Burn (Story of CI #3) (7 page)

Cail felt her bony shoulders slump forward and she stared at the ground. "Yes. Totally that bad. She’s still having visions of me and Jonah and those eight grandchildren we are supposed to give her. And the end of the world. Oh, and she's still pissed I don't live at home and help her crochet doilies and can peaches." Cail grinned, raising her eyes to meet Rupert's.

"Well, everyone can dream." Rupert gave her a lopsided smile and hooked his thumbs through the loops of his cowboy-buckle belt. Cail almost got up the nerve to tell him about Jonah and the near-knifing at the hostel but couldn't quite talk about it yet. It was embarrassing as hell and she still couldn't get herself to say Jonah's name out loud after all these years.

Rupert walked closer to her and they both sank down on a couple boulders under the pines. “Maybe it’s time to sleep it off til tomorrow. We can talk more then.”

Cail's stomach flip-flopped like a dying fish and she fought being sick. Tomorrow they needed to get everything ready for the trip to Timbuktu the following day. Tomorrow was also her reunion meeting with Jonah. He had called her cell earlier this afternoon to see if she wanted to get together and do lunch…with him and his fiancée.

It was all so unreal. Illusory.

“We have to hope Lázaro Marquez is gonna follow the trail to Timbuktu,” Rupert was saying. Then he frowned at the pines. “Wara won’t be safe until Marquez is taken out. Having Marquez after one of our own is a security risk for the whole organization, too. I want to ask Lalo to help us.”

Cail felt her entire expression sour. "You can't be serious."

Rupert looked away. Shadow fell over his face from the bill of his bright green cap, obscuring lines of age and stubble. "Listen," he said, "I wouldn't ask him if it weren't important."

Cail was already shaking her head. She couldn't believe Rupert would think of asking Lalo this. "He can't. You can't. It would be cruel."

Rupert was silent. Finally he said, "It's also cruel to let Wara live with this hit man after her. Eventually he's gonna find her. And if you knew what happened in Timbuktu, you'd understand that I can't just sit here and make Alejo watch while Lázaro hunts her down."

The burning of the school with the children inside had been nightmarish. What Lalo had told her was terrible. Of course Alejo was upset now that Wara was in danger. Cail knew he cared about her, followed her with eyes that alternated between sappy puppy love and a tiger guarding its prey. Alejo had already risked his life multiple times for Wara Cadogan.

"Are you implying I don't care about Wara?" Cail raised an eyebrow at Rupert, wondering if he was, on some level, right. Because here she was, angry at the idea of putting Lalo in danger when Wara, her friend and partner, had a very real assassin on her trail. And Lalo could help stop it. She knew he could.

But they couldn't let him.

"Of course not," Rupert scoffed. "This is just real life. Sometimes there is no perfect solution. There are horrible decisions to make. And someone has to make them."

Wara was her friend, maybe the best female friend Cail had ever had. Working together the last four months had actually been fun. She was not going to let this Marquez guy anywhere near her friend.

“Marquez is gonna take the bait,” Cail told Rupert. “He’ll come. And we’ll be waiting. We don’t need Lalo to find him.”

Rupert sighed. Cail bared her teeth in a smile. She did so love getting her way.

The fact that they would have to kill the guy after Wara was not nice, but like Rupert said, life was not perfect. Sometimes you had no choice and had to make the hard decisions.

Cail learned a long time ago that life isn't fair.

Tomorrow at noon she would face that cold fact yet again.

Jonah Jones and his fiancée and the past she had hoped to never see again.

HE SLEPT AND HIS THOUGHTS WANDERED TO HER.

He would never dare to think of her while awake, to imagine the planes of her chocolate-colored face and deep amber eyes. But when Lalo Navarro slept, he dreamed of Romina and his heart went out to her, insisting to know if she was alright. He had to know where she was.

Tonight he almost saw her, gasped just short of the details of the pale blue dress she wore, her tight midnight curls whipping wildly in the wind. The scene remained unfocused, because he was just dreaming, not trying to see her, not really.

She was barefoot. He couldn't make out the background beyond strips of camel brown and blue. Sea and sky. Unfocused mounds of white rose up from the blue, sea caps ready to crash against the sand.

That is when he felt the fire.

Fear writhed through his body like a thousand threading maggots. His vision spiraled towards the fiery eye, blazing like an alien sun with pure evil at its center, like the eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies.

It was beyond nightmarish.

Romina was the only one who could ever make him forget the eye.

But he shouldn't have.

He really shouldn't have.

Lalo was so close to death he could feel the hot life pouring out of his nostrils, wafting towards the fiery orb with a slow, satisfied hiss.

Gagging as he felt breath leave him, Lalo fought with everything in him to pull back.

"I. See. You," the dark eye of fire chuckled at him, gravelly and hellish. "And I will take your life face to face."

Lalo woke up in bed, shaking but just sitting there, not making a peep. He sat there for a long time, arms wrapped around his knees, fighting the chills even though the room was like a sauna.

It was all a bad dream. Just a screwed-up dream.

Toasted termites with locally brewed moonshine before bed and all that. His intestines just weren't used to Timbuktu cuisine.

That was it.

Lalo felt the urge to gag as he sat there on the sagging mattress, still trembling. Minutes passed, and the screams from his nightmare had brought no one banging on the door of his room at the Baptist Mission Compound.

Apparently nightmares and screaming were common in this place.

Finally Lalo rolled off the bed to find a sweater. He was sleeping bare-chested, and goose-bumps rippled across his skin, jumping over the scarred ridges where the tattoos used to be. Lalo passed the triangle-shaped mirror on the wall, foggy in the humid night air.

The face that stared back at him wasn't handsome. Narrow hooked nose, brown eyes, close-cropped brown hair. He was tall, about six feet, lean and muscled.

Lalo had been born in Colombia and was fairly brown, so he assumed the woman who gave birth to him was Colombian. Nothing was for sure, though.

They had been beyond description, those tattoos, pure evil like the eye that always threatened to find him, awake or dreaming. His father had only tattooed him in places easily covered by clothing of course. Chest. Back. Upper thighs. Nothing that could be reported to child services on the rare occasion Lalo left the compound in Colombia to go to town.

After he'd saved up the money, it took Lalo a year to find someone willing to burn the tattoos off with laser. They had been that scary.

They had left a lot of scars.

With trembling hands, Lalo pulled on a sweater and lay back down on the bed. He stared at the moldy patterns on the mission ceiling and counted bloody mosquito remains splattered across the white-washed walls.

He wasn't really tired anymore.

It was a good thing when morning rolled around and Lalo could start his day.

Strangely enough, the air did not still burn.

Four days had passed since the Baptist Christian School had burned, and orange cinders no longer drifted on the breeze over the city. Timbuktu smelled again of coriander and donkey dung and dough frying in scarred metal pots of oil.

Lalo dressed in his favorite long-sleeve tee, an Angry Birds one with colorful patches over each bicep. This particular t-shirt was really starting to stink. He pulled on the body armor vest his team always wore outside the compound, settled the Glock 17 into his back holster.

Lalo left the missionary compound at seven, nodding at Johnny the security guard as he exited the mud-brick gate. Johnny perched on a big boulder just outside the gate, cradling his weapon, the very picture of an English boy with cornflower blue eyes, golden white hair, and skin so pasty he kept a bonus-size bottle of Banana Boat stuffed in the pocket of his cargo pants at all times.

Johnny was one of four private security guards employed by the Ancient Texts company, which worked to digitalize ancient manuscripts here in Timbuktu. The four guards had to protect the company scientists, who were working feverishly to get as many manuscripts scanned onto computers as they could before radical fighters or the elements destroyed the ancient manuscripts forever. When the manuscript guys were out of country, Ancient Texts had no problem with letting the guards help out at the missionary compound. Any foreigners in Mali needed all the security they could get these days.

Two of the Ancient Text security guards were out of country, but should be arriving any time with the manuscript guys after their week-long break. It was a rough trip getting out to Timbuktu, and Ancient Texts was kind enough to not let their scholars do the journey through Africa without security.

Ideally, Johnny would be accompanied at his post by the other Ancient Texts security guy in country, but there was a funny story about that because Hannibal had just plain disappeared. The consensus among Johnny and Lalo's team was that the Hungarian guard must have been taken by the AQIM fighters who had attacked the school. He’d been there the day of the explosion, and then, when the smoke cleared, poof. Hannibal vanished into thin air.

There hadn't been any ransom demands yet, but it was just as likely that the guard had been taken just for the fun of offing him. That was how things worked out here. Foreigners were just not that popular. Hannibal was probably tied up in the desert somewhere, waiting to star in a propaganda video for Al-Qaeda.

In other words, to lose his head.

Lalo left Johnny crisping red at the gate and loped down the dusty street towards the remains of the school. It was a bright day with a sapphire-colored sky, flecked with stringy white clouds. Breakfast had been good: milky tea and scrambled eggs with some blueberry muffins that Anne, the skinny missionary lady with butt-length red hair, had somehow made out here at the edge of the Sahara.

The missionaries were letting Lalo and his team stay at the compound, now that everything was burned at the school and there were no kids to protect there anyway. Caspian was over at the hospital in case the bastards who attacked the school decided to get near the kids again. It would be good when Alejo got back here, with Cail and Wara Cadogan as reinforcements.

It was gonna be hard for Alejo, though. No one would talk about it, say anything that would make him feel worse. But it was gonna be hard.

In the run-down hospital in the center of Timbuktu, seventeen kids were in agony from varying degrees of burns. There weren't enough beds in the place, so most of them were sleeping on blankets on the floor. Lalo passed by the blackened gate of the Christian school and lowered his eyes.

Four very hot blocks later, Lalo banged on the door of Amadou's family home. He and Amy had lived in the little room at the school when class was in session, helping out teaching and acting as dorm parents to the kids. The house that had belonged to Amadou's family for seven centuries was deep red adobe, set with three square windows with summer green wood frames.

No one was coming.

Lalo squinted into the white sun, checked out the empty street on either side of the house, and rapped on the metal door again. The heat of the metal nearly par-broiled the skin off his knuckles. Sweat was pouring down Lalo’s chest inside the vest.

Thank God, the door scraped open and Amadou's toffee-colored face appeared in the crack. A scraggly salt-and-pepper beard marred his chin, blanketing the barely-healed gash where Tsarnev had hit him when Amadou tried to defend his wife. Amadou's eyes shone against his skin, bright red.

"I came so we could walk over there together," Lalo told him. In the ten blocks since he'd left the mission compound, the sun had already begun to cook its way through Angry Birds’ long sleeves. It was tempting to step inside. Lalo could make out long patches of shadow in Amadou's tiled entryway, but he knew if he went in the house, Amadou might never leave. Lalo could see the man's eyes already round in alarm, bloodshot and tortured. Amadou would never be the same again.

"Come on," Lalo said. "The kids will want to see you."

Amadou squeezed his eyes shut, then finally nodded. He walked out into the street in red plastic flip-flops, Sponge Bob pajama pants and a stained white dress shirt. Lalo took the heavy ring of keys from Amadou's hand and locked the padlock on the ancient metal door of the house. Then he put an arm around Amadou's shoulder and they shuffled through pebbles and dust down the lonely street towards the hospital.

They made the rounds of the hospital, and Amadou held up admirably. Several little faces practically glowed when they saw their school director. Lalo felt peace when Amadou actually decided to stay longer, holding the hand of one rail-thin little girl lost inside a wool blanket on the tiles.

The sun was blazing overhead and the pebbles on the road outside the hospital fairly sizzled in the heat. It was probably about ten. Soon Lalo would send Caspian back to the compound to get some rest. But first, he just needed a second. Lalo cleared his throat to dislodge the lump and made it across the street to a boulder in an inviting patch of shade.

The shade was delicious. Lalo leaned back against the adobe wall and dialed Cail.

It would be awesome to hear her voice.

He enjoyed working with the guys on his team, Alejo and Caspian. But he and Cail understood each other.

"So Cail," he said when she answered her phone. "I haven't caught you knitting, have I?"

"Lalo." He could almost see her slow grin over the line, all the way from Morocco. They had talked after the school burning for just a few minutes. Obviously, Lalo hadn't been in a very good mood. "No, I am not knitting. Last night I did bake a couple loaves of honey oat bread though, after killing an exact hundred tin cans. The bread was really good at breakfast today."

Lalo stretched his legs out into the sunshine, felt them start to bake right away in the Sahara rays just like Cail's loaves of bread. Hearing her voice was warming him up inside just as quickly.

"The bread sounds good," Lalo told her. He and the guys had been subsisting on corn gruel and old tea. That's why the missionary-sponsored breakfast this morning had been so heavenly.

"Yeah, it was pretty darn good. Comes from making bread in the wood stove every day til I was seventeen. Hey." Cail's voice sobered. "What's the update on the kids?"

She already knew that twelve had died. "The ones in the hospital are all still alive. But we're gonna need some real medicine. And a lot of them will need plastic surgery." It sounded stupid and hopeless to say it. They were in Timbuktu, after all. Skin grafting for burns was extremely expensive and complicated. Who was going to fund all the surgeries for a bunch of kids from Mali? Travel and stay with them overseas during the recovery process?

Lalo felt himself blinking compulsively. He forced himself to stop.

"So I talked with my mom," Cail said after a long pause. "Didn't go very well."

"I'm sorry."

"Lalo, she still thinks God's calling me to shoot the Antichrist!" Cail bit off her words. “I can't believe my parents can still talk like that. After everything that's happened. Can't they see?"

Cail was really upset.

"They can't see," he told her softly. "Look, I know the way you grew up was toxic to you. But you had family birthday parties with pretty cake and ate pizza that your mom made, all sitting around the table together. Your parents never hit you. It hurt you, but at least you grew up with love."

That was all there was to say. Of course Lalo never ate pizza around the table with his family, because he didn't even know which of the women in the cult compound was his mother.

They all knew how to beat you with a cane with equal passion, though. No prejudice there.

He could feel Cail's pain, the pain of having been manipulated by a belief system that took away who you were, forbid you to think for yourself. But Cail had known love in her family, and in that way she and he were very different. Cail must have taken the point and she decided to change the subject.

"Uh, Rupert said something really dumb yesterday."

Lalo felt a bicep flex and he folded his legs up against the boulder, out of the searing sun.

"He said he was going to ask you to help him find Marquez."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, well, I think I talked him out of it."

Lalo should have known this was going to happen. It was Timbuktu and he was already sweating, but another cold drop of perspiration shimmied down his cheek. "I can't. He'll find out. If I track anything, he'll find out."