Hunt at World's End (4 page)

“What do you think they were looking for?” Noboru said.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “But it’s clear they weren’t here just for Joyce. You don’t have to slash open the mattress if you just want her.”

Noboru squatted to sort through the books on the floor. Gabriel did the same to search the items that had been dumped from the drawers. It was mostly clothing, but under a crumpled pair of pants he found Joyce’s passport and beside it an old-style analog wristwatch, similar to the one Gabriel himself wore. Its face was cracked, the hands stopped at 3:10. “Well, now we know what time it happened,” Gabriel said, showing Noboru the broken watch. Then he lifted the passport. “And we can rule out one possibility. If it had been bandits, they would never have left a U.S. passport behind.”

“No,” Noboru said. “You can get more on the black market for one of those than you can for most hostages.”

“So if not bandits, who?”

“You ruling out the ‘faceless ghosts’ theory?” Noboru said, then before Gabriel could answer he raised one hand. “Hang on. This looks promising.” He pulled a composition notebook out of the pile. “It’s her expedition journal.” He began flipping through the pages. “Let’s see, arrived in Borneo, met Mr. Noboru at the airport. Oh look, she says I seemed ‘interesting.’” He kept going, scanning lines of cribbed handwriting quickly. “Looks like she spent most of her time exploring the fringes of the jungle. And look at that.” He
tapped the bottom of one page with his forefinger. “She writes here that she thinks she’s being followed.”

“Let me see.”

Noboru passed Gabriel the journal. The entry in question was dated one week back.

Probably imagining it, but…I think someone was following me at the Malawi River today. Not someone I’d ever seen before. But everywhere I went in the marketplace, this guy was there. Kept turning away and pretending to look at pottery or whatever when I caught him staring in my direction. Didn’t look Bornean, which made it kind of hard for him to disappear in the crowd. One of those bandits N warned about? But he didn’t look like that at all. Merpati’s opinion when I told her about it was just that “it’s dangerous for single women to wander around without a man.” Well there’s a newsflash. But I’m damned if I’m going to hide in my room.

The Malawi River? What was she doing there? What was she doing
anywhere
but the university archives?

Gabriel flipped ahead, scanning the pages for any more mentions of being followed, but didn’t find anything until the final entry. It was dated Wednesday, the same day Michael had gotten his last e-mail from her. Joyce’s handwriting was noticeably different, more uneven and hurried:

Another guy following me today at the marketplace in Tarakan. Definitely not the same man, though same type—white guy, maybe five-eight, five-nine, and too damn interested in everything
else around him anytime I turned to look at him. This one had curly hair and a beard. White shirt, brown pants. He followed me for a good ten minutes, before I finally lost him in the crowd. Damn it. Could this have something to do with SOA?

Gabriel looked up from the page. “SOA. Any idea what that might be?”

“School of the Arts? Society of Actuaries? State of Alert?”

Gabriel walked back to where Merpati stood wringing her hands in the doorway and showed her the page in the book. He pointed to the letters “SOA.” She shook her head and started talking loudly, gesturing back toward the stairs.

“She wants us out,” Noboru said, unnecessarily.

Taking Joyce’s passport and journal, Gabriel followed Noboru out of the room. Merpati escorted them downstairs and all the way back outside, as if she didn’t trust them to leave on their own. She loudly locked the door behind them.

Night had settled over the village, barely cooling the sticky, humid air. A full moon glowed over the treetops, its round face covered briefly by a passing cloud. All around them, light seeped out of the windows of the village houses, bright and steady from those with generators, dim and flickering from the ones that used oil lamps. As Gabriel walked to the jeep, a man across the way finished hammering a post topped with a goat skull into the ground in front of his house, then spat, touched his forehead twice and went inside. The door slammed, and Gabriel heard a heavy bolt slide into place. He glanced around and noticed goat skulls had
been posted in front of every house he could see. Not a great place to be a goat.

Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat, unzipped his suitcase and slid Joyce’s passport and journal inside.

“So now what?” Noboru asked, coming up behind him.

“They took Joyce into the jungle,” Gabriel replied. “So that’s where we’re going.”

“It’d be safer to wait until morning.”

Gabriel reached into the suitcase again and pulled out a flashlight. “For us. Not for Joyce.”

Noboru puffed out his cheeks and blew air. Then he nodded.

Gabriel reached into the suitcase again. “That knife of yours looks handy, but…” He pulled out a second revolver and passed it to Noboru. “Maybe you’d better carry one of these, too.”

Noboru had his own flashlight in the glove compartment of the jeep, and together they entered the jungle at the edge of the village, twin beams of light bouncing in front of them. Moonlight filtered through the trees and glistened on the thick leaves all around. They moved forward, the blanket of undergrowth on the jungle floor clinging to their feet as they went. Where the foliage was too thickly knotted to pass, Noboru cut away the vines and creepers with his knife, swinging the keen blade machete-style, the revolver jammed in his belt.

The high whine of insects filled the night air, and the rustling of leaves; the beam of Gabriel’s flashlight revealed tree frogs and geckos clinging to the trunks and branches in their path. Mouse deer whose heads didn’t reach higher than the tops of Gabriel’s boots fled before them through the underbrush. Clicking beetles scurried away into tiny holes amid the twisted roots.

“Tell me if you see any tarantulas,” Noboru muttered.

“Why?” Gabriel asked.

“So I can get the hell away from them. I hate those damn things. Always have.”

Gabriel tilted his flashlight down to shine it along the ground. No tarantulas in sight. “Remind me sometime to tell you what happened to me in Chile.”

“Not if it involves a tarantula.”

“Not
a
tarantula,” Gabriel said. “A whole nest of them. Chilean flame tarantulas.”

Noboru shivered. “I never, ever want to hear that story.” He stopped suddenly and bent down, shining his flashlight at some thin branches poking out from a tree at knee level. “Hold on. Look at this.”

Gabriel came over, adding his light to Noboru’s. “What have you got?”

The branches were snapped, their bent tips all pointing in the same direction. Something heavy had passed—or been dragged—through them.

“It’s too big to be from squirrels, too high for mouse deer,” Noboru said.

“Monkeys?”

“Too low. This was done by people.”

Gabriel straightened and shone his flashlight in the direction the snapped branches pointed. The jungle seemed to stretch on forever, tree after tree, vine after vine, forming an impenetrable net of vegetation. After five days, the signs remaining of Joyce’s passage through the jungle would be few; that was more than enough time for rain and wildlife activity to conceal the trail. But there should still be some signs. It just meant they’d have to be that much more vigilant to spot them.

Gabriel started walking again, following the direction of the broken branches. Several yards farther on, his flashlight beam located something at the mossy base of a thick tree.

“There.” He hurried to the tree. More branches were snapped and bent like before, but this time there was also a piece of torn fabric stuck on the sharp end of a twig. Gabriel brushed aside a long-horned beetle that had made the cloth its bed and plucked it off the branch. It was filthy, covered in mud, but under the dirt he saw
a tight weave and a blue and white pattern. It felt like cotton. “It’s clothing,” he said. “Piece of a shirt or a dress, maybe.”

“Well, I can tell you we’re definitely not the first people to pass through here,” Noboru said, his voice low. He pointed his flashlight at the ground ahead of them. Past the tree, the vegetation had been trampled flat.

They followed the trail deeper into the jungle. They passed whole tree trunks covered with swarms of ants and termites. Stick insects clung to nearby leaves and waited patiently for their chance to snatch up prey. Above their heads, an enormous tropical centipede with red mandibles and spiky legs sprouting like daggers from its segmented body crawled along a thick branch. Gabriel saw Noboru look away, disgusted, as they passed beneath it. It wasn’t just tarantulas, then. Gabriel was beginning to think the jungle was no place for him.

Ahead, Gabriel could just make out a dim orange light flickering between the leaves, growing brighter as they moved along the trail. They proceeded cautiously. The path, he saw, came to an end at the edge of a wide clearing. Just shy of the edge, while they were still hidden by a screen of trees, Gabriel dropped to the jungle floor and pulled Noboru with him. They switched off their flashlights, hid behind a low barricade of fallen branches and took in the sight before them.

Six tall wooden posts jutted from the ground around the perimeter of the clearing, forming a rough hexagon. Each post was topped with a shallow stone bowl of burning oil. These were the source of the flickering orange light they’d seen through the trees.

At the far end of the clearing was a crude but fairly large hut constructed of wood and what appeared to
be scavenged pieces of metal. There were no windows in the one wall of the hut they could see, only a single door, which was currently closed.

And at the center of the clearing, directly in front of the hut, were two massive, bent tree trunks bowed in a double arch over a ten-foot-wide circular stone that rested on the ground like a giant manhole cover. He’d seen a stone cover like that once before, in the rain forest of Guatemala; there it had protected the waters of a sacred well. He wondered what this one was protecting.

But that wasn’t the main question on his mind, because of what he saw hanging above the stone, suspended from the bent tree trunks by a pair of heavy metal chains: a wooden cage.

And it looked like there was a figure lying across the bottom of the cage.

Just as he was about to stand up, movement by the side of the hut caught Gabriel’s eye. A man emerged from the shadows. As he walked out into the light from the bowls of flame, Gabriel saw he was wearing a white robe and carrying a tall metal pole. A curved sword hung from his belt. He had the robe’s hood pulled over his head and over his face he wore what looked like a clay mask in the shape of a skull.

One of Merpati’s faceless ghosts. Gabriel and Noboru exchanged glances.

The man walked under the cage and struck the end of the pole against the wooden slats. The figure inside the cage didn’t move. Gabriel couldn’t help wondering if it was Joyce—and if so, whether she was alive or dead, merely asleep or too sick or weak to move. Stopping at the edge of the circular stone slab on the ground, the man slid one end of the pole into a socket beside the slab and turned the pole until it audibly locked in place.

Noboru clutched suddenly at Gabriel’s arm. Gabriel turned—and saw a fist-sized tarantula creeping across the branches directly in front of Noboru’s face. Noboru’s eyes widened and even in the dim light Gabriel could see the blood drain from his face. His jaw dropped open.

Gabriel clamped a hand over Noboru’s mouth before he could make a sound.

The tarantula continued picking its way along the branch and disappeared into the underbrush. Gabriel glared at Noboru, who nodded, and then he let go. Noboru swallowed hard and took a few deep breaths.

When Gabriel looked up again, the man in the robe and the skull mask was standing under the cage with his back to them. He’d picked up a long stick from the ground and was poking it up between the wooden slats at the person inside the cage, who stirred and moaned quietly.
Whoever it was, she or he was still alive.
Gabriel signaled to Noboru to stay put, then pointed to himself and the man in the clearing. Noboru nodded to show he understood, which was more than Gabriel could say for himself. He feared his gestures may have conveyed the impression that he had more of a plan than he actually had.

Gabriel rose quietly to his feet. The skull-faced man still had his back to them. Gabriel crept toward him, one hand on the butt of his Colt in case the man turned too soon. Luckily he was too intent on waking the person in the cage to notice Gabriel coming up behind him. Gabriel wrapped one arm around the man’s neck. He meant to put him in a sleeper hold but the man spun quickly, slipped out of Gabriel’s grasp, and went for his sword. Moving fast, Gabriel threw a punch, connecting with the mask, which shattered. The face
below was pale, with bushy eyebrows and a scraggly beard—definitely not Bornean. It looked like it could be the man Joyce had described in her last journal entry. He opened his mouth to shout for help, but Gabriel dropped him with a second punch to the face.

Gabriel dragged the man’s body into the trees where it wouldn’t be seen, then returned to the cage. Up close, he saw that the chains it was hanging from were attached to gears mounted at the top of the arched tree trunks. He peered up through the mossy slats along the bottom of the cage. Lying inside was a woman in a torn blue-and-white shirt and dirt-smeared khaki shorts. She’d been gagged with a cloth tied around the back of her head, and had ropes tying her hands behind her back and binding her ankles together. She was facing away from him.

“Joyce?” he whispered.

She started. She struggled to sit up, then realized the voice was coming from below her and turned to lie on her stomach. Even with her face smeared with dirt, her hair tangled and matted, Gabriel recognized her and he felt a surge of relief.

Joyce squinted down at him, studying his face, then her eyes spread wide. “Ayiel Unn?” she said around the gag.

That took him by surprise. He hadn’t expected her to recognize him after so many years. He certainly wouldn’t have recognized her without the passport photo.

“Yes,” Gabriel whispered. He glanced at the hut. No one seemed to have heard them. Not yet, anyway. “Noboru’s here, too. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“Obo-oo eeyah?”
Noboru’s here?

Gabriel looked around for some way to lower the cage. “Are you okay? Will you be able to walk?”

She nodded. “Uh-ee. Ay’ll ee ere oon.”
Hurry. They’ll be here soon.

A wooden door was set in the side of the cage, locked with a heavy metal padlock. Maybe he could bash it open, or find a way to pick it, but first he had to figure out how the hell to get up there. He’d have to climb one of the trees and make his way down the chains…

Voices sounded from the hut, a sudden clamor that sounded like the “Hear, hear!” at the end of a convocation. He looked toward the door and saw a crack of light spill out as it slowly swung open. “Hang tight,” he whispered. “I’ll come back for you.”

Joyce’s eyes widened again and she shook her head vehemently, tried to say something, but Gabriel put a finger to his lips and ran for the shadows at the edge of the jungle. He slid behind a tree as a procession of robed men emerged from the hut. He counted twelve in total, then quickly amended it to thirteen when a man who was clearly their leader or high priest or something appeared behind them. Unlike the others, he didn’t wear a skull mask or a white robe. His face was bare and he wore a red tunic with curling gold designs sewn into the fabric. A rectangular headdress of the same colors perched atop his head and in one hand he held a staff tipped with a bronze blade that gleamed in the reflected light of the flames.

The men gathered in a semicircle around the stone on the ground and the metal pole planted upright beside it. They started chanting in a language Gabriel didn’t recognize. Not Bidayuh, which he simply didn’t speak—this was a language he had never heard before.

He tried to catch a glimpse of Noboru, but from where he was now it was too dark to see the spot where they’d been hidden.

The chanting grew louder, more insistent. One of the masked men stepped up to the metal pole and pulled it toward him like a lever. Gabriel heard a grinding of gears underground and the circular stone began to slide sideways, revealing a hole beneath. No, it wasn’t a well this time. The bright orange flames of a roaring fire licked up out of the darkness.

Gabriel’s eyes went from the fiery pit to the cage hanging on chains directly above it. Not good. He drew his Colt.

The men in the skull masks looked up at the cage. Gabriel noticed a change in their chanting. He may not have spoken the language, but he knew the sound of a climax approaching when he heard it.

He needed to stop this before either the cage or its contents got dropped into the flaming pit. But how? There were too many men for him to take on at once. What he needed was a diversion, something to distract them before they could start lowering the cage…

A gunshot rang out. Gabriel saw a muzzle flash in the darkness and the skull-faced man who’d pulled the lever cried out, clutching his stomach where a red stain had blossomed on the white robe. He fell—but as he fell, he caught the lever in the crook of his arm, yanking it the rest of the way.

The cage began slowly lowering, chain link by chain link, toward the fire pit.

Gabriel’s heart slammed into his throat. Not good. Not good at all.

The men in skull masks were shouting angrily, drawing their swords, pointing toward the area where
the gunshot had come from. Where Noboru was hiding.

And from inside the cage came the sounds of Joyce shouting through her gag and kicking at the wall of the cage as it dropped closer to the flames.