Labyrinth (2 page)

The church was emptying. People, virtually all clothed in tattered white rags, swept into the wide street. Soldiers poked their rifles forward, herding the people into a tight mass, keeping them still. The mass swelled. Lubeck saw young children cowering against mothers, teenage boys trying to stand brave by fathers. Older people tripped, fell, were yanked brutally up by the soldiers and tossed forward. Even from a hundred yards away, Lubeck could hear the muttered cries and pleas to God for help. Some of the people were wailing with knees pressed to the ground and hands grasping for the sky. Rifle butts quickly silenced them. Through it all, Lubeck made out one word above everything else:

¿Porqué?
… Why?

Several of the other soldiers were returning now with stragglers from the surrounding houses. Perhaps they had been hiding. Perhaps they had simply been missed in the original roundup. It didn't matter. They were tossed into the mass now and the mass absorbed them. Two hundred people, Lubeck calculated, at least a third of them children.

The soldiers poked at the mass with their rifles until it was impossible to tell one person from the next. No space to breathe, let alone move.

The dark-eyed man shouted an order.

The soldiers backed up into a semicircle and raised their automatic weapons.

The people screamed, cried, begged, tossed their hands about in desperate circles, shoving to find safety when there was no place to go.

Above the screaming, Lubeck heard the dark-eyed man's one-word command:

“Fire!”

In the drawn-out instant that followed, Lubeck wanted to drop the binoculars from his eyes but couldn't. The soldiers aimed their rifles straight into the mass and fired without pause. Smoke belched from the barrels, flashes swirling together into a single bolt.

Some of the soldiers changed clips.

The bullets kept coming.

The screaming curdled Lubeck's ears. Still he couldn't put the binoculars down.

The first wave of red and white collapsed down and in, the second atop it, clearing the bullets' path for the next. By the end, there was no place left to fall, and punctured, bloodied bodies stood supporting each other until the wind tumbled them over into the heap.

Lubeck's steel pincers sliced through the frame of his binoculars. He leaned over and vomited.

Lubeck gazed back down. He didn't need his binoculars to see the blood spreading outward from underneath the pile and soaking into the dirt street. A young boy rolled off the top of the pile, into the scarlet pool.

Lubeck vomited again.

Down below, soldiers were soaking the bodies with the contents of the same steel cans that had been loaded into the back of the jeeps from the trucks. Lubeck's mind snapped back to reality, forced out the sickening carnage he had witnessed. He grabbed his pack and was off again.

He stopped a hundred yards farther across the hillside, too close to the town for his own liking. He had to report this, but what precisely could he report? The Bogotá station could never respond in time for it to matter. Time was not the problem. His right hand was trembling and he realized his steel pincers were as well. He pulled his broken binoculars back to his eyes.

Across the town on another hillside there was a brief flash, sun meeting something metallic. Another person obviously, another witness to the massacre. Lubeck wondered who. Then he saw the jeeps with the silver cans. They were speeding over prescribed stretches of land with one man holding the cans' spouts open, draining them of a clear liquid, which sank into the ground.

The land! Where were the damn—

“Oh, my God,” Lubeck muttered.

It couldn't be but it was. He grabbed the radio from his pack, switched to the proper frequency, yanked up the antenna, and raised the plastic to his lips.

“Come in, Bogotá station. Come in, Bogotá station.” He fought to hold the transmitter steady. “This is Field Mouse. Do you read me, Bogotá station?”

“We read you, Field Mouse” came a male voice between splotches of static. “But you're broken up. Can you move closer in range?”

“Negative!” Lubeck roared half under his breath. “No time. Just listen. Are you recording this transmission?”

“Affirmative, Field Mouse. It's standard—”

“I don't give a fuck about standard anything. Don't interrupt me. Just listen. I'm broadcasting from San Sebastian. The whole town's been taken out.” Down below troops were splattering the buildings with more of the fluid from the cans, drenching the insides as well. “Everyone's dead, massacred… .”

“Field Mouse, did you say—”

“I told you not to interrupt me! It's on tape, goddamnit! I haven't got time for a full report now but I think I know why this town can't exist anymore.” Lubeck grabbed for the binoculars with his pincers and held them against his eyes as best he could. They were going to burn the whole town, he knew now, and with good reason. “As soon as I complete this transmission forward the tape stat to Washington under sterile cover. Use gamma channel. Tell them I will follow as soon as I can with all the details.”

“Acknowledged.”

Lubeck swept the area with his binoculars. Yes, it was starting to make sense now. “San Sebastian was a farming community. I'm in a position overlooking the fields now. It appears that—” Lubeck's eyes froze. He tried to refocus the binoculars but couldn't manage it with his pincers. “Oh, my God,” he breathed into the transmitter. “This can't be!
It can‘t be!
I'm looking out at—”

Lubeck felt the presence behind him in time to duck but not in time to avoid the blow. It crunched down on his collarbone, snapping it. Lubeck howled in pain and rolled away. The transmitter flew aside.

“Field Mouse, do you read me? Field Mouse, what's going on there?”

Lubeck looked up into the grinning face of the giant in white. Chinese for sure, he decided. Weaponless, the giant approached him making no effort to be subtle.

Lubeck struggled back to his feet, hunching to keep the pain of his shattered collarbone down. The giant was going to try to finish him with his hands. Fine.

Because Lubeck had his pincers.

He held them low behind his left hip, out of the giant's sight. By the time the big man saw them, they'd be carving up his midsection as easily as the plywood Lubeck used for practice. Lubeck hunched over further, backpedaled, made himself an easy target.

The giant kept coming, pace steady and unvarying. Lubeck baited him further, faked a stumble, readied his pincers.

The giant came into range and reached down for him.

Lubeck swung his pincers forward and up in a blur of motion. His target was the midsection, though by the time he yanked his deadly steel out it would have reached the Chinese giant's throat.

The giant was still grinning when the pinchers reached him. Lubeck felt them bang into something, and at first thought it was an illusion caused by the swift entry into flesh. But they hadn't entered at all. Lubeck's entire body trembled with the force of impact, the steel pincers meeting something harder.

Lubeck tried for the giant's midsection again but the strike was halfhearted and the results the same. As he pulled the pincers back, the giant latched onto them and yanked.

The pincer apparatus came free with a pain Lubeck couldn't believe existed. His teeth sliced through his tongue and blood filled his mouth. The world was a daze before him and he was only slightly conscious of the Chinese giant's open hand crashing into his nose, splintering his brain with the shattered bone.

The last thing he saw was the giant's grinning face.

“Field Mouse, please acknowledge,” the transmitter continued to squawk through static. “Field Mouse, please—”

The giant silenced the transmitter with one crunch of his heel, while down below flames had begun to swallow the corpse of San Sebastian.

Part One:
Washington, Monday Afternoon

Chapter 1

BRIAN CHARNEY LOWERED
his glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks to the coffee table, neglecting to use the coaster. Leaning forward off the couch, he grabbed the cassette tape and fingered it.

Its contents held the reason for one man's death. Its existence almost surely held the basis for a second's. Charney had been part of that death sentence, and the Chivas couldn't change that no matter how smoothly it went down.

Charney drained the glass anyway.

He had walked back to his brownstone apartment from the State Department, hoping the walk would clear his head. Instead it only clouded it further. He had turned on only one light in the brownstone and didn't raise the shades, keeping the early-spring sun beyond the windows so he might lose himself in the dimness. But the dimness did not blot out the effect of the apartment. It was expensively and exquisitely furnished. Charney much preferred the house in Arlington, but the divorce settlement had given that to Karen and their two boys. He saw them on alternate weekends. Sometimes.

Charney refilled his glass and ran the events of the day through his head yet again. Of the two best friends in his life, one was dead and the other had been chosen to follow him. Charney had come home early because the job was everything and the job had made him do it. God, how he hated the damn job, but he had to admit he'd be lost without it.

He had waited outside Undersecretary of State Calvin Roy's office for only ten minutes that morning before being ushered in. Roy was his liaison in affairs of intelligence.

“I hope this is important,” Roy said in his southern drawl, offering Charney the usual seat before his cluttered desk.

“It is,” Charney assured him.

“I cancelled a full block of appointments to see you, son. There'll be some people mighty upset over that. They came a long way to see me.”

“So did this,” Charney said, producing the tape.

Roy rose slightly out of his chair to look at it. He was a diminutive, balding man with a wry smile that expressed his uncompromising, often cynical approach to his position and politics in general. He would probably never rise beyond the post he held now, nor did he aspire to. Working behind the scenes suited him just fine, providing room to maneuver and breathe. A native Texan who had grown up amid much wealth but enjoyed little himself, Roy owed no one anything—a trait rare enough in Washington to make him a man to be both respected and avoided. He had nothing to lose. Stepping on toes didn't faze him, even if it meant crushing them.

“It contains Alvin Lubeck's last report,” Charney continued, popping the cassette into the recorder on the edge of Roy's desk. “Rather incomplete but interesting all the same.”

Charney pressed
PLAY
. Lubeck's voice filled the room, intermixed with static. The fear was obvious and, in his final words, the panic.

“San Sebastian was a farming community. I‘m in a position overlooking the fields now. It appears that … Oh, my God, this can‘t be. It can‘t be! I‘m looking out at—”

Charney pressed
STOP
. “That's it.”

Roy's face had sombered. “You mind tellin' me where San Sebastian is?”

“Colombia. Deep in the southeast.”

“So Lubeck transmitted this to the Bogotá station. They send someone in after him?”

“Yes, but the team couldn't get into San Sebastian or even close to it. The whole area's on fire and all they can do down there is pray for rain.”

Roy nodded. “So whatever it was Lubeck saw ain't there no more.”

“That's right,” Charney acknowledged.

“What do you make of that, son?”

“Somebody started the fire to cover something up. And they took Lubeck out for the same reason.”

“Lubeck wouldn't go out easily,” Roy muttered nervously. “You mind tellin' me how he ended up at a giant barbecue in a South American piss country?”

“Following a trail he picked up in London.”

“What trail?”

“We assigned him to run interference for the World Hunger Conference scheduled for two weeks from now in Geneva.”

Roy considered the words. “Sounds like he was addin' manure to a fallow field.”

“He was past his prime,” Charney said painfully. “We wanted to ease him out, but he wasn't ready to go.”

“And set out to prove you wrong. Looks like he did a pretty decent job. You boys gotta let me in on your methods for personnel evaluation.” Roy hesitated, shook his head. “God damn, what'd he find down there that was worth murderin' a whole town over? He file any other reports?”

Charney shook his head. “This was the first we heard from him officially. Wanted to be sure, I guess. If he was onto something big, he wouldn't want us to pull him off or send in the cavalry.”

“Whole mess stinks to high heaven,” Roy muttered. Then his eyes sharpened. “We gotta find out what he saw down there, son, gotta find out what he knew.”

Charney nodded.

“But you didn't go to Langley with this, you came to me. Musta had a reason.”

“Lubeck was working out of State on this assignment. I figured you should be the first to know.”

“Don't bullshit a bullshitter.”

Charney took a deep breath. He hated himself for what he was about to do. “I don't think Langley is the way to go with this. I want to keep all the three-letter people out of it for a while.”

“Got your reasons, I suppose.”

“Plenty of them. To begin with, we don't know where to start a full-scale field case with what we've got. We send the Company or NSA out on Lubeck's trail and all of a sudden the trail disappears. It's happened before. I don't think Lubeck changed the plans of whoever took him out in San Sebastian. I think he just hit on something and was killed for it. So the opposition has no call to change their plans and cover their tracks unless we give it to them by sending in the troops. The problem is time. We've got to figure that whatever Lubeck was on to has something to do with the hunger conference that begins in two weeks.”