Lost Girls (21 page)

Bodies parted as Sherry walked forward. “How far is he?” she asked.

“Ten feet. The ground is level in front of you.” Carol stepped forward and pivoted Sherry’s shoulders. “The houngan is straight ahead—the body is lying horizontal in front of him.”

Sherry walked straight and confidently ahead as the crowd continued to part for her. She could smell the sweat, the rum and tobacco, the decomposing body in front of her.

Sherry spoke first. “Tam-Tam Boy?” she asked.

“Kisa,”
the old man said cautiously.

She had a fix on him now, stepped forward several feet, and knelt on the floor, edging forward until her knee found the side of Pioche’s lifeless body.

“My name is Sherry Moore.”

“What do you want, ooman?”

“I came here to learn something from you.”

Tam-Tam Boy turned his face upward in the general direction of the ceiling.

“Dere is no ting to learn here.” He shook his head.

Sherry leaned forward and whispered. “There are things you know.”

Carol watched the colonel leave. He was on the path leading back to the cars.

“Tricks,” the houngan said. “You want a charm, a spell. Dis,” he said angrily, “is a funeral, ooman.”

“I know,” Sherry said softly. “I need to know what he told you.”

“He be dead, ooman,” the houngan snorted.

“But you hear them speak, don’t you?” Sherry said quickly. “They talk back to you, don’t they?”

Tam-Tam Boy smiled. “You tink me a fool.”

“Quite the contrary,” Sherry said. “I talk to them too.”

The old man sighed tiredly, looked about, seemingly ready to stand. A sheen of sweat over his face glistened in the light of the fire, a stubble of gray beard against his crinkled black skin. He leaned forward suddenly.

“You talk to the dead,” he said contemptuously.

There was every possibility the houngan was a fraud, Sherry knew. Or that he actually believed in what he did, both encouraged and empowered by these people’s superstitions. There was also a possibility that the houngan was telling the truth. Who knew that better than she? How many people had doubted her over the years? Not that it mattered. The purpose of her visit was to lay a hand on the body, that was the goal here, and to achieve it she needed to keep the houngan talking.

“In truth, they do not speak to me,” Sherry admitted, “but maybe you can understand what I’m saying. If I touch them, if I hold their hand, they show me pictures of where they have been, of what they were last thinking. I was hoping you would tell me what this man told you, or maybe it is possible you see the pictures, too.”

“I am blind,” he said contemptuously, starting to rise.

Sherry could smell rum on his breath, the hint of spicy cologne.

“As am I,” she answered.

The old man stopped, his milky dead eyes meeting the barrier of darkness between them. He sat back down. “Please,” he said. “Sit.”

Sherry carefully lowered her body.

The houngan reached across Pioche’s body to touch her face, his fingertips finding her cheek. Sherry leaned forward, letting him trace her nose, then Tam-Tam Boy flattened his hand and covered Sherry’s face. He spread his fingers across the mounds and valleys, her nose, her chin, her forehead, her eyes.

“I am sorry to interrupt you, Tam-Tam Boy,” Sherry said. “I am sorry to interfere with this man’s funeral, but time is important and I have come to ask a favor.”

“Which is?” the old man said.

“I need to know where this man was when he died.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Take him hand,” he told Sherry.

Sherry found it quickly, bloated and cool, skin loose but oily, not dry; something had been used to preserve his body.

She squeezed it gently.

…a young girl was lying on a lumpy mattress, her long luxurious hair was pinned behind her head, the pin was ivory white and carefully carved by hand in the shape of a fish; a stone wall through a path into the jungle; an old wooden door, it had a viewing pane; the face of a young woman, she was Caucasian and her hair was dark and matted. There was a tattoo on her cheek, a skull wearing a top hat; an old man in front of a statue, he was wearing a straw hat; a young blond woman curled in the dirt; a kitten floating down a stream on a raft made of palm fronds; a pack of cigarette papers; a heavy-set woman in red shorts; a black man with one white eye; the spires of an old stone cathedral; the man in front of the statue again but he is framed in blue, it is a picture and he is taking the back off, the picture is crammed with money; a ladder in a stone walled cellar, holes drilled into the mortar in the walls; the black man with one white eye has a gun; blood on the toes of his boots; his hand touching the bottom of the old wooden door, painting a bloody streak with his finger; nothing more…

“He was killed by a one-eyed man,” she whispered, letting go of the hand.

“Yes?” the houngan said tentatively.

“He was thinking about a young black girl, she was lying down.”

“Wit long hair,” Tam-Tam Boy interrupted. “She use someting to hold her hair in di back of her head?” He listened carefully.

“A hairpin,” Sherry said. “It was white, long, with a sharp point at one end, carved like a jumping fish.”

“Him saw a cat,” the houngan said.

“On a raft made of leaves,” Sherry said.

“Dere is a picture.”

“Of a man in front of a statue.”

“Di frame is yello,” Tam-Tam Boy lied, cocking his head to the side.

“No, it is blue.” Sherry smiled, catching him. “Does his wife know what is behind it? Behind the frame?”

“Her know.” The houngan smiled. “I told her tell no one.”

Sherry reached across the body, touching the houngan’s shirt, finding his hand. “The old castle,” she said. “Can you tell me about it?”

“It is evil,” the old man said solemnly.

“I have seen it before,” Sherry said. “It is where this man was killed, isn’t it?”

The houngan hesitated. “Contestus,” he whispered at last. “It is north of here.”

Sherry let out a deep breath. “There is a cellar beneath it, do you know?”

“A quarry,” Tam-Tam Boy said. “For mining marble.”

“Who lives there?”

“Tonton Macoutes,” he said contemptuously.

Sherry could barely hear the words.

“I don’t understand.”

“The boogymen,” he said. “Do not go there, ooman.”

Sherry nodded, squeezed the old man’s hand. “We are the same, Tam-Tam Boy,” she said. “You hear and I see.”

Tam-Tam Boy leaned closer, whispered softly, “I tell dem what I see. Dem like to hear their loved ones speak.”

Sherry smiled. He really was just like her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You are welcome, white mambo.” Tam-Tam Boy got to his feet.

Carol saw Sherry stand and turned to where the colonel had disappeared over the hillside.

Something was wrong. She felt it. Carol stepped forward toward the building, calling Sherry’s name.

Then she heard the engine, the sound of an approaching truck, and it was moving fast. People began to run toward the trees, there was a clamor of metal from the parking lot, tailgates falling down, men shouting orders, shapes appeared on the path by the shanties, you could hear their boots pounding, the rattle of small arms on slings.

“Kisa ou vie?”
the old houngan shouted.

Carol grabbed Sherry’s arm, but Sherry pulled away, reaching to help the houngan out of the temple. “Run,” she yelled to Carol, but by then the soldiers were upon them.

Sherry and Carol were seized and pulled away from the building, each placed on a chair in handcuffs.

Carol watched in horror as a dark man with one eye approached and pulled a pearl-handled automatic pistol from his holster. “Her”—Bedard pointed at Hettie—“and the girl. Take them both.”

Soldiers ran up and put the women in chains.

“Him, too,” Bedard shouted, pointing at the dead man, and two more guards ran to carry away the body of Pioche.

Tam-Tam Boy looked at Bedard with his cloudy white eyes.
“Kisa ou vie,”
he repeated.

Bedard put a bullet between them.

“You’re serious.”

“As a heart attack,” Graham said. “I told him I had already called Ambassador Sanderson and that she was on her way to the palace to see President Préval.”

“And Brigham said what?”

“He told me not to do another thing. I mean he was just sizzling, Helmut. He actually used those words, verbatim, like I was some little kid. I said, ‘All due respect, Admiral,’ and the phone went dead. He hung up on me. Ten minutes later I get a call from Senator Metcalf, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He tells me to stand down and wait for further instructions from my director. The director, Helmut! I’ve never had a conversation with the director in my life.”

“What the hell is going on down there?”

“Hey, I’ve never even heard of anything like this. You can raise hell from your side of the pond. I’m not doing another thing until I hear what the director is going to say.”

“I thought we were lucky enough to run down the missing policewoman from Poland in a week’s time. That and connect her to a ship from Haiti. What in the hell more could anyone expect?”

“I’m just saying, this Sherry Moore is a close friend of Brigham’s and Brigham is pissed.”

“What do you think he’s up to?”

“All I can say is what I’ve heard around the watercooler, that maybe Brigham keeps a hand in DEVGRU.”

“DEVGRU?”

“Navy Special Warfare, the old SEAL Team 6 that wasn’t supposed to exist.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“If what they say is true, Helmut, Brigham’s armed with the Joint Special Operations Command and four teams of alpha-grade SEALs who are autonomous from the regular military.”

S
OMEWHERE OFF THE
C
AYMAN
I
SLANDS

When she dreamed, Katya saw yellow butterflies. They were Russian butterflies or, more exactly, Caucasus Mountain butterflies, and behind them she saw her parents’ home on the snowcapped peaks of Mount Elbrus.

The Caucasus region was a virtual melting pot of biology, of bison and wolves and leopards and eagles, of Muslims and Christians and Buddhists and Jews. She should have stayed there. She should have appreciated the simplicity of her life. Appreciated the sun and the moon and the wind and the rains, the true elements of existence that had forever influenced her ancestors.

But she had not. She had run away with a foreigner, an ecologist from Switzerland who came to photograph the leopards. He had pictures of exotic places and he told stories and knew many languages. He was funny and he was interesting, which was everything that her life, her parents’ life, and that of the other mountain farmers, were not.

Their relationship lasted only to the Black Sea resort of Sochi; the ecologist confessed he could not take her home with him, he had a wife, but she was smitten with adventure by now; she had seen palm trees and beautiful botanical gardens, Greek architecture and the gleaming hulls of ships on a startling blue sea. Even her severe asthma had seemed to suppress at sea level. There was no going back to the life she once knew.

She spent a few nights in a hostel with summer camp students who had come to learn tennis at the academy. She visited cathedrals and museums. She sat on sandy beaches and drank vodka with a man who promised he could get her a housekeeping job on one of the cruise lines. And when it came time to interview, she used a landlady’s iron to press her wool dress, brushed her hair a hundred times, and arrived early for her appointment. But it was not the chief cabin steward who showed up to greet her. It was a man with a handgun.

She spent that night in the hull of a freighter with girls who had been kidnapped in Taganrog and all the while more girls were loaded into the hold at the harbor at Sochi, all with stories like her own.

The air was bad from the beginning, but a fuel leak at sea would send her into asthmatic spasms. Katya, when she wasn’t fighting for air, fought to sleep, to dream in the rumbling hull of the ship. After days at sea all her questions about what had happened were reduced to one. Katya wondered if heaven had yellow butterflies.

The captain of the
Anna Marie
nosed his trawler beneath the hulking bow of
Yelenushka,
looking up at the rails where men were dropping lines and readying a battered metal life basket. His crew of four tied off against the freighter’s lines, then sat bobbing in the dark sea off Haiti while the women were being readied.

When they came down, they came two at a time. The captain had them put below in the empty ice hold. It took an hour and fifteen minutes, but all of the women survived. The
Anna Marie
’s crew untied lines and pushed off, letting the forty-foot trawler drift away from the hulking freighter. Ten minutes later the captain checked his radar screen, started his engines, and headed for the coast of Colombia.

CIA H
EADQUARTERS
L
ANGLEY
, V
IRGINIA

“Helmut.”

“Hold on, Graham. I need to close the door.”

Graham cradled the phone to his ear, waiting. He had been staring blankly at his desk ever since his conversation with the director two hours before. It was one of those conversations you couldn’t quite remember afterward but you knew had monumental implications. Especially the part about straying dangerously close to violating state’s sovereignty in Haiti.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Helmut said.

“I got a call from a friend before the director came to see me. My source tells me Ambassador Sanderson is inside the palace in Port-au-Prince.”

“And?”

“President Préval was already waiting for her. He told her he had talked with Washington and that the FBI was putting together a forensics team to send to Port-au-Prince in the morning. He’s agreed to send guards with them to Bedard’s compound.”

“Just like that,” Helmut said.

“Just like that. The ambassador hardly said a word.”

“So who softened Préval up—was it Senator Metcalf?”

“Actually, my source said that President Préval told the ambassador he talked to the White House, but if you think that’s strange, listen to this. Préval put a lockdown on all of western Haiti. He ordered all police field commanders to their stations. Then he closed the airports. Nothing comes or goes from Haiti for the next twelve hours.”

Helmut didn’t know what to say. “What about Colonel Deaken?”

“Officially missing. The palace sent national security guards to his house. His housekeeper said his family hasn’t been home in a week, since about the time the explosives engineer’s body was dumped in Tiburon and your office contacted the colonel for his help.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Helmut said. “Why is Préval restricting access to Haiti and letting the FBI in?”

“He’s not letting the FBI in for twelve hours either,” Graham said. “The lockdown is universal. No one comes or goes from Haiti until noon tomorrow.”

“Why in God’s name would President Préval order that?”

“Why would the Senate Arms Committee order the CIA to stand down? Want to wager a certain retired admiral is in the middle of all this?”

C
ONTESTUS
H
AITI

Sherry could hear men shouting above the thrum of a generator, a high-pitched whine somewhere in the catacombs of the ancient cellar.

“What do you see?”

“The walls are stone and dirt.”

“What else?”

“Bags, cloth sacks of something, men with guns. They are waiting for something.”

“What did they do with Pioche’s wife and her daughter?”

“Next to us,” Carol said, sitting on the floor, her hands wrapped over her head.

Carol’s voice was strained. Sherry knew what the woman was thinking, that her daughter had been here.

Sherry stood at the door. “How far away are the men?” she asked, trying to distract her.

Carol got slowly to her feet, looked out the viewing pane.

“Forty, fifty feet,” Carol said, again collapsing to the floor. Sherry heard the noise rising from within the woman; she turned to hug her and Carol moaned, her mouth pressed against Sherry’s shoulder. The tears weren’t for herself, Sherry knew. Carol was thinking her daughter might have shared this very cell. And here she had spent a summer, with her mother on the other end of the island.

Sherry thought about Brigham just then and was thankful he was not here. He would have preferred it the other way around, she knew; Brigham was like that, he tried to be protective of her, and she had never made that an easy responsibility. They would only have killed him too.

Of course Brigham wouldn’t let this go away quietly. Interpol would try to capitalize on what they learned, would try to do the right thing, but Sherry knew they shared information in a secretive world. She had no doubt as to their intentions, but Sherry had struggled through countless challenges to have some purpose in this life. She wanted to be an example for others. She did not want to become a casualty in a clandestine war.

Brigham wouldn’t allow it, she was sure. He would do everything in his power, use every bit of knowledge at his disposal, including what he knew about Madame Esme’s humanitarian organization, if it helped him get to President Préval. Failing that, he would go public.

Sherry only hoped that he would succeed, that their story would be told. She wanted the world to get a glimpse of what she had seen. She wanted CNN to show what caged humans looked like. She wanted those six o’clock sound bites to provoke reflection on what it must be like looking out from within. Knowing that dreams of love, motherhood, and success were all gone, that their lives, the only lives they would ever have, had been sacrificed to amuse and profit strangers.

Car doors slammed faintly. Sherry turned and looked to where the sound was coming from. She put a hand up, found an air vent. “Can you see out there?”

“Lights outside,” Carol sobbed. “Trucks.”

Sherry heard voices. Footsteps fading into the recesses of the cellar. The whine of the drill stopped.

Sherry heard men talking. The voice of the leader, the man who had shot the old houngan, was disquieting in a way Sherry could not describe.

The man speaking to him sounded British. They were talking about electrical loads and flashovers, but the voices were too distant, and the sobbing of the women around her too loud, to hear specifics.

Then the leader’s voice was coming back toward them, speaking Creole now, moving closer to their cell.

“Open it,” he ordered someone.

Sherry heard the rattle of a metal hasp, the creak of hinges as it opened.

Hands grabbed her arms and pulled her out in the open.

She could smell rancid breath. The man measured six, perhaps seven, inches taller than she.

A hand took her hair and wound it around the fist. She could feel his eyes on her body. She could smell the odor of his skin as he leaned close. Suddenly he jerked her head back and dragged her by the arm and hair across the dirt floor and removed her wrist restraints. Then Bedard said, “Bring the mother out, bring all of them. Line them up on their knees.”

Bedard took a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it while the women were being brought to him.

Sherry could hear them getting close, perhaps only ten feet away, before they were made to kneel facing her.

“So you are the girl’s mother.” Bedard left Sherry standing there and walked toward Carol Bishop. “The American crusader,” he said mockingly.

Carol looked up at him with disgust, muscles tightening in her legs. She looked ready to spring headfirst, but Bedard grabbed her throat and squeezed, watching her face go blue. “You will die soon enough, woman, but first I want you to see how easily a person can be broken. Your daughter was easy,” he sneered. “You should have seen her perform. She didn’t even beg.”

He pushed her away, back to her knees. Then he walked down the line, past the others, lifted Aleksandra’s hair, and let it fall over her battered face. He leaned over and took her head in his hands and jerked it to face the others, grabbed her nose and chin and pried open her empty mouth. “See this. This is my work.” He smiled. “What do you think?”

The dead man’s widow screamed and Bedard backhanded her jaw, sending blood and spittle over Carol’s face.

Bedard stepped away from the kneeling women, looked over his shoulder.

“Take off your clothes, Miss Moore,” he yelled. Sherry’s face showed no expression. She did not move.

Bedard turned to face her. “If you do not, I will take them off myself, or perhaps I will go to the child first. Would you rather I start with her?”

Sherry’s mouth tasted like metal; panic-inducing adrenaline flooded her bloodstream. Until now she had been presented with no opportunity to resist. She’d had guns pointed at her since she’d been taken from the houngan’s temple. Her wrists had been bound.

She took a deep breath from the abdomen. Wait, she coaxed herself, for God’s sake don’t panic.

Sherry was hardly defenseless, she knew martial arts well, but protecting one’s self was not about the immediacy of a response. It was also about opportunity. She knew she had to fight down what her mind and body were screaming for her to do. She could not flail out and overcome the odds, no matter how physically capable. She needed to know more about who and what was around her. She needed the perfect moment.