Don't Look Back (30 page)

He prodded Ruffian, and they moved forward, wet leaves and moist vines tapping their shoulders, painting their faces with dew. Now that Eve had actually launched into the jungle, dread no longer threatened to choke her. Something in the act of
doing
had reduced it from a razor-edged ball in her throat to something awful yet manageable. Every step left safety farther behind and brought with it mounting anticipation, the effect like balancing on a fulcrum, each foot weighing a different fall. Beneath it all, a dark impulse quickened her blood. At first she mistook it for adrenaline, but as she knifed on through the blackness, she understood it as something different, something akin to exhilaration.

“Careful,”
Fortunato hissed from around Ruffian, and a moment later a branch whipped back from the beast’s hindquarters and smacked her across the chest.

She caught the branch in the darkness, but the momentum shoved her onto her heels. Wobbling, she had a flash memory of Will snapping the branch into Jay on the way to the cascade and knocking him back a half step. Will and Claire had laughed and high-fived with all the humor and energy of a vacation freshly under way. The image like a postcard from another life.

Still holding on, Eve tried to step out from under the tilt, but the branch sagged. She slid to the side, but then a forceful hand gripped her arm painfully and yanked her to her feet.

She tore free, rubbed her biceps.
“What?”

Fortunato pointed to the spot on the side of the trail where she’d nearly tumbled, and she blinked it into night-vision focus. At first she thought what she was looking at was the other half of the cracked boulder they’d paused beside when they’d heard the jaguar’s roar. But then it came clearer—a giant beach ball of papier-mâché wrapped around a fallen branch. She leaned closer yet and saw hundreds of spots of movement scurrying about the surface.

Termites.

White dots and stiff wings. She felt them as a revulsion scurrying beneath her skin.

“When the nest grows too heavy, it brings down the branch,”
Fortunato said.
“It would not be good to fall there.”

“Thank you. Sorry I didn’t understand.”

He touched a finger to his ear.
“Listen. Can you hear it?”

She cocked her head.

A susurration flowed over the rise ahead, barely reaching her ears.

The river.

“Now,”
Fortunato said,
“we must turn silent.”

The next couple hundred yards seemed to take as long as the preceding miles. They didn’t speak at all. They communicated by touch and movement, setting down on the same footholds, passing pinned-back branches from hand to hand, guiding the burro with pats and taps.

As they carved upslope, the noise rose by degrees until it was a roar of water across stone. Soon an openness manifested itself in the gaps in the foliage ahead.

Fortunato tied off Ruffian several strides back from the river, hiding him beneath tree cover, then slipped through the final veil of leaves. A moment later she followed.

Dumbstruck, she stared down at the river, not believing her eyes. It glowed an eerie green, twisting and writhing through the darkness like a snake. On a slight lag, she put it together—the algae coating the riverbed was emitting a bioluminescence. The sight was otherworldly. Alien.

Fortunato had already started down the bank, his movement jarring her out of her reverie. She was sorry it had. For the first instant since she’d left the lodge, her mind had drifted from the dreadful undertaking at hand. In another time she could have stood transfixed for hours, watching the emerald water run.

She clicked the dive watch’s backlight and checked the digits. Four hours and twenty minutes left on the countdown. She started after Fortunato, guiding her body carefully. They worked their way along the rocky bank above the seething river’s edge. The flash flood had already blasted through, but still the water ran high and furious. It was hard to imagine that it was shallow enough downriver for the Jeep to cross, but that was a problem for the next morning.

If they lived to see it.

It took an eternity to make their way around the first bend and even longer to round the next. They kept on like that, mindful of every breath, every step, every pebble trickling out from underfoot. At one point a spout of water appeared ahead, erupting twenty feet in a perpetual fountain. Drawing close, Eve saw the cause. The swept-away bridge had gathered against a kink in the river, concrete and steel crumpled like paper by the force of the current. Even Fortunato paused before the awesome sight.

The closer they got, the greater the chance of ambush. After all, they were creeping into al-Gilani’s trap.

Breathing quietly, they pressed on past the bridge’s remains. Numerous times Fortunato halted, hearing something she did not, and she’d freeze in his wake, braced for an assault. A sleeping bird would flutter up from cover, or a snake would uncoil from a nearby rock, and they would exhale and move on.

At last the shiny thread of the zip line split the air before them. The sight of it, linked to Eve’s first glimpse of the man in the canyon, brought a wash of sense memories. Her peeping vantage down at the plywood human target. That scarred face, swiveling to meet hers. Her breathless huddle at the base of the rotting log.

They remained still for a very long time, letting their eyes pick apart the darkness, then finally approached. She made a fist around the steel cable. A dividing line between their side of the river and his, between safety and terror, between everything she’d always known and those things she’d yet to learn.

The hand trolley was there waiting, snugged against the tree trunk. It had been flung back across, left for them.

They were expected.

The line stretched across the glowing river, vanishing into the darkness of foliage on the far side.

“I will go first,”
Fortunato said, and she nodded and did not argue. He tucked the steak knife into his waistband, grabbed the trolley in both fists, then looked back at her.
“If I land there and he is waiting for me and kills me, flee.”

It was an effort to find the air to speak, so she nodded again.

Fortunato gripped the trolley so tightly that veins stood out in his arms. He gathered his weight back on his haunches, then hurled himself out over the river. Even above the rush of the current, the noise of his ride was piercing, a man-made zippering of metal on metal. He flew across, dropping to land at the base of the trees on the far side. He whipped in a full circle, knife low at his side, then scurried up what was left of the bank, vanishing into the underbrush.

She waited, river mist tickling her cheeks. She waited some more. Just as her breath began to quicken with panic, she heard a noise.

The metallic drone of the hand trolley rode back to her, empty. As it passed, she caught it by her face.

She held it, breathing even harder now, watching the darkness on the far riverbank. At last Fortunato reappeared and flashed a thumbs-up.

She held the hand trolley, remembering Neto’s words about the zip line:
Not for the faint of heart.
And that was back when the water level was lower, calmer. If her grip failed and she went into the white water, there was a good chance she wouldn’t get out.

Setting her teeth, she seized the metal bar, took two running steps, and leapt from the bank. The trolley rasped along the line, and she swung awkwardly, her view of Fortunato on the opposing shore rocking from side to side. She held her legs as high as she could, but foam flared up at her, snatching at her legs and back.

And then she was over and flying at Fortunato, who hissed,
“Let go.”
A moment before she would have rocketed painfully into the underbrush, she released the trolley, dropping onto him and knocking them both into a sprawl. They dusted themselves off and took stock of the surroundings, catching their breath. Then they crept along the bank, staying well above the floodwater that had inundated the sandy shoal where they’d picnicked three days ago.

The trail to the canyon came clear, rising through the rain-battered spray of orchids. Fortunato cut into the underbrush well before it, and she followed him parallel to the trail. They made slow time, but it was worth staying off the main path.

They skirted the clearing with the camping toilet, fighting foliage upslope and then drifting down, emerging at the northern edge of the canyon floor. Trees grew sparser, and they glided between the trunks until the house came into partial view against the cliff wall a few hundred yards away.

The lights were on.

Eve’s breath hitched in her chest. She let it out slowly through her nose.

She wanted to check the stopwatch but couldn’t risk the light. She guessed that the countdown was somewhere near the three-hour mark. They watched for fifteen minutes and then fifteen more. They became a part of the jungle, part of the stones and the peeling trunks and the beetles moving silently across the moist ground at their feet.

Fortunato broke the stillness, creeping forward, moving like a deer. She kept at his back, her heart pounding so loud she wondered if he could hear it. They came alongside the copse of close-packed trees, those fronds woven together to form a natural carport for the rusted Jeep. Even from this close, the vehicle was barely discernible, the greenery camouflaging it from all sides, blending it into the forest, making it invisible to drone or satellite.

They pushed forward inch by inch until the front of the house was unobscured.

Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani sat in brazen full view in the well-lit front room, his legs crossed, the machete resting across his bowed thighs. To his side, ignored on the floor like a piece of furniture, lay Claire, strapped to the plywood sheet with the human target painted on it. For a moment Eve thought she was already dead. Her eyes looked distended, all whites, her body motionless. A gag indented her cheeks. Her head hung limply to one side. Then Claire pulled her head back weakly, an attempt to flip a lock of hair out of her face. The gesture, so ordinary and small and human, caused emotion to well in Eve.

A falling sensation overtook her, a weight tugging at her bones, putting a vertiginous swoon into her gut. It passed, and she reacquainted herself with the scene, with reality. In his monklike pose, al-Gilani stared out at the window, unmoving, his gaze fixed fifteen degrees off from where Fortunato and Eve crouched. He was totally exposed.

Eve turned her head until her lips rested against Fortunato’s ear.
“What’s he doing?”

He pivoted slowly, communicating just as quietly to her.
“He wants us to see him
.
So we approach. He is not scared. Our one advantage is he does not expect much from us
.”

And our one
dis
advantage,
she thought,
is that he’s right.

They were within twenty yards now, close enough that she could see the rise and fall of al-Gilani’s chest beneath his gauzy cotton shirt. She remembered the smell of him in the catacombs beneath the ruins. That arm blocking her.

“Let us check the house,”
Fortunato whispered.

They moved painstakingly through the darkness, directly across al-Gilani’s line of sight. Given the light within, there was no way he could spot them. She stared through the window at his face, and he stared back at her, unseeing. He exuded calmness and supreme confidence. If he became aware of their presence, it seemed he could impale them with a look.

Keeping a wide berth, they finally passed to the far side of the house, leaving al-Gilani behind. Through a window, a back room came into sight. Next to a rickety cot, a mat lay unfurled, and next to that a bound book lay on a mat of twigs.

A Qur’an. And the mat, a prayer rug.

She remembered her Muslim patients over the years, how she’d worked with some of the more devout ones to ensure that they found a good spot in their hospital rooms to pray five times a day. She thought about how important the prayers were, how particularly the times were prescribed, and a notion struck her.

She turned to grab Fortunato.
“He’ll pray soon. He has to pray, and we can—”

He seized her arms violently and said, too loudly,
“Do not move!”

She froze.

His gaze lowered. He did not move his head, only his eyes in the sockets. With equal caution she looked down.

Across her ankle a floating wire was stretched to the breaking point.

Chapter 40

The trip wire, two inches above the jungle floor, was rusted, leaving no chance it would catch a glint of moonlight. That was why, in fact, Eve had failed to notice it.

Fortunato said,
“Do not even breathe
.
Let me see what the wire leads to.”

She felt her muscles quivering and willed them to stop. Another millimeter could turn her into a mushroom cloud. Her first thought was of Nicolas. She pictured him, his face tilted up to hers, wearing a mildly inquisitive expression as he awaited an answer to a request for a sleepover, more mint chip ice cream, Internet time to determine how many moons Jupiter has. The image rent her, and she forced it out, away.

Right now there were two things: The wire. And not moving.

On all fours Fortunato worked his way toward the house, tracking the filament, keeping it inches from his face. She watched his halting progress, the wire blending with the jungle floor, coming in and out of view. Her attention was split between him and the corner of the house, around which she expected al-Gilani to explode at any second, machete wielded overhead. She was having trouble finding oxygen in the air.

Despite the all-too-real nausea shuddering through her, she couldn’t fully catch up to the situation. Was she really here on a dank canyon floor at night, a trip wire stretched to the breaking point across her shin? It seemed impossible that four days ago she’d been grocery shopping in Woodland Hills.