The Candidate (25 page)

* * *

MIKE FELT her hands tighten around his throat again, throttling the life from him. She was so small, so light, how could her grip be so strong? Her fingers were like iron; cold and firm and unbreakable. He looked up, desperate to stop her and her face swam into view as, her fingers dug into his flesh, exploring deep into his body as she whispered in his ear.

“I love you, Mike. I love you, Mike.”

Now Jaynie’s face swam in front of him. She was strangling him, dragging the life out of him. If only he could tell her to stop. He opened his mouth and finally began to scream…

He woke with a start, alone in his hotel room. Sweat covered him and the only sound was the whirring hum of the air conditioner. He breathed heavily as he waited for his eyes to focus in the darkness. Then he flung off the sheets and padded over to the window and drew back the curtains. Outside it was still dark and the lights of Guatemala City twinkled below him, spread out like a rolling carpet of fireflies fleeing to a broken and jagged horizon of dark mountains. He was back.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself.

He put a hand to his throat and felt the swelling where a ring of purple circled his throat in a mottled necklace of bruises. He winced and remembered the eyes that looked down on him as her hands tried to kill him. He felt a twinge of emasculating shame that a woman older and so much smaller than himself was able to take him down. But her sudden attack was so brutal he barely knew what was going on even while it was happening. She would have killed him too; he did not doubt it.

He shivered and turned down the air conditioning. Immediately the heat and humidity of the tropical night invaded the room. There was no going back to sleep so he brewed a cup of coffee and sipped it in front of the window while a slow dawn crept across the mountain horizon to begin a new day. He was jittery and it had nothing to do with the caffeine. He had looked up Santa Teresa on the map and planned to head straight there, armed with little more than a police photograph of the shooter and a long list of questions.

The tiny village was about five hours drive away, along winding roads through the volcanic Mayan heart of the country. It was up in the Highlands that formed the central spine of Guatemala, far from the hot and sweaty Garifuna coast where Carillo now lived. It would be yet another different world. Mike sighed. It felt like an insane expedition and far removed from the campaign he joined. He made a second cup of coffee and watched the dawn break. It was time to go.

* * *

AS HE checked out Mike failed to notice the pretty woman standing beside him until he turned around to head for the door. Even then, as he stared into the familiar face, it was so unexpected, it took a full two seconds of gawping before his brain comprehended with startled recognition.

“Hi Mike!” the woman said with a grin full of triumph and satisfaction.

Lauren.

Mike’s mouth opened and closed like a gasping goldfish. He dropped his bag and searched for words but managed to stutter out only a stunned response. “What… what are you doing here?”

Lauren kept on grinning. “Now that’s really my question to you, Mike,” she said and she stood in front of him, hands on her hips with her head cocked quizzically to one side.

Mike said nothing. He struggled to gather his thoughts. She caught him again. Just like outside the prison in Iowa, she tracked him down. He was flabbergasted.

“Come on, Mike,” Lauren said. “I didn’t follow you again just to have you clam up on me.”

He could barely speak. “How…?” he stammered.

“You think you’re my only source? You guys have downplayed that Guatemalan money transfer, but then I heard a whisper among some of the student volunteers in Manchester that you visited down here on a trip. Didn’t take long to figure out there must be a link. Then I start digging around with the folks who arrange travel for you guys. Seems you’ve not been spending much time on the campaign trail at all recently. You’re on your own mission, Mike, and I’d like to know what it is. So when I heard you were heading down here again, I figured I needed to know why. So I took another risk. I followed you. Here I am.”

Mike was floored. But also impressed. He had no idea she was on his tail.

“What’s going on Mike?” she repeated. “What’s the link with Guatemala? What’s to stop me putting a blog post out in the next hour saying you’re down here?”

The threat was clear. Mike put up a hand and took out his phone.

“Okay,” he said. “You got me. But wait a moment. Let me make a phone call. See if we can make a deal.”

Lauren shrugged. “Sure. But don’t leave my sight,” she said.

Mike walked a few yards and punched in Dee’s numbers. He blurted out the news in a frenzied whisper while covering his phone with his hand and glancing at Lauren who watched him like a hawk eyeing up a rabbit. There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then Dee spoke.

“What the fuck?” she screamed.

Mike shut his eyes. He had never heard Dee lose her cool like that. Not at any point of the campaign. But she lost it now. She shouted a long list of expletives and Mike heard a distant smash as something crashed to the ground in whatever room she was in. Mike weathered the storm and prayed for it to end. He needed Dee to tell him what to do. Eventually there was quiet on the other end and he heard Dee struggle to regain composure.

“We are in a heap of shit here,” she said. “We’ve got six days until polling starts in South Carolina and we don’t need any mistakes. You must keep her quiet until the voting is done and dusted. After that we can deal with any shit that’s going to come out. But
not
before. You got that?”

“Fine,” Mike said. “But what the hell do I do?”

Dee thought for a moment. “Keep her close. We want time and she wants information. So we trade that. Take her with you. Work with her. But tell her that what you discover is embargoed until after South Carolina votes. She can’t run anything about what you find out down there until the last vote is counted. Got that?”

Mike nodded and Dee hung up without a further word. He walked back to Lauren who looked at him expectantly.

“Let’s grab a coffee,” he said. ‘I’ve got a proposal for you.”

CHAPTER 17

“SO, WHERE ARE we going, Mike?” Lauren asked as they at last drove past the final suburbs and slums of Guatemala City.

Her voice was playful but laced with a trace of triumph she could not resist. Mike did not blame her. After all, her journalistic gamble paid off. Both he and Dee seriously underestimated her by assuming stalling tactics would make her lose interest.

“Santa Teresa,” he said. “It’s a village up in the mountains. There was a massacre there back during the war. We are not sure, but we think the shooter witnessed it. She may be a survivor. It would certainly explain a lot. Maybe she went a little crazy and just hates the American military.”

Lauren nodded and jotted down a few things in her notebook. She agreed to Dee’s proposal easily enough. Lauren would get the inside scoop on this investigation but she could not publish it before South Carolina was over. Quid pro quo. But Dee also gave Mike other instructions.

“Don’t let this bitch out of your sight, Mike, and keep her on a strictly need-to-know basis. She’s not your friend. Remember that,” she said.

Mike glanced again at Lauren as she scribbled in her pad in a spider-like shorthand.
Christ, why did everyone have an agenda?
He just tried to do his job and somehow it led to this place, juggling more cover stories and deceptions than a spy. What happened to playing it straight? Lauren looked at him and cocked her head to one side.

“And General Carillo?” she asked.

Mike shrugged as nonchalantly as he could. “We told you about that. He and the Hodges are friends. He’s just helping him out financially. Not everything is a story, you know. We’re following the shooter’s trail here, not Hodges’. You journalists are too damn cynical.”

Lauren raised an eyebrow, but Mike pretended not to see and concentrated on the road ahead that climbed into a rumpled fold of mountains and soared into thickly-clouded skies ahead that steadily darkened.

* * *

THE DRIVE was spectacular. Traffic thinned out between villages and Mike took his eyes off the road for a few precious seconds to admire the scenery. They passed through a series of deep valleys lorded over by a line of perfect cone-shaped volcanoes so symmetrical in their slopes that Mike was reminded of his high school geography text books. At every village Mayan women carried trays of fruit and fried pastries and approached the car when they stopped at junctions. Young children clamored at the windows to sell CDs or newspapers or just beg for a few grimy quetzal notes.

Lauren stared out at the window, entranced by it all. She waved at the people and bought far more food than they would possibly need. From one young, grimy-faced kid she bought a CD of Guatemalan rap music and shoved it into the car’s archaic sound system. Immediately a melody of tinkling, electronic pop blasted into the car amid a howl of Spanish. Mike jumped and the car swerved violently. Lauren burst out laughing.

“Lighten up!” she giggled.

Mike shook his head but could not help but smile. He had to relax and try to enjoy this odd pairing up. Forget the games played behind the scenes and skim along on the surface. Lauren started to dance in her seat beside him, moving her head to the strangled sounds coming out of the stereo. Mike laughed too. She rested a hand on his arm. Her touch felt warm.

“That’s better,” she said.

The car crested a steep mountain pass and they looked down over a landscape of astonishing beauty. In front of them stretched rumpled folds of hills dotted with forest and a patchwork of tiny maize fields. It looked like an immense quilt flung over the earth. In the center of their vision was a shallow volcano, whose low walls were notched, like a broken saucer, and through the gaps they glimpsed a shimmering silver lake. Santa Teresa was one of half a dozen villages inside the crater that clung to the shores of the lake. The previous day Mike had again spoken to Jenny Gusman at the American Center for Latino Justice and she promised that someone would be waiting for them when they arrived. She was so casual that Mike had no idea if she would follow through. But as they drove down into the lip of the volcano he understood how dependent he was on Gusman’s help.

The road zigzagged up the slopes of the volcano and then repeated the pattern heading down into the enormous crater. In a series of switch-backs it descended until the lake at last spread out before them, sparkling in bright blue sunshine like a vision.

“Christ, it’s beautiful,” Lauren said.

Mike’s silence signaled his awed agreement. He drove slowly as the tattered tarmac gradually reverted to dirt and the car lurched over huge potholes. They circled the lake and a cluster of whitewashed buildings came into view around the curve of the crater wall. It was a tiny village with buildings scattered like shaken dice, some on the shore, and others up the gentle slopes of the crater wall near a thick band of forest. A gabled church stood in the middle and looked like the only really solid building. The car crawled on past fields of tall maize worked by women all wearing bright dresses. A few glanced up but most continued their backbreaking labor, enormous baskets carried on their shoulders.

Mike thought, suddenly, of his time in Florida, trying to fight against the dreadful conditions on the plantations. For the first time he knew why it was so hard to get people organized there. If this was how they grew up, how could they even know they were exploited? He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw a gaggle of young children trailing the car, smiling and running along, trying to catch it as they pulled into the village.

Suddenly, an older man, who waited by the side of the road, walked out into the middle of their path. Mike braked quickly. The man came around to the side of the car and tapped on the window with a gnarled looking walking stick. Mike had no idea how old the man was. His features looked like he was in his 50s, but his skin glowed flawlessly and smooth, stretched over an angular face and a prominent nose. He appeared to be pureblood Mayan, like he stepped down from the murals of some ancient pyramid. Mike wound down the window.

“
Señor
Sweeney?” the man said and looked suspiciously over at Lauren.

Mike nodded. “You know Jenny Gusman?” Mike asked in Spanish.

The man nodded and signaled them to park the car next to a nearby house. “I got a message from her last night. I am Rodolfo,” he said. “Follow me.”

The man disappeared into a low building outside which they parked the car. Mike and Lauren followed Rodolfo inside and were immediately assailed by the strong, acrid smell of brewing coffee. It was dark and the ceiling was low. Rodolfo busied himself over a wood burning stove with a bubbling black cast iron pot. He gestured at two plastic chairs and they sat down. A minute later the man brought them small cups of thick black liquid. Mike and Lauren sipped at them. Their lips stung from the heat and their brains suddenly fizzed with the injection of strong caffeine.