Major Ramírez looked at the passport and looked at her. Then he examined the passport again and stared at Alex’s face. He closed the passport and handed it back to her. He told his private to return her weapons.
“Venga con nostros,” the captain said. Come with us. We’re very sorry.
They led her through several thickets, the young soldiers hacking their way with machetes. They came to a path and fell in with other soldiers. Other people from the village had been rounded up too. The sad tragic trek through the forest took half an hour. Then they came to a clearing and then what remained of Barranco Lajoya.
Nothing in her experience could have prepared Alex for what she saw, not even the violence and obscenities from her experience in Ukraine.
There were bodies still lying on the ground, men and women and children, awaiting body bags. The straw roofs of several buildings had been torn off, cement and concrete buildings had been smashed. The raiding party had shown no mercy. Walls were down on almost all buildings, the generator had been smashed into oblivion, and the muddy unpaved streets of the town were strewn with the shattered remnants of the buildings. The village looked as if it had been bombed.
The soldiers led Alex into a small littered clearing behind another hut, and there on the floor were several sheets and canvas coverings. It was a makeshift morgue. There were so many bodies that Alex didn’t think to count them.
Major Ramírez removed his hat and led Alex to a viewing area, which was no different from any other area except it was a small cleared patch of ground.
The comandante looked at her with sorrow in his eyes. Then he reached down to one of the sheets.
She braced herself. Ramírez lifted the first of several gray blankets so that she could see. Against her will, against all the training she had received at the FBI Academy, against even the horror of what she had witnessed in Kiev, she gasped and retched.
On the ground were the bullet smashed corpses of the six missionaries who had served in this village, four men and two women. These were the people she had known personally and worked with. Their bodies were caked in blood, their limbs and heads twisted at impossible angles and folded back together.
Some of their faces had been hammered into pulp by the force of the bullets. One woman’s head, the one closest to Alex, had star fractures in both eyes and a lower jaw blown off. One man’s upper torso had been hit by so many bullets that the soldiers had had to tie it closed with rope and canvas.
The executions, she could tell, had taken place at close range and without the slightest sign of mercy. This was the earthly reward that these kind people had received for trying to bring some good to this small tough patch of the world.
Alex stared at the obscenity before her. She wondered: had the invaders come for the missionaries? Or could she have been the ultimate target? But if the raiders had known she was among them, why had she been the only foreigner to defend herself and to have escaped?
Plenty of questions. No answers.
“Ya está bien,” she said softly to Ramírez. “Más que suficiente.” More than enough. Enough for the moment. Enough for a lifetime.
Ramírez gave a terse signal to his soldiers. They covered the bodies again. Alex turned away and left the room. A few feet away, she sat down on the ground, too shocked to even cry. Insects buzzed around her and the heat was relentless. She no longer cared.
On the morning of the next day, she oversaw the simple funerals of the people of the village. A military chaplain presided. The dead were interred beneath wooden crosses on a mountainside that overlooked the valley. The missionaries who had lived with them were buried with them and, presumably, would remain with them for eternity. How long, Alex wondered, would the ghosts of those slain haunt this place?
That afternoon, Alex watched as Venezuelan Red Cross workers came in and led a long march of survivors down the mountainside to waiting vans. The village was no more. The survivors were to be relocated.
That same evening, Major Ramírez appeared and spoke to her. “I have my further orders,” he said. “You are to leave the country immediately.”
“It’s not like I was planning to stay after what happened,” she said sullenly.
“Your contact will find you in Caracas,” he said.
“What contact?” she demanded.
“I only know my instructions,” he said, “and I’ve just related them to you.” He paused. “And if I were you,” he said, “I would leave quickly, before the government of Venezuela changes its mind.”
That evening before sunset, she returned to La Paragua and flew back to Caracas by army helicopter. Three soldiers accompanied her, obviously under orders, saying nothing, only staring. The personal items she had left at the hotel had been safely stored for her. She retrieved them easily upon her return to Caracas.
The horrors of Barranco Lajoya hung heavily on her. She phoned Joseph Collins in New York with the intention of relating what had happened. But word had already reached him. He inquired only about her safety. She assured him that the Venezuelan army had treated her properly.
They agreed to meet in New York as soon as possible. Then, that evening, she found a Methodist church not far from her hotel and spent time in prayer and meditation-seeking answers and guidance and not finding much of either-until an elderly pastor appeared and closed the doors to the church at midnight.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Alex walked the few blocks back to her hotel from the church.
The blocks were quiet and shadowy, South American cities being lit at night nowhere as well as North American ones. She had her Beretta with her and examined every shadow as she approached it.
She returned safely to her hotel. But in her room, there was a man waiting, a visitor. She was not altogether shocked to see him. She had almost been expecting his reappearance. In the darkest corners of her mind, things were starting to fall into place, no matter how much she wished to reject the meaning of recent events.
“I wouldn’t get too comfortable here,” the visitor said, standing as she entered her own room. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“Go to hell, Michael!” She glared at him and suppressed an even more violent and profane run of obscenities.
“No, really,” Michael Cerny said evenly. “I know what you’ve been through. I know what you’re thinking. But we’re going to iron everything out by the end of the day.”
“What I’m thinking is that there’s a black cloud following me around. And you’re it. I ought to shoot you.”
“That doesn’t sound very Christian to me,” he said, “nor very charitable.”
“Then I ought to shoot you twice,” she said.
“Let’s go,” Cerny said. “We’re on our way to Paris.”
“Not a chance!” she answered.
“You might want to change your mind,” he said. “Don’t you realize what the militia attack on Barranco Lajoya was about?”
“No, I don’t,” she answered. “Mr. Collins sent me there to troubleshoot. To find out what someone had against these people. So why don’t you tell me? Then we’ll both know!”
“The attack on the village had nothing to do with the village itself,” he said. “But it was made to look that way. You honestly don’t understand what they were after, what they were looking for?”
She could see Father Martin being thrown to the ground again. The insistent voice of his murderer as he stood above him.
¿Dónde, dónde, dónde? Where, where, where?
What had they been seeking?
“It hasn’t occurred to you?” he asked.
It had. “They were looking for me,” she said.
“You,” said Cerny. “The Ukrainian Mafia sent people looking for you. They wish to kill you or kidnap you and take you back to Ukraine.”