Disappointed, Litt let his glasses fall back in place. He dipped his fingers into the bloody pool. He rose and moved to Allen's side. Locking his vision on the gaping face like a pickpocket watching his mark for the slightest sign of suspicion, he smeared the blood over Allen's right hand. He covered the front and back and had to return to the pool twice to complete the task. He used the limp hand like a brush to smudge the khaki prison jumpsuit. He also ran the hand down the side of Allen's face.
Allen's one useful eye fluttered open. He sucked in a wheezing breath.
"Litt," he said. "The cure."
"Who sent you? Does Kendrick know?"
"Cure . . ."
"It's here, my friend. Do you know what it is?"
Litt scanned Allen's face: sweaty skin, ash gray; quivering lips; bloody gums. The eye, though—conscious and aware. He'd seen it before, as if the mind were the last to give in to the disease.
"Me," he said. "My blood. Years ago, I was exposed to an early strain. I survived." He raised his head. "My family did not, but I did and started producing antibodies. Isn't that a cruel joke? My body created the cure for the disease that killed my wife and children. I've developed the antidote, but I've shared it with no one. And never will."
He stood. Allen's eyelid dropped.
At the door, Litt looked back. In a fit of anger or insanity, the prisoner had murdered his caregiver.
Litt shook his head and closed the door.
eighty-nine
The trek through Paraguay's northeastern jungle
was as excruciating as Tate had warned. Branches ripped at their clothes, snagged their hair. Thorns jabbed at them and elephant grass whipped at their faces. The flickering shafts and dapples of sunlight piercing the foliage only added to the confusing array of leaves and darkness, solids and space. Tate led them in one direction, then another, sometimes hacking through layers of vegetation, sometimes following the serpentine meanders of small-game trails. They waded through narrow streams—Julia constantly anticipating the first sharp pinch of a piranha.
"Don't fret over one or two bites," Tate had said. "It's when you feel a quick half dozen that you have to get out fast."
At the next crossing, a nibble on her calf scared an audible gasp out of her, and she scrambled onto the bank a dozen feet ahead of the others. When she discovered that she had been attacked by a piece of duct tape that had come loose, she rubbed it and said nothing.
Tate dropped down beside her, taking the healthy deep breaths of an athlete in training. He checked his watch and said, "Three-minute break." He removed the knapsack from his back and withdrew a canteen, which he handed to Julia. She took a long pull of tepid water. quenching a thirst she had only vaguely acknowledged. Tate rummaged in the knapsack, then offered leathery strips of beef jerky, brightly wrapped energy bars, and the requisite oranges.
Julia squinted up at an impossibly yellow sun dancing on the tree-tops. For a moment, it was possible to believe she was back in Georgia, out in the Chattahoochee wilderness, her feet caressed by the waters of Holcomb Creek. Jodi would be getting on Goody for talking business, while he waved her off good-naturedly and slapped her behind. The boys would be laughing, splashing in the creek, asking, "When are we gonna eat?" The sun warmed her face, splashing red flowers against her closed eyelids. A thousand fragrances mixed on the breeze and—
"Time's up!" Tate bellowed like a football coach.
Julia gazed up at him, dazed and disappointed. He unsheathed the machete, exhaled loudly, and marched forward, leaving a smoldering cigar in the cup of a peeled orange.
After an hour, the treacheries of jungle travel became tedious, and her mind reached out to their destination: What will we find there? What opposition? What breaks? She wondered what Kendrick Reynolds was doing. Had he sent in a commando team? Was he, even now, negotiating for Litt's surrender? Two days had passed since she left the hard drive for him. He should have begun the operation to stop Litt immediately.
She slid down a muddy bank into yet another stream, following Tate and dimly aware of Stephen's presence behind her. She was moving mechanically now, using some primal surface consciousness to travel efficiently, grabbing a root to stabilize herself for a trick descent or mimicking Tate's jog around a nasty thicket.
She didn't realize Tate had stopped until she walked into him. He had his forefinger pressed to his lips. She held up her palm to Stephen. Around them, trees rose like scaffoldings, holding their heavy leaves sixty feet above the ground. Smaller trees and bushes, their spindly branches and dappled leaves exploding wildly from unseen stalks. crowded like children around their parents' legs. The three humans stood in shadowy darkness, but for a single shaft of intense light that defied the canopy's protection to splash the ground at their feet.
"We're here," Tate whispered.
Julia rotated her head, saw nothing that would distinguish this spot from any other place in the jungle. As it was, she felt disoriented by the jungle's lack of a horizon or of landmarks that remained visible for longer than a few minutes. It didn't help that she had lost track of time, sensing the distance they had hiked only through her fatigued muscles.
"We will be going under much of the compound's perimeter security," Tate reminded them, waving his hand vaguely in the air behind him, "but I cannot be sure how much sound carries from the mine into the compound. I am always quiet."
He looked intently at Julia, then Stephen. They nodded. He turned, seized a tall bush, and began shaking it. He wrestled with it until it tucked in on itself, revealing a gaping black hole. Julia realized with a start that they were standing at the base of a cliff, so dark and protected she had not seen it at all. The mine opening began about four feet above the ground and rose like a screaming mouth for six feet. Irregularly elliptic, with rounded edges, it looked more like a cave than something man-made.
Tate hoisted himself into that blackness and for a moment disappeared. He reemerged, as if from a pool of ink, to offer Julia his hand. She clicked on her flashlight and saw that the mine opened up as it moved into the mountain. Rotted timbers lay on the floor, among stones, dirt, filaments of abandoned spiderwebs, and animal droppings. Stephen fell in beside her, tugging at his own flashlight, which didn't want to leave his belt.
"This is as far as I go," Tate whispered.
ninety
"The men need me," Tate said. "More important, I have
something with Rosa I'm not ready to give up yet."
He was silhouetted in the mine's opening, hunched slightly but seeming agile and strong, ready to embark on an adventure he had already declined. Smoke swirled around his head, giving Julia the impression that it was he, not his cigar, that was burning.
"You do what you have to do," she said. "We appreciate what you've already done for us."
He squatted and motioned for them to take positions near him. He flipped up the face of his watch, revealing a compass. He tore the Velcro strap away and handed the device to Stephen. Then he shrugged off the knapsack and gave that to him as well. Retreating back through the mine was their best bet, he explained, if they could get there undetected. He would mark the way back to the truck, where he'd wait as long as possible. If they were under heavy fire, he suggested stealing one of the compound's vehicles and plowing through the front gates.