Luke watched gray contrails spew from the Mustang’s dual exhausts as it squealed around the corner at the end of the block. Just as his eyes were about to turn away, they fell on an Asian man sitting in a black town car at the end of the block — the same man he had seen earlier, outside the hospital.
Before Luke finished accelerating into a full run, the Asian had pulled away and was gone.
Megan awoke to groans from the bus’s transmission as the driver downshifted through what seemed an endless number of gears.
After leaving behind the frantic street traffic of Guatemala City, she remembered the bus wending its way around miles of tightly curved roads and finally emerging onto a highway. Then sleep had overtaken her.
She checked her watch. It was just after 4:00 P.M. She had slept almost three hours.
Megan stretched her arms above her head and took in the countryside of Guatemala. Orange sunlight bathed the waist-high grasslands outside her window. The meadows were spotted with clearings, each shaded by a tree that looked as old as the land itself. Aboveground roots the size of sewer mains reached out like claws from the base of each tree, holding steady the massive trunks that stretched a hundred feet into the air and opened into rounded canopies as large as circus tents.
Beyond the grasslands, towering peaks covered in dark shades of emerald stood like a remembrance of a civilization that was once great.
When her bus rounded the next curve, the mountains suddenly gave way to open sky. They drove onto a massive steel-cantilever bridge and crossed high over a half-mile-wide expanse of river.
The bus’s brakes squealed as they came off the behemoth structure and rolled into a narrow and crowded strip of bustling commerce. A barrage of painted signs announced the town’s name: RÍO DULCE.
She had come prepared for the rainy season, wearing a lightweight olive-colored poncho she had hoped would blend into the local scene. Looking around, there wasn’t another one in sight. Lots of Nike T-shirts and hats sporting the insignias of various NBA teams, but no ponchos.
The clinic manager’s sketchy itinerary instructed her to catch any one of several buses going to her final destination, a small pueblo named Santa Lucina. When she disembarked the bus, a horde of ticket vendors thrust themselves at her, waving their hands and yelling destinations as though trying to come up with the answer that would win them her fare.
Twenty minutes later she was on the road again, heading northeast toward Santa Lucina. For this leg of the trip she sat in a weather-beaten minivan that listed heavily to the right. The owner had replaced the factory seating with four crude bench seats that left everyone’s knees propped just under their chins. Nineteen passengers were crammed into the creaky vehicle, including five small children who were sitting on the scuffed metal floorboard.
Megan glanced around. No one seemed the least bit bothered by it. The women sat pensively, wordlessly, never turning to one side or the other. There was a quiet gracefulness about them. The men were as jovial as sailors returning home to port. Several appeared to take a keen but respectful interest in the only gringa among them.
As soon as the red sun dipped below the horizon, Megan noticed for the first time that there were no lights along the roads. They had left the highway about thirty minutes earlier, and the load of passengers was gradually thinning as the driver made seemingly random stops along mostly dirt roads. She could finally see the windshield from her seat in the center of the minivan, but almost nothing was visible in the darkness beyond the thirty or so feet illuminated by the minivan’s dim headlights, one of which flickered whenever they hit a rut in the road.
A sense of tedium set in as the bus rose and fell over a series of undulating hills. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of the thick vegetation that lined the sides of the roads. But mostly her view was of complete darkness, interrupted occasionally by lights from distant villages.
By 7:00 P.M., Megan and a family of three were the only remaining passengers. All of them were going to the last and final destination on this road, Santa Lucina. As the minivan rattled its way over the crest of a particularly steep hill, the driver pointed off to the right. There was a fire burning in the distance.
When they started down the hill, Megan saw a few, then several, dimly lit dwellings scattered across the valley on either side of the blaze.
“Is that Santa Lucina?” she asked in Spanish.
The driver nodded, but she could see that his attention was still fixed on the fire. He stopped the van in the middle of the narrow road, and for several minutes everyone watched in silence as the flames rose and fell to their own eerie rhythm. She thought of her father battling an inferno in his final moments.
Her chest suddenly felt heavy and her breathing quickened. It was a ritual she endured every time she saw a burning structure.
The woman made the sign of the cross and drew her daughter closer. “Mi Dios,” she said.
Megan asked, “What’s over there?”
The husband replied, “Our church. Oh, let it not be the church.”
The woman looked at her husband and said, “Also, the clinic.”
24
Calderon crouched and dug a finger into the soil, which was still wet from the previous night’s rain. He scanned the area to either side while listening for sounds that did not belong on a southern California hillside at night.
His toes were beginning to cramp — the Nike running shoes were a half size too small — but the exhilaration coursing through him overrode the pain signals trying to reach his brain.
He would reach the site in another five minutes, at exactly 8:00 P.M. Everything was well within his mission plan.
He grabbed the knife from his ankle sheath, turned the bottom of his right shoe toward him, and cut two small grooves in one corner of the rubber sole. Then he stood, took two heavy steps, and looked back at the tread prints he’d left in the wet ground.
Satisfied, he started moving along the edge of the path again. There was always a chance he’d run into someone up here, but with temperatures in the low forties — far below the tolerance of most southern Californians — he doubted it. If that happened, he’d spot them long before they saw him.
In Los Angeles, it seemed that even the criminal element was soft. Violent crime plummeted whenever the temperature dipped below fifty degrees Fahrenheit. What he was about to do, though, wasn’t a crime in any real sense of the word. He was exterminating a spineless insect.
He reached the spot along the ridge of the hill that he had scouted that afternoon. It wasn’t an ideal perch; the scrub brush wasn’t as thick as he would have liked, but it would do. Calderon’s skin tingled as he studied the target area downslope from his position. It was a two-story Spanish-style house nestled against the hillside, with a deck extending from the second story. Of course, that description also fit almost every other home in the area.
He had an unobstructed view of the structure. A little over two hundred yards. Not a particularly difficult shot.
He placed his black nylon bag on the ground and unzipped it without a sound. Before touching anything inside the bag, he donned latex gloves. His customized bolt-action Barrett 98 rifle was a prototype that had “disappeared” from a gun show in Atlanta. It was one of only five in the world, and the only Barrett model that used.338 Lapua Magnum rounds. The Lapua rounds could pierce through half-inch glass or a standard wooden door with virtually no displacement of the bullet’s trajectory.
When Calderon had left the U.S. and moved to Guatemala, it was the only weapon he put into storage. He wouldn’t have risked shipping an experimental, unregistered weapon that Customs agents might discover, and he couldn’t bear to part with it, so he’d stored the rifle together with other specialized equipment unique to his profession. He knew this weapon better than most men know their wives. Blindfolded, he could assemble or knock it down in less than forty-five seconds, and he could put one of its bullets through a buttonhole at three hundred meters. What he liked most, though, was the penetrating power of its.338 rounds.