He’d been mulling that question for the past hour and still hadn’t come up with anything resembling a plan.
“Follow the only lead I have.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket on which Rosalinda had written the Río Dulce address for CHEGAN.
“I have no idea what is there. It is simply the address I had in my records.”
“I need to see what’s there.” He glanced over at her. “And I’ll need your help, at least to drive by and scout the place. You blend in better than me.”
Frankie stuck his head through the porthole between the cab and the truck bed. “Boss, where we going?”
“Stop calling me ‘boss.’ ” Luke reached into the footwell on Rosalinda’s side of the cab, grabbed his pack, and fished out Sammy’s phone.
He had missed that evening’s call from Sammy, but they were passing over the crest of a mountain and Luke thought he’d try for a satellite connection while he could. He punched in Sammy’s number.
A voice filled with sleep answered on the other end. “Do you know what time it is?”
Luke looked at his watch. “Three-seventeen A.M.”
“Where the hell have you been, Flash?” Sammy’s voice was suddenly awake.
“I need information about something called the CHEGAN FOUNDATION.” He spelled it for Sammy.
“Hang on. Let me get something to write with.”
Luke kept going: “Last time we talked, you said you might have something to tell me tonight. What did you mean?”
“I’m still working on it. Sammy’ll let you know if—”
“Tell me now.”
After a long stretch of static, Sammy said, “Okay, but don’t say anything until Sammy’s done talking.” Another pause, then, “I’m coming up dry on your lady friend’s kidnapping. Now, I know you said no-way no-how you were gonna talk to Calderon, but I got to thinkin’ that maybe I should call him.”
Sammy seemed to wait for a reaction that Luke didn’t give him, so he continued, “I didn’t tell him about you. I told him your hospital had hired me to look for her. He’s got connections in places where polite folks usually don’t go. I figured it’s worth a try. But I haven’t heard back, so maybe he’s got zip.”
Luke looked down at the gun tucked under his belt. It was a Colt 1911A1 semiautomatic that he’d lifted from one of the would-be killers — the same make and model that Calderon had used while a member of Proteus.
Rather than the standard .45 caliber model, Calderon had used a modified version that shot 10mm rounds — just like the one tucked under Luke’s belt.
“Stay by your phone,” Luke said. “I have a feeling that Calderon will be calling you.”
“A feeling?”
“When you hear from him, let me know.” Luke thumbed the END CALL button.
Megan looked back at the valley below her. She’d been climbing the mountainside for over twenty minutes and wondered why she hadn’t reached the road she’d seen from inside the walled compound.
The complex was strangely quiet. There were no men rushing under the wash of floodlights, no flashlights on the hillside below her — none of the angry sounds she had expected to hear.
Nothing to distract her from the guilt that hung over her like a guillotine blade. Earlier, she had rationalized that they wouldn’t risk killing Father Joe as long as she was on the loose. After all, they had to know that she would bring the police back with her. But there was something about the nature of these men that tugged at the logic of her argument.
Especially their leader, Calderon. There was a zeal and obsession to his cruelty. She couldn’t expect him to think and act as other men might.
Megan climbed over the rotting trunk of a deadfall. Her foot came down on a dry branch. A loud crack split open the forest’s calm.
She froze, winced. The buzz of insects filled her ears.
A moment later a grinding sound pierced the white noise of the forest.
Metal against metal. Gears scraping against one another. She looked up toward the sound. A headlight strobed on the hillside above her, about twenty yards up the hill, its beam darting between breaks in the trees.
Her legs started churning like a jackhammer. She thrashed up the hill.
The single headlight swept over her, then a truck drove past on the road that was just ten feet up the hillside.
She screamed but it came out as a hoarse whisper. Her breath was gone.
Megan clawed at the undergrowth and finally, on all fours, dragged herself onto the edge of the road.
She was spent.
The truck downshifted — more grinding — and turned into a curve about thirty feet ahead of her. The only brake light that worked glowed red.
She guzzled air, her lungs heaving, trying to catch her breath and raise a scream.
She rose onto her knees and yelled.
As she did, an arm came from behind and wrapped her neck in a chokehold. The last thing she heard was the unearthly sound of her own smothered scream.
48
“What was that?” Luke pumped the brakes and slowed the truck as they rounded a curve on the narrow mountain road.
“Probably a predator finding its next meal,” Rosalinda replied.
“It sounded human,” he said. “Like someone screaming.”
“In a forest full of primates, sounds like that are common.”
Luke pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked his eyes into focus. Ahead of them a faint blush of moonlight dusted the timbered peaks. Outside the driver-side window, a single cluster of amber lights burned in the valley below them. The sound was too close to have come from there.
He looked into the back of the truck. Rosalinda’s workers were staring at the trailer bed, avoiding his gaze. Frankie was curled up, asleep.
Luke eased off the brakes and the truck started to roll again.
They rode in silence for the next hour while he replayed the past week’s events. He thought back to something that had gnawed at him for days. The person who had framed him for the football player’s murder had to know that Luke was proficient with a sniper’s rifle, or the frame wouldn’t have worked. Only a handful of close friends knew of his training as a SEAL, and no one but fellow Proteus members knew about his brief career in black ops.
Luke fingered the Colt 1911A1 semiautomatic under his belt. Proteus had given its elite fighters a great deal of freedom in selecting sidearms and other personalized weapons. Two of its members had used the modified 10mm Colt. Both had come to Proteus from the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, formerly known as Delta Force.
But only one, Calderon, held a grudge against him.
The men who had attacked him at the forest lab were highly trained soldiers who used military tactics. He thought back to what Sammy had told him about Calderon training Guatemala’s Special Forces before forming his own security company, a company he would likely staff with men he had trained, and men he equipped to his own standards.
The pieces of the puzzle fell into place like pins in a lock tumbler. Calderon knew him in a way that few did, well enough to reel him in, using Megan as bait, knowing that he would press the fight rather than run.
Calderon would have seen through Sammy’s charade and known that Luke, not University Children’s, was behind Sammy’s search for information about Megan.
Luke was counting on it. He wanted Calderon to act on his hunter’s instinct. The killer had lost Luke’s scent and would follow every lead to reacquire his prey.
Without knowing it, the cunning Sammy Wilkes was being played by both sides.
Would Calderon know that he’d been discovered?
Luke realized it wouldn’t matter. Calderon would never run, never go underground. He’d continue the hunt.
And that would be his final mistake, because Luke was going to kill him.