A fast-moving object on the water interrupted his thoughts. It was a large boat, over thirty feet long, with a steering house on the foredeck, speeding up the river toward the mouth of Lake Izabal. It suddenly changed course and slowed, steering toward the fortress. He hadn’t considered the possibility that they would arrive by water.
A minute later the boat neared the dock to the left of the castle.
He checked his watch: 7:57 P.M.
Luke couldn’t hear the engine but he saw a froth of water behind the boat as it throttled back and gently tapped against the dock. Two men jumped from the deck, quickly moored the boat, then stepped back onto the vessel and disappeared below deck.
The clouds broke and a patch of moonlight reflected off the lake. The castle turned into a black silhouette against the water’s gleaming surface.
He swung his scope across the front of the castle and swept the other side of the plaza, searching the trees for movement, then swung it back and scanned the area around the dock. He repeated the process three times.
On the third pass, as his scope moved across the castle’s front wall, he caught a fleeting shadow at the edge of his lens. A man was climbing over the fortress’s dockside wall.
He swung his rifle to the other side of the castle. Another black figure was scaling the opposite wall with a rifle slung across his back.
They climbed like well-practiced spiders. He found a third man crouched just inside the castle wall, along the upper rim of the parapet just above the drawbridge.
When his eyes were elsewhere, the men had probably slipped over the boat’s stern and waded through shoreline waters to the castle’s lakeside wall, then around its perimeter. How many other movements had he missed?
All three men disappeared into the castle’s interior, searching the stony structure just as Luke had guessed they would. A short time later two of the men reappeared at either end of the fortress’s front battlement, scanning the park with their rifle scopes.
Luke centered his scope on the boat and increased the magnification. He didn’t have to wait long.
A dark form emerged from the boat’s steering house, stepped down onto the dock, and began walking toward the castle. The lone figure moved tentatively at first, then settled into a slow and deliberate gait.
Just before reaching the castle’s front gate, the person stopped and sat on the bench.
A match flared in Luke’s nightscope. His lens filled with a bright green flash of light.
Luke looked away, keyed in Sammy’s cell phone number on Rosalinda’s satellite unit, and pressed SEND.
He reacquired the dark figure just as the first ring sounded in his earpiece. The person on the bench startled at the sound, then looked down to where Sammy’s phone was taped.
He increased the magnification and quartered the target in his sights.
The second ring sounded.
The figure slowly raised the glowing match to chin level.
Oh my God!
Megan’s tremulous face filled his scope, her eyes darting from side to side.
Luke’s breaths came in heaving gasps.
She was mouthing a word, the same word over and over. Rat?…Rap?
“Trap,” he whispered.
The slide of an automatic weapon clicked in his right ear. “That’s right, cockroach.”
Luke closed his eyes. “How’d you find me?”
“So many sloppy mistakes. You college boys don’t know how to work a con. Setting up a meeting so close to your hotel, using the woman’s name on the hotel register.”
“What woman?”
“Let’s not play games. Did you think we didn’t know the microbiologist’s name? Did you think we wouldn’t check the hotels in this area?”
A sudden sick feeling swept over Luke.
“In case you’re wondering — yeah, she’s dead. We had a little talk. It seems you told her too much. I’m afraid you left me no choice.”
“You son of a bitch.”
Luke didn’t hear the loud clack when his skull smacked against the concrete deck.
His world had already gone dark.
Calderon heard the clap of footsteps on the dock as he and his men were securing their human cargo below deck. He came up through one of the forward hatches, holding his Colt semiautomatic low and behind his thigh.
Standing on the dock, next to one of the mooring lines, was a small boy.
The boy said in Spanish, “You need supplies, boss? I’ll run to the store for you. Ten quetzals.”
“Get outta here, kid.”
The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. “You like? Two quetzals.”
“I’m gonna count to three. One…two…”
The boy turned and ran from the dock. He had an odd, swaying gait.
Calderon went below deck again. Two minutes later, just as he fired up the diesel engines, he heard a creak directly above him on the deck. Using hand signals to communicate, he and Kong made their way to the fore and aft hatches. Simultaneously, they charged up through the openings, their guns held at chest level.
A seagull fluttered off the roof of the steering house. Kong gestured toward the fleeing bird.
Calderon made a looping motion with his gun, indicating that he wanted the Asian to search the deck anyway.
Calderon checked the poop ladder, then walked the length of the boat’s port side. He did this while Kong searched the aft section, including the fantail where an inverted lifeboat — an inflatable Zodiac with outboard motor — was secured with ropes across the backend of the boat.
In the shadowed light, Kong didn’t notice the subtle tenting of the raft bottom’s rubber skin.
52
The knot on the side of Luke’s head throbbed violently, and he was still drifting at the edges of a mental fog when he saw Petri Kaczynski emerge from an enormous rock-walled tunnel. Two men walked alongside the geneticist, supporting him at his elbows. The moon threw an eerie blue cast on the old man’s face — he looked like a conjured spirit.
Luke and Megan lay hog-tied next to Calderon’s boat on a thick timbered dock that reached out from the mouth of the tunnel into a black water lagoon. Sheer limestone cliffs rising straight up from the river’s edge swept around them in a lazy curve, forming a large cove that kept out the Río Dulce’s currents.
On the other side of the dock was a massive barge onto which several workers were loading crated equipment. The word TAIFANG was printed on the back of their hard hats. Armed men stood guard over the operation.
A few minutes earlier, as three of Calderon’s men had dragged them from the boat, Luke spotted the running lights of a stationary freighter in the middle of the river.
Calderon was nowhere in sight, which brought back the question that Luke had been asking himself ever since he awoke: Why hadn’t Calderon already killed them?
Kaczynski took a halting step. “I need to rest,” he said. “Stop here.”
The geneticist’s keepers lowered him onto a wooden crate, where he sat catching his breath. All three men wore shirts stenciled with the word CHEGAN.
Before arriving at the remote site, while locked away in the boat’s hull, Megan had whispered to Luke about Kaczynski, the secluded cove, and the walled compound at the other end of the tunnel where she’d been held captive. Until now her words had sounded like the imagined driftwood of a bizarre dream.
Kaczynski’s eyes traveled past Megan and settled on Luke. “I wish you hadn’t come here. I truly do.”
“I’m sure your family would be very proud of you, Petri, if only they knew.” Luke recalled watching Kaczynski’s wife drowning in grief at her husband’s memorial service five years earlier.