Fourteen seconds.
“Ah, what the hell.” Calderon flipped the toggle switch.
His last conscious thought was the sensation of intense heat from an orange fireball.
Luke was underwater and dolphin-kicking away from the barge when the C-4 exploded. The blast wave slammed into him like a tsunami.
The world went from dark to black and the murky water suddenly felt like a viscous soup. He was disoriented, unable to differentiate up from down.
This was supposed to be his element. Nighttime water operations were what SEALs knew best, but his mind went hazy and his eyes lost focus as the last of his oxygen burned away.
He brought his legs together and dolphin-kicked, following the small air bubbles he released from his mouth every few seconds, chasing them upward. When his head broke the surface, he pointed his mouth at the sky and gulped in the night air until his speckled vision cleared.
He was almost fifty feet from the dock when he surveyed the results of his work. A large chunk of the barge’s midsection was missing, as was the Plexiglas mosquito container that had sat over the section of hull where he placed the C-4 charge and detonator. The huge iron flatbed was already listing heavily, and water was flowing into the starboard side.
At the far end of the lagoon, Calderon’s boat was turning in a tight circle. A man on the vessel’s bow was using a hook pole to snag something in the water. When he finally caught it, it took three men to pull the limp body from the water. As they were lifting the large figure onto the boat’s deck, he erupted in a coughing fit and started thrashing. The men jumped away as if from a wild animal.
Calderon.
A man in the dimly lit wheelhouse shoved the throttle arm forward, made a violent turn, and powered the boat into the river’s channel.
Luke turned to a blackened cul-de-sac at the farthest edge of the cove and stared into a shallow hollow until his eyes detected the movements. Megan and Frankie were treading water behind a curtain of hanging vines.
55
“You’re being stubborn,” Luke said to Megan. “You have to go to Guatemala City, to the U.S. Embassy. You’ll be safe there.”
“I’m not going there without you.” She poked his chest on the last word.
He looked across the bus aisle at Frankie. The boy was lying lengthwise on a bench seat with his head propped against the window and his hands coupled behind his neck, his glance bouncing between Megan and Luke as if taking in a ping-pong match.
“I can’t go to the embassy,” Luke said. “There’s still a murder warrant out on me and I came here on a forged passport. The first thing they’d do is lock me up.”
“Fine, then we’re not going to the embassy. But we’re staying together, and that’s final.”
Their nearly empty bus slowed for a sweat-drenched man yanking his mule across the road. Luke felt a certain kinship with the man.
Ahead, beyond a mile-long swath of grasslands, a dome of brown haze hung over the city of Santa Elena.
Returning Frankie to his mother was the only thing they had agreed on since their escape. Minutes after the explosion on the barge, four surviving crew members and one of Calderon’s sentries had escaped in a small skiff they threw over the side of the sinking vessel. Calderon’s boat had disappeared and the freighter was already steaming away when the river finished swallowing the barge and its cargo.
A fishing trawler had come across the carnage at first light, making two figure-eight loops outside the cove before swooping in and unloading its crew to pick over the shoreline for loose salvage. For one hundred U.S. dollars, the skipper had ferried them back to Río Dulce, where they’d boarded a bus to Santa Elena.
“Calderon’s going to come after me,” Luke said, “and I’m going to let him find me because this thing won’t end until one of us is dead. Until it’s over, I want you as far away as possible.”
“And where am I supposed to hide, Luke? Tell me, where will I be safe? I’ve seen what these people are capable of. They slaughtered an entire village.” She grabbed his hand. “Don’t leave me here by myself.”
He felt the tremor in her fingers, and wrapped his hand around hers.
There was no way to remove her from this nightmare, he realized. Calderon and his men had probably already regrouped and begun hunting for them. If Megan remained with him, he was exposing her to the violent fury that would inevitably converge on him. If they separated, Megan might have to run a gauntlet of Calderon’s men to reach the embassy, after which some State Department bureaucrat might or might not adequately protect her while investigating her improbable story.
“Okay. Maybe you’re right,” he said finally. “We’ll stay together, at least until we get out of the country.”
The bus lurched when it started moving again, and Megan’s head pitched back as if a thought had just shaken free.
“The first thing we need to do is warn your father.”
She was reading his thoughts. Wounding CHEGAN had served only to arouse his enemy. Kaczynski and his knowledge were safely secured in the bowels of the Chinese freighter. Though Luke may have destroyed Kaczynski’s lone colony of egg- and sperm-killing mosquitoes, CHEGAN needed only to acquire a fresh batch of his father’s mosquitoes to salvage its genocidal plan.
His father was standing directly in their path and didn’t even know it.
“My dad’s office and home phones are probably wired. These people are thorough,” he said. “Maybe I can reach him on the wards this afternoon. They can’t tap every phone in the hospital.”
The muscles in Luke’s neck tightened as he considered his quandary. He was half a continent from his enemy’s objective, and a fugitive hiding from both his would-be killers and the police.
Time was on CHEGAN’s side. To stop them, he had to pull his father into this vortex of madness.
He knew it, and so did his enemy.
Luke closed his eyes and rubbed his lids.
Megan’s palm landed on his forehead.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
He already knew the infection in his shoulder was worsening. “I’ll get something in Santa Elena. There’re some things I need to get at a pharmacy before we drop Frankie at his mother’s.”
When Luke finally blinked his eyes back into focus, he saw that Megan’s gaze had turned inward.
“If I hadn’t asked Father Joe for help, he’d still be alive,” she said. “I should’ve let Kaczynski die.” Her voice broke on the last word.
“If he’d died, they would’ve killed both you and the priest,” Luke said. “Wherever Joe is, I’m sure he’s glad it turned out this way instead.”
“Glad? How can you say that? I gave CHEGAN back their leader.”
“Kaczynski’s a scientist, not a leader. He may have come up with the idea, and he probably thinks of himself as the linchpin, but he never could’ve organized something as big as CHEGAN. There’s someone above him.”
“You think some out-of-control government put this scheme together?”
Luke shook his head. “This isn’t the type of thing that government types would’ve dreamed up. It’s too outrageous, too farfetched. This idea was sold to them by someone who was involved in creating it, someone who understood the science and could sell the idea.”
“Who?”
“Caleb Fagan.”
“What?”
“It all fits,” Luke said. “From the beginning, he’s been on the periphery of the malaria project, helping my father. He was probably the one that fed my father whatever Kaczynski learned about Zenavax’s malaria antigen. Fagan was the perfect conduit, and he could’ve easily diverted those shipments of my father’s mosquitoes to Kaczynski.”