Angel Eyes (35 page)

With a cry, Honno's arms contracted. She heard the snap-snap snap! like twigs breaking underfoot as Giin's vertebrae popped. Then she threw him over the side of Nihonbashi, the symbol of a beginning, into the sluggish waters of the Sumida, over whose pristine surface the moon had dreamily cast its light just last night.

Then the warrior had picked up the empty attache case and walked calmly back toward the waiting limo. In her mind's eye she could see the lone cryptomeria, and now, truly, she understood all the layers of its existence. Just as the curve of its trunk softened the pitilessly hard edges of the city surrounding it, its strength lent meaning to her suffering. The cryptomeria was proof that purpose could be found in the thickest fog, the darkest night, the deepest pain. And with that, the past melted away, and only the future, shining and limitless, remained.

The city-her Tokyo-pulsed on all around her, its myriad streets radiating out in every direction, beckoning. But the warrior had already chosen her path. The one that had led her to what she wanted most: freedom.

SEVEN

MACHINE-GUN CITY/TOKYO

Estilo was all for killing Cruz the moment they landed back in Medellin, but Russell said absolutely not. Tori had told them, during the flight back to Machine-Gun City, of her promise to Sonia. Dawn was breaking, the heavy disk of the sun painting the clouds with golds and reds, as if it had set them on fire.

"We are not assassins," Russell said, being his usual meticulously logical self, reminding them point by point of how life must be led. "I do not want to involve ourselves with these people any more than we already are. And I can't see any reason to do the Orolas' dirty work for them."

"Forgive me for saying so, Senor Slade," Estilo broke in, "but you're missing the point. It is a matter of honor. This is no longer business, otherwise I would wholeheartedly agree with you. It's personal."

Tori glanced at Estilo. She had never known him to be so bloodthirsty before. He was a chanta, a slick operator. Pointing a gun at someone's head and pulling the trigger was not good business. Ask Cruz. He had done that to Ruben Orola, and just look what had happened: almost assassinated twice, stalked by his own mistress, about to be betrayed by everyone on this plane. Not that he deserved anything less. It was merely a lesson to be learned.

"I 'm concerned with neither honor nor emotion, merely with getting out of here in one piece," said Russell, the pragmatist. "The Medellin Cartel has bought the local police, the judiciary, maybe even members of the Colombian government and our own DEA, which was driven completely out of Cruz's territory two years ago."

"How about justice?" Tori asked him. "Without Sonia's help at Cruz's apartment, we never would have lived to get to the llano negro and the cocaine factory. We never would have found this.'' She lifted up the glassine tube filled with the dark metallic pellets: the center of the soft cell they had discovered in the bags of coke.

"Fuck justice," Russell said. "This is Colombia. No one here ever heard of justice.''

Russell was reminded of how he had met Bernard Godwin. It had been near the end of his graduate studies at Wharton. Bernard had come to lecture on the nature of justice, which, he had contended, was a wholly man-made concept, and therefore subject to the distortions and rationalizations only humans could bring to something of their own creation. In nature, Bernard had argued, there is no such thing as justice, only life and death.

Russell recalled how taken he had been with the lecture, and with Bernard Godwin. Years later he realized that Godwin had come to the campus on a recruiting mission for the Mall, but even that knowledge could not diminish his admiration of Godwin's mind.

Godwin had known Russell's background: how his peculiar genius with logic and numbers had estranged him from his family. As prodigies often will, he had frightened his parents and had caused his brother to feel stupid.

"We're both people who are all alone," Bernard had said to Russell. "People who can understand the depth of commitment to an abstract: a concept, an ideal."

"Like justice?" Russell had said.

And Bernard Godwin had laughed, put his arm around the young Russell Slade. "Just so."

Now, sitting in a smuggler's airplane, on his way back from the llano negro, Russell could still hear Bernard's voice speaking softly, seductively, in his ear. So much power. Hooking up with Bernard had been like having a pipeline directly to God, Russell thought. But so much has changed since then.

The cockpit grew warm as the sun, lifting above the cloud-bank to their rear, streamed through the windows, following them back to Medellin. Tori broke off large chunks of a candy bar, handed them around. Estilo manned the radio, monitoring traffic, speaking softly into the mike now and then.

"Have you forgotten," Tori said to Russell, "that it was Cruz's sicarios who came after us on the way in from the airport?"

"Okay, while we're on the subject, it was Cruz who loaned us one of his helicopters so we could get to llano negro,'' Russell pointed out.

"Jesus," Estilo said.

Tori said, "Let's by all means kiss him on both cheeks the next time we see him. I don't think you're seeing this situation clearly. I made a promise to Sonia, and I'm going to keep it."

"You'll do nothing of the kind," Russell said. "You made one mistake, but I'll be damned if I'll let you make another. You had no right to promise that woman anything. She obviously got to you on an emotional level, but I'm ordering you to put aside your emotions-they're far too dangerous out here in the field. This is the end of your maverick ride, Tori."

"Like hell it is," Tori said. "If you won't help, Estilo and I will-"

"Forget it," Russell snapped. "You signed on with the Mall, and you've got to learn discipline. You'd better start right now. We're back to civilization, and my word is law."

"If you think Machine-Gun City is civilization, Senor Slade," Estilo said, "you're dead wrong."

Estilo's words turned out to be more prophetic than even he could have imagined. The plane was met at Medellin airport by Cruz and his cadre of sicarios. None of them were shy about brandishing their MAC-10's.

The engines of the Twin Otter were still idling when Cruz directed the moving stair against the airplane's side, began climbing it. Tori went aft, opened the door. The three of them were waiting for him when he entered the cabin. His sicarios piled in after him, immediately beginning a thorough search of the entire plane. Cruz watched them carefully while he waited. He said nothing.

"No cocaine?" he said at last when the sicario leading the cadre returned, shaking his head negatively. Then the sicario handed over the glassine packet of metallic pellets.

"We weren't there for the coke," Russell said, deliberately ignoring the glassine packet.

"Ah. Then did you discover who is running the cocaine factory?"

"No. We got something of a rude welcoming."

"Then you were inept." Cruz gave them a wide grin. He hefted the packet. ''But I see for all that, you didn't come away empty-handed."

Russell said, "You mean this plane?"

Cruz's nasty laugh echoed in the confined space of the cabin. He stared at the packet. "This must be very valuable-to you.'' He lifted his gaze. "But then everything becomes valuable, sooner or later. Take information, for instance. While you were gone, I received some. It seems that Sonia had been the lover of Ruben Orola, the bastard I blew away last year. Now isn't that interesting? Of course, Sonia thought it interesting. She'd tell you so herself, but sadly, she could not be here with us today. She met with an unfortunate accident. She went for a walk in the wrong part of town, and someone shot her. Foolish girl. How many times was she warned?"

In the silence that followed, Cruz stepped up to Russell, stared him in the eye. "I don't know what your game is, but it's ended now. You have an hour to get out of Medellin. After that"-he shrugged- ''I can make no assurances concerning your safety.''

"We'd be only too happy to leave," Russell said amiably. "Just give his our package and-"

"But no," Cruz said. "I must exact payment for the use of my helicopter, not to mention me inconvenience your visit has caused me."

"That package is of no use to you," Russell said.

"Perhaps. But this plane is." Cruz studied Russell. "And it is enough to know that I have something you want. In a few days I may throw it away-who knows, who cares-but it is mine to do with as I wish."

He turned, was walking away, when Russell said, "I challenge you." Russell's heart was beating fast, and he felt a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach.

Cruz paused. Without turning around, he said, "You're a gringo. Why should I-"

"It was this gringo who found the Orola mole inside your organization. You'd be dead without me." Russell grinned. Somewhere, a voice inside his head was screaming for him to shut up, but he would not. He had to prove that he could pull his weight in the field. Along about the time when bullets were whistling past his head in the llano negro it had occurred to Russell that Bernard Godwin had deliberately sent him into the field as a taunt, a humiliation for not having come up in the Mall in the same way Bernard himself had. Russell was determined not to give Bernard-or Tori-the satisfaction of seeing him psychologically torn apart by field work. "Besides," Russell went on, "your sicarios might wonder at the reason you won't listen to my challenge. Is it that I'm just a gringo? Or have you become afraid? Are you becoming soft and weak?"

Cruz whirled around; his face was flushed with rage. "When I discovered what Sonia had been-an Orola spy-1 shot her myself. I, Castro Cruz. I put the barrel of my gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger. I was looking into her eyes the entire time. I watched the coming of death; I saw it claim her. Does this sound soft and weak?" He walked up to Russell. "And now I have to ask myself if Jorge was indeed the Orola spy you claimed he was, or why you, the spy hunter, missed Sonia."

"I wasn't looking at Sonia," Russell said. In his mouth was the taste of metal, bitter and nauseating. ''Take my challenge.''

Cruz glanced around the cabin. His sicarios were watching him expectantly. He gave a perfunctory nod, then shrugged. "It's your death," he said.

The corrida was eerie. Silent and empty, it lay sleeping in the heavy sunlight. There was nothing going on in the bullring except on Sundays, when the Medellin natives crowded its stands to drink in the contrast of life and death when man faced bull.

"All right, Senor Slade," Cruz said. He and his men surrounded Tori and Estilo in the lower reaches of the stands. "You have challenged and I have answered." Cruz grinned down on Russell, who stood in the bloody dust of the corrida itself. Waiting. "I have instructed that my best bull be set loose. If you handle him, I will give you what you want. If, on the other hand, the bull has his way, whether or not I have this package will no longer matter to you. You'll be dead.''

Tori tried to read what Russell was thinking by the expression on his face, but he was too good for that. She was thinking, If he dies, it will be on my head. I will never be able to forgive myself.

"Russell," she called out, "you don't have to do this!"

Cruz grunted. "But of course he does." He nodded to one of his sicarios, who pointed his semiautomatic at Russell. "A man does not back out of a challenge. Oh, but Senor Slade, I forgot for a moment that you're not a man; you're a gringo. Anything is possible for one such as you."

Russell said nothing. his attention was fixed on the huge iron-bound wooden doors across the dusty floor of the corrida.

Cruz raised his arm, let it drop.

The wooden doors creaked open, and they could see in the semishadows a huge, hulking figure. It snorted heavily, then pawed the ground. Russell moved, and the bull came charging across the corrida toward him.

"Doesn't he even get a killing sword?" Tori said to Cruz.

"No. The killing sword is for a matador only, not a gringo. He will have to manage on his own.''

"But he won't be able to," Tori said. "Not with just his bare hands."

"Well, I suppose that's the point." Cruz laughed, then shouted, "Ole, gringo! Ole!" as Russell whirled away from the bull's first charge.

Russell felt the burst of sweat breaking out all over his body. He had seen bullfights before, but he now understood just how enormous these creatures were close up. They were all muscle, all rage, chaos incarnate. The smell of the beast was in his nostrils. He had stared into the bull's red eyes, had seen there a sight that had jolted him: a kind of unthinking evil, elemental and absolute. In that first instant of recognition, Russell knew that there could be no middle ground here. Either he would kill the bull or the bull would kill him. No other possibility existed in those strangely magnetic eyes.

The bull charged again, his hooves thundering, kicking up dust dark with dried blood. Its head was lowered, and Russell saw its long horns aimed at his stomach. He could almost feel the agonizing rip of the gore, could sense himself being jerked off his feet by the beast's inhuman strength, the horn tearing through his abdomen as the bull flailed him along the ground or against the corrida's wall.

The thing was, it did no good to move right away, the bull would just follow. And since it was far faster than a man, it would run him down. Russell knew he needed to follow the dictates of the matador, and not move for as long as was possible, to whirl away only at the last possible instant, to constantly frustrate the beast. And yet, he told himself, what good would even this do? There was no one to cut the beast, to continually wound it, to wear down its prodigious strength, to bring it to the point where, exhausted and bleeding, it lowered its head in the middle of its charge to receive the killing thrust.

Russell waited as the bull came on. He felt his muscles rippling with tremors over which he had no control. His teeth were chattering. The beast's huge head loomed, rushing toward him at appalling speed.