Dark Time: Mortal Path (22 page)

After the refueling stop in Miami, Maliha slept until the pilot announced the approach to Jorge Chavez Airport in Lima. She rented a Land Rover. After all, the jet charter to and from Peru cost her $100,000. The Rover seemed in keeping.

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She drove up the coast and got into Huacho about ten in the morning. Manco didn’t answer a call to his cell phone, so she went to his room and knocked on the door.

No answer.

Out? No, he was expecting me.

After slipping on a pair of gloves, she picked the lock and pushed the door open a few inches. It was dark inside, with the drapes tightly closed. The scent of blood reached her nose. She crouched and drew a knife, and pushed the door open wider with it.

When she was sure no one else was in the room, she turned on the lights. Manco was dead, face up on the floor, his throat slit. Very recently dead, so recently that the killer might have walked right by her as she entered the hotel.

She couldn’t stay long, but she sat on the floor next to him and put her hand on his chest. He was a good man, and it was likely he’d died because of what he discovered, or even because he phoned her to tell her about it.

From the blood pattern in the room, it was evident he’d been sitting in the chair at the desk when he was approached from behind and killed. Checking the window behind the drawn drapes, she found that a hole had been cut in the glass and the window raised.

She slid his body across the floor and sat down in his chair, shifting around to find the exact position he’d been in as he worked at the desk.

Nothing happened for a while and then she felt herself sliding into the imprint left behind when Manco died.

She was Manco, sitting at the desk gazing down at a pot surrounded by foam in a hard case. He had a sheet of paper on which he’d copied some of the cuneiform, and a reference book open to a page on Sumer. He’d been getting close. Maybe he’d deciphered the first sentence, as she had.

Her head was yanked back, and she felt the sting of the blade as it was drawn across her throat. She raised her hands to her neck, then pulled them away to see them covered with blood. Toppling out of the chair, she landed face up and saw her attacker. As her life’s blood spilled on the floor, she lost feeling in her arms and legs as her body was shutting down.

The attacker was wearing a black hood that covered his face with crude slits cut for his eyes, and he was holding the case containing the pot. The hood didn’t matter to Maliha. She was looking at his aura, which no piece of cloth could hide.

Black, black, streaked with a foul blend of the muddy green of greed. The man had done many wrongs, and would do many more, and his aura was repulsive to see. Maliha’s eyes closed as Manco died.

She felt the cool, tingling sensation on her skin of the wisps of spirit that remained gathering around her.

She waited until it had dissipated and opened her eyes. It was a relief to her that Manco was now whole.

The pot and the notes he had been making were gone from the desk. Searching around the floor, she found what she was looking for: the faint trace of the aura she’d seen and could recognize. The killer had left behind aural footprints. She concentrated on them until they brightened a little, bright enough to follow. She could track the ugly black-and-green trail of footprints as surely as a bloodhound could follow a scent. She set off after him on foot.

He hadn’t gone far. She found him about half a mile away in a tumbledown shack that stunk of vomit and urine. Many of the other villagers here were poor, but they were good-hearted and didn’t turn to crime. She wondered how much the man had been paid for ending Manco’s life. Probably some pitiful amount like fifty dollars.

Controlling her anger, she got the story out of him. He’d been paid to silence Manco and obtain the pottery case. Manco must have talked to someone, dropped some kind of hint that he had something valuable in his room. Maybe an observant hotel clerk just guessed it from the way Manco clutched the case.

The case wasn’t in the murderer’s shack. A man had taken it away, the same man who paid for the murder. He was a stranger, American, who came in on a plane on the airstrip about thirty miles down the coastal highway, and was leaving the same way.

After she got the information she wanted, Maliha snapped the killer’s neck and didn’t hang around.

Let his spirit find its own way. Or not.

She ran back to her car and sped down the highway toward the airfield she’d seen on her drive to Caral. It had to be the one. She got there in time to see a man get on an old, battered twin-engine cargo 74 z 138

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plane with a suitcase big enough to hold the pot.

It wasn’t Subedei, as she’d feared, but a pudgy older man, his bald head gleaming in the sunlight.

She slipped into the unattended cargo hold seconds before the loading door banged shut and was secured from the outside. She’d made it just in time.

With the plane in the air and her hiding place undisturbed, Maliha used a flashlight she found strapped to a metal strut to examine her surroundings. The cargo was innocuous but had a strong odor; it was sacks of onions grown in the Supe Valley.

By this time, I smell like a sack of onions, too
.

She couldn’t tell, because her nose was overloaded. Maliha found a hatch that led upward into the passenger compartment, but it was locked from the other side.

Thinking she might have to stay in the smelly hold area the entire time, she felt a lurch as the plane started climbing higher. The hold, already chilly after takeoff, began dropping in temperature. She’d figured the plane was going to make a short hop to Lima or some other nearby city where the passengers would take a flight out of the country, but instead it was going to cross the Andes. She’d done it a number of times, but never in a dark, freezing hold. The mountain crossing could be tricky. She hoped the pilot had a lot of experience. The likely destination was Iquitos. Although surrounded by rain forest, the town had an airport large enough to handle the cargo plane. It was the launch point for Amazonian expeditions, and its airport served the coca plantations carved out of the rain forest, although that wasn’t in the tourist brochure.

Maliha had her own idea of a destination. She wanted to go back to Lima, where she had a jet with the meter running that could get her home with the prize. It was time to hijack the plane.

Her flashlight revealed another hatch. This one was unlocked, but there was something heavy on it keeping it from opening upward. She pushed harder to open it, sliding the obstruction off the top. It slid into something else with a metallic clang loud enough to reveal her presence. She ducked down and concealed herself among the onions.

Nothing happened, so after a while she raised the hatch lid again, just enough to see out. She was at the rear of a large, open passenger compartment that held a dozen seats up front. It wasn’t a creature-comfort flight.

Two of the seats were occupied. The bald man she’d seen striding toward the plane was there, along with a much younger woman. Maliha opened the lid wider and crawled out on all fours. The object that had been holding down the hatch was a rolling cart that should have been secured to the floor to keep it from moving. It was a serving cart used by a flight attendant, but there was no attendant for two passengers.

Along with creature comforts, basic safety rules had been discarded.

Maliha silently opened the door of a restroom in the back of the plane and slipped inside. She needed a few minutes to plan the hijacking.

Pilot, copilot, two passengers. Probable handguns. No sweat.

Sitting on the toilet, she was rehearsing the plan in her mind when the door opened.

The woman passenger was standing there, and it was more than probable that there was a gun in her hand.

“I told you I heard something back here,” she yelled.

Maliha came flying off the toilet with a lunge at the woman’s midsection. She hit the woman squarely in the stomach and knocked her to the floor. The gun went off, a wild shot that penetrated the hull of the fuselage over the right wing. The shrill sound of air whistling from the pressurized cabin through the bullet hole distracted the bald man, who’d turned at the sound of his companion’s voice.

Maliha got to her feet, stomped down on the woman’s arm, and sent the gun sliding across the floor. Her next kick went to the woman’s hip, breaking it and putting her out of commission, unarmed and injured.

Or so Maliha thought.

The woman started dragging herself across the floor toward the gun.

Maliha kicked her in the shoulder, spinning her around and cracking her head on the hull. The woman fell into the stillness of death, eyes open, blood seeping from her ears and the wound on her skull.

Maliha regretted that she hadn’t had time to do something less drastic.

A bullet whined past her head. Maliha could see daylight entering the plane through two holes. A few more and things could get dicey.

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The bald man had recovered from his surprise. She did a handspring, then two more, to cross the distance between them, ending with a whirling kick that shattered his forearm and sent the gun bouncing off the side of the fuselage. As she came out of the kick, Maliha pulled a folded throwing star from her pocket and flicked her wrist to open it. The six-pointed star with serrated blades was a gleaming blur until it bit into the bald man’s neck.

There was no time to observe as he collapsed. The cockpit door opened and a man barreled toward her, carrying a fire axe. She sidestepped and then tried to trip him, but he veered away from her outstretched leg, hit the hull at speed, ran partway up, and flipped to come out behind her. The axe sliced her calf and slid out of his hands. Her opponent was still in motion, and as he moved by the fallen bald man, he plucked the throwing star from the dead man’s throat with a practiced motion that confirmed he was formidable.

Ignoring the pain from her leg, Maliha picked up the axe and used it to block the throwing star that came spinning toward her.

Confined in the narrow space of the fuselage, the man was using a path of motion that was too predictable. He was good, but not good enough. Maliha aimed the bloodied axe at his projected location and launched it forcefully. As her fingers let go, she slipped in her own blood, and her aim went awry. The axe just missed him and crashed through one of the windows in the compartment. The emergency oxygen masks dropped and air howled. The man was sucked toward the window and ended up with his shoulder pressed against it, his arm hanging outside. He screamed and blood spattered the adjacent windows. Air rushing by at over three hundred miles per hour, twice the speed of the winds of a category five hurricane, had ripped off the lower portion of his arm.

Maliha ended his misery with a knife to the heart. He remained in place, his shoulder joint jammed into the window opening like a cork.

The plane was tilted downward, descending rapidly, and it shouldn’t have been. The copilot in the cockpit should have adjusted to the change in pressure by now, since the pilot was doing a fine job of plugging the leak at the window. She approached the cockpit door, which was banging open and closed.

When the door swung open, she leaped in, ready for anything in this bloody airplane. There was no fourth man. The plane had been flying its dangerous route without a copilot.

Should’ve guessed. Yet another violation.

The view out the window was alarming. A mountain peak was coming up fast on her right. She threw herself into the pilot’s seat and struggled to pull up and turn. The right wing clipped a snow-covered outcropping and broke off, leaving a huge hole in the fuselage.

The plane hit the mountain with terrific force and broke apart. The front section of the fuselage slid on the snow, while the rear smashed into the side of the mountain and disintegrated. After sliding for some distance down the side of the mountain, the front section came to rest.

Maliha lost consciousness when the plane hit, and came to, shaking in the cold. Her wounded leg was numb, which in her experience wasn’t a good sign.

Not trusting her leg to hold her in the uncertain terrain, Maliha pulled herself around within the wreckage, going from handhold to handhold.

The nose of the plane was stuck against a rock outcropping, and the flight deck was crumpled. The radio didn’t work and the emergency locator transmitter was smashed. She wasn’t ready to try hiking out.

Her leg needed recuperation time, and in this harsh environment, time was something she couldn’t count on.

Maliha the Ageless assassin wouldn’t have worried about the situation. The leg wound would have healed within minutes, and she could have run down the mountain. Maliha the mortal—that was a different story. She survived the crash only to face a slow death on the mountaintop.

A search of the wreckage turned up something very important, though. The suitcase holding the pot had been trapped under a twisted metal seat that held it in place like a seat belt.

Opening the suitcase, she found Manco’s hard case centered inside, ringed with packing peanuts.

The wind picked up some of the peanuts and created a miniature unnatural blizzard that moved off down the slope. Unwilling to open the case and find her prize shattered into dust after lives had been spent to get it, she set it aside and searched for food and emergency supplies. She found a few energy bars in the cockpit, jammed under the flight stick, and then a bag of onions from the hold.

A pillow tossed from the plane yielded strips of cloth from the pillowcase to wrap her leg wound.

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The rest of the pillowcase she fashioned into a hood for her head, with thin slits in front of her eyes, allowing her to see out but decreasing the likelihood of snow blindness.