The Decrypter: Secret of the Lost Manuscript (Calla Cress Techno Thriller Series: Book 1) (51 page)

“Last chance, Cress, or he goes over!” thundered Mason, his voice adrift in the growls of the falls.

Calla held her stomach as if pained by a violent spear, her eyes disclosing terror.

Mason took one conquering look at her and in an instant, released his hold over Nash.

Bleeding inside with the piercing of a thousand thorns, she leapt onto the rocks along the edge of the toothed cliff.  Nothing prepared her for the splintering of her heart as she watched Nash disappear beneath the drenches of the gushing torrents.

As if stricken by a brutal hand, her heart and body surrendered to immobility.

Three seconds earlier, as Nash hung over the crashing rapids, he’d barely managed to expel the words he’d cautiously avoided for months, yet longed to tell her. 

Though she did not hear them audibly, as their eyes met for the last time, he had uttered the same words she so desperately wanted to understand. 

“
Ana baħibbik
.”

 She needed no translator.

He had loved her to his grave.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

11:03 P.M.

Calla hung over the edge of the waterfall, with rapid distressed breathing.

She glimpsed down at the thunderous pour
. 
Fear paralyzed her being. Fear that turned into guilt - guilt that turned into anger.

And then frenzy. 

With the ragged cliff suffused in foggy moonlight, she glanced back at her sneering subjugators, angry tears coursing her face.  There was no reason now to give him the manuscript, nor the carbonados. Like a fierce lioness whose young had been assaulted, she launched herself at Mason, seizing his collar and jammed an elbow in the back of his neck.

He fell forward and thudded to wet path.

Her fury then turned to Slate and with one surge, she slugged him in the gut, propelling him to the ground. 

She heard his grunted moans as he struggled to his knees coughing.

Without assessing the damage she’d left behind, she retrieved the fallen carbonados, placed them in her bag with the Deveron and glowered at her startled attackers, who stood perplexed by her strength and resolve.

Before she could pounce on them, Mason sprang up - his physical robustness defying age and nature.

Calla felt a blinding blow across her cheek, propelling her backwards. She plunged to the moist ground and clenched her bruised face.

Mason strode forward and peered down at her, repulsion filling his eyes. 

He would kill her for the Deveron for sure.  Calla held on tight to her ancient treasures.

They were all she had left.

Knowing she would gamble her life for the Deveron, Mason tugged harder at the bag and crushed his right foot on her hip for better grip. 

The motion tilted her to the side as her eyes registered the depth of the falls underneath her.

Mason spat on the soggy ground.  “Now or never, Cress.”

She glanced up at him and then down at the maddened waters. “Never, lunatic. Never! ”

In one decisive moment, she hurled herself into nature’s fury.

* * *

Five Minutes Earlier…

Murchison Falls

The Toyota Ipsum parked near a baobab tree along the beaten path lined with full-size lush trees and flowering bushes.  Eichel was certain he could trek the rest of the way.  He’d come prepared, dressed in zip-off safari trousers, a long sleeve, mosquito-repellent shirt and hiking boots. 

He rocked backwards and hid within the darkness of a full tree, gripped with alarm.

Calla, Jack and a third man struggled against several assailants.  He witnessed Mason fire a hunting rifle that spewed a bullet at the man he believed was Jack Kleve. 

It took every reserve in Eichel to keep down.  He’d almost given away his hideout.

Feeling like such a weakling for not getting involved in the struggle, he reasoned that age would not allow. He stood frozen behind the thick-trunked,
kigelia-africana
tree as Mason and his men terrorized the trio. 

 Unable to stand the cowardice, he pounced into action, staggering forward. 

That was when Mason raised his rifle and sent a bullet through Jack’s chest and tossed the third man over the falls.  Mason then unleashed his rage on Cress. 

What man wrestles a woman?

That had been his cue to help a lady in peril. As courage crossed fear, he progressed forward only to observe that she could certainly handle her own defense to greater effect than he ever could, until she too plummeted over the rapids. 

His body stiffened as Mason and several men took their escape.

Three minutes passed.

He peered over the trees’ rustling leaves. 
Three murders!

It was a whisper at best, inaudible to all but him. 

Eichel’s heart stood arrested in his throat.  Unable to breathe, he failed to make a decision and remained concealed by a boulder, yards from the cliff’s edge.  He waited ten more minutes, before staggering to his feet. He crossed over to Jack’s lifeless frame and checked his pulse as he lay on the ground motionless, where Mason and his men had left him to die. 

Eichel felt no pulse. 

He knelt beside him and buried his head in his hands in defeat.

 “ARGH!”

A husky cough brought him back to the crime scene. Jack moaned, rubbing his bruised head as he coughed uncontrollably, gasping for air. 

Eichel scrambled for a bottle of mineral water in his pack.  He cradled Jack’s head and quenched his thirst with the cool water.

“Jack?  Are you alright?  That bullet went straight to your heart.”

“What happened?” Jack said.

Eichel could not bring himself to tell him.  “You were sh…shot.  How did you—”

Jack rattled his throbbing head and padded his chest.  He ripped open his shirt revealing what Eichel recognized as a bulletproof vest. 

Jack let out a short breath. “Nash told me to put this on. He was right.”

He stopped suddenly, as if the mention of his friend triggered a recent memory.  Jack sprang to his feet and scrambled to the edge of the cliff.  One gaze at the deafening falls told Eichel Jack understood.

“They’re gone, Jack. I’m so sorry.”

Jack shot him a look of doubt.

“It’s true. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Jack spun round and seized Nash’s abandoned backpack and held it in angst.

“We need to get you some help,” Eichel said.

“What happened to them?”

Eichel glanced away.  “Like I said, they’re gone.  I’m so sorry, Jack.  Mason killed them both.  They went over. Down there.”  He pointed to the drop down the boisterous waters.

Jack drove a fist in the backpack then stood erect.  “Raimund, if you’re right? We’re out of time. Let’s go!”

* * *

11:36 P.M.

A weighty gush of water spurted over her free-falling body, adding to the speed of her descent to the crocodile and hippopotamus-infested Nile.  For the second time in a week, Calla was sent fluttering to her death.

She surrendered her fate to her gifted mind.  This time, she took better control of her direction and speed and drew all the strength she could muster into her subconscious. She guided her fall to safety.

She had cheated death.

Twice. 

Would there be a third time?

She plunged arms out in a drowned out splash at the foot of East Africa’s deadliest falls. She landed into a well of rapids, meters away from a watching crocodile that gawked with its jaw stretched in anticipation. 

Gallons of water gushed in endless streams around her, driving her body further from land.  Though she welcomed the freshness of the current as it beat against her body, she tore against its force in a stable attempt to flee from jeopardy.

The frigid water, mudded with murk wrenched rapidly with powerful undercurrents, for the most part, making it perilous for her unmatched muscles. 

Her feet kicked the violent tide and it was then that she noticed the throbbing in her ankle.  Shrieking with pain, she tore her way against the speeding torrent, writhing to the bank of the river. 

Dragging her body to a hop, she slinked into a nearby bush, alone, with a drenched manuscript and two ancient carbonados from the galaxies, burrowed in her bag. 

Trembling with the plummeting temperature, she huddled in the shrubs clasping her knees for warmth.

Her mind replayed Jack’s demise and Nash’s fall. 

What do I do? 

What is this place?

Plaguing thoughts circled round her petrified mind as Calla crept on her hands and knees attempting to peer into the distance, tortured with grief over losing more than just friendship.

She was breathing, but she had lost her life.

Surrounded by the hostile wilderness, her ankle throbbed with each step. She could not go on.  It was the brutal landing. 

Calla searched for her cell phone in her waist pack.  Soaked through and through, it had stopped functioning.  Her tears stung her drying face. 

Resolving not to fight fate this time, she clenched her fists, a decision that only reminded her that her body was arrested with agony from crown to foot.

She had spotted a small village as the group had made its way up the hill.  She searched her mind for a name, orientation.

Nothing registered.

Perhaps she could make it there if she followed the river, but she could not muster enough strength as she sat swathed with bruises.

Numbness zapped her strength and she crumpled beneath the shrubberies, meters from the positioned crocodiles.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

DAY 14

5:47 A.M

Calla grasped her aching ankle and limped down the main stretch of the muddy road towards the center of Masindi, a nearby town she spotted from a distance now that day was breaking.  The rural municipality appeared somewhat maintained and frequented.  She had no idea how long she had traveled and with the diminishing strength she had left, Calla advanced towards civilization, grateful to enter the colorful, yet remote locale. 

The name Masindi that she’d read at the town’s gates echoed with familiarity.  Samuel Baker the British explorer and anti-slavery campaigner had once visited this place.

The sun peered over the distant hills, increasing its warmth through her limbs.  With her phone damaged in her recent escape, she purposed to find some sort of communication method.

The road led her to the center of the active town and she ambled along the stretch of main street, lined with merchants setting up stalls for market, boasting sugarcanes, papayas, dried fish, passion fruits, cassava and other tropical crops. 

Her hobbling feet ached as she strayed away from the main road and rested on the ledge of a grubby, all-purpose shop.  She placed her hands on her waist and drew in a deep breath.  Her clothes though nearly dry, remained plastered to her skin.

“Are you okay, my dear?”

She spun round only to face the endearing, round eyes of a large, dark-skinned woman with a sleeping baby straddled to her back.  Her smiling lips were a healthy mud brown and when she walked, her shoulder length, braided hair swung above the secure baby’s face.  A patterned head-tie adorned her head, above gleaming eyes.  The woman failed to rest from her work, for even as she spoke with Calla, her hands were fastened round a straw-woven broom and gently swept red dirt off the shop’s veranda. 

Calla slowly eased herself from her rough seat with a hop.  “Can you please help me; I need to get to a phone.”

The woman threw her head back laughing.  “I think you need more than that.  Come with me,” she said in her
Banyoro
tribe accent. 

The benevolent woman led her into the cluttered shop, chock-full with everything from sugar to batteries, all crammed on neat wooden shelves.  “You can use my phone.”

The woman brought out a sugar cane and sliced a moist papaya on a plate.  “Eat. Drink.”

Calla was grateful for the fruits’ sugars that filled her body with renewed energy.  The woman offered her a bitter lime drink that Calla swallowed in a flash, causing her tongue to tickle with the tangy aftertaste.

She glanced at the woman.  “How much do I owe you?”

The woman cast a shy smile.  “That’s okay, my dear. Just eat.”

Calla’s tired lips curled into a grateful smile as she embraced the morning sun.  Regaining vigor, she munched on the straw-like strands of the sugarcane. 

As the sugar animated her body, she watched little, half-naked children frolic with laughter at her knotted, loose hair.  One little boy showed off his self-made, wire-car toy and the bliss in their eyes only made Calla more determined to rid the world of delinquents like Mason.