The Prometheus Deception (19 page)

Whoever they were, the men were locals hard at work and no direct threat. He put away his weapon and pantomimed to Layla to do the same. Pointed guns would be a mistake; confrontation would be unnecessary.

Upon closer examination, Bryson could see that one of the men looked middle-aged, the other not long out of his teenage years. Both looked rough, peasant laborers; they also looked like father and son. The younger was the one inside the truck's cargo bay; the older one was handing him cartons to stack.

The elder one spoke to the younger:
“Veña, móvete, non podemos perde-lo tempo!”

Bryson knew enough Portuguese from countless operations in Lisbon, and a few in São Paulo, to understand what the men were saying. “Come on, move it!” said the elder. “We're on a tight schedule. No time to waste!”

He gave Layla a quick glance and then shouted in Portuguese,
“Por favor, nos poderían axudar? Metímo-lo coche na cuneta, e a miña muller e máis eu temos que chegar a Vigo canto antes.”
Can you please help us? Our car ran off the side of the road, and my wife and I are trying to get to Vigo as soon as possible.

Both men looked up suspiciously. Now Bryson could see what they were loading, and it was not crates of barnacles or mussels. It was sealed cartons of foreign cigarettes, mostly English and American. These were not fishermen. They were smugglers, bringing in contraband tobacco to sell at grossly inflated prices.

The older man set down a carton on the gravel road. “Foreigners? Where do you come from?”

“We drove down from Bilbao. We're on holiday, seeing the sights, but the damned rental car turned out to be a piece of crap. The transmission gave out and we went into a ditch. If you could give us a lift, we'd make it worth your while.”

“I'm sure we can help,” said the older man, signaling to the younger, who then jumped out of the back of the truck and began approaching them from at an angle, moving noticeably closer to Layla. “Jorge?”

Suddenly the younger one had a revolver out, an ancient Astra Cadix .38 Special, which he leveled at Layla. Taking a few steps closer to her, he screamed, “
Vaciade os petos! Agora mesmo!
Empty your pockets.
All
of them! Quick, everything, and don't try anything fancy!
Now!
”

Now the older one had a revolver out, too, this one pointed at Bryson. “You, too, my friend. Drop your wallet, and kick it toward me,” he barked. “That expensive-looking watch, too.
Move
it! Or your lovely wife gets it, and then you!”

The young man lurched forward, grabbing Layla by the shoulder with his left hand, jerking her toward him, his revolver at her temple. He did not seem to notice that Layla's facial expression had not changed, that she did not cry out or seem moved in any way. Had he noticed the calmness of her demeanor, he would have had cause for alarm.

She caught Bryson's eye; he nodded all but imperceptibly.

With a sudden jerking motion, she produced two handguns at once, one in either hand. In her left was a .45, a Heckler & Koch USP compact; in her right was a massive, extremely powerful .50 caliber Israeli Desert Eagle. At the same time, Bryson whipped out a Beretta 92 and leveled it at the older smuggler.

“Back!” Layla suddenly shouted in Portuguese at the teenager, who stumbled backward in sudden fright. “Drop the gun right now or I'll blow your head off!” The teenager regained his footing momentarily, hesitated as if considering how to respond, and she immediately squeezed the trigger on the enormous Desert Eagle. The explosion was astonishingly loud, all the more terrifying because it went off so near the young man's ear. He dropped his ancient Astra Cadix, flung his hands into the air, and said,
“Non! Non dispare!”
The revolver clattered to the ground but did not go off.

Bryson smiled, advancing toward the older man. “Put the gun down,
meu amigo
, or my wife will kill your son or nephew or whoever he is, and as you've just seen, she's a woman who's not able to control her impulses very well.”

“Por Cristo bendito, esa muller está tola!”
the middle-aged smuggler spat out as he knelt down and gently dropped his gun to the gravel. Christ almighty, she's a crazy woman! He put his hands in the air, too.
“Se pensan que nos van toma-lo pelo, están listos! Temos amigos esperando por nós ó final da estrada.”
If you're planning to rip us off, you're an idiot. We have friends waiting for us down the road—

“Yeah, yeah,” Bryson said impatiently. “We have no interest in your cigarettes. We just want your truck.”

“O meu camión? Por Deus, eu necesito este camión!”
Good Christ, I
need
this truck!

“Well, you just ran into a patch of bad luck,” Bryson said.

“Kneel!” Layla ordered the teenager, who did so at once. The boy was red-faced and shivering like a frightened child, wincing each time she waved her Desert Eagle.

“Polo menos nos deixarán descarga-lo camión? Vostedes non necesitan a mercancía!”
pleaded the old man. At least will you let us unload the truck? You don't need the merchandise!

“Go ahead,” Layla said.

“No!” Bryson interrupted. “There's always another weapon concealed inside, in case of hijacking. I want both of you to turn around and start walking back down the road. And don't stop until you can't hear the truck anymore. Any attempts to run after us, to fire a weapon, to place a phone call, and we'll turn right around and come at you with weapons you've never even seen before. Believe me—you don't want to test us.”

He ran toward the truck's cab, indicating with a jerk of his head that Layla should get in on the other side. With the Beretta trained on the two Galegos, he ordered, “
Move
it!”

The two smugglers, young and old, rose unsteadily, their hands still raised, and began walking away down the gravel road.

“No, wait,” she said suddenly. “I don't want to take any chances.”

“What?”

She jammed the smaller-caliber pistol into a pocket of her flak jacket and pulled out another gun, this one strange-looking, which Bryson recognized at once. He nodded and smiled.

“Non!”
the young smuggler screamed, turning back.

The older one, presumably the father, shouted,
“Non dispare! Estamos facendo o que nos dicen! Virxen Santa, non imos falar, por que íamos?”
Don't shoot! We're doing what you say! Mother of God, we're not going to talk, why should we?

The two men each broke into a run, but before they got more than a few yards, there were two loud pops as Layla fired a shot at each one. With each shot, a powerful carbon dioxide charge propelled a syringe of a potent tranquilizer into each man's body. This short-range projector was designed for overpowering wild animals without killing them; the tranquilizer would last, in a human being, perhaps thirty minutes. The two men toppled to the ground, their bodies writhing briefly before they passed into unconsciousness.

*   *   *

The old truck rattled and clattered as its arthritic engine strained against the steep grade of the winding mountain road. The sun was coming up the jagged cliffs, painting the horizon with pastel brushstrokes and casting a strange pale glow on the slate roofs of the fishing villages they passed.

He thought about the beautiful, remarkable woman sleeping in the front seat next to him, her head leaning against the vibrating window.

There was something tough and flinty about her, yet at the same time vulnerable, even melancholy. It was in fact an appealing combination, but his instincts warned him away for a multitude of reasons. She was too much like himself, a survivor whose tough exterior shielded a supremely complicated interior that at times seemed at war with itself.

And there was Elena, always Elena—a spectral presence, a mystery in her own way. The woman he never really knew. The promise of searching her out had become for him a beckoning siren, elusive and treacherous.

Layla meant at most a strategic partnership, an alliance of simple convenience. She and Bryson were using each other, assisting each other; there was something almost clinical, tactical about their relationship. It was nothing more than that. She was a mere means to an end.

Exhaustion was now overcoming him, and he pulled the truck over into a copse and dozed for what he thought was twenty minutes or so; he awoke with a jolt several hours later. Layla was still sleeping soundly. He cursed silently to himself; it was not good to lose this much time. On the other hand, bone-tiredness usually caused miscalculations and misjudgments, so maybe the sacrifice had been worth the cost.

Pulling back onto the highway, he noticed the road was becoming crowded with people walking in the direction of Santiago de Compostela. What had been an isolated few pedestrians had become a line of them, even a throng of them. Most were walking, though a few were on old bicycles, even a few on horseback. Their faces were sunburned; many of them walked with crook-necked sticks, wore simple, rough clothing, and had backpacks with scallop shells tied to them. The scallop shell, Bryson recalled, was the symbol of the pilgrim along the
Camino de Santiago
, the pilgrim's road of some one hundred kilometers from the pass at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees to the ancient shrine of Saint James in Santiago. It usually took a month to make the journey on foot. Here and there along the roadside were pushcarts, gypsy vendors selling souvenirs—postcards, plastic birds with flapping wings, scallop shells, brightly colored cloths.

But soon he noticed something else, something for which he had no easy explanation. A few kilometers before Santiago, the traffic was becoming increasingly congested. Cars and trucks moved more slowly, almost bumper to bumper. Somewhere up ahead was an obstruction, perhaps a traffic jam. Road work?

No
.

The wooden barricades and flashing lights from the cluster of official vehicles, which became visible as he rounded a turn, supplied the answer. It was a police roadblock. Spanish police were inspecting vehicles, surveying drivers and passengers. Cars seemed to be waved through quickly, but trucks were being detained, pulled over to one side as licenses and registrations were checked. The throngs of pilgrims passed by with curious looks, unhindered by the police.

“Layla,” he said. “Quick, wake up!”

She jerked awake, startled, immediately alert. “What—what is it?”

“They're looking for our truck.”

She saw at once what was going on. “Oh, God. Those bastards must have come to, filed a report with the police…”

“No. Not them, not directly. People like that tend to avoid the authorities whenever possible. Someone must have got to them, offered them a handsome bribe. Someone with direct lines to the Spanish police.”

“
Guardacostas?
Unlikely to be any of Calacanis's people, even if any of them survived.”

He shook his head. “My guess is that it's another entity entirely. An organization that knew I was on board the ship.”

“A hostile intelligence organization.”

“Yes, but not in the way you may think.”
Hostile isn't the word
, he thought.
Diabolical, maybe. An organization with tentacles reaching high into the governments of several world powers. The Directorate
. He suddenly swerved the truck over to the side of the road, locating a gap in the stream of pilgrims. There were shouted protests from pushcart vendors, the honking of car horns.

Hopping out, he quickly unscrewed the license plates with the screwdriver blade of a pocket knife, then returned with them to the front seat. “Just in case any of the search party is stupid enough to look only for the license plate. The trick is going to be us: they'll be looking for a couple, a man and a woman together matching our description, perhaps wearing disguises quickly thrown together. So obviously we'll have to split up, and go on foot, but we'll have to do more…” Bryson's voice faded as he caught sight of one of the pushcarts nearby. “Hold on.”

A few minutes later he was conversing, in Spanish, with a rotund gypsy woman selling shawls and other native costumes. She expected this customer—a native Castilian, from the fluency of his Spanish and the lack of accent—to drive a hard bargain and was surprised when the man all but threw down a wad of peseta notes. Moving quickly from cart to cart, he assembled a pile of clothing and returned with it to the truck. Layla's eyes widened; she nodded, then said solemnly, “So now I'm a pilgrim.”

*   *   *

Chaos, utter chaos!

Car horns blared, angry drivers yelled and cursed. The stream of pilgrims grew into a throng, a crowd of strikingly diverse people whose only commonality was their devout faith. There were old men with walking sticks who looked as if they could barely take another step, old women garbed entirely in black, black headscarves revealing only the upper part of their faces. Many wore shorts and T-shirts. Some walked with bicycles. There were weary-looking parents carrying squalling infants, their older children squealing with delight and weaving in and out of the crowds. There was the odor of sweat, onions, incense, a whole range of human smells. Bryson was dressed in a medieval cassock with a crook-handled walking stick, monk's garb from a distant past that was still worn in certain isolated orders. Here, it was being peddled as a souvenir. It had the advantage of having a hood that Bryson put up, concealing some of his features, the rest obscured by shadow. Layla, fifty yards or so behind him, wore a peculiar shift fashioned of a coarse fabric that looked like muslin, with a gaudy sweater covered with sequins, and on her head, a bright red kerchief. As strange as she looked, she blended in with the rest of the crowd perfectly.

The wooden barricades just ahead had been arranged to allow a broad passage for pedestrians to move through; two uniformed police officers stood on either side of the barricades perfunctorily examining faces as they passed. On the other half of the road, cars and trucks were being admitted one at a time. Those on foot were moving at a normal pace, hardly slowed at all, Bryson was relieved to observe. As he passed the policemen, Bryson walked unsteadily, leaning hard on the stick, the gait of a man nearing the end of a brutally long journey. He neither glanced at the faces of the policemen nor pointedly ignored them. They seemed to pay him no attention. In a few seconds, he was safely through the barricades, buffeted along by the stream of people.