The Taste of Fear (28 page)

She slipped in a slick of blood and went down hard, stinging her hands and jarring her knees. She whirled to see whose body she’d skated past. One of the gunmen—Beard. He was riddled with bullet holes. She looked at her apple-red palms and thought she might be sick.

“Scarlett?”

She bumbled for the rifle that was still hanging on the strap around her neck and swung it toward whoever had called to her. It was Sal. He was behind the high altar, pointing his own rifle at her. A rush of euphoria coursed through her body.

“Sal!” she exclaimed. She ran over and threw her arms around him, almost knocking him over in the process.

“Where were you?” he demanded. His voice was firm yet compassionate at the same time.

“He took me to the woods,” she blurted into his shoulder. “He wanted to rape me. I got away. He chased me into a mine. The bridge broke. We fell. I landed on him. He’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Creep—one of the gunmen.”

“Good lord!” Sal broke apart. His eyes were feverish with satisfaction. “That’s all of them then.”

Scarlett did the math. Creep. Jahja. Beard. That was three—three out of four. They were missing Mustache. “No,” she said. “There’s one more.”

Sal gave her his own count, which included a terrorist lying between the pews. Scarlett couldn’t see the floor between the pews from the chancel where she stood, but she did see a bloody smear leading from the transept into the rows of wooden benches.

“They’re really dead?” she said, dumbstruck. “All of them? They’re all dead?” It seemed too good to be true.

“Except for the Irishman.” Sal nodded to an open door in the outer wall of the ambulatory. “Bastard escaped.”

She felt a shot of fear. “He’s around here somewhere?”

Sal shook his head. “He heard my story about Don Xi. Knows the man paying his bill is dead. And he was in pretty bad shape. I’m guessing he would have been eager to simply get the hell out of here.”

“Don Xi’s dead? I thought—”

“I’ll explain later.”

Scarlett was about to protest but didn’t. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Don Xi. “Where would the Irishman go?” she asked instead.

“He got here somehow. I’m sure he had a way to get back out again.”

“What about Miranda? I saw her body. What happened to her?”

“She tried to run away. The guy by the door shot her.”

“What else happened? How did you kill them all?”

“It’s complicated,” he said shortly. “I’ll explain later.”

Scarlett nodded understandingly. She didn’t want to talk about what Creep had done to her either. Not now, at least. There’d be time in the future to sit down and sift through it all. God, she thought, she had a future again. “So what should we do?”

“Wait for Danny.”

“What?”

“Danny’s coming,” Sal said nonchalantly, as if Danny’s arrival had always been a foregone conclusion. “He’ll be here in a few hours.”

“But how?”

“I called him on that.”

Sal indicated a hard, orange case about the size of a laptop sitting on the center of the altar. It was open, revealing something slightly larger than a regular cell phone cushioned in blow-molded gray foam.

“How does he even know where we are?
We
don’t even know where we are.”

Sal pulled a square from his pocket and unfolded it.

“The map!” she said.

He nodded. “Complete with latitude and longitude markers. We’re just inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about halfway between the eastern border and the Congo River.”

I was right, she thought inconsequentially. It’s the Congo. “Danny’s really coming?”

“I gave him our grid reference. He should be here in a couple hours.”

“How can he possibly get here so quickly?”

“You have to give the man more respect,
cara mia.
He’s been in Tanzania for days now. He chartered a helicopter, which he’s kept on standby, ready to fly as soon as he got wind of our location.”

Scarlett’s years of pent-up hostility toward Danny Zamir instantly went up in smoke. She felt as though the best player in sport, her competition for so many years, had suddenly been traded to her team. She decided she owed him a big apology when she saw him. Maybe even a hug.

“What about the police?” she said. “Did you call them?”

“No need. The jet’s fully fueled and waiting in Dar es Salaam. We can be back in the States by tomorrow morning.

“Can we do that? Just leave? Don’t we—”

“I’m not sitting around here while the locals try to sort this bloody mess out. It could take weeks, and I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of Africa. We’re not criminals. We didn’t do anything illegal. Everything that happened was in self-defense. If they have questions for us, they can contact us in LA.”

“I don’t think it works like that, Sal.”

“They can talk to my lawyers then.”

“What about Thunder?”

“We’ll drop him off at the airport. They can take him to a hospital from there.”

“He’s in bad shape. I wish there was something we could do for him now.”

Sal nodded to the three rucksacks the terrorists had carried in on their backs. They were resting in a heap against the apse. “Maybe there’s some medicine in one of those?”

Scarlett rifled through the top one and found a first-aid kit. She messed through adhesive and gauze pads and bandages until she found several packages of aspirin. She stuck two in her pocket for Thunder, thinking they might help his fever, then tore open another two and dry-swallowed the tablets.

Sal was watching her. “Migraine?”

“It’s been on and off since we were thrown in the van.”

“Guess this really wasn’t the R&R you were expecting?”

“We should have gone to the Caribbean,” she told him dryly.

Back outside, Scarlett noticed the sky had darkened to an ominous gray. Her eyes fell on Miranda and Joanna’s bodies. Her relief at finding Sal okay and her excitement upon learning Danny was on his way to rescue them were immediately doused. The embassy women were dead. Emptiness swept through her.

“We should bring them inside the church,” she said. “It’s going to rain.”

Sal nodded. As they walked over to the bodies, Scarlett tried to avert her gaze, but her eyes were drawn to the corpses the same way a motorist’s eyes are drawn to a gruesome roadside accident. Death might be horrible but, like it or not, it was fascinating. In this case it had made parodies of the embassy women’s former selves—schlock-horror B-movie zombies.

Joanna, dignified in life, was face down in the mud, a big piece of her skull missing. Her arms were at her side, her legs slightly apart, the left one bent at the knee. Miranda was on her back, staring up into the gray sky with sightless eyes. Her skin was ghostly white, her mouth open in a silent scream, her blouse shredded from shrapnel. Through the holes in the silk her skin and bra were visible, both painted a dark crimson.

“We’ll move Miranda first,” Sal said. “She’s lighter.”

Scarlett took ahold of Miranda’s wrists, which were cool and clammy, while Sal grabbed her by the ankles. Rigor hadn’t set in yet so she was still flexible and easy enough to lift. As they carried the girl to the church, Scarlett could smell urine and sweat. They returned for Joanna and brought her inside as well. The two bodies now rested side by side in front of the altar.

“We should cover them with something,” Scarlett said.

She went to the recessed apse, where a five-by-ten-foot tapestry hung on the wall. The woven picture displayed a large cross hovering in the blue sky with golden beams of sunlight slanting away from it over a small village surrounded by trees. It took her a moment to realize the village was probably a depiction of the one she was in now, before it had been burned to the ground.

She gave the tapestry a solid tug. There was a brief rip-tearing noise, then the entire thing was lying in a heap at her feet. And she was left staring at a wooden door in the stone wall.

“Spooky,” Sal said, stopping beside her.

Scarlett said, “Let’s go get Miranda.”

“You wanted to check it out, let’s check it out.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

“Just a few minutes.”

Before she could reply, Sal walked away from her to the nearest corridor, leaving her alone. She hurried to catch up. The arched alcove was about twenty feet deep. At the end of it was a rectangular box.

“Don’t tell me that’s a coffin,” Scarlett said. She was whispering, though she didn’t know why. Nobody was around to hear her. But it seemed appropriate considering this place wasn’t an undercroft as they’d previously assumed; it was a crypt—a place for the dead.

“Give me a hand with the lid,” Sal said.

“Are you nuts?”

“What’s the problem?”

“Why do you want to open it?”

“To see what’s inside.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea, Sal.”

“It’ll give us a clue as to who ran this village before it burned down. Now are you going to help me or not?”

Scarlett wanted to say no, but she knew he would do it himself anyway. That would take longer, which meant they would be down here longer. They each took an end of the wooden lid and lifted. The lid came free with a gentle puff of escaping air. She leaned toward the coffin to look inside. Big mistake. The smell of mold and human dust and dried meat hit the back of her throat like a physical presence. She gagged and stumbled back, dropping her end of the lid. It crashed to the floor, the rotten wood splintering on contact.

Sal, left with the entire weight, cursed and dropped his end as well. Learning from her mistake, he covered his nose with his arm and looked inside. She did the same. Although Scarlett had seen several corpses in the last few hours, none of them had been dead for very long and all had looked human.

What she saw now didn’t look human one bit. The face of the skull stared at her in broken horror. The jaw hung open in a silent yowl, slightly lopsided, showing peg-like teeth. The eye sockets were gaping black holes filled with dust and other decomposed organic matter. The skeletal body was dressed in a royal-blue jacket with a line of bronze buttons down the front, wide knickerbockers, puttees, and leather ankle boots.

“Belgian,” Sal said matter-of-factly.
“Force Publique.”

Scarlett stared, transfixed by the clothed skeleton, the ghastly thing that had once been a man—a man who likely at one time had a wife and a house and a family, a man who had felt fear and happiness and love, who had seen beauty in a sunrise and put value to money and obeyed the rules of right and wrong. A man who was now bones in a box.

Scarlett felt like she was being let in on some age-old secret. This is what death looks like, she thought. How Miranda and Joanna would soon look. What she herself would one day be.

She blinked and turned away. She was freaking herself out, and this was not the place where she wanted to be freaked out.

With a jolt of panic, she realized Sal was gone.

Frowning, she swept the flashlight beam across the mouth of the alcove. Shadows danced and leapt. She almost expected to see Michael Jackson moonwalk past in
Thriller
makeup.

“Sal?” she called.

“Come here!” His voice echoed slightly from somewhere to the right.

“I want to leave.”

“Come here.”

Scarlett found him in the next corridor over, examining another coffin.

“Opening one coffin, fine, Sal,” she said, reprimanding. “Two, that’s perverse.”

“Look.”

He aimed the light at the floor, revealing several sets of footprints in the dust, which weren’t hers or his. They all led from the stairs directly to the coffin and nowhere else.

Scarlett’s first thought: vampire. Some undead thing sleeping its days away down here, waking at dusk to feed on blood during the night. When the rational side of her brain kicked in, it reminded her there were no such thing as vampires and witches and other monsters.

There was a much more logical explanation for the footprints. “Jahja?” she said.