The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (37 page)

Horse was right about us both.

“What did you tell him about me?” Ambo asked.

A private room.

Cocaine and
pisco
spread on the table. Brown-skinned girls in matching blue lingerie writhed on our laps.

“Best not grow old,” I said, my finger moist.

“Why’s that, bro?” He tickled the girl on his lap until she contorted in a mass of giggles.

I reached around a warm tittie for my glass of
pisco.
I drank long and slow. “Wind up like your dad.”

“How’s that?”

“An old man with a heavy conscience.”

“Nothing,” I said. I tossed the postcard to the side. “Why don’t you ram a missile down his throat? You just said you’ve been watching him for hours.”

“Not as simple as that,” Ambo said. “Suppose we hit the payload? Suppose we set off the chain reaction? We can’t take that chance.”

“Or send in commandoes in a helicopter? I got to think up everything for you guys?”

“Pitt sees us coming he’ll blow the mountain before we even get close.”

I swore. Why was I getting so worked up about this? Here I had my chance: one little red button. One push and the world and the pain go away.

“Then why didn’t you take him out in the desert before he even got to the mountain?” I asked. “Why didn’t you guard all the likely volcanoes in the region? You could have picked him up anytime.”

“First of all, we only found out about all this from Sergio three hours ago. The full extent of the conspiracy. Second, there are twenty active and semi-active volcanoes in the Salar. Seventeen have weak spots Victor could exploit. The Salar covers thousands of square kilometers. Finding one man in that space, even with all our satellites and drones looking for him, is a needle in a haystack. If it weren’t for Sergio, we wouldn’t have found him at all.”

“But why me? What about his wife? Go get Janine up here. Have
her
talk to him.”

Ambo hung his head. “Janine has disappeared. The kids too. No note. Nothing. For all we know, she’s part of the conspiracy.”

Something nagged at me. What was it? Images flashed through my brain. La Paz, the witches’ market, Aurora, that woman, the photo.

The motorcyclist.

“Or maybe,” I suggested, “you knew where he was all along, and did nothing.”

Instead of the violence I’d hoped for, Ambo sighed and lowered his chin into his palm. “Are you a father, Horace?” he asked. He ran a fingertip across his lower lip.

“That’s a low blow,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “Because it’s true? Because you’re a failure of a father, just like me?”

“You knew where he was all along.”

“He was playing a double game. After we had you released from jail, Pitt got in touch. Said he was following you, thought you were part of the conspiracy.” Ambo held out his hands, let invisible sand trickle through his fingers. “We thought he was on our side. We were wrong.”

I stood, turned my back on him. Clenched my fist, desperately looking for someone to punch, something to destroy. Through a narrow slit of glass I could see the Japanese tourists smoking, wrapped in blankets, hot mugs steaming in their fists. The Frenchwoman said something and the Dutch backpacker in the llama earflaps laughed, mouth wide, shoulders thrown back.

Aurora spotted me. Waved. I ducked sideways. Smacked my head against the wooden wall.

I am such an idiot. All around you people are dying, you yourself want to die, have nothing to live for, your ex-wife is a suicidal environmental terrorist, and all you can think about is this woman. Aurora.

What would she say if she knew? If I told her? My best friend killed your boyfriend. Thanks anyway for the shag in the jeep. I closed my eyes.

“I am dying,” Ambo said. Blood pulsed from the wound on his shoulder.

“I can see that.”

“No.” He looked away. “Cancer. Six months max. Pancreatic. No treatment. Lots of pain.”

“No less than you deserve,” I said.

He nodded. “Time to reflect on my life.”

“Time to relive your sins over and over again, replay them in your mind until you go mad, until the only thing you crave is death?”

He pressed his chin to his chest. “I believe in God, Horace. I believe in America. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have doubts. Have I always done the right thing? Am I a bad man?”

“Well,” I said. “Let’s see. No. And yes.”

Ambo nodded his head, each downward movement drooping lower than the last. “I loved my wife and now she’s dead. Because of me.” He looked up at me suddenly. “But what if you could end the guilt?” he whispered. “What if, in one good deed, you could wipe the slate clean? Unburden your soul of its weight, and start over?”

For a time I had thought it was possible. It’s what had sent me on this wild-goose chase in the first place. I had closed that door on Isla del Sol when I knelt over a blond-haired corpse. To rip open that wound once more—to be tortured by false hope—it was more than I could bear.

“If only,” I said. “If only God existed, and trees were made of chocolate, and the sea was made of beer. And not that crap American dog piss, but decent brown ale.” I stood. “But it’s not, is it.”

“Please.” Ambo’s outstretched arm was pathetic. “You’re the only one who can do this. Anyone else goes up that mountain, Pitt will blow it up.”

“So let him,” I said. “He deserves it. So do you. So do I. So do we all.” I held on to the wooden door handle, like a drowning man groping for a life preserver. “Besides,” I said. “It’s not my fight. If the world is doomed to end this way, then let it. The human race has made its bed. Now let it lie in it.”

Hak Po spoke. “Chinese state pay much your help. Much you like. Never work again.”

I laughed, let go of the door handle. “You think this is about money?”

He took a small plastic bag from his jacket pocket. “All cocaine you want. Lifetime supply. No charge.”

It was tempting. Never have to worry about nightmares again. Spend the rest of my life awake. Able to control the demons that lurked just beneath the surface of the world. I reached for the bag. He drew back his hand.

“Get high and stay that way,” I said.

“Exactly. Please.” He held it out to me again. “Take. Sniff snort.” He tapped a finger against his nostril, grinned.

I held up my hands, stepped backward. Shook my head. “No. That’s too easy. A high’s no good without the gutter in between.”

I opened the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Lima to look for a new drug dealer, this time hopefully someone who’s not a Chinese spy.” I paused. “Oh, and to celebrate the end of the world.”

Ambo stood, stretched out a hand to me, but slipped and fell to the ground. He clutched his chest, gasped for air. Hak Po pushed past me, shouting for the medic.

I bent down to where Ambo lay.

His bloody fingers smeared my cheek. “There may be no God,” he whispered. “There may be no priest to forgive your sins. But there is one person whose forgiveness you must have. If you are ever to find peace.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Who’s that? Pitt?”

“You,” he said, and tapped his finger weakly against my chest. “You must forgive yourself.”

Twenty-Five

The
fuck.

Goddamn fucking
bullshit.
Twist my arm and send me up this godforsaken mountain. And for all I know, I might just help him press that button, blow the world to kingdom come.

Boom.

No more fucking people. Human race dies off, a handful of farmers left to till the soil. Mankind back where it belongs. An end to concrete jungles and the crowds. An end to city living, city morals. An end to all the ugliness.

An end to me.

Would that be such a bad thing? I was half-dead already, destroyed in an orgy of chemical self-flagellation. My organs groaned under the onslaught of cocaine, liquor, junk food.
I know what punishment feels like. I know what I deserve.

How many people had died because of me? My killing spree hit an exponential curve in the last week. It began slowly, of course. Data point one: my child, last year. What was her name again? I cringe at the thought. I’ve forgotten her name!

Liliana.
That was her name.

Then we pick up the pace.

Lynn. Dead because of me. Because she loved me. Ambo was wrong. It wasn’t his fault. It was mine. If I hadn’t gotten involved with her, she’d be alive today. True, I didn’t strangle her myself. But I might as well have.

Riding in the jeep to the base of the volcano, I asked Ambo, “So why did Pitt kill Lynn? It
was
him, after all, wasn’t it?”

The heart meds the medic gave Ambo seemed to be working.
Keep the bastard alive for a little while longer. Let him suffer with the rest of us.

He nodded. “Went to your apartment. To talk to you. I think,” he said, and closed his eyes, “I suspect he wanted to recruit you for his bomb expedition.”

I pinched my broken pinkie. The endorphin rush was the only drug available. “He found Lynn there. And something happened. Something snapped. But what? And why? I mean, he killed his own mother, for chrissakes.”

“You were a bad influence on him, Horace,” Ambo said. “I told you that the first time I met you.”

A medic pinned a saline bag to the roof with his thumb.

“Hello?” I said. “Who’s the killer for hire? Not me.”

“Pitt serves a useful function in society. He makes sure the herd sticks together.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is
that
what it is.”

“You, on the other hand,” he said, turning to me, “serve no useful function in society. A conscience like yours in incompatible with life.”

“With killing dissidents, anyhow.”

“Your sense of moral outrage is contagious, son. He’s caught your disease. A fate I wish on no man.”

I struggled to process this. “So what are you saying, he broke into my apartment to talk to me, found Lynn there, and was, what? So disgusted at seeing her half-naked ass waiting in lust for my cock that he went apeshit?”

Ambo’s head drooped, marking time to music only he could hear. “Something like that. Yeah. You remember how he killed her?”

“You don’t mean that—”

But my throat convulsed and no more words came out.

Lynn, strangled on my floor.

Jump.

Pre-dawn glow creeps in the open window. Pitt stands over me, a knife in his hand, staring at my fist as I twitch and spurt. My face is purple. A hangman’s noose dangles from my neck.

Jump.

How do I explain all this?

The SUV lurched over a rock. Ambo made a noise. The medic fussed. A diamond-encrusted fist pushed the man away. “That’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “Who did he learn it from?”

I taught him. Showed him. How to wrap his belt around his throat. Just enough to give a boost. To come, but not to kill. Weeks after the Hak Po op he came to me, noose in his fist, begged me for my opening lecture in Autoeroticism 101. I gave it to him. My own form of revenge, or so it seemed at the time.

“It’s about getting as close to death as you can without dying,” I told him.

“And then what happens?”

“I see things.”

“What things?”

“How can I explain it to you? Life looks different afterward.”

What monster of the deep had I awoken?

“It’s not your fault,” Ambo said. “Snap out of it, you hear me? Last thing I need right now is you out there in guilt-trip land.”

I stared out the window. Razors of acid slashed at my insides. Pitt had come to confess. But I’m no priest. I’m no saint. And when he found Lynn there, and saw my sin for what it was, he knew the truth: there is no way to end the guilt. At least, none in this life.

“Is that what it was?” I asked the moon, already visible on the horizon. Night was never far off at this altitude.

“He strangled her with his bare hands. You came home before he could escape. Knocked you on the head, called the police, got the hell out of there. The police find a naked woman, dead, the rope in your bathroom… Sex play gone bad. That’s what Villega thought, anyway. Until I set him straight.”

“Villega thinks?” I said. It was such an absurd thought, I laughed out loud. I might never see his pimply jack-o’-lantern face again. Grade his ridiculous English homework. Then I remembered those photos he’d shown me, and I stopped laughing.

Lynn dead. Because of me.

Who else?

Who was next?

The train. The Chinese vendor Red Cap murdered.

“He very good agent,” Hak Po said. “Family get big pay for loss of husband father. So sorry.”

So sorry.

Who else?

The dead monk in the back of the van. When they kidnapped me, his corpse leaking all over my pants.

The unnamed spy at the mine Ambo and Pitt were after, the whole point of the Hak Po op. Tortured and murdered by the DSU because of me.

Paco, skull bashed in by Umlaut while the cops looked on. He was a pickpocket, but he had never hurt anyone. Just a little kid.

The innocent guests at the Hotel Finski. I could still feel the dead flesh under my fingertips, Sven melting in the noonday sun, the shark-tooth necklace burned into the skinless meat of his neck.

“You come back now, you hear?” Aurora cried, her arms around my neck.

“Back in a jiffy,” I said, turning my lips away for her to kiss my cheek, all the while thinking:
maybe never. Maybe I’m the one who’ll push the button, not Pitt.

Then Victor’s massacre on the lake shore. Old men. Children. The little kid with the soccer ball, those empty eye sockets. When Will Be The Leave-Taking, the volunteer who’d volunteer no more. Michael, the CIA tool. And a score of meditating monks, fugitives from the First World, seeking no more than a decent mantra and a well-earned peace, plus a chance to blow up the world. If I hadn’t sent Pitt their way, none of those deaths would have happened.

And Kate.

Oh, Kate.

The SUV zipped its way across the salt flats toward the mountain. The early afternoon sun glared through the smoked glass. The medic jabbed Ambo with a needle.