Esperanza (53 page)

“You’re fortunate you survived the possession,” Wayra said. “Not many make it.”

“She ordered her tribe to isolate Esperanza by shutting off power, establishing a perimeter of defense around the town. They plan to . . . to seize as many people as possible and the rest will assume forms, whatever that means, and prevent anyone from entering the city.”

“It explains why I haven’t been able to get through to anyone in Esperanza,” Wayra said.

“She knows . . . the
brujos
know . . . that an attack on them is imminent, that it’ll happen during a festival celebrating Inti. I don’t have any idea what that means.”

Wayra looked alarmed. “Is that possible,
Pedro
? That they could know?”

“Priests all over Ecuador have been taken,” Father Jacinto said. “It has made us more vigilant. Our plans are in flux.”

Ian didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.

Four men loped out of the rectory, carrying a large plastic bin, a cooler, and four ten-gallon containers of gasoline. They set everything on the ground in front of the priest. “Our contribution to the cause, gentlemen. Food, water, forty gallons of gasoline, eight flamethrowers. Fire will obliterate a
brujo.
You won’t get far without them.”

“You’re . . . a priest advocating
murder
?” Dan burst out.

Father Jacinto turned his woeful dark eyes on Dan. “My friend, the
brujos
are already dead. When they’re obliterated, they’re freed to move on in the afterlife.”

Dan gave a sharp, nervous laugh. “Dead. Right.” He blanched and looked like he was on the verge of puking. “She . . . messed with my brain, my blood chemistry . . . my memories.”

“It’s something at which they excel,” Wayra told him.

“There are also two high-powered rifles and two handguns in the bin,” the priest added, then gestured for the men to take the supplies to a small, decorative bus parked nearby.

“Why a bus?” Ian asked.

“It’s not an ordinary bus,” Father Jacinto said. “The windows can be tinted and sealed with just the flick of a switch. Mounted in the middle of the luggage rack is a rotating camera that provides a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. It has a satellite mounted on the roof, too, and an onboard computer. A panel in the roof can be opened for surveillance in case the camera fails or to shoot at the enemy. It was built by a Swiss company to transport valuables across the Alps and we simply modified it to fit our needs. We have six of these buses that we use for church-sponsored events. I’ll show you both how to operate everything.”

“Are you joining us, Dan?” Wayra asked.

“Me? No fu—I mean, no way, man.” He looked horrified at the thought. “I’m going back to Miami, try to pick up the pieces of my life.” He looked at Ian. “But would you do me a favor if you find Tess? Give her this.” He passed Ian an envelope. “It’s just an apology. For everything. I scribbled cell numbers on the back for Tess, her mother, and niece. I’ve called their cells several times, but never got through. Their service may not work here.”

“I’ll be sure she gets it, Dan,” Ian said. “And thank you for the cell numbers.”

“And Wayra, everything Dominica does, every . . . decision she makes, is ultimately about getting even with you,” Dan went on. “In her mind, you broke her heart, used her, betrayed her time and again. I mean, this is all in her own head, but it’s how she sees it.”

“No doubt,” Wayra replied.

In Spain, in the fourteen hundreds, I was killed because the father of the woman I loved hated me.
Was
that
woman the
bruja
known as Dominica? Ian wondered. It made a terrible kind of sense.

“Dan, go get yourself some breakfast,” Father Jacinto said. “Then we can make preparations for getting you home.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” He nodded at Ian and Wayra and offered a small, wan smile. “Good luck, you two.”

He seemed to limp away, shoulders hunched as if he were carrying an impossible burden. Ian felt as if he were watching a broken man struggling
to appear whole. “You need to protect him from being seized again,” Wayra remarked.

“He’ll have an escort to Quito.” The priest gestured at the bus. “Let me show you a few things inside.”

The interior of the bus was impressive—five rows of leather seats that would seat three across on either side of the aisle, for a total of thirty passengers, storage bins overhead, a built-in cooler and restroom at the back, a console covered with buttons, switches, screens. Father Jacinto sat in the driver’s seat and proceeded to demonstrate what each switch and button controlled, how the satellite and GPS worked, what the computer could track. “Internet reception is not so good. Like the cell phones.” He explained that the sides of the bus were reinforced steel, the windows were made of bulletproof glass, that the bus was basically a tank that could get through almost anything.

After Ian climbed back down, Father Jacinto said, “You will not be alone when you cross the Río Palo. By our estimates, there could be as many as twenty thousand from all over South America, men and women whose loved ones have been seized by
brujos
—and killed.”

“The liberation group,” Wayra said, glancing at Ian, and gave him a quick rundown on what it was. “They often refer to themselves as the people’s army. Or as avengers.”

“The churches all over Ecuador have been working with this group,” the priest said. “It’s why the churches have set up sanctuaries, supplied villagers with weapons, why we created alarm systems. So now the
brujos
are about to learn what happens when the people rise up. Because they have learned of our plan, you’ll stop at the Santa Clara church first, just outside of Dorado, and will be given instructions on how to proceed. We’re trying to keep everything self-contained, with only a few people knowing the full plan.”

“Where’s Dorado?” Ian asked.

“Just four hours from here. It’s where this liberation group is gathering.”

“How far is Dorado from Río Palo?”

“Less than a quarter of a mile.”

A stone’s throw, he thought, his excitement surging. “Why did they wait until now? Why didn’t they attack years ago?”

“They were waiting for you and Tess to return to Ecuador,” the priest replied. “They looked at it as some sort of sign.”

“How could they possibly know about us?”

“Your entry into Esperanza as transitionals was heralded as the beginning of a new era, Ian. And the liberation Web site has contacts throughout Ecuador. I suspect they knew the moment Tess entered the country. But you, my friend, since you came via other means”—he looked at Wayra—“there’s probably no record of you at all. The other reason they chose today is that it’s the summer solstice. Hundreds of thousands in Ecuador and Peru will be celebrating Inti Raymi, the Festival of the Sun. In the five years the liberation Web site has tracked bleed-outs, there has never been one at a Festival of the Sun celebration.”

By early morning, they were high in the mountains again, one of the Dorado 13s chugging along in front of them, a chain of vehicles behind them. The paved road was two lanes and, in some spots, barely that. Most of the time, there was no guardrail and the sheer drop-off on the right distracted Tess. She kept expecting to see fog creep up over the edge. Now and then, she heard a troubling clunk in the Ford’s engine or beneath the car. She wasn’t sure.
Please don’t break down out here.

They’d taken turns driving in two-hour shifts, and Tess was now on her second stretch, the final hour to Dorado. Lauren and Maddie were sacked out, Tess’s eyes ached, she only wanted to get somewhere. Anywhere. They had made two stops, a dozen vehicles pulling into the same roadside restaurant, then a lonely gas station, neither of which could easily accommodate fifty-two hungry people who also had to pee. It meant lost time, increased anxiety, but bonds were forged while waiting to use the restroom, to pay for a snack or a bottle of water.

Tess came to understand that everyone in this little wagon train was here to take a stand against the
brujos,
against the evil that had killed their loved ones with such indifference and broken so many lives. There would never be an official record of this battle, nothing that would go down in the history of Ecuador as a decisive turning point against oppressors. Everyone was here to stop the killing—and to rid the country once and for all of this scourge of the dead.

The businessman driving the lead Dorado 13 had watched his wife bleed out while they were having dinner on the island of Chiloé, off the
coast of Chile. He had run across Vivian Ortiz’s Web site in late 2005 and, since then, had culled several thousand cases from both Chile and Argentina. The Brazilian woman driving the rusted old VW bus lost her brother, a physician, to the
brujos
while he was conducting a conference on alternative healing in Rio. A Peruvian yoga teacher had been windsurfing on the island of Margarita when his son had suddenly begun bleeding from the eyes and keeled over while still on his board. An American congressman had seen a colleague bleed out in a hotel bathroom in La Paz. A California screenwriter had seen her daughter and a colleague bleed out during a film festival in Cannes, the only European incident in the group.

Fifty-two stories in just their group. The experiences had landed some of these people in therapy, caused others to lose their jobs and pensions, branded others as unemployable. But they knew they’d left the rational world when they began to post on the liberation Web site.

As the road leveled out, the morning light carved the landscape into stark relief—trees blown into odd shapes by wind that swept up over the edge of the mountains, memorials for roadside fatalities decorated with clusters of wildflowers, then buildings made of stone, wood, and tin, where old people sat on porches, watching the procession of vehicles. At the summit, stood a sign:
BIENVENIDOS A DORADO
. Honking erupted up and down the line of vehicles, and on Dorado 13, passengers stuck their heads out the windows, shouting and waving.

The Río Palo was less than a quarter mile from the center of town, Tess thought, and the Bodega del Cielo, the place where her journey had begun, was a short distance beyond it. Excitement and dread rolled through her in equal measures.

The trees gave way to a town so beautiful and pastoral that it possessed a fairy-tale quality. Stone buildings looked gold in the morning light, bells rang, the sonorous notes echoing across the summit, an open-air market burned with colors. A church dominated the skyline, a throwback to ancient times with a fountain out front, doves cooing in the eaves. The town’s tremendous plaza was filled with people and dozens of stalls where locals sold jewelry, food, coffee. Near the fountain, five men played flutes and guitars, the haunting notes rising toward the cloudless sky.

“Ladies, we’ve arrived,” Tess announced.

“Somewhere, like, maybe a Hilton with a hot shower?” Maddie raised herself up from the back seat, face visible in the rearview mirror. “Never mind. The answer’s no.”

“I’ll settle for a Jiffy John,” Lauren remarked.

Tess parked in a pasture the size of a football field. Row after row of small buses, all Dorado 13s, lined up with several thousand cars, trucks, vans, jeeps. Colorful banners welcomed all to the Festival of the Sun. From a stall in the pasture, they bought coffee and vegetable empanadas that steamed in the chilly air. Tess couldn’t distinguish festival goers from those who were here to avenge the death of loved ones, those here to take back Esperanza. Safety not only in numbers, she thought, but in camouflage.

The driver of the Dorado 13 in front of them was directed to a side street, to a church and its adjoining school to regroup and pick up their directions. But it was a mob scene inside, the place jammed with
vengadores
—the avengers against the
brujo
incursion. Everyone talked at once, the PA system crackling with static as a woman explained what was supposed to happen next. It was too crowded and noisy, and Tess couldn’t deal with it. She told Lauren and Maddie she would meet them outside.

Tess wandered into a field behind the church, face turned into the sun, and watched a herd of llamas. Beyond the field, Río Palo’s glistening waters meandered beneath the shade of giant ceiba trees, beckoning, tempting her.

She returned to the sidewalk and joined a group of tourists headed toward the river. Her heart beat wildly, she just wanted to see it—and see across it. The road dipped steeply and flowed seamlessly into a two-lane concrete bridge that crossed the half-mile-wide river into
brujo
land.

She paused at the top of the steep banks, shocked at how fast the water moved, rushing over volcanic rocks, into and out of the sunlight, sweeping away everything in its path. A road cut through the vast rolling landscape on the other side. Everything was a deep emerald green, vibrant wildflowers blooming in clusters, the pines and ceiba trees partially hiding homes, squares of pasture, grazing llamas, horses, goats, a
community
.

Kids tossed a Frisbee in a front yard, people were getting into cars, small groups walked toward the bridge, presumably to join the celebration to the ancient sun god. It surprised her that people lived on that side of the river. Her memories were of a lonely building, isolated in thick fog. She sat on the grassy bank to get a better view and there, in the distance, stood the bodega, cars parked out in front, buses idling, their exhaust creating gray plumes in the air, passengers waiting around outside. Was the edge of the mesa right behind the bodega, as she remembered? Were the outhouses still there?