BY THE TIME JULIA GOT THE blood sample back to the laboratory it was after hours, the night porter was on duty and the staff had gone home. The place was eerily empty.
Placing Dwayne Cariton’s sample in the freezer, she closed the fridge. A noise in her office made her swing around—the light was still off but the door was now ajar. Looking around wildly, she picked up a scalpel then, feeling faintly ridiculous, tiptoed to the office.
‘I’m sorry if I scared you.’ The voice, somehow familiar, was a deep whisper in the dark. Trying to swallow her terror, Julia switched the light on. The office chair swivelled around.
‘Tom Donohue,’ the terror sounded out in her own voice.
Still clutching the scalpel, she stared at the handsome tanned face. He smiled, the disarming smile of a sincere man—she didn’t lower the blade.
‘You’ve been briefed, I see.’
‘I have, and apparently you’re dangerous.’
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a hand gun, which he placed on the desk between them. ‘So are you. I read the Afghanistan report.’
‘That was meant to be confidential.’
‘The military’s a promiscuous world. If you weren’t a scientist, they’d probably be trying to recruit you.’ He indicated the scalpe
l. ‘You planning to trim my toenails?’
She lowered the blade. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, who broke in last night?’
In lieu of an answer, he stood and walked over to the pinboard, ran his finger along its rim. ‘Kurt Moony, Winston Ramirez, Jack Lewis. I know some of these guys. Some of them I actually care about. How about you?’
‘What do you want?’
He sat on the desk and began tapping it with his fingers: a rapid little drum roll. He turned back to the pinboard. ‘Psychopaths, cold killing machines or simply men lacking a piece of heart?’
‘You’ve got three minutes to convince me not to ring Smith-Royston,’ Julia said.
‘Nice guy; pity about the politics.’ He pulled out a cigarette packet. ‘What did they tell you about me? That I’d fallen out of the tree? Gone AWOL? Lost the grand design?’
‘Something like that. You can’t smoke in here.’
He ignored her and lit up.
‘Well, I guess from their perspective it’s all true. Frankly, I’ve never felt more lucid.’
‘Okay, now it’s down to two minutes. Surprise me.’ She edged closer to the phone.
He glanced at her, and for a moment he appeared fallible.
‘About a year ago, one of our junior diplomats went missing in São Paulo. Kidnapping is rife in that part of the world. Last year was particularly bad due to the national election. President Cardoso had problems—problems he called upon the US to help with. There was a village, a small Bakairi Indian outpost on the banks of the Parantinga River—we were led to believe a local drug lord had taken refuge there and was using it as a front for his operations. The junior diplomat who went missing—well, he’d been a little outspoken about this particular drug lord. Seems he’d had a kid brother who died of crack cocaine. So we got the intel he was there and worked up an extraction plan. Normally I craved those blacks ops—the more dangerous the better—but this one was different.’
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘A ten-man Delta squad; top of the evolutionary tree, Professor Huntington, the very best. I was in command. We were dropped by a bird upriver then travelled down by canoe in the middle of the night. The settlement was located in the centre of thick jungle and we were told there were hidden gunposts protecting it. We arrived at 3 a.m., suited up in camouflage with our NODs hanging around our necks. We crept up through the foliage to the central cleared area of the village. We didn’t see the gunposts but we’d deliberately avoided their marked locations. The village itself wasn’t what we’d expected. There were these spherical huts made of reeds—about twenty of them clustered around. It was like stepping back a hundred years. I mean, there was nothing—except one antenna coming out of one hut—to tell you what century we were in. I remember that antenna because it was what I clung to in the moment. Tom, I remember telling myself, it’s a front, the activity’s all underground, some buried bunker where the hostage will be right now, chained, his head covered by a sack that smells of shit, fear hacking away at his religion. We’d been briefed to expect guards, but as we circled the huts we found none. And it was so quiet. I’m telling you, when we reached the centre of the group of huts, with no sound at all but the crackle of the jungle, it spooked even me. Then there was a movement, a quick darting, and this terrible face came out of the dark—screaming mouth, huge eyes. Patrick—he was the youngest—he jumped on it, knife ready. It was an old man—some mad tribal elder wearing this crazy wooden mask. It took us all by surprise—we’d been briefed to expect machine-gun-wielding pimps in flak jackets.
‘There was something so out there about this man’s fury, his fucking mad blind courage. I suspected he was on something, some kind of local hallucinogen. He struggled like a wildcat, but Patrick finally took him down as silently as he could. Not silently enough though—suddenly, all hell broke loose. Villagers started running out from the huts—men, women, boys, even old men armed with machetes, knives, sticks. Some of my boys panicked and started firing. When the screaming stopped, there was only the wail of a baby and those whispering trees, those horrible whispering trees.
‘I gave the order to search the huts for the entrance to the bunker. In the fourth hut we found a trapdoor leading down to a small dug-out, but all it contained was a couple of rusty AK–47s, a few tribal masks and a stack of leaflets in Portuguese ranting about land rights and some local mining company. No cocaine baron, no kidnapped American diplomat. It had been a set-up. The villagers were armed because they were defending their land, and it turned out the Brazilian official who’d given us the intel coordinates had some powerful mining friends who wanted them moved.
‘We cleaned up as much as we could, left the appropriate clues to make it look like a local raid. Shot the two remaining witnesses because they’d heard our voices, knew we were American. The Brazilians found the body of the diplomat a week later, dumped in some trash can in a São Paulo slum.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Professor, I’m a pragmatist, wouldn’t have had my job if I hadn’t been. But this time we had our own casualties—not on the day, but within a few months. Of my ten-man squad, three went AWOL: one shot his wife on leave, two committed suicide. Four developed psychotic episodes: three of them resigned voluntarily; the fourth was committed to an institution. The eighth man took up heroin full-time. Only two of us developed no symptoms whatsoever. One went straight onto covert operations in the Middle East, and the other filed the report. He also asked for an inquiry, but was warned he’d be facing a court martial, not an inquiry, if he didn’t shut up.’
‘That was you?’