The Ninth Day Page 6

  A blast of fragrant smoke hit her full in the face. She stepped out, took a deep breath of fresh air and stepped back inside.

  The patients were in varying degrees of intoxication. Some giggled uncontrollably, while others batted at the air around them. The majority lay perfectly still, their eyes watching something that only they could see. Octavio squatted near the head of one while he conducted an intense conversation. The man babbled in Spanish, stopping only to take a breath. Octavio appeared to be prodding him along, asking questions in a low voice.

  Emma felt her own senses release, and her body started vibrating in slow motion. A languid feeling crept over her. Her thoughts became disjointed, and it was all she could do to remain focused. A low humming noise began in her inner ear. All her resolve and ambition to move disintegrated, and she wanted only to remain still. A series of thoughts and images ran before her eyes.

  She was back in the jungle, running. Large palm leaves slapped her face and she could feel the soft earth below her feet. The image morphed into one where she stared through a small porthole as a pointed rocket head raced toward her. Oz’s face appeared, followed by that of Cameron Sumner, a man she knew. He smiled at her and held his hand out as if to pull her toward him. His image exploded and blood splattered over her.

  She shook her head and was surprised to note that she’d managed to move in real time, not in a dream. Her eyes refocused, and she was back in the hut, with the dying men all around her. Octavio had moved to yet another patient, and appeared to be interviewing him in the same manner as the first. Emma needed to get to him, but she didn’t trust her balance if she stood. Instead she crab walked around the mats to reach his side. Octavio glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “Ask him if the armadillos come at night,” Emma said.

  Octavio raised an eyebrow at her. “The armadillos?”

  Emma nodded. Octavio fired off a question in Spanish to the man. The patient became agitated. He tried to sit up, and when Octavio held him down, the patient batted at his hands. All the while he babbled in Spanish.

  “What’s he saying?” Emma said.

  Octavio frowned. “He said that the beasts come at night, digging with their claws. The animals chew on them, then leave.”

  Emma felt herself come to full awareness. There was something here, a clue, she could sense it. She only wished she could discern how much of what the man said was real, and how much was salvia-induced fantasy.

  “Ask him if he thinks it’s a dream, or real.”

  Octavio looked at her. “I don’t have to ask. I’m here every night, watching over them. When I sleep, another man guards them in my stead. There are no armadillos. The only thing that comes at night is darkness, and their own fears.”

  “Still, ask him. Please.”

  Octavio got an annoyed look on his face, but he rattled off a question in Spanish. The nearest patient answered. When he was finished, Octavio looked wary, and a bit baffled.

  “He says that he has seen the armadillos, and it could be a dream, or it could be real, but no matter whether fantasy or reality, the beasts are symbolic of La Valle, and they do his bidding.” Emma tried to imagine what the man had actually seen that he mistook for an armadillo.

  “What do you think about this?” she asked Octavio. He pursed his lips as he pondered the question.

  “I think he saw something. I never saw an animal enter this cabin, but perhaps I nodded off to sleep and it occurred then.” Emma stared at the assembled men, all of whom were muttering and tossing.

  “They have a lot of chemicals running through their systems. The sleeping potion that you gave them, the salvia now, it’s entirely possible that what they are seeing is a hallucination, nothing more.”

  Octavio looked dubious. “That doesn’t account for the salvia. When a man speaks through the salvia, he speaks the truth.” Another patient began talking, holding an entire conversation with himself. He nodded and then laughed, as if there was a person in front of him, not blank air. He stopped laughing and crossed himself while intoning words in a prayerful cadence, and he reached out to Octavio and fired off some more sentences. The man’s eyes held a pleading note. Octavio listened, and then sucked in his breath. The man subsided back onto the mat, mumbling.

  “What did he say?” Emma asked.

  Octavio stood and began gathering up his things. He retied the twine around the bag containing the remaining salvia and blew on the leaves burning in the shallow terra-cotta pots he’d placed around the men. When he was done, he looked at her with a sad expression in his eyes.

  “He asked for a priest to say his last rites, and suggested that we do so as well. He said death visits us all after the clock strikes three.”

  Chapter 10

  Emma burst out of the hut, with Octavio right behind her. He reached out to grasp her elbow and held her in place.

  “I’m sorry, but I believe the man speaks the truth.”

  Emma shook her head. “His truth, not mine. Tomorrow is not my day to die.”

  Octavio contemplated her with a serious look on his face. “Why do you insist that death is not coming? It comes for all of us.”

  “Not now. Not for me,” Emma said. She indicated the salvia bag. “May I have the rest?”

  Octavio handed it to her. “Please, take it. I have more.” He gripped her elbow tighter. “What did you see when you inhaled the salvia?”

  “Not much. I didn’t really smoke it, I just breathed in the fumes.”

  “Yes, but inhaling the smoke should have induced a mild hallucination. What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see my death, if that’s what you’re asking.” Her answer didn’t seem to satisfy him, because he waited with an expectant look in his eyes. Emma sighed. “I saw the past and two men that I know. I didn’t see the future.”

  “Are the men living?”

  “Very much so.”

  Octavio let go of her arm. “Watch behind you every waking moment. Especially tomorrow. Don’t be afraid to retrace your steps to find the answer.”

  Whatever that means, Emma thought, but the request seemed easy enough. “I will.”

  This time her answer seemed to satisfy him. He gave her a curt nod and began walking toward the clearing where his tepee was set up.

  “Octavio!” Emma called out. He turned to face her.

  “Is tomorrow your day to die?”

  Octavio nodded. “I believe the man.”

  Emma watched him disappear into the trees. She struck out toward the fields. Oz had told her he’d be there, watching them as they prepared the shipment for travel. “If I’m going to transport the thing, I at least want to have some say in the method,” he’d told her. At that moment she needed to talk to the one sane person in the entire compound, and that was Oz.

  She found him, Raoul, La Valle, and three other men standing in the road between the two fields. If anything, the ruined field appeared even worse than it had just a few hours earlier. The smell of decay had increased, and the black color of the infected leaves seemed more pronounced. Very little green color remained.

  All of the men stood in front of an ambulance. When Emma stepped closer, she saw that the sides and floor of the vehicle had been removed. The migrant workers were busy packing burlap bags of leaves into the space. They finished lining the bed, and then replaced the steel bottom over the sacks. It snapped into place. They then turned their attention to the walls. Thick elastic cords ran vertically from top to bottom, spaced about three inches apart. The men stacked bricks of marijuana one on top of another behind the cords. The columns increased. When they were done with one side, they replaced the steel wall. They turned to the next side, and began stacking again. Once the walls were in place, the men began to reassemble the interior, adding a collapsible gurney, packets of gauze, breathing apparatus, syringes, and bottles of anesthetic. The ambulance resumed its usual appearance.

  La Valle turned his beady eyes on her. “The vet spoke to me. You tell
anyone else about the disease here and I’ll slit your throat.”

  “I need access to a lab. I told you that,” Emma said. She leveled a stare at La Valle. “Serena will die unless I can narrow down her symptoms. She may even die with it.”

  La Valle pointed a finger at her. “She dies, and you do, too.”

  Emma didn’t bother to respond. She wouldn’t be there long enough for any of it to matter. She was leaving that night. Once she notified the authorities, she would see that Serena and the men were taken to a real hospital for treatment. La Valle could burn in hell for all she cared.

  La Valle spit on the ground. “No lab. And forget about trying to get anyone here or in Ciudad Juarez to help you. They know that I am the real government.” He moved to his Mercedes and crawled inside. Raoul smirked at her and followed La Valle into the vehicle. The motor roared to life, and the car shot off, its back wheels churning up dirt and gravel from the crude road.

  She walked to stand next to Oz. From that angle she saw a black Cadillac Escalade parked behind the ambulance. The back doors were thrown wide and the workers were busy lining the interior of that vehicle as well. Behind the SUV was a black BMW 850 with its wheel wells exposed. The migrants packed the opened space with more bricks. Emma moved to the side to peer into the interior. The cavity that usually contained the glove compartment was exposed and it, too, was being filled. The trunk lid was up and the migrants worked their way back and forth.

  Oz took a swig from a plastic water bottle. “What happened at the hut? Did they smoke the salvia?”

  “It didn’t go well.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What happened?”

  “One of the men claimed that we were all going to die tonight when the clock strikes three.”

  Oz groaned. “More hocus-pocus. These guys believe in more shit than the rock groups I’ve dealt with for the past eight years, and I thought the rockers were nuts. They were on as many drugs, that’s for sure. What did Octavio say?”

  “He agrees with the men. He thinks he’ll die then.”

  “And you?”

  Emma shook her head. “No. Not me.”

  Oz gazed at her. “You still going to try to escape tonight?”

  Emma nodded.

  Oz looked down at the ground. “I’ll help you.” She opened her mouth to protest, and he held up a hand. “I don’t expect to come with you. But you’ll need my help with the cameras.”

  Before Emma could ask him what he meant, a worker waved Oz over to the BMW. Oz joined him to stare into the trunk. After a moment, he returned to her side.

  “I assume the trunk has a false bottom?” Emma indicated the BMW.

  Oz nodded. “We’ll try to cross the border with all three, spaced at close intervals. If one gets stopped, the other two will try to slip by. My theory is that there are only so many guards at each gate, and if we occupy them with one, the second will be ignored.”

  “We?” Emma said.

  Oz grimaced. “It seems as though I’m not to be trusted. Raoul informed me that four guards will escort me the entire time.”

  “Why do they need you at all? Why not have the guards handle it?”

  “Presumably for my U.S. passport. Raoul claims that the fakes they’ve been using are being detected more often than not. At least that was what I was told when they recruited me. But now I know that’s not exactly true.” Oz hesitated. “They actually need my expertise.”

  Emma glanced at him. Now it comes, she thought. “What expertise?” She sounded sharper than she intended, and the way that Oz looked at her made it clear that he’d caught the tone in her voice.

  “I’m good at computers. All things electronic, actually. I have a knack for it. Always did.”

  He didn’t seem willing to continue. Emma pushed him. “And?”

  “And they need me to disable the security devices used at the Department of Defense.”

  Chapter 11

  Emma snorted in disbelief. “Is La Valle crazy? He can’t disable the devices at the Department of Defense. For one thing, the security isn’t only technological, it’s human. They have guards there. Well-trained ones.”

  Oz nodded. “I know. I explained to Raoul that even if he could block the cameras, he’d still have the human security to contend with. He said that was no problem. His guns are bigger. But it’s all cartel bravado. These guys are so used to getting their own way here, they can’t envision a scenario where there is actual resistance.”

  “And that resistance would continue every step of the way into the building. The offices are loaded with current and past military personnel. Male and female. This isn’t your usual corporate crowd. These people know how to defend themselves.” Emma felt panicked at the very idea of Oz trying to blast his way into the DOD. He would die in a hail of bullets. On the heels of the thought came the realization that Raoul and La Valle had to know this. All they wanted was to get the shipment into the building. Once inside and Oz was dead, investigative personnel would descend on the shipment, touching it, inhaling it, and possibly spreading the disease. Oz was expendable. It was a suicide mission.

  “You can’t deliver that shipment. You know that, don’t you?”

  Oz gave her a grim look. “I’m going to do what it takes to stay alive. If that means I take out the DOD security, then I will.”

  Emma could see he was serious. “I won’t let it come to that. I have friends who work there. I won’t let La Valle hurt them, or you.”

  Oz stared at her a moment, then sighed. “I’ll help you escape.” She wanted to tell him to join her, and almost did, but clamped her jaw shut. He wouldn’t make it.

  “I’m headed back to the far end to look at some slides. Let’s talk about this after dinner. I can’t make a move until it’s dark in any event.”

  Emma returned to the ranch house by the stables and began preparing the slides for review. She used some of the scrapings from the sores to innoculate petri dishes containing various mediums. She wanted to see if the disease grew under various circumstances, not just when offered a plant or human host upon which to feed.

  The camera attached at the center of the ceiling contained one glowing LED pin light underneath a dark glass globe. While Emma worked on the slides, her mind was elsewhere, creating and discarding escape ideas. She wanted to attempt it without including Oz if she could. She didn’t know him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t acting as the “good cop” in a “good cop, bad cop” scenario, but her gut told her he was just as desperate to leave as she was. Even so, she would rather not involve him.

  Her mind wandered to the world outside the compound. By now her absence from her office would be noted, but she doubted that anyone would have begun worrying about it. The plants that she scoured the earth for were often in remote areas accessible only on foot and after hours or days of hiking. As a result, she routinely slept in the field, and had become adept at carrying her own tent, water, and all the supplies she would need for an overnight. Her colleagues knew this. Banner, the CEO of Darkview, might grow suspicious, but if he was in the field as well, there was no telling how long she’d be gone before someone worried about her.

  She completed her work and put the petri dishes aside. She placed a slide under the microscope and peered through it at the tissue. The image sprang into focus, a large red scale with irregular edges. Emma recognized nothing unusual.

  She blew out her breath in irritation. Solving this problem with such inadequate tools was impossible. Emma removed the slide and added another. Same picture, same problem. Ten minutes later she’d viewed them all and was no further enlightened. She pushed away from the counter and headed to the armadillo barn.

  The sun had long since peaked and was heading downward. The air remained heated, but large clouds of gnats flew low, keeping below the tree line. Emma glanced at the sky. Heat lightning flashed in the distance. Cameras placed at the corners of the armadillo barn remained stationary despite her movement. A glance at them revealed that they wer
e mounted on rigid arms. These eyes, then, were fixed. Staring. Their LED lights didn’t glow. They were the only ones she’d seen on the compound that remained dark.

  “Dummy cameras,” she thought with satisfaction. La Valle must have thought the ground-armadillo-plate border would protect anyone from taking his pets, though Emma thought it more likely that no one wanted the damn things anyway.

  She passed into the barn and was once again struck by the smell of animal dander, straw, and the funk of old water and dried dung. Emma loved the smell of horses and liked the smell of dogs. She was less than thrilled at the smell of armadillos. Not overwhelming, but not familiar either. She walked up and down the center aisle, peering into each enclosure, and glancing upward whenever she could to peer at the ceiling. The dark rafters were bare of any surveillance technology.

  The best place for her escape was right there. While there were cameras inside the house, they did not extend to the barn, and the nearest exterior camera focused on the perimeter. By Emma’s estimation, she could take out the one functioning camera, and the others on the barn were fakes.

  She removed her rubber bracelets and peeled apart one. It ripped in half easily, and had striations running the length of it. She pulled on the striated section and was left with a long piece of rubber the thickness of an ordinary rubber band. She strolled out of the barn and over to the pole that held the one camera that she thought was functioning. Its red eye glowed at her.

  Pretending nonchalance, she leaned against the pole with her hands behind her. As she did, she took the thick part of the rubber bracelet and pressed it onto the wood, flattening it like clay. The remaining thin band she slid into her pocket. She removed her compass from the other pocket and spotted due west.

  With her weapon in place, she was free to stroll back to the main house. She’d eat and rest. When the darkness came, she’d make her move.