“But we’re here to help them,” someone said.
“All cultures are in transition,” Father Martin added. “We feel we’ve given them something new and joyous.”
“We’re accused of acting the same way the Spaniards and Catholic Church did with less remote Indians when the conquistadores came through,” the nurse said.
“Except the Spaniards and the Catholic Church didn’t try to bring them electricity and health care,” another missionary chipped in.
There was laughter.
“It’s incredible,” Father Martin said. “As soon as you try to bring these people anything, people try to stop you, to take it away. Why?”
Alex had no answer. To the obvious next question of who was undercutting the missionaries’ work there, there remained no easy answer, either.
Leaving dinner that night, Alex watched a group of men assembled on the edge of the field that was contiguous to the village. The men were watching their children, teenage boys for the most part, compete in a soccer game in the dying daylight.
Despite the efforts on the missionaries, everyone she saw was destined for a life of poverty. These men would work in the distant fields, swelter in the sunshine and the humidity, and barely get by day to day, grateful for any small crumbs from life’s table.
She went to bed fitfully that night. Very early the next morning, in the midst of a pleasant dream, she awoke to the staccato sound of gunfire.
The little village of Barranco Lajoya was under attack.
SEVENTY
Alex threw off the mosquito netting that covered her and sprang to her feet. She grabbed her gun belt, which had both her Beretta and her knife hitched to it. She strapped it over her hiking shorts. She shoved her feet into her boots without bothering with socks and went quickly to the window of her hut.
It was just past dawn. She could hear a terrible commotion but couldn’t see it. There was sporadic gunfire and people screaming.
She saw people of the village running in every direction, fleeing into the woods.
She drew her Beretta. Then she moved quickly to her door, opened it slightly, saw that it was safe to leave, and stepped out. The commotion was coming from the center of the village. She headed toward it, her weapon aloft, moving along the wall of the church.
Screaming became louder. Voices pleading. People fleeing past her. She reached the corner and looked around it.
At first she thought that a gang of bandits had invaded. When she looked closer, a greater fear coursed through her. These were soldiers of some paramilitary organization, some local militia, she guessed. Maybe they were the men the girls had seen on the mountain. There was no way of knowing.
There must have been a dozen of them, just that Alex could see. Everything was happening too fast, too chaotically. It was Kiev all over again, except this time in Spanish, in the heat, and just after dawn.
More shouts and screams. The gunmen wore masks. They fired rifles and pistols into the air. They were using clubs and huge sledgehammers to strike at houses and structures. Residents, some of them barely clad, fled into the woods around the village.
Then she saw some of the gunmen drag Father Martin and his family out of their residence. Father Martin’s hands were raised and he looked terrified. He was pleading with the invaders. They kept yelling at him.
“¿Dónde está?” their leader screamed to Father Martin. “¿Dónde? ¿Dónde? ¿Dónde?”
Where, where, where? They wanted to know where something was. Something they wanted. They threw Father Martin to the ground. He shook his head. Whatever the secret was, he wasn’t telling. They let his family flee.
They meant to kill him.
A local boy came out of a hut with a rifle to defend the priest, and the attackers shot him from two different directions. When a woman came to the door behind him, his mother, she too was dropped by gunfire.
Alex watched transfixed, her horror so deep that she could barely assimilate what was happening. But she pinpointed the gunmen who had shot the boy and his mother.
Reflexively, she knelt down low into a firing position, partially concealed by the wall. In a fury, she fired at one of the men who had shot the boy and his mother.
She saw the weapon fly from the man’s hands. The man clutched his chest and went to a knee, stunned.
Alex had hit him in the middle of his gut. She turned her pistol toward the other gunman, who had suddenly realized they were under fire. Alex fired two shots at him. The first one spun him, the second one dropped him.
Then she heard another popping sound. Then a second. Father Martin lay motionless on the ground. His killer stood over him. Then he turned toward Alex.
Alex stood and, against all logic, in a blind rage, stepped out from cover. She held her Beretta forward, steadied it and fired twice. The first shot hit Father Martin’s killer in the upper chest, the second hit him full in the face. Then she heard a bullet whistle past her and smack into the stucco of the church.
She stepped back under cover. She knew the rest of the invading party would now come for her. Some of them would circle the church and try to come up behind her.
Before they could, she fled. She ran at full speed past her cottage and into heavy foliage beyond, a sickening horror still in her gut, but an instinct for survival pushing her onward. She reached the heavy foliage beyond the back of the church. She kept herself low as she ran in a zigzag pattern, pushing and pulling her way through the brush. Brambles and small branches struck at her bare legs, scratching her badly.
She kept going. Occasional shots came after her.
She stopped behind a tree. She could see slightly through a clearing. She needed to slow down her pursuers. She saw one gunman who had a teenage girl from the village by the arm. He was about forty yards away. Then she realized it was Paulina he was threatening.
Alex raised her Beretta. It was a risky shot, almost worthy of a sniper with a pistol, but she could hold her hands steady and shoot from cover.
She took the shot. She hit him full in the chest. She watched him reel backward and go down. She saw Paulina flee. Alex put a second bullet into him for good measure.
Alex knew that she would be followed. She ran deeper into the jungle. A barrage of bullets from automatic weapons ripped through the brush on different sides of her. One shot, the closest, tore into the bark of a tree about ten feet away.
But she knew they were firing wildly now. She kept herself low, her heart pounding, her adrenaline racing, her heart in her throat.
She didn’t return fire. Her only instinct was to get as far into the jungle as possible, change directions, and escape.
She kept moving. In the distance, she could hear them coming after her.
SEVENTY-ONE
Lt. Rizzo had had a horrid week.
First, Mimi, his favorite intern and Sailor Moon girl, had changed her course of studies at the university. Because of this, her schedule at the university had changed. She had signed up for a series of art and design courses that conflicted with her internship with the city police department. Hence, she had resigned her position with the Roman police. The irony of all this was that she and her new boyfriend, Enrico, were inseparable in their off hours.
An even worse disaster had occurred with Sophie. Rizzo might have known that no long-term good could come from her working at one of those chic designer clothing places on the via Condotti. Flouncing around in there each day, modeling the chic dresses, designer jeans, sheer blouses, and snug miniskirts, it was a matter of time before the wrong pair of male eyes settled upon her.
In this case, the wrong pair of eyes belonged to an American pop singer who went by the stage name of Billy-O. He was a guy in his thirties who had limited musical range but was a first-class piece of eye candy. His music producers in Los Angeles pushed him heavily and were currently getting him into some films. They had even hired a hack Hollywood TV writer to usher in a new script for him.