The path didn’t end so much as it disappeared into a rambling battered mishmash of rundown huts and shacks. Walls were made of scrap metal, as were roofs. Some roofs were thatched, others had gaping holes in them. There were hammocks for sleeping on small overhangs to some of the huts, attempts at porches, and a few primitive colorful murals that attempted to make things look better. Some of the better homes had mosquito netting on the windows. The majority didn’t. The windows were just open. Alex saw one car, an old blue Citroen with an ornate grill. It must have been forty years old and have spent part of its early life in the old French colony of Guyana, to the east. She wondered how it could have gotten there and guessed that the path must have been more passable in the past.
There seemed to be one store, which operated out of a window in someone’s hut. Barefoot children played soccer in a field cluttered with litter. A hand-painted sign on the side of one building said Iglesia Christiana. The church. The building would have been considered an eyesore and a slum in most American towns, but here it was one of the better buildings. It was white stucco, shuttered windows and large wooden doors that locked. Beside it, adjacent to a porch, was a gasoline-powered generator. Electricity had not yet come to Barranco Lajoya, nor had telephones. In Barranco Lajoya the modern world didn’t exist.
A crowd began to gather. Moments later, a small middle-aged man with slick hair, a round face, and a pleasant smile came forth from the church. He introduced himself as Father Martin. He was a Cuban American from Miami, who spoke English and Spanish.
“¡Bienvenida! Por favor, accompáñame,” he said. Welcome and come with me. I will take you to the other missionaries.
SIXTY-SIX
In London, Anatoli felt safe. Honest to God, he had never committed even the slightest crime in the United Kingdom. And he wouldn’t. He rather liked the place, the pubs, the football, the girls. Like the cute redhead with whom he had spent the previous night. The trashy blue collar fun of Oxford Street and Picadilly Circus. London was a great place to be for a young man from one of the old Soviet republics. Much better than Rome, from which he had arrived a week earlier.
He stepped out of the shiny black taxi at the foot of Edgerton Gardens in Kensington. It was a mild morning. He would walk the rest of the way home, pass by a pub for an early pint maybe, then go home and sleep off the previous evening.
He sighed to himself. He blinked against the unusual bright sunlight of London in April. He put on a pair of sunglasses.
First rain, then sun, then more rain, then more sun. He blinked. How did these English ever get used to it? It wasn’t like Ukraine where things were steadier.
He skipped the pub. He had been out late the night before and needed a long nap. He turned onto his block of red brick flats and saw nothing unusual.
He entered his building. The lift was out of order again. Well, he only lived three flights up. He took the steps two by two. He clutched an old metal key in his hand.
He looked at his door. The little splinter that he’d left above the lock was still in place. No one had entered while he was out. Either that, he mused to himself, or whoever had entered was so good that they looked for the little marks like that and fixed them.
The floor was silent. Anatoli opened the door and stepped inside.
The lunging, swinging metal baseball bat came from his blind side and was aimed straight at his kneecap. It missed slightly, but smashed the bone of his shin with a sickening crack. At the same time, doors to the apartment behind him opened and men in London police uniforms rushed toward him. They hit him hard from behind and shoved him forward into his own apartment.
Anatoli went berserk. He fought like a wild man. If there were two things he knew in life, one was fighting. The other was killing. Now he knew a third thing: if he were taken prisoner, he wouldn’t see freedom until he was a very old man, if then.
He threw his powerful elbows at the men behind him, caught one in the jaw and one in the gut. He clenched a fist, threw a backward punch at the same man and caught him in the groin. The man howled profanely and loosened his grip.
The man with the bat hammered at Anatoli’s knee again and caught it. Anatoli screamed, then cursed in Ukrainian. Those he fought cursed him in English.
Anatoli started to go down. But he managed to get a hand to the gun he carried under the left armpit of his leather jacket. He moved the gun at one of his assailants. He counted six of them now, plus one that was smaller, older, who was standing back. He pulled the trigger, once, twice.
One bullet flew wildly. But the other tore part of the left hand off one of the men who was trying to take his freedom away. The man spun away with a loud screech, blood splattering in every direction like a shattered bottle of ketchup. Anatoli saw a curled pinky finger hit the floor.
Then the bat hit Anatoli’s wrist. The gun flew away from him. Anatoli’s hand and wrist were then rendered nerveless and paralyzed from a second blow.
“Bring him down! Down!” the leader said from outside the fight.
One of the intruders had a police club and used it with remarkable efficiency. He walloped Anatoli on the left side of the temple so hard that it crushed the cartilage in his ear. Another blow to the midpoint of his face broke his nose. Then there was one to his groin that took much of the fight out of him.
Anatoli went down hard onto his face, overpowered. The fight had taken a full minute. Championship bouts one-on-one often took less.
Anatoli lay stunned but not unconscious on the old Pakistani carpet that covered the floor. Someone grabbed him by the hair, lifted his head, and slammed it down again. He felt his hands pulled behind his back and cuffed. His mouth was hot and salty, and little shards of his teeth floated on his tongue. His physical fight was gone but a rage still surged within him. If he ever got out of here, he swore to himself, he would find all these men and kill them.
He was still breathing hard, clinging to consciousness, wondering how he could have been so careless or who had betrayed him. He wondered if the redhead had been a setup to get him out of his apartment. And how had they found him?
Voices. Voices in the room. A voice talking on a cell phone: the man who had stayed back from the fight. He was obviously the leader. Even dazed and defeated, Anatoli knew how these things worked.
“Yeah, we got him,” the voice said.
There was a pause. Then it continued. Same guy.
“Are you kidding me? Of course he fought, you moron. He fought like a stuck hog. What’d you expect… that he’d come to tea with us at Fortnum’s?”
There was another pause. Then, “One of my men got clubbed in the balls. Another got a bullet wound. We need some doctors fast.”
In the background Anatoli could hear the man he had shot wailing and crying. Anatoli wished to hell he had killed him.
“Should I put him down, Mark?” Anatoli heard someone say.
“Put him down,” the commander said in response.
Anatoli hadn’t been in America often and his English wasn’t strong. But it seemed like most of these men who had attacked him were English.
They looked it. They smelled it. They sounded it.
But their leader, Mark, the one with the cell phone, the one who had stayed clear of things until the dirty work was done, was American. Anatoli could tell by the accent. If he’d known his American accents better, he would have recognized the soft strains of the Tidewater region of Virginia.