Nze sobbed openly.
Fáton was looking past his shoulder.
“Omar,” he said, “Coupez ses mains, si’l vous plaît.”
Omar, cut off his hands, please.
Nze felt a sudden swish of air, glimpsed the bright sun-sparkle of the rising machete blade. He was already screaming when it came down on him with a quick sweeping motion, his cries loud enough to startle a drove of birds from their perches in the hemming brush. Cold pain sledged up from his wrists as the machete carved into them, penetrating deep, momentarily snagging on something, a resistant knot of muscle or bone. It was wobbled from side to side, and then pushed through with a sickening wet crunch. An instant later the coldness turned to pulsing heat.
Nze howled at the top of his lungs, his blood soaking into the thirsty blackened ground. The shadow of the khat chewer, the machete wielder, the butcher who had maimed him, folded and unfolded as he crouched behind Nze, and rose again, and then dropped both severed hands in front of him, let them fall together inches from his knees, crimson streaming from them, tatters of meat flapping wetly around the stubs of his wrist bones, the second and third fingers of one hand twitching like the legs of a dying crab.
Through a haze of suffering and weakness, Nze watched Fáton slide a fist from his right gusset pocket and hold it out before him like a sideshow magician engaged in an amusing bit of hocus pocus. Then he spread open his fingers to display the wooden matchbox in his palm.
“Allumettes,” he said. Again with that even, satisfied calm. “Here is some humane advice, mon ami. As the diesel oil inside the tire bursts into flame, it might be desirable for you to take good, deep breaths of smoke. This goes against involuntary reflex, I know. The fumes will be quite hot, and are apt to sear your throat and lungs. But if you do manage to control yourself — deep breaths, I remind you — they will render you unconscious before the melted tire rubber and burning fuel start to run over your body. They cling to the flesh, you see. And I imagine it must be quite agonizing when flesh cooks.”
Fáton’s left hand appeared from inside his jacket, produced a match from the box, and flicked it against the striker.
Its head budded orange and he moved to within arm’s reach of Nze.
Nze looked at him, tears streaming down his cheeks, his nose and throat clogged with mucus.
“Please, I beg you—” he began.
Fáton frowned with disapproval, touched his flickering match head to the wad of cloth.
“Here, at least, my labor has not been in vain,” he said, and stepped backward as the makeshift fuse ignited with an audible whoosh.
The fuel inside the tire caught almost at once, fire gushing out the large hole in its sidewall, then gnawing through in other places, rapidly tracing its way around the circumference.
Moments later the whole tire went up with a combustive roar. Nze gasped for air and felt broiling heat fill his mouth. Choking on his own scream, he struggled grotesquely to tear free of his bonds with fingers he no longer had, the blaze ringing him in, raking him with its vicious talons. Blots of diesel fuel and gummy, liquified rubber dribbled over his skin, bonded with his skin, ate their way down and down and down into his skin. He could hear his blood sizzle in that blasting, torching heat as the fiery mix splashed the raw bloody stumps of his wrists.
The lids burning away from his eyes, wilting off in curled, blackened strips, Nze endured several remaining instants of sight before the eyeballs themselves were cooked in their sockets — a brief staring agony of horror in which he could see Fáton through breaks in the sheet of flame, standing with his camera raised, his pale lips drawn into a leer beneath the wide, black circle of its lens.
Then Nze’s throat finally unlocked to release the scream that had been trying to force its way out. His body its own raging pyre, he continued screaming for some time, bellows that went climbing high into the air with the flames and smoke. Fáton was cognizant of them long after he and his men had returned to the 4×4 and swung back around onto the snaking jungle trail.
Nze had not taken his advice about the deep breaths, it seemed… and, in Africa as perhaps nowhere else on earth, one’s mistakes bore the harshest of all possible consequences.
FIVE
On his last evening in Madrid, Siegfried Kuhl sat facing his high terraced window above the Gran Vía and watched the sunset bathe his completed scale miniature of the Iglesia de San Ginés in deep burgundy light. Against the wall near the apartment door were his few articles of luggage. Beside his chair was a large paper shopping bag that contained a purchase he had made at an art-supply shop some blocks from La Casa Real.
He had moved with haste to close out his affairs here, and it had now come down to his final act before leaving.
As his eyes took in the miniature, Kuhl thought of the long effort it represented, the concentrated application of his learned skills. Its piece-by-piece construction had been painstakingly slow, but impatience rather than patience had held him to it, an irresistible drive to see the model take on finished shape from its raw makings. He thought of the hours he had spent sketching plans from the digital reference images stored in his laptop computer, of the careful fabrication of its segments with his saws, rasps, files, gouges, chisels, and wood knives. He summoned back to his very fingertips the tactile impressions of working his materials, methodically hand carving unformed balsa to replicate the church’s brick and tile facades; its crests, moldings, and traceries; its every architectural feature and texture — even cutting small pieces of glass to fit its windows.
Inside his church, Kuhl had re-created San Ginés’s three arched naves and the figure of the Virgin Mother in her apparition as the Lady of Valvanera, patroness of remedies, whose grace was sought for healing and protection in war. There, it was said, a group of assassins had once stolen into the vestibule and murdered a young man as he knelt before the Lady in adoration, leaving his headless corpse to be discovered at her feet, and his spirit to haunt the aisles with ghostly elegies to a transgression unpunished… and, Kuhl imagined, a restless anger at reverence scorned and unrewarded.
After detailing the model to his satisfaction, Kuhl had sanded and primed its subassemblies for the paints he had mixed to create the earth tones of its outer walls, the darker colors of rail and roof, dome and steeple, as well as the age-tarnished iron bell in the proud tower of San Ginés, and the crucifix raised high above all. He had applied his coats of paint with precise brushstrokes, done his staining and streaking with a sponge applicator to approximate the effects of age, sun, and soot. Then he had used clever dashes of color to hint at the rare artwork decorating the interior walls — canvases by El Greco, Salvatierra, Nicolás Fumo, and a reproduction of a work by the Venetian master Sebastiano Ricci that had been destroyed in an eighteenth-century fire. Ricci, whose devout paintings commissioned by the authorities in Rome contrasted strongly with his reputation for impiety and willful defiance of religious law.
Kuhl stared at his miniature from his chair across the room, his eyes fixed on the bell tower he had epoxied to its rooftop just minutes before.
Like flames, the westering sunlight boiled through its semicircular arches.
With the dying of the day, Kuhl’s period of latency had also reached its end. Minutes from now he would depart for Barajas airport and exit the country using a fraudulent identity and supporting documents — one of many aliases he’d seeded around the world and kept in reserve for when he received his signal from DeVane. Thousands of miles away, Kuhl’s cell of sleeper agents in America had been activated and made rapid arrangements for his coming. On his specific instructions, they had secured a base that fit his cover and conformed nicely with his tactical imperatives. It would provide crucial seclusion, exploitable terrain, and at the same time place him within close reach of his potential target or targets.