She checked her pockets: penknife, half a box of cartridges for the revolver, handkerchief, the disposable butane cigarette lighter Harry had told her to carry. The coarse denim of the jeans scraped her thighs when she turned toward Emil Draga. His lofty eyes were narrowed to slits against the light and there was no fathoming his expression.
Anders said, “What’s the point of getting yourself killed? It won’t help Harry. He’s dead anyway. He’s seen their faces — there’s no way they can afford to turn him loose.”
“Is that how you’d have felt if it was Rosalia up there?”
“Rosalia.” His lips formed themselves clumsily around the word. He pushed himself upright and turned his head balefully toward Emil Draga.
“Glenn, I’m counting on you to have this running when we get back.” She wigwagged Emil Draga toward the trail and he began to trudge uphill. She didn’t miss the glint of cunning in his eyes as he went past her. She turned back once more. “Get this truck fixed — that’s all you need to think about.”
Anders’ bleak eye blinked at her; the other eye was swollen shut now. Too wilted to resist the force of her will, he only said, “Look out for tripwires and things. And they’ll have guards posted when you get up toward those high ridges. Stay out of the road when you get up there.”
She was already walking away.
The humid forest dragged at her feet, slowing her pace. It was all uphill and her legs wobbled from the strain. Emil Draga walked ahead of her in stony silence.
After half an hour she called a halt and sat down with her knees drawn up and the revolver propped on him. Emil slid down on his haunches, ever watchful.
“I expect your grandfather has some kind of affection for you,” Carole said. “I loved my son a great deal, you know, even though most of the time I had a strange way of showing it.”
“If it pleases you to talk,” Draga said, “talk.”
“Listen to me now. I want to save the life that still matters to me. You’re the only weapon I have.”
Draga watched her; he didn’t speak.
“Maybe I’m just tired,” she said, “but it’s come to me that it’s no good sacrificing the living to avenge the dead.”
He did not stir.
“I want you to know,” she said, “that I’m not going to shoot you with this unless you force me to do it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re a fool.” He showed his contempt by tipping his head back against the tree and shutting his eyes.
“I got Harry Crobey into this,” she said doggedly, “and now I want to get him out of it. That’s what I want — it’s all I want. I don’t give a shit about you and your misbegotten counterrevolution. Do you understand me?”
No reply. Carole lifted herself on watery knees. “Get up.”
There was a tripwire and she told him to walk around through the forest to avoid it. She walked directly behind him with the gun near Draga’s spine because she didn’t want anyone taking her by surprise from the shadows. The sodden ground sucked at her boots. A gust of wind came along like a breath from an oven. She felt the overpowering burden of her guilt and forced herself to disregard it; she imposed calm upon herself and narrowed her thinking down to a slit through which only the most immediate practical concerns could pass.
She felt a tendon go, in her heel, and kept moving; she fastened her lips against the twinges.
Allegro and pianissimo now. Forget the pain in the goddamned foot. It can’t be far now.
The trees were heavy, vines thickly entwined. Orchids and lush verdure; insects about her face. A dank smell of primeval rot.
She remembered bits of Harry’s dicta. Never talk to the enemy until you’ve licked him. Well there was a time to break every rule. She worked out what had to happen and rehearsed her lines until the repetition assumed the tiresome ritual predictability of a flamenco or kabuki episode:
Send Harry out here. Send him out or I kill your precious Draga. Don’t follow us. We’ll turn Draga loose when we know we’re safe.
It was all she’d need to say to them. All the decisions that were hers to make had been made now. The final decision would be up to Rodriguez. She had nothing more to do but play it out to the end.
It probably would go against her; most likely she’d end up killed, dead in the festering jungle and no one to mourn. But she would go through with this because it was Harry. And because she had got the poor son of a bitch into this mess. And because I have got, you should pardon the expression, integrity.
She moved with extreme caution now, the revolver cocked and leveled upon Draga’s spine from inches away.
It was, she thought, suicidally and hysterically pointless. But she had to do it for Harry. And for herself.
Another tripwire; they went around its anchor; she said, “Stay in the trees now. Don’t go in the road.”
This was high ground. The primitive track skirted a jutting rock and bent out of sight, tipping down to disappear. From within, the edge of the trees she surveyed it and saw no way to cross that point without stepping into the roadway. She chewed her lip. “Well go over that rock — over the back side of it.”
“I can’t climb that rock with my hands behind my back.”
It was true. But she wasn’t going to take the handcuffs off him. Gun or no gun. He could throw a rock at her, run for it, anyway. She couldn’t afford to lose him now.
“All right. Then we’ll use the road. My gun in your back all the way — if anything happens you’re the first to die. This thing is cocked. Keep it in mind.”
She had no idea at all what might be in his head; he gave nothing away. His facade of indifference troubled her because it might mean that with Latin soldierlike machismo he was prepared to die for the sake of his comrades. She rather doubted it because he was too much the child of privilege for that sort of down-in-flames gesture, but it was a possibility and if it came true then she’d have lost.
She said, “Move.”
“Be careful with that thing, woman. You could trip and set it off.”
“That would be a crying shame,” she snapped. “Move.”
He stepped out into the road and she followed. Draga moved forward a pace at a time, head lifted, apparently scanning the treetops and rocks above them. She crowded close behind him with the revolver all but touching his back. She found herself waiting for the bullet that would kill her: She wondered what it would sound like.
Without warning Draga wheeled. His elbow whacked the revolver aside. Instinctively she clenched her hand — the revolver slammed her palm in recoil; the noise was earsplitting; the bullet went harmlessly off the road somewhere; and Draga was swinging his heavy boot against her — a clumsy kick, off-balance, but it pummeled her off her feet and she sprawled. She didn’t lose her grip on the gun but she was still trying to roll over and face him when something — it must have been his boot — thundered against her kidney and propelled her over the edge of the road’s shelf and then she was tumbling, rolling, falling down the slick mud of a nearly perpendicular mountainside — brush whipped at her, clawed her face; rocks rattled under her; she was falling in space, then sliding in muck — the world spinning.
Things went nearly black but she heard the bellowing of Emil Draga’s voice somewhere far above her and she peered through the haze of her vision — brush and trees loomed at crazy angles. She heard the rush of water.
She’d lost the revolver, of course. A kind of equilibrium returned to her, she got her bearings and distinguished up from down. Above her was the track of her own sliding fall — she was incredulous at the length of the scar her body had sluiced in the mud: She must have fallen nearly a hundred feet and she wondered how many of her bones were shattered. It was a clinical thought, detached. She lay motionless, blinking. Pain gradually flooded through her system; everything ached.