Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (20 page)

The tunnel let out into a cubbyhole of a room, a couple hundred square feet, devoid of any furnishings save for a small straw pallet in the corner and another Buddha shrine butting up against one wall. I hardly saw any of it, though, my mind still lingering on the abbot waging an unwinnable war, one he wasn’t going to walk away from.

Ferraro helped me down a winding set of stone stairs at the rear of the tiny sleeping quarters, my legs pumping, my breathing heavy, a spreading numbness creeping through me as we spiraled down and down, eventually emerging in the monk’s prayer garden. Not a big area, but beautiful. The garden, maybe twenty-five feet in diameter, was a shaped like a wheel. A cobblestone path encircled the space, while eight more stone walkways shot inward like the spokes of a tire.

The
Dharmachakra
, the Wheel of Law, a symbol I’d seen on plenty of Buddhist temples during my time in Nam.

The open spaces between the spokes were filled to overflowing with flowers and plants of every variety: graceful orchids and long-stemmed birds of paradise, mixed with blue-petaled passion flowers and puffy pink chrysanthemums. There were pungent, black-leafed voodoo lilies—eerie considering where we were headed next—and scores of other species I couldn’t even begin to put names to. At the center of the garden was yet another golden sculpture of the seven-headed Naga, Ong.

Quiet and serene, despite the almost constant drone of Little Bangkok, and perfumed from the riot of flowers.

I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs with the sweet, humid evening air, held it for a long beat, then pushed the air out through my nose. My legs collapsed a moment later, my ass dropping to the garden path in sheer exhaustion.

“We need to move,” Ferraro said, all business. “Need to get as far away from here as possible before …” She trailed off, unwilling to say what we were all thinking,
before the monk dies.

“Yeah,” I said, finally starting to come back to my senses.

Losing people is hard and it always seems like the ones who least deserve to go are the ones who end up on the chopping block. Nothing we could do about it now, though. Nothing except to honor the abbot’s final wishes and his sacrifice. I couldn’t be sure if the Prophet had been bluffing when he said Darth-Bathrobe could harvest the information they needed from the monk after his death, but I had to assume that was the truth.

Such a thing could be done in theory through a nauseating practice called
splanchomancy
, which evolved using the
Vim
, the life force, of a person to do all kinds of things, including limited divination. I didn’t know of anyone who trucked with that shit, mostly because all forms of the practice were illegal, but Darth-Bathrobe and the Prophet hardly seemed overly concerned with the law.

“I know you’re tired, Yancy,” Ferraro said, scanning the temple towering over us, searching for signs of movement, “we all are, but we can rest once we’re gone.”

I waved a hand at her. “We’ve got a second.
Splanchomancy
isn’t a quick process. There’s a lot of ritual that goes into it, so it’s gonna take Darth-Bathrobe a good while to get what he needs from the abbot. We don’t have long, but we can catch our breath and come up with a plan.”

“What’s there to plan?” she asked, voice sharp. “We get in a cab and find a way to Haiti. It’s as easy as that.”

“Yeah,” I said, still sounding dazed in my own ears. “Except we’re not all going to Haiti. There’s an exit for Cité Soleil
over in the Remington Corridor—I’ve used it before—but it’s just gonna be the two of us, Ferraro.” I shifted my gaze to Darlene, who stood a little way off, shifting on uneasy feet, hands fidgeting with the edge of her shirt. “You’re going back to Quantico.”

I expected some sort of protest from the Judge—after all, she’d been charged to oversee this case and she wasn’t the sort to shrik her duties—but she just nodded, face weary. Dejected.

“Darlene,” I said, “this isn’t about what happened in there. At least not entirely.”

“You don’t need to lie, Mage Lazarus,” she replied formally, almost clinically. “I’ve demonstrated a severe error in both judgement and moral character. In light of that, the only appropriate thing to do is remove myself for the safety of the mission. That’s what the operations manual would call for.”

It hit me like a brick to the face: bureaucracy was Darlene’s shield—her coping mechanism. She wrapped herself in the pages of text as a way to distance herself from hurt and disappointment, as a way to avoid conflict. She probably didn’t like all those rule books any more than I did—okay, maybe that was reaching a bit—but there was safety and a sense of order in between those pages. With a groan, I gained my feet and shuffled over to her, putting my arms around her shoulders and pulling her into an awkward hug.

Now, I’m not a hugger by nature—a fact which should be apparent by now—but even I could tell Darlene was a lady badly in need of a hug.

She broke, sobbing in hitches. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled into my chest. “Gosh, I just choked. He was walking toward me and my mind retreated. I kept thinking,
I don’t belong here, I don’t stand a chance, not against someone like this. He’s going to kill me and I’ll never see my family again.
I felt so powerless, so useless, and then I couldn’t do anything. Nothing.”

“Hey, crazy,” I said, aiming for reassuring, “everyone freezes at some point. Back during my Marine Corps days, I knew lots of guys that were tough as nails until the rounds started flying, and then they just couldn’t handle it. Combat does that to people sometimes. Sometimes it even does it to folks who know what they’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with it either. Not everyone is cut out for this line of work, but that doesn’t make you less of a person or less of a mage. It just means you have a different skill set, and that’s groovy too.

“Besides,” I said, scooting back, holding her at arm’s length, “there’s no reason to beat yourself up because you’ve done a shitload better than I ever could’ve hoped for. You helped me escape from Moorchester. You saved my ass from that Pearl-Weeper. You figured a way to get us here. You, Darlene Drukiski, did those things. And the reason you’re not coming to Haiti is because I have a different job for you. One only you can do.”

“Really?” she asked, looking up at me with a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “You’re not just saying that? You’ve got a real job for me?”

“Hell yeah I’ve got a real job for you. Plus, this job happens to be far away from Haiti, which is maybe the worst place on the planet, so in my book it’s a win-win-win.”

She swiped the back of her hand across her nose. “What job?” she asked, sniffling again, but now looking up at me with serious eyes.

I let go of her and briefly explained my theory about Darth-Bathrobe—that he was hiding his identity because he was probably the traitor inside the Guild. “During our dustup, I caught a glimpse of a tattoo, right up on here.” I tapped at my shoulder. “Could be I’m wrong, but doesn’t the Guild document all tattoos, scars, and identifying marks in the personnel files?”

“My word, yes,” Darlene said, her voice a high-pitched squee of excitement, realizing where I was headed. “It helps with corpse identification in case a member gets dismembered or blown up while on assignment. Which means that if I can find the tattoo, I can find the traitor.”

“So the question is,” I interjected, “can you access the Guild records without going back to Moorchester?”

She twitched her nose, one eyebrow arched, then tentatively nodded. “Obviously I can’t get to the hard copies, but over the past several years we’ve been in the process of switching those records over to a private encrypted server. We haven’t done all the files yet, but we started with all active and inactive field agents, so there’s a solid chance the info we need is on that server. It’ll take some time, but I’m pretty sure I can access the files remotely.”

“Might be a long shot,” I replied, “but if you can get a hit on that tattoo, that could be a game changer.”

“My place should be safe,” Ferraro said, “and I’ve got a computer and a landline, so Yancy and I should be able to get ahold of you when we find something or vice versa.”

“Got it in one,” I said. “Everyone have warm-and-fuzzies about this plan?”

Ferraro and Darlene each nodded in turn.

Good. The only thing left to do now was get a cab and get our asses to Cité Soleil. Home to murderous machete-wielding street gangs, twisted black-hearted voodoo of the worst sort, and a bona fide murder god.

FIFTEEN:

Cité Soleil

Ferraro and I ghosted along the narrow, intricate back roads of Cité Soleil, wrapped in a thick veil of my making but still taking great pains to cling to the shadows and avoid any passersby. In a place like Haiti, white skin marked you out as surely as if you carried a flamethrower in one hand and a boom box blaring smooth jazz in the other. Being a foreigner here wasn’t necessarily
tantamount to a death sentence, but at the very least, you should expect to be robbed, kidnapped, or shot in the legs on general principle of being an outsider.

Sometimes Westerners visited places like Port-Au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, but no one visited Cité Soleil. No one. Even other Haitians stayed out, fearing the heavy-handed
Chimeres
: the brutal gangs who ran the streets, who ran
everything
. Even the Haitian government didn’t know what to do with this sprawling slum city or its gun-toting inhabitants. Wall it off? Burn it down? Leave it be, and just pretend the damned place didn’t exist? No one had an answer. Not really.

There’s a good reason the Haitians are scared of this place, of the gangs. There was a good reason the U.N. described
Cité Solei
as the most dangerous place on Earth, despite being only a two-hour flight from the sunny shores of Miami.

In this city, the Chimeres
were
everything, everywhere, and they were far more like machete-wielding tribal warlords than the street gangs we think of in America. Though Haiti did have a government and a police force, the labyrinth of
Cité Solei
belonged heart and soul to the gangs. They were the police. They were the law. They were life and death. One wrong step with them could get you murdered or worse—and in Haiti, there is certainly something
worse
than death, believe you me.

We moved as quickly as we could, not speaking, instead on constant watch against any of a thousand threats that might cost us our lives. The roadway we crept along on was hard-packed brown earth ten feet wide, and covered with garbage of every variety: Fluttering scraps of paper. Soiled and torn clothing. Filthy plastic bottles. Broken glass. Human waste in fetid puddles. Behind us lay a pile of old tires, burning, smoldering, letting off noxious fumes; a few women, surrounded by a handful of youngsters, most under five, sat around the fire, warming themselves.

On our left was a series of single-level shacks, made of overlapping sheets of corrugated tin, often rusted or riddled with bullet holes, which lent them a pockmarked, post-apocalyptic appearance. On the right were more of the tin hovels, leaning drunkenly against one another, supported by crude cinderblocks, rusted nails, and long wooden struts that poked through the walls and roofs like rotten teeth. Narrow alleyways littered the streets—claustrophobic, twisting things with clotheslines loaded down by colorful linens.

We came up on the edge of the next street, which dead-ended at a rickety bridge—really a couple of warped two-by-fours sitting on a few car tires—which shot across a deep crevice five or six feet wide, flowing with sludgy water that reeked of shit and death. And I’m not exaggerating here. The smell was just
awful.
Imagine, if you will, a dead, bloated pig, cut open and pumped full of human waste. Disgusted? Good. Now take that waste-filled hog corpse, stitch it up, let it sit in the sun for a month, then string it up like a piñata and take a bat to it.

That little picture is an accurate representation of what my nose was experiencing. And boy oh boy was it an effort of will not to projectile vomit all over the roadway.

My steps faltered as I caught a snatch of pounding drums and a flutter of movement, dead ahead. I crept forward another few feet, repositioning myself so I could get a better looksee.

Well, shit.

Though our side of the street was empty and lifeless, the same couldn’t be said for the
far side
of shit-creek. The rickety, makeshift bridge connected to another narrow alleyway, which dumped onto a boulevard bursting with people. Bright torchlight filled the night with orange fire, illuminating the mob of folks streaming by in what looked like a parade. Men and women, many little more than skin and bones, hooted and hollered in time to a cadre of pounding drums—the sound primal, almost feral.