The Council of Ten
Read The Council of Ten Online
Authors: Jon Land
The Council of Ten
Jon Land
IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER A PART OF THIS, THE ONES THAT CAME BEFORE, AND ALL THAT WILL COME AFTER
Contents
Part Eight: Prudence Island and the Castle of the Moors
A Sneak Peek at
Strong at the Break
DARKNESS FELL LIKE
a black shroud tossed over the jungle.
Drew ran. The rain had turned the ground to mud and his feet sloshed noisily through it. He was forgetting stealth, the first lesson. Pursuit was inevitable now. He had to make it work for him.
How many remained he could only guess. He knew Mace was one of them and Mace was the best. Drew clutched his Uzi tighter and squeezed himself against a tree. Its branches were a partial shield against the torrents.
Lightning flashed, providing a confusing moment of illumination. Drew stepped softly away from the tree, back onto the path. The rain pounded him again, but he had quickly become used to it. His uniform was soaked through to the skin, his small backpack waterlogged and sagging. Five days in the jungle now and there had been rain during all of them. But the end was coming.
A branch cracked in the mud behind him. Drew swung. His finger found the Uzi’s trigger. The dark figure covered with mud sprang forward. Drew fired a burst into its stomach. The figure crumbled to the ground, invisible in the blackness.
Drew stepped backward, his Uzi fixed on the still figure. Thunder rumbled. Trees loomed on both sides of him. Drew started to turn.
It was the turn that saved him. The man snaking an arm over from behind was forced to alter his action enough for Drew to sense it.
Yank the opponent backward at the throat while driving your blade into his spine
—the move was as potent as it was classic. But Drew knew it was coming now and twisted away, deflecting the blade as it came up, then ramming the barrel of his Uzi into the attacker’s gut. The man grunted and Drew slammed a knee into his solar plexus. The man went down.
Drew was behind him instantly, his knife against the man’s throat.
“How many? How many left?” he demanded in a whisper. Silence was paramount now.
“Just three,” the man rasped.
“Who?”
“You, me … Mace.”
Drew’s lips twitched at that. It was down to just the two of them, then… . Wasting no time, he stripped the cord from his backpack and tied the man up, lacing his hands and feet together and stringing both to his throat, so any attempt at freedom tightened the makeshift noose. Drew dragged the man into the brush and made sure his face was tilted away from the pooling water. Then he was on his way once more.
Incredibly, the rain seemed to intensify. He could see no more than a few feet ahead, but using a flashlight here would be like serving himself up to Mace on a silver platter. Perhaps, though, that was the answer. Do something stupid to draw Mace to him. Bait a trap. No, Mace was too clever for such a ploy to work. Drew’s best hope was to keep moving with obedience to the first lesson, his steps sure and Uzi always at the ready. In close, where it would surely end now, Mace’s skills might be less dominant. And the rain might be an equalizer, too. Thunder lashed again and Drew’s heart lurched with it. Back on the path now, he cleared his eyes with a swipe of his forearm.
His next step felt all wrong. He struck a hard spot in the soft ground. What came next his mind recorded like individual frames from a movie.
First, Mace’s hands grasping his boot and tripping him up, then Mace rising over him from the gulley where he had waited, and, finally, Mace’s blade angling down for his throat.
For an instant Drew thought he could stop the thrust. But when his arms came up, Mace’s incredible quickness darted the blade past them and whipped it sideways in a narrow arc. Drew felt the twitch and his hands rushed desperately for this throat. He fell backward in defeat.
Mace rose to his feet and wiped the mud from his arms and face. His smile turned to a laugh and he extended a hand to Drew.
“Come on, kid, let an old man help you up.”
Drew grasped it and let Mace pull him to his feet. “You win. Again.”
Mace was working the knife over his pant legs to strip the mud. “But you’re getting closer. How many this time?”
“One captured. Four killed.”
“I think I got seven. Not sure. Hey, you’re getting better each session.”
“You don’t get any prizes for coming in second.”
“You can have my free tuition to the next session, kid. Who knows, maybe that’ll be the time you get lucky.”
Drew looked into Mace’s eyes, which were the color of mud. He wondered if that was camouflage, too. “Only if you go back to … where? Angola? Chile? Where will it be next?”
“Nicaragua probably. Lots of demand down there. They don’t pay for shit, though.”
“Okay, so I’ll spring for your tuition when you get back.”
“Deal,” said Mace. “Come on, let’s fill the high command in on the final results.”
They started walking through the rain.
“First round’s on me,” Mace added.
“Nope. Loser pays.”
“Hell, eighteen others went down before you. Stand in line.”
“I still bought it. Number nineteen or not.”
Mace stopped. His face turned somber. “It was just a game, kid. Don’t forget that. Reality sucks. Trust me, I’ve been there.”
“Yeah,” said Drew. “I suppose it does.”
“SO, SOPHIE, YOU GONNA
kill him or what?”
Doris Kaplan grasped her friend’s bony shoulder and squeezed it lightly.
“Huh? What?”
“The fly,” Doris said, eyes aiming at the insect creeping up Sophie Guttenberg’s sleeve. “You’ve been watching him long enough. Swat him before he bites.”
When Sophie shrugged lamely and returned to shuffling her tarot cards, Doris reached across the airline seat and struck out at the fly still meandering about her friend’s liver-spotted arm. The insect avoided the strike easily and flew away.
“There,” Doris said, “that’s all you had to do.”
Sophie Guttenberg shrugged again and began laying the tarot cards out in neat rows.
The N
O
S
MOKING
—F
ASTEN
S
EATBELTS
sign flashed on, and a stewardess announced that they had begun their descent into Palm Beach International. At last, thought Doris Kaplan. The flight had been an hour late leaving Nassau and she had stupidly packed her heart medication—“life pills” she called them—in her suitcase. Not that she really needed the red capsules. She was sure the old ticker was fitter than ever despite what Dr. Morris Kornbloom wanted her to believe. Damn cardiologists had to say something that got you back into their office once a month. Still, the bottle of life pills would have made a reassuring bulge in her handbag, as opposed to sitting in her toiletry case deep within the airplane’s cargo hold.
“Gin!” Fannie Karp screeched from across the aisle, plunging her final discard face down atop the pile resting on a tray table. “How many points, Sylvie? Come on, how many points?”
Sylvia Mehlman frowned in displeasure. “I don’t know. Let me count.”
“Count? You don’t have to count,” accused Fannie. “You keep a running tab all the time. Who do you think you’re talking to here?”
Sylvia feigned adding up the point total of her cards. “Thirty-eight. And I’m finished for today.”
“Finished? You can’t be finished. You still have me by at least a hundred.”
“We’re landing, for God’s sake.”
“One more hand,” Fannie insisted, her arthritic, knobby hands gathering up the cards to be shuffled again.
Amazing, Doris Kaplan reflected, simply amazing. The Business had made both women rich beyond the measure of most, but death had been threatened more than once as a result of this quarter-cent-per-point gin game. Of course, the gin game had been part of their lives longer than the Business. But old habits die hard once you reach the mystical seventies, where feeling good seems a memory to be catalogued with all the others. Doris supposed that their thrice-yearly Business trips to the Bahamas were as much for distraction as anything else. You could look at only so many condo developments sprouting up along the beach and moving trucks negotiating the narrow coastal roadways before you realized that more than life was passing you by.
Doris Kaplan felt the plane’s wheels lowering beneath her. Then she heard Sophie gasp.
“There it is,” Sophie muttered, thrusting a trembling skeletal finger down at her arrangement of tarot cards. “Just like I thought.” Her face was milk-white when she turned to Doris. “Something terrible’s going to happen. The cards say so.”
“Right,” Doris returned softly, passing her off. “And you’ve been playing with the damn things since we left Nassau. How long did it take you to come up with that combination?”
“It’s fate, I tell you, fate. We’re being warned.”
“More like the law of averages.”
Sophie huffed and turned her attention back to her neat array of cards, focusing on the one marked Death in the upper right. Across the aisle from them, the final gin game was being interrupted by a stewardess insisting that all tray tables had to be placed in their upright, locked position.
“But I’m only one card away,” pleaded Fannie. “One card!”
The stewardess smiled as politely as she could manage. “I’m sorry.”
Sylvia had already seized the opportunity to gather up the cards and snap the tray table home. Fannie let her sure winning hand flutter to the aircraft carpeting, turning away and unhitching her seatbelt in an act of feeble defiance. If a sudden stop sent her lurching forward, it would serve the damn airline right.
Doris could only marvel at how a woman like Fannie had lasted so long in the Business, where secrecy and discretion were valued above all else. She guessed Fannie would have blurted out everything to her friends long ago, except the only friends she had were her three companions in this plane right now. It was no different for the rest. All the grandmothers had were each other, and mostly that was enough.
They had first met eight years before at the run-down apartment house that each tried to call home in Miami’s South Beach. Never mind the terrors of being near seventy, widowed, and living on fixed incomes, which never left them enough money to get anything fixed except their teeth. Before long the Cubans had arrived and turned them into prisoners of rickety chaise longues set before a pool with perpetually green water that smelled of too much chlorine. It just wasn’t fair. They had lived long enough to deserve better. At least that was what Doris had told herself constantly over the past five years, and up until very recently, the justification had held fast.
For the rest of the time Doris had done her best to feel no remorse over the thrice-yearly trips she and the other grandmothers made to the Bahamas. They had the rewards coming to them, didn’t they? Even God Himself would understand that if He spent enough time trapped between stucco walls with Spanish music rising over Collins Avenue.