The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (67 page)

In Sarajevo, at a freezing safe house in the bombed-out city, an almost hallucinogenic
revisitation of his grandfather’s war, Eville sat at a wooden table with Colonel Vasich,
who gave him a crumpled pocket notebook opened to a blank page and said,
Write for me the names
. Burnette wrote the targets and pushed the notebook back to Vasich, who scowled at
the list and pronounced it junk.
The Egyptian doctor, two months, gone. The Yemeni, dead. Number three, not in Bosnia.
He proceeded to contemptuously edit the candidates.
Okay, this guy, the Iranian, he is here. The Libyan, no.
He ripped out the page and crossed the room to toss it into the smoky flames of the
small fire in a large woodstove and then recaffeinate himself from the lukewarm pot,
burnt-tasting although it had never boiled.
Good,
he said,
your intel is very bad. And where are the Saudis? America should eliminate Saudis.
Saudis wish to kill your country. But, okay, what Kovacevic asks to do, I will do.

Kovacevic? said Burnette, hearing the name for the first time, but Colonel Vasich
only looked at him like he was a big joker and slapped him heartily on the back.

Burnette knew these things: America was at war behind the drapery of shadows and secrets,
almost everybody in the government considered the very idea of the war one big fucking
lunatic stunt, and he, Burnette, was himself at war but only halfway, given his countrymen’s
near total indifference to the conflict, which could reverse itself in a bloody second
but not in his favor, should he be publicly exposed as an American who was actually
fighting the war in a manner ladies and gentlemen might consider dirty and underhanded.
The disconnect existed in his body like a low-grade influenza, an infection that wouldn’t
go away. So here he was in Bosnia, like Afghanistan a wartime proving ground for jihadis,
a graduate school for slaying giants, and now a lawless haven, on a hunter-killer
team with no license to kill, although Vasich operated under his own flag as an agent
of vengeance, unfettered by legal niceties, free to fire away to his heart’s content
at his mortal enemies, the Mohammedans, the ancient Turks in all their modern incarnations.

Thirteen months later he was in the Mojave Desert, his training now specific to the
harsh ecologies of Central Asia, when he was pulled off the team and put on a flight
to Atlanta, connecting to Augusta, and delivered to the Friends of Golf for the second
time that year. By now he found the ritual irksome, on the verge of disruptive, hauling
the undersecretary’s bag in a game he knew, despite the fresh air and exercise, he
would never enjoy, but this time he arrived on the course in the late afternoon to
find the Friends—minus one—off by themselves in hooded insulated jackets on a windblown
patio, their eighteen holes long finished, drinking Irish coffees while they awaited
his arrival from the other side of the nation.

Ah, Eville, said the undersecretary, standing to greet him with a slack handshake.
He seemed off-kilter, mildly disoriented, and later in the conversation would mention
the incident—a spell of vertigo—he had briefly experienced on the ninth hole. Sit
down, will you, he said. Thanks for coming.

Where’s Sammy? asked Burnette.

He’s been scrubbed, said Ben.

Okay, said Burnette. How was the round?

Not the same, said Ben.

Sorry you missed it, said Chambers. I could have used you. For moral support, at least.

Ben reached into a gym bag at his feet and unzipped it and set one of the new, small,
DOD-developed satellite phones on the table, which the three of them stared at for
a moment until Ben explained, We’re waiting for a call.

It’s complicated, said Undersecretary Chambers.

Sir.

It’s complicated, Chambers repeated. Trust me.

It’s cockamamie, if you ask me, said Ben.

The phone began to ring and rang three times while they each looked at it and Chambers
nodded for Ben to answer it and Ben said into the receiver, Hold on.

Ev, said the undersecretary, I need you to go back down to Haiti.

Okay, sir.

We have a situation. I need you to get rid of Renee Gardner.

Excuse me, we’re talking about your daughter, sir?

Chambers sighed and planed the middle of his forehead, pinching and massaging a pressure
point with two fingers. Yes, he said, my daughter, I need you to take care of my daughter.

Take care how?

You know what I’m saying.

Eville understood there was a game and, behind the game, very committed people practicing
a level of seriousness and decision making in which nothing could be discounted. Burnette
looked up at the sky and the clouds horsetailed in the sky and then back at Steven
Chambers and at Ben with the phone to his ear and back at Chambers and said, Negative,
sir. That’s not going to happen.

Ben, said Chambers, give him the phone, and Burnette put the receiver to his ear and
said, Burnette, and there was Dottie’s voice saying, Eville, you promised. I need
you down here.

He listened to what she had to say and hung up and looked at Chambers and Ben, their
rictus smiles anchored beneath unsmiling eyes, and asked, What’s Plan B? and Chambers
said, We want to avoid Plan B.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

They streak down into Le Cap late and spooky and prepped for a firefight, no landing
lights, no rum punch, and the welcoming committee is Dupuys. Eville is not even clear
about his present rank so he calls him colonel and that seems to work, and there’s
a happy surprise, of the two men with Dupuys one is the portly Brazilian commander
of the UN police training mission but the other is Margarete’s brother, Reginald,
who tugs at his sleeve, wants to speak in confidence, but Burnette says later, and
they pile into the back of Dupuys’s HiLux and drop the pilots at the darkened Christophe
and drive to the safe house where Dupuys has a half-dozen guys from the palace guard
dressed like ninjas, trying to pull together a hostage rescue mission, the hostages
being three Brazilian police trainers and the newly appointed governor of the northern
cantonment.

Burnette shakes hands and introduces the ninjas to his team. Hey, I know these men,
they’re squared away, my own ODA trained them after the invasion. Ti Phillipe and
his force have gone rogue, grown treacherous, creating mayhem throughout the north,
allying themselves with the narco-traffickers and criminal gangs like
Armée Rouge,
recruiting the old
macoutes
and accepting financing from several of the elite families to build a little rebel
army of their own. The squad listens to the skinny and starts working options and
Reginald’s so agitated Burnette takes him outside and Reginald says, She is in danger.
The woman your friend.

Renee? says Burnette.

Oui,
Renee, they are going to kill her and her husband tomorrow.

Who’s going to do this?

The drug people, says Reginald, foreign people, but Ti Phillipe organizes.

When? asks Burnette. Where?

Tomorrow evening, Reginald tells him, at a ceremony in Saint-Marc, and when Burnette
hears that his alarm goes off, because the ceremony in Saint-Marc is where he and
Renee have arranged to rendezvous and nobody knows that who isn’t supposed to, and
Burnette feels lashed with a sense of urgency as his Title 10 and his Title 50 begin
to bust out of their little compartments and collide into one glommed-together mess
of a single frenetic mission.

You know the guy, Phillipe’s guy? he asks Reginald, and Reginald says there are two
guys, a Mexican and a Haitian.

All right, says Burnette, we’ll go to Saint-Marc tomorrow and stop them, okay? and
back inside the house Burnette shakes up the planning. Listen up, he says, something
has come up and I’m on a tight schedule here, so we’re going over there now, to police
headquarters, and bringing out those hostages. Colonel, he tells Dupuys, you got a
phone here? Get on the phone and call Ti Phillipe and wake him up and tell him we’re
coming down there.

Who put the firebug up your ass? says Scarecrow. What happened to dawn?

You and I have somewhere else to be, Burnette tells him.

Scarecrow says, Okey-doke, but it’s past midnight, you don’t want to surprise these
ass-clowns?

No, says Burnette. Colonel, get on the horn and tell them we’re coming and we’re not
happy and if we see anybody point a gun at us we will drag out every last person in
that station and hang them upside down in the street.

The squad kits up, strapping on body armor and headsets and night vision goggles and
chambering 40mm grenades in the launchers on their MP5s and bandoliering themselves
with ammo and tear gas and they cram themselves in two Toyota pickups and caravan
downtown, the D-boys divided between both trucks, a most fearsome sight through the
dark empty streets and they split when they’re almost there so the pickups approach
from opposite ends of the block, stopping near the corners and the men flowing silently
into position, establishing a kill zone, Tilly and Spank setting up on a diagonal
behind the Haitians so they won’t be doused by the ninjas’ Uzi spray, then Burnette
backed by Scarecrow walks across the street toward the blacked-out headquarters and
pounds on the big wooden door and steps to the side because it’s hard to say what’s
coming.

You know what you’re doing, right? Scarecrow’s voice hisses in his earpiece, and Burnette
says softly, Yeah, but I could be wrong, and then he shouts, Phillipe! We need to
talk, and it seems he knows his man well enough, because Ti Phillipe cracks the door
to peer out, armed and ready with his own machine gun pointed knee-high, and Phillipe
looks at Burnette in bitter astonishment and says, You! and Burnette says, Yes, me.
How’s your—he says, tapping his throat because he can’t remember the word in Kreyol.

Phillipe, with a murderous pop-eyed glare, says, Why are you here? To invade my country
again? To make war with me?

I’m your guardian angel, Burnette says, and I’ve come to save your life a second time.

At each end of the street more pickup trucks careen to a stop, armed men flying out
into a firing line, the D-boys including Scarecrow go flat on the ground and the ninjas
press into the walls and doorways and Burnette says to Ti Phillipe, Tell them to lower
their weapons and we’ll work this out, and Burnette can see Phillipe calculating the
odds and gives the command and Burnette says thank you. Here’s the deal. You have
four hostages inside. Just push them out the door.

Tell me why I would do this, says Phillipe. If I do this then you will kill us.

If you don’t do it, we’re killing everybody, the hostages will probably die too, and
I don’t care, they’re not my people, says Burnette. If you do it, we’ll just take
the hostages and leave and everybody can go back to sleep and then tomorrow you and
Dupuys will sit down with the Brazilian commander and work this out. I give you my
word. For the next three days, no one will fuck with you, nothing, as long as you
don’t fuck with them. You have three minutes to give me the hostages, okay. Then we
go away. This is a good deal. You and I made our peace long ago. I’ve got nothing
against you and you know I didn’t come all this way just to tell you lies or screw
around. Let’s not have a bad night.

Ti Phillipe says he’s going back inside and Burnette says three minutes but Phillipe
has them stumbling out the door in their underwear in less than that, clutching their
clothes and shoes to their stomachs, and Burnette sends two one way and two the other,
to the ninjas who get them down the street and into the trucks and Scarecrow back-steps
to Tilly but Burnette stands a minute longer in the middle of the street and then
turns his back on the station, if a bullet takes him now the cause of death would
be listed as
disrespect,
and he walks to Spank’s covering position and they get out of there, Burnette yelling
at Phillipe’s reinforcements to return to their trucks, and that’s how it goes.

When they arrive back at the safe house Scarecrow jumps down from the bed of the Toyota
wildly aggressive, and chest bumps Burnette harder than he should, bellowing,
Ding a goddamn derry! No cover, no advantage, no surprise! That was the stupidest,
fuckiest action I have ever been dumb enough to enact!
and Burnette sticks his hands in his pockets so he won’t punch him and sighs with
contrition and concedes that indeed it was, a style of insanity that would have inspired
his father to sign on the dotted line.

Burnette and Colonel Dupuys pull up chairs for a tête-à-tête, closing the door in
the face of the cowardly Brazilian commander who had begged off the raid to stay behind
and take a dump, and Burnette tells Dupuys that he and Scarecrow have some other business
down south but half the squad will stay and he’ll be back in three days, three days
should be enough to negotiate some reasonable outcome with Ti Phillipe. And Dupuys
says three days will be enough, yes, but he doesn’t say enough for what, his eyes
are shifty and his voice distant and his answer sounds unnecessarily cryptic. Burnette
makes sure Tilly and Spank are set for the night and he finds the chickenshit Brazilian
and says I need a vehicle.

There’s only my own, says the commander, a brand-new UN-purchased SUV, and Burnette
says I’ll take it and the guy asks for how long and Burnette tells him he’ll have
it back right away and the Brazilian cop reluctantly gives him the keys.

It’s 0400 and Burnette tells Scarecrow snag a nap and I’ll be back at sunrise and
he leaves with Reginald and at the darkened bungalow near the cathedral he sees the
curtain move when the vehicle stops in front and it’s a good feeling poking through
the venomous haze, knowing Margarete’s there waiting for them, and it’s good to see
Margarete, something he waited for without knowing it. By the time they come inside
there’s a golden welcoming light from a lantern and Margarete has water heating on
the stove and her relief is a palpable mix of joy and lingering fear, embracing her
brother, kissing Burnette’s hand before he can stop her. I listened for the shooting
but it never came, what happened? she says.
Monsieur
Burnette, thank God, you have come again, things are very bad here. Ti Phillipe has
grown wicked, I don’t understand him. He wants to fight the government. Thank you
for sending the money with the woman, she has been very kind to me, but my brother
told you, yes, these men are going to kill her husband and kill her.

The three of them sit at the rickety table drinking Margarete’s thick black coffee
and Burnette asks about her son and asks about her and Reginald says,
Monsieur,
I must tell you, I fear for our lives. Burnette raps the surface of the table with
his knuckles, trying to think this through, and says,
Bon,
let’s make a plan, and they talk for another twenty minutes.

Outside the windows the night begins to lift, it’s time to go, and Burnette leaves
them there while he drives back across town to collect the grouchy Scarecrow and then
return to the bungalow for the family and their sad suitcase and plastic bags, a blanket
wrapped robe-like around Henri, the sleepwalking boy. Reginald is out of his cop’s
uniform into the casual prowl of D-boy fashion, just us guys, jeans and T-shirt and
journo vest, all those pockets hanging empty with the bare meaning of his life, carrying
his service revolver in a paper bag.

As she’s getting into the backseat with Henri and her brother Burnette gives Margarete
a clip of money, which she accepts without remark, a manner he most appreciates, tucking
the dollars into her bra. The kid and Scarecrow drop back to sleep and by sunrise
they are on the outskirts of the city, dodging chickens and goats on Route Nationale
One. Fifteen minutes later Burnette pulls over at the turnoff to the unpaved road
that heads up into the northwest mountains, where Margarete and her son will seek
refuge for the time being until it’s clear the danger to her and her brother has passed.
They leave Henri and his mother and their meager heap of possessions there on the
side of the road in the tap-tap queue and drive on, south through the central range
of mountains, his passengers’ heads lolling with fatigue, jarred by potholes, then
straining erect on the hairpin turns. At Gonaïves they stop for gas and cold sodas
and Burnette makes Scarecrow take the wheel across the mud flats and rice paddies
of the Artibonite Valley, Ev zonked and snorting at the havoc of his dreams before
they make it out of town but even in the depth of his unconsciousness he smells the
coastline and the freshness of the sea as they approach Saint-Marc and he straightens
awake clearheaded and anxious, striving to rehearse the op in his mind but he might
as well be a blind man because he can’t visualize any of it.

The next decision is coming fast upon him—sooner or later the police in Saint-Marc
will have a role to play in the mission and although he knows the command pretty well,
trustworthiness has never been their virtue. Should he bring them in now? Avoid them
until they’re unavoidable, then entertain them with song and dance? Fuck, fuck, Burnette
says to himself, because he doesn’t have the answer, and they’ve crested a hill and
can see ahead a half-mile or so to the next bend, cars pulled over and parked on the
shoulders, and atop the low mesa on the inland side of the road, the temple flags
and Haiti’s own red-and-black high in the windless air, hanging without glory, limp
on their poles. This is the place and he knows he’s driven past many times but can’t
remember ever paying a courtesy call when his A-team was bivouacked there all that
time ago, two gritty sleepless months wasted in the center of Saint-Marc.

He tells Scarecrow to pull over and give the wheel to Reginald and they sit there
for a minute double-checking the armory they have strapped onto their various parts
and discussing what they came to do and how it might happen and Reginald has the jitters
and Burnette tells him don’t worry, we do grabs like this all the time, and Reginald
confesses he’s not worried about the bad guys, he’s nervous because he has little
experience driving a car but on he drives, a little goosey on the pedals, and Burnette
tells him keep going around the bend until there are no more parked cars and let us
know if you see the Mexican’s wheels and they lurch down the line, Burnette offering
Reginald driving lessons, but never seeing the Mexican’s black SUV and they park in
the thin shade of an acacia tree and Reginald says, Sundown will be their time, and
Burnette says, Okay, Scarecrow, ever been to a voodoo ceremony? Scarecrow says, I
don’t care if they’re fucking nuns up the ass as long as they sell cold beer.

They climb the bank to the top of the little mesa and there’s a pathetic mud-walled
hounfour
with beautiful murals and dozens of people but the drums are farther on and real
action is unfolding behind the temple in the dusty expanse of a barren field, hundreds
of people, a thousand probably, buzzing around, and at the center of their orbit are
two enormous bulls, wide-horned and black and frothing in the heat, tethered twenty
feet apart to separate stakes, and behind the animals, peasants stacking branches
for a bonfire. They split up, Scarecrow and Reginald looking for the bad guys, Burnette
hunting for Renee but she finds him first, hurling herself into his arms, her legs
off the ground and wrapped around his thighs, and he pries her off to explain.