SIXTY-NINE.

Many of the residents of the Barranco Lajoya left each morning before dawn to make the long trek down the mountain. A jitney, a rusting old minivan with missing windows, would pick them up at daybreak at the base where Manuel had parked his Jeep. The van would take them to either the nearby ranch or a more distant one where they would work in the fields of sugar cane. There they worked for the equivalent of three dollars a day, plus a lunch of beans and rice. This they would do seven days a week for ten hours a day in the torrential subtropical rainy seasons of the winter as well as the sweltering heat of the summer. These were the lucky ones.

The ranchers also owned some of the water rights in the area, excluding the native people from one of their few resources, except in the higher elevations. The people here were used to having nothing and expecting nothing. So when missionaries came in, they were grateful but knew the generosity could end any day and their schools and minimal clinics could disappear. It had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. The armies of Spain had come through in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had tortured and crushed everyone. Bolivar, el libertador, had lived at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and had managed to create an independence based on the ideals of the American independence. Now everything in Venezuela was still named after Bolivar. You even paid with a Bolivar if you had any money. But for three quarters of the people, nothing had really changed. There remained poverty and oppression. The people learned not to complain. Once again, the little that these people had could disappear with no warning.

"A couple of years ago," Father Martin said one evening, "there was an incident at another village named Barranco Yopal." Martin spoke as he shared a fish dinner by candlelight with the other resident missionaries inside the church. "President Chvez ordered a Christian missionary group working with indigenous tribes to leave the country. They were mostly American from a group based in Florida."

"Why did Chvez want them out?" Alex asked.

Father Martin laughed ruefully and shook his head. "Chvez accused the missionaries of 'imperialist infiltration' and links to the CIA."

"Was there any truth to it?" she asked.

"No, Chvez was being a demagogue," the priest said. "The missionaries at Barranco Yopal were dedicated people. They spent several years living among the tribes in order to learn the language, creating a written form for it, and translating the Bible into it. Then they taught Christianity to the people. The missionaries brought along their families. Their kids grew among the native children and didn't interfere with native culture. All they wanted to do was bring Christ and the Word of G.o.d to the people. They dedicated years of their lives to this. Then Chvez turned up one day with his military uniform and his red beret and held a ceremony to denounce 'colonialism.' He presented property t.i.tles to several indigenous groups. He gave them t.i.tle to land that they had been on anyway. t.i.tle to something that they already had. He came off as a hero and, in truth, hadn't really done anything."

Around the table, people shook their heads.

"Chvez accused the missionaries of building luxurious camps next to poor Indian villages," Father Martin continued. "He accused them of circ.u.mventing Venezuelan customs authorities as they freely flew in and out on private planes. The missionaries had built their own compound, but it was hardly luxurious. And they flew their own aircraft in and out so that their supplies wouldn't be stolen. The most efficient thieves in any South American country are the customs officials, the police, and the army."

One of the female missionaries at the table, a nurse from Toronto, chipped in. "There are people who resent us for philosophical reasons," she said. "In primitive societies, there's no separation of religion and the rest of the society. We are among people who for centuries have followed rituals intended to make the corn grow, bring rain, and remain healthy. The people who criticize us claim that by bringing Christianity to them, even if we leave their own rituals alone, we've rendered meaningless the core of the native culture."

"But we're here to help them," someone said.

"All cultures are in transition," Father Martin added. "We feel we've given them something new and joyous."

"We're accused of acting the same way the Spaniards and Catholic Church did with less remote Indians when the conquistadores came through," the nurse said.

"Except the Spaniards and the Catholic Church didn't try to bring them electricity and health care," another missionary chipped in.

There was laughter.

"It's incredible," Father Martin said. "As soon as you try to bring these people anything, people try to stop you, to take it away. Why?"

Alex had no answer. To the obvious next question of who was undercutting the missionaries' work there, there remained no easy answer, either.

Leaving dinner that night, Alex watched a group of men a.s.sembled on the edge of the field that was contiguous to the village. The men were watching their children, teenage boys for the most part, compete in a soccer game in the dying daylight.

Despite the efforts on the missionaries, everyone she saw was destined for a life of poverty. These men would work in the distant fields, swelter in the sunshine and the humidity, and barely get by day to day, grateful for any small crumbs from life's table.

She went to bed fitfully that night. Very early the next morning, in the midst of a pleasant dream, she awoke to the staccato sound of gunfire.

The little village of Barranco Lajoya was under attack.

SEVENTY.

Alex threw off the mosquito netting that covered her and sprang to her feet. She grabbed her gun belt, which had both her Beretta and her knife hitched to it. She strapped it over her hiking shorts. She shoved her feet into her boots without bothering with socks and went quickly to the window of her hut.

It was just past dawn. She could hear a terrible commotion but couldn't see it. There was sporadic gunfire and people screaming.

She saw people of the village running in every direction, fleeing into the woods.

She drew her Beretta. Then she moved quickly to her door, opened it slightly, saw that it was safe to leave, and stepped out. The commotion was coming from the center of the village. She headed toward it, her weapon aloft, moving along the wall of the church.

Screaming became louder. Voices pleading. People fleeing past her. She reached the corner and looked around it.

At first she thought that a gang of bandits had invaded. When she looked closer, a greater fear coursed through her. These were soldiers of some paramilitary organization, some local militia, she guessed. Maybe they were the men the girls had seen on the mountain. There was no way of knowing.

There must have been a dozen of them, just that Alex could see. Everything was happening too fast, too chaotically. It was Kiev all over again, except this time in Spanish, in the heat, and just after dawn.

More shouts and screams. The gunmen wore masks. They fired rifles and pistols into the air. They were using clubs and huge sledgehammers to strike at houses and structures. Residents, some of them barely clad, fled into the woods around the village.

Then she saw some of the gunmen drag Father Martin and his family out of their residence. Father Martin's hands were raised and he looked terrified. He was pleading with the invaders. They kept yelling at him.

"Dnde est?" their leader screamed to Father Martin. "Dnde? Dnde? Dnde?"

Where, where, where? They wanted to know where something was. Something they wanted. They threw Father Martin to the ground. He shook his head. Whatever the secret was, he wasn't telling. They let his family flee.

They meant to kill him.

A local boy came out of a hut with a rifle to defend the priest, and the attackers shot him from two different directions. When a woman came to the door behind him, his mother, she too was dropped by gunfire.

Alex watched transfixed, her horror so deep that she could barely a.s.similate what was happening. But she pinpointed the gunmen who had shot the boy and his mother.

Reflexively, she knelt down low into a firing position, partially concealed by the wall. In a fury, she fired at one of the men who had shot the boy and his mother.

She saw the weapon fly from the man's hands. The man clutched his chest and went to a knee, stunned.

Alex had hit him in the middle of his gut. She turned her pistol toward the other gunman, who had suddenly realized they were under fire. Alex fired two shots at him. The first one spun him, the second one dropped him.

Then she heard another popping sound. Then a second. Father Martin lay motionless on the ground. His killer stood over him. Then he turned toward Alex.

Alex stood and, against all logic, in a blind rage, stepped out from cover. She held her Beretta forward, steadied it and fired twice. The first shot hit Father Martin's killer in the upper chest, the second hit him full in the face. Then she heard a bullet whistle past her and smack into the stucco of the church.

She stepped back under cover. She knew the rest of the invading party would now come for her. Some of them would circle the church and try to come up behind her.

Before they could, she fled. She ran at full speed past her cottage and into heavy foliage beyond, a sickening horror still in her gut, but an instinct for survival pushing her onward. She reached the heavy foliage beyond the back of the church. She kept herself low as she ran in a zigzag pattern, pushing and pulling her way through the brush. Brambles and small branches struck at her bare legs, scratching her badly.

She kept going. Occasional shots came after her.

She stopped behind a tree. She could see slightly through a clearing. She needed to slow down her pursuers. She saw one gunman who had a teenage girl from the village by the arm. He was about forty yards away. Then she realized it was Paulina he was threatening.

Alex raised her Beretta. It was a risky shot, almost worthy of a sniper with a pistol, but she could hold her hands steady and shoot from cover.

She took the shot. She hit him full in the chest. She watched him reel backward and go down. She saw Paulina flee. Alex put a second bullet into him for good measure.

Alex knew that she would be followed. She ran deeper into the jungle. A barrage of bullets from automatic weapons ripped through the brush on different sides of her. One shot, the closest, tore into the bark of a tree about ten feet away.

But she knew they were firing wildly now. She kept herself low, her heart pounding, her adrenaline racing, her heart in her throat.

She didn't return fire. Her only instinct was to get as far into the jungle as possible, change directions, and escape.

She kept moving. In the distance, she could hear them coming after her.

SEVENTY-ONE.

Lt. Rizzo had had a horrid week.

First, Mimi, his favorite intern and Sailor Moon girl, had changed her course of studies at the university. Because of this, her schedule at the university had changed. She had signed up for a series of art and design courses that conflicted with her internship with the city police department. Hence, she had resigned her position with the Roman police. The irony of all this was that she and her new boyfriend, Enrico, were inseparable in their off hours.

An even worse disaster had occurred with Sophie. Rizzo might have known that no long-term good could come from her working at one of those chic designer clothing places on the via Condotti. Flouncing around in there each day, modeling the chic dresses, designer jeans, sheer blouses, and snug miniskirts, it was a matter of time before the wrong pair of male eyes settled upon her.

In this case, the wrong pair of eyes belonged to an American pop singer who went by the stage name of Billy-O. He was a guy in his thirties who had limited musical range but was a first-cla.s.s piece of eye candy. His music producers in Los Angeles pushed him heavily and were currently getting him into some films. They had even hired a hack Hollywood TV writer to usher in a new script for him.

Thus Billy-O's income resembled the GNP of a small hot country, even though he personally had more fun than a small hot country. In his public life, he played the part of a white working-cla.s.s rocker-rapper up against the establishment, and his music matched that image. The truth was, he was a spoiled kid from the New York suburbs. Sammy Newman was his real name. He was a young man who dragged three broken marriages behind him, dozens of affairs, and a couple of attache cases filled with lawsuits. But he still was one of the great lotharios of his generation. The man was a known bad boy; no one ever came out of a relationship with him better off than they'd gone in. But women couldn't resist him. Sophie was his latest. They had met in the clothing shop, and now she had taken a few vacation days to spend a long weekend with il cretino, as Rizzo thought of him, in Monte Carlo.

So much for the lot of a career policeman when some Hollywood music Adonis rolled into Rome and started to flash a limitless bankroll.

All of this left Rizzo in a thoroughly rotten mood as summer finally arrived in Rome and the month of July progressed. It also gave him more than a bit of a rotten att.i.tude. So when his captain phoned him on a Monday in the middle of the month and requested that he a.s.semble all the papers and doc.u.ments he had on the two abandoned murder cases, he met the request with a subservient growl. Rizzo was to a.s.semble all his information and prepare for a meeting with some law-enforcement agents of another nation.

When he learned through the grapevine that the agents he would meet with were American, he pondered the possibilities and complications before him.

He wondered, in his best pa.s.sive-aggressive manner, how he could make the most of what was obviously a wonderful opportunity.

He looked at the calendar. Two weeks till retirement. Well, he would do some administrative finagling and maybe push back retirement for another sixty days. There were some strings that needed to be pulled, some contacts who needed to take care of a few things. The Roman police were understaffed right now anyway. No one would mind much if he remained on to take care of some pressing open cases.

Mimi and Enrico, he mused to himself as he a.s.sembled everything on the four murders. Sophie and Billy-O. What was the world coming to?

SEVENTY-TWO.

Alex lay perfectly still in the underbrush, feeling the insects in a cloud around her face, feeling the humidity of the jungle drench her clothing. She had maintained her position for several hours.

She lay low on her right side against a small embankment of rocks, a tangle of branches and leaves pulled over her to conceal her. Her bare legs extended into the tall gra.s.s for cover. She was dripping with sweat, lying on her side, listening carefully to hear if any of the enemy a.s.sa.s.sins were near. Twice they had pa.s.sed within ten feet of her. She had kept her pistol raised and even had one of the men in her sights. But they hadn't seen her. So she hadn't betrayed her position by firing.

She tried to separate the sounds of the jungle from the sounds of human pursuers. She listened for voices. She heard none. She had put the weapon away. Then she heard movement somewhere.

She moved her hand to her weapon and again pulled the Beretta from her holster. She positioned the weapon close to her, leaning on one elbow, keeping both hands on the gun. Her heart started to race again. Almost every sound seemed like the enemy. Who were these people and why would they have attacked peaceful missionaries and an isolated village? Yet in the forefront of her mind, all she could think of was her own survival.

At this point, it was defend yourself or be killed.

Just like Kiev.

She wished the world weren't like this, but it was. Nervous tic time again. As she leaned on one elbow, one hand strayed from the pistol and went to her neck. Instead of finding the little gold cross that she had felt there for twenty years, she found the pendant Paulina had made for her. She messaged it. It felt cool and rea.s.suring in her hand. Somehow it made her feel better.

She could still hear her own heart pounding. She tried to pace her breathing to let things settle. The underbrush that concealed her was settling around her. Her bare legs stung where they had picked up some sc.r.a.pes and small cuts. She would soon have to clean the cuts and apply a strong disinfectant, but how?

Blood poisoning in this part of the world could be instant and horrific. It could paralyze a man or woman with a systemic infection within two or three days. It could kill a person in four. She would need water soon, too. Her mouth was parched. She knew where the streams sliced through the jungle, but it would have to be safe before she could move. No point taking a bullet in the back, even though water meant survival.

She reckoned that she was positioned about five hundred yards from the village. She had carefully noted the position of the sun as she had moved to one point of concealment after another, and she also had her compa.s.s.

She hatched out a plan. She would move at dusk, she reasoned, and try to find water. Then she would hide again overnight and try to creep back toward the village near dawn. She guessed that the raid on the village was a hit and run. But she was guessing.

Something in the tall gra.s.s shifted, underbrush she guessed, near the lower part of her body. Whatever it was, it pressed against her leg.

Look out for tarantulas, she reminded herself. She moved her legs slightly. Well, too big for a giant spider. It wasn't small and crawly whatever was pressing against her. It felt like a branch or a vine.

Her heart settled slightly. She heard no voices pursuing, though she knew her pursuers would be quiet. Her heart settled more.

Time pa.s.sed interminably. The tedium alone, combined with the building thirst, was enough to kill a woman.

Then she felt the pressure on her leg. The "vine" was moving, sliding. Then she felt it slide itself across her legs. At the same time she heard a distinctive rattle. The snake was already upon her bare skin, exploring.

Every instinct within her told her to jerk her leg away. But simultaneously, she knew she was dead if she moved. The snake had already entwined her. If she budged, it would strike. If it struck, she was dead.

The sweat rolled off her with a new fury. She heard the rattle again and felt the body of the rattlesnake coiled itself in a tightening grip around her leg. She had a knife but couldn't reach for it.

She moved her head slowly. The serpent was firmly around her calf now and working its way up her leg. Then it was past the knee. Then it was on her thigh a few inches above her right knee.

If she fired a shot, she would draw the attention of her attackers. But at least she would be alive to fight. She would have to kill the snake within the next minute before it sank its fangs into the flesh of her bare thigh.