Place of Skulls

Caleb Pirtle III

Copyright © 2011 by Caleb Pirtle III and Venture Galleries LLC. 1220 Chateau Lane, Hideaway, Texas 75711. 214-564-1493

Gallivant Press, an imprint of Venture Galleries and venturegalleries.com.

Published in eBook format by Venture Galleries, LLC

Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-9375-6908-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced, stored im a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or otherwise, except fas may be expressly permitted by the actual copyright statutes or in writing by the publisher.

Text: Caleb Pirtle III

Editing/Design: Linda Greer Pirtle

Cover Design: Jutta Medina

Place of Skulls is a work of fiction. Name, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely incidental.

And after that they had mocked him,

they took the robe off from him, and put his

own raiment on him, and led him away

to crucify him.

And when were come unto a place

called Golgotha, that is to say a

place of a skull,

And they crucified him …

- Matthew 27: 31, 33, 35

Prologue

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN watched the ragged edges of night paint the streets below and waited for the dead man to step from the shadows. They were never together, he and the dead man. They were seldom apart. They had never spoken. Their eyes had not yet met. Death was the only thing they had in common. And often St. Aubin had wondered which of them had really survived and which was destined to roam the earth in search of an empty grave.

The air around him was always thick with the acrid smell of gunsmoke when the dead man was near. It burned his throat. His chest hurt. He screamed the first time he saw the man whose chest had been torn away with a hollow point slug from a 9mm handgun, his 9mm handgun. The screaming was no longer necessary.

The past held its secrets in a tightly closed fist, and only on rare occasions did the fingers of another time, another place, loosen their grasp long enough to provide faint glimpses of what was, what might have been, and what did or did not happen on the landscape of a man's faith or his memory. On those rare occasions, his beliefs could be shaken, even shattered, and his hopes dimmed or perhaps darkened forever.

Andrews St. Aubin often thought that a man was the most content when he was left in the dark, past and present. He might still fear the shadows. He just had no idea what secrets lay enclosed and mostly forgotten within them. A man was better off, he reasoned, when he didn't know. Knowledge could condemn him, convict him, and maybe even kill him.

St. Aubin stood alone in his small, cluttered office with a stranger who had no past, at least not one worth remembering, and a future just as dark and oblique. The stranger was a man he knew well and hardly at all. The stranger was himself.

St. Aubin's memory programmed everything he saw and heard. Nothing escaped him. Graveyards were full of men who ignored or overlooked the things, no matter how insignificant, that could get them killed. Yet the computer that was his memory had blown a circuit five years earlier, the night he awoke in a churchyard outside the battlescarred, charcoal ruins of a crumbling little town in Kosovo, lying barefoot and numb in the freshly fallen snow, a forty-five slug embedded along the shattered edge of his left rib cage. How long ago had it been? Ten months? Ten years? A lifetime? Whose lifetime was it?

His left arm had been broken in three places. He possessed no wallet, no papers, no passport, no name, no memory, no past. All of his yesterdays had become as vacant as the churchyard, his mind as pitch black as the night around him. In his coat pocket, wet from melting snow, he had found an empty match box from the St. Aubin Hotel. No key. No address. Only a match box.

Upon the gray, weathered sign barely visible in the chilled darkness and blowing awkwardly in an uneasy winter wind above the ruins of an old rock church had been written Saint Andrews.

"Who are you?" was all the doctor asked after he had dragged himself two miles through dirty snow and into the heart of the city, expecting each violent breath to be his last, waiting, perhaps hoping, for death to terminate the burning sensation that hammered his chest. He collapsed in the emergency room of a tiny hospital where doctors treated misspent bullet wounds more often than sickness.

"St. Aubin," was all he had said. "Andrews St. Aubin."

He had to call himself something. Authorities in a strange land, he reasoned, would not ask him as many questions if he had a name. Any name would do.

St. Aubin had closed his eyes and felt himself falling beyond the crevice of sanity and into the black abyss of a deep sleep. He wondered if the grave would be as dark, if he would ever wake up again and why his frost-bitten feet hurt worse than his chest.

When morning at last jarred him awake, he lay on a pile of blankets that served as his hospital bed and stared for a long time into a cracked mirror that hung crookedly on a green wall across the bare, sterile room. The confused face of an unfamiliar, broken man with dark, sullen, and hollow eyes stared back at him.

It was, he thought, an ugly face, unshaven and scarred, obviously belonging to some pitiful bastard who had been cast into the drunken innards of hell to cut cards with the devil himself. What troubled him most, however, then as now, was that the stranger's face had been his own.

St. Aubin closed his eyes and tried to squeeze the blur that was Kosovo out of his mind. But the biting cold of the snow, the pain that threatened to rupture his lungs with each ragged breath, the smell of gunpowder, the stench of death all lay upon his psyche, as visible to him as the scar on his face.

The scars did not heal.

Chapter 1

THE ODDS OF Danny B. surviving the night were growing shorter with each passing breath. He sat amidst the scent of burnt candle wax and glanced at the crucifix hanging on the wall. Dust and mildew had caked like mud to the slender feet of Our Lord, as though He had been walking through an empty field in the midst of a late summer rain storm. The agony etched on the face of the statue face was awash with the pain of a man hanging crookedly on a cross. Or perhaps it merely reflected the torment of some unknown, unnamed artist who had carved the intricate portrait of a deity's execution.

A ribbon of moonlight passed absent mindedly across the bronzed face, and the wall became black and barren again as though the Son of Man had pulled the heavy nails from his hands and feet, then climbed down from the cross and left the church.

Danny B. closed his eyes. There was a distinct similarity between sleep and death, and no one ever knew which would come first, and if either would wait until morning. Danny B. was not a religious man, nor was he an atheist. He and God simply had a strange alliance. The Good Lord had little use for him, and Danny B. had little use for anyone whose secrets could not be bought with money or threats. God was okay. God was not the kind who could be persuaded with either.

Danny B. had lost himself in the darkness, finding his way, as he always did, to the sanctity of the confessional in the Mission San Xavier del Bac, hiding away behind the ragged velvet curtain that separated the spoken sins of the masses from the curious who, on some occasions, would have paid dearly to learn what only the priest had heard and what rumors, myths, or contradictions the good father might be willing to peddle if, of course, some kindly and compassionate soul like Lazaro Fuentes was willing to make a sizable donation to the church.

Lazaro Fuentes presided over the underbelly of Southern Arizona from Tucson to Phoenix with a fistful of tainted, ill-gotten dollars and a simple democratic creed known and practiced all the way south across the desert leading back across the border and into the innards of Mexico: "Llomo o plata." Silver. Or lead. Down in the innards of Mexico, the originating source of his wealth and power, every policeman, judge, governmental official, laborer, waif, or whore on the street--sooner or later--had the freedom and the obligation of making a simple choice.

They could take the silver that Fuentes or his shadow soldiers offered them for information and spend it. Or they could keep their secrets to themselves and take the lead, which came molded in the lethal shape of a bullet, usually fired at close range and almost always in the right temple just above the ear. In certain backstreets and trash-infested alleys of Phoenix, in particular, the war was just as deadly but waged in the darkness of frightened and silent nights. Fuentes had built his pipeline of drugs in Mexico, then crossed the border and brought the business north where the money was even greater than the demand

Danny B. had never personally met Lazaro Fuentes, but he had watched from afar, day and night, relentless and without sleeping, and he knew as much as anyone about the man, including the name of the nurse who took care of his ailing mother and the color of the rubber fringe on the condoms he had imported along with wine and cheese from France. Lazaro Fuentes was a mild mannered, soft spoken man who had the bedside manner of a country doctor. He was short, about thirty pounds overweight, and his hair oil left a perpetual dab of grease plastered into the wrinkled crevices of his forehead. The scar above his left eye had been left by either a knife or a woman's long fingernails.

Fuentes never slept alone, and he demanded a new girl, usually under the age of fourteen, to satisfy his unholy urges every other Tuesday night between the hours of eight and ten. On the third Thursday night of each month, he prayed for his lost soul in the holy chapel of his funeral home as Espiritu flogged the demon spirits from the shadows of his life, using an ancient leather quirt to cleanse him with blood that flowed from the cuts in his back, assuring his personal redemption with the sacrifice of a drunken maiden who almost always died with a railroad spike driven into her heart while Lazaro Fuentes lay tired and spent between the last quiver of her legs. Fuentes had a habit of throwing away his old loves as easily as he discarded a pair of dirty socks.

He did not want a wife. Wives were a nuisance, he said. He had already owned one. But then, she had the audacity to walk into his mahogany office on that hot July morning with a salacious smile twisted across her oval face, wearing a silk gown shipped from Italy that had trouble stretching over her fat buttocks. She had been ranting and raving like a mad woman, demanding a divorce, even though she knew the blessed Pope would never approve of one, and a ten million dollar settlement to remain quiet about the nature of her husband's elicit business dealings in Columbia.

Lazaro Fuentes gave his wife an elaborate funeral, attended by politicians, the deep-pocket rich and socially elite of Phoenix – even the President of Mexico sent an emissary to represent him – then solemnly put her away beneath a fifty-eight dollar tombstone that bore her maiden name and little else.

Fuentes had never had any ambition to seek political office back in either Mexico or Arizona. He already owned the people who occupied the offices anyway. Most came frightened and cheap. He simply spent silver or lead, hiring the law to protect himself from the law on both sides of the border, which depended on Lazaro Fuentes to serve as its final judge and jury. He hired the executioner, and he owned the funeral home.

Business was never slack. His financial dealings began in the drug pits of Mexico and ended on the wide, pristine streets of Phoenix where the size of a man’s bank account far outweighed the number of bodies he had buried in the desert that bridged Phoenix and Tucson, and, besides, those were only tired and faded rumors. A man could cleanse a lot of sins and generally bypass the outskirts of purgatory with a donation to the church.

Danny B. was recognized by those who knew him as tough and often arrogant, an agent with the DEA, a jackel who never grew tired of the hunt. He had two medals of valor and one commendation for meritorious service hanging on the back wall of his office, a promotion in his hip pocket, a badge in his wallet, and a .357 magnum stuck into his belt. For too long now, he had been standing eyeball to eyeball with the drug Mafia of Mexico, which, he wrote in his last report, "was just about every sonuvabitch who pissed in the Rio Grande on his way to Arizona.”

Even though he wasn't winning any war on drugs, Danny B. was holding his own on the edge of a country where almost every nose and bank account had already been corrupted by the expensive odor of Colombian cocaine. He may have had authority on the state side of the border, but he had been known to cross the river and walk the streets of small towns and isolated villages in a rebellious attempt to disrupt supply routes that spilled as much rich white powder as was sold on the midnight street corners and in the after hours stench of beer joints, cheap walkup hotels, and decaying buildings already abandoned and condemned. Danny B. was a walking target in Mexico. But then, he figured he was a walking target in Phoenix as well. He would step around the corner some day and into the path of a bullet that had been sitting there and waiting on him for a long time, and it made little difference whether Mexico or Arizona would hold his grave. One empty patch of desert was as good as the other.

In slightly less than two years, he, along with his partner, Raul Saenz, had been responsible for funneling information back across the border that led to thirty-four busts, ninety-seven arrests, sixty-four convictions and twenty-eight prison sentences. Two had been condemned to die. They would be spared, the judge said, if they cooperated fully with the government's inquiry. They died during the middle of their third night in prison. Natural causes, the report said. There were no wounds and no autopsy. Lazaro Fuentes buried them both before morning. No funeral. No priest. No absolution. No cooperation. No more convictions.

Danny B. had helped confiscate a quarter of a billion dollars worth of cocaine, black tar heroin, and marijuana, been shot at twenty-four times, not counting the harlot who tried to roll him in Nogales, hit twice, none seriously, and fallen more or less madly in love at least a half dozen times with women of means whose satin sheeted beds had been bugged and rent paid by laundered drug money. It was all just part of his job. Live a little. Die at the end. Make some bastard's life miserable along the way. Danny B. loved his job simply because he hated those who grew rich by destroying the raw lining of somebody else's soul with the damnation of cocaine.

His brother had always considered him to be a hot-headed dreamer, an idealist who honestly believed that one man really could make a difference, especially when his own country was choking itself to death on 150 million tons of cocaine a year. Too much of it was being smuggled in from Mexico, transported by air and foot along an isolated and deserted stretch of uninterrupted southern borderlands known as the corridor of the rich and the damned. That's why Danny B. had volunteered for assignment in Arizona. That's where the action was.

"It's the asshole of the world," his supervisor told him. "You go down there and keep your eye on the drug traffic coming across the river with one thought in mind, and that's to get the hell out as quickly and as safely as you can."

"It sounds like you've already spent part of your life in purgatory."

"I did. Once. It was enough."

"Where did they send you?"

"Sonora."

"For how long?"

"Long enough to bury the only son of a bitch down there I could trust."

"Who was that?"

"My partner. He left early one morning for a bowl of menudo. He came back in three separate burlap bags."

For Danny B., Phoenix and the empty landscape sprawling south toward Tucson and the border were simply illusions of all things bright and beautiful, stained and warped by the evil that reached out and touched them. The Phoenix shown in the travel brochures resembled a contemporary collection of buildings sculptured in steel and glass, all wedged within ages-old buildings painted in subtle and faded pastels. But even the wrong side of town smelled of money. It reeked of cocaine. It was the side of town that the elite of Phoenix society ignored. Look the other way, and it did not exist. The cracks in its streets were tainted with blood. The only thing cheaper than a man's life was that damnable jigger of tequila and a handful of salt that Lazaro Fuentes carried with him to certain funerals so he could toast the dead. Fuentes drank the tequila and sprinkled the salt atop the fresh dirt of the grave. Grass never grew where the salt touched the earth.

Frustration worked its way into Danny B.'s psyche like a thorn. It kept him awake and restless at night. "What good have I really done?" he had asked his brother during his last trip home. "And who have I hurt?"

"You've done your best. That's all anyone can ask."

"I could kill the bastard."

"You're the law."

"There is no law."

Fuentes remained a free man, and Danny B. was imprisoned by his own badge and conscience. The frustration was only a dead-end road wandering the hinterlands of his mind, and, if nothing else, it gave him a reason to get drunk and stay that way. Danny B. spent a lot more of his time in late-night, out-of-the-way bars than he used to, but not even straight tequila, a bottle at a time, could wipe away the anger that lay heavy on his stomach like bile on a dead man's tongue. In Mexico, Fuentes was a guilty as the black side of sin. In Phoenix, he was an intregal part of society and untouchable.

Danny B.'s hatred for Lazaro Fuentes had become a blind obsession. "Someday," he kept telling Raul Saenz, "that bastard's gonna make a mistake, and, when he does, I'll pour salt on his grave."

He waited. The tequila was more plentiful than either sleep or his patience.

Lazaro Fuentes did not make mistakes. Others did. They sometimes talked too much when they were angry or broke or simply thirsty, and their throats were dry and caked with the dust of a long hot summer.

Over the long, troubled months, Danny B. had learned the fine art of separating the truth from the half truths, extracting facts from fiction and understanding which rumors should be filed away and which ones thrown away.

He carefully cultivated the angry, the broke, the thirsty, those with a burr under their saddle, those with loose tongues, trading them bags of unmarked bills and bottles of bad whiskey for bits and pieces of slurred information.

He slowly built a thick scrapbook of accusations but no hard evidence against the kindly, ambivalent godfather of Phoenix who knew exactly how to handle anyone foolish enough to cross him, disagree with him, anger him, or simply get in the way. There were times when the funeral parlor of Lazaro Fuentes seemed to have more paying customers than his hotels, and the dead slept without cockroaches on the floor.

To Lazaro Fuentes, Danny B. had become a pest, an insect. The worthless little agent simply kept getting in his way. Fuentes told a business associate late one night while Danny B. waited outside the bar in a parked car, "He's always out there with his eyes bugged out like a contemptible grasshopper sitting on a green bean stalk, watching me. He says nothing, but I see him smiling, and I know what he is thinking. He is thinking, 'Who's gonna make the first mistake, me or Mister Fuentes,’and I'm saying to myself, 'It don't make no difference, boy.’”

Lazaro laughed. “It don't make no difference," he repeated. "I am who I am, and he is who he is, and he is nothing but a contemptible grasshopper."

"Why don't you get rid of him?"

"Why should I?" Fuentes shrugged and reached for a fresh bottle of cerveza, so cold he had to wait until the beer thawed before he could drink it. "When a gringo dies on my side of town, and it is not of old age, and he is carrying a badge, particularly from the federales, the explanations and all the paperwork become a lot of trouble and a waste of time. I don't have time for a lot of unnecessary trouble." His smile was as cold as the bottle, his teeth barely visible behind the sagging jowls of a man who was a day late in needing a shave.

"In time," he continued, "the grasshopper will get rid of himself. The frustration will irritate him, and the boredom will seep into his brain like a maggot that wallows in a sore, and he will drown himself with tequila, and then he won't care anymore." Fuentes sighed, and his voice was sanded down to a whisper. "It has happened before," he said. "It happens all the time."

"Perhaps this one is different."

"They are all the same."

"I hear the hate burns deep inside of him."

"The hate will destroy him before the tequila does."

All the hate did was keep Danny B. awake and on the streets at night, fleeing from his own nightmares. He became part of the deepening shadows that veiled the warped and sordid face of Phoenix. He found that the tongues were much looser in the drunken, early morning hours before dawn, and Danny B. overheard everything they had to say.

That was why he had driven alone, in the midnight hour, to a deserted airstrip that lay at the far end of a dirt road on the southwest side of town. He eased his battered Oldsmobile down a stretch of two-lane blacktop in the dark with the headlights switched off, pulling into a ditch a mile from where the airport was rumored to be and going the rest of the way on foot. There were no clouds to shield a full moon overhead, and the land shone brilliantly around him.

Danny B. crouched beneath the limbs of a dying Joshua tree and surveyed the field. The runway was new, hastily dragged out of the scrub brush by an old John Deere tractor that still sat back among the underbrush where it had run out of gas. The Cessna looked new, was equipped to pass for a cropduster in a field where crops had never grown and had two men to guard it. One of them was snoring.

Danny B. placed a bullet in the sleeping one's brain without ever waking him up. It was better that way. There had been no reason to shoot him, but Danny B. was tired, and he never did like the odds of two against one, especially not when he was in the minority, which, as fate would have it, he usually was.

The second guard fired off two quick, frightened rounds, but all he saw were shadows running wild in the moonlight, and he did not trust any of them. They were all deadly and all moving toward him and against him. The second guard could have killed the shadow as the distance between them grew even shorter than his breaths. There was only one of them. Two at the most. He carried an automatic rifle. Just point and fire, then keep firing. He couldn't miss.

Instead, he ran. Fuentes might kill him, but not tonight. Another night. Another day. No one ever planned on a life longer than twenty-four hour fragments.

Danny B. had the Cessna to himself. He shoved his .357 magnum into the waistline of his jeans and climbed inside. Stacked neatly in the baggage compartment were three military-issue duffel bags, all stuffed loosely with small waterproof packets of cocaine.

Its street value, particularly in the states, might well run as high as twenty million dollars, maybe even more. Danny B. laughed for the first time in months. There was no reason on earth to arrest the guard. The bastard was already dead. And he saw no particular reason to haul the stuff back and turn it over to the authorities, regardless of his orders.

For two years, he had been playing by the book, dutifully handing every ounce of contraband he confiscated to the government, his government, those who wore badges similar to his. And, by nightfall, it was back on the street, being shoved into a cocaine pipeline owned and dictated by Lazaro Fuentes, making its way north across Arizona. Tonight would be different.

The Cessna was loaded and ready for flight. Danny B. found an empty coffee can beside the ashes of a cold campfire, filled it with high-octane fuel from its tank, splashed it liberally across the duffel bags, tossed in a lighted match, then two of them, and waited until the greedy orange flame was chewing its way through the cocaine before crawling back out of the little plane.

He sat leaning against the scrawny limbs of a scrub bush, chewing on an unlit cigarette, watching the circles of white smoke dancing in the desert winds. Danny B. laughed again. It was amazing how effortlessly and quickly a man without a conscience could go through twenty million dollars.

Chapter 2

NIGHT STILL LAY upon Tucson, as thick and acrimonious as the smoke, when Danny B. reached the Cathedral. He had not come to pray. For him, there was nothing to pray for and no one to pray to.

The .357 magnum was all that watched over him when he walked through the valley of the shadow of death even though Danny B. did stay as far as possible from the weary, old, stooped-back men who dug the shallow graves in Lazaro Fuentes' burying ground.

The Mission San Xavier del Bac was merely Danny B.'s refuge, a place to hide when he was the prey instead of the predator. The confessional was stifling. The stench around him had been left by the multitudes of sweating Catholics who preceded him to the booth, heavily smitten with guilt, leaving their burdens for the priest to deliver to God in prayer, saying their Hail Marys, then stumbling out again into the heavy August dust to await a miracle. God did not waste miracles in a city where only Lazaro Fuentes could grant either grace or dispensation.

The hot wind stayed in the streets outside, unable or unwilling to enter the sanctuary or penetrate the curtain that draped the face of Danny B. He could barely force any air into his lungs, but even the most difficult of breaths was better than no breath at all. He needed a drink. No, he needed to sleep. But Danny B. was afraid to sleep.

He did not hear the footsteps. They were as silent as the night itself. But he heard the faint rustling of someone suddenly seating himself in the booth next to his. Danny B.'s hands tightened around the handle of his .357. Instinct told him to fire and to keep pulling the trigger as fast and as often as he could until the pistol rid itself of the bullets lodged in the clip. He would not have time to reload, and he could not pretend he no longer existed behind the ragged velvet curtain. Someone knew otherwise. Indecision could cost him his life. The time to fire had already passed.

"Have you sinned, my son?" said the voice, as old and tattered as the curtain, a familiar whisper in the darkness.

Danny B. did not answer.

"I have a gift from God," said the voice. The words were shattered by a dry, hacking cough.

Danny B. waited. His hand loosened its grip on the .357.

"Follow me," said the voice, a whisper in the darkness.

Danny B. did as he was told, and there were two shadows moving without sound through the darkness, climbing down a narrow wooden stairway that led to the basement and into a small, forgotten chapel whose dirt floor held the graves of the ancient ones, the holy and the sanctified, who had given their lives to preach the gospel in a land that had always known a different God.

An aging casket, smelling of damp mold, lay open beside an empty grave, barely visible in the thread of moonlight that crept through a tiny window and fell like a broken shard of glass upon a skeletal face partially hidden by the rotting cloth of a prophet's robe. The skeleton's mouth gaped open awkwardly in a silent scream, and a cracked, leather pouch was held clutched in the broken fingers of his hand.

The hooded shadow reached down and picked up the pouch, snatching it from the moonlight, taking it back into the darkness where it had remained for centuries. "I am the way, saith the Lord, the truth and the light," the voice said simply. "I have come to find those who are lost, to heal those who are sick, to be with those who are alone and have no one to be with them in their time of agony and suffering. I am with you now and am with you always."

"I don't understand." Danny B. heard, but did not recognize his own voice.

"He died, but he came to us and he was not dead, nor had the centuries healed the wounds where he bled." The words were sung as though the priest was chanting a sacrament celebrated for the first time in five centuries.

"Who?"

"He walked with us and among us."

The question remained.

"He left his footprints on the same sacred earth where you have left yours."

A sharp chill hammered its way into the base of Danny B.'s neck with the sudden, unexpected impact of an assassin's rifle shot.

"When he died for us, he gave us these so we would know that His words were truth, His promise was for us and forever."

Danny B.'s throat was too dry to swallow, his lips too parched to spit. "Are you telling me that the dead rose again?" His voice belonged to a stranger.

"The dead never died."

"I don't understand."

"It is not for us to understand but to obey."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"My time is at an end. The secret of my fathers shall not perish with me."

"What's in the pouch?"

"A secret known only to a few, then only to me, and now only to you. His promise was to come again, and his promise was fulfilled."

“Where?”

“The land far to the south.”

“Not here.”

“There was no here when he was there.”

"And you are holding the proof."

"It is an unbearable burden. To have it is to be cursed. I must die. It must not.”

"If you have to give it to somebody, why not the Pope?"

"The church chooses its own testaments. This is not one of them."

"But I'm not a believer, not like you anyway. When I cry out for God's help, nothing ever happens." Danny B.'s laughter was dry in his throat.

"When believers do not understand what is presented them, when it defies the teachings they hold in their hearts, they turn their backs on the truth. To the believers, I would be branded a heretic."

"Or maybe crazy."

"Perhaps."

Danny B.'s mind dangled between skepticism and curiosity. "What's in the pouch?" he asked again.

"The truth."

"A diary? A letter? What's left of some ancient scroll?"

"A confession. The truth, when it is absolute, is never written in words."

“Why is it here?”

“It came with the holy ones who brought the truth from the South to preach the truth upon the deserts here and beyond.”

“Priests?”

“They wore the robes.”

“From where?”

“Mexico”

“And you’re telling me that the Christ of the New Testament returned to Mexico.”

“He walked among the Aztecs,” the priest said.

“When?”

“Hundreds of years ago and hundreds of years since the cross.”

“Why?”

“His was a promise that must be kept.”

“And he left behind a testament to signify who he was,” Danny B. said.

“He did not come in vain.”

“Where did the priests get it?”

“The letter explains it all.”

“From Christ?”

“From the priest.”

Danny B. had thought his eyes would adjust to the darkness. They hadn’t. His curiosity began to erase his skepticism.

"Again I ask, why are you giving this to me?" Danny B. asked.

"The city above us, the land around us, the people who travel its streets, the peons who occupy its villages far away and beyond our borders are all living in the final days before destruction." The hooded one bowed his head as though he knew but could not face the inevitable. He continued, his voice much weaker than it had been before. "The end for them and for us all will not be a bang, nor will they all disappear at once. But evil is coming-– no, evil has come -– and what I hold in my hand will be lost or dropped into some pile of trash or buried here with the dead, old and new, and the truth will die with them. The truth must never die."

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Keep it. Protect it. Someday, the world will be ready to hear the truth, but not now. I am old, so old I do not remember my youth. Perhaps I was never young. You say you are not a believer. None of us are born believers. But you can be trusted. I have watched you. I have prayed for you. I have witnessed the nights you sleep in our confessional. You are searching, always searching, but you have no idea what you are searching for. You will keep what I give you, and someday you will understand what it is. And then you will believe. If the Master died upon the cross for only one, you will be the one."

Silence.

A shroud of darkness fell upon the night. The hooded form lost its shape. Then it reappeared, ragged and beginning to unravel in gray shadows. The voice that came from the hooded figure was as hoarse as a whisper. "The tree that became a cross was not grown for those who believed."

Danny B. did not see the hand that dropped the pouch at his feet. But he heard the dull thud when the bag, worn with age and mildew, struck the floor. He did not reach down to pick it up. He dared not lose his mental edge. Men had a habit of dying when they became distracted or had their concentration suddenly diverted.

He stared intently at the darkness where the hooded shadow had been, at the curtain hanging limp in the doorway of the sanctuary. He strained to hear footsteps either coming or going. He heard nothing. But after awhile, Danny B. was alone again.

He did not place the leather pouch in his pocket until the first traces of daylight wedged their way past the cobwebs, through the cracks of rotting logs above him and into the chamber that lay damp and dank beneath the baptismal floor.

A house fly, trapped in the web, had already died. So had the spider. They hung together in a golden strand of sunlight, empty shells and nothing more, suffocated by the dust that poured in from the street outside.

Chapter 3

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN read the letter placed before him three times, the first as a travel writer, which only meant he had written a word or two about the vestiges of history, the second as a skeptic, the third as an agnostic.

Out of curiosity, he scanned the words again, the ones that had been translated from an ancient Spanish dialect, then glanced over the gold wire rims of his reading spectacles, staring intently into the staunch gray eyes of Richard Brockleman, who was clutching the faded and original letter as though it was made of pure gold. Perhaps it was, St. Aubin thought. But fools had their own gold as well.

Neither St. Aubin nor Brockleman spoke. At the moment, neither had anything to say. Culturally they were worlds apart. But another time in another world had brought them together.

St. Aubin was somewhere in his late thirties, or maybe early forties. His age was difficult to determine, and he no longer knew or cared. His face was tanned, and there were wrinkles that looked like scars amidst his scars and did not belong. His eyes had flecks of butterscotch, his brown hair touched with a strand or two of gray and long enough to fall down to the collar of his tan blazer. His jeans were well worn, and the cuffs that touched the heels of his scuffed western boots were frayed.

The granite-faced Richard Brockleman was a portrait of the very rich, immaculate in a tailored gun-barrel gray suit that matched the color of his eyes. His tailored white shirt was starched, unwrinkled by the Texas heat, and his Italian shoes were polished to a high sheen. The sweat on his bald head glistened like oil, and his fingernails had recently been shaped and sculptured by a manicurist. The crow's feet around his eyes had been removed by surgery. Andrews St. Aubin was sure of it, although he had no idea why he would suspect, know, or recognize such a thing.

St. Aubin did not particularly dislike the rich. But then, he did not particularly trust the rich either, not even when the richest of the rich, the man who signed his check and expense account, swaggered into his tiny office, wearing a grin as wide as a West Texas sunset and almost as sinister.

Brockleman had a name feared by those who opposed his editorial and political stances and a face that seemed quite at home on the front or society pages of the big city newspaper he owned and published. Over the years, the Dallas Times, had become the conduit for his strong and conservative voice. His reporters shunned the liberal bias of Washington's politicos and pundits, or they found work somewhere else.

St. Aubin had no political philosophy, belief, opinion or axe to grind. He simply wrote about travel destinations, near and far, large and small, good and bad, and was surprised that anyone ever bothered to read his columns. He often doubted that anyone ever did. After all, who really cared whether the beach sand was made of volcanic ash, silicon, or spun sugar or if the antique table in some Southern antebellum mansion had been made by Louis XIV or Louis Falkenberry down at the Exxon service station? He sure as hell didn't. But that's what the brochures said, and the facts tucked away in those brochures were gospel.

Andrews St. Aubin turned his attention back to the translation of an aged letter and the message that lay hidden somewhere within its disturbing words about men and ships, gold and death. There was nothing special nor different about the act of dying, only the time, the place, the circumstances. The circumstances recorded in the letter, if anyone believed the rumors, myths, and sacred writings secreted away, then passed down for five centuries, were that an angry, unforgiving sea had claimed them all but two. The story was an old one, usually made better each time it was told. Andrews St. Aubin had told it himself two years earlier in a column about the haunted and misplaced sands of Padre Island. Fragments of the story had remained lodged in the far recesses of his brain, possessing little importance to anyone but those obsessed with the intrigue of lost bullion scattered amidst the restless dunes of an island that reached with a saber-like finger of sand toward the ragged shoreline of Mexico.

He had written: The Isle of Padre has become a graveyard with no tombs to mark the dead, nobody at all to mourn the passing of those poor, unfortunate souls who passed its way and never left. In 1553, a fleet of twenty Spanish galleons, laden with stolen Aztec gold and silver, sailed from Veracruz, Mexico, and into the growling throat of a Gulf-fueled hurricane. Only insanity could have persuaded them to head into a raging churn of sound and fury that ripped the fragile boats apart and spilled eight hundred people, as well as some fifty million dollars in misbegotten treasure, across the frenzied surfs of Padre. Only two survived. One, a priest, trekked the demon sands back to Mexico and the refuge of the church that awaited him.

The other hid for months among the solace of the dunes and prayed without ceasing for someone to come and carry him away from a land that had no shade, no shelter, only water and none of it fit to drink. A band of noblemen, along with a few old reprobates and a derelict or two, all sailing beneath the unwashed flag of the church, did sail to Padre, but they did not come for him.

Their sole intention was to rescue the gold and silver stolen by the storm. Indeed, some of it was recovered. No one ever knew just how much. Records in Spain only revealed that an ill-tempered King was "bitterly disappointed" with the amount of riches that was finally carted into the sanctity of his throne room.

As the centuries passed, hunters kept digging the sands and baptizing themselves with salty gulf waters, seeking in quiet desperation for wealth that the army of Cortes had taken from the Aztecs and given to the sea. The taking and the giving had been paid for with the sacrifice of so many lives.

The frantic search for the missing gold and silver had never fascinated nor tempted the inquisitive nature of Andrews St. Aubin. He had simply stumbled across the tale in a various assortment of historical documents, not all of them scholarly, and heard about it again from an old beachcomber digging for Spanish coins and finding sea urchins on the northern tip of Padre Island, not far from Corpus Christi. An angry sea had claimed its treasure. The sea could keep it as far as he was concerned.

But on the unkempt mahogany desk before him, among stacks of notes that chronicled the coliseum of Rome, the highlands of Jamaica, the volcanic legends of Hawaii, and the badlands of South Dakota, lay a wrinkled letter, yellowed and faded with the age of centuries, written by a dying peasant priest as his final act on earth.

It was his confession, his passionate apology for a secret that had haunted his life and damned his soul, a secret that he would not allow to be buried with him inside the silence of an earthen hole that was condemned to hold his last remains. They were the uneducated words of a man who had obviously spent more time wrestling with God than he had with theological studies.

The Bible, in its various forms, was most likely the only book he had ever read or wanted to read, perhaps the only book he had ever had a chance to read. Life was never particularly easy for a peasant priest who tended the salvation and absolved the sins of poor Indian farmers as they scattered their rotting seeds across a sun-baked ground and prayed for them to bear fruit. More often than not, their prayers died away somewhere between the sanctuary of the church and the sun that scorched their thirsty fields.

The priest, if the last sacrament of his words were to be believed, had indeed watched the wicked army of Hernando Cortes raid, rape, then plunder the Aztecs who had worshipped them as Deity, convinced that the Spanish had come from the sea as ancient gods to save their tortured souls. He had been lodged amidst splintered cracks in the aged hull of a tiny, crowded ship, stuck there in a hole heavily laden with gold and silver, as the vessel rode the crest of uncharted waves on its perilous journey back to Spain. He felt the wrath and the fury of deadly winds that snatched them from the sea and tossed them, without mercy, into a night as dark, as cold, as endless as the depth of their graves.

For whatever reason, for reasons the peasant priest would forever question but never quite understand, a God, with more compassion than the sea, saved him, then cursed him with a secret he was forbidden to share with anyone lest he be executed or, even worse, excommunicated by the church as a heretic. Only death, which had been robbed of its sting, would be his final escape and resting place.

He had arisen from the gentle sands of Padre and walked for months, moving ever southward, until he crossed the river and found himself, starved and nearly naked, back among a nomadic tribe of Indians who revered a raving mad man even if his language was as strange as his appearance.

The Indians had believed in him. They knelt in prayer and chanted a strange name as he walked among them. They asked if he was the holy one, the ancient one, who had once blessed them and healed their sick, who had died for them and promised to come and relieve them of their misery on earth. They had watched for his return. They had prayed for his return. The peasant Spanish priest was called Lord and sometimes Savior, and he was reverently handed an ancient leather pouch possessing a secret that would shake his faith and damn his very existence.

The priest kept the pouch tied beneath his robe when the Spanish soldiers found him, and Spain only wanted to know what he knew about the missing silver and gold bullion that had been promised a disappointed and impatient king. For days, long into the nights, the hierarchy of the church interrogated him about the storm and the shipwreck.

Questions became an inquisition. But Spanish authorities never asked him, nor did he ever tell them, about the secret, the heavy burden that he had been asked to bear alone and in silence upon the desert of the dead.

During the last troubled days of his existence, the peasant priest wrote with gnarled, trembling fingers that, within the tattered pockets of his righteous and ragged cloak, he carried with him undeniable, unmistakable and indisputable proof, robbed from a hidden stone vault beneath the sacred altar of an Aztec temple, that Christ himself, the chosen one, the Son of God, left his holy footprints in Mexican soil more than fifteen hundred years after the Messiah had been nailed to a twisted tree upon the bloody grounds of Golgotha.

The words would have chilled the soul of a believer. Andrews St. Aubin was not among them. He wondered if he had ever been. "You realize the letter is probably a fraud," he said, watching Brockleman closely to see what reaction the Dallas publisher might have at such a suggestion.

Brockleman's face held the same expression he would wear whether playing poker in the back room of the Petroleum Club, writing a million-dollar check to any makeshift organization that cared for homeless people or animals, or defending his beleaguered President in a battle waged with the liberal left, and the war was daily and never ending. "We won't really know whether it is or isn't until you check it out," he said.

"I'm not a theologian."

"You're a journalist," Richard Brockleman said matter-of-factly. "You have nothing to gain or lose by whatever you might discover. We are potentially dealing with a revelation that might prove to be the most controversial find of the century. I'm afraid that some holier-than-thou theologian or religious zealot would investigate the situation solely with the prejudices of his heart, not his head. A true believer wants to believe so badly that he only looks for the facts he needs to prove that the priest's letter and the information it contains is a reality. A doubter only cares about proving it absolutely and totally fraudulent. He simply doesn't want to find any fact, no matter how insignificant, that might interfere with the traditions and infallibility of his faith. I don't particularly trust either one of them."

"What makes you think I'm different?"

"You don't have a habit of drawing pre-conceived conclusions, then proving them right or wrong," Brockleman said.

"History does a pretty good job of drawing its own conclusions."

"That's what I'm counting on." Brockleman tried to force a smile and failed.

"How did the letter come into your possession?" St. Aubin wanted to know. "And where has it been all these years? It's impossible to keep such a revelation, as you call it, secret for the last five hundred years if, perchance, it happens to have a shred of truth."

Richard Brockleman shrugged his broad shoulders. "I have no idea where it's been," he replied. "I have no idea if it's true. All I know is it came to me by mail yesterday, along with a note from my brother. He's coming home, so this must be damned important to take him away from his work. I figure that if the old priest once had the undeniable, unmistakable proof he wrote about, then Danny's got it now, and he's trying to get it into reputable hands before he loses it."

"Your hands, no doubt."

"He trusts me to do the right thing."

"In a situation like this, what is the right thing?"

"I have absolutely no idea."

St. Aubin sat back in his chair, listened as the springs groaned from too much rust and wear, and considered the man sitting before him. Courageous, some called him. A man who had his own ideas about right and wrong and was never afraid to defend them on the front page or any page of his newspaper. Older than he looked. Wiser than he appeared. And Jewish. That was what troubled St. Aubin. Why would someone of the Jewish faith seem so determined to learn anything about a so-called risen Christ who had lived only in a New Testament that Richard Brockleman had never accepted?

"What about your own faith?" St. Aubin asked."I'm simply curious."

"So am I." Richard Brockleman smiled, although St. Aubin doubted its depth or sincerity. "In religious matters, I've been taught many things. Some I believe. Some I don't. Some I merely find fascinating. But I have reached the stage of my life when I'm only interested in the truth, the whole truth, and I would hate to know that my idea of the truth has always been a lie. An honest lie, passed down by honest men, but a lie nonetheless." The smile deepened. "My brother has the same Jewish blood flowing through his veins," Brockleman continued, "and he has apparently placed some validity in his discovery. Perhaps the dying words of a priest gone mad are only a myth, just as the New Testament has always been considered a myth among my people. Perhaps the priest knew something that the rest of us have always overlooked. One way or another, I would like to have a clear conscience when I pass from this life. I don't want to be condemned by the truth, nor do I want to be condemned by a lie. Right now, perhaps, both are in the hands of God and Danny."

"When do you expect him home?"

Brockleman's smile lost its edge. "God?" he asked. "Or my brother?"

"I don't think God has any plans to be here before Danny."

Brockleman shrugged and laughed, more out of politeness than anything else. "Danny said he'd let me know."

Chapter 4

ST. AUBIN CAREFULLY folded the translation and placed it alongside the ancient letter, pushing them both back across the desk. As a travel writer, he had researched the nooks and crannies of history long enough to know when a document was old and authentic, or if, perhaps, it had been fabricated. His gut feeling told him the letter was an antiquity all right, the paper yellowed and crumbling with the age, the writing on it barely legible.

But what it said could be the ramblings of a man trapped for too many days with a harsh desert sun probing, then penetrating, his brain until it would believe a lie or even a hallucination as quickly as it would the truth.

"Where is your brother now?" St. Aubin asked, reaching for a bottle of generic aspirin to deaden the dull ache that throbbed in the back of his head.

"In Arizona."

"How much did the letter cost him?"

"A man of the church gave it to him."

"Which church?"

"He didn't say."

"Where did he get it?"

"Danny said something about a cemetery."

"What was he doing in a cemetery?"

"Danny spends a lot of time in cemeteries."

"Sounds like an undertaker."

"A DEA agent." Richard Brockleman stiffened defiantly, then his shoulders sagged wearily. "A lot of cocaine comes to the border packed in caskets. The bereaved bury their loved ones. The drug lords get a little richer."

"So your brother robs graves."

"He does what is necessary."

"It's a dirty business."

"It's a dirty world."

"And, obviously, sometimes he finds more than cocaine stuffed into the pockets of the dearly departed."

"This time he did."

Andrews St. Aubin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "What are your own personal thoughts about the letter?" he asked.

"If what is written happens to be true," the millionaire publisher replied without emotion, "then it appears to me that every fundamentalist preacher in every pulpit in America will have to change his sermon come Sunday morning. For generations, they've all been preaching about the Good Lord's promise to return to earth after his crucifixion. I have no idea what they'll do when they find out he's already come again."

"And didn't come for them."

"They're still here."

St. Aubin reached for his coffee cup, but the coffee had dried and lay in the bottom of his cup like a muddy creek bottom. "Personally, the Good Lord's return has never really concerned me," he said coldly.

"Why not?"

"I was never convinced he came the first time," St. Aubin answered.

"Perhaps a little of my Jewish blood flows through your veins as well," Brockleman said.

"Aren't you concerned?" St. Aubin wanted to know.

"About what?"

"If your brother did find what he said he found," St. Aubin said coldly, "then your faith all of these centuries has been a fraud."

"The truth, whatever it may be, has never worried me, only that the truth might escape me." Richard Brockleman sat back heavily in his chair and closed his eyes as though deep in thought. "A man who is afraid of the truth," he whispered, "has ceased to be a man."

"And your brother?"

"He is a Jew only by his family lineage," Brockleman said wearily. "He lost his faith a long time ago."

St. Aubin sat forward, leaning his elbows on the desk. "What will you do if the letter is true?" he asked.

"I'll publish the biggest story in the last two thousand years."

"And if it's a lie?"

"Then," Brockleman answered with a wry grin, "we'll just let it lie."

"As far as I'm concerned, this whole matter is a fragmented waste of time," St. Aubin said, scribbling notes on his yellow legal pad. "You're chasing a myth. But then, some have always believed that religion is a myth."

Brockleman raised his eyebrows in a mocking manner. "I have a reason to be a skeptic," he said. "You don't.

St. Aubin shrugged. "Skepticism has never been considered a religion either," he replied. Maybe once he had believed and knelt in penance and been washed in the blood. But that had been a long time ago when he was another man in another place in another time, back before the curtain of darkness had been drawn obliquely across his mind, before those first thirty something years of a worthless life had been violently erased.

Now, as a travel writer, he spent much of his time exploring the crooked, wayward backroads of the past. He had none of his own. St. Aubin closed the leather notebook that held his hand-scrawled recollections of the French West Indies and felt a hard knot begin to tighten in the back of his neck. It had nothing to with Christ or what he might or might not have left behind. It was more personal. He heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps shuffling below the ragged brick edge of his second-floor window.

As Brockleman walked out of his office St Aubin glanced around from his desk and watched the last vestige of a glaring summer sun balance precariously off the far end of a gritty street jammed with cars in a hurry to move and a red light that wasn't. Sundown was merely a purple haze in the wind-swept dust coughed up by a back alley that held piles of scattered, rotting trash and a home for the homeless.

The footsteps might possibly belong to the dead man, St. Aubin reasoned as he wiped the sweat off his face. But the dead man never came before dark and did not make any noise at all. St. Aubin stared at his notes and wondered if there was a story lost somewhere among them, or if they were merely a collection of assorted words that needed to be reshuffled, rearranged, or simply thrown away. He had thrown away a lot of words in his life. There were some who believed he had thrown away his life.

St. Aubin was a card-carrying member of the Fourth Estate, a travel writer of some repute for the Dallas Times, possessing a full-fledged journalism degree from an Eastern Ivy League school he could not recall having ever seen, much less attended. He felt as much at home in Carlsbad, New Mexico, as he did in Spoleto, Italy, and he never felt really comfortable in either place. Here. Or there. The world was nothing more than a faded postcard mailed to no one in particular, and the postage was always due.

St. Aubin could not recollect the first story he ever wrote or why he wrote it. His Sunday travel column explored the far reaches of a world that seemed as familiar to him as the back of his hand, yet as strange and foreign as the back of a hand belonging to someone he had seen, perhaps, but never met.

His written words touched on whatever descriptive scraps of the past that crept into his mind, and the scraps, at least the recent ones, were often charred, fragmented, and almost always painful. There was a lot he did not understand, and St. Aubin found a measure of peace and comfort in the depth of his own ignorance. All he knew for sure was that he wrote the first travel article he ever read and did not read past the second paragraph of that one.

Eight months earlier, St. Aubin had walked into the six-story steel and glass chambers that held the offices and presses of the Dallas Times, giving the receptionist an invitation sent two months earlier by the honorable Richard Brockleman, who, according to the folded piece of paper, humbly served the Times as owner and publisher.

"Do you have any idea why you're here?" Brockleman asked that afternoon, sipping from a tall glass that smelled of whiskey, probably bourbon, his eyes black and somber, staring past the proofs of the bulldog edition that lay on his desk.

"No."

"We're hiring you."

"Who is hiring me?"

"The Times."

"What would the Times want with me?"

"We need a travel editor. You need a job. It's a perfect fit."

"What makes you think I need a job?"

"Do you have one."

"Not that I recall."

"Then you need one."

"I've never written before," St. Aubin had replied softly, "and, as near as I can remember, this is the first time I've ever been inside a newspaper office."

"It doesn't matter."

The silence lay heavy in the room while Brockleman re-filled his glass with Wild Turkey. His eyes continued to knife their way into St. Aubin's soul, provided he still had one. "Want a drink?" Brockleman asked.

"No."

"It's my understanding that you have a tendency to drink pretty heavily."

"Then you know a lot more about me than I do."

Brockleman shrugged and motioned for St. Aubin to take a seat in an antique leather chair that sat across from his desk. It smelled of fresh lemon oil. "We'll pay you a hundred and twenty thousand a year, plus expenses," he said. The publisher let the Wild Turkey burn his throat for a moment, then asked. "Will that salary arrangement be suitable for you?"

"What does a travel writer write about?" St. Aubin asked.

"You simply go to fancy places and sometimes out-of-the-way places and write about what you see and whom you see at my expense," Brockleman told him.

"Everything I see?"

"Everything that somebody else would pay good money to see."

"I sometimes see things that aren't there," St. Aubin said.

"Ghosts?" Brockleman raised a curious eyebrow.

"He doesn't have a name."

"Maybe he doesn't exist."

"Maybe not."

Brockleman stood and walked to the window overlooking the architectural sculpture of the city that ran to the heartbeat of his newspaper. He frowned and thought for a moment before saying, "You can always read the brochures."

"What'll I find in the brochures?"

"Something to write about."

"Why don't you just print the brochures?"

"I'd rather pay you to do it."

"I may not do it very well."

"It doesn't matter."

St. Aubin shrugged. Nothing mattered anymore.

For a time, Andrews St. Aubin had no idea why a good, respectable, God-fearing newspaper would waste its valuable and limited space by reporting on scenic, historical, and recreational mumbo-jumbo about faraway destinations that only held a certain appeal and fascination for the armchair traveler.

During the past year, however, he began to realize that his columns simply gave the Dallas Times a reason and an excuse to sell high-dollar advertising to cruise lines, tour lines, and airlines, which all had a better way to go and a cheaper way to get there. St. Aubin felt like a pimp, but, then again, he had felt worse.

So he rode tap tap busses across Haiti, saddled up a camel in Egypt, held onto a dog sled in Alaska while it dragged him from Fairbanks toward Skagway, sailed the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, and occasionally wandered alone across the peaceful landscape of some Civil War battlefield, wondering why so many came from so far just to see a grassy pasture where the sacred dirt, so long ago, had been soaked by blood from the living, as well as the dying.

The words came easy, but none of them, he figured, were worth the dollars he was being paid to write them. He had returned from Kenya and written: "It's a dark abyss, lost in a jungle where the shadows are both real and imagined, and the landscape is as familiar as yesterday and far more distant than tomorrow. What moves among the shadows has no name and no reason to be there, but what lies hidden by the shadows has been adrift in the dark abyss since the morning that time began." The readers of the Dallas Times, who had no reason to think otherwise, merely assumed that St. Aubin was writing about Africa instead of himself.

As the day threatened to end, St. Aubin pushed aside a faded curtain and looked back down onto the city below him, turning as gray as the ashes on an old man’s grave. The streets that catwalked their way between decaying buildings of indiscriminate age were empty, and the color of night was already beginning to darken the narrow back alleys inhabited by forgotten strays and drunken old men who smoked cheap tobacco to warm their innards and lustily chewed it to quench their thirsts. The shadows belonged only to the architecture and to nothing or no one else. In the distance he heard a car door slam and a dog bark. A secretary laughed into her cell phone as she crossed the street against the light, and a distant church bell rang seven times.

The sweat was drying cold on his forehead. He could not forget the letter that had come from Arizona. Was it real? Was anything real? Was his own life real or imagined?

The car appeared to be a luxury model with a heavy door, the dog not nearly as large as his bark and no doubt hungry, the secretary slightly plump in a tight-fitting red dress that played well in the dim light of a singles bar when the empty glasses of whiskey had totaled three, and the tone of the church bell was just slightly higher than a fractured key of F.

Below, in the last gray veil of daylight, the Lincoln Town Car backfired as it sped out of the bank's parking lot, and the secretary's faint laughter faded away somewhere between the fashionable show windows of Nieman-Marcus and the grease-stained, front window etchings of an all-night cafe. The church bell had grown silent. The dog found the remains of a corndog rotting beside a trash dump.

The expressway that hung above the grassy knoll to the west was stealing the last rays of sunlight as St. Aubin walked back to his desk and dropped the wrinkled pages of his notebook on his desk, deciding that the faraway beaches of Martinique, the isle of the butterfly, could wait until tomorrow before he wrote a few hundred words about the Air France flight attendant who lay naked upon the empty sand and worshipped the sun that came to prey upon her bare breasts.

Night was crawling into the city, and St. Aubin promptly forgot his publisher, his publisher’s brother, the ominous letter, and the suggestion that Christ had bothered to spend anytime preaching among the Aztecs. The Holy One had left no testaments, old or new, or did he? Was that what Danny B. found? To St. Aubin, it sounded like a hoax, but then, so did the bridge from Genesis to Revelation. He dropped any thoughts of religion and religious myths into the trash can along with his notes.

St. Aubin knew he would have to hurry to beat the darkness home. Night was the keeper of too many secrets, and he preferred keeping them locked outside his door. St. Aubin would have prayed for his nightmare to end, but there was no one left to hear his prayer. The gods had deserted him in the cold streets of Kosovo, and the guardian angels had all taken the night train to the border.

The only one left was the dead man. St. Aubin knew he was there – waiting across the street and lingering in the night shadows – long before he saw him.

Chapter 5

LAZARO FUENTES ONLY shrugged when he heard about the loss of the Cessna. He could always buy a new transport plane, he said. If worse came to worse, he could steal one. It did not matter, not at all. He certainly had no allegiance to the guard, other than to give the poor man's grieving widow a twenty-five percent discount on a pine casket from the storeroom of his funeral parlor.

The loss of the cocaine had been disturbing to say the least. But there would always be more. The fields were growing more coca every day. His pipeline never ran dry. The fire had been a mere inconvenience, a business expense to be endured then ignored. But loose tongues wagging at both ends, defying him, or worse, betraying him, did matter a great deal to Lazaro Fuentes. The thought that some sonuvabitch--it had to be a dealer, an employee, an ally--was greedy enough or perhaps stupid enough to reveal the location of the airstrip infuriated him and sent Fuentes into a virtual state of apoplexy.

His face darkened. Veins became knotted like cords on the side of his neck. He slapped the naked young concubine in bed beside him until blood splattered among the tears she was foolishly crying. God, how he hated children who acted like children, he thought. A real woman knew how to take an honest slap in the face without flinching.

His eyes glistened like those of a mad dog. But Lazaro Fuentes never lost his smile. "I want the grasshopper," he whispered softly to Espiritu, who left the bedroom without bothering to glance at the naked girl or the blood that had dried like a ragged tattoo on her breasts.

One brief phone call told the ghostly one where Danny B. was trying, without much difficulty, to drown himself in a glass of tequila. The Connor Hotel was little more than an hour north of the city, an antique brick establishment that, for decades, had helped keep the ghostly village of Jerome from withering away.

Espiritu licked the threads of sour flesh from the blade of his knife. “The gringo devil had better drink slowly,” he whispered to his driver as the day descended toward a scorching end. It might be the last tequila to ever rot his gut. The black funeral car hung to the side of the road as it rolled toward the summit of a mountain once rich in gold and copper, mined by men who died early digging gold and copper for someone else.

When Danny B. finally walked out of the hotel and into Spirit Room Bar, the lone church bell was ringing in the ancient miner’s church, often referred to by the last of believers as the Holy Family Catholic Church. The oddly arrayed switchback streets were empty, and a late evening sun lay splintered against the approaching darkness. He had not bothered to eat all day, and the fermented juice from some desert cactus was gnawing holes in his stomach.

The long shadows of night fell across the street and spilled through the doorway of the bar. Music, too much of it brass, blared from a jukebox, and the barkeep, with a shock of unruly hair, white before its time, sat curled in the corner, trying without a lot of success to sleep. In spring and autumn, the tables and sidewalks outside would be filled with tourists, but hardly anyone ever bothered to come in August when temperatures on a cool day staggered past the hundred degree mark.

"You leavin' early," the barkeep said as he yawned.

"I'm due a few days off," Danny B. told him. "Maybe I'll cash them in."

"Maybe you're gettin' smart."

"What makes you say that?"

"I heard about the Cessna," the barkeep said.

"Secrets don't stay secret long around here," Danny B. said.

"If I was you, man, I'd start runnin' and keep runnin’."

"If I did, I wouldn't come back."

"I'd lose a lot of money if you didn't come back." The barkeep shrugged as he brushed back his white hair. "I don't think you're comin' back."

“If not, I wanted him to know I was here.”

“Don’t tell me any names,” the barkeep said.

“Why not?”

“Ignorance keeps me in business.”

Danny B. let his fingers wrap around the leather pouch laying heavy in the pocket of his jacket. He took a deep breath. His hand was trembling. Not even the tequila could keep it from trembling. The barkeep was right. He should run. At the moment, he only had to run until tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. One day at a time. One night at a time. He was always running, either to something or away from something.

When Danny B. left, the bar was as empty as it had been when he arrived. He walked down an alley behind the bar and headed down the mountain, cutting through the weeds and cactus, cutting uneasily into the old cemetery where weathered tombstones lay lonely and neglected among the gray stalks of weeds and bramble brush that were dying from too much sun and too little water.

His eyes scanned the names carved on stone and wood: Jorge. Juan. Maria. Manuel. Alberto. Elissa. Jesus. Ismael. Yolanda. Javier. His eyes returned to the grave, surrounded by a wrought iron fece, that had been lying beneath a pile of rocks since 1832. His hand tightened around the rotting leather pouch, his eyes searching the vacant streets beyond the hillside. All he saw were empty buildings, most of them long abandoned, all of them threatening to lose their grip on a landscape turned ghostly.

No one was watching him. No one was there. He sat with his back wedged against the wrought iron gate, the only sign of life in a graveyard where no one came anymore, not even to die.

A wooden bucket, scarred by rains and years of neglect, lay at his feet, still attached to a hand-woven rope that had begun to unravel, worn with age. Once it had hauled water from a well. The drought and heat had robbed the well of its water. Danny B. closed his eyes and waited for the night, sweat glistening on his face and snaking down between his shoulder blades. He looked again at the names in stone around him: Jorge. Juan. Maria. Manuel. Alberto. Elissa. Jesus. Ismael. Yolanda. Javier.

But the only faces he saw were the ones lodged in his memory. They belonged to the guards who had grown careless beside the Cessna on an old deserted airstrip. The faces were full of life and stained with warm beer that stained their whiskers. In his mind, they were not yet dead. Danny B. had grown to fear the faces of anyone dead.

He opened his eyes, and the faces haunting his mind faded behind the evil, sardonic grin of Espiritu, close enough for Danny B. to smell the tamales and garlic on his breath. He had heard no footsteps. But then, he had been told that Espiritu was a ghost. The ghost belched and jammed the barrel of an Uzi machine gun into Danny B.'s mouth. It tasted of smoke and the rotten flesh of a corpse.

The agent was forced down the dirt path and up to the side of a narrow paved road that hung with few apologies to the precipitous edge of the hill. He was shoved roughly into the floorboard of a black stretch Limo, which obviously had no business in Jerome. It would have attracted both attention and a lot of questions, but no one ever admitted to seeing the Limo of Lazara Fuentes, not even when it drove past their shaded eyes. The Limo was for the dying. The living looked the other way.

Danny B.’s hands were twisted together and tied with wet leather boot laces. A burlap hood, thick with the smell of chicken feed, was thrown over his face. The Limo was gone before anyone noticed that the streets were empty again.

There had been no use for Danny B. to cry out. No one would have heard, or cared. When the death angel of Lazaro Fuentes stalked the land, everyone turned away and hid in the darkness of whatever corner they could find, praying that the angel was looking for someone who had a face and a name other than their own.

Sometime within the next sixteen minutes, the black funeral car left the pavement. Danny B. lay on his stomach, and the ruts in a graveled mountain road jolted his ribs and bruised his face as the black funeral car bounced along from ditch to pothole, down a dirt strip paved with sun-cracked mud. All he could hear was the straining whine of an aging engine, low on oil and about to blow. A boot heel kept his face pressed firmly against the floorboard, and the carpet smelled of beer and stale onions. A cockroach crawled beneath the burlap hood and into the corner of his mouth.

The ride took forty-two minutes. Danny B. counted the seconds in his mind, a practice he had developed years ago when he realized just how precious every second was, especially when each one might be the last. He kept count of other things as well. The Limo stopped four times, probably at stop signs, maybe even a red light, turned eight different times, crossed the railroad tracks and a cattle guard before grinding to a stop. His ears were filled with silence, which was the most frightening sound of all.

Espiritu stepped out of the black funeral car and glanced up at a small and abandoned adobe chapel, far off Route 87, the main highway that carried the region’s primary artery of traffic northward across a desolate stretch of desert from Phoenix to Maricopa. The air was sufffocating; the night had dropped a shroud of darkness upon a prairie where thick stands of saguaro cactus appeared as robed druids, outlined by thin reflections of a new moon. The ghost nodded to the hatchet-faced henchmen who had been driving and riding shotgun, and Danny B. was dragged from the car and thrown without ceremony onto the dirt floor of the chapel. Once it had been the house of God. God moved out when evil came to stay.

For a long time, Danny B. simply lay amidst the dust, as still and as silently as possible, listening to the rustle of footsteps beside him, trying to overhear the whispers that broke out, every now and then, with sardonic peals of laughter. He smelled tequila, his throat ached, and his bladder was threatening to burst. Finally, Danny B. merely sighed and relaxed, lying in the warmth of his own urine.

That was when somebody kicked him for the first time and ripped the burlap hood from his face. His head jerked back as the steel toe of a boot slammed against his right temple, and he felt the dull blade of a hunting knife tear across his buttocks as his jeans were slashed and ripped away from his body. The taste of blood soured in his mouth. Danny B. was biting his tongue to keep from screaming. His muscles began to quiver involuntarily as the barrel of the Uzi was rammed between Danny B.'s naked legs, and, in that horrible moment, lost somewhere between fear and reality, he watched Espirit prepare to blow his testicles off.

"I remember when I was just a little muchacho, no taller than a lobo's ass, when the grasshoppers first came," said Espiritu, the unholy one, as thin as the blade of the knife in his hand, his face partially hidden behind the woolen hood of his peasant's robe.

He squatted against the doorway, his chin resting on the blackened muzzle of the Uzi. "I went to bed hungry that night, and I was crying and asking mi madre why there was nothing to eat, and she told me that the grasshoppers had come. There were no fields when I woke up the next morning, and the crops had been stripped down to the bare dirt. The grasshoppers had killed the living and eaten the dead. I buried my baby sister because there was nada to eat. Nobody had nada to eat...."

He paused and dropped the yellowed remains of a cheap, hand-rolled American cigarette on the floor beside Danny B.'s bruised face.

"..till we got rid of the grasshoppers."

He slowly and methodically crushed the cigarette beneath the leather sole of a handmade bullhide sandal, barely visible beneath the robe, the color of red clay after a summer rain, kicking the gray tobacco ashes back into an empty brick fireplace that no one had used in years.

"That's what mi madre taught me, and mi madre, she did not lie, grasshopper."

Espiritu's words were dry and hollow, slurred as though his tongue had been thickened by tequila, as numb as the look in his pale, lethargic eyes. They continued to rattle around Danny B.'s throbbing head. The laughter that spilled from the belly of Espiritu was not unlike the incessant howl that rose up from a band of hungry jackals when their prey was wounded and bleeding, fresh meat hanging in torn strips from their yellowed teeth.

The door opened. The sudden gust of a warm, evening wind brushed gently and unexpectedly against Danny B.’s bare legs. Then there were the voices, faint, yet familiar, nothing but whispers, hurried, frantic whispers. The hate in the room was as deep and as vile as his own, and Danny B. found himself looking up into the smiling, calm face of Lazaro Fuentes. The aging drug lord sat on the edge of a caned-back chair, bending forward and holding a kerosene lamp, slowly swinging it back and forth. Danny B. blinked as the harsh glare from the flame burned his eyes.

Lazaro Fuentes pushed his white fedora back on his head and said politely, "I am sorry to trouble you this way, amigo, but you have something I want. No, it is something I need, and it is very difficult for us to negotiate unless we get together like this, face to face, and see if, perhaps, you and I can come to some sort of agreement." Fuentes loosened his red silk tie, and it lay like a gash against the folds of his white suit.

Danny B. clenched his teeth and did not answer. His muscles cramped, and his throat was dry. He tried to twist himself into a position to see Fuentes better. The toe of the bullhide boot tore into his face again. The night quickly became darker as though somebody had blown out the last candle's dying flame.

Lazaro Fuentes kept talking, although his voice sounded hollow, and it seemed to come from the far end of some distant tunnel. "You are a nuisance to me, amigo, but I do not bother you because you have a job to do, and I respect anyone who does what he is told to do regardless of how stupid it might be."

Fuentes paused and took a sip of lukewarm beer from a bottle sitting on the table beside him. He cleared his throat and spit on the floor beside Danny B.'s face before continuing, "It has come to my attention, amigo, that there are those who know me, who perhaps even work for me, who have a death wish. They talk to all sorts of trash, even to people like you, amigo, and tell certain things that should not be told. And that puts such an unpleasant burden on you, amigo, because I ask myself, 'who has the answers,' and I tell myself, 'the grasshopper has the answers,' and I ask myself, 'how can I get those answers,' and I tell myself, 'the grasshopper, he is a reasonable man. He is a young man. There are many bottles of tequila he has not yet drunk. There are many beds he has not yet slept in. There are many beautiful senoritas that he has not yet awakened to the joys of womanhood. The grasshopper, he does not want to die. The grasshopper, he has no reason to die.'"

The silence hung like an unwashed cotton veil between the two men.

"I am waiting," Fuentes said at last.

"For what?" Danny B. heard the shattered splinters of his own voice.

"For the names."

"Whose names?"

"The names of the gentlemen who told you about an airport, such as it is, about a plane that was not yours to burn."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

The grin that Fuentes wore was a slash of broken, yellowed teeth. "Only dead men don't know what I'm talking about," he said.

Danny B. saw the plaster crack around the edges of that famous Lazaro Fuentes smile. It flickered but did not fade. Danny B. forced a grin of his own. The bullhide boot hit him again, this time striking him in the ribs. There was a sharp crack as the bones broke. Danny B. vomited on the dirt floor.

"I am waiting," Fuentes said again.

"I've got nothing to tell you."

"I am a businessman. I understand what negotiating is all about. You give me what I want, amigo, then I am able to give you what you want. The deal is made. It is finished. We go home, you and I. It is that simple."

"What do you want from me?"

"The names of those who betrayed me."

"And what do you give me in return?"

"Your life, amigo."

"It's already mine."

"You don't own it anymore, amigo. I do."

"Why the hell should I trust you, Fuentes?"

The drug lord simply shrugged. "At the moment, amigo, what other choices do you have?"

"Go to hell."

The bullhide boot came out of nowhere and buried itself in Danny B.'s stomach. He coughed, then gagged, and his face burned. His eyes dimmed, and even Fuentes could hear the broken rib tearing his flesh.

"Hell is a place that, if the priests are correct, and I have no reason to believe they are lying to me, is waiting for sinners like me. But you, amigo, have already found the hell that is damning your soul, and the flames begin or end with the simple snap of my fingers." Lazaro Fuentes leaned back in the chair and nodded at Espiritu, who had been running his tongue up and down the black barrel of the Uzi.

Danny B. watched, unable to move, as Espiritu picked a tire iron off the floor and walked slowly toward him, his hands black with grease, his surly face glistening in the afterglow of the kerosene lamp. Danny B. braced himself and closed his eyes. Death was coming to him at last. Espiritu roughly placed the tire iron between Danny B.'s naked legs and rammed it hard into his rectum.

"Jesus Christ!" Danny B. gasped.

It was not a prayer. It was agony.

"Now you are afraid," Fuentes barked, "afraid that you will not die. The names. The names are all I want. They mean nothing to you anymore, amigo."

Danny B. grunted as the hot pain seared its way into the lining of his stomach, tearing loose every nerve ending in his body. His innards were on fire and boiling, and he tasted the bitter acid of his own bile. The tire iron bit deeper until the stifled scream came, and it was a curse, a blasphemy, and blood ran freely down the backs of his legs.

"The names, grasshopper." The words of Lazaro Fuentes pounded in his head. "The names, one by one, all of them."

Danny B. vomited again.

"The names for your life. It's really not a bad trade." Lazaro Fuentes laughed. "You paid for the names. You own them. You can do anything you want to do with them. They only belong to rotten, filthy scum anyway. Are they worth the pain you feel when you want to die and cannot die?"

Danny B. struggled to speak.

"What?" Fuentes reached down and cupped Danny B.'s drawn face into the palms of his hands. They, too, were trembling.

"The names," Danny B. mumbled.

"What about them?"

"I don't want them anymore."

There was the hint of morning sunshine creasing the sky by the time Lazaro Fuentes walked out of the adobe chapel. He was whistling, quite pleased with the way the night had gone. Everyone had always said what a good negotiator he was.

Inside the sanctuary, Danny B. was drained. He was humiliated, disgraced. He lay in the dirt and stared at the statue of a broken man hanging on the smoke-stained wall above the altar, nails in his hands and feet, an expression of pain and anguish on a wooden face pockmarked with age and neglect. That's all who were left in the adobe chapel, a ruined man, a ghost, and a wooden statue.

Chapter 6

SILENCE HAD RETURNED to the promise of a new day.

"You think it's over?" The voice was a whisper.

"It is for him."

"His life isn't worth a plugged nickel."

"Neither is his career."

"It's time to bring him in from the cold."

"What's left of him."

The small one glanced at his watch, barely visible in an earthen basement where light seldom entered. It was five minutes after six. The agent had been locked in the basement of the chapel all night, his worthless life at the mercy of a man who had neither compassion nor a conscience, a strange and ghostly renegade who moved easily in and out of his own personal netherworld.

The ghostly one could change the face or the gender of a prisoner with a blade, he said, that once belonged to an Aztec god, but the dagger he carried was too wicked to have ever graced the leather sheath of any god but his own.

The small one wearily shook his head as he strained to hear the muted sounds that emanated from the backroom of an abandoned chapel, set among a grove of Joshua trees on the outskirts of town. Shortly after midnight, he and his partner had received the word that a man, their man, had been marked for death.

The small one had not blinked nor changed expressions. The grim message did not particularly startle him. Nothing had startled him in years.

The two of them had been wedged in the dimly-lit room for almost a month, ever since they learned that the adobe chapel served as the sanctuary of a ghost and the drug lord who had hired Espiritu to be his eyes, his protector, his executioner.

They were surrounded by electronic surveillance equipment, their worn earphones usually filled with static or the half-drunken ramblings of men bragging about how much whiskey they had downed or how many women had come to their beds.

"This is crazy," the tall one said during one of those long periods of silence. "We might be better off to just tear the wires out of the wall and go back home where, on rare occasions, the world seems to have a little sanity."

"If the world had any sanity, we wouldn't be here, nor would there be a need for us to be here."

"I think the whole damn world is an asylum, and you're the only damn inmate who has no interest in escaping it."

The small one grinned. "Where would I go?" he asked. "And what would I do? And why would I want to do it? You have to live with the bad guys to catch the bad guys, and I've spent so much time with the bad guys that the good guys, at least the suits back in Langley, don't want me around anymore."

The tall one scratched the week's worth of whiskers that now coated his broad face, as hard as the steel glint in his eyes.

For a moment, neither man spoke.

A cracking noise as loud and hollow as a muffled pistol shots had returned to the earphones by the time the small one said, "It looks like we've lost him. I can't hear a word for the static."

"Bad wire?"

"Bad luck. The wind's blown the wire loose, or somebody's dog chewed through the connection."

The small one, with as much disgust as anger, ripped the earphones from his head and threw them onto the top of the desk. The surveillance monitor hummed steadily as though someone had died. He jammed a pencil into the wall so hard it splintered.

"What are we gonna do?" the tall one asked.

"Nothing."

"If we sit here, he's a dead man for sure."

"We can't help him."

"He's one of us."

"We're not supposed to be here."

"We can't just let the bastards take him off the street and blow his head off. Even animals treat their own better than that."

"There's nothing we can do."

"Jesus." The tall one reached for a cigarette. The sweat was dripping profusely from his face, and it was no longer from the heat. "That's not the way we did it in Iraq. We took care of our own."

"We've done all we can do. Now it's time to move on." A shadow of discontent crossed the small one's face. "We can't take the chance of being seen. If we're recognized by the wrong people, it'll ruin everything we've worked for, and I, for one, am not willing to compromise an operation simply because you happen to be concerned about the human condition."

"The poor bastard doesn't have a chance then."

"He knew that when he came down to work the border, and so did you. You buy the ticket. You take the ride. Sometimes you get off. Mostly you don't." The small one grimaced as he heard a crack of static blasting from the earphones as they hung on the side of the desk. The static symbolized failure. "That's the way it's always been," he said. "Nothing's changed."

"I hope it's quick then."

"What?"

"His dying."

"It never is."

The tall one closed his eyes and thought about the little drug lord who ran the cocaine pipeline north from out of Mexico with a ruthless heart and an iron hand. He took a long breath that sent sudden blades of pain through his lungs, then he said, "You're never gonna get inside Fuentes' armor. He's too damn big, too damn smart, and he's got too damn much money. He’s a pillar of society and connected to all of the right people, especially the politicians who run Phoenix. All we ever had was a long shot, and now all bets are off. We've lost the only dependable eyes we had."

"We can replace them."

"Not unless you've got more money than time." The tall one bit open a cigarette and stuffed the tobacco under his tongue. "It's a wise man who knows when to stop one war and look for another."

A subdued silence enveloped the two men. The small one glanced at his watch again. It had been only ten minutes since the last time he looked. The hands on his watch were running. Time had stopped. He yawned. God, he was tired.

In his mind, he tried to sort out the difference between losing and merely retreating. Then a faint grin began to crease his face like slender red scar. "No," he whispered harshly. "This bloody war's not over. We have a casualty. That’s all."

"You ready to pull the trigger."

The slender red scar turned sour. "I was ready to pull the trigger before we bought the gun," the small one said. “All I need you to do is load it.”

The tall one grinned. He began whistling, and the tune sounded a lot like Taps.

The night gave way to morning.

The screaming had been sickening.

The screaming had stopped.

What the small one always liked about death was the silence. A secret placed in a grave was a secret well kept. He picked up his surveillance equipment and tucked it under his arm.

By noon, he would be able to trade it for a shovel.

On the poor side of Phoenix, anything was better than a shovel.

Chapter 7

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN did not like either pomp or circumstance, regardless of the circumstances. He disliked crowds, especially if there were more than two faces he did not recognize, and he stood uneasily among strangers, watching them nervously cluster together, arm in arm, like insects during mating season, all shoving and pushing their way into the dimly-lit ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

He would write:

They possessed the old money, the inherited money, the big money in Texas, these pompous, aging sons and daughters of the rich and powerful, wearing diamonds and labels from genderless designers and the fur off the backs of dead animals. Their golden tans no doubt came from machines, and their skin was glistening from imported oils and perfumes.

The sun made them sweat, and the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful had been taught from birth to refrain from sweating in full view of the poor, huddled masses who were less fortunate than they, and almost everyone else was. Sweating, unless it happened to occur in the arms of an illicit lover, was an obscene gesture that the genteel simply did not tolerate.

The gentlemen drove a Mercedes or BMW, or they came to the hotel in rented limousines the color of their chauffeurs. The smiles in their eyes and on their faces seldom matched, but they kept smiling anyway, pressing the flesh, as aging politicians would say, exchanging names and business cards, swapping Saturday tee times at the Preston Hollow Country Club, dancing closely with each other's wives, whispering lewd promises that neither of them would remember, and saying, yes, it was a grand and glorious occasion for the President to be back in Dallas again, and, yes, it was good to be within the inner circle of the rich and powerful, and, yes, they must do what they could to ease the plight of the poor and homeless, but that could wait until another time when there weren't so many champagne bottles to empty.

He doubted if his words would be published. But he wrote them anyway. Andrews St. Aubin definitely did not belong within the inner circle, nor had he expected to be at the Hyatt Regency on a Wednesday night in August. He would have been on his way to New Mexico, by plane and car, to wander haphazardly through the puzzling ruins of the Ancient Ones, if Richard Brockleman had not handed him that yellowed, wrinkled letter from a peasant priest. The random scribblings of a man dead for four centuries were an absurdity. St. Aubin had no doubts about it.

But he was a journalist, at least he was according to documents on file with the IRS and within the inner sanctum of the Dallas Times, so the controversial words of a peasant priest, no matter how absurd, intrigued him as well.

His insatiable curiosity, along with the fact that Richard Brockleman reigned as his boss and publisher, was the sole reason why Andrews St. Aubin found himself misplaced in the Hyatt Regency, shoulder to shoulder with the rich and powerful who kept glancing at him with inquiring eyes, wondering who he was and from whence he had come.

St. Aubin understood. He lay awake on most nights, often until dawn, wondering the same thing. The Hyatt Regency was as unfamiliar as the face that went with his name. He had never seen one before. He hardly ever recognized the other. Andrews St. Aubin took a deep breath and slipped back into the shadows of a stairway that led toward a gilt-edged balcony, wrapped within the folds of an American flag.

Andrews St. Aubin straightened his brown, mail-order blazer and looked up at a gold antique clock hanging behind a chandelier on the far side of the ballroom. In fourteen minutes it would be nine o'clock. Within an hour and sixteen minutes, provided, of course, the train had not been delayed anywhere between Dallas and some lost burg in Arizona, he and Brockleman would have access to the Aztec secret that had cursed, then condemned, a sixteenth century peasant priest.

They would know, perhaps beyond a reasonable doubt, if Christ, the holy one, the Son of God, had indeed returned to earth, as He said He would, without letting any of the Baptists know. Had He, in reality, walked out of the jungles in Mexico, or had the priest simply been driven insane by the illusions and misgivings of his own miserable existence upon a desert whose thirst had never been quenched?

Andrews St. Aubin's eyes methodically moved from face to face. Some he knew by name. Some he knew by reputation. Some he did not really care to know at all. They looked, more or less, like their photographs on the society pages of The Dallas Times, only the wrinkles were more pronounced and in different places.

At the moment, if he had not been waiting on a train, St. Aubin would have rather been lost behind the far ridge of wind-carved mountains, down where the coyotes were no good but honest and did not pretend to be anything but coyotes.

St. Aubin had removed himself from the crowd and was breathing more easily now. He was where he belonged, invisible in dark shadows, hidden in the background where he could focus on what was happening inside the great hall without anyone ever being aware that he existed or knowing his name. His face was one that belonged to an innocent bystander, easily forgotten.

Andrews St. Aubin eased his way up the darkened stairway toward the balcony of the Hyatt Regency. He always moved slowly as though he were a man with no place to go and in no hurry to get there. His left foot had never fully recovered from the frostbite that had robbed him of two of his toes. The harsh, throbbing pain was constant, day and night. Only sleep had the ability to eliminate it, but sleep was a rare commodity. St. Aubin told colleagues that he had simply learned to ignore the pain. But then, most all of St. Aubin's life was a lie. He was tall, well over six feet, slender and wiry, and he always heard footsteps behind him, even when he was alone.

He did not make friends easily. He did not particularly trust the friends he had. In a world of black tuxedoes and black ties, Andrews St. Aubin wore a brown coat, denim jeans, antelope hide boots, and a borrowed green striped tie that looked as out of place in the Hyatt Regency as he felt.

Andrews St. Aubin had found no reason to smile since that first flash of memory unexpectedly tore its way past the ragged black curtain that hung like a funeral shroud across his mind. He had caught a faint glimpse of himself standing in the trash and slime of an alleyway in a city he had never seen, in a country where he had never been. The 9mm automatic in his hand had fired only once. He saw the flame, not hot, but as cold as the snow in the wind.

It had taken the young blond courier with oily eyes and transparent skin such a long time to die. In that odd, curious span of time that hangs like a fragile thread somewhere between consciousness and sleep, St. Aubin could still hear the faraway echoes of the courier coughing and gagging on his own blood, cursing in an unknown tongue, see him clawing at the gaping wound as though he had a chance to save himself by ripping the bullet out of his chest. For a brief moment, the vision was as clear as his mind once had been. St. Aubin was adrift like the dirty snow itself in the haunting, tranquil darkness of a blind alleyway, mesmerized by the sight before him, amazed at how hard a person would fight to live, how hard it was to die.

The courier's eyes closed forever before St. Aubin felt the pain of the bullet burning low in his own back. He had not heard the shot. This was a flame he had not seen. He only remembered the vague howls of silence before he fell, holding on to his consciousness as long as he could before it slipped through the numbed fragments of his mind. By the time his face was buried in snow that drifted against the churchyard gate, he had no reason to believe that he was any different from the courier.

When death comes, it collects as many souls as it can, keeps a few and discards a few. St. Aubin had no idea why death had rejected him on that cold night in a town that had no name and was only a dot on the map.

Was it a nightmare? Or reality? Had he been there in the alley? Had he fired the shot? Had he ever even owned or held a 9mm automatic? Andrews St. Aubin wished to God he knew for sure. He hoped to God he would never find out, but he feared that the restless spirit of the dead man who followed him in the darkness of night would someday tell him, and he wondered if he would be allowed to know while he was alive, or if it were a message he would receive somewhere in the afterlife of death.

No longer did St. Aubin have any urge to unravel the mystery of his past. The thought of who he was and what he might have done frightened him. The newspaper became his refuge, his personal hiding place. Not even the nightmares could track him down as long as he kept moving from place to place, country to country, time zone to time zone, especially not when he kept tallow candles burning in the darkness and was afraid to sleep at night.

The lights in the ballroom flickered, then dimmed. The Dallas Symphony faded out of a melancholy Strauss waltz, on cue, and broke into a loud, bold, rendition of Hail To The Chief, heavy with the sound of trumpets and trombones. The applause was akin to thunder when it drummed across an empty August sky, promising rain but never quite bothering to deliver any.

The spotlight swung abruptly to the southeast corner of the ballroom and struck the face of President Henry Caples as he walked briskly toward the oak podium, flanked by Texas Governor James Jay Bentley, a pair of state senators, a half dozen Republican congressmen, four secret servicemen, and the broad, formidable shoulders of Richard Brockleman.

Caples, as his aide had scripted, broke into a smile that became a laugh, and it must have been contagious because the noise inside the ballroom began to swell up and overwhelm the sounds of the orchestra. After awhile, the music was as distorted as the noise. The President stepped to the lectern, and a giant American flag above him, also on cue, suddenly began waving in a breeze stirred up by a squadron of white overhead ceiling fans. He motioned for the crowd to quiet down, but the noise grew incessantly louder, just as he knew it would. There was a band of screaming, hand-clapping Republicans hired and strategically placed throughout the crowd to make sure of it.

Andrews St. Aubin detested the show unfolding below him. It was too staged to be sincere, a wild, madcap circus of political jugglers, opportunistic high-wire walkers, and self-centered carnival barkers, all carefully choreographed to massage the ego, squeeze the emotions, and coax the almighty dollar out of those aging sons and daughters of the rich and powerful who had paid a thousand dollars a ticket just for the privilege of being seen where it was important to be seen on the Wednesday night that the honorable Henry Caples chose to be in Dallas.

"Ladies and gentlemen," boomed the deep, graveled voice of someone heard but not seen, "the President of the United States, Henry Charles Caples...."

The applause erupted again, louder than even before.

Oh, well, St. Aubin told himself, the bastards paid enough to get into the place, they might as well get their money's worth. He turned and slipped out of the balcony, walking easily past a stone-faced secret service agent who cared only that the misplaced St. Aubin was leaving and not trying to talk his way into the ballroom. St. Aubin limped on toward the door behind the heavy purple drape that would let him out into the sweltering heat of a Texas summer night. He had absolutely no interest in hearing what Henry Charles Caples had to say. He already knew.

Brockleman asked him to review the speech, all fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds of it, including time reserved for spontaneous applause, before the President ever saw it. There were five historical references in the presentation, and Brockleman wanted to make sure they were accurate and, even more important, appropriate. After all, the President might be in town. But tonight was his night. Whatever the President said about Richard Brockleman should be etched forever in stone or, at least, on the front page of every newspaper in the state serviced by the Associated Press.

St. Aubin, with Brockleman's approval, added a more familiar Sam Houston quote and scratched one attributed to James Madison, realizing that President Henry Caples would never know the difference. The President only read speeches. He did not write them. He probably did not have a great deal of interest in what he was going to say, only that he had the ability to say it well enough to be remembered and quoted by television pundits and historians long after he had left the premises.

Henry Caples had flown Air Force One to Texas for the sole purpose of hanging the Presidential Medal of Patriotism around the thick neck of Richard Brockleman, who liked being recognized by the media as a good American with old-fashioned American ideals, honest and hard-working, whose devotion to his country was as star spangled as the flag that waved above him.

Some said he was a great American, the son of a West Texas soybean farmer, a self-made, multi-millionaire, a 1959 MBA graduate of Texas A&M University whose name and whose newspaper had become synonymous with all that was holy and righteous about the country he vowed to protect with every inflamatory editorial he published. Richard Brockleman was feared as a maverick in business, a strong-willed iconoclast who only followed the rules he had personally invented. His enemies swore that Brockleman had a nasty habit of re-writing the rules, depending entirely on which side of an issue he happened to be. He used his newspaper as a hammer to bludgeon and break those men who did not support or agree with his conservative causes. To him, the world was as black or white as his front page, and the gray areas did not exist. Richard Brockleman did not understand nor had he ever believed in compromise.

Richard Brockleman was an imposing man whose very presence in a room commanded attention and respect. He was two inches over six feet, weighed almost two hundred and forty pounds, and, until his fiftieth birthday, had never carried an ounce of fat. His face was chiseled granite, and Brockleman was completely bald, although it was rumored that he did have a barber come in every morning to shave away the gray hair that wanted to cluster down around his ears and across the back of his head.

Brockleman had long ago learned the importance of placing strong, dedicated men around him, then listening intently to their ideas and letting them do their jobs without any outside interference. He spent his money freely and not always wisely, buying blocks of opera tickets he never used; chances, a thousand dollars at a time, for charity raffles he never won; hospitals both at home and abroad; companies that tried to shoot him down or get in his way, and congressmen, as well as state legislators, whose votes belonged to him day or night, anytime he asked for them. Three of the congressmen were standing on the podium with him now.

Richard Brockleman served his country well. He had historically been a hard liner against the threats of both Communism and illegal drugs, often depressed because the Red Menace of Communism was no longer the menace it once had been. He missed the Cold War. Russia had been an enemy with a face. He regarded drugs flooding across the Texas border the seamy bounty of an invisible war. Fighting against a never-ending influx of drugs and the human mules who smuggled them from one side of the Rio Grande to the other was like jousting windmills, and he could not stop the wind from blowing.

When the maddening applause rattling the windows of the Hyatt Regency ballroom began to finally lose its energy and fade away, Caples turned and, with the vigorous nod of his head, motioned for Brockleman to join him behind the lectern.

"The home folks all love you, Richard," the President said under his breath, still smiling broadly, pointing to faces he recognized in the crowd, a gesture that always assured him of a few votes and possibly some additional campaign funds.

"Bullshit." Brockleman said softly. He was not impressed. "Most of the sons of bitches wouldn't walk around the corner to see me unless I had been in a wreck, and they were holding my burial policy." In spite of his words, the flicker of a sardonic grin had worked its way across his lips.

President Caples ignored him.

Brockleman, with a nonchalant wave of his hand, acknowledged the applause, then whispered in the President's ear, "Let's get started and get this shindig over with, Henry."

"Don't be in such a hurry."

"I've got more important things to do."

"What's more important than standing here in front of God and everybody, elbow to elbow with the President of the United States?" Caples needled him.

"I've got somebody coming in tonight, somebody I haven't seen in over a year."

"A woman?" Caples raised an accusing eyebrow. "Richard," he said, "you know better than that. The press will take your head off just below the Adam's apple, and I won't have any place left to hang the medal."

Brockleman found no reason to react to the president's somewhat flat attempt at humor. "It's family," was all he answered.

"What time?"

"A little after ten, if the train's on time."

"Trains are always late."

Brockleman shrugged, staring at the flashbulbs that looked like erratic and disjointed fireflies exploding throughout the darkened ballroom.

Henry Caples turned his eyes back to the crowd, suddenly aware that the applause was rapidly becoming more mechanical, fading fast, void of much enthusiasm, just about to run its course, and he had no way to turn it back on again. That, invariably, was always the saddest moment in a politician's life, other than perhaps losing an election or a girl friend. "Smile, Richard," Caples whispered, sharpening up his own smile, tapping his fingers on the lectern as the orchestra wound down its version of The Eyes of Texas.

Brockleman would have thought better of the orchestra if it had played the Aggie War Hymn. He thought seriously about lighting up a cigar, then decided against it. The heat from the television lights were beginning to burn his balding head. "Why the hell should I stand up here smiling like a goddam jackass eating thistles?" he asked.

"It's not everybody who receives the Presidential Medal for Patriotism," Caples said quietly and reverently.

"That sonuvabitch had better be as valuable as a herd of pregnant racehorses," Brockleman snapped, "because I figure roughly that it cost me on the high side of just about ten and a half million dollars."

"Is that what you spent on our little military operation in Yemen?"

"That, Mister Caples, is what it cost me to get your ass elected President."

Outside, Andrews St. Aubin removed his green-striped tie, wadded it up and threw it into the boxwoods that surrounded the hotel. It wasn't much of a loss. Brockleman could loan him another one. Then again, with any luck, he just might not ever need another one. St. Aubin hoped that the President was already well into his speech.

The train, carrying a secret that, if true, would reshape and redefine the tenets of the Judeo-Christian religious world, that theologians, politicians, power brokers, atheists, agnostics, mystics, occultists, demigods, and heretics would kill to own, kill to conceal, kill to exploit or kill to destroy, was due in the station in exactly sixty-two minutes and twenty-six seconds. He could look across the backyard of the hotel and see the tracks.

Chapter 8

RICHARD BROCKLEMAN HAD not gone down to the station to meet a train in years. By day, the old Union Station was clean and well lighted, perhaps more modern and up to date than the international airport. At night, an array of bright lights cast a cold glow up and down the concrete platform where DART – the Dallas Area Rapid Transportation – and Amtrak stopped just long enough to deposit and pick up their assorted commuters and passengers. Only occasionally did the city pause long enough to glance up as a fast-moving freight train came rolling in and out of Dallas. The station itself was old and grand with polished marble floors, a reminder of the days when traveling by rail was the preferred and sophisticated way for the rich to whisk themselves from one corner of the nation to the other.

Only an hour earlier, the applause for Brockleman had been deafening, and even the opposition who had their reasons for disliking him were fighting for the privilege of shaking his hand, or at least touching the hem of his Armani garment. He forced a deep, guttural laugh that was full of contempt and satisfaction. "The bastards not only dislike me," he told St. Aubin. "I sometimes believe they're scared to death of me."

"And you prefer it that way."

Brockleman thought for a moment, then chuckled. "By God, I do," he said.

Now he was separated from the political and hypocritical crowd, beside the tracks where they would never wander, and there was only the perverted silence of a train yard around to disturb him as the rails stretched from the light into the shadows of the night. The tumult and the shouting had been doused in champagne. The status-seeking drunks who had worshipped him while he was in their midst were all probably cursing him now that he had left, provided any of them realized he had left at all.

To the west, the tower of the Hyatt Regency was little more than an ominous metal hulk, swallowed up by the night and framed by moonlight that had found a ragged seam in the clouds. A derelict staggered down the tracks, pausing just long enough to press the stale rim of a cheap wine bottle to his lips before climbing into one of the open freight cars. It was hot and suffocating and smelled of decayed fruit. It was home. No matter how modern the station had become, its benches, sooner or later, would always be the final sleeping place for the restless and the homeless.

Brockleman watched the aging and ageless derelict with hard, condemning eyes. "It's a pity," he said.

"What is?"

"The poor bastard over there has wasted his life."

"Maybe he's happy."

"How could he be happy?"

"He doesn't have a newspaper to get out before morning."

Brockleman certainly couldn't argue with such logic. He glanced at his watch, and a nervous frown worked its way across his square face. "Dammit," he said aloud, "trains are never on time. I don't even know why anybody bothers to ride them anymore."

He waited for St. Aubin to answer him.

Silence.

Brockleman was alone. He squinted to make out the obscure form of St. Aubin, moving quietly through the crooked shadows that spilled out harshly from the edge of the station platform. Behind him, the glittering skyline of Dallas, framed in lights, rose above the fountain and tree line in all of its glory and prestige.

The dead man was walking down the railroad track from north to south. Only St. Aubin saw him. The dead man's shoulders were sagging, the collar of his heavy coat buttoned tightly around his throat. His angular face was as pale as the light bulb hanging next to the station door. St. Aubin turned away as the dead man walked past, moving from the darkness into a mist, the color of oyster shells, rising out of the Trinity River and spilling across the city streets. St. Aubin watched him go and knew the dead man had not gone far and would not be gone for long.

He would have spoken. He had nothing to say.

A dog growled. From a bench still sheltered by the darkness came the slurred sounds of the derelict singing himself to sleep, wailing something about women and strawberry wine and the fact that he had never had much luck with either. Maybe it wasn't a song after all.

In the distance, a whistle blew. Long. Forlorn. Brockleman began walking toward St. Aubin. The echo of a train whistle just might be the most gut-wrenching sound left to disturb the earth. Without thinking, the publisher straightened his tuxedo coat and felt sweat rolling down the small of his back. It was cold and clammy against his skin, too damn cold for August, and it sent chill bumps crawling across the back of Brockleman's thick neck.

The dog quit growling and began to howl. The old man's mournful song ended with a hiccup, and an empty wine bottle shattered when it hit the cement beneath his bench. A security guard headed his way. A man could sleep as long as he wanted if he didn’t spill broken glass on the platform.

St. Aubin stepped toward the tracks as the locomotive began snaking its way slowly toward the grand old terminal, looking much like a blockhouse in the darkness, hissing and spitting its obvious disgust at having to work so late. The hot wind was suffocating.

"It's about time," Brockleman said, tired of the weary silence and wanting to hear somebody's voice, even if it was his own.

St. Aubin said nothing.

"I don't know why in God's name Danny insisted on coming in by train." Brockleman's shrug was one of confusion. "Hell, I could have sent him a plane ticket, and neither one of us would have been out in this God-forsaken place at this ungodly hour."

"I'm sure he had his reasons," St. Aubin said.

"I'm afraid there are times when Danny shows up in places he's not supposed to be," Brockleman said.

St. Aubin understood but did not know why.

"He's got a crazy streak in him," Brockleman said.

"Maybe he's a lot like you."

This time Brockleman's laughter was genuine. "Maybe, you're right," he answered.

The letter, yellowed and crumbling with age, had arrived special delivery early in the morning, and it was lying on Richard Brockleman's desk when he walked into the private confines of his newspaper office shortly after eight-ten.

An accompanying message, hammered out on an old standard typewriter, said succinctly: "Received enclosed letter in a cemetery, which probably won't surprise you. I've read what I can with the Spanish street language I know, but you can have it properly translated. At the moment, I don't have the time. Circumstances odd, to say the least. Purported to have been written by Father Miguel Rivera, a survivor of the Cortes shipwreck. You'll have to look it up to see if it really happened. You can find a translator at any of the universities in Dallas. The contents will shock you if it says what I think it does, but rest assured that I now have evidence in my possession that supports its claim beyond any shadow of a doubt."

The words, signed hastily by Danny B., had been written on Sheraton Hotel stationery, and the envelope was postmarked Phoenix. Three hours later, the e-mail arrived. It said simply, "Train arrives at 10:14 tonight. I'll be on it. Be there." The e-mail carried no signature, but Brockleman knew immediately who was coming home.

The train shuddered to a stop, whining and complaining against the steel rails that were worn slick and glistening in the dim moonlight. Richard Brockleman stepped to the edge of the platform, bewilderment embedded deep in his eyes.

He was expecting Amtrak, which would have been bad enough. What he saw was even more troubling. A locomotive was pulling only two cars, and neither of them was equipped to hold passengers. One was a cattle car, and it was empty, although it smelled of wet hay and dry manure. The other was a box car, and the sweet stench that seeped from the crack in its metal doorway was virtually unbearable.

Brockleman coughed and almost gagged. He staggered backward a step and jerked his head around in a frantic effort to force a breath of fresh air into his lungs. "What in God's name is this all about?" he asked, his voice as coarse as sandpaper.

Andrews St. Aubin pushed the publisher roughly back out of the way, shoving him toward the brick station wall. Right now, he knew, but did not know how he knew. Only one thing was for certain. There were a lot of places Richard Brockleman needed to be. The train station was not one of them. St. Aubin leaped off the platform, grunting as his feet hit the hard, baked ground below. The frostbite had left wounds too deep to heal. Neither he nor a doctor had ever been able to explain the bullet hole two inches down from the base of his spine. Pain shot through him with the impact of another bullet.

St. Aubin already knew what he would find when he opened the box car door. He was afraid that he also knew whom he would find. St. Aubin, somewhere during a time and place that escaped his memory, had smelled the sweet stench of decaying flesh before. He thrust his weight against the metal door and wedged the crack wider.

In the far corner, brushed by the splintered rays of a summer moon, he saw the pale eyes of Danny Brockleman staring back at him. The young man's body was bloated by too many days in the August heat, and his skin had already turned as black as charred leather. It was beginning to break open and peel away from the bone. Flies swarmed around the clotted patches of blood that lay matted against the front of his torn shirt.

Danny's mouth gaped open, as though he were still trying to ask somebody a question, and his tongue had been pulled through a gash in his throat. It was stuck to the hair on his chest. St. Aubin made a desperate attempt to slam the door closed before Brockleman had an opportunity to see inside.

It was too late.

He turned and saw the image of a man whose ashen face was twisted and whose eyes had turned to stone. The sounds coming from his throat did not belong to a civilized man. They were the haunting wails of an animal, out of control and thirsting for blood, demanding an eye for an eye and willing to rip the eye out himself.

Chapter 9

RICHARD BROCKLEMAN DID not grieve, not outwardly anyway, not in the manner normally associated with a death in the family. After St. Aubin gently took him by the arm and escorted him away from the concrete platform that stretched alongside the depot, there had been no further outbursts of rage and frustration. Brockleman had been bent and broken on many occasions, but he never cracked. That simply was not his nature.

He prided himself on being strong enough and able enough to withstand any adversity, no matter how tough it got, and he had already regained his composure by the time the first police car pulled into handicap parking beneath the dim glare of a street lamp that should have burned out years ago.

Brockleman appeared to not even notice when the white-haired medical examiner and forensics team, after two hours of exhaustive examination, finally gave their approval for the police ambulance to haul the body away. But inside, Richard Brockleman was as dead as the rigid corpse that had been shoved into a body bag and piled like human waste upon the stretcher. He spoke without emotion to both detectives and a battery of reporters who swarmed around him, amazed at how different their questions were. The police were sympathetic, yet detached. The press was made up of scavengers, even the reporter from The Dallas Times, obviously pleased that someone fairly prominent had died on their beat and had been considerate enough to die with plenty of time left for them to make their early-morning deadlines.

Richard Brockleman carefully measured his words, giving each answer as briefly as possible, treating the inquisition as he would any news conference, staring with cold eyes into probing television lights and refusing to blink. Richard Brockleman never blinked. Men who blinked did not build multi-million dollar newspaper empires.

The questions came from reporters who had faces without names, spoken by voices that possessed neither identity nor any traces of sentiment. Brockleman sought to identify his own reporter. Damn him. If he hadn't been doing what Brockleman had hired him to do, the publisher would have fired him on the spot.

Brockleman had already planned tomorrow's front page. A photograph of Danny B., taken in more pleasant circumstances, would occupy a prominent place above the fold. He himself would write the obituary. How Danny B. had died or how he had returned to Dallas would not be mentioned. The deaths of those who killed him would, in days to come, require eight-column headlines across the top of page one.

"I understand the dead man was your brother." The sudden question startled him, even though it shouldn't have.

"He is."

"We're told that his name is Donny, Mister Brockleman. Is that right?"

"It's Danny. With an A."

"How old was he?"

"Around thirty. Thirty-two, to be exact. Danny was a lot younger than I am."

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"It's been almost a year now."

"Were you very close, Mister Brockleman?"

"Quite. I'm afraid Danny trusted me more like a father than a brother. Since he was three years old, I've been the only family he's had."

"His parents?"

"A plane crash. Nineteen eighty-two. It'll be in your files."

"Since you say you were so close, isn't it a bit odd that you didn't see each other very often?"

"Danny's work kept him quite occupied."

"What did Danny do?"

Brockleman paused long enough to clear his throat. His mouth was dry, and it tasted like soured wine. What he needed was a jigger of Wild Turkey, maybe two of them, but at the moment he would settle for water. Brockleman understood what it was like to be a target in the sightline of so many snipers who viewed him and the death of Danny B. solely as front-page copy or the lead story on Daybreak News.

Every station had one, and the plight of the Brocklemans would no doubt occupy the first five minutes, maybe ten if the beautiful talking heads, who kept smiling whether they were reporting debutante balls or disasters, conveniently tacked the Presidential Medal of Patriotism ceremony onto their story. The ceremony suddenly seemed so pointless and so long ago.

St. Aubin was nowhere to be seen.

Brockleman concentrated again on the faces, the voices that were all clamoring for his attention: odd faces, solemn faces, gum-chewing faces, male and female alike, most of whom he had seen earlier in the night, back before the world, without warning, had tumbled into the ugly pits of hell and taken him with it.

Brockleman turned mechanically toward the harsh, unforgiving glare of the lights from cameramen working with the hounds at NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. He took a deep breath and hoped that no one had noticed how badly his hands were shaking.

To him, Danny B. would always be a grinning, freckle-faced eight year old going to bed at night with a scuffed Little League baseball clutched tightly in his chubby fingers. The boy loved that baseball. Brockleman swallowed hard to keep his voice from breaking. God, how he loved that boy. It was written by the pain in his eyes. "Pardon me," he said, as politely as possible under the circumstances, "but would you repeat the question, please?"

"What did your brother do? What kind of work was he involved in."

"He worked for the government?"

"Diplomatic Corps?"

"Drug Enforcement Agency?"

The microphones were rudely shoved closer to Richard Brockleman's face. He was, in the eyes of the television cameras, no longer anything resembling a human being. He was news. The death of his brother was news. For most newspapers, Danny B. would be buried in a back-page obituary column. Richard Brockleman's name would occupy the front pages for days, maybe months.

The scavengers with press cards would settle in to live on the street that ran past his Park Lane home, in his front yard, on his front porch, in the lobby of his office, in his driveway, and everywhere he drove. Television would spend millions of dollars worth of sixty-second sound bites on him. Associated Press would run at least twenty-four inches of copy, digging into every shadowed corner of his life and Danny B.'s death.

The supermarket tabloids were what Brockleman feared most. Before August ended, the bastard offsprings of yellow journalism, he figured, would be blatantly insinuating that he had built his enormous newspaper empire on the street sales of cocaine and heroine that his brother had been smuggling out of Mexico.

Damn them all.

Brockleman hoped they had a lot of money. They could condemn him in their ink-smeared headlines all they wanted. But once they defamed the name and reputation of his brother, he would own them all. And the worthless bastard who had the misfortune of writing the story would never again sign his name to anything other than a welfare check. Richard Brockleman would make sure of it. He had a staff of attorneys on call and more money than the tabloids had ink.

He listened to the questions of the press, but his mind was elsewhere. Richard Brockleman made a quick mental note. He needed a good funeral home, a rabbi, and an attorney who specialized in prosecuting defamation of character suits, the more ruthless the better.

"Where had he been assigned?" asked the police reporter from The Fort Worth Star Telegram.

"I don't know." Brockleman's voice was muted as he fought to suppress the rage boiling up within him. "But my best guess is that he might have been working in the vicinity of Phoenix."

"What makes you think that?"

"I got a note from Danny this morning. It was written on the back of some stationery from a hotel in Phoenix."

"What'd the note say?"

"Not much really. Then I got word he was coming home by train and would be arriving here tonight."

"You sure it was from Danny?"

"There was nothing in the message to indicate otherwise."

"Was it Danny's handwriting?"

"The last message was an e-mail."

Channel 8’s microphone was close enough for Brockleman to spit on now, and he was tempted. "Have the police seen it?" an on-the-air reporter asked, making sure that his face was within full view of the camera.

"What?"

"The note."

"No." Brockleman's voice grew cold and tense. "The police have barely seen Danny," he snapped.

"Was he a good agent?"

Brockleman's jaws were clenched, and his eyes narrowed. "Danny was a damn good agent," he said, working hard to conceal his emotions. He was on the verge of exploding, and another goddam asinine question by some goddam asinine reporter just might be enough to light the fuse. The fuse was growing shorter by the moment.

"Did he tell you anything about what he was working on?"

"No."

"Never?"

"Danny kept those things to himself. About all we ever discussed was his basic feelings about the drug war being waged on the border."

"And what were those feelings, Mister Brockleman?"

"Danny wanted to see every damn drug dealing son of a bitch he could find either behind bars or dangling from the end of an executioner's rope."

"Is that the way he did his job?"

"No. Danny went by the book, even though those sons of bitches in our bleeding-heart congress passed every law they could to keep his hands tied with red tape and make it damn near impossible for him to do the job he was supposed to do." Brockleman spit with disgust but could not remove the sour taste in his mouth.

"It doesn't sound like you agree with the book."

"The book got him killed."

"Do you figure Danny's death was drug related?"

The image of Danny sitting there in the box car, his body bloated, blackened and caked in blood flashed across Brockleman's mind. It was the image of a nightmare that not even time would be able to erase. He shuddered. The sweet stench of Danny's dying was still fresh in his nostrils.

"Danny's death was not an accident," Brockleman said, almost losing his voice. He tried desperately to choke down the tears that were swelling up in his throat.

"Will you be seeing the President again while he's here?"

"This is not the President's business."

"Do you think it's curious that all of this happened on the night you received the President's Medal for Patriotism?"

It suddenly dawned on Brockleman that the damnable medal was still hanging around his neck. He ripped it off, breaking the red, white and blue ribbon, and stuffed the gold medallion in his jacket pocket. Brockleman turned abruptly and walked away from the glaring lights, the microphones, the cameras, the inane questions. He was not the kind of man to cry, especially not on tomorrow morning's headline news. The TV hacks did not care a damn thing about Danny or his death. All the sons of bitches wanted were ratings, and anything that happened to Richard Brockleman meant instant ratings in Dallas. His face was red with anger, his stomach churning, and he fought to keep his voice as calm as possible.

"What are you gonna do now, Mister Brockleman?" someone called out.

Brockleman felt his legs begin to buckle, and he reached out to support himself against the weathered side of Union Station, waiting until the world decided to quit spinning around in his head. "Some son of a bitch is gonna die," was what he wanted to say. But all Brockleman managed to get out was, "If you will excuse me now, I have to attend to some funeral arrangements."

The old engine that had pulled a cattle car, a box car and what was left of Danny Brockleman into the depot at exactly eleven thirty-two that night was quite empty. Andrews St. Aubin was not particularly surprised, but he silently cursed himself for not being more alert when the train came jerking to a stop. He had merely meant to stay in the shadows, out of the way, and not interfere with Danny's homecoming. On such occasions, families needed to be left alone.

His only interest had been the evidence that the agent claimed to possess, the evidence confirming that Christ had indeed returned to earth, keeping His promise to do so a secret from everyone except an unstable old priest in Mexico.

But St. Aubin had not been in any hurry. Men had been waiting for two thousand years or more.

He had reasoned that another few minutes, even hours, would not make much of a difference. Yet, for some unexplained reason, St. Aubin knew that his suspicions should have been aroused immediately by the sight of such an odd caravan of railroad cars emerging from the night, especially when he had been expecting a passenger train.

He had stood mesmerized, curious, like a ten-year-old looking at a fat lady with a handlebar mustache and the skin of a snake while she danced on stage of his first State Fair freak show. Now, in retrospect, he felt a slow anger burning in his gut. St. Aubin had allowed himself the luxury of relaxing, if just for a moment, and that, he somehow had known for too long, could be fatal.

Then came the sweet odor of death, not unlike the rotting petals of a funeral wreath left too long in the sun. He had smelled it before. But where? And why?

Danny B. was no longer human. Neither were the sounds that had risen from out of Richard Brockleman's throat. One lay dead. One had become wild with grief and rage, wanting to dismantle some thing or some one with his bare hands.

St. Aubin was the man in the middle. He immediately pushed the sight of Danny B. from his mind. Danny B. no longer had any use for him. Brockleman did. St. Aubin had escorted the Dallas newspaper magnate away from the box car while Brockleman kept screaming obscenities to cleanse the demons that were tormenting his soul. The confusion only lasted thirty seconds, maybe less time than that, but it had been obviously long enough for an unnamed engineer to quietly slip undetected out of the train and into the darkness.

The engineer's name was not difficult to find. It was Alden Edwards.

"He's been with us at the railroad since nineteen and eighty-four," St. Aubin was told by the last Union Pacific official still on duty, sickened by what he had seen, unsure of what he could legally say, afraid not to tell everything he knew.

St. Aubin's eyes had the hard edge of broken flint. "Edwards live here in Dallas?" he asked.

The freight agent was young, and he needed a shave. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of a white shirt that had turned yellow from too many washings in alkali water. "His home's out in Maricopa, Arizona," the agent replied, his words coming so fast that he sounded out of breath. "Alden's been bringing trains out of the desert and across New Mexico now for the last dozen years or so. Does a good job of it.”

"What was his load tonight?"

The hawk-faced freight agent thumbed quickly and nervously through his bills of lading, then answered with a slight quaver in his voice, "Cattle."

"How many?"

"It says here he was hauling two-hundred and sixty-eight head of black angus, all being shipped by the George S. Rezen Ranch east of Tucson."

"That's a lot of cattle to stuff in one car."

"It looks that way to me, too, sir."

"Where were they headed?"

"This is where the train stopped."

“You unload a lot of cattle here?”

“Not in downtown Dallas. No, sir.”

"Then what happened to them?"

"Beats the hell out of me, sir."

"And what happened to Alden Edwards."

The freight agent straightened his frail shoulders, and blue veins began to bulge and pulsate in his temples. He had become either irritated or frustrated or both, wiping beads of sweat from his balding head and adjusting a pair of wire-rim glasses that kept slipping down onto the tip of his nose. The ceiling fan was apparently doing nothing at all to cool down the cramped little office, only stirring around the stale air and dust that was blowing through an open window.

"I don't know what happened to him," the agent said at last. "It ain't like Alden to skip out without checking in as soon as he gets here. That ain't like Alden at all. I been sittin' right here in this same office for the last eight years, and, mister, I can guarantee you he ain't never done that before."

St. Aubin nodded and turned back into the Dallas heat, walking down the rails to the cab of the engine. He stepped inside. The cab was filthy and in disarray, with greasy bones from a half-cooked chicken scattered amidst mud and cow dung crumpled on the floor. For some odd reason, St. Aubin had not expected a good, loyal company man to leave such a mess. He guessed that there would probably be fingerprints all over the cab, too. But what good were Alden Edwards' fingerprints when there was no Alden Edwards?

St. Aubin walked back to the box car and stepped inside. The odor of rotting flesh made it hard to breathe, and his eyes began to water. Detective Keith Wood glanced over his shoulder and nodded as the beam of his flashlight carefully scanned the interior of the car. "It's a bitch, ain't it," he said.

St. Aubin knelt beside him, cupping his hand over his nose.

"You'll get used to it," Wood told him. His paunch was no doubt due to a steady diet of after-duty beer, and his gray suit had come from a discount house. It did not hang right on the detective's sloping shoulders. But then, with the weight that Wood packed on a five-ten frame, no clothes would ever hang right. He badly needed a haircut, and long sideburns wrapped around his round face. He had loosened his tie, and his white shirt was stained with sweat that left him feeling as clammy as the night around him.

"What'll I get used to?" St. Aubin wanted to know.

"The smell."

"There are some things you never get used to." St. Aubin's breathing was coming in short bursts, and he could even taste the stench that hung like a tainted fog in air thick with decay and death.

Wood squatted amidst the refuse, carefully pulling on a pair of surgeon's rubber gloves, and he squinted at St. Aubin. "You with the railroad?" he asked.

St. Aubin shook his head.

"I know you ain't carrying a badge."

"I'm with Brockleman's newspaper," St. Aubin replied softly.

"One of them crime beat reporters?"

"Travel."

"This train ain't goin' anywhere." The detective frowned. "You're a little out of your element then, aren't you?" he asked.

"That's what I told Brockleman."

"The dead man's brother?"

St. Aubin nodded.

"What business you got down here?"

"Only God knows."

God wasn't talking to him.

Maybe God did not particularly want a travel writer with a bad memory or a rich man or anybody else to lay their hands on the secret that had cursed a poor peasant priest so many years ago.

Danny B. had gone to meet his maker, although he had a little help on his journey. Maybe he had carried the secret with him. Then again, maybe the evidence did not exist. Only death was certain. Life was as brief as a shooting star, although never as bright nor as memorable.

St. Aubin watched Wood pick up a torn bandanna, matted with straw and blood, and asked, "Finding anything useful?"

"We've got a few things that obviously, like you, don't belong in here. But I don't know how useful they'll be."

"Did Danny have anything resembling a satchel or briefcase with him?"

"The boy didn't pack for this trip."

"How about a cross, or maybe a crucifix?"

"I doubt if he even had time for a prayer."

"His pockets?"

"Two nickels and a key."

"You have the key on you?"

"Medical Examiner's got it."

"Did it go to a lock box?"

"Looked more like a hotel room key to me."

St. Aubin nodded as drops of sweat slipped off his face and fell onto the floor beside him. "What all have you uncovered in here?"

"Besides the corpse?"

"After they carted him out."

Wood grunted as he rose to his feet and fumbled in his shirt pocket until his found a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He pulled out a Camel and lit it. "An old straw hat, pretty beat up and falling apart." he said. "A half dozen or so brown paper bags, most of 'em wadded up and all except one empty. It had an apple core inside." Wood spit out a few stray stems of tobacco and continued. "There are a few chicken bones on the floor, gnawed clean. And I've run across a pair of leather sandals, the kind Mexicans call huaraches. That's about all."

"You think any of the stuff was Danny's?"

"I doubt it." Wood grinned, and his teeth were chipped. "The hat's too big. The sandals obviously belonged to a woman. The paper bags probably carried food. They're pretty well soaked with what looks to me like grease stains. We won't know for sure until the lab gets through with 'em."

"Then, Danny wasn't alone when he got on the train."

"Doesn't look like it. My guess is that he was crammed in here with a bunch of illegals who were so damned interested in getting the hell away from the border that it didn't even bother them to make the trip with a dead man."

"Danny was alone when the train stopped."

"We all die that way."

"What happened to the illegals."

"They start slipping off every time the train slows down. They only want to get to Texas, then move on farther north. They don't care where they land when their feet hit the ground." The detective coughed. "Cigarettes are gonna be the death of me," Wood said.

"It's an ugly way to die."

Wood glanced around the abandoned box car, stained with blood and grease. "It's better than some of the ways I've seen," he answered.

"I'm sure you've got a theory or two about situations like this," St. Aubin said.

"More theories than facts." The detective shook his head. "You can't convict a man on theories, and you can't prove many of them. But they're not hard to figure."

"Then tell me. Why in the world would a DEA agent be coming all the way from Phoenix to Dallas riding a freight train?"

Detective Keith Wood shrugged wearily and continued scratching amidst the trash and dirt that littered the floor. He had all night to finish his grisly task, and Wood was in no apparent hurry to get through with it. He coughed again as the smoke of his Camel stuck in his throat. "Maybe Danny didn't have a choice," he said.

Chapter 10

IN THE LUXURIOUS, comfortable confines of his white two-story Colonial home on Park Lane, Richard Brockleman was trying to find out just how much bourbon a man, either sane or otherwise, could pour down his throat before passing out. He sipped his Wild Turkey from a crystal mug, lukewarm and without either water or ice to dilute it, and the alcohol was having absolutely no effect on him.

It had been six minutes past one during the beginning of a cloudy afternoon when Brockleman arrived back at the house. Outside, it looked like rain, and it never rained during a Dallas August. His thoughts were on Danny B.'s funeral and what a rabbi could say about a man he didn't know. Maybe his brother would pefer some preacher. Danny B. had never been particularly religious, but then, neither had he, even though his money had outfitted the Temple Emanuel, Jewish Community Center, and a half dozen Baptist churches. Brockleman had always been known to hedge his bets. What he needed at the moment was a large and reverent sanctuary.

As he told St. Aubin, it would take a large sanctuary to hold every son of a bitch coming to pay his respects for Richard Brockleman's loss and a chance to do some more business once the time for grieving had officially ended.

A nice five-figure donation should get Danny B. as good a funeral as Dallas had witnessed in years, and he owed his brother that much, probably more. Brockleman let the whiskey slide slowly down his throat until it had the burning sensation of salt in old wounds. If the rabbi didn't give the best damn eulogy that Dallas had ever heard, he'd have the son of a bitch's job, and the man would be preaching sidewalk sermons to the homeless in Yellville, Arkansas.

Brockleman looked as old as he felt. Useless. Helpless. Sometimes, Richard Brockleman hated everybody. Mostly, he hated those bastards who had no names, no faces, and held the goddam knife that cut Danny B.'s throat.

Brockleman had gone straight to the bar in his library, a warm mahogany-paneled room full of leather-bound books his wife had bought before her death, books he had not read. He poured his first drink without turning on the lamp, spilling the Wild Turkey, and the eight-year-old bourbon numbed his skin like rubbing alcohol. He was gambling that it would do his brain the same way.

The muscles in his shoulders cramped, and the back of his neck was clotted with a series of aching knots. When he was tired, the glare of the light hurt his eyes, so he left the room dark, dropping heavily into an overstuffed black leather sofa.

Andrews St. Aubin would write: Dallas may be burying Danny B. this week, but it was Richard Brockleman who died, just as surely as if the blood that soaked into Phoenix soil had come from his own veins. Danny B. is the fortunate one. Richard Brockleman will have to live the nightmare again and again. Danny B. no longer remembers nor cares about what happened. He is only ashes among the ashes, dust among the dust. Richard Brockleman still feels the pain of the knife.

He wrote it. Then he wadded up the paper and threw it away.

"The whiskey's on the table," Richard Brockleman said as he heard St. Aubin walk into the room. The usual deep timbre had ebbed from his voice.

St. Aubin said nothing, easing into a small Oriental chair that had been wedged between bookcases in the far corner of the library. It was not particularly comfortable, but it gave St. Aubin a clear view of the door and both windows that opened up onto a rose garden. He always sat with his back to the wall and figured there was a good reason for it, though he didn't know why.

Brockleman threw an old photograph on the table. It held the image of Danny B. at the age of four, wearing faded overalls and running barefoot across the hot West Texas sand.

"What was he chasing?" St. Aubin asked.

"A jackrabbit."

"He ever catch it?"

"He thought he could."

The boy was laughing. "Danny B. was always laughing," Brockleman said. "I was in the wrong town and the wrong place when the laughing stopped." He paused then asked, "Have I told you much about Danny?"

Andrews St. Aubin had never known Richard Brockleman well enough to even realize he had a brother. But he also understood the man's basic need, at a tragic time like this, to relive every moment he could remember about the boy who had dutifully marched off to the border of Southern Arizona to rid the world of drugs and come home on a train. Memories and a corpse were all that Richard Brockleman had left.

"Not much," St. Aubin told him.

Brockleman drained his crystal mug and filled it again, cursing silently because Wild Turkey had been the strongest whiskey he could find, and the Wild Turkey draining into his belly was no stronger than a jigger of rainwater in the Trinity River.

"The kid never got a break in his life," he said. "He was a helluva football player. A running back. I got all of his old newspaper clippings put away in a box somewhere. He was All-District as a sophomore, honorable mention All-State as a junior. Hell, every important college football coach in West Texas and one in Oklahoma was knocking on our door. Then he got his knee busted up in practice, and he lost a step, and none of those goddam coaches wanted him anymore. It was like he had leprosy. For a year, they had been kissing his ass and saying Danny ran with the tenacity of a wild goddam mustang every time he touched the football. Now they couldn't even remember his name. It damn near crushed him, but Danny never did talk about it much.

"He went off to college anyway, but had no idea what in hell to make of himself. He dropped out of Texas Tech, flunked out of Baylor, enrolled at Houston and never even bothered to buy his books. Danny buried his disappointments with drugs. I guess all college students are messing around with drugs these days. It damn near ruined him.

"I was sending him a couple of thousand dollars a month to pay his way through school, and, hell, I found out later that Danny was blowing ever goddam cent of it on every goddam drug he could get his hands on. It didn't make him any difference what it was. Marijuana. Speed. Uppers. Downers. Heroin. Crack. Cocaine. If he could smoke it, snort it, sniff it, stick it down his throat or into his veins, by God, Danny wanted it.

"Then he fell in love. Cute little girl, too, from some little place over in East Texas. Carthage, I think it was. Hell, I don't even remember her name. Danny brought her to see me once. I guess he wanted my approval, but all we did was fight. Not about her. About those goddam drugs. They were killing him, and he was too damn stupid, maybe he was just too damn high, to know what the hell they were doing to him."

Richard Brockleman's crystal mug was empty again. He tossed it on the floor, next to a mahogany desk that, the rich and famous said, had once belonged to Sam Houston long before he was governor, and drank straight from the bottle. The whiskey no longer burned his throat. It no longer had any taste. Brockleman only kept drinking to keep from screaming with the demonic torment of an enraged bull.

St. Aubin's eyes never left him.

"Well, Danny and this little girl got themselves engaged," he continued. "They were having a party up on the sixteenth floor of the Shamrock Hotel in Houston. God only knows what all was going on. Anyway, this little girl got her drugs mixed up, and she started hallucinating, and, damn, she thought she was a bird, and she thought she could fly." Brockleman's voice cracked. "She stretched her little arms over her head and went out the window, and Danny watched her all the way down. And he was laughing. God, can you believe it? A little girl was committing suicide, whether she knew it or not, and he was laughing. Hell, Danny thought she could fly, too. I don't have to tell you what she looked like when he found her. They said the hood ornament of a ninety-eight Buick was embedded in her face."

The Wild Turkey grew stale and tasted as though it came from a toilet bowl.

"I don't think I ever heard Danny laugh again," Brockleman said, taking a deep breath as the rank bitterness within him began to mellow. "Danny went cold turkey after that. He bought a gun and told me he wanted to nail every goddam son of a bitch he could find dealing drugs. I told him, go ahead. Go out on the streets and shoot somebody's head off. But all he'd get out of it was the chance to be some big bastard's personal harlot down in a Huntsville prison cell. I told him there was a better way, that he could be just as effective fighting drugs the legal way."

Brockleman paused as a sharp pain stabbed him behind his eyes. He shuddered and waited for the pain to go away. When it didn't, he continued. "Danny was a damn good agent," he said. "He had some successes. He nailed a few drug mules, and he knew who the drug lords were. But he couldn't touch them. Tried. But couldn't do it. The goddam government wouldn't allow it. There are those in the goddam government, our goddam government, mind you, who are as crooked as the dealers are. You can fight drugs all right. You can even whip those sons of bitches. But, by God, you can't do it the legal way. Danny tried. And the bastards sacrificed him. He was like a duck in a shooting gallery. You can only get lucky for so long; then your luck starts to run out."

Brockleman stood, walked to the window behind his desk and opened it. The air was sticky, the heat stifling, the cooling system working overtime and failing miserably, and it seemed as though even the roses in the garden below him had lost their fragrance.

St. Aubin's words had the impact of a bullet. "Danny B. was sacrificed all right," he said, "but there's a chance, maybe not as slight as you might think, that the drug lords had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Brockleman jerked his head around, his eyes wide, a sudden scowl darkening his face. "What the hell are you talking about?" he snapped.

"There's a possibility that Danny B. was fooling around with something more dangerous than drugs."

"I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at."

"On every street corner, on just about every television channel you run across after midnight, there's some fancy-haired preacher pounding his fist on the Bible and warning saints and sinners alike of the trials and tribulations they'll be facing when the Good Lord comes back to earth again. Danny B. said he had proof that the Good Lord had already made his way back."

Andrews St. Aubin was choosing his words carefully. "That's gonna mightily upset some folks," he said. "It's gonna make a lot of preachers mad and scare the hell out of the rest of them. Some of them would have called Danny crazy. Some would have labeled him a heretic. There are even some within your faith who would no doubt prefer to keep such a revelation from ever seeing the light of day. And, at least one, regardless of his faith, his theology or denomination, may have wanted to silence him for good. Take the evidence and burn it, bury it, preach about it, or maybe even sell it to the highest bidder."

"For a used word salesman, you've got some ideas as worthless as a four-card flush," Brockleman muttered as he stumbled clumsily across the room, searching the wet bar for another bottle. Scotch. Bourbon. Vodka. Gin. Tequila. It no longer made any difference what the bottle contained as long as it was full, and he could find it.

"Then you haven't read Revelation."

Brockleman's face were as hard as his eyes. "The Christian faith has been preaching from Revelation for centuries," he said. "They don't understand it. It scares the hell out of them. As far as I'm concerned, Revelation is just a collection of odd words about odd signs and wonders written a long time ago and placed in a book that some people revere and some don't even accept."

"Is that from a Jewish point of view?"

"Just a realistic one."

"For those who believe, Revelation has been the one, holy, and single promise holding them together for a long time."

Brockleman slowly shook his head with disbelief. The Wild Turkey he pulled off the bottom shelf was old, but not as old as he was feeling at the moment. "You'll never make me believe it," he said, growling. "Religion has its faults, but not its assassins."

"It's happened before."

"That's heresy."

"A man was nailed to a cross."

Brockleman shuddered. "Only if you believe," he said. His hands were trembling. "I didn't think you believe in Christ any more than I do," Brockleman snapped, his eyes accusing St. Aubin of hypocrisy, if not blasphemy.

"I believe that which is part of history."

"The Old Testament's history, the New Testament a concoction of bad dreams afloat in the heads of confused men who needed hope so desperately they made it up and passed it on as truth."

"Partly truth, maybe," St. Aubin said wearily, "and partly contradiction."

"I don't really care what Danny found," Brockleman said, squinting into the dimly lit room, trying to re-define St. Aubin's face, which had become a distant blur. "My faith be damned. Your faith, if you have any or ever had any, be damned. But whatever he came across in that goddam cemetery was important to Danny, and that makes it damned important to me. Right or wrong. True or false. What did or didn't happen two thousand years ago is not nearly as important to me right now as what happened to my brother."

"An eye for an eye?" St. Aubin wondered why the thought did not trouble him.

"It's the Biblical way."

"The Old Testament way."

"There's only one Testament." Richard Brockleman filled his glass with Wild Turkey. Straight up. No time for ice. No need for water. The bottle slipped from his nervous, sweating hand and fell at his feet. It did not break. It made no noise at all when it hit the carpet. Brockleman's eyes were tired, his face drawn. He blinked hard, but St. Aubin was nothing more than a virtual shadow blending into the darkness that draped across the far corner of the room.

"I don't know why Danny died, or who did what was done. But maybe you're right. Maybe, after being close to dying for so long, Danny had actually found something he thought was worth living for," Brockleman said softly, his words slurred and becoming more difficult to understand. "All I know is that whatever he found did not come home with him. Whatever it was is wherever Danny left it. Unless some bastard stole it. Whatever it was, St. Aubin, find it for me."

"It's already been lost for five hundred years." St. Aubin found the nerve endings of his mind wandering, dangling somewhere between the abyss that separated dealers of dope from dealers of religion. In Mexico and maybe even in Arizona, there might be little difference between the two. One preached hell so hot you could feel the heat. One had the keys to hell. Maybe drugs were the easiest way to keep hell full.

"Maybe it's lost again," St. Aubin continued. "Maybe someone more powerful than even you and a lot smarter than I am wants it to remain lost. Besides, how do you expect me to find something when neither of us knows exactly what I'd be looking for?"

"You'll find it, St. Aubin."

"How do you know?"

"I know you a lot better than you know yourself, and once you've found it, or, perhaps, while you're down there looking for it and retracing Danny's last few days," Brockleman said precisely, "the odds are that you might just stumble across some information about who did this to Danny, why it was done, who paid to have it done, and why his body was shipped back to Dallas in a box car. There must have been a reason for his death, St. Aubin. Bring me back that reason."

"Get yourself a private detective," St. Aubin told him without emotion. "I'm just a two-bit travel writer."

"That's not what your dossier says."

"I don't have a dossier."

Brockleman's sardonic grin turned grim, etched with a touch of evil. "The government does," he said.

A sudden chill knifed its way deep into Andrews St. Aubin's back. A thousand questions raced through the black, barren recesses of his mind. He only asked one. "What does the government say about me?" His voice was no louder than a whisper.

"That you can find out anything you want to, whenever you want to, wherever you have to go to get it. People who swap names as easily as they swap countries have tried to bury their secrets, but they couldn't bury them deeply enough to keep you from digging them up." Brockleman smiled apologetically. "That is, I'm afraid, the reputation you used to have."

"Who did I used to be?"

"It doesn't matter anymore."

"What about now?"

“St. Aubin," Brockleman said matter-of-factly. "I'm afraid that you no longer have a reputation. In certain circles, I'm afraid you are extinct."

"Then you know who I am?"

"I only know what you once were before you came to that flat stretch of earth at the edge of the world and jumped off."

"What gives you the right to know anything about me?"

"It's my business." Richard Brockleman slouched in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He desperately wanted to sleep. He felt as though he might never sleep again.

"When the government needs to finance certain things without robbing the tax payer, it expects my account to personally handle the financial arrangements. The government tells me things. Sometimes, it tells me things that others aren't supposed to know. We keep each other’s secrets and do each other favors, the government and me. You needed a job where you could forget and be forgotten. I gave you one. That's all."

"Then I must have a name."

"Andrews St. Aubin is sufficient for me." Richard Brockleman reached for the telephone lying on the desk beside him. "I'll call Charlie out at Love Field," he said. "He'll have the jet ready by the time you get to the airport. He'll have you in Arizona by the time the sun goes down."

"I don't function well at night."

"I can't get you there any earlier."

"I see a face in the dark."

"Whose?"

"He never says."

"Then it belongs to no one."

"Once upon a time it did. But that was before he died."

"Then he doesn't exist."

"In the sunlight he doesn't." St. Aubin stared out the window and down upon a deserted street. The days did not disturb him. The sunlight washed away any trace of the dead man. But in the darkness, the dead man would come again, and St. Aubin would recognize him, all except the eyes. The face had no eyes.

He sighed and stepped away from the window. "Danny B. was your brother. He's dead. And I regret that a great deal," he said. "But what makes you think that I personally give a damn about what happened out there in the train yard last night, or even want to believe that an ages-old prophecy that's more myth than gospel has already come to pass? I have what's left of my own life to live, and it’s not much. You can get the President, the D.E.A., the Attorney General, and the whole U.S. military to help you live yours."

"Possibly," Brockleman answered. "But, possibly, they'd be as useless as a screen door on a submarine. Nobody gets much help on the border, especially not those who show up on official government business. It’s a world, Danny told me, where men tell lies to stay alive and tell lies to condemn some men and execute others. After awhile, the lies move from one government channel to another and become part of some bastard’s official report. The books are closed and probably thrown away. I don't want the books closed until I know what happened to the secret that Danny carried to his grave."

"Maybe those authorities you don't trust will lie to me, too."

"They'll try. I have no doubt about it. They're very good with illusions, you know. But you're different, St. Aubin." Brockleman stood to face the man whose memory still lay frozen in the dirty snow of a foreign land. "You're very good with riddles. In fact, your whole life is a riddle. Some puzzles have answers, and some don't. I'm betting this one does, and I'm betting that you can find out what those answers are."

Brockleman's face softened. Some who had done business with him swore that Brockleman was a no good son of a bitch who had neither feelings nor a conscience, and maybe they were right. Richard Brockleman, however, prided himself in his ability to negotiate even the toughest deals. He knew human nature. He made it a point to know what motivated men and what they feared. He knew when to bluff and who could or could not be bluffed. The real secret to winning any negotiation simply meant being careful enough and diligent enough to have access to more hard facts and confidential information than his opposition did. Even now.

Brockleman smiled a tired smile. "At the moment," he said, "I know a lot about the past you have chosen not to remember, St. Aubin. Whether you realize it or not, you have a knack for getting around in places that other people find curious and uncomfortable. You simply play the game better than they do. You mingle well with royalty and the great unwashed, the corrupt and the pious, the rich and the poor, those who fear God, those who should, and those cultists who believe his Son has, quite possibly, made more than one visit to the late great planet earth. You have the uncanny ability to show up and be gone before anyone ever knew you were there."

St. Aubin closed his eyes, searched the dark abyss of his mind once more, found nothing worth remembering and said, “Regardless of who I was, whenever I was somebody else, I'm not him anymore."

Brockleman shrugged his slumping shoulders. "You've always been a good soldier," he answered. "You follow orders whether you like them or not. You travel from one side of the world to the other for the newspaper. It’s not asking much for you to go to Arizona, this time."

"Is that an order?"

Brockleman watched the clouds forming over his weary eyes and wondered why he did not hear them flutter like the wings of birds. "I prefer to call it an assignment," he said. "Your cover is perfect. Write a column once or twice a week, send it back to the copy desk at the Times like you always do, and nobody will suspect you're there for any purpose other than trying to persuade some poor tourists to discover the beauty of land where summer spends the winter and hell spends the summer.”

"Maybe all you'll ever get is a column or two."

"Maybe there's nothing else down there." Brockleman's eyes narrowed. "But I'm betting otherwise. Whatever Danny found, whether it's a great revelation or a baldfaced lie, rightfully belongs to me. No one else."

"And you, in your infinite wisdom, will no doubt decide whether it's necessary to share Christ's secret with the rest of the world, much like you made the decision to keep my own identity secret from me."

The silence between the two men was broken only by the harsh, troubled sounds of their breathing. Both stared hard at each other. Neither blinked.

"The government, though it never told anyone, brought you in from the cold, literally and figuratively," Brockleman said at last. "But we didn't abandon you even when there were those in high places who argued that we should have."

"We?" The tone of St. Aubin's voice hung somewhere between bewilderment and indictment. "It sounds to me, sir, like you consider yourself to be the government, or at least an integral part of it."

"A lot of us are in this together," Brockleman replied as though it was common knowledge, and in his circles it was. "Sometimes the government tells us what to do. Sometimes we tell the government what to do. Most of the time we're just ordinary businessmen trying to get by. That's how America works."

Andrews St. Aubin watched the angry shadow of a cloud pass by the window, and the room grew even darker. He wondered if he would ever free himself of the shadows hanging across the dark chasm where his memory used to be.

Brockleman placed a gentle hand on St. Aubin's shoulder. His words were no longer slurred, his eyes no longer cloudy. "As I said, we live in a world of riddles. You solve the one that troubles me," he said softly, "and I'll give you back the riddle to your own existence."

"Maybe I don't want to know."

"No man wants to remain a stranger to himself."

"There are times when I would give everything I own or used to own to know who I was," St. Aubin said softly. He paused, then continued, "But the thought of what I was frightens me."

"I didn't think anything frightens you."

"You don't have the nightmares I do."

The tension in the room was interrupted only by the hollow three o'clock chime of a grandfather clock at the far end of the hallway. St. Aubin felt his heart lose a beat, then work hard to get it back. He walked across the room, glancing at the self-portrait of Rembrandt hanging above the fireplace. The agony in Rembrandt's eyes matched his own.

"It won't be easy," St. Aubin said at last, "and it won't be cheap. Along the border, a lot of people may know a lot of things about the final days of Danny B., where he lived, where he slept, where he went, what he did and why he did it, what his secrets were and where he kept them hidden. But the kind of information they possess always carries a heavy price tag."

"You'll get what you need." Brockleman stumbled wearily against the blunt edge of a marble-topped coffee table as he stepped toward a small wall safe wedged behind the only painting in the room he had bought at a discount house. It was the impression of a French garden and not a very good one.

He fumbled clumsily with the combination, trying twice – his fingers had lost all their feelings – before the lock opened, and the heavy metal door swung open. "And, St. Aubin, when you find the secret, whether it's a document or an artifact or a King James autograph from the Bible itself, I want it in my hands before any church, politician, or religious figure sees it."

"It may get you killed."

"If you live long enough to get it back to me, then I'll take my chances." Richard Brockleman slowly began counting out one hundred dollar bills, laying them in neat stacks on the antique table in front of St. Aubin.

He took a deep breath, and his eyes were as dark as the circles beneath them. "If you can't buy the information," he said, pulling a 9mm Glock 17 automatic from the safe and placing it atop the bills, "you may have to take it by force."

St. Aubin arched an eyebrow, "You're asking me to kill if necessary."

"I'm asking you only to do what's necessary to stay alive."

"Did Danny B. have a gun?"

"He did."

"It didn't help him."

"He played by the book, St. Aubin." Brockleman shrugged wearily. "You, on the other hand, don't have a book."

"Did I ever have one?"

"You wrote the book as you went along, then burned the pages so no one else would ever read them."

"How many?" St. Aubin asked.

"How many what?"

"How many did I kill?"

"No one ever asked you." The whiskey was wearing off. The fog had lifted from Brockleman's mind. The words were crisp and straightforward. He said, "Death is nothing more than hastening a man's departure a day or so sooner than he expects it. In these endeavors, there are times when the buyer and the seller can't both survive. If one walks away alive, I want it to be you, St. Aubin. And I want you to bring me whatever it was that may have cost Danny his life."

St. Aubin picked up the revolver and stared at it. It was heavy. Almost five pounds loaded and awkward to hold. But somehow the handgun felt as though it belonged in his hand. "A man's life is a terrible thing to waste, no matter what he's done," St. Aubin said.

"You'll get over it."

"How do you know?"

The evil curvature of Richard Brockleman's smile told him that, lurking somewhere in the forgotten vestige of his near or distant past, there was a lot about Andrews St. Aubin that Andrews St. Aubin did not know.

Chapter 11

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN rode straight from Richard Brockleman's mansion to the airport in a special limousine shuttle, hoping he would be in Phoenix and asleep by the time night descended upon a land as unfamiliar and as distant as the man he had been when Saint Aubin was merely a hotel and Saint Andrews only a church in a country where men were paid to kill or be killed, and, for the life of him, he could not quite remember why.

St. Aubin was a puzzle. Richard Brockleman had the pieces and could put them back together again for him. But St. Aubin feared he was not ready to find out about himself and the dead man who walked the streets outside his window when the sun was stolen from the sky, replaced by a night as dark as his memory. He might never be ready. The nightmares never disturbed his sleep. They only stalked a world shrouded by darkness, a world filled with a face without eyes, a face that only St. Aubin saw, pale and translucent, its wrinkles smoothed by the cream and powder applied by an undertaker. The face came with the darkness and left with its passing.

At the executive terminal behind Love Field, Andrews St. Aubin found a small yellow package awaiting him.

It held a key, a battered room key to the Sheraton Hotel that Detective Keith Wood had found in Danny B.'s frayed jacket pocket. The Medical Examiner had not wanted to let Richard Brockleman have it. "It's the only hard evidence we have," he said.

The publisher placed ten thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills upon the Medical Examiner's desk, and, without a word, the aging, white-haired coroner turned and methodically began re-typing his report on the untimely demise of Danny Brockleman. He got the name right, the location where the body had been found, the time of night when the train pulled to a stop in Dallas, and the cause of death.

There was no mention of the key.

By the time Richard Brockleman's corporate jet touched down on the steamy runway outside of Maricopa, darkness had already swallowed up the eastern landscape of Arizona. Not too far away to the South, across the shallow, tepid waters of the muddy Rio Grande, lay Mexico. Much nearer than it had ever been before. At least, it seemed that way.

In a Sunday column, St. Aubin had once described Mexico as a poor country, a desolate country, full of strange customs, unexplained myth, and misbegotten loyalties, where a painted woman's body could be rented for ten dollars or less, even after the rise of inflation, and a man's life could be bought for two bits and a glass of stale whiskey. Sometimes all it took was the whiskey.

Mexico is a big land, a hard land, an unforgiving land that keeps most of its secrets buried in unmarked graves, a place where the big rich make the laws, and the bigger rich break them, and the best that anyone can ever hope for is to die of old age while the devil is out of town.

Mexico might well hold the secret he was chasing, St. Aubin thought. He prayed he would not have to go there. Men had a habit of dying in all sorts of ways in Mexico. Then again, maybe the same could be said of Southern Arizona. Just as hot. Just as barren. And even amongst the Saguaro Cactus and hard-rock mountain ranges, it was just as desolate.

St. Aubin slept that night in a small motel a mile south of the airport, then awoke at sunrise and took a yellow taxi to a small neighborhood back behind the soccer fields of Pacana Park. The driver was sleepy, had just come on duty, and that suited St. Aubin just fine. If there was anything he hated, it was a cabby asking him dumb questions or giving him a guided tour of a town that did not interest him, and Maricopa did not interest him in the least.

Danny B. had ridden out of Maricopa on an odd little collection of railroad cars that Alden Edwards was taking to Dallas in the dead of night. He had ridden the rails at least thirty-four hours, passed no telling how many station houses along the way, and no one had bothered to wonder or even ask questions about the strange journey. None of it made sense. Then again, nothing had made sense to Andrews St. Aubin in a long time.

At the moment, Alden Edwards was the only link that St. Aubin had with Danny B. From all reports, Alden Edwards was a dependable and honest man, a family man, a solid citizen, a good neighbor, a faithful Union Pacific employee who probably did not know anything about the bloody corpse that lay in a box car amidst chicken bones, greasy paper bags, and a woman's missing sandal. Then again, maybe he did. Even dependable, honest, family men like Alden Edwards sometimes had a price.

But who paid him, if anyone did? A drug lord? Or a preacher? What did Danny B. have? Or know? And who had taken it from him?

The temperature reached the nineties long before the sun rose wearily into an unclouded Arizona sky, and Maricopa was expecting to break a hundred degrees by noon, if the cracked voice of a disk jockey on the cabby's radio could be believed. St. Aubin did not doubt him for a moment.

He watched a line of Mexican workers slowly making their way toward him, then past him. He would write: It was a never-ending parade of solemn faces and hollow eyes that continued trudging toward the promise of day jobs in Maricopa. It was, for most, an empty promise. A few found random employment, working a ten-hour shift, then returned home to Mexico at night, provided they could find the empty bed of a pickup truck on its way South. The pay was cheap, less than five dollars an hour. But they kept coming back, day after day, patient and unflinching. They never considered not coming back. Down in their villages, down dusty roads fit only for walking or wagons, it was difficult to earn three dollars a day.

Others carried bedrolls on their backs, men with squatty little wives and sad-eyed, barefoot children, searching for a home in a land that had plenty of room but no use for them. Their backs were slumped, their footsteps slow, their clothes full of dirt, sweat, and patches. Hundreds of them headed north each day, fleeing the land of their birth. They were poor. They were desperate.

Some, St. Aubin suspected, tucked cocaine in their bedrolls. Others were hiding guns in the unlikeliest of places. Undercover cops like Danny B. knew the guilty from the innocent. Danny B. was dead, perhaps because he knew the difference.

The workers, without ever knowing it, had walked away from a land of pain and misery where Christ had walked. At least, that was what Danny B. had written, and his proof, he said, was undeniable, unmistakable, indisputable. The Aztecs had built their holiest of temples upon a bleak patch of earth, placing the remnants that Christ left them in a stone vault beneath a sacred altar.

For a brief moment of time, those precious remnants, whatever they were, had been in the possession of Danny B. Death had not stolen them, only silenced the whereabouts of their hiding place, probably forever. His Dallas grave contained more than the broken, battered carcass of a good man who no longer resembled anything human. It had become the repository of knowledge, the final resting place of Danny B.'s knowledge.

According to his brief note, Danny B. held in his hands artifacts that had been held in the hands of Christ. He may have even known the exact location of the Aztec temple, if it ever existed at all. The last thing he ever saw was the face of his executioner. Did the killer have cocaine lodged under his fingernails? Or was he wearing the robe of a clergyman? Only Danny B. knew why he died.

Richard Brockleman assumed that the revelation of Christ was a sacred writing, perhaps even written by the Son of Man Himself. It was a theory that Andrews St. Aubin quickly and quietly discounted without discussion. Sacred writings, no matter how old, could easily be counterfeit, scribbled by some priest or holy man who had been smitten by strange dreams or the illusions of peyote smoke.

If the revelation of Christ was real, and St. Aubin presumed that Danny B. had become as cynical as he, then it must be some artifact, as holy as the grail that no one ever found, as mysterious as the stones that held the Commandments, most of which St. Aubin had probably broken. But how could anyone prove that an artifact was real? Did the grail actually touch the lips of Christ? Did God, with the stroke of lightning, carve the Commandments, or did Moses chisel the words in Stone? Was the Bible really history, or merely twice told tales? What good would it do for St. Aubin to uncover what Danny B. had found? How could he ever hope to prove what he himself doubted? Doubt was an old and a familiar feeling. He doubted every one and every thing, and, thus far, it had kept him one step ahead of those who had taken life for granted and lost it.

St. Aubin looked out across the empty and uncompromising landscape of Arizona. He had been in such places before. Only the country, the faces, and perhaps the customs were different. Nothing else had changed. The ragged edge of his emotions was numb. The uncertainty of it all no longer troubled him. What he must do was perfectly clear to him.

At least one face in a state of even million faces, thousands of them changing every day, belonged to the man who had watched Danny B. struggle to draw his last breath, who, perhaps, now possessed the holy secret that had been taken from Christ by the Aztecs. All he had to do was find that one single face. He watched the parade of the great unwashed file past him, so close he could smell the sweet odor of sour tequila on their breath. Andrews St. Aubin only wanted one face. It could belong to anybody. And it had probably never sweated beneath the sun beating unmercifully down on Maricopa.

The morning wind bore into his shoulder blades like the burning tip of a dagger as he walked down the street of cracked pavement that led past Alden Edwards' small white frame home. The yard was bare and devoid of any color. No flowers grew. No trees cast a morning shade.

A police car was driving away when St. Aubin stepped from the cab and onto a sidewalk chalked with hopscotch squares. Sweat plastered his blue cotton shirt to the small of his back, and the wind against his face felt as though it had been blown from the backside of a furnace. The air was so stifling and moist that it took an extra effort just to draw a deep breath. St. Aubin could not understand why anyone would ever want to live in such an empty and miserable little town. Maybe Alden Edwards could tell him. Maybe Alden Edwards could tell him a lot of things.

A tall, slender gentleman, wearing a light-weight tan business suit, emerged from the doorway before St. Aubin had reached the porch. He stood with his arms folded defiantly across his chest, and he wore a threatening scowl across a thin face that had not yet been shaved this morning. Above him, a ceiling fan stirred the air but had no luck cooling it. His hair was black, slicked back against his head with oil and perspiration. A pencil mustache hung to the top of a broad lip that looked as if it had been scarred by one too many bar brawls. He did not say a word. He merely stood beside a white-washed railing that wrapped itself around the porch, watching suspiciously as St. Aubin made his way up the sidewalk, careful not to step on any of the chalked squares.

St. Aubin nodded instead of speaking. Meeting a stranger in a strange town under strange circumstances was no different from playing poker when the bet was ten dollars and all a man had left was a five dollar bill wadded up in the toe of his boot. He could stay, or he could fold. He never did anything he would regret without looking for a tremble in the hands that held the cards, a quiver in his opponent's voice, a lie wedged somewhere deep within his eyes.

The man's face did not change expressions. He wiped the sweat from his chin with the back of his hand, finally unloosening his tie. His eyes narrowed. The right one was almost blind. The left one was lying, and the man had yet to say a word.

"I'd like to speak with Alden Edwards, if he's here," St. Aubin said at last.

"He's not."

"Do you know where I can find him?"

"At the moment, no."

"It's important that I talk to him."

"I'm sure you have a reason."

"He took a train load of cattle to Dallas." St. Aubin said, warily eyeing the nervous man who blocked his entrance to the Edwards household. "The cattle did not arrive."

"I'm afraid I cannot help you."

"I didn't think you could. But, perhaps, Mister Edwards can."

"He's not here."

"So you said." St. Aubin stepped up onto the porch, finding some solace in the shade, away from the heat that had reached down to strangle Maricopa. "Perhaps I can speak to his wife."

"She doesn't know anything."

"About what?"

"About the cattle that did not arrive in Dallas."

"How about Danny Brockleman?"

The gentleman’s muscles flinched slightly, but his dark and ominous eyes remained hard, unblinking. "Let me assure you that Mrs. Edwards is not speaking to anyone about what, if anything, happened in Dallas," he said.

St. Aubin thought he detected a faint tremor in the man's voice. "If you don't mind, I would like for Mrs. Edwards to tell me that personally," he said.

"Mrs. Edwards is under sedation, I'm afraid. The doctor insisted that she get some rest." The man's English had been honed and polished to perfection.

"Are you speaking for her, then?"

"At the moment, yes. I'm George Pena, her attorney."

"Who's paying the bill? Edwards or the railroad?"

"It doesn't really matter, does it."

St. Aubin shrugged. "Then maybe you can give me some information," he said.

"Why should I?"

"Danny Brockleman was my employer's brother. My employer wants some answers. He thought I might be able to find them for him."

"Can you?"

St. Aubin shrugged his shoulders again. He was beginning to feel exhausted. "That depends."

"On what?"

"On people like you."

"You won't find out much from people like me."

"Why not?"

The attorney smiled for the first time. "People like me don't know a lot. These, I’m afraid, are the facts I have: Mr. Edwards had been out for ten days. He brought one train in about five o'clock Wednesday morning. He took the cattle train out about nine. His time sheets are all in order. His work history is impeccable. The police have been here most of the day, asking the same questions you are. They have no idea what happened between Maricopa and Dallas, and, unfortunately, I am afraid that I don't either."

"Did he call his wife?"

"When?"

"Between Wednesday morning and last night."

"He did not.”

St. Aubin felt the sweat stinging his eyes as it rolled down the creases that age had chiseled in his forehead. "Why would he run," St. Aubin asked. "He brought a train to Dallas, and its only cargo was a dead man, and he hit the ground running as soon as he got the engine stopped."

The attorney spit in disgust. "Did you see Mister Edwards?" he asked.

"No one has seen Alden Edwards since he left Maricopa, and I can't prove anyone saw him then. I still don't even know what he looks like."

"Wait here a moment, please." George Pena turned, opened the door, and slipped into the darkness of the living room. He was back less than thirty seconds later, handing St. Aubin an eight-by-ten photograph in a fake gold frame that had begun to turn black with age. "It was taken on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary," the attorney said.

St. Aubin stared, in the harsh, glare of sunlight, at the images of a round-faced, jovial-looking man and his plump, white-haired wife. Both were laughing, holding hands, and apparently very much in love, even after all those years. St. Aubin could not separate his gaze from the railroad man. Alden Edwards wore a crewcut, and his glasses had wire rims. He had obviously put on a black suit and tie for the special occasion, but he did not appear totally at ease or comfortable dressed in such a formal manner. Alden Edwards appeared to be just as his resume had said he was: good, honest, dependable, decent, hard-working, and faithful.

St. Aubin handed the photograph back to Pena and walked away without a word.

He had known good, honest, decent, hard-working, and faithful men before. More than once, if the charred and foggy fragments of his memory were a reality instead of a distortion, they had tried to kill him, and they probably had a good reason although he had no idea what it was. With any luck, he would never find out.

He walked the street until a cab passed by.

He rode with the window down until he reached the motel. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was cool inside, and, on an August day in Maricopa, cool was beautiful.

Andrews St. Aubin was lying on the bed, letting the darkness settle in around him, his jumbled and disjointed thoughts slowly becoming entangled in a bad dream, when he suddenly realized that he was looking at the black and white photograph of Alden Edwards again.

It filled the television screen, large and grainy, and the sight of the picture jarred St. Aubin awake. This time Edwards was alone in the photograph. The image of his wife had been scissored out. But the laughter was still there, and so was the faint twinkle in his eyes. Alden Edwards was no longer missing.

The TV anchorman, off camera, read his script with an impassionate monotone, full of authority and self importance:

Alden Edwards, the object of a state-wide search since early this morning when the corpse of an undercover narcotics officer was found in his Dallas-bound train, has been located. His body was discovered by two New Mexico fishermen shortly before four o'clock this afternoon, lying face down in about two feet of water inside a barrow ditch near the Tularosa River. At the scene, the medical examiner told us that Mister Edwards had apparently been dead for at least three days. More details will be forthcoming with John and Alysa on Action Four's Ten O'clock News tonight right after American Idol.

It had been more than two years since Andrews St. Aubin gave in to the temptation of entertaining himself with a stiff drink of good whiskey. Whiskey, good or bad, dulled his brain and slowed his reflexes, and that could be fatal. St. Aubin bluffed his own fate. He picked up the telephone, dialed room service, and ordered a fifth of Jack Daniel's black. No, he said, he did not need any ice.

Chapter 12

THE JEEP DROVE out across the brush country in the final hour before sundown, and Paul Mitchell swore that he could actually see the Arizona heat rising off a landscape that was charred the color of ashes. The air around him was thick and moist, and his white, short-sleeved cotton shirt had been plastered to his back with layers of sweat. The jeep rolled to a stop beside the gnarled limbs of a dying juniper tree. The shade crossed Mitchell's face in splinters, offering no protection at all from the sun.

Even late in the day, the temperature was hovering just above the hundred-degree mark, and Mitchell, nearing fifty and looking older, quietly cursed the godforsaken land that had pried him from his air-conditioned Washington office. He brushed the gnats away from his thin, angular face and adjusted his Oakley sunglasses as a droplet of sweat streaked the dust that had collected on the lens. His gray slacks were badly wrinkled, and his floral navy blue tie had been loosened at the collar. His thinning brown hair was clipped short, and his pallid skin, turning a pale shade of pink, was beginning to itch and burn.

Mitchell, without a word, snapped his fingers, and the driver of the jeep, General Donald Draper, handed him a pair of military-issue binoculars.

The general, too, had begun the day wearing a gray suit, but, shortly after lunch, he had wadded up his coat and thrown it behind the seat. He was a big man, well over six feet tall, and weighing close to two hundred and thirty pounds, very little of it excess fat. His stern, unsmiling face, the texture of tanned rawhide, looked as though it had been sculpted out of sandstone, and General Draper had, it was whispered in some Washington political circles, cold gray eyes that could be described as lethal.

Draper had seen combat in both Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, coming home with a chest full of medals, including four purple hearts and a Silver Star for valor. He had spent so much time in the midst of war, he once told Mitchell, that the sound of death often seemed to be as familiar as the voice of an old friend. He and death had shared the same bunker, same fox hole, same hill top, same oil patch, and had parted company somewhere on a distant stretch of sand south of Kuwait. The grim reaper had grown as tired of him as he had been sick of death. At least, the lingering thought of death no longer kept him awake at night, and he no longer dreamed that his bed was a coffin, lying in stagnant rainwater beside the bomb craters of Saigon. Or was it cistern water on the outskirts of Baghdad? The nightmares, with the passing years, had lost their clarity.

"I'm too damn old to be frightened anymore," he had said the night before, pouring down tequila after tequila in downtown Phoenix at Seamus McCaffrey’s Iris Pub. "I've gotten too damn cautious."

"You're too damn mean."

The general had laughed. The general always laughed when he was angry. He had been angry ever since the war ended so suddenly in Vietnam, and the soldiers all came marching home in shame and humiliation. Draper was mad because the politicians lost the war. He was mad because the generals had not been allowed to win it. He was mad because the same damn Vietnamese who tried to kill him were now operating the damn cash registers in every damn convenience store in America. They had thrown away their black pajamas, perhaps, but they still had that glint of hate in their eyes, especially when they saw a soldier in uniform.

Three years ago, on a rain-soaked night in Georgia, one shortchanged him, and Draper had beaten the man to death with his bare hands, trying to cleanse the deep-seated anger from his soul with every blow. It cost him his military career. It almost cost him his freedom. The general had been chained and locked away in the Fort Benning stockade, charged with killing a Vietnamese, when Paul Mitchell quietly made his telephone call to the Pentagon.

He needed a man like General Donald Draper on his staff, he said. Draper was tough. He was loyal and smart and patriotic. He knew how to take orders. He knew how to kill, if necessary, and how to train men to kill quickly and quietly and without guilt.

The psychiatrists all reasoned that Donald Draper was merely suffering from some war-related Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome when he hammered the man to death behind a 7-Eleven counter stained with powdered sugar and spilled coffee. Vietnam was every soldier's excuse to go bad, if he indeed went bad, and General Donald Draper's heroism obviously outweighed his sins.

"That wasn't the reason at all," Draper nonchalantly told Mitchell. "I just didn't like the little bastard."

"You can't kill a man simply because you don’t like him."

"I've been doing it all my life."

"But that was war."

"So was this."

There were many able staffers camouflaged in some facet of the government's intelligence corps skilled in diplomacy, many who had the uncanny ability to either tie or untie bureaucratic knots, many who were programmed to handle research and shuffle paper and keep Congress up to date with what the puppets on Capital Hill needed to know, which was as little as Mitchell dared tell them. There was, however, only one General Donald Draper, and Paul Mitchell wanted him. Mitchell usually got what he wanted. He had his ways. He knew where the skeletons were hidden. He was personally responsible for some of them.

Officially, Draper lost his two stars, his pension, and his uniform, but little else. There were, of course, cries of whitewash, but they faded quickly as Draper dropped out of sight. The press forgets names in a hurry when there are new names to assault, and the press never runs out of names. Draper had gone underground. For all practical purposes, he simply stepped off the face of the earth and fell off the far side of never-never land, which was typical of all of Mitchell's secret operatives. None of them had families nor names nor fingerprints. They lived in the shadows of deception they had made with their own hands. Draper adapted easily to life as a civilian. He again had an enemy, and the enemy had a name.

In the dusty, wayward streets and tawdry bars that encircled the decaying outskirts of Phoenix, out on the sun-bleached prairies of the dead that spilled from Arizona into the vacant plain of Mexico, the decorated Donald Draper once again considered himself to be behind enemy lines. The saloons were dark and crowded with sin that spoke more than one language. The washed and unwashed alike were trying to taste every forbidden tidbit of sin that Little Mexico dangled so lewdly before them. Most of it was liquor. A little of it lay between the legs of long-haired girls, most of them trying to escape a land south of the border, girls who smiled seductively from behind the flickering reflections of candles scented with perfume and cigarette smoke. The midnight queens of Little Mexico were beautiful in the darkness. The harsh glare of daylight never treated them quite so kindly.

The sin that angered Draper came in the form of small plastic pouches, packed with a white powder that could be as deadly as it was expensive. Cocaine. Some pure. Some dirty. The dust of the devil himself.

The faces belonged to the young and old alike, the drunken, the innocent, the surly, the natives, the out-of-towners. And Donald Draper, each night wandered from one joint to another, watching them slowly and methodically become slaves to a master that would someday leave them twisted and tortured, eaten by worms and maggots, in graves that bore the stench of cocaine. The lime in his tequila always turned sour in his mouth.

The sunlight that seared the Arizona sky had not been able to exorcise the anger, the depression, that simmered inside both Draper and Mitchell since they had overheard the last agonizing scream of one of their own. The hot wind died away, and the shadows were beginning to snake their way across a purple landscape.

The general ripped the tie from around his neck and threw it back on top of his gray coat, wrinkled in the backseat of the jeep. Paul Mitchell kept his binoculars trained on the strange little campground that had sprung up out of the brush, lying alongside the ghostly ruins of Copper Creek. Long ago, it had been a mining town, wild and lawless, if anyone believed the rumors. The hills were veined with silver, lead, and copper. But the last of the miners walked away in 1942. Draper drove past the tailings, dumps, and chutes of an old mine, eased across a bridge and eased toward the Bunker Hill Mine. In the flat land just beyond the adobe ruins of an old company store, Mitchell was able to count twenty-two huts, weather-worn and thrown together with second-hand lumber. Most of them circled a sprawling metal building that glistened in the late afternoon sunlight as though it was the broadside of a mirror.

To the left, about a hundred yards away, sat the old Sibley Mansion, perched on the banks of Copper Creek. The rock ruins had been turned into a small, rustic church, and the block letters on a white-washed sign proclaimed the holy presence of the Chapel of St. Ignatius. The white had turned the color of ash. A lone bell hanging beneath a dying cottonwood tree was silent.

The door was open, but Mitchell's eyes were unable to pierce the hollow darkness that pervaded the interior of the makeshift chapel. Mitchell swung the binoculars back toward the huts, back toward the swarm of humanity that lay propped up and sleeping against the boarded walls that shielded them from a wretched sun.

"How many do you figure the Father's got living there?" Draper asked at last.

"Two hundred at least. Maybe more. There are a few children running around the yard, so I guess their mamas are somewhere close by. They must be inside though. All I see hanging around outside are men." Mitchell used his sleeve to wipe away the sweat that hung heavily from his bleached eyebrows and continued, "From this distance, every one of the sons of bitches look alike."

"What are they doing?"

"What they do best."

"What's that?"

"Not a damn thing."

From all outward appearances, the compound was a calm and unhurried place. A few new faces came each day. A few old faces left. They belonged to the sad-eyed men and women who had slipped across the Mexico border and crossed into the flat lands of Arizona, searching for work and a better life for themselves and their families.

At least that's what had been written in the report Paul Mitchell received from the state department. He never believed a damn thing the state department told him. His had always been a suspicious nature. But then, such skepticism prevented him from making mistakes, and in his business, mistakes were usually the epithets of dead men.

During the past six months, the Mexico/Arizona border had rapidly become Paul Mitchell's personal battleground. The intelligence communications he received from the lower valley were appalling. Thousands of illegal aliens – from Mexico, from Nicaragua, from Columbia, from throughout Central America – were daily making their way onto hallowed soil that had been bought and paid for by the United States. The price had been bartered in blood. Some of the aliens were being smuggled in the backs of delivery vans. Some were hiding in railroad cars. Many were cutting their way through or climbing the border wall itself.

It would not be long, Mitchell reasoned, until Arizona had become a foreign state. He could see it coming as plainly as he could see the aliens sleeping in the shadows of St. Ignatius Chapel. Yet, those bastards in the State Department refused to believe or chose to ignore the truth. They were a thousand miles away. The Beltway had its problems, but Southern Arizona was not one of them.

Mitchell's mouth was dry. He licked the dust off his lips and turned to General Draper, who sat motionless behind the wheel of the jeep. "What time is it?" he asked, letting the binoculars hang loosely around the wrinkles in his neck.

The general glanced at his watch. "Almost seven."

Mitchell coughed up the dust that hung in his throat and spit it on the ground. Not much was stirring in the compound yard, and that disappointed him. He was not quite sure what he was looking for, but he expected to find it anyway. Paul Mitchell was a hunch player, a gambler. He always placed his bet before the cards were dealt.

Dust boiling angrily off a narrow dirt roadway, barely visible to the west of him, suddenly caught Mitchell's attention. He stood, leaning against the windshield, and again raised the binoculars to his eyes, quickly adjusting the focus.

"What you got?" Draper asked.

"A bus." Mitchell paused. "A goddam church bus."

"It's not Sunday."

"It doesn't have to be. The Catholics have a bad habit of holding mass every time they get themselves a new bottle of cheap communion wine."

Donald Draper shaded his eyes with his hand. Now, he, too, could make out the shape of the battered blue-streaked bus as it rumbled slowly toward the church. The gears were grinding, and the motor had a high-pitched whine that seared the flat brush country with surprising clarity.

Both watched as the bus rattled past the rock chapel without slowing down and struggled on toward the compound. By the time it bounced to a stop, an odd assortment of Latinos with hungry eyes and ragged clothing, were already climbing from its open doors, glancing nervously around them, ready to break and run at the slightest unfamiliar sound. They were rabbits waiting to hear the dogs bark.

Draper frowned. "Is that what you were waiting for?" he wanted to know.

Mitchell shrugged. "Maybe," he said.

"You got an opinion on what's happening down there?"

"I think the holy and righteous Father James Alvarez is breaking every goddam law on the books."

"The Mexicans think he's a saint."

"I think the son of a bitch is a wild-eyed, bleedin' heart communist."

The general chuckled. "The communists have pretty much gone out of business," he said.

"This one didn't." Mitchell spit again. This time, it was bile, not dust, hanging in his throat.

"He says he's got God on his side."

The dust in the wind rubbed Mitchell's face like sandpaper. He snapped, "Look around you at this place. God hasn't been in this corner of hell for years. He's got better sense than that."

It was a point that Draper could not argue.

The bus departed the compound and was being parked behind the church. Mitchell could not take his eyes off the driver as she jumped barefoot onto the ground. It was a girl, barely a woman, not more than twenty years of age. Her black hair soaked up the glare of the sun, and it hung loosely down upon her shoulders. Her facial complexion was more olive than it was brown, and her black eyes were big and full of curiosity. Her white cotton shirt had been washed too many times and had grown much too small for her. Her faded denim shorts were cut off far above her knees, revealing legs that were long and the texture of silk. The sweat collecting on her thighs gave them the appearance of being rubbed down with fine imported oils. She was no doubt a goddam communist, too. Paul Mitchell laughed quietly to himself. But she was, without doubt, the best damn looking communist he had ever seen.

"Let's go pay a visit to the righteous Father Alvarez," Mitchell said.

"He may not let you in."

"Why the hell not?"

"You don’t speak Spanish, and you don’t have stale tamales on your breath." Draper's grin was twisted and full of sarcasm.

Chapter 13

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN looked out of his Sheraton Hotel room and toward the new steel and glass sculptures of downtown Phoenix. The buildings were bright and aglitter in the glare of a tired afternoon coming to an end. It was that damnable time of day that he hated most. Night was still a faint promise away, and the darkness that fought its way into the back corner of the alleyway below was dueling with splinters of sunlight to keep from being chased out with the remnants of trash that lay scattered by a blistering afternoon wind. He shaded his eyes, only vaguely aware of the long line of automobiles that had jammed themselves together on the broad streets and back alleys, forming a distorted grid through the city.

St. Aubin would write: The whole of Phoenix was battling, without a lot of success, to untangle themselves and find a certain measure of freedom on the open roads that lead away from a city of irony. Its buildings are portraits of architectural refinement, and they defy any memories of a historic past. The stark beauty of Phoenix fades into the desert, its brilliant colors replaced by the harsh browns and sepia tones of a landscape that has no respect for the splendor of a city that should have probably been built elsewhere. Even the streets of Phoenix are out of place, smitten with a plethora of modern conveniences in a town that no doubt preferred to grow old gracefully.

He would write it, and Richard Brockleman would print it as truth even though his eyes had never seen either the old or the new of Phoenix. Horns blared loudly, and at a distance, short staccato bursts symbolized the frustration, the anger of drivers who had grown weary of another day of labor and whose only goal at the moment was to beat the sundown home. The pristine sidewalks were crowded as well, and everyone, it seemed to even the most casual of observers, was in a hurry.

St. Aubin's' eyes darted from face to face, even though he was much too far away to recognize any identifiable features. He knew that somewhere among them was the face of the dead man who only came to him after darkness gripped the landscape that enclosed him. The dead might still walk the street before darkness fell, but the fading light, no matter how pale or gray, kept St. Aubin from seeing them.

The dead did not hide, and, although he had tried, St. Aubin could not hide in the night, which encased the world with the color of a closed grave. All he saw on the sidewalk below him were men, some in dark business suits, others dressed in tattered khaki trousers and unwashed tee shirts, and women, probably secretaries, maybe even Arizona State professors, attired in brightly-colored dresses that were pressed firmly against their bodies by the wind. There was nothing familiar about any of them, at least the ones who were alive, provided any of them were. Andrews St. Aubin was merely a stranger in the midst of strangers. He blinked and shook his head, trying to remove the face of the dead man from the dark interior of a tormented mind.

There was another more important to him now. Somewhere out there among the one and a half million people roaming the streets of Phoenix was the faceless stranger who had brutally killed a man. Under normal circumstances, perhaps, that would not have mattered or made any difference. Andrews St. Aubin no longer cared about the deaths of most men. They were merely statistics, and there were just too many of them stacked up in a world that had apparently decided to settle its differences with violence rather than words.

But Danny B. was flesh and blood, not a simple statistic dumped in an obituary column on the back page of some newspaper that ended up a day later in somebody's trash. An old man, much older than he had been three days ago, was grieving back in Dallas simply because Danny B. had come home with his throat cut and rigor mortis in his joints. Danny B. had died much wiser than most men.

He had died, if the letter from an old and forgotten priest had been accurate, with the knowledge that the Son of God had walked somewhere other than the journeys recorded within the wrinkled pages of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, if he had ever walked on earth at all.

Earlier that morning, St. Aubin had placed a telephone call to Reverend Prentice Gaston, the director of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. He had met Doctor Gaston only once, interviewing him for a special religious section in the Times, retracing the reverend's trek from Bethlehem to Golgotha, reliving each agonizing mile that led Christ from the manger to the cross.

Athough he never quite understood why, St. Aubin deeply respected the cleric's commitment to his beliefs. When the good doctor wasn't lecturing, he was preaching. When he wasn't preaching, he was praying. When he wasn't praying, he was digging with reckless abandon through volumes of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, always searching for one new nugget of information that might make the scriptures more illuminating to his students than they had previously been.

Doctor Gaston had neither laughed nor ridiculed him when St. Aubin inquired about whether or not he had ever heard or read about the sojourn of Christ in Mexico fifteen hundred years after the incident on Golgotha's cross. "There are rumors, and there are legends," the reverend told him. "But then, I'm afraid all the world's known cultures have their rumors about a Christ-like figure who walked among them and brought them his own particular and sometimes peculiar version of hope and salvation."

"What can you tell me about the rumor in Mexico?" St. Aubin asked.

"Are you searching for the truth, Andrews, or merely trying to debunk it?" Dr. Gaston chuckled softly. "We don’t often think of Mexico as the Holy Land."

"I've been there before," St. Aubin said, his voice devoid of emotion. "I've never seen anything particularly holy about Mexico."

"Then why your interest in this legend about a god who supposedly descended to earth and preached the Word of Life to the Aztecs?"

"Curiosity, I guess."

"Don’t tell me that a hard-boiled agnostic like you is finally getting religion." Doctor Gaston laughed warmly.

"They say it's never too late."

St. Aubin could almost imagine the reverend arching an eyebrow. "Well, will wonders never cease," Doctor Gaston said. "The Bible says that the Good Lord can soften hearts made of stone, Andrews. Maybe you're living proof of that." He paused, then asked, "What do you want to know?"

"Whatever you know, Doctor."

"There have been some documents written, but mostly it's speculation."

"It's certainly more than I know already."

There had been a moment of silence at the far end of the line. St. Aubin could hear pages being turned as Doctor Gaston no doubt began rummaging through the binders that kept his decades of research material.

Finally, the reverend said, "It seems there was a man in the sixteenth century, the son of a virgin named Chimalma, who, it's said, was chaste and temperate, practiced penance and fasting, preached the natural law, and the Aztecs regarded him as one of their principal gods. They called him Quetzalcoatl, the God of Four Winds, and they built temples to honor him. It's said, believe it or not, that the cross on his mantle was a Saint Andrews cross, symbolizing the Supreme Being who had created both God and man. He was tall. He was white, which caused quite a stir among the dark-skinned Indians. He had long blond hair, a beard, and was considered the creator and savior of the world. Before he came, the Indians used human sacrifices to cleanse themselves of their evil doings. After Quetzalcoatl came to them, those same Indians continued to practice their penance, but without offering up the blood of living creatures. When this god of theirs knew it was time for him to die, he sailed eastward on a raft of coiled serpents, promising to return some day from exile and restore his kingdom. As far as I know, Andrews, the Aztecs were still waiting when, as a nation, they ceased to exist."

"Like other Christians."

"I'm afraid we're talking about practicing heathens, Andrews."

"The story's the same."

Doctor Gaston breathed a sigh of resignation. "There are striking similarities, I have to admit."

St. Aubin wondered, "Why does organized religion choose to ignore the story of Quetzalcoatl's sojourn on earth? I've seen a lot of television evangelists burn a lot of hellfire and brimsone, but I've never heard anyone mention Quetzalcoatl."

"It's elementary, dear Andrews."

"How's that?"

"Quetzalcoatl's never mentioned in the Bible."

"If I'm not mistaken, Quetzalcoatl appeared in Mexico hundreds of years after the final scriptures of the Bible were written and voted to be included in a book."

Dr. Gaston replied, as scholarly as he could, "There are many in the religious world who believe that if Quetzalcoatl was not mentioned in the scriptures, then, chances are, he did not exist, not Biblically anyway."

"Maybe the Aztecs had their own Bible."

"I'm sure they did."

St. Aubin thought for a moment, searching for the right way to phrase his next inquiry, before saying, "Let me ask you a question, Doctor."

"Ask as many as you wish."

"You say the Aztec nation no longer exists."

"As one who has probably researched the history of Mexico as often as I have, Andrews, you're as well aware of that fact as I am. There are still descendents of the Aztec people, a mixed blood now, but as a nation, the Aztecs have left little more than their legends."

"Maybe this god of theirs did return."

"There's no record of it."

"Maybe the Aztecs didn't have time leave a record. Maybe Quatzalcoatl did come back for his people, like a thief in the night, and take them home with him all in the blink of an eyelash." St. Aubin paused, then said. "That's what you and other good caretakers of the gospel been preaching for years."

There had been an uneasy, awkward silence on the line. At last, Doctor Gaston asked quietly, "If Christ did return for his people, Andrews, then why are we still here?"

"It's a question you should ask yourself, Doctor." The silence grew even more uncomfortable. St. Aubin grinned crookedly before inquiring, "What are your own personal thoughts about the legend, reverend?"

Doctor Gaston coughed before answering, with a certain amount of indignation, "I only know one thing for sure, Andrews."

"What's that?"

"My Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew, not Spanish nor the language of the Aztecs." Doctor Gaston had no longer been chuckling when he hung up the phone in his office.

St. Aubin could almost see the good reverend close his eyes with frustration, press his fingers tightly against his temples to stop them from throbbing, then hurry to chapel to see if the Good Lord would absolve him of the heresy he had just heard from the acid tongue of an agnostic.

One thing was for certain, St. Aubin knew. There had been a god in Mexico, or so the rumors said. Dr. Gaston had confirmed that. The legend had little difference from the scriptures. If what Danny B. had learned was fact instead of fiction, then the legend and the scriptures were as one. St. Aubin laughed softly to himself. The Christian world, he knew, would never be the same if the Aztecs had made it to heaven before the Baptists.

Now, Andrews St. Aubin stood at the window of the Sheraton, looking down from his fourth floor room, staring intently at the faces below him.

Watching the smiles.

He did not trust the smiles.

And the frowns.

Those who wore them were worried. What in God's name did they have to be worried about?

The young.

Death had already begun stalking them, whether they knew it or not.

And the aging.

Death already knew where they lived.

The pretty.

Beauty could be distracting. Distractions, more often than not, could get a man killed and had, although the name and the location and the incident itself escaped him. It was nothing more than a blur.

The ugly.

They wore the face of the condemned, a face like his own.

St. Aubin felt the dead man staring at him long before he saw the courier, young and pale, and his lips were the color of alabaster, devoid of all blood that had drained into the snow. Amber flames where the eyes had been looked like mirrors in the fading glow of sundown. He heard the dead man laughing, although no smile had crossed his face.

The dead man was waiting for St. Aubin in the small park across the street and near the Arizona Center. He was seated alone on an iron bench, its rust hidden by a flaking coat of black paint. He was the only man wearing a heavy woolen overcoat in the sultry, summer winds of Phoenix.

St. Aubin did not keep the dead man waiting for very long. He never did. He had tried. He had run for years. But the dead man always found him. The snow had melted, and the dead man had no grave to hold him and no casket to keep him off the streets. He, like St. Aubin, was adrift, one dead and one alive, and there were days when St. Aubin did not know who was trapped in the fire and brimstone and who had escaped hell, if, indeed, anyone had.

The bullet hole in the young man's chest was as big, as ugly as it had always been, the flesh torn angrily away from his breastbone. The amber flames where the dead man's transparent eyes had burned even hotter when St. Aubin sat down beside him on the park bench. His face was so pale it was virtually translucent, the bulging veins in his temple lined in blue.

Sweat had dried on St. Aubin's forehead. The hot wind trying to flee a dry desert bed had a curious chill. The questions Andrews St. Aubin asked the dead man never changed: "Why were you there at such an ungodly hour?"

The answer was always the same: Silence.

"Had you been sent to kill me?"

Nothing. Not a whisper.

"Were you someone who did not deserve to die?"

Not a whimper.

"Did you simply get in the way that night?"

The dead man reached instinctively to try and close the hole in his chest with long, fragile fingers.

"Why are you here?"

No one in the crowd passing by bothered to even glance at St. Aubin. He was not the only lost and wayward soul who talked to himself on the darkened streets of Phoenix.

St. Aubin sighed as the last vestiges of sunlight crept with uncertainty beyond the trees surrounding him. The pigeons foraging for crumbs around the bench were cast in the dim glow of a new moon. St. Aubin rubbed his hands together and asked a question he had never considered before. "Where do men go when they die?"

For the briefest of moments, he thought he saw a flicker of sadness reflected on the dead man's face.Maybe it was only a shadow and out of place.

"Is there a Supreme Being?"

Silence.

"Why did He send his Son to Mexico?"

Nothing.

"And what was the Son of God doing there? They say the dead know things that the living only wonder about."

The distant hills claimed the last remnant of a sun grown cold, and darkness fell like a woolen funeral shroud upon the night streets of Phoenix. Even the laughter coming from the Arizona Center was tangled up with a sudden and ominous silence. Andrews St. Aubin waited for an answer he knew he would not hear. He looked up and turned toward the dead man. The dead man was walking across the park and through a flock of pigeons that scattered at his every step.

Only the pigeons and St. Aubin saw him go.

Chapter 14

PAUL MITCHELL KEPT his binoculars trained on the lonely little mission outpost of Father James Alvarez until the last glimmer of dusk hanging above the desert had been snatched away by the night. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the scattered bits of information that his office had pieced together on the priest.

Age: 63. A member of the Augustinian Priesthood, one of the last of a dying breed. Pastor of St. Ignatius. He had built it himself four years ago, restoring a rancher’s house abandoned decades earlier. Pastor of a poverty-stricken little church.

Yet, Father Alvarez always had plenty of money to carry on his mission work.

Mitchell scribbled in his notebook: Why? And how? And who was his Godfather? God had been known to hand down an occasional miracle from time to time. But it was man who handed out money, usually for all the wrong reasons.

Father Alvarez, according to Mitchell's sources, had long been an opponent of the U.S. government's involvement in Central America. Until recently, his opposition had been between him and his conscience, strictly an opinion he shared confidentially and only with God. During the last few months, however, his stand had become vocal and loud, almost militant at times. Some of his latest homilies for mass were obviously inspired by Marx, certainly not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Take from the rich. Give to the poor. Distribute the wealth. After all, the rich had a lot to give. But what in God's name did the rich want in return?

Paul Mitchell glanced at the digital time glowing on the face of his Special Forces watch, bought at a pawn shop just outside Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Nine-seventeen. He nodded at General Draper and said, without much enthusiasm, "There's no reason to keep the Father waiting any longer."

"An official visit?"

"Perhaps."

"Officially speaking, we have no authority here."

“Officially speaking, we’re just lost and looking for someone to direct us back to Phoenix..”

"I imagine the good Father Alvarez knows you almost as well as you know him."

"So?"

"He knows for damn sure you're not a tourist."

The jeep slowly and meticulously bounced its way past the brittle thickets of prickly pear and cottonwood stumps, clinging stubbornly to a land that seldom tasted either water or rain. The harsh, gray wasteland around the little mission outpost gave little shade, no relief, and only sparse shelter to the fools who had tried to tame it.

For centuries, wayfarers had cursed the desert of the dead. It would be difficult for Paul Mitchell to dispute them. The sun was gone, and darkness veiled but had not cooled the landscape. The heat rising off the ground was suffocating, and sweat lay in wet beads against his face.

Draper ignored the dirt roadway. It was impassable anyway. He cut straight across the flatlands, and it took less than seven minutes to arrive at the compound. As the jeep groaned reluctantly to a stop beside the metal building, Mitchell could see every eye in the place watching them. Uneasiness crawled down his spine. His nerves were taut, and he reached in his pocket for a package of Rolaids that he ate like candy.

"A man could get paranoid around here," he said softly to Draper.

"There's no reason to be paranoid."

"Why not?"

"You don’t have to think about any of these bastards being out to get you. That's not even a consideration. They'd kill you and never blink."

"Only if they have a reason."

"They've got a reason."

"What's that?"

"You're wearing a new pair of shoes, aren't you?"

"Alligator."

"Look around you.”

Mitchell did.

“They're barefooted," Draper said.

Mitchell forced a grin and swung out of the jeep. The evening wind had picked up slightly, and the faint hint of a new moon hung wearily from the ragged corner of a western thunderhead rising above the moonscape, too thin to promise any rain. He stared out at the solemn faces staring back at him, black eyes, angry eyes, sad eyes, wild eyes, eyes that cut into him like dagger points. No one moved. Most of the Mexican laborers sat on the front porches of run-down huts, their shirts unbuttoned, doing what they could to combat the oppressive heat that hung in their throats like alkali dust. None of them had bathed for days, maybe weeks. They were grizzled silhouettes huddled beneath a dim yellow light bulb that dangled precariously from a frayed electrical cord, wrapped around the rotting end of the rafters.

Children with dirty diapers squatted beside them. Babies cried from somewhere inside the wooden huts. Chickens scratched tirelessly in the dry dirt, barely visible in the sliver of moonlight. Before the week had ended, most of them would be eaten, including skin, brains, gizzards and necks. The yard was already scattered with feathers, and the sickening aroma of burning fat filtered across the compound. An old woman was singing a lullaby. Maybe she was young. It was difficult to tell anymore. Her teeth were rotting, and an unforgiving sun had aged, then wrinkled her skin. A dog growled. It had one eye, and the gnats were crawling in and out of the empty socket.

Mitchell caught his breath. Draper turned to catch a fresh breath of air. There was none. Normal men would have thrown up. Neither of them heard the soft footsteps of Father James Alvarez as he walked up quietly behind them.

"May I help you gentlemen?" he asked.

Mitchell turned slowly and smiled broadly as though he had just heard the voice of a long lost friend. It was merely a reflex. Draper leaned against the jeep and reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He did not smoke, but there were times when he felt more comfortable holding something in his hands. He preferred his service revolver, but that, he knew, was no way to greet a priest, a man of God, regardless of Father Alvarez's political persuasion. Draper opted for the cigarette instead.

Mitchell introduced himself and Draper, fishing a military-issue wallet out of his hip pocket, shuffling through a wad of papers, and handing Father Alvarez a business card. "I'm with the government," was all he said.

The priest barely glanced at the card. "With the immigration service, I suppose," he answered.

Mitchell nodded and adjusted his glasses. As far as he was concerned, Father Alvarez could believe any damn thing he wanted to. "We'd like to look over your facility here, if you don’t mind, of course."

"That's been done before."

"Not by me."

Father James Alvarez shrugged wearily. He was much smaller than Mitchell had anticipated, with a thin, hatchet face and wavy gray hair that had grown down almost to his slumping shoulders. He barely weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and the wrinkled skin on his face was parched from too many days in the desert sun. His robe was faded and threadbare, his sandals made from goat's leather. Father James Alvarez could have been a beggar on any street corner of two countries, but the absolute power he possessed was revealed by the smoldering fire hidden behind eyes the color of ash.

There was an unmistakable hint of amusement in his soft, unwavering voice. He obviously did not believe Mitchell at all. Father Alvarez smiled and gestured dramatically toward the compound. "You, sir, are welcome to stay as long as you like, but I'm afraid that you won't be impressed with what you find here," he said. "I'm just a poor priest. This is a poor parish. And the people you see at the shelter here are even poorer. I have little. They have less. But we all share what we have together."

Mitchell's smile did not betray the frustration, the anger boiling up inside him. He tightened the tie around his neck, scratching the sunburn until his neck was raw.

Draper kept chewing on the tip of his unlit, unfiltered cigarette, his eyes slowly and methodically searching every nook and cranny in a cluster of huts that looked to him, for all the world, like a refugee camp. He had seen them in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Middle East. They were all the same, and he hated every damn one of them. Just about the time a man, a soldier, felt compassion for the huddled masses who lived there, one of them would rise up and slit his throat. Draper knew. He had seen it. More than once.

Mitchell walked away, heading toward the open doorway of the metal building. He stopped suddenly at the edge of a hut, beside a sad little flower garden, the only touch of refinement in the whole shelter. And now even the flowers, illuminated by the harsh glare of a naked light bulb, were dying. He nodded at a family of eight perched on the steps. "Where are these people from?" he asked.

Father Alvarez's answer was a whisper. "I never ask those who come to sleep beneath my roof where they are from or where they are going," the priest said. "That is their business. It is not mine."

"I presume they didn't come from your parish."

"They are now part of my parish."

"But they didn't come from here."

"You presume correctly."

"From Mexico?"

"Maybe."

"From Nicaragua?"

"Perhaps."

"They’re illegal, Father. You know that, of course."

The look on the priest's face was one of genuine compassion. "Who says they are illegal, Mister Mitchell?"

"The law does."

"Who made the law?" Father Alvarez answered his own question. "Man made the law. It is one that our conscience can not condone. I am bound to follow the words that a higher source laid down for us, to love our neighbor as ourselves. That's all. That should not be too difficult for you to do, Mister Mitchell."

"God gave us the right to make our own laws," Mitchell countered.

"But not if those laws are enacted to hurt his children, and we are all his children, you know."

Mitchell's smile flickered, then vanished in shadows left by the dim yellow light bulb wavering nervously in a stilted wind. He preferred an enemy he could fight. There were no weapons he could use against a man of the cloth.

The priest waited for Mitchell to answer in a chess game of wills where the man who spoke last almost always won. The silence between them was drawn out, then awkward, so Father Alvarez continued talking: "There are many here who are hungry and have no jobs. They stay awhile, then move on. They do the work that no one else wants to do. For them, waiting tables in a rich man's cafe is a career, and minimum wage is a fortune. It puts them on easy street, as you say. There is one family here – a man, his wife and two daughters – who escaped the death squads of their homeland. They cannot go back home. To go back home is to die."

"On this side of the border, we have no place for them."

"Their own country has no place for them. Your laws say they are illegal, Mister Mitchell. But they are coming anyway. You catch them. You send them back. But that doesn't stop them. They will only come back, and many of them come here first." A deep sadness was etched in Father Alvarez's eyes. He said, "You disapprove of my shelter at St. Ignatius. I know you do. I can see it written on your face. But I can put two hundred of these misbegotten people here each night, or you will have two hundred roaming your precious streets, raiding your trash cans. I feed them, Mister Mitchell. On the streets, they steal when they are hungry. The risks they take to enter the United States are great. But they believe that the promise of work is worth the risk."

Mitchell shook his head. He was not impressed. "Somehow, some way, this has all got to stop," he said coldly.

"What are you afraid of, Mister Mitchell? That one of these poor, uneducated people will come over here and take your job, steal your car, marry your daughter, rape your wife? Which is it, Mister Mitchell. What are you afraid of?"

Without a word, Paul Mitchell, flanked by General Draper, pushed his way into the metal building. The stench was unbearable. So was the heat. The noises inside came from the innards of hell itself. A dozen or more army cots, wrapped in dirty sheets and blood-stained towels, lined the far wall. The men lying upon them were old and not so old, and they had stuffed pillows in their mouths to muffle the sounds of their screams. There were prayers and curses, and it was difficult to tell the difference between them.

Father Alvarez took Mitchell gently by the arm and led him to the farthest cot on the left. "This is Miguel," he said. "His last name is unimportant. He is twenty-six years old. He lost a leg trying to make his way to a new life."

Miguel's face was burning with fever, and the muscles in his body had begun to quiver with a convulsion he could not control. Father Alvarez dampened a rag with cool water and washed the sweat but not the pain from his eyes.

"What happened?" Mitchell asked, more out of curiosity than concern.

"He paid four hundred dollars for a coyote to bring him across the border. His brother had made it to Miami a year earlier, and he wrote Miguel, saying there was a job waiting for him if he could just get out of Mexico. He had been working in a clothing factory, making seventy cents a day, but the factory closed down, so, I'm afraid, Miguel had no other choice."

"How in God's name did a poor fool with empty pockets get the four hundred dollars?" Mitchell wanted to know.

The priest shrugged as though he did not care. "Maybe he stole it," he said softly. "It really doesn't matter." Father Alvarez took Miguel's hand and squeezed it. The smile on the man's tortured face lasted only a second before the pain returned to take it away.

Father Alvarez continued, "He reached Maricopa in the back of a florist's van, then caught a freight train heading north. Miguel was riding between the box cars, out of sight in case the lantern man came looking for strays. About ten miles out of Maricopa, the train suddenly changed speeds. The couplers holding the box cars together slammed into each other and pinned Miguel's right leg. He saw his foot fall onto the tracks below him, and when the train changed speeds again, it threw Miguel off. A rancher found him lying unconscious on the desert and brought him to the shelter."

"Why didn't he take Miguel on to the hospital?"

The priest raised his eyebrows, surprised that Mitchell would ask such a foolish question. "The rancher did not want Miguel to die," he said. "But then again, he did not want to have to pay for Miguel to live."

"Is the kid going to make it?"

"God makes those decisions. Not I."

Both men stared for a long time into Miguel's fevered face. "Is this," the priest repeated, "what you are afraid of, Mister Mitchell?"

Paul Mitchell reached down and gently touched Miguel's ragged shirt, soaked with sweat. The man's skin felt as though it were on fire. Mitchell's fingers moved beneath Miguel's armpits, and he felt one lump, then two, sewn into the unbleached cotton fabric. Without warning, he ripped both lumps out of the shirt. Miguel screamed. The pain seared his ragged nerve ends. Miguel screamed again.

"Jesus." Father Alvarez leaped at Mitchell to stop him.

Draper grabbed the little priest by his collar and slung him hard to the ground. Slowly tearing open the plastic lumps with his fingernails and sprinkling a delicate white powder on the dirt floor beside him, Mitchell looked down at Father Alvarez. "That, sir," is what the hell I'm afraid of," he said.

The priest tried to speak but choked on his own spittle.

"Now, at least, you know how Miguel got his four hundred dollars to buy his way to Arizona." Mitchell's voice was cold and harsh. "The son of a bitch was a dope dealer." He paused long enough to grind the cocaine into the dirt with the heel of his shoe. "The son of a bitch is a drug smuggler, and he was gonna sell the goddam stuff to all of God's children, padre. He'd screwed up his own life. Now he was gonna screw up theirs.”

Mitchell glanced back at Miguel, lying crumpled on the cot, his body wracked with pain, clawing madly at the stump where once his leg had been. "Frankly," he said, "I hope the son of a bitch bleeds to death."

Miguel was making noises that sounded like a wounded animal caught in a steel trap as Paul Mitchell walked out into the night. The heat was unbearable, considering the darkness of a new moon. He stopped just long enough to urinate on the flower garden before climbing back into the jeep and waiting on General Donald Draper to drive him someplace where the tequila was cold and, if at all possible, where the girls had long, silky legs glistening beneath a coat of hand-rubbed imported oils.

Chapter 15

AS SOON AS he returned to his hotel room, Andrews St. Aubin turned on the lamp beside his bed, watching the harsh glare chase away any splinters of darkness that had congregated in the corner and on the wall. He preferred light, real or electric.

The dead man preferred the refuge and the shelter of darkness. St. Aubin and the night had spent a lot of time together. They were old acquaintances, but never friends, and the night smelled like the sordid streets of Kosovo in the midnight hour when the dead man died, as cold as the snow and ice that turned red beneath a street lamp that was the only witness to his dying.

St. Aubin glanced past the curtain and down on an empty street one last time, then picked up a Bible that some Gideon had left in the top drawer of the writing desk. St. Aubin studied its pages, scanning scriptures that were familiar to him and passages that were as foreign as if they had never been translated from their original Greek letters.

He stumbled across Luke 21:25 and began reading:

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;

Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory...

John 14:3 told him:

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

And the First Epistle of Thessalonians revealed:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first....the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.

Andrews St. Aubin rubbed his weary eyes, burning from lack of sleep. The promise was there all right. It had been for centuries. Preachers, especially those who liked to prophesy in the glare of late-night television lights, had spent their entire careers and pocketed small fortunes without ever straying too far from those particular scriptures.

Most believed the promises were true, no matter how far-fetched they might sound to a man with a memory as empty as his past. But, try as he might, Anrews St. Aubin could not find any reference, no matter how vague or oblique, of the Good Lord telling anyone at any time that when he returned to earth he would be setting up his new world ministry in Mexico.

So what was Danny B. bringing home, and why didn't it arrive home with him? Did he die because of what he had found and what he knew? Or did he die for an entirely different reason, still possessing a secret known only to Danny B. and the angels?

Mexico had long been a country of confessions, confusion, and contradictions. All Andrews St. Aubin had were questions that only the dead could answer. What would he find that had been smuggled from the innards of Mexico, and where should he go to find it? Whom would he have to kill in order to get it? Why did he even contemplate killing someone? Had he pulled the trigger before? And had the dead man come to carry him back to nirvana, or wherever men went when they traded their last breath for a hole in the ground? St. Aubin thought a lot about that godforsaken hole in the ground.

Andrews St. Aubin lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He should retire and get out of this shadowy kind of existence, St. Aubin told himself. Leave Brockleman to fill up his columns of travel advertising with somebody else's fool words. Teach the art of writing in some small, out-of-the way college that probably wouldn’t hire him as soon as they discovered his diploma was a forgery. It would be nice, he thought, to hide behind the peaceful and hallowed walls of academia where not even the dead man could force his way inside. Maybe he should take it easy like the doctor told him to do. Then again, all he knew about writing was the unprincipled art of jamming one word against another, throwing in a prepositional phrase every now and then, and, when in doubt, dangling a participle like some noose above the gallows. How could he teach writing?

St. Aubin was only thirty-seven, if the age on his job application was correct, which he doubted, but he was already getting far too old to keep chasing rumors and dodging a dead man who would follow him to the ends of the earth. It wasn't good for his health anymore. St. Aubin laughed quietly. Hell, it had never been good for his health.

At the moment, he would be a lot better off wading a cold mountain stream somewhere up in the Colorado high country, popping the shoreline with a hand-tied fly, in search of the elusive trout. Richard Brockleman would probably even buy him a remote mountain cabin up in the Rockies, but not until he knew what had happened to Danny B. and if, or when, Christ had ever preached a sermon on a mount in Mexico.

Chapter 16

FATHER JAMES ALVAREZ had never believed in miracles even though his denial of their existence was regarded by most brethren within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as bordering on heresy. He had, without complaining, served faithfully and dutifully as pastor of a small Catholic Church outside of Gallup, New Mexico, for more than three decades, before turning his back on the hierarchy of the church and building a roof on the rock ruins that became St. Ignatius. Often during those tumultuous years, when he was sick, depressed, or had consumed too much wine after communion, he even doubted the reality, much less the promises, of a loving God.

The aging padre always admitted, even to himself, even during the hardest of times, that the earth had surely been shaped by the magnificent hands of a Supreme Being. No one in the scientific community had ever proved otherwise, no matter how hard they tried. But it was obvious to him that the Entity who ruled over the universe certainly had a passionate dislike for the creatures he scattered across the earth. They were constantly afflicted with poverty and disease. Their bodies grew old; their minds became senile. The strong withered. Babies disturbed the night, crying with hunger. Men walked the filthy sidewalks of filthy towns in search of work, no matter how filthy it might be, and there were no jobs to be found. Women, young and old alike, stayed home and gave birth to babies they could not feed, and many of the babies died with skinny arms and bloated bellies. But most grew up to walk the filthy sidewalks of filthy towns, or stay home and hold little babies of their own, babies who were children among the most fortunate if they died young without ever understanding how hopeless their lives were destined to be.

For his last three years in Gallup, Father James Alvarez had been too discouraged to pray. He would kneel beside his bed at night, close his tired eyes, and quote the same scriptures he had learned as a small boy in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. But no words of praise ever came from his heart. He had no prayer at all for an Entity with a warped sense of humor, a God who would place living, breathing creatures on a corrupted earth, then forsake and desert them, or leave their legs crippled with arthritis as he had James Alvarez.

He hated God. He cursed God. He waited every day to be struck down by God's wrath. While he waited for the end to come, and surely it must come soon, Father James Alvarez patiently continued his duties in the church, preaching sermons on peace and love that he no longer believed, marrying the young and sexually eager, baptizing their children, and burying them long before their time, conducting funeral after funeral, and wondering why he had not yet been the guest of honor at his own.

God, he finally decided after three days of fasting and thoughtful meditation, was either patient or blind or did not give a damn about what he, the good, agnostic Father James Alvarez thought or did. On his fifty-ninth birthday, weary of heart and weak of spirit, the padre took an unexpected leave from the church and journeyed to the sanctuary of Chimayo in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico in an effort to flee the poverty and disease and misery that had imprisoned him for so long. He suffered when those in his congregation suffered, and there was no relief for either of them.

He mourned when they mourned. He cried their tears for them. He gave them money, and they gave him their burdens. He clothed them. He fed them. He counseled them, even though he could not pray for them. He heard their confessions. He forgave them, even if the Supreme Being didn't. He was willing to die for them, but God would not let him.

The padre had not been able to sleep that hot, sultry night in Chimayo, even though the bed full of lumps in his cheap, ten-dollar-a-night hotel room was the softest he had ever felt. Perhaps the mattress of feathers was too soft. Perhaps too many of the unholy and unwashed had committed their sins upon it. Perhaps he could not sleep because he felt guilty, lying in trappings of luxury while those who were suffering back on the outskirts of Gallup faced the night with hollow, hungry eyes and only a dirt floor on which to lie.

When Father James Alvarez glanced at the clock on the table beside his bed, it was sixteen minutes before five o'clock, and the darkness that lay heavy outside his window mirrored his own worsening state of depression. The September moon was having trouble fighting its way through a thunderhead that thickened in the sky, and the ceiling fan lost its battle with the heat that sweltered around him. The padre grunted with a throbbing pain as he pulled on his threadbare, cotton slacks, forcing them over a pair of arthritic knees. Too many washings had changed their color from black to granite gray. His shirt was dingy and wrinkled, but that did not matter to him. He made a last feeble effort to straighten his clerical collar, reached for his carved oak cane, and limped out of his room, catching an elevator at the far end of the hallway. He rode a single floor down to the empty lobby of the hotel. He no longer remembered its name.

The streets outside were empty. It was that rare hour of the morning when the night people had all slipped back into the shadows and gone to their shelters, and the sun was not yet shaking the day people out of their beds. The priest began slowly walking toward a lamp post where ragged patterns of light touched the sidewalk like broken shards of glass. He had no idea where he was going or how to get there. Father James Alvarez merely stumbled along, and the wind blew cool against the sweat on his narrow, pinched face. His thinning gray hair had grown much too long, and it was uncombed, falling down across his pale blue eyes. His legs hurt, but he ignored them. They always ached, day and night, awake or sleeping, standing or sitting.

It was, he decided long ago, simply God's own way of letting him know how vulnerable and useless he really was. The sun was just beginning to crease the lower edge of the thunderhead, streaking the clouds with various shades of pink and purple, when Father James Alvarez turned down the avenue that led toward the aging Sanctuario. The sight unfolding before him startled the pastor of St. Ignatius. For years, he had heard odd tales about the sacred pilgrimage to a place called the Lourdes of America. He had never witnessed it in person before. He suddenly found his breaths coming in short and labored gasps, and the stifling humidity of the September night air had nothing to do with it.

Hundreds – even at that unearthly hour of the morning – were down on their knees, their faces buried in the dust that was blowing gently across the hard ground leading to the sanctuary, the rich and the poor, mostly the poor, and, mostly, they had been crying. As Father Alvarez knew, they had come to pray, to thank, to ask, to meditate, to fulfill a promise and find healing upon the holy dirt that lay beneath them.

They were the penitent who had draped the old chapel with flowers, who were now beginning their slow, painful journey beneath the adobe archway, crawling on their knees a foot at a time, often merely an inch at a time, gradually working their way inside and down the aisle toward the altar of miracles. Behind them, they were leaving a tiny trail of blood and skin torn by the harsh rocks of the courtyard. It was, the padre had been told during his early training years, a small price to pay for prayers answered by a God who never paid any attention to a priest and his small church outside of Gallup.

There was, Father Alvarez had been told, no more sacred spot than the holy Shrine at Chimayo. He knew the story well. It was an integral part of the church's lore, almost mythical in nature, a belief that dangled somewhere between truth and superstition.

The original chapel had been built in 1813 upon ground held sacred for its healing powers by the Tewa Indians. Decades later, during Holy Week, a friar, during a solitary time of pennance back among the surrounding hills noticed a light burning atop the earth. With his bare hands, he dug up a crucifix and carried it back to the small church. When a new day broke, the crucifix was gone. It lay again upon the same holy ground. Twice the friar took the crucifix to the chapel. Twice more it mysteriously disappeared. The friar, curious and perplexed, decided that a higher power was calling him to build a new church upon the revered patch of earth to house the crucifix. It would be known as the Shrine of Chimayo. The soil beneath him had been blessed. It would cure all who came to baptize their spirit and their infirmities in a holy dirt.

Father James Alvarez saw the parade of humanity enter the chapel and followed them, mesmerized by their chants, their moans, bubbling from deep within their throats. He saw their tears drop upon the stones of the courtyard, stones that rubbed raw the flesh of their trembling hands and knees, stones stained by blood, both fresh and dried by the ages. For many, it was as though the Santuario of Chimayo was their last hope. Maybe it was their only hope. Then Father James Alvarez found himself on his knees, too, and he cried out in pain as his arthritic joints struggled to pull his frail body into the sanctuary whose adobe walls were lined with religious artifacts, pictures, and crucifixes. In a far corner were stacked canes and crutches. The cured no longer needed them.

He found himself amidst a multitude. He felt as if he were alone, lost somewhere in a vast and barren wasteland, and the sun parted the clouds, reaching down like an ancient dagger to pierce the nerves between his shoulder blades. Before him, Father Alvarez saw a small hole in the floor. He reached inside and brought a handful of holy dirt from the posito, scattered it on the floor, and lay his weary, unbelieving body across a patch of earth blessed so long ago by an unseen hand.

"Jesus," he said. And the way he said, "Jesus," startled him. It was a prayer. Father James Alvarez had forgotten how to pray. "Jesus." He said it again.

Lying on his back in the chilled, dim light of a sanctuary untouched by the sun, Father James Alvarez tried to stand but could not move. The multitudes had gone with the day and left him alone. He lay for hours, the smell of the blessed earth thick in his nostrils. He saw the face on the crucifix smile. No, he told himself as his hands began to tremble, it was not the man on the cross. It was something or someone else whose image had been captured in upon the walls of Chimayo.

"This is my son," the padre thought he heard the crucifix say, but the chapel was hushed with silence, and no one was speaking.

The room was dark, but the face glowed as though it had been encircled by an array of translucent candles. It was radiant, its skin fair and without blemish, and long blond hair fell around the shoulders of a man whose robe shimmered as though its threads were spun from the rays of the sun. His beard was as blond as his hair, and his eyes shone so brightly they could turn night into day.

The Radiant One who had no name stood above him, his arms outstretched, and there were scars Roman spikes in the palms of his hands. It was then that Father James Alvarez heard a voice speak in an unknown tongue. The words were foreign to his ears, but he understood every word that the voice said.

"Go, James Alvarez," the voice had said, soft and as gentle as the warm touch of a summer wind. "My people are poor. They are so depressed. They are hungry, and they are dying. The time has come to dry their eyes, James Alvarez. My people are coming to you. Prepare for them. Prepare a way for them. Prepare for their deliverance. For you are the chosen one, James Alvarez. You will carry their light in a time of darkness, give them hope when they have none of their own. Go now and prepare for them a place of refuge in a strange land. This is my message to you as it was to another so long ago. I will not leave you nor forsake you. When the time is right, I will give you a sign. These who are your people will have walked upon a land where the Son of Man has walked, for as he walked among the poor and the lost, so will they, for they are the poor and the lost."

The priest waited, not daring to breathe, afraid it would break the spell, for he was indeed in the presence of God. The eyes were stern, yet merciful. The face was as old as the beginning of time. Yet it had not aged. The words were a commandment.

Finally, James Alvarez heard himself speak in a voice he barely recognized, one separate and apart from his soul. "Are you the Son of Man?"

"I am as I have always been, the I Am. When my people are oppressed and troubled, I come to them, for I will not forsake them nor leave them when they call out for me."

James Alvarez felt his heart tremble. Time stood still, and he bowed his head, no longer able to look into the face of the Radiant One. He knew he was not worthy. When he broke the silence, his voice was a whisper, humble and repentant. The earth began to tremble, and the priest was enveloped by a mighty rushing wind that came and left as suddenly as a clap of thunder. For a moment, all light was squeezed from the gray abyss of the old sanctuary.

Father James Alvarez stood, when he was able to stand, and walked back down the aisle, out from beneath the bell towers and toward the sundown. The storm clouds were gone. He walked across the courtyard. He walked up the street. He walked past a priest, much older than he, who was blessing a battered pickup with cackling chickens in the truck bed. He walked past an old woman with a crippled son as they made their way painfully toward the shrine. He walked past a row of parked cars and down a small dirt road. The priest walked up one hill and down another. He had walked almost two miles before he realized he had forgotten his cane and left it inside the Shrine of Chimayo. The pain was gone. His arthritic joints were as new, no longer stiff, no longer twisted. Father James Alvarez fell on his knees, and, for the first time in years, did not hear them crack.

Within days, everyone within shouting distance of the little church on the outskirts of Gallup had heard of the miracle. Parishoners came to view the aging priest who no longer walked with a limp. They came to hear the words he whispered at mass, to take his holy sacraments because it was his hands that broke the bread and poured the wine, to touch his knees, to wipe the sweat off his brow and rub it on their own faces, hoping that the miracle would somehow fall upon them as well.

Father James Alvarez was a changed man and a man most miserable. He no longer doubted the power, the compassion of the Radiant One who, if he were indeed the Son of Man, had walked across the land of the poor, a dusty desert far beyond the river that bore his own footprints. The priest did not question the words he had heard, the mission he had been given. He did not understand them. But he did not doubt them. Believers never do. The old priest had heard the words spoken from the crucifix. He heard them still, even in the quiet hours of night, even when there was no one in the little rectory with him. They were a burden. They were a blessing.

"My people are coming to you, James Alvarez," the voice kept assuring him. "Prepare for them."

“Why have they not yet come?” he prayed.

“They walk another road.”

“But I am here.”

“They walk another road,” the voice said again.

“Where does it lead?”

“Where the road ends. There, a new life begins.”

“A church?”

“The church no longer knows you.”

“Then what will it be?”

“For you, nothing. For them, a city of hope.”

“I cannot find it.”

“If you look for it, I will lead you.”

Father James Alvarez left Gallup without saying goodbye. His congregation sat on the pews Sunday morning, and the pulpit was vacant.

“He is sick,” some said.

“He is dead,” some said.

“No,” said another. “He is gone.”

“What shall we do?”

“Wait.”

“For the Father to return?”

“For the church to send another.

The early sunrise caught Father Alvarez alone in the pasture of dried, brittle grasses clustered beside a ravine that once held the running waters of Copper Creek. The stream bed was dry. The field beyond was empty, and the stock pond had become nothing more than a misshapen bowl of cracked mud. The road had ended. At the edge of the ravine, it had come to an abrupt stop. Sometime the day before, Father Alvarez had steered his old brown Cutlass out of New Mexico. He wasn’t for sure, but he figured he was probably in Arizona. He spent more time with the Bible than a road map, and, for so long, he had not believed in one or trusted the other. He had no idea why he drove west and into the glare of a setting sun. Perhaps it was the light that drew him down one highway and finally to a road that led nowhere.

The motor had died with a single cough. The radiator was steaming. A hose had busted, and Copper Creek was without water. Father Alvarez leaned against the hood of the car and glanced around him. There were no signs of any kind, only the ruins of old rock and adobe buildings in a town that had drawn its last breath generations ago. When the sun reflected off the windows of an old rancher’s mansion, the crumbling structure resembled a church. All it needed was a roof.

Father Alvarez smiled.

He was home.

He gazed back down the road and wondered when the people would come and how they would find him.

He shouldn’t worry, he knew.

The Radiant One would lead them to him.

He sighed and brushed the dust from his clothes. The heat did not bother him. He had felt it all before. It was time to get to work.

Hour after hour, he drove gnarled and weathered stakes into the hard ground, and as the days passed, a primitive building began to rise up behind a thicket of cottonwoods and bull nettle. The lumber was old. Much of it had been retrieved from the city dump on the backside of Tucson, and some of it was rotting away.

Father James Alvarez, however, did not appear to notice. He dug a shallow well, poured enough water into the radiator to keep the decrepit old Cutlass running back and forth from the mission to Tucson, and he kept hammering the compound together with rusty nails as the summer heat sweltered up around him. It would have a kitchen, he decided, and a few cots if he could find them free or perhaps cheaper. At night, he sat in a crooked doorway and looked across the empty country, waiting for people, whoever they might be, to find their way to a ragged little city of hope, wondering who they were and what was taking them so long. His rusting money box lay open beside him. It, like the landscape around him, was growing empty. He had no idea how to fill it up again.

Enrique Chavez arrived first.

The priest literally stumbled across him early one morning while the darkness still lay like an oppressive shadow upon the land. The young man had climbed through an open window of the ramshackle building sometime during the night, and he lay curled up and asleep on the dirt floor. His black hair was unruly and matted, and the wrinkles in his shirt were caked with sweat and dust. His sandals were torn and much too large for his slender feet. And the young vagabond awoke with a start when Father Alvarez knelt and gently touched his shoulder. He immediately was on his feet and ready to run, his eyes as wide, his muscles as tense, as a trapped animal.

The priest smiled and motioned for him to relax and stay where he was. "There is no reason for you to run, my son," the padre said softly.

"Who are you?" The young man's jaws were clenched tightly, and his eyes were darting wildly around the big, empty room.

"Father James Alvarez."

The young man instinctively crossed himself. "Are you the pastor of the church I saw up the road?" he wanted to know.

"That I am."

"What are you going to do with me?"

The priest smiled again. He could see the distinct signs of hunger buried deep in the young man's frightened eyes. "Have you had breakfast?"

"No, Father."

"When was the last time you ate?"

"Yesterday. Maybe the day before. I don't remember."

"Will you be so kind as to join me then? I spend so much time by myself that I'd rather not eat alone."

"Join you where?"

"At the rectory."

The young man glanced furtively at the doorway. He could see the first gray streaks of daylight reaching slowly across the ground outside. He fell back to his knees, cowering again in the corner. His hands were trembling as he brushed a knot of unruly hair out of his eyes.

"I can eat someplace else," he mumbled. "Later."

"Are you afraid to be seen?" the priest asked.

The young man turned away.

"Then I will join you here. Wait for me." Father James Alvarez stood and walked briskly toward the door. He returned twenty minutes later, carrying two sacks, each filled with flour tortillas, wrapped around scrambled eggs, goat cheese and chorizos. A large thermos of black coffee had been shoved under his arm, and he walked through the door, wondering if the frightened young man would be gone.

The young man had not moved at all. His name, he said, was Enrique Chavez. He had been traveling for days on foot, mostly at night, moving steadily toward the border, trying to escape his little village of Huandacaro.

"There is no money there," Enrique explained between bites. "There is very little food. The old men are dying. The young men are leaving. The babies are crying. I am too old to cry anymore."

"Where are you headed?"

"North. To this country."

"Why?"

"To find a job." Enrique shrugged matter-of-factly. "I have no job back home. I work on my cousin's pig farm, but his children were hungry, and now the pigs are gone, and he does not need me, and he can not pay me anyway."

"But you cannot stay in this country."'

"There is work here." Enrique smiled for the first time. "My brother worked in a restaurant in Phoenix,” he said, and his words began to run together as excitement crept into his voice. "And my brother, he made ten dollars a day and sent money back home to my mama, and nobody in my family has ever made so much as ten dollars in a single day before." Enrique wiped the grease from his lips. "Now I am old enough to come here and be rich, like my brother, and I can send money back home, and my mama, she will be proud of me, too."

"But you can't stay in this country," Father Alvarez repeated. "There are such things as immigration laws which say you can't simply go as you please back and forth across the river. Your citizenship is in Mexico. It's not here."

"I can stay until somebody finds me."

"You're breaking the law, you know."

"I cannot be worried about your law."

"But you will be arrested and jailed."

The fear had died away in Enrique's eyes. A full stomach had given him confidence again. "It is better to be arrested here than starve back in Huandacaro," he said as though he had no other alternatives to consider.

By nightfall, Enrique Chavez was gone. Father Alvarez stood in the doorway of the primitive building, watching until the young man had vanished from view, cutting past a stand of Saguaro Cactus as the approaching shelter of darkness chased the sun from an unclouded Western sky.

Word spread quickly along the border. In the land to the north, there was a kindly priest who had built a refuge, a way station for those who dared to smuggle themselves onto foreign soil, searching for a job in a land that had many jobs for ten dollars a day.

The priest had prepared for them a place to sleep at night. It wasn't comfortable, perhaps, but it was dry, and it put a roof over their heads, and they were safe as long as they gathered at the place of the cross. Father James Alvarez kept their secrets to himself as though they were his own, and down in the poverty-stricken heart of Old Mexico, his village became known as the Holy City of Hope.

At first, only a few dared to venture to St. Ignatius Catholic Church. Then the immigrants came by the hundreds to the place Father Alvarez had built for them, and the priest no longer heard the holy voice of the Radiant One speaking to him. Some stayed for a night, some for a week, and, working together, they hauled lumber from the city dump to build more shelters upon the pasture. In time, Father Alvarez became the good shepherd for the lost and the wayward who were either labeled as illegal aliens or goddam wetbacks, depending entirely on whether the words were being spoken by a politician or a rancher.

The Radiant One had given Father Alvarez a mission. He was to prepare a place for the people at the end of the road. The Radiant One had wanted them fed but had not given him any money to buy food. His church was small and impoverished. The members of his congregation could barely feed themselves and their own families. And the padre grew weary of lying awake at night, haunted by the crying of the babies who had no milk.

It was on a September morning, cooler than usual, when the package arrived for him. It was wrapped in plain brown paper, and wadded up inside were two thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills. There was no name to be found anywhere on the package, no return address.

It was given to him by an unemployed laborer who had lost a hand during the Mexico City earthquake. The man, who called himself Ricardo, looked far older than his thirty-two years, and his face was gnarled and pockmarked by acne scars. His arms bore the festering needle scars of a heroin addict. His hand-me-down clothes were worn and unwashed, but his shoes were new, and he appeared unable to look Father James Alvarez in the eyes when he spoke.

"Where did you get the package?" the priest asked him when the brown paper bag had been placed in his hands.

"In the Zocalo. For weeks I had been sleeping in an alley beside the plaza, stealing from the trash cans behind the restaurants of the Zona Rosa." Ricardo slumped into a lumpy chair with broken springs, donated by some ladies from a Tucson bridge and garden club.

"Who gave it to you?"

Ricardo shrugged. "I don't know. This man, he was old and gray, and he woke me one afternoon, and he gave me this package, and he told me to find you, that you would help me, and you would use what was in the package to help others."

"Didn't you think his request was somewhat out of the ordinary?"

Ricardo shrugged again and reached for a handful of cold, greasy French fries that someone had left on a plate beside the chair. "What is ordinary?" Ricardo's laugh was empty and full of self pity. "Nothing is ordinary," he said. "Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us anymore."

"Had you ever seen the man before?"

"Which man?"

"The old, gray-haired man who gave you this package."

"Everyone becomes old and gray."

"He didn't give you a name?"

"Maybe he didn't have a name." Ricardo licked the grease off his fingers. "All I know is that I was hungry, and I had no place to work and nowhere to go, and he gave me new shoes, your name, and a bus ticket as far north as the bus would go before it stopped at the border. The fence was not difficult to climb, not even for a man with one arm. He wanted you to have this, and now you have it. That's all I know."

"Weren't you curious?"

"Maybe." Ricardo shrugged. "But a man who asks no questions stays alive much longer in Mexico City," he said.

Father James Alvarez frowned. "Did this old, gray-haired man you met perhaps tell you anything else?" he asked, choosing his words slowly.

Ricardo nodded.

"What did he tell you?"

"He told me that he worked at a meat packing plant somewhere in a little village outside of Mexico City. I don't remember where, but I do remember he had splotches of blood on his shirt, and he had the stench of slaughtered animals on him." Ricardo suddenly shivered, and he clenched his fists to keep his hands from trembling. He looked away, saying, "And he told me that if I opened the package before I gave it to you, he would find me and hang me up with the carcasses of the cattle he had butchered."

The priest was alone when he tore the brown paper package apart, and he thought he felt his heart stop when the first batch of fifty-dollar bills fell from the bag and began tumbling to the floor at his feet. Father James Alvarez dropped to his knees, groping with both hands like a mad man, scraping up more money than he had ever seen or held before. His prayer of thanksgiving was filled with fear, and he hoped to God that he would hear the holy voice of the Radiant One again. The room was silent. The money in his hand smelled like blood.

Every month thereafter, promptly on the second Tuesday, usually after three o'clock in the afternoon, a non-descript little brown paper package would arrive at the church sanctuary, always brought by someone new who was looking for a place to hide away in the night. None of them knew who had sent it. A taxi driver in Alamos had given the package to one. A hotel clerk in Hermasillo had given it to another. A bartender in Mazatlan had passed it on to a third.

During those early months, Father James Alvarez spent many sleepless nights wondering who had heard of him, who had known of his work, who on earth could be sending him so much money. Then, like hunger pains after a good meal, the curiosity passed. The money was always on time. And that, in reality, was all that mattered. In time, it even began to lose the smell of blood. No one could explain the unexpected gift to him. After four months, he no longer even asked for an explanation. Maybe there was no explanation. The signs and wonders of God Almighty were like that sometimes, he told himself. Even the holy scriptures said they were.

So every time the brown paper package arrived at his Holy City of Hope, his halfway house for the damned, Father James Alvarez simply smiled his gratitude, bought milk for the babies who cried in the early morning hours, put shoes on the barefooted, gave them all a cot to sleep in for a night or two, pointed their feet in the direction of jobs that awaited them in the land of the free and home of the brave, and told himself that the brown paper package must indeed be a miracle, a secret known only to himself and the Radiant One.

At times, he found traces of white powder loose in the corner of the packages. He tasted it once, then again, and knew that he was a man blessed among men most blessed. The white powder must have come from the holy one, he told himself, especially when it brought peace and relief on a land that offered neither.

He watched the darkness swallow up the silhouettes of Paul Mitchell and General Donald Draper, listening intently until the whine of the jeep's engine faded away beyond a lone and barren knoll untouched by the threads of moonlight. He felt the same fear that gripped the hearts of those displaced persons who slipped into his shelter in the dead of night, praying they had not been seen and would not be caught. He, too, wanted to run. But unlike them, he had no other place to go. He was where the Radiant One had wanted him to be, and the holy one would protect him or say grace over his grave when the land had been stolen by others.

The men who carried counterfeit cards from a counterfeit immigration agency troubled him. Who were they? He wondered. What did they want? What were they looking for? What did they suspect? They were well aware that illegal aliens, as the government's propaganda called them, were filtering through his Holy City of Hope before scattering throughout the back country, across Arizona, and into Colorado.

But something else was more important to them. What was it?

Father Alvarez shivered even though the night remained sultry. The heat had not been lifted off the desert floor and dissipated by an ill wind that kept blowing through his village of rotting log huts. He knelt and licked the sprinkled grains of white powder off the dirt where it had fallen beside Ricardo's cot.

He dared not spit out the dirt.

He dared not lose the taste of the white powder. He sometimes found it spilled in the sweat-stained sheets that covered old army-issue cots where those seeking jobs in the northland had slept.

The powder did not clear his head nor his conscience, but it eased the heartaches that tortured a lonely priest who was doing all he could and could not do more to obey a holy voice that had spoken aloud to him from an ancient crucifix.

Father Alvarez sat on the porch and stared at the stars until the white powder had time to weave them all together, throwing splinters of light across the dark recesses of a sky that had no beginning and no ending, looking, he knew, much as it did when the hands of a Supreme Being had reached out, scooped up the stars themselves, and molded them like a mud ball above the land upon which he had spent his sixty-some-odd years.

The splinters of light sang to him, and, once, they wrote his name between the clouds just before it rained and left the desert awash with angry floodwaters.

The splinters of light were his solace and his salvation.

The white powder was precious to him.

Chapter 17

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN awoke from a restless and fitful sleep with his mouth as dry as the seared landscape outside his window. He had cheated the dead man once again, but who else on the unknown streets of Phoenix would be waiting for him? Did they know he was in town, and why? To those who had watched Danny B. die, the life of Andrews St. Aubin was as worthless as a burnt tortilla and not nearly as desirable.

St. Aubin knew there was always a first time for everything, a first time for living and dying and meeting the man, face to face, who would send him to meet his maker, provided his maker was still around when he got there. Chances were, he wouldn't be.

St. Aubin ordered flank steak and eggs from room service and got up just long enough to make certain that the thick, velvet drapes were drawn so the dead man would not stare at him through his fourth-story window. Darkness, like life itself, never stayed for long, and St. Aubin watched the first, slender ray of sunlight curl across the mirror and crawl past a patched crack in the plaster wall.

He dressed in his faded jeans and boots, pulling on a red golf shirt with blue and white stripes, picking up his windbreaker, and leaving the room without ever bothering to turn off the lamp that fluttered harshly beside his bed. He shunned the elevator and chose the marble staircase. St. Aubin might be out of breath when he reached the ground floor, but he had never trusted those elevator doors that had a habit of closing around him like the lid of a bronze casket.

He would write:

Even the early mornings of Phoenix had a thousand eyes, as cold as those of a turkey vulture waiting for something or someone to die. They were all seeing, but hardly ever seen, prying in the lingering darkness, hidden in dank shadows, carefully watching and piecing together every scrap of misplaced information they could find, knowing that everything has a price, even if it has no value. Those who paid were those who knew better than to take anything for granted, no matter how innocent or insignificant it might seem to be. The graveyards of Phoenix were full of careless men and women smitten with careless indiscretions.

He would probably never get around to sending the words back to Brockleman, but he wrote them anyway.

Andrews St. Aubin felt as though those thousand eyes were locked on him as he stepped out of the Sheraton, pausing long enough in the stone archway of the lobby for his own eyes to adjust to the new sun. The night had failed to chase away the heat that lingered in the city, and a stale wind only blew half-heartedly down a street that already was smelling of burnt coffee and exhaust fumes.

St. Aubin took a deep breath. He held his hands out in front of him. They were steady again, and he felt the weight of the 9mm Glock 17 hanging heavily inside his rattlesnake belt, hidden by the folds of a black cotton windbreaker.

A taxi was parked beside the curb. its driver either sleeping or drunk. Sometimes it was difficult to tell. A girl smiled his way, but the smile did not reach her eyes. She was short and thick-legged and wore far too much makeup to cover the knife scar on her face. Girls who worked at night were also willing to work in the early morning, but St. Aubin quickly dismissed her and fell in step with the parade of suits and sunglasses that trudged past the park and on toward the Herberger Theatre Center.

He did not see the old, white-haired man who sat on a bench where the dead man had sat, surrounded by pigeons who were fighting over the scattered crumbs that lay at his feet. Sebastian Drabek was easy to overlook. His face was emaciated, nothing more than cracked skin stretched over his gaunt, skeletal features. He weighed less than a hundred pounds, and his second-hand clothes – a white patterned shirt tainted yellow, its sleeves rolled up to the old man's elbows, and brown cotton trousers – fell loosely around his long, bony frame. The leather soles of his shoes had been eaten away by rats from the garbage dump where he slept, and the tattoo of a twisted heart on his left forearm spoke of love that had faded with age.

At the moment, Sebastian Drabek was grinning with the knowledge that the hunger in his belly would soon be satisfied. There was a new face on the streets of Phoenix, a hard face, not the face of a tourist or a businessman at all. The old man had no idea who the stranger was, from where he had come, or why he was out walking the sidewalks of Phoenix during the early hours of a summer morning.

Frankly, Sebastian Drabek did not care. But he knew Lazaro Fuentes would care. Lazaro Fuentes did not like strange faces with piercing eyes that trusted no one and probably had a reason. Lazaro Fuentes would pay good money to find out about them. Maybe five dollars in hard cash money. Maybe ten. Sebastian heard himself giggling, and green spittle oozed out of his toothless mouth, dripping onto the front of his stained hand-me-down shirt that once bore the imprint of wildflowers. The flowers had all wilted. But that did not matter. Not now. Before morning ended, Sebastian Drabek would be rich.

He stood and leaned against the bench, straining to catch a glimpse of the stranger with a hard face, squinting in the shards of sunlight that ricocheted off the hotel's lobby window, watching him pause just long enough to spend a dollar at a newspaper machine. By the time Andrews St. Aubin had turned to continue walking down Juarez Street, Sebastian Drabek was only two steps behind, and his soft laughter had become a cackle.

By noon, he had seen enough. He had heard enough. The stranger was obviously a man obsessed. He did not stay in the fashionable business district. Men with hard faces never did. He walked away from the shadows of tall buildings and moved quietly into the underbelly of Phoenix, a world of taco stands and tattoo parlors, cracked windows, barred doors, and broken walls tarnished with graffiti. He was casually wandering down streets where only the brave walked during the light of day, and no one walked at night. He may have been lost, but he was definitely not out of place.

The man with the hard face kept asking the same question over and over again. The bartender ignored him. The prostitute offered him something better than a simple answer for his money. The taxi driver became frightened. A wino vomited on himself. The pastor of the San Esteban Baptist Church quickly locked the door to his sanctuary as soon as the stranger left. The pastor crossed himself, gazing toward a sun-baked sky, and he wasn't even Catholic. Only one would have been willing to answer the questions that clouded the stranger’s mind, provided, of course, money was no object. But the stranger never noticed the fragile frame of Sebastian Drabek shuffling along on the sidewalk behind him.

Sebastian never said a word. He knew what all good peddlers of information knew. What the stranger wanted to know would be worth more money tomorrow than it was today, and by the end of the week, the stranger would be willing to pay any price that the old man demanded. Sebastian would sell anything he knew for a dollar. Sebastian had even been known to sell what he didn't know without worrying about the consequences.

Some promised to make him rich. Some threatened to kill him. It did not matter, not to Sebastian Drabek anyway. Even if he lost his life, he knew, he hadn't lost much. He didn't ask to be born. He wasn't asking to die. But both events happened to man, he knew, and a man of independent means who lived on the streets and ate the crumbs that pigeons left behind was helpless to prevent either of them.

The stranger with the hard face spent the day chasing down one dead end after another. Sebastian's grin widened. With any luck, and he hadn't had any good fortune lately, this was a grand opportunity for the old man to make two transactions, which was a rare commodity on the backstreets of Phoenix. He watched the stranger turn the corner, and Sebasian was alone again. He didn’t mind. All he had to do was wait until tomorrow, he told himself, and he would be a wealthy man, provided, of course, the stranger didn’t wind up a dead man in some rat-infested alley, which could be any alley between here and the edge of town.

Sebastian Drabek spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the back porch of Lazaro Fuentes' funeral parlor, his head leaning against an old hand-carved marble urn. The brick driveway was empty, the dark blue Continental nowhere in sight. Sebastian was not an impatient man. He would wait for Fuentes to return even if it took all day, all night, or a week. Fuentes was a good business man. And Sebastian had something to sell him.

For a time, the old man tried to sleep, a warm sun against his face, but Sebastian was too nervous to sleep. His hands shook as though he suffered from palsy, and there was a growl deep in his innards. When he finally decided that sleep had deserted him, Sebastian tried to pray: To God. To the Holy Virgin.

After awhile, Sebastian Drabek realized that he had nothing important to say to either one of them, so he wiped the spittle from his whiskers, moved into the shadows to find some solace from a parched sun and watched the day slowly turn to dusk. He was in no hurry. What he had to sell could be purchased as easily tomorrow as it could be today, perhaps for even a better price. He had not expected to eat today anyway.

Chapter 18

TO PAUL MITCHELL, it seemed as though he and General Donald Draper had spent most of the night in the airport. They had not been able to get a commercial flight out of Tucson until well after the sun had been laid to rest on the far side of the barren hills. Frontier Arilines carried them as far as Denver, and Continental reached Dallas shortly before midnight. A red eye special on American put them in Washington D.C., while the city slept a restless sleep, wrapped in the glare of neon after dark.

Mitchell and Draper walked wearily through the dirt and grime that littered a deserted concourse at Ronald Reagan International Airport. A homeless man sat huddled beneath a flickering sign that advertised Starbuck's coffee, and an old woman with faded eyes and a crooked grin collected scattered and wrinkled copies of the Washington Post and U.S.A. Today with her push broom.

The corridor that led to the baggage claim was clustered with a mixture of foreigners who smelled of incense and spoke with a wide variety of languages and dialects. Mitchell quickly scanned their faces as he walked briskly past them. It was an old habit, one he had no intention of breaking. Some of the faces he recognized. They belonged to second-hand members of second rate diplomatic corps from third world countries that few even knew existed: aides, couriers, spies, pimps, all willing to sell what they had. Only a few had anything worth selling. It was often difficult to tell the difference between them, if, in fact, there was any difference at all. On most of them, he had files, thick files, in-depth files, but, at the moment, most of the files were locked shut. Another part of the world had become his all-consuming obsession.

Mexico. It was filth. It was greed. It was corruption. It possessed the world's most expensive, most lethal pipeline of cocaine. It was a powder keg waiting to explode. Paul Mitchell had returned to Washington, D.C., to light the fuse. He and the general hurried on past the baggage carousel. Someone else would be coming to collect their luggage. They pushed their way through a delegation from Lebanon that had gathered beside the revolving the door, and stepped out into the faint chill of an early morning.

The black limousine was waiting for them beside the curb. A young man in a tailored black suit, his brown hair clipped short, a slender scar across the back of his neck, stood leaning against the front fender. He glanced at his watch. The two men were only an hour and thirty minutes late, which was not bad all, considering the amount of air traffic that clogged the skies above the nation's capital, even at this ungodly hour.

His name was Roger Valek, and he carried enough shrapnel in his back to sink a small ship. He had been working in Paul Mitchell's office of Counterterrorism since his discharge from the Marine Corps, only two weeks after a handmade bomb destroyed his jeep in the back alley of an Afghanistan village.

He opened the door to the limousine without any formal greeting. Mitchell did not believe in wasting words or time, and he considered formalities a nuisance, a luxury, and an extravagance he could not afford.

Mitchell paused beside the open door and straightened his tie. "Has it been arranged?" he asked.

Valek nodded.

"What time?"

"Eight-thirty."

Mitchell nodded. "That should give the general and me just enough time to shower and change clothes," he said.

Valek stared ahead as he pulled out into traffic, his voice devoid of emotion. "It's tonight."

Mitchell frowned, and he felt the blood pounding his temples like a hammer. "I told you to set it this morning. For breakfast, if possible."

"Holcomb can't be there until tonight."

"Who the hell does he think he is?" Draper snapped. He stretched and tried to rub a muscle spasm out of the small of his back, which had begun to ache at thirty thousand feet, somwhere over Roanoke, Virginia.

Mitchell bit his words off sharply. "Carl Holcomb knows who he is. And he knows that we know who he is. And we can't do a damn thing without him." Mitchell weighed his options, decided that twelve hours would not jeopardize the operation, even though he had built countries and destroyed them in less time than that. "Where did you set the meeting?" he asked at last.

"I rented an apartment in Georgetown, near the college."

"What's wrong with the office?"

Valek pulled around a taxi turned toward the beltway. "Senator Riggs did not want to be seen going into your office," he said. "The senator was adamant about it."

Mitchell grinned wryly. "I can understand that," he replied. "We're dirty. He's not, or so he claims. The bastard works hard at being Mister Clean on the Hill. That's all right. I own him anyway."

Draper felt as rumpled as his suit as he reached into the cabinet in the back seat of the limousine, removing a bottle of black label whiskey. He was a Scotch drinker. But at the moment, he would settle for anything that had a kick to it.

Draper had absolutely no use for anything that might water down or weaken the whiskey. The first swallow burned his throat, and he liked the way it felt, even if it was a common man's whiskey. The general did not like the way Valek handled matters, nor did he approve of the authority that Mitchell kept giving the ex-marine. Personally, he did not like Valek, never had. The young man was efficient as hell but too damn arrogant, and he had a bad habit of making up new orders when, for some reason, he did not particularly want to follow the ones he had been given.

"I don't like it," the general muttered.

"The apartment's not a bad idea," Mitchell assured him. "It'll be safe, secure, out of sight and not likely to raise any interest or any suspicion."

"I don't care where the hell we meet," Draper responded. "I just don’t like the fact that Holcomb can change whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and nobody ever does a damn thing about it."

Valek spoke up. "Let me assure you, sir, Carl Holcomb has no intention of being caught in a compromising position with what he considers to be a bunch of hired guns. If he's seen with you or Mister Mitchell, he would just as soon it be so dark that no one can recognize either of you or particularly his face."

Draper's laugh was dry and deadly. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Is old Carl suddenly worried about Operation Taps, afraid that some of the blood on our hands might rub off on him?"

"He's a very cautious man."

"He's a political jackass."

"He's also very important to us," Mitchell said. "Your opinions of the man are not important, general. Neither are mine. He's calling the shots. It's as simple as that. If he wants to be an arrogant jackass, then that's his prerogative."

Draper sighed with weary resignation and answered, "I don't like his little waiting game, that's all. He knows we're dead in the water if we don't get his approval and the President's support."

"We have other options."

"They'd better be good ones, Paul, because you and I both know that the honorable Carl Holcomb will sell us down the river if the going gets rough. And the senator prays every night that either or preferably both of us will someday just ride off into the sunset and never come back."

"Holcomb can't do what he wants done without us."

"What about Riggs?"

"The senator is costly, but, at the moment, we need him."

Draper shrugged his tired shoulders, rode in silence for a mile while pouring himself a second stiff drink, then asked, "Will the President be there?"

"No." Valek's answer was as crisp and cold as a pistol shot.

"Why the hell not?"

"He wasn't notified."

"Again I ask, 'Why the hell not?'"

"Holcomb thought it best that the President not be advised of the meeting."

"That's horseshit." Draper wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "So where the hell does that leave us now?"

"It's up to Holcomb," Mitchell answered matter-of-factly.

"Holcomb is an asshole," Draper repeated.

"But, for the moment at least, he's our asshole." Mitchell's chuckle was more ominous than humorous. He slumped back into the plush, velvet-covered seat, the energy draining from his weary body. There was the distinct taste of fear in his mouth, and he had no place to spit. "Holcomb always has a reason for doing what he does," Mitchell said softly.

The limousine rolled through the malaise of headlights, hypnotically threading their way through a subdued fog that rose with reluctance above the calm, murky surface of the Potomac.

Chapter 19

LAZARO FUENTES NEVER slept late. He could not afford to. There were deals to be made, paper work to clear up, appointments to keep, meetings to attend, graves to dig, corpses to bury, some with names, some without. Days that began early and ended late, he reasoned, were simply the curse of being a good businessman. He was always at work long before the banks opened, knowing full well that they would open anytime he needed money, day or night, regardless of the hour. He did not own the banks, perhaps, but he had bought the bankers, cash on delivery.

They respected him. Maybe. They feared him. He preferred that. They called him sir. Lazaro Fuentes demanded it. The day, he decided, would be a good one, probably even better than yesterday. Business was expanding. His distribution center for the expensive white powder that came from Colombia had been completed. The pipeline north was in place. The girl who had screamed and cried beneath him last night had not yet turned thirteen. Tonight he would have her sister, and she was two years younger. It was no wonder that Lazaro Fuentes was smiling. Life had never been better for him. He called for his driver and walked out, squinting, into the glare and warmth of an early August sun.

Sebastian Drabek was on his feet by the time the blue Continental braked hard to a stop in the oval driveway that ran alongside the funeral parlor. He watched as the pair of body guards emerged first, followed closely by the stubby little body of Lazaro Fuentes himself, dressed in a black suit with thin pinstripes, his thinning gray hair slicked back with an assortment of sweet-smelling oils.

The guards eyed Sebastian for a moment, apparently decided that he was harmless and walked rapidly up the sidewalk, tramping down the ragged blades of dying grass that grew up from the cracks in the cement.

Sebastian squared his shoulders, bowed his head reverently, and waited until Fuentes and his men had finally reached the porch before he spoke: "Senor Fuentes."

"Yes."

"I am just a poor peon, senor, not fit to stand in your presence."

"I know who you are, Sebastian." Fuentes forced a sad smile, the kind he usually saved for a grieving widow, especially if she was young or rich, preferably young.

"And I regret to trouble you, as I am doing now." Sebastian bowed his head further, as if in prayer.

Fuentes frowned impatiently. He was in a hurry and in no mood to be conned by the same beggar who had been conning him for years. The sun had already been up too long to suit him, and Fuentes had no time to waste. He rustled around in his coat pocket, fished out a handful of coins and thrust them out toward Sebastian.

The old man politely refused them. "I am not a beggar," he said proudly.

Fuentes stifled a laugh.

"Like you, senor, I am a businessman, too," Sebastian said so softly that he could barely be heard.

This time, the laugh could not be contained. It burst from deep inside the belly of Lazaro Fuentes. His two body guards did not change their sullen expressions. They were not paid to change expressions or show emotion. They glared with distaste at the ragged old man, waiting for orders, which would surely come, to remove the beggar from the driveway, using force if necessary.

"And today is not like any other day, senor," Sebastian continued, ignoring the laughter. "Today, I have something to sell." The old beggar smiled coldly, and there was something about the look on the ravaged man's face that caused the merriment to die where it had lodged in Fuentes's throat.

"A salesman? That is an honorable profession, Sebastian. What do you have that is so important it must be sold at my front door, even before I myself have had a chance to begin work this morning?"

"I know something that you do not know, senor."

"What might that be?"

Silence. The smile had not left Sebastian's face.

Fuentes licked at the sweat forming on the corners of his mouth. The old man had suddenly become cagey, and cagey old men could be dangerous.

"What I know has a price tag," Sebastian said at last.

"That is only fair." Fuentes decided to play the old man's game, whatever it was, until the old man had become expendable again. Fuentes had become rich and powerful by being able to outsmart old men at their own games.

"It's worth ten dollars, maybe." Sebastian paused, lowered his eyes, then said, "maybe even a hundred."

"Perhaps less?"

"Perhaps. Yes. Perhaps even more."

Fuentes removed his calfskin wallet from an inside coat pocket and slowly removed a twenty dollar bill, folding it in half and laying it on the porch railing, placing a handful of quarters on top of the bill to keep it from blowing in the wind."

Sebastian made no move to pick the money up. Instead he said, "There is a new face in Phoenix."

Fuentes shrugged. "There are many new faces in the city," he replied. “Thousands of new faces every day.”

"This is a hard face, a deadly face, I think."

"Have you seen it before?"

"No, senor."

"Does this face have a name?"

"I am sure that it does."

"Then what is the name?"

"I have not heard the name, senor. I have only seen the face." Sebastian shuddered for no apparent reason. "But I have heard the man who owns the face asking questions," he said, "many questions."

"Where?"

"Everywhere. He talks to everyone he meets – in bars, in restaurants, on street corners, in the church. Young men. Old men. Women. It does not matter to him."

A dog barked behind them. Fuentes glanced over his shoulder before asking, "What kinds of questions?"

"He is looking for someone."

"Who?"

"Someone who knows Danny B. Perhaps the man who killed him."

Lazaro Fuentes scratched his chin, slowly shaking his head as though confused by Sebastian's statement. His stoic expression was filled with lies, but only his eyes gave him away. Fuentes pointed to the money lying on the railing. "Take it," he said. "I'm afraid your information is not worth twenty dollars, but take it anyway. I don't know anybody with the name of Danny B."

Sebastian did not move. "The man who owns the face is looking for Raul Saenz as well," he said.

"I don't believe that I know him either."

"I am sorry, senor Fuentes, but I am only a poor, ignorant man, and all I know is what I am told, and I am told that you know everyone in Phoenix, perhaps in Arizona, and maybe even all of Mexico."

"You flatter me."

"Raul Saenz and Danny B. were partners."

"As I said, their names are foreign to me."

A certain coldness returned to Sebastian's hollowed eyes. He raised his thin arm and pointed a bony finger, as though it was a pistol, at Fuentes's broad chest. "The man who owns the face wears a gun. A big gun."

"Is he a cop?"

"He has no badge."

"Undercover?"

"I think, perhaps, no." Sebastian Drabek squinted as the glare of the sun struck him in the eyes, almost blinding him. "An undercover policeman tries to be brave, but he is always frightened. I know them. I have seen them. They are always waiting to die. The man who owns the face, he is not afraid."

"To die?"

"Of anything."

"What makes you say that, Sebastian?"

"I can see it in his eyes. When you live on the streets as I live on the streets, Senor Fuentes, you learn to read a person's eyes. A man's tongue may lie to you. His eyes never lie. They don't know how to lie."

"Who is this man working for?"

"No one knows."

"I am disappointed, Sebastian. I'm afraid you don't really know much after all."

"I know where he is staying."

"Where?"

"The Sheraton."

"And the room number?"

"Four fifty two."

"Is he alone."

"No one is with him."

Lazaro Fuentes grinned. He pulled a second twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and stuffed it in the old man's ragged shirt. "You are a good man, Sebastian," he said.

"Do you want me to bring you a name?"

The laughter had returned to Fuentes. "I do not need a name," he answered. "The man you speak of is merely a stranger who is here today and who will be gone tomorrow, looking for someone who possibly does not even exist anymore."

Lazaro Fuentes patted Sebastian's shoulder, brushed past him, and unlocked the big, hand-carved teakwood door that led inside the funeral parlor, its dark mahogany walls reflecting the glow of electric candles that flickered above the faces of the dead.

The old man picked up the two twenty-dollar bills from the porch railing, stuffed them in his shoes, pocketed the handful of quarters and stumbled out into the sunlight. For a day, maybe a month now, he would be a rich man. On the streets where Sebastian Drabek lived, a rich man was any man who went to sleep at night on a full stomach.

Fuentes leaned against the door of the viewing room. His mind was on the stranger with a gun who was asking questions about a man who no longer walked the dirty streets of Phoenix. That troubled him. Who was the man who owned the face? What did he already know and for whom was he working? There were ways of finding out, Lazaro Fuentes knew, many ways. Some of them could even be quite painful. A few never failed, although they had cost him a few cheap funerals. He reached for the telephone, dialed a number he knew well, and waited to hear the whispered voice of the one who called himself Espiritu, the ghost.

Chapter 20

FOR THE LAST thirty minutes, maybe longer, Andrews St. Aubin had noticed the woman watching him. She sat in the far darkened corner of the lounge in the Matador Restaurant, glancing nervously toward the doorway every so often as though she was expecting someone to join her.

Thus far, no one had.

The hour was late.

Or was it early?

St. Aubin wasn't so sure anymore. Even his days had become confused. A wall calendar was no help. The room was too dark to read it anyway. At the moment, St. Aubin did not particularly care if it was Wednesday morning or Friday night.

All he knew was that, somewhere beyond the doorway, a man had Danny B.'s death on his conscience, and with him, or with someone else, was a rare collection of historical and Biblical facts or artifacts that just might prove the Son of God had bathed in the muddy Papaloapas as surely as he had in the Sea of Galilee.

Mexico, he knew, might be a big and mystical land that did not give up its secrets easily. But anyone who had the audacity to smuggle them out of Mexico would certainly sell them. There were always low bidders, high bidders, and bidders foolish enough to buy nothing more than the tombstones that were hammered without a prayer into the hard, callused ground above their heads.

The trail had led to Phoenix, but it was cold and growing colder. There were a half million faces or more on the street and only one to find. There were miles to go, or maybe only a block or two. He did not know. There was so much he did not know about the man who had killed Danny B. or the man who was chasing him. Neither he nor the assassin had a name, and he figured he would know the man who held the knife long before he learned his own. A waitress removed the empty plate, still stained by the blood of a ten ounce sirloin, rare, and cheese from his enchiladas. He looked up and studied his face in the mirror behind the bar.

St. Aubin had worked for the government, or so Brockleman said. He traveled to unfamiliar lands and worked in unfamiliar cities. He carried a bullet somewhere close to his spine. One man had died. He was certain of that. Were there more? Had he ever had a conscience? A family? A wife? Children? A price on his head? A memory?

What secrets lay buried behind the black curtain that sheltered him from his own indiscretions? Why had Brockleman been so damn confident that St. Aubin could track down a murderer and a missing Biblical artifact in Mexico? St. Aubin had his suspicions, but he was afraid he would never learn the truth until it was too late and, sometimes, too late was simply too early to die. Only the dead man knew for sure.

A Latino deejay was playing country and western music in the far corner of the bar. For St. Aubin, it was difficult to determine if the sky outside was still light or had turned dark beyond the stained glass in the window beside the door. But then, there was a good chance that he could blame his confusion on three-dollar tequila. In some corners of Phoenix, everything that went wrong was blamed on the tequila.

He looked back at the woman. Her eyes had not left him. In his mind, he wrote: Her complexion was dark, blurred by the tequila, but she did not appear to be Latino. Her thick black hair was draped long across her shoulders. She was a small woman, maybe thirty-five years old. In the dim light, it was difficult to determine anyone's age. If she had any wrinkles at all, the shadows and the candlelight had erased them.

A gentle smile touched her lips.

George Jones was wailing out a broken-hearted love song on the deejay’s turntable, and St. Aubin wondered if the woman would like to dance. Then he decided against asking her. He was too damn tired to dance anyway. He wasn’t for sure anyone had room to dance in the Matador Lounge. He watched as she slid out from behind the table and walked slowly across the floor toward him. St. Aubin was mesmerized. His mind kept writing: She moved with the ease, the sensual grace of a jungle cat, her cotton sun dress swaying in a faint breeze created by the cranky ceiling fans that worked hard above the bar, brushing lightly against her slender legs with each step she took.

St. Aubin hoped she wasn't as dangerous as a jungle cat. If she were, he was as dead as the man who waited in the night. His subconscious kept warning him: beauty can be distracting. Beauty is deadly.

The woman stopped at his table. "Hi," she said.

Her single word didn’t sound so dangerous.

St. Aubin nodded. One thing was for certain. The distance and the cigarette smoke had not lied to him. He thought: With her finely carved features, she could have been a cover girl, maybe, when she was younger, even a centerfold.

"You're from out of town, aren't you?" she asked casually.

Again, St. Aubin nodded.

"Do you mind if I sit down?"

"Please do." St. Aubin made a half-hearted attempt to stand and help her with her chair, but the tequila had dulled his senses, and the woman was already seated before he could get his legs in motion.

"I'm from out of town, too," the woman said.

St. Aubin smiled, hoping the fog would lift from his eyes. "If you aren't," he said, "you've done a remarkable job of hiding your accent. Nobody in this part of the world can put that many syllables into a single word."

The woman laughed, and it warmed him, and that bothered St. Aubin. "I'm from Mississippi," she said. "Tupelo."

"You're a long way from home."

"And I'm getting homesick, too." She laughed again.

“Businsess?” he asked.

“There’s no other reason I would leave Tupelo.” The laughter touched her eyes.

St. Aubin sighed as the fog lifted.

"I saw you sitting here by yourself” she said, “and you didn't appear to be having any better time than I was, so I thought I'd come over, if you don't mind, and at least talk to someone who can keep up with all of the syllables I put in a word, as you so eloquently say."

"I don't mind at all." St. Aubin snapped his fingers, trying to attract the attention of a waiter slumped against the corner of the bar. "Would you like a drink?"

"Wine, please. Chablis."

"A bottle?"

"A glass will do fine."

St. Aubin ordered while Conway Twitty replaced George Jones on the turntable. He leaned on the table with both elbows, trying to read the woman's dark eyes. There was a hint of mischief in them, as well as perpetual laughter, though he had trouble telling how sincere it was. There was nothing menacing about them at all.

"I'm a school teacher," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"That I'm a school teacher?"

"That I wasn't in your class."

This time, her laugh was a giggle, probably induced by too many glasses of wine lying inside such a small stomach. "I'm here on a cultural studies exchange program," she went on. "I learn about the Native American culture, specifically its folk tales, and I teach about Southern literture, particularly Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. I think I've already been here just about a week too long, and, if my little old airline ticket isn't lying to me, it looks like I've still have another week to go."

"That's tough."

"It could be. It could get better, though." The waiter brought their drinks, wine and tequila, shoved St. Aubin's ten dollar bill into his shirt pocket, and hurried away while the olive-skinned school teacher from Tupelo, Mississippi, took a sip of her Chablis. She was quiet for a moment, lost in thought, then she asked, "How long will you be here?"

"I don't know."

"You a tourist?"

"Business.”

"What kind of business?"

"Mostly, I just look for things."

“What kinds of things?”

“Odds and ends.”

"What do you do when you find them?"

"I remove them."

"A thief?"

"Depends on your point of view, I guess."

The woman frowned, finally deciding that either the wine had fogged her mind, or the tequila had numbed his.

"I like to dance," she said.

"When you walk, you move like a dancer."

"I studied ballet in school."

"I didn't," St. Aubin answered.

"I could teach you."

"I'm afraid I'm a little too old, too slow, and too tired to learn." He remembered the words of an old Tom T. Hall song: "My mind's on the dance floor with you, but I can't get my body to move." He laughed and she didn't know why.

The woman finished her wine, and St. Aubin noticed a slight tremble in her hands She lowered her eyes, tried to speak, and failed. She took a deep breath and tried again.

"Do you like games?" she asked.

"Only when I win."

"I don't like them at all."

"Then you shouldn't play them."

"Okay. I won't." The woman paused, then said, "I'll get right to the point, although it scares me, and it shouldn't."

"Go on."

She looked up, and her soft, frightened eyes were pleading like those of a caged animal wanting to be free. "I've been so lonely," she said, carefully measuring each word. "Can I spend the night with you?"

"I don't even know your name."

"Sometimes," she whispered, "it's better that way."

Andrews St. Aubin glanced over her shoulder and saw the dead man walk into the bar and seat himself on a stool beside the door. No one else noticed. No one else knew. The woman and the dead man had both come for him. He only took one of them home.

St. Aubin could feel the amber flames of the dead man's eyes cursing him as he walked with the woman out into the neon beauty of the night, leaving the dead man to do whatever dead men did when they were alone and no longer afraid of dying.

Chapter 21

THE CALIBRE APARTMENTS on Cheshire Boulevard were two blocks removed from the mainstream of Georgetown traffic. They were the three-story reproduction of a Colonial manor, virtually hidden behind a red brick wall that offered privacy and seclusion for the most discriminating of guests. Most of its occupants were elderly and rich, men and women who still liked to gather out under the live oaks in the cool of a summer evening to reminisce about the days when they were the power brokers, the influence peddlers of Washington politics. Time had left them behind now, robbing them of everything but their memories.

They had all abandoned the white wicker chairs that lined the patio, out beside the decaying tulip beds, by the time Roger Valek eased the black limousine quietly into the driveway, pulling out of sight back behind the brick wall.

The Calibre Apartments were cloaked in peace and solitude, just as they were advertised to be. From the outside, only a dozen or so lights were visible in the windows, and the faint sound of a radio playing Scott Joplin's ragtime disrupted the stilted silence of a day fading into night.

As he climbed out of the car, Paul Mitchell thought he glimpsed a nervous rustle of curtains on the third floor, and he wondered if someone was up there watching him. In his line of work, there were eyes everywhere. General Donald Draper often accused him of being stricken with an acute case of paranoia. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe not. The mind did have a habit of playing tricks sometimes. But the subconscious was also the best warning system that man possessed, and Mitchell knew that, thus far, his paranoia, real or imagined, had managed to keep him clear of those sordid things, legal and ominous, that go bump in the night. The careless and the foolish died long before their time. Mitchell had no plans to ever die at all. Moving to the cemetery for any reason, frankly, had always been against his better judgment.

The three men, walking quietly together, their shoulders stiff, as formal as the color guard in a military parade, entered the Calibre Apartments at the basement level. None of them had spoken since leaving the car parked back in the shadows that fell upon the brick wall. They rode the service elevator to the second floor, and it smelled of dirty linen and stale meatballs. Mitchell and the general waited out of sight until Valek made sure the corridor was empty before stepping out into the carpeted hallway. At apartment three-sixty-three, Mitchell's aide pulled a key from his coat pocket and quickly unlocked the door.

Senator Abner Riggs and Carl Holcomb turned their heads to face them as they entered the room. Both men wore worried frowns, underscoring the heavy strain that burdened their shoulders.

As far as Paul Mitchell could ascertain, at first glance, Riggs appeared to be ill-at-ease, which was highly unusual for the Senate Majority Leader. The color had been drained from his ruddy face, and he was nervously twisting a white mustache that, like his thick, graying hair, always needed trimming. His brown suit was wrinkled, and his striped green and tan tie had been loosened at the collar. The senator was seated stiffly, his legs crossed, in a blue Victorian chair in the corner of the sitting room, and he nodded his greeting as pleasantly as possible without making any attempt to stand.

Mitchell guessed that the self-righteous Senator Abner Riggs was too frightened to get out of the chair, worried that his legs might buckle beneath him. He was a damn good politician. He did not have a stomach for bloodshed at all.

Holcomb, holding a glass of Maker’s Mark, mostly ice, little liquor, was standing tall and straight. His jaws were clamped tightly together, and there was an obstinate look buried in his pale blue eyes. Carl Holcomb was a powerful man in Washington, and he knew it, and he liked for others to be aware of it as well. For almost two decades, he had been the guiding genius behind the sudden rise of Henry Caples to political prominence, carefully orchestrating the Wisconsin senator’s career until it reached the White House.

Holcomb remained as the president's top advisor and confidante. He made policy as frequently as he made enemies, which was daily and as certain as death and taxes. Caples would not think of making any kind of decision at all without the advice, approval, and blessing of Carl Holcomb. Mostly, Holcomb made the decisions without being asked or ever telling the President what he had done. The less the charismatic Caples knew, the better he liked politics and the position of power he held.

There were many of those in Washington who privately believed that Henry Caples occupied the oval office, but it was Carl Holcomb who ran the country. The President merely received the votes, the credit, and the blame. Holcomb did not discourage those beliefs, at least not privately. Publicly, however, he was viewed as simply an humble servant whose only mission in life was to serve at the pleasure of the nation's most important public servant.

He defended the President. He protected the President. Behind closed doors, in smoke-filled rooms, down where the dirty, often smelly business of politics actually took place, Carl Holcomb spoke for the President. His word may have not been law, but it was gospel.

Holcomb looked casually up at the antique clock sitting on the mantle of a stone fireplace. "You're early," he said, taking a slow, deliberate sip of watered-down bourbon, dismissing the normal pleasantries, which were unnecessary and a waste of time.

"There's a lot to be done," Mitchell answered.

General Draper walked quickly to the bar on the far side of the room, rummaged through a tray of bottles until he found Chivas Regal Scotch, and poured himself a drink, carefully dropping a single cube of ice into the glass. Roger Valek made sure the lock was in place behind them; then he crossed his arms and took his position beside the big oak doorway, looking very much like a sentry at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. His eyes matched his face, and his face was hard and stoic.

Mitchell removed his silk gray suit coat and threw it across the back of the sofa, sat down beside it, and slowly unlocked the combination to his briefcase. "Will anyone else be here?" he asked without looking up.

"No one else was invited," Holcomb responded.

"The President was." Mitchell spit the words out.

"I repeat," Holcomb said tersely, "no one else was invited."

"That was your job, Carl."

"What was my job?"

"Getting the President here."

Holcomb's first answer was a smile, filled with contempt for Paul Mitchell and men like him. They were important, to be sure. The country needed them. Even the President needed them from time to time. But they had one fault that Carl Holcomb could never forgive. They were driven to take charge of a situation when it was obvious that he, the President's man, was already in charge.

Mitchell pulled a stack of papers from his briefcase and leaned back against the floral sofa. He stared at Holcomb and waited for a reply as the silence between the two men grew tense but never awkward, no more than one chess player waiting for the other to make a move.

Holcomb let the silence drag on for another moment, then he said, "The President already knows as much about Operation Taps as he needs to know."

"Which is?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

Mitchell's anger was reflected only in his eyes. His face remained devoid of any emotion. It was a discipline that he learned years ago when he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and his captors only came each morning, armed with their evil little devices, to interrogate those whose faces were masked with fear. As a result, when the shooting stopped, Lieutenant Paul Mitchell had been able to walk away from the prison camp with his mental faculties and his body intact.

He understood the games of the mind, no matter how intricate they were and how they were played. The situations might change. The rules never did. Carl Holcomb was a master at playing them as well. Mitchell felt his anger die away like a fire in a gentle rain. Holcomb, the bastard, had met his match.

"For Operation Taps to succeed," Mitchell said patiently, "we must have the President's support. You know that, Carl. You know that better than any of us."

Senator Riggs gripped his cane tightly. "The President and the Congress prefer to solve problems with a certain amount of diplomacy," he replied softly. "You, Mister Mitchell, on the other hand, want to take an army, invade Mexico, and go to war."

General Draper drained his glass of Scotch and poured himself another before walking heavily across the room toward the senator. "Dammit, Abner," he snarled, "we're already in the midst of a war."

"Not officially." Senator Riggs forced himself to his feet. "Maybe there is another way," he said, a slight tremor in his voice.

"There is none." Draper was adamant.

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure."

The Senator was not impressed. "That's only one man's opinion," he said dryly. "And you, I'm afraid, have a distorted view of life."

Paul Mitchell leaned forward, pulling a handful of papers from his briefcase. "The facts that General Draper and I have assembled will, I firmly believe, fully support that opinion."

Abner Riggs shuffled to the window and looked out into a deserted street. He thought he glimpsed a hint of lightning, but it might have been the glare of a headlight on the far side of the trees. He closed his eyes and rubbed them, taking a deep breath and wondering what the good old boys were all doing back home in Indiana tonight. God, how he wished he was back there with them now, drinking a little beer, worrying about the farm prices, cursing the skies because it hadn't rained. He missed the old days. How long had he been gone anyway? Thirty years? Thirty-eight? Damn, it didn't seem that long. There were times when Abner Riggs considered his decision to walk away from the farm and run for the Senate to be the most foolhardy act of his life. This was one of those times. No. Maybe not.

He opened his eyes and stared into the solemn faces of Carl Holcomb and Paul Mitchell. They were good men. They were good Americans. They had never been irrational, nor had they lost their minds, not to his knowledge anyway. But what Carl Holcomb and Paul Mitchell were debating was absolutely insane.

Operation Taps would not work. Riggs was certain of it. If the operation ever became public knowledge, and it was too difficult to keep such an action secret, it could very well tear the country apart, much like Vietnam had. In the beginning, it would be a small operation, clandestine and overlooked, then it would grow much like a forest fire triggered by a single spark. The Senator had no doubts. However, he had no idea how he had gotten himself mixed up in the middle of their crazy scheme in the first place. Senator Riggs thought seriously about simply walking out of the room without ever looking back. But he felt his legs weaken, and he wasn't sure he could make it as far as the door.

His only other option, he finally decided, was to reason with them. He was good at that. He said, "What we're all sitting here and discussing is an extremely drastic action to take, Paul. Operation Taps just may well blow the ever-lovin' lid off this country."

"Maybe it's time this country woke up and realized how bad a shape it's already in," Draper snapped. "Every goddam country in the world is sending us the dregs from its society. We've got murderers, rapists, trained assassins, thieves, addicts, and a piss pot full of shitheads running loose, disguised as poor, misguided, unfortunate, hard-working but poverty-stricken Mexican immigrants, and a good portion of them are coming from Iran or another of those Middle Eastern countries that don’t like us. Not a goddam one of them can speak English. And we're supposed to feed and clothe the sonuvabitches while they bleed us to death, shove their goddam cocaine up our asses, and walk the streets with bombs strapped around their chests."

"The country has problems," Riggs agreed. "No doubt about it. But then, we've always had our problems, general."

"No, Abner. We’ve always solved our problems. We're looking down the barrel of a gun, whether you like it or not," Draper continued, "and most of the goddam politicians in the good old U.S. of A. are too damn stupid to realize it and too lazy to do anything about it." The general's face was as flushed as Riggs had ever seen it.

"Let me assure you, general, congress is well aware of the problem. We've got committees working on it day and night."

"Hell, Congress is full of Caster Oil and doesn't even know it needs to shit."

The Senator's face reddened, out of anger, perhaps, but mostly out of frustration. "We're making headway," he said, but his voice had weakened, and his argument no longer sounded very convincing.

"You're all sitting on your collective asses, talking out of both sides of your goddam mouths, letting the whole nation crumble right out from beneath you." The general was eyeball to eyeball with Riggs now, their faces only inches apart. "A rattlesnake doesn't have a brain any bigger than a gnat's ass, and it doesn't have any balls at all," he snarled. "But even a rattlesnake knows when to strike."

Riggs shifted his position and turned his face away. The whiskey on the general's breath was stifling. "Maybe we do move too slowly in Congress," he admitted, "at least too slow for a gunslinger who can't wait to hold the smoking gun. But, dammit, we are aware of the problem. We know how big it is. And we know that something has to be done about it, and we're working as hard as we can on the solution right now. But finding the right solution takes time, lots of time. I’m afraid that's just the way our machinery works in government. It's not perfect, but, dammit, general, it works."

"You're afraid, senator," Mitchell said softly. "I'm afraid, too. I'm afraid we don't have nearly as much time as you would like for the cogs of your worthless machinery to grind with the speed of cold molasses in a useless, futile attempt to solve a situation that has become an international crisis. A nation--our nation, senator--is suffocating beneath a writhing mass of humanity that no one wants and enough white powder to choke the last breath out of our children. There's a volcano out there. It's rumbling, it's growling, and it's already starting to spit fire and smoke from its belly. It's gonna blow, sir, and it's gonna blow soon."

Senator Riggs turned back to the window, pulling the drapes aside with a trembling hand so there would be nothing to spoil his view of the city at night. His voice was tired, and he knew that his argument was falling on deaf ears. "All I'm saying, Paul, is that maybe, just maybe, we need to put our collective heads together and come up with a plan that may not be quite as radical as Operation Taps."

"These are radical days," the general said, draining his glass and reaching again for the Chivas bottle.

The Senator turned back to face Mitchell, his shoulders suddenly very weary. It seemed like midnight, even though common sense told him the hour couldn't be that late. "Operation Taps is going to get a lot of people killed," he said.

"A lot of people are already being killed."

"Personally, I don't think the people of this country will buy it."

"They'll buy anything if it's sold right."

"I'm just afraid that what you're planning to do will tear the country apart at the very seams of its foundation."

"Drugs have already torn it apart."

Paul Mitchell couldn't help himself. A wry smile etched itself on his face. He could tell when a man was beaten, and Senator Abner Riggs was beginning to look like a man who had lost the will to fight him.

The senator shrugged, grasping for any thread of logic, no matter how weak it might be. "But the President has already begun his war on drugs," he blurted out in a fit of desperation.

"It's a war we're losing," Draper said loudly. "It's a war we're gonna continue to lose. Trying to win it the way our goddam politicians are trying to win it is like pissin' in the wind when you have a short pecker. I don't know about you, Senator, but, frankly, I don't like to get pissed on, and I'm not about to stand around with my thumb up my ass and lose a war without a damn good fight."

Mitchell straightened his glasses and gently put his hand on the old man's shoulder, the heated glare of his eyes demanding the Senator's attention. "Abner," he said, "you and I have known each other for a long time. We've debated together, and we've worked together, and we pretty much know how each other thinks. We're not here to discuss whether or not Operation Taps is viable. We're here to see what we have to do to make it work. Now, when we walk out of here tonight, I have every reason to believe that Carl will make sure the President is behind us. Abner, you are, as majority leader, the most influential person in the Senate. What I need to know from you is how Congress will react to the operation."

"I don't know."

"Give me your gut feeling, then."

Riggs sighed and stared up at the ceiling, watching a fly batter his head against the wall, looking for a way out of the room and finding none. He could sympathize with the fly. At last, he said softly, "If Congress, as a whole, heard what you have in mind, it would throw you in jail, brand you as lunatics and probably heretics, and throw away the key. If Congress thought that the President was secretly supporting Operation Taps, and I don't know if he is or isn't, it would impeach the son of a bitch, and there probably would not be a dissenting vote on the floor. If, however, you talked to each representative and each senator on a man-to-man basis, you would probably find that a majority of them believe exactly the same way that you do."

"Then we'll keep them in the dark."

The senator's fight had left him. "They work better that way," he said at last.

Mitchell grinned broadly. That was all he needed to hear. He turned to Draper and winked. His sigh was one of relief.

Carl Holcomb had approached him with the basic plan for Operation Taps almost a year ago. His request had been a simple one. "See if it's feasible," he said. Holcomb had been honest. "I don't particularly like you, Mitchell, and I don't like your God Almighty attitude. But you are the only man I know of who can make Operation Taps work, if it has any chance of working at all. At any time, however, we may kill the idea without a moment's notice. When or if I give the word, for any reason, to cease and desist, then you bury the operation and bury it deep as though it never existed. If the fuse has already been lit, then you grab it with both hands and pull it out before it blows up in your face. Only two of us know about the operation and its implications. If any word of what you're doing happens to leak out, and if you're caught, then I can assure you that the President will deny everything you say, and you will be terminated. It's that simple, Paul. We could not afford to have you go on trial. National Security is too important for us to take that risk. In the meantime, I'll keep my finger on the President's pulse. Who do you suggest we bring into our little circle to monitor the Congress?"

The answer had been as simple as it was obvious. Senator Riggs was powerful, respected, and influential. He could keep his mouth shut when he had to. And he was loyal as hell. He had to be loyal to Mitchell, if to no one else. Mitchell kept a noose around the Senator's neck, and he kept it tight. Riggs liked money, lots of it, and young boys, as many as he could get. Mitchell provided both. He kept the photographs in a vault as insurance. Riggs had seen them once. Once was all it took to buy a man's undying loyalty.

The months of hard work were now behind him. As far as Paul Mitchell was concerned, Operation Taps, no matter how controversial it might be, was not only feasible and viable, it had become an absolute necessity if the country had any hope at all of successfully battling the terrorism, the chaos erupting throughout the Americas, north, south, and central. All the risks had been calculated. All the details had been carefully worked out and were on paper although the intricacies of the plan were still locked away in the recesses of his own mind.

Draper certainly did not know them all. Draper was tough. He was a good man to have by your side during a midnight firefight, especially when the odds had been heavily stacked against your survival. But there were some things that Mitchell did not dare entrust to the general. Even Holcomb was better off being told only what he needed to know when he needed to know it. Carl Holcomb may have fathered the loose outline of the puzzle that became Operation Taps, but only he, Paul Mitchell, knew where all the pieces were hidden. He had put them there.

He removed his glasses, turned, and faced Holcomb. During the past few months, Mitchell lived in constant fear that the Presidential Adviser would get cold feet at the last minute and drop the hammer on him. The paranoia had surfaced stronger than ever. That, in reality, was why he decided to bring Draper into the Operation. He wanted someone who could shoot straight, quick, and without a conscience guarding his back. But now, those fears were behind him.

"What is your present timetable for launching Taps?" Holcomb asked.

"I'm ready as soon as the President pulls the trigger."

Holcomb turned away. "I'll let you know," he said.

Mitchell cast a glance at Senator Riggs. The old man was shivering as though the temperature in the apartment had suddenly dropped ten degrees. His eyes were hollow and his face ashen. He certainly did not have the appearance of a man described by the New York Times as "the juggernaut of the U.S. Senate, the fourth most powerful man in America." Mitchell swore to himself that the indominatable Abner Riggs had aged five years during the past thirty minutes.

Holcomb's voice interrupted his thoughts, shoving away any concerns about the Senator. "There are some provisions you must understand before we go any further," the Presidential Adviser said. "You won't like them, but they're absolute."

Mitchell remained expressionless, as though his face was carved from stone. The final cards, he knew, were being dealt. Now it would be up to him to play them wisely, even if he had to bluff, which he almost always did.

"The President's name must not be connected with the operation in any way."

"Yes, sir."

"It is imperative that we protect him and give him an avenue of deniability in case something goes haywire."

"I understand."

"When you walk out that door, Paul, you're on your own."

Mitchell nodded.

"This is one time you can't come in from the cold," Holcomb said. "You knew that from day one. If the operation falls apart, and if the press gets wind of it, the President will brand you as a radical, a revolutionary, a white supremacist, a mercenary, a mad man."

Mitchell grinned. "I've been called those things before," he said.

"By the President?"

"By my former wife's divorce lawyer."

Holcomb shrugged matter-of-factly and let the comment die away as quickly as it was spoken. He was in no mood for one of Mitchell's wisecracks anyway. Humor was meaningless, misguided, and it bored him. For Carl Holcomb, there was nothing left to say or be said. The meeting had come to an end. He straightened the front of his suit jacket, rubbed the gold cuff links roughly against the silk fabric to brighten then, then strode across the room and out the door, passing Roger Valek as though Mitchell's personal soldier of fortune wasn't even there. His every movement was deliberate and planned in advance.

Carl Holcomb, Mitchell thought, would have made a damn good funeral director. He certainly looked the part.

General Draper had downed his fourth tall glass of Chivas Regal, and the Scotch was beginning to glaze over his eyes.

"God help us," was all Senator Riggs could manage to say, slumping again into the Victorian chair and gently rubbing his temples. His head hurt as though it had been penetrated by a bullet, and he wondered if he would still be alive come morning or if he even gave a damn anymore.

Chapter 22

LAZARO FUENTES GLANCED at his watch as the bronze Lincoln Continental sped down the streets of Phoenix, snaking its way through the evening traffic and heading north toward Sendona. It was ten minutes past seven o'clock. He was running behind time as usual, but Fuentes found it convenient and almost always advantageous to arrive at an important function fashionably late. It was not his style to appear overly anxious to consummate any business deal. Tonight's meeting would not be able to start without him.

The first hints of darkness lay upon a landscape thick with Saguaro cactus. Beyond sprawled moutain ranges chiseled from red rock, crowned with steep and jagged cliffs above the tree line. The air was hot and moist, the most unpleasant of evenings to be out and away from the air-conditioned confines of a man's home. Fuentes sighed. If not for the meeting, he would be lying against some young girl's quivering and quite naked skin pressed tightly upon his swollen flesh. But, alas, business came first, regardless of the hour, and there were very important and very rich men who had traveled a very long way to meet with him. He would worry about the young girls later.

Young girls were always plentiful, especially young girls who would do anything to him and for him if he kept paying their mothers until the girls were no longer any use to him. By the time they were sixteen, they were washed up, dried up, and back on the streets. They would, however, make this the most exquisite of nights, especially with the carcass of the inquisitive stranger lying on a blood-stained slab in the sanctity of his mortuary. Then again, Espiritu might leave the stranger for the coyotes.

Fuentes grinned. It was difficult to know what Espiritu might do, and he never asked. That would come later. The sex. And the dying.

His driver eased the funeral car through downtown Sedona, past sidewalks crowded with tourists who had come to wander from shop to shop, buying Native American wool rugs and turquoise jewelry. He swung down a back street and into the long, circular driveway of Los Abrigados, a fashionable resort and spa well known for making sure that those who wanted to stay anonymous remained that way. He wound his way to the back of the sprawling white stucco building and parked beneath a stand of oaks.

Lazaro Fuentes stepped out, as gracefully as possible, wearing the same kind of smile he placed on the faces of the deceased before the next of kin were allowed to view the bodies. He would place a smile on the stranger, too, if Espiritu did not remove the stranger's face with his knife. He came to Los Abrigados often, but only when meeting with certain people about certain things that were better off kept secret. The gray of the evening had turned black.

Fuentes smoothed the wrinkles from his dinner jacket, straightened his tie, and walked up the stone steps to the door. Thunder rattled the sky, closer this time, and Fuentes looked up as the first raindrop fell upon the sidewalk and sizzled. It was a good sign. The land had become far too dry, and the crops were burning in the fields.

Fuentes slicked back his black, thinning hair with the palm of his hand, waited for the door to open, then walked inside, his smile full of warmth and good humor. There had been no need to knock or ring the bell. Everyone knew he was coming, knew he would be late, and were watching for him.

In the study, he was met by three men. Two he recognized immediately. Fuentes had been expecting them. The third, his face partially hidden in the shadows that fell behind a desk lamp, was someone he had never seen before, which could be bothersome, if not potentially deadly. Lazaro Fuentes did not do business with strangers. He felt his shoulders tighten involuntarily, and his smile flickered slightly but never left his face.

"I apologize for my tardiness," Fuentes said, his eyes sweeping the room, trying to ferret out any other surprises that might be waiting there. "A business matter kept me longer than I had anticipated."

"Business must be good." The voice came from the corner.

Lazaro Fuentes seated himself in a sofa beside an empty fireplace. "There was a time, back when I was younger," he said, "when people settled their arguments with their fists. Then they hired lawyers. Now they simply shoot each other." His smile broadened. "Yes," he continued, "it appears that business has never been better. There is, I have learned, as much money digging holes for graves as oil."

Two of the men laughed politely. The third had not changed expressions.

Antonio Gallardo stood, poured straight whiskey into a glass and handed it to Fuentes. He was tall and wiry, with a hawk face and stooped shoulders. His dark hair was unruly, and his navy pin-stripe suit was expensive and tailored. Like Fuentes, Gallardo preferred the finer things in life, and he could afford them. For the past decade, he had served as the number two man in the National Security Intelligence Directorate within the Interior Ministry in Mexico. That made Gallardo one of Mexico's most powerful and feared law enforcement officers.

He had been known to work both sides of the border and was always loyal to the largest paycheck. He kept the cocaine pipeline open and jailed anyone who opposed or tried to stop it. If a judge stood in the way, he simply replaced the judge. At times, Gallardo shipped those who resisted him past the border and to the funeral home of Lazaro Fuentes, but only if it was necessary. Recently, Fuentes noted, it had become increasingly more necessary.

Fuentes quickly dismissed Gallardo and raised his glass toward Carlos Avelar. "Salud," he said.

Avelar nodded but did not speak.

His black suit looked as though it had been worn for a week. It was wrinkled, and traces of mud had splattered the right pants leg near the cuff. His black turtleneck sweater was soiled and much too bulky for the summertime heat. But Avelar did not seem to have any interest in either the heat or his appearance. His face was round and had been scarred by adolescent acne. His head had been shaved. He wore sunglasses, even at night, and his mouth had been carved into a perpetual sneer.

Avilar had been an ambitious shoeshine boy on the streets of Medellin, Colombia, when he discovered how easy it was to take a handful of raw cocaine and turn it into a fortune. He worked for the syndicate. Then he owned the syndicate. Avelar never bought anything that could be achieved just as easily with a bullet or a bomb. To Avelar, anyone who got in the way was expendable.

Business was business. He possessed what the world wanted. He had cocaine. Fuentes built the human pipeline to make sure it was delivered north of the border and, more specifically, to him. Gallardo made sure no one interfered. Together, they formed a tight and profitable little triumvirate.

Fuentes frowned and barely tasted the whiskey. He could not take his eyes off the heavy-set, balding man, whose unfamiliar face was shaded by a dim light dancing in the corner. He was dressed in a gray woolen suit, totally out of place in the humidity of a Phoenix summer, and he was sipping vodka at room temperature.

"There has been a change in the arrangements," Gallardo said, breaking the silence at last.

"Why was I not informed earlier" Fuentes wanted to know.

"You are being informed now," Avelar said, his voice a harsh whisper. "That is why we are all gathered here."

"Then what are the new arrangements?" Fuentes asked.

"Your shipments north will be doubled." It was Gallardo talking.

"When?"

"As soon as possible."

"Monday," Avelar said, his voice both defiant and demanding. "Can you do it Lazaro? Can you move that quickly and that efficiently?"

Fuentes did not hesitate. Hesitation, he knew, had always been considered a sign of weakness. "There are always more transients available for the pipeline than enough cocaine to fill their pockets," he said matter-of-factly.

"That is changing even as we speak."

"When is the increased shipment due to arrive?"

"It is already here."

Fuentes arched an eyebrow with surprise. "I was told only a month ago that the cocaine supply was drying up."

"Somebody has lied to you," Avelar said.

"But the planes –."

"What about the planes?"

"I read where they have poisoned the fields."

Avelar laughed. "The stupid bastards who run the American CIA paid the pilots to poison the coca fields," he said. "They dropped water instead."

"A grievous error, I assume."

Avelar stifled a yawn. "The pilots work for me," he said.

Fuentes shrugged as though he would have suspected nothing less. "More cocaine means more investment capital," he said.

"That is being provided for us," Gallardo answered.

"How much?"

"As much as we want. As much as we need. As much as we can take."

"I don't like dealing with loan sharks."

"This is not a loan." Gallardo's eyes were gleaming. "We are being charged no interest on the money. In fact, we are not even being asked to repay the principal."

"Who, may I ask, has that kind of money and is willing to throw it at our feet?"

"Someone who wants to make sure that our good neighbors who live here in the north have enough cocaine to suffocate every man, woman, and child in the country."

Gallardo turned his head and motioned toward the heavy-set, balding man whose dark-skinned face was emerging at last from the shadows. "Lazaro," he said, "let me introduce you to our new banker."

Fuentes raised his empty glass in a salute.

The heavy-set man ignored him.

Silence.

"Does he have a name?" Fuentes asked.

"At the moment, no, he does not have a name," Gallardo answered. "He prefers it that way."

"Then you are certain that the man without a name has the money required to double the shipments north?"

A cynic's laughter rumbled deep in Gallardo's throat. "The Syrian Embassy in Mexico City has all the money any of us need," he answered.

"A blank check, as it were," Fuentes said.

"Already endorsed."

Lazaro Fuentes could still hear Gallardo's cynical laugh ricocheting in his brain when he returned to the funeral car. For whatever reason, the thunder and rain had deserted Phoenix, and the life and death of the stranger who brought a hard face and carried a gun to the streets of his town were the farthest things from his mind.

Just how rich could one man become? He said the words aloud, then his chuckle turned into a laugh rumbling deep within his gut.

Chapter 23

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN lay in the darkness of his hotel room, unable to sleep. The silence around him was broken only by the steady breathing of the dark-haired girl who lay beside him, breathing steadily, perhaps contentedly, her face pressed hard against his shoulder. By now he knew everything there was to know about her. At least, he knew everything that he wanted to know about her.

Her name was Carol Ann McCarthy, and, for the past ten years, she had taught history, both American and British, to tenth grade students at Tupelo High School. She definitely had Mississippi blood coursing through her veins and was fiercely proud of her Southern heritage. Her great grandfather had been a Confederate soldier who fought at Vicksburg and Shiloh during the hated war of Northern aggression. Those had been her words: "The war of Northern aggression." Some people refused to forget, and others refused to forgive. Mississippi was full of both kinds. St. Aubin was sleeping with one of them.

He turned and for no particular reason he could think of at the moment, lightly kissed her cheek. It had been a long time since he had kissed anyone's cheek, and his mind searched for a glimpse of the last woman who had made love to him. It came up blank, and he wondered if there had ever been a woman, regardless of her accent, in his life. Before the war? After the war? Which war?

Carol Ann stirred slightly and wrinkled her nose but did not open her eyes. She was the epitome of the mythical Southern belle all right. She knew when and how to act like a lady and when to act like the woman she was, and she had come to him in the darkness of the early morning hour, soft and gentle at first, then like an uncaged animal, gnashing her teeth, tearing at his skin with her fingernails full of anger and full of love, trying to master him, begging to be driven into submission.

St. Aubin knew what to do. He doubted if he had ever done it right, if he had done it at all.

Carol Ann McCarthy had spent too many days alone, she said. So much of her life had been spent alone, she said. He didn’t believe her but saw no reaon to question her. Beauty never spent much time alone. Now in the innocence of slumber, veiled by the night, her face had the qualities of a child who did not know whether to pout or smile. She looked younger than her thirty-seven years, and her straight black hair lay in broken, silky circles beneath her. Her mascara had clotted beneath her eyes, caused by the tears rolling down her face just before she drifted off to sleep.

For the life of him, Andrews St. Aubin could not understand why in God's name a woman insisted on crying just because she chose to make love to a stranger. Everyone, he guessed, had their penitence to do. Crying was as good as any way to ask for absolution of their sins.

St. Aubin sat up in bed and glanced at the luminous dial on his watch. In twenty minutes it would be five o'clock, which meant he had been in bed for four hours and asleep much less time than that. His muscles ached, and there was a dull throb in his temples. St. Aubin blamed it on the tequila and eased out from beneath the rumpled sheets, reaching for his pants where he had thrown them carelessly on the floor. He walked across the room, pulled the curtain aside, and stared out the window, washed from the inside and never the outside.

The hint of dawn was not yet even a promise in the sky, and he thought for a fleeting moment that he glimpsed a familiar face in the shadows that crowded around a street lamp beneath his room. The face looked dead, and he knew that it was. Beyond the shadows, the avenue was empty.

The amber light from the corner street lamps barely touched the sidewalk. A car sat parked awkwardly against the curb. The front tire was flat and the door left open. There was no sound, no sign of any movement as far as St. Aubin could see.

Phoenix had died, like the man who faded beyond the shadows and no longer feared what St. Aubin feared. It was that odd hour of morning when even the hard-core insomniacs had finally passed out, and the street people had all melted into the darkness.

Within fifteen minutes, Andrews St. Aubin dressed and walked quietly toward the door. He could feel the weight of the Glock wedged inside his rattlesnake skin belt.

"Are you leaving?" Carol Ann's question stopped him.

"It's time."

"It's still dark outside." Her voice was faint and lyrical, and she was slurring her words together.

"I have an appointment," St. Aubin lied.

"Nobody in Phoenix keeps appointments at this hour." Carol Ann yawned, and St. Aubin could see the reflection of her in the mirror, stretching as the sheet dropped down around her waist.

She had no idea how sexy she looked, and he could not tell her.

There wasn't time.

"I do," he said.

"Who is he? Or is it a she?"

"It's a man."

"A friend."

"Maybe."

"I forgot." Her words were as sleepy as her eyes.

"What?"

"You're a thief, aren't you?"

"It depends on what I find."

St. Aubin could see Carol Ann pressing his sweat-soaked pillow against her naked body, holding it tightly with both hands.

"I won't be here when you get back," she said softly.

"Where will I find you?"

"Don't worry." She yawned again. "I know where to find you."

St. Aubin rubbed his hands across the day's growth of whiskers on his face and reached for the door knob.

Her words stopped him again. "Aren't you going to kiss me good-bye?"

St. Aubin thought about it. But before he could answer her, Carol Ann had drifted back off to sleep, so he slipped out into the hallway and wondered if he would ever see her again, or whether he would ever think of her again if he didn't.

The smell of her perfume was still in his nostrils when Andrews St. Aubin stepped through the exit door and began his descent down the marble staircase. Two floors were not a long way to walk. Elevators could get a man killed, depending on who, if anyone, was waiting for him when the doors opened.

Within thirty minutes and two cups of coffee after he reached the bottom floor, he knew, a dim morning light would be creasing the sky and chasing the dead man away. When a fading light crossed the shadows, he sometimes thought that his face resembled the dead man, which was why he seldom looked in mirrors anymore.

Chapter 24

ESPIRITU, THE ONE who called himself a ghost, stood like a tall, slender splinter upon the earth. He pulled the last vestige of a dark night around him as though it were a burial shroud, and his eyes glowed as brightly as burning embers in the fading reflection of a moon shaped like the dagger that was never far from his hand.

His voice rose above the bald mesa lost above Verde Valley Cliff, a laugh, a scream, a song that had no words and no ending, and a harsh, hot wind tore across his scarred face like blowers from the pits of hell itself. An ancient shepherd's robe cloaked his body, and goatskin sandals were strapped to his feet. Above him, carved into a great limestone cliff, were the ruins of Montezuma’s Castle, deserted by a mysterious race of people who simply walked away almost six hundred years earlier and dropped off the face of the earth. It was a sacred ground, a holy place then as it was now.

Espiritu looked out at the figures who knelt before him. There were six of them, and their heads were bowed, and they shuddered at the sound of his voice, his laughter, his screams that were an inhuman blasphemy against the tortured, sacred souls of the living. The six had separated themselves from the living. They had given their souls to Espiritu, and the one who called himself a ghost had twisted those forsaken souls like cracked leather in his long, bony fingers before throwing them into the bonfires kindled by Satan.

He slowly raised his arms, and a shooting star dropped through the clouds as though someone evil or someone divine had cut an unseen string that kept it in hanging in place. It was there, just for an instant. Then it was gone. So swift. Like life itself.

Espiritu felt the ground tremble beneath his feet. A decadent moon hung in the sky above his shoulder like a broken fingernail. The laughter, the screams, died in the night. A strange, unholy silence crept across a desert that was home only to those creatures that crawled on their bellies across the volcanic sands.

"My children," said Espiritu.

His words were like a song.

Every head raised. Every eye was on him, as pale as the moon above, afraid to look upon the countenance of a ghost, afraid to look away. A bonfire of mesquite and juniper crackled between them, painting patterns of yellow and red upon their faces. Their lips glistened from their own spittle. Their eyes were glazed with fear.

"Be not afraid," Espiritu said. "There is no cause to fear when the spirit of darkness walks among us."

They listened to the silence, and within it they heard footsteps, faint at first, then louder, coming toward them, coming after them, and it was the rhythmic beating of their own hearts.

They could see the spirit of darkness, a ghost that stared at them and whispered to them from deep within the hollow of Espiritu's own eyes.

The master was among them.

He had not forsaken them.

They were his servants, peasants, wayfarers from a small village who had been penniless and starving and were starving no longer.

"There is work to be done," Espiritu said.

The heads nodded in unison.

"There is much work, and it is never done."

Again the heads nodded.

"The master is depending on us." His voice was a chant, each movement of his slender body a ritual recorded in the black leather book that lay upon the fire but did not burn. Their eyes brightened. Their hearts were beating faster now.

"He will protect you."

"We believe." The voices were an echo in the wind.

"We are together. We are as one," said Espiritu.

"We are together."

"We are here to partake of the sacrament."

"We are here."

"The sacrament will be your salvation."

"Glory be to the sacrament."

The wind howled as it fled the mesa of volcanic sands.

"Drink his blood and no one can hurt you," Espiritu sang.

"His blood is upon us."

"Eat his flesh, and you become invisible to those who seek you out. No one can harm you. No one can find you, even though you walk among them. Their eyes are useless against you. Their bullets cannot penetrate you."

"His flesh is in our mouths."

"You become immortal."

The old one sank to the ground, his eyes cast toward the stars, and a scorpion crawled out of the sands and upon his face.

"No one can hurt you." Espiritu's words rattled in his throat as he knelt, picked up the scorpion and ate it.

"We feel no pain."

"No one can kill you."

"We are without death."

"Drink his blood."

"We thirst for his blood."

"Eat his flesh."

"We hunger for his flesh."

The heart beneath the ghost was beating faster, a drum pounding against the chest of the harlot who lay naked before them, strapped by leather straps that tore into her flesh, tied to an altar of stone.

Her eyes were ablaze.

Her skin glistened with sweat.

She was no longer young.

She would always be beautiful.

She would never grow older.

Her head had been shaved, and it rolled back and forth on a pillow of granite, in rhythm with the chant that rolled so easily off Espiritu's lips.

He stood above her.

The six figures knelt around her.

They touched her with their tongues for she was most blessed among them, the chosen one, whose blood and whose flesh would keep them safe from the gringos, the patrolmen, the armies who lay in wait for them while they carried their bags of white powder into the land north of the river.

Her breath smelled of stale mescal. Her nose was flecked with white powder that had stolen her mind and carried her to a world from which there would be no return. Her breasts were large and no longer firm, and there was a scar beneath her left nipple. From a knife, perhaps. From the teeth of a careless lover.

She moaned. Was it pain? Or pleasure? Or was there a difference?

Espiritu would never know. He loved them both, as he had loved her, and he could taste her even now. He wanted her again, but it was too late. She was far more important to him now. She was the chosen one.

The one who called himself a ghost reached beneath his shepherd's robe and withdrew the dagger, its blade long and honed as sharp as a razor's edge.

Her skin was stretched tight across her chest. He could see the pounding of her heart. He could see her heart calling to him.

She saw the dagger as its blade flashed upward, a blur in the fading moonlight, and the mescal drained from the salt of her flesh.

She screamed. The cry died in her throat as a whimper.

With a single motion of his wrist, Espiritu drove the blade deep into the harlot's chest and watched the six disciples who knelt at his feet devour her heart while it was still beating in their hands. Espiritu smiled.

The spirit of darkness would be quite pleased.

The spirit of darkness laughing even now. The laughter was loud and raucous, and it matched his own. The one who called himself a ghost left the valley long before the disciples had finished their feast.

They had many miles to go before the night came again, and, by then, no one would find them. No one could see them. Bullets could not touch them. The spirit of darkness had his hands upon them, and they were invincible. They believed. That was all that counted. They believed.

By another nightfall, they would be on the far side of the red rock canyons, pouches of white powder sewn into the lining of their clothes, and their pockets would be stuffed with five dollar bills, more money than any of them had ever possessed before. They were the immigrants, the mules, the pipeline, cheap labor who would haul a million dollars worth of cocaine into the north for a hundred dollars and a tortilla filled with eggs and chorizo.

Some would continue their journey farther north, searching for one job after another, walking across many miles that carried them through many cities and into many beer joints that needed tables cleaned and dishes washed.

Some would return, often against their will, and drink the blood again.

A few would die, a curious amazement plastered on their faces, as the fevered pain of a bullet tore deep through the gristle of their bodies.

Espiritu climbed into his jeep and drove back across the desert without ever bothering to turn the headlights on. No roadway stretched out before him. He needed none. The one who called himself a ghost headed toward a distant shaft of sunlight that shimmered and danced its way between the cuts in the mountains and above the desert sands.

Miles away, in a Phoenix hotel, waited a man with no name, a stranger, an American who had been asking questions about the death of someone who did not concern him.

The stranger, however, did trouble another, and there was only one way to ease the tormented mind of Lazaro Fuentes. Espiritu reached down, licked the harlot's blood from the blade of his dagger and returned it to his belt.

Chapter 25

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN stared through the cracked glass of a back door exit, the taste of stale coffee on his lips, watching an empty sky where darkness seemed to linger far past its appointed time.

Beyond and around him, he would write, sprawled a harsh landscape where only those plants with thorns and a certain distaste for water could survive. It stretched out flat from sunrise to sunset, a terrain whose appearance never changed, a corridor for the damned. Arizona encompassed 113,998 square miles and was populated by 6,392,017 people, not counting, of course, the never-ending parade of stragglers, both rich and poor, who moved ever northward out of Mexico and the lands south.

It wasn't glorious prose, he knew, not nearly as glorious as the place. At least one of the 6,392,017, maybe more, hiding somewhere within those 113,998 harsh, square miles, had taken a knife and brutally ended the short, bitter life of Danny B. Where amongst those 6,392,017 people was the killer hiding, and why had he, or she, feared or loathed Danny B. enough to kill him?

His death was definitely not an accident, or the rotting body of Danny B. would not have been shoved into the corner of a box car and shipped home. Had the killer been inspired by drugs or by the proof that the blond-haired son of a virgin named Chilmalma, if the old religious educator's notes were correct, had again descended from the clouds and walked upon a land that held the lost, or misplaced secret, of his coming.

If he found the killer, St. Aubin wondered, would he find the proof as well, and where should he look first? Andrews St. Aubin knew only one of the 6,392,017 names: Raul Saenz, who had worked alongside Danny B., investigating the infested belly of Southern Arizona. Raul Saenz might not have answers to all of his questions, but he would have a few, provided, of course, that he, unlike Danny B., had escaped the killer's wrath.

St. Aubin waited until morning touched the streets of Phoenix before pushing the door open and stepping out onto streets swept clean by a warm Southerly wind. The faces of those who walked past him turned away as though he was not among them, and St. Aubin paused beside the park bench where the dead man sat at night. A pigeon foraged among the dirt, searching for forgotten crumbs.

For St. Aubin, the sun had lost its warmth. A sudden and familiar chill worked its way into his bones. He wondered if he had come to Phoenix to save his own soul or send another to join the dead man in hell.

The day before, the pastor of the San Esteban Baptist Church had asked St. Aubin to leave without answering any of his questions. The pastor had never heard of Danny B., who was certainly not a member of his congregation. He did not know whether Danny B. was alive or dead, nor, obviously, did he care, and the name of Raul Saenz was just as unfamiliar to him.

Yes, Christ was coming again, to be sure, the pastor admitted, but Christ had not already come, especially not to Mexico, although St. Aubin suspected that the pastor had heard of the god who sailed away in a raft of coiled serpents. Quetzalcoatl was simply a myth, nothing more, and to think otherwise was blasphemy. The preacher simply feared that even the faint hint of blasphemy might condemn his worthless soul even more than his pastorate at San Esteban had.

St. Aubin turned the corner onto Monroe Street. In the distance, he could make out the faint nineteenth century outline of St. Mary’s Basilica, gleaming as yellow as the sun.

Chapter 26

THE JEEP THREADED its way through the knot of automobiles that jammed the downtown streets of Phoenix, making lanes in the flow of traffic where lanes had ceased to exist, and finally pulled into an alley across the street from the Sheraton. Espiritu ignored the "Do Not Park" sign, climbing out of the Jeep and leaning against the brick wall of the American Kitchen and Wine Bar, his black, piercing eyes darting from window to window of the hotel.

Sunshine had reached the top floor and was beginning to play its way down the side of the Sheraton, eating into the cold gray shadows that encased it. The one who called himself a ghost folded his arms as he recalled the phone call from Lazaro Fuentes. The information had been sketchy. But it had been enough.

"I want to find out more about this stranger who's been asking questions all over town about Danny B.," Fuentes told him. "I don't like questions. I certainly don't like people who ask them."

"You want to know his name?"

"I want to know his business."

"Maybe he's a cop."

"Sebastian doesn't think so."

"Sebastian is a blind man."

"He reads the streets pretty well."

Espiritu could not argue with that. "Maybe the stranger thinks he's a tough guy," he said. "Maybe he doesn't want to talk to me."

"Maybe he does not have a choice."

Espiritu laughed. He preferred tough guys who did not want to talk. He had been known to remove their swagger, as easily and as swiftly as he castrated a stray coyote on the prairie when he was hungry and the gods had not yet fed him. He pulled information out of them as he would pull their tongue from their throat and leave them whimpering in the dirt when death came to silence their humiliation.

Everyone had a certain threshold of pain, a breaking point. Espiritu never had trouble finding it. It was, he told Lazaro Fuentes a long time ago, "a gift from God." He and God had the same mission on earth. God, with the snap of his holy fingers, had killed whole nations at a time. Espiritu was condemned to take care of only one man at a time.

"You want me to kill him?" he asked Fuentes.

"When you find out who he is, and what he is doing here, and who he is working for, and what he knows, then you may do with him as you please."

"Where do I find him?"

"He is staying at the Sheraton."

"Room number?"

"Four fifty two."

Espiritu grinned.

Four fifty two. It was, the gods told him, a very unlucky number to have.

The one who called himself a ghost left the alley and trotted briskly across the narrow street, recklessly working his way through the traffic, shouting insults at those who cursed him, laughing at the honking horns that tried to move him and keep him out of the way. Espiritu entered the hotel and walked across the empty lobby without glancing in either direction, moving straight to the elevator.

To the desk clerk, he appeared to be no one of particular importance, wearing pegged denim jeans and a torn, stained tee shirt beneath his black leather jacket. His lizard-skinned boots had sharp, pointed toes, and they, like his gaunt face, were caked with dust from the desert floor. He was nothing more than a tall, lanky bus boy and running late to work, a day employee that the night clerk had never seen before and, as quickly as the hired help turned over, would probably never seen again.

Espiritu rode the freight elevator to the fourth floor alone. Down the hallway, past the ice and vending machines, he found room four fifty two, and, less than thirty seconds later, he had the door cracked open. Espiritu never understood why hotels wasted so much money on security. He could get into any room in Phoenix as easily and almost as quickly without a key as he could open the locks with one.

The room was dark and filled with the faint fragrance of summer perfume, a rich girl's perfume. The one who moved as quietly as a ghost wore a cynical smile. So the stranger had not slept alone last night. Maybe the girl was still there, too, and he would find them, coupled together, legs and arms wrapped around each other, rutting like animals in a peon's backyard. Espiritu could almost picture them in his mind, and he felt his jeans tighten. Maybe the stranger could watch while a real man made a woman scream and bleed in the worn-out hollow of a hotel bed. Maybe she was there alone.

Espiritu wiped the spittle from his lips and stepped into the room, easing the door shut behind him. The only sound was that of the lock clicking into place. He looked toward the bed. It was empty.

The one who moved like a ghost sat down on the edge of the bed and searched through both drawers of the table that held a phone and alarm clock. In the top drawer he found a Gideon Bible, and the bottom one yielded little information about the stranger who troubled Lazaro Fuentes. There were a handful of golf shirts, none of them new, a stack of boxer shorts, and a newspaper clipping about some train engineer who had been found dead in an Arizona barrow barrow ditch.

Espiritu mulled the name of Alden Edwards over in his mind, and it meant nothing to him. A pair of faded jeans had been thrown across the chair beside the window, and a wet towel lay on the carpet in front of the mirror. A business card on the dresser bore the private phone number of someone named Richard Brockleman, a Dallas publisher. It might be important. Then again, it might have been left by the last tourist who occupied room four fifty two of the Sheraton Hotel.

In the bathroom, Espiritu heard the sound of water running.Perhaps, the girl had not left after all. He reached beneath his jacket and removed the dagger from his belt, moving slowly and quietly to the bathroom door, nudging it slightly and letting it swing open. The mirror was steamy, the floor wet. He jerked the shower curtain back, and a pulsating stream of hot water kept shooting into the porcelain tub.

No one was standing there.

Still clutching the knife, Espiritu methodically began to remove his clothes. The water was hot, and a dull, weary ache throbbed in his shoulders. He would wash away the grime and dust of the desert that had worked its way like a thorn into his skin. There was nothing else to do anyway until the stranger returned. Espiritu was in no hurry. He had all day. He had all night, if necessary.

He might be waiting on the stranger, but his thoughts were fixated on the girl when he stepped naked into the tub and let the spray of hot water cleanse the dirt from his face and the blood from his hands.

Chapter 27

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN stepped into the darkness of St. Mary’s Basilica long before the central business district of Phoenix had awakened to meet the day. The Most Reverend Michael Mochrie had come to his office early since sin and the harbingers of sin dwelt most often in the nighttime hours. He was surprised to find someone who had questions, but no confession, and the priest was showing as much compassion and understanding as St. Aubin had found in a city that had thus far been as unfriendly as the desert around it.

Yes, Michael Mochrie told him, he was quite familiar with the legend. The Aztecs had written on more than one occasion about a pale-skinned god or priest-king who had come to them as the promise of the Light, the Messiah, and, yes, there seemed to be a great many traits that this historical or mythical person did indeed share with the one that the Judeo-Christian world called Jesus.

Both were born of a virgin, the Aztec version having been miraculously conceived by a ball of down whose light and airy appearance could have easily represented the Holy Spirit. The reverent teachings and exhortations of both included circumcision, the need for oral confessions, fasting, penance, and the holy sacraments – the same rituals, in fact, that Catholic missionaries would bring to the shores of Mexico years later. Both Christs, the one of our Bible and the one in the myths of Mexico, were persecuted, and both died, promising to return someday and gather up the people who had been faithful to them.

"Our Christ, according to the Bible, ascended into Heaven," Reverend Mochrie concluded. "The Aztec Christ, according to legend, traveled to a faraway place where the sea disappeared into the far reaches of the earth. Perhaps, one is no different from the other."

The pastor of St. Mary’s Basilica stood, walked around his desk, and pulled a copy of the historical writings of Father Duran, a missionary friar, from his book shelf. He opened the pages, and Andrews St. Aubin was allowed to read the passage concerning the blond, fair-skinned Aztec god who had come as the promise of Light:

He was a very abstemious man and fasted continually, Father Duran had long ago written. He lived chastely and practiced much penance; he had the custom of building altars and oratories everywhere, of placing pious images on walls and altars, of kneeling before them to pray, and of preaching.

St. Aubin read the passage twice. "Did this Aztec God have a name?" he asked.

"He was called the Plumed Serpent, the god of the winds, the god of the dawn, the morning star, but maybe this historical account will help you," the reverend said, opening an ancient manuscript, lying in dust on the far corner of his desk and showing St. Aubin a wrinkled passage recorded sometime between 1558 and 1569 by a Franciscan named Sahagun.

Sahagun had written of a monotheistic character who possessed all the riches of the world and who had brought the gospel to a lost tribe: They adored one lord only whom they believed to be God; they called him Quetzalcoatl, and his priest bore the same name. This priest told them over and over there was but one god and lord whose name was Quetzalcoatl.

St. Aubin placed the book back on the pastor's desk and said, "It seems that everyone in every religious faction in two countries has heard of Quetzalcoatl."

"I'm sure they have."

"But no one believes in him."

"The true believer believes in the truth."

"Is Quetzalacoatl a lie, a rumor, a myth, a legend, the mental creation of a sixteenth century crackpot?"

"The legend is real. Perhaps the man was not. No one has ever found a historic trace of him."

"From what I understand, no one has ever found a historical trace of the one you call Jesus either."

"The gospels wrote of Jesus."

"The Aztecs wrote of Quetzalcoatl."

"One was inspired."

"And the other was heathen?"

"That is what we choose to believe."

"Isn't there a chance, no matter how slight, that this mythical Quetzalcoatl who preached to the Aztecs might be the same Christ who preached in the New Testament?" St. Aubin asked as politely as he could. "Jesus promised to return. Maybe he came as Quetzalcoatl."

Reverend Mochrie’s smile remained as gentle as his voice. "If you are a student of the Bible, and perhaps you are, the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew informs us that the gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the worlds for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come."

St. Aubin leaned back in the antique, hardback chair, inquiring, "Has the end come, Reverend."

"Sooner or later, it comes for us all."

St. Aubin reached out and picked a Bible off the reverend's desk. He thumbed through its pages, not stopping to read any of the scriptures, none of which would have been familiar to him anyway. "I have a question, father," he said.

"Most people do."

"You've been very open and honest with me about a subject that, no doubt, is not preached very often on Sunday morning."

The Reverend Mochrie smiled quaintly, a little mischief in the corner of his eyes. "The Bible says God works in strange and mysterious ways." He shrugged. "I try not to limit them."

"I asked the pastor of the San Esteban Baptist Church the same questions I asked you, and, the next thing I knew, he was escorting me out the front door as if a demon from hell had invaded his sanctimonious little domain."

The reverend's smile became a laugh. "Pastor Davidson believes the Bible should be preached just the way King James wrote it."

St. Aubin arched an eyebrow. "I thought the Bible came from many writings, Greek and Hebrew alike," he said.

Reverend Mochrie leaned forward across his desk and whispered, "Don't tell Pastor Davidson."

St. Aubin chuckled, staring at the painting on the wall, the one of Christ knocking at the unopened door, then asked the most important question he knew, the one that kept gnawing at his gut. "Reverend?"

"Yes."

"Has anyone ever seen any proof that this Aztec god or priest-king or messiah actually returned to Mexico?"

The Reverend Mochrie thought for a moment, his hands placed beneath his chin as if in prayer. Finally, he said, "I recall a story that had its birth sometime in the late fifteen hundreds, sometime during the time when Sanhagun wrote his history," he said. His words came slowly as he dredged a long-forgotten tale from his memory. "I believe that it happened somewhere near Oaxaca. Missionaries reported of seeing a painting on an old deer skin, and it showed three Indian women sitting on the ground and crying beside a naked man. His hands and legs were extended, and ropes had tied his hands and ankles in place while someone had nailed them to a wooden cross."

"Then it happened again."

The reverend's smile never faded. "All I believe is that it happened," he said. "Here or there. Once or twice. It's not important. It happened."

St. Aubin stared out the window a moment as he tried to frame his next question. “If Quetzalcoatl did exist,” he said, “and if he did leave some trace of his existence and who he was, is there a possibiliy that anything he left behind could make its way to the land that we know today as Arizona?”

“Certainly.” Father Mochrie did not hesitate. “Cortes left the Aztec kingdom in ruins and came through here in the mid-fifteen hundreds looking for cities of gold. He found neither cities nor gold. And if my recollection is correct, back in the 1920s, a cache of ancient Roman artifacts were found just north and west of Tucson. Spears. Daggers. Swords. Even a sixty-two pound cross made of lead. Things like that. Some had writing that appeared to be Hebrew and a form of Latin known only before the end of the first millennium. Maybe they had been stolen. Maybe the Romans themselves left them, and nobody knows they were here or why they came. There’s a lot nobody knows. All I can say is that the University of Tucson did study the relics and say they were authentic.”

The pastor expressed no hesitation when discussing historical facts, no matter how controversial they might sound. The recent life and death of Danny B. disturbed him, but his voice remained soft and self-assured. If a man lived, he must surely die. It was the master plan of God. "People die every day," he said. "If they aren't buried behind my church, then I’m afraid I don't remember them. I pray for their souls because my job is to pray for their souls, but I seldom ever know who they are."

"How about a man named Raul Saenz?"

The Reverend Mochrie closed his eyes in thoughtful repose. "It's not a name I know or have heard before," he said.

It was not a name anyone knew or admitted to know.

As St. Aubin walked down Monroe Street, he began to wonder: Was Raul Saenz a man, like Quetzalcoatl, a man or a myth? From what Richard Brockleman told him, three different agents had worked with Danny B. during his assignment in Southern Arizona. The first had trouble picking up the different dialects along the border and only survived a month before his cover was blown. The second was a family man who had three sons in grade school back in El Paso. In the midst of a busted drug deal, he got caught in a deadly crossfire and took a bullet in the lung. After leaving the hospital, he had not requested a return to Arizona, and the agency gave him a desk job in San Antonio. Raul Saenz was the last, and on the night Danny B. died, Saenz had gone into hiding. Or was he dead as well? The assassin could have shipped one home and kept one in an unmarked grave. But why? It didn't make sense, but neither did life ... or death.

Before St. Aubin departed Maricopa in the wake of Alden Edwards's death, he had paid a visit to the Drug Enforcement Agency, but no one there had anything out of the ordinary to tell him. The government had a bureaucratic tendency to keep its secrets to itself, especially during times of confusion, and the government, he often thought, had invented confusion or at least had become a major distributor. St. Aubin instinctively knew that, but he wasn't for sure why or how he knew.

If Brockleman had been right, there had been a time, not so long ago, when he, too, had worked with or for the government, locked into another agency, behind the unseen walls of another country, fighting another battle with an enemy that had another face. St. Aubin felt compassion for Raul Saenz. He knew what it was like to be uprooted and displaced. Death did not necessarily remove a man. An eraser on a piece of paper could be just as effective. It obviously had been for him.

The D.E.A. had no record of anyone on its staff by the name of Raul Saenz. At least that was the report given to St. Aubin. All St. Aubin had received from the FBI was a cold stare, which was a reasonable indication that either the Feds did not know a damn thing or knew entirely too much.

Richard Brockleman had telephoned the President, who gave him his condolences, but nothing else. Brockleman placed a second call to the CIA, which, for years, had taken advantage of his money, his support, his influence, and his power. The voice at the other end of the line had listened to Brockleman's calm, measured plea for assistance and said softly that someone would be getting back to him.

As far as St. Aubin knew, no one had.

In Phoenix, Raul Saenz was a non-person as well. St. Aubin possessed a faded snapshot of Saenz and Danny B. standing together outside the doorway of the Gran Paisano Bar, laughing and drinking beer. It was the last picture of his brother that Richard Brockleman received, taken, if the date on the back was correct, just ten days before the executioner had gone to work on Danny B.'s throat. The black and white photograph, however, was grainy, and the faces of both men were virtually hidden by the falling shadow of an unpainted wooden sign that hung above them.

Since arriving in Phoenix, St. Aubin discovered that certain names frightened people. Danny B. was one of those names. Raul Saenz had, for all practical purposes, exited a decaying earth, and the living who saw the photograph did not recognize the faces of the dead or the missing.

When a border state buried its mysteries, it buried them deep.

The Phoenix police sergeant, slumped over his desk, simply glanced with neither interest nor concern at the picture, shrugged his broad shoulders, and told St. Aubin: "We got all kinds here. They come from Ohio for their health, from Michigan to strike it rich, from Mexico to find a job, from South America to raise hell. They stay awhile and leave, and sometimes they leave in a hearse. There are many names involved, and I am afraid that I do not recall them all."

"You don't recognize either face?"

The sergeant squinted, holding the photograph in better light. "It is so difficult to tell," he replied.

"One of the men is Danny Brockleman. Most people knew him as Danny B."

"I know the name, perhaps, but not the man." The sergeant reached for a cup of scorched coffee. "The rumors on the street say he is no longer in the city."

"Which one?"

"Danny B."

"Which city?"

"This one. Phoenix."

"Danny B. is dead."

"I’m sorry."

St. Aubin searched the sergeant's aging, yellowed eyes, trying to determine if the policeman was being honest with him or lying through teeth as yellowed as his eyes. The teeth were virtually hidden behind a comtemptous smile. The eyes were hard, and they did not flinch. The officer's face was a mask of indifference.

St. Aubin pressed on. "Danny B. was a cop, too," he said.

"If you say so."

"He worked for the Drug Enforcement Agency."

"They don’t check in with me."

"He did your dirty work."

"He didn’t do it all. We’re still cleaning up after him."

“Danny B.?”

“The names don’t make any difference.”

"Raul Saenz was his partner."

"The names never stay the same for very long."

"And you don't know anything about either man.”

"Only the gossip on the street."

"What does the gossip tell you?"

"I deal in facts, sir, not gossip," the sergeant said. He sighed, turned away, and began sorting absent-mindedly through a stack of investigative reports.

St. Aubin was almost to the door when he heard the sergeant speak again. "Let me give you a word of advice."

"If it's cheap." St. Aubin looked around.

"Whatever happens between here and the border happens," the sergeant said, staring up at a green ceiling that was in a desperate need of a new paint job. "We stop it one day, and it begins again the next. We jail one man. Two take his place. The gangs are always fighting, and about the only hope we have is to let them kill each other while we stay out of their way. I know where the last drug deal went down, and I know where the next one’s going down. But there’s more of them than us. There are a lot of things worth dying for, I guess, but a drug deal’s not one of them. All we can do is protect the innocent and let the guilty take turns holding funerals.”

St. Aubin nodded and walked out into a crowded sidewalk. The dead ends were piling up. Thus far, he had not been able to track down anyone who could provide any information on either the whereabouts of the missing Raul Saenz or the last day Danny B. walked the streets of Phoenix. He had gathered more information about the life of an Aztec god in Mexico five hundred years ago than he had about the events in Phoenix five days earlier.

St. Aubin had gone into so many bars that they all began to look alike and smell alike. No one knew Raul Saenz. No one had heard of Danny B.'s death. Not even the bribes had been able to jar any information loose from their memories. The patrons, the bartenders, the bouncers, the bar maids were either ignorant or telling the truth or scared they might face the same fate that had ended Danny B.'s sojourn among them. St. Aubin was betting on the latter.

They spoke to him in hushed, hurried tones, trying to get rid of him as though he were a leper, and none of them had the courage to look him in the eyes. But who were they frightened of, he wondered, God or man, and why? And how many other throats had been cut to silence that many tongues? Even the Gran Paisano Bar offered no answers, and, from the photograph in his jacket pocket, St. Aubin knew that Danny B. and Raul Saenz had, at least once in their miserable lives, visited that bar, if none other in the city. They had been smiling, maybe laughing out loud, without a care in the world, the best part of their lives in front of them, and now one of them was dead.

St. Aubin ordered a tequila, although he had no intentions of drinking it. He placed a fifty dollar bill on top of the photograph and slid it casually across the top of an old cherrywood bar toward an aging man who held a half empty bottle of cheap mescal in his gnarled and trembling hands. He was missing a front tooth, and the festered head of a bald eagle had been tattooed on his arm.

"Know either one of them?" St. Aubin asked.

"No." The bartender's smile faded, his lips pressed firmly together, hiding the fact that he had lost the tooth, probably to a customer who wanted information that he did not have or refused to give.

St. Aubin folded a second fifty-dollar bill and lay it upon the photograph. "They were here," he said.

St. Aubin heard his voice turn colder. "The one on the left is Danny B." He waited a moment, then said, "The other one is Raul Saenz."

The bartender turned away and placed the half-empty bottle of mescal back on the shelf. The light inside the Gran Paisano was so dim that St. Aubin could not even read the label. "I don't know names," the bartender said. "I don't remember faces."

"Danny B. won't be coming back."

"I simply pour their whiskey," the bartender said. "If they like it, they come back. If they don't, they don't."

"We buried Danny B."

"The whiskey didn't kill him."

"Who did?"

A faint grin returned to the bartender's face. "Someone who had a reason, I guess," he said.

"Who had a reason?"

"A lot of folks have a lot of reasons."

"To kill Danny B.?"

"To kill anybody."

St. Aubin scratched the hotel's phone number on the back of a card and tossed it toward the bartender. "This is where I'm staying if you remember anything," he said. He picked up his hundred dollars and walked slowly toward the door.

"People with long memories have short lives," was all he heard the bartender say before he left the darkness of the Gran Paisano behind him.

The day had drained him. St. Aubin walked slowly down the sidewalk as the lengthening afternoon shadows began to overtake him. He couldn't be out much longer, he knew. The dead man would be coming as soon as the shadows turned to night.

St. Aubin knew no more about Danny B. nor Raul Saenz now than he had known that morning, and he tried to suppress the frustration that churned in his gut. It burned like boiling grease. He could feel his pulse rate quickening. This, he told himself, would be a miserable landscape to hold his grave.

The Alps above Innsbruck would be a far more desirable place for the sun to bleach his wasted bones, but he did not recall ever being there.

He barely recalled being anywhere day before yesterday.

Chapter 28

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN felt a hand touch his arm. He turned abruptly and stared down into the emaciated face of a human skeleton whose eyes were much too big for his head, who was staring at him with a bewhiskered grin.

"I have been waiting for you, sir," Sebastian Drabek whispered, his voice raspy as though his windpipe had cracked.

"I don't believe I know you."

"It does not matter to me if it does not matter to you."

St. Aubin shrugged as the afternoon shadows finally caught up with him.

Sebastian bowed his head reverently. "I understand you are looking for someone named Raul Saenz."

"Do you know him?"

"Sebastian knows everybody."

"Do you know where I can find him."

Sebastian began to cackle softly. "I also understand that you have a spare hundred dollars, probably two fifties, that you are wanting to give away," he said.

"It depends."

"On what, sir?"

"On what you know."

"I know everything."

"About everybody, I presume."

"Sir, you must know Sebastian very well." The old man arched his white eyebrows in mock surprise, and the cackle grew louder.

St. Aubin took the two fifty dollars bills from his shirt pocket and slowly unfolded them. "Aren't you afraid?" he asked.

"Of what?"

"Of talking to me about Raul Saenz." The fading sunlight broke out of the tree limbs in splinters, striking St. Aubin in the eyes. He shifted his position until his face was in the shade again. "I've asked a lot of people about Raul, but all of them are afraid to tell me anything. I'm just curious, I guess, to find out why you are willing to talk to me when the others aren't."

Sebastian's eyes widened. "What is there to be afraid of?" he asked.

"Dying, maybe."

Sebastian's cackle became a howl. "Some say Sebastian Drabek would be better off dead," he replied. "Maybe they are right. Maybe I am already dead and just do not know it yet."

St. Aubin handed him the two fifties. Sebastian stroked them gently and carefully, and his hands began to shake. "I have seen these before," he whispered. "But I have never held them." He kissed the bills, then looked up. "Are they good?" he asked.

"They'll spend."

"No," Sebastian answered. "The dime and the quarters, I will spend. These I will keep, and nobody will ever say that Sebastian is poor again."

St. Aubin nodded. "Tell me about Raul," he prodded.

"He is alive."

"Where?"

"Here. He has not left Phoenix."

"Then why can't I find him?"

"He has a new name. His calls himself Felix now."

"Felix what?"

"Just Felix. When you are drunk all the time, you need no other name."

"Where can I find him?"

"Felix is in love with a whore. You can find him with her. He drinks while she is with other men. He drinks most of the time."

"Where can I find her?"

"You ask so many questions, sir."

"The fifties give me that right."

"More answers require more fifties."

St. Aubin opened his wallet and removed a twenty, handing it to the old man. In the dim light, it could have just as easily been a fifty. Sebastian wadded the bill up and stuffed it in his ragged shoe without bothering to look at it.

"Where does the whore live? St. Aubin asked?"

"She is easy to find."

"I need an address."

Sebastian frowned, and a worried look crossed his face. "I don't know an address," he answered softly. "But you can find her. Many men find her. Many men knock on her door, and, if they have ten dollars, she lets them in." The emaciated one smiled sadly. "She would even let Sebastian in if he had ten dollars."

"Now you do."

Sebastian sighed. "She is not worth ten dollars," he said.

"Can you take me there?" St. Aubin asked.

"There is no need for Sebastian to do that. Just go to the Casa de la Luna," he said. "She is there. Felix is there. She will let you in if you have ten dollars."

"Does she have a name?"

"All whores have a name. But she has forgotten hers. She calls herself the Flower."

"What if I don't find Felix there?" St. Aubin asked.

"What do you mean, sir?"

"What if you are lying to me?"

Sebastian grinned broadly and shrugged. "Then, sir, you can come back and kill me, too. It does not matter."

St. Aubin rubbed his chin and wondered what the little man knew, or was willing to manufacture for a dollar or two, and who had sent him or if anyone had sent him at all.

"I also want to know about Danny B." St. Aubin said.

"He was a business man."

"What kind of business did he have?"

"He bought information." Sebastian shrugged. "When I had information, he bought it from me."

"What kind of information?"

"He wanted to know who had drugs and who didn't, and who was willing to sell his soul and who had already sold it."

"Cocaine?"

"It is the candy of the rich."

"Is that what killed Danny B.?"

"Cocaine?"

"Knowing who had it and who didn't."

"Danny B. knew too much about a lot of things."

"Christ?"

"Only if he was a religious man."

"Who killed him?"

"Raul knows."

"And the Flower?"

"She only knows about the men who would rather spend their ten dollars on her than on some rich man's candy."

Sebastian Drabek turned to walk away, but St. Aubin's words stopped him. "Are you a religious man, Sebastian?"

"I have a rosary."

"What do you know about Christ coming to Mexico?" St. Aubin asked.

Sebastian looked around nervously. "He's not there now," he said.

"Was he ever there?"

"He didn't say."

"Danny B. said he was."

"Christ talks to priests and saints. He doesn't bother people like Sebastian."

St. Aubin reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of dimes and quarters. He gently dropped them into the little man's hand.

"What are these for?" Sebastian said, frowning.

"It's something you can spend," St. Aubin said.

Sebastian Drabek looked hurt. Humiliation was embedded deep in his pale eyes. "I don't need these," he snapped. "Sebastian is not a beggar. Sebastian has a hundred dollars. More now. He is a rich man." The ragged little man threw the handful of coins angrily into the street and marched off into the traffic, muttering to himself.

A dusty dusk had settled uneasily over Phoenix by the time Andrews St. Aubin arrived at the hotel. He would write: The sky had turned purple, fringed with black and gold. The working face of the city had become bright with neon, and a cool night wind, for the moment anyway, had chased the oppressive heat out of the streets. The bars were not yet full, the hotels not quite empty. Meals were still being cooked while limes were being squeezed for the rims of margarita glasses. Phoenix is as seductive as tequila, and it can be just as dangerous, especially for those who are never fortunate enough to figure out the difference between drunkeness and happiness."

St. Aubin could remember being one, but not the other. He did not copy from brochures all the time.

Andrews St. Aubin pushed his way into the lobby of the Sheraton and checked the desk for messages. Richard Brockleman had called three times. That was to be expected. He would talk to Brockleman later, after he had found Raul Saenz. St. Aubin could feel the tightness return to his muscles. Every nerve ending was taut, alert. It was a good feeling, an old feeling. St. Aubin had no idea where or if he had ever felt it before. But the frustration had finally left him. He was no longer groping in the dark. He had a lead now, and sometimes, one lead could be enough. All he needed was a name. Perhaps, Raul Saenz would be able to furnish him that name.

Andrews St. Aubin saw her before he was halfway across the lobby. Carol Ann was sitting in an overstuffed chair beside the lounge, dressed in pink and lace, smiling at him. St. Aubin walked immediately to her, and she stood and kissed his cheek. Her lips were warm, and St. Aubin saw a strange fire burning deep within the coloration of her eyes.

"I wasn't expecting to find you here," he said.

"You wouldn't have found me here in the lobby if you had given me a key to your room." She winked.

St. Aubin smiled and nodded. "The pink looks real good on you," he said, not really knowing what else to say.

"It looks better when I'm not wearing it at all," she whispered.

He could imagine. He already knew.

"Would you care for dinner?" St. Aubin asked.

"Later. At the moment, I have something much better than steak and potatoes in mind." She winked, and her eyes were playing with his near and recent memories.

St. Aubin found himself wrestling between duty and temptation, and, somehow, duty did not seem as important to him as it once did. Maybe, he was just getting older. Yet, he knew that temptation would have to wait. It always did.

"Although I hate it more than you'll ever know, I have to go now" he said at last. "I have business to take care of, and I'm afraid it won't wait."

"Maybe I won't either."

"Then it's my loss."

Carol Ann's smile faded. "How late will you be?"

"I never know." St. Aubin stroked her hair softly and pulled her closer to him. "It could be morning before I'm through. Then again, there's a chance I could get back before the pillow beneath your head turns warm."

"Can I come with you?"

"I'm afraid not."

"I won't get in the way. I promise."

St. Aubin came as close to laughing out loud as he had in a long time."My dear," he said, squeezing her hand in his, "you would be very much in the way."

"Why do you say that?"

St. Aubin sighed, struggled for the right words, did not find them, and finally told her as gently as he knew how. "I'm going to a whorehouse," he said.

Carol Ann paled and looked as though he had slapped her across the face with his bare hand. Over a thick steak, cooked rare, and a bottle of chilled imported Chablis, no doubt imported from a liquor store down at the end of the block, St. Aubin did his best, and failed miserably, to explain the situation he was in. He was a newspaper journalist, to be sure, a travel writer. He had not lied to her about that. He had come to Phoenix simply to write about the flavor of the region, the good and the bad, the old and the new, the lovely and the ugly. It was what he did.

"There must be better places to write about than Phoenix," she said.

"It has its charm."

"I read a lot of travel articles in a lot of newspapers and a lot of magazines," Carol Ann told him.

"It's a job."

"But I've never read about a tour of whorehouses."

"I'm trying to dig up a little history of the region," St. Aubin said. "The man at the whorehouse can tell me about it."

"Why does he know so much about history?"

"He's seen most of it."

"How about the women at the whorehouse?"

"By now," St. Aubin said with a shrug, "most of them are history. It doesn't take a woman long to grow old in the arms of so many men."

Carol Ann sipped on her Chablis without tasting it. She did not know whether or not to believe him. He sounded sincere enough, but men always did when they had years of practice lying to a woman, whether it was a wife, a mistress, the girl next door, or at a hotel cafe in a new town.

St. Aubin told her he had located the historian living in La Casa de la Luna with a woman, purported to be a whore, who called herself the Flower. Now all he had to do was go meet with the man and gather whatever historical information a Mister Saenz might have about the turbulent and controversial past of Phoenix, the kind of historical sin and shame that would bring a whole new wave of convention business to its streets. Most would buy souvenirs, but a few might buy women, although not to take home with them. St. Aubin should be back within a couple of hours, if not sooner, he said. It wasn't the whole truth, St. Aubin knew, but it was close enough. Well, maybe it wasn't close at all.

Carol Ann acted as though she believed him, and his explanation would no doubt keep her from following him down into the bowels of iniquity, where, it sometimes seemed, he felt most at home.

The last thing Andrews St. Aubin did before walking out of the hotel restaurant was hand Carol Ann the key to his room.

"I'd rather not have to go to the room alone," she said.

"At the moment, it's the best I can do."

"Some men would kill for the chance you're passing up." Carol Ann's laughter was musical and haunting.

"Tomorrow, I'll take the day off."

"And do what?"

"That's up to you."

"I may not leave the bedroom."

"Then I'll see the best that Phoenix has to offer."

"Don't be long," Carol Ann whispered.

"I'll be back as soon as I can."

"If I'm asleep, please wake me."

St. Aubin nodded that he would.

"I hope she's ugly," Carol Ann said.

"Who?"

"The whore."

"She is."

"How do you know?"

"I'm told that the fee for her very professional services is only ten dollars."

Carol Ann shrugged seductively. "With ten dollars, she may be the richest woman on that side of Phoenix."

"Provided she gets to keep it all."

"As long as she doesn't keep you."

Andrews St. Aubin was still laughing when he walked away. The laughter died in his throat. Phoenix lay wrapped in darkness. God, how he hated the darkness. Time was running short.

Raul Saenz was safely tucked away inside the Casa de la Luna, provided the old man knew what he was talking about, but how long would he be there, and how long would he remain alive? As long as the old man knew where Raul Saenz was hiding, Danny B.'s partner was a condemned man. Anyone with an extra five dollars, maybe less, could learn what St. Aubin had found out.

Sebastian Drabek survived on the scraps of information he could sell. He was never concerned with nor aware of the consequences. If his information put a dagger in Saenz's heart, so be it. At least the old man wouldn't go hungry that night.

Andrews St. Aubin could not wait for morning, which lay too many hours away. The dead man would simply have to come along if he was out there, and St. Aubin had no doubt that he was.

Carol Ann finished one final glass of Chablis, then rode the elevator to the fourth floor. By the time she unlocked the door to room four fifty two, St. Aubin had already crawled inside a cab and was on his way to Casa de la Luna.

There was no way he could have heard her scream.

Chapter 29

IN HIS YOUTH, Paul Mitchell had been a born-again, washed-in-the-blood Southern Baptist from the Catholic side of the tracks in Marietta, Georgia. He had given his heart to God on his fifteenth birthday, been baptized in the shallow waters off a sand bar in the Chattahoochie River, and ate two fried chicken wings and a drumstick at an all-day dinner-on-the-ground to celebrate his entry into what the Reverend Ed Horner called, with tears running down his puffy cheeks, the "good shepherd's holy and heavenly flock."

At the time, Mitchell had not given heaven much thought at all. He was merely running as hard as he possibly could to escape the first-degree burns of an eternal hell. If Heaven could keep him out of hell, then Heaven, or even Atlanta, was the place where he wanted to be. On many nights, he had drifted off to sleep with the acrid odor of sulfur and brimstone in his nostrils, especially after days he had sinned. Young Paul Mitchell simply had too many chances to sin, and he took every chance he got. Sometimes now, even though he had not personally entered a church of any denomination for the past thirty years, he was still haunted by the thoughts of damnation from a wrathful God who probably had every reason in the world to be angry with him.

Paul Mitchell had simply thrown himself on the mercy of God's court. He had desperately wanted peace. At the age of fifty-four, Paul Mitchell was still looking for it, and there were times when he was convinced that peace did not flourish on the good earth. It was God's eternal lie. For a good part of the last three decades, Paul Mitchell had ignored the Bible, its promises and its prophecies. He had little time for the scriptures. But as the lands around him grew more wicked and uncertain, he had begun to spend more of his time, late at night when he was on the road and alone, which was often, reading the apocalyptic writings in the Testaments, both old and new, inscribed by the hands of those who saw visions of a world coming to a bitter and brutal end. They intrigued him and confused him and, more often than not, did their best to disrupt his sleep with nightmares of Armagedon.

The sudden, ominous ringing of the telephone would have jarred Paul Mitchell awake if he had been asleep. Paul Mitchell did not sleep much anymore. Too many plans still had to be made. Too many pieces of the puzzle not yet been assembled and time, thank God, was running shorter every day. He glanced at the hotel clock on the oak veneer stand beside his bed. Sundown had only been an hour ago. The phone rang again. Mitchell picked it up and placed the receiver against his ear without speaking.

"Paul ...." The voice at the other end was unmistakable. It was a bark, loud and distinct, full of arrogance and authority. What in God's name would Carl Holcomb be doing on the phone at such an unholy hour?

"Yes."

"I've met with the President."

Holcomb waited for an answer. When there wasn't one, he continued, blunt and to the point, "Consider Operation Taps as dead as Hannah's goat."

Paul Mitchell felt a knot in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to throw the phone against the wall in disgust. Instead, he said calmly, "It was my understanding that you had the President's full support when you originally brought me the idea, Carl."

"The political climate is changing."

"I thought the President had gonads as big as basketballs."

"The President won't do anything without knowing for dead certain he has the full backing of the Senate."

"It's Riggs's job to either whip the Senate in line or make sure they are as ignorant as the rest of the country about Operation Taps."

"The good Senator Abner Riggs says that we – you in particular, Paul – are a bunch of goddam anarchists, crazy goddam anarchists. Those are his exact words, if I remember them correctly, and he's washed his hands clean of the whole affair. If the slightest thing goes wrong, he'll be running through the halls of Congress like Paul Revere, doing his damndest to put the blame squarely between your eyes."

Mitchell frowned. He reached for a toothpick, jammed it between his teeth and snapped it in half. "Riggs owes me," he said.

"Senator Riggs isn't paying."

"He has no choice."

Holcomb's voice was strained. "The operation's dead," he said. "Forget it. It won't happen. We never talked about it."

"I can't forget it."

"In politics, Paul, you don't raise the dead. You know that."

Mitchell fumbled for an antacid in the pocket of his pajamas, then asked, "Do you have any idea of how much time, effort, planning, and money have already gone into this operation, Carl?"

"We write it off and walk away," Holcomb replied tersely. "Compared to what Operation Taps would have cost us, it's pennies. Congress throws that much away in tips on the weekend. The money won't be missed."

Mitchell waited a minute, then asked the inevitable question. "Can you change the President's mind?"

"He won't move without the Senate behind him. He doesn't like the Senate kept in the dark. And he's refusing to push Riggs," Holcomb said. "If he does, Riggs may start talking whether anything goes wrong or not, and we can't have the Senator talking about anything as sensitive as Taps."

"The President is a coward."

"The President wants to be re-elected."

"He's got the opportunity of a lifetime, Carl," Mitchell pleaded. "This is his chance for a legacy. He can go down as the greatest President in the history of the Western Hemisphere."

"He's afraid he could go down in flames."

"It's his chance, his destiny, to win the war on drugs."

"He wants to win, Paul. Drugs have nothing to do with it."

Mitchell spit the toothpick on the floor and chewed on a second antacid. "You betrayed me, Carl."

"In your business, Paul, there are no absolutes," Holcomb countered. "I told you from the beginning that we were playing a dangerous and controversial game. A phone call starts it. A phone call stops it. This, Paul, is that phone call."

Mitchell sat back on the bed and rubbed his eyes, a dull ache throbbing in the back of his head. It's funny, he thought, how the red and yellow stripes in the wallpaper, in the dim light, looked like flares going off in the middle of a firefight.

Finally, he spoke again, softly this time, "Carl, we've got one problem."

"Spell it out."

"Your phone call's too late."

"I don't understand."

"The operation has already begun."

Mitchell smiled. He could almost feel the arrogant and audacious Carl Holcomb seething at the other end of the phone.

"Nobody told you to pull the trigger," the President's top advisor sputtered.

"It's been pulled."

"By whose authority?"

"I call it necessity."

Carl Holcomb's anger spilled out of the receiver. "That's treason, Paul. You've always walked a fine line between what's legal and what isn't, what we'll stand for and what we won't. This time, dammit, you've gone over the line."

Now, it was Paul Mitchell's turn to be arrogant. "You should come over here with me sometime, Carl," he said. "It feels damn good."

"Senator Riggs was right. You are a crazy, goddam anarchist. I'll have you arrested before the night's over."

Mitchell let Holcomb simmer for a moment, then said obliquely, "Who do you think we should let hear the tape first, Carl – a judge, a jury, or CNN News."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Carl, just remember who I am and what I have done for the last twenty-two years of my life." A condescending laughter worked its way in his voice. "Dictators, big and small alike, have been overthrown because I pulled the goddam trigger. I've neutralized third world countries larger than Washington, D.C. Surely, you didn't think I would be stupid enough to talk to you about something as important, as sensitive as Operation Taps without bugging the telephone first."

Mitchell figured that Carl Holcomb was sweating as profusely as he was.

He was.

Holcomb fought to control his anger, aware that it suddenly tasted like fear. "I want that tape, Paul."

Paul Mitchell replaced the receiver without saying goodbye. He eased out of bed and walked to the window, looking down on the lights of Washington, D.C. The streets below were virtually devoid of traffic, and down the avenue, just beyond a grove of trees, he could see the outline of the White House illuminated in the darkness.

The phone rang again. It would be Holcomb. Mitchell stood, watching the blinking red light, and let the phone ring for two minutes and eighteen seconds before it quit again. He slowly walked across the room and placed two telephone calls himself.

The first was to American Airlines. "I want a single ticket to Phoenix," he said. "One way. Midnight is fine."

Damn the President.

The second call was placed to Roger Valek, who, like Paul Mitchell, was on alert twenty-four hours a day. "It's Riggs," Mitchell said. "His debt has come due."

"He's a powerful man."

"Powerful men have powerful debts."

Paul Mitchell had packed a small overnight bag and left by the time Carl Holcomb was able to summon an official limousine, awaken two marine guards to accompany him, and make the twelve block drive to the hotel. The Presidential Advisor passed three cars and a yellow cab headed toward Charleston, West Virginia.

Charleston was less than two hours away at this time of night. The miles would give Mitchell time to think. Mitchell realized that Carl Holcomb was already on the move. But Holcomb, his arrest warrant, and his military police escort were headed in the wrong direction. That was his advantage in the ominous world of shadows where he lived and worked. He could always depend on Carl Holcomb going in the wrong direction, which is where arrogant cowards always wound up.

Within twenty minutes, Holcomb would be racing up and down the corridors of Washington's Ronald Reagan Airport. Another jeep load of military police would be on the ground at Dulles Airport. All were looking for a goddam anarchist. All looking for Paul Mitchell. Now you hear him; now you don't. Now you see him; now he's gone. Now, you're holding your fingers in your ears so you won't hear the Taps blow or how loud the explosion is.

Paul Mitchell realized quickly that flying out of Washington or any place close was out of the question. In a game of chess there were only two ways to win. Make a move that your opponent would never suspect, or place a bullet just below his nose and above his chin.

Chapter 30

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN had more trouble than he anticipated finding the Casa de la Luna. For almost an hour he walked the streets that wound drunkenly through the so-called brothel district of Phoenix, looking for the place where a woman who called herself Flower spent the night with gentlemen callers while her boy friend listened to her ten-dollar moans of ecstasy and drank cheap whiskey just outside the bedroom door.

He would write: Most of the houses were nothing more than cheap bars, dimly-lit, with tiny little corridors that led back behind throbbing neon jukeboxes to clusters of tiny rooms where old mattresses were covered with yellowed and wrinkled sheets. The beer was stale, the wine warm, the whiskey expensive, and the clientele came in all shapes, sizes, ages, and forms of lust.

He would write it, but he knew a family newspaper would never print it.

St. Aubin sat at their bars and drank their beer, and, after awhile, the girls who stared curiously at him with hollow eyes all began to look the same.

As he wrote: They were dressed in imitation lavender silk and lace, designed to show plenty of skin, particularly around the thigh and breast, and the air was sweet, almost sickening, with the fragrance of their perfume. Mostly, they were short and just a little too thick around the middle to be tempting. Their faces were painted with rouge and lipstick to hide the years and the scars and the bruises. And, even though the hour was still relatively early for a Phoenix night, they appeared to already be tired. Or perhaps they were simply bored by a man who stared at them but wasn't buying, who preferred stale beer to what they had to offer in the darkness of a room where anyone with ten dollars could fall in love for a dollar a minute.

It wasn't fit to print. But it was the dark side of Phoenix.

A girl with raven hair, hanging in matted curls upon her bare shoulders, walked toward him, her hips keeping time to the music, which was too loud and abrasive to even hint at romance. Her purple dress, virtually transparent, was fastened together by a single button, and she pressed her heavy breasts against St. Aubin's arm when she sat down on the barstool beside him. Her skin was soft and firm, and St. Aubin doubted that she had yet turned eighteen.

"You want to buy Louise a drink?" she asked.

St. Aubin shrugged and pushed his mug of warm beer toward her.

She ignored it.

"Are you lonesome?" was her next question.

"Sometimes."

"Tonight, you are lonesome?"

"Tonight, I'm looking for someone."

"I am someone you would like to know."

Andrews St. Aubin suddenly realized he had not been alone at a bar stained by spilled whiskey and scarred by too many fights. At the far end, barely visible in the fog of cigarette smoke that curled toward the ceiling, sat the dead man. He seemed as bored as the girls had been. Or maybe he was merely saddened at the thought of being caught in the midst of a place he could no longer feel or touch, trapped, as it were, in a strange and curious netherworld, lingering somewhere between purgatory and perdition, or maybe worse considering he was a foreigner in a foreign land.

No one but St. Aubin saw him or cared that he was among them. He did not look like a man with ten dollars. His coat was ragged, much too heavy for the sweltering heat of summer, and the hole in his shirt was embedded with scorched powder and dried blood. The empty sockets of his eyes were burning when he cast them on St. Aubin, and, after a while, they weren't sockets at all, only embers dying in the night. He reached for a beer that someone had left behind. The glass never left the bar. St. Aubin saw the dead man's lips move. He made no sound. A scream would have been just as loud, but the dead man had never uttered one, then or now.

St. Aubin looked back at the girl and asked, "Do you call yourself the Flower?"

Louise frowned, and, for the first time, St. Aubin realized that her lipstick was smeared, and it lay in crooked lines upon lips that matched the purple in her dress. "I do not understand," she said.

"I'm looking for a girl named the Flower."

"Louise is better."

"The Flower works at the Casa de la Luna."

Louise placed her warm fingertips on St. Aubin's face. "I can make you forget anybody named the Flower," she said.

"Do you know a Raul Saenz?" St. Aubin asked.

A flicker of fear, then distrust, swept across Louisa's eyes like a dark shadow. The hooker quickly removed her trembling hand and turned away. "No," she replied as she stood to walk away.

St. Aubin grabbed her arm. "Why are you leaving?" he asked.

"There are other customers," Louise told him.

St. Aubin glanced around the room. A half dozen girls sat together at a table beside the front door. A bartender was reading the comics, although he was not laughing. A drifter slept in a corner booth. The dead man was walking out the door, the collar of his coat turned up around his neck as though he were stepping out into the frost-bitten winds of an early snow.

"I don't see anyone," he said.

"They will be here."

"When?"

"Soon, I think."

St. Aubin took a handful of twenty dollar bills from his jacket pocket and spread them out on the bar. "I have a hundred dollars here," he told her. "Are you interested."

Louise forced a smile. Her perfume seemed a little more fragrant than it had been before she glimpsed the color of money.

"What do I get for a hundred dollars?" St. Aubin asked.

"Anything you want." This time it was Louise who shrugged. "It is, as you see, a slow night. For a hundred dollars, you get everything that Louise has. Maybe once. Maybe even twice. Maybe all night."

"How about some information."

The smile twisted into a pout. "I prefer men who come here to find love, not ask questions," she snapped.

"Are you frightened, Louise?"

She lowered her eyes but did not answer, reaching instead for St. Aubin's mug of warm beer. She drank, and the beer spilled from her quivering lips, leaving the bodice of her transparent dress as moist as her eyes.

"Where is Casa de la Luna?" he wanted to know.

"It is best that I do not know where it is."

"What makes you say that?"

"I am twenty years old."

St. Aubin nodded.

"I want to be alive when I am twenty-one."

"What does that have to do with the Casa de la Luna?"

"It is a very bad place."

"Tell me, Louise, why is it that no one down here wants to admit that the place even exists."

"Casa de la Luna is a very private place. If you do not know where it is or how to get there, then you do not belong there."

"Why not?"

"To go to Casa de la Luna, you must have an invitation."

"Where can I get one?"

"Only the rich are invited to Casa de la Luna."

St. Aubin laughed out loud. "Perhaps, I'll be rich in the morning," he said.

"Perhaps, you will be dead in the morning."

Andrews St. Aubin hastily jotted down the sketchy directions that Louise gave him, then left the hundred dollars lying on top of the bar. She was nervous, but she had wadded up the bills and stuffed them into her purse before he reached the front door. Louise was frightened of what she knew or what she had heard about the Casa de la Luna, whatever it was. But she was more frightened of facing another day broke and hungry. After all, it had been days since a man had been willing to pay for what lay beneath her dress of imitation silk and lace. Louise crossed herself and said a small prayer as she watched the strange man leave.

She did not know his name. She did not want to know it. She only hoped that she would never see nor hear of him again. A man as foolish as he would have no one at his funeral, not even a preacher.

Andrews St. Aubin caught a taxi that drove him to within three blocks of the Casa de la Luna. He walked the rest of the way, slipping down a back alley that led him to a thick adobe wall surrounding a large, two-story Mediterranean-styled mansion. A security guard stood stiffly beside the front gate, armed with a rifle, and a black hearse, its motor still running, was parked in the driveway.

St. Aubin knelt beneath a dark curtain of tree branches that draped around him, watching intently as a burly-shouldered, well-dressed young man struggled through the iron gate, dragging a silver casket behind him. Sweat beaded his forehead, glistening in the glow of moonlight that spackled his face. He was probably about thirty years old, St. Aubin guessed, although it was difficult to tell in the darkness. He looked more like an accountant who had no business with a casket and whatever or whoever lay inside it.

Coming from somewhere behind the wall, St. Aubin could hear the agonized weeping of a broken-hearted woman, and her cries became a wail that pierced, then shattered, the silence that had settled as uneasily as the night upon the land. A distant shot was lost in the wind. A scream faded with it. The darkness returned to the silence of the night.

The young man paused beside the black hearse, wiping his face and rolling up his sleeves. His hair appeared black and curly, and his thick chest was threatening to rip the buttons from his gray suit jacket. He spit on the ground beside the casket and spoke to the security guard. St. Aubin was kneeling too far away, and the wind scattered the young man's words before they could reach him.

The guard did not move or answer him. His face, only a silhouette against a spray of moonlight, was stern and unyielding, and he continued to stand as straight, as rigid, as a statue on the Presidential Square. He seemed to have no interest in or curiosity about the only man in Phoenix, young or otherwise, who happened to be hauling a casket down the street in the middle of the night.

The security guard waited until the silver coffin had been shoved into the hearse, then stepped quickly forward, without making a sound, lifted his rifle and shot the young man once in the back of the head, throwing his body on top of the casket and slamming the door even before the sound of the blast had quit reverberating down the street.

Chapter 31

THE HEARSE HAD begun moving immediately, even before the pulse in the young man's throat convulsed wildly and beat its final time. The security guard straightened the wrinkles out of his jacket and quickly walked back to his sentry post beside the front gate, ignoring the red tail lights as they disappeared around the corner. He was whistling softly, and faint beads of summer sweat began to appear on his sharply chiseled face, burnished in the moonlight.

Andrews St. Aubin surveyed the walls that surrounded Casa de la Luna. They were thick, high, and imposing, as impregnable as a fortress. Beyond them, floodlights beamed down from the roof of the mansion, and the courtyard had become as bright as mid day. The lights had been strategically placed to penetrate effectively back into every faceted corner and remove all traces of darkness from the terraced gardens. There were no shadows. No place to hide.

St. Aubin had only two options left him. He could buy the security guard, or he could kill him, whichever happened to be easiest when he reached the front gate. Neither option particularly appealed to him.

But he did wonder why the thought of killing did not disturb or repulse him, a two-bit travel writer who should feel more comfortable behind a word processor than the barrel of a Glock 17

He glanced up and saw the dead man sitting on the wall, and then he knew. He had killed before, and the dead man had come to be there when a bullet, stray or fired with meaning, ushered him into the dead man's world, wherever it might be. The floodlights shone through the dead man, then past him, or the security guard would have no doubt seen him and shot him, unaware that his shot was useless and late.

St. Aubin's eyes again swept across the Mediterranean mansion. The lights were burning in every upstairs room, save one. The Casa was apparently busy tonight. Even the rich, probably the foreign rich, needed certain glands serviced from time to time by comely young ladies who knew how to make the removal of their money as painless and full of pleasure as possible.

The Casa appeared to be a grand and expensive place, a ludicrous monument to the good life and the big rich who knew a thing or two about the good life, rising out of the stench and squalor of poverty, its red tiled roof outlined by lights against a black sky.

Why, St. Aubin wondered, were those in the gutter district so afraid of the place? What was there to be afraid of? Who was there to be afraid of? Why did black limousines bring paying customers to the Casa, and silver hearses pick them up? What had caused their hearts to fail? A girl? A bullet? An overdose? Why was it necessary for a funeral home attendant to die as well? Had he uncovered a secret that should have remained a secret? Was he an innocent? Or an adversary? Had he learned what Danny B. had learned? If so, what the hell was it? And what resource paid the obviously very high overhead at Casa de la Luna? Oil? Or cocaine? And what, in God’s name, was Raul Saenz, an overworked, underpaid D.E.A. officer, a man who mingled with the sleaze and slime of society, doing in such a magnificent place with a run-of-the-mill, ten dollar whore? And who was he hiding from? The executioner of Danny B.? His old bosses? An assassin with a cleric's robe? Or were they all one and the same?

St. Aubin took the time to check his Glock before walking past the row of trash cans, smelling of soured milk and dead fish, and out of the alley, shoving the pistol back into his belt. He felt its handle jabbing roughly into his ribs, and, despite the irritation against his skin, it was a feeling of comfort. St. Aubin hesitated at the sound of an approaching vehicle, pressing his back against the stone wall of the alleyway.

A pair of glaring headlights swung down the avenue, and a metallic gray Lincoln Town Car eased to a stop in front of the wrought iron gates. There was no time for Andrews St. Aubin to consider his next move. It was all instinct now, heightened by a distinct rush of curiosity and a never ending lust for survival.

St. Aubin pitched himself onto the street as a cloud pushed the light of the moon out of the sky, rolled twice, and pulled himself beneath the Lincoln as it drove past the security guard and turned into the courtyard. St. Aubin grabbed the first solid bar of metal he could find hooked onto the greased underbelly of the vehicle and held on tightly, his boots bouncing against the pavement, letting the Town Car drag him safely into the courtyard, far beyond the ominous and forbidding walls of Casa de la Luna.

The engine died, and St. Aubin fell heavily back onto the gravel that covered the driveway. He heard one door slam, then a second, and, from above him, came the sound of men laughing. He could not make out the language nor identify the accent. Their words were slurred, probably by too much tequila or whiskey, and, within seconds, St. Aubin no longer heard their voices at all. He crawled from beneath the Lincoln and glanced quickly around him. The courtyard was empty.

St. Aubin brushed the dirt from his jeans and walked causally, as though he was not burdened by a care in the world, across the red tile patio and toward the front door. The security guard had apparently been posted solely to protect those who were fornicating within the walls of Casa de la Luna.

Once inside, there would be nothing else for him to worry about. That's what St. Aubin kept telling himself, and he wondered why it all sounded so much like a lie. Graveyards were full of men who lied to themselves and believed the lies they told.

He pushed open the ornamental door and swaggered nonchalantly into the lobby, trying to appear, in case anyone was watching, as though he were nothing more than a regular late-night customer who knew his way around every forbidden nook and cranny of the notorious Casa de la Luna. He waved and nodded at a man he had never seen before and winked at a girl selling cigarettes as though she was a long-lost paramour.

Someone was watching.

A hostess, tall and slender, wearing nothing but a garter belt, black hose, and red satin high heel shoes, was standing beside a handcarved oaken staircase, a glass of white wine in her hand. She arched an eyebrow and stepped toward St. Aubin, her long, dark hair falling down around her shoulders, hiding the nipples of her bare breasts.

Her eyes had not left St. Aubin's stained jeans and wrinkled windbreaker, which were oddly out of place in a richly appointed house that was much more accustomed to white collars, silk suits, and the refined, polished men who wore them, men who would tip her with wads of high-dollar bills just for the privilege of running their hot, gnarled fingers over her cool and well-oiled skin.

The stranger with the crooked grin who stood before her now looked more like a mechanic, or maybe a chauffeur who was lost or looking for his boss. St. Aubin said nothing but slipped a pair of neatly folded fifty dollar bills into each garter belt. It was a language she understood. The hostess was no longer interested in the clothes he wore. Men with money were always welcome at the Case de la Luna. Men with money all looked the same naked anyway.

"I have not seen you here before?" she said as a faint smile touched her face. Her Serbian accent was not nearly as exotic as her body, and her teeth weren't all polish and pearl in case anyone ever noticed, and hardly anyone ever did.

St. Aubin shrugged.

"Your name?"

"It doesn't matter."

"You do have an invitation?"

"I'm here."

"But I was not expecting you."

St. Aubin slipped another fifty dollar bill between her thighs and let his hand linger there against her flesh for a moment. He thought he felt her quiver slightly, then decided it was probably his imagination.

"The upstairs girls are all occupied at the present," the hostess said at last, her voice low and sultry.

"What about the downstairs girls?"

"I'm the only girl downstairs," she said with a wry smile perched on her lips, "and I'm not for sale."

"That's a shame." St. Aubin shrugged and gently brushed the long, dark hair away from her breasts.

"Sometimes it is."

St. Aubin stepped back and folded his arms. "When will the girl who calls herself the Flower no longer be occupied?"

The hostess frowned and appeared flustered. "I don't understand," she said, and her voice was not nearly as sensuous as it had been.

"The Flower. She does still work here, I presume."

The frown hardened, and the girl with long, dark hair began backing slowly away. "You do not have an invitation to be here, do you ?"

St. Aubin tossed another fifty dollar bill at her feet. This time, she ignored it.

"You have money, maybe, but you do not have an invitation. You must go now."

"And if I refuse?"

"Someone will escort you out."

"In a hearse?"

The girl's shoulders stiffened. To St. Aubin, it seemed as if she had suddenly forgotten how to breathe. Her eyes were wide now, embedded with fear, and her hands were trembling. Her frown was as crooked as her teeth, and sweat was turning into dainty beads that lay like blisters upon the scented oils soaking into her body. St. Aubin saw her reach instinctively toward a small red button tucked away beneath a ribbon of velvet on the wall. Probably an alarm system of some kind, he reasoned, one that would bring in every hired gun on the west side of Phoenix.

The girl's finger came within an inch of the red button, then stopped abruptly. St. Aubin jerked her out of sight behind a baby grand piano and jammed the barrel of the Glock into her mouth. The Casa de la Luna had grown callused when it came to rough games between those buying and selling love. To those who happened to glance their way, what was going on in the lobby wasn't nearly as important as what would be taking place behind closed doors. The hostess was down on bare knees, her head thrown back, her dark hair dangling in loose strands across her face, whimpering, too frightened to scream and not yet ready to die.

"I want to see the one who calls herself the Flower," St. Aubin said, his voice steady and without emotion, as cold as the barrel of a pistol still unfired.

The hostess cast her eyes toward the stairway.

St. Aubin removed the pistol barrel from her mouth, and she began rubbing the dark bruise on her lips. "I will follow you," he said. “I will not harm you unless, of course, you do something out of the ordinary which, unfortunately, forces me to send flowers to a funeral I don't think either one of us is ready to attend."

The pistol, the words, all seemed so familiar, and he might have remembered why if he had not seen the dead man walking behind a short, chunky redhead with a redhead's freckled face into a room at the top of the stairs.

If there was anything on earth the hostess of a whorehouse understood, it was how to read a man. She knew when they were flirting with her. She knew when they were serious. The man who dressed like a mechanic and who came without an invitation was deadly serious. He would not hesitate at all, if necessary, to pull the trigger. He might regret it later. But there was no doubt in her mind that he would do it.

The hostess took his hand as St. Aubin helped her to her feet, and, together, they slowly began climbing the stairs. St. Aubin was only a step behind, his Glock out of sight, hanging heavy in the belt beneath his jacket. If anyone on the upper floor bothered to notice, he was only another customer being led away to the promised land of milk and honey. The hostess stumbled and almost fell as she stepped onto the balcony, leaning heavily against a red velvet-covered wall for support.

The carpeted hallway was lined with electric candles, and the painted faces of lewd and leering cherubs looked down from the ceiling. A woman sang behind the door of one room. A man was grunting heavily behind the door of another. A woman begged to be beaten. A man was snoring. A commode flushed.

St. Aubin forced an ironic grin. Rich. Poor. Ladies in silk or cotton, with nails painted red or cracked and stained, it didn't matter. All whorehouses sounded and smelled pretty much alike. For some odd reason, it pleased St. Aubin to know that he knew.

At the end of the corridor, the hostess gingerly removed a high heel shoe from her left foot and took out a key taped beneath the arch support. With quivering hands, she unlocked the door and swung it open. Inside, the room was black. And silent. Maybe empty. Maybe not.

With one motion, St. Aubin grabbed the girl by a fragile shoulder and shoved her roughly into the darkness of the room. He spun back against the wall and waited for the deadly staccato of gunfire. Nothing. All he could hear was the frightened, labored breathing of the hostess who was lying face down on the bedroom floor, her fingers frantically digging their way into the thick Persian carpet.

The ominous sounds of silence were growing louder. St. Aubin followed his curiosity inside, reached for the switch and turned the light on. He kicked the door shut behind him. He wasn't sure what he had expected to find, but it certainly wasn't the unholy spectacle that greeted him when the flickering overhead bulb sprayed the room with a yellowed, perverse light.

The Flower, as least he assumed it was the Flower, was lying spread-eagle on the bed, her young face splotched by the purple imprints of someone's fist. Her hands and feet both were tied crudely to the iron bedpost by baling wire cutting deep into her flesh. The Flower was very much naked and either asleep or in a coma.

A short, stocky man with a brush mustache and hair so black it glistened sat on the foot of the bed. He had been handcuffed to the girl's swollen ankles, and there was a vacant look of defeat and surrender in his eyes. The man's red-checked shirt was torn and caked with mud. Perhaps it was blood. His gray pants were soaked with urine. He was barefoot. St. Aubin knelt before him. "Raul Saenz?" he asked.

The man's eyes flickered, but no longer with fear. "Have you come to kill me?" he asked, as thought whispering in a funeral parlor.

"No." St. Aubin paused and motioned for the hostess to seat herself in a green upholstered chair beside the window. "I've come to take you away."

"Who are you?"

"I knew Danny B."

"They killed him."

St. Aubin nodded.

"They'll kill me, too." The agent's eyes were streaked with red veins from lack of sleep, from a recent and steady diet of cheap whiskey. An empty bottle lay near his feet.

St. Aubin twisted, then broke off, a rusting piece of bailing wire that imprisoned the Flower. He bent it into a slight hook and used it to unlock the handcuffs, although he wasn't sure he had ever performed such a feat before.

"Why haven't they already killed you?" he wanted to know.

"They don't know where I am."

"Then who's got you locked up in here?"

"Maybe I know. Maybe I’m not sure."

Saenz began rubbing his swollen wrists, watching while St. Aubin, as gently as possible, untied the wire that held the Flower shackled to the bed. Her fingers had already turned blue, but she no longer felt the pain. "Why are they holding you prisoner?" St. Aubin asked.

Again Raul Saenz shrugged as though he didn't know nor no longer cared. "When they found Danny B.'s body, I went into hiding," he said, his voice as dead as his eyes. "There was a vendetta out. All of our names were on it. I didn't know where to go, so I moved in with the Flower until I thought it would be safe to return to the streets."

"You came here?"

"No. The Flower lived above the Laguna Madre Bar. That's where she worked." He coughed and wiped away the bloody spittle that had collected on his lips. "She knew I was a target. She didn't have to take me in, but she did."

He knelt and gently began stroking the purple welts on her face. The Flower moaned softly but did not open her eyes.

"How did you wind up here?"

"I got word that the D.E.A. was planning to smuggle me out of Mexico. All we had to do was get to a warehouse on the far end of Jackson Street without getting ourselves shot. We waited till after dark, then made a run for it."

"The Flower, too?"

"I wasn't going without her." Saenz wiped away the sweat that was plastered like grease on his forehead. "We found the truck waiting for us, just like they told us it would be, and we buried ourselves beneath some burlap bags filled with old coffee beans. The next stop was supposed to be Flagstaff. We never made it out of Phoenix."

"Who stopped you?"

For the first time, Raul Saenz laughed, and the laughter was bitter. "Who knows? There are some who want me dead and some who want me alive. Some say I know too much, and some want to find out what I know, and some want to make damn sure that what I know goes to the grave with me. I have a pretty good idea of who they are. I just don't know which is which."

St. Aubin wet a rag at the bathroom sink and began to squeeze water gently against the Flower's lips, a drop at a time.

"Sometimes, I don't know who is who anymore, and that includes you," Saenz finished, his voice weary and on edge.

"Consider me a friend."

Saenz spit on the floor. His jaws were clenched. "Down here," he said, "the enemy is sometimes your friend, and your friends will sell your soul for a bag of tamales, and the only friend I got is dead."

St. Aubin wasn't sure the girl would still be among the living come morning, but he certainly did not want her to die until he found out what he could about Danny B., and Raul Saenz, broke and bitter, was, perhaps, the last and only person who could shed any light at all about the final hours of an agent who knew too much and died too young.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. Behind him, a gentle wind fluttered through a lace curtain that had turned brown with dust and neglect. St. Aubin turned to Saenz and said simply, "Danny B. had a secret."

"Danny B. had a lot of secrets."

"One involved a religious artifact."

Raul Saenz knelt beside the Flower and caressed her face, burning with fever. "Danny B. spent a lot of time in church," he said, his voice hollow and distant," but he wasn't a particularly religious person."

"Something may have changed that."

"He didn't mention it to me."

Andrews St. Aubin stood and walked to the window, looking out on the blur of cheap neon that flickered throughout the back streets of Phoenix. "Why did Danny B. spend a lot of time in church?" he wanted to know.

"It's a good place to hide when people want to kill you." Saenz rubbed the ragged edge of a scar that somebody's knife had left on his face. "Danny B. did a lot of hiding."

"Any particular church?"

"The old one."

“Here?”

“Tucson. It was closer to the border. He didn’t have to run far to reach Tucson. The miles from Tucson to here are deadly when somebody’s mad, and Danny B. had a way of making a lot of people mad.”

"Does it have a cemetery?"

"Most churches do?"

"Does it have a name?"

"The church?"

"The cemetery."

"Most just call it a graveyard." The thought struck him funny, and Raul Saenz began laughing, perhaps to keep from crying any more than he already had.

St. Aubin walked across the room and cracked the door open, glancing quickly out into the hallway. It was empty, if he didn't count the girl in the pink slip and the fat drunk who was buttoning his shirt but had forgotten to zip his fly. Both were headed for the stairs with pleased looks plastered on their faces, he because his glands were empty, she because her hand was clutching another hundred dollar bill and a package of white powder she had lifted from his pocket while his mind was on things more carnal.

"Do you know if Danny B. was ever given anything at the church?" St. Aubin asked, quietly closing the door.

Saenz spit but could not remove the bad taste from his mouth. "It certainly wasn't salvation," he said.

"Where did Danny B. hide those things he didn't want anybody else to find?"

Saenz shrugged as though he didn't really know and had never bothered to ask. "All he ever said to me was that the graves held a lot more than the dead."

"In the cemetery behind the old church?"

"This part of Arizona has a lot of graves."

"One of them doesn't hold Danny B."

Saenz laughed bitterly. "Then Danny B. beat the odds," he said.

St. Aubin surveyed the scene before him. The Flower, what was left of her, might still be around until morning. Then again, she might live forever and just never wake up. The hostess had curled up in the chair, sobbing softly, her face pressed against the fabric. His actions had probably condemned her to death, too, unless she escaped the Casa de la Luna, and there was really no place else for her to go.

Raul Saenz was grasping for the last straws of sanity and slowly losing them one by one. St. Aubin was convinced that Saenz held the key to Danny B.'s secrets, even if he did not realize it, and Raul Saenz barely realized who or where he was. He certainly did not expect to see the coming or going of another day. There were times when death was preferable to living in fear and misery, and this was one of them.

"What was Danny B. working on when he died?" St. Aubin asked.

"Nobody ever knew everything that Danny B. was doing," Saenz answered. "Not even me, and I was closer to him than anybody else down here. He didn't like partners, though he didn't mind me hanging around. He didn't trust a lot of people. He preferred to work alone."

"He must have stumbled across something pretty damn important."

"Maybe. Maybe, he just made somebody pretty damn mad."

"Who?"

"A nasty little drug-smuggling bastard who rules both sides of the border. If he doesn't own the business, he owns the ones who do."

"Does he have a name?'

"Lazaro Fuentes. But that's no secret. Everybody on two continents knows Fuentes has a drug pipeline that runs from south of the border to as far north as the highways go.”

"Did Fuentes kill Danny B.?"

"His hand wasn't on the knife."

"But he owned the knife."

"Like I said, he owns everything else."

"And he's after you."

"He would sleep better if I wasn't around anymore."

"Why? Everybody knows Fuentes is guilty. At least you said they do."

Saenz laughed again, louder this time, and turned away from the Flower. "Sure. Everybody knows he's guilty. But I'm the only one who can convict him."

"Then why don't you?"

"Some people don't want him convicted."

"In Mexico?"

"In lots of places."

"Who, for example."

"Sometimes," Raul Saenz said, "You don't have to look any farther than the back of your own hand."

Chapter 32

MENTALLY, RICHARD BROCKLEMAN felt as though he had died the night Danny B.'s tortured, mangled body was found inside the box car. His lust for living had dried up like fallen leaves in winter, blown away by a wayward wind. He merely sat in his bedroom, staring into the darkness in silence, trying hard to remember the good times he and his brother had shared together, unsure of why there had been so damn few of them.

Grief had become a deadly cancer, slowly spreading through him, sucking the essence of life itself from his veins. Brockleman realized what was happening to him but did nothing to prevent it. He no longer gave a damn. His appetite had deserted him. Since the funeral, Brockleman had existed solely on coffee, cigarettes, and an occasional glass of whiskey. He drank the bourbon at room temperature without tasting it at all.

The desk in his study was stacked with dozens of telephone calls from his office, most of them marked urgent. None of the calls had been returned. His only telephone conversations had been with Andrews St. Aubin in Phoenix, and the calls were always brief, to the point, and full of disappointment.

"How's it coming?" Brockleman would ask.

"Slowly."

"No leads yet?"

"A few."

"Can you tell me about them?"

"I'd rather not, not yet anyway."

"Any trace of the artifact?"

"It's a big country out here, Richard. It's full of religious artifacts."

"But there's only one I care about."

"If it exists."

"Danny B. said it did."

"Danny B. only said he had proof that Christ had come again to Mexico."

"Find it, St. Aubin. It's the one legacy Danny B. can leave behind for the whole Christian world. Find it, St. Aubin, and he didn't die in vain."

"There's no way I'll ever be able to track it down unless I can find the ones who killed him."

"You think they have it?"

"If they do, they'll sell it."

"To you?"

"To the highest bidder."

"You know how much money I have, St. Aubin."

"I know what the Wall Street Journal says you have."

"Spend what you need to get it. But get it. I can have the money wired day or night. The hour is not important."

The static on the line told Brockleman that he had lost contact with St. Aubin. He waited all day and into the night for another call from Mexico. It had not come, and the whiskey numbed the pain but did not end it.

Richard Brockleman refused to suffer in public. He did not want to bear the indignity of putting on a brave face, meeting day after day, night after night, with well wishers, when his guts were burning with grief. Most of the bastards cared more about being pictured in his newspaper than about his dead brother anyway. Damn them.

The intellectual side of Richard Brockleman had persuaded him to believe that locating the lost religious artifact or artifacts that his brother had found in Mexico was all that really mattered to him anymore. Danny B. never lied. Danny B., God bless him, didn't know how to lie. If he said he had unearthed unmistakable, irrefutable proof that the Good Lord Himself had walked among the peons of Mexico, perhaps even healing the sick and raising the dead as he had in the four Christian gospels, then the proof existed beyond a reasonable doubt.

Richard Brockleman – no, Danny B. – would be responsible for bringing to light a simple and holy fact that would re-shape, re-define, and revise the theology, the ideology, the teachings of every organized religious denomination that preached about a resurrected and risen Lord who would return to earth at an hour unknown to mankind and judge the just and unjust, taking the just home with him and casting the unjust into a pit of fire.

What if he had already come? And they had missed him? What Danny B. had found just might be the most significant discovery of the past two thousand years.

That's what his intellectual side wanted Richard Brockleman to believe. But his gut was pleading for revenge. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life. That was Biblical, too. It came from his Bible, the Old Testament: the history and the law.

Someone must pay a price he could not afford to pay, provided, of course, that life was as precious to the condemned as it had always been to Richard Brockleman.

He stumbled across the room, his legs weaker than usual, and pushed the curtains aside. The day was gone, and he had not even noticed it passing. Hanging just above the rich, full branches of a gnarled old oak tree in the corner of his fenced yard, the moon had hidden its face with grief, too. Or was it shame?

A cloud was drifting across the night sky, dragging its shadows reluctantly down the dimly-lit streets of the Park Cities. Beside him, on a Queen Anne table, the late night jazz station interrupted a Gershwin melody, as it always did at five minutes before the hour, so some fellow with a voice as deep as a bassoon could read the latest news, in case anyone was interested, and hardly anybody ever was this time of the morning.

But this report caught the attention of Richard Brockleman. Its immediate impact was straggering. The honorable and respected Senator Abner Riggs had been found dead in his car, parked alongside the Washington Beltway. There had been one gunshot wound in his temple, and a note, clutched in his hand, suggested suicide. Reports suggested, though none had been confirmed, that the senate majority leader had for the past six years been suffering severely from a malignant tumor and clinical depression.

Richard Brockleman turned the radio off as his spirits sank lower. The world had gone mad. The world as he knew it was going to hell in a handbasket. He always thought that his friend, the senator, had more guts than to cut and run when the going got rough, and suicide was certainly the coward's way out. Brockleman watched as the headlights of a black limousine eased into his circular driveway. He was not expecting company. He did not want any visitors.

The vehicle, as dark and ominous as a hearse, pulled to a stop beside the white brick portico, beneath an antique gas light that had once adorned an historic street outside a brothel on the Grand Strand of Galveston. Brockleman frowned. Who in his right mind would have the audacity, the indecency to disturb him at this particular time of night, whatever time it was?

The door of the limousine opened, and a small, wiry man climbed out of the back seat, looking nervously around him. Or was he just being cautious? The neighborhood was quiet. Even the streets were empty as far as Brockleman could see in either direction. The Park Cities had gone to bed early, safe and secure in those great brick mansions whose stone turrets would have rivaled ancient castles on another continent.

The visitor straightened his gray suit coat, adjusted his thin, wire-frame glasses, probably out of habit, and turned toward the porch. The hanging shadow of the cloud that draped the sky above Dallas hid the man's face. Richard Brockleman would have recognized him anywhere and under any circumstances, good or bad, usually bad. But for the life of him, Brockleman could not think of any sane reason on earth why Paul Mitchell would come unannounced to his home so late after dark, unless, of course, he knew something about the death of Danny B.

Paul Mitchell knew a lot of things about a lot of people, most of which he was not supposed to know or at liberty to say. That was his business. Richard Brockleman had never trusted him. Those who did sometimes vanished without a trace. The government could erase anyone it wanted. The government had wanted to remove Andrews St. Aubin from the face of a god forsaken earth, but St. Aubin had effectively erased himself. A man without his memory was no threat.

Brockleman flinched when he heard the loud knock downstairs, echoing through his darkened home. Frankly, he had no use for Paul Mitchell. Nor had Brockleman ever been able to figure out why the President, who had always been so astute in foreign affairs, put such faith in Mitchell and his office of counterterrorism. Mitchell obviously had the blessing of Henry Caples. He had been anointed by Congress. He was feared by a State Department that looked with disapproval and mistrust on anyone who operated solo or from behind a veil of secrecy.

But what the hell did he do, anyway? Brockleman did not know, nor had he ever run across anyone else in government who had a finger on Paul Mitchell's unpredictable pulse. As far as he could ascertain, Mitchell was neither a spy nor a hired gun. He was a bureaucrat. That was all. An arrogant goddam professional bureaucrat.

The knocking on the door was as annoying as the backfire of a car. Brockleman shuddered and turned away from the window, removing his robe, throwing it on the floor and reaching for a white shirt and pair of imported slacks that were hanging on the back of the library door.

Chapter 33

THE ONE WHO called himself a ghost had climbed to the top of a high-rise apartment building tucked away off Broadway Road. Gazing across the narrow street, he had a clear view of the top floor of the Casa de la Luna, right where old Sebastian, for ten dollars, had suggested he look. Sebastian had no conscience and no friends, and soon he would no longer have the ten dollars.

Espiritu's military-issue binoculars paused on the narrow window of a small room toward the back of the Mediterranean mansion, and a cynical grin etched itself across his twisted face.

Raul Saenz was there. And so was the stranger. Together. It would be so easy now. Espiritu lay on his stomach atop the flat roof of the warehouse and calmly adjusted the scope on an old M-16. It was not the best of rifles, but it was effective at long range, as accurate as the eyes of a ghost would allow it to be.

The M-16 fit snugly against Espiritu's shoulder as though he and the rifle were made for each other, and perhaps they were. The one who called himself a ghost was never in a hurry. But why should he waste a good night with his face pressed against the stench of the asphalt when a slight squeeze of the trigger would take him off the roof and back into some warm bed, preferably not alone and with someone who would never know he was there?

The faint fragrance of perfume drifted past his nostrils, and that startled him for a moment. Then the smile returned. He still had the smell of the girl on his hands.

Espiritu stared through the scope and into the room. He would, he decided, shoot the stranger first. Saenz could wait.

The stranger concerned him.

Saenz was nothing more than a puppet whose strings could be cut any time.

The stranger would be thrown to the coyotes who prowled the deserts. Saenz had already been dead for days. The bullet had just not yet been delivered.

Saenz was on his feet, a silhouette against the dim light in the window, in the way, standing between the rifle and the stranger. The men were too close at that distance for Espiritu to distinguish one from the other. Espiritu sighed. A job was a job. That's all. Who died first did not make any difference, not in the grand scheme of life anyway.

One would die without warning.

The other would die many times waiting for the shot that would surely come.

The crosshairs held steady on the back of a skull, and the ghostly one, as he had done so many times before, gently and professionally squeezed the trigger.

A slender flame leaped toward the open window, and the skull splintered, as the moon turned its face once more behind a cloud that had lingered far too long in the night sky.

Chapter 34

THE KNOCKING ON the front door had become loud and abrasive by the time Richard Brockleman reached the bottom of the stairs, still groping with the pearl buttons on his white, tailored shirt. He cast a quick glance at himself in the hallway mirror, but barely recognized the haggard face staring back at him with eyes that were lifeless and totally devoid of any emotion. A two-day growth of whiskers covered his cheeks like a blackened stubble in the deadly aftermath of a prairie fire. Brockleman's pale, hollow eyes reflected the irritation he felt as he opened the door.

Paul Mitchell's face was just as solemn. He stood there stiffly on the porch, quickly glancing over the man before him, the shell of a man who, only days earlier, had represented the epitome of strength that America symbolized around the world. Mitchell adjusted his glasses while a hot, brisk wind played havoc with his thinning hair.

For a full thirty seconds, maybe longer, neither man spoke.

Mitchell frowned, waiting for a polite, if not formal, invitation into the house. The honorable Richard Brockleman was a gentleman, if nothing else, linked by blood and money to the old school of aristocracy. He understood protocol, both foreign and domestic, and not even the mental suffocation of grief and despair and, perhaps, even anger would be able to prevent him from being a perfect and, if necessary, a genteel host. That was simply a tribute to Richard Brockleman's nature and his breeding.

Paul Mitchell had carefully studied the Dallas social scion for months now. He knew Brockleman better than he did his own family, even if the two men had only met once before, and not under the best of circumstances. Few people ever met Paul Mitchell under the best of circumstances.

The President, or perhaps it was Carl Holcomb, had killed his proposal for Operation Taps. But Mitchell was determined to keep the operation going forward as originally conceived and planned. All it needed was money. Richard Brockleman had money and a reason to spend it. Paul Mitchell was gambling that Brockleman would spend whatever sum it took to avenge the untimely death of his brother. The bereaved, caught and twisting in the emotional gauntlet of mourning, were never quite that rational. The bereaved would believe whatever they were told, provided the story was good enough, and Mitchell knew how to tell a damn good story.

At this particular hour of the night, however, Richard Brockleman did not care about either protocol or social etiquette. His only concern was to be left alone with a bottle and a memory. The nagging frustration that churned deep within him had reached the boiling point and was threatening to explode. He was simply hoping that Paul Mitchell would express whatever sympathy, whatever regrets he had, then get the hell out of his doorway.

Finally Mitchell broke the wall of silence that had risen thickly between them. "Do you mind if I come in?" he asked.

"It's late."

Mitchell glanced at his watch although he knew almost to the second what time it was. "I'm sorry," he said softly, "but I would like to talk to you, Mister Brockleman."

"I'm afraid there's nothing I'd like to talk about to you or to anybody else at the moment." Brockleman's voice was as dull and listless as his eyes.

"It's terribly important, sir."

"To you, perhaps, Mister Mitchell. But not to me." Brockleman turned away and began pulling the big, hand-carved mahogany front door shut behind him.

"It's about your brother."

Mitchell took a deep breath, waiting to see how hard and how deep his words had penetrated the veil that liquor and grief had woven around the strained, stoic demeanor of Richard Brockleman. His head snapped back around, and there was a faint flicker of fire buried deep in his eyes. "What about my brother?" he snapped.

"We know who had him killed."

Brockleman's back stiffened, and his hands began to tremble. A deep crimson flushed into his ashen face. "How did you find out?" His voice cracked.

"It's our job, Mister Brockleman." Mitchell shrugged almost apologetically. "We go places where we're not supposed to be. We know things we're not supposed to know. We have the names of every son of a bitch on seven continents who ought to be hanged and left hanging until the vultures pluck them clean. The problem is, though unfortunate it may be, the god-almighty state department won't let us stick their heads in a noose until we've grown the tree, and the pompous bastards in Congress won't tell us where they've hidden all the goddam acorns."

"What have you done about them?"

"Who?"

"The men who killed my brother."

"Nothing."

"Why in God's name not?"

"It's like I told you, Mister Brockleman, the information we have is worthless unless it gets into the right hands."

"Who has it now."

"It's lying on the President's desk," Mitchell lied.

Brockleman moved suddenly toward the hallway. "I'll call Henry about it right now," he said.

"It won't do any good," Mitchell answered, stepping quickly across the threshold and into the house.

"Why not?"

"He can't do a damn thing about it either."

"He's the President, for God's sakes," Brockleman blurted out. "He can do anything he damn well pleases."

"Not this time."

Brockleman, phone in hand, turned abruptly on his heels to face Mitchell, who had followed him into the den. "Again, I ask, why the hell not?"

"At this particular moment, your brother is just not worth the sacrifice that the President knows he would have to make."

A dark, angry frown shadowed Brockleman's face. His teeth were clenched, and he was gripping the telephone so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. "I don't think I quite understand what you just said to me, Mister Mitchell." There was a raspy, nervous edge to the way he spoke.

"May I have a Scotch, Mister Brockleman?"

The pulse in Brockleman's throat beat wildly and out of control. A cold sweat moistened his face, and his legs weakened, beginning to buckle beneath him. He braced himself against the wall to keep from falling. Brockleman closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips tightly against both temples. His head was throbbing fiercely, and his stomach had grown nauseous. Gradually, the wave of nausea that gripped him began to wither away, and Brockleman could feel strength slowly returning to his legs. His mouth tasted like sour mash. He looked up at Paul Mitchell and asked, at last, "With water or soda?"

"On the rocks, please."

"Will Glenrothe be suitable?"

"Glenrothe will do fine." Mitchell had expected nothing less from his host. The Scotch would be imported no doubt, not merely purchased around at some neighborhood liquor store.

Brockleman, without another word, led the way out of the den and down the hallway to his study. To Mitchell, he was a man of unexpected contrasts, rich and powerful and suddenly very pathetic. He was wallowing in the misery of the poor, the unfortunate, the misbegotten. God had not created all men equal. He had simply created all men. Pain and death were the great equalizers.

Brockleman's suit had no doubt cost a thousand dollars, maybe even more. But Bockleman had allowed it to become wrinkled and stained, and it fell unevenly from the almighty publisher's shoulders like a hand-me-down shawl on a Deep Ellum bag lady. His shirt tail was hanging out over his belt, his black tie hung crookedly around his neck and his feet were bare. The awkward irony of the moment struck Mitchell as humorous, in a morbid sort of way, and he almost laughed out loud. He just might be the first person in Dallas to ever see the richest and most famous of the city's rich and famous walking barefoot in a thousand dollar suit. Most of Dallas's society probably believed that the world-renowned Richard Brockleman had been born with expensive leather on his feet.

The study in the Brockleman mansion had obviously been the object of much neglect during the past few days. An empty Wild Turkey bottle lay on the carpet beside the bookcase. A vase of chrysanthemums sat beside the telephone. The water had dried in the vase. The flowers were dead.

Mitchell eased back in an overstuffed chair, watching the ice melt in his glass of Glenrothe. Brockleman sat perched on the corner of his desk, trying hard to mask his emotions and failing miserably.

"Tell me about my brother," Brockleman said, getting straight to the point.

"There's a lot to tell."

"I've got the rest of the night."

"It's not pretty."

Brockleman's shoulders jerked involuntarily as though he had been shot. "I was there when the train brought Danny's body home," he answered coldly. "I know it's not pretty. I just want to know who the hell killed him and had him killed and why nobody's doing a damn thing about it."

Mitchell sipped the Glenrothe slowly, letting the ice in the glass numb his lips.

Finally he answered obliquely, "It gets rather complicated, Mister Brockleman."

"Death isn't complicated, Mister Mitchell." Brockleman slammed his fist hard against the desktop for emphasis. "One second you're a warm, living, breathing human being. The next second, you're nothing but a pile of rotting flesh. I want to know what happened to Danny in that split second between the two."

Mitchell sighed wearily and gently cradled his drink in both hands. "Just how much do you really want to know, Mister Brockleman?"

"Every damn thing there is to know."

"Very well then." Paul Mitchell crossed his legs and leaned his head back against the top of the chair, his voice soft and unemotional. "We're in the midst of a terrible war," he said. "Unofficial and undeclared, but a war just the same. Danny Brockleman, I'm afraid, was nothing more than a foot soldier who became one of its casualties. To you, he is a brother. To the rest of the country, unfortunately, he is just another statistic."

Brockleman had regained his composure now. Even the dull ache in his head had disappeared, and his pulse rate was back to normal. Maybe, at last, he would be given some answers. He might not like them. But, at least, he would know the truth, no matter how ugly it might be.

Mitchell continued, "Every time we read or hear the news, the enemy has a new face. Iran. Iraq. Libya. Bosnia. Kosovo. Afghanistan. Yemen. Places that our geography class in high school had never heard about. Throw a dart at the map of the Middle East, Mister Brockleman, and any place it hits will be smack dab in the middle of some country, Third World or otherwise, that doesn't like us. They won't fight us. There's no way they'd win. They have the oil, perhaps, but no tanks and no airplanes to use it. They dabble in nuclear weapons but can’t throw one much farther than their own border. They don't need to lure us into a war, sir. They've found a way to attack us at the very core of our existence."

"You're talking about drugs, aren't you?"

"They're the most frightening weapon in the world today, and, as a nation, we're too damn stupid to realize it."

Brockleman nodded, his shoulders sagging. For the first time, his eyes turned abruptly away from Mitchell and fell on the yellowed photograph of his brother. It was lying on top of yesterday's newspaper, a high school graduation picture, and the young man smiling had been full of hopes and dreams, all cut short on the plains of Arizona. "Danny told me the same thing less than a year before he died," Brockleman said.

"Danny knew damn well we're fighting a war." Mitchell cleared his throat with another stiff drink of straight Scotch before speaking again: "Drugs have a stranglehold on us, Mister Brockleman. Cocaine. Heroin. Marijuana. Crack. Ecstasy. Meth. It comes in a lot of different names, but they're all deadly. They're killing our children, our neighbors, the goddam junkies who live down the street. It doesn't matter who we are. Old. Young. Big. Little. Black. White. Rich. Poor. We're all shoving that stuff in our veins or up our noses, and we can't get enough of it. Before long, we'll have to start turning our parks into graveyards just to hold all the cadavers lying in the street."

"I think now you're guilty of over exaggerating somewhat," Brockleman said, suddenly growing very irritated.

"Then why don't you ask your brother?"

Brockleman chose to ignore the remark. "I realize that drugs are a problem, a damn big problem," he answered. "Perhaps we are in a war, but it's a war we're winning."

"Bullshit."

Brockleman folded his arms defiantly. "Let me remind you, President Caples has opened his own personal assault on the drug problem."

"Like Reagan did. And Bush. And Clinton. And Bush's kid. Obama certainly did not close the borders. And Caples? Hell, he’s using a BB gun to try and stop a goddam army tank," Mitchell snapped, "and by the time he runs out of BBs, the goddam tank will have every damn one of us crushed and buried in the mud."

"It's not that bad."

"It's worse than that."

Richard Brockleman stood and began angrily pacing the room. "I'm tired of your rhetoric, Mitchell," he yelled. "You said you knew who murdered my brother. I want the bastard's name. That's all. If you can't do a damn thing about it, if the President can't do a damn thing about it ... well, that's fine. I'll hunt the son of a bitch down and kill him myself."

"There are many names."

"I want them all."

"They live in many places."

"I'll find them."'

"And I will help you, Mister Brockleman."

The statement hit Richard Brockleman with the sudden, unexpected impact of a hammer to the back of his head.

"Sit down, Mister Brockleman," Mitchell told him, smiling a sad smile, "and let me explain. There is a war going on, to be sure, but you and I are on the same side. We're fighting the same fight. We both hate the same demons who are eroding the moral foundation out from beneath our country. We may walk on different sides of the street, Mister Brockleman, but you have to admit that we both love and respect and would die to protect this land we call America, this land that is our home."

Mitchell paused and removed his suit coat, dropping it to the floor beside him, waiting while Brockleman slumped down in the chair behind his desk.

"Get to the point, please," Brockleman said wearily.

"The invasion has already begun."

"You've lost me."

"During this century, we as a nation, have always been able to brag that no foreign country has ever attacked our shores or tainted our soil,” Mitchell said. “Then, I’m afraid Bin Laden's terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center Towers. But no invasion followed. We can't say that anymore, Mister Brockleman. We are being invaded on a daily basis. Every day, more than a thousand illegal aliens are slipping across the border that separates the United States from Mexico. They come from South and Central America seeking asylum. Some have said they were fleeing the fighting in their homelands, and, to be truthful, I can't say that I blame them. Others are simply looking for a job, some way to escape an unbearable life of poverty and squalor in Mexico, and I can't really blame them for trying to get away from that, either.

“We've always been a country with a big heart and open arms, willing to give anybody, any immigrant, a chance. But we can't do that anymore. Thousands are flooding across our borders, armed with the one weapon that will destroy us all. They're coming with their pockets, their backpacks, their bags all filled with cocaine. They are a human pipeline, and if we don't figure out some way to stop them soon, then I can assure you that America as we know it will cease to exist.

“Terrorists in the Middle East who prefer to live without names or faces are merely sitting back and watching us die a slow death. When the time comes, they will own us all – lock, stock, and barrel without ever having to fire a shot. Danny was damn good at what he did, Mister Brockleman. He uncovered the plot, and it cost him his life. One man obviously held the knife to his throat, but one man did not kill Danny. Mexico did. The drug lords, the corrupt politicians did. You want to avenge Danny's death? Then you've got to take them all down."

Brockleman shook his head, suddenly afraid to believe all that he was hearing, afraid not to believe the facts that Paul Mitchell had spread before him. "That's impossible," he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

"It can be done."

"How?"

"As I told you earlier, Mister Brockleman," the President's hands are tied by red tape and bureaucracy. Publicly, he is indeed trying to stop a tank with a BB gun. He knows it, and there's not a damn thing he can do about it. That's why the President asked me to visit you."

Paul Mitchell smiled. A smile made even the worst of lies more believable and bearable. Lying had become an art, and Paul Mitchell had perfected it. His eyes never wavered. His smile never quivered. His face remained stoic, full of sadness and grief for Danny B., a man he had never seen alive, but a man whose death could do more for his country than his life had ever accomplished.

"Exactly, why did Henry want you to see me."

"The President believes in you, Mister Brockleman. He knows, and I know, that there is only one way we can win this war. But our success or our failure, I'm afraid, depends on you and your assistance."

"Why didn't Henry call me himself?"

"Two words, Mister Brockleman. Plausible deniability. If anything goes wrong, and God forbid that it does, then, as far as the President is concerned, neither we nor our mission ever existed. The President must play politics, and, as you know, he is very good at it. That's the nature of the system. He is depending on us to do what must be done."

Brockleman sat forward on the edge of his chair, propping his elbows on the desk. He was both confused and intrigued. "What is it that you want me to do?"

Paul Mitchell casually picked up his coat and stood as he finished his Scotch. He walked across the floor and placed the empty glass on the edge of the bar. "Can you be ready to leave Dallas by daylight?"

"That doesn't give us much time."

"It's enough."

"Where are we going?"

"Our scheduled departure time is six-ten. We need to be at Love Field no later than five-forty five."

Richard Brockleman had picked up the graduation picture of his brother, staring at it intently, as Paul Mitchell walked out into the night.

Regardless of the hour and the fatigue, Mitchell had never felt better.

The President – no, Carl Holcomb and Senator Riggs – had been foolish enough to deny him funds and support for Operation Taps. But he did not need their money, their politics nor their Congressional approval. He had Richard Brockleman. And Richard Brockleman had more money than most little countries where Paul Mitchell had been stationed. Richard Brockleman would finance Operation Taps. Richard Brockleman had the one thing that the President, Holcomb, and Riggs were missing: a raging, volcanic hatred for the land and the people who had put a knife to Danny B.'s throat. Hatred could be a beautiful thing.

Paul Mitchell was whistling by the time he reached the black limousine.

Chapter 35

THE WINDOW AND the back of Raul Saenz's head had shattered at the same time, throwing glass, blood, and bone fragments all over the room. The hostess screamed. Andrews St. Aubin dove behind the edge of the bed and waited for the deadly explosion of a second shot.

The hostess screamed again, loud and piercing, the lost, lonely howl of a coyote when it has seen the vultures circling above a new moon and knows it doesn't have long to live. She had rolled herself up into a naked ball on the chair, her long, hair almost touching the floor, unable to move, unable to run.

St. Aubin glanced at Saenz, who lay crumpled beneath the window. Nothing was left of his face, only a ragged hole where his mouth had been. His eyes had been closed forever, and they were no longer in his head. Teeth lay scattered on the carpet. He had died without ever knowing his time had come to an end. Perhaps, it was better that way.

The screams of the hostess became choking sobs, full of agony and self pity, a plea for mercy, a prayer of the damned.

St. Aubin could hear doors slamming down the corridor, and the hallway was a maddening crescendo of frantic sounds, of loud voices growing louder, some wailing and some cursing, as the confused and frightened, in varied stages of dress and undress, raced in panic toward the stairwell.

Suddenly, the ashen-faced hostess was on her feet, her arms flung high over her head, an insane woman whose features were drawn and pinched tight with fear. Her mouth gaped open wide as though her screams were being ripped out of her throat.

All St. Aubin could see were the whites of her eyes as she bolted wildly toward the door. Her fingertips had just reached the crystal knob when the bullet hit her, neatly placed just below the back of her neck, severing her spinal cord, turning her screams into a surprised grunt, then silence. She was dead even before the blood began to spurt, then bubble out of a hole no larger than the size of a centavo.

St. Aubin could taste the vomit in his throat. There must be, he reasoned, some purpose, real or imagined, behind the death of Raul Saenz. The man played dangerous games. Dangerous games had dangerous consequences.

The girl died simply because the gunman was having fun, a hunter who had no regard for his prey, who was calmly sitting there on the rooftop, probably behind a fortress of brick or cardboard boxes, able and quite willing to fire at anything or anyone who moved.

St. Aubin rolled over on his back and, in the same motion, shot out the yellow lamp bulb with his Glock, flooding the room with darkness. He crawled across the dead woman's body as a third bullet broke the mirror above him, showering his face with shards of glass, finally stumbling out into the mass confusion that crowded the hallway.

Men were running barefoot, dragging their clothes behind them, fighting their way toward the crowded staircase, no longer lusting after anything except the taste of their next breath. They were the cultured, the genteel, the sophisticated. Now they had become animals, scratching and clawing for survival, running over anyone who got in their way, trying desperately to keep from getting run over, afraid of dying and even more afraid of dying in a whorehouse.

Closer to the very rich now, shoulder to shoulder, St. Aubin could smell the fear in the hallway and detect their accents, their dialects, if not their words. Some Spanish. Some French. Some Middle Eastern. He was bad with dialects. The harshest obscenities were obviously American. Probably bureaucrats. A few diplomats. An oil baron or two. A war lord. A drug lord. Lords of industry who could be bought, had been bought, and believed that bribery was probably a legal and acceptable way of doing business since it had been omitted from the ten commandments.

God, he thought, a bomb could hit the Casa de la Luna, and the world would instantly become a better place in which to live. But, being of sound mind and body, St. Aubin kept hoping that the bomb would wait until he found a way out of Phoenix's most respectable place of ill repute. The girls had not bothered with their clothes at all. Being naked was all in a common night's work for them. Dying that way would certainly not embarrass them nor humiliate them as it would the rich and famous. Bronzed muscles rippled through their stomachs and thighs, when they ran.

Men dreamed of such beauty. The men in Casa de la Luna were no longer interested in the women, who, only moments before, had been gently caressing their hot, fat, and sweaty bodies, making them feel like gods translated into any language. They scrambled down the stairway, St. Aubin among them, and pushed their way out onto the verandah of the Casa. Sirens wailed forlornly in the distance, speeding closer with every passing second.

St. Aubin kept himself wedged firmly in the middle of the pack. There had always been safety in numbers, and, under the circumstances, he was in no mood to take any chances. Graveyards were full of men who took chances. St. Aubin had no way of knowing who had been the assassin's primary target. He must have had his enemies, to be sure, if, of course, Brockleman was telling the truth. But they should have quit chasing him years ago. They were probably already dead or too damn old to remember his name anymore.

The years had dulled the edge he once had. Maybe he was the prey and not the hunter after all. Maybe the bullet had, in reality, been searching him out. Maybe Saenz had merely gotten in the way. Only one man knew for sure, and his finger had been on the trigger. Maybe it was still there. If the gunman were still watching, however, still lying in wait, bent on finishing a job, that, perhaps, had not yet been finished. St. Aubin's aim was to simply lose himself in the crowd, become one amongst many, swallowed up by a swarm of humanity, hidden by darkness and cloaked with anonymity.

The pack of pot-bellied and balding men shoved its way through the wrought iron gates. The security guard was nowhere to be seen. On across the street they ran, elbow to elbow, their breathing coming in short, labored bursts, too tired to keep moving, too frightened to stop. One fell abruptly to his knees, clutching his chest, wheezing, fighting to force air back into his lungs. The crowd knocked him to the sidewalk and trampled over him as though he were nothing more than a pile of rags that had gotten in their way.

St. Aubin broke away and found refuge in the alley that smelled of soured milk and dead fish. Kneeling beside the trash cans, he watched a police car roar into the driveway of the Casa de la Luna, followed by an ambulance and a black limousine. Neither the police car nor the ambulance interested him. The limousine did.

Three men stepped out, their faces hidden in the shadows of the night, and the tall one, walking with a slight limp, was definitely wearing a uniform. The moonlight danced only for a second atop the three stars on his shoulder, then it was gone.

Andrews St. Aubin stood and moved farther back down the alley, his eyes slowly growing more accustomed to the darkness. There were times, however, when he trusted his instinct more than his sight, and this was one of them. Somewhere in a warped and distant past, he had learned to depend on his ears, knowing full well that his eyes would immediately focus on any sound. In the darkness, the hearing was more vital to him than the seeing.

St. Aubin was aware that he was no longer alone in the alley even before he saw the man lying in a twisted heap beneath the fire escape. He recognized the face immediately. The missing security guard had now been accounted for. St. Aubin knelt beside him and touched his face. It was cold and waxen. A huge knot rose up on his head, probably caused by a fall. A bullet had torn away most of his throat, probably after the fall.

St. Aubin had no reason to check his pulse. He looked up the side of the three-story warehouse. The security guard, he reasoned, had probably seen the flashes of gunfire coming from somewhere atop the building. He and the assassin had no doubt come face to face on the fire escape, and only one of them had time to get off a shot.

St. Aubin re-entered the street that lay at the far end of the alley. The sidewalk was empty in both directions. He glanced at his watch. It was almost four o'clock. He could take a taxi back to the hotel, if there were any to be found. Or he could walk. In the harsh, yellow glare of the street lamp, St. Aubin noticed that his shirt and windbreaker were streaked and clotted with blood. Taxi drivers took note of things like that. Police often paid them well to be suspicious, curious, and observant.

St. Aubin walked the twenty-six blocks back to the hotel. He was not alone. Twice, in the reflection of street lamp across the street, he caught a glimpse of the dead man. The burning holes where the eyes should be were darker than usual. A derisory grin had etched itself across the face of a man who no longer laughed nor had any reason to. St. Aubin's heart was beating hard enough for the both of them. He turned away, and the dead man crossed the street after him. St. Aubin felt the urge to run, but he was too old and too tired. He knew he would never be able to outdistance his guilt no matter how hard or how often he ran.

Instead, he wondered if the lovely Carol Ann McCarthy would be lying in bed and waiting for him. A part of him wanted her to be there. She was sweet and gentle, but St. Aubin, at the moment, had no desire to make love to her again. He only wanted to hide for a time in her arms and forget who he was and why the dead man trailed after him at night. It would be better if the lovely Carol Ann McCarthy had already gone. Already tonight, three had died because of him. She had no reason to become a target as well. St. Aubin felt strangely different about Carol Ann. It wasn't love. St. Aubin assumed he was no longer capable of giving or receiving love. His life simply had too many scars. His feelings for her had no name and no explanation, and he saw no reason to try and explain them to anyone, not even to himself.

Aubin shook his head to clear the complications from his thoughts, and he was angry at himself. Graveyards were full of men who let women get in the way of their survival. In his business, whatever it was or had been, a man in love was a man on his way to the undertaker's table. He had seen it too many times, but he couldn't remember the names or the places, only the graves.

At the Sheraton Hotel, St. Aubin left the dead man outside. He slipped into a phone booth and closed the door behind him. It was an ungodly hour to call Brockleman, but at least he finally had a solid name connected to the death of Danny B., and his boss wanted any news he could get, as quickly as he could get it.

The phone only rang twice before St. Aubin heard Richrd Brockleman's raspy and haggard voice on the other end of the line.

"It's St. Aubin," he said.

"I've been expecting to hear from you. You wouldn't be calling at this hour unless you had found something."

"I have."

"The artifact of Christ?"

"I still don't know what it is or even if it exists."

"Danny knew."

"I know who had Danny killed."

Silence.

The sound of death. It lay twisted inside the phone.

Then Brockleman spoke again. "What's his name?"

"Lazaro Fuentes."

"My God!" Brockleman's words were the whisper of a prayer.

"What's the matter?"

"I know the son of a bitch."

"From what I understand," St. Aubin said slowly, the words dry in his throat, "the whole damn world knows him."

"You don't understand, St. Aubin."

"Probably not."

"I've done business with Lazaro Fuentes." St. Aubin could heard Brockleman pouring himself a glass of bourbon, always bourbon. "I may publish newspapers, but I dabble in oil. That's not a secret either, and I've got leases on his lands in Mexico. Fuentes and I have sat at the same table together, drank wine from the same bottle. He's cashed my checks, and I've drilled his oil. Why in God's good name would he want to kill Danny?"

"From what I've been able to gather, Fuentes is more interested in making money than friends. Oil, perhaps, has given him a measure of credibility in the international business world. Cocaine has made him one of the wealthiest men on both sides of the border."

"And Danny found it out."

"Danny B. was gonna shove it all up his ass, tied neatly to a stick of dynamite, and light the fuse."

Brockleman was silent for a moment, then he asked, "Who told you all of this?"

"Your brother's partner."

"You found him then."

"He was scared. He was hiding."

"Where is he now?"

"He's dead," St. Aubin answered, suddenly more weary than he had realized. St. Aubin could hear Brockleman draining the glass of Scotch and pouring himself another.

"Did Raul say or know anything about the missing artifact of Christ?" he asked .

"He didn't have time to say."

"You think Fuentes has it?"

"Does it have a price tag?"

"Probably."

"Then, if Fuentes knows about it, he's got it."

"St. Aubin?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you find him?"

"A man as powerful as Lazaro Fuentes won't be difficult to locate."

"Then do it, St. Aubin."

"Do what, Mister Brockleman."

"Take it from him like he took it from Danny."

"The artifact of Christ?"

"His life."

"I'm not an assassin."

"You'll figure out what to do when it's time to do it."

"Hire yourself a professional gun."

"I already have." Brockleman paused, then added, "Find him. Detain him. If you don't want his blood on your hands, Andrews, then I'll pull the trigger for you."

The phone went dead in St. Aubin's hand.

Chapter 36

IN THE STUDY of his Park City's home, Richard Brockleman finished his second glass of Glenrothe Scotch. He might as well. The Wild Turkey was gone, drained from the broken bottle beside the fireplace. Boubon? Scotch? At the moment, one tasted little different from the other. He would have started a third, but the Glenrothe was empty, and he was too damn tired to open another. He no longer knew if he had another. He staggered to his desk, afflicted by fatigue more than the whiskey, and began rummaging through his private business files. Behind Fillmore, Foster, and Frankfort, he found the one marked Fuentes.

He turned it upside down and poured the papers out on an antique table beneath the gold-leaf lamp he had picked up years ago on a foray into Morocco. Among the contracts and invoices, carelessly tossed inside the folder lay a fading old photograph of himself and a short, overweight little man, walking together among the wooden derricks of a wildcat Mexico oil field.

Brockleman carefully studied the smiling face of Lazaro Fuentes. It was round and soft, unlike the man himself. His hair was turning gray, lay close to his scalp and was slicked back with far too much grease. Fuentes had power. And money. Power and money could buy anything, even a man's worthless or priceless life, depending entirely on the assassin's point of view.

Lazaro Fuentes was an astute businessman, a shrewd, wily negotiator, easy to underestimate, tough to beat on any transaction. He did not have lawyers. He did not talk to lawyers. He did not talk to anyone who brought lawyers to a meeting. To Fuentes, every deal was settled the way his ancestors fought their duels, mano a mano.

Brockleman had needed his leases. But he never really felt comfortable around the man. Now he knew why. The fatigue had drained from his shoulders. His head was clear of the cobwebs. Richard Brockleman, for the first time since the last clods of clay and dirt had fallen on Danny B.'s coffin, began to feel like a whole man again.

Brockleman stared at the antique English clock on the mantel above the fireplace. It was twenty-two minutes after four. Within the next thirty minutes, he would be leaving for Love Field and a flight west.There would be time for another drink after all. Richard Brockleman knelt behind the bar, pulled out his own personalized brand of Wild Turkey and slowly drank the bourbon the way it came out of the bottle, warm, a bit rough around the edges, and without blemish. It didn’t particularly mix well with the Scotch. He no longer cared.

Damn Fuentes, he said to himself as the liquid burned, then numbed his throat. Lazaro Fuentes was a dead man. The high and mighty Lazaro Fuentes had been there to hear the last agonized beat that Danny B.'s heart had ever taken. Richard Brockleman grinned savagely. It would be his pleasure to hear the last agonized beat that the black heart of Lazaro Fuentes ever took.

Even the flesh of the high and the mighty would be stripped of its dignity by the vultures, the scavengers, that came in flocks and packs to pick the heated deserts of Arizona clean.

Chapter 37

SOMETHING WAS DREADFULLY wrong. Andrews St. Aubin did not know what it was, but he could feel it. In the scratchy fragments of his memory, there were times when he had been able to taste fear, and those were the times, he guessed, that had kept him alive. He stood beside the door to room four fifty two and fumbled with the key. His hands were shaking, and his hands never shook. St. Aubin had mastered his emotions long ago.

He held the barrel of the Glock against his face, and the metal was cold and streaked by the moisture of his own sweat. St. Aubin kicked the door open and lunged head first into the bedroom, sweeping the pistol feverishly from wall to wall.

Silence.

No sound at all.

No movement.

"Carol Ann," he called softly.

No answer.

Nothing.

St. Aubin slowly pulled himself to his feet.

The stench in the room was virtually unbearable. The rumpled sheets on his bed had been slashed with a knife and were drenched with blood. The mirror, too, was smeared with dried blood. The lamp lay shattered on the floor, and the carpet beneath his feet was wet.

St. Aubin grabbed the chair for support, and his heart was beating wildly against his chest like a jackhammer gone awry. His legs grew weak and were growing weaker. Each breath was a labored gasp as though all air had been sucked from the room. A flash shot through his head as though lightning struck his eyes, and the room began to grow dark, then darker.

On the pillow, on the bed, lay the crooked, rigid fingers of a hand, a woman's hand, that had been hacked from her arm. The blood had clotted and dried. On the third finger was the unmistakable University of Mississippi ring that Carol Ann never removed, not even to take a bath.

Andrews St. Aubin heard a scream, the likes of which he had never heard before. It was coming from his own throat. Full of anger. And vengeance. Full of knowledge that everything he touched or loved always died.

The scream became a growl, wild and without the slightest hint of mercy. His chest tightened as though someone was pulling a cinch strap taut, and the pounding of the jackhammer against the outside valves of his aorta knocked him to his knees. His head was spinning, and the pistol hit the floor before he did. He groped in the darkness to find it, but the feeling was gone from his fingers. The air had departed his lungs, and he choked on his own spittle.

St. Aubin grinned. He had beaten the odds. A bullet wouldn’t kill him after all. His own worthless heart would simply take one final beat and stop for good. In the cold darkness, he thought he heard Carol Ann's voice, thought he saw her face, sleepy and smiling at him again. She spoke his name one last time before he passed out, fully convinced that he had drawn his last breath and there would be no other.

From out of the darkness came the ghostly one to carry him away. He had not bothered to wash the blood from his fingernails.

Chapter 38

ON THE BUMPY two hour and twelve minute flight from Dallas to Phoenix, in the face of a strong head wind blowing out of the gulf, Richard Brockleman read through the series of Associated Press stories that Paul Mitchell had clipped for him. Most had appeared in his own newspaper, the one Brockleman never took time to read.

The vital information, which Mitchell had underlined with a red marker, was as shocking as it was frustrating for Americans like himself who, by damn, wanted the drug war won and merely assumed that the President and the rest of the almighty government hierarchy had figured out a way to win it.

As one article bluntly pointed out: The United States has invested millions of dollars worth of machine guns, helicopters, and powerboats to battle the stream of drugs coming out of South America and Mexico. Yet the measures are being called short-sighted and superficial. A two-million dollar package for Mexico, for example, was denounced as nothing more than 'window dressing' by one high-ranking official, who said, 'Even if we can drive the traffickers out of Mexico, there's still just too much money to be made in this nasty business. They will no doubt find some other country in which to establish a base, and their first choice would be either Texas or Arizona.

Another report said, Gunfire erupts most every night in Mexico's towns and villages where the exorbitant cost of cocaine and heroine is sometimes as cheap as a man's life. Men kill to steal it. They kill for the chance to use it themselves. They kill for the right to sell it. A mass burial ground was uncovered in the desert lands South of Nogales, and none of the twenty-four skeletal remains have yet been identified. It is believed the bodies are those of drug smugglers who tried to double cross their bosses and establish their own business in a multi-billion dollar industry.

The war, fought within the confines of the United States, was apparently being lost as well. The judicial system is overwhelmed in Arizona, one news story said. More than eighty percent of the prisoners were convicted of some drug-related charge. And early-day prisons built to hold 1,500 inmates are now crowded with twice that number. As a result, the courts are releasing hardened criminals after they spend only a few months behind bars simply because there is no available prison space left to accommodate them.

Brockleman read the last news article, then carefully lay the manila folder aside. He closed his eyes for a long moment before turning to face Paul Mitchell and asking. "Do you consider those reports fairly accurate? Or are they merely propaganda, a well-orchestrated pack of lies?"

"To be a newspaper publisher, Mister Brockleman, you don't like the press very much, do you," Mitchell answered.

"Not particularly." Brockleman loosened his tie. "Most reporters I've known would rather lie than tell the truth when it's sitting right in front of them."

"And you pay them good money to do it."

"It sells newspapers."

Mitchell was grinning. The humor had not yet penetrated his eyes. "Generally, I'm inclined to agree with you," he said. "The press can be vultures. They only want to write what will be printed on the front page, even if that occasionally causes them to color the truth. But these reports are, I believe, a fair documentation of the facts."

Brockleman sighed wearily, squinting as a faint hint of morning sun discolored the edge of a distant cloud bank. "I presume you have a plan?" he said.

"Eliminate the men who sell the drugs, and you eliminate the drugs."

"For how long?"

"For as long as the elimination process continues."

For a moment, Brockleman thought he detected a cold, calculating smile play its way into Mitchell's eyes. He ignored it, saying instead, "Those countries have all the firepower they need to fight our war for us and win the son of a bitch as well. We're giving them every damn high-powered weapon the Pentagon has, and some they're not even talking about."

"Are we?" Paul Mitchell leaned back in his seat, folded his hands beneath his chin and said, "Colombia asked the good old boys in Washington for helicopters."

"And we sent down helicopters."

There was a touch of bitterness in Mitchell's laughter. “We shipped them Hueys," he said. He started to spit on the floor to show his disgust, then decided against it. "Hueys were built for combat. They're heavy and cumbersome. They were absolutely worthless in Colombia.The Hueys barely got off the ground. The mountains are a mile high up where the drugs are being refined. The Hueys are a flat land machine."

"So we threw our money away."

"Good money after bad." Mitchell closed his eyes, and his voice was almost lost in the roar of the engines just outside the window. "There were, of course, judges and police down there who were honest enough to go after the drug lords, but they were running scared."

"You can't blame them for that."

"Every time one of them walked out into the street, he was a sitting duck in a shooting gallery. Mexico buried four judges last year. We've lost track of the number of policemen who've been lost."

Brockleman's head jerked around. His eyes had become narrow and piercing. He whispered harshly, "In case you've forgotten, one of them was my brother."

Mitchell had not forgotten.

He merely wanted to keep Richard Brockleman balancing precariously on the ragged edge for at least another hour, maybe until noon. Brockleman was a hard man. But he was a tired man whose brain was fogged from too much whiskey and too little sleep. Men stressed out in such a condition could be easily manipulated if someone knew how to control the human mind, and, somewhere along the way, Paul Mitchell had become the consummate professional.

"So what happens to the gun supplies we ship South?" Brockleman spit out.

"The guns work fine. Chances are, though, we forget to include the bullets."

"Is that supposed to be a joke, Mister Mitchell?"

"The whole damn war's a joke, Mister Brockleman." He tightened his seatbelt as the jet banked sharply and began its descent into Phoenix. "If you really want to know, I'll tell you what happens when we send guns down so somebody else can fight our war for us. The drug bastards who sit in high places steal them and use the weapons on us. Yes, Mister Brockleman, it's a joke all right. It's a goddam funny joke, but we aren't the ones laughing."

Brockleman turned back to the window. From far above, the landscape looked so peaceful and quiet. It lied. Somewhere down below there was a man, maybe many men, and they were laughing at his country, damn them. They were laughing at him. Their laughter was full of scorn and contempt. They had the blood of his brother on their hands.

Were they laughing the night Danny B. died?

Chapter 39

THE BELLS WERE tolling for a young man with the tattoo of a snake on his left arm and no name. Father James Alvarez stood in the doorway of the small chapel in Nogales and watched as a handful of mourners, dressed in black, carried the wooden casket across a wind-swept yard, on toward an ancient cemetery where a new hole had been dug in the hard-rock dirt.

The young man had been bound for the City of Hope. From all indications, he had been on his way to the border, walking along the path of the damned, but someone was lying ambush for him. The border patrols had become more aggressive. So had those who merely wanted to prey on the misfortunes of others.

The chief of police had found him, shortly after a clear Sunday sunrise, lying in a narrow barrow ditch beside a chicken farm, his eyes still open, with three bullet holes in his chest. A small paper bag had been tied to his waist, and on it was written the name of Father James Alvarez. The bag was empty. So were the young man's pockets.

To the police of Nogales, he was simply an unwanted vagrant whose death was more of a nuisance than anything else. It would have been far better for them if he had gone ahead and climbed the fence instead of crawling back to the edge of their town.

"Do you recognize him?" the police chief asked when Father Alvarez arrived to claim the body.

The priest studied the face that stared up at him from the morgue slab. Young. Thin and unshaven. A slight scar just below his left ear. Black hair that hung down almost to his shoulders. His could be the face of any young man.

"No. I don't know him at all."

"Do you know why the bag has your name on it?"

"He no doubt was looking for work." Father Alvarez clutched a worn rosary for no particular reason. "He had probably been told that I would feed him and give him a place to sleep for the night. That's all."

The chief threw the frayed sheet back over the young man's face. "Do you know what might have been in the paper bag?" he asked.

"Maybe his clothes," Father Alvarez lied.

Sometimes the lies came easy.

"Probably his clothes," the chief repeated. "These are bad times for us. A man's clothes are often more important than his life."

Father Alvarez's smile did not reflect the bitterness he felt inside him. He knew what the bag had carried. He only wondered who had the money now. Those who had shot the young man, whoever they were, or those who had found his body? He worried as always about the babies who would go hungry that night because the money to buy milk was missing.

"There's one other thing you might want to know," the chief said.

"We found traces of cocaine tucked away inside the wrinkles of the bag."

Father Alvarez nodded as he closed his eyes in a silent prayer. The information did not interest him, nor did it disturb him.

"Maybe with a little luck you can find a place for him in heaven," the chief said with a numbing laugh as the priest walked out of the morgue.

"That, sir, is not my decision."

"It had better be. God doesn't live in Bisbee, Arizona."

The funeral was brief and to the point. No music. No tears. The words of Father James Alvarez were disturbed only by the ringing of the bells in the wind. The priest had been able to round up a few mourners from the small congregation of the church simply because no man, he believed, should go to the grave alone, not even a man with no name and a snake tattooed on his arm.

As he turned back inside the chapel, he glimpsed, just behind the burning candles and beneath the cross, the door to the confessional slowly closing. Father Alvarez sighed. He knew he did not have the time, but anyone who had journeyed all the way to Nogales to confess his sins, regardless of the hour of the day or night, could not be ignored. To do so would be disgracing the robe that he wore. The priest slipped into the booth and bowed his head.

"Forgive me, father, for I have sinned," said an unfamiliar voice.

"Bless you, my son."

"Father?"

"Yes, my son."

"We are aware of the great work you are doing for our people, for your people." The unfamiliar voice was calm, the words quite precise.

"I simply do what the voice of the Almighty tells me to do."

"Your work has only just begun."

Silence. Strained. And foreboding.

Father Alvarez frowned. He could feel the sweat running coldly down between his shoulder blades, and the heat inside the booth was stifling.

"I don't understand," he said.

"We also have work for you to do."

Silence again.

"Who are you?" Father Alvarez asked at last.

The voice did not answer directly. "We have been working together for a long time now, Father," it said. "I send the people to you. You send them toward new lives in the North."

"How did you know of me?"

"Perhaps, the Almighty speaks to me as well."

There was a moment of hesitation. “The Almighty simply asks that I provide the money,” the stranger said at last. “We both do what we must. That is the way of the Gods."

Father James Alvarez wiped the sweat from his face and shifted his position slightly to ease the cramp in his back. For the first time since he had taken the vows of priesthood, he was scared, frightened of what he knew and what he didn't know, fearful of anyone who had heard the voice of the Radiant One when the Radiant one spoke only to Father Alvarez.

"What is the work you have for me to do?" the priest asked, a slight tremble dangling between each word.

"We provide the opportunities for many who are poor and starving to find a new life in a new land," the voice said, unwavering and self-assured. "In that respect, Father, we are one and the same, you and I."

Silence.

Father Alvarez sat struggling with his conscience. The thoughts sounded so much like his thoughts. The words echoed his own words. Why did he doubt them so?

The voice continued, "But, unfortunately, Father, men who leave their country behind must also leave their wives and children behind. That, good sir, is the great sacrifice that these men make for their survival. Our families, so often, can either have us or our money, but seldom both, not at the same time anyway. The money lies elsewhere. It is our job, our duty, to help poor, tortured souls go find it, and they are finding it north of the border. We don't just send them to a foreign land, then forget them. Messengers help them keep in touch with their families. Our messengers make sure that the money they work so hard to earn really does reach their wives and children. There are so few people you can trust these days."

"Why have you come to me?"

"You, Father, are the one man among all men we know we can trust."

Father Alvarez could hear the man tapping his fingers impatiently against the confessional walls. "I repeat then," he said, "what is the work you have for me to do?"

"The border has become a difficult place for us. It is viewed with suspicion by those on both sides of the fence. Our messengers are no longer able to travel back and forth without being stopped, harassed, and hassled by government patrols. Sometimes they are simply turned away. Sometimes they are jailed." The voice paused, then said, "And sometimes you are forced to bury them as you did Alfredo today."

Alfredo. At least there would be a name for his tombstone now. Father Alvarez's sigh was one of relief. He had feared that a man without a name would be cursed to rot in the hells of purgatory forever.

"On Friday mornings," the voice said forcefully, "you are to leave your City of Hope and journey back to Nogales. You are no stranger here. In the confessional booth, where you sit, you will find a number of packages wrapped in paper. But then, receiving a package is nothing new to you. We have sent you many, and these packages have helped you feed the starving and clean the unwashed. The white package always belongs to you, Father. All we ask is that you simply deliver the brown packages to your church in Copper Creek. Our messenger will pick them up there. It is not a difficult task at all, Father."

"And what if I refuse?"

"Why should you, Father?"

"I am an old man," the priest said wearily, his voice cracking. "Maybe I can make arrangements for someone far younger to help you."

"It is imperative that you and you alone come, Father. There can be no one else."

"Why not? There are many in my church you can trust."

"But you, Father, are a revered and respected man of the cloth. No one troubles you. No one harasses you. No one looks at you with suspicious eyes. You, sir, are free to come and go as you please, whenever you please."

"But I do not travel well anymore, not even for an hour," the priest argued.

"You came today."

"I came to bury a young man."

"The next time you will come to save the babies who will someday grow to be young men."

Silence again. Father Alvarez hated the silence.

"I'm sorry," the priest said. "But it is too much to ask of me."

He waited for an answer. More silence. Father Alvarez listened closely for the sound of someone tapping on the wall of the confessional. Nothing. He was alone. Father Alvarez slipped out of the booth, and a gust of hot wind brushed harshly against his face. He opened the door to the confessional and saw several packages lying there, waiting for him. There were seven in all, stacked neatly on the floor.

He reached for the white one, his hands quivering, and tore away the paper. Fifty dollar bills dropped at his feet, and there must be hundreds of them, more than had ever been sent him before. His legs lost their strength. He wanted to pray. He was afraid to pray. Father Alvarez picked up one of the brown packages. It was heavy and tightly wrapped with a thick cord. He suspected what was in it. But he did not know for sure, nor did he want to know. He only looked inside the creases of the brown paper to see if the Radiant One had allowed any of the blessed white powder to collect there. He found no trace of it.

He was a simple man, Father Alvarez had always told his congregation, a God-fearing man. It was not his place to judge men. Nor condemn them. The Bible had told him, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." Those who were judged were almost always found guilty. The old priest did not want to be among them.

At last, his tongue was loosened, and a disquieting prayer began to fall from his parched lips. Father Alvarez was on his knees, confessing his sins, his damnable, unholy sins, while he worked feverishly, scooping up the scattered fifty dollar bills and stuffing them into the pockets beneath his black robe. Was anyone listening to him? Did the Radiant One know what he must do and why he must do it? Had the Radiant One also heard the hungry babies crying in the night?

The blue Continental ignored the last stop sign on the edge of the town and roared away from the dusty streets of Nogales. In the back seat, Lazaro Fuentes leaned his head back against plush leather and closed his eyes. The meeting had gone quite well, he told his driver. Father James Alvarez was a compassionate man, and, like compassionate men, he could be bought.

Lazaro Fuentes had invested many hours during the last few years, cultivating, then establishing a multi-million dollar empire. His human pipeline sometimes faltered. The priest would not. The land outside the Lincoln lay flat and baked and barren, devoid of any signs of life. Even the rattlesnakes had gone elsewhere.

Alongside the road, Lazaro Fuentes saw a bent man, a dog in his arms and a pack on his back, trudging slowly northward, his feet wearily shuffling in the dust, his face the texture of uncured leather. The hitchhiker was probably forty, but he looked more like sixty, and, within a week, he would either be a dead man or a rich man. But then, for some, wealth was a dollar in their pocket and a bowl of beans in their bellies.

Fuentes would have laughed at the thought, but sleep overtook him first.

Chapter 40

THE JEEP TURNED off the main highway and fought its way up to the crest of a rocky knoll overlooking the church of St. Ignatius. Richard Brockleman adjusted his sunglasses to cut down on the glare ricocheting across the windshield. An unforgiving blast of hot air caught him squarely in the face, and he could taste the grit from a dry arroyo blowing into his mouth. For the last few miles, Paul Mitchell had not spoken at all. He was letting Brockleman lose himself in his own thoughts.

The day was already beginning to fray Brockleman's nerves, and it was not yet noon. He needed a drink. Nothing cold. Only something to ease the pain that kept pounding the righteous inner sanctum of his head. Brockleman looked around him, and the land was an illusion, a curious paradox, sometimes a desert, sometimes a garden, where thistles and thorns grew side by side with desert primrose and columbine whose blooms were as bright as neon, as soft as velvet.

The heat of the sun bore down on him from a high and cloudless sky. Brockleman climbed out of the jeep when it stopped, walked to the edge of a ravine and knelt beside a flowering cactus. Below, he could see a massive knot of humanity, moving aimlessly about a fenced compound just behind the church. The people were too far away to have faces. There were men, some barefoot, some who had thrown their shirts aside, and women, with babies crying in their arms and children running naked at their feet, and, somehow, the sight reminded Brockleman of maggots swarming inside the festered sore of a dying animal. He heard Mitchell shut off the engine and, a moment later, walk up behind him. "Is this what you wanted me to see?" Brockleman asked.

"Do you know what it is?"

Brockleman shook his head. "It looks like a prison yard," he answered, "but I don't imagine that a church would have its own prison. A refugee camp, maybe."

"The people in Mexico and around here call it the Holy City of Hope."

"Then they certainly don't have very high expectations."

"Most of them don't have any expectations at all." Mitchell paused to wipe away the sweat that had smeared his glasses. "Look closely," he continued, "and tell me what you see down there."

Brockleman shrugged and loosened his tie. God, it was hot, he thought. He spit but could not get rid of the grit on his tongue. "Nothing special nor particularly out of the ordinary," he said. "Men. Women. Kids running wild. That's about all."

"They come by the thousands," Mitchell said.

"From Mexico?"

"And from Nicaragua and Panama and Colombia." Mitchell cleared the dust from his throat and said, "A few even come across from Iran and Iraq. They may not want to dine on chorizos and beans, but they know how to make bombs. No passport, no visa, no green card, and they have no place to go when they get there. They stay a couple of days at the City of Hope with Father Alvarez, and he feeds them until their hunger pains are gone, and he turns them loose, and they scatter from one end of this country to the other. They don't speak the language, don't have a job, and taxpayers wind up taking care of them. The border has a hole hundreds of miles wide, and somebody's got to plug it up."

Brockleman stood and watched a scorpion lose its way in the dust. "I realize their being here may be an inconvenience," he said, "But, hell, man, the border states from here to Texas were pretty well nailed together with wetback labor. If we have to feed them, fine. We'll just grow more beans. I can't understand why everybody is trying to bleach the brown out of either Texas or Arizona. Historically, those states belonged to the Mexicans before we got our hands on them anyway."

"For the most part, they aren't coming here empty-handed," Mitchell said, standing and folding his arms.

"What do you mean?"

"Those aren't just human beings you're looking at."

"Then what in God's name would you call them?"

"A pipeline." Mitchell waited for the words to soak in, then added, "They are a human pipeline bringing in millions of dollars worth of cocaine every day. They wind up living in a shanty town on the wrong side of the tracks. The drug lords wind up rich. And our sons and daughters wind up lying dead in the streets. It's costing taxpayers a lot more than their money. It's costing them their society, their morals, their values, their children. Cocaine's not a drug, my friend. Not any more. Cocaine's a murder weapon, and we're in danger of losing whole generations."

"That's why Danny was so willing to risk his life," Brockleman said, his voice a mere whisper lost in the wind.

"That's why you buried Danny B."

Brockleman stood and walked back to the jeep, his shoulders sagging, the sun piercing the back of his neck like a branding iron. Lifelessly, he crawled back inside. And when Mitchell had joined him, he asked, "How does it work?"

Mitchell blinked. The sweat was burning his eyes. "Simple advertisements are run in newspapers, particularly in towns where a majority of the men are unemployed. The ads promise free transportation to the border, and they speak of all the glorious jobs waiting in this country. The men sign up by the thousands. Everyday, the thousands are crammed into the back of cattle trucks and hauled to a spot just north of Nogales. Each is given a brown paper bag to carry across the river."

"I don't have to guess what's in it."

"At the Holy City of Hope, they're fed and contacted by someone who buys the bag from them. Men kill to get it and kill to keep it. Some of the stuff makes it across the border, some is stopped. But we haven't been able to stop it all. We confiscate a billion dollars worth of white powder, two billion gets through. You do the math."

"What happens to them if they try to freelance and keep the cocaine for themselves? God knows it must be tempting."

Mitchell slouched in his seat as he turned the key in the ignition and turned the jeep back down the narrow roadway. "They disappear," he said.

Brockleman shook his head. The system was damn near foolproof. A smuggler's plane could be shot down. His car might never make it past customs. But a horde of people was damn near impossible to stop.

The stretch of main highway that lay before them was abandoned, and Brockleman could see heat rising in waves above the cement. The parched prairie land turned green. Finally Brockleman broke the silence. "Why doesn't somebody do something about it?"

"About what?"

"About Father Alvarez and his so-called Holy City of Hope."

There was a sharp edge in Mitchell's voice. "You can do any damn thing you want in this country and get away with it as long as you do it in the name of the church," he said. "You go and try to shut down the good Father Alvarez, and you'll have every bleeding heart liberal in America screaming for your head and every card-carrying son of a bitch who's a member of the American Civil Liberties Union fighting to see which one of the bastards is gonna have the good fortune of prosecuting your ass. The cross may wash away sin, but, by God, it's hiding a lot of cocaine, and there's a man in the oval office who would like for somebody to do something about it."

"It won't be easy."

"Wars aren't meant to be easy. They're meant to be won."

"And you honestly think that this is one we can win."

"There is no doubt in my mind that we can win it."

"What'll it take?"

"Manpower. Firepower." Mitchell paused and slowed the jeep, moving cautiously into the mid-day traffic of Phoenix. "And your money, Mister Brockleman. About fifty-four million dollars of your money."

Somehow, Richard Brockleman was not surprised.

The wars were being fought in the brush lands outside the city, out where men, known as mules, could earn as much as a hundred dollars for staying out of the way of bullets all night and bringing across a small fortune in white powder.

Paul Mitchell, frankly, had never been able to understand them or why, night after night, day after day, they would risk so much for so little. After awhile, he stopped trying.

Brockleman stared past the towering skyline of Phoenix and out toward the empty landscape spilling to the south, a land of burnt grass and thorns, that kept two nations so close together, yet so far apart, and he wondered how much blood had stained the desert, how many had already died on the banks of dry creekbeds, and how many more lives it would claim.

"It's not enough," Brockleman said.

"What's not enough?"

"You can't buy Mexico for fifty-four million dollars."

"We don't want to bid for it. We don't want to buy it. We've already invested a lot more money than that in Mexico, and we might as well have flushed every goddam cent of it down some goddam toilet."

Brockleman’s sigh was one of frustration. He glanced up at Mitchell. "What plans do you have for my fifty-four million dollars?" he asked.

"We're planning to take a little trip to Mexico, that's all" Mitchell replied. A sardonic grin replaced the frown that had shadowed his face.

"Damn expensive trip."

"Not if you're bringing an army with you."

Richard Brockleman grew suddenly cold. His stomach began to churn, and a wave of nausea swept over him. The hackles on the back of his sunburned neck had risen, and he stared hard at Mitchell. The man's answer must surely be a jest. But Paul Mitchell's eyes were like marble, and they told him everything he needed to know. Paul Mitchell was dead serious.

"Let me get this straight," Brockleman said, carefully measuring each word. "What you are proposing is the invasion of Mexico."

"We have studied several plans, many ideas, and developed more than a dozen strategies and scenarios for stopping the flow of drugs into the United States," Mitchell answered matter-of-factly. "Only one, we believe, will work."

"Mexico is a neighbor."

"It's a bad neighborhood."

Brockleman fought to control his emotions. His voice was calm by the time he asked, "Who wants to invade Mexico, Paul? Is that the President talking? Or is it merely one of your wild-eyed, grab 'em by the balls and squeeze 'em till it hurts schemes?"

"I'm a good soldier," came the reply. "I don't question orders. I don't invent them, and I seldom give them. I only follow them. That's all."

Lying, Paul Mitchell had learned long ago, had nothing to do with the truth. It was merely the selection of what points a man might need to win a debate. All that was important was what another might be willing to believe. If the truth got in the way, it could simply be set aside, perhaps even terminated if necessary.

"Then why in God's name does the President need my money? Why doesn't he just declare war, appropriate the funds he needs, and roll those big tanks of his south?"

"I'm afraid it's not quite that cut and dried."

"He's the President, isn't he?"

"Mister Caples runs the country. He doesn't run Congress."

"Then I presume that Congress doesn't know a goddam thing about this ridiculous plan of yours."

"Some in Congress believe that the only hope we have of controlling our southern border is controlling Mexico."

"Who are they?"

"Their names are confidential."

"How many congressmen are we talking about?"

"I'm not at liberty to say."

"What you're telling me then is that the President just doesn't have the votes he needs to send troops into Mexico."

Paul Mitchell nodded. That, he knew, was a point that Richard Brockleman could honestly believe. The Texas millionaire understood politics, the good and bad of it, if nothing else. "Not yet he doesn't," Mitchell answered.

Brockleman turned and leaned against a lamp post, his back to the sun, a hot wind ruffling his hair. "Spell it out for me, then," he said. "You obviously need money. Your old sources have obviously dried up, or at least they've gotten smarter with old age. You've got some plan that's probably as worthless as a pig's fart in a whirlwind. So spell it out for me. Let me know just what in hell you've got in mind for Mexico."

Paul Mitchell sighed. The time had at last come for him to explain the inner workings of Operation Taps in terms that Richard Brockleman would believe and accept. "For the past fourteen months, a crack commando unit has been training in the deserts of New Mexico," he said. "It's not a large army, but it is an effective one. They move like apparitions in the night, and they're experts at explosives and guerrilla warfare. They strike quickly. They're deadly. They can cut your throat and be gone before you even know you're bleeding.

"We need money for weapons, for equipment for tactical support. We'll fly the commando unit in under the cover of darkness. They'll parachute into a pre-determined encampment, then scatter throughout the countryside. We have the names of every known drug lord in Mexico who runs the cocaine and who supplies it, the political leaders who are getting rich off drugs, the legal and law officials who make sure the pipeline of illegal drugs moves smoothly through their country and into ours. In a week, maybe a month, they simply won't be here anymore. Mexico may have to build a new cemetery just to accommodate them all."

"You're not bringing in an army. You're bringing in assassins."

"We prefer to call them mechanics."

"And why should I help you?"

"To save your country is one reason," Mitchell replied, a hint of pride edging into his voice. You've always done what you could to defend and protect your country. The price of America can't be measured in dollars." He paused briefly, then added, "And because some of those who fall will be the ones who showed no mercy for your brother."

Brockleman’s throat was as dry as the sand beneath the jeep. "I have a name to add to your list," he blurted out. "Lazaro Fuentes."

"Mister Fuentes won't be with us next week."

"It's worth fifty-four million dollars if that's a promise."

"I'll send you a ticket."

"To what?"

"His funeral."

Brockleman felt the heat rising up off the sand as he asked, "Is this crack commando unit of yours made up of Americans?"

"They're Iranian."

"From Iran?"

Mitchell shrugged. "Mostly from Philadelphia," he said.

"Why Iranians?"

"If any of them are killed, and some no doubt will be, they'll immediately be identified as terrorists from the Mideast. Their names cannot be traced. They have no fingerprints, no dental records, no families, no roots that can be found anywhere."

"And you're sure your operation will work?"

"We take risks, Mister Brockleman. But we don't gamble unless the house odds are on our side." Mitchell looked out beyond a vast and inhospitable land. "You can't fight drugs with search and seizure laws," he said. "We've got one viable option left, Mister Brockleman. That's to find the bastards responsible for drug trafficking and get rid of them. Rhetoric won't do that. Laws won't do that. Debate in Congress won’t do that. Judges can't do that. In time of war – and don't ever forget that this is war – you don't have to read any son of bitch his rights. You just take his fucking head off." He paused, then continued, "We're fighting in a world run by mad men."

Richard Brockleman thought it over in silence. The taste of burnt jalapenos from breakfast soured in his mouth. His head ached. He glanced down at the sidewalk and watched a tumble bug fight its way across the concrete and admired the tenacity, the persistence of the little bug who had only one goal in life, and that was to reach the sand. The sand meant safety at the end of a long and cruel journey.

When the tumble bug finally tumbled off the cracked sidewalk and rolled into the sand, righting itself in the warmth of a noon-day sun, Mitchell stepped on it.

Brockleman felt numb, as he did after too much whiskey. "Where," he asked, "is the commando unit right now, even as we speak?"

"I’m not at liberty to say."

"What sets the plan in motion?"

"A phone call."

"From here?"

"Here will do fine."

"Then, what are you waiting on, Mister Mitchell?"

"I am waiting on you, Mister Brockleman."

Richard Brockleman turned abruptly and walked stoically away toward town. He was nowhere close. He did not care. He took long uneasy strides as he began working his way through an impatient line of moving traffic.

"What are you doing?" Paul Mitchell called after him.

"I'm leaving."

"Why?"

Brockleman whirled around in the middle of the street, his face an ashen gray, and yelled above the grinding engines, the cacophony of honking horns that surrounded him. "You said the whole damn world was run by mad men, Mister Mitchell. Well, you, sir, are the maddest son of a bitch of them all."

It was nearing sundown by the time Brockleman walked back at the Hyatt Regency and stumbled wearily into a back booth of the Compass Lounge. He tried beer to wash the bad taste out of his mouth, but the beer was stale. The tequila turned to salt and lime. The cheap bourbon was burning the inner lining of his stomach. He felt not unlike the tumblebug beneath Paul Mitchell's boot. He left the lounge shortly after ten o’clock, rode the elevator to the ninth floor, and stumbled down the hallway. His eyes were having a hard time focusing on the room numbers.

He found nine-thirty-four, which looked vaguely familiar, tried the key once, then twice, and finally pried the door open, mostly against its will. The red message light was blinking, and it matched the dull throbbing in his head. He picked up the phone, made a stab at zero, and hit it on the third try.

"Front desk," came the voice, definitely female.

"The blinking light says I've got a message." His words were slurred together.

"What's the room number?"

He looked at his key again. "Nine-thirty-four, I think."

"Richard Brockleman?"

"Yes."

"You have a telegram, sir."

"Well, lady, don't just stand there. Read the damn thing to me."

The voice paused, then asked, "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

The words were soft and hesitant. "It says, 'We regret to inform you that Andrews St. Aubin is dead. Stop. He died late last night in his hotel. Stop. His death apparently resulted from a heart attack. Stop. Will await further information on what arrangements will be necessary for the body. Stop."

The phone went dead. It would be morning before Richard Brockleman realized that he had ripped the cord from the hotel wall.

Chapter 41

IT WAS ALMOST noon when Paul Mitchell slipped into a pay telephone at the Phoenix airport and made his first phone call of the day. He dialed the number, let it ring three times, then hung up. Exactly two minutes and thirty-five seconds later, Mitchell dialed the number again. An electronic monitor answered the phone.

Mitchell's voice was decoded and cleared, and he waited, as he had done so many times before, for the scrambler, left over from the Cold War, to be adjusted in a small computer room tucked away in an underground chamber on the outskirts of Washington, DC. The chamber was known only to twelve men. The President was not among them.

"You're on the clock," came a voice that had been electronically distorted.

The message was being routed to the backroom of an abandoned Carrizozo, New Mexico, bar that had been abandoned since a mysterious fire in April, and Mitchell knew that the man behind the voice was General Donald Draper.

"The bank is open," Mitchell said.

"At what time?"

"Eleven thirty-four."

"Have there been any transactions?"

"One."

"How much?"

"Fifty-four million."

"What about the check?"

"It has cleared."

"And the bank?"

Mitchell thought about Richard Brockleman. The man was broken, aging overnight, a mere shadow of himself. Richard Brockleman had always been strong, intimidating, invincible in both the political and the business worlds. Now he was a drunk again. And crying. God, how he hated to see a grown man cry.

"The bank is quite solvent," Mitchell said at last.

"And the banker?"

"Another transaction is eminent, whenever necessary, if necessary."

"How much?"

"It's a blank check." Mitchell paused, then added. "It has already been signed."

Paul Mitchell left the phone dangling in the booth. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked again toward a desert stretching to Mexico, so quiet and peaceful, its brush lands barely visible beneath a haze of dust and smoke.

Paul Mitchell might be damned for what he was about to do.

Condemned.

Maybe even convicted.

But he was a man at war.

Quite frankly, Paul Mitchell had learned years ago to pull the trigger with neither conscience nor remorse.

The shot would mean far more to the victim than it did for Paul Mitchell.

Chapter 42

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN assumed he was dead. The sweat had dried on his face, yet the air around him was hot, sultry, and it lay heavy in his lungs. The pounding in his chest had stopped, and the sharp pain that had become so unbearable was only a distant memory. That's the beauty of death, St. Aubin thought. It removes the pain. It ends all fear. With death, there is no reason to be afraid anymore. His sudden and final journey into eternity had not been all that traumatic after all.

St. Aubin laughed, and the sound of his laughter startled him. He felt as though he were floating, a prisoner of the sky, suspended from the stars, hung high above the earth, which looked so black, so far away.

Then he saw the fire of hell and the creatures who were crowded around it, their faces, if they had faces at all, masked by thick smoke that smelled of oak. Were they coming after him, St. Aubin wondered. Or was he already one of them? He looked around for the pale, translucent face of the dead man. The dead man would not have left him at a time like this.

St. Aubin had always believed that the dead man relentlessly trailed him in life so that he personally could escort the lost, miserable soul of Andrews St. Aubin past the veil of life, across the deep waters of the River Jordan and into the darkness of Hades itself. The dead man was nowhere in sight.

Why would the dead man leave me now at the time of my passing, he thought? A bullet from St. Aubin's pistol had condemned the dead man. Why had the dead man deserted him? The time had come for him and the dead man to be as one, only a memory, if anyone cared to remember, and he doubted if anyone would.

Far overhead he heard the throbbing sound of an airplane engine as it droned on through the darkness.

Damn.

Hell didn't have airplanes, not as far as he knew, and, if he wasn't in hell, then where in hell was he? St. Aubin closed his eyes tightly and fought to clear away the fog that had settled in his head and was trying to suffocate his powers to reason. He felt the pain return, and it was probing deep into his wrists. His back ached, and his face was awash again with layers of salt and sweat. Doubt flooded him. Then anxiety. Finally a caustic fear that caused him to tremble with anger and defiance.

St. Aubin opened his eyes, his senses no longer frayed and unraveling. God, how he loved the taste of fear. It was the one solitary mechanism that kept a man alive. He was definitely alive. The dead man could wait a little longer. But then, the dead man had nothing better to do anyway.

St. Aubin's laughter grew louder, but the wind whipped it quickly beyond the bare wall of the mountains, and no one heard. No one turned their eyes upward to catch a faint glimpse of the shadow that was hanging, arms outstretched like a crucifix far above the trees that congregated around a small creek.

He was alone.

He was captive.

But that no longer troubled Andrews St. Aubin. As long as a man clung to his last breath, he was captive of something or someone, good or evil, bad or worse. Mankind was not born to be free. But St. Aubin was alive. That was all that mattered.

A gust of hot desert wind slapped him in the face, and the fog began to dissipate from St. Aubin's mind. The sudden wave of euphoria that had gripped him only moments before vanished as quickly as it had come. St. Aubin's focus was much clearer now, and the stark reality, hard and cold, began to sink in. He was among the living all right, but how long would he remain there?

First, St. Aubin checked out his own situation and was not overly thrilled with what he found. He stood in the dark stone cavity of an ancient Aztec cliff dwelling. His wrists were tied to the splintered log rafters, probably by either wire or wet leather straps that grew tighter as they dried out. He could not tell for sure. St. Aubin only knew that the pain was like fire burning in his flesh, and his fingers were numb. He was standing precariously on a narrow ledge at the base of the doorway. The rocks were held together by dried mud, and they felt as though they might break apart and crumble out from under him at any moment, especially if he made the mistake of shifting his weight.

One false step, one false move, perhaps, and he would be hanging by his wrists, his dead weight pulling heavily against the ties that bound him. He would not be able to hold out for more than a minute, two minutes at the most. Then his shoulders would be jerked out of their sockets, and any hope for escape would be gone, not that there was much hope as it was. He would be at the mercy of the jackals that knelt in a ragged circle around the flames below him. Obviously, he already was.

St. Aubin looked down. The distance to the hard scribble ground appeared to be at least a hundred feet, maybe farther. Heights could be dreadfully deceiving, especially at night when there was no moonlight on the desert.

The constant beating of the wind, the dust boiling off the barren terrain, had left tears running down his face. The harsh grains of sand felt like tiny razors, scratching and clawing at his eyeballs. He blinked to clear them and studied the mystical scene that was unfolding below him.

St. Aubin counted thirty-six men, all barefoot, all dressed in the ragged clothes of starving peons, the kind who roamed the streets and begged for jobs, who ate scraps from somebody else's trash cans.

His mind took note: They were motionless, their dark, empty stare transfixed on a stone altar that glowed the color of burning embers, a reflection of the wind-blown flames that leaped like skeletal fingers into the black cavernous night around them.

A tall, thin man, dressed in a white hooded robe, stood behind the altar, and all St. Aubin could see were those piercing, yellow eyes that stared out from beneath the cloth draped loosely around his head. His eyes were gripping, hypnotic. His appearance was that of a refugee from the netherworld, not quite human, and he was chanting a litany, or maybe a song, a song dedicated to the dying and the near dead, and maybe to the stranger who was hanging on the rotten edge of a vacant doorway far above them all. The currents of the wind carried the strange, mournful sounds to St. Aubin's ears, but not the words.

His eyes fell upon the altar itself. A woman lay there. Squirming. And naked. She was tied firmly with leather straps to wooden stakes hammered deep into the hard earth.

St. Aubin's stomach knotted up. A scream of anguish, of anger, hung in his throat, then slowly died away. He was cursing, but no one could hear him. He was damning them all, and yet it was he, like the woman lying in sacrifice upon the altar of stone, who was the damned.

Her right hand was missing. It had been hacked from her arm, and a withered stump, clotted with dried blood and infection, quivered only inches above the ground.

Jesus. The curse had become a prayer. A eulogy. God, he had held such a hand. But to whom did it belong? St. Aubin had never seen the woman before in his life.

From out of the darkness, there appeared another form, also robed and hooded, swaying gently, walking to the rhythm of the litany, moving silently, as though walking on air, toward the base of the stone altar.

The peons moved aside, falling on their faces, gnashing their teeth and kissing the hem of the robe as it passed them, an apparition of the beatitudes, perhaps the Alpha, surely the Omega. Could this be the messiah that Danny B. had written about? A deity who still walked the deserts, who had ascended into Heaven upon a cloud, or was it smoke, coming again, as it was written in the scriptures, and not yet ready to depart the sects, the disciples of the damned, who worshipped him as they worshipped none other. In outstretched hands, there lay a dagger, its blade long and slender, shining like a forbidden jewel in the firelight.

The tall one bowed before the dagger, touching it gently with his fingertips, blessing it. Then the dagger was in his hands, being raised slowly toward the curve of a forbidden moon embedded in the velvet taffeta of a night time sky.

The white hood fell away from the smaller one's head. St. Aubin could see the face clearly now. Jesus. The curse was on his lips again. He was staring into a face that he knew well, a lovely face, soft and gentle, who had spoken to him about loneliness and love in a rich Mississippi accent. The pink and lace were gone. The fragrance of a rich girl's perfume, the smell of her passion, must be bearing the stench of blood.

Carol Ann McCarthy, if that had been her name at all, cast her eyes toward him, and the warmth of her smile had been replaced by a sneer that made his blood run cold. Hers had become the face of an animal. Wild. Defiant. The debutante had become the harbinger of death itself.

The woman on the altar was screaming. St. Aubin could see her squirming with pain, her mouth gaped open, her eyes wide with the kind of fright that comes when someone catches and comprehends that first unmistakable glimpse of death. But he could not hear her. Those who heard her had merely come to watch the frenzy of her final moments among the living. The dagger was only a blur flashing in the firelight until it dug deep into the cavity that held her heart.

Chapter 43

IT WAS AFTER dark when General Donald Draper climbed into his rental car and drove south the fifty-eight miles from Carrizzo and pulled into to an all-night diner perched in the crosshairs of a New Mexico crossroad.

The highway headed east simply dropped off the far edge of a small chain of foothills and, for all practical purposes, vanished. Nobody traveled it much anymore. The land was forsaken and would have been empty without the old hangar tucked away back in the rain-cut ravine of the Sierra Blanca Mountains.

The diner served Draper breakfast anytime day or night. The waitress knew what he wanted by the time he sat down, three eggs, over easy, and a rack of burnt bacon. The coffee was black and thick, and it sometimes took a lump of sugar an inordinate amount of time to sink, much less dissolve. He sat alone in a corner booth, glad that the jukebox still worked, tired of living within the silence of his own secrets.

For the past three nights, sleep for Draper had come in short, uneasy doses. His face was drawn, and the veins in his temples were bulging. His shoulders were sagging, and he could feel the exhaustion working its way through him like a cancer. The waiting, the uncertainty had drained him.

The operation had always been a long shot at best. He had sometimes doubted whether the plan, so ingeniously conceived and devised by Mitchell and Holcomb, would ever find the funds it needed to be put in motion. The general always knew that, at the last minute, Holcomb would back out. The man was brilliant, but he lacked nerve

After two years of carefully laying their ground work, slowly piecing together a huge puzzle so complex that it defied being pieced together, Operation Taps was on the verge of becoming a reality. There had been a time in his life when Donald Draper considered himself to be a patriotic and a moral man, one who believed in the law, in the Bill of Rights, in the dignity of his fellow man. Now he only believed in getting the job done. It did not concern him whether or not Operation Taps was legal. Or moral.

Wars were never moral, and wars were being fought every day -- out in the open, behind closed doors, on battlefields, in foreign lands, closer to home than anyone ever dared imagine, in back alleys where the enemy was seldom seen -- and all you ever heard was the sound of heavy breathing.

The game known as war was really quite simple. You stopped your enemy from breathing. Or he tore your last breath away. It wasn't a pretty game. But it was a real one. Only a few, Donald Draper knew, were tough enough, strong enough, wily enough, and crazy enough to play the game and survive. He was one of them.

The general glanced at his watch. Within thirty-four hours, under the darkness of night, a team of men, who would never reveal what they had delivered nor where they had been, would roll a black helicopter into the abandoned World War II hangar that lay alongside the Sierra Blanca Mountains.

Within the week, again under the cover of darkness, while the rest of America slept, it would head southward, flying low like the angel of death, beneath the probing curiosity of any military's radar system, carrying Mitchell's band of Iranian mercenaries toward a landing zone in the high country of Mexico. Taps were being played. He could almost hear it now and would have if the jukebox had not been playing so loudly.

Chapter 44

SUSPENDED BY LEATHER straps upon rotting rafters that groaned mournfully in an open stone doorway as a hot wind blasted his face, Andrews St. Aubin began to remember abstract patches of his past, and he did not like the memories that his fractured mind, in its infinite wisdom, had kept secret from him. He thought he knew all about man's inhumanity to man. He had witnessed men being tortured, seen them break. He bore the physical and mental scars of inquisition himself.

Name.

Rank.

Serial number.

That's all anyone had ever taken from him, and those with dark faces and eyes that possessed the hypnotic stare of a cobra had invented creative processes to make a man hurt in ways he had never imagined possible. But who were they, and where had he met them, and why had they wanted to cause him pain, even kill him, and why did they haunt him still? On bad days, or nights like tonight, he remembered them, a sighting here, a memory there, questions that had no answers, answers that only the dead man knew for sure.

St. Aubin, as a measure of self defense, had long ago mastered the hypnotic art of disassociation. Mentally, he was able to remove himself totally from pain, from any place where pain, no matter how severe it might be, was being administered. It had kept him alive. It had kept him sane.

But if he were sane, why did he see the dead man when the night settled down close around him, and why was he searching for evidence of a Christ who had deserted him so long ago, if Christ was man or diety instead of myth? Hanging in a doorway carved like an ancient cavity in the ruin, Andrews St. Aubin desperately tried to begin disassociating himself from the scene below. But he could not tear his eyes away from the altar.

He stared with a strange, disconcerting fascination as the tall one, the unholy one, tore the woman's heart from her chest and began eating it, even before her final scream had died in the night wind.

One by one, the peons, their heads bowed, walked beside the altar, and each of them was given a small tightly-wrapped paper bag, along with a small morsel of meat and gristle that had been carved from the woman's bloody organ.

The tall one slowly raised his head, and the hood fell away from his face, framed in the glow of a fire that had been whipped into a frenzy by the hot desert wind. His long, pointed tongue, like that of a snake, kept licking the blood off his lips, and his eyes reminded St. Aubin of smoldering coals.

Carol Ann, too, was looking at him as he hung helplessly from the decayed rafters at the top of the Aztec ruin, and she was laughing at him. Her soft face, her gentle face, was smeared with the stains of blood that had dripped from the heart of another.

The tall one jerked his hand upward and pointed a bony finger at him, and St. Aubin felt a burning sensation bore into his chest. He had experienced the same pain before, and he still carried shattered fragments of the .45 slug in the muscle that held his spine in place.

Every head was raised now. Every eye was upon him.

Two of the peons broke away from the circle and began walking rapidly, almost trotting, toward the base of the cliff. They were, he knew, coming for him. It was his turn to lie on the rock slab and watch, in horror and fascination, while the tall one, the unholy one, dug his heart out of his chest. One sacrifice had not been enough.

St. Aubin felt every muscle in his body tighten.

Name.

Rank.

Serial number.

That's all he would give them.

But he had no name. No rank. No serial number. It did not matter. All they wanted was his heart. Fear stayed long enough to heighten St. Aubin's senses, and now it was gone. He felt strangely calm for a man about to die.The sweat on his face had turned to salt, and he watched the two peons climbing one after the other up the rotten rungs of wooden ladders tied together and leading upward against the face of the ancient dwelling.

St. Aubin's worn and weary body hung limply from the rafters, his head slumped forward, watching through the narrow slits of his eyes, waiting patiently, coiled like a desert rattler, ready to strike.

The leader had a long, jagged scar that tore across his forehead and curled down below his right eye. He was thin and wiry, and had the smile of a tormented mortician. He obviously enjoyed watching women die. He liked to inflict pain. St. Aubin could read it in his eyes.

The other's face was adorned with a black mustache. He was short and squatty, overweight and breathing as though the exertion of the climb had already begun to hurt his chest. St. Aubin could see the pulse pounding his temples, almost hear the labored, agonized beating of an overworked heart. The man's knuckles were white, and his hands shook just a little harder every time he reached for the next splintered rung. His feet were unsteady and unsure of themselves, and the height had begun to bother him. His body hugged the second level of ladders closer with each cautious step he took, and his steps were becoming ever slower.

Scarface reached St. Aubin first. He smelled of blood and beans, and he had probably not bathed in weeks. Scarface, crawled out upon the narrow rock threshold of the ruin, high above the altar, and knelt to study St. Aubin's face. The odor was stifling. St. Aubin thought he would vomit. He did not move.

Scarface stood up and slapped him, gentle at first, then hard. St. Aubin's head snapped from side to side. He groaned but did not open his eyes.

Scarface pulled a match from his pocket, scratched it against the tree trunk and shoved the flame into the captive’s face. The skin on St. Aubin’s right cheek blistered, then blackened. He could smell his own flesh burning.

Mentally, he was a thousand miles away.

Satisfied now that the prisoner was unconscious, or maybe in a coma or worse, Scarface reached up and untied the crude knot that held St. Aubin's left hand to the limb. There would be no problem hauling him down to the altar. It was a simple movement. It would almost be the last that Scarface ever made.

The weight of St. Aubin's body swung forward. Scarface, off balance, reached for support, and St. Aubin swung forward, slamming both feet onto man’s rib cage. Bones broke with a sickening crack. Ragged sceptres of decaying wood tumbled end over end down toward the valley floor.

Scarface frantically grabbed St. Aubin's neck and held on, his feet dangling and groping for support. He coughed up blood, and it ran thick with spittle down his chin. Damnation flooded his eyes. A curse spilled from his lips. His face had grown twisted, and those long fingers were clawing at St. Aubin's throat.

St. Aubin kicked him hard in the groin. Scarface grunted, and his grip loosened. St. Aubin kicked again. Scarface dropped like a dead weight. His flailing arms were still reaching out for something, for anything, to hold onto when he hit the ground. The quiver of a broken neck triggered his final movement.

St. Aubin jerked his head toward the peon with the mustache.

The fat man could not take his eyes off Scarface, who lay in a broken bundle at the base of the Aztec ruins. He had wrapped both arms around the wooden ladder, and his body shook with spasms of fear. He had seen death before, but he had never seen death watching him. He was no threat, St. Aubin knew. He had never been a threat.

St. Aubin promptly forgot him. He grabbed the rafters and began pulling himself slowly upward, struggling to reach the skeletal rotting logs that held the roof in place. His muscles ached and burned. His hands had lost all of their feeling. He could not rest now; nor could he quit.

Far below, the tall one, the unholy one, was running toward the wooden rig, a silhouette against the flames. His spindly shadow danced wildly amongst the brush that rose up out of the valley. He stood at the base of the cliff, a mask of arrogance on his face, and he wiped the blood from his dagger. The blade caught the reflection of the fire and began to burn gold, then amber, in the tall one's hand. He leaped onto the ladder.

St. Aubin, fighting inside himself to find the last source of strength that had not been drained away, knelt motionless for a moment, sucking in the hot desert air, trying to catch his breath. It was coming in short, painful bursts. The fire around the altar lay dying, nothing more than scattered embers in the wind, and he remained at the top and on the edge of darkness.

The splintered logs bowed beneath his weight, and he heard the ominous sound of cracking wood. With numb fingers, St. Aubin loosened the knotted leather band that still held his right hand, freeing himself at last, crawling cautiously back upon the roof, his feet feeling for logs strong enough to support him. He never took his eyes off the tall one, the angry one, who kept climbing steadily and swiftly, as silently as a ghost, toward him, the dagger wedged between his teeth. He glanced behind him. The cliff towered upward as though the rocks had been sliced with a knife. Tall. Steep. No way to climb out.

St. Aubin pulled himself to his feet and stepped gingerly across the weathered, wooden ribs that held him. His knees ached, and a sharp pain seared his back. He waited for the numbness to seep out of his muscles, then lay on his stomach and carefully began inching his way toward the ladder.

A strong wind, blowing from the gates of hell, rustled its way out of the mountains and swept impatiently across the desert lands around him. Lightning dropped from a black hole in the sky, and the night smelled like sulphur and rain.

The tall one was closer now, his face stained with dried blood, his eyes aglow with fire. St. Aubin could hear the growl emanating from his throat, and it was the growl of an animal that had its prey cornered and was closing in for the kill. The tall one reached the peon, whose body was still pressed tightly against the ladder, trembling and whimpering, trapped by the ominous heights and afraid to climb any higher, afraid to take the first step backward that would lead him back down to the ground again.

The tall one, the unholy one, had neither sympathy nor mercy for him. There was disgust lodged warily in his eyes. And indifference. A scowl was a ragged scar across his face. Without a word, he took the dagger from his mouth and shoved the blade into the peon's kidney, twisting it once, before grabbing the fat man's ragged shirt and jerking him away from the ladder and out of his way. The peon was dead long before his worthless body slammed into the earth.

For St. Aubin, there was no avenue for escape. There was no time to seek out what his options might or might not be. There was only time to react. He, too, became an animal, fighting desperately for the most common of all instincts, slipping back across the roof, out of breath and feeling the logs bend and give, then crack, beneath the pressure of each step.

The vicious growl that rose up from beneath him, from out of the tall one’s throat, changed tone and tenor, becoming a howl, loud and piercing. No longer indifferent. No longer human. It drove deep into St. Aubin's psyche with the sudden thrust of a burning knife blade. He expected the coyotes to start howling and the moon to cut loose the strings that held it in the sky, but the coyotes limped timidly from the desert, and the moon waited for a cloud to hide its cowardly face.

St. Aubin waited. He was bleeding from the broken splinters that had embedded in the palms of his hands. His fingers were slick, and he was finding it difficult to hang onto the decaying rafters. It would have been so easy, he thought, to simply turn loose and solve the last of his problems. The desert floor was so far away. It would take such a short time to get there, and there was no pain in falling and probably none when he met the ground. Life was as fragile as a will-o-the-wisp, once departed, quickly forgotten. St. Aubin kept waiting. Dying was too easy, and he never did anything the easy way.

The tall one's yellow eyes were tiny coals, staring out of the darkness. St. Aubin could almost feel the heat from the eyes blister his skin. The coals became the color of amber, melting into a flame, then they lost their color altogether. It was as though he was looking squarely into the face of the devil himself.

St. Aubin's chest hurt. His pulse was racing madly. He could no longer tell the difference between the sweat and blood running down his forearms. His knees buckled. Even the hot breath of the desert had turned cold.

St. Aubin stood upon the rooftop, balancing himself on two rafters, breathing heavily, aware that the next breath, most certainly, would be more precious than the last, his torn shirt flapping in the wind. He glanced above him. He was as high and as far as he could go.

Andrews St. Aubin turned to face the tall one, who called himself Espiritu, the spirit, the ghost, who had been baptized in the unholy blood of the damned. He ripped off his leather belt and let it hang loosely at his side like a primitive whip. It was not much of a weapon. It was the only one he had.

Espiritu reached the top of the ladder, holding onto the edge of the roof. The sneer became a smile, as narrow, as chilling as the blade in his hand. "It's over," he whispered.

St. Aubin did not reply.

"Look up above you." Espiritu was playing with him now. "It's as close to Heaven as you will ever be."

St. Aubin could see the curiosity of death mirrored in the tall one's eyes. He saw his own cursed reflection, his flesh cold, his face coated with the cheap powder from an undertaker's bag of magic tricks, lying on a mortician's slab with a jagged and bleeding hole where his heart had been.

He rammed the heel of his boot toward Espiritu's head. The ghostly one spun away as though he had not been there at all, grabbed St. Aubin's leg and threw him backwards. Espiritu was over the edge before St. Aubin hit the splintered and crumbling roof, the dagger in his hand, poised to strike, its blade sharpened by the lightning that leaped angrily from the mountains and struck the ground around them with the pungent smell of brimstone.

Thunder rattled across the sky like kettle drums. Espiritu moved forward with the grace of a jungle cat, his howl rising to a fevered pitch, slowly and meticulously shoving the bloodied tip of the blade beneath St. Aubin's chin.

St. Aubin, lying on his back, wrapped both hands around Espiritu's wrist, and, for a moment at least, was able to twist the dagger aside. He hammered a fist into the ghostly one's neck. Espiritu was chiseled stone and beyond pain. He grunted but did not wince. The blood staining the tall one's skin belonged to St. Aubin.

Lightning curled above his head like a halo, and the thunder was a growl that came from low inside the belly of the earth. St. Aubin felt the pressure of Espiritu's knees pressing hard against his chest. His breath was coming in rapid, painful bursts, and he could hear the ancient chant spilling from the tall one's lips. A prayer, maybe. But to whom? Who in God's name heard the prayers of the devil himself?

St. Aubin's vision was growing dimmer, and his strength was being drawn like blood from his veins.

The dagger was raised, higher now, above Espiritu's head, its blade as thin, as curved as the new moon that hovered precariously in the black sky above them. The chant grew louder. Lightning crackled, and a warm glow hovered above the mountains, much like the first traces of sunlight trying to wrestle darkness from the dawn. The tall one was preparing for the final sacrifice.

St. Aubin thrust his arms upward and wrapped the leather belt around Espiritu's neck, jerking him toward the edge of the cliff dwelling. The chant ended in a sudden, surprised, and frenzied gasp, the dagger slashing wildly at an enemy that Espiritu could no longer see. St. Aubin gritted his teeth, forcing the belt tighter, ever tighter, as the thick, brass buckle dug cruelly into the tall one's windpipe.

The dagger dropped to the roof and tumbled between the decayed log rafters.

Espiritu instinctively grabbed the leather belt with both hands, fighting for air, for the very essence of life itself, his mouth open, sucking air that was never quite able to reach his lungs, screaming in pain, in anger, then fear, screams that were nothing more than a desperate wheeze caught and lodged like a fish bone in his throat.

St. Aubin had heard those sounds before. But then, St. Aubin had heard animals die before. He rolled over on his side, placed his feet firmly against the tall one's ribs and shoved Espiritu over the edge of the roof.

The unholy one who called himself a ghost hung suspended above the desert floor, swinging gently back and forth. He kicked once, then twice, and his body shuddered when the sudden realization struck him that the one to whom he prayed, the one to whom he sacrificed the living, no matter how worthless their lives might be, had forsaken him. His god was a lie, and the lie was etched in agony on his own face.

St. Aubin, lying on his stomach, still held tightly to the leather belt, his muscles throbbing, his arms trembling, his weary shoulders protesting the weight that danced so heavily against them.

He stared over the edge of the ancient roof and down into the tall one's face, growing waxen and as chilled as the first hint of snow on a land burned by the sun and untouched by winter. The anger, the hatred, had flown from Espiritu's eyes. They were streaked with flecks of blood, cloudy and bulging as though they would swell out of their sockets. The amber had melted, the gold turning as gray as the ashes in the fading fire that flickered in the winds encircling the altar.

The tall one clawed at the belt with his fingers until his neck was raw, bleeding. His body was already beginning to jerk, like the dance of a dying puppet, when St. Aubin finally lost his grip and felt the belt slide through his bloody hands. He closed his eyes and heard, but did not see, the sickening snap when Espiritu hit the ground far below.

To St. Aubin, the long climb back down the broken rungs of the ladder seemed to take the rest of the night. He was emotionally drained. Numb. He knew that he had no right to still be alive. Graveyards were full of men who took less chances and led far simpler lives than he.

By the time his feet touched the valley floor, the peons had all fled, and the fire whose flames once leaped so brightly around a stone altar had become a pile of ash and dying embers.

The wind against St. Aubin's face was hot again. The desert was dark, but not nearly as ominous nor as foreboding as it had been. St. Aubin leaned against the base of the cliff for support, and the gentle fragrance of a rich girl's perfume lay heavy, almost suffocating, in the sultry night air.

He was not alone after all.

He looked around and saw her, the one who called herself Carol Ann McCarthy, and she was kneeling beside the tall one's broken body. A bent and crippled peon stood above her, waiting quietly and patiently for Espiritu to tell him what he should do next.

When a man's prophet dies, a little of the man dies with him.

There were no tears in Carol Ann's eyes, only disbelief, and St. Aubin could feel the searing heat of her stare burning deep into his soul. He waited for her to speak, to curse him if nothing else. A curious silence hung between them.

"It's over now," St. Aubin told her as the tall one had told him. His voice was flat and empty.

"He will come back," the peon whispered.

"Not this one."

"He cannot die." The old man's stare became intense, defiant. "He is protected. He has the blood to shield him."

"Then he’ll have to dig his way out of a grave first."

"He is not dead," the peon protested, slowly backing away. "He will come back."

St. Aubin shrugged and watched as Carol Ann suddenly arose and ran barefoot across the rocks, her long brown hair bouncing softly against her shoulders. She knew that the one who called himself a ghost would not be coming back, and she was running toward a dry arroyo that led back into the interior of the mountains. Lightning played on the ground around her. The White Hills shuddered with the sound of thunder exploding down deep within their rocky crevices.

St. Aubin took a deep breath. He should run after the girl, he told himself. He should give her the distinct honor of being buried right alongside the tall one, the unholy one, whoever the hell he was, whoever the hell she was. But, at the moment, St. Aubin decided, he was just too damn tired to give a damn anymore. About her. About the tall one. About the girl lying on the stone slab, her eyes open as though she still did not believe what had happened to her.

He sat down on a rock ledge, leaned his head against the cliff, and thought he caught a glimpse of the dead man walking out of a light rain that came toward him from the hills. St. Aubin laughed. He had cheated the dead man one more time, perhaps the last time. The dead man took the peon's arm, and they walked together into the darkness, neither touched by the rain.

Chapter 45

ON A FAR better day, Andrews St. Aubin would have written: After the hot winds blow out of the White Hills, and the restless sands end their shifting, the rains come to cleanse the desert. A traveler can leave many tracks, but the wind, then the rains erase them all, and the landscape becomes pristine again, awaiting for the next eyes to envision the prairies as though they are seeing desert for the first time, believing that no one has ever found his way to the desert before.

But the day was only slightly better than the night had been. Besides, his pencil was broken, and his last piece of scrap paper had tumbled in the erratic winds as they tumbled along behind the feet of the peon, afraid to follow after the dead man, even more fearful of leaving the desert alone.

The aging cattle truck pulled to a stop beside the C & H Hay Barn in north Phoenix, and St. Aubin moved past a pair of black angus, then crawled out of the back, his clothes torn and layered with blood and dirt. He waved to the driver and limped painfully down a back alleyway that led toward town, dragging a dusty burlap bag behind him, blending in quite easily with a crowd of out-of-work peons who were aimlessly roaming the streets at midday.

During the night that had just passed, especially during those awkward hours that trailed after him from darkness until the first hint of sunrise, the scattered thoughts disturbing St. Aubin's mind were torn from a map that neither his memory nor his brain could read. They were fragmentary and patched together, full of accusations and condemnation. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make the pieces fit back together again. St. Aubin had heard voices, and the voices spoke to him and about him and against him, but none of them ever mentioned his name.

The smell of gunfire lingered, and so did the stench of burning flesh, belonging to others and not his own. The land he had walked was dark, but he found no dead man waiting for him beneath a splinter of moonlight. St. Aubin wanted to think that killing was merely an act of survival, the animal instincts of a trapped and desperate man. But that was a lie, and the lie troubled him. The killing back in the quiet valley and upon the roof of an ancient and abandoned ruin had been so easy for him, and he felt no remorse, no guilt, and knew that he could kill again.

There was no reason why a second-rate travel writer who wrote about plush resorts and exotic beaches should be able to kill as easily as a butcher cutting slabs of meat hung on a hook.

St. Aubin had driven Espiritu's Jeep out of the desert shortly after dawn spilled across the top of the mountains, stopping in the village of Cave Creek long enough to trade the vehicle for an old .45 revolver, which he had stuffed down inside his right boot, a model 550 assault rifle, which he had wrapped in his jacket and tucked under his arm, and a hundred and fifty-six dollars. Both weapons, he knew, were probably stolen, but that didn't bother him. He did not exactly have a title to the Jeep either.

St. Aubin had not asked the farmer how a man trying to raise corn and beans on poor, sun-baked ground that begged for water happened to have a revolver and assault rifle in his possession, and the farmer did not ask him where or how or from whom he had acquired the Jeep. Such questions required answers that neither wanted to know.

At the moment, the Jeep had become a liability for St. Aubin. Certain parts of Phoenix, he knew, had many eyes, and most of them never slept, and some of them, no doubt, knew the tall one, the unholy one, who moved like a ghost when he appeared from the dark bowels of nowhere. The Jeep could get St. Aubin killed.

The guns just might, if he were fortunate enough, keep him alive, and thus far luck had not deserted him or stranded him on the forsaken high desert. That was St. Aubin's reasoning, as unreasonable as it might be. Somewhere out there, down some deserted street or empty back alley, he knew, was an unknown, unseen enemy. At least one man wanted him dead. Maybe there were others who had been paid to make sure that his carcass never left Arizona. He had only one suspect: Lazaro Fuentes.

Lazaro Fuentes, however, was nothing more than a name spoken by Raul Saenz on the night a bullet splintered his head, and Saenz had become a broken and desperate man whose nightmares were warped by the lingering effects of drugged whiskey.

St. Aubin had journeyed to Phoenix to steal a five-century-old secret. Lost. Hidden. Forgotten. Condemning those who had found it and those who never believe it existed. That obviously meant he must track down a killer as well, and St. Aubin wondered if Richard Brockleman had planned it that way. But now, someone, maybe more than one, was tracking him, which was why the assault rifle suddenly became so appealing.

It was light and easy to carry, weighing no more than nine pounds, even when the magazine was loaded. It was mobile, less than two feet long with the stock folded. It could fire off 675 rounds a minute, and the rifle had an inordinate amount of accuracy within a hundred yards. St. Aubin wondered why he knew so much about a weapon he didn't remember ever firing before.

The .45 revolver was too old, too big, too cumbersome to ever be mistaken for a Saturday night special, but it gave him firepower and the ability to strike with the sudden, deadly ferocity of a desert rattlesnake. The assault rifle was handy to have only if the odds were overwhelming or the confrontation ugly, and one was as disagreeable as the other.

St. Aubin's muscles ached. The old bullet wound behind his lung throbbed every time he took a breath, either deep or shallow. Alkali dust lay plastered thick on his face, leaving streaks that, at a distance, resembled ragged scars running from his hairline to his chin. His hair was windblown, his lips parched, his eyes pale and relentless. He was a man without a friend, a vagabond whose conscience and soul had been picked clean by the sins of his past.

The cattle truck had picked him up several miles outside of the city. He had no idea how many. His clothes were rank with the smell of cow dung. He wore a three-day growth of whiskers, and his grizzled face was sunburned and gaunt. Outwardly, he could have easily passed for a Mestizo laborer, broke and unemployed, willing to work for a plateful of day-old food and a thistle roof over his head at night.

St. Aubin found a pay telephone in the back of a small cafe, ran his credit card through the system, and placed a call to Richard Brockleman's office in Dallas. He still had no answers. Only a lot of questions. A jukebox was blaring behind him, and the music was old and scratchy, the trumpets loud and disconcerting. It reminded him of a bullfight, although he had never seen one. A dishwasher out back was banging pots and pans together, trying, without much luck, to free them of the dried beans and meat of mysterious origin that lay stuck inside.

A stray cat whined. Static kept breaking up the voices at the other end of the line. They sounded so far away, so familiar somehow, yet St. Aubin did not recognize any of them. "Richard Brockleman, please," he said wearily when he apparently reached a low-level secretary who was posted at the bottom end of the Times corporate bureaucracy. Her voice was as scratchy and abrasive as the music.

"I'm sorry, sir, but Mister Brockleman is not available," she said.

"Can I reach him at home?"

"No, sir. As I said, Mister Brockleman is not available."

"When will he be coming in?"

"I don't know, sir."

"When do you expect him back?"

"That has not been determined."

St. Aubin's patience was growing thin. He was not a man who felt at ease when entangled with the strands of bureaucratic double talk. "Then what can you tell me?" He immediately wished he had not been so rude to the woman, who was only doing her job the way it had been explained to her.

"I regret to inform you, sir, that Mister Brockleman has been admitted to the hospital."

"When?"

"Last night."

Silence.

"What's wrong with him?"

"All we have been told is that Mister Brockleman is suffering from extreme mental and physical exhaustion." Her voice was as impassionate and as precise as a recording. "His brother died only a few days ago; then Mister Brockleman received word late last night that an employee of his, one of our reporters, had died as well."

St. Aubin's eyes narrowed. It all suddenly began to make sense, which meant it didn't make any sense at all.

"What's his name, please?" St. Aubin wanted to know.

"Who?"

"The reporter."

"A Mister Andrews St. Aubin, the newspaper's travel writer, I believe. I'm afraid I don't know any more of the details."

Jesus!

"What was that, sir? We have a very bad connection, and I am having difficulty understanding you."

"Nothing." St. Aubin felt a chill run through his body

"Would you like to leave a message for Mister Brockleman?" the voice asked.

"No."

"Who shall I say called."

"It doesn't matter," St. Aubin said as he hung up.

He sat for a few minutes, the telephone still dangling from his hand, trying to collect his thoughts while the grating noise that was passing for music on the jukebox slowly began to rub his nerve endings raw.

Somebody in Phoenix apparently knew who he was, what he wanted, and who he was looking for. Somebody had secrets they wanted buried. His grave was as good a place as any. What worried them? The death of Danny B., or the artifact of Christ, or the one who was worshipped as the morning star by whatever name he used when he walked the beaches of Galilee and Cancun, who may or may not have been flesh and blood, and who may or may not have returned to Mexico.

The bullet in the Casa de la Luna had been intended for him after all. Poor Raul Saenz had merely gotten in the way. The lady from Mississippi had obviously set him up. The tall one, the unholy one, had been chosen to execute him.

But why butcher him on a stone altar in the middle of a god-forsaken desert when a quick bullet behind the ear would have been just as effective and a lot more reliable. Was his death, for some ungodly reason, supposed to be symbolic? Or did somebody merely have a twisted and sadistic sense of humor?

St. Aubin's second call was to the Sheraton.

"Room four fifty two," he said when he finally got through to an operator.

"I'm sorry, sir," the receptionist answered politely, "but there is no one presently registered in that room."

St. Aubin continued, "I was under the impression that an old friend of mine, a fellow by the name of Andrews St. Aubin, was staying at your hotel and registered in that room. That's what his secretary told me anyway."

St. Aubin detected what sounded like a soft gasp of genuine shock. "When did you last speak with her?"

“It's been a few days now."

"Then you have not heard?" Her voice sounded like it would prefer to be somewhere else instead of talking to him.

"Heard what?"

"Mister Andrews St. Aubin, I am afraid, passed away two days ago. A heart attack is what I am told. I was not on duty at the time."

St. Aubin frowned and instinctively reached down into his boot and touched the butt of the .45 revolver, cold and heavy. It was rusted but gave him a sudden sense of security. He wondered when the last time anyone had fired it, and if it could shoot straight or shoot at all.

"Has his body been shipped back home yet?" St. Aubin asked, his voice suddenly grown thick and hoarse.

"I do not know what the arrangements are, sir."

"Who picked up the body."

"The funeral home of Mister Fuentes, I believe."

"Lazaro Fuentes?"

"Yes, sir. In fact, I am told that Mister Fuentes himself came to the hotel to personally make the necessary arrangements." Her voice softened. "Mister St. Aubin must have been quite an important man."

The grin on St. Aubin's face turned dark and ugly. He left the telephone hanging loose alongside the wall, the jukebox blaring into the receiver.

Chapter 46

IF TONIGHT HAD been the night of the strike, it would be perfect. Paul Mitchell drove his rent car down the gravel tracks of an old roadway that wound its way back toward the abandoned hangar nestled in the mountains north of Ruidoso. A heavy cloud cover hid the moon, and the land around him was black. No one would even be able to glimpse a shadow in flight. A light rain was falling, and the winds were uncommonly cold for the season.

Mitchell parked and hurried into the hangar where eleven men had been awaiting him for the past two hours. They were seated beneath the faint, uneven glow of a light bulb painted red, their faces grim and solemn. There were no traces of impatience to be found among them. They had been trained to wait.

Within a week, maybe less, those grim and solemn faces would be blackened with streaks of charcoal, hidden by black woolen hoods. The hard, unforgiving months in the New Mexico desert would be behind them, and they would be on their way south to do what they had been trained to do. No questions asked. No complaints. No doubts or second thoughts. They were good soldiers, carefully chosen for their Iranian lineage. Some would not return.

None had received any assurances from Mitchell that he would be able to extract them from the chaos, confusion, and carnage they would be creating throughout Mexico. Still, there were no questions. That's what made them good soldiers.

Paul Mitchell removed his windbreaker, wet with rain, and walked straight to the blackboard. It was a procedure he had done time and again, but he firmly believed that the more his troops knew about the inner workings of a mission, the greater chance they had for success.

He pinned an oversized map onto the blackboard and began, as he had done so many times before, pointing to selected targets that his men would hit, striking quickly and without warning, then vanishing into the night and gathering at a rendezvous point in the valley of kings. The strike itself should take no more than eight hours unless something went terribly wrong, and, if that happened, everyone was on his own. They were walking the razor's edge of a tightrope, working without a net.

As Mitchell had told Draper, if their mission turned into a crisis situation, he and the general were as vulnerable as the soldiers. Brockleman would lose all of his money. That was understood. Mitchell had decidedly more to lose: his career and his life, in no particular order. One was as important to him as the other.

According to his plan, Mitchell would have the soldiers out of Mexico within two days even if there were minor complications, which was always possible during an invasion, no matter how small, how quick, or how deadly. There were no absolutes in the unpredictable state of warfare, and Paul Mitchell was going to war with the smallest army he had ever commanded.

In Mexico City, a conservative radio station would be blown off the air. In Phoenix, a bomb – its electronic trigger mechanism jammed – would be tossed into the emergency room of a hospital. The bomb was harmless. But the city would certainly sleep a nervous sleep for the rest of the night. Enough plastic explosives to erase the entire population of some third world countries would be smuggled in by an advance team and piled beneath the railroad tracks that led from the silver mines of Taxco. In Guadalajara, Mitchell had targeted a downtown convention hotel. Tourism had always been the lifeline of Mexico. By morning, on the day after, tourists would not dare set foot in the country.

The four strikes had been strategically planned and synchronized. The damage would be frightening, the loss of life minimal. By midnight, on the day of the strike, the country, caught completely off guard, would be staggering and reeling in the face of such sudden and unexpected attacks. An Iranian terrorist group would immediately claim credit for the destruction.

The message had already been written and recorded on tape, and a Western Union messenger was scheduled to deliver it to the most prestigious television station in Mexico City within twenty-four hours of the first explosion if all went well, and Paul Mitchell had no doubts that it would.

While the country suffered with paranoia, fear, and blind confusion, bracing itself for another wave of threatened terrorist attacks, the eleven Iranian soldiers who sat in the hangar before him would move out through targeted cities, armed with 9mm Zoaf pistols, Khaybar KH 2002 assault rifles, plastic explosives, and a list of names and the addresses where the men who answered to those names could be found. The names, some aliases and some real, belonged to known and suspected drug lords who kept the pipeline open and running throughout Mexico, the directors of three Colombian drug cartels who had free rein to bring cocaine into the country's airports as easily as if they had been businessmen importing bottled water and aspirin.

Mitchell's months of electronic surveillance, his intelligence sources deep within Mexico, his own operatives, as well as political informants who had grown wealthy by stealing information and peddling it to the highest bidder, had been tracking down those names and addresses for months now.

The list was accurate. It was complete. Mitchell's assassins knew who the targets were. Where they lived. The offices where they worked. The casinos where they gambled. The beaches where they vacationed. The back rooms where their business deals were consummated in secrecy. The bars where they drank. Whose wives they slept with. How often. And when. There would be no escape for any of them.

By morning, on the day after, they would be dead, their money worthless, if anyone could find where they had hidden it, if anyone could find where Paul Mitchell had taken it. Their supply of cocaine would be stuck somewhere between Colombia and Mexico with no one to buy it, no one to deliver it north, no one in charge, absolutely no one at all. Paul Mitchell had never felt better.

For the slumbering drug lords of Mexico, the hours were ticking away toward Armageddon, and he had been the one chosen by fate or by design to light the fuse. His team, under the critical and demanding eye of Donald Draper, had practiced it all a thousand times in the past few months, maybe more. No one had to think anymore.

Each man reacted solely on instinct, with precision, with a fanatical dedication that Mitchell had never seen before in any band of fighting men. He had selected them all personally. He believed in them. They believed in the subversive scenario that Mitchell had created for them, going over it again, perhaps, for the final time.

It was the plan of genius, Mitchell told himself. It could not fail. No. He could not fail. His reputation, his one chance for immortality within the secret sanctity of the intelligence community, was riding on the ultimate results of Operation Taps.

Paul Mitchell glanced quickly at the face of each of the eleven. One would die for sure. It was a decision he had personally made out of necessity, not madness. The success of the mission depended on it, and no one, not even he, could stand in the way of the mission. But only he knew who was pre-ordained to be dumped into a Mexico City alley with no one to witness nor grieve his death. The police would find him lying behind the radio station, explosives in his pack. It was imperative for them to find at least one wild-eyed, religious fanatic who could be blamed for the bombings and, ultimately, for the assassinations.

The world would look upon the dead man as a messenger from some Iranian terrorist organization. There would be no doubt about it, not in their minds, not in anyone's minds. Mexico was under siege, and Mexico was in trouble.

Terrorism was a deadly game for which there was no defense, only fear. One had to die on the streets of Mexico City so the other ten could survive, so he himself could survive. It wasn't fair, perhaps. But wars never were.

He smiled.

Only one of the eleven was smiling back.

Paul Mitchell sighed.

Within days, there would be a bullet where the smile had been, even if it was his duty to pull the trigger, and he knew that it was.

Chapter 47

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN slept in a two-bit bedroom in a walk-up hotel for eighteen consecutive hours. The mattress was dirty, the wallpaper peeling, the carpet scarred by old cigarette burns. St. Aubin had not even noticed. He was too weary to pay much attention to anything, not even the flies swarming over a rotten apple core that had been lying for days on the window sill. The sign out front said “Berties.” It changed many times throughout the year.

St. Aubin had simply walked the back streets until he found the kind of place whose night clerk did not ask questions about blood stains on his clothes, then trudged to the third floor, fell across the bed, and let his aching body succumb to the exhaustion that drained it.

The sun was already sinking low behind the distant steel and glass of Phoenix when St. Aubin finally awoke. He lay for the longest of times, staring at the ceiling, at the faint water marks that criss-crossed the faded wallpaper like two-lane highways and creekbeds on a road map. His stomach growled, but there was, he decided, no time for food. St. Aubin had work to do, and and he was running out of time. He could eat later, if, of course, he was still alive.

St. Aubin reached down to make sure the revolver was still stashed firmly in his boot, then pulled himself out of the sagging bed and ran a hand through a patch of uncombed hair that spilled across his forehead.

The assault rifle lay on the floor where he had dropped it. St. Aubin kicked it beneath the bed. Tonight, he would not need it. He might never need it again. He might never see the room again, not if an unheard voice on the far side of the city was reciting a rosary with his name attached.

Darkness had already crept into the garbage-lined streets by the time St. Aubin departed Bertie’s Hotel, the old burlap bag thrown over his shoulder. An aging beggar man, sitting on the curb beneath the yellow glare of a neon sign, glanced up, came to the obvious conclusion that St. Aubin was in worse shape than he, spit through clenched teeth onto the sidewalk, and looked away. St. Aubin could not remember when he had last shaved. He had been able to wash away the blood caked in his whiskers, but not the stench of his confrontation with the tall and unholy one high above the valley floor. In his restless dreams, he could still hear the screams of the woman, see the surprised look on her face when her heart was snatched from her chest.

He kept wondering why the lovely Carol Ann McCarthy had wrapped her soft arms and legs around him and then had wanted to witness his passing from one life to another while the wayward desert winds claimed what was left of his soul.

St. Aubin thought about taking a cab. But he did not want to waste any of his money, and, besides, the walk just might help him clear his head. Dusk was hot and muggy, the air thick and difficult to breathe. Even the heavy breeze that slapped his face when he stepped from the back door and out into an empty street felt as though it had come from the back end of a furnace.

The neon above him flickered but refused to stay lit. The hotel smelled like burnt coffee and stale cigarettes. A car slowed down so someone could get a better glimpse of the girl on the corner, then it sped up again. The girl was short and dumpy with thick thighs and varicose veins, but some john would want her before daylight.

St. Aubin looked around for the dead man and didn't see him. Still, he knew the dead man was there. He and the dead man were connected, the living with the dead, separated only by a careless moment of time, and neither knew how much time either one of them had left on earth.

St. Aubin caught a glimpse of the black and silver hearse parked in the driveway even before he noticed the funeral home of Lazaro Fuentes. It sat right where the Yellow Pages said it would. His muscles tightened, and a faint smile touched his face. St. Aubin turned down a darkened alley, and his pace began to quicken. A brindle cat scurried among the rotting piles of trash. A gray one squalled. The alley, smelling of rotting oranges, carried him to the mortuary's back door.

St. Aubin tried the knob. It turned in his hand. He glanced up and down the street, found it deserted, then opened the door and stepped inside. Funeral homes, he guessed, were never locked. No one ever wanted to go in, and those who were in, weren't able to walk out, not with embalming fluid coursing through their veins.

The hallway had the pungent aroma of flowers and incense. Taped organ music played slow and mournful, scratchy and loud. It reminded St. Aubin of the gray cat who had bitched at him back in the alley. He heard voices at the far end of the corridor and eased toward them. Through a narrow crevice in the doorway, he saw two men standing beside a bronze casket, their faces framed by a spray of white artificial flowers.

One was short, much too fat for his height, immaculately dressed in a black pin-stripe suit and starched shirt. His fixed smile was full of compassion, although there was no hint of sympathy in his eyes. The other was taller, his hair streaked with gray, his shoulders bent beneath the gray linen of a summer suit. His bony fingers were holding a Bible tightly to his chest.

St. Aubin listened closely to the whispered words, sometimes spoken too softly to hear. It seemed that the older gentleman was a preacher who had come to make those final and necessary arrangements before the body of the deceased was transported to the church. The fat one was most accommodating, eager to make a good impression, eager to please. He kept nodding his head. He could not keep from smiling.

Nor could the fat one keep his soft, pallid hands off the corpse of the young girl who lay in the bronze coffin, making sure that every strand of her long, black hair was in its final resting place, once again smoothing out the flesh-colored cream that carefully hid the purple bruise just below her left eye.

Mister Fuentes was the name the preacher man used when talking to him. The elusive Lazaro Fuentes. Andrews St. Aubin relaxed. He stuck the burlap bag under his arm and retreated into a darkened room, waiting until he heard the preacher's footsteps fade away down the far end of the hall. He gingerly removed the .45 revolver from his boot, shoved it into his belt, and slipped quietly into the room behind Fuentes, who was humming softly to himself as he straightened the girl's green velvet robe.

The cheap candles burned brightly behind St. Aubin, leaving his face obscured by shadows dancing drunkenly around the room. The fat one leaned down and kissed the young girl. It was a pity to lose one so young and beautiful. He kissed her again.

"Mister Fuentes, I presume," St. Aubin said softly.

The mortician whirled around, startled, squinting as he tried to make out the faint outline of the disheveled man's face. "Who are you?" Lazaro Fuentes asked, his voice suddenly cold and dispassionate.

"I have come to view a body you have."

Fuentes nodded toward the casket. "The girl?"

"No. I'm afraid I don't know the girl."

"Then whose body, senor?"

"A man by the name of Andrews St. Aubin."

Fuentes raised his hands prayerfully beneath his chin. His eyes grew sullen. St. Aubin could not tell whether the man's head was shaking out of fright or anger. There had always been such a narrow gap between the two emotions.

He waited for the mortician to answer him.

When Fuentes remained silent, St. Aubin told him, "I was informed that Andrews St. Aubin had died of a heart attack, that your funeral home had come to the Sheraton and removed the unfortunate remains, that you yourself, sir, had taken personal responsibility of the body." Fuentes braced himself against the bronze casket.

"I have no one here by that name," he said, his voice cracking.

"You do now."

"I believe there has been a mistake."

"I suppose so." St. Aubin's grin was ruthless. "It seems as though I am very much alive, although I do admit that I may not look like it."

As St. Aubin moved into the light, he was unsure of what was frightening Lazaro Fuentes the most: the face of a dead man, the morbid face of the living who should no longer be among the living, or the deadly end of the big and ugly revolver in his hand.

Fuentes stared past him, his eyes frantically darting toward the dimly-lit hallway.

"You're wasting your time," St. Aubin told him.

Fuentes did not answer.

"He won't be coming."

"Who?" It was barely a whisper.

"The tall one."

"Espiritu?"

St. Aubin shrugged apologetically. "I don't know his name."

The mortician's frown curled into the sneer of a dog gone mad. "He will come. Espiritu always comes."

"That's what the old man said."

The sneer softened.

"I left them all, the tall one, the old man, and a girl out on the desert," St. Aubin said matter-of-factly.

The eyes of Lazaro Fuentes grew wider, and his pupils began to dilate. "What happened to the girl?"

St. Aubin shrugged again. "Maybe the coyotes got her," he said.

"And Espiritu?"

"The buzzards were coming after him."

"He is not dead."

"You could have damn sure fooled me."

"Espiritu is not a man." Fuentes spit his words out.

"Not anymore."

"Espiritu is a ghost, a visitor from the spirit world." Fuentes suddenly found it very difficult to swallow. "You cannot kill a ghost."

St. Aubin saw sweat forming small beads on the mortician's forehead. "I don't believe in spirits," he said.

Fuentes suddenly broke out in laughter, a wild, maniacal cackling that echoed down the hallway, even louder than the recorded organ music. "Espiritu cannot die." Fuentes threw open his arms for emphasis. "His power is greater than death. He drinks the blood of the living. He feasts on their hearts. And the blood protects him. I've seen him out in the desert. I've watched his eyes catch fire. I've heard the voices of his gods, and they demand that others must die so the spirit man can live. His power is great, and when he drinks your blood, St. Aubin, there will be no power on earth greater than the power that beats within his heart."

St. Aubin's expression was one of amusement. "So I was to be his next victim on the stone. That's why he didn't kill me when he had the chance."

"You are to be his most sacred sacrifice."

"Why me, Fuentes?"

"You are an adversary,” The confidence had returned to Fuentes’ voice. “The blood of an adversary gives him strength beyond belief."

"I guess it was a shame to disappoint him then."

"It is not over." Lazaro Fuentes had begun rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, rubbing the palms of his hands together with anxiety. "He is coming for you. Even now, even as we speak, he is coming, and every minute that you breathe takes you nearer the stone again."

"I don't think so, Fuentes."

"Oh, yes. I can hear his footsteps in the hallway now. He is coming, St. Aubin. He is definitely coming."

St. Aubin picked the burlap bag up off the floor, turned it upside down, and the grisly head of the tall one, the unholy one, the one who called himself a ghost, tumbled onto the floor. Smeared with blood, dried blood. His eyes were peeled back, pale and translucent. His jaws looked as though they had been pried apart. His tongue hung crookedly out of the corner of his mouth.

Lazaro Fuentes recoiled in shock, in horror. Lazaro Fuentes was accustomed to seeing the faces of the dead, but never the unholy face of a dead man who was not supposed to die.

"I personally don't believe that the rest of him can find the way here," St. Aubin said coldly. He kicked the head toward Fuentes, whose knees had grown weak, whose legs were quickly losing their ability to stand. St. Aubin grabbed Fuentes by the shoulders to keep him from falling and slapped him hard. Once. Then again.

St. Aubin's eyes jerked toward the bronze casket. "Remove the girl," he said.

"I cannot do that."

"Now." St. Aubin's voice struck him with the impact of gunfire.

With trembling hands, Lazaro Fuentes slowly gently took the rigid corpse in his arms. His knees sagged beneath her weight.

"Where do you want me to put her?" he asked.

St. Aubin glanced around the room, then his eyes rested again on the mortician's waxen face. He suddenly felt very tired. "Personally," he said, "I don't really give a damn what you do with her."

Fuentes staggered across the room and dropped her on a small, vinyl-covered sofa. "It's a terrible thing that you do," he said. He was out of breath.

"What's that?"

"Disturb the dead this way."

"The dead don't bother me," St. Aubin replied. "It's the living I'm concerned about. The living have secrets, Fuentes, and I get really upset when I don't know what their little secrets are."

Fuentes frowned, puzzled.

"Now it's your turn," St. Aubin snapped. "Get in." Fuentes's eyes swung from the barrel of the revolver to the casket and back again.

"I don't understand."

"The coffin," St. Aubin barked. "It's empty now. It has plenty of room for you. Get in. If I do it for you, there's no chance of your getting out."

"I cannot do that," Fuentes's breath was coming in short, frantic bursts.

St. Aubin moved toward him. "Sure you can," he said. "You've been putting poor, unfortunate souls into caskets for a long time now, Fuentes. How long? All of your life? One more surely won't make any difference. All you have to do is put one foot over the edge, then the other. Lie down and cross your arms. It shouldn't be that difficult for you to remember."

"I cannot do it."

St. Aubin jammed the barrel of the .45 revolver against the fat man's temple. "It makes a lot of noise when it goes off," he said. "It'll probably burst your ear drums before it kills you."

Lazaro Fuentes tried to speak, but no sound came from his throat. His body was jerking as he crawled into the bronze casket. St. Aubin leaned over Fuentes and said softly, "Tell me about Danny B."

"He was a cop." The voice was a whine, barely audible.

"Tell me more."

"He died."

"How?"

"I don't know."

St. Aubin leaned closer. "Some say that you killed him, that the honorable Mister Lazaro Fuentes himself was the butcher who took a knife and did things to Danny B. that should not be done to either the dead or the living."

"They lied to you."

St. Aubin slammed the upper lid shut just in time to muffle the scream. He twisted the lock into place. "Goodbye, Mister Fuentes," he said.

"Wait. For God's sake, don't go and leave me here!" Fuentes was yelling now, but his high-pitched voice could barely be heard. "I cannot breathe in here."

"I asked you a question," St. Aubin said. "I expect the truth. I'm not here to play games, Fuentes. I'm here to find out why Danny B. was killed."

"I did not kill him." The voice was suffocated by the thick satin lining inside the casket. "You must believe me."

"But you know who did."

Silence.

Then, "Yes."

"I'm waiting."

"It was Espiritu who murdered him."

"Did you order the execution, Fuentes?"

Again silence. Then a muffled scream.

St. Aubin could hear Fuentes hammering on the lid with his fists, ripping away the satin that encased him.

"Did you order his execution, Fuentes?"

"He was a cop. That's all."

"There are a lot of cops down here."

"He had a vendetta against my business." A pause, then, "Sweet Jesus, please let me out of here. I am suffocating."

"What is your business, Fuentes? Drugs? Did Danny B. find out how you were smuggling cocaine across the border? Did he threaten to destroy your pipeline and ruin the financial empire you had built for yourself?"

Fuentes was choking. Then he gagged on his own fear. He was wheezing when he answered, "God, please, get me out of here."

St. Aubin opened the lid to the casket, and Fuentes was gasping for fresh air. He had suddenly witnessed his own mortality, perhaps realizing for the first time just how fragile it was. "Please don't lock me in here again." He said. "I can't stand to be closed up this way." Fuentes was sobbing now.

"Are you a religious man?" St. Aubin asked.

"I have bought my own pew in the church."

"Do you believe in the church?"

"I pray to the Virgin Mary every night."

"How about her Son?"

"Him, too, when I can.” Fuentes said coughing.

St. Aubin paused, searching for the right words and realizing there weren't any. Instead, he asked, "Did he come back?" he asked.

"Who?"

"Christ, the holy Son of God."

"Where?"

"Mexico."

"He did not come to me."

"Ever heard of a deity named Quetzalcoatl?"

"A myth that the Aztecs told and the Indians believed. Nothing more."

"Maybe he and Christ were the same?"

"Your questions have me confused." Fuentes had regained control of himself, although the veins were still bulging and pulsating nervously in his temples. The sweat had matted his thinning hair. "I don't know what you are asking," he said.

"Danny B. sent a letter to his brother," St. Aubin said slowly, making sure that Lazaro Fuentes was able to comprehend every word. "In the letter, he said he had been given unmistakable proof that Christ himself had returned to earth, as he had promised, and he had walked the deserts of Mexico. He did not have that proof on him when we found him. My question is simply this. You took his life, or no doubt had a hand in it. What did you do with the artifact or artifacts of Christ?"

The silence was chilling, and Lazaro Fuentes knew he was looking into the calm but tortured face of a mad man. Full of venom. And blasphemy. The Good Lord would surely strike him dead, but the mad man was holding the revolver, and not even the Good Lord would interrupt a man whose finger had grown heavy on the trigger.

"I'm at a loss," Fuentes finally managed to say.

"No, sir. Danny B. lost his life, Richard Brockleman lost a brother, and I'm losing my patience. You, Mister Fuentes, have lost nothing. But you took what Danny B. had, and I'm here to take it back."

St. Aubin watched while the flame of a candle on the altar withered away, and the wax around it began to grow cold again. The only sound in the troubled room was the labored breathing of Lazaro Fuentes, who feared that each breath just might be his last.

"Danny B. was only carrying a revolver when Espiritu took him away," Fuentes said, his eyes begging St. Aubin to believe him. “A few dollars, perhaps, but nothing else. His pockets were empty. He did not even have his wallet with him."

"A man should not lie when his maker is listening to his confession."

"Why would I take something that obviously belongs to the church?"

St. Aubin rested the barrel of the .45 against the quivering chin of Lazaro Fuentes. "You are a businessman, sir. You sell what others want to buy. To some, the artifact of Christ, or perhaps it was a document written by the Messiah himself, would be worth more than the cocaine you run through your human pipeline. If you found it when you took Danny B., it's for sale. I want to buy it. We won't even negotiate price. If you've already sold it, I want to know who bought it."

"If Danny B. had such an artifact, he did not have it on him when he died."

"And he didn't say anything to you about it?"

"We did not ask him about it."

"He could have used it as a bargaining chip to save his life."

"There was nothing that could have saved his life."

"You wanted him dead."

"Espiritu wanted his blood to drink."

There was a sadness buried deep within the eyes of Lazaro Fuentes. It had nothing to do with self pity, but all about the money he could have earned from the artifact of Christ, the money he lost and would never have a chance to earn again.

The sadness was also mirrored in St. Aubin's eyes. Richard Brockleman had sent him to find the artifact of Christ and, if possible, learn the identity of the man or men who killed Danny B. He had found the man who orchestrated the death of Danny B., and he had left the body of the murderer lying back in the desert, his head screaming in silence beneath the coffin that held Lazaro Fuentes.

But any undeniable evidence proving that the Son of God – be he Christ or the god of the winds – had come again to Mexico was still a mystery, as it had been a mystery for the ages. That left one final riddle that only Fuentes could answer at a time when his worthless life was worth more than money.

"One last question, Fuentes."

"I am at your mercy."

And so he was.

"Why in God's name did you send Danny B.'s body back to his brother in a railroad car?"

Fuentes closed his eyes, and St. Aubin placed a quarter over each of them. It was the way of the dead.

"Espiritu buried Danny B. out on the desert," Fuentes sputtered as his eyes opened, and the coins slid off his face and onto the satin pillow. "We left him there. Somebody else dug him up."

St. Aubin picked up the quarters and smoothed the satin pillow that had wrinkled beneath the weight of Fuentes's head. It was damp with sweat.

"Then who stuck Danny B.'s body in a railroad car full of illegal aliens and shipped it back to Dallas?"

The room was hot, suffocating. St. Aubin could smell Fuentes sweating, and it had the harsh aroma of garlic and sour cheese.

"The shadows," Fuentes said.

"Give me a name."

"They have no names."

"What do you know about them?"

"Hardly anything. They keep to themselves, drive a truck filled with electronic surveillance equipment, live in a shack on the edge of the desert and make two telephone calls a day, precisely at ten in the morning and nine at night and always to the same phone number."

"Who do they call?"

"I don't know who answers. But the number is a private line at the White House."

Damn . “How do you know all of this?

“They watch us. We watch them. That’s how it’s done.”

St. Aubin felt a cold chill slice between his shoulder blades. He was sick at his stomach, in the midst of a war, and he could no longer tell the difference between his friends and his enemies. He could not remember ever fighting a war, but Brockleman said he had, and the feeling seemed far too familiar to be a fabrication. His orders had always been the same, but he had no idea what they were, who had given them, or if he should shoot first or wait, and he remembered the dead man, and there was no doubt about what happened to those who waited.

"You came to find the truth about Danny B.," Lazaro Fuentes said. "And I did not lie to you."

His eyes were pleading and on the verge of desperation, much like the dead man had looked when he realized that the pain in his stomach meant he was alive, and when the pain was gone, he would be dead, and the pain wasn't hurting nearly as bad as it had been when the shot was fired.

"You are a just and a righteous man, Mister St. Aubin," Fuentes continued. "You would not kill a man who told you the truth you were seeking."

St. Aubin stared at the revolver in his hand. It felt but did not look like it belonged there. "I'm not going to kill you," he said.

A smile worked its way cautiously across the mortician's face. "Because I can make you rich," Fuentes said, suddenly brimming with confidence. All men, he had bragged time and again, had two weaknesses, money and women, and St. Aubin looked much too weary to be interested in a girl, even a young girl bathed in lilac oils. "Because I am a businessman, and you are a businessman," Fuentes said, "all we have left to negotiate is the money you are going to earn for saving my life."

St. Aubin shook his head. "Unfortunately," he said, "the people I kill don't die. They never escape the night, and, frankly, I'm tired of living in the same nights with them."

St. Aubin gently tossed the .45 revolver on top of Fuentes's chest and slammed the casket lid shut again, locking it. "You can do it yourself," he said, "either before they bury you, or afterward. I don't particularly care anymore."

The scream began in anger. It ended in self pity. Lazaro Fuentes could wait for someone to open the casket in the morning, but he would be dead long before morning. The air, what so little there was of it, was locked inside with him. The air inside could not get out, and the air outside had no way at all to get in, and Lazaro Fuentes probably had fifteen minutes, maybe even less, to think about the consequences. Suffocation was so much slower than a bullet.

Before Andrews St. Aubin had reached the end of the hallway, he heard the muffled shots from the pistol. He stopped to count them. Fuentes would no doubt try to shoot his way out of the casket. But bullets from an old revolver would not dent the bronze casket, and the hot metal of spent lead would leave Fuentes with scars like cigarette burns on his face.

If Lazaro Fuentes was as smart as he was frightened, he would save the last bullet for himself. There was one final scream. Then one final shot. Finally, silence.

Andrews St. Aubin sat in the darkness of the preparation room, slouched in an old leather chair, his head resting against an aging, green wall. He waited for the first light of dawn to slice across the sky so he could return to the hotel alone, and the dead man could go wherever dead men went at sunrise. He wondered if the dead man would carry Lazaro Fuentes with him.

Chapter 48

BY MID-AFTERNOON, Paul Mitchell had flown by private plane to a dirt airstrip just outside of Nogales and gone immediately by jeep to the Catholic church. It was a small chapel, hardly used anymore except for funerals and weddings and on Friday nights when the good Father Alvarez came to hear confessions. On the twenty-two minute flight out of Phoenix, Mitchell meticulously read and re-read the names of those condemned by Operation Taps, even though he had memorized them months ago.

He took a Cross pen from his shirt pocket and crossed out one of the names. Lazaro Fuentes. Fuentes had been the godfather of illegal drugs pouring out of Phoenix, and he had died such an ignominious death, locked in his own coffin, his skull blown away by the quick, sudden blast of a .45 revolver that could have belonged to anybody.

But Paul Mitchell, who played hunches the way a Miami hustler played horses, had a better than average idea of who had carried a pistol, as old as it was mysterious, into the funeral home and put the city's most notorious mortician to sleep. Whether he had actually pulled the trigger or not made little difference. Beneath the typed name of Lazaro Fuentes, Mitchell wrote Andrews St. Aubin. St. Aubin was no threat, perhaps, but he could be a nuisance.

Mitchell did not want any nuisance or distraction of any kind interfering with his operation. St. Aubin may have considered himself to be a travel writer. Mitchell knew better. As soon as he heard that Richard Brockleman had dispatched St. Aubin to ostensibly find out the names of those responsible for the death of Danny B., Paul Mitchell requested and received a dossier from a file that, as far as the intelligence community knew, was no longer in existence. Shortly after the Cold War ceased to chill the conscience of the world, the secret file had been shredded and burned. The historical records of sensitive, overseas missions and the operatives who had carried them out became a pile of ashes tossed to an indifferent wind.

Paul Mitchell had been in charge, and he had carried out the directive just as the President had ordered. Paul Mitchell, however, kept a duplicate of every record thrown to the flames. He locked them away. He kept them updated. The past and the present. There were only two keys. He had one, General Donald Draper the other. Amidst the rubble of forgotten names was one that would remain forgotten, even though now he insisted on calling himself Andrews St. Aubin.

Paul Mitchell knew more about the man’s past than St. Aubin did. Andrews St. Aubin was merely the frayed end of a miserable life trapped in the body of a stranger. His memory was gone, and there were times when he saw things that weren't there. His mental strength was fractured and splintered. He had become possessed by the one curse that a man in his position could not afford to have.

He was afraid of the night. He was afraid that he was being pursued by those whose lives he had ended. He was afraid to die only because he was afraid that the dead and undead would be waiting for him. The Company doctor recommended an asylum, with or without a rubber room. St. Aubin, for whatever reason, had wound up behind a small desk at a big city newspaper, where he traveled the world and didn't recognize any of it. One fate, Mitchell had written in his report long ago, was about as good as the other.

Richard Brockleman had known, as Paul Mitchell knew, that a man as carefully and diligently trained as St. Aubin would never lose his instincts nor his nerve in times of crisis. He had learned the art of war in a post Cold War chain of international crises, had been programmed to kill or be killed, to keep his back to the wall, trust no one, presume that every eye in a crowd was searching for him, that every hand held a weapon, that every day would be his last. Such caution had kept him alive while better men, perhaps, died. Such instincts remained intact in his subconscious even though his memory and the last scattered remnants of his sanity had melted with the blood red snow in Kosovo.

That was why Richard Brockleman had defied the strict and highly secretive regulations of the Company, removed the so-called travel writer from the strict confines of his own personal asylum, and had dispatched St. Aubin to search down the hit man who had taken a knife and ripped the life from his brother. Brockleman got what he wanted, and Paul Mitchell had Richard Brockleman's fifty-four million dollar investment in Operation Taps.

The fact that Andrews St. Aubin was still operating on the back streets of Phoenix troubled Mitchell. He was concerned that Brockleman might have unwittingly provided St. Aubin sketchy information, if nothing else, about Operation Taps, even though he had gone to great pains to convince the Texas newspaper magnate that his journalist, like Danny B., would not be leaving the deserts of Arizona alive.

The success of the operation depended solely on a veil of secrecy. If one person too many understood what was going on, then his cover would be blown, and Mitchell would be condemned by his own President, his own country. The threat of humiliation was more disturbing than the threat of a death sentence, and one would be as certain as the other. It could be absolutely disastrous if anyone else knew or accidentally stumbled across a few scattered pieces of the puzzle.

Mitchell could not afford to take a chance on a man whose past was as lethal as St. Aubin's had been, a man who believed he was what he wasn't, who talked to the dead and couldn't figure out why the dead didn't answer him.

Andrews St. Aubin could indeed be a dangerous and disruptive man. Paul Mitchell sighed with resignation. The decision had been made before he left Washington. He had, in reality, no other choice. He wondered if he would ever regret it and doubted that he would. Andrews St. Aubin would be erased, and Richard Brockleman, God bless his soul, would never know why or by whom.

Mitchell folded the piece of paper and stuck it back in his shirt pocket while the wind blistered his face with dust and an unforgivable heat that parched the desert around his jeep. Since the decision had been made on St. Aubin, he turned his attention to the frail and delusional Father James Alvarez.

Mitchell had placed the priest under surveillance shortly after the Holy City of Hope took shape on the pasture lands around Copper Creek. He was, as far as Mitchell was concerned, simply a harmless, misguided old man who probably had no idea of what he was transporting from the chapel of Nogales back across the border.

At first, he only supplied a halfway house for peons smuggling cocaine into Texas in the bottom of their shoes, in pouches sewn within their shirts, in their hats, in the bags that carried their clothes. Within the past few days, Father Alvarez was being paid and paid well to deliver the shipments himself across the river in brown paper bags, and his City of Hope desperately needed all of the money it could get.

Father Alvarez apparently asked no questions. He merely did as he was told with a clear conscience, fully convinced that, on the dawning of Judgment Day, he could not be held accountable for what he did not know.

The chapel was empty when Mitchell arrived. Its door was propped open with a large chunk of sandstone, and a thin layer of dust lay on the sanctuary floor. It had wiped away any footprints from that last eulogy or confessions the priest had heard. Mitchell's footsteps echoed sharply against the empty adobe walls as he walked quickly to the confessional booth.

A bird flew from its perch atop the stained glass window behind the baptismal font. The stained glass window had been cracked, and there was a jagged hole where the outstretched hand of a crucified Christ had been. Dust danced in the slender saber of sunlight piercing through the crack and pouring into the chapel. It penetrated but did not illuminate the darkness.

Paul Mitchell knelt and, with a flashlight, surveyed the thirteen packages piled in the far corner. Being careful not to arouse any suspicion, he removed one and, holding his breath, gently replaced it with another.

Paul Mitchell had a message of his own for the good Father Alvarez to deliver, and he wrapped two thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills around the package to make sure that the priest, without fail, would follow the instructions he had written on the side of the soiled brown paper.

On top of the package, attached with a frayed rubber band, he placed a room key and a bus ticket to Phoenix.

Chapter 49

SEBASTIAN DRABEK STOOD across the street from the crowd that had packed itself into the sanctuary of the St. Mary’s Basilica to hear the final eloquent words spoken over the corpse of Lazaro Fuentes. Fuentes was a man of great compassion, the priest said, a man who shared his laughter and his wealth with those who were not so fortunate. He had been born poor, but he had overcome the shackles of poverty, the priest continued, rising to become one of the most prominent and respected men in Phoenix, in Mexico, and in all of Arizona. Perhaps more than anyone else, Lazaro Fuentes symbolized the spirit and the goodness of his old and his new country.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

Sebastian Drabek felt another wrinkle in his face, heard another growl in his belly. He had hurried to the funeral home as soon as the news began to spread that Fuentes had crawled into a casket and killed himself. Sebastian did not believe the rumors, not for a moment, and even when he forced himself to gaze upon the freshly powdered face of the deceased, he had serious, agonizing doubts that the strong and indomitable Lazaro Fuentes would do anything as foolish as dying. Fuentes would certainly not die alone and by his own hand.

The rich and the powerful had come to the Cathedral. Sebastian Drabek, even from across the street, could hear them in their hour of mourning, crying tears for a fat, greedy little bastard who had never shed a tear in his life. He hated them because they were in the cool of the sanctuary, and he wasn't. He hated them because they had cars to drive and chauffeurs to drive them, and he walked wherever he went, or he didn't go. He hated them because they would drown their sorrow with wine, maybe even champagne, maybe even a hundred dollars a glass, and he would spend the night licking the stained lips of old beer bottles thrown into the gutters.

Most of all, he hated Lazaro Fuentes. Fuentes paid him for the information he heard on the streets, and Sebastian Drabek was always listening. A few dollars here, a few dollars there, and the old man could put beans in his belly. Now Lazaro Fuentes was gone, and the information he always bought was useless, and Sebastian felt the faint stabs of hunger pains working in his gut. The tears he shed were real but were for himself, not for the poor, worthless corpse that lay in a Cathedral while some priest was doing his best to pry Lazaro Fuentes loose from the bonds of purgatory.

The old man turned his back on the Cathedral and shuffled down the far side of a deserted street. His red face itched, and he needed a shave. The emptiness in his belly, however, was more important than the whiskers, and he longed for the taste of ice in his beer, although Sebastian Drabek would have been just as happy with a hot beer or any beer that someone else was willing to pay for.

He sighed. Nobody bought beer or beans for a beggar. He squared his shoulders again. Sebastian Drabek was not a beggar, he told himself. He was a businessman. All he needed was to find someone to buy what he had to sell, now that Lazaro Fuentes had died and taken his money with him. A slight grin worked its way into the creases of the old man's face as he turned down a tree-lined boulevard that led toward the old walkup hotel. In Mexico, a man with information was a wealthy man and none, at the moment perhaps, was any richer than Sebastian Drabek.

Chapter 50

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN heard the Cathedral bells ringing for the lost and wayward soul of Lazaro Fuentes. For one, the world had ended. For the rest, it would go on, and they would wait their turn to be eulogized, then hauled on down to the burying ground, although few, other than St. Aubin, ever dwelled on the thought for long.

He sat in the silence of the old hotel room, the curtains drawn, and stared at the end sheet of a Bible that someone more miserable than he had left beneath the mattress. On the end sheet, tainted with whiskey spilled years ago, St. Aubin had written four names.

Alden Edwards.

Raul Saenz.

Espiritu.

Lazaro Fuentes.

They were the only leads he had to the final days and the final hours of Danny Brockleman. Only they had known where Danny B. had been, where he had gone, what he had done, and, most of all, what he had found. Perhaps one of them, if not all of them, had known what was truth or myth, maybe only rumor, whether it had been left behind by Christ or by men who proclaimed themselves to be the disciples of Christ. St. Aubin had tracked them down and found them, and now they all lay dead. If they knew any secrets belonging to Danny B., they had taken them to the graveyard.

Alden Edwards had apparently been dead for hours, maybe days, before the lifeless, broken body of Danny B. had been crammed without ceremony into the box car of his train.

From day one, Raul Saenz had obviously been the key to finding the man, or men, who murdered Danny B. But Saenz had been hiding from the same killers, and he was in chains. Who the hell had imprisoned him in a whorehouse?

Lazaro Fuentes certainly hadn't, and Espiritu would have happily cut his throat or ripped his heart out. Neither would have had any reason to keep him alive.

Now, Espiritu's bones, no doubt picked clean by the buzzards, were lying broken and bleached out in a sacred valley beside a sacrificial stone altar and beneath an Aztec ruin.

Lazaro Fuentes died, appropriately enough, in one of his own coffins. He had never had the guts to kill anyone but himself. Fear of closed places and suffocation could do that to a man.

St. Aubin kept searching for answers that had thus far eluded him, wondering which stone it was that he had left unturned. Something still was obviously out of place, and he had no idea what it was. For some odd reason, the whole simply did not equal the sum of its parts, no matter how many times nor how many ways he put the parts back together. The equation was much larger than that, and St. Aubin knew he had never been worth a damn at mathematics.

Down here, Raul Saenz had said on the last night of his life, the enemy is sometimes your friend, and your friends are sometimes your enemy. Saenz's testimony could have convicted Fuentes. But somebody obviously did not want Fuentes convicted.

Again, who?

Saenz had merely told him, Sometimes, you don't have to look any farther than the back of your hand. What the hell did he mean?

Lazaro Fuentes, begging for his life as he lay condemned in the coffin, had confided, Espiritu buried Danny B. out in the desert. Someone else dug him up.

Again, who?

The shadows, Fuentes had said.

Give me their names, St. Aubin had demanded.

They have no names, Fuentes whispered.

But they did have electronic surveillance equipment. They kept to themselves. They lived like shadows. Their telephone calls, twice a day, went straight to the White House. The more he learned, the less he knew.

St. Aubin felt as though he were living in a vacuum, somewhere on the lost side of reality, riding a roller coaster that definitely had more ups than downs and no end at all. By the time he closed the door to his room and walked down the back stairs of the hotel, St. Aubin was feeling as though the world around him had become as ominous as the padded satin surrounding Fuentes when the coffin lid closed. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was age. Maybe it was exhaustion. He no longer knew for sure.

Twice he tried to place a call to Richard Brockleman's office in Dallas, but the switchboard had been closed both times, which was unusual for a switchboard that operated twenty-four hours a day. He had not heard from the man who had hired him and shipped him to Mexico since receiving the unexpected report of Brockleman's sudden nervous breakdown. Was that real, too? Or had those who lived in the shadows somehow managed to take Brockleman out of the loop, leaving St. Aubin abandoned and stranded?

St. Aubin stepped out onto the sidewalk as the last vestige of a late afternoon sun fell across the narrow street. He walked for almost an hour, then turned onto the avenue that led to St. Mary’s Basilica, where bells were ringing and Fuentes was being mourned mostly by those who were glad to learn that he had departed this earth, who had wedged themselves into the sanctuary to stare coldly into the coffin and make sure that Fuentes was actually leaving and not coming back any time soon.

St. Aubin glanced down the street lined with a thousand eyes, and all seemed to be staring at him, and he did not trust any of them.

While Phoenix slept the night before, St. Aubin had traded the assault rifle for a .357 Magnum, six boxes of bullets, three boxes full of hollow points, two tortillas, filled with cheese and beans, a warm beer, and the name of a woman who, if she had no other gentlemen callers for the rest of the night, could make him forget all about the beer and beans. The pockmarked trader who carried his pawn shop in the trunk of a decrepit, hand-painted Volkswagen knew more about the woman than the pistol. She had been his third wife and still paid him a commission for any business he sent her way. St. Aubin had thrown away the woman’s name as soon as the Volkswagen eased around the corner and down the street. There was no sense in getting her killed, too.

In the dim and sultry twilight, St. Aubin calmly checked the .357 Magnum, which seemed like the natural thing to do, although he didn't know why. In some distant past that still lay behind a fog in the dark recesses of his mind, the pistol, or one similar, may have been the best friend he had. It felt heavy and awkward, carried by only those who weren't for sure they would be around when the sun shone on a new day. St. Aubin was sure he had felt that way before, but didn't know when, although such a weapon must have been there in his hand, barking on the snow-layered sidewalks of Kosovo.

The dead man would remember. He certainly didn't.

The .357 was fully loaded, and St. Aubin shoved it into his boot. He missed the old .45 revolver, but Fuentes had not given it back.

"Mister St. Aubin." The voice startled him.

St. Aubin turned slowly around, anticipating that the end had come on the crowded, busy streets of a city that did not care who he was, why he was there, from where he had come, or how he would go, as long as he went. His would be a grave without mourners or a tombstone. His eyes instinctively expected to glimpse the apologetic barrel of a gun, the glint of the sun bouncing off a knife blade or something worse. Instead, he found himself staring into the grinning, whiskered face of Sebastian Drabek, who could no doubt be as deadly as anyone in spite of his disheveled appearance.

St. Aubin did not speak. He shifted his weight, knowing there was no way in hell he could reach the pistol in time if the old man wanted to kill him.

"Look down the street," said Sebastian. "See all those people?"

St. Aubin said he did.

"They think you are dead."

"They don't know who I am."

"It was in the newspapers. Your heart quit beating. That happens a lot down here. No. Mister St. Aubin, you're not here, and I'm just an old man standing here by myself, talking when there's nobody to talk to. I'd be talking to you, Mister St. Aubin, instead of talking to myself, but you're dead. Muerto is what they say in Mexico, but it all means the same."

"Maybe it's better that way."

"What's better?"

"Me being dead."

"Sebastian never believed it for a minute." The beggar wiped the spittle off the edge of his mouth, then said, "I have some information that might be important to you."

St. Aubin nodded. "I'm waiting," he said.

"It's not free."

"Good information never is."

"It's about El Chapulon."

St. Aubin's eyes narrowed, unable to follow the beggar's words. "I'm not sure I follow you."

"El Chapulon, the grasshopper."

"I'm still lost."

"It's what those who wanted to crush the grasshopper beneath their boots called Danny B." The old man‘s hollow smile had become a grimace, washed in the glare of a late sun that was worming its way through a crack between the glass encased buildings. "And you know who wanted to crush the grasshopper and whose boot carries the stain of his blood."

St. Aubin watched a black limousine roar past and turn the corner without slowing down. The windows were tinted black. "We all know who killed him," he answered flatly, no longer interested in what the beggar had to say.

Sebastian glanced back over his shoulder, suddenly afraid there would be no buyer for the scrap of information he had, frantically searching the crevices of his mind for any secret that might be of value to the stranger.

In the near distance, the aging Cathedral bells were extolling the virtues and the damnation of Lazaro Fuentes. "Mister Fuentes will not kill again," the old man replied.

"It looks that way."

"You made sure of it, didn't you."

"From what they say, he killed himself."

Sebastian shrugged, not accepting St. Aubin's words as either truth or a lie. "So they say," he replied.

"Tell me about Danny B."

"You say you already know who killed him."

"But I’m sure there's more." St. Aubin sighed wearily, his eyes as lifeless as the weeds that withered in the cracks at his feet. "There is always more. There always is."

Sebastian crossed himself as the doors to St. Mary’s Basilica opened. "For a hundred dollars, I will tell you everything I know about Danny B."

A man wearing sunglasses and a black suit stepped out of the chapel, looking from one end of the street to the other. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, turning his back to shield the nervous flame from the wind.

"How much do you know, old man?"

"Enough to keep me alive."

St. Aubin removed his wallet. He had only eighty-six dollars left. No money had been wired to him since a mysterious illness had driven Richard Brockleman to a Dallas Hospital, leaving St. Aubin virtually broke and on his own. He could have gotten more from the newspaper, perhaps, but he didn't want to answer some editor's fool questions about what he was doing and why he wasn’t dead like the Wednesday obituary column said he was.

St. Aubin didn't mind being broke. He had been that way before, but he couldn't quite remember when or for what reason. St. Aubin folded two twenty-dollar bills and shoved them into Sebastian's shirt pocket.

The old man frowned. His shoulders slumped with disappointment. "You insult me, sir," he said. "I have something to sell, and it has a price, and you are looking for a bargain." Sebastian sighed and turned away. "If you want a bargain, go find yourself a whore."

St. Aubin grinned. "Does she know anything about Danny B.?"

Sebastian shrugged again. "If she does," he answered, "she's dead."

St. Aubin held a fistful of dollar bills in the old beggar's face and said quietly, "You may think I'm a rich man, Sebastian. But the truth is, dead men are broke. I only have six more dollars than you do."

The old man's face brightened. "I know where we can get a plateful of tamales for three dollars," he said quickly. "I can remember more when my belly's full than when I'm hungry."

"Nearby?"

"Follow me, Mister St. Aubin."

Sebastian Drabek shuffled his way down a backstreet alley, past trash cans and a squalling cat, through a broken picket fence, across the splintered glass of broken cerveza bottles, down a crooked street where the impoverished came to gamble with crooked dice and stolen whiskey and into a little misfit cafe that had four tables and a single light bulb hanging over the bar. The light was burned out.

He and St. Aubin sat in a corner behind the door where they could see anyone who came in or went out, and, at the present, the cantina was empty except for a left-handed guitar player sleeping behind the door and the aging, toothless waitress who wiped the crumbs from their table and placed a platter of tamales before them. The beer was extra, and it was stale but cheap.

Sebastian ate one tamale, wiped the grease from his lips with the bottom of his flowered shirt and was peeling the corn shuck from a second one before he spoke. "Do you know where Danny B. stayed?" he asked.

"I know he was checked into the Sheraton Hotel."

"He wasn't there all the time."

"Did he have an office?"

"Danny B. worked the streets. He did not need an office."

"Was there a girl he'd go home to?"

The old man laughed. "Danny B. had needs from time to time, but he didn't have a girl who would wait up for him at night. Girls could cause a man to make mistakes, he said. He had no use for women. Said they could get him killed."

"Something did."

"It wasn't a girl."

St. Aubin nibbled on the cold tamale that crumbled in his plate. "So where did Danny B. stay?" he asked at last.

"He drank his tequila in the ghost’s bar."

"The ghost gets around."

"Ghosts spend a lot of time around here."

The darkness inside the cantina wasn't nearly as oppressive as it had been. The sunlight came and went, but mostly it stayed outside. "Where was Danny B. kidnapped?"

"He drank his last tequila with the ghost."

"Where would I go in Phoenix to find the ghost?"

"You wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Danny B. was hiding in Jerome when the ghost found him."

"What was he hiding from?"

"He took something very important from Lazaro Fuentes."

"Keep talking, old man."

"He took several million dollars worth of cocaine."

"What'd he do with the stuff?"

Sebastian's gaze swung steadily upward until he was staring at the ceiling. "It all went up in smoke, smoke and ashes." The old beggar chuckled and added, "Villages within twenty miles in every direction all went to sleep smelling the smoke and seeing visions that night," he said. Sebastian's laughter faded, and he leaned across the table, lowering his voice, speaking confidentially and just above a whisper. "Danny B. got careless, and it cost him his life. He knew he was in trouble, and still he drank with the ghost. Mostly, when he knew he was in trouble, he went to the church, and Danny B. was always in trouble."

"I didn't know Danny B. was a religious man."

"A man can get religion when somebody's trying to kill him." Sebastian sucked the grease from a corn shuck and washed it down with the warm beer.

St. Aubin asked the next question as carefully as he could. "What did Danny B. find in the church?"

The old man motioned to the waitress that he needed another beer, and St. Aubin tossed another dollar bill on the table. For a dollar, she brought two.

"He was safe in the church," Sebastian said. "Danny B. wasn't looking for anything else, just a chance to still be alive when the night ended. His side of town in any town is not a good place to be. The food is bad. The streets are bad. The people are bad, and they do so many bad things and don't care who they hurt or how many they hurt. But even they won't go into a church to kill somebody on ground that is holy. We all worship the same God, St. Aubin, the good and the bad."

St. Aubin leaned across the table. An old woman came through the back door selling cabrito. He ignored her. "Which church, Sebastian?" he asked.

The old man burped and patted his stomach. His grin widened. "Yesterday or tomorrow, that information would have cost you another hundred dollars," he said. "But today, I'll simply take the last tamale."

"It's yours."

Sebastian Drabek peeled back the corn shuck. He had not eaten in two days and was never quite sure when he would eat again.

"Where can I find the church that Danny B. found?" St. Aubin asked.

"It has a name."

“What is it?”

“The other beer?”

“Take it.”

“The Mission San Xavier del Bac.”

“Here?”

“South of Tucson.”

“Why Tucson?”

“Danny B. spent most of his time near the border.” Sebastian shrugged matter-of-factly. “When he had to run, the mission was closer.”

"It’s difficult to hide in a church."

"Not in the Confessional."

"It's not a very big place to hide."

The old man laughed, his mouth full of tamale. "It's bigger than a coffin," he said.

"The priest know he was there?"

"The priest knows a lot of things in the Confessional."

"Did he give Danny B. anything?"

"A Hail Mary, maybe."

"Danny B. wrote that he had proof Christ had returned to earth and set up his kingdom in Mexico."

Sebastian Drabek stopped chewing. "When?" he asked, afraid that something important had happened, and he missed it.

"A long time ago."

The old man breathed a sigh of relief. "Then he's not there now?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

Sebastian reached for the beer. The tamale lay dry in his mouth. "What did Danny B. have to make him believe such a tale?" he wanted to know.

"He didn't say."

The old man stared at his plate, picking up the last few crumbs with his fingers. He scratched the whiskers on his chin, propped his elbows on the table, and rolled his eyes toward St. Aubin. "What would you pay to get it, if I happened to know where it is?" he asked cautiously.

"If what Danny B. wrote is true, then it's worth a fortune."

"To who?"

"To just about anybody who has a fortune to pay for it."

Sebastian belched again. His hands were trembling. He reached for his napkin and dropped it. Instead of picking it up, he simply kicked it under the table. The old man's tired face grew dark, and his jaw tightened.

St. Aubin watched him intently, trying to read what kind of secrets might be lying behind the dull eyes of a street beggar. "Do you know where it is?" he asked at last.

The old man looked up coyly. "Do you have a fortune?"

"Not today, I don't."

"Then, today, what I've told you is what I know." Sebastian stated.

"One thing more, old man. Why didn't you tell me what you knew about Danny B. when you first met me?" St. Aubin asked.

"I'm a businessman."

"So you said."

"When I first met you, Mister St. Aubin, you were not the highest bidder for those things I know that nobody else knows about this town and about the people who catch their first and their last breaths here."

"What changed your mind?"

"Business comes, and then it goes," the old man said wearily.

"What happened to the highest bidder?" St. Aubin wanted to know.

Sebastian Drabek leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and listened to the Cathedral bells fade away in the distance. "He's gone out of business," the old man replied softly. "The best customer I had, and he's gone out of business."

Sebastian waited until he heard the heavy sound of St. Aubin's boots leave the cafe, then he screwed the lid back on the bottle as tightly as he could, stood and winked at the fat waitress before limping out the back door. For the old man, it couldn't get any better. His belly was full, he had forty dollars in his pocket, and there would be beer for breakfast. Perhaps the money would buy him an hour with some street-corner girl before morning, but, by the time Sebastian reached the sidewalk, he decided that Danny B. had been right. There wasn't a woman in Phoenix worth forty dollars.

Chapter 51

ST. AUBIN SCRIBBLED on the back of a funeral program someone had tossed in the gutter: The funeral procession wound its way with pomp and circumstance through the streets of the city, a black hearse carrying the embalmed carcass of Lazaro Fuentes to his final residence, a patch of burnt ground that held both the rich and the paupers. To the ground, it made no difference who they were, what they had done, or how important they had been. They all went to the burying ground alone and penniless. All they carried with them were the clothes that covered the indecency of a naked body, and the clothes were generally rented from the funeral home that hauled them away.

The Times wouldn’t print it. The Times thought he was dead. Dead men didn’t have a job. Besides, the words weren’t about travel unless anyone considered the last journey of Lazaro Fuentes to be travel. St. Aubin smiled at the irony of it all. He worked his way to the edge of the crowd that lined the sidewalks. He watched the parade, full of dignity and indignation, weave its way around the corner, moving steadily into the faint light of a rose-colored dusk. The only person he knew lay beneath a pile of freshly watered flowers in the lead vehicle. By this time tomorrow, he figured, the water would be as dry as the tears and the flowers wilted.

The strained faces of the others, riding in limousines as black and almost as long as the hearse, belonged to strangers. They were no doubt politicians, business leaders, diplomats from here and afar, maybe the godfather of some Colombian drug cartel, Mafia, and perhaps even family. For some of them, Lazaro Fuentes had provided the pipeline that made them rich, and they returned the favor. Many grieved only because they knew it would take months to build another pipeline, and their money supply would no doubt dwindle somewhat until it was finally in operation. Fuentes could be replaced, but it would take time.

In the third limousine behind the slow-moving hearse, St. Aubin glimpsed the craggy face of an American military officer that did not seem as unfamiliar as the rest. He had seen the face before. But when? And where? Three stars adorned his shoulder, and the name on the pocket of his uniform was Donald Draper. The name meant nothing. The face was unmistakable.

Then it came to him. The realization cut through St. Aubin like the thin blade of a scalpel. On the night he saw Raul Saenz shot to death, after he had fled the whorehouse and was watching with odd curiosity from the dark alley across the street, wondering if the shooter was satisfied with his night's work or if he was still on the prowl and looking for another, it was General Donald Draper who had arrived in a black limousine almost immediately after the shooting stopped. Perhaps, he had been riding in the same black limousine that carried him now.

St. Aubin didn't know for sure, but he had seen rays of moonlight riccocheting off those three stars on his shoulder, and, for a brief moment, they had outlined his face. It was a face that Andrews St. Aubin would never forget, nor had he ever expected to see it again. What was the general doing at a whorehouse that night, and why had he obviously been the man in charge even before the police had been notified? And what, in God's name, was he doing at the funeral of Phoenix's most notorious drug lord, prominent enough to ride in the third car behind the hearse?

Who the hell was General Donald Draper anyway?

St. Aubin grabbed a taxi and told the sleepy-eyed driver to follow the procession to the cemetery, even though he knew it would cost him at least ten of the last forty-one dollars he had. The general intrigued him at a time when all he had were questions. The general might have an answer, or be an answer, or simply be the token representative of a country that still did not know who its friends were, or the difference between its friends and its enemies.

The priest was silhouetted against a sun that hung low in the sky like a gold dollar no longer worth the price of gold. Threads of sunlight, falling through the overhead tree limbs, danced on the lid of the bronze casket.

Danny B. spent a lot of time in cemeteries, Richard Brockleman had said. The graves sometimes held more than caskets and bodies, he had said. Was this the cemetery where Danny B. received the artifact of Christ? There was a lot of dying on the desert, and the desert full of burying grounds, official and otherwise. Which one held the secret so precious to Danny B. and Richard Brockleman? Which one held the knowledge that money couldn’t buy and death couldn’t contain.

St. Aubin's eyes shifted toward the landscape behind the priest. In any direction he looked, there were graves as far as he could see, ancient and solemn, unspoiled and silent, full of mysteries and revelations they kept to themselves. All he would learn from the graves was what had been written on the tombstones: names, dates of birth, dates of death, and sometimes a scripture, all of which dealt with Christ, but none about his secret return to the land of the Aztecs. St. Aubin knew that if he had been in Christ's place, Mexico was the last place he would have gone.

St. Aubin paid no attention to the final eulogy or the Lord's Prayer, if that was indeed what the priest was chanting in some foreign tongue. He kept his eyes fixed on the broad shouldered figure of Donald Draper, standing straight and at attention on the first row. The general was not paying much attention to the eulogy either. He seemed to be preoccupied, his mind concerned with something other than the untimely death of Lazaro Fuentes. Had he been a friend, merely an acquaintance, or a sworn enemy of the man who died screaming within the suffocating innards of his own coffin? Had the general come to the funeral full of grief or satisfaction? Had the demise of Lazaro Fuentes been the end of a problem for General Donald Draper, or merely the beginning of one? The general left as soon as the final amen had been said, taking the limousine alone back toward Phoenix.

St. Aubin eased into a crowded funeral car where every one was probably strangers anyway. They did not know who had ridden to the burying ground with them and did not care who was headed back to town. They were simply men who had performed a necessary obligation, made sure that Fuentes was put away properly, and were already thinking about the troubles of tomorrow, or the pleasures of the night that still awaited them.

St. Aubin glanced from person to person and figured that all of them no doubt had a wad of illegal dollars stuck in their wallets. They could tell by looking at St. Aubin that he didn't belong among them, not with his wrinkled clothes and unshaven face. But none were bold enough to try and remove a man who was carrying a .357 Magnum in his boot. A shard of sunlight riccocheted off the butt of the pistol. A man with a .357 Magnum in his boot did not need a wad of dollars or a reason to be in the car.

It took less than eighteen minutes for the final procession to reach the heart of the city. The general's limousine eased into a no-parking zone beside a small, out-of-the-way bar that serviced the intimate and elegant San Carlos Hotel, and Draper stepped out onto the sidewalk, straightened his uniform, and walked stiffly inside.

St. Aubin asked the funeral car to stop a block farther north. He stepped out and began walking briskly across the street.

The interior of the Bistro 202 was lit mostly by multi-colored candles melting on the tables. St. Aubin blinked, letting his eyes become adjusted to the darkness. General Donald Draper was sitting at a corner table, his back pressed firmly against the wall. He was not alone. A girl sat with him. Tall. And willowy. With long, dark hair, and a face that had once smiled at him in the moonlight of a Phoenix bedroom.

St. Aubin's eyes narrowed, and his nerves were raw. Just what kind of business, he wondered, did General Donald Draper have with a lovely school teacher from Tupelo, Mississippi? St. Aubin's jaw tightened. The last time he had seen Carol Ann McCarthy, she was an angel of death, down on her knees beside Espiritu's broken body, scowling at him like a dog gone mad upon a patch of ground sacred only to the Aztecs.

They were huddled together, leaning over a map that Carol Ann had spread on the table, oblivious to anyone in the bar. Her dark hair dropped in curls upon a pair of bare shoulders, and her dress was green, made of satin, maybe silk. The cluster of diamonds in her earrings glistened in the candlelight. Her face was as soft tonight as it had been hard out beneath the ancient ruin. A gentle smile had replaced the sneer.

St. Aubin found an empty booth behind them and ordered a beer, straining to overhear their conversation, even though the girl and the general were speaking in hushed, but anxious whispers. The bar was quiet and sedate, the beer chilled and wet enough to wash down the dust in his throat.

"Has it already begun?" Carol Ann was asking.

"What?"

"The operation."

"Why do you ask?"

"Fuentes is dead."

Draper leaned back and drained his glass of Scotch, pouring another from the bottle the waiter had left on the table..

"He was at the top of your list," Carol Ann continued.

The general sighed, looking far more weary than he had felt in a long time. "The reports say Fuentes took his own life."

"Do you believe it?"

"No. Fuentes expected to live forever."

"Then somebody else killed him."

"Apparently so."

"Who?"

Draper lay his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. "From what we have been able to ascertain, there is a new player in the game."

"Whose side is he on?"

"He doesn't know about our side."

"Brockleman's man, I assume."

Draper stared hard at Carol Ann with eyes dark and piercing. "We thought he was dead."

"He doesn't die easy."

"You told me that the evil one was protected by the devil himself."

Carol Ann's laugh was rough cut with irony. "He and the devil are a lot closer now than they've ever been before."

"And we've got a problem."

Carol Ann's voice was softer now. "Not for long," she said.

Draper watched the girl empty her bottle of wine, then snapped his fingers in an attempt to get the waiter's attention. "Another glass of wine for you?" he asked.

"No. I'm tired," Carol Ann replied, yawning. "Is the room ready?"

Draper took her small hand in his. "For you, my dear, it's always ready."

"All I want to do tonight is sleep," Carol Ann told him with an apologetic smile. She was removing her diamond earrings and placing them in her purse.

"You'll get your chance, my dear." The general's grin broadened, as he carefully folded the map and stuck it into his shirt pocket. "It's a long night."

St. Aubin watched the two of them leave the bar. He had not been able to hear every word, but he had heard enough. He stood, picked up the five-dollar tip that Draper had left on the table, used it to pay for his beer, waited to collect the change, then left a dollar tip of his own before walking casually out of the Bistro. The general and the girl had moved from the bar and disappeared inside the elevator of the San Carlos Hotel.

St. Aubin stepped into the small, intimate antique lobby, its quaint and historic walls adorned with art that looked as though they had been imported from the best galleries of Europe. Of course, Hobby Lobby sold the same prints. He watched the light blinking atop the elevator door. It stopped on the eighth floor. St. Aubin glanced at the clock on the wall. It was twenty-two minutes past seven o'clock. He grimaced. He still had a long night ahead of him. A sharp pain jabbed into his chest. He hoped it was only indigestion instead of cholesterol going over the wrong dam.

St. Aubin knew he should go home, forget Phoenix, forget the drugs, forget Danny B.'s death, forget those wild rumors, probably the drunken fantasies of some dying priest, about Christ, the god of the dawn, and his sojourn in Mexico. If it hadn’t been written in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, then it didn't exist, or so the preachers believed. St. Aubin had searched history as diligently as anyone and had never found much to support any words of wisdom that Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John had written. All religions had their myths, Christians, Indians, and Aztecs among them. The believers lived on faith alone, nothing else.

What Danny B. had found just might change that, but what Danny B. found was as lost as his own soul. St. Aubin knew he should go, no doubt about it. He argued with himself until twenty minutes after midnight, then watched the night maid wearily push her cart of clean towels and toiletries into the elevator. He followed her inside and smiled apologetically as he lost his balance and fell heavily against her. She was in her late forties, a little too plump, a little too tired, and a little too careless.

When the door opened to the eighth floor, St. Aubin, with one final apology, staggered drunkenly out of the elevator with the maid’s master room key in his pocket. By the time she missed it, he wouldn’t need it anymore. The hallway was narrow, lit only by a splinter of moonlight that spilled through a small window at the distant end of the corridor.

St. Aubin quietly and cautiously opened the locks on four different doors until he found the right room. Draper lay sprawled on the bed, Carol Ann curled up against him, her head on his chest.

St. Aubin moved silently across the thick carpet and picked up the general's shirt, thrown carelessly across the back of a chair. He gingerly removed the map and walked to the window.

Carol Ann grunted in her sleep.

St. Aubin froze and watched her change positions. The sheet fell below her naked breasts, and she began breathing normally again.

St. Aubin turned his attention back to the map, studying it in the narrow sliver of moonlight that crept past the lace curtains and into the room. On it, seven cities had been circled, and a list of names had been written in ink beneath each city. Only one name had thus far been scratched out.

Lazaro Fuentes.

Only one name had been added.

Andrews St. Aubin.

He kept being suffocated with new questions, never any answers. What his name was doing on the list was not one of them. St. Aubin did wonder, however, what the lovely and talented Carol Ann was doing with the man who had the map. What did it mean, and why was Draper so damn interested in it?

Has it already begun? Carol Ann had asked.

What was supposed to begin, and when, and who was behind it?

Lazaro Fuentes had been at the top of the list, or so Carol Ann had said. Which list? This list? And were they all condemned to die, including himself? Just who had been chosen to hunt them all down and execute them? St. Aubin wondered how his final breath was supposed to be snatched from his body.

Only the Shadows knew.

St. Aubin shuddered as a chill ran the length of his spine. The Shadows knew about Danny B., too, had dug him up out of the desert and shipped him back home, rotting in a box car. St. Aubin glanced down at the sleeping, peaceful face of General Donald Draper. What did he know about Danny B. and the secret that rode the box car back to Dallas with him?

St. Aubin carefully folded the map and slipped it into his shirt pocket. The general would no doubt panic when he found the piece of paper missing. He would blame Carol Ann, and she would throw blame at him, and the cat burglar would be on the streets with a missing piece of a puzzle that might be worthless to them all.

He glanced for one final time at Draper and Carol Ann lying together, quite naked, their faces distorted by oblique patterns of moonlight and darkness. The general was a tough old son of a bitch. And she was so beautiful, so soft, so much a mystery.

The general, St. Aubin suspected, could kill as easily as he took his next breath. She was no doubt more deadly than the general was, the black widow whose mate was doomed to death the moment he went to her web.

The San Carlos bedroom was heavy with the fragrance of her rich perfume. For a brief moment, St. Aubin was overcome by memories of the one night she lay close to him, whispering his name, sometimes squirming, sometimes floating in his arms. As he looked down at the general and his woman of mystery, St. Aubin had the sudden urge to kill them both.

He waited for the elevator door to open, tossed the master key on the floor, and walked the eight flights of stairs to the lobby. No one looked up when he walked out into the darkness, no one but the dead man. He had been sitting in the far corner with a day-old newspaper lying in his lap.

Chapter 52

SEBASTIAN DRABEK HELD a fistful of wrinkled dollars, at least five hundred of them, as he watched the black limousine push its way defiantly back into the flow of traffic. Its windows were tinted, and the sun could not penetrate them. He held the money close to his chest as though it was a beautiful whore who might be gone by the time the limousine was out of sight. Women and money had never been kind to him. Without one, he could not get the other, and Sebastian Drabek had never had either for very long.

There were days when he scraped by and days when hunger pains ripped apart his belly like a malignancy. But today, business had been good. Today, he had broken his own creed and knew he should be feeling guilty. At least he might have felt guilty until he counted the five hundred dollars, given to him in fives and tens. Then his guilt passed like a belly ache.

Today, he had sold the same information twice. When a man is rich, Sebastian told himself, he can afford a new shirt. He could buy one, but the clerk would want to know how an old man like Sebastian had so much money. So the beggar did as he had done for so long. He stole a shirt from a drunk who lay asleep on the street. It was faded and patched, and it wasn't new. But it was different.

Sebastian Drabek never considered himself a thief. He removed his shirt with the wilted flowers and left it lying across the drunk's bewhiskered face, doubting seriously if the peon, provided he wasn't dead by morning, would ever be able to recognize one from the other. Shirts soaked with a man's salt, beer, and sweat all smelled the same anyway.

Above him, General Donald Draper lay on the rooftop of an abandoned bank building, the aroma of Carol Ann’s perfume still lodged in his nostrils. The night had been one of satisfaction. The day would be even better. She had still been sleeping with a smile on her face when he left the room carrying the canvas bag. As far as the taxi driver was concerned, he was a businessman trying to strike a deal, probably an illegal one, on the bad side of Phoenix. Draper trained his binoculars on the black limousine as it drove away, leaving the old beggar as rich as he had ever been.

He watched Sebastian limp away from the trash cans where the drunk lay in a dead stupor, buttoning his newest dirty shirt, then he swung the binoculars around on the bent, weary figure of Father James Alvarez trudging down the sidewalk, a laundry bag thrown heavily across the bend in his shoulder.

Each step looked as though it might be the final one the ashen-faced priest ever took. Father Alvarez paused, wiped the sweat from his graying eyes, and leaned against the adobe facade of an office building, the last of his energy spent and probably wasted. He was out of breath, his stomach heaving, and Draper feared that Father Alvarez might well pass out before his journey had been completed.

The last remnants of daylight were fading fast, and the priest looked even older in the harsh glitter of neon falling in slender threads of blue and yellow across his face. The general shifted his weight. The asphalt beneath him had not yet been cooled by the early night winds, and he felt as though his skin had been burned raw through a jump suit the color of adobe brick. His military-issue binoculars had become fogged with heat and moisture. He paused long enough to clean them with the bandanna hanging around his neck, then turned his gaze toward the far end of the avenue.

He saw Andrews St. Aubin emerge from the crowd, looking pensive, rather than cautious, although there seemed to be a bounce missing from his step. Brockleman's man, his shoulders sagging, looked as weary, as beaten as the old priest. The heat, the chaos, the confusion, the frustration, the dead ends, even the near and constant companion of death itself had worn them all down.

Draper smirked, the salt from his sweat irritating the cut his razor had made on his neck that morning. It was a game that he and Paul Mitchell had mastered years ago.

It was the game of war, and the rules never changed, and yet they were always changing.

Only one thing stayed constant, however. When the enemy lost the will to fight, the war was over. It was no longer necessary to kill. But then, the kill had always been more efficient and lasting than the cowering words of man. Truces were made to be broken, but not by broken men.

The general grinned. It was almost over now. Leaving St. Aubin was too great a risk. The bastard – it must have been him – had broken into his hotel room and stolen the operations map. Who else had a reason? Who else had a motive? Who else had the stealth training it took to move as quietly and surreptitiously as the night?

Paul Mitchell had called him the most dangerous man in Phoenix. Paul Mitchell had read his secret file. A man on a blind mission was a man ready to deal in death. His own would probably never cross his mind. St. Aubin might or might not unlock the secret. He and Mitchell could not take that chance. Nothing could be traced to them. Their roads led to the White House.

An international incident and the threat of treason hung in the balance. The grin faded. Andrews St. Aubin had no idea who he was, and now he would never know. The final barrier to the launch of Operation Taps was about to be eliminated.

St. Aubin was still a block away from the old walkup hotel when Father James Alvarez and his laundry bag struggled through a door of cracked glass and shuffled into the lobby. Draper placed the binoculars in a leather carrying case.

The priest was out of sight, no doubt stepping into the elevator by now. It was only twenty-one steps from the front door. Draper had counted twice to be sure, twenty-one steps and sixteen seconds, probably more considering the priest's age.

From that moment on, the general would be relying strictly on timing and instinct. None was better at it. He had two silver stars and an oak leaf cluster to prove it. The Medal of Honor had been given to him in a ceremony of strictest secrecy. But then, the action and its consequences had taken place during a secret war in a secret part of the world where the United States, if anyone bothered to check the records, had never sent mercenaries, spies, troops, diplomats, or money. Donald Draper had buried twelve good men in soil where they weren't and had never been.

He turned his attention back to St. Aubin, walking with hesitation across the street and toward the hotel, working his way through traffic, seemingly unaware of the horns that were honking at his every step.

He was, the general knew, a man most unfortunate. During time of war, if the war had a chance to be won, there were always the unsuspecting few who were expendable. St. Aubin was one of them. He would be forgotten quickly, if anyone remembered him at all. Operation Taps would no doubt occupy a full chapter in the annals of history, but Donald Draper realized that it was still uncertain whether he and Mitchell would be looked upon as saviors or traitors. There was such a fine political line between the two.

St. Aubin, his eyes fractured like broken mirrors, glanced back over his shoulder, ever cautious, ever suspicious, then disappeared into the hotel. The general wondered if he had been talking to himself or the dead man. St. Aubin's files had dwelled as much on the dead man as it did on the agent who had been brought in out of the cold, but not far enough to ever get warm or his memory back.

Draper looked down at his watch and began counting. Father James Alvarez was an obedient servant, if nothing else. He had been asked to prepare a way for his people, and he had. It wasn’t a request. He had regarded it as a commandment. He had been sent bags of money to shelter the weary, feed the hungry, and cure the sick. All the priest had been asked to do was deliver bundles of brown paper packages to an appointed place at an appointed hour. He did so without fail.

Good fortune had made it possible for him to find small grains of white powder, just as surely as Moses had been sent manna from Heaven, easing his pain and healing the loneliness that worked its way like a cactus thorn into the tortured darkness of his soul. When the white powder was sufficient, he could see beyond the far side of the milky way and hear the voice of the stars.

Mitchell’s note had been cryptic enough, but Father James Alvarez had not questioned it or its meaning. He was afraid not to do as he was told, so he had taken the bus to Phoenix and walked to a hotel that had a small sign, a simple name: Bertie’s.

Downstairs, the desk clerk was asleep, and the frayed carpet was stained with coffee or something worse. The elevator was swinging loosely on its cables, but it managed to carry him to the second floor.

The journey, not nearly as far or as taxing treks to Nogales, had been a small penance to pay for the two thousand dollars he had buried in a black kettle behind his chapel in the City of Hope. The aging priest took the key from his robe and walked to the third door from the top of the stairs.

He waited until the old man with glazed eyes stumbled past, then, with trembling fingers, he placed the key in the lock and turned it slightly. The door swung open. Father Alvarez walked reverently inside, surprised to find a room as small, as bare, as sparsely furnished as his own.

The Radiant One must love the poor as well as the wealthy, he thought. He loved me when I had nothing and now when I have a black kettle weighted down with money. He chose me to deliver the package to someone here. Maybe this package holds money as well. Maybe the pitiful one who resides in this room will be as rich as I am. Perhaps, he, too, has tasted the powder and seen the stars spell his name in the sky and heard the thunder keep time with his own heartbeat. Perhaps he and I are the ones with whom the Radiant One is well pleased.

Not once had the priest been tempted to open the package. If it was indeed wrapped around money, and surely it was, the riches, large or small, belonged to another, not him. The mysterious ways of a strange voice in strange times were difficult to understand, so Father James Alvarez did not try to unravel them. He was, as he had always been, simply a loyal servant, a cripple who had thrown his cane away, a disbeliever who had witnessed his own miracle.

The priest gently placed the package on a bed whose rumpled, tangled sheets had been stained and tainted by the sweat, the dirt, the blood of many. It was a place full of promises and lies, where men had breathed hard above the begging woman in their arms and taken their final journey from one side of life to the other, whether they had been ready or not, and none of them ever were.

It was time to leave. He knew he should go. Instead, he bowed his head in prayer. He reached into a small leather pouch tied around his waist, pressed a few grains of white powder between his fingers and touched them to his tongue to make sure the Radiant One was on high and listening to him.

On the roof, General Donald Draper was carefully watching the seconds tick by on the black face of his watch.

Sixteen seconds, and St. Aubin would be standing at the elevator.

Another six seconds and the elevator door was opening.

In eight more seconds, the elevator had reached the second floor. Brockleman's man was getting off while the priest was getting on.

Fourteen steps and nine seconds, and St. Aubin was fumbling with the key to his room.

Eleven seconds at the most, and St. Aubin was inside. The general carefully pulled a small black box, no larger than a tube of lipstick, from the canvas pack that lay at his side. The detonator had already been primed. As calmly as he would flip a switch to send light flooding into a darkened room, Draper pressed the blue button on top.

An invisible current tracked its way across the street to a brown paper package packed with cocaine, blood money, and enough plastic explosives to rock the decayed side of Phoenix like an earthquake.

The general closed his eyes, tightened his muscles, pressed his face against the hot asphalt and waited. The wait lasted three point seven seconds.

The sky caught fire, and the sound was deafening.

Draper felt as though he had been thrown helter skelter into the pits of hell. The foundation of the building shook violently beneath him.

Then silence. Dead silence. The building trembled again. There was no weeping. No wailing. No gnashing of teeth. Not even a whimper.

The top of the fragile old hotel simply disappeared.

Donald Draper felt the pungent and acrid taste of smoke burn his tongue, his throat, his lungs. His flesh was seared, and, for a brief moment, the general was convinced that he had killed himself. The blast rocked the elevator and sent it tumbling back down to the first floor, its cables torn and twisted, hanging like giant strands of a metal spider web above the ashes of a hotel that should have been condemned a decade ago. Now there was not enough of it left to condemn.

Andrews St. Aubin crawled choking and gasping for air out of the wreckage. He could not tell what was on fire and what was not. Smoke was everywhere, engulfing the lobby in gusts of black and gray. The elevator door had opened, and St. Aubin was waiting to step out onto the second floor landing when the white heat suddenly blew up in his face. He did not remember the sound.

He was simply standing there, a long and worrisome day coming to an end, when the floor had been jerked away from beneath him as though he had stepped off the edge of the earth, and perhaps he had. If the elevator had not fallen, he would be dead or dying, and quick was always preferable to lingering.

St. Aubin shook his head to clear the cobwebs, and they did not want to leave the dark and serpentine recesses of his troubled mind. For a moment, he could not determine whether he had been blinded by the explosives or the smoke. Only one was permanent.

A woman cried softly. Sirens howled in the distance. He heard the footsteps of people running, but not in his direction. The woman quit crying and screamed in anguish instead of pain. St. Aubin thought he heard the sound of someone chanting a rosary for him or perhaps for the whole world in a thin and cracked voice.

The priest lay stretched before him, his hands clasped in prayer beneath his chin. Three of his fingers were missing, and his right leg was a bloody stump. The skin on his face had been peeled back by the blast. It was charred black. St. Aubin saw raw gristle where his ears had been. Only the old man's eyes were clear, darting from side to side, searching for an answer.

It was too late for salvation.

St. Aubin knelt beside him, and the priest blinked to bring his face into a sharper focus, ghostly amidst the smoke.

"Are you the Radiant One?" the priest asked in a hoarse whisper.

"If that's what you want me to be," St. Aubin said softly.

The old man's eyes had turned the color of spoiled milk, becoming pale and flat. "Why have you forsaken me?" he whispered.

Father James Alvarez took his last breath before St. Aubin could answer, which was just as well. Andrews St. Aubin had no explanation, and he had no doubt that the bomb had been meant for him, placed there by a mad man who didn't care how many he killed as long as Andrews St. Aubin was among them.

As soon as General Donald Draper realized that he still remained amidst the living, he rolled over on his stomach, his face smeared with molten asphalt, and stared over the edge of the building. The noise below was deafening cacophony of screams, wails, howls, and sirens. He grabbed his binoculars and raised them slowly to his eyes.

The general had always been slow to anger, but what he saw below sent a wave of frustration and nausea through him. Andrews St. Aubin, his clothes tattered, the boots burned off his feet, came walking out of the thick and ashen smoke, carrying the broken body of the priest. Draper reached for the sniper's rifle that lay at his side, raised it quickly, caught the image of St. Aubin in the scope, and squeezed the trigger.

The impact drove St. Aubin back into the rubble. His knees buckled, and he fell among the scattered remains of brick and mortar. If Father James Alvarez had not already been dead, the bullet that slammed hard into the aging priest's chest would have killed him instantly.

Chapter 53

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN should have been walking the fields of the dead long before the sun returned to touch the chaotic streets of Little Mexico in Phoenix, and he knew it. The irony of the situation was not lost on St. Aubin. The aging priest had lost his life trying to kill him, and the old priest had saved his life by taking the bullet that a sniper's rifle had aimed just below the pocket on the left side of his shirt.

For much of the night, in the ruins of the hotel and the trauma center of a hospital not far from the blast site, St. Aubin overheard enough gossip, rumors, and speculation from both official and unofficial sources to learn that Father James Alvarez had brought a package into the hotel, carried it up to the second floor, and used a handmade key to let himself into a small room sometimes occupied by a vagrant who was two days behind in his rent.

Police investigators had found traces of the explosive, along with remnants of cocaine and currency, burned into the wood, although most of the hard evidence had been ceremoniously blown away, not at all unusual in bombing incidents.

The old priest was certainly not suspected of participating in any underground terrorist activities, although his Holy City of Hope had been condemned politically on both sides of the border for its role in sheltering a parade of illegal immigrants on their arduous journey to forbidden lands in the north. He was obviously somebody's stooge. The trigger man had absolutely no regard for human life.

It was an odd and curious situation, the police captain had said as he led St. Aubin past the burning embers, across the shattered adobe brick, and toward the ambulance, odd and curious and deadly. Around them were medics with shots of morphine and sad-eyed priests who had brought the sacraments of the last rites for those who had not been nearly as fortunate as St. Aubin.

Did the unkempt vagrant know the priest? the investigator had asked.

No.

Had he ever seen the priest before?

Not to his knowledge, St. Aubin said.

Did the vagrant have a name?

St. Aubin had scribbled down Joe Titus on the hotel register when he checked in, and that name was good enough to use again.

No driver’s license.

No identification.

They had been in his jacket, he said.

The bomb had removed them all.

Then why would the priest want to kill him, the investigator inquired, and who, in God's holy name, would have been callous enough to shoot Father Alvarez long after the explosion had already jerked him from the land of the living?

The beleaguered travel writer said he had no idea, although, he knew, Lazaro Fuentes must have had friends, which meant they were now St. Aubin's enemies, and, as a rule, enemies did what they could to eliminate or terminate each other, whichever word the drug mafia was using these days. The last man standing won, provided, of course, there was anything left to win and anyone left standing.

Sleep was restless that night, then not at all.

St. Aubin would have walked the blackened streets of Phoenix, but he was in no mood to face the dead man again, and the dead man was already pacing the night. Was the old priest with him, or had Father Alvarez been able to make a much cleaner exit into what was left of the hereafter?

St. Aubin could hear the dead man's hollow footsteps shuffling back and forth just outside the window of a run-down shelter that some Catholic missionary had built for the down and out.

St. Aubin fit either description.

When the sun finally rose in a troubled sky, only he and a feverish baby, not quite two months old, were awake inside the crowded refuge that, long ago, had served as a warehouse.

It was old and drafty.

The sweltering heat could get in, but it was having no luck at all getting back out again.

Only the baby was crying.

Chapter 54

GENERAL DONALD DRAPER had scrambled from the rooftop while the last echo of the rifle shot was dying away above the plaza, above St. Aubin’s head, waiting in a cramped crawl space behind the air conditioning duct until the darkness of night came to wrap Phoenix in anonymity. Draper had remained motionless, his breathing barely discernible. He experienced no sudden rush of adrenaline, no pounding of the heart.

Time dragged, but it always did in situations of covert warfare where he waited to be caught or escape from harm's way amidst the cover of confusion that was swarming down the frightened streets of the city.

Once the thunderbolt had hit, General Draper always found that the safest place on earth to be was lost in the eye of the storm itself. He left the sniper's rifle, wrapped in rags and shoved back into the metal duct, doubting if anyone would ever find it. It was fine if they did. He had bought the rifle using the name of Andrews St. Aubin. It had been stolen in Sedona and purchased from a pawn shop in Prescott. A pimple-faced clerk had scratched down the name and asked for no identification. The rifle might be traced but not to him.

Before departing his makeshift sanctuary, Draper removed his black jumpsuit and leather gloves, dropping them across the weapon. The general walked casually down the staircase wearing slacks and a white shirt, its sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A blue and red Tobasco tie hung loosely around his neck. Once on the street, Donald Draper could easily be mistaken for a concerned businessman who was doing all he could to help the unfortunate victims of a tragic blast. He took an old lady's arm, her face bathed in blood, most of it her own, and gently led her toward a waiting ambulance.

Already, the local radio station would be playing the tape of an Iranian holy man whose terrorist group, heretofore unknown among the world's policemen, was claiming credit for the explosion that rocked the heart of Phoenix. It was, Draper had to admit, an early, unplanned, and impromptu prelude to Operation Taps. But it was necessary. Paul Mitchell didn’t mind taking chances. He eliminated risks.

Andrews St. Aubin had posed a threat, even if it was a minor threat. One casual word spoken at the wrong time to the wrong person in the wrong situation could ruin Taps. He had the map in his possession. What else did he know? His death neatly tied up loose ends, even if it had taken a bullet to do what the blast had failed to accomplish.

For more than an hour, the general rummaged among the ruins, the twisted carnage of the wreckage captured in the harsh glow of spotlights hastily erected by rescue crews and television stations. There was no trace of St. Aubin. Draper's gaze searched the faces of the wounded who lay bleeding and bandaged on the sidewalk or were stumbling blindly and without reason among the rubble with vacant, listless eyes.

They were peons, in the way and expendable. Their deaths would be no more important than their lives had been. Newspapers did not waste space on obituaries for the poor. St. Aubin should be among them. He wasn't.

General Draper walked to the makeshift morgue in a warehouse two blocks from the skeletal remains of the old hotel. He stood above each of the seven whose lives had been ended by the plastic explosive an old priest carried with ignorance and unwavering loyalty to St. Aubin's room.

The general, without a word, handed the police officer his counterfeit credentials from the FBI, and the police officer, without a word, allowed him to view the bodies, although none retained any identifiable features. The room smelled of smoke and reeked of death.

The policeman nervously pulled the tablecloth shroud from each convoluted face. On the slab, if his sketchy information was correct, were the desk clerk, two hookers who had obviously seen better and higher-priced days, three day laborers from somewhere south of the border, and, of course, the old priest.

Draper frowned with disgust when he looked down upon the carcass of Father James Alvarez. A bullet had torn a ragged hole in his chest, a bullet that had been intended for Andrews St. Aubin. The hasty shot had missed its mark. He had failed. He would not fail again.

"Thank you," Draper said as diplomatically as he could to the policeman, turning to leave the morgue.

"The one you’re looking for is not here, I presume," the officer said.

"No, he's not here."

"That is good news for you?"

Draper nodded but did not answer. His face was as dark as the night outside, the light gone from his eyes. Anger boiled deep within him as he walked back through the weeping and wailing until he found his way outside. The air around him was as hot and suffocating on the street as it had been inside the warehouse. The loose end remained loose, and that was unacceptable during times of war.

Draper cursed softly to himself. St. Aubin had become more than a simple irritation, and when Brockleman's man went down, the general would dig the grave himself. Draper stared intently at every face he passed on his way back to the San Carlos Hotel. Young faces and old ones. Wrinkled faces and frightened ones. Confused faces and weary ones. None of them belonged to St. Aubin.

Paul Mitchell had been waiting for him when Donald Draper reached their suite overlooking the courtyard. The hour meant absolutely nothing to Mitchell. It was his tendency to grab brief snatches of sleep when he could, day or night, in the backseat of a car, in the first class cabin of a plane, or on a couch in somebody's office while waiting for his next appointment. Sleep was merely a reflex designed to energize a weary body, a necessity and never a luxury.

In the middle of a mission, or especially while getting ready to launch one, sleep was a distraction and therefore wasted on Paul Mitchell. He glanced up from his newspaper. "You made a lot of noise," he said.

"Wasted noise."

"The press is already having a field day with the Iranian tape." Mitchell grinned a crooked grin. "It may play better than we even thought it would. The President is making angry threats, and the politicians are fighting each other to condemn Iran and take credit for warning us all about the great Iranian threat. In Washington, they’re holding closed-door meetings to decide how to retaliate. Lord, I would like to see Carl Holcomb’s face now. Our next strike will have Mexico and the United States both arming themselves for war, leaving the drug dealers for us." His grin turned into a mocking laugh.

Draper nodded and slumped down in an overstuffed blue chair beside the writing desk, covered with a black leather briefcase, two note pads, three sets of maps, a guide book to the interior of Mexico, and a tape recorder. All were worn with use.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Mitchell asked.

"It's St. Aubin."

"What about him?"

"He refuses to die."

In the midst of such a mission, neither excuses, failures, mistakes, blunders, or breakdowns were possible or acceptable.

"Was he in the hotel when the explosive ignited?" Mitchell asked.

"I watched him go inside and gave him time to reach the second floor before hitting the detonator."

"He must have lingered in the lobby."

"He certainly wasn't with the hookers."

"What makes you say that?"

"They're dead as hell. He isn't."

Mitchell frowned, and his voice was hard and bitter as it had been. “Any trace of the map St. Aubin stole?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you think he can figure it out?”

“He’s been trained to figure things out.”

“What’s the chance of his blowing up Operation Taps.”

“He could ruin the operation and not even know it.”

Paul Mitchell stood, walked across the room, and poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver pot that room service had left hours ago. The coffee was stale, lukewarm, and full of grounds, but it cleared Mitchell's throat when he added a jigger of whiskey.

He said, “The explosion today jump started the operation. But it was only a tremor. The real bang begins in a week, which means we have seven days to find St. Aubin and do what you should have done yesterday.” He glared at Draper.

The general glanced away. “It won’t take seven days,” he said.

“It better not.” Cold coffee. Hot whiskey. It was a lethal combination. “General,” Mitchell said, “our lives, our reputation, our legacy, our asses depend on the success of Operation Taps. Pull it off, and Holcomb will be back on board before the final funeral is held. So will the President. Fail, and we’re not even footnotes in history. We have a lot to lose. Only St. Aubin can derail the plan. Don’t rely on any of your Cold War, long-distance tactics. Get close. Don’t miss this time. You may have one shot. You better have a bullet inscribed with St. Aubin’s name.”

Chapter 55

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN could have easily been mistaken for any one of the peons gathered outside the Mission San Xavier del Bac for early morning mass. His hair was unkempt, his clothes disheveled, charred and clotted with streaks of burnished red that looked and smelled a lot like dried blood. St. Aubin would have traded everything he had, with the possible exception of the .357 Magnum hanging heavy in his belt, for a hot bath. But what he was wearing, not counting the .357 Magnum, was not worth the price of a hot bath. One of the Catholic missionaries had given him ten dollars for food. He used it buy a bus ticket to Tucson, then hitchhiked nine miles south down Interstate 19 to an old mission that had been standing isolated and alone since the late 1700s. A rancher in a pickup truck had driven him the final miles. St. Aubin kept his eyes on the Browning X-Bolt Medallion rifle hanging on the back wall of the cab, wondered if it had a price, then quickly dismissed the idea. He was a dollar short of buying a used taco anyway.

His eyebrows were singed. A doctor in the emergency room, familiar with any pain other than his own, removed a milky shard of broken glass and placed three stitches in a cut just behind St. Aubin's left ear, then dabbed salve on burn strips that were more of a nuisance than an injury. The salve smelled like hog lard. The pickup driver had not asked him any questions.

St. Aubin had removed Father Alvarez's leather sandals before the undertaker came to haul the old priest away. The Father was no longer walking on sharp stones or among the thorns of the desert. St. Aubin would have preferred boots, but there was no chance of him getting any boots unless he killed someone who happened to wear the same size that he did. It was certainly something to think about. The sandals didn't fit, but they kept his bare feet off the dirt.

St. Aubin gazed at Mission San Xavier del Bac, a National Historic Landmark founded in 1692, although the present church had not been built for another hundred years. A travel brochure he had picked up days earlier claimed that Mission San Xavier was the finest example of Spanish Colonial architecture in the United States.

St. Aubin would write: The Baroque, Moorish, and Spanish beauty of the mission dominates the stark, barren landscape around it. Sinners walk its aisles, but not the heat. Even in summer, the adobe interior is cool and dimly lit, and the figures in the paintings and carvings decorating its walls stare out at you with ghostly faces. Even their pain hides in the darkness.

When St. Aubin walked inside, the flickering of candlelights danced like fireflies on the stone walls. The priest was chanting his homily in Latin, or maybe it was Spanish. It could be either as far as St. Aubin was concerned. He sat down on a pew in the back of the chapel, crossed himself, although he didn't know why, and sat alone, surrounded by sunken eyes of ebony and walls of gray.

The sanctuary was quiet, a place of congenial solitude in a maddening world that was crumbling like molten ashes beneath his sandals. Since he did not know who wanted him dead, St. Aubin did not trust anyone, and that included the priest. After all, one had already tried to send him past that crevice in time and circumstance that separated now from forever, the place where the dead man went when the nights no longer wanted him.

Money, the lack of it and the lust for it, makes murderers of us all, St. Aubin thought. He was no better than the rest of them. Then again, he was no worse either.

When the final prayer ended, and the last lips sipped from a silver communion chalice filled with warm wine, St. Aubin quietly made his way toward the front of the Cathedral. No one noticed him as he slipped past the crucifix and followed the stooped priest down a narrow stone corridor, one set of footsteps echoing the other.

The priest walked slower, then slower, suddenly aware that he was no longer alone in the hallway. Finally he stopped, turning around with a quizzical expression to face a man who looked as though he hadn't eaten for a long time and had a lot on his mind and his conscience. In both instances, the priest was correct.

Father Villego spoke first in Spanish. He could tell by the strange one's eyes that his words had been wasted. He tried again in broken English. "Have you a special need, my son?"

"I have a lot of needs," St. Aubin replied softly, "probably more special to me than they would be to you."

"That's what we're here for," the priest answered.

"What's that?"

"To share each other's burdens." The priest had an angular face, shaded by heavy eyebrows and a ruddy complexion.

His hair was red, streaked with gray, and, at least once in his life, his nose had been broken. In earlier years, the padre would have stood at least six feet tall, but age had shortened him. His robe was white, and the cross draped around his neck looked as though it had been handstitched with pure gold.

"I'm looking for the one we call Christ," St. Aubin said, blunt and to the point, “but he is known by many names.”

Father Villego smiled. "No,” he said, “the one you refer to as Christ remains Christ, but many different tongues call him many different names.”

"Did the Christ you worship come back again?"

The smile faded.

“Did he preach to the Aztecs?” St. Aubin asked.

The line between sanity and insanity had suddenly become fine and narrowly drawn. The priest wasn't quite certain on which side of the line the strange one was standing. A feeling of uneasiness gnawed in the pit of his stomach. He was too old to run, and curiosity was suggesting that he remain to hear what this early-morning confrontation was all about. He had dealt with all kinds, both good and bad, the saved and the sinners, the lost and the unforgiven. This would be no different.

St. Aubin changed his tactics. "There was a D.E.A. agent by the name of Danny Brockleman who used to come here a lot," he said. "Spent many nights in your confessional, or so I'm told."

"It's a place where many come to leave their sins behind."

"Danny B. came to sleep."

The priest's smile was etched with a deep sadness. "The door is always open for the redeemed, the sinful and, yes, even for the sleepy." Father Villego hesitated slightly, then asked, "Are you looking for this Danny Brockleman.?"

"I know where Danny B. is." St. Aubin shifted his weight. The corridor did not seem nearly as black as it had. It was aglow with a faint light, although St. Aubin had no idea from where the glimmer, no larger than a firefly, was coming. "What I want to know," he continued, his voice flat and expressionless, "is what he found here."

"Perhaps it was mercy," the priest said, "and perhaps salvation. If all your Danny Brockleman found was a night of peace and rest, then the church performed the duty that Christ has given it."

"Danny said Christ had returned."

"Perhaps in his heart."

"To earth."

The priest waited for St. Aubin to laugh. He didn't.

"Danny said he had proof that no one in the science or religious world could dispute," St. Aubin said with a sincerity that surprised even him.

Father Villego laughed. "Danny Brockleman must have spent too much of his time down in the catacombs," he said.

"What's down there?"

The priest shrugged. "Graves of the old ones," he said. "Tombs of the sainted ones." He paused, then added, "And, of course, Father Aguilar takes care of them all."

"The graves?"

"The graves, the spirits, the ghosts, the things that go bump in the night." Father Villego sadly shook his head.

"Father Aguilar was the pastor of Mission San Xavier before I came. He was a good man, a compassionate man. But then he started to see things that weren't there. He called them visions. He heard voices that no one else heard. Father Aguilar went to the catacombs in sackcloth and ashes. He fasted and prayed for days, then weeks, and now years, living only on bread and water that we send down to him twice a day. His hair turned white, and he went blind, although he sees what he wants to see. It is nothing you and I can see, my son.

Finally, he quit praying. He buried his Bible in a tomb that had not been opened for years and said he found the book of Revelation there amongst the prophets, and Father Aguilar never came back from the tombs. He's there still. He speaks to no one but the voices in his head, and he talks of Christ's return as though it happened yesterday, and, for him, perhaps it did."

"Does he mention anything about a deity called Quetzalcoatl?"

Father Villego smiled softly. "It's a deity we learn about as a child, then forget when we grow old."

"But Father Aguilar hasn't forgotten."

"Old men dream dreams, some real, some imagined."

"Then you don't believe him."

"About what?"

"About the return of Christ."

Father Villego sighed deeply. "When Christ returns," he said slowly, "there will be peace in our midst." A speck of light touched his face. "Look around you, my son, walk the streets, listen to the drunkards curse, the women cry, the children die with dope in their blood, and tell me if there is any peace upon the land."

Silence hung heavily between the two men as both contemplated the priest's words. St. Aubin could not argue with him. Finally he asked quietly, "Can I speak with Farther Aguilar?"

"Certainly, but I can't guarantee that he will speak to you." Father Villego turned to walk away. "Don't let him frighten you," he said without bothering to look back at St. Aubin.

"He's harmless. But, it grieves me to say, and God forgive me that I do, but Father Aguilar is as crazy as a loon."

The faint light, perhaps from the candles, followed the priest out of the corridor, and St. Aubin found himself standing once again alone in the shadows of the night.

Chapter 56

THE STAIRS THAT descended into a series of dark, stone chambers below the mission were narrow and winding. An eerie chill blew against St. Aubin's face like an ill wind. It felt as though someone was breathing on him, and the damp passageway had the musty smell of freshly turned earth. The slender saber of flame on the red candle he held fluttered wildly and threw an odd assortment of colored shadows against the wall. The only sounds he heard was the distant trickle of running water and his own footsteps.

St. Aubin moved quietly and respectfully among the tombs, some dating back for centuries. He stumbled against the statuary of a fallen angel and almost dropped the candle as he reached out to steady himself against the rusting iron pickets of a fence that surrounded a stone sepulcher. It was weathered and cobwebbed with the black stains of age, wrapped in dried and brittle vines that had never turned green nor witnessed the light of day.

He looked past the graves and saw the fragile form of Father Aguilar framed in the archway of a stone chamber. The ancient priest was caught in the slender trappings of a faint light that seemed to come from nowhere and cast a charcoal gray pall across the catacombs. The old padre was motionless, and the light settled into the whites of his eyes. All other color had left them.

A sudden thought struck St. Aubin. Father Aguilar was already buried among the graves. All the priest had left to do was die. "I'm Andrews St. Aubin," he said and waited for the old priest to reply.

Silence, save the trickle of the running water. Father Aguilar did not even bother to glance his way. Before him, St. Aubin realized, stood the only one left who knew the answer to the riddle that had, perhaps, cost Danny B. his life. The only one who knew either the riddle or its answer was a mad man, crazy as a loon, the priest upstairs had said, a mad man who had so much to say and sat before him as a mute.

"I am a friend of Danny's," St. Aubin said, trying to make some connection with the old priest who obviously did not see him and, perhaps, did not hear him either.

The silence was unsettling.

Father Aguilar shuffled forward and seated himself on the edge of a stone vault, holding on to a rusting metal cross to keep from losing his balance. He was a wisp of a man, probably weighing less than a hundred pounds. His white hair hung long and thick upon his bent shoulders. An unkempt beard covered the pale skin that stretched tightly across the dried and wrinkled leather of his face.

St. Aubin was sure he had seen skeletons with more meat on their bones. The old priest's robe was the color of the gray light surrounding him, as ashen as his eyes. He was used to being alone. He was never aware when there was anyone else in his presence.

"You gave Danny something," St. Aubin said. A strange quiet pervaded the catacombs. St. Aubin heard his voice echo among the stone chambers or he would have heard nothing at all. "You gave Danny something," he said again, "and now it's gone."

He saw Father Aguilar turn slightly toward him. The ashen eyes were hidden from the veil of light, his head bowed as if in prayer.

"I know it was very important to you, Father," St. Aubin said.

"He left them with us," the old priest said, breaking his silence, the metallic edge to his voice surprisingly strong. "He left them as a reminder that he had come again to this earth and had come to us just as he had come to the Jews. He walked with us and among us. He healed the sick and raised the dead. He gave to us signs and wonders, and if they are gone, then he was never here at all." Father Aguilar's voice cracked as it trailed off. He looked even smaller than he had before. The whites of his eyes grew empty as an unseen wind blew the ashes away.

"Are you talking about Christ?" St. Aubin asked softly.

"He came to us as Quetzalcoatl, the winged eternity of the wind, and set up his kingdom at Tula." The old priest was matter of fact. "His skin was fair, his hair blond. He spoke in an unknown tongue no one had ever heard before but everyone understood. His journey through Mexico became a mystery, and miracles followed where he walked. He baptized more than four hundred thousand Indians, was persecuted by the sorcerers, and exiled. He died for us and arose again eight days later, ascending into the heavens as the morning star. Of that, there can be no doubt."

"What makes you believe all this?" St. Aubin inquired.

"History," the old priest said. "Facts. Not legends as the learned would have you believe." Father Aguilar pointed upward with a crooked finger, saying, "Up there, it is easy to diminish the accounts of Christ, of God, of Quetzalcoatl. Down here, he is real. Down here, he still speaks to those who hear him."

"Does he speak to you, Father?"

"He has no one else to talk to down here."

St. Aubin wondered if the old priest was mocking him.

Father Aguilar continued, "When Quetzalcoatl died, he promised to return again, just as Christ had done at the end and the beginning of his reign. When the fair-skinned Spaniards stepped ashore in the 1500s, the Indians thought that Cortes was Quetzalcoatl. They fell to their knees to worship him, and Cortes had them killed. He destroyed their city. He stole the riches that Quetzalcoatl had left behind for them."

St. Aubin started to speak, then realized he had nothing important to say. He let the old priest continue, and the old man’s words sounded like a chant, a song with only the faint trace of a melody.

"The missionaries who came with Cortes only made the trip to bring the gospel of Christianity to a godless bunch of heathens, but they learned that the godless bunch of heathens possessed a religious heritage similar to the one that the scriptures had given to them.” It was as though the old priest was reading from a book, and he had memorized every page. Same story. Different scriptures.

“Any proof he was there?” St. Aubin asked.

“Scholars and explorers have found temples, sacred images, and crosses painted on Indian statues,” the old priest said. “One stone cross had been carved with the figure of Christ the Redeemer. It was the face of Quetzalcoatl. It was a face the Spanish knew well. At the foot of the temple of Ehecatl, they saw to their astonishment a funerary monument that bore the unmistakable form of a crucifix. There could have been no crucifix without a knowledge of the cross, the burial and the resurrection.”

“So this was the God of the Aztecs,” St. Aubin said.

“No, he was the prophet, the messenger, the messiah,” the old priest said with a slight shrug. “He was the God of one. He was the God of us all. Indian paintings of Quetzalcoatl showed him wearing a conical bonnet not unlike the Papal tiara, and he carried a curved stick that missionaries realized was shaped much like a bishop's crosier. His personal cross was a St. Andrews cross. And he wore a beard.”

“A lot of men do.”

“The Aztecs had no beards to cover their faces. The missionaries discovered that the Indians knew stories that had only been told once before, and that was in the book of Genesis. Quetzalcoatl brought them to Mexico, as Christ had brought them to the Jews."

“There are many who would like to keep you quiet.”

“They assume I am already dead.”

“Are you?”

“There are days when it seems so.”

St. Aubin listened intently to the old priest and tried to separate the facts, if there were any, from the myths, and there seemed to be plenty of myths. Maybe, life itself was a myth. St. Aubin said at last, "There are many up there who don't believe you, including men of the cloth from your own church, your own faith."

"God doesn't make us do anything. He only sends his son to tell us – with signs, words, and wonders – what we should and shouldn't do. Since time began, there have always been some who believe and some who are condemned to damnation." Father Aguilar paused as the words became lodged in his throat, then he confessed, "If they are gone, then we are all condemned to damnation."

"If they were so important, Father, then why did you give them to a stranger, someone who had no connections with the church?"

"The young one did not believe, but he was a searcher of the truth." The old priest sighed sadly. "The church does not want to believe anything that interferes with what it already believes. I cannot live forever. But I could not die, knowing that the secret of the one you know as Christ would die with me."

"I will find them for you, Father," St. Aubin said, not nearly as confident as he sounded. "But I don't know what I'm looking for."

Silence.

Then the priest asked, "What happened to the young man who came to find a place of rest among the catacombs?"

"Danny?"

"If that is what he is called."

"He was killed."

"For what I gave him?"

"I don't know, Father."

The old priest faded into the gray light, but his frail voice remained behind. "When Quetzalcoatl was on his way to exile, he stopped at Tenayuca, then he proceeded on to Culhuacan," Father Aguilar said.

"He journeyed to Quauhquechula where he built for himself a temple and an altar. Within the altar, he placed the remnants from his first sojourn on earth."

"He must have had a reason."

"He brought them and left them so the Indians who knew him and those who came after the Indians would understand who he was and that he had indeed come again as he promised he would. He knew there would be doubters. There are always doubters. Holy men who read the scriptures only believe that his return will take place on the same mountain top from where he ascended into a cloud of light."

"Did he deliberately deceive them."

"He deceives no one. His only intention was to come to all men, not necessarily to the same land and to the same tribes twice."

"Has he been elsewhere?"

"I have no reason to doubt that he has. I would certainly not want to place my own humble and personal limitations on what the Son of God can and can't do, where he can or can't go, where he has or hasn't been."

St. Aubin felt drained. The coolness had fled, and the catacombs had suddenly become hot and stifling, wet and musty, devoid of any fresh air. They were indeed a place for the dead. The living had no business down among the tombs.

St. Aubin wondered why he felt so cold and how the old priest could sound so learned and so sincere about something that sounded so bizarre. But mad men, he knew, told themselves lies and believed the lies they heard from their own lips.

St. Aubin took a deep breath and chose his words slowly and deliberately, "Just what was it that Quetzalcoatl placed in the altar while he was in exile?"

An anxious silence clouded the catacombs, thick and uncertain. The gray around them turned to black. The candle in St. Aubin's hands flickered twice, then went out, the wax growing hot as it fell upon his fingers.

Father Aguilar's words were a distant echo, soft and muffled. "The nails," he said. "He brought with him the nails from the cross."

St. Aubin narrowed his eyes and stared hard into a misty cavern of total darkness. He moved cautiously past the graves, slipped around the iron fence and stepped onto the damp stone vault where the old priest had been sitting.

Father Aguilar was gone if he had ever been there at all.

Chapter 57

ANDREWS ST. AUBIN had ridden for the past forty-five minutes in the back seat of a second hand work bus that was throwing black smoke in every direction and plowing its way from crossroad to crossroad, inching ever closer to the village of Clarkdale. He had waited around with day laborers beside a Valero Station on the edge of Tucson until the bus came along to carry them to the Searchlight Minerals Corporation, where men were still trying to extract gold, silver, copper, and zinc from twenty million tons of slag that had spilled out of the historic United Verde Copper Mine. St. Aubin had no intention of working the impact mill or leaching tank, but the bus would get him within six miles of Jerome without the cost of a ticket.

No one on the bus had apparently bathed for days, including St. Aubin. The priest's sandals hurt his feet, and the leather straps were rubbing blisters across his ankles. His shirt was torn and burned in places, his hair matted and clotted with the same blood that stained his clothes. He might not have made it this far if it had been his own blood.

The stench around him seemed unbearable until he finally grew used to it on an old and winding road just south of the last place Danny B. had gone on his own accord. A man in overalls sat in from him. He had a bullet hole in the brim of his straw hat, and he was cursing every pot hole the bus hit. A man beside him clutched his rosary beads and prayed just a little harder each time he glanced over and glimpsed the long-barrel pistol shoved into St. Aubin’s belt.

St. Aubin smiled. The aging man closed his eyes, threw his head back, and the only word he spoke that St. Aubin recognized was Dios, which, he decided, was probably the only word that really amounted to anything anymore.

He could still picture the frail Father Aguilar in his mind. Had they really met in light as gray as the hour before dawn, or was the priest who talked to visions merely a fragment of his own insanity, not unlike the dead man. Why did he believe the old priest when he had never before believed anything that had to do with religion, organized or otherwise? The Bible was a good book, he supposed, full of hope and peace, love and nightmares, and little else.

The boiling dust outside the bus filtered through a crack in the window. The air conditioner lost its battle with the heat and quit running altogether. St. Aubin went over in his mind, point by point, the reasons why he was on a crowded bus bound for Jerome, where men sold their souls to the highest bidder and gave away their souls for a bottle of tequila.

One. Richard Brockleman had wanted St. Aubin to recover the artifact that Danny B. said would prove to be the undeniable, unmistakable, and irrefutable proof that Christ had already kept his promise, fulfilled the prophecy in the scriptures, and returned to earth, healing the sick and raising the dead in Mexico, whether preachers or religious leaders were ready or not to acknowledge the fact.

Two. Danny B. had been given the artifacts by a crazy man who had the misfortune of wearing the robe of a priest.

Three. If the crazy man wasn't lying or mistaken, what Danny B. had had in his possession, for probably less than forty-eight hours, were the blood-stained nails that had been hammered into the hands and feet of Christ before he was hung upon a cross.

Four. Now the nails were missing.

Five. They were certainly not in Danny B.'s clothes when his battered and tortured body arrived in Dallas, stuffed into the cattle car of an odd little freight train whose only passengers had been illegal aliens and a dead man.

Six. He had tried to track the last movements of Danny B., but the only man who might have known them, Raul Saenz, died with a sniper's bullet splintering the back of his head.

Seven. The sniper had been Espiritu.

Eight. Now Espiritu, the ghostly one, the unholy one, was wandering the backroads in hell with Raul Saenz and his whore as well.

Nine. Richard Brockleman had no doubt sent him to Mexico to see if he might be fortunate enough to stumble across the man or men who killed his brother.

Ten. That was done. Lazaro Fuentes and Espiritu, God rest their souls, had already had breakfast this morning with Danny Brockleman, provided they all wound up in the same place, and, considering the unsavory, violent lives they led, they probably had.

Eleven. Where had Danny B. gone when he left the Mission San Xavier del Bac, carrying the nails that had been entrusted him by an old priest who was afraid he would die and the secret, the mystery, of the nails would die with him?

Twelve. Sebastian Drabek said Danny B. often found refuge in Jerome when he needed to get away and hide for a couple of days.

Thirteen. Sebastian said Danny B. drank with the ghost.

Fourteen. All St. Aubin had to do was find the ghost.

Fifteen: Had the ghost been Espiritu, or was it something else?

Fifteen. Maybe the ghost had the nails.

Sixteen. Maybe the ghost had always had the nails.

St. Aubin only had to answer two questions, then he could go home again, if he had a home and could find it.

Where were the nails?

And who was trying to kill him?

Espiritu had pulled the trigger when the first sniper fired at him and hit poor Raul Saenz instead. But a second bullet had been fired at him as well. Who fired the second? And who had given a lowly priest the bomb he carried to blow Andrews St. Aubin to kingdom come?

Andrews St. Aubin was the only passenger to depart the bus when it stopped at a cross street just below the dying town of Jerome.

The others probably knew better.

Jerome clung desperately to the steep slope of Cleopatra’s Hill. The winding streets wandered drunkenly through the town, and it seemed that no two of them ever crossed. In the heat of an August afternoon, the sidewalks were empty. The few stores still open had shut down for the day. Most of the buildings had been shuttered long ago and would no doubt be closed forever. The bricks were crumbling, the paint faded by an unforgiving sun, and the tin roofs were rusting, partially torn from their frames by the wind. The rich mines were deserted, and piles of slag had been left in piles on the hillsides. Once Jerome had been the richest and wickedest town in Arizona. The riches were obviously gone. St. Aubin decided that wicked had not chosen to leave. A dust devil blew past his sandals.

The magnum lay heavy in St. Aubin's belt, hidden by the tail of his shirt, flapping in the hot afternoon breeze that felt as though it was escaping from somewhere deep inside the devil's own oven. If the devil were indeed searching for a place to call home, Jerome assuredly had everything he needed.

St. Aubin figured that the barren and deserted town even had its share of sin if a man looked hard enough and didn't mind waiting until the sun went down. Girls of ill repute had certainly leaned on the upstairs balcony, but their thirst for love played out about the same time the copper ore did. St. Abuin stood beside a lamp post, letting his gaze run east to west, from one end of the deserted village to the other.

The Holy Family Catholic Church, where miners had come to pray, was wedged against a street higher up the hill. A bell rope whipped back and forth in the wind. A single bell rang a lonely dirge in case anyone was listening. Farther down the hill, past the cribs where ladies of the night sold their wares on Hulls Avenue, St. Aubin could glimpse a haphazard assortment of broken and weathered tombstones, the kind that peons left in the hard earth. Some of the graves were encased in wrought iron fences. Wooden crosses lay on the ground among mounds of rock and tortured earth. It did not appear that anyone had dug a grave for a long time. The years had left the cemetery in ruins.

The door of the general store was open. A farmer, perhaps a miner, maybe even a tourist, stepped outside, pausing long enough to light a filter tip cigarrette. He paid no attention to St. Aubin. The unwashed were not uncommon in Jerome. At the far end of the street, set apart from the rest of the village, a wooden sign with hand painted letters proclaimed the Connor Hotel. Music from a jukebox worked its way outside the Spirit Room Bar. The record must be as old as the bar, St. Aubin thought. It was easier to hear the static than the guitars, and the loose-tongued woman singing sounded like a squalling momma cat in heat.

St. Aubin studied the sign: The Spirit Room. There was nothing special about it unless someone wanted to drift inside, out of the heat, and drink where the spirits had been. Was it referring to liquor or a ghost? Would old Sebastian have even known the difference? Maybe this was where Danny B. had indeed sat down and drank with the ghost. It was probably as accurate as Sebastian had been in years.

St. Aubin strode across the street. No traffic. No tourists. No miners. No harlots. Nothing. If Jerome had its ghosts, they had all packed up and left for the summer. St. Aubin felt better than he looked. But then, he knew, there were dead men who looked better than he did at the moment. Dead men hadn't gone through what he had.

Death was still looking for him, and that could age a man. St. Aubin stepped from the harsh glare of the sun into the dimly-lit interior of the Spirit Room Bar.

It was pretty much what he expected. Drinking tables. Pool tables. A juke box. An empty stage. A bar. Shelves filled with liquor to satisfy the thirsty, as well as those with discriminating tastes. Some of the bottles hadn’t been opened in a long time. A ceiling fan creaked and groaned. The light bulbs had already been turned off to keep the room from becoming any hotter. A thin coat of dust had collected on the bar, and a sign on the wall said: No Running, no sniveling, and no smoking. The bar, a relic from another time, had been burned by cigarettes and scarred by its share of knife fights. The barkeep brushed back a shock of white hair and poured mescal into a glass stained by grease and fingerprints.

In the corner, a Mestizo had placed a wrinkled five dollar bill on the top of a cigar box and would keep drinking cheap mescal until the five dollars were gone and the worm was dead. It wouldn't be long now.

St. Aubin sat down beside the Mestizo. His mouth was as dry as the dust that had followed him from Phoenix. He couldn't escape it, nor the heat. He had five dollars and some loose change in his pocket, probably just enough to buy either a taco or a beer, but not both. He reluctantly weighed his options and settled for the beer. It wasn't cold, but it was wet enough to choke down the grit and dust in his teeth. A man doesn't order his last meal until he's ready to die, St. Aubin told himself. The meal could wait.

The Mestizo passed out, his head falling heavily on top of the bar. The barkeep pocketed the entire five dollars. The Mestizo, when he awoke, if he ever awoke, would never know the difference anyway.

St. Aubin sat down on a bar stool and pulled the photograph of Danny B. from his shirt pocket. He pressed it against the top of the bar, trying without success to flatten out the wrinkles. "Do you know this man?" he asked the barkeep.

"He comes here."

"When was he here last?"

"It's been a few days."

"Alone?"

"Almost always alone."

"Do you know who he was?"

The old man shrugged. "I don't even know who killed him," he said.

"How did you know he was dead?"

"Word gets around."

"Who told you?"

"I hear people talk when they drink my beer and tequila," he said. "They say he died. That's all."

"Anybody see what happened?"

"People who stay alive never see what happens."

"And that includes you."

The barkeep’s grin widened. "Especially me," he said.

"Where did Danny B. go when he left here."

The old man shrugged again before saying matter-of-factly, "The cemetery, I guess." He turned away, picked up a wet rag and began wiping away the dust that had collected on the bottles. St. Aubin felt himself flush with anger. All he wanted was a few simple and honest answers, and the barkeep had suddenly turned into a wise ass.

Where else did dead people go, if not to the cemetery? The music on the jukebox ground to a halt, and the white-haired man shuffled, as though he didn't have a care in the world, across the worn wooden floor and inserted another coin. He stood there awhile, the neon lights exploring the pockmarks in his face, his long, crooked fingers keeping time with a song that sounded much too modern to be playing in the desert reaches of Jerome.

St. Aubin climbed off the stool and ambled toward the window. He watched the last traces of a whirling dervish sweep wildly down the hillside from the brick and red rock chapel and on toward the rock-strewn gulch that held the final resting place for poor and miserable souls who had come to Jerome and would never leave.

St. Aubin's shoulders stiffened, and reality struck him like a sudden bolt of runaway lightning. The old barkeep wasn't being a wise ass, he thought. The old barkeep was dead serious. Danny B. had gone to the cemetery when he left the bar, he had said. The old barkeep could see him through the same window where St. Aubin was standing.

And what was it that Richard Brockleman had told him? Danny B. spends a lot of time in cemeteries was what Brockleman had said. Danny B. finds a lot of things in cemeteries. He was given the nails from the cross in one. Would he also hide something, like nails from the cross, in a cemetery where no one comes to bury the dead anymore, where no one in his right mind would ever think to look?

St. Aubin searched the dark recesses of his mind, and, somewhere down beneath the fog that cloaked his memory, he recalled the fragmented pieces of a scripture that had been hidden far too long. It had to do something with a crucifixion on a mount called Golgotha, which was known, if King James hadn't been mistaken, as the place of a skull.

The dull pain left the back of his neck. The beer had not deadened it. St. Aubin couldn't keep himself from laughing. The barkeep probably thought he was drunk, a one-beer-in-the-middle-of-the-afternoon-on-a-hot-day kind of drunk. Let him think what he wanted to. Andrews St. Aubin left the Spirit Room Bar and began walking down toward the place of skulls. It wasn’t a gentle climb. The rock cut his feet through the thin souls of the sandals. The brush had thorns. The scattered dead limbs that hung over the weathered tombstones were cracking in the wind, and the wind was whistling through the cracks in the broken glass windows of a ghost town that lay behind him.

His eyes scanned the names on the tombstones: Jorge. Juan. Maria. Manuel. Alberto. Elissa. Jesus. Ishmael. Yolanda. Javier.

St. Aubin knelt in the dry, brittle grasses and looked at the gentle mounds of rock and earth. It was impossible to tell if anyone had recently dug in the hard dirt. The wind brought the dust and took it away, covering and uncovering the graves at will.

St. Aubin tried to think like Danny B. What would he have done, and what would have caused him to do it?

St. Aubin studied the names on the tombstones again, slower this time: Jorge. Juan. Maria. Manuel. Alberto. Elissa. Jesus. Ishmael. Yolanda. Javier.

The choice was obvious, considering the nature of the relics that had been buried in the unforgiving ground of Jerome.

He picked up an old wooden bucket that lay beside a dry well, knelt again, and slowly began digging in the grave beneath the tombstone that bore the name of Jesus. The dirt was hard and packed, the edge of the bucket worn and dull.

The sun bore without mercy or remorse between his shoulder blades. The salt from his own sweat burned his eyes. A dog slinked past. A tumbleweed, coming from nowhere and headed in the same direction, rolled against Elissa's tombstone, stayed a minute or two, then rolled on. An old Pontiac clattered down the dirt street, coughing and in doubt of making it as far as the high side of Jerome.

St. Aubin had managed to scoop two buckets full of dirt from the mound and was working on the third when he heard a sound that, somewhere in his past, he had heard before. He knew what it was. He didn't know why he knew. Like the sudden rattle of a diamondback on a desert in the dead of night, the ominous sound of a hammer being cocked back on a revolver is not easily mistaken nor forgotten.

St. Aubin quit digging and slumped to his knees. He waited to hear the revolver fire, quick, sudden and always unexpected, even when it's expected. He did not turn around. St. Aubin did not want for his last sight on earth to be the face of the man who killed him, and he wondered, for a brief moment, if he would hear the shot before he felt the impact of the bullet tearing deep into his flesh.

The hot muzzle of the revolver pressed hard against his neck, just above the dirty neckline of his frayed shirt. "Keep digging," the voice behind him said. "Keep digging until its wide enough and deep enough to throw your ass inside."

St. Aubin did not recognize the voice. But then, he had never been introduced, formally or otherwise, to General Donald Draper, retired.

Chapter 58

LIFE FOR ANDREWS St. Aubin had always been obliquely separated by time and place. Then and now. Day and night. Before and after. Once and again. Today and tomorrow. Light and dark. Near and far. One end from the other. Lost and found. He was always stranded somewhere in the middle, as he was now. If there was a good day to die, and surely there was, St. Aubin thought, this was probably the one, the last moments of life soaking like his blood amidst the dust that lay upon the place of skulls.

He was tired, thirsty and hungry. His back ached, and the hammer, keeping time with the beat of his heart, had returned to pound the back of his head. He had blisters on his feet and his fingers, one from walking in a dead priest’s leather sandals and the other from digging with a wooden bucket. Thank God the general had brought a shovel from the trunk of his car, even it was meant for him to use while digging his own grave.

General Donald Draper, if he remembered the name correctly, jammed the .44 Magnum revolver into St. Aubin's back, just below the rib cage, and pushed him into the Spirit Room Bar as the last light of day was creeping toward and beyond the mountains.

Jerome was surrounded by a distant purple haze that would soon usher in the night. St. Aubin had dug in the grave of Jesus until there was no reason to dig anymore. He and the general left a hole at least four feet wide and three feet deep. They found the dried bones of some peasant named Jesus, lying in the rotten remains of a wooden casket, but nothing else. It was a grave big enough to hold St. Aubin if they rolled him up in a ball.

St. Aubin, with little to go on except guile and instinct, had grasped for lost straws, made what he considered to be a calculated guess, and guessed wrong. It hadn't been the first time. It could well be the last.

St. Aubin sat down beside the table closest to the jukebox, his face spackled by the blues, reds, and yellows of neon. An empty Corona bottle had fallen to the floor at his feet. It had been empty long before St. Aubin stumbled into the bar with Draper's big hand wrapped around his throat.

St. Aubin was convinced that he should know what to do in these kinds of situations. He was supposed to have faced them in times past when he was somebody besides Andrews St. Aubin. He frantically searched deep into the dark and distant confines of his mind, but they remained dark and distant.

The general leaned against the bar, dressed in camouflage fatigues and combat boots. There were three stars on his shoulder, and St. Aubin remembered seeing them glistening in the moonlight outside the Casa de la Luna the night Raul Saenz died. The face was familiar as well. The general had ridden in the funeral procession that carried Lazaro Fuentes to the burying ground, then spent the night with a school teacher from Mississippi who seemed to sleep with a lot of unsavory characters, one of them being Andrews St. Aubin.

The general had a distinct square face, chiseled jaw, close-cropped graying hair, and a scowl that remained a scowl even when he smiled, which was seldom. The general was all business, and this was obviously not the first time he had ever held a .44 revolver or fired one. St. Aubin's own .357 Magnum lay on top of the bar beside Draper, well out of reach.

The old barkeep sat slumped in a straw-backed chair beneath the dusty shelf that held his stock of beer, tequila, and whiskey. His eyes had rolled back into his head, a small patch of blood drying in matted streaks just below his left eye. His white hair no longer needed combing.

The noble General Donald Draper had shot him while the old man was pouring a glass of mescal. The glass still sat there untouched. The wrinkle-faced old man had died before the worm.

Curiosity finally got the best of St. Aubin. He broke the silence. "I assume there's some reason you're keeping me alive," he said.

"If it were up to me, you'd already be laying in the grave outside and turning cold," Draper replied, holding the revolver as gently, as lovingly as he would a child. Then again, he had probably never been that close to a child. "But Mitchell wants the map you stole from my room. He wants to know what you’ve told, to whom you’ve told it, and he wants to watch you die," Draper continued. “He would have already been here if Valek's plane had been on time."

St. Aubin shifted his weight in the chair, but it didn't lessen the pain. "What if I no longer have the map?"

"Then it'll be over." Draper laughed, or maybe he coughed. It was difficult to determine with his face shaded by the darkness. “Personally, I think you were trying to bury the map. All we have to do is find where you conveniently tucked it away.”

“What’s so important about the map?”

The general laughed loudly. “If you were still around a week from tomorrow, you’d know,” he said. “Then again, Mitchell is afraid you already know. Maybe a lot. Maybe a little. In this game, even a little knowledge can get you killed.

St. Aubin stared at the general, his faced masked with genuine bewilderment. There were times, he knew, when it was better to feign ignorance, and this was not one of them. St. Aubin decided to act as though he knew what the general was talking about even though he was in the dark as black as the interior of the Spirit Room Bar. He smiled and shrugged. "You know it won't work," he said, bluffing.

"What won't work?"

"Your plan is too complex, too complicated, and it has too many holes in it."

Draper said, "We figure Brockleman told you all about certain aspects of the operation. The map provides you with the smoking gun. That's why we can't keep you alive, St. Aubin. You're his man, but he's our man. You know too much, and we can't afford to leave any witnesses behind when we walk out of Mexico. Witnesses beg and swear they won't talk, but, sooner or later, they always do. They'll promise you anything to save their worthless lives. But there's only one way to keep a secret a secret. I guess you know all about that, St. Aubin."

St. Aubin’s expression never changed. If Draper had surprised him, he would never know it. The name the General was throwing around so casually, the name of Richard Brockleman, knifed wickedly into St. Aubin's senses, the first five, as well as the sixth. A moment ago, he had been ready to accept the inevitable. Now he wasn't. His nerves were taut and on edge again, no longer frayed, no longer willing to wither up and die. The mental chess game that St. Aubin was playing with the general had within those two words, Richard Brockleman, grown more serious and intense.

He was the pawn, and it was his move.

He sat back and propped his sandals on top of the bar before saying, "I don’t have the map,” St. Aubin said. “The government does. Your problem, general, is to figure out which government and what it will do about your sinful ways.”

Draper's scowl became as dark as the shadows on his face. "The little tricks that kept you alive in the Serbian prison camp won't work any more," he said. "You may have changed, St. Aubin, but not nearly as much as we have."

St. Aubin's eyes grew hard with indignation. It sometimes seemed that everyone knew more about him than he did. The more he learned, the less he wanted to know about the man he was. He was afraid to find out too much about the man who wore his face. St. Aubin did not think he liked the man who lurked on the far side of a merciful veil that concealed his past. St. Aubin, having nothing better to do than stay alive, kept bluffing.

"When are you and Mitchell going to put this ingenious little plan of yours in motion?" he asked.

"As soon as you're out of the way." The general was as calm as if he were talking about the weather changing from sunshine to rain. "We've tried to stop the illegal flow of drugs with diplomacy, with customs officials as corrupt as the drug lords, with threats and border patrols, but nothing's worked. The illegal aliens keep right on coming, and the drugs keep flowing. Nothing's worked. Well, by gawd, I'll bet all three of my stars that Operation Taps will work. By tomorrow night, I'll have a small force on the ground and, within twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the most, Mexico will be in a state of confusion and making high-dollar funeral plans for every big-time drug lord in the country. Of course, we don't have to worry about Fuentes any more. You had the pleasure of taking him out for us."

St. Aubin did his best to suppress the shock that threaded its way through his mind. The magnitude of the general's plan was as insane as it was overwhelming. St. Aubin picked up the glass from the bar, held it up and let the worm turn yellow, then red, in the glow of neon. "What happens to your troops when it's over?" he asked.

"They'll be in and out before those sonuvabitches ever figure out what hit 'em."

"Was this invasion your idea, general?"

"I wouldn't call it an invasion, St. Aubin."

"When you attack a foreign country – I don't care whether you use a handful of troops or an entire division – I call it an invasion." St. Aubin spit with indignation, but his mouth was so dry he had nothing to spit.

"The man closest to the President thought it up." Draper frowned as he opened a warm Corona, even though beer, especially Mexican beer, had never been good enough for him. He detested the taste. He hated waiting for Mitchell even more. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that St. Aubin hadn't moved. He hadn't.

"Mitchell hammered out the details," he said.

"And the President approved it?"

"What the President doesn't know can't come back and ruin a brilliant career."

"Then he's in the dark."

"It's better that way."

St. Aubin heard the faint rustle of footsteps moving silently along the dusty street outside the bar. It couldn't be Mitchell lurking in the darkness. If he had Mitchell figured correctly, the self-anointed genius behind the operation would come bursting into the bar, an Uzi cradled in his arm, ready to go to war or start one.

"Then the government's not financing your little operation, general."

"It was a damn sight easier to talk one man into shelling out the money than convince every bleeding heart who sits in Congress."

"I assume that I know the man who didn’t have any better sense than to bankroll your little nightmare."

A wry grin creased Draper's face. The stale beer, even a Mexican beer, on a hot evening in a hot bar wasn't nearly as bad as he thought it would be. "You probably know him better than we do, St. Aubin," he said. "Richard Brockleman happens to think that what we're doing is a sterling idea. Fifty-four million of his good, honest dollars have made it all possible."

St. Aubin tried to fight it, but he knew his face had turned pale. He felt the blood leave it. Perhaps the loss of color wasn't noticeable in the dark. "He's not that kind of man," St. Aubin protested.

General Draper laughed, and this time it was genuine. "Richard Brockleman became that kind of man the night he found his brother's body in a railroad car," he said. "He was ready to do anything he could to avenge Danny's death. We simply showed him a way to get it done."

St. Aubin felt his hands trembling. The missing parts were all starting to tumble back in place. The riddles that made no sense suddenly had answers. "You and Mitchell even orchestrated that, too, didn't you?" St. Aubin said, his words barely audible.

"We didn't kill Danny," Draper answered. "Fuentes, as you know, was responsible for that. Danny had simply learned too many things about Fuentes and his drug operation, so he obviously had to be terminated. Fuentes, I'm afraid, really had no choice."

"And it was you, no doubt, who provided Danny B. with his information."

"Mitchell thought it was our duty to share what we had learned."

"That was his death warrant. But you knew all along it would mark him for execution, didn't you?"

"Danny was no virgin. He was aware of the risks involved with his job."

"His death certainly made things convenient for you."

"I'll admit it came at an opportune time."

Now the disjointed words of Raul Saenz were beginning to make sense. He had blamed the Shadows, or at least the operatives who worked in the shadows of secrecy. St. Aubin was in the presence of one. But only one of the two men still living in the Spirit Room Bar had a gun, and it wasn't Andrews St. Aubin.

St. Aubin said, "So you dug him up, shipped Danny B. home to Brockleman, and played on the emotions of a heart-broken, grieving, old man, fast talking him out of his money so you could go to war and let him seek his measure of revenge in Mexico."

Draper sighed, polishing the barrel of the .44 Magnum with the tail of his shirt. "We did what we thought was necessary," he said.

"Did that include killing Raul Saenz, too?"

"He knew too much."

"About Fuentes?"

"About the whole damn operation. He even told us where Danny was buried. We never planned to take him out, just keep him under wraps and out of the way. Looking back, however, I guess we were fortunate that Espiritu took the head shot. Sooner or later, we would have had a loose end to tie up whether we wanted to or not."

"How did Raul know where the grave was located?"

"Fuentes paid him a thousand dollars to bury Danny." Draper saw the expression on St. Aubin's face and laughed again. "This close to the border, everybody is on somebody else's payroll. Policemen. Judges. Union leaders. Government officials. Beggars in the street. Even D.E.A. agents. They'll sell their souls for a dollar and buy yours for fifty cents, dead or alive."

"Is that what I'm worth?"

"No, St. Aubin. I'll shoot you for free."

The rustling of muffled and silent footsteps stopped just outside the front door. St. Aubin could tell by watching Draper that the general had not heard them. The old barkeep no longer heard anything. The jukebox had lost its voice, and the general was busy opening another bottle of warm beer.

St. Aubin turned to face the doorway. He knew who was coming. St. Aubin simply wondered why it had taken him so long to find Jerome.

The dead man walked into the bar, his hands thrust deeply inside his Navy woolen overcoat. The wound in his chest had opened up, and fresh blood was soaking through his blue sweater. The rest of him was the color of cold ashes. St. Aubin did not bother looking him in the eyes. He knew the eyes weren't there.

"Did you get lost?" St. Aubin asked.

"What?" Draper asked, suddenly lost himself.

The dead man shuffled across the worn planks, eased past the jukebox and seated himself atop the knife-scarred bar. St. Aubin had never been able to figure out the expression on the dead man's face. Was it sad, full of self-pity, aloof, or even aware of where he was and why he was there.

"I thought you had forsaken me," St. Aubin said.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Draper asked, a worried frown suddenly working a crease into his face.

St. Aubin heard the dead man speak for the first time.

"I've tried," he said, "but it's not possible."

St. Aubin did not understand the language, but he understood the words as though there was some bond between the two, between the dead and the living, that made some semblance of sense even when it didn't.

The dead man continued, "The night I died, I wasn't supposed to die."

"Did I kill you?" St. Aubin asked.

"What makes you think I'm dead?" Draper bellowed nervously.

"I was simply supposed to meet you and deliver you a package," the dead man said, his voice as ragged and old as the ages. "I don't even know what was in the package. The bullet was meant for you."

The dead man sighed as though his shoulders were weary from carrying the burden with him for so many years. "I got in the way. I died for you that night, and now I can't leave this earth until you die as well."

"It may not be long," St. Aubin said.

"That's what I think, too." The dead man sighed again. "I'm so tired," he said. "I'm so tired of being neither here nor there but caught somewhere in between."

Draper slammed the beer bottle hard on top of the bar. He grabbed St. Aubin and jerked him around. "What's going on?" he demanded to know. "Who the hell are you talking to? It certainly isn't me."

St. Aubin ignored him. He stood up and walked toward the dead man. "I'm sorry," he said.

"You've always been frightened of me," the dead man said, "and not once have I ever tried to hurt you."

"I was afraid of what I thought I'd done."

Again St. Aubin felt the hot muzzle of the .44 Magnum buried in the back of his neck. This time, it was trembling in the general's hands. Poor General Draper, he thought. He sees nothing and hears nothing, and what he doesn't see or hear scares him more than what he does.

"I don't care whether Mitchell gets here or not," Draper barked. "I don't care what you know or where you’ve put the goddam map. I don't give a damn one way or the other. But you scare me, St. Aubin. Crazy men scare me sometimes. I don't think you're afraid to die, and a man who's not afraid to die is a dangerous man. I don't know what little mind games you think you're playing, but they're over for good."

St. Aubin looked at the dead man.

The dead man shrugged.

The look was one of sadness after all.

The dead man pulled something that resembled a P-08 German Luger from his coat pocket. It was difficult to tell exactly what kind of weapon it was in the dark interior of the bar. It only looked big and cold and deadly.

There was, St. Aubin decided, nothing quite as ominous as a ghost with a gun. St. Aubin heard the hammer cock on the .44 Magnum.

The general would simply shoot him, then offer some explanation to Mitchell later while the drug lords were dying in Mexico. St. Aubin didn't know anything, the general would say. He was just out chasing wild geese, and a wild goose ended his life. The general and Mitchell would be drinking hard whiskey and laughing while St. Aubin and the dead man were making their way together toward never never land.

St. Aubin stared hard at the dead man, holding the Luger as though it was strange and a little awkward in his pale hands. The veins were blue, webbed and bulging beneath his thin, translucent skin, but there was no pulse in any of them. "Are you going to shoot him?" St. Aubin said, knowing it would probably be the last question he ever asked.

"Damn right, I'm going to shoot you," Draper snapped, his voice coarse.

The beer had not been able to wash down the fear he was tasting.

St. Aubin heard the shot. It was loud, the sound of thunder when the sky is angry and the clouds have refused to rain.

He felt nothing. Maybe that was the way of death.

He stared at the dead man. The dead man had not even looked up.

St. Aubin heard General Donald Draper collapse heavily onto the floor behind him. He turned slowly around. Draper lay face down, motionless. There was a hole in the back of his head slightly bigger than St. Aubin's fist. The green around the collar of his camouflage fatigues was wet and turning red. His three stars were no longer shining.

St. Aubin looked up and saw Carol Ann McCarthy standing in the doorway, her face as hard as her eyes. She was chewing gum and holding a lightweight Glock 27 steady with both hands. She used the hot barrel to brush the hair out of her eyes.

St. Aubin tried to imagine her again in silk and lace and found that the acrid smell of gunpowder in the air around him had fogged his memory. Instead, he wondered if the next bullet was meant for him.

Carol Ann lowered the Glock and swayed seductively, but with purpose, across the bar floor while St. Aubin knelt beside the lifeless form of Donald Draper. She kicked the .44 Magnum out of the general's hand before glancing coldly at St. Aubin.

"You gonna check and see if he's dead?" St. Aubin asked.

"It's not necessary."

"I guess I should thank you," he said.

"That's not necessary either," Carol Ann told him.

"I guess there's an explanation for why you're here."

She smiled, but it was not as warm nor as gentle as St. Aubin remembered. "The government pays me to keep an eye on Mitchell. Mitchell pays me to keep an eye on Draper. Draper paid me to keep in eye on Fuentes. Fuentes paid me to keep an eye on you." Her smile broadened. "I do all right," she said.

"I kept my eyes on you for nothing," St. Aubin said.

"It happens sometimes."

St. Aubin looked down at Draper. His face had turned a powder white. St. Aubin reached down and closed the general's eyes, even though he never figured out why. "Did this particular bullet cost Mitchell?" he asked, wondering why the mysterious Mister Mitchell would want his partner dead in the middle of a war not yet begun.

"The government decided that Mitchell and Draper were becoming just a little too reckless. They only work for the government. They aren't the government," she said, her voice as chilled and emotionless as her eyes had become. "It was necessary for somebody to cancel them."

"You've got a helluva job," St. Aubin said.

"I'm very good at it," she answered.

"I can tell," he admitted, his gaze falling upon Draper's corpse. "How about Mitchell?"

Carol Ann McCarthy, still clutching her Glock, her arm hanging loosely at her side, began walking toward the doorway, the neon light of a silent jukebox spilling softly and tenderly across her face. Without the Glock, St. Aubin thought, she would be the most beautiful woman in Jerome, perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Perhaps, she was even lovelier with the Glock, depending on whether she had come to save your life or end it.

"He's out there somewhere," she said.

St. Aubin watched as the dead man stuffed the Luger back into the pocket of the woolen overcoat and followed her out into the darkness, leaving him alone again, immersed in the stilted odor of death, dust, and decaying wood.

Chapter 59

JEROME WAS AS QUIET as the inside of a tomb. The gunshots had done little to disturb the village. Windows had been dimmed by dark and dust, and no one was foolish enough to venture out into the streets. Shades of an early night had descended upon the brittle landscape. By the time a relentless sun had returned to the little ghost town, Jerome would be mourning one of its own and trying to determine why a stranger had died in their midst.

St. Aubin figured the village would probably bury them both without ever calling anyone associated with the law. It was easier that way. The killer had been killed, and whoever killed the killer deserved to be free. What was there left for the law to do?

Andrews St. Aubin made his way back to the cemetery, its caked mounds of hard dirt sprinkled by the scattered, callused light of a half moon. He walked past the hole beneath the tombstone that read Jesus, the hole that, according to Draper, should have been St. Aubin's final resting place. He wanted his grave covered with grass and wildflowers, dug into a soft earth and moistened by mountain rains in summertime. He would leave the desert land of Jerome to those less fortunate, although he sometimes wondered if there were any less fortunate than he.

They knew who they were, and he didn't want to know.

St. Aubin knelt in the moonlight, and his eyes slowly and carefully scanned the graves again, pausing to study each tombstone hammered into the sun-backed earth. Some were wood, some made of stone.

Danny B. had come to Jerome to escape and hadn't. If he had the time before he was hauled away to meet his Maker, he would have hidden the nails from the cross somewhere close to where he had drunk his last glass of sour tequila.

These graves were as good a place as any. One of the wooden markers had been fashioned in the shape of a cross, broken and lying against a wrought iron fence. Maria, it said. Maria, St. Aubin thought, Spanish for Mary. Mary, he thought, the virgin mother of Jesus, the one who had given him birth and wept at the foot of the cross when her son was nailed to a tree.

St. Aubin smiled to himself. There was a strange, bristling sensation at the base of his scalp. Danny B. knew all about deception. The narrow grave marked Jesus was the logical choice for him to hide the holy nails, which meant, in the frantic, desperate mind of Danny B., it had not been the logical place at all.

Danny B. did not dig. He would not have had enough time, and his actions would have been far too obvious, even in the aging remains of an old mining village where men were born for no other reason than to dig out other men’s gold and die far too young and mostly too often.

St. Aubin crawled to the head of the grave and grabbed the weathered stone at the foot of the cross, the one marked Maria, with both hands. He slowly rocked it back and forth in the dirt, slowly and methodically pulling the stone out of the earth. St. Aubin rolled up his sleeves and reached down into the rectangular hole no more than thirteen inches deep.

His fingers felt the soft leather of a goatskin pouch. He pulled it to the surface, untied the leather strings and poured four dull-pointed pieces of metal onto the ground. They attracted the moonlight the way a metal rod attracts lightning. St. Aubin looked at them for a long time.They were longer than he expected, and heavier, thick with rust. Or was it blood? He didn't know, and might not ever know.

They certainly did not look like any nails he had ever seen, but then, he had never laid his eyes on Roman spikes before. St. Aubin gingerly and reverently picked up the nails and dropped them back into the goatskin pouch. He did not know whether to be exhilarated or disappointed. They were nails all right. But what did they prove? They could have come from anywhere. All he had to back the claim that Danny B. made were the rantings of a mad priest and the writings of a mad priest who had been separated by five centuries.

St. Aubin saw the headlights of a car coming up the winding, narrow road long before he heard the quiet roar of the engine. The headlights were shining more brightly than the moon, which had turned pale, the color of the dead man's face. Was it Carol Ann returning, he wondered, or the mysterious Mister Mitchell? Regardless of who it was, would the other be far behind? Were they coming for each other, or for him?

St. Aubin instinctively felt to make sure that his .357 Magnum and Draper's .44 revolver were still shoved inside his belt. He did not have enough firepower to fight a large war, but, he decided, if less than twenty shots were fired, he would do fine. All he needed was one bullet, maybe two. St. Aubin had never been a wasteful man, not to his knowledge anyway.

He began crawling on his belly past the abandoned well and beneath the dead limbs of an oak tree that had once brought promise but not much shade to Jerome.

St. Aubin pressed himself against the side of the Cribbs, hidden from the cascading and translucent glare of the half moon that the clouds had cut into quarters. He watched the Buick pull up to the front of the Connor Hotel and park. The only light in downtown Jerome was spilling through its doorway of the Spirit Room Bar.

The car door opened, and the population of Jerome had suddenly swelled by two. The population of its cemetery would grow by at least three graves, maybe more, before morning. Two – the poor, old bar keep and the arrogant but careless Donald Draper – had already breathed their last. Who would occupy the final graves was still in question.

The smaller of the two men was balding and wore glasses. He seemed to be in charge. Mitchell, no doubt. The other stood rigid like a Marine officer. For Mitchell, it was simply another day of doing what he did best. The Marine no doubt enjoyed the hunt, but probably not as much as the kill.

St. Aubin sighed and sank back into the long shadows that spilled from the vacant buildings and webbed the street with patterned crosses of their own.

Roger Valek slung his a semi-automatic rifle over his shoulder and trotted down the street to secure the perimeter of Jerome.

Paul Mitchell walked briskly into the Spirit Room Bar, fully expecting to find the very elusive Andrews St. Aubin cowering on one side of a .44 Magnum, General Donald Draper standing insolently on the other. He and St. Aubin would share a drink and discuss old times. Then St. Aubin would drain his glass and die.

Mitchell might make it easier for him to exit this life. He might dredge up enough compassion to fill in some random pices about St. Aubin's notorious and illustrious past before sending him – with a single shot to the temple – plummeting toward the promised land, but only if, perchance, there was sufficient time before daybreak.

Mitchell looked around the bar. St. Aubin was gone. Draper had remained behind. Only his corpse would leave. Paul Mitchell was flushed with a deep-seated anger as he stood above the mortal remains of the general with whom he had fought and won so many battles, conventional, covert, or otherwise. The rage churned within him, then exploded. He raised his 9mm AT94K semi-automatic pistol and emptied it, shattering first the jukebox, then the beer bottles stacked on a shelf behind the bar. He ignored the cadaver of the barkeep. The barkeep was of no consequence.

St. Aubin, his Magnum in hand, had almost reached the Buick when he heard the staccato of shots, the whine of bullets ricocheting from pillar to post inside the Spirit Room Bar. He dropped to his knees and found himself staring face to face with the lovely and enticing Carol Ann McCarthy. St. Aubin and the lady were separated only by the glass of the automobile's rear window. She sat rigidly, almost formally, in the backseat of the car, staring at him, but no longer seeing him. Her smile was crooked. Her hair had lost its shine. A bullet had been neatly placed where her right eye had been.

As she had said, she was very good at what she did, but obviously not as good as Paul Mitchell or the Marine who had managed to lose himself behind the shadows at the far end of town. St. Aubin felt a loss. Carol Ann McCarthy would have never been his, but she had been for a single night, and he would never forget the circumstances or the night. Her lips had been so warm, and now they were cold and bloodless.

St. Aubin forgot her in an instant. Graveyards, he knew, were full of people who weren't able to forget. The Magnum was heavy in his hand, the revolver heavy on his belt, the nails heavy in his pocket. He darted to the far side of the street and began working his way through the darkness that sheltered the abandoned buildings, moving as silently as cat's feet in the direction of the ancient Holy Family Catholic Church, tracing the steps where the Marine had gone.

He listened intently. The harsh breathing of a man who was about to kill or about to die usually gave him and his location away. St. Aubin detected no sound at all, other than the gnats buzzing around his head. His face was awash with sweat, but his breathing was slow and even, his hands steady.

He had been here before, but where? The unknown was all he had ever dreaded. Cemeteries, he knew, were full of graves dug by an enemy that had no face and, usually, no name, men who killed simply because they were hired to terminate a life and were damned efficient at what they did.

The sky above was black velvet, and the moon seemed to be hanging on the cusp of a cloud, as dark as the sky, outlined by a strand of white as delicate as a spider's web. The sweat on his face had turned cold, and St. Aubin felt himself fighting hard to temper the sense of panic that was surging through him. He heard the sound of the Marine's boots scraping against the rocks as Valek walked back down the street, and the fear was suddenly gone, replaced by the same deadly calm that lay tucked away within the eye of a hurricane.

The unknown was no longer unknown. No longer was he fighting an unseen enemy. He could see the Marine's shadow, and the shadow was moving toward him, and the shadow did not know where he was or if he was there or anywhere close. No doubt Roger Valek had been told that Andrews St. Aubin was no longer a threat, was already at the mercy of Donald Draper, perhaps even lying cold and lifeless on a table inside the bar if, by happenstance, the general had grown weary of waiting. Everyone who knew Draper was aware that he was an impatient man. That put Roger Valek at a terrible disadvantage. He looked around him and believed he was alone, facing an empty street.

Graveyards, St. Aubin knew, were full of men who thought streets were empty and guns unloaded. He took a deep breath, felt his muscles tense and, with the quickness of a heartbeat, St. Aubin was on his feet, running hard and weaving his way through the distorted shards of moonlight that spilled through cracks that time and the weather had carved in so many of the derelict buildings, shaming and condemning the lonely streets of Jerome. Ten more steps. That was all he needed.

St. Aubin knew that the Marine had heard him by now. Roger Valek's eyes were frantically sweeping the street, searching the shadows, trying to put form and substance to the muffled sound of running feet.

Ten steps could take a lifetime. He no longer had a lifetime. St. Aubin's body jerked backward, and his knees buckled as he felt a bullet dig into his flesh, just below his shoulder blades, burning and searing, the pain stabbing deep into his rib cage. He could feel cold air swabbing the holes where the shot entered and exited his body. He had no idea what the bullet had damaged. St. Aubin only knew that it hurt to breathe, and the next breath was more important than the last.

He had turned his back on Mitchell, and Mitchell felt no qualms about shooting a man in the back. The bullet spun St. Aubin around, and he stumbled awkwardly, all strength draining like spilled blood from his legs, but he did not fall.

Valek had not yet seen him, but the Marine was running down the street, drawing closer with each step. St. Aubin pitched forward and rolled from darkness to moonlight.

Valek was in full view now, his eyes wide, but not with fright. A bitter mask of hatred stretched tightly across his face. St. Aubin squeezed off two shots before he had a chance to aim, then took his time and fired his third round before the pain became too severe for him to pull the trigger again.

His hand went limp, and the pistol fell into the dust of the alley. The world around him darkened, and the colors all turned green, then purple, and finally black. The black faded to sunlight, and the sun would not be climbing above the crescent in the mountains for another four hours.

Roger Valek took three agonizing steps toward the fallen St. Aubin, fumbling with the semi-automatic rifle, groping frantically for the trigger, unable to find it as the weapon slipped from his sweating hands and fell to the dirt. His face and hands were numb. The moon had fled the sky, and the ground cracked open beneath him, forming a great chasm. He danced for a moment like a puppet whose strings had been cut, then tumbled to the gravel road beside St. Aubin, and he felt as though he were dangling in an abyss of darkness with nothing below him to break the fall.

Both men lay side by side, staring at each other in utter fascination.

"Who the hell are you?" Valek whispered.

"I don't know," St. Aubin said.

Valek's shoulders jerked only once, and he died before he ever had the decency or the dignity to close his eyes.

Chapter 60

THE SHARP PAIN in St. Aubin's back became a dull ache, then a throb. Someone might as well have been pounding again and again into his shoulder blades with a post hole digger. St. Aubin struggled to his feet, waiting for the fog to clear out of his head, for some trace of strength to return to his legs. He tried to raise his left arm, but it did not want to respond. The numbness had reached all the way down to the ends of his fingers.

He picked up the Magnum. Three bullets were missing. It could have been worse. St. Aubin cast a furtive glance over his shoulder. Paul Mitchell had not moved. He was still standing in the doorway of the Connor Hotel, barely visible in the broken splinters of shattered moonlight. He was calmly reloading the semi-automatic.

Mitchell called out to Roger Valek. Once. Then again. No answer either time. He sighed, out of weariness, not frustration. Never frustation. Mitchell was in no hurry. St. Aubin was no longer lost or misplaced. He was here in Jerome, and Mitchell knew where he was. Mitchell glanced up and looked back down the street. St. Aubin must be hurt and probably couldn't run. Not far anyway. That much was obvious.

The road into town led nowhere, and nowhere was miles away, and the high desert, its mountain slopes catacombed with open pits from abandoned mines, was no place to be caught after dark or, most times, during the day. It was more deadly than the tarantulas that burrowed in its sands.

Mitchell had lived to be forty-eight years of age because he was not afraid to take his time. Men in a hurry took chances and made mistakes. Men in a hurry were in a hurry to die. Mitchell had until morning to finish the job. He took a deep, calculated breath and checked the luminescent dial on his digital watch. An early sunrise wouldn't find the deserted streets of Jerome for several more hours.

Mitchell had enough time to drink a warm beer if he could find a bottle that hadn't been shot to hell. He would give St. Aubin a few minutes to consider his plight. The thought of dying had been known to rattle men stronger than a vagabond travel writer from Texas. Regardless of who he once had been, Andrews St. Aubin was not the same man anymore.

St. Aubin moved slowly, laboriously up the steps and toward the old chapel. Each step jarred the wound in his back, and the throbbing kept time with the erratic beating of his heart, and his heart was beating much faster than it normally would. St. Aubin paused to wipe the dirt and the sweat off his face with the back of his hand. His head was clearer now, and the faint, disturbing veil of darkness had lifted from his eyes. He had climbed twenty-two steps and seemed no closer to the church. He still had steps to go. His legs argued against the climb. His head ignored them.

St. Aubin let his mind take the pain someplace far away, then he forgot it. He had no other choice. St. Aubin did not like the uneasy silence that trailed the wind down the empty street of Jerome. He did not trust it, not at all. Such silence did not belong in the land of the living.

He glanced back over his shoulder again. Mitchell was nowhere to be seen, but he was out there. That's what Carol Ann had said before she walked away, the stench of Donald Draper's death still clinging to her blouse. Mitchell had been out there all right, waiting for her as he was waiting for St. Aubin.

St. Aubin kicked open the door to the chapel and fell inside. He crawled his way down the splintered aisle where sinners had trod, and he leaned, spent and in anguish, against an altar where no one cried or prayed for forgiveness anymore. There was a chance that forgiveness no longer existed in Jerome. Sinners had learned to live and die without it.

St. Aubin knew that Paul Mitchell would be coming for him. He didn't know when, but now he certainly understood why. His was a mad man’s mission. And he feared that St. Aubin might blow it out from under him. The wrong information with the right man was worse than the right information in the hands of the wrong man. The loss of his reputation was more important than the loss of a life to men like Paul Mitchell.

The truth was: St. Aubin did not care about the operation. Win or lose, he did not care and never had. He simply had a job to do. It was done. The consequences of politics gone awry had never troubled him. He fought the bad guys. St. Aubin forced a grin. He probably worked for the bad guys, too.

In the stillness of the chapel, in the perplexity that separated reason from insanity, St. Aubin wondered why he – the cynic, the skeptic, the agnostic – wanted so badly for the nails from the cross to be real, why they had become so important to him. He took the ancient goatskin pouch from his pocket. Either the nails had become heavier than they were, or he had grown weaker, losing more blood every time his heart pulsed.

The interior of the chapel was sparse and smelled of rotting wood, dried earth, and mildew. He saw the moonlight filter through the jagged cracks in the windows, a mosaic of reds and blues, touched by a shade of yellow, as it reflected past the stained glass.

A handcarved wooden crucifix, at least three feet tall, maybe larger, was hanging on the brightly painted wall behind the altar. It, too, showed the trappings of antiquity. A face was twisted in agony. Primitive eyes had been raised toward the heavens, or maybe just toward a ceiling painted black by the night.

St. Aubin looked back through the window and down the hill toward the Connor Hotel. Unless the moonlight had lied to him, the street remained empty.

Then the seed of a random thought entered his mind and began to take root. It hit him hard and jarred his drowsy senses awake. A man stays alive by determining what his enemy will or won't do, and, until this moment, St. Aubin had been content to merely sit in the sanctuary of the chapel and wait for Mitchell to make his move. Mitchell was obviously content to wait in the sanctity of the bar and let St. Aubin bleed to death or linger in pain until the loss of blood made him too weak or delirious to fight back.

Then, and only then, would Mitchell come and find the nails that had penetrated the hands and feet of Christ. He might not know what they were, but a meticulous man like Paul Mitchell would cerainly find out. He would win without ever firing a shot. Whatever might happen, St. Aubin knew, the priceless artifacts could not be left in the clutches of Paul Mitchell. He would make a mockery of them.

St. Aubin glanced back at the great wooden crucifix and smiled with a certain amount of grim and derisory satisfaction. He might lose his life, but he would not lose the nails. Mitchell might be the only one to walk away from Jerome alive, but he would walk away empty-handed.

St. Aubin labored in pain as he pulled himself across the altar and, holding onto the feet of the crucifix for support, was finally able to stand, even though all strength was ebbing from his body. The chapel grew darker as a wave of nausea gripped him. He was holding onto the fading outer edge of consciousness with brittle fingers. He closed his eyes and waited for the stab of nausea to pass.

Using the butt of his Magnum for a hammer, Andrews St. Aubin began slowly and methodically pounding the rusting Roman spikes into the wooden hands outstretched on the crucifix. His was the only whimper of pain. He closed his eyes and tried to will the pain away. It didn't go.

This was where the nails belonged, he told himself, a place where no one would find them, and they would be protected until the end of time, which comes at different times for all men. He drove the final two nails into the slender, hand-carved wooden feet before slumping to the floor and falling back behind the altar, his fortress, if not his redeemer.

St. Aubin had no idea how long he lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness. But the faint hint of a rose-colored dawn was hanging like burnt antique lace above the mountains when Paul Mitchell finally staggered out of the Spirit Room Bar, dragging the rigid corpse of Donald Draper behind him and dumping it in the backseat of the Buick alongside Carol Ann. He would load Valek later and bury them all where they would never be found. A bonfire in the middle of the desert usually worked best. The barkeep was on his own.

St. Aubin sensed that Mitchell was coming long before he heard him. He wondered if he could still move, and if so, where he could go, then decided he had gone far enough and would go no farther. It was time to take a stand, one on one, like the old days. How old were they? St. Aubin had never felt older.

Mitchell's breaths were even, yet tinged with anxiety, as he slowly made his way up the hillside and stepped up on the threshold of the chapel. The early hour was already hot and beginning to take its toll. The heat had not yet forsaken the desert. Mitchell eased the door open. The rusty hinges groaned in protest.

He stepped inside and scanned the dark interior of the church as he had studied an enemy outpost hundreds of times. He could see no sign of St. Aubin, but he knew his adversary was there, hiding in the shadows. But which shadow? And was he asleep, wasted, or already dead?

Mitchell adjusted his infrared night vision goggles, and his gaze cut a sharp swath across the front of the chapel. Again nothing. There was no movement at all. Regardless of where St. Aubin lay, the fight had no doubt gone out of him. It was, Mitchell reasoned, such a sad and ignoble way for a man without a name or a country to die. He could not see St. Aubin in the darkness or tell whether or not he was breathing. The thick altar blocked his line of vision in the front of the church, and each dark space between the pews posed a new threat and a new hiding place.

"St. Aubin," he called out.

No answer.

"I know you can hear me."

Mitchell hesitated.

Silence met him, not unlike the night itself. Mitchell raised his semi-automatic and fired once into the altar. The bullets riccocheted close enough to St. Aubin's head to stir the dead if not scare them. Splinters and chips of mildewed wood flew wildly and in all directions.

Mitchell's fierce gaze ignored everything around him. The shot's sole intention had been to warn, frighten, awaken, or determine if the spirit and the soul, God rest it, had already fled a misspent body. It was inconsequential. There was still no sign nor sound of life or movement at the far end of the church.

Mitchell could not take any chances. He never left until he knew a job was finished, the target terminated. He trusted no one but himself. He walked down the aisle, holding the semi-automatic pistol firmly in his hand. One last bullet in the back of the head, the coup de grace, would end it for good.

A perfect goodbye. There would be no lingering doubts. Mitchell would never have to worry about whether or not the sound of footsteps behind him belonged to Andrews St. Aubin. One last bullet in the back of the head, and he and St. Aubin both would sleep better at night, one permanently. Frankly, Paul Mitchell had never felt better.

The decorated Donald Draper might not be beside him to direct Operation Taps, but Paul Mitchell understood each step of the plan better than anyone. After all, the intricate scheme and all of its intricate parts had come from the genius of his own imagination. He did not need the general, as he had not needed Carl Holcomb, Abner Riggs, nor the President.

Damn them all.

Paul Mitchell did not need anyone.

The general had failed miserably in his quest to stop Andrews St. Aubin. He had failed three times. Once with the explosives. Once with a sniper's rifle. Once in the Spirit Room Bar. Once was understandable. Three times were unpardonable.

It had taken Paul Mitchell to clean up the mess that the general left in Phoenix and now in Jerome. Maybe the general had gotten too slow and too careless. Age would do that to a man. Age was the one enemy Draper could not outwit nor outfight. He would get no older.

St. Aubin, motionless, his eyes closed, counted the footsteps as he heard them come arrogantly and steadily down the narrow weeper's aisle of the chapel.

One.

Each step was distinct, the sharp heel of Mitchell's boots, with order and precision, pounding out a slow, rhythmic cadence on the rotting wood floor.

Two.

Mitchell was taking his time, an apparition of self-discipline and restraint, a man in control and in charge.

Three.

The sound of his footsteps became muted, then monotonous.

Four.

A hollow echo.

Five.

The sound of a sleepwalker lost in the dead of night.

Six.

The metallic click was unmistakable. The final closing of a bronze coffin made the same sound.

Seven.

Mitchell was checking his clip, as all good soldiers did at a time like this. By the book. That's the way he had been trained. Even when he broke the rules, he knew each one of them by heart.

Eight.

Mitchell had always been a careful and deliberate man.

St. Aubin waited until the count of footsteps reached nine. Then he thought about the commandment that a mother's soft voice had whispered to him so many years ago. He remembered the voice, but not the mother.

The commandment had said: Thou shalt not kill.

He hoped it meant something to Paul Mitchell. It meant nothing to him.

St. Aubin slowly raised an arm, the one attached to the Magnum, and quietly placed it across the top of the altar. He gently squeezed the trigger without ever raising his head or opening his eyes. Instinct was the finely drawn line between life and death.

Mitchell's instinct.

And his.

Paul Mitchell saw the spit of flame in the darkness.

He was dead before the sound reached him.

St. Aubin slid back down behind the altar.

He looked up into the twisted, agonized face of the crucifix, aglow even though the moon had turned red and fallen beyond the mountains, and Jerome lay enclosed in the mystical moment of time that the poets called the darkest before dawn.

His gaze, slowly losing its focus, shifted to the rusting nails that he had hammered into the wooden hands and wooden feet of the crucifix. A mad priest had said, and a mad priest had written that the nails were taken from a crude, rugged cross where Christ had died and brought them to Mexico when he returned to earth.

A promise made.

A prophecy kept.

St. Aubin felt like a mad man, too.

The hands and the feet above him were different now. They were bleeding, the blood so thick he could no longer see the imprint of the nails. Tears had moistened the wooden eyes of the crucfix and were rolling gently down the wooden cheeks of a wooden face. The blood dripped fresh from the ragged holes that he and the ancient Roman nails had torn without mercy into wood carved from a dead tree by the hands of man.

It fell, the blood did, a drop at a time.

It fell on the floor beside St. Aubin.

It fell upon the wound that Mitchell's bullet had dug into his back.

The touch of the blood was soft and tender, cold and soothing, then hot as though a flaming poker had seared the torn and broken flesh and made it whole again.

Peace was a wonderful thing.

St. Aubin closed his weary eyes and breathed deeply.

The pain left with the night.

Epilogue

THE DEAD MAN WAS waiting for St. Aubin on the southern edge of Jerome. He wasn't hard to find, not even in the early morning darkness. The village was not yet awake. Some who lay there would never wake up.

They walked together in silence down the winding road and past the piles of slag until the first golden rays of a morning sun spun their way atop the distant mountains.

The dead man paused and watched the faint fingers of light as they began crawling wistfully out of the foothills.

"I'm sorry," St. Aubin said.

The dead man nodded but said no more. He broke away and headed out across the desert, neither here nor there, but trapped somewhere in between.

Both men were alone again, forever linked by circumstances and consequences, yet as different as day and night, before and after, then and now, once and again, near and far, light and dark.

Neither planned it that way. Neither could change it.

St. Aubin shaded his eyes and looked for distant ruffles of dust kicking up where the road met the horizon. Sooner or later, the old second hand work bus would come his way. Maybe it would even stop long enough to pick him up.

Day wages wouldn’t buy him a ticket home, but he would get by somehow.

He would tell Richard Brockleman that Danny B. could rest in peace now. St. Aubin had taken an eye for an eye. He had taken several of them.

It was the way of the Old Testament, the old law, and Richard Brockleman had always possessed a devout belief and deep respect for the Old Testament. To him, it held the words of life and death and death eternal. Brockleman would ask him for names, nothing more.

All St. Aubin would tell Richard Brockleman was that he found what Danny B. believed was the unmistakable, undeniable, irrefutable proof that Christ had come again and left his footprints in Mexico's soil.

A priest had given Danny B. the holy nails that came from an unholy cross.

Yes, St. Aubin had held them in his hands.

Yes, they were certainly old enough to be real.

Yes, they were no doubt stained with blood.

Yes, it was indeed a miracle they had survived the centuries.

No, he did not have them with him, St. Aubin would say.

He had left them where they belonged, which was all Richard Brockleman needed to know and all he would ever learn.

A man's faith, religious or otherwise, was the only possession he would carry to his grave, and Brockleman would be able to die, as he had hoped, with a clear conscience about what was and wasn't truth.

Andrews St. Aubin would be the good travel columnist that Brockleman had hired him to be. He would someday write about the harsh, forbidding landscape of Mexico, art galleries, historic museums, beaches, cliff divers, Mayan ruins, and pastel architecture of quaint colonial cities, but not about the nails. There was no reason for him to write about the nails.

The story had already been written.

TAKE YOUR OWN PERSONAL EXCURSION THROUGH THE KEY SCENES OF SKULLS.

Newspaper publisher Richard Brockleman received his Presidential Medal in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency on the western edge of downtown Dallas.

http://www.hyattdallasdowntown.com/

Andrews St. Aubin and Richard Brocklemen walked through Union Station in Dallas to meet the train bringing home the publisher’s brother, DEA agent Danny B.

http://www.unionstationdallas.com/

Down these tracks outside of Union Station came the odd collection of cattle cars that carried the broken body of Danny B.

Andrews St. Aubin stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Phoenix when he was assigned to investigate the death of Danny B. and find the holy religious artifact the DEA agent had uncovered.

http://www.sheratonphoenixdowntown.com/

On a park bench across the street from the Sheraton Hotel, Andrews St. Aubin tried to talk with the dead man who stalked him in the night.

In the lounge of the Matador Restaurant, Andrews St. Aubin met the flirtatious Carol Ann McCarthy, who said she was a school teacher from Tupelo, Mississippi.

http://local.yahoo.com/info-19978178-matador-mexican-restaurant-phoenix

Lazaro Fuentes was driven through downtown Sedona on his way to a clandestine meeting with the Middle East foreigner who had agreed to finance his multi-million dollar drug smuggling operation.

http://www.visitsedona.com/

Lazaro Fuentes was welcomed to Sedona by the ominous sight of bleached cattle heads nailed to a wall.

The secret meeting conducted by Lazaro Fuentes in Sedona was held in a secluded room of the luxurious Los Abrigados Resort.

https://www.diamondresorts.com/Rentals/Los-Abrigados-Resort-and-Spa-Rentals

In the doorway of Montezuma’s Castle ruins, Andrews St. Aubin was held captive by Espiritu, the personal executioner of Lazaro Fuentes.

http://www.nps.gov/moca/index.htm

After undergoing a sacred ritual at the base of Montezuma’s Castle, those coming out of Mexico carried the drugs of Lazaro Fuentes across the desert, past great red rock mountains.

http://redrockcountry.org/

The human drug smuggling pipeline of Lazaro Fuentes was forced to make its way, mostly by foot, across the harsh desert territory of Arizona.

Andrews St. Aubin learned more about the legend of Quetzalcoatl from the Most Reverend Michael Mochrie at St. Mary’s Basilica in downtown Phoenix.

http://www.stmarysbasilica.org/

The funeral for Lazaro Fuentes was held within the sacred walls of St. Mary’s Basilica in Phoenix.

http://www.saintmarysbasilica.org/history.asp

Andrews St. Aubin overhead General Donald Draper and the mysterious Carol Ann McCarthy discussing plans for Operation Taps in the Bistro 202 bar of the San Carlos Hotel in Phoenix.

http://www.hotelsancarlos.com/

The bus carrying Andrews St. Aubin to the ghost town of Jerome wound its way through a desert land of mountains and cactus.

The ghost town of Jerome hangs precariously on the side of the mountain. In its glory days, Jerome was one of the richest towns in the West with gold, silver, and copper being mined from his mountains.

http://www.azjerome.com/

Andrews St. Aubin walked the streets of Jerome in search of clues about the missing religious artifact, a secret that Danny B. had taken to his grave.

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Pr-Sa/Quetzalcoatl.html

The Spirit Room of the Connor Hotel in Jerome had been frequented by Danny B. when he fled the wrath of Lazaro Fuentes. It was in the Spirit Room where Andrews St. Aubin determined where the religious artifact might be hidden and where he almost died.

http://www.connorhotel.com/

Andrews St. Aubin was frantically searching a grave in the ancient and unkempt cemetery of Jerome when he felt the metal of General Draper’s pistol against the back of his head.

http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/az/jerome.html

Wounded and bleeding, Andrews St. Aubin made his way into the Holy Family Catholic Church and found refuge while he awaited those who were sworn to kill him.

http://www.jerometimes.com/three.html

Inside the beautiful and ornate Catholic Church, known as the old miner’s church, a weakened Andrews St. Aubin knew he would have to make his last stand.

Table of Contents

eBook Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Epilogue

Table of Contents

eBook Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Epilogue