parents object they kill them. Sometimes they kill them anyway.”
“I don’t care what they’re doing,” said Holliday. “The question is, How do we get ourselves out of their way? Right now we’re trapped. They’re ahead of us and behind us.”
“We could hide the boats and wait for the ones behind us to go past, then go back upriver,” suggested Rafi.
“They’ll have scouts on land as well as in boats. The jungle is their home. They would almost certainly find us,” said Eddie.
“There’s no way of telling how far ahead they are,” said Holliday. “Or if they’ve already arrived at their destination.”
“How would we know?” Peggy asked.
“First we must portage the boats below the falls. Maybe they will have left some sign?” The Cuban held up the can. “A trail of Sparletta, like the two children of
“ ‘ Hansel and Gretel.’ ” Peggy laughed.
“Yes,” said Holliday grimly. “And that’s what those kids with the AK-47s will do if they catch us. Rafi and I will see how far it is to the fire. Peggy, you stay here with Eddie and watch our backs. Maybe unload some of the gear from the boats to make them lighter.”
“Will do,” said Peggy.
Holliday and Rafi followed the narrow trail into the jungle. It had clearly been used as a portage for a very long time: logs, some old and rotten, lay half buried in the dark, rich soil at six- or seven-foot intervals to make it easier to slide the dugouts overland. As they made their way down the pathway the trees around them broke into chatters and screams of animals warning one another of the approach of possible predators. Beyond those warning calls there was the normal chaotic sound track of the jungle: the shivering whisper of breezes through the high canopy, the eerie singing of insects calling to prospective mates and the barely audible slip and slide of other creatures, climbing, twisting and digging their way through ground and trees.
“It’s never quiet, is it?” Holliday said.
“Spooky,” answered Rafi, his voice edgy. “Especially when you stop and imagine what kind of things are alive all around you and how easy it would be for them to make a meal out of you if they were given half a chance. This morning I woke up and saw a centipede on the ridgepole of the tent that had to be six or seven inches long. Nasty bastards, and they bite, too.” He shook his head. “I’m just a desert kind of guy, I guess.”
“Right.” Holliday laughed. “A desert kind of guy who likes his on-campus Aroma Espresso Bar venti caramel macchiatos, stirred, with extra caramel sauce and toffee nut instead of vanilla.”
“How did you know that?” Rafi asked, looking a little affronted.
“Peg does about a five-minute skit of you ordering. It’s like something off an old episode of
“Well, at least I don’t whine because they closed all the Starbucks outlets in Israel.”
“I could never figure that out,” said Holliday. “Starbucks is like the plague-it’s everywhere except Israel.”
“The secret power of the Viennese coffee cartel,” said Rafi.
The trail came to an end and they stepped out onto a slab of stone half the size of a city block. Directly in front of them they could see a steep, treacherous set of rapids that no one in their right mind would attempt to run.
“Not your Lost Templar’s vision of Eden,” said Holliday.
“It’s too soon to be the Kazaba Falls,” said Rafi. “We’ve got a long way to go yet.”
The frothing pool beneath the rapids turned into a misty reed-edged lake a thousand feet in diameter feeding into the low-banked river again, far below. The jungle was like an unbroken, undulating carpet of yellow and green that stretched to the horizon. Holliday took the military binoculars he’d liberated from the assault team and looked downriver. In the middle distance and close to the winding river he could just make out several thin curls of white- gray smoke rising above the jungle. It was either a riverside village or the camp of the child soldiers. The river at that point appeared to be less than two hundred feet wide. There wasn’t the slightest chance of slipping by keeping under cover of the opposite bank. He handed the glasses to Rafi.
“Maybe it’s just a downstream village,” suggested the archaeologist.
“I doubt it. That smoke is about five miles off. The kiddie soldiers are a day and a half ahead of us. They would have raided the village by now if they were still on the water and you’d be seeing a lot more smoke. If they haven’t raided the village that means they’re in the jungle somewhere between here and there.”
“So what do we do?” Peggy asked.
“Get rid of the dugouts and anything else we can’t carry,” said Holliday. “Take the tents, the dry food and the weapons. That’s about it.”
Peggy and Rafi started going through the packs while Eddie took Holliday aside.
“Those men who attacked us by the river. They had
“That’s right,” said Holliday. “Two of the men had a half dozen each.”
“I need four,” said Eddie. “And some of those plastic drinking glasses.”
“What for?”
“A welcome present for whoever our friends are back there,” he said, cocking a thumb upriver the way they’d come.
“A welcome present?”
“A farewell present, too.” Eddie grinned. “
Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre had no affection for mountains. If he couldn’t see the sun rise over some kind of horizon it made him nervous. He didn’t like Switzerland at all, where sunrises were in very short supply and there were mountains everywhere.
He flew out of Heathrow in the early morning, caught the eleven-thirty train from Geneva to Zurich and arrived at exactly two thirty in the afternoon. He rented a Europcar VW Passat and drove the twenty-five miles to Aarau, a town of seventeen thousand clustered around the banks of the Aar River at the foot of the Jura Mountains. It was exactly what you’d expect of a classic Swiss town.
Saint-Sylvestre had a lunch of lamb and egg noodles in the Restaurant Laterne on the Rathausgasse, then walked two blocks to number eleven, the address on the business card.
The Gesler Bank was a small, discreet gray building with small shuttered windows and an arched doorway with a brass door. There wasn’t even a plaque announcing the building’s purpose, only a carved number 11 above the door. There was, however, a state-of-the-art CCTV camera on a bracket in the doorway arch angled to cover anyone pressing the white porcelain button on one side of the doorframe. Saint-Sylvestre pushed the button, ignoring the cameras. There was a brief pause and then the brass door clicked and came slightly ajar. Saint- Sylvestre stepped inside and the door closed behind him. He found himself in a glassed-in security portal, the brass door at his back and floor-to-ceiling glass panels all around him. Through the glass he could see into a small wood- paneled lobby, the walls hung with oil paintings, all portraits. A guard in a pin-striped suit sat behind a small desk. The guard leaned forward and spoke into a microphone.
“I’m here to see Herr Leonhard Euhler,” answered Saint-Sylvestre, speaking in French.
The man behind the table didn’t hesitate for a moment and replied in clear French with a Paris accent. “What business do you have with Herr Euhler?”
“Private business. I am here under the authority of the Moroccan government.”
“One moment,” said the guard, still speaking French. Keeping his eyes on Saint-Sylvestre in the security portal he reached down to his belt and lifted up a little speak-to-talk unit, then clicked for an answer, which Saint- Sylvestre couldn’t make out. “He’ll be right down,” said the guard.
