survival. The ground beneath his feet steadied, but the far side of the small plateau started to disappear.
The helicopter began to slide, metal screeching against rock as it was slowly dragged ever closer to the edge and the plunge down to the river of lava that cut through the valley floor. Cazamind panicked, lost his footing and managed to scramble away from the machine. Max saw that he had fallen and that the chain of the attache case had snared itself on the helicopter. It was going to pull him down. He would be fried. Max ran forward and saw the man desperately trying to unlock the handcuff. The helicopter groaned as it slipped away. Any moment now it would slide rapidly into the furnace. The crumbling earth would not bear its weight much longer.
Max felt the heat from the flowing lava blistering his skin, even though it was a hundred meters below him. He got down beside the man, who looked imploringly at him and gestured with a small silver key that was attached to a chain from his belt. He could not reach the handcuff.
“Help me, boy, help me! For God’s sake, don’t let me die. Don’t let me die! Please!”
Max’s mouth was so dry he could barely speak, but he pushed his face close to the man’s. “My mother needed help. She was dying, and you refused to help her.”
The man shook his head desperately. He was crying, a horrible death only moments away. He begged. “I had to! It would have exposed our plans.”
“Did you infect her? Is that how she died?”
Cazamind shook his head. “No, no. We hadn’t started the program then. She just got sick. It was the jungle that killed her. Not me. I swear. The case! Everything is in the case! She found out-”
The helicopter slithered another meter. “What?” Max screamed at him.
“Save me! I beg you!” Cazamind would barter the world to save his life. “Your mother … the rain forest … we were buying the rain forest … thousands and thousands of hectares … It’s all in the case!”
“Who gives the orders? Is it Zaragon? Is that who you work for?” Max yelled.
Cazamind’s face scrunched up in fear and self-pity. He shook his head. Tears leaked into the creases around his eyes. “Please … please … don’t let me die.…”
There was no more time. Max ripped the key chain from him, fumbled with the lock, his hands sweating. The helicopter lurched. Cazamind screamed. Max got the key into the small lock. He hesitated. Cazamind looked horror- struck. Was the boy tormenting him? Was he going to let him die after all?
“The case’s combination. What is it?” Max insisted.
“All sixes! HURRY!”
Max turned the key and released the handcuff. The terrified man fell clear and rolled away as Max grabbed the attache case.
He wanted revenge for his mother’s death, but he could not let the man responsible die in such a horrible manner.
Riga had no such sensitivity.
As Cazamind got to his knees, Max could see him mouthing,
Riga had the bodyguard’s handgun, which he leveled at Cazamind’s head. Max saw that he tried to beg, and there was a brief look of surprise and relief as Riga lowered the weapon, but it was a cruel act of false hope-it was all over in a second. Riga threw him backward. Cazamind’s scream was lost in the roar of fire. His body hit the downward slope and then tumbled over its edge toward the lava that had just consumed the helicopter.
Max could not avert his eyes from the horrific sight. Cazamind’s body flared into a fireball and then disintegrated as it hit the molten lava.
It seemed to Max that, no matter how injured or exhausted he was, Riga was unstoppable. The killer turned toward him, kept his eyes on the boy and bent down to retrieve the attache case. His blackened, bloodstained face was like a Mayan war mask. Max was too exhausted to resist when he took it from his grip.
“This,” Riga said as he picked up the case, “is everything.”
They faced each other. Was he going to kill Max now?
“End of the road, Max. Go home. Be a schoolkid, like you’re supposed to be. Stay out of trouble.”
And without another word, Riga moved away down the far side of the slope into the trees, which looked as though they had been flattened by a bombing raid. Max was safe from the killer now. He had been reprieved. All he had to do was get home-somehow. So why did he hesitate? Why did he turn and search the smoke-filled hillside for the assassin?
Because in trying to save the rain forest, his mother had stumbled upon a greater evil. Others could suffer a vile death like Danny Maguire, and the evidence of corruption and inhuman experimentation was in that case. He went after Riga. It was what his dad would have done.
Charlie Morgan’s superficial injuries from the crash had been patched up by her men, and when they broke through the narrow defile, there was virtually no further resistance from the gunmen. She saw the fire mountain move and watched smoke churn in a rhythmic swirl that could only be caused by the draft from a helicopter’s rotors. Her binoculars showed her fragments of the conflict on the hillside more than a kilometer away. The smoke and flame obscured much of what was going on, but she watched for a few moments longer while her men were regrouping and heading for where they had heard cries from a vast hidden compound that held the captive Maya. She wasn’t interested in who they were or why they were there-what held her focus on the distant hillside was that there were two survivors. The larger of them had taken something from the smaller, who had the look of a boy. At last she had found Max Gordon.
The man moved away and it looked as though he carried a small case. That case was important.
She ran.
Max unclenched his fists. His fingers, caked with dirt and ingrained black ash, curved into claws. A strange stillness embraced him, distancing him from the roaring fires and exploding trees. The fractured land still tore itself apart in a determined act of self-destruction, but Max did not move. He gazed across the layers of smoke, saw the sun throw spears of light through the clouds, pinpointing the running man-who then disappeared into the smoke- shrouded forest.
Instinct took over from reason. Max would have to risk moving down the slithering hillside and jumping across the breaking ground to reach him. It would take the predatory skills of a jaguar to move that quickly and sure- footedly in pursuit.
Max’s thought process had moved to another level. He was beyond rational thought; he was sniffing the air, finding the man’s scent, and he was running.
Rain clouds that had clung stubbornly to the mountain peaks edged down toward the inferno and released a tropical downpour that began smothering the flames. The ghostly haze rolled into the broken land, twisting its way through branches and undergrowth. Moisture dripped from the broad leaves as the ash-blackened rain pounded the forest.
Memory told Max he had run to the farthest part of the valley where the lava stream’s curtain of crimson mist still rose, though now it was being sucked into the forest, making it an eerie netherworld of twisted shrouds.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. A woman, tufts of hair the color of fire, was running hard along a path in the partly obscured distance. She disappeared from view. Max hunched down. The footprints of his prey scuffed the earth; his senses tasted the man’s smell. A slab of ground broke free, earth tremors and rain forcing it away from the clinging roots of the forest. Trees tore, snapped and crashed down, carried by the force of the landslide. Creatures ran, birds screeched, monkeys howled.
Max leapt onto a tree trunk, gripping and ripping its bark as in a seamless bound he stretched across the void and found the safety of pockmarked boulders next to water cascading down a ravine. A natural channel from the high peaks, its roar was louder than the depleted firestorm in the distance.
A surge of water splashed against rock, dousing Max. He gasped as if plucked from a dream. His hands stung from dozens of scratches and thorns-as though he had been running on all fours. He refocused.
Less than two hundred meters away, wind sculpted the mist, twisting the crimson curtain into a monstrous smoke ring-an oscillating halo-and in its midst lay the body of a man beneath a fallen tree. He was facedown in the mud, one arm outstretched, the other trapped beneath him. A short distance away, the attache case lay on the ground. It looked as though the assassin’s luck had finally run out and the landslide had killed him.
