of it. For long periods of time his eyes took in nothing-that is, nothing of which he was aware. He was gone, traveling in his mind.
Then, as if playing catch-up, his eyes registered the changing light of the past hour or so all in the space of just a few moments, like a timelapse film. The clouds skimmed northward across the valley, and the sunlight flickered rapidly as the clouds flitted past, and then underlying it all was the changing light resulting from the angle of the falling sun.
And then again everything held still while he passed through terra-cotta into other worlds.
He got up once to remove his clothes, jamming them into the small canvas duffel bag. He turned aside and urinated into the grass, then squatted on his haunches and returned to the tile roof.
Another hour or so passed and the mosquitoes had gotten so bad that he turned to the duffel bag again and took out two round, plastic containers holding charcoal and olive body paint. Methodically, without any attention to time at all, he began to smear his body with the camouflage paint. He didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, as if it didn't matter much how it was done. But he was thorough, head to toe, inside his ears and nostrils, between the crevice of his buttocks, and even his genitals.
Dusk.
Now he squatted among the weeds, invisible. With the dying light, the swarms of mosquitoes grew exponentially. Frustrated by the repellent in the paint, they formed a cloud around him. He heard them, a high- pitched whining sound enveloping him in its harmonics, exactly like the dusk in Espiritu Santo when he was waiting to kill the man from Andradina and was astonished to hear the sound of time passing. It was an aural sensation precisely the same as the cloud of mosquitoes. It was so odd to discover that.
Time passed. A long time… in a darkness blacker than old blood.
When the telephone vibrated in his hand-he had held it throughout, laying it down only to put on the body paint, and even then carefully resting his toes on it so that he would feel the vibrating if it should happen-he answered it by saying only, “Yes.”
“Macias has left, ”Burden said. “I believe that only a guard, Roque, and Luquin remain. That's the best we can figure it.”
“Macias won't return?”
“No.”
“I have the rest of the night, then?”
“No. You have to leave by two o'clock, at least. You have the directions to the airstrip.”
“Yes. But nothing has changed?”
“No.”
Silence. He wasn't sure how long it lasted, but he was aware of it, which meant it might have been a long time. But Burden didn't hang up. He was there.
“You want to know something, Garcia?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“I didn't think this would ever happen. I thought I would die and this would never have happened.”
Silence.
“I won't thank you, ”the man said. “I will spare you having to have that on your conscience.”
Silence.
“But if I could thank you, I would do it. And if I believed in God, I would thank him for it, too, but he wouldn't want my gratitude, either. Gracias a Dios, but he would stop it from reaching him. Such gratitude.”
Silence.
“Do you hear the insects?”
“Yes, ”Burden said.
“I am engulfed by mosquitoes, ”he said. “A cloud of them. They are singing time at me.”
Silence.
“I don't ever want to see you again, Garcia. You understand that.”
“I understand. Yes.”
Silence.
“I look like an insect, ”the man said.
Again there was silence, and after waiting a moment or two, he turned off the phone.
Chapter 51
After Burden's phone call, the man's heart began to fibrillate. He was used to that and recognized the onset of his familiar disturbance. Something happened to you when you took off all your clothes and covered your body with the colors of earth and vegetation. You began to slough off your human-ness. And that was good.
Wearing only tennis shoes that he'd also smeared with camouflage paint, he began moving up through the lake-level woods to the hillside. The mosquitoes formed a whirring aura around him, and he felt as though he were suspended in the sound of time but not touched by it. He moved through the darkness in a cocoon of timelessness.
The move up the cliff was slow, but not especially difficult. This was simply a steep climb, with a couple of spots where the placement of feet and fingers was important but not critical. He was careful not to dislodge any rocks and send them crashing noisily into the brush.
The pool was set solidly into the stone face of the bluff, but the deck that surrounded it was supported by thick, stolid concrete pilings sunk into the rock face below. When he reached the pilings he stopped to rest a moment before climbing the last twenty feet by crawling over the boulders that had been pushed over the bluff when the pool was built. Then he reached a cinder-block room that housed the pool's plumbing underneath the deck. From there stone steps led up to a tall louvered gate that opened onto the deck and pool area.
He crouched at the gate a long time, holding the little duffel bag with his clothes and a few other things. When he heard no one talking, he carefully unlatched the louvered gate, which opened up into a blind corner of the pool area, and moved inside. He laid the duffel bag in the shadows against the house, unzipped it, and took out the small, dull gray automatic pistol that Burden had given him. It was specifically modified to fire subsonic “cat's sneeze ”loads. The rounds had soft lead noses that exploded on impact.
The pale light coming through the glass walls-it looked like television light-threw too much illumination onto the deck and pool. He wouldn't be able to cross to the other side from here. Leaving his duffel bag, he went back out the gate and made his way down the first flight of steps. At the first turn left, he stepped right into the brush that separated the houses along the cliff. To avoid the noisy vegetation as much as possible, he hugged the outside walls of the house.
When he reached the front corner of the house, he snuggled up under a large shrub and waited. He knew Luquin's security. At night, someone always stayed outside in the dark. He waited. The living human being made noises.
He waited. He heard his own blood in his ears. Not too different from the whirr of passing time. He waited.
The guard farted. The man adjusted for the distortion of the architecture and vegetation. The front of the house was a U-shaped courtyard. And luckily, there were hedges. He eased down on his side, his bare back against the house, and advanced under the hedges, groveling inch by inch.
The guard yawned with a groan. The man corrected his audio perception. He was closer than he thought. A few more feet, mulch and twigs digging into his skin. The hedge took a left turn at the patio's edge. The man waited, then slowly eased his head from under the hedge. He saw the guard about two and a half meters away in a lawn chair.
When he shot the guard, there was only the muffled pop of his skull and a soft splash on the stones. The man was quickly on his feet. He took the AK out of the guard's lap and laid it on the stones. He left him lolling in the chair.
He went to the front door and tried the knob. It was unlocked. He opened the door by millimeters and heard the television. Good. He eased his head around the door. A foyer, lucky. Roque would be within twenty feet of
