Dream of a Falling Eagle

power, voodoo or otherwise. You're no voodoo master. Blow out your candles, and you're just a garden-variety necrophiliac who likes to dress up and who gets his rocks off by carving people up, or ordering them carved up. Do you eat your kills?'

He didn't like that at all. His dark eyes flashed with anger, and he took a step backward. I'd put Dr. Guy Fournier in high dudgeon. 'I am a voodoo master!' he announced indignantly.

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. What you are is a corpse-fucker with a CIA day job. When you're not fucking stiffs, you're jerking off thinking about them. You may know a lot about Garth and me, but I also know a lot about people like you. I used to make a living writing papers and lecturing about people like you. Since you're going to kill us anyway, the least you can do is spare me all your voodoo bullshit. Probably everything else you've been telling me is bullshit too. Shadow Ops, indeed. You're just one more CIA flunky, probably a contract killer. Freaks like you are a dime a dozen. You're no different from Piggott; you may have known a little more, but the company still used both of you like Kleenex. You killed your flunkies when their usefulness was at an end, so don't be surprised if your masters dispose of you when all this is over.'

Color rose on his high cheekbones. 'You are wrong, Frederick-son.'

I heard Garth stir. I turned my head to the left, saw that he had regained consciousness. He had raised his head and was looking around. Our eyes met, and he said evenly, 'I'm going to kill that damn horse.'

My laughter was loud, long, and genuine. 'Now, Garth, let's not blame our ill fortune on some dumb animal.'

'I specifically asked the stable manager for a nice horse. You remember?'

'Your horse was very nice. You just didn't know how to ride her. But it's all worked out. Look who we've found.'

'This creep is Fournier?'

'That's him.'

'How come he's got a hard-on?'

'Actually, we were just discussing that phenomenon. He's a corpse-fucker, a necrophiliac. Think Jeffrey Dahmer with a Ph.D. in a high-rent district. Guy Fournier, I'd like to introduce you to my brother, Garth.'

'A corpse-fucker,' Garth said, clucking his tongue. 'That's interesting. Listen, Mongo, whatever plan of escape you've developed, I hope it doesn't involve horses.'

'No horses. The fact of the matter is that I've been waiting for you to wake up so that you can tell Fournier here to go fuck himself.'

'Me? Why don't you do it?'

'I thought you should do it.'

'We'll flip a coin.'

'I always lose coin tosses with you. Actually, I've been trying to convince Guy that it would be in his best interests to surrender to us.'

'Any luck?'

'The jury's still out. I suspect he's thinking about it. I mentioned the fact that, sooner or later, Veil or Chant Sinclair will feed him his balls if he kills us.'

'Be quiet!' Fournier snapped, abruptly stepping forward into the narrow space between the two tables and glaring down at me. The nostrils in his aquiline nose flared, and his lips were compressed in a thin line. 'I already caught this act of yours back in my office, Frederickson. You couldn't fool me again, even if you were in a position to capitalize on it.'

'Damn. If you won't surrender, and I can't fool you, what am I supposed to do?'

'This seeming nonchalance in the face of death, this witty banter with your captors; it's described in your dossier. It's a game you play. You're trying to throw me off guard, trick me.'

'Is it working?'

Fournier's response was to suddenly extend the knife toward my brother's face, holding the tip of the blade less than an inch from his right eyeball. A chill rippled through me, and I quickly looked away so that Fournier couldn't see the terror on my face. He said, 'I think you'll find the situation less amusing when I start stabbing your brother's eyes out.'

'You can make us scream, Fournier,' I replied quickly, turning my head back to meet his gaze. 'That's no big trick, and it's been done before. That doesn't make you a voodoo master. No matter what you do to us, you're still just a corpse-fucker with delusions of grandeur.'

'Yeah,' Garth said evenly, looking directly at the knife tip millimeters from his eyeball. 'So go fuck yourself.'

The Haitian's eyes rolled back up into his head. He turned toward Garth, wrapped both hands around the elongated handle of the knife and raised the blade over his head, directly above Garth's chest. Then he began to chant softly in Creole.

My heart pounding and my breath catching in my throat, I strained with all my strength at the leather strap around my right wrist. Blood flowed, ligaments stretched, joints creaked-and suddenly my right hand slipped free. But I'd run out of time.

'Die!' Fournier shouted in English, and went up on his toes to drive the knife into Garth's chest.

Incredibly, it looked like Mongo the Magnificent was going to slip from the jaws of death one more time, escaping even this second encounter with Guy Fournier, and indeed killing at least one of the people primarily responsible for Moby Dickens' death.

Mongo the Magnificent was not impressed.

The professor was in a killing frenzy, intoxicated with his voodoo rites and sexual pathology. It would only take me a few seconds to unbuckle the straps from my ankles and left wrist, and I was sure Guy Fournier was planning to dawdle much longer than that with the business of plunging the knife home into Garth's chest, and then carving out his heart. Fournier would be dead, his neck broken, long before he finished the job. But Garth would be dead too. Not that his sacrifice wouldn't have been worthwhile. If I survived, there was still a chance I could prevent the assassinations of the president and vice president and the hijacking of the country. With what I now knew and with Fournier's corpse in tow, along with any other evidence I might find in this place, it was even possible I could take it over the top and put lots of CIA people, if not their whole apparatus, out of business permanently. With both of us dead, however, Fournier and his CIA handlers would just keep on truckin', possibly for a very long time, in a fascist America under the stewardship of President William P. Kranes. Garth's loss of life would not only serve to save mine, but also, in all likelihood, that of the United States of America. The stakes were astronomical, and so using Garth's death to save myself, kill Fournier, and put an end to all the impending brand of insanity seemed the only sane thing to do.

But Mongo the Magnificent was still not moved by the logic of his thinking. Not long before, when I had been about to throw Moby Dickens out of my office, Garth had reminded me of the things that were meaningful, and I didn't need another reminder. I found that the prospect of survival, or of William P. Kranes becoming president, or the CIA prevailing, or the prospect of a fascist America, no longer interested me at all. What was important was that I hadn't had a chance to say good-bye to my brother.

'Hey, shithead!' I shouted, reaching across my body with my free hand, grabbing a fistful of yellow robe, and yanking hard just as Fournier started to plunge the knife downward. 'You've got a loose dwarf back here!'

My yank had thrown Fournier off balance and thrown off his aim. The knife blade missed Garth and glanced off the edge of the marble tabletop. At least I had the satisfaction of giving the Haitian a good scare, because he must have jumped at least a foot in the air as he uttered a high-pitched sound that sounded like the yip of a small dog. When he came back down to earth he spun around, and his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open when he saw me clawing frantically with my free right hand at the buckle of the strap on my left wrist. I ceased my token effort and lay back down on the cold marble when Fournier pressed the knife to my throat.

'Mongo!'

'Just wanted to say good-bye, Garth! I love you, and it's been a hell of a ride!'

'Cut him and you die, sir! If that hand with the knife so much as twitches, I'll blow you in two!'

Wooaa. My heart skipped a beat or three, squeezed by both astonishment and hope. I could feel warm blood trickling down my neck, but my throat wasn't slashed, because I was still breathing through my nose and mouth as