her with each awkward step. As soon as she started down the red-colored slope, the guards inside the caldera saw her and moved to a point directly beneath her, weapons ready, watching her descent expectantly.
She was already having second thoughts about the wisdom of this. If they wanted to, they could pick her off with a single shot. If they let her get to the bottom alive, her survival depended, she realized, on Herve Chatel’s goodwill — and, just possibly, on how much influence he had with Ibrahim Azhar, a known terrorist, hijacker, and murderer.
The hell of it was, there was no way for her to change her mind. She couldn’t scramble up and out of this crater if those people down there decided that she wasn’t going to leave.
The San Martin crater was oddly shaped, an oval a third of a mile long, northwest to southeast, and two- tenths of a mile wide. The crater ridge rose only about fifty meters above the surrounding black, moon-surface terrain; the deepest parts of the crater’s interior, however, plunged into shadow over a hundred meters below. The crater’s floor was broken and uneven, some places much deeper than others. The helipad and tents had been set up on a relatively shallow, level stretch to the southeast; the drilling derrick rose from the very deepest part of the crater, in the northwest. To Lia’s untrained eye, it looked as if the crater was the product of
The guards came up to meet her as she neared the bottom of the cinder slope. “You are not permitted here!” one barked in accented Spanish, then repeated himself in even worse English. “You no come here!”
One guard grabbed her arm and yanked her forward. “Hey!” she shouted, playing the outraged tourist role. “Get your hands off of me!”
“What you do, restricted area?” one of them demanded.
Lia turned and looked at Herve Chatel, watching from perhaps fifty yards away. “Herve!” she called. “Herve! It’s me, Diane! Call off your dogs, will you?”
One of the guards snarled something in Arabic and struck her in the back with the butt of his rifle, sending her sprawling to the ground. Too late, she remembered that the term “dog” was a deadly insult among Muslims in general and Arabs in particular. She’d meant the phrase colloquially, not as invective.
Rough hands grabbed her by either arm and hoisted her to her feet, dragging her toward Chatel and Azhar.
“Lia, are you okay?” Rubens’ voice said in her ear.
“Yeah,” she said through clenched teeth. “Language difficulties.”
“Silence, whore!” the guard on her right growled. They dropped her in an untidy heap on the ground.
“Diane!” Chatel said, hurrying forward. “What are you doing here?”
“I was out biking,” she told him. She started to rise, and Chatel reached out and helped her stand, brushing the volcanic dust off of her shirt in entirely too familiar a manner. She ignored it. “I was
Azhar joined them, his face dark but otherwise unreadable. “You know this woman?”
“Yes,” Chatel said. “She came with me from Spain. She is … a friend.”
Azhar smirked at that. “I know about your ‘friends.’ “ He looked at Lia. “Didn’t you see the postings on the trails? No trespassing.”
“I saw one north of here,” she said. “At Montana Rejada. After that, I stayed on the bike trails below the crest of the ridge. Those weren’t blocked off.”
“You needed to be on the crest trail to get here,” Azhar told her.
“I went off-trail,” she replied. “I crossed a flat, open stretch of cinders and pine trees, and ended up on the ridge trail. I didn’t see any roadblocks.”
All of that was the exact truth. They couldn’t possibly block off all those miles of twisting bike trail and footpath, not without bringing in an army.
“Are you alone?” Chatel asked her.
“I was riding with a couple of other tourists for a while, but that was a few hours ago.” That would explain the presence of her companions if Chatel checked with the sentries that had turned them back at Rejada.
“I really wish you hadn’t come up here, Diane,” Chatel told her. “It makes things … complicated.”
“Why not? You were gone so
“I would have been back to the hotel tonight. I’ll be flying back to Spain tomorrow.”
“So … what are you doing here, anyway? Drilling for oil?”
“Not inside a volcanic crater,” he told her. He seemed uneasy. “This island, these volcanoes, they’re all igneous rock, not sedimentary. Not a good place to prospect for petroleum.”
“This is part of a research project,” Azhar told her. “There is a … a danger of the volcanoes on this ridge exploding, of them possibly triggering a massive tidal wave.”
“I’ve heard the theory,” Lia told him. “Why all the security? Roadblocks, armed guards …”
“These things can be … misunderstood by the general public,” Chatel said. “It could even cause a panic. People might think that an eruption is imminent if they see us drilling up here.”
The explanation actually made sense.
“I was reading a book just the other day about La Palma blowing up and causing a big tidal wave.
Chatel made a face. “
As they talked, Lia looked around the floor of the crater. In the deeper part, to her left, the drilling derrick ground and chugged. Nearby, she noticed more enormous wooden spools of insulated electrical wire. What the hell was that for?
“So long as I’m here,” she said brightly, “can you show me around? I
Chatel exchanged glances with Azhar. “Perhaps later. But you
She looked at her watch. “Just so I’m back at the hotel by seven.”
“We’ll see what we can do.” He turned at the sound of rock scraping. Another figure was coming toward them from the direction of the workers’ tents.
Lia followed Chatel’s glance, her eyes widened, and she bit off a curse.
“Well, well,” a familiar voice said. “The elusive Ms. Lau. I was wondering what had become of you.”
Feng Jiu Zhu, formerly of Chinese military intelligence, had the cold stare of a venomous snake as he joined them, and he was holding an ugly little semiautomatic pistol.
20
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and Rubens fished it from his jacket. The only person who would call him on that phone was his secretary.
“What is it, Ann?”
