“How far do you need to go?”
“There’s a village on the Scilla River about a mile from where it empties into the Chinko.”
“That’s about a hundred miles north. How important is this?”
Cali answered readily. “One of our researchers came across some medical records put together by a missionary in the late eighties. No one had paid any attention to them. It seems the people in this town suffer from the highest cancer rate on the planet. The CDC believes there may be a genetic cause. If we can isolate it, well, you can figure it out for yourself.”
“Gene therapy to prevent cancer.”
She nodded. “And possibly cure it. I need to get blood and tissue samples.”
“And if you don’t get there before Dayce, those people are either going to be dead-”
“Or so scattered I’ll never find them,” Cali finished for him. “That’s why I rushed here as soon as I could.”
“You’re talking about going further than I’d planned, but I’ll take you.”
“You were going back up there?” Cali couldn’t believe it.
“Why do you think I unloaded the truck?” he said. “I passed a lot more people than I could carry on my way down here. The government’s not going to get them, so someone has to.” His voice went grave. “Just so we’re clear, though. We’re turning around at the first sign of trouble.”
Cali’s tone matched his. This was her best, and probably only, shot. “You got it.”
“Okay, once I get this beast refueled we’re out of here.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He grinned. “Don’t thank me until we come back. Why don’t you wait in the cab out of the rain.”
Mercer watched Cali slide around the battered Ford but didn’t know what to make of her. He was sure that if he hadn’t offered to drive her she would have followed her original plan. It was in the stubborn set of her jaw, but mostly it was the intensity of her eyes. Cali Stowe believed in her mission and he couldn’t imagine much that could deter her. It was a trait he admired because there were few people left who had it.
One of the refugees he’d driven down pressed two tomatoes into his hand as he fed diesel from the drum lashed behind the cab. Mercer was overwhelmed by the gesture. This man had just lost everything he owned, the home he’d lived in probably since he was a child, but still wanted to thank him with perhaps the only food he’d have for as long as it took to get resettled. Mercer carefully inspected the tomatoes, took the best for himself, and handed the other back. Returning the better one would have been an insult. The farmer touched Mercer’s hand and nodded. Behind him his wife smiled her gratitude and hugged her children a little tighter.
Mercer’s thoughts turned back to Cali. As a field researcher for the CDC he imagined she’d been in some rough country before, but he doubted she’d seen anything like this. Yet she’d shrugged off her car getting shot up as though it was a mere inconvenience. That kind of confidence came from experience. He doubted the CDC prepared people for this kind of thing, so he guessed there was something else in her past-military training, perhaps.
That made him feel a little better about driving her north. While he only had one weapon with him, a Beretta 92 pistol, he sensed she wouldn’t freeze if he needed to use it. And for all he knew she had her own gun.
The sudden image of her holding a drawn pistol spiked his pulse. It was the capacity for violence juxtaposed with her delicate features and that sensual mouth. Uncharacteristically, he acknowledged how attractive she was. Uncharacteristically because Mercer hadn’t thought of a woman in those terms in a long time, not since a woman he’d thought he’d loved died eight months ago.
He then found himself circling the same argument he’d faced since her death. He hadn’t told her he loved her until after she was gone, until after there were no consequences to the declaration. He still didn’t know what that meant, or if it had meaning at all. He’d talked about it with his best friend. Harry’s advice was that he should mourn her for a while, miss her probably forever, but not let his guilt make her more than she was. Usually taking advice about women from Harry was like asking a vegan to name a good steak joint; however this time the old man had a point. Harry knew Mercer better than anyone alive and knew how guilt drove him more than any other emotion.
The truth was it was a fear of guilt that drove Mercer, the fear that he could have done more, but hadn’t. That is what pushed him so hard in his professional life. He feared not being able to face the mirror knowing that somehow he had failed at something, really, at anything he attempted. And rather than back down from challenges, Mercer continually set himself tougher and tougher goals. He had no obligation to return north other than his own desire to help those who couldn’t help themselves.
Yet like so many men, he avoided the challenges of his own emotional life. Rather than take time following Tisa Nguyen’s death, he’d buried himself in work. Soon after her funeral he’d returned to the Canadian Arctic where he was under contract with DeBeers. Then it was off for two months on behalf of the Brazilian government to head a task force investigating illegal gold mining in the Amazon rain forest, and then six weeks consulting in Jo’Burg followed by another couple of months working with geologists at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository. As he’d known, the distractions hadn’t healed the wounds, but he felt the scars were less raw, which was why he could see Cali Stowe as an attractive woman.
A gush of diesel erupted from the gas tank and Mercer quickly shut the hose’s valve, his thoughts snapped back to the present. He looked around, chagrined. People were struggling for their very lives while he was rediscovering the first flicker of his libido.
He coiled the hose around the bracket mounted behind the cab and hauled himself into the truck. He slid out of his wet raincoat and stuffed it behind the seat. Cali had changed into a dry bush shirt and had used makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes and freshen her lips. She was probably in her mid-thirties, but the freckles made her look like a teenager. Mercer smiled at her efforts.
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Typical woman, can’t go anywhere without makeup. For your information I’ve been a field researcher for the CDC for five years in some places that make this look like paradise. My makeup kit weighs exactly six ounces and I don’t go anywhere without it.”
“With your fair complexion it’s a good idea.”
Cali stopped and looked at him, her mouth creased upward in a surprised grin. “Thank you. You wouldn’t believe the grief I get from some of the men I’ve worked with.”
“I spend seven or eight months a year away from home,” Mercer told her. “I know how important the little things can be. I worked with a guy in Canada a while ago who carried the remote from his TV set. He said holding it makes him feel he’s back in his living room. Although it really pisses off his wife and kids.”
Cali laughed. “What about you? Anything you carry to make yourself feel better?”
Mercer turned serious. “Not to sound dramatic, but this helps.” He slid his Beretta from behind his back and set it on the bench seat between them. “I thought you should know I have it.”
She nodded. “Let’s just hope we don’t need it.”
The jungle began just five feet from the back of the town’s last building, an arcing canopy of greenery that met above the single dirt track so it was like driving through a living tunnel. For the first half hour they passed miserable groups of refugees trudging south toward Kivu. Mercer stopped at each to tell the refugees that if he had room he’d give them a lift on the way back but to hurry nevertheless. None of the locals had seen or heard Dayce’s army, but Mercer and Cali remained quiet and vigilant as they continued northward.
The rain started to slacken, and even though the windshield wipers made a sound like nails on a chalkboard with each swipe, Mercer wouldn’t turn them off. Too much water was dripping from the trees, and if he had any hope of spotting an ambush, he needed clear visibility.
Two hours into their drive, and an hour after seeing the last group of refugees, they neared the swift Scilla River. The mud brown Scilla was barely fifty feet wide where it swept into the Chinko. A ferry made of empty barrels lashed with wire and topped with corrugated metal was the only way to cross. Mercer was relieved to see that before he’d fled, the ferryman had punctured enough barrels so the flat craft was half-sunk on the near shore. If Caribe Dayce had followed the Chinko down from Sudan, which the rumors said he had, he would have to track east for at least fifteen miles to where the river could be crossed on foot.
“According to the report,” Cali spoke for the first time in twenty minutes, “the village I’m looking for is about a mile to the left.”
Mercer peered into the jungle. While the area where the two rivers met was relatively flat, the Scilla carved through a series of hills so its banks were steep dirt berms. There was no road in, just a narrow footpath meandering along the bluff that quickly grew to eighty feet in height. He backed the truck next to the ferryman’s
