Jon Evans - Swarm

I raised my hand to my wounded cheek, then yanked it away; the aching wound flared into volcanic agony when touched. I nodded at Jesse’s black eye. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but it’s our faces that just got beat up, because your oh-so-altruistic friends happen to be a front for drug dealers.”

“Even if that’s true,” Jesse said, “why would they come after us?”

“They weren’t after you. They were after Sophie.”

“Then why were they talking about Anya? And if you’re right, then we’re the goose laying golden eggs. Why cart us off to the slaughterhouse?”

I had no answer. He was right. “Then who?”

“I have no idea,” Jesse said.

“Stop it,” Anya interposed. “All this speculation is useless. When we get ourselves safe, then we can figure out what happened. It’s useless to argue like this now.”

She was right, and we all fell silent, but it was an uncomfortable silence. Jesse stared at the table. Anya looked meditative. Sophie looked out at the Caribbean. I wanted to ask her how much Jesse knew of her secrets. But all I could do was watch her and wonder exactly how much she had been hiding from me since the day she and I had first met.

We waited on the Hotel Cyvadier’s verandah for two hours. Marie-Anne, racist but hospitable, had the waiter bring us baskets of bread and carafes of water. Whoever said man cannot live on bread alone was never desperately hungry when a fresh baguette arrived at his table. The first one vanished in less than thirty seconds.

The few other guests, all white, watched us with curiosity and asked Marie-Anne about us. The hotel staff, all black, discussed us with each other. The interest level made me uneasy. It was all too easy to imagine the gossip being relayed to the nearby town of Jacmel, and thence to a Haitian police officer who had received word of a sizable reward for our arrest and delivery. My stomach lurched with sour tension every time a vehicle pulled into the Cyvadier’s gravel parking lot.

But the first to come looking for us was Zavier and his golden smile, driving a Toyota so old, rusted, and battered that it looked more like a work of modern art than a functional vehicle. Sophie and I were delighted to see him. Anya and Jesse were not.

“Where’s the Land Cruiser?” Jesse demanded of him before he even reached our table. “The big car, where is it?”

Zavier shook his head ruefully. “I could not. The police, I could not.”

“The police? What?”

The big black man grimaced. I thought I recognized his pained expression: he wanted to explain a complex concept in a language he only barely spoke.

“ Est-ce que tu parles francais? ” I asked.

He looked at me gratefully and burst into a stream of fast and accented French. I hardly understood any of it, but eventually, between his broken English, my broken French, and Jesse and Anya’s grasp of context, we came to understand that Zavier had gone to the walled property they maintained in Port-au-Prince to get their Land Cruiser, but found it occupied by the police, who had wanted to arrest him. He had gotten away by dint of some clever piece of subterfuge; I didn’t quite understand the details of his deception, but I understood that he was quite proud of it. With the Land Cruiser unavailable he had come here in his own car.

“Shit,” Jesse said morosely, when the picture was clear.

“We can go to the our embassies,” I suggested. “They’ll arrange temporary passports. We can fly out.” Then I looked at Anya and wondered if there even was a Russian embassy in Haiti. But surely the USA would take care of her too. At least long enough to detain her for interrogation.

“First we have to get to Port-au-Prince,” Jesse said. “Let’s get a move on.”

We walked gingerly to the Toyota; bare feet and gravel are a painful combination. Jesse claimed the passenger seat. I rode with my knees pressed painfully up against its back. The Corolla’s seats were threadbare and much-patched, the back doors opened only from outside, one window was stuck shut and the other half-open, the seat belts were only a memory, and the radio was a ragged, gaping hole. The shocks were gone, and every bump of Haiti’s obstacle-course roads went straight to my spine. But the tires looked fine, and the oft-repaired engine ran remarkably smoothly.

The road was rutted mud, still wet from the storm. We passed very briefly through Jacmel, a crumbling town of rotting concrete and earthquake-ravaged rubble juxtaposed with ancient colonial buildings that had somehow survived the earth’s violence, all hidden behind high walls and metal grilles that made it clear this was or had been a city of random violence. It seemed all grey, beige, and brown; any vivid colours had long since faded beneath the relentless tropical sun. The single exception, the bright lights and logo of its one Elf gas station, seemed jarringly out of place.

The city’s denizens viewed us with placid curiosity, if they noticed us at all. Zavier’s battered Toyota blended well with other Haitian traffic. On the way out of town, just before we began to climb up into the hills, we passed a small airstrip. A small plane had just landed, and was disgorging men. Hispanic men. One had an odd, stiff-legged gait.

The pilot of the boat that had come to seize the Argus. The man behind him was the snaggle-toothed gunman who had fired his AK-47 over our heads. To my profound relief, neither looked up as the Toyota passed.

“Don’t look now,” I said in a low voice, “but the vulture has landed.”

Naturally everyone looked. Jesse grunted with surprise.

“Half an hour for them to get to the hotel,” Sophie said tersely. “Ten minutes to work out where we’re going. We better take an alternate route or they’ll intercept.”

I transmitted this idea to Zavier.

“ C’est pas possible ,” he said. “I am sorry. There is only one road from Jacmel to Port-au-Prince.”

It was a road that should have been sponsored by Six Flags. It wound through steep hills, and along huge sheer cliffs, with no protective fencing. At least it was recently paved, no doubt thanks to post-quake reconstruction, and the view was glorious; an endless panorama of mist-wreathed green ridges, shot through with rocky crags, beneath a blood-red sunset. We passed the occasional quarry, roadside building, fruit vendor, or plot of farmed land, but most of these highlands seemed still untamed.

I would have appreciated it more if I hadn’t been so miserable. The low-grade headache that had plagued me since being rifle-whipped was throbbing worse and worse, and my stomach churned uneasily as Zavier whipped the car around tight switchbacks. He at least was enjoying himself. Outside the car he was stern and wooden, but a small smile played on his face when he drove. Anya had closed her eyes and was breathing deeply through her nose, maybe meditating, her perfect face slack and empty. Beside me Sophie too had retreated to her own world of pure intellect. Her eyes were open, but even when the turns threw her against me or Anya, her expression betrayed no awareness.

The sun sank behind the western hills with amazing speed. Only one of the Toyota’s headlights stabbed into the near-absolute darkness that followed. The police roadblock was around the corner from a sharp turn. We didn’t see its lights until we were less than fifty feet away.

Zavier braked the Toyota to a sharp stop, jolting us all out of our reveries. It took me a few seconds to come to grips with the situation. The roadblock consisted of a big log laid across the road, and four men with guns in ill-fitting uniforms: Haitian police, not UN peacekeepers. A car sat parked behind the log, engine running, headlights illuminating the scene. On both sides of us the road ended at a not-quite-cliff.