David Morrell: The Covenant Of The Flame

Yes! Whoever! But there wasn't any doubt who they were.

Barker and Hudson!

Davis shook with indignation. Junior Democratic senators threatening a senior Republican senator? Had they no conception of the power that a seasoned politician like Davis could muster?

I'll - !

Yes? You'll -

What? Exactly what will you do? Confront them? Reinforce the validity of their accusations? No matter what you do to them , it's nothing compared to what they can do to you if they decide to reveal what was in this package. Your career will be finished, ruined, a joke!

Then what are you going to do?

'Dear?'

Davis flinched as he heard his wife coming down the stairs. In a rush, he shoved the torn evidence into the envelope.

'Did I hear the doorbell?' Davis 's wife appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Her wrinkle-rimmed eyes were baggy. Her pudgy cheeks and belly sagged. Her white hair was in curlers.

'Yes, love,' Davis answered. 'It was nothing. Just a messenger with some last-minute information about the clean-air bill.'

'Oh, my, how tedious. I wish they wouldn't bother us this early.'

'I know, sweet,' Davis said. 'But it was important. It made me rethink which way I'll vote. I'm beginning to sympathize with Barker and Hudson. The children, dear. We have to protect the nation's children. We have to insure them clean air so they can have clean lungs.'

'But what about - ?'

'My generous supporters in Detroit? I guess I'll just have to make them understand, dear.' Davis thought about the photographs, about the arousing smell of his assistant. 'Yes, that's right. I guess I'll just have to make my generous supporters understand.'

The Amazon basin. Brazil.

A haze filled the sky. Juanita Gomez, wearing a long black dress, fought to maintain her strength as she squinted through tears and a veil toward her husband's makeshift coffin. Yes, be strong, she thought, her soul aching. You must. For Pedro. It's what he would have wanted. Around her, she knew, her husband's mourning followers watched her as intensely as they did the coffin. If she lost control, if she gave them the least cause to suspect that her grief had weakened her resolve to continue her husband's work, then her husband's enemies would indeed have accomplished what they'd hoped to achieve by killing him. For Pedro! she thought. Be strong!

Juanita was twenty-five, short and thin, with a narrow face and tawny skin. She wasn't beautiful, she readily admitted, and had never been able to understand why Pedro had chosen her. Her single attractive feature was her shoulder-length dark hair, which despite the poverty of her diet had a sheen. How Pedro had loved to stroke it. How he'd bragged that their two infant children had inherited Juanita's lovely hair. What am I going to do without you? Juanita thought, barely able to restrain the trembling in her legs. But the answer -

– it seemed she heard Pedro's impassioned voice inside her brain -

– instantly made her stand straighter.

Have courage, Juanita. Don't give up. Make sure I didn't die uselessly. Take my place. Inflame my discouraged followers. Say the words! Give the speech!

Yes, Juanita thought and raised her angry eyes toward the thickening haze that obscured the sky. The speech. Since her husband had been shot two days ago, Juanita had felt an overwhelming pressure of words inside her. Although she'd never been gifted with her unschooled husband's amazing ability to speak in public and capture a crowd's attention, she'd suddenly known that she had to make a pronouncement at his graveside. It was almost as if she'd been commanded to do so. Throughout the preparations for Pedro's funeral, while his bullet-ravaged corpse lay on precious, hard-to-find ice, Juanita had mentally rehearsed what her compulsion dictated. Last night, too distraught with sorrow to sleep, she'd perfected the words. Soon, when the elderly priest finished droning his words over the coffin, it would be her turn. She would say hers . Pedro, her beloved husband, would speak in her, with her, through her – and provided that she remained strong, her husband's followers would subdue their fear, overcome their discouragement, and persist in their fight to save the land.

Be strong!

The cemetery was ancient, the majority of its wooden crosses listing from decay. The graveyard stood on a barren hill that overlooked the shacks in the village of Cordoba and the silt-choked, mud-colored tributary of the once-magnificent Amazon River. The silt was caused by runoff, Juanita knew, by erosion when the rain washed away the soil that the roots of the former majestic forest could no longer protect.

Because of the fires.

Because of the slash-and-burn tactics of her husband's enemies.

Those enemies had compelled the villagers to cut down the trees, to set fire to them, and to use the cleared land to grow more crops. That was why a thickening haze obscured the sky. Juanita trembled with increasing rage. Because of the fires in the distance, on the rim of the dwindling forest. The soil was extremely thin, even with the ashes from the trees, and after a few years of intensive farming, the soil stopped being fertile. As a consequence, more trees were burned, more land cleared, more crops planted until that soil too became infertile – a sickening pattern of progressive destruction.

But there was even more sickening destruction, Juanita knew. For her husband's enemies, who owned the land, forced the villagers to leave and brought in heavy equipment to strip-mine the treeless land to get at the minerals beneath it. In the end, nothing of worth remained. Wherever Juanita looked, barren ugliness surrounded her.

The priest had almost finished his prayers. Juanita felt heat in her soul, a furious need to turn to her husband's followers and say her words, to urge them to persist in their fight. Pedro had organized these villagers, convincing them to refuse to allow the wealthy, greedy, evil men in the nation's capital to continue destroying God's creation. Pedro had learned from visiting foreigners – what had they called themselves? ecologists? – that the dense smoke from the widespread fires was poisoning the earth's air. The foreigners had also said that this largest forest in the world took something bad (she remembered the meaningless term 'carbon dioxide') out of the air and added something good (what was it? oxygen?), that if the forest disappeared, which it would at the present rapid rate of millions of acres each year, the carbon dioxide in the air would accumulate until the weather changed, the temperature rose, and the rains no longer came.

The world depended on this forest, the foreigners had insisted. The burning had to be stopped!

Pedro had understood what the foreigners had told him, but he'd also understood that the peasants wouldn't fight to save the forest merely because foreigners claimed it was important to the world. At the same time, Pedro had known that the peasants would fight to save their homes, to preserve the rubber trees that gave them both shelter and the crop from which they earned their living, to protect the river from the muddy erosion that choked the fish they depended on for food. They'd fight. That is, if someone showed them how to fight, if someone banded them together, if someone gave them the confidence to realize that in numbers there was strength.

So Pedro had accepted the challenge, and for a time, he and his followers had been successful, forcing the enemy from the land. Apparently too successful, for the evil men in the capital had sent assassins with machineguns to shoot – to shred - Pedro's body while he made a speech in a neighboring village, and now the air was again thick with smoke. Once more, the ominous fires burned.