Ted Bell - Spy

“Please don’t feel the need to stay. I think he’s mildly insane with fever, actually. You go. I’ll do the interrogation. Go to Reception and read a magazine. Or, that farewell letter if you really want to pry.”

“I do want to pry. It’s my métier, you know.”

Hawke turned and was out the door in an instant, his face flooded with relief at escaping the noxious oven.

Ambrose moved a chair into position beside the bed and sat down. He took the man’s skeletal hand and held it under the dim lamp, examining his skin and fingernails. After a few moments, he put the hand down and leaned in toward the face for closer inspection.

The mouth was conveniently agape. Congreve pulled the white linen handkerchief from his breast pocket, wrapped it round his fingers, and grasped the German’s tongue twixt thumb and forefinger, extracting it.

“Good lord,” he said, under his breath.

The tongue, in the small pool of light, was horribly furry and spotted white. Malarial, possibly something far more interesting. Hemorrhagic fever perhaps, although it was quite rare, and confined primarily thus far to West Africa.

“Listen to me, Herr Zimmermann,” Ambrose said to the man in flawless idiomatic German, “I perceive that you are dying. You seem to have some kind of parasitic infection. Viral, or, possibly microbial.”

“Poison,” Zimmermann croaked.

“I don’t think so. I think you caught something. Tell me, have you recently been traveling in the Amazon Basin, Ambassador Zimmermann?”

“Igapo,” the man managed to say. “The Black River. They—tried to kill me—they tried many times. I was thrown overboard. But, I am still here and—”

“Who tried to kill you, Ambassador?”

He closed his eyes and whispered in Spanish, “Las Medianoches.”

Ambrose had heard the name from Hawke.

“My wife…she’s in danger…”

“Mr. Ambassador, I want to hear your story. But I fear we haven’t a good deal of time.”

The man lay back upon the pillow and closed his eyes.

And then he began to speak softly but most volubly and Ambrose leaned in to listen, nodding his head periodically as a dead man’s tale came rolling off his discolored tongue.

While he sat there, he learned a few terrifying facts about a union of radical Islamists, guerillas, and narcoterrorists. About the size of their infrastructure, and the power of their influence in Latin politics. Their possible links to Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.

If this man was to be believed, it seemed the whole of the southern hemisphere was about to blow up in the Americans’ faces. And, if Zimmermann’s information was correct, ground zero was going to be the Texas-Mexico borderline. It was frighteningly familiar. A third-party plot to use Mexico against the Americans. Just like 1917. Only this time it wasn’t Germans doing the plotting. It was Middle Eastern terrorists.

The German’s clawlike grip was surprisingly strong. Congreve looked down and saw the man’s head had come up off the pillow and was straining toward him, his watery eyes bulging.

“There is a man in the jungle,” he said, his voice raw. “He knows I’ve betrayed him once. You must stop him before he attacks again. Do you hear me?”

“Give us his name.”

“Muhammad. Muhammad Top.”

“Papa Top?”

“Ja.”

Congreve said, “Where will he attack next?”

“It is written.”

“I don’t have time for biblical references. Tell me where to find him.”

“It is written, I tell you! Written in…in—”

Zimmermann was gone.

18

LA SELVA NEGRA

M uhammad Top ended his morning prayers with a special flourish, three ascending notes flung to the curved bowl of ceiling above his head. He gave a small sigh, allowing himself the brief luxury of repose. Yes. Allahu Akbar. Mighty Allah had replenished his soul during the night hours and now prayer chased sleep from every cobwebbed corner of his waking mind. As he sat kneeling on the hard wooden floor, with nothing but his thin prayer rug for comfort, he shivered.

But, it was not the deep jungle cold that had seeped inside his bones during the night that stirred him.

No, this was a frisson of pure excitement. Papa Top, as he was known to his adoring legions, felt the electric promise of the coming day as a sharp, tingling sensation, one that raced up and down his spine and sped along nerve endings to his extremities. Every day now promised to be a great day, even an historic one. The Day when all wrongs would be righted. And all sins punished. Inshallah. God willing.

The Hour of Retribution.

The Reckoning.

Hello, there! Is that you?

Yes, this feeling was so delightfully pleasant he looked down, half expecting to see an erection sprouting from his groin. But no, the sleepy serpent had not bestirred himself, had not yet risen from the dead calm of the predawn hours. Alas, there had been no concubine in his bed last night, nor did he feel need or want of having one sent up now. No. There was far too much work to be done this day.

Let sleeping snakes lie.

Dawn was just breaking in the leafy green stillness beyond his opened doors and windows. It would still be an hour or more before any trickle of sunlight managed to penetrate the gloom at the very top of the rain forest. Even though his small room was suspended just beneath the deep green canopy of the treetops, only thin rivulets of watery pink light ever managed to leak down his walls as the sun rose over the jungle.

Upon rising from his pallet, Papa Top lit one of the many iron torches that ringed the wall of his spare circular bedchamber high in the trees. During morning prayers, the light from the single flickering kerosene torch threw stark orange and black shadows upon the thatched walls of his room. Torchlight was both eerie and comforting and he would have it no other way. He had become, after all, primarily a creature of darkness.

Like running water, though, electricity was now readily available throughout this strange village. Early on, Muhammad Top had decided to erect his empire high in the trees. Because of the heavy flooding that swept through this remote area during the rainy season, it was critical to be above ground level. And, as all military commanders know, one wanted the high ground in battle. Not that he ever intended to fight here.

His life’s mission was to take the fight to the enemy.

The newly installed high-capacity power stations meant all manner of wonders were possible. There was a new underground communications bunker, the command center, from which he would soon wage his great jihad on the infidels to the north. Electric powered buggies and troop trams, for instance, now sped across the suspended rope bridges that formed the network of the warlike community. Battery-powered aerial drones patrolled the skies above looking for intruders. And Trolls that spat lead rolled through the jungle looking for invaders.

Still, in his primary bedchamber, he chose not to have power at all. He preferred candles or torches in spaces where he lived his solitary life.

Of all elements, Papa Top vastly preferred fire.

Once, when Muhammad was a child, he had visited his paternal ancestral village on the parched banks of the Euphrates in Syria. One day an old crone came to visit his house. She was a Syrian Hama, a witch, veiled and wearing a black cotton garment, called an ezar. Embroidered with symbols of wind, earth, and fire, the flowing ezar enveloped most of her frail body and head. Little Muhammad Top had seen only the witch’s fierce black eyes and, as she had bent and whispered a strange riddle, smelled her sour breath.

“If your house was burning, Muhammad Top,” the woman said to the small boy, “and God in his wisdom allowed you to rush in to save only one single thing, what would that one thing be?”