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  Mira had no intention of letting him evade her. “I need to know what happened to my brother, Mr. Traylin.”

  “You want to know what happened? He saved my ass, that’s what. If it weren’t for Luke, we’d both be lying in pieces in a psychopath’s living room.”

  “He … saved you?” She put her head against Luke’s. “Is that true?”

  Luke muttered something she didn’t understand.

  “Your kid brother’s my hero,” Traylin said.

  Mira didn’t correct him. Luke was the older of the two, albeit by only a minute. And now his younger sister sat here suffused with warmth at the thought of her brother being someone’s hero. No one had ever said that of him before, at least not anyone who sounded so sincere.

  She reached across him and touched Traylin on the arm.

  He was scanning the darkness for his truck; he turned at her touch.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  What she wanted to say was For not treating him like a child or For taking him seriously. There was a pattern that people adopted when they interacted with someone with Down, but Traylin seemed unaware of it.

  “Luke did all the work,” Traylin told her. “He’s the one who’s quick on the draw with a ray gun.”

  “What’s that mean? What happened back there? Who is this man you’re looking for?”

  “Later. I think I see the truck.”

  The rover’s powerful lamps revealed the vehicle. Jonah had not even gotten them fully braked before Traylin slung himself out. He ran for the truck but then doubled back. “Wait a minute. The observatory’s twice as far away as your place, and I need to get somebody out here before he torches everything. Your phone is closer.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ben said, already climbing from the rover’s passenger seat, “if only to hear exactly what the hell is going on. Okay with you, Joe, if he uses your phone again?”

  “I suppose, though all of this is highly irregular. We’ll follow behind as quickly as we can.”

  Traylin gave Luke a quick salute. “You the man.” Then he turned and ran to his truck, Ben hurrying after him.

  Luke looked at Mira, his tears replaced by a tentative smile. “I’m the man.”

  “Apparently you are.” She watched the two men slam their doors and tear away in a funnel of dust. Though it was hours past midnight, she wasn’t tired. While part of her was worried that she and Luke had crossed into dangerous territory, another part rejoiced in it: Luke was the man, and no one had ever told him that and actually meant it. Whoever Gabe Traylin was, and whatever peril he was facing, he’d already earned a promotion in Mira’s heart.

  The rover pursued the truck taillights until the distance between them grew too great.

  “Gretel?”

  “Yes?”

  “He cut her up bad.”

  * * *

  Ben squatted in the trench and scooped up a handful of Martian soil.

  They called it Daedalia Planum, a land of frozen lava flows and impact craters. Ben remembered reading of Daedalus, inventor to the gods and creator of the Minotaur’s prison. Ben had drawn upon that lore when writing of his fictional Lieutenant Dycar, setting his protagonist at odds with the Martian landscape just as Daedalus and his son had challenged the sky. In the end, the heat melted the wings from the younger man’s arms, and the cold solidified the blood in Dycar’s veins. Both died, but both had finally known freedom.

  “Live free or die,” he said to himself. The battle cry of Harley-Davidsons everywhere.

  He stood up.

  This was not Mars. This single acre marked with yellow flags was no extraterrestrial frontier, but make-believe. Men of towering bravado such as Dycar and Icarus had no business here, where mortals scooped soil samples into dishes and guessed at the probability of growing wheat. Ben wondered if his lack of literary inspiration was due to an equal lack of courage. Nobody had guts of mythic level anymore. Nobody went hunting for the big game.

  “Cops are on their way.”

  Ben turned, letting the last of the dirt run through his fingers. “I’m sorry?”

  The astronomer, Gabe Traylin, held the phone in both hands. “The police. I gave them the Mentiras coordinates. Which means I probably just lost my job.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “My boss said he’d fire me if I kept stirring the pot.”

  “And that’s what you were doing out there? Stirring the pot?”

  “Luke and I, yeah. With one big-ass spoon.” He wiped his forehead. “I think I need to sit down.” He lowered himself gingerly to the ground, careful to keep ACEF’s expensive phone out of the sand.

  Ben watched him with growing concern. “Anything I can get for you? Bottle of water, maybe?”

  Gabe shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”

  “If you say so.” Personally, Ben thought the man looked like he was ready to lose his lunch, but saying so wouldn’t help. “So … you going to tell me what’s out there that’s worth the unemployment line?”

  Gabe didn’t look at him but kept his gaze safely on the stars. “I guess we found a murderer.”

  “You guess?”

  “Maybe a serial killer, I don’t know. That sounds sort of dramatic.”

  “I take it that you initially made this discovery by accident.”

  “I blame the Marlboros.”

  “Come again?”

  “I was having a smoke when I … when I found his first victim. So, yeah, it was an accident, unless you believe that there are no such things.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Me? I believe that the universe began as a point smaller than a pinhead and that it’ll go out the same way. Everything else is for someone else to worry about.”

  Ben considered that. From his readings in the sci-fi field, he understood enough layman’s cosmology to know that Gabe referred to a theory called the Big Crunch. In the Big Crunch model, all of creation would end as it began, a tiny speck into which had been crammed the sum of everything. Just as space expanded, so too would it contract. It had been called the breathing in and out of God.

  “Not the most optimistic view of things,” Ben allowed, taking a seat next to the younger man. “But one to which you’re certainly entitled, given the circumstances. Sad, though, to think that the world is in such a state that you can’t even escape the bad mojo in a place as remote as this.”

  “I’m just glad you guys were out here. Vic and I had gotten ourselves kind of lost.”

  “Thank my brother. Jonah oversees this operation. He’s the egghead in the Cable family tree. Everything you see here is his responsibility, from the hydroponics bays to the waste-recycling unit. Me, I’m just a vagrant enjoying the view.”

  “I hear you there.” Gabe finally looked away from the sky, pulling a crumpled scroll of papers from his back pocket. In the light from the nearest track-mounted bulb, he smoothed the pages on his knees and studied them.

  Though Ben wouldn’t normally be so intrusive as to ask about the documents, he figured that a night like this warranted a moratorium on social etiquette. Maybe it wasn’t any of his business, but he wasn’t letting that get in his way. “I take it that what you have there somehow pertains to recent events?”

  “I’m not sure. I found them down there in the son of a bitch’s hideout. I’ve got a newspaper clipping and then some kind of report. I don’t suppose the name Pinochet means anything to you?”

  “Pinochet? Seriously? All of that nasty business went down before you were born, but that man’s name is bad medicine here in Chile. Take a dash of Hitler and sprinkle in a bit of Charlie Manson, and you’re getting the idea. But even a charming guy like that still has his supporters. Go figure.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Oh, the usual sinister dictator stuff. Augusto Pinochet was a strong-arm general who took over the Chilean government in the midseventies. You know how it goes after that. Human rights violations, political a
ssassinations, all your basic civil liberties mailed parcel post to hell.”

  Gabe held up the piece of newsprint. “It says here that a couple of years ago, the CIA admitted to supporting this guy’s regime. They financed some of his operations.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “I guess not, but it’s pretty damned screwed up.”

  “Such is the way of the world, my friend. We’re nothing if not screwed up. If our men in black aren’t funding the coup to put a tyrant in command, then they’re sending weapons to the folks they want to overthrow him. Either way, they’re involved up to their eyeballs in most of the world’s blood. Hell, half the time both sides in a war are killing each other with weapons they bought from the same source, that being Uncle Sam. But that’s not the question that really matters, now is it?”

  Gabe thought about it only for a second. “Why would that bastard in Mentiras care about something like this, especially when it happened over thirty years ago?”

  “Bingo. That’s what you’d call the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What else do you have there?”

  Gabe handed him the documents.

  Though Ben’s command of the Spanish language would never win him a contract to translate the native works of Octavio Paz, he could usually muddle through the basics. Angling the paper toward the light, he scanned the dense type that began with the rather ominous header of DIRECCIÓN DE INTELIGENCIA NACIONAL. “The National Intelligence Directorate. This just gets more interesting by the minute.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Give me a second…”

  The silence that followed his words was utter and complete. Perhaps no desert on Earth was a suitable simulacrum for the Red Planet, but this absence of sound went a long way to reinforcing the illusion. When the winds on Mars weren’t blowing, its plains knew this same kind of empty peace.

  “Let’s see … looks like the directorate, or DINA, was officially reorganized and renamed in 1977. Most of this stuff is just legalese about transferring employees from one office to another. Nothing very exciting.”

  “This directorate was … what? Some kind of national security agency?”

  “More like secret police.”

  “Like the Gestapo?”

  “A fair analogy, I suspect. I’m not very steeped in Chilean history, but I bet a visit to your local library could explain a lot. Not that anything’s local out here.”

  “And that’s all it says?”

  “Unless you’re interested in how DINA was reorganized as a law-abiding organization after years of illegal activities, then yes, that’s all it says. Wait, belay that.” Ben leaned closer to the paper. “There is a name underlined here.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Micha Lepin. Mean anything to you?”

  “No. Is that male or female?”

  “It’s a man’s name, I believe. Not any chance he could be your Mentiras suspect, is there? If this is from the late seventies, then Lepin would have to be at least in his midfifties by now, and probably a lot older than that. How old was the man you encountered?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess. Was he under sixty?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? Surely you can tell if the guy was closer to twenty than seventy.”

  Gabe looked away. “It happened really quickly.”

  Though Ben had never considered himself exceptionally savvy when it came to his fellow man, he sensed now that Gabe was holding something back. “What did you see out there, exactly?”

  Gabe seemed absorbed in his examination of what the poets called the firmament. Ben didn’t know much about the stars, other than what he read in his horoscope, and recently the seers in the daily paper hadn’t been kind to him. Gabe, though, was different. An astronomer understood the distance between those stars and why it made interstellar travel impossible for the current human physiology. Ben wanted to ask him about all of that because it fascinated him, but right now he’d settle for a simple answer to his question.

  Suddenly Gabe said, “What if there was a crime so horrible that, if you told anyone about it, they’d just think you were a freak for imagining things like that?”

  “Then I reckon I’d keep it to myself.”

  And Gabe did.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Minutes later, Gabe remembered the dog tags.

  He’d been sitting here with the phone in his lap, using a whip and chair to hold off the flashbacks of that woman in the wagon. Where her breasts had been were two patches of bloody gauze taped to the skin. The stub of her left arm had healed cleanly. Her right was a bruised mess, indicating a much more recent procedure. Her legs were the same way, meaning that the man had kept her hostage for a considerable length of time and periodically removed a limb.

  Had Gabe merely heard about such an atrocity, he would’ve recoiled and pushed it from his mind, happy to go on with his life. But having seen it, having touched the bodies of the boy with the pinwheel and the woman in Mentiras, he couldn’t escape.

  He dragged the chain from his pocket.

  The dog tags turned in the light when he held them before his face. Gabe allowed them to settle onto his palm, while in his mind a soldier trekked across the desert with a devastated boy in his pack. That soldier, otherwise known as the Midnight Messenger, was anonymous no more.

  OLIVARES, ALBAN

  Gabe closed his eyes and wove that name on the loom of his mind. Alban Olivares. He bound the threads around the soldier’s fallen body, making him into something more than just a runner in the night. By christening him, Gabe created him. When he opened his eyes, Olivares was a father, a brother, and somebody’s son. He played cards with his buddies in the barracks and got his heart broken by American girls.

  “Gabe?”

  He blinked away his reverie to find Ben looking at him. “His name was Alban.”

  “The man at Mentiras?”

  “One of his victims. Alban Olivares”—he held up the dog tags—“tried to rescue a boy who’d been kidnapped and … and tortured. He was shot and killed. I saw it happen. That’s what started all of this for me.”

  “So how’d he find out about it? You could say that Mentiras epitomizes the term middle of nowhere. How did your man Alban discover it to begin with? Did he track the killer out there?”

  “I don’t know. Hopefully the police will figure it out.”

  Ben laughed.

  “What? What did I say?”

  “Apparently you’ve had better luck with the constabulary than I have. I’m sorry, but I’ve never had a very high opinion of the boys in blue, and I wouldn’t figure the ones down here are any better.”

  “You’re saying the Investigative Police are incompetent?”

  “Not at all. But when I was young, Jonah and I were involved in a … what you would term a rather serious accident. A member of a wealthy family was responsible. A wealthy white family, as it turned out. No offense intended to present company. When it came time for them to pay the piper, both legally and financially, they found that a few of the police officers were more than willing to doubt our innocence in the matter. We were very nearly blamed for the event that put Jonah in his chair and our daddy in his grave.”

  “Damn.”

  “Damn indeed. But it worked out in the end, as it always seems to do, though ever since then I’ve given cops a wide berth. Of course, by the time they get all the way out here, their quarry will likely be long gone, and there are places here in South America still wild enough to hide a man who intends on being hidden.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  “Which means you’re the linchpin of their entire case. Lucky you. I hope you weren’t planning on flying back to the States. You’re what the media calls the prosecution’s star witness.”

  Gabe had nothing to say about such an idea. Face blindness didn’t lend itself to being any kind of witness, star or otherwise. Gabe would never be able to pi
ck anyone out of a lineup. “Well, I don’t know about that. I’m pretty sure Luke got a lot better look at the guy.”

  “That may be, but we both know that the judiciary system will consider you the more credible of the two. It’s probably not very socially correct to assume that, but…”

  “Why would I be any more credible than anyone else?”

  “It’s not you I’m talking about. It’s him. The defense attorneys will make it clear to the court that Luke isn’t always the most reliable fellow, as charming as he might be.”

  “He seemed pretty goddamn reliable when he Tasered that asshole.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Actually, I don’t. Would you have climbed into a well with me, knowing that a murderer was possibly down there? I was a total stranger to Luke, but you know what? He backed my play. If you ask me, he has a third-degree black belt in the balls department. So just because he’s a kid doesn’t make him unreliable.”

  “He’s no kid. I’d bet he’s right around your age.”

  “Say what?” Gabe realized he was missing the point, as he’d so often missed it in the past. What was it about Luke that Ben so clearly recognized? “But I thought—”

  “He has Down syndrome.”

  Gabe waited for the rest. There had to be more, some punch line that would make sense in a moment or two. But Ben said nothing more.

  You can’t be serious. Such a reaction might have once served John McEnroe, but it seemed inadequate to describe the depth of Gabe’s surprise.

  “I assumed you knew,” Ben said.

  Gabe ran a hand through his hair. “It was dark.”

  “Sure.”

  Down syndrome? Had Gabe known, he never would have … No, scratch that. Any disability that Luke might possess was fully canceled out by his courage. Put anyone else down that hole when the rifleman showed up, and Gabe might have found himself tied up in that plastic tub, watching as his own leg was amputated. “He can share a foxhole with me any day of the week.”

  “He’d be proud to hear it, and so would his sister.” Ben stood up. “I better get this phone back on its charger. This isn’t the kind of place you want to be without one.”

  Gabe watched him walk away until the darkness claimed him.