Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(35)
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
“You’ve got to participate, girl. How many letters?”
Bibi looked at the kitchen window above the sink and was only somewhat relieved to see that indeed it had been locked. “Eleven,” she said, though she had no reason why that number and not another. “Eleven letters.”
Paxton and Danny didn’t believe in ghosts. Perry allowed for the possibility, but never expected to see one. Only Gibb was as certain of the reality of unmoored spirits as he was of the existence of the air he breathed, for his mother, who had raised him alone, sometimes saw his dead father walking in the fields behind their house or standing under the oak tree in the yard, or sitting on the porch, smiling and translucent. On those occasions, she said it made sense that dear Harry would decline to move on as souls should, considering that he had loved her and Gibb as no man had ever before loved his wife and son. Gibb never glimpsed the apparition, though he yearned to see it. He knew it must be real, because his mother never lied; and each time she saw the wraith, she grew luminous with delight.
Yet none of the four SEALs, including open-minded Perry and true-believing Gibb, felt that this town in the barren outback of Hell might be haunted. If anyplace in the world should have made you feel that it lay aswarm with otherworldly presences, it should have been this doomed village. But perhaps the cruelties visited upon these people had been so demonic and vicious, the murders committed with such cold-blooded pleasure and violence, that the many victims had been killed twice, in body and in spirit, and had no choice of either an afterlife or a lingering haunt.
At 3:00 A.M., when the SEALs had left their surveillance post on the roof, moving into the narrow streets with a stealth that only ghosts could have matched, the town seemed never to have supported life, to have been forever as dead as any crater on the airless moon that shed now only a quarter of its potential light. The dwellings were crammed together, each walled from its neighbors, curiously isolated in proximity to the others, segregated, crude and sullen-looking places, lacking any sense of comfort or community, each family a separate tribe on its own speck of an archipelago, so that no aura of history adhered to the structures, either. Nor did they serve even as monuments to those who had once inhabited them.
Pax wondered if this deadest of dead places would be the death of him, but he didn’t dwell on the thought. Difficult as it might be for civilians to believe, a battle-hardened SEAL valued his life less than the lives of his buddies, less even than his honor, which was the only attitude to have if you wanted to win a war.
They had split into two teams and had circuitously approached the target house by using the streets that paralleled the one onto which it faced. Pax and Perry entered, from behind, a damaged building that stood across from what might be Abdullah al-Ghazali’s nest. They took fifteen minutes to ease through the walled and debris-strewn backyard and through the ruined interior to the front door, which had been blown off in an attack seventeen months earlier.
Crouching just inside the doorway, they studied the house across the street from this closer vantage point, wearing night-vision gear, and confirmed what they had seen previously with periscopic cameras and binoculars. The structure was intact except for pockmarks and divots chipped out by bullets, all the windows protected by exterior metal shutters. Instead of mud bricks plastered over with stucco, the house appeared to be more modern, constructed of reinforced concrete, not an uncommon preference in a country where unending sectarian and tribal warfare once fought with rifles had long ago escalated to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
At 5:11 A.M., the mission-specific satellite phone in Paxton’s jacket pocket vibrated. The caller could be only Perry, who with Gibb had taken up a position on the roof of the building to the east of the target house, with a view of its backyard.
Perry spoke softly. “Faint interior light, leaking around a shutter. Just now.”
This served to confirm that the cigarette smoker on the roof, seen the previous afternoon, had not merely used the house as an observation platform, but had taken shelter there, perhaps with the mass murderer Abdullah al-Ghazali.
Pax and his guys would not move against the house until full daylight, and even then they would wait as long as the situation supported a delay, hoping for some indication that the smoker was not the sole occupant. If the seven terrorists were spread out in, say, three widely separated houses, an attack on one would alert those quartered in the other two, and the element of surprise would be lost. In that event, the odds of nailing al-Ghazali himself were not as good as they ought to be. Regardless, the assault would occur during the coming day; a further delay was too risky.
From somewhere in the waning night came the eerie cry of that desert wild cat called a caracal, and Paxton tensed.
Crazy as it was, with the pierced thumb and the blood and the tiger-eyed blond Amazon, with candle wicks popping and hissing, with salamanders of candlelight chasing their own lithe shadows across the tabletop, with the fragrance of roses rising with ever greater—and somehow funereal—intensity from the next room, and with the threat of unknown enemies gathering in the night to home in on psychic waves that Bibi could in no way detect, she nonetheless found her disbelief suspended. For the moment, Calida Butterfly had a presence, an air of authority, that would make the most committed skeptic doubt his own doubt.
The diviner stirred her right hand through the wood tiles that filled the silver bowl, neither watching to see what letters her fingers plucked from that alphabet soup nor trying to discern them by a Braille-reader’s touch.