Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(37)
Calida looked at her oddly. “Everything is always sliding. Life is an avalanche, kid, and you know that as well as I do. Sometimes a slow and more enjoyable kind of sliding, sometimes wild. I read your novel. It’s in there—the avalanche. Get your skis on, girl, and ride the snow wave. Don’t let it wipe you out.”
“Yeah, well, right now I feel like a spleet.”
“A what?”
“A goob, a wanker, a wilma.” She picked up her half-full glass. She pulled a Calida and finished the chardonnay in one long swallow.
“To save a life,” the diviner said, reading the tiles on the table. “Now let’s find out whose.”
The shriek of the caracal in the night had worried Pax because he thought it might be the work of a mimic. When two shrieks followed and seemed to originate in a far different place from the first, his concern increased. If he and his guys were known to be in town, maybe they were being stalked by agents of some local warlord, signaling readiness to one another in the language of caracals.
There were caracals in the Middle East, though their numbers were much lower than in Africa and Asia. Iranians had once trained those cats to hunt birds. Although caracals weighed as much as forty pounds, they could leap straight up as high as seven or eight feet, biting and battering down eight or ten birds at once from a low-flying flock.
Pax and Danny had stood ready, awaiting another cat cry to judge its authenticity, MK12s in hand, wishing the guns pumped out a more damaging caliber. Yet time had passed, and the dawn had come without incident. Sometimes a caracal was nothing more than a caracal.
As the first hours of light brought no wind, only a deepening quiet, Paxton hoped for some telltale to confirm that more than one of the terrorists resided in the shuttered house. At 8:47, his satellite phone vibrated.
Perry called from his position, with Gibb, on the roof of a two-story building east of the target house. He spoke in hardly more than a murmur. “One male. Not the smoker. Backyard. Two buckets.”
“Say again—buckets?”
“Carrying buckets.” After a pause, Perry said, “Back gate. Into the street. Moving south.”
“Weapon?” Paxton asked.
“Drop-leg holster.”
If the terrorist hadn’t been armed, and if he had ventured far enough from the target house, they might have tried to capture him for interrogation. But one shot would alert the other bad guys—and, if intel was correct, bad girls.
“Probably night soil,” Perry said.
He was a fan of historical fiction, especially novels of war and seafaring set in the eighteenth century. Occasionally he used antiquated words, not pretentiously, not even consciously, but because they had become part of his vocabulary.
“Clarify—night soil,” Paxton said.
“Shit,” Perry replied, which was pretty much what Pax thought he’d meant.
Like most small-to medium-size settlements in this blighted country, the town was in some respects medieval. No sewage system. No septic tanks. No indoor plumbing except, in a few cases, a hand pump in the kitchen sink, tapping a private well. There would be an open-air communal latrine just beyond the last buildings, basically ditches and a series of baffles, where people relieved themselves or to which they carried their products. It would be situated to ensure that the prevailing winds more often than not carried the stink away from the town, which meant in this case to the south and west.
Perhaps the personal-hygiene standards of Abdullah al-Ghazali forbade the dumping of their waste in a far corner of the backyard. More likely, they periodically disposed of it in the communal latrine because the stench it produced and the cloud of flies it drew would identify their hideout as surely as if they had raised over the house one of their black-and-red flags.
Into his phone, Pax said, “One bucket for men, one for women?”
“Honorable modesty,” Perry agreed, and he terminated the call.
Short of knocking on Abdullah’s door and pretending to be from the Census Bureau, they were not going to get any better confirmation that all seven terrorists were in the house. The buckets were superb intel.
In the deep shadows, just inside the doorway of the building that faced the terrorists’ haven, Paxton and Danny began quietly to set up the Carl Gustav M4 recoilless rifle, an antitank weapon that was also effective as a bunker-buster.
Bibi was wired. Not on chardonnay. Wired on the weirdness of it all. Cranked up by a feeling of impending violence. Like the air pressure before the first lightning flash of a storm so strong that it might spawn the mother of all tornadoes.
Apparently some weird guy lurked in the parking lot, obsessing over the meaning of the vanity plates on Nancy’s sedan. And evidently a nameless presence stalked the kitchen, because the smell of rotting roses had become a stink, because the candle flames were undulating three or four inches above the lips of the cups that contained them, and because the room had suddenly grown chilly. The wall clock and her wristwatch had stopped, their sweep hands no longer wiping away the seconds, and the digital clock on the microwave had gone dark, as if something that lived outside of time had stepped into this world and brought its clockless ambience with it. Perhaps the psychic-wave detectors, a.k.a. “the wrong people”—whoever or whatever they might be—were already on their way to Bibi’s apartment to beat her to death or suck her blood, or steal her soul, whatever the hell they did to those cretins who were foolish enough to think that a little divination session over the kitchen table would be harmless, gosh, perhaps even fun.