One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [79]
Two hours later, Bakr was bouncing along inside the ancient converted school bus, roasting in the heat. The fan in the roof did little to provide any relief, although the local nationals riding with him didn’t seem to mind. Looking around, he began to get an idea. He asked the man sitting in front of him how far they were from the border, speaking Spanish for the first time. When he heard they were only about ten minutes away, he told Sayyidd in Arabic, “We’re getting off right now. When we stop, let me go up top to get the luggage.”
“Why? We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”
Bakr pulled out the test tube he had filled in the temple. “We’re going to test the weapon right here, while the bus is still out in the middle of nowhere.”
He moved to the front, gave out a lame excuse to the driver, and convinced him to pull over. Climbing on the roof, he pretended to mess with their luggage, passing one bag down, then pretended to struggle with the other. The driver killed the bus, not wanting to waste the gas, something Bakr was waiting for. Working swiftly, he securely taped a piece of twine to the test tube, then measured out the length of one of the fan blades in the roof of the bus. He cut the twine, tied the loose end at the hub of the fan, then laid the test tube on the edge of the mount. Now, once the bus started back up, the fan would jerk the tube off the mount and smash it against the frame, shattering the vial. Once that happened, Bakr hoped the poison would be blown into the bus by the rotation of the fan.
He retrieved his bag, climbed down, and called the driver to him—wanting to make him walk back to the bus to give them more time to increase their distance before it was started. He gave the driver a tip and thanked him, then began walking back the way they had come. The driver shook his head and moved back to the bus, muttering about crazy foreigners as he went.
Bakr and Sayyidd were walking as fast as they could when they heard the bus start up. Turning around, they watched it begin driving away. It moved about forty yards down the road before it began weaving back and forth. Then it lazily crashed into the wood line on the edge of the road, never getting up over twenty miles an hour. Nothing happened for a long five seconds, then the back door exploded open and two people fell out, clawing at their necks and writhing on the ground as if they were trying to scrape off ants covering their bodies. From the inside of the bus Bakr could hear what sounded like a group of pigs grunting, and could vaguely see arms and legs thrashing about, like a nest of snakes.
“Allah the Merciful,” Bakr said in a subdued whisper. “It works better than I would have ever dreamed. And faster too.”
48
Jennifer and Pike checked into their rustic villa in the small village of Punta Gorda, Belize. With Pike gone to sniff around the town, Jennifer was finally able to take off the filthy clothes she’d stolen. She filled the sink with cool water, soaked a rag, and blotted her face. She felt a sharp sting on her right cheek. She jerked her hand away like she’d touched a hot stove. Damn, that hurt. She leaned forward and looked at her cheek in the cracked mirror above the sink, seeing two small gouges ripped out, each about the size of a popcorn kernel. She had no recollection of how she’d sustained them, and hadn’t even noticed the cuts when she’d cleaned off at the hotel in Guatemala last night. She leaned in closer. Shit . . . that’s going to leave a scar. Matches my nose.
She was the only one who could still see the small white line across the bridge of her nose, a trophy from her childhood of competing with her older brothers. She thought of the tree she had fallen out of. Like lightning jumping from pole to pole, her thoughts went from that summer day, to her brothers, to her mother, ending with her uncle. And what had happened to him.
Uncle John’s dead. Up until now, she hadn’t had the luxury of dwelling on his loss. The thought hammered home for the first time. She felt the grief roil her