The Devil's Elixir (2 page)

It also helped that, unlike the more rigid and exemplary Álvaro, Eusebio was a warm, gregarious man. His naked feet and humble attire had inspired the natives to refer to him as Motoliana, which meant “the poor man,” and, against Álvaro’s advice, he’d embraced the name. His humility, his exemplary life, and his thoughtful conversation, all of which were illustrative of the principles he preached, greatly inspired the natives. He also soon developed a reputation as a miracle worker.

It began when, during a drought that threatened to annihilate the natives’ approaching harvests, he recommended that they form a solemn procession to the mission’s church, complete with prayers and vigorous flagellations. Copious rains soon relieved the locals of their fears and turned the season uncommonly fruitful. The miracle was repeated a couple of years later, when the region was suffering from excessive rains. By a similar remedy, that blight was checked, and Eusebio’s reputation grew. And with it, doors gradually opened.

Doors that might have been better kept shut.

As the initially guarded natives started opening up to him, Eusebio found himself drawn into their worlds more deeply. What had begun as a mission to convert turned into an open-minded journey of discovery. He began to take trips deep into the forests and canyons of the forbidding mountains, venturing where no European had gone before, meeting tribes that usually welcomed strangers with the tip of an arrow or the edge of a spear.

He never returned from his last trip.

Almost a year after he’d disappeared, Álvaro, fearing the worst, set off with a small contingent of tribesmen to find his lost friend.

Which is why they were here now, sitting around a small fire outside the tribe’s thatched
xirixi
—the ancestral house of God—discussing the impossible.

 

“
I
t seems to me that you’ve rather turned into their high priest, or am I mistaken?”

Álvaro was still shaken by his experience, and although the food had restored some strength to his limbs and the fire had warmed him up and dried his cassock, he was still highly agitated.

“They’ve shown me more than I can possibly show them,” Eusebio replied.

Álvaro’s eyes widened with shock. “But—my God, you’re embracing their methods, their blasphemous ideas.” He looked scared, and he leaned in, his brow crowding his eyes. “Listen to me, Eusebio. You must end this madness now. You must leave this place and come back to the mission with me.”

Eusebio looked at his friend and felt his spirits sink. Yes, he was happy to see his old friend, and he was delighted to have shared his discovery with him. But he found himself wondering if he hadn’t made a huge mistake.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t,” Eusebio told him, calmly. “Not yet.”

He couldn’t tell his friend that he still had a lot to learn from these people. Things he hadn’t dreamt possible. It had taken him by surprise to discover—slowly, gradually, and despite his preconceptions and deeply ingrained beliefs—how strong the natives’ connections were to the land, to the living beings that shared it with them, and to the energies that seemed to emanate from it. He’d talked to them about the creation of the world, paradise, and the fall of man. He’d told them about the Incarnation and the Atonement. They’d shared their insights with him. And what he heard startled him. For his hosts, the mortal and the mystical realms were intertwined. What seemed normal to him, they deemed supernatural. And what they accepted as normal—as truth—seemed like magical thinking to him.

At first.

He now knew better.

The savages, he discovered, were noble.

“Taking their
medicina
, their sacred brews,” he told Álvaro, “has opened up new worlds for me. What you just experienced is only the beginning. You can’t expect me to turn my back on such a revelation.”

“You must,” Álvaro insisted. “You must come back with me. Now, before it’s too late. And we must never speak of this again.”

Eusebio flinched back with surprise. “Not speak of it? Think, Álvaro. This is all we must talk about. It’s something we need to study and understand and master—in order for us to bring it home and share it with our people.”

Álvaro’s face flooded with shock. “Bring it back?” The words sputtered out of his mouth like poison. “You want to tell people about this, this—this blasphemy?”

“This blasphemy is an enlightenment. It is a higher truth they must experience.”

Álvaro was outraged. “Eusebio, I warn you,” he hissed. “The Devil has sunk his claws into you with this elixir of his. You are at risk of perdition, my brother, and I can’t sit back and allow it—not for you, not for any fellow member of the faith. You need to be saved.”

“I’ve passed the gates of heaven already, old friend,” Eusebio replied, calmly. “And the view from here is magnificent.”

I
t took Álvaro five months to send a message to the archbishop and to the prelate-viceroy in Mexico City, get their replies, and assemble his men, and it was winter by the time he ventured back into the mountains at the head of a small army.

To stop his friend.

To put an end to his sacrilegious ideas using whatever means necessary.

To thwart the Devil and his insidious temptations, and save his friend from eternal damnation.

Armed with bows, arrows, and muskets, the combined force of Spaniards and Indians ascended the first folds of the sierra on steep, rough paths that were covered by thick, matted bushes. Winter torrents had broken up the trails that snaked up the crumpled mountains into deep, stony channels, while straggling branches, flung horizontally across them, made the contingent’s progress even more difficult. They’d been warned about the mountain lions, jaguars, and bears that inhabited the region, but the only living things they encountered were voracious
zopilote
vultures that hung overhead in anticipation of a bloody banquet and scorpions that haunted their fitful sleep.

As they rose higher, the cold became more intense. The Spaniards, used to a much warmer climate, fared badly. They spent the days fighting the wet, rocky inclines and the nights huddled around their bivouacs, kindling their fires until, mile by arduous mile, they finally neared the dense forest that enshrouded the settlement where Álvaro had left Eusebio.

To their surprise, they found the pathways that wormed through the trees strewn with huge pieces of timber that had clearly been felled by the natives. Fearing an ambush, the troops’ commander ordered his men to slow their pace, prolonging their suffering and straining their nerves and their vision as they crept through the thick gloom of the funereal pines. After enduring toil and torment for three weeks, they finally reached the settlement.

There was no one there.

The tribesmen, and Eusebio, were gone.

Álvaro didn’t give up. He prodded his men forward, the native scouts following the tribe’s trail through the folds of the sierra until, on the fourth day, they reached a deep
barranca
at the bottom of which flowed a thunderous river. The ravine had been spanned by a rope and timber bridge.

The bridge had been cut down.

There was no other way across.

Álvaro stared at the ropes that hung over the edge of the cliff, consumed by anger and despair.

He never saw his friend again.

 

“P
ull the goddamn trigger and get your ass out here,” Munro barked through my earpiece. “We’ve got to clear out NOW!”

Tell me something I don’t know
.

My eyes darted around, reacting to the three-bullet bursts and the longer, wild frenzies of gunfire that were echoing around me from all over the compound. Then some dull thuds and a searing grunt tore through my comms set, and I knew that another operative from our eight-man team had been cut down.

My body froze as opposing instincts dueled for control. I swung my gaze back to the man who was cowering next to me. His face was all sweaty, locked in anguish from the big, bloody gash in his thigh, his lips quivering, his eyes wide with fear, like he knew what was coming. My grip on the handgun tightened. I could feel my finger hovering over the trigger, tapping it indecisively, like it was red hot.

Munro was right.

We had to get out of there before it was too late. But—

More gunfire pummeled the walls around me.

“That’s not what we’re here for,” I rasped into the mike, my eyes locked on my wounded prey. “I’ve got to try and—”

“—and what,” Munro rasped, “carry him out? What, are you Superman now?” A long burst ripped through my comms set, like a jackhammer to my eardrums, then his manic voice came back. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”

His words were still ricocheting inside my skull as another volley of bullets raked the back wall of the lab. I dove to the floor as wood splinters and glass shards rained down around me, and took cover behind one of the lab’s cabinets. I flicked a quick glance across at the scientist. Munro was, again, right. There was no way we could take him with us. Not given his injury. Not given the small army of coke-fueled
banditos
bearing down on us.

Dammit, it wasn’t supposed to go down this way.

It was meant to be a swift, surgical extraction. Under cover of darkness, me, Munro, and the six other combat-ready guys that rounded off our OCDETF strike team—that’s the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, a federal program that drew on the resources of eleven agencies, including my own FBI and Munro’s DEA—were supposed to sneak into the compound, find McKinnon, and bring him out. Him and his research, that is. Straightforward enough, especially the sneaking in part. The thing is, the mission had been ordered up hastily, after McKinnon’s unexpected call. We hadn’t had much time to plan it, and the intel we were able to put together on the remote drug lab was sketchy, but I thought we still had decent odds. For one, we were well equipped—sound-suppressed submachine guns, night vision scopes, Kevlar. We had a surveillance drone hovering overhead. We also had the element of surprise. And we’d been pretty successful in raiding other labs since we’d first arrived in Mexico four months earlier.

Quick in and out, nice and clean.

Worked like a charm for the
in
part of the plan.

Then McKinnon sprang his eleventh-hour surprise on us, caused Munro to go apeshit, got hit in the thigh, and screwed up the
out
part.

I could now hear frantic shouts in Spanish. The
banditos
were closing in.

I had to make a move. Any longer and I’d be captured, and I didn’t have any illusions about what the outcome of that would be. They’d torture the hell out of me. Partly for info, partly for fun. Then they’d bring out the chainsaw and prop my head in my lap for a photo op. And the worst part of it is, my noble death would all be for nothing. McKinnon’s work would live on. In infamy, by all indications.

Munro’s voice crackled back to life, blaring deep inside my skull. “All right, screw it. It’s on your head, man. I’m outta here.”

And right then, my mind tripped.

It was like a primeval determination bypassed all the resistance that was innate to me and brushed aside everything that was part and parcel of who I was as a human being and just took control. I watched, out-of-body-experience-like, as my hand came up, all smooth and robotic, lined up the shot right between McKinnon’s terrified eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

The scientist’s head snapped back as a dark mess splattered the cabinet behind him, then he just toppled to one side, a lifeless mound of flesh and bone.

There was no need for a confirmation tap.

I knew it was final.

My gaze lingered on the fallen man for a long second, then I rasped, “I’m coming out,” into my mike. I took a deep breath, popped the strikers off two incendiary grenades and lobbed them at the
pistoleros
who were hunting me down, then sprang to my feet, laying down a wall of gunfire behind me as I bolted toward the exit. I stopped at the back door of the lab, took one last look at the place, then I burst out of there as the whole place went up in flames behind me.

 

I
n his corner office on the twentieth floor of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, Hank Corliss stared at his monitor and continued to grind over the latest morsel of background information he’d unearthed. Then he leaned back, swiveled his chair around so he could face the window, and frowned at his trembling fingers.