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Javi looked at his two passengers with confusion; he clearly wondered what they had done to get themselves picked up at a checkpoint, but soon enough he reached inside his vehicle, pulled the two backpacks out, and set them down in the road.
He passed the pair on his way back to the driver’s-side door. Softly, he said, “Sorry, guys. I’m sure there is some mistake,” but he didn’t sound like he meant it. He just wanted to be out of here, and Court couldn’t blame him.
He wanted to be gone, as well.
Javi climbed back behind the wheel, fired up his engine, and reversed. Turning around on the gravel path that jutted off the two-lane highway, he was back on the road in seconds, passing the cars and buses held up by the roadblock and heading back towards Flores.
Court returned his attention to the sergeant, and he noticed the man’s arm move a little, which meant his hand was repositioning inside his raincoat. Even though Court couldn’t see the weapon he knew was there, he recognized the movement the cop was making.
He was adjusting his hand resting on the pistol so he could get a better grip, which meant, to Court, that he was about to draw his gun.
Speaking into his phone again, the older man said, “Ambos?” Both. “Seguro?” Are you sure? After another brief pause he nodded. “Entendido.” Understood.
He hung up the phone, and his face drained of all color. To Court he looked nervous, loath to proceed but bound by orders.
Moments later, the sergeant seemed to notice the other vehicles on the road. A dozen cars, trucks, and buses were lined up in each direction, and a few people wearing raincoats had climbed out to stand in the street.
The sergeant looked back over his shoulder at the gravel road, and then he seemed to make peace with whatever it was he’d been asked to do. To his men he said, “Search them.”
Neither Court nor Zoya had anything suspicious on them or in their packs other than a single machete, which was put in the front seat of one of the pickups without any mention of it. When the search was over, Court was hustled away by two young officers and placed in the back seat of one of the pickups, and a man with a Tavor sat down next to him. He saw Zoya being led towards another truck by the officer with the Uzi.
They gave each other a quick look before the doors were shut; all the men except for the pair with shotguns loaded up, and then the two pickups began to move.
Despite the expression on the sergeant’s face, Court hoped they’d be taken back to Flores, to jail, which he wouldn’t have loved, but it was far superior to his alternative suspicion about what was happening. When they instead turned and began rolling slowly up the gravel road towards the ramshackle homes there, his worst fears seemed to be correct, and he liked this even less.
These regular Guatemalan police had been given an order by someone, likely someone extremely high above them, to take this pair of foreigners to a secluded area and put a bullet in their heads.
TWENTY-TWO
The drive lasted less than three minutes. Court’s pickup turned a corner past the run-down homes on the gravel road and then followed a gentle rise in the jungle. Passing a couple of derelict little buildings, the driver then pulled up in front of a one-story structure with a rusty metal roof. The windows had been completely knocked out; mold crawled up a wooden wall and an overhang. A sign above the building hung vertically, and it had been so weathered by time and the elements that Court couldn’t read it, but from the look of the place he thought it might have been a little freestanding tienda back in its prime, a very long time ago. Today it appeared dark and dingy and utterly unoccupied, except for a black spider monkey in a tree above and a few chickens scratching around in the brush.
The engine of the truck was turned off, and the only sound Court heard was the rain beating on the truck, water pouring off the corrugated roof of the building, and the incessant patter of the raindrops on the metal-and-cinder-block structure.
He heard a new noise, then looked over his shoulder. The pickup Zoya had been put in pulled up behind them, and then it turned off its engine.
Both the foreigners were led out of their vehicles by armed cops. As soon as they stood there, some fifty feet from the front door of the dilapidated building, Zoya spoke English. “This is a police station?” She knew it wasn’t, Court was certain; she was just trying to draw the men into a conversation to slow down the action, giving both her and Court a chance to evaluate their surroundings.
But none of the cops replied to her. It was clear they were beginning to figure out what their sergeant and their two prisoners already knew.
The older man appeared from the rear truck, then ordered his four men to walk the prisoners around the back of the building.
The entire seven-person entourage picked their way through the rubble around the outside of the broken structure without speaking; everyone seemed nervous now. Court stepped over and around piles of garbage and clumps of foliage as chickens scurried out of their way. He saw pieces of rusty and bent rebar lying around, and he evaluated the efficacy of using one as a weapon.
The energy from the young police around him as they walked was palpable. Court could tell they were scared, and not because they felt they were in any danger. They were scared because they’d just realized they would be taking human lives today, and no matter what they were getting paid for all this, they didn’t much want to do it.
They were cops. They might have been dirty cops, Court didn’t know, but it was obvious to him they weren’t so dirty that they found themselves relaxed about executing a couple of people who looked like regular tourists. He wondered if they would hesitate when the time came.
Court and Zoya, on the other hand, were altogether different.
They’d kill, and neither fear nor apprehension would slow them down one instant.
Rounding the corner to the back of the building, Court saw a one-story cinder-block wall jutting out from it at a ninety-degree angle, as if it had been part of a room that had been partially torn down or perhaps it had fallen down during one of the many hurricanes that had pummeled the country over the past few years. The wall that remained, he realized, would be the wall he and Zoya would be lined up against in just seconds.
Court said one word now to Zoya, who was five feet away on his left, closer to the wall of the cinder-block-and-metal building.
“Smertelney.” Lethal.
Zoya nodded, her eyes scanning the area. Replying in Russian, she said, “On your cue.”
