None of them went to the man right away. He stared up at the night sky, an expression of utter shock on his face as he struggled to understand what had just happened to him. He fought to breathe and his hand quivered as he tried to find the object that was burning his chest. He was aware that his body had been pierced by something that was not a bullet. It occurred to him that perhaps something had fallen on him. But as his fingers found the end of the bolt and explored the fletching he realised it was an arrow of some kind. The quetzal feather moved in the breeze and through his fingertips and when he realised that it was attached to the arrow’s nock a memory worked its way into his thoughts. He had seen such a thing before. He inched up his head, forcing his chin towards his chest in order to look at it, but he was unable to raise his head far enough.
One of the other men finally dropped to his knees beside the wounded man. ‘Call the police!’ he shouted in the direction of the doorman. ‘Get an ambulance! Hurry!’
‘I want to see it,’ the wounded man rasped, grinding his teeth in determination. ‘I want to see it!’
His colleague seemed unsure what to do. But he put his hand behind the man’s head to help raise it up.
The man grimaced with the pain but he had never lacked grit or tenacity. When he saw the fletching and quetzal feather he knew its meaning straight away and relaxed his neck muscles as if there was nothing more to be done. His helper lowered his head back onto the step.
The man knew only too well the significance of the arrow. He squinted at the rooftops high above, hoping to see who had launched it. He could make out nothing but blackness, not even stars, but it didn’t matter. He knew who was there and that his nemesis had not yet finished with him.
A thin smile began to form on his lips but it faded as the vivid images of what he had done those years ago filled his head. If he could have said a final word to his executioner it might have been an apology, for it was the only awful deed in his life that he regretted. At the time it had all seemed necessary to him but even his black heart had been touched by the vileness of his actions. He wondered how long he had before the end.
The second bolt struck him in the throat, cutting through his larynx and smashing a chunk out of the concrete behind his neck. The man went still and blood trickled from his mouth, his open eyes glazing over as the life went out of them.
PART 2
Six Weeks Later: Central America
Harris looked exhausted. He sat on a rotten log, taking a breather, his safari clothes covered in a patchwork of sweat, his trousers muddy up to the knees. The narrow track they had come along had dried since the climb out of the valley and the trees had thinned. The sun - and the air - were welcome. He dug into a breast pocket and pulled out a stick of gum, unwrapped it, tossed the paper onto the jungle floor and pushed it into his mouth. ‘Gum?’ he asked his young assistant who was photographing some kind of insect on the ground.
‘Thank you, no,’ Jacobs replied, with a cheerful smile. Jacobs was as dishevelled as Harris but he did not look as tired as his boss.
Harris hardly knew Jacobs. He was a new guy on the team, fresh from the factory, an Ivy League graduate who had spent barely a couple of years stateside before getting a transfer to the Centrals. Rumour had it that his family was well connected. As far as Harris was concerned, apart from both of them being in the same business they were worlds apart. ‘Where’s he gone?’ he asked.
‘The soldier?’
‘No. I was suddenly worried about Elvis. Of course I’m talking about the damned soldier!’
‘He went into the bushes.’
Harris looked up and down the goat track that disappeared into the forest in both directions. ‘Are you screwin’ with me?’
Jacobs looked a bit startled by his boss’s apparent bad mood. ‘No, sir. I’m sure he—’
‘I know he’s in the goddamned bushes somewhere because there’s nothing else around here but bushes!’