State Of Evil

“Both are resting now, after their midday meal,” Mbarga said. “The South American requested a companion for his bed.”

“He is a pig,” Gaborone said, “but very wealthy.”

“I sent him one of the neophytes. The Irish girl. She’ll see you later, Master, to receive her penance.”

“Ah. A wise choice, Nico. And the other?”

“He asked nothing, Master. I believe he favors young men over girls. The way he looked at some of your parishioners…”

“Enough! There is a limit to my patience.” Gaborone frowned mightily, then added, “If he should insist, choose wisely. Use your own best judgment, Nico.”

“Always, Master.”

“When I speak to them again, tonight, we may—”

The shout came from outside, somewhere across the compound. Nico heard the single word, repeated loudly.

“Fire!”

“What’s that?” asked Gaborone, distractedly.

“A cry of ‘fire,’ Master. I’ll see what—”

“Go! Hurry!” As Nico left the master’s quarters, Gaborone called after him, “And don’t disturb our guests!”

Outside, Mbarga smelled the smoke before he saw it, dark plumes rising from one of the storage sheds. What did they keep in that one? Food. Mbarga wondered if the grain in burlap sacks had grown too hot somehow, inside the shed, or if there’d been some kind of accident to start the fire.

Jaw clenched, Mbarga planned what he would do if it turned out that someone had been smoking, in defiance of the master’s edict.

He joined the flow of people rushing toward the fire, anxious to smother it or just to be a part of the excitement. He was halfway there and shoving rudely past the others when another cry went up, this one arising from the far side of the camp.

“Fire!” someone shouted over there. “Another fire!”

IT WASN’T ANYTHING high tech, but Bolan often put his trust in fire. It ranked among humanity’s best friends and oldest enemies, holding the power to inspire or panic, after all those centuries. A warm fire on the hearth might lead to passion or a good night’s sleep. Flames racing through a household or a village uncontrolled were guaranteed to set off a stampede.

He’d taken time to choose his targets, noting structures here and there around the huddled village that would burn without immediately posing any threat to human life. Storehouses, toolsheds and the like were best. And he was lucky, in that Gaborone’s community hadn’t invested in aluminum or any kind of prefab structures that were fire resistant. They used simple wood, often unpainted, and there seemed to be no fire-retardant chemicals or insulation anywhere.

His first challenge was entering the camp, but Bolan managed it. The watchtowers were manned, but by a careless breed of sentries, more inclined to talk than to scan the tree line for approaching enemies. The guards on foot were spread too thin, and no fence had been raised to help them keep intruders from the village proper. Bolan waited, chose his moment, and crept in when those who should’ve tried to stop him were distracted, feeling lazy in the heat of early afternoon. A light rain shower that had fallen while he circled the perimeter wasn’t refreshing; quite the opposite, in fact.

But luck was with him. As the atmosphere conspired with Bolan to seduce his enemies, so he was shown the young man he had come to find. Bolan carried no photograph of Patrick Quinn. He’d memorized it and returned it to the slim file Val and Johnny had presented to him in Wyoming. He would know Quinn if they met, though, and the straggly wisps of beard his quarry had been cultivating in the past few weeks did little to conceal his face, when Bolan saw him coming out of the latrine.

Quinn had a listless air about him, but that seemed to be the rule for tenants of Obike. He wore what seemed to be the standard uniform for male inhabitants, a pair of faded denim pants with rope pulled through the belt loops, and an off-white cotton shirt. Long sleeves despite the heat, but no one seemed to mind. None of the sleeves he’d seen so far had been rolled up. Perhaps it was another of the guru’s rules.

Quinn had lost weight since he was photographed, and there was no trace of a smile in evidence. Bolan watched as the young man walked from the latrine to one of several barracks buildings on the north side of the compound, went inside and closed the door behind him. Even with the windows open, Bolan guessed it had to have been a sweatbox there, inside.

After determining where Quinn was, Bolan set his fires accordingly. Obike’s honor system helped him, since he found no locks upon the doors, and the midday siesta minimized his contact with the villagers. Bolan met one along the way, about Quinn’s age, unarmed but ready to alert the camp before strong fingers clamped his windpipe shut and Bolan’s fist rocked him to sleep. He bound the young man’s hands with trouser twine and gagged him with the severed tail of his own shirt, then stashed him in a toolshed, propped against a bank of hoes and rakes.

He had gone on from there to set three fires, slow-burners, sited to draw villagers away from Quinn’s barracks and focus their attention elsewhere. The first alarm was shouted moments after Bolan found his hiding place beside the target building, crouched in a convenient shadow.

Those cries of “Fire!” had the desired result. Guards rushed to find out what was happening, while sleepy villagers emerged more slowly from their gender-segregated clapboard dormitories. Bolan watched and waited, heard men stirring just beyond the wall that sheltered him. He couldn’t pick Quinn’s voice out of the babble, but it made no difference.

Leaving his rifle slung, Bolan removed the hypodermic needle from its cushioned case and held it ready in his hand.

NOW WHAT? Patrick Quinn thought. He’d barely fallen back to sleep after his trek to the latrine, and now the sounds of crisis roused him from a troubled dream whose fragments blew away before his mind could catch and hold them.

Someone shouting from a distance. And what were they saying?

“Fire! Fire!”

Quinn bolted upright on his cot, no blankets to restrain him in the stuffy room’s oppressive heat. Around him, others were already on their feet, repeating the alarm in half a dozen languages.

“Hurry!” someone declared.

A new round of warning shouts rose from a different part of the village, bringing a frown to Quinn’s face. Two fires at the same time? Quinn wondered whether it was one of Master Gaborone’s incessant drills. They’d been more frequent lately, since the incident with the American film crew, and failure to perform was bound to mean some sort of punishment.

Quinn started for the door, then hesitated. That was smoke he smelled, no doubt about it. Would the master go that far to make his practice exercise seem real? He wasn’t known for using props, and yet—

When the third cry of “Fire!” rent the air, rising from yet another part of the village, Quinn knew something was wrong. The master’s drills were never that elaborate. He simply sent his guards around to roust the people from their beds or jobs and send then streaming toward the sectors designated as emergency retreats.

A real fire, then—or fires, to be more accurate. When was the last time that had happened? Never, since Quinn first set foot inside the compound.

Sudden fear surprised him, but he had a duty to perform. Each member of the congregation had a role to play, whether at work or in response to situations unforeseen. Quinn reckoned he could be of service to the master and his fellow congregants, if he could just suppress his fear and trust the prophet’s message.

Feeling childish, now that all the others had gone on ahead of him, Quinn rushed the door and made his way outside. He hesitated on the dormitory’s simple wooden steps—all of the buildings in Obike had been raised to keep out snakes and vermin, though Quinn thought the shady crawl spaces beneath had to be like breeding grounds—and scanned the village, seeking out the plumes of rising smoke.

Three fires, spaced well apart, and what could be their cause? Quinn shrugged off the question. That wasn’t his concern. The first job was to douse the fires before they spread and did more damage to the village. Hopefully, no one was injured yet and they would not have lost any vital supplies.

Quinn chose the blur of smoke and frantic action closest to his barracks, on his left, and moved in that direction. He had barely taken two strides past the corner, homing on his destination, when a strong arm clamped around his neck and someone dragged him backward, toward the shadows at the east end of the dormitory.

Quinn resisted, would’ve cried for help if he could speak, but speech and breath alike were suddenly denied him. With his fingernails, he tried to claw the arm that held him fast, but fabric stopped him gouging flesh. He kicked back, barefoot, striking someone’s shin without significant effect.

The needle jab behind his ear was almost insignificant, a pinch immediately followed by a chill, the numbness spreading to his face and scalp, then downward through his body. Quinn was startled when the arm released him, let him breathe again, but when he tried to turn and fight his legs would not obey the orders from his brain. They folded, let him fall into a dark void that had opened to receive him, sucking him forever downward toward the center of the Earth.

IT WAS ALMOST TOO EASY. The young man struggled briefly, shivered, then collapsed in Bolan’s arms, deadweight. Bolan half turned him, crouched to make the fireman’s carry work, and took the sleeper’s weight across his left shoulder.

There was no time to second-guess the dosage he’d injected, calculated in advance to drop an active male adult of five foot nine, weighing about 150 pounds. The object of his search had clearly lost some weight since those statistics were compiled, presumably because the Process Diet wasn’t big on building body mass, but would it make a crucial difference?

However Patrick Quinn reacted to the drug now coursing through his system, Bolan couldn’t stop to check his vitals on the spot. The first priority was to get out of Obike before someone discovered that a tall, armed man was making off with one of Master Gaborone’s happy campers. If that happened, Bolan could expect fireworks, and Quinn was likely to be injured, maybe killed, as a result.

The plan wasn’t to use him as a human shield, or to discard him in the bushes while the Executioner took out a troupe of sentries. His mission was supposed to be a soft probe, in and out before the heavies knew he’d been here, carrying a package that he hoped they wouldn’t miss in the confusion he’d created.

For a while, at least.

His luck held firm as Bolan made a beeline for the compound’s south perimeter. As planned, the fires he’d set had drawn the guards and villagers to find out what was wrong, then solve the problem as a group endeavor. Bolan gave them points for thinking on their feet and thanked his lucky stars for the brief lapse in discipline that left his way unguarded.

A HALF HOUR ELAPSED between the first harsh cry of “Fire!” and the last puff of smoke from sodden embers. Thirty minutes saw the fires extinguished, leaving those who fought them at a loss to understand how they’d begun. There was no correlation of the buildings that had burned—food storage, garden tools, clothing—nor any clear-cut reason why one of them, much less three, had suddenly burst into flame.

“Arson?”