Chapter Twenty-One
Arris closed the novel, Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield, and tossed it onto the bed. Whatever interest the subject might have held for his host was a mystery to Arris. The book was a fictionalization of the Long Range Desert Group, an ad hoc British commando unit from World War II that was notorious for shooting up Axis airfields deep behind enemy lines; anybody with any time in service in a special forces unit knew at least the outline of the story, and that outline did not include one of the commandos being captured by the Germans and personally released by Field Marshal Irwin Rommel. With as much actual history to construct a story from, Arris couldn’t understand why the author had felt the need to jump that shark. He was fairly certain the Long Range Desert Group had never even bothered to contrive an assassination plot, but who knew? Why the real stories were never enough for fiction writers sometimes mystified him, but, then, it wouldn’t have been fiction.
He walked out onto the balcony and looked down at the lawn, the shadows from the jungle beginning to lengthen across it as the sun set. After the meeting on the patio with the young man, Arris had seen nobody for the rest of the day. Well, not exactly nobody. There had been the boy in the jungle that had followed him to and from the mansion. Arris had spent a significant chunk of time on the beach, pretending to stare out into the sea but tense as a coiled spring, waiting for another attack from the natives, this time while alone. It never came. Instead, the boy had hovered in the scrim of short bushes at the edge of the jungle, crouched close to the ground, watching Arris intently, as if he would suddenly do something terrific.
After nothing happened, Arris made his way back through the jungle, walking slowly and listening to the near-silent progress of his shadow. The boy was alone, which Arris thought odd, given his age. Although, it was odd that there was anyone out in the jungle at all, watching the mansion – or perhaps just him – for some sort of activity. What was the teenage boy interested in? Nereika? If the boy were watching the mansion, though, Arris couldn’t understand why the boy didn’t have a partner, someone covering his back from the approach of someone like Arris. It wasn’t smart, or experienced.
The boy had stopped once Arris crossed through the bushes and onto the lawn. The boy had been stepping carefully through the underbrush a dozen yards away, attempting to mask his footfalls with Arris’, and then had dropped suddenly to the ground, trying to hide among the small plants as Arris parted the shrubbery and stepped onto the grass. Arris had resisted stopping to listen more to the boy’s progress, not wanting to give away the fact that Arris was on to the boy.
Instead, Arris crossed the lawn, ducked behind a low stone wall near a side entrance and crouch-walked his way along the mansion and back into the jungle. He had only to wait a few minutes before he heard the footfalls of the boy running, now having given up all pretense at surveillance and, apparently, eager to relate the findings of his observations.
Following the boy back to the natives’ camp was easy, although Arris slowed up and crept around the perimeter cautiously, at first, searching for any lookouts. There were none; no guards, no observation posts, no security installations of any sort. There was just jungle and then a large clearing, filled with ramshackle huts and a central fire pit, an island re-creation of every Third World dirt village Arris had ever seen. Poverty looked the same the world over, the common ingredients being salvaged building materials, crooked rough-hewn tree branches, thatch and despair. These people had been living in this spot for roughly two-hundred years, and in that time they had descended from a combination of pre-history African civilization and Dutch cultural achievement into a mélange society a National Geographic photographer would recognize as the natural state of man the world over.
And this in the near-shadow of an engineering miracle built into the side of a mountain not a kilometer away.
Arris had watched the village for about an hour, seeing nothing of interest to him and detecting no visible threats to the world beyond it. It was a fishing village, and the adult males were apparently out on whatever they used as boats, the remaining males either too young or too old for such work. The women maintained the camp, tended the fire, looked after the children and worked a couple of small vegetable gardens.
The boy’s breathless arrival stirred the camp’s interest for a while, with a grizzled village elder emerging from a hut to take a seat on a worn, rickety chair near the fire. Arris guessed the chair to be a spot of honor or authority, although nobody in the camp made any kind of ceremony toward it. The elder simply limped over to it, sat down, waved the women away and listened to whatever it was the boy had to say. From the distance, Arris couldn’t make out any of the words, though the guttural nature of the sounds that broke through the ambient noise of the jungle led him to believe it was most likely a form of Dutch.
Afterward, the boy melted away into the jungle on the far side of camp, apparently heading to the beach while the elder remained in the chair, staring at the small fire and occasionally poking an ember with a length of stick. This was all that Arris could take. He’d watched the activity in such villages scores of times over the past few years, although usually waiting for a target to emerge from a hut and hop in a four-wheeler, and was uninterested in the anthropological aspects of such cultures. If there were no terrorists, crime lords or drug dealers living amongst the filth, then there was nothing of interest for Arris. And, even then, there was little interest.