Payback

2

The crisp, late May air of the northeastern Andes stung Stephan Babin’s face as he looked out across the valley. Natives would think the brilliant sky a harbinger of a grand, dry day; they would welcome the beautiful chill as a sign of good fortune. But Babin was a foreigner here, a prisoner, though not bound by bars. The mountains would never seem hospitable, and as clear as the sky might be, it would never portend anything for him but bitterness and death.

He pushed himself forward on his crutches. To most of the world beyond this tiny patch of northern Peru, Stephan Babin was a dead man, killed in a plane crash three years before. There were many days when he thought of himself as a ghost, a spirit haunting the earth.

If he wasn’t a ghost, Babin was certainly less than a physical man, his body a diminished wraith of what it had been before the crash. Most days he had so little feeling in his legs he might just as well not have them. What he could feel, hurt. His back alternately felt numb and screamed out in pain. Only his shoulders, strengthened by his need to use the crutches to walk or even balance consistently, were as they had been before the accident.

Babin was also as single-minded and bitter as any spirit haunting the earth. He existed only for revenge against the people who had crippled him — who’d betrayed him and left him for dead. His plan to extract it had taken shape slowly over the past eighteen months, but his hatred seemed to have existed forever. It was as deep as the nearby mountains were tall, as cold and vicious as the wind howling at their peaks.

“Señor Stephan, what are you doing without a coat?”

Babin turned and looked at Rosalina, the housekeeper General Atahualpa Túcume had installed here to watch after him.

“The general would not want you to catch a cold,” said the old woman gently. “He would blame me — he worries about you constantly, like a father.”

“General Túcume is not my father.”

“Senor Stephan, he has been like a father to you. That you cannot deny.”

No, that he could not deny, not at all. Túcume had saved his life and kept him alive. Babin had repaid him handsomely, and by any measure the debt would be completely requited within the next few weeks. Then, like a son, Babin would strike out on his own, fulfilling his own dream of revenge. The American CIA had shot down his plane; their countrymen would burn for it, burn in the most fearsome fire the world had ever known.

“Señor Stephan?”

“Rosalina, you are always right.” Babin worked his crutches backward. “I’ll come inside. The general is counting on me after all, is he not?”