“That bomb will be the distraction Cassiel will need.”
Rafael suddenly looked out the window to the people loading canisters. José was making stupid faces for the other men to see as he was screwing on the inner lid. He wasn’t watching what he was doing and cross-threaded it. Once he saw what he’d done, he cursed at the lid, as if it were to blame.
“I think I have just the man for such an important mission.”
Hasan saw where Rafael was looking.
“Those are incredibly valuable men,” Hasan said. “We have trained all of you since you were babies just for this mission. We have much invested in all of you, and much hope lies with all of you.”
It didn’t sound like Hasan was objecting so much as he was testing the strength of Rafael’s suggestion.
“It is because we have so much invested in this plan that I believe this one must be culled. He makes too many mistakes. Our leaders of course had no way of knowing when we were still young children, but he isn’t very intelligent.
“I fear that because he is so clumsy and ignorant he could accidentally put the entire effort in jeopardy without even intending to. As valuable as each of those men are, I think it would be better to select this one as the martyr you need. It would solve two problems at once.”
Staring out the window, Hasan considered Rafael’s suggestion.
At last, he smiled. “Bring him in and I will let him know that, because we have so much faith in him, he has been selected for a very special honor: he is to become a martyr far earlier than he had anticipated.”
Rafael finally smiled himself. “He will be in awe that you have personally selected him for this mission.”
EIGHTEEN
After she finished cleaning the truck of Owen’s blood and fingerprints, Angela went inside the cabin and unlocked the door to the basement. Her grandparents had always kept the door locked. Angela did as well.
She flicked on the light and then descended the steep wooden stairs. The basement had a low ceiling and was only about half the length of the house. Granite ledges sloping down from both ends formed a shallow V under the house. The floor of the house spanned that V, resting on the rock ledge at either end.
The teak floorboards of the basement were spaced about a quarter inch apart so that the floor could be washed down with the hose stored on the wall at one end. Water would run through the spaces and down the sloping stone underneath and then into the chasm under the far side of the basement.
That chasm was carefully concealed with a good-size hatch. Her grandfather called that chasm the hell hole.
She suspected that it had been created by a split in the gigantic granite formations of the mountains to either side, as if the mountains had pulled apart and the ground had cracked open, leaving a fissure that went down into the bowels of the earth. Her grandfather had put the geological oddity to use. Angela suspected he had chosen to build the cabin on that particular spot specifically because of that rift in the earth.
After clearing away the trees, accumulated deadfall, and brush that had originally covered and concealed the opening, he built his place resting right over that abyss.
Angela liked to think of the two mountains, one to each side, as her grandparents watching over her. Grandmother Mountain to the left and Grandfather Mountain to the right, their spirits always there stoically sheltering her.
Angela knew that there had to be a bottom to the hell hole under the basement floor, but everything she’d tried to measure the depth had been unsuccessful. She once bought rolls of string, tied a big bolt to the end of one, and then fed the string down the hole, tying on the end of new rolls when one ran out, until she ran out of rolls. It surprised her that she hadn’t hit bottom. In all, the string she had used had been over five hundred feet long.
The metal bolt at the end of the string had swung around, near the top bouncing off wide walls as it descended, but lower down it hit nothing, so she knew the abyss wasn’t constricted. She was even more surprised when she let the string go and watched the end flutter away down into the darkness. She counted the seconds until it hit bottom. She never heard a sound. As far as Angela knew, it might as well still be falling.
When she’d aimed a powerful light down into the hell hole, the light revealed smooth granite walls that sloped inward a bit, then widened again, then got crooked for a bit, and then opened wider yet as they descended until the light simply evaporated in the darkness.
Her grandfather had told her to be careful around the hell hole because if she ever fell in she would never be seen again. There were no shelves of rock, stone spurs, or roots to grab hold of if you fell in, no corners to wedge a foot, nowhere to get a grip to climb back out. Greasy layers of moss grew in places and covered the flat stone where moisture seeped through fine cracks. It was nothing but basically a slippery smooth and somewhat crooked granite shaft down into a great abyss.
She knew that her grandfather was right. If you fell in, there was nothing to stop you. No one would ever hear you screaming for help on the way down, and you would not survive the fall. Even if you somehow did, you would never be able to climb out. You would die in the cold blackness.
Angela suspected that over the thousands of years before her grandfather had built the cabin, all sorts of animals had probably slipped on the sloping ledge and fallen to their death. She imagined that there were prehistoric predators down at the bottom of the abyss. Sometimes she wondered if there might even be a saber-toothed tiger down there.
Angela had once tossed a flare down into the bottomless pit. She watched it fall until the shrinking dot of flickering reddish light had gradually vanished into nothingness.
Another time she had held several smoking pieces of incense over the hole to see if air was moving up or down through the opening, which would indicate another entrance somewhere down in the hole—a side shaft—but the smoke revealed absolutely no air movement. The hole was not the entrance into a subterranean cave system. It was just a hole. A very deep hole, but just a hole.
When her grandfather had shown her the hell hole, she had asked him if Frankie was down in that hole. He said only that men like Frankie belonged in hell. As far as Angela was concerned, that told her everything she needed to know.
Frankie was no longer alone in the hell hole. That first man Angela had recognized as a killer had joined him after his three-day introduction to hell. Other men had followed, all killers she had recognized by what she had seen in their eyes. They were killers who would never again harm anyone. Their remains would never be found. They would be down there forever with the other, ancient predators.
Owen would have joined them except that it was more important to Angela that she find out where he had left the body of Carrie Stratton, the last woman he had murdered. Her family needed to know. Owen’s corpse would reveal her location.
Angela pulled the sheath with the knife out of her boot. She tossed the knife, in its sheath, down the hell hole. She heard it skip against the stone walls a few times on its way down, and then there was nothing but silence as it descended.
Next, she sat on the metal chair off to the other side of the basement and removed her boots and socks. She tossed them down the gaping black hole. Next, she shed her shorts, underpants, and top, dropping them down into the darkness.
Everything she’d had on went down into the abyss.