lazarus vendetta | Page 2

neck rise.

Susan Kendall frowned. "Where is everyone?"

"I do not know." Ferrand slid cautiously out from behind the wheel. By now dozens of excited men, women, and children should have been thronging around them —

grinning and murmuring in glee at the sight of the bulging seed bags and brand-new shovels, rakes, and hoes piled high in the Toyota's cargo bed. But nothing stirred among Kusasa's darkened huts.

"Hello?" the Frenchman called. He tried out his limited Ndebele. "Litshone Njani?

Good evening?"

The dogs only howled louder, baying at the night sky.

Ferrand shivered. He leaned back inside the pickup. "Something is very wrong here, Susan. You should make contact with our people. Now. As a precaution." The gray-haired American woman stared at him for a moment, her eyes suddenly wide. Then she nodded and climbed down out of the Toyota. Working swiftly, she set up the linked satellite phone/laptop computer they carried in the field. It allowed them to communicate with their home office in Paris, though it was mainly used to upload photos and progress reports to the main Lazarus Web site.

Ferrand watched her in silence. Most of the time he found Susan Kendall intensely annoying, but she had courage when it counted. Perhaps more courage than he himself possessed. He sighed and reached under the seat for the flashlight clipped there. After a moment's reflection, he slung their digital camera over his shoulder.

"What are you doing, Gilles?" she asked, already punching in the phone code for Paris.

"I am going to take a look around," he said stiffly.

"All right. But you should wait until I have a connection," Kendall told him. She held the satellite phone to her ear for a moment. Her thin-lipped mouth tightened. "They've already left the office. There's no answer."

Ferrand checked his watch. France was only an hour behind them, but it was the weekend. They were on their own. "Try the Web site," he suggested. She nodded.

Ferrand forced himself to move. He squared his shoulders and walked slowly into the village. He swept his flashlight in a wide arc, probing the darkness ahead. A lizard scuttled away from the beam, startling him. He muttered a soft curse and kept going. Sweating now despite the cool night breeze, he came to the open space at the center of Kusasa. There was the village well. It was a favorite gathering place for young and old alike at the end of the day. He swept the flashlight across the hard-packed earth . .

. and froze.

The people of Kusasa would not rejoice over the seeds and farm equipment he had brought them. They would not lead the rebirth of African agriculture. They were dead. All of them were dead.

The Frenchman stood frozen, his mind reeling in horror. There were corpses everywhere he looked. Dead men, women, and children lay in heaps across the clearing. Most of the bodies were intact, though twisted and misshapen by some terrible agony. Others seemed eerily hollow, almost as though they had been partially eaten from the inside out. A few were reduced to nothing more than torn shreds of flesh and bone surrounded by congealed puddles of bloodred slime. Thousands of huge black flies swarmed over the mutilated corpses, lazily feasting on the remains. Near the well, a small dog nuzzled the contorted body of a young child, vainly trying to rouse its playmate.

Gilles Ferrand swallowed hard, fighting down a surge of bile and vomit. With trembling hands, he set down his flashlight, took the digital camera off his shoulder, and began taking pictures. Someone had to document this terrible slaughter. Someone had to warn the world of this massacre of the innocents —of people whose only crime had been to side with the Lazarus Movement.

�

Four men lay motionless on one of the hills overlooking the village. They wore desert camouflage fatigues and body armor. Night-vision goggles and binoculars gave them a clear view of every movement made below while audio pickups fed every sound into their headsets.

One of the observers studied a shielded monitor. He looked up. "They have a link to the satellite. And we're tapped in with them."

His leader, a giant auburn-haired man with bright green eyes, smiled thinly. "Good." He leaned closer to get a better view of the screen. It showed a series of gruesome images—the pictures taken only minutes before by Gilles Ferrand—slowly loading onto the Lazarus Web site.

The green-eyed man watched carefully. Then he nodded. "That's enough. Cut their link."

The observer complied, rapidly entering commands on a portable keypad. He tapped the enter key, sending a set of coded instructions to the communications satellite high overhead. One second later, the digital pictures streaming up from Kusasa froze, flickered, and then vanished.

The green-eyed man glanced at the two men lying flat next to him. Both were armed with Heckler &