The Rebel's Revenge Page 14

  ‘Then how could she have helped the Union?’

  ‘Why, by spyin’ for them of course,’ Sallie replied. ‘Don’t look so surprised, boy. Weren’t that unusual for African-Americans to act as intelligence agents for the North. It was called “the black dispatches”. A lot of them was women, too. I guess mebbe ’cause women had a way of gettin’ into places where they’d hear things. Harriet Tubman was the most famous of all, managed to wreak all kindsa damage against the Rebs. Then you had Mary Elizabeth Bowser, who worked in the Confederate White House up in Richmond and smuggled secrets to the Union right out from under the nose of Jeff Davis hisself.’ She chuckled at the thought of such audacity, then went on, ‘Mary Touvestre – she was the one who warned the Yankees that the Rebs was workin’ a new ironclad warship, and started ’em building one of their own.’

  Ben was impressed. At ninety-nine or a hundred years old, Sallie Mambo’s recollection of historical detail was pin-sharp.

  ‘Mama, how did Peggy die?’ he asked her.

  ‘Terrible thing,’ the old woman said. ‘Oh, a terrible thing. Yes, yes.’ She took one of the charm pendants that hung from her neck and clutched it to her brow, squeezing her wrinkled eyes tight shut and muttering some inaudible prayer.

  ‘Was she murdered?’

  The old woman nodded, eyes still shut.

  Ben asked, ‘Out of revenge for what she’d done during the war?’

  Sallie slowly looked up at him. ‘The war never stopped, for some folks. I dare say there’s a few who’re still fightin’ it even now.’

  ‘Was she stabbed with a sabre?’

  Another sad, solemn nod. ‘Couldn’t have been more’n twenty-six when they done it to her, the poor babe. Mildred couldn’t talk ’bout her without goin’ into floods of tears, even sixty or more years later. You know how close twins is.’

  ‘Did they ever catch the killers?’

  ‘Bless your heart, child. This was Louisiana in 1873. Year of the Colfax massacre, when a hundred and fifty poor blacks got slaughtered on Easter Sunday by white men in Grant Parish. Weren’t nobody was gonna give a cuss about some freed slave girl gettin’ butchered. They was still lynchin’ negroes in 1950.’

  Ben was conscious that he was firing questions at her, but he had to keep pressing. He said, ‘But someone might have been suspected of her killing, at the time. There could have been rumours, gossip. Her sister Mildred must have had her own ideas about who did it.’

  ‘I believe she did. They came real close to gettin’ her, too. Story goes, intruders broke into her home one night, just a couple months after her sister died. One of ’em had a sword, and he’d’a used it, if her man friend hadn’t seen ’em off with his scattergun. Then they was married and upped and run off to live in Arkansas where nobody’d recognise her. She never came back until many years later.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she shared her suspicions with you as to who tried to murder her?’

  ‘No, I don’t s’pose she did,’ Sallie said. She paused and scrutinised Ben with a thoughtful frown that created a thousand new wrinkles. ‘Tell me, child, why’s this so important to you?’

  ‘Because it’s like you said, Mama. I have trouble following me. Bad, bad juju. And tracing back the links to who killed Lottie Landreneau is the only way I’m going to shake it off. Somehow, these murders are connected and I mean to find out how, and why.’

  Sallie Mambo held him with her gaze. Whatever it was she was thinking, it was masked behind her inscrutable expression. Then she heaved a long, weary sigh and said, ‘Son, I’s gettin’ real tired. All this talkin’ is sorely taxin’ for an old lady. And my memory ain’t what it used to be, neither. Reckon I’ve told you all I can.’

  Carl had kept in the background all this time, but now he stepped out of the shadows to take charge of things. His tough attitude was back, too. ‘We’s done,’ he told Ben. ‘You said, once you got yo’ answers, you’d get out of here. You got’m. Now you be gone.’

  There seemed to be nothing Ben could do to drag any more out of the old woman. He thanked her, and stood up. Keisha clasped Sallie’s hand. ‘It was so wonderful to see you again after all these years, Mama.’

  ‘You come and visit me again, girl,’ Sallie said, sounding quite spent and exhausted. ‘Don’t go leavin’ it too long, else I won’t be here no more.’

  ‘Oh Mama, you shouldn’t talk like that.’

  ‘We’ll meet again,’ Sallie said. ‘In this world or the next.’

  Ben could feel the looks Carl was giving him, but he couldn’t leave without giving it one last shot. He scribbled down the number of his burner phone on an old receipt slip using a stub of a pencil he’d found in his jacket pocket. He held out the slip to Sallie. ‘If you remember anything more, would you give me a call on this number?’

  Carl snatched it from his hand and scowled at him. ‘Mama don’t use no phone. She ain’t no messenger, neither.’

  And then the meeting was over. Carl and the other guards escorted the visitors back outside. Evening had fallen and they threaded their way back to the Jeep by torchlight. The three of them got in, Tyler fired up the engine and headlamps and got turned around on the narrow track.

  As they drove away, Ben looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the bobbing torch beams recede into the darkness of the forest.

  Chapter 24

  Nobody spoke until they’d come off the track and were heading back along the dark, empty road. It was Tyler who finally broke the silence. ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  Ben replied from the back seat, ‘Not so bad. Going to see Sallie was a good call, thanks to Keisha. I owe you, once again.’

  He didn’t want to let them see his frustration that they had, in fact, come away with relatively little. The meeting with Sallie Mambo had produced nothing more than a hearsay account of the death of an undercover Union spy, a long, long time ago, that seemed to bear a resemblance to the murder of Lottie Landreneau. There was still no hard link between the two killings, and absolutely no leads for Ben to follow from here. After a promising start his trail had hit a dead end.

  Keisha was turned around in the front passenger seat with her chin resting on her arms, watching him. ‘I know what you’re thinkin’, except you’re too decent to say it. You think we wasted our time back there, ’cause Mama wasn’t able to come up with the name of Peggy Iron Bar’s killers. Right?’

  Maybe Keisha really was psychic after all.

  ‘That would have been useful information,’ Ben admitted.

  ‘Still, can’t blame her if she couldn’t say.’

  ‘Couldn’t say or wouldn’t say?’ Ben replied. ‘Until then she seemed to have perfect recollection of all kinds of facts, names, dates, places, the works. Suddenly, nothing. Her mind seemed to go blank.’

  ‘I guess that’s what happens when you get old,’ Keisha said, defensively standing up for Sallie. ‘Same thing happened to my Aunt Georgia, and she was only ninety-seven.’

  ‘So what next?’ Tyler said.

  ‘What happened back in the 1870s is one thing,’ Ben said. ‘If there’s a connection, what happened two days ago means that there’s someone out there who’s been holding a serious grudge against the Landreneau family, for a hell of a long time, and for reasons unknown, except that their motives are somehow related to those behind Peggy’s death and the attempt to do the same to her sister Mildred. But before I can get to that, I need to know there really is a connection. What ties these people together? That’s the next step.’

  Tyler said, ‘I’m guessin’ that if Lottie Landreneau’s mother told her the secret when she was little, it’s obviously somethin’ that’s been common knowledge in their family for years, even generations.’

  ‘Which suggests that they’re related by blood,’ Ben said. ‘The Landreneaus and the Eyumbas, or Iron Bars, or whatever they chose to call themselves back in the day. And that’s what I need to verify. If they weren’t, I’m dead in the water. Back to Square Zero. Out of o
ptions. Might as well give myself up to Sheriff Roque right now, or spend the rest of my life running.’

  ‘And if they were?’

  ‘Then it can only point to one thing,’ Ben said. ‘A vendetta that’s been kept alive for at least a hundred and forty-five years. A torch of hatred that’s been passed down through time. Going after the Eyumba sisters wasn’t enough. They want to wipe out their descendants, too. Lottie’s mother knew that. It’s why she passed the secret to her daughter, to protect her, and warned her never, ever to tell a living soul.’

  ‘Holy crap,’ Tyler said. ‘That’s some unforgivin’ shit.’

  ‘And carried out to the letter. Lottie was the last of her line. No siblings or children.’

  Tyler asked, ‘But if they were gunnin’ for her, why’d they wait this long?’

  Ben replied, ‘Same reason they never managed to catch up with her parents, or theirs before them. My guess is that whoever’s behind this lost track of the family tree for over a hundred years and only recently reconnected the threads.’

  ‘A gap?’

  ‘As if the vendetta went dormant, like a volcano, then was brought back to life much later on. Presumably by someone else, since the original killers would be old enough now to make Sallie Mambo look like a spring chicken. So, we’d be looking at a new generation of killers, so to speak. Perhaps literally, in the sense that they could be related to the historical ones in the same way that the Landreneaus could have been related to the Eyumbas. Following in the family footsteps, right down to copying the same MO by using a sabre as a murder weapon. It makes me think that the sword must be some kind of heirloom. Maybe it’s the same actual sabre that was used to murder Peggy, and in the attack on her sister. Maybe the reason Lottie’s killers left it behind was to make some kind of twisted statement. With her death, the revenge quest was complete.’

  Tyler pondered over it all for a while, gripping the steering wheel as he concentrated on the dark road. ‘I guess that’s how it’d have to work, logically.’

  ‘If it works at all,’ Ben said. ‘And if my theory’s right, I’d say that this new generation of killers picked up the trail again sometime in the last three years. I wish I could pin it down more closely.’

  Tyler shook his head. ‘Now you lost me again. How’d you figure three years?’

  Ben replied, ‘Because that’s the length of time Lottie had just spent travelling around Europe, where nobody would have been able to find her. It was only when she returned to her home town of Chitimacha a few months ago that she became a visible target again. Question is, whose?’

  Keisha, who had been listening in silence, seemed to have had an idea. ‘Okay, so the first thing we need to do is verify that there’s a blood relation between the families, right?’

  ‘Wrong,’ Ben said. ‘It’s the first thing I need to do. I can’t ask for you to go on helping me like this.’

  ‘We can argue about that later,’ Keisha said. ‘Now, if I recall, the State Archives are in Baton Rouge. They have everythin’ from birth, death, marriage, land and legal records datin’ back centuries. It shouldn’t be too hard to dig up the family connection, if there is one. Maybe that would create a starting point for figurin’ out the rest of it.’

  ‘Then that’s where I’m going,’ Ben said.

  But Tyler seemed doubtful about Keisha’s proposition. ‘I hate to rain on your parade, folks, but let me tell you three reasons why that’s a real dumb notion. First, Baton Rouge is a hundred and eighty miles away, okay? The police will have every major highway blocked up tighter than a fish’s asshole. They’d pick Ben up before he crossed the parish line.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Ben said.

  ‘Fine, then how about reason number two: even if by some miracle you could evade the roadblocks and a zillion cops lookin’ to plug you full of lead, how’s the currently most wanted man in Louisiana goin’ to walk in the door of a heavily guarded government building and ask politely to spend hours siftin’ through a mountain of old records in the hope you might actually find somethin’?’

  ‘Nobody said anything about walking in the door,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll break in through the roof if I have to.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll bet you would. But let me save you the trouble of gettin’ yourself all shot to pieces for nothing. ’Cause, reason number three, I can promise that’s what you’ll come up with in there. A big fat zilch.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’ Keisha demanded.

  Tyler replied patiently, ‘Because, honey, I used to be a lawyer, and in that capacity I have spent more hours than I care to count wearin’ out the seat of my pants in the Erbon and Marie Wise Research Library in Baton Rouge while diggin’ through said State Archives, and I can tell you that birth records weren’t required by law in the state of Louisiana until 1918. Even supposin’ they had been, and even supposin’ that anybody actually gave a rat’s ass about such requirements back in them days, especially a bunch of poor black country folks, those archives only hold data goin’ back that far for Orleans Parish.’

  ‘That’s pathetic.’

  ‘This is the Deep South, baby doll. It ain’t New York.’

  They all fell silent for several minutes. Tyler drove on into the night. The road was empty ahead, just miles and miles of wilderness flashing by in their headlights. Like a dark tunnel stretching to infinity, which was how Ben saw his future at this moment.

  Then Keisha said, ‘Well, now, there’s another idea. We could talk to Professor Abellard.’

  ‘Oh, please, darlin’, let’s leave Abellard out of it. The guy’s a hopeless drunk.’

  ‘I know he is,’ Keisha retorted. ‘Else I’d have mentioned him before. But maybe he’s cleaned hisself up since then. Maybe we’ll get lucky.’

  Ben said, ‘Who?’

  Chapter 25

  The Clovis Parish Sheriff’s Department had had its hectic times over the years, but nobody could recall having ever witnessed a scene like the one outside the Villeneuve Courthouse off Ascension Square the next morning. An armada of police patrol cruisers and gleaming black SWAT vehicles deployed in from all over the state filled the car park and spilled out onto the street, while squads of heavily armed officers togged up like paramilitary warriors swarmed everywhere both inside and outside the building as though it had finally been announced that the Russians were invading. An argument had broken out earlier that morning when the SWAT commander had tried to park his tank on the courthouse lawn. There were more automatic weapons on display than there were citizens in Villeneuve. And judging by the cheesy grins on many of the officers’ faces, it seemed they couldn’t wait for the bullets to start flying.

  The CP Criminal Investigations Division, hub of the command centre from which Waylon Roque had overseen his domain throughout these last decades, was a cluster of cluttered offices within the prefabricated khaki building adjoining the rear of the courthouse. Sheriff Roque himself had occupied the same small, humble office since being first elected. Same battered old desk, same creaky chair, same malfunctioning air con, same faded pictures on the walls, same framed portrait of his long-suffering wife Philomena frowning down at him from next to the dusty star-spangled banner. He was not a man of fancy tastes and cared little for comforts. He was a man of action and results, and damned if he was going to fail to get results in the Landreneau case.

  At this time the sheriff was sitting in the creaky chair at the battered desk, sweltering in the 9 a.m. heat and sipping on an iced tea while continuing to fret over a situation that was, to say the least, challenging. The gruesome murder had sparked off the biggest manhunt in the history of Clovis Parish and he presided over his forces like General Patton.

  This was the first short break he’d taken since the operation had flown into action. His every waking moment from then until now had been spent strutting up and down like a man possessed, barking commands into phones and radios, delegating duties, and humiliating slow-witted deputies or anyone else who failed to meet his
expectations. As a result, every able officer he could muster, and some who probably weren’t so able, had been pressed into service.

  Meanwhile a small air force of helicopters had overflown every patch of farmland, forest, swamp and bayou for miles around. Every principal route leading in or out of Clovis Parish had been roadblocked since the crack of dawn on the morning of the crime and hundreds of vehicles had been stopped and searched, while he’d had all available troops scour every imaginable location in Chitimacha and the surrounding area.

  Sheriff Roque hadn’t had this much excitement since the shooting of that dangerous desperado, Ethan Brister.

  And yet, all attempts to find the chief suspect – now universally referred to by Clovis Parish law enforcement as ‘the fugitive’ – had failed. It was as though this man Ben Hope had simply vanished into thin air. Which, since bureaucratic wheels far beyond the scope of Sheriff Roque’s little world had begun to turn and shreds of information about Hope fed back through the system, was increasingly fitting the profile they were building on him. The UK Ministry of Defence, liaising with officials of the US State Department and the British Consulate in New Orleans, had at first been extremely resistant to releasing any details of the former serviceman. Under pressure and in the spirit of international cooperation, certain highly secret files had been made available to US law enforcement, on a strictly eyes-only basis.

  The upshot of all this complex wrangling was that Waylon Roque now had a reasonably accurate, though only very partial, idea of Hope’s background, military experience and skillset. It made for depressing reading, from the point of view of someone whose job it was to catch him.

  As an SAS major this guy had led black ops missions in places Roque had never even heard of. He was a master sniper, an expert in surveillance and counter-surveillance, special weapons and tactics, demolition and forward air control. Counter-terror raids; daring combat missions both on land and at sea; behind-the-lines sabotage assaults; hostage rescue team extractions in the face of superior enemy force: Hope’s list of accomplishments made the Delta Force boys look like the Eagle Scouts. And this was just the stuff that the British government were willing to disclose.