We were alone down here, and as long as the NSA was still chasing the DMS, there was no chance of the cavalry coming.

We tried not to think about that; we tried to focus on the task at hand.

We tried.

Chapter Forty

Bulawayo, Republic of Zimbabwe

Five Days Ago

Gabriel Mugabe sipped tea as he watched the forklift drivers move back and forth to shift pallet after pallet of bottled water from the train depot to the warehouse. He was pleased with the quantity. An American had given him a very tidy kickback to make sure that customs cleared the delivery quickly.

“Why so quickly?” he’d asked.

“We’ve invested a lot of money in advertising,” said the American. “Our advertisements go live on September 1, and we want the product available right to the moment.”

“But you said you’re giving the water away. What does the timing matter?”

“Impulse buying is one of the few things that still survives in this economy. Give a little and they’ll buy more.”

Mugabe thought that the American was being stupid. Giving away sixty tons of bottled water was like flushing good money down the toilet. But the American insisted that worldwide one-day buzz was worth many millions at the launch of a product. Mugabe neither knew nor cared if that was true. All that mattered to Mugabe was the fat envelope of money the American discreetly gave him. Mixed currencies-American dollars and South African rand-none of the Zimbabwean dollars that were worth less than toilet paper. Very nice.

They’d shaken hands on the deal. Mugabe wasted very little of the money on bribes to the custom officials. Mugabe’s name was enough to inspire cooperation. What little he spent was to grease the wheels in the port of Beira in Mozambique. The cargo ship unloaded there and the water was sent by train to the depot in Bulawayo and from the train yard to warehouses owned by men who feared the Mugabe family.

Gabriel Mugabe was the nephew of the President of Zimbabwe, who had been accused by organizations around the world, from Amnesty International to the African Union, for human rights violations. Gabriel privately agreed, but in his view the issue of human rights was an attempt by the weak to undermine the strong. He believed that strength came with rights that superseded anything the weak had to say. History, he felt, supported this view, and Mugabe could cite historical precedent going back to the Old Testament and up to the hypocritical U.S. so-called War on Terror.

Though Gabriel Mugabe was not the flesh-eating lion that his uncle was, he was rightly feared here in Bulawayo. The water arrived safely and most of the cash the American had given him was still in his personal safe at home.

He sipped his tea, which had been fresh brewed with water from the pallet Mugabe had appropriated for his personal use.

“Free water,” he said with a sneer. “Fucking Americans.”

Chapter Forty-One

The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

The Morning of Friday, August 27

The boy’s name was Eighty-two. Or SAM. It depended on who was speaking to him. Otto always called him by the number; when Alpha was in a good mood he sometimes called the boy SAM. The boy seldom thought of himself as anything other than “me.” He didn’t believe the number or the name was truly his. He suspected he had a real name, but if he was right it was one he would never be allowed to use-and would never want to use.

He crouched on the sloping terra-cotta roof in the shadows cast by the fronds of a pair of towering palms. Eighty-two was small and well practiced in the art of being invisible. Most people here at the Hive were not allowed to talk to him, and those who were mostly ignored him. The people who paid attention to him terrified him, and so the boy avoided them. He lived among them, seeing scores of people every day, but he sometimes went a week without so much as a meaningless exchange of commentary on the weather. In the span from November 10 of last year until March 2 of this year he did not have a single conversation. Even the doctors who tested him seldom spoke to him. They grabbed him, poked him, pierced him with needles, took samples, made him lie down under scanners-all without directly addressing him. They knew he knew what was expected of him and mostly they pointed to where they wanted him to sit, stand, or lie down.

It hurt him for a long time, being alone, but recently he’d come to prefer it. It was better than engaging in conversation about what was going on here at the Hive. And it was better than when Otto’s men dragged him along on one of their hunts. Eighty-two went on those because he had to, because Alpha expected it and Otto demanded it, but so far he had not shot at any of the animals. In another year, when he was bigger, he knew that he would be expected to participate in the hunt rather than tag along with the videographer.

Nobody-not even the videographer-knew that Eighty-two had taken his own camera, a little button camera he’d stolen from the previous videographer’s gear.

The hunters had gone to São Paolo for a single day of celebration, and Eighty-two had slipped away from the pool area for forty minutes and found a cybercafé half a block from the hotel. Sending the e-mail with the video had been the single bravest thing he’d ever done, and those forty minutes were the most frightening of his life. He was not able to wait around to see if there was a response. He wished and prayed that there was, that the Americans were on their way.

Now he was back at the Hive. Back at the House of Screams, Eighty-two’s name for it, though he suspected many of the New Men thought of it in that way, too. After all, it was their screams that filled the corridors of the building day after day and night after night.

The boy wore only a pair of swim trunks. His skin was pale. He was not allowed to tan, and if he allowed himself to get a sunburn Alpha would have Otto beat him. Otto’s beatings lasted a long, long time. Eighty-two suspected that Otto enjoyed them and was sad when Alpha told him to stop. Otto’s lips were always wet with spit when he was done giving a beating, and his eyes burned bright as candles.

Down in the compound three of the New Men were working to dig postholes for a chicken pen. The boy watched them, fascinated. The New Men had thick features and coarse red hair, and when no one was around they chattered back and forth in surprisingly high-pitched voices. The boy recognized two of the New Men. One of them was the oldest of the community still living here on the island, maybe twenty-five, though his hair had already started to go gray and the skin on his face was creased with lines. He looked sixty or seventy. The young man working beside him was not much older than the boy, but the New Man was top-heavy with muscles and looked at least thirty. The third member of the party was a woman. Like the others she was dressed in lightweight cotton trousers and a tank top, but she was sweating as she dug and the shirt was pasted to her breasts so that the boy could easily see the dark outlines of her nipples.

Eighty-two felt a stirring in his loins and looked away, embarrassed that he was spying on her. And ashamed that it was affecting him.

The female’s shovel hit a stone in the dirt and she bent quickly and used her fingers to dig it out of the ground. Without thinking she threw it over her shoulder and picked up her shovel.

Suddenly there was a harsh shout from across the compound and the boy turned to see one of the guards-a huge man with a blond crew cut and a gun belt slung low on his hips-come striding toward the work party.

“What do you think you’re playing at, you ugly slut?” he shouted in an Australian accent that was sometimes hard for the boy to follow.