Free Lone Wolf #7: Peruvian Nightmare by Mike Barry Page B

have every confidence in you, Mr. Wulff. I wish that I had as much confidence in myself as I do in you, or, for that matter, as you do in you.”
    And then Wulff had left the room, considering the interview over. If there was one thing you learned from your years in the department it was a sense of timing of the pace of a conversation—and now one day later he was on a bus in the Andes crawling the final mile to the lost city of the Incas where someone, he was told, would meet the bus, take him to the next stop. It all seemed overly elaborate and a bit childish, but then they did things differently down here. He had learned that from Havana, and Cuba was just a trace of South America.
    He was crammed in with a bunch of tourists, perhaps thirty of them, all of whom were beginning to gasp already from the thin air of the high mountains. The cabin of the bus was supposed to be pressurized in some way but it simply wasn’t working; the air was thin and moist, stroking his lungs unevenly. Even though he was in much better shape than the rest of them, Wulff was beginning to feel it, a slow dilation and constriction in the arteries, a light-headedness, a feeling that rising rapidly from his seat would not be the proper thing to do. The guidebooks (he had done a little guidebook reading in the hotel) all said that it was advisable to spend a full day your first day in Cuzco just lying in bed, reading, resting and acclimating yourself to the atmosphere. But that was a joke; at fifty or sixty dollars-per, almost none of these people planned to be flat on their backs. Acclimatization was out of the question for him; unless his deliverers had other plans, he wanted to take the stuff and head right out. A seven-hour ride in, a seven-hour ride back—how much damage could it do him? Behind him, one of the women was throwing up.
    Wulff held onto his own gorge, looked out the window, and saw a sequence of staggering views of bare mountain ranges. There were several thin, precipitous drops, and an impression from certain angles as the bus staggered up the last hills that there was a sheer drop of several miles into the canyons below. Abruptly, as he felt the nausea begin to come at him heavily in waves, he turned from the window, closed his eyes, and rested his head against the backrest. The bus driver, gasping like the rest of them, was trying to give some travelog on the lost city of the Incas—the fabulous rumors of hidden gold, the royal hunt of the sun, that somewhere within those ruins and artifacts still lay the wealth of an ancient civilization more ponderous than any on earth today. But he could barely get the words out and seemed no more interested than the rest of the tourists. Wulff kept his eyes shut, trying to blank his mind. The bus squawled to a sudden halt.
    For a moment he thought that they had reached the depot, the station, whatever the hell their destination was, but opening his eyes slowly Wulff saw that it was nothing of the sort. Something was very wrong outside the bus, someone was banging frantically at the door, and even as this registered on him he heard the sound of shattering glass. Then the bus driver, momentarily arched behind his seat, mesmerized with terror—perhaps only attention—was trying desperately to get out of the seat, trying to reach the door, bellowing, the passengers already screaming. And then there was a short dull explosion, a forty-five caliber kind of sound. When Wulff had oriented himself to the sense of it, the bus driver was already taking the hit, grasping at his belly, mumbling something midway between a prayer and a shout as he collapsed to the floor. The passengers were still screaming but their sounds were curiously insubstantial in the thin, dead air, some of the passengers already gasping in silence. And then a man, short-bearded and with glaring eyes, came through the door of the bus, clawing and gripping his way in, his arms bloodstreaked to the elbows from the small and many