Burnt Sienna Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  BLOCKBUSTER REVIEWS FOR

  BURNT SIENNA

  AND DAVID MORRELL

  “MORRELL HAS ALWAYS STRIVED TO MAKE ENTERTAINMENT FICTION LITERARY. AND IN BURNT SIENNA, HE ACHIEVES A PERFECT FUSION BETWEEN THE TWO VERY DIFFERENT ENDEAVORS. Beautifully written, with not a single extraneous word, BURNT SIENNA evokes the best of Graham Greene, yet remains uniquely Morrell.”

  — Associated Press

  “MORRELL IS A MASTER.”

  — Houston Chronicle

  “THRILLERS DON’T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS The characters are interesting, the plot is relentless, and no one excels at writing action scenes like Morrell.”

  — Library Journal

  “DAVID MORRELL IS A MASTER OF SUSPENSE. He wields it like a stiletto — knows just where to stick it and how to turn it. IF YOU’RE READING MORRELL, YOU’RE SITTING ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT.”

  — Michael Connelly, author of

  Angels Flight and Void Moon

  “MORRELL’S ROBUST LATEST DELIVERS HAIRPIN PLOT-CURVES.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “MORRELL, AN ABSOLUTE MASTER OF THE THRILLER, PLAYS BY HIS OWN RULES AND LEAVES YOU DAZZLED.”

  — Dean Koontz, author of False Memory

  “THE ABSOLUTE MASTER … THE CRAFTSMAN SO MANY OF US LOOK TO FOR GUIDANCE.”

  — Andrew Vachss

  “BURNT SIENNA WILL MORE THAN SATISFY THOSE WHO LIKE LOTS OF ACTION, PULSATING SUSPENSE, AND STRAIGHTFORWARD WRITING … grabbing readers in the first pages and propelling them through a roller-coaster of crisis upon crisis to the shoot-’em-up ending.”

  — Knoxville News-Sentinel

  “MORRELL STANDS HEAD AND SHOULDERS ABOVE MOST OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES.”

  — National Review

  “A MASTER OF THRILLING PAGE-TURNERS, MORRELL IS HITTING ON ALL CYLINDERS WITH BURNT SIENNA.”

  — Cedar Rapids Gazette (IA)

  “FEW THRILLER WRITERS BRING AS MUCH IMAGINATION TO THEIR CRAFT AS DAVID MORRELL. In these days of recycled plots through prequels, sequels, and serials, he puts a shine of originality on each new effort.”

  — Lexington Herald-Leader

  “EXCITING STUFF Morrell … the man who created Rambo, may write the most literary thrillers around, as well as the most exciting.”

  — Mansfield News Journal (OH)

  “MORRELL’S WRITING IS CRISP AND TOUGH, AND HE KNOWS HOW TO GRAB A READER.”

  — Life

  “THIS IS THE 15TH EXCITING STORY BY THE AUTHOR WHO CREATED JOHN RAMBO, a hero whose very name means heroism of the highest order.”

  — Abilene Reporter-News

  “FILLED WITH ADVENTURE, ACTION, ROMANCE, INTRIGUE — AND IT IS WELL WRITTEN.”

  — Sullivan County Democrat

  “WELL WRITTEN … [MALONE IS A] FULLY REALIZED CHARACTER.… The pace is excellent.… You will enjoy it.”

  — Ellenville Press

  “A SOLID ENTRY IN ITS GENRE.… I WAS ENTERTAINED WITH EVERY PAGE … read the entire book in one sitting.”

  — Roanoke Times

  “MORRELL DELIVERS — AND DOES IT VERY, VERY WELL.”

  — Booklist

  ALSO BY DAVID MORRELL

  FICTION

  First Blood (1972)

  Testament (1975)

  Last Reveille (1977)

  The Totem (1979)

  Blood Oath (1982)

  The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984)

  The Fraternity of the Stone (1985)

  The League of Night and Fog (1987)

  The Fifth Profession (1990)

  The Covenant of the Flame (1991)

  Assumed Identity (1993)

  Desperate Measures (1994)

  The Totem (Complete and Unaltered) (1994)

  Extreme Denial (1996)

  Double Image (1998)

  Black Evening (1999)

  NONFICTION

  John Barth: An Introduction (1976)

  Fireflies (1988)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  BURNT SIENNA. Copyright © 2000 by Morrell Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  Cover design by Jesse Sanchez

  Warner Vision is a registered trademark of Warner Books, Inc.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2342-5

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: May 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  To Danny Baror:

  foreign agentextraordinaire

  That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive

  — Robert Browning

  ONE

  1

  From Newsweek

  “That was a long time ago. I don’t think about it,” Malone claims. But if, according to the critics, his paintings celebrate life more than any artist since the Impressionists, one can’t help suspecting that the sensuality in his work is a reaction to the nightmare he barely survived on the night of December 20, 1989, during the U.S. invasion of Panama.

  A painter who was once a military helicopter pilot — in the cutthroat competition of today’s art world, that dramatic juxtaposition between Malone’s violent past and artistic present accounts for part of his mystique. But while his Marine background is exotic to some patrons, it also initially made critics skeptical that his work had merit. As Douglas Fennerman, Malone’s art representative, points out, “Chase had to work twice as hard to earn his reputation. From that point of view, it doesn’t hurt to have a soldier’s background if you want to survive on the battlefield of the galleries in Manhattan.”

  Certainly Malone looks more like a soldier than any stereotype of an artist. Six feet tall, sinewy more than muscular, he has a sun-bronzed face and ruggedly attractive features. Interviewed on the beach near his home on the Mexican resort of Cozumel, he had just completed his daily exercise of a five-mile jog coupled with an hour of calisthenics. His sandy hair, bleached by the Caribbean sun, matches the color of the beard stubble that adds to his rugged handsomeness.Apart from the paint smears on his T-shirt and shorts, there is no hint of his place in the art world.

  He is thirty-seven, but it isn’t hard to imagine that he didn’t look much different in his lieutenant’s uniform ten years earlier when his helicopter gunship was shot down by a Panamanian rocket. That happened at 2:00 A.M. on December 20, and while Malone refuses to talk about the incident, Jeb Wainright, the copilot who was shot down with him, remembers it vividly.

  “In the night, there were so many tracers and rockets flying around, not to mention flames shooting up from explosions on the ground, it looked like the Fourth of July. In hell. To soften everything up, we hit first from the air: 285 fixed-wing aircraft and 110 helicopters. Like a swarm of gigantic mosquitoes, with damned big stingers. Forty-millimeter Vulcan cannons, 105-millimeter howitzers, laser-guided
antitank missiles.The works.”

  One of the principal targets was the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces, a factorylike building in a shanty section of Panama City, called El Chorrillo,“the little stream.” The enemy put its headquarters there, U.S. military planners theorized, so that Panamanian troops could use the twenty thousand people in El Chorrillo as a shield.

  “And something like that happened,” Wainright continues. “When our choppers attacked the headquarters, the enemy ran for cover in the surrounding area. But we kept after them, and that’s when Chase started shouting into the radio to tell our command post that civilians were under fire. They sure were. Almost at once, five square blocks burst into flames. Command Central didn’t have a chance to respond before we were hit. I still remember my teeth snapping together from the explosion. Chase fought to keep control of the gunship. It was full of smoke, spinning and veering, all the while dropping. Chase is the best chopper pilot I ever saw, but I still don’t know how he managed to get us safely on the ground.”

  The nightmare was only beginning. In the darkness, with the fire spreading from shack to shack, Malone and Wainright struggled to escape. As the twenty thousand residents of El Chorrillo swarmed in panic through a maze of alleys, Malone and his copilot were shot at by Panamanian forces as well as by U.S. gunships whose crews didn’t realize American fliers were on the ground.

  “Then a bullet hit me in the leg,” Wainright says. “I have no idea from which side. While the civilians rushed past us, Chase rigged a pressure bandage on my leg, heaved me over his shoulder, and tried to get away from the fires. At one point, he had to use his service pistol against Panamanian soldiers holed up in a building. I later realized it took him until after dawn to get us out of there. We were slumped against a wall, soot falling all around us, when American tanks and flamethrowers showed up to level what was left of El Chorrillo. Two thousand civilians died that night. God knows how many were wounded. All twenty thousand lost their homes.”

  Shortly afterward, Malone left the Marine Corps.

  “Chase had always been drawing stuff when we weren’t training,” Wainright recalls.“Sometimes, instead of going on leave, he stayed in the barracks and worked on his sketches. It was obvious he had talent, but I had no idea how much until after he committed himself to trying to earn a living at it.That night in El Chorrillo, he made up his mind, and he never looked back.”

  A viewer will find no hint of violence in Malone’s paintings.They are mostly colorful landscapes.Their vibrant details, which are reminiscent of van Gogh and yet distinctly his own, communicate a passionate joy in the senses, a thrill of sensual appreciation for the natural world that perhaps only someone who has survived a face-to-face encounter with apocalyptic violence and death could be moved to depict.…

  2

  As waves lapped at Malone’s sneakers, the sunset reflected off the Caribbean, creating a hue that seemed never to have existed before. He was conscious of the gritty sand beneath his shoes, of the balmy breeze against his thick, curly hair, and of the plaintive cree-cree-cree of seagulls overhead. Raising his brush to the half-finished canvas, he concentrated to get it all in — not just the shapes and colors but also the sounds, the fragrances, and even the taste of the salt air: to attempt the impossible and embed those other senses in a visual medium so that the painting would make a viewer feel what it had been like to stand in this spot at this magical moment, experiencing the wonder of this sunset as if there had never been another.

  Abruptly something distracted him. When Malone had been in the military, his ability to register several details at once had been a survival skill, but it was as an artist and not a soldier that he now noticed movement at the edge of his vision.

  It came from his right, from a stand of palm trees a hundred yards along the deserted beach, near where the unseen dirt road ended. A shifting shadow became a squat man stepping onto the sand. The intruder raised a hand to shield his spectacles from the sunset’s brilliance and peered in Malone’s direction. As the man approached, his dark suit revealed itself to be royal blue. The black of his shoes was soon covered with the white of the sand that he walked across. His briefcase, a chalk gray that matched his hair, had bumps on it — ostrich skin.

  Malone wasn’t puzzled that he had failed to hear the man’s car. After all, the roar of the surf on the shore was so strong that it obscured distant sounds. Nor was he puzzled by the intruder’s joyless clothing; even an island paradise couldn’t relax some harried business travelers. What did puzzle him, however, was that the man approached with a resolve that suggested he had come specifically because of Malone, but Malone had not told anyone where he would be.

  He took all this in while appearing not to do so, using the need of tilting his head toward his palette to disguise his periodic glances in the man’s direction. As he intensified the scarlet on his canvas, he heard the intruder come so close that the crunch of his shoes was distinct.

  Then the crunch stopped an arm’s length from Malone’s right. “Mr. Malone?”

  Malone ignored him.

  “I’m Alexander Potter.”

  Malone continued to ignore him.

  “I spoke to you on the phone yesterday. I told you I was flying in this afternoon.”

  “You wasted your time. I thought I made it clear: I’m not interested.”

  “Very clear. It’s just that my employer doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  “He’d better get used to it.” Malone applied more color to the canvas. Seagulls screeched. A minute passed.

  Potter broke the stalemate. “Perhaps it’s a matter of your fee not being sufficient. On the phone, I mentioned two hundred thousand dollars. My employer authorized me to double it.”

  “This isn’t about money.” Malone finally turned to him.

  “What is it about?”

  “I was once in a position where I had to follow a lot of orders.”

  Potter nodded. “Your experience in the Marines.”

  “After I got out, I promised myself that from then on I was going to do only what I wanted.”

  “A half million.”

  “I’d been obeying commands for too long. Many of them didn’t make sense, but it was my job to follow them anyhow. Finally I was determined to be my own boss. The trouble is, I needed money and I broke my promise to myself. The man who hired me saw things differently than I did. He kept finding fault with my work and refused to pay me.”

  “That wouldn’t happen this time.” Potter’s tie had red, blue, and green stripes, the banner for an Ivy League club that would never have asked Malone to join and to which he would never have wanted to belong.

  “It didn’t happen then, either,” Malone said. “Believe me, I convinced the man to pay.”

  “I meant that this time no one would find fault with your work. You’re too famous now. Six hundred thousand.”

  “That’s more than any of my paintings has ever sold for.”

  “My employer knows that.”

  “Why? Why is it worth so much to him?”

  “He values the unique.”

  “Just for me to do a private portrait?”

  “No. This commission involves two portraits. One of the subject’s face. The other full length. Nude.”

  “Nude? Can I assume your employer is not the subject of the portraits?”

  Malone was making a joke, but Potter evidently didn’t have a sense of humor. “His wife. Mr. Bellasar doesn’t allow even his photograph to be taken.”

  “Bellasar?”

  “Derek Bellasar. Is the name familiar to you?”

  “Not at all. Should it be?”

  “Mr. Bellasar is very powerful.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he reminds himself of that every morning.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  The abrupt change of subject caused a shadow of confusion to glide behind Potter’s glasses. He raised his brow in what passed for
a frown. “It’s hardly a secret. The Manhattan gallery that represents you confirmed what was in the recent Newsweek article. You live here on Cozumel.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “How did I know where to phone you?” Potter’s expression displayed total confidence again. “There’s no mystery. The article mentioned your passion for privacy, that you don’t have a telephone and you live in a sparsely inhabited part of the island. The article also mentioned that the only building near you is a restaurant called the Coral Reef, where you receive your mail and take your business calls. It was simply a matter of my being persistent, of phoning that restaurant until I happened to catch you.”

  “That’s still not what I meant.”

  “Then I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “How did you know I was here.” Malone pointed toward the sand at his feet.

  “Ah. I see. Someone at the restaurant told me where you’d gone.”

  “No. This afternoon, I came here on the spur of the moment. I didn’t tell anyone. There’s only one way you could have known — you had someone following me.”

  Potter’s expression didn’t change. He didn’t even blink.

  “You’re trouble,” Malone said. “Leave.”

  “Perhaps we can discuss this over dinner.”

  “Hey, what part of no don’t you understand?”

  3

  Potter was sitting at a table directly across from the entrance, staring as Malone stepped into the Coral Reef. The man’s solemn business suit contrasted with the colorful tops and shorts of the many tourists who had made the ten-kilometer drive from Cozumel’s only town, San Miguel, to visit this locally famous restaurant. Years ago, it had been no more than a beer and snack shop for divers attracted to the clear water of the nearby reef. But over time, the building and the menu had expanded, until the restaurant was now listed among the must-sees in every Cozumel travel guide. Potter had every right to be a customer, of course, but although the place was usually busy, Malone considered the Coral Reef to be his private refuge, and he resented that Potter had contaminated it.