by Graham Brown
“What the hell am I doing here chasing after stolen art?”
“Whatever’s about to be sold here, it was important to Ranga and Bashir,” Moore reminded her.
“But how?” she asked. “How could this possibly have anything to do with that?”
“That’s what you’re here to find out,” Moore said. “You have an invite to a private auction tonight courtesy of a friend of mine, Mr. Faisal Najir. He’ll expect you to come dressed for the occasion.”
Danielle looked at Moore suspiciously. “Where?”
“Center city,” Moore said.
Danielle recalled Beirut’s city center as a bombed-out wasteland. “That’s no-man’s-land.”
“Up on the surface it is,” Moore said. “But don’t worry, you’ll be underground.”
CHAPTER 20
As Hawker watched, a pair of huge plasma screens descended slowly from the ceiling at each end of the ballroom. All eyes turned toward one or the other, causing the crowd to part in the middle like the Red Sea. He could see one screen from where he was, so he held his ground and kept his back to the wall.
“Welcome to the city of the future,” a voice said, mixing with the music. “Here you will see your future, a future without sickness, a future without infirmity, a future without dying.”
He leaned forward to get a better view of the screen. It showed a man stepping off a yacht with a beautiful young woman on his arm. He was silver-haired and obviously in his midsixties; the woman — of course — might have been twenty-five. But as they walked toward the camera, the image changed. The gray in his hair disappeared, the lines on his face faded and vanished, his shoulders straightened, his chest filled, his gut shrank to nothing.
“With Paradox you will see yourselves at age one hundred, living more vitally than you do today at forty, fifty, or sixty,” the voice promised.
By the time the yachtsman passed the camera, he looked to be thirty-five or so, a paragon of health and virility. The woman on his arm no longer looked out of place.
“Aging is nothing more than the dying of cells. But reversing this process at the cellular level will reverse the effects that you feel.”
On the screen a CGI animation showed cells dividing; it zoomed in on the DNA strand as the double helix split and reconnected. Tiny links at the end of the chain fell off, drifting from the screen. Those were the telomeres, as Danielle had explained it to him. Like the tips on your shoelaces. When the telomeres were gone the rest of the lace began to fray.
“This is not a resurfacing project designed to hide the damage of age. Nor is it an attempt to make you look younger, or even feel younger — this is a revolution. When you join us you will be remade, younger, stronger, more virile. Youth will no longer be wasted on the young.”
A cheer went up from the audience and Hawker stood amazed. Not because a raft of the wealthy were interested in turning back the hands of time, but because the graphics on the screen showed cellular activity, with labels and subtitles.
These were the very subjects of Ranga’s notes, according to Danielle. More shocking to Hawker was a graphic in the lower corner. It indicated a trial number: Series 951. It might have meant nothing to the others, but Danielle had recalled the lists of experiments ending with Series 951.
The same number Danielle had recounted as the last entry in the notes. Sonia’s presentation was promising to extend life, using the very same data and a virus with the very same trial number that Ranga’s notes had indicated would destroy life.
A seed of anger returned to Hawker’s heart.
The best-case scenario had Sonia as just another snake-oil salesman, promising the rich what they wanted to hear, but Hawker didn’t believe in the best-case scenario.
And the worst: that Sonia’s company and all of this were part of Ranga’s plan, part of the cult’s plan. What better or more ironic way could there be to spread a disease than to get rich people to pay millions for the privilege of being infected. Come here for the serum of life, only don’t expect to live much after you take it.
And if that was the case, it meant something far more sinister was going on.
CHAPTER 21
As the video presentation wound down, Hawker found himself needing space to think. He moved from the window and began examining the service passages of the hotel. He could still hear the spa music in the ballroom, although the voice-over had been replaced by a dozen individual speakers and models who were milling around in the crowd, talking in person to the wealthy men and women.
He paid attention to it only sporadically. Instead he studied the back halls of the hotel and the unmarked doors that led to prep rooms, kitchens, and fire escapes. If trouble came, it would be one of these areas that proved to be the weak link in the chain. At the same time, these back-of-the-house areas would allow the greatest chance to escape and evade it; but first, one had to know one’s way around.
He came out of a staging room filled with audiovisual equipment and moved down the hall to an unmarked stairwell. It led up to the heliport that lay above them and down as a type of fire escape.
Down the hall a door to the right was locked; to the left he found a dead end. He turned back and saw two people walking toward him: Sonia and the gray-haired man.
They exchanged glances.
“I’ve got this,” he heard Sonia say.
“Are you sure?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
He kissed her on the cheek and took the stairwell up to the heliport.
“Can I help you find something?” she said to Hawker, sounding very official.
That was a hell of a question. She came closer, moving forward with confidence.
“What makes you think I’m looking for something?” he asked.
She slowed, glancing up the stairs. The sound of footsteps climbing was still audible.
“You were always looking for something when I knew you.”
She didn’t sound so official anymore.
Up close she was even more beautiful than she had been from a distance. Her soulful hazel eyes, her smooth, tan skin glowing against the white hue of the cocktail dress.
“Maybe we all were,” he said.
“Searching for answers together?”
“Better than searching alone,” he added.
As she spoke he noticed a different look in her eyes, a weary sadness she’d hidden behind the smiles and the salesman’s confidence. Truthfully he wondered how she maintained it at all, considering what was going on.
“Did my father send you?” she asked.
The question struck Hawker oddly. Obviously Ranga had tried to contact him, but the way Sonia asked the question, she sounded more upset or aggravated than concerned. The reason hit him suddenly: No wonder she was able to star at this reception, no wonder she was able to hold it together — she didn’t know that her father was gone.
“When did you last speak with him?” he asked.
“Six months ago,” she said. “We had a tenth falling-out. Or maybe an eleventh. This one appears to have stuck.”
If they’d fallen out months ago, he wondered, then how could her data trial match the number of his most recent work? He kept that to himself. She was lying. There could be many reasons for that, the easiest of which was she didn’t know what Hawker was doing here, but if he cornered her now, she would just cover up the lie with another lie.
“Why?” Hawker asked. “What’s been going on?”
She looked away as if deciding where to start. “My father is still a refugee,” she began. “He refuses to—”
Hawker raised a hand, stopping her. He wanted to hear every word, but something was wrong. He glanced up the stairwell. He should have felt a draft when Gray Hair opened the door to the roof. But he hadn’t felt it yet.
He took Sonia by the elbow and moved down the hall.
As a flood of different emotions washed over him, Hawker tried to remain cool. He had to remind himself that the woman in front of him was not
the young girl he’d protected years ago. That somehow she was mixed up in what was going on.
“How much do you know about the people your father was working with?”
“Not much. He was always secretive.”
“What caused your falling-out?”
“Life,” she said. “Changes. I couldn’t live his way anymore.”
“I mean specifically.”
“I’m on the board at Paradox,” she said defensively. “Obviously he’s no longer any part of this company, just a name on the founders list.”
“So he was jealous?”
“No,” she said. “He was worried.”
“About what?”
“About what we’re doing,” she said, growing aggravated. “Why are you asking me these things?”
“Something bad has happened,” Hawker said.
Her expression changed, worry replacing the aggravation. She shrank back, beginning to shake. “Please tell me he’s okay,” she said. “Please, Hawker. Please tell me he sent you to find me and talk me into coming back.”
Tears were welling up in her eyes.
“I …”
A group of people turned down the hall, two men and one woman, carrying drinks. They spoke loudly and asked about the restroom.
Sonia got it together and pointed to the doorway just before the stairwell. The guests moved off.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Tell me where he is.”
“I’m sorry,” Hawker said. “I couldn’t reach him in time.”
Her knees buckled at the sound of his words and Hawker had to grab her by the arms to keep her from falling.
She looked up, the tears overflowing her eyes.
“Why?” she asked. “How?”
“Somebody he was working for killed him,” Hawker said. “He got a message to me asking for help.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked, pleading as if it could be changed now. “Why didn’t you save him?”
“I tried.”
She wouldn’t look at him. She began to pull away. He held on to her.
“I need to know who he was working with,” he said. “It’s important.”
She pulled out of his grasp, holding her hands up as if she could ward him off. “Get away from me.”
The moment was hellish to Hawker, every trigger of guilt and anger and vengeance, all being hammered repeatedly and at the same time.
“Sonia,” he said sharply, trying to get her attention, “you could be in danger. I need to know what you know.”
He wanted to whisk her up in his arms and carry her away from there. To take her somewhere safe, where men like those who’d killed her father could not hope to stray. But there was something larger at stake and Hawker knew he had to hold back.
She didn’t run. She just stared, a hand on the wall to steady herself.
As he waited for her, a commotion down the hallway caught his ear. Glaring down the hallway looking for the source of the noise, Hawker caught sight of a body tumbling down the stairwell from the upper level.
Gray Hair.
He hit the bottom landing, clutching his throat and bleeding profusely.
Before she could see it, Hawker pushed Sonia back into an alcove.
One of the bathroom seekers ran to assist Gray Hair, not realizing what had happened.
“What the hell …”
The words barely escaped his mouth before a cascade of gunfire rained down from the stairs above.
Too late.
Hawker grabbed Sonia and pulled her into the storeroom with his hand over her mouth. He led her to a table, and they crouched down.
“What’s going on?”
“Quiet.”
“But—”
He silenced her with a glance and they waited. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the lights on the eighty-first floor went out and the sound of machine-gun fire thundered down the darkened hallway.
CHAPTER 22
Danielle’s trip through Beirut was a surreal journey, a passage through a city that had long been at war with itself. Most people knew of Beirut’s sad recent history, a place being torn apart for thirty years by civil war, invasions, and strife. What most people didn’t know was that Beirut had once been a shining beacon of prosperity and multicultural cooperation.
After World War II, the population had been divided roughly fifty-fifty between Muslims and Christians and the power had been similarly shared. For twenty-plus years it had remained that way, with a strong commercial sector, a rapidly growing economy, and a thriving tourist industry.
During those years Beirut had been a nexus for much of the Arab and Western worlds. Europeans came to its beaches and casinos almost as frequently as they went to Monaco and the south of France. Beirut was the gateway to Europe in one direction and the gateway to the Middle East in the other.
But then the sorrows came. The Muslim population grew faster than the Christian, and demands for more power by Muslim leaders were met with suspicion and resistance from Christian ones. Soon the city and the country around it were in a state of civil war, a war that would eventually draw in Syria, Israel, and the United States.
A decade of that madness left the city divided, with a Christian side, a Muslim side, and a vacant central core acting as a sort of unofficial demilitarized zone.
On each side rebuilding efforts went on; on each side those who wanted peace fought with those who wanted aggression, while the two sides faced off against each other across the vacant no-man’s-land.
But the will of the Lebanese people to thrive seemed greater than the ability of fate to keep them down. At various times in past millennia they had rebuilt after massive earthquakes, invasion, occupation, fires that had burned the city to the ground.
As Danielle rode through the city in a silver SUV, she noticed cranes sprouting from every block. Bulldozers and construction equipment clogged the streets and horns honked in frustration, marking an odd kind of progress. Beirut was filling in the wound that had cleaved it in two, and while many complaints were made about the pace, style, and final design of all the work, no one really wanted it to stop.
On the Muslim side, Danielle passed modern-looking hotels, office buildings, and other structures most in America would be shocked to find in Beirut. She made it to the shore, drove past Pigeon’s Rock, and arrived at the St.-George Yacht Club.
It was a busy place as well. Hundred-foot yachts anchored at various spots in the harbor. Farther out, eighty-foot sailboats bobbed on swells as smaller craft moved here and there.
She parked, made her way down the pier, and arrived in front of a sleek-looking motor yacht named Phoenician Builder. A guard checked her credentials and waved her on board. A second crewman led her to a shaded deck where Faisal Najir sat enjoying a late lunch.
Najir sat alone, wearing slacks and a white linen shirt open to the third button, just far enough to display a dark, hairy chest and several medallions hanging from his neck. His olive skin glowed with the sun and his wild mane of curly hair seemed to enjoy the breeze that swept over the boat. A pair of bodyguards stood a few steps behind him.
As Danielle approached, he stood and extended a hand.
“You are Danielle Laidlaw,” he said confidently.
“And you are Faisal Najir, master builder,” she replied. “A friend of Arnold Moore’s.”
“And lucky to be both,” he insisted.
He waved a hand at the empty seat. “Please.”
Danielle sat. A waiter appeared, filling her glass with water, as if they were at a restaurant. She glanced at him and then at the bodyguards.
“Can we talk privately?”
Najir nodded to the guards and they moved away, beyond hearing range.
“Did Arnold tell you why I’m here?”
“You wish to attend an auction of … how to say it: unsavory items. No, no, ‘items with unsavory backgrounds’ sounds better.”
Danielle was unsure which would turn out to be more unsavory, the items fo
r bid or the crowd bidding on them, but that was the gist of it.
“Do you know of such an auction?” she asked.
“I do,” he replied. “You wish to bid on something or just observe?”
She nodded. “Both. Specifically anything a man named Bashir or another man named Ranga Milan might have been interested in.”
A look of discomfort registered on Najir’s face. He glanced away for a moment.
“Do you know them?” she asked.
“Not the second name. But Bashir is well-known here. He is well liked. I am friends with Arnold Moore but I will not assist in incriminating or otherwise harming Bashir.”
“It’s not something you need to worry about,” she said.
“It is something I choose to worry about,” he replied.
Danielle realized he’d taken her statement the wrong way. “Bashir is missing,” she said. “The other man I named is dead. We don’t know why, but tonight’s auction held great interest for both of them. It may have something to do with what happened to them.”
The words lingered, laid out there as bare truth for Najir to ponder. Danielle preferred to be straightforward when she could. With little time, she thought it best not to beat around the bush.
“So the Iranians finally finished him,” Najir said.
“We don’t think it was them,” she replied. “But whoever it was, they may be more dangerous than any existing regime.”
“What are we talking about?”
“A cult that wants to destroy God.”
He laughed lightly. “What does God have to fear from man?”
“Not God, specifically,” she said. “God’s children. People.”
“Which people?”
“All of us,” she said. “At least all the children of Abraham.”
Now Faisal nodded. Abraham was in a sense the patriarch of the three great Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
“We have reason to believe they may be able to do great harm.”
Bashir put his hand on the glass in front of him as if he were about to have a drink, but he did not lift it. He seemed too deep in thought.
