The air between them seemed flammable, as if a word or even a thought could ignite it.
She lifted that proud head and looked down her patrician nose at him.
“Saint Germaine,” she said quietly. There was equal parts contempt and admiration in her voice. “Or do you prefer ‘Deacon’? I’ve heard that people are calling you that now.”
He kept the gun on her. “It doesn’t matter.”
It didn’t. Neither was his name, and he was sure that, as smart and as connected as this woman was, she would never know his real name. No one would.
“Deacon, then,” she said. “It’s less pretentious.”
He lowered his pistol and pulled off his balaclava. “And we wouldn’t want to be pretentious,” he said. “Would we, Lilith?”
Chap. 2
Deacon rose to his feet, his pistol still in his hand but the barrel pointed down. It made the statement he intended.
Lilith flicked her wrist the way a samurai would when shaking blood from a katana, and then slid the black-bladed knife back into its sheath. Without taking her eyes from Deacon, she knotted her fingers in the back of the dead man’s hazmat suit and with no apparent effort lifted his body off of the Styrofoam cooler and casually swung it up into the rushing water. It was an act that demonstrated a level of physical strength far in excess of what should have been possible for a woman of her size. A very strong man might have had difficulty lifting so limp and heavy a burden and tossing it aside so casually.
That, too, made a statement, and it was in no way lost on the Deacon.
He moved closer and stood a few feet from her and the cooler.
“Are you here for that?” he asked, then ticked his head toward the open door. “Or what’s in there?”
Lilith took some time answering that. Her expression gave little away, even to someone as practiced at reading expressions as Deacon. She nudged the cooler with the toe of her boot.
“Do you know what’s in here?”
“I might,” Deacon said. “Do you?”
Another pause. “No.”
“Ah.”
They both looked at the open door.
“That’s going to set off an alarm,” he said.
“I know.”
“If they think they’re being raided they’ll dump their hard drives and—”
“It’s an old burglar’s trick,” she said. “Set a smoky fire and watch through a window to see what people rush to save. A good man will save his family Bible. A blackmailer will save his cache of evidence. And a scientist—”
“—Will save his research. Yes, I’ve read Sherlock Holmes.”
Lilith gave him the tiniest sliver of a cold smile. Not at all friendly, but not as hostile as the flat, reptilian glare.
“Why were you waiting over there? You could have picked the door lock.”
“I wasn’t trying to get in. I wanted this.” He squatted down and removed the cooler’s lid. Inside were three aluminum cylinders packed into carved slots. Each cylinder was pressure locked with a tight metal cap.
“What is it?” asked Lilith. “A bioweapon? Some kind of germ warfare thing?”
“A performance enhancing synthetic steroid,” said Deacon.
She actually smiled. “’Performance’? What kind of performance?”
“Not the kind you’re thinking,” he said, returning her smile. “It’s the first generation of a formula that combines the select lean-mass-building steroids with a synthetic nootropic compound that significantly increases and regulates the hypothalamic histamine levels. In normal pharmacology these drugs are wakefulness promoting agents often prescribed to prevent shift-work sleepiness. This version is designed to build stamina and wakefulness to a point where the treated person won’t tire and won’t lose mental sharpness.”
“To what end? Super soldiers?”
“Hardly. Indefatigable factory workers.”
Lilith blinked. “Factory…?”
“These drugs are intended for use in third-world countries to increase the efficiency and output of unregulated factory workers. Shift workers who can work twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at maximum efficient output.” He sighed. “It’s a new tweak on legal slave labor because it’s for use in countries where there is no enforceable human rights presence and where governments are easily bought. Earlier versions of these drugs are already being used in Southeast Asia and some places in Africa.”
A sneer twisted her mouth. “The new face of slave labor.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“You’re American,” she said. “Most of the companies that would use this sort of thing are American.”
“Many are, yes.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you here with official sanction?”
He shrugged.
Lilith shifted to get a better look into his eyes. “Why do you care?”
She leaned on the word you.
Deacon didn’t answer. Instead he closed the cooler and replaced the lid. Then he took the container and placed it in the shadowy spot where he’d been crouching. It vanished from sight as if it ceased to exist.
“I didn’t see you in the dark over there,” said Lilith after a few moments. “Not until you pointed your gun at me.”
“Your back was turned when I raised my weapon. You could not have seen the movement.”
She shrugged.
“One of these days,” said Deacon, “I would like to obtain a drop of your blood.”
“To test?”
“Of course.”
“You wouldn’t understand the results,” she said.
“I might.”
“No.”
“Why are you so sure?”
Her tone was flat. “Because I’m not like you. Not like anyone you know. You’d see the numbers and the chemistry, and maybe if you had the funding you would run some tests on my DNA, and all it would do is confuse you. Maybe scare you.”
“Fear is seldom a deterrent,” he said.
“Wouldn’t that depend on what there is to be afraid of?”
“Generally not.”
She made a moue of irritation. A very French thing, although Deacon knew that she was not French. He did not know everything about Lilith’s heritage—and some of what he’d been able to piece together was apocryphal or at least doubtful—but he knew that her mother had been a Warsaw Jew who had died badly at Sobibor. Deacon had no information beyond wild rumors as to who her father was. The only other family member Deacon could reliably identify was a daughter whose real name, like Lilith’s own, was buried beneath layers of secrecy and obfuscation. Although he would never say so, to her or anyone, it was the fact of having one genealogical foot planted in horror and the other planted in obscurity that engendered within him small feelings of kinship for her.
And, like his own history, there were questions about her past that most people would find difficult to answer and, if answered, challenging. Life, however, is far stranger than the greater population of this troubled old world would readily and comfortably accept.
While Lilith watched, Deacon dragged the two dead thugs, one at a time, to the stream and rolled them in. It was clear to them both that it required more effort on his part than she’d used to dispose of the man in the hazmat suit. Neither felt the need to comment on it.
When the last man vanished into the swirling waters, Deacon consulted his watch, glanced upstream and then over at the still-open door, and pushed his sleeve down to cover the watch.
Lilith said, “Those men were out here to hand that cooler off to someone.”
“Yes. A four-man team. Two Americans, a Brit, and their local contact.”
“When are they due?”
“Five minutes ago,” said Deacon.
She opened her mouth to ask for clarification, then thought better of it. She glanced at the rushing water as if expecting to see four bodies float by.
“Ah,” she said.
He nodded.
“So, your part i
n this is over?”
“I did what I came to do,” he answered. “Now tell me…what’s your interest here? Arklight has never expressed an interest in this area of human rights.”
Deacon, for his part, leaned on the word human. Making the point and leaving much understood but unspoken.
It seemed to both amuse and annoy Lilith, since various partially formed expressions came and went on her face in rapid succession.
He noted that Lilith did not flinch or rage at his mention of “Arklight.” Once before she had tried to kill him for speaking that name, for even knowing it. The fact that she had been unsuccessful formed one of the somewhat shaky pillars of the truce between them. The truce, he knew, was as substantial as vapor and existed only because they had yet to have directly conflicting agendas. Her tolerance of his use of the name of the highly secret and extremely dangerous group, of which Lilith was nominal head and chief operative, was as close to an olive branch as he ever expected to receive from her.
Finally she gestured to the open doorway. “The lab in there is partially funded by Ordo Ruber.”
Deacon said, “Ah.”
The Red Order was something that he had on his to-do list but which he currently lacked the funding and manpower to tackle. If his intelligence could be trusted, it was an ancient order along the lines of the Templars. Secretive and dangerous, with tendrils tangled into the underpinnings of several world governments, the OPEC nations, and the Catholic Church. He had not yet had the time to verify much of what he had heard and therefore had no framework for a cohesive case he could make to the President and Congress.
Lilith said, “There are rumors that the Order has been hiring scientists of all stripes—molecular biologists, geneticists, and others—to try to rebuild the genetic lines of the Red Knights. You know who they are?”
The Red Order was rumored to employ a group of special operatives known as the Red Knights. Like the ninja of ancient Japan, however, there was layer upon layer of misinformation and deliberate disinformation about who and, more importantly, what the Red Knights were. Some of the stories were preposterous. Others merely frightening.
“Rumors only,” admitted Deacon. “Feel free to share.”
She ignored that. “They want the Knights to become a more powerful and effective organization than ever.” Something, some strange fire, ignited in Lilith’s eyes. “I can’t allow that.”
“Then this is a straight hit?”
“No. This isn’t the central lab. We don’t know where that is. This is more of a processing and distribution center for research materials to be sent to researchers in the Order’s pocket.”
Deacon nodded. “And you mean to do what? Get hold of their bulk research materials and notes and use them to find leads to the scientists working for the Order.”
“You were always cleverer than the other little spies, Deacon. Yes, that’s exactly it.”
“Do you have a team coming to help you?”
“It’s only a small lab,” she said. “Staff of ten or twelve.” A pause. “These are scientists, lab techs, and a few foot soldiers. Three are already down.”
“What about the Red Knights?”
Lilith shook her head. “They don’t do guard duty. They won’t be here.”
Deacon looked at the gun he still held. He was about to say something when a buzzer suddenly sounded from inside the open doorway. Loud and insistent.
“Finally,” she said, resting her hands on her knives. They could hear shouts and running feet. “This part is mine.”
Deacon smiled and shook his head. “To be fair,” he said mildly, “you helped me when you eliminated the three men who came out here. I feel as if I should return the favor.”
But Lilith shook her head.
“I don’t want your help,” she said. “Be a nice little spy and go play James Bond somewhere else.”
The shouts grew louder.
Deacon took a breath and let it out slowly. Then he holstered his pistol and turned away. He picked up the cooler and faded into the shadows, watching over his shoulder as Lilith drew her weapons and moved like a blur of shadows and steel through the open doors. The tunnel immediately echoed with the rattle of automatic gunfire and the screams of men in terrible pain.
With the cooler under his arm, Deacon began walking back the way he’d come, a frown etched on his face.
He got almost a hundred yards before another scream split the air.
It wasn’t the dying scream of a man.
It was the shriek of a woman in terrible pain.
And in terrible fear.
Deacon dropped the cooler, tore the pistol from its holster, whirled and ran back along the edge of the black water as fast as he could.
Chap. 3
As he ran toward the door a man staggered out, blood streaming from deep crisscrossed cuts that gouged him from shoulders to hips. His belt was severed and with each step his trousers slipped further down his bloody legs. But he still held an AK-47 in his hands, finger jerking spasmodically on the trigger, bullets punching into the chamber beyond.
Deacon put a single .22 round into the back of the man’s head and shoved him out of the way.
He jumped through the doorway, pivoted as he dropped into a crouch, gun up and ready in both hands, eyes taking in the scene. He was at the end of a short tunnel that doglegged to the left and opened onto a large stone room that had been converted into a rough field lab. There were long work tables, banks of computers, and various kinds of processing machinery. Blowers pushed cool, clean air into the room and pulled dust out. Two men lay in a red tangle at the mouth of the tunnel. Automatic rifles lay inches from their dead hands. Three other men, a guard with a handgun and two men in white lab coats, were down inside the room, their faces and throats slashed to ribbons.
Inside the chamber there were seven uninjured men. All of them had weapons—guns, a fire axe, and a burly man with a black t-shirt held one of Lilith’s daggers. They were strung out in a wide half-circle around three figures who fought and tore at each other in the center of the room.
Lilith and two tall, pale-faced men dressed in dark clothes.
All of them were bleeding.
But Lilith was limping as she backpedaled from them. Her left arm curled gingerly around her middle. At first Deacon thought that the arm was broken, but then he saw the lines of bright red running down her loins and thighs.
She had her arm clamped over a stomach wound.
The men surrounding her were yelling and pointing weapons.
Lilith coughed, and there was blood on her lips.
The two men in dark clothes laughed.
Lilith’s invasion had gone horribly wrong.
Deacon took all of this in within the space of a heartbeat.
He did not pause, did not waste time processing or strategizing. He tore a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, hurled it.
It was a flash-bang, a stun grenade developed by the British SAS. Deacon dropped into a crouch and covered his head with his arms. Even so the bang was almost unbearably loud. The burst of light stabbed him through his shut eyelids.
The men in the room screamed.
Deacon immediately opened his eyes, took his guns in both hands again and began firing as he rose. He was peripherally aware that the two men with Lilith were beyond the effective range of the flash-bang and yet they had their hands to their ears, hissing in pain.
He noted it, but it was far from a matter of first importance as he felt his gun buck in his hands.
His first shot took a scientist in the side of the face. It was not intended as a kill shot, though the bullet punched a wet hole through cheekbone and out through the opposite cheek. The intention had been to drive that man into the men beside him. The collision took three of Deacon’s opponents out in one second. He swung his pistol and fired four shots, two each to guards, hitting them as they turned toward him, the first shot to each hitting bodies to jolt them to a stop and the second hitting them in th
e head. Small caliber rounds lack the power to exit the far side of a skull, so instead they bounce around inside and destroy the brain. It was why the caliber was the preferred weapon of assassins.
That left two men immediately able to respond.
One man had the fire axe.
The other had a pistol.
Deacon shot the second man in the face and then put the axeman down with a head shot.
He calculated his ammunition. Eight shots fired. Four dead, one wounded, two recovering from the collision with the scientist. That was a full magazine and the one he’d chambered. He dropped the magazine and reached for a second, but one of the two survivors rushed him so fast he had no time to finish the reload.
Deacon stepped into the attack, pivoting his body as he tilted his weight onto his front leg. Both hands moved out as he simultaneously blocked with his left forearm and rammed the unloaded pistol into the attacker’s face hard enough to jolt the man to a stop. Deacon recoiled his gun-hand and chopped the man in the Adam’s apple with the gun.
The man dropped at once.
But now the second man was up and in motion, bringing his rifle to bear. If he’d dropped the gun and used his hands, or if he’d swung the rifle stock at Deacon, he might have had a chance. Instead he tried to aim the weapon.
Deacon stepped into him, dropping his own pistol as he intercepted the swing of the barrel and grabbed the long-gun with both hands. He turned his second step into a flat-footed kick that shattered the man’s knee so badly the leg buckled and bent the other way. Deacon tore the gun from his hand, reversed it and pulled the trigger.
The gun bucked as two rounds hit the man in the chest, but then the slide locked back.
Empty.
Deacon tossed the gun aside.
Twenty feet away the two men in black and Lilith had all turned toward him.
Her eyes were filled with pain and hate.
Their eyes were filled with a pernicious delight that was appalling to behold. And those eyes were all wrong. The irises were not brown or blue or green. They were red. As red as the blood that painted this room. Instead of round pupils, theirs were slits. Like the eyes of reptiles.
Joe Ledger Page 25
