by Lee Burvine
Then his expression changed. It softened. His eyes began to wander. He looked ... confused.
And then Rees saw it.
The hypodermic in Faraj's left side. He'd fallen on it. The plunger was fully depressed now. The syringe ... completely empty.
Slowly the life drained out of Faraj's face. All expression there vanished.
He sank, limp, back down to the carpet. He lay there on his back, eyes open. Completely still, except for his steady breathing.
His words came back to Rees. To the world you would seem to be in a vegetative state.
Hell. Faraj had gone to hell.
And Rees thought there could be no better place for him.
CHAPTER 51
TO MORGAN'S EXPERIENCED eye, Danni and Louis both looked like they were about to jump right out of their skins.
They'd all been watching the library's ground floor for about a half hour now, eyes peeled for the man who grabbed Rees. The man they hoped would come here looking for the history professor, Burhan Kazemi.
So far, nothing.
Danni and Louis were neither prepared nor trained for the painful combination of tension and boredom that comprised a typical stakeout. And this was worse. Because at the same time they all knew the blond man was watching them too, from somewhere not far away. It was taking a mental toll. Morgan had to admit even she was struggling, with nothing to distract her from a headache that seemed to grow worse by the hour.
A student stood up from a nearby library computer, collected her things, and left.
Morgan got an idea. She turned to Danni and Louis. "You want to take a look at that video Rees told us about?"
Danni's face brightened instantly. "Oh, yeah. The one with the book in it? The lectionary?"
"Yes." Morgan opened Fischer's pouch and dug out the flash drive.
Louis was watching her like a dog expecting a treat. "Is that from Fischer's project?"
Morgan held the flash drive out in her palm. "Yes. Videos. From the time-viewing they did."
Louis was practically salivating now. "Are you serious?"
With the mood already considerably better, Morgan led them all over to the opened up computer.
Danni sat down at the keyboard as Morgan plugged in the flash drive. Morgan and Louis stood behind her. Morgan kept one eye on the library entrance.
The first file Danni tried to open just wouldn't. She tried three times and only managed to crash the video program. She cussed the file and went on to the next one.
This one sprung open with video of a bearded man speaking to an assembled audience. He was leading a ceremony in some Middle Eastern language. From what Rees had told them, it must be Aramaic.
The familiar circular shot framed the book, the lectionary, dead center in sharp focus. Just as Rees had described.
"So when is this from?" Louis asked.
"Seventh century or earlier," Morgan replied. "That's what Rees said. Because it has to be from before there was ever a Qur'an."
Louis shook his head in disbelief. "It's incredible. It's ... wow, they really did it. Look at that."
The video played another half-minute and stopped.
Danni launched the next file.
The feathered dinosaur video ran then. As Morgan and Danni watched the animal hunting again, commenting on details they missed the first time, Louis stood there in silence. Literally speechless.
When that one finished, Danni returned to the first file. "This file might be corrupted. Let me see if I can do anything."
She opened a cascade of windows. The computer screen filled with lines of code. She scrolled down through page after page of it.
Morgan marveled that these strings of letters and numbers and words all actually meant something clear to Danni.
Louis stabbed a finger at the screen. "Hey, stop, there's something."
"Yeah, I see it too." Danni typed rapidly. She deleted some characters, typed something else in their place, and navigated back to the desktop. This time when Danni double-clicked the first file, it opened. "Yeah," she said. "Now that's what I'm talkin' about."
Moments later the file began to play. Again the same fuzzy, circular frame, just as in the other two recordings. Morgan suspected it was some artifact of the time-viewing technology.
A horrific scene suddenly appeared on the monitor in front of them.
Morgan quickly looked around to make sure no students were near enough to catch a glimpse of the screen.
Louis's mouth hung open almost comically. Danni's face had gone blank, except for a strange tautness.
Morgan's experience in law enforcement naturally turned what she was seeing into a crime scene. Out of habit, she began to analyze the evidence.
The man had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. Likely more than that. Closer to forty-eight if she had to guess.
Postmortem lividity in the lower extremities suggested he died in just that position, right there.
This would be the primary crime scene, then.
The naked body, exposed to the elements, showed signs of scavenging by wild animals. Likely the work of carrion birds. Morgan didn't know if locally there would have been feral dogs or wolves, but they probably could not have reached the body.
Not hanging, as it was there, high up on a capital T-shaped wooden cross.
CHAPTER 52
IT DIDN'T TAKE long for Rees to free himself.
Once he'd worked one hand loose of the duct tape, he dragged himself and the chair over to his captor's side and located the X-Acto knife, still in the man's shirt pocket.
The rest went quickly.
He felt surprisingly steady on his feet, and thought it might be the stimulants, although they seemed to be waning. A quick body check revealed no serious injuries from the car crash.
When he finished that, he looked down again at the man on the floor there.
Faraj lay on the soiled motel room carpet with his green eyes open. His breathing was steady. His nose had mostly stopped bleeding. The spread of dark blood on his face and neck made the injury appear worse than it probably was. His peaceful expression revealed no trace of whatever nightmare roiled inside his head.
A nightmare from which he would never wake.
Rees wondered if holding a pillow over Faraj's face would be the more ethical thing to do. To end a living hell that could stretch on perhaps for decades.
He bounced the idea around in his head awhile, and in the end decided against it. He didn't need to add a mercy killing to the list of actions he would have to account for some day. So he wasn't leaving Faraj there in that horrible place just out of a desire for vengeance.
Not just.
On the coffee table along with the gun and Taser, Rees found a cheap cell phone. Also a set of rent-a-car keys. The phone's time and date display answered one question immediately. Only a couple of hours had elapsed since he'd been taken.
If the keys were to the BMW that hit Louis's car, he didn't need them. The Beemer must be drivable, but Rees thought it would probably stand out too much.
He peeked out the curtain. Sutro Tower sprouted up in the distance over a row of rooftops. At least he was still in the City.
Then he checked inside the toilet kit there for anything that might be useful. Pill containers and colorful vials. More hypos. A few recognizable surgical implements. And a handful of wicked-looking devices he didn't even want to guess about.
In the motel room closet, he found a blue gym bag with clothes and actual toiletries in it. Multiple passports too, in a zippered compartment. All with different names. None of them Faraj.
And cash. Lots of it. He rifled through a stack of US currency in various denominations. Altogether there looked to be about thirty-five or forty thousand dollars there.
Well, it's not going to be hard to pay for a taxi now.
A knock came at the door.
Faraj might have confederates.
R
ees grabbed the gun off the coffee table. He remembered Morgan's remark about the safety. He searched desperately for the switch but he didn't see it. The damn thing might be useless unless-
"Housekeeping." A female voice out there.
Rees steadied his breath before he spoke. He tried to affect a light tone. "Yeah, can you come back later, please? Thank you."
"Yes, okay."
Rees listened to the retreating footsteps, then waited. After three minutes he was reasonably convinced it hadn't been some kind of ploy.
He dumped the clothes and toiletries out of the gym bag, and dropped the money back in it, along with the gun. The Taser he left. He had no idea how to use the thing anyway.
After drinking what felt like a gallon of cool water straight from the bathroom tap, Rees splashed his face and the back of his neck.
He began to look up into the mirror, and froze.
Images from the hellish drug hallucination flashed back into his mind. Blood-smeared snakes. Something stinking and horrible with eyes of green fire, lurking in a deep pit.
He shuddered. "You're all right. You're all right," he said to himself in as soothing a tone as he could muster. He sucked in a couple of deep breaths, then raised his eyes to the mirror. And he saw...
Himself.
A frightened, middle-aged man with disheveled, brown hair, graying at the temples. Dark rings under his eyes. A red splotch, low on his forehead that was beginning to swell. He touched it with his fingertips and winced.
He managed a weak smile. "Welcome back, buddy."
As he dried his face with a musty smelling hand towel, Rees's mind ached with thoughts and images of his sister, Anna.
In the depths to which the drug had plunged him, he had felt her pain as his own. Felt all her loneliness. The self-hatred. The hopelessness.
Suddenly, Rees became aware that something had changed within him. Changed profoundly.
I forgive you, Anna. I understand now. I understand.
Volcanic emotions erupted within him. He gripped the bathroom counter, closed his eyes, and let them come.
Twice the tears and sobs appeared to subside. Twice they came back even stronger. When his emotions had finally settled, Rees found himself sitting on the floor of the bathroom, thinking not of Anna, but of Morgan.
He had felt a bond with the DCIS agent. Deep and personal, almost from the very beginning. It seemed foolish now that he hadn't immediately recognized where it came from.
The hole in his heart. The one he had refused to let anyone fill over all these years.
Serve only the truth. That's what he told himself. That was the deep commitment that had emerged out of the tragedy with Anna. He would serve no authority but the truth of things from then on.
But the truth was that the human heart, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum. He knew that. And he'd been trying to pretend otherwise.
That was dishonest. Which meant he'd been violating his own credo. Well, he was through with doing that.
But now Morgan was probably dead. Along with Danni and Louis. There was a way to find out. Louis had a cell phone. Rees should be able to reach them on it.
If they were alive.
Rees had Faraj's phone now, but didn't have Louis's cell number. And then he recalled what Danni said when they decided to reach out to him. Louis has the coolest phone number in the universe.
Yes he does, Rees thought. It was just the area code plus the first seven digits of the irrational number phi. Using a mnemonic system that turned digits into linked words, Rees had long ago memorized the number out to a hundred decimals. Nerd party trick.
He just couldn't remember the damn three digit local area code for the East Bay.
A quick call to 411 took care of that. He punched in the number, afraid that some police officer investigating Louis's death would answer.
After four rings Rees heard...
"Hello?"
It sounded like Louis's voice. "Louis?" Rees asked.
"Who is this?"
"It's Gevin Rees. Is everyone all right there?"
Louis gasped. "Holy shit, Dr. Rees?"
"Yeah. Are you guys okay? Are Kerry and Danni with you?"
"Yes, yes we're all, we're fine. Are you okay? Where are you?"
"I'm all right. And actually, I don't know where I am. Still in San Francisco somewhere. Where are you guys?"
Rees could hear Morgan and Danni talking. Then a rustling sound.
Morgan's voice. "Rees, listen to me carefully. Theresa and I are fine. We haven't found Professor Keating. We don't know where Keating is."
What the hell is she talking about? Theresa? Keating?
"What?" Rees asked.
"Professor Keating. Herodotus's partner," Morgan explained. "Theresa is working on locating him. She's gone back to the ranch."
The ranch? For a moment, Rees thought he'd lost his mind. The drugs flashing back on him. Then he realized what Morgan was doing. "I'm alone, Kerry. No one's forcing me to make this call. I got free and I'm all right."
A whoosh of breath in the receiver. "Okay. Thank God. I couldn't rule out them using you to find us. Torturing you. Or threatening something awful."
"I get it. It's okay."
If Rees had played along with the charade, Morgan could have inferred that someone outside their circle was listening in. Someone who wouldn't notice her using fake names and places. In fact, if he had thrown a couple of phony names right back at her, Morgan could have been dead certain he was speaking under duress.
"Are you someplace safe, Rees? Is anyone pursuing you?" Morgan asked.
"No. No, I'm all right. I was afraid the man who hit us with the car might have killed you. Wait, why didn't he shoot you?"
"I'm glad you're okay too, Rees."
"No, it's just-"
"Don't worry. Louis said almost the exact same line. Must be a scientist thing. We're at the library at San Francisco State. Professor Kazemi isn't here. But he's our man all right."
"He's not there?"
"He was here. He left a message, a new meeting place-the Ferry Building plaza, at five o'clock. He wants you to come alone."
"Can't blame him for that," Rees said. "That's in the Embarcadero, right?"
"Mm-hmm. Pier One."
"Okay. I'll find it. Give me a half hour with him alone. Then let's all reassemble there and figure out our next move."
"We'll try to meet you there around five-thirty. But there's a problem, Rees. The blond man knew we were coming to the library. He was here earlier asking around, looking for Kazemi and for you."
"How the hell did he know we were coming there?"
"I don't know."
Rees took a moment to think about what this might mean. "Okay, obviously he didn't know I'd already been grabbed. So that confirms it. At least two groups are after the results from the Kafir Project."
"Yeah, we think so too. And there's one other thing."
Because I don't have enough to deal with right now. "Okay, go ahead."
"I have Fischer's pouch, and the flash drive," Morgan said. "We plugged the drive into a computer in the library. There was a third video on there."
"I know. It's corrupted or something."
"Danni got it open. I think we know why they shut the whole project down now."
"I've been ... filled in on that part too. They weren't stopping with Islam." Rees felt a strange flutter in his chest. "What was on that video, Kerry?"
"A crucifixion. Or the aftermath, I guess you would say. The ... victim had been dead for at least two days."
Rees felt dizzy. He had a terrible premonition of the floor splitting open beneath him again. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. "All right, I get the picture. Where does this leave us now?"
"We think the blond man is probably still around here somewhere, waiting for us to leave. I'm armed, but he has a big advantage."
"Because he knows where you
guys are."
"Right," Morgan said. "I was thinking we could phone in a bomb threat. Then we leave with the crowd."
An image came to Rees's mind. People running and screaming as shots rang out. "I don't think you want to do that. He could use it for cover. Shoot everybody between you and him, then shoot you. It would look like a killing spree on a campus. With a threat already called in-you'd actually just be making it even easier for him."
"You're right. I'm ... not thinking well. I've got that damn awful headache again."
An idea came to Rees then like a hilltop vista. Stretched out and visible in a single glance. "What if you didn't call in the threat? I think I have something. And you've got just the right skill set there to pull it off."
"Let's hear it," Morgan said.
CHAPTER 53
THE FEMALE DCIS agent and the chick from Lawrence Livermore were doing something at a computer terminal on the library's first floor. A new guy with long black hair was hanging with them now.
Sabel had eyes on all of them, but only intermittently. It wasn't easy to spy on someone from close range. With so many exits on all sides of this building, though, he didn't really have a choice here. At least there were enough bookshelves and moving bodies to cover him pretty well.
As for Gevin Rees? Nowhere to be seen. Ditto the historian Burhan Kazemi. Herodotus.
Sabel just couldn't catch a break on this mission.
He'd tail these three when they left the library. Reacquire Rees through them if he had to. It seemed like his best shot now.
Sabel got a weird vibe all of a sudden. Nothing specific. Just more energy in the air.
Then he noticed something odd about how people were interacting. They were ... clumping more. And people were moving kinda quick between the clumps.
Something was definitely up.
A student with a dark brown complexion and straight hair, Indian maybe, came around the corner. He went all bug-eyed looking at Sabel, then turned and walked away real quick.
Okay, what the hell is going on here?
* * *
IT TOOK ONLY a few minutes for Danni to set up the Facebook account for Nowisthetime Triplesix, and a Twitter account for nowisthetime666.
