Veil

by George C. Chesbro

  "Because you're a smart-ass who isn't half as clever as he thinks he is. Once you got out of the cage and killed the Colonel, you realized that you couldn't get out of the compound on your own. Maybe you thought you'd bluff your way out."

  "You do have to get me out," Veil said evenly, fighting against the panic he felt welling in him. There was just no way to rush what he had to do. "And you have to do it quickly. Every minute we stand here means that other lives are in danger. It also means that the man you really want is probably putting more distance between us."

  "You must take me for a fool."

  Veil took three quick steps backward; at each step the firing pin of his .38 fell on an empty chamber. The Mamba cursed and threw the revolver away.

  "I mentioned that I was feeling generous," Veil said as he took the knotted strap he had made from the leather pouch and drawstring out of his breast pocket. "I didn't say suicidal."

  The Mamba instantly went into a fighting stance, forming the fingers of his left hand into a claw that was thrust out at eye level. The right hand flicked to a hidden scabbard behind his neck and came away gripping a large Bowie knife. Then he began to move, circling Veil, varying his speed, knife hand and empty hand weaving intricate, hypnotic patterns in the air less than two feet from Veil's face.

  Veil, who had spent ten years learning classic kata and another ten unlearning them, knew pretty much what to expect from the other man. He leaned back slightly from the darting blade but remained relaxed, the leather strap dangling from his right hand. He fixed his gaze on the Mamba's waist and hips, forecasters of movement, and allowed his peripheral vision to track the swirling movement of the knife; any sudden lunge or extension of the knife hand would be signaled a fraction of a second beforehand by a movement of the hips.

  First came a feint with the knife, which Veil ignored, then a sidekick, which was parried. He did not try to counterpunch or kick; the knife in the Mamba's hand was too dangerous for that, allowing no margin of error.

  Veil had no doubt that the Mamba's master was well versed in many schools of combat, but the Mamba was simply too young to have gone much beyond becoming master of one style, which in this case was Japanese. The Mamba was most likely unfamiliar with Thai "scarf" fighting, with which a master could successfully defend himself against an armed attacker, in the meantime blinding or strangling his opponent, using no more than a simple handkerchief which he had wetted with his own saliva. And a whip, Veil thought, was considerably more deadly than a handkerchief.

  A slight cocking of the Mamba's hips indicated to Veil that the man was getting ready for a combination of side and roundhouse kicks, which would probably be followed by a figure-eight attack with the knife hand. A split second before the first kick could be thrown, Veil flicked his right wrist. The leather strap darted through the air, and the drawstring tip snapped at the end with the speed of sound, producing a sharp crack. The Mamba arched his back an instant too late, and fear for his eyes flashed across the muscles of his face. Slowly blood began to fill a three-inch welt on his right cheekbone.

  Veil's strike had caused the other man to lose his concentration and rhythm, and he reflexively reached up to touch the cut on his cheek. In that moment he was vulnerable, but still Veil waited.

  As the Mamba recovered and again started to assume a fighting stance, Veil flicked his improvised whip twice—once at the groin and once at the knife hand. The second strike hit across the back of the man's hand, drawing blood. The Mamba ignored the pain and instantly lunged forward with his knife, but Veil was ready. He leapt to one side and spun away, at the same time flicking the whip at the man's eyes. The Mamba backed away. His tongue darted out, licked his lips.

  Now the Mamba began to take defensive maneuvers against Veil's whip, slashing across his body at the flying leather. The focus of his attention shifted from Veil to the whip popping in front of him, and it was the mistake Veil had been waiting for. He purposely snapped the whip wide, beside the Mamba's left ear. Instantly Veil spun clockwise, knowing that he had only microseconds to act. Even as the man was slashing across his body, Veil's heel was inexorably moving toward the exposed right side of the man's rib cage. The blow landed, breaking two ribs. Veil kept moving, spinning out of the way as the Mamba, showing an incredible tolerance for pain, spun and slashed back through the space where Veil's belly had been only an instant before. But now Veil was behind him. Veil looped the strap around the man's neck, grabbed both ends, and pulled.

  The Mamba, knowing that a single, sharp pull would kill him, panicked; he dropped the knife and clutched at the strap around his neck with both hands. Veil released the strap and drove a fist into the man's broken ribs. The man screamed in agony and dropped to his knees. Veil darted around to the front, his fist raised for another blow. But the Mamba was finished, his glazed green eyes clearly reflecting defeat by the pain in his body and fear of Veil's overwhelming mastery of the martial arts.

  "Now I hope you'll listen to me," Veil said, cupping the man's chin with his right hand and lifting his head. "Parker didn't, and it cost him his life. I am not a fucking agent for anyone; I'm a painter. If I don't get out of here alive, you remember this conversation—but don't repeat it to anyone here in the compound. Wait until the investigators come in. If I'm killed, it's going to be up to you to clean house—or see that someone else cleans it. You may not know who Parker's superior is around here, but the Pentagon certainly does. There may be other doubles, so watch your ass. I'm sorry I had to bust you up, but you didn't give me a whole hell of a lot of choice. If you're ever in New York, look me up; I owe you a drink."

  Then Veil knocked the man unconscious with a simple, hard right cross.

  Chapter 24

  ______________________________

  Veil, his long hair tied up beneath the Mamba's camouflage cap with his leather strap, began making his way back across the width of the valley, heading for the river. He chafed at the slowness of his pace, but knew that he could not go faster without risking detection; he had to mimic the tracking maneuvers of the Mambas and hope that he was not identified by someone on high ground with powerful binoculars.

  He paused to eat the last of the beef jerky; he forced himself to eat all of it; he would now need all of his dwindling reserves of energy for an unknown period of time. Although he was still free of symptoms, and even though he knew he could be risking convulsions from an overdose, he took three of the brown pills—as much for the strength they would give him as to prevent withdrawal symptoms. Then he went on.

  The sound of soft chimes was with him constantly now. However, this music of peril was not clear and close behind his eyes, but muffled and welling from somewhere deep in his soul. The chimes were not for him.

  Veil feared he was already too late.

  It was dusk by the time he reached the riverbank, the rising moon obscured by clouds scudding across a dull copper sky. He walked upstream until he found what he was looking for— a log jammed between two boulders. Using the Mamba's machine pistol like a crowbar, Veil freed the log, then wrapped his arms around it from the side and let the log carry him out into the swift-moving current as he clasped the machine pistol between his knees.

  If there were any Mambas tracking along the riverbank, Veil did not see them; more important, they did not see him, for in what seemed a very short time, he was closing on the brightly floodlit area that extended thirty yards beyond the concrete wall spanning the valley and marking the boundary of the Army compound. Peering over the top of the log, Veil could see two uniformed soldiers on top of the wall, each armed with a machine gun and scanning the river on both sides of the wall.

  He was operating on three key assumptions, Veil thought as he sucked in a deep breath, released his grip on the log, and let the churning current carry him under. One, the Army was far more concerned with keeping intruders out than keeping them in; two, the fast flow of the river at the end of its journey to the sea was, in itself, a deterrent to covert movement upstream;
therefore, three, the barrier extending below the surface—and there had to be one—would not be heavy-duty.

  He would either be proved right, Veil thought, or disproved dead. There was no going back.

  Gripping the machine pistol in his left hand, he pulled with his right and kicked, angling toward the bottom. He could see nothing in the icy darkness and had to rely on touch alone. Rested, relaxed, and after hyperventilation, Veil could hold his breath under water for almost two and a half minutes. In his present situation he guessed that he had close to two minutes before he would be forced to return to the surface— probably to be machine-gunned on sight. Or he could choose to drown, a notion he considered not without some irony in view of how desperately he had craved a drink only the day before. Except that this drink would kill him.

  His fingers touched heavy netting, the most suitable choice for a barrier since it could be lowered to release heavy debris. Veil had the Mamba's Bowie knife but made an instant decision not to waste time and air trying to use it to cut through the netting, which would almost certainly be wire-reinforced and very difficult to cut through with anything but wire clippers. Instead he pulled himself along the bottom of the relatively shallow river until he touched what he had been hoping to find—a strip of concrete that served as a footing in which to anchor the net with wire grommets set in steel rings.

  The pressure in his lungs was building.

  With the current pressing him into the net, Veil planted his feet on the concrete on either side of the grommet. Using touch to guide him, he threaded the barrel of the machine pistol through the grommet. With the end of the barrel firmly set on the concrete, he grabbed the stock with both hands and exerted a steady, backward pull.

  Nothing happened. The grommet held firm.

  Veil relaxed his grip, then tried again, pushing with his legs and pulling with all his might, afraid that at any moment he would feel metal bend, or snap at a weld. After a few seconds he detected slight movement. He pushed the barrel through the grommet even further, then yanked with all his strength.

  The grommet gave, and a ten-yard section of netting suddenly billowed downstream, carrying Veil with it.

  Veil let go of the machine pistol, turned in the water, and pushed off the bottom, knifing upward at an angle that he hoped would bring him to the surface beyond the floodlit area on the other side of the wall.

  He came up in cool night, near the bank. He half expected to hear shouts of alarm and warning, or automatic-weapons fire; but the only sounds that came to his ears were his own hoarse gasps and the rushing water. He sucked in air, rolled on his back, and let the current carry him downstream.

  Exhausted, his mind and body drained by his continuing ordeal, Veil was almost swept down the channel that branched off from the waterfall and emptied into the sea. At the last moment Veil recognized the danger, rolled over, and knifed under water to reduce the drag of the water. He pulled, kicked, corkscrewed to his left, and surfaced in the somewhat calmer channel that ran past the waterfall. Gasping for breath, light-headed and knowing that he was dangerously close to losing consciousness, Veil dragged himself up on a rock shelf at the foot of the towering cliff he had dived off to begin his journey into the Army compound.

  Above him was the hospice, and the steel cords supporting the cable car cut across the night sky to link the hospice to the main Institute complex on top of the mountain across the valley. Like an umbilical cord linking mother to child, Veil thought—except that in Jonathan Pilgrim's mind the hospice, a base camp for a desperate search, had always been the mother; the Institute was just an excuse for Pilgrim to probe the nature of the place where his soul had journeyed at the time of his death.

  Veil sprawled out on the rock shelf and rested until his breathing became normal. Then he took a series of deep, measured breaths and tried to relax and marshal his energy. When he began to shiver with cold, he rose and ran in place in an attempt to generate body heat. He considered stripping off the wet jumpsuit, but decided that, even wet, the cotton provided needed insulation against the chill night air.

  With the cold in him temporarily beaten back, Veil began moving along the face of the cliff, exploring its stone surface with his hands. The cliff appeared impossible to climb, yet one or more Mambas had periodically come through the mountain caves to penetrate and spy on the compound. Even Mambas didn't fly, and Veil was certain there had to be a relatively easy route up to the hospice.

  He found it fifteen yards from the waterfall—steel pitons driven into crevices in the rock face. He grabbed the first piton and began to climb up the vertical wall.

  Halfway up he suddenly began to tremble and cramp.

  Unwilling to release the pitons with either hand to fumble for the pills, unsure of his remaining strength and equilibrium, Veil pressed his body against the rock face and waited. Fortunately, the spasms turned out to be relatively mild and passed quickly. Fighting dizziness, he completed the climb to the top.

  He rested on the edge of the cliff for a half minute, then ran to Sharon Solow's office. He found Perry Tompkins absently swinging back and forth in the swivel chair before the computer terminal. The huge painter's head snapped around as Veil burst into the office, and his coal-black eyes glinted with excitement and pleasure.

  "So?" Tompkins said, raising one eyebrow slightly. "Did you have a good time?"

  Veil smiled thinly. "Not really. I don't think I'll go back, and I definitely will not recommend the place to my friends."

  "Did you find what you were looking for?" Tompkins asked seriously.

  "I think so—at least part of it. What are you doing here, Perry?"

  "Playing light in the window. We figured this would be the first place you'd come to when you got back—if you got back. You caused quite a commotion when you disappeared. Pilgrim and Dr. Solow knew you had to be in the Army compound, but they didn't know what to do about it. Whatever son of a bitch is in charge down there sealed the place off. He wouldn't even talk to Pilgrim on the phone."

  "Where's Sharon?"

  "Up in the hospital with Pilgrim. He's been shot."

  Veil tensed. "Bad?"

  "Bad, but he's alive. At least he was alive the last time I called, which was fifteen minutes ago. The surgeons took a bullet out of his chest."

  "Does anyone know who shot him?"

  "No. Pilgrim is still unconscious."

  Tompkins sprang to his feet as Veil headed for the door. "Veil! Before you go up there, let me get you some dry clothes! You're freezing to death!" "No time, Perry."

  "I'm coming with you!"

  "No," Veil said firmly. "I have something else for you to do. I want you to round up all the people in the chalets, patients and Lazarus People, and get them someplace safe."

  "What? Why?"

  "I'm not sure why. I just have a bad feeling, Perry."

  "Where can I take them? It would take hours to get them all across to the other mountain."

  "No! I don't want them over there."

  "Then where do I put them, Veil?"

  Veil shook his head in frustration. "I don't know. Just tell everyone to be on the alert for anything unusual; I want everyone to be careful. Don't give a reason. I don't know the reason."

  "There isn't anyone's feelings I'd trust more, my friend— and I do consider you my friend. I'll do what I can."

  Veil nodded, then turned and hurried out of the office. He ran up the steep trail leading to the hospital, grew dizzy, and staggered the last fifty yards. He half fell through the swinging doors at the entrance—into Sharon Solow's arms.

  "Veil, oh, Veil," Sharon murmured, cradling his head, kissing his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth. "When Perry called ... I thought you were dead."

  He had to get up, Veil thought as he fought against a furry darkness that threatened to envelope him, had to somehow keep going. His enemy was on the loose, and that enemy was unpredictable as well as deadly. There was no time to rest now.

  But he couldn't take his arms from around t
he woman, couldn't take his lips away from the sweet-smelling, wheat-colored hair that fell across his face. He had been afraid that he was going to die without ever having told her that he loved her. Yet he couldn't tell her now; he could only hold on.

  And drift away.

  But not far away. He could not afford to pass out, he thought, even as his vision blurred and he experienced a nauseous, spinning sensation. He felt as if he were paralyzed, lying in a dark room where disembodied hands stripped him of his clothes, then wrapped him in something warm. There were voices—some near, some far away—but he could not understand what they were saying. Once, lips that he knew were Sharon's kissed him lightly on the mouth. More than anything else he longed to sleep, but he constantly fought to stay awake. There was so little time left; perhaps none at all.

  If only he could see; if only someone would turn on the lights, open a window in the room, speak to him slowly so that he could understand. . . .

  "You're incredible," Sharon said.

  Veil jerked his eyes open, started to roll over, and almost fell off the hospital gurney. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge, then slumped forward as he experienced another attack of nausea and dizziness. Sharon steadied him, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist and resting her head on his chest. His wet clothes had been stripped from him and taken away, and he was dressed in a warm blue sweat suit. His feet were bare.

  "How long have I been out?" Veil murmured as he clung to Sharon, running his fingers through her hair and kissing her scalp.

  "All of an hour and a half. And you haven't really been out; you've been fighting it all along. You must think you're King Kong; no, you are King Kong. You've been dehydrated, sunburned to a well-done turn, and a blood test showed traces of what must have been a ton of some strange combination of amphetamines. God knows what you've been through, Veil, and you're still on your feet—or trying to get there." She paused, squeezed him. "The doctors wanted to give you something to knock you out. I said no."