by AD Starrling
It was a balmy eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun blazed brightly down on the islands of Bermuda. Despite the SUV’s air conditioning, a thin sheen of perspiration already peppered her brow.
It had been eighteen hours since they found Conrad Greene’s body.
Connelly swallowed the lump in her throat as she recalled Westwood’s words the day before.
‘I know you’re busy with all the stuff going on at the moment, but you’re the only one I trust to do this,’ the president had told her somberly on the steps of Air Force One.
Sarah Connelly had stared at Westwood for some time before finally agreeing to his request; she knew full well he would have come himself had he not been traveling to Europe for an important meeting with several heads of state, including the new Russian premier.
She gazed blindly outside as the SUV rolled through the outskirts of Hamilton town. The two agents in front had remained silent throughout the ride. Half an hour after landing on the island, they pulled into the circular drive in front of the capital’s main hospital.
The agent in the passenger seat jumped out before the vehicle had rolled to a complete stop. He scanned the surroundings through his sunglasses. The driver joined him and opened her door.
Connelly thanked the man and stepped out onto the asphalt. Sultry warmth washed over her. A trickle of sweat pooled at the base of her neck and ran down her spine. She shivered despite the heat and looked up at the pale facade of the building. She squared her shoulders and headed for the main entrance, the two agents in tow.
A gaggle of journalists crowded inside the hospital lobby. Excited murmurs rose from the group when they saw the dark-suited men. Connelly blanked the mikes and cameras angling toward her and carried on briskly down the corridor. The police officers drafted in for added security formed a defensive wall in front of the rowdy reporters.
Connelly walked past the sign for the morgue and pressed the call button for a lift. She stepped inside the steel cabin with the two agents. The doors closed and the lift started to rise. Tension knotted her stomach as they drew closer to the third floor.
They exited the elevator and strolled down a busy corridor to the entrance of a private ward. Connelly gave her name at the door. It buzzed open a second later. She walked in and acknowledged the agent at the nurses’ station with a brief nod.
‘Where is he?’ she asked.
‘Last one on the left,’ said the man. He indicated the corridor to the south.
Connelly headed down the passage. All of the rooms bar one had been cleared of patients. She stopped in front of the final cubicle. The blinds were down in the glass inset in the top half of the door.
She signaled to the two agents. They took up guard position outside the doorway. Connelly inhaled deeply and twisted the door handle. It opened smoothly in her grip. She entered the room.
Her eyes were immediately drawn to the billowing white curtains at the window. She caught a glimpse of turquoise waters between the swaying fronds of palm trees. Her gaze shifted to the empty bed. She closed the door and looked toward the sound of running water coming from the closed bathroom to the right.
Connelly crossed the floor and sat in the armchair next to the bed. She eyed the gilded staff on the nightstand and lifted it gingerly in her hands. She fingered the rings in the middle.
She was studying the spear blades that had almost impaled her when the bathroom door opened. Conrad Greene stepped out.
He was buttoning up a clean shirt, a towel slung around his neck. He stopped in his tracks when he saw her by the bed. Apart from seeming thinner than the last time she had seen him, Conrad Greene looked to be, if not a picture of health, then at least a fairly realistic sketch of it.
‘Oh,’ said Greene. ‘Hi, Sarah.’ An unspoken question dawned in the immortal’s gray-blue eyes. He hesitated and glanced at the door.
‘Hartwell isn’t with me,’ said Connelly. She placed the double-bladed spear on the bed. ‘She took an extended leave of absence shortly after you went missing.’ She looked up at Greene. ‘She said you’d know where to find her.’
Greene went still. Surprise flared in his gaze. His lips curved in an arresting smile.
Connelly ignored the mild quickening of her pulse, crossed her knees primly, and propped her chin in the palm of her hand. ‘So, care to tell me what the hell happened?’
Greene’s expression grew sober. He walked to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress.
As the helicopter continued its deadly dive toward the ocean floor, Conrad reached down and unclasped Nadica Rajkovic’s fingers from around his ankle. She resisted him for precious seconds, her nails biting into his skin with steely determination. He jabbed desperately at her with his free leg and felt his boot connect sharply with her head. Her grip finally loosened.
Conrad kicked away from the aircraft and turned to watch the looming darkness swallow its shape. Bubbles of air escaped Nadica’s lips as she reached toward him, her features distorted in a mask of rage and her mouth open on a silent scream. She disappeared from view.
Conrad looked to the distant surface and started to swim, his arms swinging out in strong, steady strokes while his legs scissored through the cold water.
His vision started to flicker with dark spots when he was halfway to the glimmering, sunlit ceiling. The lack of oxygen became a physical, growing pain at the back of his throat, and the urge to take a breath an even stronger one. His movements grew steadily more sluggish. A chilling numbness soon enveloped him and spread to his fingers and toes.
Something sparkled in the gloom next to him. Conrad blinked and made out the gilded staff floating in an underwater current. He reached out and wrapped a hand around the weapon.
The immortal gazed up and felt Death’s shadow walk toward him once more. Resignation flooded his diminishing consciousness. He was not going to make it to the surface.
Conrad sank in the eddies and dimly wondered how many deaths an immortal could survive at the bottom of the sea. His eyes fluttered close. They popped open a moment later as a startlingly clear thought suddenly flashed through him.
He said a silent prayer, clasped his staff to his chest, and unleashed the full force of his immortal powers. Heat exploded inside him and burned a fiery path across his soul. As the murkiness of the ocean depths engulfed him, Conrad thought he saw his birthmark glow, the snake’s body a shimmering ribbon of unearthly energy.
Then, awareness faded and he plunged deeper into his watery grave.
‘What? And that’s it?’ said Connelly presently, her tone full of skepticism. ‘Twenty-eight days later, you pop up in a fisherman’s net some two hundred and fifty miles from where you crashed?’
Conrad sighed. ‘Not exactly.’ He ran a hand through his damp hair and grimaced. ‘It seemed I managed to slow down every single process in my body.’
Lines creased Connelly’s brow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone who drowns in icy water has better preservation of organ function than someone who drowns in a milder environment,’ Conrad explained. ‘I released my powers as I lost consciousness out of pure instinct, to try and achieve the effects of those very conditions.’ He paused. ‘What they did was effectively put me in a hypothermic state close enough to death that my body would need minimal energy to operate and survive.’
Although the details were still hazy, Conrad also suspected that the healing energy of his immortal legacy went on a continuous loop, repairing his damaged tissues until he finally surfaced days later, his body dragged up from the oceanic abyss by a powerful eddy.
He’d awoken an immeasurable length of time after he emerged from the fathomless grasp of the Sargasso Sea and drifted in and out of consciousness on its surface, suffering the scorching hot days and freezing nights that followed. Thirst and hunger became secondary concer
ns, as did the sunburns that healed almost instantly.
At times, the immortal had been aware of large, dark shapes swimming close to him, their postures displaying curiosity. Though none of them bumped him, Conrad had hoped they weren’t sharks. He wasn’t in a fit state to fight a gnat, let alone dangerous creatures of the deep.
When George Tucker finally hauled him up in his net, the immortal had slipped into one of his comatose sleeps. It was the captain of The Beaver who first realized that he was still alive, when Conrad wouldn’t let go of the staff weapon he had gripped in his left hand for twenty-eight days. Tucker was also the one who detected the sluggish twenty-beats-per-minute pulse at his wrist.
Conrad had woken up in a cabin on The Beaver just as Hamilton Harbor came in sight. After congratulating him on his miraculous survival, Tucker offered him his first drink of the month. It was a glass of expensive Irish whisky. The immortal managed to keep it down for all of sixty seconds.
He had dispatched a case of the stuff to Tucker’s home address that very morning, after making a phone call from his private room in Hamilton town’s main hospital.
‘Did you recover Nadica’s and Zoran’s bodies?’ Conrad asked Connelly.
The Director of Intelligence shook her head, her expression chagrined. ‘I’m afraid not. Westwood had Navy search and rescue looking for you practically every single day since the accident. He refused to believe that you were dead.’ She sighed. ‘The Bastians also participated in the search, with Victor just as adamant that you were still alive. We’ve had the NGA satellites scanning the sea for debris for the last month.’
Conrad swallowed the lump in his throat. He had spoken to Victor briefly during the night, in between being poked and prodded by the hospital staff; the Bastian leader hadn’t managed to go into a great deal of detail before the first reporter descended on the hospital grounds. Several others followed after receiving the tip-off about the sole survivor of the fatal helicopter accident that had taken place during a covert military assault on a private yacht a month ago.
The immortal recalled what the captain of The Beaver had told him the previous day. The helicopter had crashed in a region of the Sargasso Sea dominated by the North Atlantic Gyre, one of several enormous systems of rotating oceanic currents stretching thousands of miles across the Earth’s surface. It was not surprising that he had been found some distance from where the aircraft had impacted into the sea.
The fact that Westwood and Victor never stopped looking humbled him.
Connelly opened her mouth. She hesitated. ‘Did you see them—?’
‘Yes,’ Conrad cut in. ‘They didn’t survive the crash.’ He studied his hands.
Zoran Rajkovic had been dead before they hit the water. Conrad knew without a doubt that Nadica had followed him to his grave at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea.
‘I take it you heard about Ariana?’ said Connelly. Her expression darkened.
Conrad nodded. It was one of the few things Victor had told him the night before. Ariana Rajkovic was now in the custody of the Bastian First Council. His mentor had mentioned the diaries they had found on the yacht, which chronicled her long history and her associations with the Ottoman Empire. The Bastian leader had quietly pondered what an asset she would have been to the Crovir immortal society had she lived her lives within it.
Although Westwood and the other heads of state had demanded Ariana be tried in a human court of law, the Bastians and the Crovirs had convinced them otherwise.
‘It would look strange if she survived the death penalty,’ said Conrad.
Connelly grunted noncommittally.
‘What’s been happening in Washington and abroad?’ said Conrad.
‘You trying to distract me, Greene?’ Connelly asked, suspicious.
‘No,’ Conrad replied with a faint smile. ‘I didn’t get a complete update from Victor.’
Connelly spent the next half hour recounting the events following the helicopter crash. In the time it had taken for Conrad and his team to travel to the Rajkovics’ luxury yacht, six cities had managed to identify and destroy the laser devices above the primary boreholes that were meant to destroy them.
In the hours that followed, another twenty eliminated the threat to their territories. Four military bases, two in the US, one in Italy, and one in Germany, were destroyed by Scud missiles; the artillery trucks from which they were launched had been manned by devoted followers of the Rajkovics. There had been no loss of life, however, with the sites having already been cleared of all personnel following Petersen’s confession.
Over the next day, the FBI and the CIA also apprehended the assassins Ariana had dispatched to kill the families of the three scientists Conrad and his team had rescued from Morocco.
The governments of the world were still rounding up members of Ariana Rajkovic’s thousands-strong army of descendants, followers, mercenaries, and drug lords scattered to the four winds.
‘What will happen to her?’ Connelly finally asked.
Conrad observed the Director of National Intelligence for a moment. ‘She will be tried and likely executed,’ he said quietly.
Some color drained from Connelly’s face at his words. ‘How many times?’
‘However many it takes,’ said Conrad.
Awkward silence fell between them. It was broken by raised voices outside the door.
‘Seriously, you guys need to take a chill pill!’ someone roared. ‘I’m his best friend. Now, let me in!’
‘Excuse me,’ Conrad told Connelly. He rose from the bed, crossed the floor, and opened the door. ‘Get in here,’ he told the man framed by the two agents.
Anatole’s eyes widened. He barged inside the room and engulfed Conrad in a fierce hug. ‘You bastard!’ he said, his voice husky with emotion. Elated laughter shook his chest. ‘I knew you’d make it!’
Victor Dvorsky appeared in the doorway. The agents glanced at Connelly. She sighed and inclined her head. The Bastian leader walked in and studied Conrad for silent seconds. ‘You look good,’ he said.
Conrad smiled. From Victor, this was the equivalent of a welcome parade.
Laura Hartwell wiped her brow with the back of her hand and blinked at the dazzling midday sun. She took a sip of the bottled water on the worktable, grabbed another handful of nails, and raised the mallet. The sound of steady hammering echoed around the clearing once more, breaking the jabber from the squirrel monkeys in the trees around the swamp.
Floorboards rattled under Laura’s boots. She paused in the middle of striking a nail, turned her head, and eyed the dog loping toward her. Rocky slid to a stop on the porch, claws digging into the wood. He dropped a stick at her feet and sat down heavily, his loud pants warming the skin on her legs. He watched her with an expectant expression.
Laura resisted the lure of the shiny, brown eyes. ‘Look, pooch,’ she said in a no-nonsense voice, ‘until you master the ability to hold a hammer, I suggest you let me carry on with the construction work.’
Rocky whined and nudged her leg with his head. Laura sighed. She was as much putty in the dog’s paws as she suspected Conrad had been.
She picked up the stick, strode to the edge of the porch, and pitched it toward the trees. Rocky bolted across the clearing and disappeared under the canopy, his tail rotating fast enough to achieve vertical lift-off. The immortal grinned and returned to the task of rebuilding the house that had been destroyed by the plane crash more than a month ago.
When she first arrived in Alvarães, nine days after the events in the Sargasso Sea, Laura had been surprised to discover that the burnt ruins of Conrad’s home had been cleared from the land. It was Matheus Diaz, the police officer who took her out to the site, who explained how he and Roxanne, Conrad’s closest neighbor and friend, had taken care of removing the remains of the plane’s wreckage and the
damaged cabin. They were both convinced that the man who had lived there would return one day.
Laura had Diaz introduce her to the old lady later that very evening. Roxanne had studied her above the drifting wisps of smoke from her mapacho cigarette for a long time, before telling her she should take Rocky into her care. Laura still visited the old woman most days and listened to her tales about the one she loved to call Deus Demônio. Diaz sometimes joined them.
They were all pleased with how Rocky had progressed since Laura’s arrival. When she first met the dog, he had been solemn and withdrawn. Although he seemed to recognize Conrad’s scent on her, his eyes were dull and his tail drooped constantly. Roxanne explained that he had barely eaten in a week.
As the days passed, the dog gradually came out of his shell. Then, about a fortnight ago, his whole demeanor changed. Laura awoke to his excited yips early one morning. She crawled out of her tent to find him jumping and barking at the sky, tremors of excitement rippling through his body. She sat on the ground and cried then, the flame of hope that had lived inside her in the dark days following the helicopter crash blazing into life and filling her soul.
The dog’s behavior could only mean one thing. Conrad Greene was alive.
With the help of Diaz and Roxanne, Laura doubled her efforts to erect a new house for the man she loved while she waited for his return.
The chatter from the monkeys grew louder. Branches swayed in the canopy as they disappeared into the shadows of the forest. Laura stopped, hammer in hand. She turned to study the clearing and spotted the cause of the monkeys’ agitation further up the swamp. A black jaguar was curled up on the roots of a kapok tree, golden eyes fixed unblinkingly on the immortal.
‘Hey girl,’ Laura called out softly.
The creature acknowledged her greeting with a lazy blink.
