by Greig Beck
As he watched her, the air around her seemed to blur, like a cloud of oily smoke was settling over the road, and the burning knot of pain in his skull ramped up its nagging intensity. Fifty feet away, the officer with the scar spoke softly into the phone — out of earshot of everyone except Alex.
‘It’s them all right.’ He paused, then spoke again. ‘Yes, but I don’t like the look of him — he might be a problem.’ His head came up and he turned; his eyes were emotionless as he stared back at Alex. ‘Roger that. We’ve got a plastic sheet to wrap him.’
He came slowly back to the group, his face a mask of indifference. ‘Put your hands on your head, turn around and kneel. I’m just going to put some cuffs on you.’
The pain began to flower inside Alex’s skull. ‘What’s the problem, officer?’
‘No problem, sir. Just do as you’re told.’
Alex grimaced from the explosion of pain behind his eyes as he raised his hands. He turned his back on the officer, and saw that Adira’s face had changed to a mask of anger and her fists were balled. He let his eyes travel to the two officers behind her. It dawned on him what he’d thought was out of place. Their uniforms were perfect, expect for one thing — the belts were just plain black leather; no baton, spray, tasers… or cuffs.
From out of nowhere, a soft insistent voice sounded in his head. Was it Adira? It spoke urgently. No cuffs. This is an execution — yours. Kill him.
Alex slowly lowered his hands. ‘You’re not really police, are you?’
The answer was the almost inaudible sound of pressure on a trigger.
The pain in his head disappeared. Kill them all.
Alex exploded into action. He spun and yanked the gun from the man’s hand and flung it into the darkness. His hand came away warm and wet, and he noticed that one of the man’s fingers was missing. He had ripped the gun free with such force that he’d taken the digit with it.
The man, instead of grabbing his wrist and howling, went into a fighter’s stance. He lashed out with a hammer blow that caught Alex on the chin and kicked his head back. He immediately followed with a front snap-kick aimed at Alex’s groin. Alex was quick but not enough; he caught part of the boot in his testicles and the burst of pain and nausea made his head swim.
Who are these guys?
Alex lunged forward, taking another blow to his cheek, which he ignored. He grabbed the scarred officer and spun him round so his body shielded Alex’s in the same moment as the officer yelled, ‘Shoot him!’
Alex heard the men curse as they saw he’d deprived them of an easy kill shot. Alex had planned to simply subdue the scarred officer, but the voice came again in his head — No survivors — and it was as if something took over his body. He gripped the man’s shoulders harder and pulled him forward, smashing his own forehead into the bridge of his nose with a sickening crunch. Blood ran into Alex’s eyes, but it wasn’t his own. The scarred man fell like a boneless sack at his feet.
Intuition made Alex leap to the side as bullets came out of the darkness. He was an easy target now, and as he rolled he knew these men, whoever they were, would give him no quarter. These were assassins, and if it was death they sought he’d give it to them.
He saw Adira struggling on the ground with one of the officers. The other stood with legs spread in a marksman stance, trying to track Alex with his weapon. One shaved second was all the man would need, but Alex was moving far too fast for him to get off an accurate shot. He was a blur as he rose up in front of the shooter and in a single motion brought his hand up into the man’s neck, his thumb and finger spread either side of his larynx. The blow crushed the man’s throat flat and he fell, making small barking coughs as he tried to pull in air.
Alex turned quickly, but saw that Adira was kneeling beside the man she had fought with, drawing one of her lethal spikes out of his ear. The man’s legs kicked in a final dance and his eyes registered nothing but surprise.
With all the men down, it was as if a switch had been thrown; his boiling anger began to subside. He crossed back to the officer with the scar on his chin and kneeled to check his status. He was dead; the crushing blow had driven his septum up into his brain.
Alex spoke over his shoulder. ‘Get their weapons, and I’ll see what else they’ve got in their cars. And by the way, I didn’t need your advice back there.’ He glared at her.
Adira looked confused, then she shrugged and moved to the man who was still gasping for breath on the ground. She picked up his gun and looked down at him, her face an unemotional mask. She aimed between his eyes.
‘Wait,’ Alex said.
She ignored him and pulled the trigger, then smiled at him apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, Alex; we’re not taking hostages. He was as good as dead anyway — you made sure of that.’
Alex held her eyes a moment, then grunted and went over to the SUV. He watched her through the windscreen. She was examining the gun in her hand, turning it over. She ejected the magazine to look at the bullets, then frowned. ‘Shizta.’ She spun and moved quickly from body to body, rapidly turning out their pockets and patting down their torsos and limbs. Alex shook his head and went back to his search of the vehicle’s interior. Adira was a strange woman. Sometimes he felt he knew her, even had strong feelings for her. But at other times, she was a complete mystery.
He’d thought it was her voice that had whispered to him: Kill them all. But now he wasn’t sure.
In the SUV’s glove compartment he found two hand grenades. Nice, he thought, and stuffed them into his pockets. As he worked, the scarred officer’s phone vibrated. Adira rushed to snatch it before Alex. She jammed it to her ear and waited. Alex could hear the silence as someone else did the same on the other end of the line. After another moment, Adira threw the phone over the tree line and they heard it splash into the river.
‘Expecting someone?’ he said, not thinking she’d answer him.
She stood there quietly, her face dark and unreadable.
‘C’mon,’ he said, nodding towards the bodies.
It took them another ten minutes to fill the dead men’s shirts and trousers with stones and drag them towards the river. The rushing water snatched the bodies away and they quickly disappeared in the torrent. It would be weeks before they were found, and by then they would probably have washed down to Brownsville.
Alex looked at Adira as he dusted off his hands. ‘Welcome to America.’
* * *
Salamon pressed his foot down on the accelerator. From the response to his call, he knew the mission had suffered a serious setback.
By the time he arrived at the interception point, there was little to see. A quick circling of the area showed blood underneath a shallow layer of sand beside the road. In the bushes nearby he found a Sig Sauer with a human finger jammed in the trigger guard. Salamon growled deep in his chest as he remembered the general’s words: ‘The American will be a problem.’
He flipped open his phone, typed in a long string of numbers, then waited a second or two for the distant connection.
‘I need more agents,’ he told Shavit.
* * *
Adira sat in the passenger seat of the SUV they’d salvaged from the attack, while Alex took the first leg of the long drive to Asheville. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. The weapon she held on her lap had no part number, but that didn’t matter; she’d recognised it instantly — a full-size Jericho 941 pistol, also called an Israeli Uzi Eagle, and weapon of choice of the Mossad Kidon. Now she knew exactly how her uncle had reacted to her running away with Alex. He had sent torpedoes after her. They were marked for termination… or was it just Alex who was to be executed? She couldn’t tell anymore. Nothing was staying together for her; there was no logical plan to follow.
She felt anger burning inside. How had the agents found them so quickly? Her mind ran through their convoluted route — and every time she came back to the Egyptian incident. They must have picked up their trail there. Perhaps they’d been behin
d them all the way… or ahead of them.
And now?
She swore again. That phone call had been local. The walls were closing in. The rules had changed again; it was now kill or be killed.
* * *
Hammerson swore at the empty room. The image from the satellite had been light-enhanced and showed what looked to be three local police officers surrounding Alex Hunter and Adira Senesh. There was nothing the HAWC commander could do but watch and hope things didn’t turn bad.
‘What the fuck?’ Hammerson leaned forward, his face contorting into a frown as, inexplicably, the officer behind Alex lifted a gun to the back of his neck. ‘No, no, no.’
Blurringly fast, Alex spun and ripped the gun out of the officer’s hand. From there, things went as bad as they could get, real fast. Alex took down the first officer, then a second one. Hammerson was surprised by the amount of resistance they put up — more than he would have expected for local police.
Adira lashed out at the third man, striking him in the ear. By the way he dropped, and then convulsed on the ground, he guessed she had punctured his brain with one of her deadly spikes.
Three dead cops and they’ve only been on American soil for an hour. Fucking hell!
Hammerson watched Adira search the bodies, while Alex went over to the vehicle parked nearby. She paused to examine something in her hand. ‘Okay, what have you found?’ he said aloud, and zoomed in to see the gun. He took a still of the weapon, and of the bodies, then watched in silence as the pair dumped the corpses in the river before driving off in the SUV.
He walked slowly to his computer, tapping his chin with one large blunt finger, and pulled up the recording loop, represented as a line on the screen. He tracked back to when the police had first intercepted Alex, then deleted the entire recording up until their departure.
Hammerson blew out a breath through compressed lips and dropped back into his chair. He brought up the image of the gun Adira had been examining; he didn’t recognise the make and was certain it hadn’t come from any US law enforcement armoury he knew of.
He lifted the phone and tapped a few numbers before saying softly, ‘I need a clean-up crew ASAP — several bodies in the Rio Grande outside of Laredo. Find ’em, ID ’em, and then incinerate.’
He sat back and let his mind work, trying to piece together the strange events surrounding Alex’s sudden reappearance and return to America.
‘Why now, son? What’s triggered this?’ He drummed his large blunt fingers on the desk. ‘Are you looking for something?’
He pulled up a map of Texas and printed it out, then drew a circle around it. Dropping the pen, he placed his fingers on his forehead and leaned in close, willing the map to tell him something. Nothing jumped out. He sighed and sat back for a few seconds, then picked up his pen again and wrote a list of names: Adira Senesh, Jack Hammerson, Sam Reid, Aimee Weir. He thought for a while, then added two more: Casey Franks, Kathleen Hunter. There were very few people Alex knew well, or had remained in contact with from his past. His job as a HAWC hadn’t allowed it.
He typed each name into the search engine. The usual scientific information about Aimee Weir came up — she was going well in her career as a petrobiologist. As expected, he got nothing on Reid, Franks or himself. But when he typed in Kathleen Hunter’s name, his mouth dropped open.
‘Oh, good Christ.’
It was a small piece in the Asheville Times — there’d been an attack on the Hunter property, and its owner, Kathleen Joy Hunter, was now a missing person.
‘Asheville.’ Hammerson got to his feet so quickly his chair fell over behind him. He pressed a button on his intercom. ‘Get Sam Reid in here.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘Rattlesnake? Perfect,’ Matt said, feeling his stomach turn over. He was hardly in the mood for any kind of food, but especially not the exotic variety, which seemed to be all Spirits Native American Diner had on offer.
The attractive olive-skinned waitress smiled broadly and passed around menus and glasses of water, telling them she’d be back in a minute to see if they were ready to order.
‘Nice place,’ Charles said, watching her go.
‘And the food’s good too,’ Sarah added. ‘My version of comfort food.’ She leaned across to Matt and gripped his forearm. ‘C’mon, cheer up.’
Matt shrugged. ‘I’m okay. I just expected more support from Chief Logan. Means we’re on our own… for now.’
Charles waved a hand in the air. ‘Don’t worry about it — we’ve got everything we need. The cops’d just get in the way.’
Matt gave him a half-smile. Charles would say that. Matt reckoned he wanted any discovery to be made by him first — his great-uncle’s blood obviously still flowed strongly through his veins. He leaned back and looked around the wooden ranch-style interior of the restaurant, stopping with a jolt at a nearby table.
‘Hey, you’re not going to believe this,’ he hissed, hunching forward. ‘Eleven o’clock — check it out.’
Charles turned slowly and then snapped back. ‘You are shitting me. That’s the guy again.’
‘What is it? What guy?’ Sarah swivelled in her seat.
‘Don’t look,’ Matt said, hunching down further and lifting his menu to obscure his face.
Sarah swung back. ‘What, you mean old Thomas?’
The old man got to his feet and walked towards them. When he reached the table, he didn’t say a word; he just stood there looking down at Matt. Matt kept his eyes on the menu, frowning at it with the concentration of someone studying the Magna Carta in its original Latin. He kept it up for as long as he could, but eventually the force of the man’s gaze dragged Matt’s head up to meet a pair of eyes so intense they would have been more at home on a bald eagle. Matt swallowed audibly.
‘Hi, Thomas, how’re you doin’ today?’ Sarah said and smiled up at him.
The old man nodded in acknowledgment, ‘Miss Sarah,’ but kept his eyes on Matt.
‘Hello there, sir.’ Matt knew his voice sounded feeble.
Up close, the man looked even more antique than he had from a distance, with leathery skin that had been creased a thousand times by sun, sand and dry winds.
Sarah frowned at the strange interaction. ‘Thomas, this is Matt Kearns and Charles Schroder, friends of mine from the city. And this here is Mr Thomas Red Cloud — closest thing we’ve got to a tribal elder in these parts.’ She continued frowning as she looked from Thomas to Matt. ‘Ahh, have you two met before?’
No one spoke.
Thomas reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small crumpled piece of soft paper. He unfolded it and laid it on the table in front of Matt, then tapped it with one brown, liver-spotted finger. ‘Chiye-tanka.’
Matt looked down. It was the napkin he had drawn on in the diner with Charles, when his friend had first arrived. He nodded and met the old man’s eyes. ‘The Great Ones.’
The old man sat down next to Matt, pushing him along the bench seat, then tapped the napkin again. ‘What do you know about them, Mr Matt Kearns?’
‘What do I know?’ Matt shrugged. ‘I can tell you what I think — that there’s something big moving around on the Black Mountain, and we suspect it might be responsible for the recent disappearances. It’s certainly coming closer to town. We also think a lot of people are in danger unless we can convince the authorities to take us, to take it, seriously.’
The old man sat like a stone for a few seconds, looking into Matt’s eyes. Eventually, he nodded, and spoke slowly. ‘Yes, it is true; I believe the Great Ones have returned. My people have been the guardians of their prison for an eternity — a duty that was passed to us by our ancestors, the First People. They enjoyed a land of abundance, with animals of great size and number. But they were not alone; the Great Ones lived high in the mountains. At first, mankind and the giants shared the land, but as the First People’s numbers grew, the Great Ones became angry. Without the people even knowing it, a war was declared. Warriors, women and chi
ldren started to disappear, and the people became angry and fearful. But when the Chief’s daughter was stolen, then the war was joined.’
Thomas lifted Matt’s glass of water to his lips and drank half of it down before continuing with his story. ‘The Chief chose his greatest warrior, Tooantuh, to gather a hundred-strong war party. He also summoned his most powerful sorcerers to force the Great Ones back into the caves and then to seal them away from the light with a wall of stones, each carved with a sacred story and symbols to hold them forever. Many warriors were lost in the battle, and Tooantuh himself never returned. It was a great cost to the tribe, but mankind was saved that day.’
He paused, shut his eyes briefly, then chuckled. ‘It’d make a great comic book, huh?’ He finished Matt’s water.
Matt noticed Thomas wore a small leather bag tied around his neck; it looked soft and slightly oiled, as though it had been rubbed between finger and thumb a thousand times.
Thomas became serious again. ‘Whether the story is believed or not, every four generations the wall must be maintained. I am the last of those who know the symbols, but I was not able to repair the wall when I was supposed to and the Great Ones broke free. And now…’ He trailed off.
Matt leaned forward. ‘I knew it — something happened, didn’t it? Something that broke down the wall? Have you seen this Great One? I mean, do you know where it is?’
Thomas waved a hand at Matt as though batting away his questions. ‘The coyote and beaver told me; the eagle spirit screamed it down from heaven; the great-grandfather buzzard came to me in a dream. They said that the earth moved and the wall came down.’
Matt’s mouth fell open. ‘Wow — no way. Is that true?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘Shit no. I read about the earth tremor in the papers like everyone else. But, Mr Kearns, despite the fact that I might not be a full believer in Native American lore, I have still been lighting sacred fires around the town lately. Anything’s worth a try, right?’ He shrugged. ‘Problem is, I don’t really believe in what I’m doing, and perhaps that’s why it’s not working. Hell, I’m not even sure I’m doing it right. There’s not a lot of people left for me to ask.’ He reached out and placed his hands over the top of Matt’s. ‘But I do believe in the Great Ones. At least, now I do.’
