by Ted Dekker
“Don’t be naive. Are you telling me that if I don’t run the story, more people will live?”
She didn’t answer. Of course not, the answer was no, because if the virus was real, they were all dead anyway. And this virus was as real as she’d said. Real as milk or bread or gasoline. He’d gone from incredulity to a state of constant horror over this impending sickness that was growing in his body at this very moment.
“Which means that you’re not making any progress,” he said. He turned away. “Great. All the more reason to break this open.”
“Are you glad that you know?” she asked. “Has the quality of your life improved because I dragged you into this?”
The last five days had been a living hell. He looked away.
“Exactly,” she said. “You want to draw the rest of the world into the same kind of miserable knowledge? You think it’ll help us deal with the problem? You think it’ll bring us one minute closer to an antivirus or a vaccine? Not a chance. If anything, it slows us down. We’ll be dealing with a whole new set of problems.”
“You can’t just not tell people that they’re going to die. I don’t care how much you want to protect them; it’s their lives we’re talking about. The president is still holding firm on all this?”
She crossed her arms and sighed. “His advisers are split. But I promise you, the moment the people know, this country shuts down. What am I supposed to do if I can’t get a line out to the labs in Europe? Thought about that? Why would the employees at AT&T go to work if they knew they only had thirteen days to live?”
“Because there’s a chance we’ll all live if they keep the lines open, that’s why.”
“That would be a lie. You’d just be replacing one lie for another,” she said.
“What? Now there’s no chance we can survive this?”
“Not that I see. We have thirteen days, Mike. The closer we look at this thing, the more we realize what a monster it really is.”
“I can’t accept that. Someone has to be making progress somewhere. This is the twenty-first century, not the Middle Ages.”
“Well, it just so happens that DNA is no respecter of centuries. We’re all just groping around in the dark.”
“You know the word will get out soon anyway. I’m surprised the rest of the press hasn’t pieced this together already.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s only been a week. Patterns take time to recognize unless you know what you’re looking for. The military knows what to look for, but they’ve been told what to expect under various cover stories.”
“But for how long? This is insane!”
“Of course it’s insane! The whole thing is insane!”
He put his hand on the hood of her Durango. Cold. She’d been here for a while. Maybe all night. Or longer.
“Our story about the quarantined island south of Java is starting to fall apart,” she said. “A number of people made it off the island before they shut it down. The press over there is wondering how far it’s spread. So are half the labs working with us.”
“My point exactly. There’s no way they can hold this in. We should have every lab in the world working around the clock on this—”
“We do have practically every lab in the world working around the clock on this!”
“We should have the whole military out, looking for these terrorists—”
“They’ve got every intelligence agency with anything to offer on it already. But please, these guys have the antivirus—we can’t just send a tomahawk cruise missile after them.”
“We know where they are?”
She didn’t answer, which meant she either did know or had a very good idea.
“It’s France, isn’t it?”
No answer.
“Finally, an excuse to nuke France.”
“I think there may be some takers.”
“Surely not the government proper.”
“No. I don’t know anything else, Mike.” She held up a hand. “No more. I’m wasting time out here.” She started back.
“People need to make things right,” he said. “With their children. With God. Twenty-four hours, Theresa. I won’t implicate you.”
She looked back at him. “Do whatever you have to do, Mike. Just think long and hard before you do it.”
“Where are we going?” Monique panted.
Thomas scanned the meadow that lay ahead of them. Beyond it, a hazy horizon. “Away from Carlos. Do you have any idea where we are?”
“I would say up north. Maybe outside of Paris.”
“The Sûreté will be scouring the country for us as soon as Carlos sends word,” he said. “We have to get to a phone that has service to the United States. The airports will be too dangerous. What about the English Channel?”
“If we could find a way to the Channel without being tracked down. Why not Paris?”
She was French and would pass easily. He might stand out.
“You know Paris well?”
“Well enough to get lost in the crowd.”
“We have three days before they go public. When that happens, they’ll have to declare martial law. Public transportation may be shut down. We have to get you out of the country before then.”
“Then Paris is our best bet. I would say it lies to the west.”
“Why?”
“The horizon isn’t as clear to the west. Smog.”
He considered her reasoning. “Okay, west.”
They ran west for nearly two hours before the sun began to dip past the western horizon. They’d encountered several farm buildings, which they skirted after a quick look, but still no paved roads. The problem with using a farm phone was that the Sûreté would undoubtedly track any overseas calls originating from this part of the country, a simple task when there couldn’t be more than a few hundred in a hundred square miles out here. A pay phone in a place frequented by tourists would be much safer.
The problem with finding such a place was simply that Thomas and Monique were running blind. Not only were they losing light, but they still weren’t sure where they were.
They ran on, torn between taking the time to find the right direction and keeping distance between them and any pursuit Carlos gave. Twice Thomas cut back on their own path, struck out due south for several hundred yards, and then continued west again.
Thomas’s mind grappled with other issues as they ran. The wound he’d inflicted on Carlos’s neck. He had been right: Knowledge and belief of the realities opened a link between them. Not a gateway, mind you—neither Carlos nor Johan had awakened as the other. Not that he knew of, anyway. But some kind of cause-and-effect relationship had been triggered between them. Those who believed in both realities saw the transferable effects in both realities. Blood, knowledge, skills.
You bleed in one; you bleed in the other.
Surely Monique would believe after seeing what had happened to Carlos. With Thomas’s prompting, she would likely believe that she was connected to Rachelle. But was this a good thing?
And if he killed Johan, would Carlos die here? Perhaps.
Allowing Johan to live had been the right decision; he was sure of it. Now that he knew the link with Carlos, he would have to reconsider. But how could he kill Rachelle’s brother?
And there was another matter that bothered him, something he was having difficulty placing. His memory had been clouded with these dreams, and he couldn’t quite say why, but there was a problem with Justin of Southern.
The warrior had defeated him soundly and revealed his intentions of brokering a peace, while the Horde was plotting their final defeat. Mikil had sent out two groups of scouts, but none had yet reported any grave threat. Thomas had reinforced the Guard on each side of the forest, but otherwise he could do nothing except wait while Justin—
He pulled up.
Monique stopped. “What?”
“Nothing.” He ran on.
But there was something. There were Qurong’s words—the ones he’d
overheard in the Horde camp. He could hear them now.
“I tell you, the brilliance of the plan is in its boldness,” Qurong had said. “They may suspect, but with our forces at their doorstep, they will be forced to believe. We’ll speak about peace and they will listen because they must. By the time we work the betrayal with him, it will be too late.”
By the time we work the betrayal with him, it will be too late.
Who was “him”? When Thomas learned he hadn’t killed Martyn— that the man Qurong had been speaking to wasn’t Martyn—he’d assumed that “him” had to be Martyn. The thought had passed through his mind as Justin led Martyn from the amphitheater. It was partly why he had no intention of believing in any peace those two brokered. His Guard would be ready.
But what if “him” was Justin of Southern?
Of course! Who better to betray than a hero among the people, a mighty warrior who’d ridden like a king through the Valley of Tuhan and defeated the commander of the Guard in hand-to-hand combat?
It was a trap! Justin must have an alliance with Martyn already. He’d negotiated the Scabs’ withdrawal from the Southern Forest. Then he’d ridden back to the main Horde camp with Martyn and arrived in time to save Thomas and his band in a show of good faith. The man atop the hill overlooking Thomas and his men had been Martyn.
It all made perfect sense! The battle at the Southern Forest, Qurong’s words in the tent, Justin’s saving Thomas in the desert, Justin’s victory in the challenge, and now this unveiling of Martyn as Johan. Even the march through the Valley of Tuhan.
And it was all to this end. A trap. A betrayal.
What if the betrayal ended in the slaughter of their village? The death of the children? The death of Rachelle? Would Monique die? What if he was killed by the Horde? He was needed here.
Thomas would not be fooled by their betrayal. He would hold the line and refuse any peace offered by Johan and Justin. It would end in a terrible battle, perhaps, but—
Another thought struck him. What if he used this knowledge against the Horde? What if he created a reversal of his own, one that might avoid war altogether? His own peace on his own terms.
Thomas stopped again, heart pounding with an eagerness to dream again. He had to return and deal with Justin’s betrayal!
Ahead, at the edge of a clearing, lay a small stone quarry. The lights of a farm cottage glowed several hundred miles down in the valley.
“What now?” Monique demanded, panting.
“It’s almost dark. We don’t know how far we have to go or where we’re really going, for that matter. We have to stop for the night.”
“What if he catches up to us?”
“I don’t think Carlos will expect us to stop for the night—he’ll go on to the city or he’ll search the barns and the towns.” He nodded at the farm lights ahead.
She looked around. “You want us to stop here?”
He jogged over to the quarry. The ground fell twenty feet, like a bowl. Several huge boulders lay at the bottom.
“We can lay down some branches or straw.”
He thought she might protest. But after a moment she agreed. “Okay.”
Ten minutes later they had covered the ground with grass and propped several large leafy branches against the largest rock to form a rough lean-to.
Thomas sat on a boulder near the lean-to, strung too tight to even think about sleep. But that was just it—he had to sleep now. He was desperate to sleep. To dream. To stop Justin before the betrayal could destroy both worlds.
“Thomas?”
He looked at Monique, who leaned on the boulder next to him.
“We’ll be okay,” he said.
“I think you’re too optimistic.”
“How can I not be optimistic? Three days ago I persuaded the president of the United States that my dreams were real, and he sent me on a fool’s mission to find you. It cost some men their lives, but I did find you. Now we’re free, on our way back to the world with information that will change history.”
She looked away, clearly unconvinced. “We’re in France. Unless I missed something back there, the people who’re doing this have control over France. And you do understand that I have no evidence that the information I have will actually create the antivirus, don’t you?”
“Svensson has the antivirus. We watched him inoculate himself.”
“But I don’t know if what he used is based on the information I gave him.”
“Fortier all but said it was yours.”
“Why did they keep me separate from the others?”
They sat in silence. Under other circumstances it might have been an uncomfortable silence, but now, on the eve of the world’s destruction, with pretension long gone, it was only silence.
“So you really do believe all of this,” Monique said.
She meant his dreams. “Yes.”
“How is it possible?”
“You didn’t have too much trouble believing that I got information from my dreams. That’s information out of thin air. Why not more?”
“There’s a far cry between dreaming up information and cutting someone’s neck without touching him,” she said.
“I was also shot dead in the hotel right in front of you.”
She paused. “It goes against everything I’ve ever believed.”
He shrugged. “Then you’ve believed in the wrong things. And if it’s any consolation, so have I. When you live it like I have, it begins to feel quite real. Even natural. I’m not saying I understand. I’m not saying that I’m even meant to understand it.”
She looked at the sky. “You think about God in all of this?”
“I don’t have a good history with religion, despite my father being a chaplain. Maybe that’s because my father was a chaplain. For the first couple weeks of these dreams, even though I had some incredible dreams of encountering God in the emerald lake, I kept it all in its own little box, reserved for the unexplained. There was the colored forest with its version of God, and there was this Earth, each in its own set of dreams. On this Earth God doesn’t exist, I believed. I wasn’t ready to think differently.”
“And now?”
“Now the reality of Elyon is feeling very compelling again. In my dreams, I mean. For a long time after the Shataiki invaded the colored forest, battle was more real to me than Elyon. I’ve been commander of the Guard, fighting wars and spilling blood for fifteen years, and not once has anyone reported seeing a black bat or hearing a single word from Elyon. We call our religion the Great Romance, but really it feels more like a list of rules than anything similar to the Great Romance we once had. But now I think the knowledge of Elyon is starting to work its way into me again— in both realities. Make any sense? If Elyon’s real there, surely God must be real here.”
“It might explain your dreams,” she said.
Another long silence.
“I’m still not ready to believe that I’m connected to a woman named Rachelle who is conveniently married to you,” she said.
He sighed. “It may be best that you don’t believe it. Because if you are connected to her, then anything that happens to Rachelle may also happen to you.”
“You mean if Rachelle gets cut, I get cut? Like Carlos?”
“Rachelle has already experienced that very thing. We can’t allow anything to happen to you.”
“Because it will affect Rachelle as well.”
Thomas sighed and leaned back against the boulder.
“Is Rachelle in danger of being killed?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. We all are.”
“Then I suppose you’d better dream and save the world.”
By her tone he knew that she was frustrated with these ideas of dreams, but he didn’t have the energy to win her over now. He decided to give her one parting thought.
“I just may. But I think I’ll have to go after Justin to do that.”
She didn’t ask who Justin was.
The moon was bright a
nd the night cold when they finally agreed that they should sleep. The lean-to was meant to hide them from any prying eyes in the sky, and Thomas insisted they both sleep under the leafy branches.
Despite their initial attempts at modesty, they both accepted the fact that comfort and warmth were more important at the moment than forcing themselves into positions that would keep them up half the night. They lay shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm in the dark and began to drift off.
Thomas was almost asleep when he felt her hand rest on his. His eyes opened. At first he wondered if she was touching his hand in her sleep. He should ease his arm away.
But he couldn’t. Not after what he’d put her through.
It took him another fifteen minutes to begin drifting again. They fell asleep like that, wrist to wrist.
Carlos covered the ground in a steady, fast walk. The moon was high enough to light his way, which made the going easier than during the first hour of darkness, before the moon rose.
He traveled alone because this issue of Thomas Hunter had become a very personal matter, and also because he knew he could deal with the problem without ever revealing the full truth of what had happened in the house.
In his hand he held a receiver that accepted a signal from the woman. They’d sewn the transmitter into her waistband a week earlier—no reason not to keep very close tabs on such a valuable asset. If and when she discarded the slacks, he would have a problem, but until she reached a town, she wouldn’t have the opportunity. And based on their course, that wouldn’t happen before morning.
They had stopped. Even at this pace he would reach them in a matter of hours.
He lifted his hand and touched his neck again. The blood had dried; the cut was hardly more than a scratch. But the manner in which he’d received it played heavily on his mind.
As did what Thomas had said about his own demise after his usefulness had expired. He’d considered the possibility that Fortier would simply dispose of him once the man had what he wanted—there were never guarantees with men like Fortier.
But Carlos wasn’t a man without his own plans. This development with Hunter could actually play into his hands. For one, it gave him a perfect reason to kill Hunter once and for all. But it could also ensure his own value until he had the opportunity to take out both Svensson and Fortier. He would tell them that before dying Hunter had confessed something new from these histories of his, a major coup attempt immediately following the transition of power to Fortier. They would keep him alive at least long enough to head off the coup.
