The Tenth Circle

by Jon Land

  So maybe the legends were true, after all, and if they were, she wanted to see whatever it was Wareagle had seen.

  Zarrin had reconstructed his path through the two floors of Quincy Market as best she could as soon as the big man had drifted out of sight. She was suffering from the dual ill effects of not enough rest and the connecting flights that had brought her to Boston. Once mere inconveniences that never would have even occurred to her. But now everything occurred to her. Everything when it came to movement and exertion that needed to be rationed and measured, the days stealing more and more normalcy from her at every turn.

  Now she needed to steal as much of it back as she could.

  All she’d endured at the KGB training camp in the remnants of the old Soviet Union seemed so distant and foreign now. Endless days of hunger, sleep deprivation, being tortured to make sure she could withstand the worst an enemy might do to her. Being matched up against fellow students in groups of four and sent into the woods with instructions that only one would continue in the program.

  Zarrin was the only one to advance by incapacitating the other members of her team instead of killing them. Showing that she understood subtlety and restraint, that she could turn anything into a weapon, including the hands al-Asi ordered that she use to practice the piano to exhaustion when the other trainees were allowed to sleep. Frigid winter morphed into steaming hot summer. She lost track of the days first, then the weeks, and finally the months.

  Her body became leaner, lines of sinewy bands of muscle strung to her five-foot-eight-inch frame. But she also learned quickness; not speed, her instructors were fast to say, but quickness. Her profession required being able to move in confined spaces, not large ones, cover small distances in blinding fashion. In winter, training for this covered leaping from boulder to boulder in a frigid mountain stream on the outskirts of Siberia. Only the speed of the water kept it from freezing and even then there were ample chunks of ice floating past her as she trained in bare feet, necessitating her jumps be immediate and fluid. Miss a boulder and she was likely to drown since her instructors were under strict orders to offer no respite for failure.

  At the same time, she had become remarkably proficient behind the piano as well—to the point where it was difficult to tell which pursuit she excelled at more. They seemed to compliment each other, strides in one discipline leading to similar strides made in the other and vice versa. Feeding off each other, as they helped Zarrin achieve the perfect balance.

  Continuing her work on the piano had the dual effect of keeping her original teacher, Kazim, close to her heart, always her mentor no matter how many Russian masters tried to take his place. And in remembering Kazim, she remembered Hamsa, its terrorist leader, and her vow to return to the refugee camp to finish the job Colonel al-Asi had interrupted.

  Upon graduation from her training in the Soviet Union, the camp was the first stop she made, only to find al-Asi waiting for her. A tall, broad-shouldered man she took to be the colonel’s bodyguard lurked in the shadows nearby.

  “You must learn not to be so predictable, Zarrin,” he greeted.

  She stiffened. “I have business here.”

  “It’s already done, completed just this morning.”

  “Interesting timing, Colonel.”

  “The Israelis decided they could wait no longer.”

  “The Israelis?”

  “A man they sent, actually. A specialist in such things. Hamsa is no more. I made sure its leader’s throat was cut. I thought that to be fitting, closing this particular circle.”

  Zarrin realized the man she’d taken for al-Asi’s bodyguard was gone, as if he’d simply vanished. “Should I thank you?”

  “Yes, for making sure you didn’t squander all the progress your training has produced on a mission of vengeance.”

  “As an assassin or a pianist?”

  “Both, Zarrin,” the colonel had told her.

  Zarrin counted ten men in retracing Wareagle’s path, all heavily armed, but there were probably more, obviously here to stage the next attack, dispatched by the very same party who had made the church bombing look like her work.

  She needed all her skills now, needed to be the same expertly trained killer who emerged from the KGB camp, not just the skilled operative who could plant explosives on roadways and detonate them from hundreds of miles away.

  Make her body like fingers across the keyboard … Flowing and smooth without stiffness or stumbling.

  Zarrin began to steady her breathing, employing the visualization technique that never failed her, using the lessons gleaned from one of her pursuits to support the other. This as she watched Blaine McCracken step through the glass entry doors on the floor below with Johnny Wareagle right by his side at the very moment the gunfire began.

  CHAPTER 54

  Boston, Massachusetts

  McCracken registered the first shots as blisteringly loud reports that bred a bare moment of utter silence before the screams began. The moment froze in his mind, snapshots of the families, the children, the school groups, the baby carriages, the diners, and the strollers he’d glimpsed all ratcheting through his mind in rapid succession.

  Outside, he and Johnny had made their way through the crowds gathered to watch street mimes, jugglers, and a man twisting balloon animals into various shapes in record time, all brought out by the sunlight and unseasonable January warmth. It had been much colder down in North Carolina, the seasons thrown out of whack along with everything else. McCracken even noted a man dressed in clown makeup folding paper and cardboard into colorful, tall hats that were then placed atop the heads of children gathered for what looked like a grouping of birthday parties in a heated outdoor section beneath a restaurant’s glass overhang.

  The Faneuil Hall crowd might have been larger than anyone could have anticipated under the current climate of fear, but the city of Boston had taken plenty of precautions in the form of a massive law-enforcement presence. In full riot gear. On horseback. Not afraid to showcase their assault rifles and ammo belts. The National Guard was present too, in full combat attire, including flak jackets.

  It made people feel safe, but McCracken knew it was a false sense of security. Taken by surprise, in a single moment of unified violent assault, the posted security would be cut down. Not because they weren’t brave or prepared, but because they were about to go up against men well practiced in killing. Men who’d done it before, and likely often. It was cowardice of the worst kind, but it defined the way the world worked today. Death had come to be treated too often like lost points in a video game.

  With the 9-1-1 system disabled, trying to warn the police and National Guardsmen what was coming would only hasten the attack before McCracken and Wareagle were in place to do their best to thwart it. And how exactly would Blaine, currently a fugitive, announce himself? On whose authority was he here, when even he couldn’t get the only government official who could attest to his involvement on the phone?

  McCracken’s plan was for Wareagle to take the second floor, crowded with lunchtime patrons in need of tables, while he’d handle the first floor cluttered with eating establishments of all varieties amid yet more tables. They entered Quincy Market, negotiating a path through an exiting throng when, through the nearest windows and wall-length glass frames, they glimpsed the mime, juggler, and balloon impresario tear weapons from beneath their jackets. Those machine pistols were spitting fire in the next moment, aimed for the exterior security detail that was caught totally by surprise.

  Bystanders scurried for cover. Police and National Guardsmen struggled to steady their weapons before they were gunned down, then found themselves afraid to fire with so many rushing to flee in their sights. A riderless police horse charged by, changing directions in a flash at the sound of more gunfire ratcheting.

  The interior crowd and noise hid both sound and sight of what was transpiring from the police
and guardsmen inside long enough for the gunmen Johnny’s reconnoiter had already identified to burst up with assault rifles blaring on full auto. Stitching a jagged line of blood, death, and panic across both levels that left McCracken and Wareagle frozen between enemy factions both inside and out.

  “Indian, go!”

  Johnny was already in motion, his huge bulk tumbling bodies aside to forge a path through the crowd for the stairs leading to the second floor. Their plan gone to shit, advantages turned to disadvantages. Bodies outfitted in both Boston Police blue and National Guard camouflage continued to fall, some of the first-floor terrorists starting to train their automatic fire toward the panicking crowd when …

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  Single shots, measured as to be precise, pierced the din. McCracken saw one terrorist go down in mid-stream, then a second. He looked up toward the source of the bullets to find a lithe shape, more shadow than man, gliding away, slipping through narrow fissures in the chaos.

  Except it wasn’t a man.

  That was McCracken’s last thought before he whirled forward, SIG opening up on a terrorist who’d just shattered a bank of windows with a stitch of fire, the rest of his bullets finding fleeing patrons slowed by exits stuffed with swells of congestion. He wasn’t sure how many shots he fired, only that the terrorist’s shots turned the clutter into a mass pincushion, twisted around with each thumping impact, victims wheeling wildly like a marionettes manipulated by a drunken puppeteer.

  Then another terrorist went down to fresh fire from above, same cadence and caliber as before. Fired by a woman, McCracken in no position to consider her presence or identity. A phantom, a specter, an anomaly that made no sense.

  A woman!

  Could it be someone from law enforcement, off duty or working undercover at the Faneuil Hall complex? No, not a chance, given the accuracy and clear, practiced nature of her fire. This was something entirely different—more seasoned and professional—a woman who’d used her gun to kill before many, many times.

  That thought crystallized as McCracken sighted in on two targets who’d reacted fast enough to the counterassault to take cover. Their mistake was continuing to target civilians, retraining their fire on convenient, fleeing targets instead of confronting their unexpected adversary. McCracken’s biggest problem was finding a sight line and shooting angle through the Quincy Market patrons still swarming around him in panic.

  He pushed his way against the grain, gun raised and steadied, ready to fire the moment a clear path to either of the two terrorist gunmen opened up. The first one did, enough of a sliver to glimpse the whole of a man’s head over the assault rifle he was wielding. The sun was streaming down from the atrium skylights, seeming to cast him and him alone in its light. McCracken used three shots, unsure how many hit before the man crumpled, his rifle’s strap catching on the toppled table behind which he’d taken cover and holding him up halfway to the floor.

  The other gunman nearby spotted McCracken and jerked upright from behind the counter of a pizza restaurant. Instinct turned his attention away from his real targets to the unexpected threat who’d just gunned down a member of his team. The man fired a wild spray of automatic fire that cut down two more bystanders, while McCracken dove beneath it. Rolling amid the sea of churning shoes and sneakers until he came to a halt ready to fire. Four shots this time, two of them hits for sure.

  Back on his feet now, McCracken felt the momentum of the crowd sweep him away, nearly lifting his weight off the floor. Based on Johnny’s count there was only one gunman left on this level, Blaine stealing a gaze upward in search of the mystery shooter before pushing to free himself from the swell around him.

  He was wrong.

  Because there were two gunmen left, not one.

  Each claimed strategic positions; one behind a candy display counter, shooting out through the now-shattered glass, and the other hidden by shelves of homemade sauce and various pastas featured at a popular Italian eatery boasting old-fashioned goodness. Both ready to fire, McCracken with neither angle nor shooting lane to claim for himself.

  But that didn’t stop the terrorists, who unleashed twin torrents of fire forward that cut down more victims between them and Blaine. He felt the heat of a bullet actually singe his scalp enough to flood his nostrils with the sickly stench of burned hair. The sensation forced him to twist away reflexively to the right, and the move spared him from another bullet’s impact, resulting in a graze to his rib cage that felt hot and cold at the same time.

  He wanted to shoot back, needed to shoot back, but there were still too many innocents between him and the terrorists. No way his bullets could find them without risking those lives as well, no way. He needed another weapon, something like, like …

  McCracken spotted what he needed attached to a beam diagonally across the room and lit out for it, more enemy fire tracing him and felling more bystanders in his path.

  CHAPTER 55

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Zarrin watched the big man, McCracken’s Native American friend, work. He wielded twin Desert Eagle brushed-chrome semiautomatic pistols, the model XIX that used a .44 magnum load and took an 8-shot magazine. Zarrin had never seen a man capable of firing in two different directions at once, using his eyes to take a mental picture he then followed in his mind to fire. But Wareagle seemed equally adept at shooting what he could see as shooting what he couldn’t. Even more amazingly, some inexplicable sixth sense, some primordial warning system, kept him from firing when someone crossed either of his Desert Eagles’ shooting lanes, even when he was looking in the other direction.

  Zarrin was flexing her hand, trying to push the blood, warmth, and life back into it after gunning down three of the enemy on the first floor herself. Maybe saving McCracken’s life or, at the very least, sparing him the trouble and helping to even out the odds.

  The carnage up here on the second level was less magnified than the first, and she tried not to imagine what either floor would look like had the terrorists only needed to deal with the police and additional personnel dressed like soldiers in uniforms much too stiff and clean. Could have stretched well past a hundred victims, given the firepower the terrorists had brought along and the frenzied chaos and clutter that created a fish-in-a-barrel scenario. The final number of casualties might well have eclipsed all the other attacks, had McCracken and Wareagle not shown up.

  As for Zarrin, she tried to see Quincy Market as a piano, her body like her fingers skating across the keys. Lost in her music, always a step ahead of the pain and stiffness that otherwise plagued her. She needed to be able to move with the grace and precision more befitting the person she’d been several years ago. Doing replaced thinking and fixating. Once in motion, she was fine until she stopped, her mind tricking her body to turning fluidly and smoothly, gracefully negotiating the stuck swell of bodies hurtling downward. Propelled by absurd instinct since they were flowing straight into a shooting gallery in that direction as well.

  Zarrin stayed in motion, the Parkinson’s vanquished for now. Her mind moved from one concerto to another, snippets of each combined into a medley paced to fit the mood. She heard Mozart as she saw a stray gunman lurch out, from nowhere it seemed, righting her pistol on him. Then Brahms when she traced another terrorist’s dash across the floor, ready to fire when she heard the distinctive boom of the Desert Eagle before she could pull her trigger. Zarrin swung to find War­eagle’s gaze upon her, a world of bodies, wafting gun smoke, and the stench of panic between them before he rushed off again on another terrorist’s trail.

  That cleared enough of a path for her to see out the bank of second-floor windows downward, where what barely passed as a gunfight on the concrete plaza and walkways continued. Barely passed, because the outnumbered costumed trio of terrorists utterly outmatched the police and those dressed clumsily as soldiers. Their weapons looked all wrong in their hands as they fired or tried to, wh
ile the juggler, the mime, and the man wearing a huge hat formed of balloons seemed as indestructible as the cartoon figures they resembled. Firing in nonstop streams or quick bursts, more bodies continuing to sprout from a corpse garden growing out of the asphalt thanks to their bullets.

  But now the cartoon figures were retreating—maybe with their particular role complete or maybe because they had caught on to something going horribly wrong with the overall plan inside. The rhythm of the shooting, perhaps, or the lack of automatic fire that should have perpetrated a massacre of unprecedented proportions. For the cartoon figures, the front line of the attack, the feeling could be as jarring as a heavy wave in a calm sea or as subtle as a slight ripple in the current.

  Either way they fled, still firing wildly about to clear their path, rushing toward big SUVs that looked as if they could seat a dozen. Three vehicles that must have just squealed to a halt on Congress Street blocking a lane of traffic.

  They would escape, the rest of their team all dead behind them, the trail gone cold.

  Unless Zarrin acted. Unless Zarrin found the speed she’d lost and agility she barely remembered.

  The concerto playing in her head was Wagner now, booming beats driving her toward the emergency exit, beyond which lay the street.

  And something else on which she had focused.

  CHAPTER 56

  Boston, Massachusetts

  In the end, McCracken launched himself airborne and rolled the rest of the way to the fire hose coiled inside a steel container box attached to a thick wooden beam.

  He had it out and unspooling even as he twisted the spigot. Held its powerful, snakelike form in both hands and felt the water explode outward in hissing burst.

  He aimed for the shelves first, too much clamor and screaming to hear the rattle of homemade spaghetti sauce jars rattling against one another and thumping to the floor. He saw the terrorist who’d taken cover there shoved backward, the shelf keeling over at just enough of an angle to send the remnants of its contents raining onto him.