by Jon Land
You killed the first two. And now you’ve killed this one too.
Denton thought he’d only spoken the words in his head, but the looks cast him by a couple of nurses working feverishly to save his wife suggested otherwise.
Go fuck yourselves.
Maybe he’d said that out loud too.
Nigeria, 1991
Jimenez watched, still breathless, as Cambridge stepped out from the tree line into the sprawl of earth scorched by the meteor strike. Grinning, his assault rifle barrel still smoking, eyes wide and gleaming in what could have been ecstasy.
He’d gunned his own men down in a torrent of fire!
Jimenez ducked back into the cover of the dense brush, as the surviving Maitatsine radicals trailed Cambridge out of the jungle, herding the members of Jimenez’s team before them. They prodded the eight shapes forward until the scientists reached the edge of the crater, at which point the fighters kicked or swiped their legs out, forcing them to kneel with their backs to Jimenez.
This couldn’t be happening.…
And it didn’t seem real when Cambridge casually strolled straight down the line, shooting each of the scientists in the head. A few tumbled down into the crater, while others collapsed straddling the rim.
Jimenez realized his mouth had dropped open, each breath making his chest and lungs ache. The pistol had remained frozen in his trembling grasp; he couldn’t even raise it, never mind try firing. He wanted to move, but couldn’t, a wave of fear seizing him so firmly that it trapped the breath in his throat. He had to remind himself to breathe, and even then could only manage short desperate heaves that left him light-headed, on the verge of hyperventilating and passing out.
But that would’ve been too easy, surrendering to unconsciousness, while the bodies of brilliant men and women lay rotting in the sun. Jimenez felt his eyes welling with tears and his knees starting to wobble, when something cold pressed up against the back of his head, and he felt the Beretta snatched from his grasp.
* * *
The Maitatsine rebel shoved him forward into the clearing, straight up to where Cambridge stood, stumbling as he tried to avoid the bodies of the fallen SAS troops their leader had just shot.
“I was wondering where you’d disappeared to, Professor,” Cambridge grinned.
“What is this?” Jimenez managed. “What have you done? In the name of God, are you mad?”
Cambridge kept grinning, as he snapped a fresh magazine into his pistol. Then he used his free hand to shove Jimenez on toward the crater.
“God,” he repeated. “Are you a religious man?”
Jimenez gazed at the frames of his team members, twisted and frozen in death. “Does it matter?”
“Not a bit.”
And then Cambridge’s eyes grew so cold they seemed to recede deeper into his skull, the dark portions swallowing the whites. He yanked the necklace from Jimenez’s neck and snapped off the cross, regarding it indifferently before tossing it aside into the bushes.
“Because your God is not here.” Cambridge racked a round into the chamber and aimed his Beretta at Jimenez. “Now, get on your knees so we can be done with this.”
* * *
From his knees, Jimenez looked up at the Beretta’s bore in line with his forehead, wanted to close his eyes but couldn’t. “‘Shall I leave their innocent blood unavenged? No, I will not,’” he said, in what sounded like someone else’s voice.
Cambridge’s grin grew wider. Jimenez noticed the tiny bumps rising out of the snake bite on his other hand were oozing puss and blood amid the now hideous swelling. Cambridge rubbed it against his pants, leaving a thick stain, as he tried to relieve the itch.
“So you are a religious man, Professor, relying on God to do something you can’t. Don’t you remember? Your God isn’t here. If he is here, beg him to give me a sign and I’ll spare your life. But he won’t, because he isn’t.”
With that, Cambridge viciously jerked Jimenez’s head around to look at the bodies sprawled about the ash-covered clearing, the coppery stench of their blood starting to claim the air now.
“I’m the only god here now, Professor.” Cambridge leaned over and plucked the gold pen from Jimenez’s lapel pocket. “How’d you like me to write your epitaph?”
Jimenez turned and gazed up at an expression as flat as it was cold, splattered with the blood of the men he’d just killed that had coated portions of his coarse, stubble-laden scalp as well. If the devil had a face, this was it, he thought, as Cambridge pocketed the pen that had belonged to Jimenez’s father.
Cambridge holstered his pistol and yanked a shiny, razor-sharp knife from his belt in its place. He stepped around Jimenez and pressed the icy-cold blade of his knife against his throat, speaking softly into his ear from behind.
“I think we’ll take your head, Professor. You won’t be needing it anymore anyway.”
Jimenez felt the chill of the blade against his throat, prayed there would be no pain, and closed his eyes.
New York City, 1991
Ben Younger thought the flashing lights were only in his mind. Then he realized the medical team desperately working to save both his wife and newborn son had seen them too. But the beeps were slowing, the blips on the screen rising between longer intervals.
They were dying, both his wife and unborn child, and there was nothing he could do. Then he saw something out the window, the sky darkening from twilight to pitch, all trace of light stolen from it.
An eclipse, it must be an eclipse.…
He gave no further thought to the scientific rarity, until a coldness seemed to join the darkness spreading beyond, a chill that rose from the depths of his own being he expected would frost the windows.
Suddenly, the monitoring machine by Melissa’s bedside lit up like Christmas trees, faded to black, then blipped to life again. The lines and LED readouts weak, but brightening.
Beep, beep, beep, beep …
Two sets, signaling life while darkness continued to thicken beyond the window.
BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP …
Louder now, followed by something even louder:
A baby crying.
Ben watched the doctor swing toward him, having just clipped the umbilical cord from his flailing, thrashing, and muck-covered son.
“You’re a very lucky man…”
* * *
“… Mr. Denton,” the doctor, drenched in blood and sweat, said in the room a few doors down, “to have a healthy daughter. But your wife, I’m afraid she…”
The doctor’s dour expression, accompanied by a slow shake of his head, completed the thought for him.
“I’m sorry,” he finished.
“For what?” Denton asked him, as thin light began to cut through the blackness beyond the window. “You did your job, best you could, and delivered my daughter. All in all, a fair trade, I’d say.”
Nigeria, 1991
Am I dead?
Jimenez was afraid to open his eyes, for fear of finding the knife still poised against his throat, Cambridge yet to finish the job. And when he finally pried them open, there was only darkness, making him thankful that death had come without pain.
Then how am I opening my eyes?
He realized he was still alive, realized darkness had dropped like a curtain from the sky and sucked up the light around him. Swept his eyes about the area of the crater, all by himself in the clearing now.
Your God isn’t here.
But He must have been, because Jimenez realized he was witnessing a total eclipse, a true once-in-a-century phenomenon being so isolated down here had kept from his attention. This was different from any darkness he’d experienced before, as if the world had been sucked utterly dry of all light and this was what was left. And it wasn’t just the light; the heat had been bled from the day as well, a strange chill prevalent where the air had been steamy just a few moments before.
The Maitatsine radicals were gone.
Cambridge was gone.
�
��If He is here, beg him to give me a sign and I’ll spare your life.”
And Cambridge had.
New York City, 1991
Ben and Missy named their son after Ben’s grandfather:
Maximillian, Max for short.
Dale named his daughter after a queen of England his now late wife Danielle had read a book about in the last, difficult stage of her pregnancy:
Victoria, Vicky for short.
Ben shared the glorious occasion at the bedside of the only woman he’d ever loved. Looking down at Missy cradling their son. Mere minutes old, Max Younger had been born happy and healthy, wrapped in a blanket now and smelling of heaven itself. Ben finally took his son in his arms, reveling in his warmth and breath while unfalteringly amazed at how miniaturized everything about him was.
I’ve never held a baby before.
The realization almost drove Ben to return Max to his mother, but he held fast instead, bouncing slightly and seeing if he could get the baby to grab his finger in its tiny hands. That’s when he saw a blotch on Max’s palm that at first glance looked like no more than a bruise, but on second took on the impression of a shape Ben had come to know all too well: a scratchy assemblage of crossed lines that looked randomly sketched.
Identical in miniature to the mark embedded in his own palm, left by the rock he’d grasped in a Yucatán cave nine months before, emanating that strange dark light. Ben felt his stomach tighten, as if that strange coincidence had already defined the bond between father and son.
Ben heard Max gurgle, watched the infant cough some mucus from his mouth, emotions rampaging through him like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The baby looked up and seemed to smile at him, and Ben couldn’t help but smile back, kissing his newborn son lightly on the forehead.
“I love you, Max.”
PART 4
PATIENT ZERO
The Present
Who holds the devil, let him hold him well,
He hardly will be caught a second time.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
THIRTY-FOUR
New York City
“Please tell me I’m not dead,” the man behind the desk said to Max.
Max grinned and closed the office door behind him. “Not unless I am.”
The man rolled his wheelchair out. “Then give me a hug, hoss.”
Weeb Bochner’s voice still carried a trace of his backcountry Georgia roots. It had taken him three tries to get through SEAL BUD/S training, all of thirty-three years old when he and Max had been assigned to the same SEAL Team 6 unit.
They met halfway across the office, Weeb on his wheels and Max on his feet. Max bent over, half crouching, to give Bochner a hug, witnessed by the maybe hundred pictures that plastered his walls. All of him standing on two legs in various uniforms shown with various dignitaries on any number of deployments, except for the one of him receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. Max wasn’t included in any of them; nor was any other SEAL who was still active. There were a dozen elegantly framed commendations as well, evidence of Weeb’s distinguished service.
“I’ve got a problem, brother.”
“Of course you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” Bochner looked Max over from his wheelchair. “Still doing your time?”
“What do you think?”
“Right, stupid question. But we normally don’t deploy in Manhattan.”
“There were some issues on my last mission.”
Bochner smirked. “Par for the course.”
He’d been just over six feet before landing in his wheelchair, but Max could still see the powerful muscles rippling across his chest, shoulders, and arms. Compensation, Max knew, having seen it often enough. Obsessively working what you could control to distract from what you couldn’t.
They’d been on a raid in Afghanistan’s squirrelly Kandahar Province that had turned out to be a Taliban trap. Half the team inside the building, the rest holding at the perimeter, when the explosions shattered the stillness of the night, swiftly followed by strafing fire from inside what seemed like every other building in view. A chunk of steel ended up lodged in the lower part of Weeb’s spine when he fell through a crumbling floor. Max had gone down after him and carried him out of the building. Over his shoulder, with one arm holding Weeb in place while the other returned fire. Two other team members died in the raid, Weeb certain to have joined them if not for Max’s efforts.
“The fuck you think you’re doing?” Bochner had managed to rasp, as Max scooped him up amid the gunfire ratcheting beyond.
“What’s it look like?”
“You got better things to do today than die, hoss.”
“So do you.”
Weeb had rejoined the world when the need for his particular brand of expertise exploded in the private security field. For a price, companies like PRO-TECH, short for Protective Technologies, could do pretty much anything a regular army could, their clients culled from Fortune 500–type companies that required personal protection for their executives while traveling abroad. Weeb, last Max had heard, was responsible for coordinating the most at-risk assignments in the most dangerous arenas where gunplay often proved necessary. As such, he and the company as a whole had built a wealth of contacts across all levels of law enforcement that could be called upon at anytime to aid their efforts.
“Issues,” Bochner said, echoing Max’s previous statement. “I’m guessing lives got saved in the process, Commander. Though back in Kandahar, I said not to bother with mine.”
“I must not have heard you.”
“This coming from a man who can hear mosquitoes buzzing a half mile away,” Bochner quipped.
“What?” Max mocked, cupping a hand behind his ear.
“So what can I do for you, Pope?”
* * *
Max sketched the broad strokes for him, including the fact his real name was Younger, Max Borgia being an alias built to hold up to all but the most extreme scrutiny. But he left out the peripheral details like visions and stinging pain in his palm from the birthmark that was a spitting image of the mark burned into his father’s.
“Creedmoor,” Bochner said, offering no further comment, as he slid a pad closer to himself on the desk to make some notes. “And that’s where the attack happened.”
“Yesterday. I’ve been pretty much tied up with the police ever since.”
Bochner regarded him closer. “How’d that go?”
“Well, I did kill two men.”
“Who were armed and dangerous and trying to kill you, as they say.”
“The police couldn’t have been more respectful,” Max said, not bothering to add how relieved he was that the identity he’d been living under had held after ten years. “Stopped just short of asking me for my autograph, especially when my classified file came through.”
“You mean, Max Borgia’s classified file.” Bochner leaned forward. “Those two gunmen, you didn’t recognize them?”
“Not a clue. But they moved like pros, and they didn’t even blink when they zeroed me in the corner.”
Bochner nodded, sorting through what Max was telling him. “Sounds like the NYPD is on top of things here. What would you like me to do exactly?”
“Start with the identities of the two gunmen. They weren’t acting on their own. Somebody sent them to Creedmoor to kill me, as crazy as that sounds.”
Bochner nodded slowly. “That what you told the police?”
“No. I’m telling you. I’d also like you to arrange security for my mother at the facility, make sure she’s not targeted in my place.”
“I’ve got a couple of ex-marines on the payroll I can put on the job. Your mother’ll be safe, you can count on that.” Bochner leaned back, rocking his wheelchair slightly. “But none of this makes any sense. Whoever’s after you didn’t have to set up such an elaborate hit in New York. They could’ve nailed you in transit, after the Navy had you stand in the corner.”
Max swallowed hard, havin
g trouble forming his next words, even though he’d rehearsed them. “This isn’t about the Pope, Weeb, it’s not about Max Borgia. It’s about somebody else entirely, named Max Younger.”
“Keep talking,” Bochner urged.
“Let’s just say I’ve got some skeletons in my closet. Family shit. You need to know my mother’s name is Melissa Younger. Her husband, my father, was Ben.”
“Was,” Bochner repeated.
“He died ten years ago. Check him out, and you’ll see why I changed my name. What happened at Creedmoor, maybe it’s connected to him.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Whatever it is you’re not telling me.”
“I’ve told you everything you need to know to help me,” Max said, leaving it there. “If that’s a problem…”
“It’s not, hoss.” Bochner finished jotting down some notes and wheeled himself out from behind his desk. “You’ve come to the right place. I’ve been waiting a long time for this day, the opportunity to do something for the man who made it possible for my life to have a second act. I’m going to keep this off the books, call in some favors if I have to.”
“I appreciate that, Weeb. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me until I’ve got something for you other than lip service. How long before you’re due back?”
Max rose from his chair. “They haven’t told me yet, so I’ll be in the city for a while, at least until this gets sorted out.”
Bochner took Max’s extended hand, squeezed it tight, and held it. “Watch your back in the meantime, Pope.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Cairo, Egypt
“They’re stalling,” Vicky said to Neal Van Royce. “We’ve wasted an entire day sitting around.”
“Not wasted. The Centers for Disease Control is mobilizing, the same minds that licked Ebola ready to take on whatever we’re facing here.”
“Which is nothing like Ebola. We’ve lost a day when we can’t even afford to lose a minute. We’ve issued our initial reports to Washington, and we need Washington to secure the cooperation of every government in the Middle East. They need to be ready to ground all air traffic in and out of the region to keep this from spreading further.” Vicky watched Van Royce scanning his e-mails yet again. “How bad?”
