by Graham Brown
She leaned forward and kissed him. When he didn’t pull away, she pulled him closer, holding on tightly and kissing him harder. He kissed her back, feeling the warmth of her body through their wet clothes and giving in to feelings he’d kept at bay for months. Feelings that Sonia had made clear to him but Hawker had chosen not to act on.
It wasn’t that she was too young; she wasn’t. She was twenty. He was only thirty. It wasn’t that he worked for her father. Or that they spent their days as virtual prisoners who could not let their guard down. Those reasons had never really mattered, and to whatever extent they had, they evaporated as he kissed her and pulled her close.
In the heat and the passion of lust and love and breaking away from the fear, all thoughts left him except one: The moment he got Sonia and Ranga to freedom, to some civilized part of the world, he would have to let her go. There was nowhere for this to go, nothing ahead except pain for both of them.
That thought lingered, even as they pulled off each other’s soaking wet shirts and their hands began exploring each other’s bodies.
“Take me with you,” she asked, giving voice to Hawker’s lingering fear.
“I can’t,” he said. “It won’t be good for you.”
“It can’t be worse than this,” she said.
“It’s always worse than this,” he said. Until recently, guarding her and Ranga had been like heaven. Whatever was next would be closer to hell.
“I don’t care,” she said, her eyes closed, her words breathless as she pressed the side of her face against his. “I don’t care.”
Hawker wanted not to care, but he knew in his heart that he couldn’t do that to her. Not if he loved her. Not even if he didn’t.
The door banged open behind them. Hawker turned with a start.
Two men in fatigues, one white, one black, stood there. The white man held the keys to the truck.
“You lose these?” he said.
The men had been watching. From where, Hawker didn’t know, but this was a bad sign. It may have tipped their hand.
Hawker turned and stood with his back toward Sonia. He put his hands against the countertop. His fingers found a knife.
“That’s a nice piece of ass you got there,” the white man said. He turned to the black soldier. “What do you say we get some of that?”
As the man spoke, Hawker gripped the knife and charged. The white soldier swung his head back around just as Hawker slammed into him, plunging the knife into his chest. Gunfire sprayed into the floor and off to the right as the soldier squeezed the trigger on his weapon reflexively.
Hawker pushed him back, slamming him into the black soldier. The three of them crashed to the ground. Hawker pulled the knife out and plunged it into the black soldier’s neck. It erupted with blood. The man’s head tilted back and his eyes rolled up.
Hawker held it there, held the two men down as they died. And then a shot rang out.
He snapped his head around in time to see a third soldier fall in the doorway.
He turned back to the kitchen. Sonia held his pistol, her hands shaking. She and Ranga had sworn they would never kill, but to save him Sonia had done just that.
Hawker stood, grabbed one of the rifles, and scanned the terrain outside the door. A military jeep with a hardtop sat there. It appeared to be empty.
He backed up to Sonia. She was still shaking, still aiming the pistol where she’d fired it.
“It’s okay,” he said, helping her to lower the gun.
Her eyes blinked and she refocused on him as the sound of thunder rumbled again.
“Put this on,” he said, handing her shirt back to her.
She nodded slowly and slipped her arms into the shirt.
“We have to go,” he said, pulling his own shirt on.
She seemed confused. “What?”
“We have no choice now,” he said.
She turned to him and instead of fear or concern, all he saw was relief. They would finally be leaving this horrible place, and whatever happened they would never be coming back.
CHAPTER 44
Danielle came out of the interrogation room exhausted. She and Hawker had been taking four-hour shifts. Keegan had gone out. Like Moore he was trying to “tap any contact” he could find in hopes that there was information on the street about this group that the intelligence agencies did not have.
Trying to get information out of the prisoner, they’d kept the lights blazing, forced him to sit with his hands tied behind his back and questioned him repeatedly. When they weren’t firing questions at him, they taped a pair of headphones to his skull, blasting Western rock and roll into his ears. Danielle had also injected him with various stimulants and barbiturates that were supposed to weaken his resolve and loosen his tongue. But so far they’d gotten nothing from him, except a name he claimed over and over: Scindo.
As she left the room, she propped the door open and sat where she could keep her eyes on him. Considering the nature of the cult they were dealing with, she feared he might try to kill himself. It wouldn’t be easy with his hands and feet taped but she wasn’t taking any chances.
Hawker was supposed to be sleeping during her shift, but she found him sitting at the kitchen table with one of the 9 mm Berettas lying in front of him. He had the clip out and was loading it methodically, carefully slotting in one bullet after another, making sure they seated correctly, as if it mattered.
She’d seen the odd-looking type of shells before. It wasn’t a good sign. Hawker was nearing the breaking point.
“We can’t wait much longer,” he said.
Over the past sixteen hours Hawker had grown quiet, aloof, as if he couldn’t talk to her now. He hadn’t slept much more than their prisoner. Certainly she’d found it hard to sleep during his shifts, fearing Hawker would take the situation into his own hands.
They’d discussed several options, none of which she liked. And since then, Hawker had been brooding in silence.
“I’m not the enemy,” she said.
He looked up.
“I know that,” he mumbled, then went back to the loading.
At least they were talking.
She thought how heavy his heart must be. Feeling betrayed from all sides.
“You sent a text to Lavril,” she said.
“Tapping my phone now?”
“Keeping an eye on my partner.”
He didn’t seem to buy that answer. “I need to know what caliber gun was used at rue des Jardins,” he explained. “Lavril said it was a small caliber, maybe twenty-five.”
“Why?”
“Sonia mentioned being in Paris the day that all went down. She said she was looking for her father but now I’m not so sure.”
Danielle sat back, surprised. “You think she’s involved in this?”
He exhaled heavily, sounding worn-out. “What if she was at the house?” he said. “What if that .25-caliber pistol she gave you is the one that finished off those guys.”
“Hawker …”
“She and Ranga had a falling-out,” he added. “She told me she led that cult to Ranga. That she had contact with them before he did. What if all of them were involved, desperate to figure out how to save Nadia, and then Ranga bailed? His message said not to trust anybody.”
“You’re overthinking this,” she said, understanding how he was drawing the conclusions but feeling he had to be wrong. “What about the attack in Dubai?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, pressed the Internet button, and slid it across the desk toward her. She looked at the page displayed on his screen.
Drug company executive killed in ambush. Authorities have recordings linking him with the Dubai shootout.
The photo showed a burned-out car with an inset of the executive’s smiling face. The photo came from the company’s PR file.
“You don’t necessarily believe this?”
“The guys in Dubai were different,” he said. “They weren’t locals, they were well eq
uipped, they came in a five-million-dollar helicopter, for goodness’ sakes.”
“Aum Shinrikyo had a helicopter, too,” she said. “A Russian gunship, minus the guns. No one says cults have to travel on foot.”
“Remember the guys in France? One of them had a knife as a weapon. The guys in Dubai were professionals.”
She put the phone down, not interested in looking at the burned-out hulk of a car anymore.
“We have two chunks of that stone,” he continued. “Maybe seventy-five percent of the whole brick. Do you see any golden ball in our sections?”
Danielle had taken the two pieces apart and found nothing, except a curved interior wall that looked as if something round or spherical had been pressed up against it when the mud dried.
It reminded her of the Styrofoam that came with everything big enough to need a cardboard box. After you emptied the box you could tell what had been in it by the shape of the preformed Styrofoam packaging.
She remembered what Sonia had said. The ancients sealed the seeds in a waxen ball and then covered them in gold, before hiding it within the secret vessel.
If that golden ball existed it seemed likely that it had been contained entirely within the small section that Sonia had taken.
“She just grabbed what was in front of her,” Danielle said.
“She grabbed it first,” he said. “Before either of us reached in. Before I even said anything.”
“That doesn’t mean she knew what she was getting.”
“I think she did,” Hawker said. “She studied it, when it broke.”
Danielle remembered Sonia looking at the broken pieces, staring at them like she was in shock. It had seemed like confusion and sadness to Danielle; now Hawker seemed to see it as cold, calculating study.
“For an instant, in the dark,” she said, defending the young woman.
“She slowed us down on the way back to the ATVs and then she slipped and gave us away.”
It all made some sense, but Danielle couldn’t believe it was true. More likely lack of sleep and desperation were getting the better of Hawker. “Don’t do this to yourself,” she begged. “In the end it doesn’t really matter, does it? She’s not the important thing here.”
He tilted his head slightly, pursing his lips as if another blow had just landed. Instantly she regretted the choice of her words. Tact was often the first casualty of exhaustion.
“I need to know,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to believe in her.”
Danielle could understand that. “If Lavril says the wounds are from a .25-caliber that doesn’t prove anything. Even if it did, it’ll just leave you hating her for betraying you and hating yourself for believing in her.”
He remained silent and she hoped her words were reaching him.
“And if it comes back that the kill shots were fired from a .32 or .380 or a .22, then you’ll hate yourself for failing her somehow even though you did everything you could.”
Hawker took a breath. He put the last bullet in the clip and slid the clip home in the handle of the gun.
She reached out and put her hand on his hand and the pistol at the same time. She wasn’t good at this part, at healing or helping. It had never been her nature.
He looked up and this time he held her gaze. “What would you have me do?” he asked.
She did her best to answer honestly. “I’d try to forget about her and finish the mission. I’m not saying it’s easy.”
He looked at the wall, bitter and tense.
“Why else would she run to them?” he asked, getting to the point that obviously hurt him the most.
Everyone had their blind spots, things they just couldn’t see because their temperament prevented it. She guessed that maybe Hawker had manufactured his own blind spot in regards to Sonia.
“Do you really not get it?” she asked. “She saw you on the hill. You think she didn’t know what was going to happen? You think she didn’t know you were going to die up there trying to save her?”
Hawker looked away, considering the thought.
“You think either of us wanted you to stay there?” she added. “If it had been her—or me—up on the hill, what would you have done?”
Hawker seemed to get what she was saying, but she couldn’t tell if he believed it. Maybe didn’t want to. Maybe it was easier not to.
“She loves you,” Danielle said bluntly. “You were willing to die to save her and she was willing to return the favor.”
“I wasn’t planning on dying,” he said.
“But it was a distinct possibility.”
“She couldn’t know they’d follow her,” he said.
There was still anger in his voice, a ragged edge.
“She knew they weren’t shooting at her. She made a choice. You have to decide if you think it was for her benefit or for yours.”
Beside her, Hawker’s phone lit up. She noticed a French country code. But it was a text, not a call.
“It’s Lavril,” she said.
He nodded. “And?”
She pressed the View Message icon, then hesitated for a moment as she read it. “The gun was a twenty-two. Not Sonia’s.”
A look of relief eased onto Hawker’s face. And then a new kind of anger took its place.
“So she’s at their mercy,” he said, and then nodded toward the detention room. “And that son of a bitch in there knows where she is.”
Before she could react, he snatched up the pistol, stormed toward the interrogation room, and kicked the door open.
CHAPTER 45
Sonia stood in an open doorway looking into an advanced genetics laboratory. It was spotless and clean and equipped with everything she and her father could have ever asked for. In fact they—or at least he—had asked for this equipment at one time. The sight of it made her sick.
“Move,” a man said, jabbing her in the back with a rifle.
She stumbled forward into the gleaming room. Another man sat on a chair inside, grinning at her. He had a rectangular tattoo that curved around his neck and covered some kind of scar. In a strange way it almost looked like a bar code. A snake tattoo slithered down one arm from under the cuff of his black T-shirt. His eyes were points of black ice in a gleaming white room.
“Leave us,” he said to the guard.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Don’t you recognize your master?”
So this was the leader, the one she’d spoken to but never met.
“You’re no ‘master,’ ” she said. “You’re just a murdering psychopath with a bunch of fools following you.”
She expected venom from him, a slap across the face or hand to her throat to choke half the life out of her for what she’d said, but he seemed unmoved.
“See things so deeply, do you?”
She didn’t respond.
“You’re the fool,” he said with disdain. “You and your pathetic allies. Hawker … Danielle … the ridiculous Arnold Moore.”
She didn’t recognize the last name, but a wave of trepidation swept through her as he spoke Hawker’s and Danielle’s names. She hadn’t expected him to know or care who had been helping her. How could he know? she wondered. Why did he care?
She tried not to react.
“You think this is about you?” he said. “How vain.”
She suddenly felt afraid even to speak. Was there something going on beyond what she understood?
The “Master” changed the subject.
“Your father bowed down before me,” he said. “You will do the same. And then the whole world will follow.”
It was the danger that had driven Ranga and her apart. In their own ways they’d attempted to mitigate that danger, Ranga going into hiding, Sonia trying to take Paradox public and raise enough money and publicity to the point where she’d be safe. But none of it had worked and this sick, twisted man in front of her was gloating over it.
Feeling a wave of strength flow from her
anger, she looked around. For some reason a hammer lay on the bench beside her. She grabbed it and lunged forward, swinging it at him, but he caught her wrist as if he was waiting for it, twisted her arm around until it felt as if it might snap, and then swatted the hammer out of her grasp.
She expected him to let go now that she’d been disarmed but he continued to twist her hand, turning her wrist outward and down until it felt as if her elbow, her wrist, and her shoulder were going to come apart at the same time.
She let out a meek cry of pain but he didn’t stop. Instead he pushed harder, stepping forward, pressing her down until she was forced to her knees. With a shove he let her go. She fell backward and hit the floor.
In more fear than ever, Sonia scooted away from him until she hit the solid block of the workstation behind her.
The man with the tattoo stepped toward her, grabbed the hammer off the floor, and then yanked her up to her feet.
“Let me show you something more useful to do with this tool.”
Grabbing the back of her arm he walked her over to another table. Resting in the middle lay the section of the tablet Sonia had placed in her pack. She knew what it held. She prayed she was wrong, but she doubted it.
The man grabbed a carbon steel chisel, placed it against the center of the tablet, and swung the hammer rather lightly.
One blow, one chime of metal on metal, and the tablet split in half. At the center, three small objects half the size of golf balls rocked back and forth. The baked clay clung to them but in places the gold leaf showed through.
The seeds of the Tree of Life lay inside.
“You think they’re just going to stop?” she said, thinking of Hawker and his American government friend. “They want this as badly as you do.”
“Maybe worse,” the man said in a mocking tone.
“They’ll come for me,” she insisted. “And even if you kill me, they’ll come for you.”
“I believe you,” he said sadistically. “In fact I’m counting on it.”
Once again Sonia had been thrown off balance. The situation was terrifying. She was quite sure she was going to die before it ended, but each time her captor spoke or reacted differently than she expected, she grew even more afraid.
