Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “Todd—”

  “He’s your backup in New Orleans. He’ll help you, he’ll . . .”

  “Todd, you’ve got to listen to—”

  “. . . get you out of this.”

  Katie squeezed the phone tighter. “Todd, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Hide if you can. Flee the village. You’re in danger.”

  Silence again.

  “Todd? . . . Todd?”

  “Call Twist, call—”

  Click.

  That was it; the line had gone dead. And the men were closing from both sides and across the street, the phone call having branded her an easy target. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t continue forward. All she could do was veer suddenly toward a restaurant called K-Paul’s on Chartres Street.

  CHAPTER 16

  New Orleans

  McCracken and Wareagle both ordered the blackened Louisiana drum, fish caught just miles away.

  “I feel better already,” McCracken said, taking a bite of his.

  “Have you spoken with the family of the student who died?”

  “Now why would I do something like that?”

  “Because you’d want them to hear what happened from you, Blainey. You’d want to put a face to the grief to better deal with your own.”

  “Not yet, no,” McCracken said, almost shyly. “But I’ve got their contact info. Not sure if just showing up on their doorstep is in anyone’s best interest. Folsom said he’d handle it, which means it won’t happen or be a waste of time. . . . What?” McCracken asked, when Wareagle continue to stare at him in silence.

  “It’s refreshing.”

  “What?”

  “How you’ve always valued one life as much as a hundred. In the Hellfire and after.”

  “Well, Indian, I’m too old to change now.” The entry door being thrust open ahead of a young woman bursting through drew his attention immediately that way. “Like I was saying.”

  She had wavy black hair and eyes that seemed to shine in the restaurant’s light. She swung toward the door again as she backed away, as if expecting someone to barge in after her. Keeping her eyes peeled in that direction, she angled for the bar while scanning the room, in search perhaps of an alternative exit.

  Just like McCracken would have done if he were being chased.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking, Indian?” he asked, aware Wareagle’s gaze had been drawn to her as well.

  In that moment, a pair of big-shouldered men burst through the restaurant entrance.

  “Not our problem, Blainey.”

  But then pistols flashed in the big-shouldered men’s hands.

  “It is now,” McCracken told him, reaching for the chair across which he’d laid his samurai sword.

  Katie DeMarco veered away from the bar when she saw the men coming, steering toward an exit sign posted near the south side of K-Paul’s rear just past a similar sign for the restrooms. Coming that way straight toward her, though, were another pair of men who might have been twins of the first pair. Dressed almost identically, their hands were starting to emerge from beneath their jackets.

  Katie thought of crying out, screaming, anything to draw attention to herself and stop the coming attack. But the resolve she glimpsed in the men’s eyes told her no response that feeble could forestall their intentions. So she turned again, intending to cut through the center of the restaurant, when a man at a table just past the bar whipped out a sword from inside a wooden scabbard, its mirrorlike steel glinting in the naked light of the restaurant.

  At that point, McCracken was utterly unsure of his own intentions. He’d always described moments like this as swimming with the currents, letting the flow dictate his actions based on what unfolded before him.

  He had just brought the katana overhead when the two men angling for the woman from the bar area halted and steadied their pistols on her.

  They’re going to fire.

  McCracken didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. Holding fast to the simple wooden handle, he brought the back edge of the blade down hard on both men’s wrists at once, catching them totally by surprise. The force of the blow stripped the pistols from their grasps and sent them clanging to the floor, one coughing a bullet through the crowded restaurant on impact.

  That was more than enough to send patrons ducking, diving, or scurrying for cover, as McCracken rammed the hilt of the sword’s wooden handle hard into the nearer man’s forehead. He seemed to fly backward through the air on impact, feet torn from under him until a plate-laden table broke his fall and collapsed beneath him. The second man spun and had the presence of mind to go for a second pistol holstered back on his hip, steel starting to show when McCracken whipped the blade edge outward and caught enough of the man’s wrist to open up a deep, nasty gash that left the hand on that side useless.

  McCracken couldn’t believe the sword’s power, as elegant in motion as it was deadly. It felt as though he were wielding air, effortlessly able to slice though bone and flesh and almost difficult to measure his blows enough to avoid severing a limb. And, with the second man’s focus rooted on the sword now, McCracken looped in with an elbow that mashed jaw and nose under its force on impact. The man’s head whiplashed backward, and he dropped to the floor like a felled tree.

  McCracken swung, sword angled anew when screams rang out, and he spotted one of the attackers on Johnny Wareagle’s side wheeling about the tables with a huge knife sticking out of his arm.

  •

  Wareagle had seen the pistol coming up on the raven-haired woman. Knew there was nothing he could do from this distance, other than hurl the blade now grasped in his hand. It twirled through the air in a blur, ultimately piercing the gunman’s forearm.

  The gunman’s pistol fired wildly, severed nerves forcing his hand to lock in place without being able to fire it again since he couldn’t make his finger curl back over the trigger. But now the second man on Johnny’s side was angling his pistol on the young woman rushing toward an emergency exit in the restaurant’s rear, no thought given to the frenzied crowd or the very real possibility that a bullet could just as easily find a bystander. The man simply opened fire, bullets tracing the young woman’s path toward the back exit, panicked patrons now blocking Johnny’s path to reach the man. Options reduced to one, Wareagle leaped atop one of K-Paul’s tables and hopped across others en route to the final gunman who was jamming a fresh magazine home.

  From the table nearest him, Wareagle lashed out with a kick that impacted just under his chin, literally lifting the gunman off his feet. He looked as if he were trying to perform a somersault, then hit the floor with his skull breaking his fall.

  McCracken watched the final gunman go down, just as a shaft of light shined inside from the open emergency exit through which the raven-haired young woman had disappeared. Before he could even think about pursuing her, a pair of uniformed New Orleans cops burst through the front door with pistols drawn.

  “Police!” the older of the two officers screamed, gaze darting between him and Johnny with eyes bulging at the sight of the samurai sword in McCracken’s grasp. “Drop to the floor! You hear me, down on the floor, both of you!”

  McCracken and Wareagle had no choice but to oblige, as sirens wailed in the narrowing distance.

  CHAPTER 17

  Greenland

  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Lipton?”

  Todd Lipton looked up from his satellite phone back at the reporter. “Friend of mine’s gotten herself in a bit of trouble,” he said.

  “WorldSafe trouble?” she asked him.

  “I came out here to escape these things,” Lipton told her, clipping the satellite phone back on his belt.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” said Beth Douglas, the reporter doing the story on WorldSafe from “an undisclosed location,” as she scribbled something down on her notepad. “Can we continue?”

  “Please.”

  “So what are you, Mr. Lipton, the rugged prote
ctor of the world’s natural resources or an environmental terrorist?”

  Lipton ran a hand through his nest of thick black hair, which was a perfect match for his long beard. “That’s a rather extreme distinction.”

  “Then let me rephrase the question,” Douglas offered. “Is WorldSafe’s reputation deserved or are you denying responsibility for the attacks on several alleged polluters?”

  “I categorically deny being involved in any crime. How’s that?”

  Beth Douglas scribbled some more, didn’t respond. Lipton watched, trying to read what she was writing and starting to question the strategy of consenting to this interview. But money was low and the article was certain to aid the new fund-raising efforts currently under way for the group.

  Right now he found himself more concerned about Katie DeMarco and would have to overcome the distraction, as well as resist the temptation to call her back as many times as it took to get a clear line. She had used the word danger, warned him to flee and hide. No easy task since the team had based itself in the obscure fishing village of Qepertarsuag in Greenland amid rolling hills, crystal water, and lush greenery. It was a place time itself had forgotten. But none of the natives seemed to mind, and certainly Lipton and his people didn’t either. Going back to living off the unspoiled land was exactly what they were about. The locals were friendly and welcoming and refused to take a single cent to allow WorldSafe to base their camp within a grove of trees in view of the water’s edge between the village’s rustic royal blue church and the start of the sloping hillside that held many of the homes of its residents.

  “Mr. Lipton?”

  “What? Er, sorry. You were saying . . .”

  “I was asking if you consider yourself part of Greenpeace.”

  “No. We broke away years ago when the politics got to be a bit much. And too high an amount of the funds Greenpeace raised went to administrative costs—salaries, in other words. As you can see, Ms. Douglas,” Lipton continued, pointing at the modest camp around them, “we spend our money to support our cause, not fatten our wallets.”

  Douglas seemed to like that quote, underlining it after she’d jotted it down, while Lipton scratched at his beard.

  “How would you describe the differences with which you operate?” she asked him.

  “Well, while our goals are similar to Greenpeace’s, WorldSafe’s methods are neither as confrontational nor as militant. Instead our organization has come to rely on infiltration and embedment to uncover truths that simple sign wagging and protests could never reveal. Information makes for a much better weapon than sabotage and, thanks to the web, the revelations we uncover are able to reach the widest possible audience.”

  “So you deny involvement in any of the violent actions that have been taken against your targets?”

  “Categorically, Ms. Douglas. And we don’t ‘target’ anyone; we merely expose the truth.”

  “People died in those attacks, Mr. Lipton, a number of them. Over twenty.”

  “Maybe you should ask Greenpeace about their involvement. The closest we’ve ever come to aggression is launching a computer virus or two,” he said, trying for a smile but failing to muster one.

  “And yet,” Beth Douglas continued, “the nearest Internet access is a ninety-minute drive from here.”

  “We also have no electricity, plumbing, or running water. Our members here live in two-hundred-square-foot eco-shacks formed of thinly insulated corrugated metal that take about a half day to assemble. Not a lot of room for anything except a pair of fold-down bunks, but the simple lifestyle we prefer doesn’t call for much at all.”

  “Are you worried about your enemies finding you here?”

  “We don’t have enemies, Ms. Douglas, only corporations that don’t like the truth exposed.”

  “And if they decided to retaliate?”

  “I fully expect they’d do so in a court of law.”

  “Difficult to adjudicate your actions in an American court with you based in Greenland now.”

  “That thought had crossed my mind,” Lipton said with a wink, at his most gracious and charming, even though he couldn’t get his mind off whatever had befallen Katie. “What do you say we continue our tour of the site?”

  “I need to send a text first,” Beth Douglas told him, Android phone already in hand.

  Lipton turned away, thinking of Katie DeMarco again as the reporter typed a simple message:

  IT’S A GO. SEND THEM IN.

  CHAPTER 18

  New Orleans

  McCracken used his one phone call at the police precinct to which he and Johnny Wareagle had been taken to dial Hank Folsom’s number at Homeland Security in Washington.

  “Guess who?” he greeted, after Folsom answered his emergency private line.

  “McCracken?”

  “Time to return that favor you owe me, Washington.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “No, just your city and you’re all the same to me.”

  “And you want a favor?”

  “Little entanglement down here in New Orleans I need you to extricate me from.”

  “So you’ve heard . . .”

  McCracken caught the edge in Folsom’s voice. “Heard what?”

  The man from Homeland cleared his throat, clearly caught having said too much. “This isn’t a secure line. That’s as far as this goes.”

  “As far as what goes?”

  “Just tell me where you are, McCracken. Homeland’s been looking for you.”

  Folsom wouldn’t say what for, asking instead for the details on what exactly McCracken and Wareagle had gotten themselves embroiled in.

  “You’re not making any of this up?” he asked at the end.

  “Nope.”

  “Even the part about the samurai sword? No, never mind. I think I get it now.”

  “Get what, D.C.?”

  “How you came by that famous nickname of yours—McCrackenballs. You still know how to crack them, don’t you?”

  “In this case I could have sliced a few off, but chose not to. I’m getting discreet in my old age.”

  “Tell that to the Mexican authorities. Your actions down there caused a diplomatic nightmare.”

  “Department of State’s problem, not Homeland’s.”

  “Get back to this woman in the restaurant,” said Folsom. “What else can you tell me about her?”

  “I’ve told you everything already. Never saw her before in my life. She runs into K-Paul’s chased by four thugs determined to kill her.”

  A pause followed during which McCracken could hear Folsom breathing. “You’re certain about that?”

  “Shots were fired, Capitol.”

  “Can you just call me by my name?”

  “Sure, Hank, or would you prefer junior? Your father was in I-Corps back in the day before he landed that cushy diplomatic gig. Following in his footsteps, are you?”

  “Touché.”

  “You really think I’d work for a man without checking him out?”

  “You weren’t working for me.”

  “Sure, Hank, whatever you say.”

  “Tell me more about these four men.”

  “All currently hospitalized and sure to be out of custody before you file your next memo.”

  “And how’s that exactly?”

  “Someone’s pulling strings, someone who knows how to make problems go away in a hurry.”

  “That’s a pretty big assumption, McCracken.”

  “Is it, Hank? How about I bet you your pension that they’re free by the time the hospital finishes stitching them back together?”

  “You’re making this into something bigger than it is.”

  “Right, my lousy judgment’s why you came to me in the first place to rescue those frat boys.”

  “I came to you because I knew you were the only one who could get it done and I was right.”

  “Now tell me why Homeland’s looking for me again.”

  Folsom hesitated
for a moment before responding. “Because of a friend of yours named Paul Basmajian.”

  McCracken felt himself stiffen, Wareagle sensing the change immediately in his demeanor. “He’s a lot more than a friend, Hank.”

  “So I gathered.” Folsom hesitated, the sound of his breathing filling the line. “He’s missing, along with an entire hundred-man crew from an offshore oil rig called the Venture.”

  McCracken felt like someone had struck him hard everywhere at once. For a moment the words didn’t come and, when they finally did, it felt as if someone else was speaking them.

  “If they were just missing, Hank, if there’d been an accident or an attack, Homeland wouldn’t need Johnny and me. That means there’s got to be more.”

  “Oh, there is,” Folsom told him, “a lot more. You know what a Level Six event is?”

  “No. Must be a term that came up since I went on hiatus. Enlighten me.”

  “Let me put it this way. Level Five is a nuclear attack. Does that give you a clear enough idea?”

  McCracken felt his pulse rate increasing. “You’re talking a potential threat to the entire country.”

  “Not quite, McCracken. Try the world.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Greenland

  Lipton was glad when Beth Douglas finally left, allowing him to turn all his attention back to Katie DeMarco, but finding himself increasingly unnerved when he remained unable to get through.

  What if someone had jammed her phone . . . or his?

  Katie’s message, rendered cryptic by the terrible signal, had left Lipton’s neck hairs standing on end. With night having fallen now, and WorldSafe hardly seeing the need to assign a security guard to watch over the camp, Lipton decided to check the grounds for possible trouble himself.

  “I said you’re not safe. I think Ocean Bore is on to us.”

  Katie DeMarco’s words continued to unnerve him as he stepped out of his eco-shack into the crystal clear night air. Amazing what real air smelled and looked like, Lipton thought. People often laughed at him when he insisted air could look like anything. They just didn’t understand how much ugly light shed by cities and towns did to detract from what the unspoiled world should be. Entertainment here came instead from the majestic brilliance of a star-filled sky, never looking the same from one night to the next. And had WorldSafe based their camp farther to the north of the world’s largest island, they would have found themselves in the land of the Midnight Sun, capable of enjoying daylight all day long during the summer months.