by Ted Dekker
So Englishman would simply kill the woman now and go after Johnny.
Unless going after Johnny proved more difficult than he’d estimated, in which case having the girl alive might prove useful.
All of this crossed his mind before Johnny crashed to the ground outside the window. Kelly was screaming something as her third bullet whipped through the bedroom doorway.
The Englishman reached around the door frame and shot the pistol from her hand.
She cried out and snatched her hand close to her chest.
“Stay!” he snapped.
“You want me, not him!”
Englishman jumped to his feet and bounded for the door. He could hear stones tumbling outside as Johnny climbed the rock slide behind the cabin, but the sounds were scattered. The thought of Johnny escaping him now mucked up his instincts.
Kelly was reaching for the gun behind him. Furious, he jabbed his finger back at her. “Stay!”
The gun by her hand flew through the air as if it were on a string. He accepted it with his open fist, stepped into the night air, and fired wildly at the mound of boulders behind the cabin.
He fired seven shots in rapid succession. But he knew as he pulled the trigger that he couldn’t direct the bullets with so much confusion at hand. His bullets smacked into rocks, unguided.
Englishman cried out in rage. The man was escaping. He could kill the girl and go after him, but Johnny undoubtedly had another gun strapped somewhere to his body. Johnny didn’t have Englishman’s power, but his aim was astonishingly accurate. And he loved the dark even more than Englishman. Johnny could sit in silence at the top of the cliff and pick him off at his leisure.
Englishman threw one of his guns on the ground and walked back into the cabin, calming himself. Johnny knew Englishman wouldn’t kill Kelly now. A hostage was too valuable given the circumstances. And Johnny made the judgment quickly. Much more quickly than Englishman expected.
He stared at Kelly, who was evidently still stunned by the flying-gun trick.
“Get up,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re leaving for a place better suited to our objective. If Johnny doesn’t follow, I’m going to kill you.”
“He’ll never do that.”
“He’ll die for you. Or do you think he was just pulling your leg?” “He’ll know you’re just using me.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s foolish enough to love you; he’ll be foolish enough to die for you.”
The sound of a helicopter winding up on the cliff cut through the night. He cursed himself for not taking the time to scout it out and disable it earlier.
Englishman eyed Kelly, who had gathered herself and was scowling. He allowed himself a smile. The woman he’d allowed to toy with him for so many months was beautiful; he could never deny that much. And wearing her anger, she was downright fascinating. Little did she know how much she cared for him.
But Englishman knew. Deep down where the black and the white traded blows, Kelly was desperate for him.
He lifted his pistol toward her, thumbed the release, and let the spent clip clatter to the floor. “Round one, Johnny.”
Englishman slammed a fresh clip into the gun, chambered a round, and let go of the handle. The pistol hung in the air unmoving, aimed at Kelly. He stepped away from the obedient weapon.
“Stay,” he said. “If she tries to run, shoot her in the leg.”
Englishman looked at Kelly, who had traded her scowl for a look of amazement. Some fear. Respect and admiration. She was smitten by him. It was a pity he hated her; they would have made a good pair.
So why was he making such a display about showing her his power? Was he trying to impress her? They both knew there was no need for him to release the gun. It would shoot just as well in his fist.
He was toying with her, rubbing her hopelessness in her face.
Or maybe he was trying to win her respect because he didn’t hate her as much as he thought he did.
Englishman grunted, stepped forward, and snatched the weapon out of the air, his bad mood at having lost Johnny now fouler because of this minor indiscretion.
He pointed the gun at the door. “Go.”
“Where?”
“After Johnny.”
“Where is Johnny going?”
Englishman hesitated, deciding whether to demonstrate his flaw-less logic in determining Johnny’s next steps, which he had indeed calculated in the last sixty seconds while unwisely indulging in this gun-floating trick. He owed her no explanation. But he gave her a short one anyway, perhaps to impress her once again. He chastised himself even as he spoke.
“He’s going to prove his love for you.”
JOHNNY RAN down the mountain, propelled by his need to save. To liberate. To kill.
With each plunging step through the underbrush, his decision to put so much distance between him and the woman he loved haunted him. He had to force his legs forward, down, over logs, through the branches grabbing at his legs.
But his instinct told him that his decision was a good one. Perhaps the only way to save Kelly. If Englishman guessed his course and prevented him from succeeding, on the other hand, this flight away from Kelly could prove disastrous.
The helicopter had wound up and left with David. He’d protested Johnny’s insistence that he leave immediately, but a short discussion had persuaded him. If Kalman had sent Englishman after them, it would be for Johnny and Kelly, not David. The last thing they could risk was making the helicopter a target, which it would become if Johnny and Kelly were in it. Shooting a helicopter out of the air would be an easy task for Englishman.
More than this, Johnny wasn’t interested in fleeing. He and Kelly knew they would have to deal with this threat directly.
He’d come instantly and fully awake at the sound of a distant rock hitting the cliff. Not rolling down with a series of clicks as others had done through the night, but striking a far rock wall with some force.
Unnatural. Then he’d heard the soft thump of two feet landing on sand and knew that Englishman was outside.
Now, Johnny broke from the brush onto a wide ledge that over-looked the sleeping, moonlit town below.
He’d been here. He’d seen something significant from this very ledge. The events that David had described hours earlier flooded his mind. He’d seen part of them from this vantage point. The only thing that was more difficult to believe than this story of David’s was that Johnny had some power hidden in his bones today because of it.
But the details of his past weren’t germane to his mission today. They would tell him who he’d once been, not who he was now. They wouldn’t save Kelly or him. They would not kill Englishman.
Englishman, who evidently wasn’t the same man Johnny had always known him to be.
Johnny turned onto the path on his right and continued his descent at a fast run. A shiver passed down his spine. He’d seen Englishman’s knife lift from the floor as if manipulated by a magnetic field. Seen it floating toward him, picking up speed, flashing through the night.
His instinct told him to block the weapon before it reached his neck. His mind told him not to. It understood something that wasn’t apparent to his instincts.
It understood that if Englishman could do this, he could easily kill Johnny at any time. Could kill Johnny at his leisure. If Johnny tried to stop the knife, he would only injure himself. Perhaps lose his fingers or a hand.
His mind buzzed with the implication of Englishman’s power. Either Englishman had perfected control of the zero-point field, or he possessed a power far beyond any Agotha knew about. Or David Abraham, for that matter, because David had said that only two others possessed such power, and both were being watched.
Johnny had affected the flight of a bullet with supreme focus, but Englishman had done far more. Any direct conflict with the man would end disastrously.
He ran with a growing fear. What he was about to attempt was nothing short of
impossible. Yet he saw no other way.
His fear gave way to anger as he approached Paradise. The town was in deep sleep when he ran past the Paradise Community Center, toward the blue truck. A dog barked at him from a front yard. He sprinted past, eager to get out of this hole from his past.
The keys were still in the wheel well where they’d left them. The money behind the seats. Blowing a breath of relief, he slid behind the wheel, fired the truck, peeled through a U-turn, and roared out of the valley.
Miles flew by in a confusing haze. The tunnel in his mind obediently formed, leading to the familiar light. Success depended on reaching the target before it was removed from his scope of operation. If he was too late, the mission would present him with significant new challenges that would set him back days.
He had money. He had a set of papers that identified him as Saul Matheson. And he had the skills of an assassin—the fact that he could so easily form his tunnel now under duress assured him of this much.
Johnny drove north, through Delta, toward Grand Junction, slip-ping deeper and deeper into his tunnel, energized by a growing anger that surprisingly didn’t compromise his focus. In fact, this new fury boiling in him seemed to make the light brighter.
He reached the airport north of Grand Junction as the sun edged above the mesas. The guns he left in the truck; the rest he took.
The only seat available on the 6:49 flight to Denver was a firstclass seat identical in every way to the rest of the seats on the nineteen-seat United Express turboprop. The firstclass seat on the Boeing 757 to New York was more comfortable, but comfort wasn’t a thing he could easily judge. In his mind, the pit was still his safest and by extension his most comfortable place.
He didn’t belong in the pit. Not now.
Now he belonged behind a gun, preparing to send a bullet into a target’s brain to save the one woman besides his mother whom he loved.
He would kill anyone to save her. Anyone or everyone.
The decision satisfied a deep yearning in his psyche to justify the hours of torment during which Johnny had become Carl. The training would be redeemed—it would now help him save the woman he loved.
He was really Carl, he decided. He would be Carl and he would do what Carl would do.
He would force Dale’s hand by killing the man he’d crossed the oceans to kill.
30
Carl and Kelly had selected the Best Western in Chinatown as one of their two dummy rooms. The authorities may have traced him to the Peking Grand Hotel, where he met Samuel, but there was little chance that anyone had found the room they rented for a week at the Best Western.
If they had, Carl doubted they’d found the small stash of weapons in the toilet tank. He was right.
Carl pulled out the bag, ripped open the plastic, and spilled two 9mm handguns, two extra clips, two sheathed knives, and one cell phone onto the bed. He shoved both guns into his belt behind him, dropped the clips into the pocket of his jacket, and strapped one knife to each of his ankles.
Grabbing the cell phone, he strode from the room, hurried down the stairs, and caught a yellow cab at the curb.
“Bellevue Hospital,” he said.
“Bellevue, First Street,” the cabby repeated, punching his meter, which immediately began its count from $4.20.
“Please.”
The car pulled into traffic. The late-afternoon sun was setting behind them as they angled northeast on Houston. Carl had never put much thought into whether a target deserved to be killed, at least not in his time of training with the X Group. But now he did, and he’d come to the conclusion en route to New York that this target deserved to die, no matter what the world thought of him.
This man deserved to die to save Kelly.
This man deserved to die because Johnny had sworn to kill him.
This man deserved to die because Carl had been trained to kill him.
KELLY WAS tempted to cry out to one of the security guards as they exited La Guardia Airport, but she knew the impulse was a bad one. Not only were they all on the wrong side of justice, but they were playing a game that no security guard or policeman would understand.
Englishman had driven her north to Grand Junction, where he’d found the blue truck parked at the airport. He grunted in satisfaction and then booked them on the 7:50 flight through Denver to New York.
Kelly had asked him questions on the drive from Paradise, but Englishman refused to respond. She wasn’t sure if he was sulking or simply playing his cards close. Afterward, they didn’t exchange a single word all the way to New York. He had her in a virtual prison. One wrong move and he would kill her with as little effort as it took him to cough.
Who was the man? Certainly not the same assassin she’d ordered around in Hungary. But he was the same man, which could only mean that he had been playing her the whole time. Did Agotha or Kalman know that he had these incredible powers?
No, she didn’t think so. Agotha wouldn’t have shown so much interest in Carl’s small feats if she knew that next door there was a man who could float a gun around the room.
If she hadn’t seen Englishman float the gun with her own eyes, she would still think the old man had spun a piece of pure fiction with his tale of magical books. She’d often thought of the Bible as precisely such a fictional book of fables.
But now she’d seen the impossible, and she was quite sure there was such a thing as supernatural power after all. On any other day, the revelation would have thrilled her to the bone.
Instead, it left her flat. Of course this power existed. She’d known it all along, somewhere beyond her immediate consciousness.
None of it mattered anymore. The man she’d fallen in love with was going to die. And if he was going to die, she was also going to die.
Englishman hailed a cab and held the door for her without meeting her eyes. She could swear he was sulking.
“UN Headquarters,” he told the driver.
The cab pulled out, braked hard to avoid colliding with a sedan, then surged into the flow of cars.
“Why are we going to the United Nations?” she asked.
Englishman spoke to her for the first time since leaving Colorado. “To kill Johnny.”
EVERYTHING IN Carl’s mind was black except for that light at the end of his tunnel. The light of his plan, the light of Kelly’s freedom.
“Could you pull over here?” Carl asked, motioning to a side street.
“Not Bellevue?” The man’s eyes searched the rearview mirror.
“Pull over here.”
The cab pulled over.
“Is this your cab?”
“Yes. I lease name and sign from company.”
“I need to borrow it. Two hours, ten thousand dollars. Does that sound fair?”
The man looked back and waved a hand. “No, it is illegal. I cannot—”
“Fifteen thousand, then.” This time Carl pushed three banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills through the hole in the Plexiglas shield that separated them. “You can buy a new car if I damage this one.”
The driver gawked at him, either thrilled by such an extravagant offer or terrified by it.
“No questions. If you’d rather, I’ll make the same offer to the next cab. I don’t have much time.”
“How will I get car—”
“Parked in front of Bellevue Hospital in two hours. Yes or no?”
The man hesitated only a second before taking the money and flipping through it. He cast a long, furtive glance back, then tapped his watch. “Seven o’clock, Bellevue Hospital?”
“Yes.”
The man climbed out and looked around nervously as Johnny rounded the cab and slid behind the wheel.
He drove the car north, past Bellevue, past Thirty-fourth, past Forty-second, and parked near the UN Headquarters on the corner of First and Forty-sixth.
Most meetings on the original summit schedule had been disrupted by his attempt on the president’s life, but according to the CNN report that Car
l had seen in the Denver airport, the meeting now under way in the UN Building wasn’t one of them.
Under any other circumstance, he would have set up with a rifle and taken a shot from a safe distance. But with Englishman undoubtedly in pursuit, he didn’t have time for such luxury.
Carl waited in the cab patiently, staring with fixed eyes at the doors through which the target would exit, acutely aware of details that his training had taught him to absorb.
The man fifty yards up the street who ambled slowly with a bottle in one hand and a stick in the other, poking through each garbage receptacle he passed.
The child across the street who’d stopped with his mother to gaze at the UN entrance.
A bird on the street lamp twenty meters north, cocking its eyes at him.
The security guards stationed by the front door, who had cast frequent glances his way before crossing the street and accepting his explanation that he was waiting for an aide, whom he named from a memorized list.
Each limousine and cab that approached and passed, which he examined like a machine searching for defective eggs at a poultry factory.
Most of this occurred outside of Carl’s direct focus. Only one objective mattered to him now, and that objective received most of his attention.
Carl sat with both hands on the steering wheel, drilling the doors with an unbroken stare, sweating with cold fury now. He didn’t want to sweat, but he wanted to feel, so he let his body react normally to the anger that filled the black walls of his tunnel.
Only when a tremble overtook his fingers did Carl rein in his rage. Within seconds his fingers stilled, and within five minutes the sweat on his skin had dried.
Then the doors opened and a dozen dark-suited guards and digni-taries spilled from the UN Headquarters.
It was time.
31
Englishman had a choice.
He always had a choice. Choice, choice, choice, that was his middle name. But he knew what he would choose.
At the moment his choices were as follows: One, kill Kelly now, as she rode muted in the backseat of the cab, and then kill the cabby and take the car on his own. Two, kill Kelly and let the cabby live. Three, kill only the cabby and take the car with Kelly beside him. Four, kill neither Kelly nor the cabby and let the cabby do the driving under the persuasion of his gun.
