by Jon Land
But the Mind wasn’t helpless.
Of the moment when the first life gave way to the second, there was virtually no recollection—just an instant of blinding heat and somewhere deep the realization of a transition as intense in form as it was in meaning. From the body’s perishing, the Mind was born. Since it could not feel, it feared nothing. It was immortal, invincible, in search only of purpose. Often, though not often enough at first, the Mind grasped its reason for being from the dreamlike state it found itself drifting into.
There had to be retribution. What else could account for its very existence? In the daydreams it could see those who had destroyed the first life and brought the pain. But not its own pain. Something far beyond the body had been lost, something infinitely more precious. The Mind saw the faces and strove to touch them. It could not feel and yet it felt pain, and the only thoughts that eased the pain were of retribution. The makers of death would be vanquished, one at a time, in ways fitting the establishment of the madness they perpetuated. Not one would be spared. Not one.
For a brief time these thoughts served the Mind well. Yet the vastness of the retribution that was required soon mirrored that of the pain the Mind could not force from its being. It could not feel and yet it felt. A paradox. The memories conjured up the faces again and again, and perhaps it was the faces that at last showed the Mind how to alleviate the pain.
Where the pain had begun lay the means to vanquish it forever.
Yes!
Another instant of blinding, terrible heat and the Mind would be soothed. Strange how everything had become so clear so quickly. With the craving for more had come more. Desire and attainment were merely different sides of the same coin.
The Mind’s rage eased. It rested. For a time.
Because passion was fleeting. The coin had a third side in which satisfaction was again denied. More, always more. Each time one vision began to crystallize to soothe it, another began to take form, and the pain would flame anew, different yet the same. Pain from the first life that thrived on beyond the world the Mind had constructed for itself. Thus, the answer. It had escaped the first life, but the first life continued. Another paradox.
And with that the Mind had begun to ponder on the ways to resolve it.
Chapter 24
HE WASN’T SURE what awakened him—not a sound so much as a motion, or a sudden change in it. He awoke to the awareness of figures around him, realizing it just too late to keep his alertness secret from his captors.
Those around him tensed and shifted uneasily.
All the men were seated, Kimberlain noticed, and some had twisted themselves around at strange angles in order to face him. This was a small jet, a twelve-passenger craft, with only four guards and himself presently seated. The motion that had stirred him had been that of the wheels locking down as they approached some airport in the night.
His head throbbed badly. He wasn’t sure how long he had been out, but the effects indicated somewhere between six and eight hours, allowing ample time to fly to any number of places. But the darkness beyond the window was the late-night kind, which meant that perhaps he had been brought to Europe; the time change would account for the degree of darkness.
He didn’t have to move much to find the tight wire binding him to the seat’s arms. The slightest tug brought a grimace of pain to his face. Whoever these people were, they were experienced. All the rope in the world isn’t as effective as well-placed wire across the wrists. If he pulled too strongly he’d run the risk of severing his own arteries. The guards would be needed for when the time came to remove these bonds—on the fast-approaching ground, perhaps.
The small jet’s tires grazed the runway, and Kimberlain felt himself bounce slightly in his chair. He tensed, squeezing his hands tight to the arms to keep the wire from digging in, but his captors knew how to leave just the right amount of slack.
With the squeal of brakes in his ears, he looked around from one set of cold eyes to the next. The men’s role had simply been to deliver him here from New York. Someone else would undoubtedly be waiting outside the plane. But not the Hashi, or he’d already be dead. Who then?
The small jet ground to a halt, and already his captors were positioning themselves strategically throughout the cabin to thwart any possible escape maneuver on his part. And if all else failed there would always be the wire laced to his wrists, with the other ends held by men who could disable him instantly if they needed to.
Wordlessly a pair of men beckoned him to rise after they disconnected the wire from the armrests; as Kimberlain had expected, each held one of the now free ends, almost as if they were leashes. Kimberlain rose, secure only in the notion that he would have been dead already if that was the ultimate plan for his capture. All he needed was time. If they were bent on keeping him alive, then the chances of escape were all the greater.
They were leading him toward the jet’s exit door now. Another of his captors pushed it open to allow a flood of damp cold air to pierce the cabin’s warmth. As he reached the door, one of the men holding the wire was starting down the steps while the other lagged a few paces behind Kimberlain. Arms thus forced into a spread, the Ferryman began to descend.
The throaty sounds of jets taxiing and taking off drowned out all others. A blanket of fog was draped over the scene, but a blanket not thick enough to obscure the lights in the back and foreground. This was London’s Heathrow Airport. They had taxied to a distant runway closed down by the fog. The damp mist chilled Kimberlain to the bone: any speed would be hard to summon, and he would need all he could muster when the time came. The procession moved onward, the pair of men attached to him by wires on either side and another pair keeping a steady distance to the rear. They knew who he was. They had been warned.
Twenty yards later, Kimberlain made out another series of figures through the mist on a runway standing near a similarly small jet. He counted five, but the mist was thickening and could have affected his vision. Drawing closer, he saw his original count to be correct, along with something else.
In the center of the group stood a woman dressed in slacks and a brown leather jacket. She was barely discernible through the thickening mist, which was starting to swallow the area, but Kimberlain could nonetheless see that her hair was blond and knew somehow that it was the woman from Boston, the woman who had taken Mendelson’s dying message from him. Brutish-looking men flanked her at every angle—more deterrents against his trying anything.
Kimberlain’s captors stopped when only a single macadam strip separated them from the group. The blonde advanced a few steps. His eyes were drawn from her to the brutish-looking men. Something about the way they held themselves was wrong, the way they seemed to be trading glances with one another. The Ferryman realized the truth an instant before they broke into a spread, but the instant was long enough to take him into a dive beneath the first barrage of their gunfire, ignoring the pain from the wires tightening across his wrists. The roar of a jet hurtling into takeoff swallowed the blasts, so all that remained were orange flashes from the bores and the crumbling bodies of his two captors.
Kimberlain pulled free of their death grips and rolled toward the nearest of them with the wires dangling about him. The brutes were still firing, but their aim had turned on the pair of guards bringing up the rear, which gave the Ferryman the time he needed to tear one of his dead captor’s guns free. Palming it, he realized the mist around him had turned thick as soup. He could hear the brutes shouting at each other in the confusion that had been created and wondered what had become of the blond woman who’d been at the forefront of the assault. It made no sense. She had let him live in Boston, only to have him transported across an ocean to be killed.
Behind Kimberlain another jet had just landed and had begun to taxi deliberately down the mist-shrouded runway. His first impulse was to fire back at the gunmen, but with his cover assured, escape was a far better option. He rushed in a crouch backward through the fog and cut a diagonal line to t
he passing jet. Bullets reached his ears as muffled spits, fired lamely, wildly, desperately, by men struggling to make themselves heard above the sounds on the tarmac.
The Ferryman reached the taxiing jet and sprinted alongside it for added cover. Holding his pace, he jammed the pistol into his mouth to free both hands for the chore of unwrapping the wire laced round his wrists—no easy task under the circumstances. He dropped the tangled wires and retrieved the gun from his teeth. The wet air invaded his lungs and nearly choked him. He fought for breath. The black cold chilled the sweat forming on his face.
The jet was swinging toward its gate now, and Kimberlain swung with it and then bolted away between another pair of jets with the red TWA emblem affixed to their sides. He made his target a door between the passenger jetways marked NO ADMITTANCE and charged toward it as fresh bullets found a bead on him. With the pursuit closing in, he took the final three steps in a single lunge, and as he yanked open the door a bullet tore off a huge chunk of wood just over his head. Before the next could find him, he had plunged inside.
The warmth of the terminal revived him, but the effect was shortlived. He leaped over the handrails of a moving footpath designed to help weary travelers more easily negotiate the lengthy walk to customs. Kimberlain was running now, weaving between just arriving passengers and hurdling over their carry-on luggage deposited on the moving walkway. An attempt to disguise himself by mixing with them would be futile, he reckoned, for his lack of an overcoat would betray him to his pursuers even before the lack of a passport to get him through customs and immigration did.
The Ferryman sped on. The warmth inside the terminal made his breathing easier. He had fallen into that state where desperation pushes out all fatigue. Behind him he could sense the pursuit accelerating, and he put on another burst of speed. To some he might have seemed an impatient traveler in fear of missing a connection. No one noticed the pistol he had wedged into his slacks back on the tarmac.
A swing to the left brought him down yet another endless corridor. His best chance lay in staying within the crowd for as long as possible and then dealing with customs when he got there. After that there would be taxis nearby, and once inside one he would be safe. This was London, after all—a friendly place for anyone who knew the territory.
He had reached the head of the procession of travelers by the time a quick descent and two more turns brought him to the customs station. The lines before the occupied booths were surprisingly long for this time of night. Kimberlain picked out an unoccupied one and sped through it, ignoring the shouts and screams at his rear from immigration officials. Baggage claim passed next in a blur, and several customs and immigration officials were still reaching for their walkie-talkies when he rushed by them. One stepped out in his path, and Kimberlain brushed effortlessly by him. To his rear the sounds of pursuit could mean either more authorities or gunmen following in his wake. No time to find out, and both were his enemies now anyway. The Ferryman sped out of Heathrow into the night.
A swift right up ten yards brought him to the taxi stand, where a number of the familiar square black English taxicabs sat lined up in a row. He plunged into the back of one and had pressed the pistol bore up against the rear of the driver’s head through the open plexiglass partition before the man could turn.
“Drive!” came his command.
“Just tell me where,” the driver said fearfully, shifting into gear.
“London. The rest later. Fast now! Go!”
The driver obliged, streaking from his perch toward the lanes that would take him from the airport complex and onto the M-4. Kimberlain kept the plexiglass partition fully open so he was a grasp away from the driver’s head. The man had his window open a crack, and cold, damp air flooded the cab’s rear seat. The Ferryman settled back low, making sure only the cabby could know the gun was still pointed at his head.
Questions raised on the runway returned. The whole incident made no sense. The brutes obviously represented a different faction from the men they had slain. And with that in mind, which faction did the blond belong to?
No matter. He had other thoughts to concern himself with. London was a haven for power; its finer hotels catered to it. Several maintained a code to be passed at the front desk in an emergency. Do so and a room would be his without pain or record of registration. A room and, just as important, a phone.
The cabby was pushing his car fast down the M-4. It was almost midnight, and the huge motorway was eerie in its near-emptiness. Kimberlain’s head was throbbing with pain and fatigue. His wrists were scraped raw from the effort untangling the wire had caused during his rush down the tarmac. Whatever they had given him to knock him out was still in his system, and he had to battle the lingering effects of that as well. Each car that passed them revived his senses with the rising of his neck hairs.
Kimberlain stretched his legs out all the way in the spacious rear of the cab. He was beginning to think he might have outrun his pursuit by the time the driver turned off the M-4 onto Kensington and the last leg of the journey in the damp London night. The cabby gazed back as if to ask for further instructions.
“The Hilton on Park Lane,” Kimberlain told him.
Minutes later, they caught up with Park Lane traffic and made their way toward Hyde Park Corner. The towering Hilton was just across the way. Kimberlain breathed easier as the driver swung into the hotel’s private circle. The cabby had started to brake when the Ferryman spotted the two figures flanking the revolving doors.
“Keep going,” he told the man as he hunched low.
“Sir?”
“Drive!” he said while sinking still lower as the doorman approached.
He could have been overreacting, yes, but something about the two figures seemed wrong to him. Instinct had gotten him this far, and he had learned always to trust it. The driver swung out of the Hilton onto a side street and then turned left onto Piccadilly. There were other hotels available to him, but if the Hilton was under watch, why not the others? And if all of them were under watch, that meant the opposition’s resources were incredible and …
The Hashi! Here! After him now!
Kimberlain was starting to rethink his next move as the cab eased by an underpass and slid to a stop at a red light. It gathered motion again only long enough to reach the next traffic light at the corner of Half Moon Street.
A pair of headlights flashed in the rearview mirror, and Kimberlain noticed they had approached much too close. He was halfway to the cab’s floor when the back window exploded. The cabby’s head rocked forward, then back, blood splattering the cab’s inside and spraying up against a closed section of the plexiglass partition. The light had changed to green. Automatic fire continued to pepper the interior.
Rather than stay a sitting duck for the gunmen, Kimberlain steeled himself for an offensive response. With bullets still thudding as the trailing car pulled alongside to complete the job, the Ferryman came up and pushed himself through the narrow partition separating him from the front seat. He reached for the cabby’s leg with one hand and the steering wheel with the other, abandoning his pistol in the process. The killers’ car had pulled up next to the taxicab by now, bullets continuing to stream inward, when Kimberlain jammed down on the cabby’s knee to force the accelerator down. The cab screeched and shot forward through the intersection. The trailing car was momentarily left behind, but it gathered speed and caught up quickly. Upholstery exploded in bursts of fluff, and the rest of the windshield disappeared. But Kimberlain let the killers draw right up along his left side before swinging the wheel hard and fast that way.
The killers’ car was midsize and dark, no match at all for the heavy bulk of a London cab. The cab sideswiped the lighter vehicle, and Kimberlain kept the wheel turning in, forcing the killers onto the sidewalk and straight toward an office building on the corner, just past a Mercedes-Benz dealership. The gunman in the rear fired until the very last moment but succeeded only in pricking Kimberlain’s face with splintered gl
ass. The front end of the lighter car crashed through the front wall, shattering glass everywhere, and ending up half inside, with its front end compressed like an accordion. The Ferryman managed to right his cab into a spin which took it across Piccadilly. It had barely come to a halt before he was out through the open rear window and moving again.
Horns honked from all directions; people were shouting and screaming. If more of the killers were about, he was too easy a target out in the open. The Green Park underground station had an entrance a block or so back that was camouflaged well enough in the darkness. Kimberlain weaved through the snarled traffic and rushed back toward it. He took the stairs leading down quickly and lunged through the entrance without bothering about a ticket. A swing left and then right at the bottom of the first set of steps brought him to a group of people heading for the Jubilee Line, which was as good as any for an escape route from the area.
He took the last staircase at a dead run, ignoring possible pursuit from the rear and focusing on the thundering train he had to catch. The doors had just started to close when Kimberlain surged through them and pressed his shoulders hard against the wall to steady himself. He had caught his breath by the Bond Street stop and his senses by Baker Street, where the exit of all the remaining passengers told him this was as far as the train went at this hour. He eased himself out among them, trying to feel if any of the Hashi had managed to follow him this far.
He slid past a man checking tickets and after a short climb emerged into the well-lit sanctuary of Marylebone Street. He started walking, eyeing the dome-shaped figure of the London Planetarium and its famed neighbor, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, just across the street from him. He crossed over with the intention to continue walking until he had enough time to consider his options.
The Ferryman had passed the Planetarium and was moving by the advertising windows of Madame Tussaud’s when the figures came around the head of the building thirty yards in front of him: coming down the street, coming too fast, hands starting into their jackets. Behind him he caught the clickety-clack of heels gathering pace, heels that had just turned onto the street from his rear. They had him boxed in, and there was no reason for them to rush, since there was no place left for him to go and his gun was back in the abandoned taxi.
