Endgame: The Calling (51 page)

Aksumite Communications Outpost, Kingdom of Aksum, Ethiopia

There is another knock at the door of the little hut.

The beings must be trying to cut him off. To stop him, now that he’s figured out the secret of Endgame.

But he can still fight. If that’s what is knocking, he can still fight.

The darkness inside his hut is his friend.

He grabs his favorite weapons, slides to the wall next to the door, and waits.

Knock knock.

Knock knock.

No more knocking.

The door is kicked in. Two figures enter the hut—one short, one tall—and when they’re all the way inside, Hilal slams the door shut behind them.

The darkness.

He twirls his arms and moves into the space he knows so well. In each hand is a machete.

Black polished steel.

Ebony grips.

HATE
engraved on one,
LOVE
on the other.

He has a gentle soul, but do not test it.

He hits something and hears a wail and a
thump
on the floor. Flesh and bone, he knows the feeling well.

Very well.

A desperate gunshot follows. The slug ricochets around the metal walls and misses Hilal, but by the pained grunt across the room, he thinks it might have grazed one of the others. He splits them, moves through the room, and jumps onto a metal table that none can see but that he knows is there. He slams a machete down, cleaving a computer monitor in two. Sparks fly and the room lights up for a millisecond. Long enough for Hilal to know what he’s up against.

The Nabataean.

And the Donghu on the floor, injured.

Hilal thrusts out his right arm, turns the blade flat, crouches, and spins like a dancer. The machete arcs toward the Nabataean’s head. But Maccabee luckily drops to the floor, and Hilal’s razor-sharp blade only severs half an inch of hair from his head.

“The door!” Baitsakhan yells. “Open the door!”

All right, injured one,
Hilal thinks.

He backflips off the table and over the Nabataean.

Another shot. Muzzle flash. The bullet flies between Hilal’s legs. A close call.

Yes. I will give you some light.

His feet hit the concrete floor silently. He slides to the door. He presses his mouth close to the metal wall, knowing the acoustics will transport his voice to the other side of the small room.

“Here!”

Another shot, aimed at the reverberations of Hilal’s voice. Not even close.

Another ricochet. Hilal waits to hear if it strikes one of them.

It doesn’t.

No matter.

He throws the door open.

Maccabee turns to shoot, but Hilal steps forward and smacks the end of the gun with both machetes at the same moment. The weapon clatters to the floor. Hilal brings the blades up hard and fast, uncrossing them, searching for more to slice and maim. Maccabee raises his arms too, but when the blades impact his wrists they strike metal cuffs concealed under the Nabataean’s fine linen suit. Maccabee flashes a sinister smile. Hilal grimaces as he retreats into the light of day. These killers smile when they come for him. It sickens him, and he will pray for their souls after he’s disposed of their bodies.

Baitsakhan rises to his feet. His eyes are full of hate. He exits the hut and throws something. Hilal smacks it to the ground with a backhand swipe.

The thing clunks to the soft ground under the cedar trees.

It is a hand.

Baitsakhan’s own hand.

“You lost something,” Hilal says. He knows never to speak during a fight, but he also knows that words can hurt more than any weapon.

Baitsakhan’s wrist spurts blood. “Gun!” he says as he tosses his pistol to Maccabee, who snags it from the air.

Hilal throws the machete and it
whomp-whomp-whomp
s through the air and strikes the pistol as it goes off. A wedge of dirt rises at Hilal’s feet where the slug hits. The pistol flies to pieces. The machete takes a small piece of one of Maccabee’s fingers before flying past him and embedding in the trunk of a tree. Baitsakhan throws a small black object at Hilal. Hilal backpedals and with his remaining machete smacks it like it’s a baseball. It sails into the deep green cedars and explodes.

A grenade.

Hilal hears something only he understands. A stone door sliding open. It is but a whisper.

Baitsakhan stalks toward him, his eyes empty and vacant. He’s losing blood, delirious, and kill-crazy. He throws another grenade. And another and another. Hilal hits them all away with his machete. They each explode in the distance, sending shrapnel whizzing past. Maccabee, suddenly less enthused about this operation, takes cover.

After the last explosion, Hilal runs backward at alarming speed, never taking his eyes from his attackers. He heads for the clearing, for the secret church carved from stone. The place where the stone door has just been opened.

Where Master al-Julan will be waiting.

“You’re dead!” Baitsakhan barks, full of hatred, now cradling his wounded arm. The color is fading from his face.

Hate makes you weak, brother,
Hilal thinks.

Maccabee pops out of cover. He has a grenade of his own, but he takes more care than his young partner did. He pulls the pin slowly, holding onto the lever so it won’t explode, waiting for his moment.

“How did you find me?” Hilal shouts at his assailants as he continues to backpedal. He is only 24 feet from the church, but he must know how they found him, why they come now of all times.

“Earth Key showed us,” Baitsakhan says.

“You don’t have Earth Key.”

“We do.”

“Impossible.”
I would know. We all would.

“Show him.”

Maccabee doesn’t show him the dark glass orb. Instead, he throws the last grenade and at its apex shouts, “Now!”

Maccabee hits the deck, and the Donghu too. This grenade is different. Hilal knows he cannot bat it away like he did the concussion grenades. This one is incendiary.

It is fire.

Mere inches from the church’s trapdoor entrance, the air above Hilal is engulfed in flame. The fiery tongues lick, devour, swallow. They burn his clothing and his shoulders and his head. They consume him as he goes down down down into the impenetrable room beneath the ancient church.

The fire subsides; the burns remain.

More darkness, but he is safe now.

And he is not alone.

The last thing he remembers is the smell of burning hair and the pain.

The searing pain of fire, the searing pain of hell.

This is Endgame.

Grand Hotel Duchi d’Aosta, Trieste, Italy

Sarah wakes at 5:24 a.m.

Her dreams were geometric. 9,466 shapes. Rectangles. Tetrahedrons. Spirals. Crumpled polygons. Circles. Parabolic lines stretching to infinity.

She is close, so close to figuring out this grid from the golden chamber in Turkey, and figuring out her clue.

She stares at the ceiling.

Shapes.

Numbers.

Letters.

Signs.

Christopher snores next to her. She’d forgotten all about him. The puzzle has dominated her thoughts. Fooling around with him last night—it helped her forget about Endgame. For one night she was normal, just like that couple they’d watched strolling by the restaurant.

They didn’t sleep together. Just lay in each other’s arms and kissed and felt and touched. It was fun, but now, just before the sun rises, Sarah bites her lip and tries not to scream. It was cruel, what she did. Spending the night with him not only because it was her last chance to kiss him but also because it would be easier to sneak away in the morning. If she had stayed in her own room last night, or in Jago’s, Christopher would be up before any of them. Up and waiting.

She might still be able to sneak off, but what she did won’t push Christopher away; it’ll only keep him closer. Jago was right. Sooner or later, Endgame will kill Christopher. And Sarah doesn’t want to watch him die.

Jago was right. She isn’t normal. Time to embrace that fact.

But this confusion is fleeting, because right now, as she’s lying in bed, the puzzle sizzles at the forefront of her mind. She almost has it. If only the incessant pounding from down the hall would stop.

Wait—pounding?

Sarah slips out of bed without Christopher so much as stirring. She is still wearing the clothes from the day before. She steps into the hall and sees Jago at her door, looking like he’s about to kick it down. He’s wide-eyed, furious, panicked. He has Chiyoko’s sword in one hand, a crumpled piece of paper in the other.

“Jago,” she whispers, rushing over to him.

He sees her. They meet in the center of the hallway.

“The disk! She took it! The mute!”

“What?”

Jago thrusts the note at her. Sarah reads it, her stomach bubbling with dread.
I am no longer tracking you. On my blade and honor, it is true.

“Goddamn it, Feo! How did you let her take it?”

“I don’t know . . .” Jago answers, trailing off as his eyes drift over Sarah’s shoulder, toward Christopher’s room, just starting to realize where she came from.

“Let’s go get her.”

Jago slaps the front of his jeans, feeling his pockets. “No!”

He takes off at a run down the hall. Sarah yells after him, “Where are you going?”

“The keys!” Jago shouts over his shoulder as he crashes into the stairwell door. “Bitch took the keys!”

Sarah glances at Christopher’s closed door before sprinting after Jago. She arrives on the street only five seconds behind him, but that’s long enough for an enraged Jago to punch through the window of the nearest car. Sarah stands on the hotel steps as Jago paces wildly back and forth, clutching his bruised fist. It’s still dark. The air is cool and damp. The bell of a buoy can be heard in the distance.

“It’s gone,” Jago barks. “The car. The disk. She took everything except her fucking sword.” Realizing he’s still clutching the weapon in his damaged hand, Jago tosses it disgustedly onto the ground.

Sarah comes down the steps. “It’s okay, we can fix this.” She picks up the wakizashi and gently touches his shoulder. “Let me see that hand.”

Jago twists away from her. “What is this ‘we’? You’ve been playing me too, just like the Mu. But worse.”

“I’m not playing you. Calm down.”

“I screwed up, let her get the drop on me, it’s true,” Jago says, nodding wildly. “But you’re sleeping with that dumb little boy? This whole team thing is over; we’re done.”

“You need to calm down,” she says, trying to keep her cool.

“What the hell is going on?” Christopher asks as he emerges from the hotel. He looks tired and bleary, but also has a little swagger going as he comes down the steps. Jago’s teeth grit; the veins along his neck stand out. Sarah’s worried he’ll punch out another car window, or worse.

“Chiyoko took the disk and our car,” Sarah says curtly, wishing Christopher would just go back inside.

“How the—?” Christopher asks incredulously, but cuts himself off when he notices the look on Jago’s face. “Damn, dude. Fall asleep on the job?”

Christopher doesn’t see it coming. Jago’s hand lances out, flat and sharp, right for Christopher’s throat. Luckily, Sarah does see it coming, and she steps in and deflects the blow. Christopher, caught off guard, stumbles on his bad leg and falls to the curb.

“What the—!”

Sarah cuts him off before he can make this situation any worse. “Go back inside, Christopher. Get our things. We need to get moving.”

Christopher stands slowly. Jago is still staring at him, fire in his eyes, and Christopher can tell the only reason he’s not attacking is that Sarah stands between them. “You sure?” he asks Sarah.

“Go.”

Christopher hobbles back into the hotel, Sarah and Jago face off on the sidewalk. There’s only about six feet separating them. They look like two tentative prizefighters, neither eager to make the first move.

“Don’t you ever try to hurt him again,” Sarah tells Jago warningly.

“You keep him around, that tells me that you want him dead. I figured I could speed up the process.”