Panacea (34 page)

“As that Hamas guy who grabbed you found out.”

“Let's leave that story back at Gan Yosaif.”

“Fine, but what do you think about those Hamas guys carrying the 536 brand?”

Laura shook her head. “I was thinking about that while you were alone with What's-his-name—”

“Chayat.”

“—and no matter which way I turn it, it doesn't make sense from any angle.”

“Right. No sense at all in Islamic radicals carving Roman numerals on their arms, unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless 536 is everywhere, unless its membership supersedes national and religious and ethnic boundaries.”

“But Stahlman said it had Christian origins.”

“Stahlman could be wrong.”

She remembered Chayat's puzzlement:
I am having difficulty with the way your arrival in an abandoned kibbutz coincided so perfectly with the raiding party's
 …

She'd assumed it was simply a matter of terrible luck. Now she wasn't so sure.

“You think they were there to intercept us? To stop us from finding the panacea?”

It no longer mattered that she didn't believe in it. Others obviously did—passionately—and seemed ready to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it secret.

He shrugged. “What else can we think? But how the hell did they know where we'd be?”

“Well, someone put a bug in my bag. What's so hard about putting a tracer in our Jeep?”

“But a GPS tracer can tell them only where we are, not where we're going. Those Hamas guys were practically waiting—oh, hell.”

“The land office?”

“Right. A 536 member in the ILA would have known.”

“But didn't you say the raiders were talking about us as hostages?”

Rick's remark about the leader calling “firsties” on their planned gang rape still turned her stomach.

“Right. ‘Firsties' and ransom. No other issues. But maybe they thought they could use us as a two-fer: stop us from tracking down the panacea
and
use us as bargaining chips for the return of some of their own.”

She leaned back and closed her eyes. “So everybody's against us. The panaceans don't want anyone outside their cult to know their secrets, and 536 doesn't want us to find them either.”

“The panaceans are simply hiding from us and everyone else. We're lucky you were able to connect with Ix'chel.”

You held his heart in your hands?
That had been the tipping point for Ix'chel.

“Right,” Laura said. “Thanks to her we know next to nothing rather than absolutely nothing.”

“Yeah, but 536 on the other hand … looks like they want us off the playing field, and they're not afraid to play rough.”

“I can't wait to get out of here.”

“You think Europe will be any safer?”

She straightened and looked at him. “Won't it? I mean, it'll be more civilized—no deserted communes and deserts and terrorist raiding parties. That has to be better.”

“Don't count on it. Got a feeling Mexico and Israel make up the proverbial frying pan. Next stop…”

“The fire?”

“The fire.”

 

9

When they reached Ben Gurion they dropped off the Jeep and found an empty corner of an El Al terminal where they spread out their world map. The line from Mesoamerica into Europe was already there, as was the test line from Israel. All they needed was the new azimuth from Gan Yosaif. Rick pinpointed the GPS coordinates of the kibbutz and was about to draw a line from there at 293 degrees northwest when shadows fell over them.

Laura looked up to see two airport security cops—a man and a woman, both young—staring down at them. Both were armed and dressed in light blue uniforms with dark blue trim and epaulets. Each had a shoulder walkie-talkie.

“What are you doing?” the woman asked in English.

A simple answer popped into Laura's head—one that had the benefit of being the truth. She put on her brightest smile and said, “We're plotting the location of our next destination.”

Her smile was not returned. “Are you ticketed passengers?” the man said.

Rick tapped the map and picked up the ball without hesitation. “Not yet. That's what this will decide.”

“Come with us, please.”

This hadn't been the plan. Now what? More trouble with Rick's passport and its “minor irregularities?” But the encounter turned out to be a good thing.

They were escorted to a room in the security area where they explained their quest. The woman security guard wrote down the GPS loci and the azimuths, then walked out. Twenty minutes later she returned with a surprise for them.

“We have a computer program that plotted it out,” she said, handing Laura a slip of paper. “Here are the coordinates where the azimuths cross.”

Laura looked at the numbers and degrees and minutes and seconds.

1° 21
′
36
″
E

42° 47
′
38
″
N

They meant nothing to her.

“Where is it?” she said.

“Nowhere—quite literally.”

“Can we be more specific, perhaps?” Rick said.

“Midi-Pyrenees. In the mountains south of Toulouse and northwest of Andorra.”

Rick frowned. “France?”

“Southern France!” Laura said, giving him a knowing look. “Part of ancient Gaul, to be exact.” She turned to the woman. “Thank you. You've just decided our next destination. Looks like we fly to Paris.”

The two cops did not seem willing to take this at face value. They escorted Laura and Rick to the ticket counter where they stood by and watched them buy their first-class tickets to Charles de Gaulle on the first nonstop out Wednesday morning. They then guided them to Terminal Three's King David Lounge.

Rather than go through the hassle of leaving the terminal and renting hotel rooms for the dwindling hours before they'd have to be up and about for their six
A.M.
flight, Laura and Rick settled into a corner of the first-class section of the lounge to spend the rest of the night.

Laura pulled out the slip of paper and looked at the coordinates again.

“If my theory is right, this should be the location of the so-called Wound.”

“Approximate location,” Rick said. “Totally ballpark.”

“But that cop lady said she had a computer program that—”

“GIGO, remember? We're talking about protractor readings taken off some woman's bare back and off a photo of a tattoo on someone else's back as they were lined up with the North Star. A degree or two off this way and a degree or two off that way, and we're talking a target area totaling hundreds of square miles.”

Annoyed, she waved the paper. “Then what good is this? Why did we spend all this time and effort and endanger ourselves if this isn't the location of the Wound?”

“It doesn't tell us the exact location, but it puts us in southern France, and gives us an approximate area to search …
if
you're right.”

Always that little dig …

“Ix'chel said it points to the Wound.”

Rick shrugged. “Then we'll go with that.”

Laura didn't see any other options.

Rick pulled out his phone. “Gonna give Stahlman a call and bring him up to speed. Maybe he's got some ideas.”

“Let me have a word when you reach him.”

When she had the phone, Laura dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out three folded sheets from her notepad.

“Mister Hayden updated me,”
Stahlman said
. “This is turning out to be an extraordinary quest. I'm expecting you to tell me you're quitting.”

“Why do you keep nudging me to quit?”

“I'm doing nothing of the sort—anything but. It's simply that, according to Mister Hayden, just hours ago you were in jeopardy of what could justifiably be termed ‘a fate worse than death.' We both know you didn't sign up for that. So I'll restate my previous offer of prorating—”

“I'm not quitting.”

The words had popped out as if on a direct line from her subconscious. What was that all about? She'd narrowly escaped abduction and gang rape tonight. If she had a lick of sense she'd take Stahlman's offer and head for home.

But as much as her heart pointed toward Marissa, another part of her needed to see this through.

Why? Was she starting to believe in the panacea?

No way. But …

“You continue to amaze me. I confess to be in awe of you.”

Nice to hear, but she didn't need to be stroked. Stahlman needed a cure, but she needed a solution to the mysteries of Chaim and Tommy. She'd been sent to find
something
and people were trying to stop her. That didn't sit well with her stubbornness gene, she guessed. She'd find the Wound and see where the trail took her from there. If it ended there, so be it. But if she found another signpost, she'd head in that direction.

“Are you recording this call by any chance?”

“No, but all I have to do is press a button.”

“Good. Press it. I translated Ix'chel's poem on the flight to Madrid. Maybe it'll make sense to you.”

After she'd finished her recitation he said,
“Makes no sense to me.”

“Join the club.”

“Look, I'm going to put someone on finding you an authority on the pagans of Gaul and Aquitaine you can consult when you get to France. Save the poem for him.”

“Gotcha.”

“Let me speak to Mister Hayden again.”

While Rick talked to Stahlman, Laura texted Steven her flight plan: due to land de Gaulle at 10:05 tomorrow morning, Paris time, which would be four
A.M.
East Coast time. She'd call when it was sevenish in New York.

Rick pocketed his phone and said, “Aquitaine? Where's Aquitaine?”

“Right next to Midi-Pyrenees, I believe. Caesar had a battle or two in Aquitania in his
Gallic Wars,
if I remember correctly.”

He was staring at her. “How do you remember that at all, correctly or otherwise?”

“Beats me.” Truth: She hadn't the faintest idea where she'd pulled it from. “But whatever, I've got this feeling we're getting close.”

“To what? The Wound? We don't even know what that means.”

“But maybe some history nerd in Paris can help us figure that out. The Wound is key to the panaceans' mythology. Find that and we'll have a big leg up.”

“Let's hope.”

He slouched back in his chair and closed his eyes. Laura had seen a sign—in both Hebrew and English, thankfully—about shower facilities. She availed herself of those to clean up, then napped as best she could. She dreamed, and in her dream she was firing Rick's Glock at charging CMV particles that wanted to take Marissa hostage.

 

10

Bradsher cleared his throat as he put down his phone. “They're on an early flight to Paris tomorrow.”

“Then get us on a late flight tonight. I want to be there first.”

“It might not be necessary, sir.”

“Why not?”

“As you know, we've been monitoring her phone. From what we've gathered, her daughter is sick.”

Nelson waved this away. “Children get sick all the time. And isn't her husband with the child?”

“Yes, but the child had a recent stem-cell transplant for leukemia and an otherwise simple infection can turn serious very quickly.” Bradsher smiled. “A common virus might accomplish what Miguel could not.”

“You mean take her off the trail? But we no longer want that.” If it wasn't one damn thing it was another. “How real is that possibility?”

“According to her last phone call, Doctor Fanning expects to learn of the lab results on her daughter when she lands in Paris. If the results are bad, she'll head straight home.”

“We can't have that,” Nelson said. “Returning to the States will derail her quest. And I have a feeling she's on to something.”

“We can control the results,” Bradsher said. “No sweat.”

Nelson waved him to silence. Changing results would be easy—everything was stored in computers these days. But that wouldn't stop the child's condition from worsening. They'd accomplish only a brief delay in Fanning's abandoning the hunt, and that was no accomplishment at all.

“Can we control her phone?”

“We're already in her phone. Not a big step from there. How much control do you want?”

“No voice communication to or from the States. Only texts. And the same with Hayden, in case she wants to borrow his for a call home.”

“Easy.”

“Then I want to control every text that enters or leaves her phone.”

“That can be done but it will require someone on standby twenty-four/seven.”

“Then make it so.”

“Will do.”

Glory filled him as his role in this divine drama took on greater and greater definition. Here was a glimpse at why the Lord had included him: to keep Laura Fanning on the path He had set for her. The Serpent had sickened her child to bring her home. Nelson would see to it that its foul plan failed.

“Oh, and speaking of monitoring her phone,” Bradsher said, “she's had a deputy from the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department looking into Hayden.”

“Interesting. How's he doing?”

“Not bad. He ferreted out the Haddad/Hayden connection. Now he says he's going to use a ‘fed' contact to help dig further.”

Nelson couldn't help but smile. “Good luck with that. That information is buried
deep
.”

Bradsher's expression showed a mixture of hurt and annoyance. “Yessir.”

“Too bad. The truth might drive a wedge between the two of them. We might be able to exploit that gap if it proved necessary.”