Seven Unholy Days (16 page)

26

1:42 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

HART COMPLEX

              Jana slid into a shallow sleep in her suite. Soft knocks on the door jolted her out of it. She couldn’t believe she was about to be dragged back down to the dungeon again so soon. Hadn’t she just left there? Or was it the next day? Her heart started pounding; if it was the next day, it could be time for the royal wedding.

She opened the door and saw Dane Christian there. “May I come in?”

“As if I have a choice.”

“You do. I’m not here to take you to him.”

Relief flooded over her, followed quickly by apprehension. “Then what are you here for?”

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. “Around one-forty.”

“AM or PM?”

“AM. Why?”

“I just like to know. Come on in, I guess. After all, how often does a girl get a chance to chat with her kidnapper in the middle of the night? Lucky me.”

Dane eased into the room like a shy boy picking up his first prom date, and Jana saw the chink in the armor. He was there with something personal to say, a fish out of water. Conversely, when it came to one on one, Jana was very much in her element.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, staring at his feet, “I’m sorry all this happened.”

“So you’ve said, but I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“I’d like to help you get out, but it’s not possible.”

“I don’t buy ‘impossible,’ but first, why don’t you tell me what in heaven’s name is going on.”

He pulled a bottle from his pocket and swallowed a handful of pills from it. Jana took the bottle and looked at the label.

“You just took a handful of Percocets. Why?”

“Tumor. My brother didn’t even know.”

“I see. How bad?”

“It’s been there for several years but it’s growing like crazy now. I have a couple of years, maybe less.”

“Despite what you’ve done to me, I hate to hear that. Is this how you want to wrap up your life, kidnapping and murder?”

“I said I’m sorry. I meant it.”

“I appreciate the fact that you didn’t want to leave me at home where the bomb is, and of course that you didn’t kill me, but it’s hard to see how you did me a favor by bringing me out here and handing me over to that monster downstairs.”

“I had no idea he was going to pull that.”

“He’s certifiably crazy, Dane. You do know that, right?”

“You have no idea,” Dane said, still staring at his feet. “And you have no idea what horrible things I’ve done for him.”

Jana knew he was a hardened criminal but he suddenly looked like nothing more than a sad and broken human being. She took his hand in hers. “What kind of things? What is this all about? Please tell me.”

He shook his head and Jana saw the wet eyes. “I’m so sorry ... so many people dead ... so many more to die ... so sorry ... ”

Jana walked him to the bed and sat him down. She took his face in her hands and looked him in the eye. “Dane, you can’t help what you’ve already done, but can’t you stop more people from dying?”

He took his fatigue jacket off and used it to wipe his face as the tears flowed. “No, it’s too far gone. His people are everywhere. People I hired and trained to set everything up out in the field. It’s already in motion and he won’t let anybody stop it. Aside from the professionals that had to be bought, he has hundreds of people out there who worship him. They think he’s some kind of savior or something. This has been in the works for years, and they’ll die for him.”

“What’s in the works, Dane? What is he going to do?”

“He’s had all communications cut off and any exit from the grounds is barred unless he gives express approval. He’ll never let us out of here. Even though I’ve been the operational head all along, he’d have me shot if I tried to drive off the compound right now. And while we’re inside, he can sit down in that room and seal us all in here forever. He can cut off our air. But I’m going to try to—”

A small radio on his belt chirped. “Mr. Christian. I require your presence in my chambers immediately,” Hart’s voice said.

“We can get out of here together. I’ll help you stop him,” Jana said.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Dane said on his way out, “and I’ll tell you more about what’s going on.”

27

1:45 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              “Show me where the last spot was,” I whispered in Abdul’s ear. He moved like a cat—quick, limber, silent—to the end of one of the console cabinets in the middle of the room and stopped. I nodded, he stepped back, and I got down on my knees for a closer look. The cabinet had a vented metal panel on the side. That would be X on this treasure map.

Tark held a flashlight while I gingerly removed four retai
ning screws and eased the panel off. And there it was, the microphone itself about half the size of a thimble. It was wired to a bare circuit board that was in turn patched into a fiber communication junction. 69 had enjoyed a streaming audio feed, unfettered access to everything we said. Who knows how long it had been there, but one thing was for sure: his entertainment package was about to change.

I powered up my laptop and routed a message to the big display.
Back to work on the password, Abdul.
Act naturally. I’m splitting this screen so we can work together. A duplicate of your monitor will show up on the left side, mine on the right. Tark, I need you outside.

“I know this is your plant, Tark, and I’m not trying to bust your turf. Right now we’re in the tech end of things and I need operational control. You got a problem with that?”

“You just let me know how to help.”

Seems as though I’d pegged the guy wrong on the pissing contest thing. Maybe I was the one with a penchant for the game. Maybe I’d need to rethink parts of Decker Philosophy 101 when this mess was fixed.

“I appreciate it. I need you to get hold of the Bureau. It’s hard to figure Rowe’s angle on this thing, but maybe they can shed some light on it. And we really need to know what their profilers have to say about this guy based on what we have from him.”

“All right, what else?”

“Be sure Litman has people on Rowe’s trail. His car’s still in the lot and transportation and other resources will be hard to come by. He expected to remain in charge here and he’s out there unprepared.”

“I can handle that. What are you going to focus on?”

“We have a nasty deadline coming up in eight hours. I intend to find that password. I don’t know what he’ll do if we do find it, but I sure don’t doubt that he’ll make good on his threats if we don’t.”

             
Ask me out loud if I think it’s safe to go online.
The big screen was coming in very handy for non-verbal communication.

“Will you go online again?” Abdul said.

“No, can’t take the chance. He’s tapped into my laptop somehow and I don’t want to risk it. I’ll follow his rules and keep trying to break the code here.”

“Okay,” Abdul said with a wink as I was logging on through the satellite link.

I grabbed the stack of system logs Abdul had run for me when I first started trying to check out my pattern theory and striped the key events with a highlighter. The Fox site was way perkier at two in the morning, and within three minutes I had their timeline downloaded and printed. I took the hard copies and headed to the lounge, where I spread them out across a table and started scanning for the pattern I was sure existed.

I didn’t have to look long. It was so obvious that I felt like an idiot for not having seen it far sooner. I ran—not walked—back to the control room and slid into my workstation.
Abdul, I need the text files of the system logs that you printed. ASAP.

The man was good at ASAP. The file icons appeared on my laptop within fifteen seconds. I opened them and went to work merging the list of internal GCE system events into the Fox list, cutting, pasting, pulling it all together in a spreadsheet file. As soon as I was done I printed the results and motioned for Tark and Abdul to follow me as I headed to the break room.

“You guys see anything odd about this list?”

“Yes,” Abdul said. “Everything happened at sixteen minutes after the hour.”

“Sure did,” Tark said. “First failure here was at one-sixteen. National drop was exactly twelve hours later, and the chemical weapon attack in Los Angeles was at eleven-sixteen. I guess it could be coincidence, but it sure would be a stretch.”

“It’s no coincidence. The pattern is stronger than that. Take another look,” I said. They looked but I could tell they didn’t see it. “These events didn’t just happen at sixteen minutes past the hour. They all happened at sixteen past the same hour.” I han
ded them another version with all the times transposed to U.S. Eastern Daylight Time.

“Oh my gosh,” Tark said. “You’re right. Everything on here happened at two-sixteen Eastern!”

“Exactly,” I said. “And there’s no way that happened by chance. This, my friends, is a hard pattern. The guy has a thing for two-sixteen.”

“How did everybody miss this? It seems so obvious now,” Tark said.

“It’s easy to see why we missed it,” I said. “Since I got here on Monday afternoon, we’ve been putting out a steady stream of fires.”

“What about all everyone else, however?”

“Strong question, Abdul. Knowing Washington has its stables of investigative geniuses all over this case, why hasn’t someone else picked up on it? CIA, FBI, National Security Council, they all miss it while our little ragtag crew down here in Mississippi spots it first.”

“There are plenty of smart people up there, but our gover
nment got caught with its britches down and they’re scrambling to keep their heads above water too,” Tark said.

“I guess so. All right, let’s keep our forward progress going. What does the pattern mean and how does knowing it help us?”

The speculative brainstorming began. A February sixteenth birthday? Something special about the two-hundred-sixteenth day of the year? A latitude or longitude? We had our pattern but we seriously needed to get something out of it because the deadline was bearing down on us and the trial-and-error code breaking was going nowhere.

“One-oh-eight times two ... ” Abdul was pacing, thinking out loud. “Fifty-four times four ... ”

“Does that number mean anything special in computers?” Tark said.

“Nothing jumps out at me,” I said. “We do of course want to try it and every variation we can think of as the password.”

“It divides by two so it is not a prime number ... twenty-seven times eight ... ”

“One-one-oh-one-one-oh-oh-oh ... ”

“That’s binary for two hundred sixteen,” I explained to Tark, who had a puzzled look on his face.

“D-eight ... ”

“You boys can stop guessing,” Tark said slowly, a strange look spreading across his face. “I know exactly what it is.”

He walked over to a whiteboard on the wall and wrote out
216 = 6 x 6 x 6,
then turned to us and said, “It’s six-six-six, the mark of the beast.”

28

2:02 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

HART COMPLEX

             
“Are you absolutely certain the audio monitor is functioning properly?” Hart said.

“It’s working. We heard them talking just a few minutes ago,” Dane said.

“But they’re not talking as much. I want to know why.”

“Mr. Hart, it’s two o’clock in the morning. They’re probably worn out. I know I am.”

“Sleep at a time like this is for fools and simpletons. This is a time of destiny.”  Hart had not slept in three days and nights. He was wild-eyed, circling the room.

“How the hell could a simpleton like me have a sense of de
stiny? Have you ever shared the whole story with that crew of robots upstairs? Does anybody on this whole damned earth know what’s going on other than you? Destiny, my ass.”

“How dare you speak to me like that. I won’t hesitate to o
rder you executed for insubordination.”

“I want my money and I want out of this. I’ve had enough.”

“You are thoroughly delusional, Mr. Christian. You’re not going anywhere.”

“You’re wrong, you sick asshole. And you know what? I don’t even want your money. I’m out of here.”

Dane stood up and headed for the door. He heard the hammer going back on Hart’s Walther PPK and hit the floor as a .380 hollow point bullet punched into the concrete wall in front of him. He instinctively rolled and reached for the small .38 revolver he always kept in the right cargo pocket of his fatigue jacket. Only then did he realize the jacket was lying on the bed in Jana’s room.

Several more shots rang out and he sprang into a low ru
nning crouch, heading for the cover of Hart’s most prized possession, the glass-encased ancient copy of the Torah in the middle of the room. It worked. Hart froze, his face locked in a look of panic at the thought of harm befalling the treasure. The smell and haze of gunpowder hung in the air. Dane stayed in a crouch behind the pedestal—also made of glass—of the display, circling to keep it between them as Hart resumed his advance.

Hart circled and closed, and Dane knew he was running out of time. In thirty seconds Hart would be close enough to shoot him pointblank without fear of hitting his precious book. His only option was a few seconds of distraction. Without warning he gave the heavy pedestal a shove. It hit the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces but the case holding the Torah itself must have been Plexiglas because it didn’t break. Hart shrieked like an animal and Dane sprinted toward the door.

He felt the searing heat of the bullet between his shoulder blades just before he heard the report of the shot. He reached for the doorknob and heard the SNAP of a dry fire. Hart was empty. He hobbled through the door and made it to the tube-shaped elevator, which raised him quickly to the uppermost subterranean level where Jana was being held. Leaving a trail of blood, he half walked half crawled to her door and swiped his magnetic key through the lock before collapsing onto the floor.

              Jana heard a noise and saw the green light flash on the door lock. She opened the door to find Christian sprawled face down on the floor, the top of his back bleeding profusely. “Dane! Dane! Wake up, we have to get you inside. He rolled over and muttered something unintelligible and she saw blood pouring from his mouth and nose. She pulled him inside and propped him against a wall, leaving his arm between the door and frame until she could stick a towel in the doorjamb to prevent it from closing and locking her inside.

“My ... jacket ... ” he said in an awful gurgling voice, poin
ting toward the bed. Jana looked and saw he had left his fatigue jacket on the bed when he was there earlier. She started to pick it up, then saw the bottle of pills that had fallen out of the pocket and onto the bed. That’s what he wanted from the jacket.

Jana’s nursing experience made reality plain enough. Dane Christian, her one best—if not only—hope would be dead wit
hin minutes. She shook a whole handful of the powerful painkillers out of the bottle and gave them to him along with a glass of water.

He forced the pills down through a mouth and throat full of blood and again pointed toward his jacket. “More pills aren’t going to help, Dane. Give those a few minutes to take hold.” He tried again to say something else but couldn’t get the words out and finally gave up. Jana held his hand until the narcotics star
ted to work. His shallow breathing slowed and his eyes glazed over, his lips barely moving as he slipped into a twilight sleep. Then he died.

Jana knew the trail of blood would quickly lead Dane’s erstwhile foe—most likely Hart himself—to her door, and she needed to make an immediate exit. She gently closed Dane’s eyes and laid him down on the floor. He may have been a terr
ible man but he seemed repentant at the end and she couldn’t bear to leave him there propped up against the wall like a stuffed animal. She thought about how ironic it was that his brother had died in exactly the same position, in her brother’s house, probably at his hand.

She went to get Dane’s jacket to drape over him and was surprised by its weight. Something heavy was in the pocket. A revolver, .38 caliber. That could come in handy. She popped the cylinder out to check her ammunition, suddenly grateful to her farmer father who had insisted she learn how to handle wea
pons as a teenager. “Just in case,” he always said. She had rolled her eyes at the time, but she was rolling the cylinder now and snapping it back in place, ready for action if need be. The time for passivity was over.

Feeling around in the other pockets of the jacket yielded two full Speed-Loaders, bringing her total store to fifteen rounds. Maybe the gun was what Dane was really pointing her to, not the pills. She checked the last pocket and found a thumbdrive. She needed the fatigue jacket’s cargo pockets, so she pulled the towel from the doorjamb, laid it over Dane’s face, put the jacket on, and hit the door running.

Outside the door she headed left down the long hallway that led to the elevator. If she could get up top she might have a fighting chance. The people she’d seen working in that computer room when she first got here looked like a gaggle of nerds and she liked her chances against nerds with a .38 Special. She had the elevator in sight fifty feet ahead when the heard a soft electronic tone and a whoosh of air. Someone was about to disembark the elevator.

She had just passed a crossing hallway and quickly retreated and ducked into it before the doors on the elevator opened. She flattened herself against the wall, the gun in her right hand with her finger on the trigger. The steps were coming quickly down the hall, echoing off the hard tile floor and cinder-block walls. Her body was frozen as Hart walked by the intersection of the hallways, his eyes on the blood trail that would lead him to her former cage.

She heard him open the door, waited five seconds, then hit the main hallway and headed back toward the elevator as quickly and quietly as she could.