The Heaven Trilogy (147 page)

“I hope you have some information for us,” Bird said, taking each hand quickly. “I’ve got a thousand men scattered over southern Florida and we don’t even know what we’re looking for. A picture or a description wouldn’t hurt.” He spoke without smiling. By the rings under his eyes, he hadn’t slept for a while, David thought.

“If we knew what you were looking for, you would know by now, wouldn’t you?” Friberg’s tone earned a hard stare from the National Guard officer.

“Tell me what you’ve got,” Friberg demanded.

Bird hesitated only a second before spitting out his report in staccato fashion. “We’re sweeping every port south of the blast site in ten-man teams with Geiger counters. So far, nothing has turned up. We’re manually picking through every storage bin waiting for customs inspection, but like I said, without a specific description the process is slow. We’ve isolated every shipment received in the last three days and are currently searching their deliveries, but again, we’re shooting in the dark. If we at least had a size on this thing—”

“But we
don’t
have a size on this thing. What about the DEA leads? Have you traced the suspected trafficking routes?”

“Not yet, sir. We—”

“Not yet? I thought the DEA gave that top priority. These terrorists are operating out of drug country, Lieutenant. Don’t you think it would make sense for them to use trafficking routes?” The director’s face flushed red. “Bring me the DEA intelligence.”

“Yes, sir.” Bird eyed Friberg for a moment.

“Now, Lieutenant.”

Bird turned and strode for the door.

“Excuse me, sir,” David interjected. “But have we established contact with Casius?”

Friberg faced him. “What would Casius have to do with this, Lunow? If we’d made contact with him, he’d be dead, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Friberg’s nostrils flared.

“But I was referring to his knowledge of the situation, not his elimination. You put the word out to him?”

“He’s a rogue agent. Our intentions are to kill him, not court him. And we don’t exactly have a direct line to the man’s head.”

“He’s been in contact with these terrorists, for crying out loud! He may have information you need,” David said. “And if you wanted to get word to him, I would think a few well-placed helicopters with loudspeakers might be a start. But you’re not interested in bringing him in, are you?”

Friberg trembled when he spoke. “You are out of line, Lunow! But I don’t have the time to address your obvious lack of understanding right now. We’ve got a deadline here.”

The director turned his back on David and strode for the window.

“Ingersol!” he snapped.

Ingersol flashed David an angry stare and followed the director over to the window. Bird burst through the doors, gripping the DEA report. He joined the men at the window.

David swallowed. “We’re toast,” he mumbled. “We’re toast and they know it.”

SHANNON CRAWLED from the Orinoco River, feeling a deep desperation he’d rarely felt. It was the same vacuum that had sucked at his chest eight years earlier. The emptiness he thought might precede suicide.

His back stung badly and he wondered if the skin was drawing infection. He was a good ten miles from where he’d left Tanya on the banks of the Caura River.

Shannon stood for a moment on the shore, his hands dripping limp at his sides. For the first time in eight years he had failed to kill a man he’d pursued. Abdullah had escaped.

He gripped his hands to fists, glanced up the mountain, and lumbered forward. He would finish this. It was all he knew, this drive to kill. And it wasn’t just about Abdullah, was it? He was showing them all.

The feeling couldn’t be too different from what a trapped animal felt, pounding relentlessly into a concrete wall, oblivious to the blood seeping from its head.

Shannon blinked the sweat from his eyes and crashed through the underbrush, not caring who heard him now. If this was his last mission, so be it. It would be a fitting end—to die having killed the one who had taken the life of his mother on the lawn.

Are you ready to die, Shannon?

Tanya.

Her face rose up in his mind, out of the black fog. A seventeen-year-old blonde, diving from the cliff into his arms. A twenty-five-year-old woman, running through the jungle at his heels. His vision blurred and he grunted.

You’re a fool, Shannon.

He pulled up and gripped his head, suddenly terrified. For a few long breaths he shook on the path. What was he doing? What had he
done?

The black fog settled into his mind slowly.

A thought stuttered through his mind. An image of his blade crossing Abdullah’s neck. He shook again, this time with a familiar eagerness.

Shannon dropped his arms and ran. He would kill Abdullah and then he would kill Jamal.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

TANYA WAS sleeping dreamlessly when the blow caught her midsection. She instinctively coiled up, coughing. A voice screamed above her.

“Get up!”

Another blow slammed into her back and she scrambled to her knees. Above her, a figure slowly shifted into focus, backlit by the afternoon sun. Her head spun, and she thought she was going to faint. But the feeling passed, and she blinked at the man.

A man with the white wedge through his hair still stood over her, grinning with twitching lips. Abdullah. She knew him immediately.

He held a silver pistol in his right hand. A small aluminum skiff tied to a muddy stump bobbed on the current behind him. The man’s white shirt had been browned by river muck and his black shoes were caked with mud. He’d saved his pants by rolling them up above his socks to hairy, bony shins that looked as though they hadn’t seen the sun in years. The angry scar on his cheek curled with his grin. He’d come down the river from the plantation, which meant Shannon had failed to find him.

“Well. What a surprise. It’s the assassin’s woman,” Abdullah said. His tongue seemed dark in his mouth when he spoke, like an eel hiding in its black cave. His wet lips quivered spastically.

“It appears that you’ll die after all.” The Arab’s eyes glistened black and bulging, and Tanya thought that he had lost himself. She stood slowly.

She saw Father Petrus then, kneeling in the mud by the skiff, blindfolded, hands tied behind his back.

“Father Petrus!” She instinctively moved toward him.

“Shut up!” Abdullah struck her shoulder, and she fell back to her seat.

She scrambled around. “What have you done to him?”

“It’s okay, Tanya.” The priest’s voice was hoarse.

Tanya? He knew her real name?

Abdullah smiled, amused. “You want your priest, don’t you? Yes, of course, you are about to die and you want your priest.” He turned to the river. “Priest, come here.”

Petrus did not move.

“Come here!” Abdullah screamed. “Are you deaf?”

Father Petrus got his legs under him and staggered toward them. The Arab stepped out impatiently and shoved him the last few yards. Petrus collapsed beside Tanya.

She ripped his blindfold off and threw it to one side. Petrus blinked in the light, and she helped him to his seat.

Abdullah looked at them, an amused expression on his face, momentarily lost, it seemed. He lifted his black eyes and studied the tree line above the clearing. “Where is your man now? He’s not here, is he? No. He couldn’t have come this far so quickly. But he’ll come. He’ll come for his lover.”

Please, God . . .
Tanya started the prayer but didn’t know where to go with it.

Abdullah rested his eyes on her again. He motioned to her with the pistol. “Do you know what I’ve done?”

His face held such a look of pure evil that Tanya instantly knew. The bomb. He had detonated the bomb in her vision. Fear squeezed at her heart.

“Yes?” A twisted grin lifted his left cheek, the one without a scar. Sweat snaked from his temples. “Do you know?”

“You’re the devil,” she said.

His lips snapped shut. His eyes glared round. “Shut up!” Spittle flecked on his lower lip.

She looked at Father Petrus seated beside her. Their eyes met and his were bright. His face sagged and his clothes were torn but his eyes were bright. A smile tugged gently at his mouth. She blinked. A lump rose in her throat.

She looked up at Abdullah. “You’re the hand of Satan.”

The Arab’s gun hand began to tremble and she spoke again, gaining confidence now, “Yes, I do know what you’ve done. You’ve detonated a nuclear bomb.”

He stopped, surprised. “It worked?”

He didn’t know? “Yes, I think so.”

“And how would you know this?”

“I saw it,” she said simply. “In a dream.”

He cocked his head slightly and examined her face carefully. “You saw it, did you? And what else did you see?” His lips twisted. “Do you see what will happen now?”

She hesitated. She only knew that it would be good for Shannon to come through the trees now. And she didn’t necessarily want him to save her, although that seemed reasonable enough, but she wanted him to be here. Shannon.

“I’m sure you want to kill,” she said.

He blinked. “And will I succeed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you don’t know anything.”

“I know that you’re death.”

“Shut up!” he screamed. His voice echoed about the trees.

She looked past him to the tree line.
Shannon, do you hear that, my love? Come quickly. Please, there isn’t much time.

My love?

“If you speak again, I’ll kill him,” Abdullah said, pointing the gun at Petrus.

She looked back at him. “You can’t kill him.”

Abdullah’s face quivered with anger.

“He would hear the gunshot. My Shannon would hear it,” Tanya said.

The Arab’s black eyes seemed to hollow with hate. Like two holes drilled through that skull of his.

“Lie down on your stomach.”

Petrus protested. “Please, I must—”

“Shut up!”

Tanya hesitated and then did as he asked. His knee dropped into her back and she waited for something to happen. The fear returned then, as she lay on her stomach. A panicking terror that ripped through her bones like white-hot lead. Nausea swept through her and she imagined his blade reaching forward and slicing through her neck.

Oh, God, please! Please save me!
Her heart crashed in her chest and her muscles strung tight. Behind her Abdullah’s breathing thickened.

And then Abdullah simply stood and walked away.

TANYA LAY on her stomach for a long minute before moving. Petrus was still seated beside her, staring at the river. She followed his eyes. Abdullah squatted on the muddy bank, twenty meters off. He stared at them, rocking, gun limp in his right hand.

Tanya pushed herself up to her seat and faced Abdullah.

“Father Petrus?”

He answered without turning. “Yes, Tanya?”

“I’m . . . I’m very sorry, Father.”

He turned his head and raised a brow. “Sorry? Don’t be sorry for me, my dear. We are winning. Can’t you see that?”

“Winning? We’re sitting on a river a thousand miles from anywhere with a madman staring us down. I’m not sure I’m following.”

“And to be honest, I’m not necessarily following either. But I do know a few things. I know that your parents were drawn to this jungle twenty years ago so that you could be here today. I know that a young girl named Nadia died in my homeland of Bosnia forty years ago so that I could be here today.” He offered a smile. “This is far beyond us, my dear.”

“My parents were
killed,
Father.”

Father Petrus looked up to the canopy to his left and sighed. “So were mine. And I think we may be as well. As were all the disciples and Christ himself.”

Tanya’s mind spun. Something in her belly told her that his words were spun of gold. Her vision swam.

“God’s chess match,” she said.

She expected him to comfort her. To reason with her or something. But he didn’t.

“Yes.”

For a full minute they just stared out to the trees, hearing a sea of cicadas, watching Abdullah’s glazed-over stare from across the way. He was squatting and waiting for something. He was insane.

“You’re saying that my parents died so that I would end up in a box and pledge my life to God to come back here and lay on a riverbank and die myself.”

“Perhaps. Or so that you could do something only you can do.” He looked at her. “Do you know what that might be?”

She considered the question. “It sounds crazy, but maybe to love . . . Shannon.”

“The boy.”

“Yes, the boy. You know him better as Casius. The assassin.”

The father’s eyes widened with the realization. “Casius.” A smile tugged at his lips. “Of course.”

A tear pooled in her eye. “It may not make any sense to you, but my heart is crying for him.”

“So then he is a part of this too.”

“He was the man I loved.”

“Yes, but more.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But nothing is without a purpose. For all we know
his
parents were somehow drawn to the jungle so that he could become who he has become.”

“An assassin? Doesn’t sound like God to me.”

“And the man who killed Hitler, was he raised up by God?”

“You’re saying that one of the reasons God brought our parents to the jungle was so that Shannon and I could fall in love and become who we are today for some reason somehow connected with this . . . this attack on America by these terrorists.”

“The chess match. I’m saying that the black side has had something up its sleeve and God has known for a long time. Yes. It happens a thousand times a day.”

“We are hardly pawns. What if my parents had not responded to God’s call?”

“Then you wouldn’t have fallen in love with Shannon, would you?”

“And what if Helen hadn’t persuaded me to come back?”

“Then . . . then you wouldn’t be able to love Shannon again.”

“And?”

He paused. “And I don’t know.”

A knot rose in her throat and she swallowed against it. “Part of me does still love him. But he’s changed. I’m not sure I know how to love him.”