The Mark of Cain (37 page)

“No, you don’t. Look, give him his space tonight,
and maybe even tomorrow. But once we get home, the two of you are going to make
plans for some one-on-one time. Okay?”

She sighed, resting her cheek back on his chest. He
was just so good to her. He always knew what was best for her. No wonder she
fell so hard so fast….

“Okay. Thanks,” she said into his shirt, letting his
musk calm her.

“For what?”

“For being so wonderful.”

“I just want you happy. It’s completely selfish.”

She giggled, looking up at him. “How could that be
selfish?”

“Because I like it when you’re happy. You have a
beautiful smile,” he said, lightly chucking her under her chin.

She gave him her biggest one before they sat down
near the fire—which Inac fixed until it was huge and toasty, cutting the chill
from the night air. They ended up visiting with Crystal and Ji until she fell
asleep in Inac’s arms.

***

The drive home was uneventful; mostly because
Tracker wouldn’t speak to any of them. Hara wanted to work things out, but she
didn’t understand his attitude in the first place. She contemplated it the
whole ride home until she fell asleep. When she woke up in her own bed the next
morning with a single scarlet rose on her nightstand—one that suspiciously
looked just like the ones on the landlord’s prized rose bushes—she knew that
Inac had put her there.

Inac…her fiancé. She couldn’t believe how lucky she
was. It wasn’t until she read the note accompanying the rose that her heart
sank.

Hara
, it said.
I’m sorry, but I
got called away for business. I shouldn’t be more than a week or so. I’ll call
you the first chance I get. Use this time to make up with Tracker. Also, in
case I’m not back in time, good luck with school. I love you.
Inac

She walked out to the kitchen to put the rose in
water. Surprisingly enough, she found Crystal in there.

“You’re up early,” she said to her roommate, who was
not only awake, but dressed in jeans and a sexy tank top. Strange. She was
never
up before noon.

“Yeah. I have to go try to change one of my classes
before school starts next week.”

Hara nodded as she located a small vase from the
cheapo, dark particle board cupboards.

“That from Inac?” Crystal asked, gesturing at the
rose as she shoveled cereal into her mouth.

“Yeah,” she pouted. “He left it with a note saying
that he was sorry but he had to go out of town.”

“I know. He got the call as we were pulling off the
freeway. He was really mad. It was kind of scary, actually.”

Hara felt her eyes widen in surprise. “What did he
say?”

“Well…at first he was just like, ‘You
can’t
be serious!’ Then he said something in another language…it sounded like he was
cussing or something.”

“And then what?”

“He asked who else knew.”

“Who else knew what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever the other person was telling
him, I guess,” she said as she poured more cereal into her bowl, her dark hair
falling into her eyes. “But Tracker was listening pretty intently and Inac kept
glancing at you like he didn’t want you to hear what he was saying.”

“Did he say anything else?” What was Inac hiding?

“Just to ready the team so they could do what they
should’ve done the last time. Then he yelled at whoever he was talking to for
not knowing about ‘It before it got this far.’ It sounded like a threat.”

None of this made any sense. Inac threatening
somebody? He was too
gentle
to hurt a soul. Sure, she’d seen glimmers of
something frightening barely suppressed in him, but whatever it was always
disappeared before she could figure it out. And that had always been when
talking about his past. Now that she knew he’d been a soldier, it made sense….

“He must’ve meant that he was firing the guy,” she
explained, though she didn’t believe her own words.

“Yeah…I don’t know. Like I said, he was scary.
Besides, we know he’s killed before.”

“As a soldier! It wasn’t murder!”

A lightbulb went off in Crystal’s eyes as she peered
out from under her bangs. “Oh my gosh!” she cried, not taking the Lord’s name
in vain because Hara hated that most of all the cusswords. “I figured it out!”

“What?”

“He’s like CIA or something. That’s gotta be it! You
saw how good at all that ‘survival in the wilderness’ crap he was, and you told
me that he flew the helicopter.”

Hara thought about it. She was probably partly
right. The way he talked about the Mokolios sounded like they owned
governments. In that case, Crystal couldn’t be far off.

“You know, I think you’re right,” she said as she
pulled a bowl out to pour some of the cinnamon and sugar cereal for herself.

“It would explain all his secrets.”

“Yeah…it would. Look, don’t tell anybody. Okay?”

“You have my word.” After a moment, Crystal yelled,
“I can’t
believe
you’re engaged to a secret agent! That is so
cool
!”

“Yeah, it is….”

Hara waited all that day for him to call. And then
the next and the next. She started worrying when it had been almost a week. A
week where Tracker and Inac had both fallen off the face of the planet. Where
were they?

***

“I’ll ask you again, Aviv,” Inac said in perfect
Hebrew. People who believed it to be the divine language would be proud at Cain
muttering it. Really, the language of God was dead to man. At least to every
man but him. Parts of it had found its way into every other language, but
Sumerian and Sanskrit were the closest to it of all; their most ancient forms
held roots of the Divine Tongue. “Who is this reporter you’ve been talking to?
Who else knows my real name?”

Aviv laughed, spitting blood out with each trill. He
was surprisingly tough for a politician. Most were shallow enough to spill
everything with just the
threat
of marring their looks, whether or not
they were good-looking in the first place.

“I won’t tell you,” he spat as blood dripped into
his beard, giving it more of a red tint than it had had before. The blood
dropped to the cement floor of the slaughter house, mingling with the ancient
blood of animals—Inac wasn’t about to ruin the floor in one of his beautiful
homes. And he wasn’t about to do the clichéd thing Americans watched mobsters
do in movies by putting their victims over a plastic sheet. That was just so
tacky.

Inac nodded at Santoni, telling him with it to bring
in a member of the prime minister’s family. He hated that they were forced to
do this, but Aviv had told somebody
everything
. How he had even learned
all of the information had Inac wondering whether or not he had a traitor in
his midst. That, or Aviv had been talking to The Order. But The Order was
spineless, so it couldn’t be Them. If They had wanted to expose him, They would
have done so centuries ago.

A seven-year-old boy with large, innocent eyes was
brought in. Up to this point, Inac hadn’t yet killed any of the prime minister’s
family. It had taken his men a week just to find Aviv, and his family had been
even more difficult to locate.

Aviv’s blue eyes opened wide. He had obviously
thought his family had been safe where he’d hidden them. He should know better
than that. Nobody could stay hidden from Inac for long if he was actively
searching for them. The only reason Hara had evaded him as long as she had was
because he’d thought himself to already be rid of her.

“Aviv, you have a chance to save your grandson. If
you don’t tell me what I want to know, you’ll be forced to watch him die,” Inac
said, his nose centimeters from the Jewish man’s broken one. What had once been
a strong, proud, Jewish nose now resembled a gnarled old branch.

Aviv spat on Inac’s cheek. “You’ll never get me to
tell!” Suddenly, he started laughing as Inac wiped the blood-riddled spit onto
his shirt. The minister was beginning to crack; he had broken the man more than
he’d thought he had. “Your girlfriend will know everything,” he said when he
finally calmed somewhat.

Inac stilled, asking, “Girlfriend?”

“The pretty one with the fair hair. She’ll know who
you really are.”

“For the sake of your family,” Inac hissed, “I
certainly hope you’re wrong. I have no qualms about killing each and every one
of them.”

Inac then went over to the boy, taking the gun from
Santoni and putting it to the back of the boy’s head. He didn’t want to be a
monster
,
so he would have each family member quickly executed; a bullet to their brain
stem. Then they at least wouldn’t have to suffer for Aviv’s crimes.

“The
name
, Aviv, or your grandson dies.”

The little boy began crying, shivering as he looked
at his grandfather, making Aviv cry as well. Finally, Inac was hitting the
correct nerve. They shouldn’t have wasted their time with torturing him.

Inac lowered the tip of the gun and moved it along
the child, letting it tickle the kid’s torso and shoulders, then his cheek and
mouth. It was almost like a lover’s caress he was so gentle. He knew that would
be what would scare Aviv the most; Inac’s calm demeanor. As Inac did so, the
child repeatedly cried out for his grandfather, begging for him not to let him
die.

“Okay!” Aviv yelled. “I don’t know the name, but I
can tell you how to get in touch with him.”

Inac pulled the gun away and sat down, a smile on
his lips. “Tell me….”

***

The doorbell buzzed. Hara was home alone so she
walked down the hall, rubbing the tearstains off her cheeks. She was so worried
about Inac and Tracker that she couldn’t stop crying.

When she opened the door, Tracker stood there,
looking down at his scuffed up old white tennis shoes that were falling apart
at the seams—he really needed to get some new shoes.

“Track!” she yelled as she jumped forward, throwing
her arms around him. “I’ve been so worried about you. Where have you
been
?!”

He gently put his arms around her. “Sorry. I just
had to think about some things. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“Well you
did
. I’ve been calling you and
calling you.” Suddenly, the fact that he was fine angered her so much that she
pulled away. “Where
were
you?!” she demanded, not even needing to
attempt to look upset.

“At home.”

“So you heard me knocking all those times and just left
me out there thinking you were dead?!”

“I’m sorry, Hara….”

“You’re sorry?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “Oh, you’re
sorry
.”

“Hara….”

“No, Tracker! No, ‘I’m sorry, Hara’ is gonna work
this time! You can’t just come here and think that would magically make everything
okay!” She knew that she was getting out of control, her voice to a decibel it
had never been to before, but she didn’t care. “Go away, Tracker! Get out of my
face!”

She then whirled and slammed the door in his face.

***

“Sir, it checks out,” Santoni said. “The reporter
squawked like a parrot. We found out everything he knew and there’s nothing
left. All the information’s destroyed, and his body will take a while to be
found.”

“And the man Aviv said is the source?” Aviv had
squawked, too. He’d told them exactly where he had gotten all the information
from—which was much more than the little bit he’d known before. He’d told them
not only who he’d given that info to, but also where he claimed he’d gotten it
from.

“He was telling the truth. The Vatican thought that
by sharing the information, you’d come back up on the grid.”

“And?”

“We sent Them a message telling Them to back off.”

Inac, who didn’t care enough to know what the
message was as long as They got one, turned back to Aviv.

“I’m sorry that it has to be this way,” he said in
Hebrew to the man who was so much younger than Inac, yet appeared to be so much
older.

Aviv nodded. “You never lied about what you would do
to me if I betrayed you.”

From behind Inac, Santoni’s deep bass said in
English, “What would you like us to do, sir?”

Without taking his eyes off Aviv, Inac answered,
“Drop him off in Palestine alive and in the same condition as he’s in now. Let
them do what they will with him.”

Aviv’s eyes widened; he was a politician who dealt
with the United States enough to have learned English. “Please?” he begged in
Hebrew. “Please have mercy and kill me now. They will torture me far worse than
you! Please?”