The Tenth Circle (14 page)

Dearborn, Michigan

Zarrin watched the birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s finally winding down. From her strategically chosen parking place in the lot, she could see parents starting to fetch their children’s coats, extending them toward tiny arms.

The man who’d been seated at the picnic table when she’d first arrived remained standing, totally on the grass now with his cell phone pocketed. Zarrin kept watching him, as her mind drifted back to the Palestinian refugee camp where she’d spent much of her youth before Colonel al-Asi’s people came for her.

And the first man she’d ever killed.

The West Bank, 1988

“What do they call themselves, this gang that runs the camp?” she asked her piano teacher.

“Concentrate on your studies,” Kazim instructed.

“This is important too.”

“Why?”

“Because I like to know who my enemies are.” The then-fourteen-year-old Zarrin looked at him closer. “And because of the way they treat good people like you.”

Kazim nodded grudgingly, certain there would be no more teaching of music today until the most gifted student he’d ever had was satisfied. “They are called
Hamsa
, after a palm-shaped amulet thought by many to symbolize the hand of God.”

He went on to explain how Hamsa controlled distribution of clean water, food, even medicine, appropriating the vast bulk of supplies that came into the camp courtesy of the Red Cross or supportive nations.

“Like the antibiotics you need,” Zarrin concluded for herself, “because of your diabetes.”

Kazim looked down at the stumps that ended where his knees should have been, infections having cost him both legs. “That isn’t a problem now.”

“But it will be. What then?”

“Worry about perfecting your playing, not me.”

“I can worry about both.”

“Not today.”

It was a week later when Kazim’s fever spiked to 103. He tried desperately to get Hamsa to provide him with antibiotics as they had in the past, but this time he had nothing left to trade other than the similarly legless piano on which he taught Zarrin to play. He was sweating badly, struck alternately by bouts of being horribly hot and terribly cold. She tried to comfort him as best she could with blankets and whatever water she could scavenge, but his condition continued to worsen by the hour.

Zarrin knew she had no choice. She held only vague memories of the off-target Israeli air strike that had killed her parents, still clear enough to resolve she would never stand helpless again while someone important to her died. So that night, Zarrin shadowed one of Hamsa’s soldiers in his nightly run through the camp dispensing goods to those with the money or goods to exchange for them. She waited until he emerged from a ramshackle shack in the darkest section she could find. Then she pounced, coiling a knife stolen from a Red Cross commissary around his neck.

She was going to make him give her the antibiotics, threaten him with death unless he dropped his satchel. But the man was stronger than he looked and started to fight her. Zarrin could feel him starting to twist, the advantage soon to be his, a beating or even death at his hands the likely upshot. The men of Hamsa walked the camp like gods; no one dared accost or threaten, never mind kill, one. But Zarrin had no choice. She felt herself draw the blade sideways, slicing the man’s jugular. She’d stripped the satchel holding medical supplies from his shoulder and fled, while he lay writhing toward death amid the muck of the street.

“I convinced Hamsa to change their mind,” she told her teacher.

Kazim showed improvement after the first dosage of the antibiotics Zarrin had stolen, distributing the remaining medicines to those most in need. Within two days, he was able to get around again in his wheelchair or on crutches. But on the third, when she went to his shack for her piano lesson, she found him lying on the floor amid the shattered remnants of his piano, badly beaten with blood and drool dribbling from his mouth.

“No, no!” she cried, cradling Kazim in her arms, willing him not to die and refusing to acknowledge it when he took his last breath.

The memories of her parents’ deaths struck her in that instant with crystal clarity, to the point where she thought she could hear the rumble of the Israeli jets overhead. Somehow, though, feeling Kazim die in her arms was worse. Maybe because she was older. Or maybe because, this time, she could not live with the pain that cut through her insides like a knife and do nothing.

Zarrin pictured herself killing Hamsa’s murderous leader, who was also one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. She would do it soon, as early as the next day, thoughts of her own survival irrelevant. She would sacrifice her own life to get close enough to do it with the same knife with which she’d cut the throat of his soldier. Prayed only that she’d live long enough to watch the fear in his eyes as the animal realized death was coming.

“For you, my teacher,” she whispered into Kazim’s ear. “I do this for you.”

Zarrin had tucked the knife inside her belt under her shirt, intending to approach the Hamsa leader with a basket of flowers she managed to collect. She’d hand him one, a gesture of respect and subservience to his power, and when he reached for it or moved to thank her, she would stab him in the throat and tear at it with her blade until his men struck her down.

She was moving for the section of the camp Hamsa occupied, flower basket in hand and knife at the ready, when men she’d never seen before intercepted her. They dragged her, literally kicking and screaming, away. Zarrin’s first thought was that they must be from Hamsa, dispatched to deter and detain her. Or much worse.

But instead of doing to her what they’d been rumored to have done to so many other young girls, these men spirited her to another section of the camp and into the rear of a van that waited with its engine still idling.

“Who are you?” she demanded, as bravely as she could manage. “Where are you taking me?”

The men didn’t answer her, just smiled. Until the van pulled away and one said, simply, “We are taking you to school.”

Her training had begun almost immediately, first at another camp that would later be labeled a terrorist training ground and raided by Israeli defense forces. By then, though, Zarrin had already been sent to Russia, where she completed her training at the hands of experts.

Experts in killing.

They made Zarrin into the legendary assassin she’d eventually become, finishing the work that had begun when she slit the throat of the Hamsa soldier to save Kazim’s life.

Zarrin’s mind was jerked back to the present when a dark SUV turned into the parking lot, circled once, then backed into a slot on the opposite side of the restaurant from her.

Zarrin gunned her already warm engine.

The front doors of the SUV opened at the same time, a pair of men wearing long, dark overcoats and dark gloves climbing out. She could tell by the way one hitched up his shoulder that he wore a submachine gun dangling from it, cold steel concealed by the heavy fabric.

Zarrin shifted into gear and sped forward, braking just enough to make sure there was no screech when she twisted round the corner at the building’s edge. She’d timed the move perfectly, the two men positioned in the middle of parking lot’s single big lane, halfway between their SUV and the restaurant entrance.

Zarrin accelerated at the last second, the screech she now wanted to sound freezing the men long enough to swing toward her in the last instant before the bumper slammed into them. She hit one of the men square on, flush, the other with a more glancing blow that nonetheless spun him to the side and pitched him airborne. His jacket separated, offering Zarrin a glimpse of the submachine gun dangling from a shoulder strap. Meanwhile, she’d felt the bones of the man she’d hit square on crunch on impact as he flew up and over the roof, hitting her stolen car’s trunk before bouncing to the pavement below.

The spotter made a run for his car, fumbling a cell phone from his pocket when Zarrin aimed her pistol out the window and fired twice. The man jerked to a halt, as if being halted by a leash. Then he crumpled to the concrete.

Zarrin eyed the parking lot exit, screeched toward it only to jam on the brakes. Because she’d remembered something.

The ball pit, closed for repairs on the day of Colonel al-Asi’s grandchild’s party. But what could break in a ball pit?

And then she was bringing the car around, twisting and tearing forward straight for the glass wall. Crashed through it to send shards and fragments spraying in all directions, narrowly avoiding adults pulling children’s arms into their coats. Screams, wails, and cries flirted with the outskirts of her hearing, Colonel al-Asi lurching her way, still trying to make sense of what had transpired in the parking lot.

But Zarrin was ready when the two figures burst up from the ball pit, submachine guns in hand. Their disorientation cost them the next moment, left it all to her. And that was all Zarrin needed to empty the remainder of her magazine into the two men, bullets divided equally between them until they pitched downward to be swallowed anew by the colored balls. Sinking slowly until they disappeared, by which time al-Asi had reached the hood of her rental car, staring at her in abject shock.

“Get in, Colonel!” she yelled at him. “Get in!”

He rode stiff in the passenger seat, clutching the dashboard before him so tightly Zarrin could see the fingertip impressions.

“Thank you,” he said finally.

“They came for you, Colonel. Anticipated my actions perfectly and waited until they thought I was gone to move.”

“You saved my family, Zarrin, saved everything.”

“I noticed the spotter. I got lucky.”

“Training, not luck. And experience. I now owe you a debt I can never repay.”

“Then help me find them, Colonel. Help me stop this before it’s too late.”

He nodded deliberately, sneering, the calm and confidence in his expression replaced by resolve. “Consider it done.”

“And answer a question for me.”

“Anything.”

“Back in that refugee camp, did you order the death of Kazim, my music teacher, so I’d be free to do your bidding?”

“You think I’d do such a thing?” he challenged, genuinely miffed.

“Yes, if it suited your purpose.”

“You disappoint me, Zarrin.”

“You still haven’t answered the question, Colonel.”

“No,” al-Asi insisted finally, “but I did stop you from retaliating. Wouldn’t want to waste such exceptional skills, especially after I’d witnessed your work firsthand.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Hamsa soldier you killed. I saw a recording of that.”

“You were watching me even then… .”

“Of course I was. Waiting until you proved yourself more than a just a survivor. I saw it in your eyes when I toured the camp, but I needed to see it in action.”

“And now, thanks to me, you’re still alive to enjoy your grandchildren. Whoever was behind setting me up was watching you because you’d already been deemed a threat. And they’ll be back, Colonel.”

Something changed in al-Asi’s tone, familiar in memory but distant in time. “Then I guess we have some work to do.”

Roanoke Island

“They came back,” Jacob muttered, face pressed against the hard damp ground with McCracken holding a hand on his back.

“A dozen men, Blainey, maybe more,” said Johnny Wareagle.

“Waiting for our asses,” managed Captain Seven.

McCracken thought quickly, eyes moving to the pouch from which Wareangle had pulled Jacob’s homemade grenades. “Those things really work, kid?”

“Oh yeah. For sure.”

Then, to Captain Seven, “You said there’s still some White Death left in the ground.”

“Traces anyway.”

“Then give me the laces from your Vans.”

“Huh?”

“Both of them, Captain,” McCracken said, as fresh hails of automatic fire hummed over their heads.

Jacob and Captain Seven crawled off, staying low to be as far out of sight as possible. Wareagle made a show of returning fire with his pistol to hold the enemy at bay, certain now that a dozen was likely a low-range estimate.

“There are more of them beyond the tree line, Blainey, laying a trap to the south.”

“Very direction the kid and Seven are headed.”

“The boy will sense them too. He’ll know.”

There were three homemade grenades in Jacob’s pouch, little more than black powder sifted from high-powered firecrackers mixed with small roofing nails inside a cast-iron ball that looked like part of the base for some piece of heavy machinery. Each had short fusing poking out from their tops, and Blaine tied Captain Seven’s Vans laces to two of them.

Eighteen inches, about a second to burn down for each inch, meaning he’d be cutting very close.

While McCracken worked to string the laces to the exposed fusing of two of Jacob’s homemade grenades, Wareagle twisted a third open and sifted the black powder into his palm, turning it moist with spit. Then he spread the paste-like compound along the length of one shoelace, rubbing hard to make it meld with the fibers.

Once Johnny had gone to work on the second, McCracken pushed the first grenade down into the ground directly over the replacement well the Roanoke colonists had dug in 1590, leaving only the tip of Captain Seven’s Vans lace over the surface. Then he repeated the process with the second, while Johnny continued to return fire to hold the enemy gunmen at bay.

“This doesn’t work, it’s gonna be a long night, Indian.”

“Maybe not long enough.”

Wareagle handed him the lighter from Jacob’s pouch.

“Not much changes, does it?”

“Let’s find out, Blainey.”

And with that, McCracken flicked the lighter to life and touched the flame to one lace tip and then the other. The sizzling hisses started up immediately and the next moment found McCracken and Wareagle rushing through the former encampment, returning fire in token fashion as they ran, counting down the seconds the whole time.

They caught only glimpses of the men crashing into the clearing before darting into the woods on the opposite side, hitting the ground hard at a safe distance away from what they hoped was coming. Torrents of gunfire traced over their heads at the fifteen-second mark.

The grenades ignited a breath apart from each other at sixteen. Then the screams started, just as described in Governor John White’s journal, only much, much louder given how many more men had been trapped in the clearing when the same noxious cloud that had killed the Roanoke colonists claimed its next victims.

The screams became rasps, then horrible gasping sounds as the gunmen heaved for air before crumpling over the makeshift graves of the original colonists, leaving an eerie quiet in the cold air rich with snowflakes now. The stench of burned gunpowder dominated the scene, drowning all other smells out, as smoke wafted over the victims, thinning to the point it all but disappeared.

McCracken and Wareagle lurched back to their feet, both realizing they’d involuntarily held their breath until that moment. They surged into motion, toward the south, ready to confront whoever lay in wait to spring the trap. Only that part of the assault team was gone, having fled at the sound of the terrible screams that had come at the hands of exposure to the White Death. Blaine and Johnny found Jacob and Captain Seven still hidden under the makeshift cover of leaves and brush.

McCracken jerked the boy to his feet, startling him.

“I told you they’d work,” Jacob said proudly.

“Finish what you were saying before, about what happened when somebody came back for the White Death.”

Jacob jerked free of his grasp. “It wasn’t them,” the boy said, looking back toward the camp.

“Who, then?” McCracken demanded. “And when?”

Jacob started to back off, brushing himself off as he turned for the path. “You want the answers, you’ll have to come with me. The rest of the story is best told by somebody who was there when it happened.”