The Tower (9 page)

She probed the darkness, everything glowing a phosphorescent green in the night-sight. The house remained dark and silent.

Nothing moved.

She felt a slight vibration in the sleeve pocket of her camouflage jacket and swung the rifle round ninety degrees to a neighbouring tree. She could just make out the slim outline of Eli, the hand holding the phone that had sent the alert making a chopping sign across his throat.

Time to pull out.

Exfiltration was fast and practised. She capped the scope and powered it down, slung the rifle crossways over her back then dropped down from her tree. Eli joined her and stood sentry while she broke the rifle down further and bagged it so it could be stashed quickly in the trunk of the car once they made it back to the road, then they headed away through the woods. Occasionally, they came across the stacked branches and litter of a den built by the neighbourhood kids who slunk from their houses and went feral in these woods. There was no one around now, the late hour and weather had seen to that.

They drew close to the edge of the trees and Eli stopped. The dark yard they had passed through earlier was now bright with light spilling from several rooms in the house and a TV was blaring loudly somewhere inside. Too chancy to go back that way and risk being seen.

Eli pointed right and moved off, keeping the boundary lines of the properties in sight as they moved through the trees looking for another way out. They found a quiet house, no lights on, no movement inside, no car in the drive, and no security lights pointing out at the yard ready to light up anything that moved across it. There were no toys or trampolines in this garden, just a lawn surrounded by a wooden fence running all the way round the property. Carrie wondered if it had been put up to keep the neighbourhood kids out. Either way, it wouldn’t stop them.

She went first, springing over the fence and landing in a crouch, her hands feeling the cold, wet earth through her gloves. She heard the creak of the fence and squelch of Eli’s boots as he followed her, crouching down behind her, so near she could feel him. She savoured the delicious closeness, a momentary distraction that made her slow to react.

The dog appeared out of the dark in an explosion of noise and teeth. It launched itself straight at her, a large, angry animal, black as the night, all muscle and rage. She turned and raised her arm to protect her face from the claws and the bite, but the dog did not reach her.

Eli’s boot caught it just behind the head, turning the snarl into a yelp and sending it spinning away. It landed on its side, rolled and scrabbled to get to its feet but Eli was already on it, grabbing its rear legs and heaving it up, flipping it high with an arch of his back then down hard, smashing its head against the ground. Another yelp squeaked from it as the soft earth stunned it but did not knock it out. The dog clawed at the ground again, weaker now, its back legs kicking free from Eli’s grip, desperate to get away from the source of its pain.

Eli stepped forward, his trailing leg whipping through the air, connecting with the dog’s throat in a wet thud that snapped the dog’s head back. This time it did not yelp at all because its windpipe had been crushed. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, bloody and twitching as it fought for breath. Casper moved over it, raising his boot high and bringing it down hard, stamping the life out of it repeatedly in fury until Carrie laid a hand on him, pulling him away and past the house to where the streetlights swayed in the wind.

They vaulted the chain-link gate with the
BEWARE OF THE DOG
sign on it, keeping in the shadows of the trees until they made it back to the little league baseball park where they’d left the car, well away from the street lights.

Eli got in the passenger seat. Carrie drove, the heater on full, filling the car with dry air and noise, neither of them speaking until they were a couple of miles down the road.

‘You OK, baby?’

Eli didn’t reply.

Carrie let it slide and settled into the roar of the heater and the rumble of the road, worrying about what lay beneath his silence.

She had never seen him kill anything before tonight and there had been something magnificent and terrible about the way he had done it. Eli wasn’t physically imposing, if anything his height made him appear slimmer than he was, but there was something about the way he carried himself, something lean and dangerous, like an old-fashioned razor – and she knew where it came from.

Like all true lovers, part of their intimacy lay in the secrets they shared. Eli had confessed his in the mission military hospital where he’d been released after being locked up for seven months for
nearly
killing someone. One by one he had detailed, in a quiet expressionless voice, all the people he had killed in his relatively short life. It had started with the kid in Juvie who had tried to touch him somewhere he shouldn’t. He hadn’t expected the skinny, younger boy to fight back and had been caught off guard when he did, slipping on the tiles in the shower block and cracking his head. Eli told her how he had jumped on top of the boy, grabbed his hair and hammered his skull against the tiles until someone else found them and dragged him away. Eli’s tormentor had died in the infirmary two days later.

I just wanted to make sure he stayed down
– he told her –
but then I couldn’t stop.

This first homicide kept him institutionalized until he got a release into the Army where his country turned his aggression to good use. Carrie had listened as he listed all the people he had killed while in uniform, stroking his head and letting him talk them all out like he was exorcizing demons. Killing was his gift, but also his curse, and she knew his true secret, whispered to her alone in the quiet of a psychiatric cell he’d been sent to after killing a sergeant in a fight over a toothbrush:

I like it
–
the killing. I like it. It’s the only thing I ever been good at. But killing is a sin, so I must be damned to all hell for liking it so.

She looked across at him now, the muscle in his jaw working in that way it did when something was eating him up inside.

‘Hey baby, it’s OK, honey – you were only looking out for me,’ she told him. ‘Saving someone you love from hurt is a righteous thing to do. And some poor dumb animal don’t have no immortal soul.’

He shook his head. ‘Animal or a man,’ he said, ‘it’s all the same for me.’ He stared ahead, his face lit by the wash of oncoming headlights, his eyes focused on something darker than night.

She wanted to stop the car and hold him, stroke his head, but they needed to get away. Stopping a car by the side of the road in this weather was just inviting some do-gooder or a highway cop to come snooping, and they couldn’t afford to be seen.

‘You want to make the call? Tell Archangel what we saw at the house,’ she said. ‘I’ll look for a motel where we can rest up.’

Eli dug a phone from his pocket, the screen lighting up his face as he searched for the number. He switched it to loudspeaker and the sound of dialling and connecting chirruped in the enclosed space.

Carrie had never been concerned with killing or death the way Eli and many other men like him seemed to be. She had heard all the arguments against the deployment of women in theatres of war and thought most of it was just horseshit. The first time she had watched an Iraqi tank commander’s head snap back after she squeezed the trigger of her M24 she’d felt nothing, nothing at all. Never lost a single moment’s sleep about it neither. And it was the women who gave birth, and then watched their sons and husbands go off to war. Living on when everything you’d loved had been taken away, that was the really tough stuff. Killing was easy.

The ringing tone purred amid the rumble of the road. Someone picked up and Archangel’s voice joined them in the car.

‘Is it done?’

‘No,’ Eli said, ‘he wasn’t there, but someone else was. Cops of some sort I think.’

‘Did they see you?’

‘No.’

There was a pause on the line. ‘He can’t have gone far. Let me see what I can find out. Go somewhere safe and wait for my call, until then God bless and keep you both.’

Then the phone went dead.

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy … for the time is at hand.

Revelation 1:3

Liv woke just as dawn was starting to bleed into the eastern sky. She was lying on the ground next to the grave of the Ghost, her head full of strange symbols and the sky full of fading stars.

She had been dreaming she was back in her old apartment, watering the hundreds of plants that lined the walls. She had grown plants since she was small, squeezed between her father and her brother as they potted and seeded like other kids baked cakes with their moms. It was her dad’s way of spending time with his kids and getting them to help out with his gardening business. He taught them the names of everything, though he also let her make up some to keep her amused. Some of them had stuck. To this day she still called
Physillis
an orange eyeball tree.

She opened her eyes and the loamy smell of the earth escaped from her dream and drifted across the desert. It took her a few moments to recall where she was as she hung for some blissful heartbeats suspended between the past and the present before she remembered. The apartment was gone, incinerated along with everything in it by someone who had been looking for her. Her father was dead, so was her brother – and Gabriel was gone. It all struck her like a fresh loss, so hard that she just wanted to curl up again, go back to sleep and escape into the bliss of her dream.

Then she heard the noise, like the soft hiss of a huge snake.

Instinctively she rolled away from it, right across the grave, coming to rest so she was staring across the stone at the source of the sound.

Tariq was curled up and sleeping on the ground nearby, his AK47 cradled in his arms, his mouth forming words that escaped as sibilant whispers from his dream.

– Saa’so Ishtar – Saa’so Ishtar –

She watched him twitching in his sleep, whispering the words over and over until the lightening sky woke him too.

‘What is Ishtar?’ She fired the question at him while he was still blinking awake. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands then looked over at her, his forehead creased in a question. ‘You were saying it over and over in your sleep – what is it?’

‘Ishtar is a goddess,’ he said, pushing himself up and automatically checking his rifle for sand, ‘an ancient goddess from the time when all these lands were green. She was the goddess of fertility, and love, and war. It was she who made everything grow and gave names to every living thing.’

Liv remembered her dream and the memory of naming plants by her father’s side. ‘I heard people calling me that – amongst other things.’

Tariq unwrapped the keffiyeh from around his neck, shook it out and carefully laid it on the ground. ‘There is an old tale,’ he said, as well-practised hands removed the magazine from his rifle, ejected a shell from the breach then began taking it to pieces. ‘It is a nomad tale from the ancient times. It tells how Ishtar was tricked by jealous men and made prisoner in the caves of the underworld. She was kept in darkness, away from the sun, to make her weak. Her powers were stolen so that the men who had imprisoned her might live as gods, never ageing and never falling ill. And because of this the lands that had been nourished by her dried up and everything died.’ The top cover of the rifle and the recoil spring were carefully laid in turn on his keffiyeh.

‘But the story also tells that when time reaches the end of its long road Ishtar will escape from the darkness and return again, bringing back the water so the land may be reborn.’ He blew hard into the firing chamber, inspected inside then did the same with the other parts he had removed. ‘And you brought the water, that is why they call you Ishtar.’

Liv laughed. ‘I’m an unemployed, homeless reporter from New Jersey. Does that sound like a goddess to you?’ She stood up and stretched the kinks out of her back. ‘Listen, you said yesterday you could take me anywhere I wanted to go. You think you could take me as far as the Turkish border?’

‘If you wish,’ he said, snicking his rifle together again with impressive speed and smacking the magazine into place. ‘But first, let me show you something.’ He rose from the ground and slung the rifle over his back, heading around the perimeter fence to where the holding pits had been dug. They had been intended to catch the overspill of crude oil from the central well but were now brimming with water. Tariq helped Liv up the side of one of the banks and pointed past the edge of the second pit. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You see it?’

From her elevated position Liv saw how the water had breached the holding pits in several places, creating rivulets that snaked away across the baked earth, carving new channels as they went.

‘The blood is flowing back into the land,’ Tariq said. ‘And see –’ he pointed along the edge of the water ‘– the land is starting to live again.’

All along the banks of the new rivers, green shoots were bristling. ‘See there, we call that Ya’did or skeleton weed. And there, you see those tiny yellow flowers?’

‘Groundsel,’ Liv said. ‘And that is
Artemisia
, or some other sort of ephemeral grass; and that looks like a tamarisk seedling.’

Tariq turned to her smiling. ‘You see, you know the plants, you can name them all.’

Liv shook her head. ‘Don’t read too much into it. My dad was a horticulturalist and I had no mother so I grew up digging and planting instead of playing with dolls, I got dirt in my blood.’ She followed the lines of the water to where the heat rippled the air. In the distance a column of dust was rising, another illusion to raise her hopes that Gabriel might be returning. She stared at it, waiting for it to melt away like her hopes always did. Only this one didn’t. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she said, hope swelling in her chest.