Section 8

CHAPTER 10

The report of Kasama's execution reached Abayon while he was once more hooked up to the dialysis machine. He was not surprised. Abayon knew the power of the Yakuza. And he knew that anyone who could do what had been done to Kasama was even more powerful. He had seen this before. A powerful organization struck by some group that lived in the shadows, one that seemed able to wield power with impunity. Not for the first time – or, he knew, the last – he wished he had not been so quick to cut Colonel Tashama's throat. In the six decades since that event, he had come to realize that it was as close as he'd ever gotten to someone who might have known what this shadow organization was. However, given the security levels he had run into whenever he tried to penetrate his enemy, he realized Tashama had probably known little more than he needed to hide this part of the Golden Lily here.

The nurse pulled the needle out of his arm and smiled at Abayon. He nodded his head in thanks. The dialysis was not a cure – it was a stop-gap measure designed to keep death a handsbreadth away. Time, the most valuable of all currencies, was what he needed. Just a little more time. And then he would embrace death. He had faced it many times before and he did not fear it – he only feared not completing what he'd set out to do so many years ago.

The issue of whether there was life after death had plagued mankind since the beginning of consciousness. For some people, usually those in the bounty of their youth, such a question was often considered in theoretical terms. For those in his situation, pinned to a wheelchair and hearing his life leave him molecule by molecule with each breath, it was a very real consideration.

He had managed to get the doctor to be honest with him, and Abayon knew that he would not be alive that long. What was beyond that increasingly occupied his mind. He was not one of the Muslims who believed heaven was a bountiful place of all the food one could eat and all the beautiful women one could take for one's own pleasure. Those were the naive dreams of ignorant men. A strict reading of the Koran indicated that man could have no concept of heaven because it was so far beyond anything experienced here on Earth.

Abayon liked the concept of something he couldn't conceptualize. It was a spiritual existence, not a physical one. There would be a birth of a soul from his own soul. And that new soul would reap the benefits of the type of life one had lived on Earth. According to his interpretation of the Koran, Heaven and Hell existed in the same place but on a different dimension. It was all relative, depending on what one could perceive and one's state upon death.

Abayon planned for his state upon death to be one of equilibrium. He had suffered much in life and spent decades building himself up to a position of power in order to equal out the scales. It had required tremendous patience, the need to hold back when there was a burning desire to strike out against his enemies and those who had done him tremendous wrongs over the years.

There was evil in the world. The evil of the material world. And looming behind that evil was the United States and its corrupting influence. In that, he agreed with Al Qaeda and the other extremist Islamic groups. But Abayon sensed something more. A power behind the power. He had seen and heard and interpreted too many unsettling things over the course of his life.

Finding this complex and its contents had been disturbing enough over sixty years ago. But it had only been the first of several events that changed his view on the world, just as his learning of Islam had changed his view of the afterlife.

A guard wheeled Abayon from the medical center to his office. Abayon checked the in-box, signing off on the minor details that kept the Abu Sayef running its day-to-day operations. He smiled as he thought it was not much different running a guerrilla organization than a corporation.

Wheels up. Vaughn felt the plane depart from the runway. A small pile of equipment was tied down on the ramp: two parachutes, night vision goggles, and helmets. He loosened the straps and removed one of them.

"I like to pack my own," Tai said as she grabbed the other one.

"I do too," Vaughn said, but they both knew that was impractical in the back of the aircraft. They checked the rigging on the outside as best they could. Everything appeared to be in order.

Vaughn turned to the crew chief, the only other occupant of the cargo bay.

"How long until the drop?"

The crew chief spoke into his headset, listened and then turned to Vaughn and Tai.

"Two hours, twenty-six minutes."

Everyone else appeared to be asleep to David. They were several hours out of Hawaii, and looking out the window, all he could see in the moonlit night was the ocean far below. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his satellite phone, then hooked his PDA to the phone. He brought up a small keyboard display on the PDA, held the stylus over it, and began to enter a text message:

ROYCE THERE WERE SOME THINGS ABOUT THE OR GANIZATION WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT. I AM NOT SURE IF

David paused, the words reflected back at him. He smiled. He still wasn't sure whether he should write and send this message to his old friend. A lifetime of lies and deceptions had wormed its way so deeply into his mind, he wasn't sure anymore what was the right thing to do. A harsh lesson he had learned early in his career in covert operations was that sometimes ignorance was indeed bliss.

He leaned his head back on the seat, the message incomplete, and closed his eyes. Within minutes he had joined the other retirees in slumber.

Abayon paused in his paperwork when there was a knock on the steel door, a dull thud, repeated in a pattern he recognized. He pressed the release for the heavy door and it swung outward.

A young Filipino woman who had just passed her twenty-second birthday stood in the entranceway.

"Come in, Fatima," he called out to his goddaughter.

She smiled as she walked toward him, and Abayon felt some of the weight that had been pressing down on him lighten. It was always a pleasure when Moreno's granddaughter visited him. Even if it involved business. She was the light he was leaving behind to shine for the Abu Sayef.

"Have a seat," he said.

There was an old, overstuffed chair set against the wall about four meters from Abayon's desk. Visitors often glanced at it strangely, since it seemed inappropriate for both the office and the occupant. But it was Fatima's chair, one she had occupied as a child in Moreno's home when his wife – Fatima's mother – was still alive. When Moreno's wife died, he'd burned the house down in his grief, but Abayon, anticipating his friend's strong reaction, quickly had the chair removed and brought here.

Now, Fatima settled into it and tucked her legs up beneath herself. She looked small and childish, but Abayon had long ago seen past the outer facade. She was brilliant, and as tough-minded as her father. For years Abayon had watched the younger ranks of the Abu Sayef for someone who might take his place. It took him a while to accept that Fatima was the most qualified, and the one he most trusted with his legacy.

He knew that announcing a woman as his heir would not go over well with most of the members of the Abu Sayef, but he didn't care. She was the best person, and would have to make her own way. It would not be easy, but he felt she was up to it. And he knew the power struggle would make her stronger in the long run, and that he was leaving her a powerful legacy.

"My father is gone," Fatima said. Abayon nodded.

"Will he return?" Abayon did not hesitate in answering.

"It is not likely."

Fatima slowly nodded.

"I could tell by the way he said good-bye."

"He is going to strike a great blow for our cause."

"And Ruiz?" Abayon liked that Fatima wasted no time on emotional subjects. He could tell by the dark pockets under her eyes that she had probably spent the entire night crying over the departure of her father, but she was not going to bring it up now.

"Ruiz is in Hong Kong," he said.

"With some of the treasure from the vault."

It was not inflected as a question, but he answered anyway.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"To auction it."

"Do we need the money?"

"The cause always needs money. Whatever he can get for the objects he took, however, will not come to us, but rather to our brethren in other countries."

"Al Qaeda."

Abayon nodded.

Fatima considered that.

"It is dangerous."

"Yes, it is," Abayon said.

"However, it is better that some other group keep the forefront in this war than us, because whoever is in the forefront will take the most casualties."

"The Bali bombing," Fatima said.

"That's one example."

She crossed her arms and regarded her godfather.

"There's something more going on than what you're telling me."

Abayon tried to hide his smile. She was indeed the one who should take his place.

"Yes, there is."

"And what is it?" He didn't have to try to hide his smile anymore, because it was gone.

"I don't know exactly."

He sighed.

"People think there is a war between Islam and Christianity. I do not look at it that way. I have known, and fought beside, many Christians who were good people. And I have met some very bad people who were Muslims. Islam and Christianity have the same roots, just different paths from those roots."

He shook his head.

"No, the war is between the haves and the have-nots. Between those who control the world's economy and those who are controlled by it."

"Between the established nations and the third world," Fatima said. Abayon nodded once more.

"Yes, except the gap is getting wider instead of narrower. The western world, particularly the United States, is so focused on itself that it fails to even acknowledge what is going on in the rest of the world."

"Unless made to."

Yes," Abayon allowed.

"That is what 9/11 was. A wake-up call."

"But the United States attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. I do not see how that was good for the third world."

"It got attention, and everyone did not react as the Americans. Even now there is a backlash in that country over Iraq. And when I say 'western world,' that isn't quite accurate. Perhaps the better term is 'industrialized world.' For certainly Japan, and to an extent Korea, are part of this. It is those countries that consume at the expense of the rest of the world."

"There are so many countries like that, though," Fatima pointed out.

"Many countries, but…" Abayon lapsed into silence. Fatima waited for a little while before speaking.

"But…?"

"They are connected at some level, some secret level," Abayon said.

"How do you know this?"

"The gold and art that was hidden here. Most think it was just the Japanese. The Golden Lily project. But

I heard something a long time ago that I've often thought about."

"And that is?" Abayon felt old and tired. He did not want to tell this story but knew he had to. Fatima needed to know it if she were to make the right choices after he was gone. And with what he had planned shortly, he knew he would soon be high on the target list for his known and unknown enemies.

"You know my wife and I were captured by the Japanese during the war. What you – and everyone except your father – do not know, is what happened to us. How my wife really died. And no one, not even your father, knows what I learned from an American I met during my captivity."

"An American?" Fatima was confused.

"But you were sent to Manchuria, to…" She paused, unwilling to say the name.

"Unit 731," Abayon said.

"I have never heard of any Americans being sent there."

"A handful were," Abayon said.

"A special handful. What I am going to tell is part my story and part his story, so please bear with me."

Fatima nodded.

"Yes, Godfather."

Abayon looked around.

"Take me up to the observation platform. I'll tell you there."

Fatima got up and went behind the wheelchair. She pushed it to the door, opened it, pushed him through, and shut it behind her. Then she began the long journey to the platform, pushing Abayon in front of her.

"Thirty minutes," the crew chief yelled into Vaughn's ear.

He acknowledged the time warning and glanced across at Tai. She was lying on the red web seat on the other side of the plane, eyes closed. He doubted, though, that she was sleeping. No matter how many jumps one had, there was always a sense of anxiety.

Vaughn went over and tapped her on the shoulder.

"Thirty minutes. Let's rig."

David's eyes snapped open as the screech of an alarm bell resounded through the interior of the plane. Oxygen masks dropped from the overhead, dangling on their clear tubes. Instinctively, he reached for the mask, then paused. He could see the other passengers grabbing the masks and slipping them over their heads.

David's nostrils flared as he sniffed the air. Nothing seemed amiss. He took a deep breath and was rewarded with lungs full of oxygen. The alarm was still clanging but there was no other sign that anything was wrong. The plane was flying straight and level.

The man to David's left, across the aisle, slumped forward, head bouncing off the back of the chair in front of him. Within seconds all the other passengers were also unconscious. David reached out, took the mask that hung in front of him and stared at it. He was tempted to take a sniff, but didn't know how powerful the knockout gas obviously flowing through the plane's backup air system was.

The pilots. David unbuckled his seat belt, made his way forward and knocked on the metal door separating the passengers from crew. He waited a few seconds, the moments weighing heavily on him, then knocked again, harder. Then he pounded, slamming his fists against the unyielding metal.

"Stop."

David said the word out loud to make it very clear to himself. He did as he ordered himself. He slowly turned, went to the nearest person and checked his pulse. Still breathing, albeit very slowly. He nodded. It made sense. They would be killed when the plane crashed. On the very slim chance that a body was recovered, cause of death would be crash trauma. A smart plan.

There was no retirement. There was only oblivion. He had suspected as much. In fact, he now realized he'd known this was coming. It was the logical solution. Everyone on this plane was a loose end. And the Organization had never tolerated loose ends. Something else also struck him with startling clarity. There was no way the Organization was going to put this many of its members together and allow them to swap their stories, even it was on some remote island in the far Pacific. Pieces could be put together that were never meant to be put together.

David slowly made his way down the passenger compartment, searching for a tool to use to try to breach the door to the pilot's compartment. Since 9/11, planes had been hardened to make getting into that compartment nearly impossible. He held on to the word "nearly" – there was always a way around things.