The 13 th tribe

[59]

It felt to him as though the only light coming into the cafe from the front windows was a single ray of sun falling directly in his eyes. He leaned forward, out of it. “What are you saying, help you stop them?”

“I need you to come with me, to watch my back, help find a way to stop them.”

“But what does that mean, stop them? Kill them?”

“Whatever it takes,” Owen said. “Kill them, take back the chip, find enough evidence to make someone pay attention… I don’t know, exactly. But I don’t want to wake up tomorrow or a week from now to find out somebody detonated a bomb in New York or London or anywhere, and know I didn’t try everything to stop it.”

“These guys are good,” Jagger said. “They’re coordinated and well connected, motivated and wealthy. They’re in the middle or maybe the end of a game you haven’t even started, and you don’t know the rules. They’re probably out of their minds. I mean, these are the kind of nuts people write books about and little kids cry over because they might be hiding under their beds. And by the way, they also happen to possess a nuke.”

“Or something equally destructive.”

“Right… well…”

The twentysomethings were staring at them now as well, and Jagger realized he was standing, leaning across the table to get into Owen’s face. He straightened, pushing back his chair with his calves.

“I wish you luck with that,” he said. “I really do.” He turned and started for the door.

“Jagger…,” Owen said, “please.”

Jagger stopped. After a pause, he returned to the table. He stood looking down at Owen and said, “Why me? Why are you even asking me? Why are you trying to drag me into your secret war?” He pointed at the men and woman three tables away. “Ask them. Wouldn’t hurt, right?”

“You’re not just anyone,” Owen said calmly. “You have the mind of an investigator, the skills of a soldier. And more than anything.. ”

“What?”

“You’re a cauldron of molten hate. You’re furious and frustrated. You have a young son fighting for his life, suffering for no fault of his own, and you want to make the people who hurt him pay. Normally I’d tell you revenge will eat your heart and make a hat out of your soul, but right now it’s a flaming sword, white hot and powerful. And I’d be a fool not to use it to stop the Tribe. Why not avenge your son and in the process save thousands of lives?”

“Because I’m not leaving Tyler. Or Beth. What kind of man would I be if I left them like this?” His voice became quiet. “How would I live if… if Tyler slipped away and I wasn’t here?”

“How will you live knowing you could have saved a city and didn’t?”

“It’s a suicide mission.”

“Maybe,” Owen said. “Maybe not.”

Jagger shook his head. He cut through the smoke and stares and pushed out the door. Four blocks away, the hospital rose like a glass pyramid over the roofs of rundown houses. Kids kicked a soccer ball down the street, chasing it and kicking it again. A multicolored Fiat with the word Taxi spray-painted on its side chugged through an intersection, leaving a dense cloud of gray exhaust. He headed into it, toward the hospital.

The world goes on. But it all seemed like a dream. He tried to remember his son’s last words to him, before he was shot, and his heart ached further when they came to him: Dad, I’m scared. Crouched down in the corner by the burning bush, big eyes staring up at him, wanting to be told everything was all right. So that’s what Jagger had told him. And then he’d said, Be brave, son. He wanted to hear Tyler’s voice again, that little-boy voice that could knock a train off its tracks.

He heard a rattle like maracas, and his heart leapt. Turning, he saw two little girls sitting on a front stoop, shaking out the contents of a piggy bank. So much like the sound of Tyler’s utility case. How he loved that junk, and Jagger felt a weird sort of affection for the unknown people who’d dropped their coins or key fobs so his son could find them, making him smile.

Everything went away-the little girls, the houses, the street-as his mind grasped an image, a recent memory: Tyler dropping something in the case, the sound of its hard heaviness landing on candy and rocks. Charon’s obol, the coin-looking thing he’d found in the cave where the teenager had been hiding. Ollie had said it would have been placed in a corpse’s mouth so its soul could pay the ferryman for a ride across the River Styx. Could it be a coincidence that he’d found it where one of the Tribe had been, on the day another of them, a woman with a penchant for death, attacked the monastery?

You can bet wherever they’re holed up in Paris, Owen had said, it has some connection to death.

Was the obol a clue to where they were, something the boy had picked up near his home?

A car horn honked, and Jagger jumped. He had stopped in the intersection. Six feet away, the grille of an ugly Ford sedan rattled in time with a revving engine. The horn blared again, and a hand waved at him out of the driver’s window.

He debated going to the hospital and completely forgetting Owen. Then he headed back toward the cafe.

He found Owen where he’d left him, at the table, his head bowed in prayer. He pulled a chair out and sat. “Owen?”

The man didn’t move. The twentysomethings were laughing again, glancing at him. The old men and their eyes. Another man stood at the counter now, paying and carrying a mug and a fried pita thing on a plate to a table near the door. And Owen was smiling at Jagger.

Jagger raised his hand. “I didn’t change my mind. I’m not going with you, so stop smiling. I have something that might help. Do you have a mobile phone?”

Owen fished inside his pack. “It’s a satellite phone,” he said, handing it to Jagger.

“Can it receive images?”

“Songs too, if you have any Leonard Cohen.”

It was a little larger than Beth’s iPhone, with a touch screen now showing a picture of Owen crouched among a group of children, straw huts in the background. “What do I do?”

“Tap it.”

Jagger did, and a keypad appeared.

“Just dial, no special codes. The satellite assumes you’re calling within the same region unless you enter a country code.”

He dialed Beth’s number.