The Eden Prophecy

CHAPTER 41

Hawker stood in the kitchen of a small house, in a vacant section of Al Qurnah, washing the grime from his hands and face. Burying his face in a towel, he tried to think and clear his head even as it pounded with post-battle adrenaline.

His eyes burned from the sand and the wind while his mind burned with rage. Try as he might, Hawker could not come to grips with the sight of Sonia falling from Danielle’s ATV and then running toward their assailants.

As Danielle put in a call for Moore to contact them, Keegan came up and put a hand on Hawker’s shoulder.

“I’ll guard the bugger,” he said, referring to their prisoner, who sat tied and gagged in another room. “You want me to cave his head in?”

Hawker intended to interrogate the bastard but he needed to get his wits about him. Although anger could be useful it had to be wielded with control.

“I’ll do it myself if it comes to that,” he said.

Keegan nodded and walked out of the kitchen, just as Danielle came in, looking keen to wash her own face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll find her. Somehow we’ll find her.”

Hawker appreciated the kindness. He wasn’t used to it, and so he appreciated it all the more.

He moved over as Danielle took off her jacket and shoulder holster. His own holster lay on the counter, and as he glanced at it Hawker’s eye fell onto the gun in the holster. It was a smaller pistol, not the 9 mm Beretta that Danielle normally carried.

“You handed this to me,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

“It was Sonia’s,” she said. “Somehow we traded.”

“You give it to her in the first place?”

“No, she had it with her.”

Hawker studied the weapon. It was a.25-caliber automatic. The sight of it left a sickening feeling in his stomach, a possibility he didn’t want to consider.

He handed the towel to Danielle, stepped away to grab his phone, and sent a text message to a number in France.

A moment later Moore was on the satellite line and the three of them were having a teleconference.

“… the CDC confirmed all the numbers on infection rate and virulence. And the threat is now receiving the highest-priority response,” Moore said.

“Meaning what?” Hawker asked.

“Stockpiles of antivirals are being increased. Interpol is redoubling its efforts and the president is going to brief leaders of NATO countries in the morning.”

“That’s all political bull,” Hawker said. “We need to do something and we need to do it now.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Moore said.

“We should be going after these bastards,” he said. “We should have full recons of southern Iran going by now. We should have strike teams in there, we should have helicopter patrols scanning the coast, and we should be violating Iranian waters looking for a getaway boat because these anti-God lunatics are probably not planning on staying in the Islamic republic.”

He noticed Danielle studying him, her eyes kind. Moore was blunt.

“Hawker, I understand that Sonia is your friend but a mini-invasion of Iran is—”

“It’s not about her being a friend,” Hawker said. “She’s the key now. They came after her in Dubai to disrupt the fund-raiser — which put her back in Ranga’s shoes: desperately looking for funding — and because they wanted to grab her in person. If they had gotten what they needed out of Ranga there would be no need for them to take her. But Ranga pulled some kind of trick on them.”

“Like what?”

Hawker shrugged. “Maybe he told them that everything they needed was at the lab, hoping they’d blow themselves up going to get it. Or maybe they killed him too quickly by mistake. Either way, they didn’t give a damn about her until he was dead. There can only be one reason for that.”

“Because they want her to finish what he started,” Moore said.

“Exactly.”

“Suppose that’s correct,” Moore said. “Any idea how long it will take to synthesize the serum?”

“She said she could do it in a day.”

Moore took a breath and nodded. “Yang insists that’s the simplest part.”

“How long do think she’ll hold out?” Danielle asked.

“Not long,” Hawker said. “A day, maybe two; depends what they do to her. Depends on if she even wants to hold out.”

Neither of them asked him to elaborate, which he was thankful for. In his anger he’d begun to say things he wasn’t sure he meant.

“I’m afraid they might not have to do anything to her,” Moore said.

Hawker looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Two things have happened,” he said. “First, someone hit Paradox last night and made off with computer records and various stock from their lab. No one’s sure, because the company is in a shambles, but we’re guessing they have the viral stock for 951.”

It kept getting worse.

“In addition,” Moore said, “the NRI office that you dropped Sonia’s aunt and sister at in Kuwait went dark at almost the same time. Someone hit it hard. Both of them are gone.”

A new wave of bitterness swept forth as he pictured the little girl with her arthritis and failing vision being manhandled by the cult’s thugs.

“How did anyone know they were there?” Danielle asked.

“Don’t know,” Moore said. “They might have been watching the house.”

“This isn’t my first dance,” Hawker said. “I promise you no one followed us.”

“Could have been a tracer, or from an aircraft or a neighbor’s tip,” Moore said.

Hawker tensed, trying to contain himself. This latest news was throwing him off balance. How the hell was this group always one step ahead of them? It was as if the cult knew their playbook. As if they were listening in. Which would be impossible unless …

The only one who knew they were going to Iran besides him, Danielle, and Moore was Sonia. And the only person who knew where the safe house was besides him, Danielle, and Moore was Sonia.

Hawker prayed he was wrong, and just as paranoid as everyone accused him of being, but the image of Sonia falling off the back of that ATV almost deliberately continued to run through his mind. He’d begun to think that Sonia was involved with the cult somehow.

Ranga had warned him to trust no one. He hadn’t listed an exception for his daughter. Could their falling-out have been more than just another argument?

The thought made Hawker sick, but it didn’t affect what they had to do now. The next move had to be the same.

“If they have her sister, then Sonia won’t hold out at all. And if they have 951 they might not even need her,” he said, bluntly. “So you might as well assume that weapon will be up within the next twenty-four hours. That means we have to find them before they go underground again. It took us an hour to get back here. It would have taken them twice that long to get to the coast. And that’s why we have to intercept them.”

Over the phone Moore exhaled audibly. “Things don’t work that fast, Hawker. Even if I could get the president to agree, he’d have to issue the orders, move units into place. No one’s standing by to do what you suggest. Getting units on-site in three hours would be a miracle.”

“Give me a helicopter. I’ll start myself.”

“Getting you killed by an Iranian missile isn’t going to help us,” Moore said. “Sit tight. I’ll call back in half an hour.”

“Sit tight?” Hawker said, raising his voice.

“What else can we do?” Danielle asked.

Hawker hesitated. “We have one of their guys,” he said. “We can break him.”

“You want to torture him?” Danielle said, making no effort to hide her disgust.

“This is an extreme circumstance,” he said. “Besides, we’re on foreign soil, he’s not an American, the Constitution doesn’t apply. Isn’t that what we’ve been told?”

Hawker was addressing his words to Moore, but Danielle had taken over. “Forget about the Constitution. This is insane. You’re not a torturer.”

“I’ve been on the other end of it,” he said. “I know what to do.”

“And what do you think you’re going to get out of him?” she asked. “He’s Arab. Probably just a local like the guys they hired in France.”

“He is one of the guys they had in France,” Hawker said. “He has the brand, the same one Ranga had. He’s part of the cult.”

“He might not break,” she said.

“Everybody breaks,” Hawker insisted.

Danielle shook her head. “It’s still unreliable. Look at Ranga. They tortured the hell out of him. Did they get what they wanted?”

That pissed him off. “All the more reason not to give a damn about this guy,” he said. “For all we know, he’s the one that did it.”

Danielle glanced at the satellite phone, seeming to notice Arnold maintaining his silence.

“You’re not actually considering this?”

“We have to consider all options at this point,” Moore replied.

“We have enough here to make Gitmo look like Club Med,” Hawker said, trying to seize the initiative. “And we don’t have time to waste.”

“No!” Danielle shouted. “Even if you forget the morality, torture has been shown unequivocally to be a weak intelligence-gathering tool. At best. You both know this. Put that guy through hell and he’ll tell you anything to stop the pain. By the time we verify what he’s said, it’s too late anyway.”

Hawker hated how he felt. A fissure had opened up between him and Danielle in Paris. The slightest of fractures. He’d felt it in Lavril’s office and afterward. Now a wedge was driving deeper into that gap, forcing them to opposite sides.

He held his tongue, trying not to throw fuel on the fire. Danielle took a step back as well.

“The most productive intel we got out of Iraq came from Saddam himself,” she said. “And not because we put him on the rack, but because an interrogator did a great job getting inside his head.”

“We don’t have that kind of time,” he said. “Billions of people are going to suffer if we fail. If there’s a chance, even one chance in a hundred that this guy knows where they’re going, then we have to break him and we have to do it now.”

“It’s wrong,” she said, fury in her eyes.

“Right and wrong don’t matter anymore,” Hawker said, realizing he agreed with her to some extent but that nothing mattered except stopping the misery.

“Do what you can for now,” Moore said, ending the discussion. “But no torture. Keep him awake, coerce him, pump him full of anything that might loosen his tongue. But let’s not cross that line, yet. If we have twenty-four hours, let’s use it.”

Hawker ground his teeth and looked away. He wasn’t sure he could follow that order for long but he’d try. Across from him, he could see the relief on Danielle’s face: nothing like victory, just thankfulness mixed with exhaustion.

“In the meantime,” Moore added, “I’m tapping every available asset. Something will turn up.”

Hawker hoped Moore was right, but he doubted it. Unlike other enemies they’d dealt with — foreign nations, terrorist groups, rogue billionaires — this group lived off the grid. They still had the same questions about this cult that they’d started with. Another twenty-four hours wouldn’t change that. But he feared it might change the fate of the world.