The Eden Prophecy

CHAPTER 54

Leaving the missile crates behind, Hawker continued his search. A chart room, a room filled with welding equipment, a room filled with moldy stores of flour and rice. Finally, at the heart of the lowest deck he found a door that looked different from the others. In fact, it looked like an airlock with rubber sealed edges and a handle that would have been at home on the inside of a commercial aircraft door.

He glanced in through a small window above the handle. It looked like a lab in terms of styling and modern equipment. He saw movement in the corner. Sonia sitting in a chair, sobbing, covering her face.

Left to die, he guessed.

He threw the handle open and rushed toward her.

“Hawker, no!” she shouted.

A shot echoed through the room. Hawker felt an explosion hit him in the back and he flew forward, slamming into the wall face-first. He fell and his rifled clattered out of his hand.

Rolling over, he looked back toward the doorway. A man with jaundiced-looking eyes, sunken into a narrow, hatchetlike face, stared at him. A snake tattoo coiled around his right arm, and a dark scar lay hidden beneath a block of ink that curled around his neck.

“Welcome to my parlor,” the man said, raising a Chinese-made SKS rifle to a resting position.

The SKS fired the same slug as the AK-47. A heavy 7.62 mm shell. The blast had thumped Hawker hard. Part of it had penetrated the vest.

Now on the ground, Hawker felt as if he couldn’t breathe, as if the vest weighed a ton. He could feel blood flowing down his side. The only sound that came through the ringing in his ears was Sonia’s muffled screams.

She dropped down beside him as another man came in the door. This second man was a hulking brute, with a different tattoo on his forearm, a knife dripping with blood. He stood a step behind the first. He guessed the snake man was the leader of the cult. Their prisoner, Yousef, had called him Draco.

Sonia reached Hawker’s side. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Get away from him,” Draco ordered.

Tears streamed down Sonia’s face. “I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I’m so sorry.”

The hulking man stepped forward, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her back.

Hawker tried to rise but the wind had been knocked out of him. Based on the sudden shortness of breath he felt and the immense pain on his right side, he guessed he might have a punctured lung.

“You don’t look so dangerous now,” Draco said. “Hardly enough to cause anyone pain. And yet you are the bane of my existence.”

Hawker stared in utter confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I don’t even know who you are.”

The man snapped off a shot at Hawker. The bullet took a chunk out of the wall by Hawker’s head. Hawker flinched and contorted his body away from the impact. The pain in his side tripled.

“You don’t know me?” Draco shouted. “After what you did to me?”

Hawker’s chest heaved and fell awkwardly as he fought for breath and understanding. Perhaps he could buy some time. His hearing had come back and some of his strength seemed to be returning. More important, Danielle was still out there.

He pressed himself against the wall and used it as leverage to force himself up. He stood facing Draco.

“You were only hired to take the fall,” Draco said. “Don’t you know your role? You were supposed to die or disappear and be blamed for what happened.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hawker said.

“They cast me out because of you!” Draco shouted. “Cast me out into the darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth and they took you in. You: a traitor.”

The man knew something about him, wherever the information came from. But Hawker was no traitor.

“I never betrayed anyone,” Hawker managed. “I just wouldn’t … betray my conscience.”

“Well, that’s the problem with a conscience,” the man replied. “It can really mess up your day.”

As Hawker spoke he realized for the first time in a long time that he had nothing left to make up for. He’d done what was right. Not just what was right for him, but what was right in and of itself. And even then he’d spent years struggling with the choice that had banished him.

His only guess was that this man must have been involved somehow, though he didn’t recognize him.

Just then a thunderous explosion rocked the boat. Hawker steadied himself with a hand on the wall, hoping it was the first of the Tomahawks, but it was followed by only a few rumbles and then slowly the odor of smoke began to seep into the room.

Draco glared at him. “Have you no respect?” he said.

“Bow your head. You’ve just heard the sound of Ms. Laidlaw’s death at the hands of a tripwire.”

The smug arrogance and the words themselves lit a fire in Hawker. Not waiting, not thinking, he charged. He pushed himself off the wall and lunged forward. The SKS fired. A shot hit Hawker on the side, a glancing blow. The vest took most of the energy and Hawker collided with Draco, wrapping his arm around the man’s neck, trying to tackle him.

They stumbled together but didn’t fall. They crashed through the door into the bay where Nadia was strapped to the gurney. Hawker drove the cult leader into the wall.

Still standing, Hawker slammed his knee into Draco’s stomach and then butted his forehead into Draco’s face. The man’s nose shattered and he cried out. The back of his head hit hard against the wall as he tried to get the rifle loose and shoot Hawker.

Using the leverage he’d gained, Hawker wrapped one arm around Draco’s neck and grabbed his weapon with the other. Gripping it with all his might, he kept Draco from turning it at either him or Sonia.

Draco pulled the trigger anyway and gunfire sprayed the room. The recoil hammered near Hawker’s wound. The pain was incredible, but Hawker held on, and Draco fired again, unwittingly forcing his own man, Cruor, to take cover.

As the latest shots ended, Hawker could feel his hand burning where he held the rifle. He let go, slammed a punch into Draco’s face, and then turned him and bent him backward, pulling the man off his feet and body-slamming him to the ground.

Hawker landed on top of him and began to pummel the bastard, slamming his fist into Draco’s face.

Before he could beat Draco to death, Cruor lunged for him, grabbing him around the neck and choking him. The brawl became all disjointed, a glimpse here, a punch there, another blow here.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Sonia smashing something into Cruor’s skull, and the man went off to the side. But as the thug landed, he rolled, brought his own weapon to bear, and blasted Sonia in the stomach. She fell backward against the wall, clutching her abdomen and doubling over.

At almost the same moment shots rang out from the other direction, blood splattered on the far wall, and Cruor collapsed to his knees and then fell on his face.

Draco scrambled away, ducking through the door to where Nadia lay. A pair of shots chased him, puncturing the glass between them. Fissures spidered across the clear plate and it crumbled in toward Hawker.

As the shattered glass fell away, it revealed Draco hiding behind Nadia. His right hand held an injector attached to her IV line; his left hand held another one that hooked into the same line at a Y connection. They were large syringes, the size of toothpaste tubes, with thumb-sized plungers. One had been marked with a red stripe and one with white.

Hawker looked around wondering where the hell the shots had come from. Danielle stood in the doorway with a rifle raised to her shoulder.

“Never one without the other,” Draco managed. The words came raggedly from his busted mouth. “I trust you recognize me, Ms. Laidlaw.”

“Gibbs,” she said, sounding disgusted. “I have to say you’ve looked better.”

Hawker finally understood. Gibbs had been director of the NRI before Moore. He’d ordered Danielle to hire Hawker for the ill-fated Brazilian expedition, planning to eliminate the team once they’d discovered what they were looking for, to take the discovery private, and to force the blame off on Hawker, a known fugitive and criminal at the time.

But after it all went wrong, Hawker had pulled Danielle and the other survivors out of the jungle. Gibbs’s partner had been killed and Gibbs had fled, disappearing into the underworld before he could be arrested.

Hawker didn’t recognize him because he’d never met the man. But Danielle knew him well.

“Fire and my body tenses,” Gibbs/Draco said. “The plunger will go down even if I die.”

Gibbs crouched behind Nadia, using her as a shield in her upright sitting position.

On the floor across from Hawker, Sonia was bleeding out, her shirt soaked through with blood, the floor beneath her turning red. He was torn between moving to Sonia, whom he couldn’t help, and holding his position a few feet from Gibbs, almost in striking range. He crawled to Sonia. She had to be in terrible pain, her eyes barely focusing.

Danielle eased closer, the rifle still trained on Gibbs. “What is it you want, Gibbs? What the hell was all this about?”

“I want to be king,” he said, laughing. “But I’ll settle for making the world beg for my mercy and pay me billions.”

“So why do all this? You could have taken the virus and left.”

“You arrived a little early,” he admitted. “But I wanted to be here anyway. To show you that you’d lost to me, to find you writhing on my deck filled with shrapnel and throw his”—he looked at Hawker—“dead body beside you. I wanted pictures to send to Arnold so he’d know I’d taken you, his prize student, as payment.”

“You’re delusional,” she said. “You blame us? For what you did?”

The anger returned. “They hunt for me with dogs and they fawn over you,” he said. “They give you the keys to the kingdom, even as they try to destroy me. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you both. I could have killed you many times. Just a shot here or there. But you would never have known it was me. And I would never have had the chance to do what I’m about to do. Punish the whole world for casting me out.”

Hawker listened to the voice. He heard madness and instability. He sensed that Gibbs would destroy the world if he couldn’t be part of it. Especially now.

“And killing your own people?”

Gibbs smiled through his busted face. “I didn’t need them anymore,” he said. “The definition of expendable, so I expended them. Besides, they were bad for the bottom line and I had to let you in somehow.”

Hawker listened to the two of them. It felt as if Danielle was trying to keep Gibbs talking, trying to stall him from acting until the air strike hit. But strangely enough, it felt as if Gibbs was trying to stall as well. In his weakened state, Hawker tried to see through the fog. One last attempt to put the puzzle together.

It seemed as if everything Gibbs had done was a smoke screen. The cult, the threats, the cryptic language that never quite made sense, all these things now seemed no more than various means to an end. It some ways it had worked. It had kept the NRI guessing, kept them in a state of self-imposed blindness as they searched for some clue that would link it all together. But that clue was a ghost. It didn’t exist because the whole thing was a con, a trap designed to get them here and get Gibbs’s hands on 951 and the Eden virus.

The missiles, the old Soviet missiles La Bruzca had sold him, were probably the last piece of bait. But the information Danielle had coaxed out of Yousef had gotten them here early and Gibbs had struggled to finish, ending up on his own sinking ship.

All guesses, he realized, and probably only half-right, but they were all Hawker had to go on.

Gibbs seemed acutely deranged but still calculating. So why wasn’t he running now? Why wasn’t he backing down the hall with Nadia’s wheeled gurney in front of him as a shield? He had to know some type of air strike would be on its way. Did he think it was going to be held off until Hawker and Danielle resurfaced? Probably he knew better. He’d been in command once.

The only answer Hawker could come up with was that he wanted the air strike to hit for some reason. If he was cornered, maybe he was playing for a tie. Or more likely he had some other way of winning even if they all died in flames.

“And all this,” Danielle asked. “The cult, all this insanity?”

“New religion for the fools,” Gibbs said. “If you want someone to reject God you have to put something in His place. I chose … me.”

Moving his hands in such a way as to show the syringes better, Gibbs continued. “And now you get to choose. Red for death, white for life.”

“We’re all going to die here,” Danielle said. “And your dream is going to die with us.”

“My dream is to see you suffer,” he said. “And this planet will suffer for what you’ve done to me.”

“I destroyed your missiles,” she said, moving sideways as if she were trying to get a better line to shoot her old boss. He turned, moving the gurney on its wheels; the child seemed to stir.

“You were lucky,” he said. “But do you think I would have left them in plain sight if they were my weapon of choice? Missiles to spread disease are very hard to come by. Even with all I’ve accomplished, I couldn’t manage that. But at least I thought they’d draw you in.”

Hawker’s thoughts raced. Gibbs did have something else, one more trick. He glanced at the wall. A Series of beakers filled with clear liquid were secured there. Each one was hooked up to an electrical pump and a length of thin tubing that left the room. Hawker recognized the thin, irrigation-like drip lines.

“The birds.”

Gibbs turned to him, careful to stay in his crouch.

“You’re smarter than you look,” he sneered. “I’ve been feeding them sugar water and fish guts for weeks. At this point they’re well trained. Airborne versions of Pavlov’s dog. I hit that pump and they suck down whatever comes out of the tube. This time it’ll be the virus. And when the inevitable shock and awe air strike obliterates this ship, it will scatter those birds to the wind. Some will live and some will die, but those that survive will land in other places. Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait. It’ll give a whole new meaning to the words ‘bird flu.’ ”

Hawker noticed the beakers were divided into those with a red mark and those with a white one. Red for death, white for life.

Gibbs inched toward the beakers.

“Don’t,” Danielle said, tightening her grip on the rifle.

“You won’t shoot,” Gibbs said. “Not till the very last second at least. Because in your weak little mind you still think there may be a way out for you and him and this girl. Shoot me and she’s Typhoid Mary on a whole different scale. You’ll have to leave her here to die.”

As Gibbs spoke, Nadia opened her eyes. She looked out across the room. “Sonia?” she cried. “Savi?”

She was groggy, coming out of sedation. Hawker guessed she couldn’t see without her glasses. Sonia tried to respond but couldn’t. She reached out, her face contorted in pain.

“Sonia, don’t,” Hawker pleaded.

Grunting in agony, Sonia fell back into a pool of her own blood. Hawker put his hands on her shoulders, trying to calm her.

She looked up into his eyes. Her skin was pale, her lips turning blue, her pupils massively dilated. “I’m sorry …,” she said, barely audible.

Behind him Gibbs was inching closer to the pump. Across the room, Danielle was trying to get a bead on him. They were closing in on one minute. Maybe they would all die together after all.

Sonia reached out, touched Hawker’s face, the blood of her hand covering his cheek. Her other hand was clenched and trembling. She looked at him and then right past him. Her eyes were blank, most likely blind. “I … changed … it,” she whispered.

“Changed what?” he asked.

“White … for life. It will heal Nadia but it can’t …” She gulped for air. “It can’t live … outside … the body.”

Her strength failed and she collapsed, but Hawker found a surge of energy.

“Shoot red,” he shouted, turning and lunging for Gibbs.

He heard a shot fire and expected to see Gibbs’s hand fly off the red plunger, a bullet hole through his forearm or wrist. But instead the IV line split. Danielle had shot it out, eight inches above where it hit Nadia’s arm.

It was brilliant. No matter which plunger Gibbs pressed nothing would enter the child.

Gibbs seemed to realize this too, and he dove for the pump switch.

Hawker charged, hitting the gurney and driving it forward; he pinned Gibbs against the wall.

Gibbs stretched for the switch, which was just out of reach, and then convulsed suddenly as Danielle blasted three holes in his chest. Blood splattered the wall behind him. His arm fell and he slumped forward.

As Hawker took his weight off the gurney, Gibbs slid down the wall. He ended up facedown on the floor.

Hawker looked at the two syringes. Neither had been depressed. He glanced at his watch. Fifty seconds.

“Let’s get out of here,” Danielle said.

As fast as his weakened body would move, Hawker stood and pulled the straps off Nadia.

“I got her,” Danielle said, picking the girl up and carrying her out the door.

Hawker had to go, but for a second he dropped down beside Sonia. She was dead. He touched her face. He was sick at the thought of leaving her there, but there was no time. He went to stand and noticed something clutched in Sonia’s hand. It was a syringe, capped off and marked with a stripe.

White. White for life.

He grabbed it, stood, and lumbered down the hall.

By the time he reached the main deck he was choking and coughing up blood. He saw Danielle and Nadia go over the side. Saw Keegan come racing up in the boat.

He jumped after them, hitting the black water. His world went dark and silent.

Inside the laboratory, Stuart Gibbs twitched. He was not yet dead and somehow through the pain and the blood, he realized it. With great effort he managed to push the gurney away, get to his knees, and begin to crawl. He was beyond hope now, but hate drove him on. He would not let them survive. He would curse the world that had rejected him.

He reached the table beneath the beakers, pulled himself up, and stretched for the pump switch. The pain was incredible and the agony coursing through his body caused him to scream aloud as he stretched for it. He flicked the switch and fell back to the floor.

Lying in an awkward heap, Stuart Gibbs heard the pumps engage. He felt the vibration throughout the room as they drew the viral suspensions into the driplines.

Through his failing eyes, he saw the levels in each beaker begin to drop. He would die but his last act would bring hell to the world one way or another.

Kicking hard, Hawker made it back to the surface. The body armor weighed him down; he slipped free of it. As he came up, powerful hands yanked him out of the water and into the speedboat.

He heard Keegan shout “Go!” as he sprawled out onto the deck.

At the driver’s console, Danielle shoved the throttle to full. The boat leapt forward, accelerated away from the freighter, and raced south at top speed.

Hawker lay in the back, exhausted, barely able to breathe and facing the sky. Overhead he saw the cormorants circling like dragons in the dark. And then they suddenly veered off and dove toward the island en masse.

No, he thought. It can’t be.

Seconds later the sound of whistling death shot over their heads, as the first of the Tomahawks raced past them on its way to the island. Two others followed, converging from different angles.

The cormorants swarmed over their feeding places, jostling and pushing against one another to get at the free buffet they’d grown used to finding. Liquid oozed from the thin black tubes. They squawked and flapped, stretching their beaks down, snatching the line from one another and then fighting to keep it.

And then they looked up and turned to the south in unison. A strange whistling sound came toward them. Thunder boomed a second later and a concussion wave blasted through them, ripping their feathers and wings apart. Some of the birds tumbled, others tried to fly, but even as they flapped their wings, a wave of thousand-degree flames crashed over them, engulfing them from every direction and incinerating them on the ground and in midair.

Aboard the powerboat Hawker stared back at the conflagration. A half mile off, the explosions were still deafening. In the moments after each impact, chunks of rock and flaming debris rained down like small meteors.

At one point, three or four missiles hit simultaneously. A blinding explosion stretched across the island like a halo before rising skyward like a mushroom cloud.

Behind him, Keegan held the little girl, who was now fully conscious and confused. “Sonia?” she asked. “Where’s Sonia?”

Hawker felt his heart break even more. He continued to stare at the island behind them as another round of Tomahawks hammered it, once again raising fire to the sky.