The Omicron Legion

Chapter 21

The nightmare began for Patty Hunsecker when the phone jarred her from sleep at the first light of dawn.

“Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any,” she said, knowing full well it could only have been Sal Belamo.

“Wake up, lady,” came Belamo’s rapid voice. “Wake up quick.”

Patty was upright in the next instant. “What’s wrong, Sal?”

“We got as some problems, lady. Do what I say and you’ll be all right. You hearing this?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’m calling you from one of these goddamn car phones. The safe house isn’t safe. You’re not safe. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Patty said, not as bravely as she had hoped.

“I’m on my way there now. Chances are someone’s gonna beat me to the building, so here’s how we’re gonna play it. You gotta get out, and you gotta do it now. Back stairs. Rear exit…No, they could be watching that…”

“Who, Sal?”

“Good question, lady. Not a good answer. Give you the shitty details when I pick you up. Suffice it to say everything makes sense now, most of it anyway. Old Blaine’d be proud of me…and you.”

“What’s going on?”

“You’re leaving, and I’m picking you up. Go up to the roof. Do you hear me? Go up to the roof. You’ll find some heavy twenty-foot planks up there. There’s an apartment building next to the safe house that’s the same height.”

“I know it.”

“What you gotta do, you gotta slide those planks across and walk on over. Then head down through the unlocked door on the building roof to the alley on the western side. I’ll be there.”

Patty was fully awake now, and so was her fear. “What about security? Can’t we call—”

“Fuck security. If they’re not dead, they’re useless. Just do what I tell you.”

Patty dressed quickly in jeans and a sweater. She moved cautiously into the corridor, holding her breath in fear that a gun barrel would greet her. There was nothing, no sounds, no shapes. She slipped silently to the stairwell and started to open the door when she heard the echo of steps ascending. Hard to tell how many. A single man, perhaps two.

Patty felt panic swell within her. She had to reach the roof, but obviously this approach was out. Something had spooked Sal Belamo — and whatever it was was coming up the stairs for her. She bolted back toward her room, trying to frame the building’s structure in her mind.

The fire escape! That was her only chance! She reentered her room and locked the door behind her. Then she rushed to the window and lifted it open. The fire escape lay before her, rusty and providing no reason for confidence. Nonetheless, she pulled herself outside onto it. Her boots clanged noisily on the metal tubing. Rising to a crouch, she slid the window back down and began her climb up the ladder.

The cold Washington morning bit into her lightly clothed body, and her breath misted before her face. There were four flights to cover, the steps were cold and slippery, wet with morning dew. A few times she had to stop just to wipe her palms on her jeans. As she neared the top, her heart thundered with the fear of being caught, but she managed to swing her legs off the ladder’s top rung and onto the roof without anyone stopping her.

Scanning the rooftop, she spotted the planks Sal had mentioned and ran over to examine them. To her dismay, only one was usable, the other too rotten to be trusted to carry her. This meant she’d have to get to the neighboring building with only ten inches of cushion.

Patty hoisted the plank and slid it over to the adjacent roof with the utmost care, aware a mistake now could ruin her only viable escape route. No sooner was it in place on the opposite roof, its middle section sagging noticeably, then fresh sounds of pursuit reached her from the stairwell door. She was actually thankful for the sounds; they gave her the burst of adrenaline she needed to step out on the plank and begin her walk.

It was much easier than she had expected. She kept her eyes focused on her goal — the roof of the adjacent building — forcing herself not to look down. Even though her stomach was twisted in knots, the fear of the men in the stairwell proved greater than her fear of falling. She reached the other building with a final leap, remembering to pull the plank after her so whoever was following couldn’t use it to get to her.

The door to the roof of the building she had just escaped from crashed open just as she reached the one Sal Belamo had directed her to.

Please let it be open…

It was. Patty was through it in a flash, hoping her pursuers hadn’t caught a glimpse of her. She thundered down the steps and swung left when she reached the building’s lobby. She bolted through the door to the street just in time to hear a car screech down the alley at the end of the block.

“Hop in!” Sal Belamo ordered from behind the wheel of an ancient Pontiac GTO.

To reinforce his command, bullets pounded their way from the head of the street, shouts and screams behind them. Sal grabbed Patty and yanked her in from the driver’s side. Her feet pushed off the windshield to help her reach the passenger seat as Sal tore away, leaving a burned rubber smell behind him. Patty found the seat at last and felt some exposed springs dig into her buttocks.

“I ain’t exactly finished with her renovations,” Sal apologized as bullets peppered the rust.

The rear window was one of the few parts of the car that was whole — until a burst of fire shattered it and sprayed pieces of glass on both of them.

“Uh-oh,” Sal muttered. Patty caught a glimpse of a dark sedan sliding to a halt at the other end of the alley. The car’s doors whipped open.

“Hold on,” Sal said, and the GTO surged forward with a blitzing roar.

The gunmen managed to lunge out of the way as the GTO smashed their car broadside, shoving its collapsed frame into the center of the street, where a morning delivery truck finished the job. Belamo spun the wheel madly one way and then the other, righting the GTO, which, except for an extra crinkle across the rusted hood, seemed undamaged.

“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” Sal said, with a grin.

“I’ll say.”

“Titanium steel bumper,” he explained. “Part of my own option package when I decided to rebuild this baby.”

Belamo gave the big engine some gas and screeched around a corner. Patty unhunched herself in the seat and brushed off the glass stuck to her clothes.

“Stay down!” Sal barked. “Don’t know if we lost them yet.”

“Doesn’t this come with a rear oil spray?”

“Nope. And no bulletproof shields or machine guns, either. I was workin’ on the ejector seat, though.”

“I can tell,” Patty groaned, shifting to avoid the exposed springs still scraping at her buttocks.

“There’s gonna be hell to pay for this,” Sal said, heading toward the first of the morning traffic.

“You mean what they did to your car?”

“The fuck-up that brought it on, first class all the way, let me tell ya. You ask me, the world’s gone to hell, and a few of us just don’t know it yet.”

“What happened, Sal?”

“Shit hit the fan, lady. And guess who was standing in front of the blades. Here,” he said, and flipped her a wrinkled envelope.

“What’s this?”

“Some cash, an airline ticket, and a passport. You’re on your way to Rio.”

“I’m what?”

“We gotta get a message to old Blaine, lady, and I’m too hot to play delivery boy. All you gotta know now is that it’s you, me, McCrackenballs, and the Indian. Nobody else. Dig?”

“The Gap? Virginia Maxwell?…”

Belamo took a corner hard, and Patty slammed against the right-hand side of the car.

“Listen to me, lady, we had it all wrong. Only reason I know now is ’cause of you.”

“Me? What are you talking about?”

“Better fasten your seat belt to hear this, ’cause it’s gonna jolt you more than my driving….”

Patty reached Rio early Monday morning, nearly a day after Sal’s desperate phone call had awakened her. She started looking for McCracken at the Sheraton Hotel, as Sal had advised. Her call from the airport told her that he had never checked in. Nonetheless, he would have left information about his actual whereabouts at the Sheraton, available to anyone who knew how to ask.

At the hotel, her cab driver had to squeeze by a procession of tour buses lined up around the Sheraton’s circular drive. Patty squeezed through the arriving hordes and entered the hotel through one of the twin revolving doors. The Sheraton lobby was a sprawling affair. A comfortable seating area and escalators dominated the right, while the lobby-level jewelry shop took up most of the left. She headed for the reception desk directly across the way.

“Excuse me,” she greeted the clerk.

“Checking in, miss?”

“I think one of your guests left a package for me.”

“Your name?”

Patty provided the one Sal had given her. “Smithers.”

The clerk punched some keys on his computer terminal, waited for the response to show up on the screen.

“I’m sorry, miss. I have nothing here under that name.” He looked up at her. “What was the man’s name who was supposed to leave it?”

I didn’t say it was a man.

That realization struck her before she had a chance to respond to the clerk’s question. She backed away from the counter as he scrutinized her. “Miss?” he called softly. “Miss?”

Patty didn’t stop. She had learned everything she was going to at the hotel. She wasn’t the only one looking for McCracken. And whoever else there was would now be looking for her.

She swung away from the clerk, finally, and found herself face-to-face with a pair of Japanese men who were standing on either side of a large plant in the center of the lobby. Their eyes locked unblinkingly on her. They remained motionless.

All the victims showed prominent connections with the Japanese….

That bit of her own research echoed in her mind as she swung to her left, toward the elevator bank, only to find another pair of Japanese there. Trying to act as naturally as possible, she moved past the Japanese in the center of the lobby. Their eyes followed her every step. She moved toward the escalators; two more Japanese were standing in front of them, their expensive suits almost a perfect match. She looked over at the entrance; three more men were hovering amid the wave of arriving guests. She was surrounded, boxed in. What could she do? What would McCracken do?

A baggage cart overflowing with suitcases squeaked toward her. Making an instant decision, she closed her eyes and stepped out into its path. The collision rocked her, and Patty made sure to use her shoulders to jostle the bags. The results were perfect. The cart wobbled, and suitcases spilled everywhere. Patty went down harder than she had meant to, then lay still as a crowd began to gather.

“So sorry, miss, so sorry,” the Brazilian bellhop was saying in a mixture of English and Portuguese, reaching down to assist her.

Patty accepted his help, saying, “I was just on my way out, actually.”

“Then let me help you to the door.”

“I’m fine, really.”

“Can I get you a cab? I’m so sorry.”

“It was my fault. I wasn’t looking. I’m fine.”

Patty’s eyes swept the area around her and saw four of the Japanese men mixed among the crowd. They seemed unsure as to what their next move should be. Clearly she had complicated their task, hopefully buying the time she needed to get safely out of the hotel.

She backed her way out of the open hotel doors, colliding with a group of arriving guests. At least four of the Japanese were coming her way. There was a long line of guests waiting for taxis. She would have to get away on foot.

But the Sheraton’s isolated location left her with little maneuverability. There was just the Vidigal slum rising up the nearby mountain, and that was no answer.

She turned toward the lobby again to search out the Japanese and ended up colliding with an arriving guest. They knocked into each other with such force she almost fell.

“Easy does it, ma’am,” he said in English. He was big! And he was American!

“It’s about time,” Patty snapped, reaching down to pick up the cane the man had dropped when they’d collided.

“Time?” he echoed, stupified.

“Where the Christ have you been?” she demanded.

Patty grasped his arm on the pretext of regaining her balance, which allowed her to draw close enough to him to speak softly.

“Help me,” she whispered, and for just an instant their eyes met — the same instant the Japanese men came out of the hotel doors.

“I’m sick and tired of all this,” she continued, her loud ranting beginning to draw the crowd she sought.

“I’m…sorry,” the man forced himself to say.

“Let’s just get out of here. Now!” she demanded.

He seemed to notice the Japanese men. “Listen, it couldn’t be helped. It—”

“Now!”

“Fine. All right.”

He took her arm with his free hand and aimed her toward a jeep an attendant had been about to park. She climbed in ahead of him, and he pulled himself inside, grimacing with the effort it took. He pulled his cane in after him and closed the door.

“Thank you,” Patty said, with a sigh.

It was then she saw the pistol the man held low by his hip.

“Give me one reason not to shoot you,” he said.

Chapter 22

“You’d be doing their job for them.”

“Whose job?”

Patty turned to look back toward the entrance. The Japanese were gone. The rest of the crowd had dissipated.

“Just drive. Please.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

The man stowed the gun beneath the seat and extended his hand. “Name’s John Lynnford.”

Patty accepted it gratefully. “Patty Hunsecker.”

He gunned the engine and looked back in the same direction her eyes had taken. “What’s this all about?”

“You’re rescuing a damsel in distress.”

John Lynnford’s stiff leg worked the accelerator as he pulled the jeep into traffic. “Distress from what?”

“Not what — whom. Did you see those Japanese back there?”

“Can’t say that I did.”

“They were after me.”

“What’d you do, buy an American car back home?”

“No, I’m Emperor Hirohito’s illegitimate daughter.”

Lynnford regarded her briefly. He was a heavyset, thick-boned man with unevenly styled blond hair, and blue eyes that made him look younger than he probably was. She instinctively trusted him, even though she had no good reason for doing so.

“The Japanese were waiting in the lobby,” she explained.

“For you?”

“For anyone who approached the front desk and asked the right question.”

“Which was?”

“Has to do with a friend of mine that I’ve got to find.”

The jeep glided to a halt at a red light, and John Lynnford looked at her again. “You want to get out?”

“Not really. You want me to?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Your willingness to work my show.”

“Your what?”

“Show. You’re looking at the sole owner of the Orlando Orfei Traveling Circus and Carnival. We’re setting up for a run in Barra da Tijuca.”

“Always wanted to join the circus,” said Patty.

The Orlando Orfei Circus was setting up shop in a muddy field in Rio’s most modern shopping district. Located amid the Casa shopping complex and Carrefour Mall in Barra da Tijuca, the location could not have been better when it came to drawing crowds.

John Lynnford took the roads like he knew them, and they exchanged few words during the ride. As they approached the area, Patty heard the eerie whine of a calliope, along with the constant thud of stakes and studs being pounded into the ground. A number of men seemed to be issuing orders. To her right was the shell of a soon-to-be Ferris wheel. Just beyond it was a merry-go-round, and beyond that the midway was taking shape.

John Lynnford climbed out of the jeep ahead of her, easing his boots gingerly to the muddy ground, then retrieving his cane from the cab. Patty joined him.

“This way,” he said, and started off. “You can wait in my trailer while I send someone back into the city to apologize for my missing the meeting I had scheduled at the hotel.”

“Sorry.”

“If we end up opening a day late, you’ll have to do better than that.”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?”

“Tell me how much you’ll lose, and I’ll make sure you’re reimbursed.”

John Lynnford leaned on his cane and regarded her sardonically. “Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.”

“You were serious about a bunch of Japanese trying to kidnap you, too.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Look, ma’am—”

“Patty. Please call me Patty.”

“Look, Patty. I’ve heard these kinds of stories before, but you really don’t fit the type.”

“What type?”

“Someone on the run, looking to hide. Look around you. That’s how plenty of these people got started. That’s how plenty of them will finish.”

“And you?”

“Uh-uh. You first.”

“Then let’s go to your trailer,” Patty said, taking him up on his suggestion. “This is gonna take a while. You’ll be more comfortable sitting down.”

John Lynnford didn’t question her during the tale, not even once. The only break in Patty’s monologue came when, without the use of the cane, he limped to a small refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He drained it in a single gulp and started on another without offering any to Patty.

“Wow,” was all John Lynnford could say before he swallowed the rest of his second beer. She had just finished her story.” Jeeze, forgive my manners,” he said, eyeing the bottle and beginning to pull himself up from the chair.

“Nothing to forgive. I’m not thirsty.”

“Go on, then.”

“There’s nothing more to tell.”

“Where’s this McCracken fellow?”

“I don’t know, and I haven’t got the slightest idea how to find out.”

“They could have gotten to him, you know. You mighta come all this way for nothing.”

“No,” Patty said. “You don’t know McCracken.”

“You’re right about that, and I’m thankful for it.”

“You’d like him, John.”

Lynnford rolled his eyes. “That’s what they told me about the last city controller who jacked up my show’s tariff.”

“You and McCracken would get along just fine.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Mavericks always get along.”

“Interesting analysis.”

“You denying it?”

“Let’s stick to the subject at hand, Patty.”

“Can I have that beer first?”

This time Lynnford used the cane to reach the refrigerator, he came back with a third bottle for himself as well.

“You need a glass?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“I always like a woman who drinks her beer straight up.”

“Men don’t have a monopoly on lips.” She took a hefty gulp of the beer. It was cold and wet and that was all that mattered. “You believe me now, don’t you?”

He sighed. “Everyone here has a story, Patty. When you’ve been with the circus long enough, you learn to tell the ones that are true from the ones that are made up.” He sipped his beer. “The difference is most of the stories I hear come from people who wanna stay here and hole up for a while. Not the case with you.”

“No.”

“So here you are, up the creek with a toothpick for a paddle, and it’s only a matter of time before somebody follows the current.”

“Meaning?…”

“Meaning the hounds chasing you probably won’t be paying customers — and having them nosing around the Orlando Orfei won’t do either of us any good.”

“I really don’t want to endanger anyone. If you want, I’ll—”

“Shut up, Patty. I said I wanted to help you, and I meant it. Lots of people who’ve moved to the midway’ve left skills behind. A few of those skills just might be what you need.”

“Part of their stories?”

“Almost surely.”

“Speaking of which,” Patty said, straightening up, “I haven’t heard yours yet.”

John started to raise the beer toward his lips, then stopped. “Not much to tell,” he said softly. “Not compared to you, anyway.”

“So bore me. I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

Lynnford looked out the window at the work going on outside. “You’re looking at my life, Patty. And it’s been my life for as long as I can remember. Some of the family was into the business end of circuses and carnivals, others like me were performers. Three cousins, my brother, and I formed a trapeze act when all of us were barely out of puberty. Became a big attraction, a lead one even. It lasted six years, until I was twenty-two — ’bout fifteen years ago. My cousin forgot to catch me on a routine swing, and the net did the same. Shattered my leg on impact. Not a bone left whole to this day. More steel than marrow, Pat. Guess I shouldn’t complain, though. I’m alive, right?”

“Alive here.”

“Ever so true. The family bought out the Orlando Orfei chain, and I saw myself as the perfect person to manage it.”

“I understand.”

“Not until you’ve been here awhile, you won’t. Nobody asks any questions. They accept you for what you are and leave it at that. Your life can begin fresh the day you walk in. You’re not the first person to come to us the way you did, and you won’t be the last.”

“Except I’m not staying.”

“But you’re not about to find your friend McCracken without a hint of where to start looking, either.”

“I have to try.”

“And I understand that. What you gotta understand is you’ve got to be ready to move fast if things take a turn for the worst. That’s where we come in.” Patty rolled the beer bottle between her palms. “We? As in the people here who are going to help me?”

Lynnford rose and tapped his cane toward the window. “They’re all working now. We’ll get the ball rolling as soon as they break for lunch.”

“Are you happy now, Benjamin?” asked Pierce, standing in the doorway of the room that would be the tall man’s home for the foreseeable future.

Benjamin stared at him for a time. “I won’t be happy until we’re all together, until all this is finished.”

“Which will be very soon,” said Nathan, who had come up behind Pierce. “He wants to see us.”

“Now?” Benjamin asked fearfully.

“He called us here for a reason,” Nathan answered. “It’s time. Or damn close to it.”

“Let’s go,” Pierce suggested.

“Yes,” Nathan agreed. “Let’s.”

And they waited for Benjamin who, shrugging his shoulders, joined them in the corridor. The bunker was located some ten stories beneath ground level, constructed at a cost of nearly a billion dollars over the course of the past decade. All the work had been overseen by the man who had at last summoned them here. As far as they knew, this bunker was one of several scattered strategically across the United States, safe and insulated from anything that occurs on the surface above.

As a result, the air in the bunker had a sterile, antiseptic scent to it. Overdry, it played hell with the sinuses, but the slightly larger oxygen content kept the men from noticing. The worst feature of all, each would have probably said, was the lack of windows. With no world beyond to relate to, there was nothing to provide life with scale. Nothing, that is, other than the plan that had brought them all down here.

Nathan led Pierce and Benjamin to an elevator, which they rode to the very bottom floor of the complex. It was lit in a dull red haze and was colder than all the others. The lack of light, coupled with the absence of windows, was maddening. Stomachs clenched, they passed through an archway and into an even darker conference hall. The hall’s ceiling lights were encased by drop-off coverings that spread the light sideways instead of down. Everything else in the room was pure, pristine white. Untouched, virginal. Pierce thought it looked a little like snow.

Three places had been set at the huge conference table.

“Sit,” came a command spoken from the darkened slab that was the front of the room. “Please, my children, sit.”

The voice echoed through the hall’s sprawling limits, emerging in a slightly garbled, watery tone. Only the outline of its bearer was visible; a shadow hunched in a chair. What little life there was in his voice came from the echo. Pierce, Nathan, and Benjamin did as they were told.

“My children,” the voice started, “I am happy to report that all is proceeding on schedule.”

With that the hall’s light dimmed even more and a map of the entire continental United States was projected on the wall behind the shadow’s voice. The map’s glow cast his frame in an eerie translucence, outline bathed in a spill of light that might have come from the heavens themselves. Slivers of the light glowed red when the next instant brought twelve red splotches to the map, scattered irregularly over the United States and focused amid the nation’s largest centers of population. Accordingly, by far the heaviest concentration was along the Eastern seaboard. Six red lights dotted New York through Miami, while the West Coast and Midwest showed only three each.

“Everything is going as planned,” the voice explained emotionlessly. “No adjustments have had to be made in our timetable as a result of the complications.”

“Than the matter has been settled?” Pierce asked.

“Not quite,” answered the voice as the intensified glow from the red lights bathed the wall like blood. “I regret that it has now become necessary to alter our strategy to a very minor degree. One of the disciples must be replaced.”

“It was McCracken, wasn’t it?” Benjamin asked the question tentatively.

“Our efforts to eliminate him in Brazil failed, yes.”

“You’re saying you sent one of the disciples in and he failed?” Nathan asked incredulously.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Is McCracken that good?”

“We knew he was from the beginning. In reality, we have learned much from the encounter. The details are sketchy, but they provide a lesson, nonetheless. We won’t make the same mistake again.”

“But this mistake has cost us, hasn’t it?” challenged Pierce.

“Do not take that tone of voice with me, child.”

“Your precautions to deal with McCracken were inadequate. He’s faced similar battles before and won them all.”

“Not against the likes of our legion.”

“What happened to the disciple in Brazil?”

“Misjudgement, by all accounts.”

“No. As long as McCracken is still at large, our operation is in jeopardy.”

The shape took a deep breath. “We will watch him smolder in the ruins of his world. When we rise to claim the ruins, we will crush him like an ant. He represents everything you were conceived to destroy, the type of American who crushes everything in his path in the same way his nation once tried to destroy us by every means available. Your existences came about in response to this, and for nearly fifty years we have waited for the day that is soon to come. You three have helped chart everything. You three above all should know.”

“We want to be sure,” said Benjamin in conciliatory fashion. “That’s all.”

“McCracken has disappeared,” reported the shape. “But we have effectively isolated him. When he surfaces, we’ll know it. He is alone. No one in Rio would dare befriend him. He has become a pariah.”

“Why?”

The shape laughed a laugh that sounded more like the shrill wind ahead of a thunderstorm. “Apparently witnesses have placed him at the Bali Bar. He’s been blamed for the murder of Fernando Da Sa.”

“The news is bad, Kami-san.”

Tiguro Nagami had found Takahashi outside in the garden of the estate in Kyoto. The day had given itself up to twilight, the only time Takahashi’s pained eyes allowed him to drink in the rich sights, however much of their beauty might have been lost without the sun. “I felt as much,” he replied.

“The woman escaped us, and we are no closer to finding McCracken.”

“There is more. The tone of your voice speaks of it.”

“I have collated the reports of what occurred in the Botanical Garden. Twelve additional bodies were found, Kami-san…All savagely killed.”

Takahashi turned to face him. “Then it begins.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“Why should I be?”

“Because up to now we could never be totally sure the enemy had succeeded.”

“Children of the Black Rain,” Takahashi muttered.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Nothing. I trust we still have a chance of locating the woman and McCracken.”

“In any event, we have hope.”

“But it is dwindling, isn’t it, Tiguro?” Takahashi turned and gazed off into the garden for a long moment before shifting back toward Nagami. “Weetz will be in Philadelphia tomorrow. “

“His report confirms all is ready.”

“Then our battle continues. The death of the vice president will set them back, Tiguro. That is something, anyway.”

Johnny Wareagle stood in the center of the Delta Airlines terminal in Boston’s Logan Airport. He had parked his jeep close to the first terminal he came to and had spent the last several hours wandering about from one concourse to another. In his mind was the feeling that there was somewhere else he needed to be. A destination was calling out to him with a purpose all its own. The Delta terminal was no different in most respects from the others, but for some reason Johnny stopped in the center of its concourse.

In that moment the existence of the enemy was very real to him. In that moment, between breaths and heartbeats, he felt himself enter the mind of his greatest adversary. The concourse went black, and Johnny felt chaos and cool processed rage. He felt a soul cold enough to be frozen solid and a manitou that was formed of purpose and nothing more. Animals had more soul, more spirit than this. He felt he was glimpsing a machine, albeit one that gave off a foul odor of sulphur and rotten eggs.

Something lay dead in the blackness, and Johnny conjured memories of the jungle place he had walked through with Blainey. It was there that some part of his foe had been killed and replaced with another. The dead part might have reached out occasionally, but his foe never reached back. In the last instant before he slipped back, Johnny felt his adversary’s incredible power, an enjoyment of death equaled only by the capacity to bring it on.

Johnny opened his eyes, realized he was sweating. He had reached into a Wakinyan’s head for the first time, and a portion of his mind had come away scorched and seared. The night before, the spirits had brought his ancestors to him while he knelt by the fire. He could not see their faces, but their voices were clear. They told him the time for his Hanbelachia, his vision quest, had come at last. Everything he was, everything he had tried to be, was merely a prelude to the task before him. There would be only success or death, and nothing in the middle.

Johnny wanted to ask them about the hellfire, wanted to ask them about the obstacles he had overcome then, only to be faced with others. Was there no end? Would this test give way similarly to another? But his ancestors were gone, and there was only the breeze.

Johnny had smiled then. Life was a circle, after all, and a circle has no definable end or beginning. Strangely, McCracken seemed to have realized this ahead of him. He did not search for meanings or purpose; he merely acted. They shared the same circle, but seldom the same space in it.

Johnny started walking, his seven-foot, three-hundred-pound frame moving with the grace of a jungle cat even along the concourse. Many gawked, but few paid him a second glance. Or maybe by the time they tried to, he was gone. He gazed up at a screen listing departures, his eyes locking on the second one from the bottom: a Delta flight leaving in two hours.

For Philadelphia.

Chapter 23

McCracken came awake slowly, clawing past his eyelids for the light he felt beyond him.

“He’s coming around, Reverend,” he heard a young voice call from above him.

“Let me have a look, then. Let me have a look.”

Blaine’s eyes opened to an eerie half-light and the sound of water dripping somewhere nearby. A rank odor filled his nostrils, a putrid stench mellowed enough by an anomalous cold breeze to be tolerable. Suddenly a face attached to a shock of raggedy, long hair was peering down at him, twisting to get a better view.

“How you be then, governor?” asked the man, with a shadow of a British accent.

“If I’m dead, this better not be heaven.”

“Hell be more like it — and even that might be giving it too much credit,” said the man, and Blaine saw a pair of medium blue eyes set in a face layered with month-old beard stubble. “You’re in Harocimha, largest favela of them all. Home for me and my boys.”

Blaine was aware of feet shuffling toward him, the sound like rats lunging for a meal. It made him bolt upright, and a thunderclap erupted in his head.

“Easy does it, governor,” the man said, easing him back down to what Blaine realized was a straw mattress placed on top of a rickety set of bedsprings. In the next instant, the two of them were engulfed by a sea of young faces and eyes, smaller ones pushing their way forward to have a look and being shoved backward for their efforts. Gazing about, Blaine saw he was in some sort of shanty. Poorly layered brick and clapboard formed the interior of the structure, cutouts for windows, but no windows present, allowing the only light in. The interior was multileveled and steep. Only the remnants of a floor were visible, the rest being hard-packed dirt and rock. McCracken turned toward the sound of dripping water and saw a deep ravine running from outside the shanty down through it, carrying what could only be raw sewage based on the scent.

“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” was all Blaine could think to say.

This time he succeeded in propping himself up a little. The young eyes and soiled faces backed off a bit. Blaine smelled unwashed hair and bodies mixing with the other scents sifting through the cavernous mustiness. He recalled now a similar scent as he was dragged down into a tunnel from the alley behind the Bali Bar. It was all coming back to him, and little of it was pleasant. Splotches of memory were missing, but he did recall an agonizing walk up a labyrinth of stone steps, his arms propped upon young shoulders and the pain everywhere. The steps had undoubtedly led here to the Harocimha favela, Rio’s most infamous slum.

“Be glad it ain’t anywhere but here, governor,” the raggedy-haired adult told him. “Here no one can find you no matter how hard they try. Here nobody can find anyone. Great thing about the favela.”

McCracken was finally clear on where he was, but not on how he had gotten there. He knew more than a million natives called the favelas of Rio their home. Little more than shacks hammered out of wood, stone, and abandoned brick, many of the structures would be washed down the mountain come the rainy season. Others were more sturdily built and even boasted running water and electricity. But the sewage system was no more than a series of channels like the one running through his hideout, draining down the mountain and into the sea.

“How long have I been here?” he asked.

“You been in and out for damn near a day and a half now.”

“That makes today…”

“Monday, governor,” the man said, and extended a boney hand covered to the lower knuckles by what had once been a glove. “Name’s Reverend Jim Hope. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Blaine took it reluctantly. At the same time his eyes swept through the boys gathered about him. He counted twenty, ranging in age from seven to maybe sixteen. Their skin colors seemed as disparate as their ages. There were blacks, mulattos, well-tanned Portuguese who could have passed for Americans, and various levels in-between. “For a man of God, you been awful busy procreating.”

The comment took a while to sink in. “This flock’s mine in the spiritual sense, not the biblical.” He slapped his arms around two of the boys’ shoulders. “They ain’t the product of my loins much as the product of my conscience. Homeless till I gathered them here. I educates them, too, in the ways of man and machine.”

McCracken noticed the bed cots and straw mattresses laid about in no discernible pattern over the crusty floor. Propped up on and against the wall were a number of battery-powered lanterns. There were tables and chairs, an ancient refrigerator with a whining motor, and a working gas stove rimmed with squat steel cannisters containing fuel. He saw cupboards and chests, along with a sink overflowing with dirty dishes that might have been there forever. McCracken turned his attention to himself and checked the tightly wrapped tape enclosing his ribs, then touched the sutures and bandages dotting his face.

“Teach one of them to be a doctor, Reverend?”

“No, governor. But the favela meets all needs. For a price, of course.”

“And just how did you pay it?”

Jim Hope removed his gaunt arms from the shoulders of the two boys and stuck his hands inside his great coat. They emerged fingering a host of wallets, billfolds, and jewelry.

“In cash, governor,” he said, smirking.

“I see what you mean by educating them,” said Blaine.

“Lucky for you it was, too. If my boys ain’t’ve been in the Bali Bar when they was, you’d be a dead man now, I reckon.”

“To pick a pocket or two, right?”

“No, we stick to the tourists to earn our keep. Don’t we, Edson?”

A boy who could have passed for American tossed an arm upon Reverend Jim’s shoulder.

“Please, sir. I haven’t eaten in three days,” Edson said mournfully.

“Well, then,” said Reverend Jim, mocking the motion of extracting a bill from one of his many wallets. In the next instant a second boy had snatched the wallet from his hand and mocked escape.

“This was the streets, governor, he’d be two blocks away by now.” Reverend Jim accepted the wallet back. “Good job, Marcello. You, too, Edson.”

Both were smiling triumphantly.

McCracken sat all the way upright, and this time Reverend Hope’s young charges didn’t shrink away.

“They like you, governor. Said you handled yourself pretty damn well. Man like you’d fit in just fine with this bunch.”

“Sure, and we can tell prison stories by the firelight.”

“You’d be better off not making fun, governor.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The truth is, I’ve really got to be on my way.”

“No easy task in itself, I’m afraid,” Reverend Hope said. He pointed to the ceiling. “Men back in the city seem pretty intent on finding ya since two nights back.”

McCracken started to swing his legs off the cot. “I’ve still got to get out of here.”

Young hands immediately surged forward, doing their best to restrain him. A few of the older boys showed knives.

“Reverend, tell them to put the blades away before someone gets hurt.”

“That would be them, of course.”

“Yup.”

“Do as he says, boys.” Then, to McCracken as the knives disappeared, “I’ve met men like you before. Most of the time I was running from ’em.”

“If they were like me, you wouldn’t have got away.”

“But we all need help from time to time, now don’t we?”

“Apparently.”

“And me and my boys are willing to keep helpin’ ya, but you gotta wait a bit.”

“I may not have a bit.”

“You may not have a choice. Got a few of my lot out now checkin’ the streets for scuttlebutt, governor. They come back, we’ll know more.”

“In the meantime, Reverend, I’d like to meet the boys that saved me.”

“Wanna thank them personal like, right?”

“Not exactly.” Blaine glared in feigned anger at a young mulatto who was still holding him down. “I think one of them stole my wallet.”

By lunchtime the Orlando Orfei Circus had been magically brought to life. Patty had managed a brief nap on the couch in John Lynnford’s trailer until his gentle, calloused hand roused her. He led her outside, and she saw the rides were all assembled; a few had even started into their test spins. The finishing touches were being placed on the booths and stands that formed a makeshift midway. The big top for the animal and clown acts was halfway erected, as were the much smaller tent-topped auditoriums for entertainment in the form of exotic dancers and the freak show.

One of the first things John tried to do after taking over the Orlando Orfei was to put an end to the freak show, but it was the arguments of the freaks themselves that persuaded him against it. This was their world, they insisted, the only one where they felt truly comfortable. People were going to laugh at them anyway. Let them do it for a fee and then leave the freaks alone to be with their accepting fellows.

Using his cane to aid him across the uneven ground, John Lynnford led Patty beyond the midway and into the cafeteria tent. They approached a table whose lone inhabitant was a dwarf who was reading a newspaper with the aid of a magnifying glass.

“Good afternoon, Professor,” John said.

“Quiet,” the dwarf snapped. “Can’t you see I’m reading?”

He turned the page gingerly, and Patty saw its edges were creased and yellowed, the paper so brittle it seemed ready to break off in his hand. “Okay. That’ll do,” he said as he folded the paper fondly into quarters. He looked Patty over. “I guess you’ll want the sports page.”

“No, I—”

“A challenge, then! You’ve come with a challenge.”

Patty was turning toward John when he began to explain. “The professor here is the world’s foremost authority on facts.”

“All facts,” the little man broke in, and tapped his head proudly. “Photographic memory.”

“His booth is my personal favorite. People challenge him with a day in history, and he can always name a noteworthy event that occurred on that day.”

“Or they name the event,” the little man elaborated, “and I name the day. Doesn’t matter either way. I never lose. What have you for me? Perhaps you’ll be the first to stump me.”

“He reads newspapers,” John continued. “Day and night. How many languages, Professor?”

“How many are there?” He looked back at Patty and leaned farther over the table. “A challenge, girl! Try me!”

“The first Superbowl,” Patty managed.

“January fifteenth, 1967. Green Bay versus Kansas City. Final score 33–14 in favor of Green Bay. Try again! A date this time.”

“April twelfth, 1861,” she asked after thinking for a moment.

“Category?”

“History.”

“History! Of course!” The little man barely needed to think. “Southern artillery opens fire on Fort Sumter. The American Civil War begins. More?”

“That’s enough.”

“Another date, then!” The little man drummed the table in eager anticipation.

“October tenth, 1980,” John chimed in.

The professor regarded him playfully. “A dirty trick, my friend. The day I joined the circus.”

“He was a forger,” Lynnford explained. “The best in the business.”

“The best ever!” the little man boasted, but then his expression grew sad. “Until my eyes started to go. They’re still going. A little harder to read my papers every day, it is. I made a mistake with some counterfeit money. Cost a few gentlemen millions and left them most unhappy. Some went to jail. I came here.”

“Passports, Professor,” John coaxed him.

“Simple work. Beneath my degree of expertise.”

“For my pretty friend here.”

“Hmmmmmmmm…You either match her face to a picture or match a picture to her face. The latter means starting from scratch.”

“Can you do it?”

“Check my files. Let you know.” He studied Patty’s face.” Strong features. Difficult to match. Means starting from scratch. Leave me her measurements and specs. But no picture until she’s finished with Teresa. Go now. I’ve got my paper to finish.”

“Who’s Teresa?” Patty wanted to know after they had left the tent.

John just looked at her. “You’ll see.”

John pushed himself up the four steps leading to a rusted metal trailer.

“It’s me, Teresa,” he called after knocking.

The door opened, and Patty caught a glimpse of a woman in a clown suit; no, not a suit, just flour-white facial makeup with red highlighting her cheeks, eyes, and mouth. Her hair was tied in a bun, ready to be swallowed by the clown’s typical dome and wig. She was wearing baggy jeans and a black shirt. Her hands showed traces of white makeup.

“Can we come in, Teresa?”

The woman gazed down the steps toward Patty. The warmth disappeared from her expression. She looked suspicious.

“It’s all right,” John said soothingly. “She’s with me.”

Teresa nodded reluctantly and let John enter, backing away as Patty climbed the steps in his wake.

“The professor’s working on a passport for her. She needs a new appearance. Can you do something?”

The clown regarded Patty closely for the first time. She shrugged, then nodded again. “She’s a friend, Teresa,” John said softly. “You can trust her.”

But far from looking convinced, the clown moved into another section of the trailer.

“Teresa was already here when I took over,” John explained. “No one knows her true story because she hasn’t spoken a word since her arrival. There’s also not a soul on my payroll here who admits to having seen her without her makeup.”

“My God…”

“She just represents the extreme of what all of us are going through. We’re all hiding; Teresa just manifests it more blatantly. But the beautiful thing is that nobody ever pesters her about it, and she’s the best clown we’ve got.”

“But don’t you wonder what happened to make her withdraw like this?”

“Of course I do, except it’s none of my business.” John Lynnford paused. “At any rate, you’ve got to change your appearance before you leave here. The professor will provide you with the means, and Teresa will take care of the face.”

With that Teresa returned, she was carrying a vanity case. She backed a chair against the kitchen sink and signaled Patty to take it. The clown eased her neck gently backward, drenched her blond hair in water, and combed it straight back. She massaged what might have been shampoo into it, rinsed it, then went through the whole process again.

“You’ll be here for a while,” John said. “I’ve got to see how things are going. We open at sundown.”

In all, the transformation process took over two hours. Patty’s hair emerged jet black and tightly curled from the perm process. Makeup gave her face an entirely different hue and tint. Contact lenses made her eyes dark brown. But there was more, enough so that when at last Teresa allowed her to look in the mirror, she didn’t recognize the face that looked back.

She looked ten years older, at least, harder and meaner, with furrows accentuated on the forehead, brow, and under her eyes.

John Lynnford was coming up the steps when Patty stepped through the doorway.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“I’m the new attraction for the spook house. Let me loose inside to scare the little kiddies.”

“It was time you grew up, anyway.”

“Fifteen years in two hours is pushing it a little.”

“Added to how many years in the past month or so?”

“I get the point.”

“I really wasn’t meaning to make one.”

He led her to the professor’s trailer. The little man had no idea who she was until he put on a different pair of glasses.

“Get her some clothes, boss,” he said to John. “Have her picture taken and get it over to me. The passport’s almost finished.”

Back outside, Patty stopped and touched Lynnford’s hand.

“How am I ever going to thank you for all this?”

“Some ticket sales would help. Come back when you’ve got more money.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Look around you. We’re a community here, a family. We’ve all been down, and we all know what it’s like not to have anyone there to pick you back up again. It’s a lousy feeling, and the best way to forget it is to pick up someone else. That’s what we do.”

Patty looked into his eyes. “I wish I could do the same for you.”

“Sorry. Lost cause.”

John started to move away. Patty closed the gap and grasped his arm gently.

“You weren’t the only one injured in that fall,” she said, with sudden understanding. “Your cousin didn’t miss the catch, did he?”

Lynnford’s lips trembled. His cane burrowed its way into the ground. “It was our grand finale. The five-person pyramid swing we were known worldwide for. I was the top rung. Everything depended on me. I tried to be fancy, and I slipped. The bar wobbled, and that was that. The net wasn’t built to handle five people tumbling into it at once. It gave way, and no one came out of it whole. Two broke their necks, another his spine. I got out of it best of all because there were other bodies to cushion my fall. That’s why I’ve never asked Teresa why she doesn’t speak. I figure she’s got her reasons and she deserves them. We’ve all got our reasons and they’ve got to be respected. You’ve got your reason to leave, so we help you. If you had chosen to stay, we would have helped you there, too.”

Just then the circus strongman, Zandor, rushed up to John Lynnford’s side. His rippling muscles glistened with sweat that seemed to pour like a fountain from his bald dome. He gestured with a pair of massive arms toward the shopping mall and parking lot on the left as he whispered his report.

“You’re sure?” Lynnford asked him.

“Yes.” Zandor nodded.

With the strongman still standing rigid at his side, Lynnford turned back to Patty.

“I’m afraid we’ve got company.”

“More of the Japanese.”

Lynnford shook his head. “Locals, by the sound of it, and not the most honorable sorts, either. Maybe sent by the Japanese.”

“Then you’ve got to get me out of here. You’ve got—”

“No way,” Lynnford interrupted. “We don’t know if they’re still around the area or not, so this remains the safest place for you. This may even work to our benefit. We can make it work.”

“How?”

“We know they’ll be coming, and we know when.” John Lynnford paused. “Tonight, at the Orlando Orfei’s opening.”

McCracken’s immediate goal was to get some strength back into his weary, battered body. The effects both from his desperate fight with the disciple and his ill-fated fall from the roof of the Bali Bar had taken their toll. A half hour of painstaking exercise brought him a good portion of the way back, though not all. He knew the rest would be there when he needed it, and he might need it soon, because the news Reverend Jim Hope’s boys brought back from the streets wasn’t good. Not surprisingly, the murder of Fernando Da Sa had been pinned on him by the true perpetrators, and the crime lord’s soldiers were scouring the streets for him.

“And there’s more,” Reverend Jim reported.

“Can’t wait to hear it.”

“The same men are looking for a woman who showed up at your hotel.” Blaine looked up from the plate of brown rice and fish the boys had cooked for him. “A woman?”

“As luck would have it, one of my boys was in the area at the time.” Hope winked.

“I’m sure. Just go on.”

“Something spooked her and she ran off, but then word got passed that she was working with you, and Da Sa’s people got interested.”

“Describe her!”

“Cute, athletic, blond hair.”

“Patty!”

“You know her, then.”

“What I don’t know is what the hell she’s doing down here!”

Thoughts raced through Blaine’s head. Patty Hunsecker must have come to Rio to find him, alerted to the procedure by Sal Belamo. This could only mean something had gone dreadfully wrong back in the States. Sal would never have risked sending Patty down here if her life wasn’t equally endangered back home.

McCracken placed his plate down on the stool in front of him. “Do you know where she is?” he demanded.

“We might be able to find out.”

“How?”

“Da Sa’s men. If they latch onto her, it won’t stay secret from my boys.”

“It’s good to hear they steal more than money.”

“Lots of times information’s more valuable. Plenty of my lot used to run with the younger ones in Da Sa’s bunch; when they grow up they’ll probably join them.” A frown crossed Jim Hope’s face. “Course the problem we got now is plenty of Da Sa’s soldiers come from the favelas. So once they learn you’re here, we can’t rely on protection from within, governor. Quite the opposite, if you know what I mean.”

“I do. Just find the woman.”

“What happens when we do?”

“I go in and get her.”

Hope smiled. “Had a feeling you were gonna say that, governor. Course you know that’ll probably put you up against Da Sa’s boys…who are out to get you anyway.”

“I’ll let them bring in plenty of reinforcements to even out the odds.”

The boys drifted in and out of the shanty they called home throughout the afternoon. One pair arrived brimming with pride. Reverend Jim Hope let them accompany him over to Blaine.

“These got a present for ya, governor.”

Blaine took a thick travel wallet from the reverend’s extended hand. Inside was a passport belonging to a man of his approximate size and likeness: thick hair, dark features, and a beard. No scar through the left eyebrow, but it was doubtful any customs official would notice the oversight.

“We figured the papers you got with you might not get you outta the country.”

“You figured right.”

“Somebody you work for turn the tables, governor?”

“I’m not sure yet, Reverend.”

“This woman might be able to tell ya, though.”

“That’s what I m hoping.”

To pass the time while he waited for some word on Patty to be brought back, Blaine listened to the story of what had brought Reverend Jim Hope to Rio — and what had kept him here for over a decade now. A bank job had gone bad outside of London, a guard shot by one of his cohorts. Jim was only the driver, but he’d still have to pay the same price as the shooter, so he took off. Rio wasn’t chosen for logic; it was the first international flight he could book passage on. A single stop in his apartment to pick up a tote bag and off he went to Heathrow.

He met the first of his boys, ironically, when a pair of them tried to pick his pocket his first night in. Jim was drunk, and instead of giving them a licking, he gave them a wink.

“Now, you wanna see how to do it right, chaps?”

The boys couldn’t speak English, but they seemed to get the point. Teaching them English was the second order of business. After all, a great percentage of their targets would be Americans, so speaking the language would help. He took the name Reverend Jim Hope and took in as many boys as he could handle without losing control. When they got old enough they left. There were always new ones waiting to replace them.

“Thing is,” Jim Hope said, “this city’s a mess, governor. Sure, tourists come down here for the beaches and the sun, but they don’t see the poverty ’cept when they look up the mountain and see the favelas rising up the side. And the poverty feeds off itself. You know why there are so many babies born in Brazil? ’Cause the government pays all the costs. Don’t pay for no abortion or birth control, though. So more kids keep gettin’ added to the picture. Them that has ’em don’t want ’em, so they end up in the streets.”

“Adding to the surplus population.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Jim Hope gazed about him proudly. “Anyway, these boys’d have nothing without me. I keeps them safe, clean, and alive.”

“You don’t owe me any explanations.”

“Done some bad turns in your time, governor?”

“A few.”

“I met men like you in prison. Didn’t talk much about what they did that got them there. People pretty much left them alone. Never did anything to prove themselves, but I suppose some don’t have to.”

“And some do.”

“And what is it that you do, governor? What is it that got you down here? I ain’t asked that yet.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

Reverend Jim Hope wasn’t about to. “Something busted you up pretty bad. Doc patched you up, but the way I see it, there’s smarter things to do than going out to ask for more.”

“Believe me, I don’t have a choice.”

“Like me with the boys?”

“Sort of.”

Hope’s eyes swept through the shanty again and came to focus on the stinking sewer stream running down the channel in its side. “Ain’t much, but the boys think they’re livin’ like kings. Compared to most around here, they are, too. Given a choice not a one of ’em would leave, neither. This is all they know, and none sees a reason to know any more.”

Just then, the sound of feet pounding quickly up the steps leading to the shanty made both Blaine and Reverend Jim turn toward the doorway. Hope met the trio just inside, and the lead boy whispered something in his ear.

“They found the woman, governor,” he reported, turning back toward Blaine.

Blaine rose rigidly to his feet. “Where?”

More whispering. “It ain’t good, governor.”

“Where!”

“She’s holed up at a circus in Barra da Tijuca, and Da Sa’s men are gonna move on her come the opening tonight.”

Blaine came forward. “Da Sa’s men? Why?”

“I reckon whoever turned them against you, turned them against her, too.”

“Just tell me where, and if one of your boys can get me a gun…”

The much smaller Reverend Jim stopped him with a hand pressed flat against his chest. “Need yourself an atom bomb to go against these odds, and one of those ain’t easy to pick out of a pocket.”

“You got a better idea?”

Hope’s wide smile revealed the brownish edges of his teeth. He spoke as the complement of boys present in the shanty came forward to enclose him.

“When going up against an army, governor, it’s best to bring one of your own.”

Chapter 24

“Hiding would seem a safer bet,” Patty suggested as she walked alongside John Lynnford toward the Ferris wheel, her post for the evening.

“Meaning a concealed place where you have limited range of motion. They find you and it’s over.”

“True.”

“And if they aren’t supposed to see you, neither can we. We wouldn’t be able to help you…. Patty, have some faith in Teresa’s work. All these people have to go on is a description you don’t fit anymore. Now do you want to hear the rest of the plan or not?” John asked her.

“I’m in your hands, right?”

“You’ll be taking tickets right in front of the platform. Someone else will run the ride, so you won’t have to worry about pushing any buttons or controls. You’ll be on ground level and not in plain view.”

“Why the Ferris wheel?”

“Central location on the midway in a relatively dark spot.” John pointed with his cane to the shopping mall parking lot on the circus’s right. “We’ll plant a car there this evening. When we close tonight at twelve o’clock, I’ll have one of our roadies escort you to it — just a couple melting into the crowd — and drive you to the airport. The professor’s working out the airline schedules.”

“What about tickets?”

“I’ll give you some cash to buy them out of tonight’s receipts.”

“That’s the problem,” Patty said, with a sigh.

“What is?”

“Where exactly do I go? I came down here to find the only man I could trust. I’ve got to get that message to him. If I don’t, he’s dead, and so am I. Eventually. Soon.”

“You want to stay with us, that’s fine, too.”

“Thanks for the offer, but no can do. What I know now goes way beyond me.”

“This a vendetta?”

“It used to be. Now I don’t know what it is.”

The yellow truck rumbled toward Barra da Tijuca, the boys filling its open back clutching the rails for handholds.

“Makes me feel like Bill Sykes,” Blaine said to Reverend Jim, who was squeezed next to him in the front seat.

“Bill who, governor?”

“Nevermind.”

Originally the plan was to take buses to the site of the circus, but seeing the yellow truck hauling fresh gas cannisters for the stoves of the favela gave Hope another idea. He knew the driver, and a quick exchange of words convinced him it would be in his best interest to drive the group to Barra da Tijuca. Blaine, dressed in native garb, could pass well enough for a local. The biggest problem was his muscular chest and arms, which made him stand out. The Brazilians were built lean and sinewy and the people of the slum seemed most impressed with such a well-developed stranger.

The favela’s construction boasted no overall plan. Layers piled atop layers, shanties tucked in wherever space permitted, created the serpentine structure of the steep, narrow walkways squeezed between them. Privacy was nonexistent, and ownership often changed as quickly as it took a pair of fast hands to pull clothes from a makeshift line.

Which was how McCracken’s tattered outfit had been obtained.

The sun was down by the time the truck dropped them off in the field adjacent to the Orlando Orfei Traveling Circus. Before entering the grounds, Reverend Jim gathered the boys around him, then gave each of them money for enjoying the attractions. Hope had also brought a pocketful of firecrackers with him; setting them off would be the signal that there was trouble. Beyond this, they had no plan. All Blaine could be sure of was that, according to Da Sa’s people, Patty was here, and that they were going to move on her tonight.

“Wait a minute,” Blaine said to Hope before the boys were dismissed to run amok. “Can they spot Da Sa’s men? I mean, can they tell them apart from the rest of the patrons?”

The boys’ collective smirk provided their answer as Reverend Jim nodded proudly.

“Interesting.”

“Got yourself an idea, governor?”

Blaine nodded. “Gather round, boys,” he said, “and pay attention….”

The crowds had begun arriving an hour before sunset, somewhat before the scheduled opening. The midway was already fully functional, although there were still some finishing touches to be added to the big top. The first show was scheduled for eight o’clock; succeeding shows would continue every hour on the hour throughout the evening. It was not an elaborate or lavish setup so far as such things went, but especially for the economically depressed people of the region, the circus was a not-to-be-missed highlight.

Patty quickly fell into the flow of taking tickets from the people forming an eager line in front of the Ferris wheel. The creaky apparatus whined into motion at the start of each ride, a speaker pounding out the same tune in rhythm with every turn.

She surveyed the strollers and ticket holders alike as inconspicuously as she could. She felt safe even in the spill of the thin light, even though she knew that, in all likelihood, the people who were after her had to be somewhere in the crowd. But they would be looking for the woman they got a glimpse of at the hotel, not the person Teresa had created. That, more than anything, gave her reason for hope and security.

Still, she had never felt more alone, and thinking of that made her think of Blaine McCracken. He lived in a world apart, alienated from the rest of a civilization that needed him to maintain its balance. He once told her how much he envied Johnny Wareagle’s reclusive existence in the forest, not realizing how much his own life had come to resemble it. You don’t have to pull out to pull away. McCracken had helped teach her that much back in the Pacific.

The Ferris wheel spun into the start of another ride, and Patty stuffed the tickets through the slit in the box in front of her. By sunset the ride was running at full capacity, seeming to strain under the weight. The entire midway was jammed now, no game or ride spared the inevitable line. Even the professor’s booth boasted a few skeptical patrons eager to test his knowledge.

Before her, the huge, muscle-bound Zandor was strutting proudly down the midway. He obliged children by letting them feel his muscles in the hope their parents would come to the entertainment tent, where he performed his act. Patty knew the steel bars the strongman bent were the real thing.

She concentrated on taking tickets, but once the ride started, she let her eyes roam. So far she hadn’t spotted anyone who looked suspicious. She took a deep breath. The chances of her being spotted had been reduced significantly now that it was getting dark.

A pop! sounded suddenly; behind her the Ferris wheel ground squeakily to a halt. A few of the people caught near the top screamed. Patty shuddered. Talk about bad timing! The damn thing had broken down, and now practically everyone at the carnival was looking in her direction.

“A cable broke loose down below,” the man running the ride told her. “I can see it. I’ll try to fix it.”

The man grabbed his tool belt and moved off toward the wheel itself, dropping down below it to get to the works and the faulty cable. The racket made by the stranded riders continued to attract bystanders. Although the true villain was the broken cable, accusations were hurled at her — in Portuguese, to boot — which she barely spoke at all.

She saw John’s face in the crowd. He was coming toward her, to rescue her from this mess! Then she noticed he was walking without his cane. Two men on either side of him were supporting him. The men were smiling. John wasn’t. They’ve got me, she realized, actually more worried about John than herself. They’ve got me….

Blaine had been walking about for twenty minutes when he first noticed the ticket taker at the Ferris wheel. He looked away, but something made him gaze back her way. The hair was the wrong color, the age, too, but something, something…

Could this be Patty?

He wasn’t sure until he saw the two men moving the woman’s way, dragging a third between them. Da Sa’s soldiers had one captive in hand and were now heading for the woman.

“Now!” McCracken ordered, rushing up to Reverend Jim. “Now!”

Hope’s hands jammed into his pockets and emerged with some fireworks and a lighter.

“Come on!” Blaine urged, just ahead of the first hiss, as flame met fuse, and Reverend Jim tossed the initial trio forward.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

McCracken shoved him aside. “Keep your eyes on the boys, Reverend. Keep them safe.”

“Where are you going?”

Blaine looked back one last time before sprinting for the Ferris wheel and the men approaching Patty Hunsecker.

“To work,” he said.

The popping sounds cost Patty a heartbeat, as John and the two men holding him captive neared the platform. The Ferris wheel had started to spin again, and behind her customers were piling out. She stood frozen, unable to move.

Turn myself in and maybe they won’t hurt him. What choice do I have?

That thought had been barely formed when she saw the shape whirling toward the platform, just to the rear of the trio approaching her. The night was dark, and he was darker, but Patty saw the beard, recognized him as his hands shot out in the direction of the men holding John Lynnford.

The goons holding the man with the limp never even turned. Blaine’s approach angled slightly from the left. He grabbed the one on that side by the scruff of his collar and heaved backward. When the man resisted, Blaine went with the motion and smashed him facefirst against the steel railing meant to keep eager patrons back. The one on the right had turned by then, the gun that had been pressed against Lynnford’s side coming up but not getting there before Blaine smashed the whiskey bottle against his face. It shattered against bone and flesh and the man reeled backward, crumpling, his cheeks and nose a spider web of blood.

“Come on!” he yelled to Patty.

Instead she leaned over to help John, who had been thrown down in the struggle.

“There are others!” she screamed at Blaine.

“I know,” Blaine said, ducking the gunfire that pulsed their way, bodies toppling in the path ahead of them. “The kids didn’t have enough time!” he shouted. “They didn’t have enough time!”

The plan McCracken had outlined to the boys was risky at best. Once they heard the sound of the firecrackers, they were to move in pairs on targets chosen by themselves. Not to lift wallets from pockets, though, not tonight. Tonight their targets were the pistols the enemy force undoubtedly wore beneath their jackets or clipped to their belts. Blaine had hoped to give them plenty of leeway. To pick and choose the time after he spotted Patty. As it turned out, he’d given them a minute at most, which meant few if any had completed their assigned task.

As he grabbed for Patty and Lynnford, he would have been surprised to learn that six of the fourteen additional gunmen had already been stripped of their pistols. Others either were equipped with minimachine guns or wore their pistols too well secured to make off with. But for these, the boys had an answer as well.

McCracken had expressly forbidden them to use the guns they had pilfered; nothing could have seemed worse to him than turning children into killers. But they had brought an assortment of other weapons that worked just fine. When a number of the still-armed gunmen drew their weapons, the boys were all over them with spray-paint cans, distorting their vision and confounding their aim. This much was accomplished ahead of the initial bursts of fire. At the sound of the gunshots, the boys scattered among the rest of the patrons along the midway, which had been turned into chaos.

A stray bullet caught John Lynnford in the shoulder as Blaine and Patty helped him backward. McCracken heard him gasp; he shielded the man with his own body as they dragged him into the cover provided by the guts of the Ferris wheel.

In the process, McCracken realized angrily that some of the boys had totally disregarded his orders and were in the process of firing back at the gunmen. For a time they held their own, but now those of Da Sa’s soldiers who had been stopped temporarily by the spray paint were joining the battle, shots firing wildly in all directions. Bodies surged down and through the midway, changing directions from one burst of fire into another. Booths toppled as patrons sought refuge. McCracken watched as a bald strongman lifted a gunman brandishing an Uzi up overhead and tossed him effortlessly into a neon sign advertising the TEST YOUR STRENGTH booth. Bulbs popped and crackled. The bell at the top chimed as the gunman crashed into the apparatus and tumbled it with him.

“Zandor!” Patty cried happily.

“Stay here!” Blaine ordered.

“Where are you going?”

“Out there to do what I do best, lady. And do it fast.”

McCracken had just slid out from the makeshift hiding place when five trucks roared onto the scene with gunfire marking their path.

He should have figured the opposition would have left some reinforcements back a bit — to be used only if needed, like now. The trucks roared onto the scene. The gunfire surging from them was indiscriminate, and bodies fell everywhere, some hit, some trying to find cover.

Blaine’s first order of business was to get a gun. He had scarcely left the cover of the Ferris wheel when he spotted the dark figure of Reverend Jim waving to him with pistol in hand. In a crouch, he rushed toward Hope, only to be caught in the spill of a truck’s headlights, making him an easy target for the gunmen on board. At the last possible instant, a shape lunged between the truck and him. The angle allowed Blaine to see the young American-looking boy named Edson, who had been part of that morning’s demonstration back at the slum, firing straight at the truck. It veered and crashed into the Ferris wheel, tearing away some of its supports and forcing it into a dangerous list.

Edson was turning proudly toward McCracken when a bullet smacked him in the stomach and blew him backward.

“Shit!” Blaine shouted, reaching the boy just ahead of Reverend Jim.

He grabbed for the boy’s pistol and rolled, bringing it up to fire on the gunman who had done the shooting. The three remaining bullets excavated the man’s chest, and he fell over backward. Blaine moved on toward Edson, who was twisting on the ground and screaming, greenish-blue eyes filled with fear. Reverend Jim got there ahead of him and was holding the boy still as best he could. He raised one hand long enough to give Blaine the pistol he had been waving.

“Get him to safety,” McCracken ordered. “Stay with him.” Blaine looked at the writhing boy. “When you get him quieted down and more comfortable, round up as many of the others as you can. I’ll join you later.”

“Sure about that, governor?”

McCracken looked at the four trucks still barreling through the midway spitting death.

“You can bet on it.”

The members of the circus had responded as well as could be expected, not fleeing but choosing to defend their patch instead. John had obviously prepared them for this kind of battle — Blaine could see men and women — every kind of crude rifle hidden behind the cover of what had been booths and stands — firing resolutely at the gunmen and the trucks. Their bullets kept the enemy at bay, allowing at least a portion of the crowd to dash to safety.

For his part, Zandor was hurling shards of steel rail used to fasten down the big top at the trucks as they passed by his position. Blaine saw one of his tosses strike a driver square in the face. The truck crashed into the refreshment stand and spun onto its side.

He felt he could handle the three trucks that now remained. The problem was how to stop the enemy still patrolling the grounds, shooting at anything that moved.

The answer occurred to Blaine when his eyes found the big top. He and Reverend Jim had taken stock of its contents when they had done a fast walkabout through the circus grounds earlier.

He dashed toward the big tent against the tide of people streaming out from it. Those inside were late finding out what was happening outside, but now they were joining the flow of the escaping mass. McCracken held fast to his two pistols, ready to use them at an instant’s notice if necessary. For now, though, even if he had been able to pick out the gunmen, it would be all but impossible to hit them without risking the lives of innocent people. Well, he was about to make what was already chaotic worse, though to his own advantage.

Dropping to all fours, he lifted a flap of the big top and crawled under, then made his way beneath the steel layers of platform seating. The show featured the circus’s fifteen trained lions, perhaps the attraction it was best known for. All the lions were still in the large performance cage, left there when the shooting started. They prowled anxiously about, roaring and bellowing. Blaine reached the door to the cage; it was locked. He fired one of his pistols at an angle certain to keep any ricocheting bullets away from the great beasts. Two shots were all it took. The lock lay in pieces. McCracken climbed up onto the heavy steel of the cage and swung open the gate. The lions emerged and padded silently toward freedom.

“Go to it, fellas,” he said as they began to roar.

Chapter 25

The sudden appearance of the lions outdoors changed everything. Blaine emerged from the big top and saw two of the remaining trucks crash head-on, the drivers’ attention diverted by the sight of the great beasts loping across the fair grounds. The gunmen, trying to protect themselves against the lions, would stand out now, and Blaine had plenty of bullets left for them, even if the circus people didn’t.

Gunfire pouring from the final truck winged one of the galloping beasts and another leaped for its cab, terrifying the driver. The truck careened wildly and smacked straight into the Ferris wheel, tumbling it to the ground in a shower of sparks. Blaine had already switched his attention back to the gunmen on foot. They were easily identifiable since they were trying to buck the crowds, not flow with them, and his two pistols clacked alternately at easy targets.

One of Da Sa’s men managed to creep up unseen behind him, only to be smothered by a rush from the boys Reverend Jim had managed to gather together. Another two seeking cover were found and dispatched in quick fashion by Zandor. Blaine was flashing him the okay sign when his eyes fell on the tumbled remnants of the Ferris wheel.

“Patty,” he muttered to himself. “Patty…”

And then he was running toward the pile of ruined steel, where he had last seen her. Patty had crawled out from under the corpse of the Ferris wheel when she saw the gunmen approaching. Dashing across the midway, she leaped on top of the merry-go-round, which had somehow continued to spin throughout the entire battle. As she dived behind a wooden horse for cover, gunfire aimed for her splintered the wood and tore its painted head off. The merry-go-round picked up speed, and Patty stayed low, eyes searching for her hunters. She could see figures approaching through the rampaging crowd. The fun house would make for the best cover according to John. It was the next building over, set back a bit.

The merry-go-round circled again, and the approaching gunmen opened fire on the position where they had last seen Patty. Another horse blew apart as she scampered toward the edge, ready to make a run for the fun house. The ride was moving at its fastest clip, and the maneuver was not as easy as she would have thought. But she couldn’t risk another pass that would put her directly in front of the approaching gunmen, so it had to be now.

Patty leaped and hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb a measure of the shock. The fast-spinning merry-go-round provided the cover she needed. Patty ran up the ramp leading into the fun house and plunged into its dark confines.

She could tell from the murky lighting and eerie sounds that it, too, had remained operational throughout the chaos. She walked on, able to see barely a yard in front of her through the fake fog that was the first effect to greet patrons.

Suddenly a pair of red eyes flashed before her, accompanied by a shrill howling. Patty lurched back as the spring-driven ape-man recoiled upward, returning to its slot. The quickness with which the thing had struck gave her an idea. She reached in her pocket for the screwdriver she’d used to fasten the ticket box at the Ferris wheel into place. Looking around she found a crate and, after positioning it properly, stepped up on it and went to work.

Seconds later, she was finished, frame pinned against the wall, as the gunmen pounded up the ramp leading into the fun house. The two men entered the fake mist just a yard apart, confused by the darkness and the swirling fog. Just a little farther, she urged the lead gunman. Just a little farther…

The first man reached the spot where Patty had been greeted by the recoiling ape-man and, once again, the mass of rubber, wood, and fur dropped downward. Only this time, there was no spring mechanism to stop its fall and send it back upward, because Patty had removed it. The thing simply crashed into the man, knocking him down.

Patty, meanwhile, put the rest of her plan into action. She plowed into the second man with as much force as she could muster. The man was quick; he started to pull back on his trigger almost at once. But Patty had made his gun hand her first target; as she jammed it upward, the barrel spit orange heat.

“Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhh!”

For an instant, Patty wasn’t sure who was screaming; then she realized the ape-man’s tape was caught in a loop and was playing the same ugly cry over and over again. She held fast to the man’s gun hand with her left hand, while with her right hand she went for his eyes with her finger nails. She felt the nails part flesh, then tear sickeningly into his sockets. His screams were worse than the ape-man’s.

Patty spun away from the man, who was now groping blindly around, and grabbed the gun from his limp hand. She turned back in the ape-man’s direction just as the first man was shoving it off him, his gun coming up.

Patty shot first. Once, twice, as many times as she could pull the trigger until the distinctive click sounded, and then she kept on pulling in her panic. Ten feet before her the gunman let the pistol slide from his grasp. He looked more confused than anything else, as a pool of blood gushed from his upper chest. His head collapsed suddenly, but his eyes stayed open. The second man was still wailing, clutching desperately at his ruined eyes.

Patty pulled herself together again. These two weren’t the only ones left. More would be following them into the fun house, and she had to make use of this darkened labyrinth of a hiding place.

She crossed through the manufactured swamp area, complete with its eerie night sounds and moist, fetid walls, and realized she was still holding the spent pistol in her hand. She dropped it and felt strangely naked. Listening intently for sounds of pursuit, she kept walking, but the fun house’s taped sound effects made it almost impossible for her to hear anything.

Patty approached the chamber of horrors and crossed a threshold that triggered the monsters into motion. The mummy lunged from an upright crate. Frankenstein’s monster walked an unvarying path — forward and back — thanks to a spring connecting him mechanically to the wall. Dracula rose from a coffin that opened with a squeal and a whine.

The coffin! Maybe, just maybe…

Patty dashed over to it and stripped off the spring mechanism that opened it mechanically at regular intervals. The coffin top began to drop down suddenly, nearly crushing her hand. Chewing down her pain, Patty pushed herself into the coffin and squeezed the waxen vampire figure to the side. Then she closed the lid back down, the darkness swallowing her.

Zandor reached the Ferris wheel just after Blaine. Together they threw pieces of the shattered wooden platform and steel housing away to clear a path into the debris.

“Patty!” Blaine yelled as he dug through the mess. “Patty!”

At last he could see into the ruins of the chamber containing the Ferris wheel’s works. A single shape lay there, partially entombed by ruptured and splintered parts.

John Lynnford coughed out dust and dirt when Blaine reached him. His face was mined with cuts and lacerations.

“Where’s Patty?” Blaine demanded.

“They saw us under here,” Lynnford muttered, “so she left. To save me.”

“When, dammit?”

“Four minutes ago, maybe five. She went in the direction of the fun house.”

Patty regretted her strategy instantly. It wasn’t just dark in the coffin, it was black — and the figure’s poorly kept wax smelled like death itself. The coffin trembled slightly. Footsteps, lots of them, were thundering into the chamber. There were voices, too, rising in muffled fashion over the chamber’s sound effects. There would be no chance of escape at all, if the enemy lifted the coffin’s lid.

Frantically Patty began to feel about in the blackness for a weapon, but all she could come up with was the screwdriver she had used before. She took it from her pocket and held it tight with a sweat-soaked hand.

The footsteps were coming closer. The coffin trembled a bit more. She willed the lid not to open, but the lid began to rise, slivers of half-light puncturing the blackness of her tomb. She froze for a moment, then plunged the screwdriver outward at the blurring figure. A steellike hand grabbed her wrist in midair as the coffin opened all the way.

“Hope you don’t mind if I wake you up, Countess,” said Blaine McCracken, Zandor the strongman was peering over his shoulder.

Blaine helped a trembling Patty from the coffin, who then embraced him.

“I liked you better as a blonde,” he said, easing her away. “Tell me, what brings you to Rio?”

“Information, McCracken, and none of it pleasant. I found out what the victims all had in common. They were all adopted, each and every one. And many had extensive dealings with the Japanese.”

“Including your father?”

“Most certainly. But that’s not all. I asked the system to generate a list of potential victims based on the profile. I remembered that’s what you asked for.”

“Why is it I think you found some names I’m not going to like hearing?”

“Because I did, McCracken. One, anyway: Virginia Maxwell.”

Chapter 26

“Head of the gap,” Blaine muttered, all the levity gone from his expression.

“I told Sal, and he tried to warn her. Next thing I know he’s calling me at sunrise to tell me someone tried to kill him and I’m next on the list. I just made it out.”

“I should have known, dammit. I should have caught on…”

“Caught on to what?”

“Later. Once we’re out of here.”

McCracken’s face was grimly set as he led Patty through the fun house.

“Sal sent me down here to tell you. He said you’d know what to do.”

“I’ve got a few ideas.”

“What’s it all mean, Blaine? What’s going on?”

They emerged into the night air, and Patty saw John Lynnford being carried across the midway on a stretcher. She rushed over to him.

“You’ve looked better,” she told him, taking his hand.

Lynnford grimaced. Bandages soaked with blood were wrapped tightly around his shoulder.

“Keeps me from thinking about my leg, anyway,” he joked, managing a weak smile. “That’s a first in quite a while.”

McCracken caught up with them and checked Lynnford’s wound. “Bullet passed straight through. Minimal bone damage, by the look of it. You’re lucky.”

“And you’re Blaine McCracken.”

“Ah, once again my reputation precedes me!”

Lynnford’s eyes swept the midway. “All of it deserved, apparently.”

“I’m sorry.”

Lynnford propped himself up on his good arm. “For what? You saved my circus. You saved her life.”

“All in a day’s work.”

“You’ll still need help getting out of the country. Even more so now.”

“Suggestions will be entertained.”

“I’ve got a few.” Lynnford winced in pain. “Just let me get patched up a little.”

“No sweat,” said McCracken, his eyes falling on Reverend Jim. “I’ve got someone else I’ve got to see.”

Reverend Jim met him halfway. They both looked at the cluster of his boys gathered around a pair who lay still in the night.

“We lost two,” Hope said sadly. “Edson and one of the older ones.”

Blaine’s stomach sank. “Both dead, thanks to me.”

“It wasn’t your fault. If they had done what you said—”

“It was my fault, all of it. They were doing fine in your world. They weren’t ready for mine.”

“Can’t say I ever met another sort who was.”

“But that didn’t stop me from using them, did it?”

“It was what they wanted, governor.”

Blaine started toward the boys, but Reverend Jim cut him off. “You could help them better by makin’ off with yourself and the lady, so this won’t be for nothing. Time’s a wastin’, governor. You read me on that?”

“I’ve got to do something.”

“Getting the people behind the bullets’ll do just fine.”

“Not for me, it won’t. Oh, I’ll do that all right — But I’ve got something else in mind.”

“Save it, governor.”

“Yes, Reverend, save. I’m going to leave you a contact code so you can reach me. Start using it in a week and then every day after. When my business here is finished, we can talk about paybacks.” Again Blaine’s eyes drifted to the children. “I want to send you some money to help set this straight — to set them straight.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

“Nobody had to. Believe me, I have to do this. I’ll send you a hundred thousand dollars to begin with. That should be enough to get them out of the favela. After that, I’ll send you as much as you need to keep them from ever going back.”

Reverend Jim’s eyes were bulging. “Where’d a man like you get that much cash?”

“Friends in the right places, Reverend,” Blaine replied, staring into the distance. “All over the world.”

“What happens now?” Patty asked him as he started the engine of the car John Lynnford had left in the mall parking lot.

“We follow John’s plan and hope it works,” Blaine answered, stowing the directions to the airport Lynnford had had written out for them in his lap.

The route would make as much use as possible of back roads, steering clear of major arteries, where more of Da Sa’s men might be concentrated. Of course, this also meant that traditional means of escape couldn’t be used. A letter signed by Lynnford would hopefully provide the alternative here. The Orlando Orfei Circus frequently required the use of cargo services to bring animals and equipment into the country. Sometimes the proper papers were nonexistent, and cash was exchanged in their place. The letter presented to the carrier Lynnford most trusted should guarantee Blaine and Patty passage on the next cargo flight out of the country. The destination didn’t matter. The general direction of the United States would suit Blaine just fine.

“Finish what you started to say back at the carnival. I want to know what’s going on,” Patty said as the circus disappeared behind them. “I want to know what’s really going on.”

“I was hoodwinked.” He looked at her. “You were, too.”

“Make sense!”

“I can’t. Not yet. Virginia Maxwell solicits my services and then turns out to be a potential victim of what I’m supposed to stop. But when Sal warns her, she tries to have him killed. What does that say to you?”

“I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t have asked.”

McCracken squeezed the wheel. “Okay, we’ve got these successful Americans, all adopted and all suddenly on a hit list.”

“And the Japanese link — don’t forget about that. Which reminds me about the men…”

“What men?”

“The ones waiting for me at your hotel. All Japanese. They knew I was coming. Do you think Maxwell sent them?”

“No way. She’d never have dispatched any group that stood out that much.”

“Who, then?”

“Good question. Wish I had an answer. The thing is, there’ve been two groups operating in this all along. Your father and Virginia Maxwell are part of one. Whoever sent out the six killers is part of another. But where does that leave the disciples?…”

“The what?”

“Sorry. Just thinking out loud.”

Patty thought for a few moments as the car drove on through the night. “Who was it that was after us at the circus?”

“A crime lord named Da Sa got himself killed, and I got blamed. Whoever really killed him made sure of that…and then made sure to link you with me.”

“The Japanese?”

Blaine shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.” He hesitated. “The thing is…”

“I’m listening.”

“No, it’s too crazy.”

“Nothing’s too crazy at this point.”

“Okay, try this out. What if one of our forces was behind the placing of all these adopted babies? Your father, Virginia Maxwell, every last one of them.”

“Toward what end?”

“They grew up to be rich and powerful, didn’t they?”

“What are you saying, McCracken?”

“I’m not sure yet, Hunsecker.” Patty turned away and gazed out the window into the night. “What about my father? Maxwell tried to kill me, and you’ve drawn a link between—”

“I haven’t drawn a link between anything. I’m just playing with the facts, seeing how they fit together. Anyway, Virginia Maxwell is still alive.”

Patty shifted in the passenger seat and pressed herself against the door, staring at her dim reflection in the window.

“I killed a man tonight,” she said, with strange matter-of-factness.

“Who would have killed you if you hadn’t.”

“Save the dime-store philosophy for somebody else, okay? In that moment I think I understood you better than I ever have, McCracken. I understood what it’s like to be cornered and have no choice but to fight back. I understood what it’s like to kill someone and not feel anything about it.”

“Because you had no choice.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. I look back and I want to be sick, feel sick, but I can’t. All I feel is…nothing. That man doesn’t have any meaning, like he wasn’t real.”

“He was real only in the sense of trying to kill you, Patty. That’s what Johnny Wareagle would say, and he’s right. You saw him in the context of what he was, and that context is the only meaning he had to you.”

“You don’t understand. The context is the problem. I could shoot a man, I could do everything I’ve done these past couple weeks, because of my father. Except now I find out maybe my father wasn’t the innocent victim I thought he was. Maybe he was part of something I didn’t know about that got him killed, and maybe, too, he wasn’t such a nice guy after all. You see, McCracken, if his life was a lie, then so is mine. None of it means anything anymore.”

“Wrong. The meaning’s just changed. John Lynnford could have kept you safe and hidden at the circus, but you insisted on coming with me instead because it still means plenty.”

“I can’t wait to find out what!” she said, half sarcastically.

“Exactly. That’s what keeps you going. That’s what keeps me going, and Johnny, too. Like Hanbelachia.”

“What’s that?”

“A vision quest, an Indian rite of passage ceremony. Johnny told me he was still waiting for his, and I’m beginning to think mine’s gonna come at the same time.”

Patty’s eyes lost some of their sadness. “You’re really starting to sound like him.”

“Mostly because I’m starting to really listen to him. He makes sense, Hunsecker. And when all is said and done, he’s probably the only man I know who does.”

Patty shifted again and sighed. “Well, from my perspective, it’s—”

A quick pop! ended her words an instant before the car swerved violently out of control. Blaine struggled to right the wheel. He was turning into a skid when a second pop! sent it whirling into a wild spin.

“They’ve shot out the tires!” McCracken shouted.

Blaine twisted around, trying to unfasten his seat belt and go for his pistol at the same time. Incredibly he managed both before the car came to a complete stop. He started to shove the door open when the bright lights blinded both of them. A number of figures stormed forward, guns marking their paths.

“Drop your weapon!” a voice ordered, and when Blaine didn’t, gunshots peppered Patty’s side of the car.

“All right!” Blaine let his pistol slide to the soft ground off the road.

“Now step out of the car with your hands in the air!” the voice continued. “Both of you!”

Blaine looked at Patty and nodded. He kept his hands in view while he kicked the door open the rest of the way in order to climb out. Patty followed him out the driver’s side, and saw his shoulders stiffen just before she saw the faces of their attackers in the spill of light.

They were Japanese, each and every one of them!

Chapter 27

“Where to?” the cabby wanted to know.

“The city,” replied Johnny Wareagle.

“Sure, but where in the city? Uptown? Midtown? Downtown?”

“Downtown,” said Wareagle, his massive frame scrunched in the backseat.

Johnny had reached Philadelphia unsure of what awaited him there. He got into the taxi because he knew it was the city itself where he was needed, where he would meet the foe who had visited him in his dreams. Beyond that, Johnny knew nothing. He was relying on the spirits to guide him — and on his ancestors to ensure that they did. He did not question the mysticism that so dominated his life. It had been a part of him for as long as he could remember, but not clarified until he had passed into his teenage years.

Johnny had grown up on a Sioux reservation in Oklahoma, where the old ways had been miraculously preserved. On the eve of his Hanbelachia, the tribal shaman took him aside.

“Do you understand what you are, Wanblee-Isnala?” the old man had asked him.

“I am a Sioux, greatest warrior tribe of the plains.”

“Not what we are, what you are. You don’t, do you?”

Johnny shook his head.

“You feel strange at times.”

Johnny searched for the right word. “Different.”

“From your peers, from your friends. It is time you knew why. There is different blood in your family. Every other generation of your grandfathers have been shaman for their tribes. I replaced your father’s grandfather, who died when you were an infant. He and the others were gifted in ways that have been lost over the years, lost but not forgotten. Know this, Wanblee-Isnala: You have great powers, but not in the same way as your grandfathers. Your fate is that of a warrior. You will face many enemies.” The shaman saw the young Johnny Wareagle’s face set in determination, his thoughts easy to read even for one not blessed with the gift. “Know this, though. Your Hanbelachia will not take place with the others of your year.”

Johnny had known not to challenge the words of the shaman, but he could not help posing the questions that rushed through his mind.

“When? Where?”

“You will know the time…and the place. Your ancestors will guide you, and the spirits will bring you their words. You have the gift of listening, Wanblee-Isnala. Only those who listen can hear.”

Johnny listened now from the back of the cab, but no words reached him. He knew everything he was and had been was constructed toward a rapidly approaching moment. The foe that would test him was in this city, and Johnny would follow the spirit’s words.

When? Where?

The old questions were raised once more. But the spirits did not answer questions. They simply provided guidance. The communication was one-sided, as it always had been.

“Traffic’s a mess,” the driver said, sighing.

“Yes.”

“Wish the fucking veep could have picked some other city to visit.”

“Veep,” repeated Johnny.

“Yeah, the vice president’s in town. Giving some kinda speech at Independence Hall. They closed off Walnut and Chestnut streets for his motorcade. Goddamn people are lined up everywhere. We got that to thank for this.”

A chill spread through Johnny, and he felt a smile come to his lips. The spirits often did not speak to him directly. Sometimes they passed their message through other parties.

“That is where you must take me.”

“Where?”

“Independence Hall.”

The driver suddenly swerved into the right lane. “Get you as close as I can.”

“Pit Crew Leader, this is Pit Crew One.”

Arnold Triesman raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. “Read you, Pit Crew One.”

“We are inbound on the expressway. Racer is secure and comfortable. Ten-minute ETA to city limits.”

“Roger that, Pit Crew One.”

Arnold Triesman began another circuit along Chestnut Street in the historical section of downtown Philadelphia. He was in charge of the Secret Service security detail for the vice president’s appearance here, and he wasn’t the least bit happy with the logistics. Ever since Kennedy and Dallas, motorcades scared the shit out of all men in his position. You couldn’t watch every corner of every rooftop; it just wasn’t possible. Add to that maybe a hundred thousand people crowded into the street and you were holding a ball that was slippery enough to slide right out of your fingers. One crazy was all it took, just one. The thought made Triesman’s flesh crawl.

Racer was the latest code name for the vice president, chosen for the man’s penchant for fast cars. As Pit Crew Leader, Triesman had a hundred men at his disposal; they were with the motorcade, scattered along the route, and perched strategically on rooftops. They couldn’t cover everything, but when a fifteen-year Secret Service vet was running things, you came as close as you could.

The service had cost Arnold Triesman one marriage and had kept him from considering another until his tour was up. Except he hadn’t been able to walk away when it finally was, and another two years had come and gone much the same way as the first thirteen had. Even if he wanted to get out, it was questionable whether the service would let him. As far as running security details in the most impossible of situations, Triesman had no peer. It wasn’t so bad, after all. Impressed the hell out of his sons six months back when he had finally relented and let them come along on a detail for the president. Kids even got to meet Top Guy himself and couldn’t sleep that night from the excitement. Triesman felt as if they were really his kids again for the first time since the divorce. It seemed ironic that the very thing that had broken the family up was now the only bond he had with his children. Damn strange, it was.

A helicopter soared overhead, drawing the stares of the thousands crowded together behind the blue sawhorse barricades along Chestnut Street. Triesman lifted the walkie-talkie to his lips again.

“Fly Boy, this is Pit Crew Leader. How’s the sky looking?”

“No movement on rooftops except for our boys, Pit Crew Leader.”

“Can you see Racer?”

“That’s a roger. Estimate city outskirts reached in five minutes. Fifteen to your position at the hall.”

“Stay frosty, Fly Boy.”

“Roger that, Pit Crew Leader.”

Triesman continued his walk. A number of his men were scattered throughout the crowd gathered on the motorcade route that ran the length of Chestnut Street. The heaviest complement was concentrated in the area of Independence Hall itself, both inside and out. The vice president would be making his speech inside the courtyard, near the statue of Commodore John Barry, founder of the U.S. Navy. The logistics from a security standpoint were tenuous at best. A nest of tall buildings forming the Penn Mutual complex overlooked the courtyard from across Walnut Street. The twin Public Ledger and Curtis Publishing buildings afforded an equally clear view across Sixth Street, which was adjacent. Triesman had men posted throughout all the buildings as well as sharpshooters on the roofs, but he still wasn’t happy. And he wouldn’t be until Racer was safely back in his limo after giving his speech. It would be Triesman standing by Racer’s side at the podium, and Triesman who would play pin cushion to bullets, if it came to that.

“Pit Crew Leader, this is Pit Crew Fifteen,” a voice squawked through his walkie-talkie. “Read you, Pit Crew Fifteen.”

“I think I may have something here.”

“Report your twenty.”

“Corner Chestnut and Seventh.”

“What have you got?”

“Suspicious party moving in the crowd.”

“Description.”

“Male. Tall and broad, very tall. Beige pants and worn leather vest. Black hair tied in ponytail.”

“What?”

“Pit Crew Leader, I believe he’s an Indian. I believe—”

“Come in, Pit Crew Fifteen. Fifteen, are you there?”

More silence filled the air, broken finally by Pit Crew Fifteen’s voice.

“I’m here, Pit Crew Leader, but subject isn’t.”

“Say again!”

“I lost the Indian, sir. He just isn’t there anymore.”

“Hold your position, Fifteen. I’m coming your way.”

Weetz did not raise his eyes to the helicopter when it soared over the Curtis Publishing Building. Instead he kept his head down and right eye pressed against the scope of his sniper’s rifle — Well, not really his rifle. Actually it belonged to the Secret Service sharpshooter now lying dead in the stairwell. The agent’s clothes had made a decent enough fit, and the rifle was fortunately one Weetz was well versed in using.

In spite of this, though, the problem was no two rifles fired exactly alike. From this distance, miscalculation by a micro-inch could send the shot hurtling hopelessly off course, and one shot was all he could realistically depend on. The tree cover in the courtyard was a bitch, but he had chosen a spot on the roof that allowed a clear vantage. Wind could pick up and fuck things up royally. Good thing the forecast was holding up so far. In fact, all his intelligence was holding up. He shifted his rifle slightly and sighted two feet over the podium.

The very spot the vice president’s head would be occupying in a matter of minutes.

Johnny knew he had been seen. He could feel the eyes burn into him as clearly as a blue laser piercing his skin. Instantly he dropped into a crouch and stayed there until he was certain the eyes had lost him.

The spirits had spoken, and Johnny knew why he had been guided here. There was going to be an attempt made on the vice president’s life. It was Wareagle’s fate to face the bullet fired by the enemy. His Hanbelachia was upon him. His enemy was in range. Johnny rose from a crouch to a stoop; reaching out, probing. Just as he had known it in the Amazon, he knew it now.

One of the Wakinyan was here!

He recognized the thing’s spiritual scent, but the precise take on it was denied him. Johnny felt the unfamiliar grasp of impatience. He distracted himself with thoughts of the area itself. Security was tight and very well orchestrated. Secret Service agents, like the one who had picked him out, were scattered in large numbers throughout the crowd and stationed on various rooftops. It was impossible for even the best sharpshooter to move about unseen. Unless, unless…

What would I do if the assassination was mine to accomplish?

The answer led him toward the tight crowds packed along Chestnut Street. His eyes swept across the buildings until they locked on a pair of brick structures rimmed at the top by white granite rails. He counted fifteen stories. A perfect number.

A strange calm possessed him then. The spirits were there guiding him, showing him the way.

To the twin brick buildings, one of which held the Wakinyan upon it.

“Seven-foot-tall Indians don’t ordinarily disappear,” an exasperated Arnold Triesman said to Pit Crew Fifteen at Seventh Street.

His subordinate looked dumbfounded. “Has anyone else reported seeing—”

“Not a thing!” Triesman cut him off. “No sign, no sighting.”

“I could have been wrong.”

“You don’t believe that, and neither do I.”

“Oh, he was there, all right, but I can’t honestly say he was dangerous. It was just that he…stood out. And it was more than the fact that he was so big, too. Something just didn’t feel right, chief.”

“Yeah,” acknowledged Triesman, walkie-talkie back in its accustomed spot near his lips. Triesman figured a few more like this and he’d wear a groove into his jaw. “Come in, Pit Crew One.”

“Read you, Pit Crew Leader.”

“How goes it back there?”

“Coming up on the route now. I can see the people. Nice crowd by the look of it.”

“I wish it had rained.”

“Ditto, chief.”

“Look, One, be ready for an immediate cover and evac from the area. Clear?”

“Sure, chief. What have you got?”

Arnold Triesman gazed at the befuddled agent by his side before responding. “A feeling, One. Just a feeling.”

Weetz watched the motorcade slide by along Chestnut Street, urging it to go faster. The crowds cheered and applauded, American flags waving everywhere. He wanted this to be done with. Normally it was unheard of for a man in his position to remain in the open for so long. The circumstances, in this case, had dictated his actions, but that didn’t make Weetz feel any the easier. He was even tempted to change the strategy, go for the shot while the target was stepping through the arch en route to the Independence Hall courtyard. Too much risk going for a moving target, though.

The motorcade moved to within a hundred yards of Independence Hall, and he returned his attention to the podium.

Johnny could feel eyes searching for him as he moved among the crowd, just precautionary and no more. He reached Sixth Street and prepared to veer left at Congress Hall toward the twin buildings. He could not get a fix on which one of them held the Wakinyan. Confused feelings rushed through him. Something was not as he expected it would be, but he could not let that throw him.

“Pit Crew Leader to entire Pit Crew,” said Triesman into his walkie-talkie. “Pit Crew Leader to entire Pit Crew. Racer’s car has come into the pit. Let’s look sharp.”

Ten yards before him, the vice president was stepping out of his limousine, which had stopped directly in front of the entrance to Independence Hall, the tumultuous cheers of the crowd reverberating in Triesman’s ears. God, how he hated moments like this. Twenty thousand people jammed into a city block — and all it took was one crazy with a gun. He met the vice president at the arch and glued himself to the man’s left side.

“I have Racer,” Triesman said into his walkie-talkie. “Keep your eyes open.”

Weetz’s vantage point on the Curtis Publishing Building precluded him viewing his target’s arrival. He saw the vice president for the first time when he stepped through the arch into the courtyard engulfed by a Secret Service detail. His audience rose from the steel chairs that had been arranged in neat fashion and applauded. Weetz eased his eye tighter against the sight and caressed the trigger.

He had the side of the vice president’s head locked in briefly, but there was no sense risking a shot yet. Not until he was stationary behind the podium.

“Come on,” he urged the vice president, “just a little further now.”

Arnold Triesman wanted to call the whole thing off. Right then and there, before Racer pulled out his speech behind the podium, he wanted to shoo him back out through the archway. The nag in his gut had escalated into full-scale cramps, and he had all he could do just to stay upright. He’d learned to trust such feelings over the years.

But this time his fear seemed uncalled for. There were no working threats, no possible perps other than a giant Indian who had disappeared, and his boys had thrown a blanket around the area that was thick enough to keep the sun out.

“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia…”

Racer’s opening remarks were greeted by polite laughter and applause in the courtyard. Triesman hovered by his right side and gazed upward at the skyline through his sunglasses.

“Hold it, mister! I said freeze!”

Johnny knew he had chosen the wrong roof as soon as he emerged through the door on top of the Public Ledger Building. Something had confused his feelings, and all he could do was what he was told.

“Now turn around. Slowly.”

He obliged — and found himself facing a Secret Service agent holding a sniper’s rifle on him.

“Stay right where you are or I’ll shoot!..Hey, can you hear me or what?”

Wareagle’s eyes had drifted across to the next roof and another figure sighting down through his own rifle. The commotion on this roof should have drawn his attention but hadn’t. The coldness that emanated from him wasn’t that of a Wakinyan, but something was all wrong about the man, nevertheless.

“Now, turn around and kiss the wall. Hands in the air!”

Johnny had no choice but to obey for now.

“Pit Crew Leader, this is Sky View Eight,” he heard the agent bark into a walkie-talkie. “I have suspect in custody at my twenty. Repeat, Sky View Eight has suspect in custody.”

The man was eight feet away, a safe distance, especially considering that Johnny’s back remained turned to him. No way, logic dictated, that a man could both turn and close that gap before you could fire if you had him properly covered. The agent saw the big Indian swing, but never actually recorded the lunge that cut the distance by more than half. He had been lowering his walkie-talkie and, before he could record another thought, he felt himself parted from his gun, which clacked once on the edge of the roof and then dropped over. He was never aware of the blow launched at him until a numbness raced through his head. There was only a flash and then darkness as consciousness fled with his footing.

More relaxed now, Triesman slid away from the vice president in order to more easily issue instructions. The Indian was in custody on the Public Ledger rooftop, so apparently the sighting hadn’t been so innocent, after all. “This is Pit Crew Leader. We have a Code Red on rooftop of Public Ledger. First and second teams converge. Fly boy, you copy that?”

“That’s a roger, Pit Crew Leader.”

“Let’s move!”

Weetz’s mouth was parched. He ran his tongue over his lips and adjusted the tip of the rifle one last time. In that final instant, when thoughts of the kill are more real than the kill itself, he pulled out of the real world. He heard nothing — not the crowd, or the helicopter, not even his victim’s words. There was only silence, and he gave himself up to it. He knew that when the rifle went off, he would not hear the gunshot. There would be a slight kick against his shoulder, the feeling quickly muted by the sight of his victim’s head exploding through his sight.

Weetz relished that. No kill was complete unless he could register the end result himself. Same reason fathers wanted to be in the delivery room, he supposed, in a twisted sense.

Weetz started to ease the trigger backward.

Wareagle knew there was nothing he could do now. He had chosen the wrong roof, and the error had cost him. This wasn’t a Wakinyan on the adjacent roof, just an ordinary paid assassin readying his shot. That’s what had thrown him off. But the Wakinyan was about. Somewhere.

The wop-wop-wop of the helicopter soaring directly for him distracted Johnny as the second shape appeared on the Curtis Publishing Building roof. A blast of cold thumped into him, his eyes swung to lock on a blur whirling toward the gunman fast enough to deny its own motion. Wareagle knew he was watching the enemy who had drawn him here, knew it even before the Wakinyan reached the gunman from behind.

The sudden extra influx of security around the area had almost denied Abraham access to the building. He had finally made it in after incapacitating two Secret Service men, but something remained very wrong. He had never known such a feeling — or the slight tremor of fear that came with it.

He recalled the escape he and the other disciples had made into the Amazon jungle. The seven soldiers had proven no contest at all, but in their wake two others had come. Different. Much more…challenging. Could one of those two be here today?

He had barely been able to get to the roof in time. The gunman pulled the trigger at the precise instant Abraham reached him, and the errant bullet flew harmlessly by. From there it was over very fast. Abraham twisted the man’s head in a sudden, violent motion. The head turned all the way around and flopped down between his shoulder blades. It was then that Abraham felt eyes boring into him like hot coals melting through his flesh and swung to find their source.

Arnold Triesman never heard the gunshot. What he did hear was a granite-splitting smack against the statue of John Barry. Instinct took over from there.

Before he could form any thought, Triesman had barreled into the vice president and taken him down. Instantly the other agents enclosing the podium plunged with him to complete a blanket of cover. Long seconds passed before Triesman could separate himself from the pile and free his walkie-talkie. He brought it to his lips, wondering what the hell had gone wrong on the rooftop above.

“We have shots fired from Sector Eight! Repeat: Shots fired! Converge! This is a Code Blue! Everyone converge!”

Johnny Wareagle watched the Wakinyan’s eyes find his from the adjacent rooftop. The chill within him deepened. The Wakinyan radiated cold in all directions.

In that instant he knew he was face-to-face with something more machine than man, knew this was the opponent that had been chosen for his Hanbelachia. Everything in his life had been a prelude to this.

Their eyes held as the Wakinyan leaned over and pulled the rifle from the corpse’s grasp. There was plenty of time for Johnny to dive to safety, but he didn’t. He watched as the Wakinyan brought the rifle level with his chest, holding it out with one hand on the barrel and another on the stock.

Johnny saw the weapon bend, then heard a sharp snap as it broke in two pieces.

The Wakinyan might have smiled slightly. It was too far a distance to tell. Someone from the hovering helicopter shouted something through a bullhorn and Johnny gazed up briefly. When he looked back in the direction of the Curtis Publishing Building, the Wakinyan was gone. And before the chopper’s sharpshooters could find him in their sights, so was Johnny.

Chapter 28

Blaine knew the Japanese weren’t going to kill them when they didn’t shoot right away. Instead, the gun-wielding group herded him and Patty toward a trio of waiting cars. Their moves were well processed, almost mechanical, the mark of orders being carried out to the letter.

They drove on to Galeão Airport, through an open security gate, then on to a private hangar, where a Learjet sat waiting. Six of the Japanese led the two of them on board.

“Where are you taking us? What’s going on?” Patty demanded.

Blaine had the same questions, but he didn’t bother to pose them, he knew no answers would be forthcoming. These men were simply soldiers, dispatched by a party with a vested interest in whatever was going on. On which side, it was impossible to say. The fact that they were still alive was a good sign.

Once inside the plane, Patty was placed down in the front on the right, Blaine in the rear on the left — as far from her as the confines of the cabin would allow. The unspoken intent of the Japanese was clear: If he tried to move against them, success would come at the expense of her life. “We will not bind you,” the man who seemed to be the leader said in English. “It would insult your honor.”

“Does that make us allies?”

“It makes us nothing. We have a long flight ahead of us. I would ask you to make yourself comfortable.”

“Where are we going?”

“Japan.”

“What a shock.”

Much to his own surprise, Blaine did sleep. It came in fitful bursts that were hardly refreshing, but it did come. Occasionally he tried to make eye contact with Patty, but the distance precluded even that. They endured the flight together, yet alone.

Blaine did not recognize the airport they landed at after eighteen hours, which included a refueling stop. He calculated it to be 4:00 A.M. Japanese time on Wednesday, but he was blindfolded before he could pick up any clues as to exactly where in the country they were. He was shepherded into one car, Patty into another, and then they were driven off into the night. Another hour passed, and Blaine concentrated on charting the exact route they were taking by the motion of the car, just in case he needed it for future reference.

At last the car bounced to a halt and the engine was shut off. The hands of his Japanese escorts yanked at him, dragging him off toward the sounds of running water. He thought he heard a gate first opening, then closing, then was next aware of most of the Japanese leaving. One who remained behind removed his blindfold, and he looked over to see that another had done the same for Patty. He moved toward her, touching her shoulder tenderly.

“Long time, no see,” he said as the last two Japanese disappeared from view.

A quick scan of their surroundings revealed them to be in a Japanese garden of such loveliness even the night could not cloak its beauty. The sound of rushing water had been a small waterfall cascading into a brook that wound its way through the perfectly manicured shrubs, trees, and flowers. Everything was perfect, peaceful in its symmetry.

“I love the night,” said a voice, and Blaine watched a Japanese man in a white suit emerge from the trees. He stopped just at the point where he couldn’t be seen.

“Who are you?” McCracken asked.

“To you — no one. Yet, everyone.”

“I’ve had it with riddles.”

“The best ones are yet to come, Mr. McCracken…. And we have what remains of the night for me to tell them to you.”

The man stepped directly into the spill of the moonlight, and Blaine realized he was an albino. He had never seen an Oriental albino before and the sight was a bit unsettling, worsened perhaps by the fact that the man’s white suit blended too well with the tone of his flesh.

“I am Takedo Takahashi. But I don’t suppose that holds any meaning to you.”

“Not a one.”

“By the same token, yours held little meaning to me until just over a week ago.”

“I tend to make a quick first impression.”

“Your previous stay here was well noted.”

“Thanks to the patience of one of the best friends I ever made.”

“Hiroshi Sensei,” said Takahashi. “I know the story.”

“Not all of it.”

“More than you think, I’d wager. I make it my business to know precisely who it is I am dealing with.”

“And are you dealing with me, Snowman?”

“I prefer the term Kami-san.”

“Suit yourself.”

Takahashi moved closer to McCracken and seemed to squint. On the grass between them a trio of small rattan chairs had been set.

“Sit, please,” Takahashi said.

“Just the three of us?”

“I hope the gesture will help you trust me, as I now must trust you.”

Blaine took Patty’s arm and led her to the chairs. Takahashi waited until they were seated before settling in his own chair directly in front of them. The garden was lit by nothing other than the moon. Occasionally the breeze would lift up some of the whispering water and spray their faces. “We have an hour until dawn,” Takahashi said. His English was perfect. “You will hear my story in that time.”

“Gotta crawl back into your coffin with the sunrise, Kami-san?”

“It’s you who will need to be elsewhere after you’ve heard what I have to say.”

Blaine exchanged glances with Patty. “So talk,” he told Takahashi. “What the hell is going on here, and where do you fit in?”

“At the beginning and all the way through, Mr. McCracken. Everything’s related, you see.”

“I figured that much. What I don’t know is how.”

“After you do know, you will come to regret it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Passing judgement is what all this began as. Nearly forty-seven years ago, Mr. McCracken.”

“The end of World War Two…”

“Exactly. Our country was ravaged. The two bombs your President Truman ordered dropped on our cities destroyed our spirits, bankrupted our souls. But we are an infinitely patient people, Mr. McCracken. Our history speaks of this.”

“I know your history, Mr. Takahashi.”

“Then you also know one of the prime ways of dealing with an enemy is infiltrating his ranks and striking from the inside. It has been that way since the days of the clans and the shogun, when the word of the samurai was spoken with his sword.”

“We were speaking of World War Two.”

“We still are. Nothing had changed up until that point….” Takahashi’s voice trailed off briefly. “Even now, not much has. Your bombs forced us to accept defeat, at least outwardly. In point of fact, it was more than just appearances for many of our leaders. They saw the futility of where our philosophy had taken us. A new order was required, and if working with your occupation forces was the best way to ensure it, they would do so.”

“There would have been opposition, though.”

“Most of it squelched, the rebels being made outcasts, ronin. But there were still others who resorted to the old ways of placating the enemy on the surface while within thirsting for revenge. Patience was the key. You are familiar with the work The Art of War, Mr. McCracken?”

“Somewhat.”

“One of the postulates deals with maximizing available weapons instead of seeking new ones.”

“The best defense is a good offense.”

“In a sense, yes, but we are talking of vengeance here. And the key was available weapons. Unbeknownst to your government, our scientists had made great strides in the field of biochemical research. It was along different lines than the Nazis, but we, too, were seeking the creation of supermen.”

“Soldiers?”

“No, that was where we differed. We were seeking the scientific means to imbue characteristics that would virtually guarantee our subjects rising to great heights in their chosen spheres. We are an insular people, Mr. McCracken, and the original intent of the work was to assure the propagation of the ruling class, certain to be severely depleted by the war. But when we lost the war, the focus was altered. A legion of superbeings, yes, but used as agents in important positions in the country of our enemy, so that in the future, they could be destroyed from the inside out.”

“The United States,” Blaine said.

“Toward this end, five hundred American newborns were kidnapped from the United States between the years 1945 and 1948. The planning was elaborate. Deals were struck with doctors to arrange the babies’ apparent deaths shortly after birth. Since both the doctors and hospitals were carefully selected and well spread out, no pattern was ever detected.”

“That’s monstrous,” Patty snapped.

“So was what the United States did to my country, Miss Hunsecker.”

“I see you’re acquainted with me, too.”

“Quite well. Quite well, indeed.”

“Because of my father. My father was one of these babies, wasn’t he? That’s why he’s dead.”

“Please. We are getting ahead of ourselves. First you must understand our work with the infants. When they reached the age of eighteen months, certain chemical compounds we had discovered that stimulated areas in the brain connected with superachievement and power were injected into their brains. In other words, we altered the chemical balance of the infants’ brains to create the types of personalities desired. With proper programming — and early training — loyalty could be assured as well. Of the five hundred infants in the experiment, two hundred either died or were pronounced unfit. With the three hundred still remaining, we were able to accomplish our acceptable margin of error of one complete success in every three — ninety-seven to be exact — all working in concert toward the goal of virtual economic takeover by Japan.” Takahashi’s gaze turned strangely distant. “They were called the Children of the Black Rain, after the awful force that created the need for their existence in the first place.”

“Which must make you one of the fathers, Takahashi.”

“My mother was pregnant when your bombs fell.” Takahashi slid a hand across the white skin lining his face. “And this is what emerged from her womb as a result — a freak, to use your terminology. There were plenty of us, many much worse than I. We would provide guidance. We would direct the actions of the Children of the Black Rain when our time came, when the original aging founders of the operation passed to their destiny. A smooth transition had to be assured. The plan could not suffer the burden of a different generation coordinating it. So it became our lot to extract revenge for the White Flashes your country set upon mine.”

“But something went wrong, didn’t it?” Blaine challenged.

The albino seemed reluctant to speak. “For some in our number, victory was not enough. They wanted a revenge more fitting the black rain you set falling from our skies. They had been selected for the same good reasons I had been, but all the time they were plotting their own vengeance — without the support or knowledge of the rest of us. Infiltration, yes. Takeover, yes. Virtual enslavement, yes. But accomplished through a much more drastic means, with far more dire results. You see, they knew quite well how the Children of the Black Rain had been created in the first place. And modern technology afforded them the ability to advance the procedure beyond anything the rest of us had ever conceived of.”

“And so the Omicron legion was born?…” Takahashi nodded. “Their own private army, soldiers who could fight their battles for them and become the builders who ensured that, long term, their twisted vision would come to pass. The chemicals we had used to create the Children were replaced by incredibly advanced microchips that, once implanted into the brain of subjects deemed fit, would create the ultimate warrior.”

“Ultimate monster, you mean,” Patty said. “Which makes you a monster, too, because you let it happen. You were a part of it.”

Takahashi stood up and turned sideways, speaking as much to the night as to Blaine and Patty. “And that is why I have chosen to fight it. The small group of rebels in our midst moved against the rest of us before we had fully grasped their plan. All the others who stood apart from them were wiped out. I alone remained — and was able to ascertain exactly what their plan was by lashing out at the traitors. I killed them all, at least thought I had, but obviously their plan accounted for just that eventuality, because one remained at large — one whose identity I had no idea of and could not uncover. This failure left me with no choice other than to destroy the Children of the Black Rain I had devoted my life to protecting. I retained six professional killers of considerable prowess to accomplish that feat.”

Patty gazed up at him, her eyes showing an uneasy mix of rage and frustration. “And one of them killed my father. Forced his car off the road and made it look like an accident. You are a monster, Mr. Takahashi. There could have been other means, other ways.”

“Which wouldn’t have worked any better than the ones I chose to employ did, I’m afraid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your father isn’t dead, Miss Hunsecker.”

“What?”

Patty stared at Takahashi for what seemed like a very long time. She continued to stare at him even as he spoke again.

“General Berlin Hardesty was the first on our list, and several others followed almost immediately. But we underestimated the Children’s ability to mount a response. They let me think I was succeeding, while all the time I was playing into their hands. The contingency must have been set in place for sometime, a complex communications network made even more complicated by the fact that the very nature of their operation required that the Children not be in contact with one another. But they found a way to spread the word of warning. In the case of your father and many others, we killed doubles, replacements.”

“If my father’s alive, where is he?” Patty demanded. “Where can I find him?”

“Undoubtedly at one of the underground bunkers the Children of the Black Rain have constructed all across your country. But he is not the man you knew as your father, Miss Hunsecker. A child of the Black Rain has no love for anything but the ruthless movement that spawned him.”

“No more ruthless than a man who would send killers after me and my brothers.”

“You were stirring up trouble, casting attention on a pattern of killings we could not afford to have attention drawn to. Please try to understand.” Takahashi came closer to her. “Your father is one of them. Your father is part of a plan to destroy your country as you know it today.”

“I’ve heard that before,” said McCracken. “From the disciple I killed in Rio. Now I’d like to hear how.”

The slightest bit of color seemed to flush into Takahashi’s cheeks. “If it was black rain that forced us to remake our country, so it would be black rain that forces you to remake yours.”

“Nuclear weapons?”

“Nuclear power plants.”

Blaine went cold.

“A dozen or so of them sabotaged, forced into a complete meltdown,” Takahashi continued. “A dozen or more melt-downs, each three or four times the potency of Chernobyl.”

“My God,” Patty muttered.

Takahashi looked her way. “He was not there for us when the black rain fell in 1945, and He will not be there for you when it falls so very soon.”

“But it makes no sense,” she continued. “All these years my father and the others were laying the economic groundwork to take over the country only to destroy it?”

“I did not say destroy, Miss Hunsecker. I said destroy as it is known today. The power plants in question are concentrated within the heaviest areas of population. The metropolises of the East Coast, the larger cities of the Midwest, South, and California. Many will die, tens of millions, but far more will survive and be totally uprooted.”

“Half the population,” Blaine said, considering the potential targets. “Perhaps even more.”

“The survivors in the targeted zones will be forced from their homes, forced to resettle their lives away from the cities that will be no more than steel-and-glass graveyards for a thousand years.

“And, of course, those same steel-and-glass graveyards contain the lifeblood of American existence,” McCracken added. “Information, data. Government and business.”

“Exactly. The United States, especially, is held together by the glue of people pressing keys and switching relays, bringing you your television signals, radio broadcasts, and dial tones. Those major relays and stations happen to be centralized in the very centers that are most at risk. How will your government function? And what of your economic base? Everything will be frozen, suspended.”

“Except the people,” Patty said indignantly. “The ones who can get out will. Resettle, you called it.”

“Yes. Toward the areas of the nation unaffected by the radioactive clouds spreading on the wind. Those areas at present, of course, are the least populated.”

“The corn belt,” Blaine said, picking up Takahashi’s trend of thought. “Areas west of the Mississippi, the mountains and plains.”

Takashashi nodded. “A vast population shift will ensue. Millions flooding areas that lack the capacity to handle them. Goods and services will be at a premium, along with the very rudiments of life and the capacity to effectively distribute them. Necessities such as electricity, water, waste disposal, sewers, all forms of fuel will become woefully inadequate. The panic will continue, even escalate.” He turned his pink eyes toward Patty. “This is what the Children of the Black Rain have laid the groundwork for, Miss Hunsecker. They will emerge from the bunkers they have fled to, in total control of the goods and services so drastically needed, because that is what we arranged their placement for. They will have taken over.”

“They’ll still need the government to do that, Mr. Takahashi.”

“And they’ll have it.”

“You’re not going to tell me the president is one of them.”

“No — the vice president. The final element of the plan will be the assassination of the president before the nuclear plants are destroyed.”

“One of our six killers was dispatched to kill the vice president,” Takahashi continued. “He…failed.”

But McCracken’s mind was elsewhere as he tried to make sense of the pictures Takahashi was painting. The great cities of the United States reduced to skeletons. Massive ghost towns of steel and glass, the raw power of the world’s most advanced nation abandoned to the deadly rads. And in the safe zones the survivors living crowded and cluttered; many already dying, others wishing they were.

But that wasn’t all, was it? The Children of the Black Rain would emerge from the bunkers prepared to take over the nation they had effectively destroyed with a blueprint for remaking American society and the resources to bring it off. The men who had formulated the original plan nearly a half century before were long dead, their legacy perverted by a single rebel standing over the Children, controlling them. And that single member was about to preside over the nuclear devastation of the United States.

“Which nuclear plants?” McCracken asked finally.

“That I do not know. Most are centered along the East Coast, where the prevailing wind currents will blow the deadly clouds over the largest clusters of your country’s populace.” Takahashi paused. “But if you can uncover which ones, the operation can still be stopped.”

“How?”

“The Omicron legion. Everything depends on them successfully sabotaging the nuclear plants. You can stop them. You are the only man who can.”

McCracken looked up. “What makes you say that?”

“Because they fear you. You escaped them in the Amazon and killed one of their number in Rio. You are the one factor the Children’s plan did not account for. You are the one factor that can destroy it.”

Something flashed through Blaine’s mind. “Can you give me a list of the Children?”

“I’ve already had one prepared.”

“What about the locations of the bunkers where they’re hiding out?”

“Unfortunately, I cannot help you there.”

“But you know when this is all going to happen. I can tell that much.”

A thin smile crossed the albino’s milk-white lips and lingered there as he spoke. “When else, Mr. McCracken? December seventh, 1991. The fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.”

Chapter 29

Mira’s eighth victim proved the easiest to reach of all. Newton Samuels regularly used an escort service, and it was an easy chore for her to replace the woman scheduled to accompany him tonight. As was the procedure, his limousine swung by an assigned spot at the proper time, and Mira climbed into the back. The limousine pulled off instantly, not a word spoken by the driver. She checked herself in the built-in vanity mirror and then pulled the file from her handbag.

It looked like an ordinary nail file, even felt like one, albeit a bit heavier. The file was formed, though, of a high-grade carbon used in sharpening tools. While the limousine slid through the night, Mira busied herself honing her steel-tipped nails to a razor edge. The sight would have looked harmless had the driver been looking.

The car deposited her in front of the mansion, and another of Samuels’s servants led her up the steps and into the study. She counted at least a half-dozen guards present on the grounds now, including two at the front gate. Her options for escape after she dispatched Samuels would be curtailed.

“If you’ll be good enough to follow me, miss,” said the butler two minutes later. “Mr. Samuels would like to see you upstairs.”

The butler brought her to his door and knocked quietly. “You may enter,” he said, without waiting for a reply from within.

Mira did, and closed the door behind her. The room was dark, lit only by the thin spill of light coming from a partially open bathroom door.

“Come here,” Samuels called.

He was seated in a leather reading chair near the rear wall, reclining comfortably. Mira could see he had his tuxedo shirt and tie already on, but was naked from the waist down. She walked across the room and stood over him.

“Now,” he said. “Immediately.”

Mira dropped into a crouch and grasped him.

“Hurry,” he said, sighing.

He grew in her hand, and she lowered her mouth to him. It was going to be easier than she thought, the easiest yet. Her hands climbed past the studs, marking a neat line up his chest, the throat just inches away from her deadly nails. She had to make sure the initial slice was deep enough this time. She couldn’t afford him screaming or crying out before death took him.

The nails scraped against his collar. Mira prepared to flick them.

And realized he had gone limp in her mouth.

She was already into her motion by then and it was too late to correct it, even though she sensed something was terribly wrong. Before her deadly nails could find flesh, she felt her hand being snatched out of the air and twisted violently. She heard her wrist crack an instant before the explosion of pain rocked her. She fought through it and tried to pull away, lashing out with her other hand as she did. But the blow found only air as the figure whirled through the darkness.

What are you?

Mira asked that question in her mind in the instant before her hand was caught between desperate flailing motions. She felt a grasp of steel close on her fingers and wrench them savagely backward.

Crack!

Her scream from the resulting pain would have been even louder than the snap if her face hadn’t been shoved into the cushion of the chair. He had broken the fingers cleanly at the joints. They flapped helplessly, like the limbs of a puppet with no strings attached. The thing over her jammed downward with a thrust strong enough to split the chair, then forced her facedown into its innards. She knew she was dying now and just wanted it to come fast, wanted the pain to be gone.

Bartholomew kept her there a very long time. He liked to feel people die, especially the precise moment death claimed them. But he also enjoyed the moments that came after. He imagined life didn’t pour from them, it seeped, and he kept at it until he had swallowed in all there was to take.

It had been over much too fast this time.

Much too fast.

All things considered, the thing Berg liked most about America was french fries. He ate them by the dozens, liking best the fast-food variety the magazines said were loaded with fat and cholesterol. Berg wasn’t worried. He figured he’d never live long enough for cholesterol to kill him.

He’d purchased three extra-large servings at the McDonald’s across the street after sliding the bomb into place beneath the target’s car. It was parked in the lot of the plant the target owned and operated. Getting to the car posed only a minor difficulty. Berg had pretended to be doing some filler work on the asphalt parking lot to permit him access underneath its chassis.

“About time they got these potholes fixed,” someone said to him right after he had slid back out. Berg smiled in the man’s direction, wondering if he had noticed anything. But the man sauntered off without another word, and Berg was safely off to stow his equipment in the trunk. Then he headed for his fries.

By the time his target emerged two hours later, Berg was ravenous again. He’d blow the sucker as soon as he was inside and then pick up another four orders before pulling off. Guy said good-bye to everyone he passed, by name, Berg could tell, smiling a lot. Berg had never liked killing nice people, but he didn’t get to choose very often. Arabs were the best to kill, and he’d done that plenty of times — they were seldom nice.

And they made lousy french fries.

Berg smiled at his own joke as he activated the detonator. He saw the target climb into his car and close the door behind him. Berg noticed a stray fry on the floor of his car and stuffed it into his mouth as he was pushing the button.

He was still chewing when the blast blew him into oblivion. He had no awareness of anything other than a sudden flash and maybe, just maybe, a realization that he had become the victim here; he hadn’t noticed the switch because he was out buying the damn french fries.

In fact, the bomb worked better than Berg had even hoped for. So well that it took fire and rescue authorities nearly thirty minutes to ascertain there had actually been someone inside his car.

Berg’s target was among the first on the scene to see if he could lend any assistance.

The thing was, Khan liked to kill. He wasn’t sure exactly how that had happened, but what little Chinese philosophy he knew attributed it to birth. He was Mongolian, actually, and by any standards a huge man. He had practiced his trade first as an enforcer on the docks of Shanghai and later as an assassin for the Tong. Knives, guns, hatchets — the weapon mattered not at all. Khan liked his sticks best. He loved his sticks.

The sensation of twirling the galvinized steel, making it whistle through the air en route to its target was the most fulfilling thing he could imagine. Yes, the sticks — combined with his incredible quickness — made for deadly effectiveness. He could follow a man without the man ever knowing. If he stopped to gaze back, Khan would be gone, the action undertaken in the same instant it took the target to swing round. He had shaved his head for as long as he could remember, because hair was something a foe could grasp if the kill had to be made in close. He allowed himself a thick Manchurian-style mustache — he wasn’t worried that anyone would grab that.

But tonight he had plenty more to worry about. The last two men on his kill list had disappeared before he could get to them. He had planned on going for a third today, only to find that he, too, had vanished. Khan did not know who to blame. Could the white-faced man have betrayed him somehow, sent others to do his job for him? Perhaps the brutality of his earlier kills had disturbed the whiteface.

He always stayed in rundown, seedy hotels when on the job, and cover was only part of the reason. Khan actually liked the feeling they brought with them, full of the mad, the failed, and the helpless. He fed off their thoughts and the stink of their souls. He could kill them all, not a single room spared, if he chose.

Not tonight, though. He was a half block from the shabby hotel where he was currently staying in downtown Chicago, on the outskirts of Wrigleyville, when he veered away. Something was wrong. Someone was watching for him. He could see nothing, and that bothered Khan. The enemy always, always, revealed itself somehow — if not by sight or sound, then at least by feeling.

Khan kept walking and jumped on the L the first chance he got. He rode it for over an hour, switching trains regularly. Then, judging he was safe, he jumped off and hailed a cab after a short walk. The meter had rung up close to thirty dollars before Khan was satisfied no one was following him. He got out and took to the alleys and back streets that had been his home since his early years in Shanghai. He could sleep without giving up his senses, use garbage for cover, if necessary.

Khan had embraced the thick darkness of a garbage-strewn alley when he realized someone was behind him. Certain he had not been followed, Khan assumed it was just some hopeless bum whose turf he had invaded. He would kill him fast and be done with it, then give himself up to the blessed night for refuge.

The sound of a misplaced step froze his thinking.

He wants me to know he’s back there.

Khan wasn’t sure where that thought originated because it made no sense. He dismissed it and ducked into hiding, melting into the scenery so he might see his adversary pass by.

No one passed. No one came. There was only the night before him.

Khan stayed as he was, rooted in place, one with the garbage cans about him. Someone was out there all right, someone who was very skilled in his own right, which was just fine.

Because Khan had his sticks.

He drew them fast and twirled them nimbly into gripping position. Held them low by the hips, ready to whisk in any direction in the shadow of an instant.

He was just turning to check behind him when the hand closed over his throat from the rear. The pressure against his windpipe would have snapped off his Adam’s apple if instinct hadn’t made him twist his head enough for his powerful neck muscles to save his life. Sucking in what breath he could, he spun away and lashed at his attacker with his sticks.

The blows struck nothing. The attacker was gone.

He came up behind me, and I never even heard him….

Khan swung around suddenly, and a savage kick pounded the back of his head from the direction he had been facing until a second before. The blow thrust him back against the garbage cans, and he whirled to be met with a blow that split two of his ribs on impact. Another blow was aimed for his face; Khan deflected it with one of his sticks and countered with a strike for his opponent’s solar plexus. It drew a grunt when it should have resulted in a kill! No man could still be standing, no man!

But this one was — he countered with a combination series of fists that pounded Khan’s right cheek and jaw. Khan realized the awful splintering sounds in his ears were his own bones breaking. Yet he was able to jump back to make time and distance his allies. The figure before him was considerably smaller than he was, which perhaps accounted for why he hadn’t been able to finish Khan off when the advantage was his. Well, he’d had his chance and missed it. Khan bellowed and unleashed the fury of his sticks in a blurred frenzy.

The disciple named Thaddeus elected to hold his position. He had been expecting more of the giant Mongol than this. There had to be some sport, some enjoyment. He would bait him, let him have his chance to use the killing sticks.

Thaddeus stood his ground as Khan charged. The Mongol’s half-swollen face held no expression; the sticks twirled nimbly in his hands as he made his charge.

Khan lunged in with sticks crisscrossing the air in a vortex of death. Thaddeus caught the hands blurring through the night in midmotion. He twisted the Mongol’s arms together at the elbow and jerked them mightily. A snap as loud as a gunshot sounded, and one of the arms hung limply by the Mongol’s side.

Khan still had one stick left, which he sent into motion a breath before he saw the stick he had lost was in the hand of his opponent. The last thing he remembered was switching his motion to a blocking form — too late — as the enemy’s stick slid under the defense and bashed into his nose, driving the bone backward through his brain.

Khan stood there briefly before he crumpled, and Thaddeus wondered how it could have been so easy to kill a man of such reputation.

Fox was finished with the whole damn business. His first few kills had come smooth and sweet and then everything had fallen apart. Targets impossible to reach, or even to find. The wrong man killed on the most recent occasion. Messy, very messy, and Fox hated mess above everything else.

Well, fuck the albino Japper and his mother, too.

Fox hit his home turf of Boston running, making straight for the bank that held his safe-deposit box. He’d clean out the cash and jewels and disappear for a while. The Jap fuck wouldn’t know the difference, and his whole plan was gonzo anyway.

Fox had just finished emptying the contents of his safe-deposit box into his black leather briefcase when the lights in the cubicle died. The silenced Beretta was in his hand a second later, while the other hand found the doorknob and twisted it open. The whole damn, windowless box area was pitch-black. A power failure now. If that didn’t beat fuck all…

Fox heard the sound just before he started to head in the general direction of the exit door. Someone else was with him in the darkness. Not another customer, obviously; he was alone when he came in, and no one had entered since. The guard, then, perhaps…

The sound came again, not made by a guard at all, because a guard would have spoken and wouldn’t have tried to conceal his presence.

Fox fired a silenced round in its direction.

Another sound sprang from the opposite side of the twenty-foot square room filled wall to wall with safe-deposit boxes. Fox fired again, and this time the bullet ricocheted madly.

I know you’re in here, fucker.

The sound of rushing footsteps sounded to his right, and Fox shot that way. More footsteps came from the left, and he wasted two more bullets.

There’s more than one of them, he thought. There’s gotta be. Well, that suits me just fine!

Fox slid away from the door to the cubicle and pressed his back against the middle row of safe-deposit boxes against the far wall. Muzzle flashes would give him away sure as shit. He’d keep his ass calm and make sure he had something to fire at next time before he shot. Better yet, better yet…

Fox holstered the Beretta and pulled out a killing knife courtesy of cool, blue Vietnam. The separation of sounds told him three figures were in the darkness with him. Just like the good ol’ days as a tunnel rat, squeezing his big frame into the passageways dug by gooks and slitting their throats as he passed them along the way. Yup, darkness suited him just fine.

Fox moved away from the boxes and joined the darkness. He owned the fuckin’ night in Nam, and he would own the asses of the men who had invaded this darkness. If he couldn’t shoot them, they weren’t about to shoot him, which placed the odds in his favor.

I’m gonna get you, motherfucka!

Fox figured the enemy was shittin’ their pants trying to find him in the pitch-black, when he walked straight into a gun barrel. Nothing behind it he could feel, just cold steel touching his forehead.

“Hey!”

Fox had time to scream that as he whipped his blade out at a target as untouchable as gas. Funny thing was he heard the gun go off, actually heard the shot that blew the brains out the back of his head.

The disciple named Peter did not need the light to see. Yes, the darkness kept him from seeing shapes, but auras showed up plain as day, and he decided to taunt this one before finishing the job. All in all, it was boring, disappointing.

There had to be someone out there who could provide a bit of a challenge.

Somewhere.