The Vengeance of the Tau

Chapter 15

Arnold Rothstein was happiest when he was in Israel. Though German by birth and American by choice, he considered the Jewish state his true homeland, a fact demonstrated by his donations of upward of a hundred million dollars to the various causes supporting her. Add to this the additional sums he had helped raise, and the total was much closer to one billion.

As one of the richest men in the world, no portion of it was untouched by his influence. He had made his original fortune in diamonds and later in oil, but now he owned a major Hollywood studio, a New York publishing house, a magazine distributorship, and a convenience-store chain, just to name a few. He had been likened to such tycoons as William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch, and the Rothschilds. At the age of sixty-five, life had never seemed more vital to him. There had never been more to do.

The only thing he truly hated about his success was the privacy it denied him. He could seldom go anywhere without being accompanied by an entourage or being accosted somewhere en route. Only in Israel could he come and go as he pleased. Only in Israel did he feel truly at home.

Especially at the kibbutz known as Nineteen.

Here he was treated like everyone else. Here people passed by without taking special notice. The women greeted him respectfully and went about their chores. Occasionally the children would follow along for a while, growing tired at the lack of excitement. Most of the time they wouldn’t. He passed the tank memorial inside the entrance and thought of similar vehicles he had driven in wars from different ages.

“She’s been waiting for you,” the female leader of Nineteen told him, as she led Rothstein toward the private home set apart from the rest. “She barely slept last night and won’t tell us what’s wrong.”

Rothstein found the old woman seated behind her wrought-iron table. A shawl covered her shoulders to guard her from the early morning cold. The sight of her made Rothstein’s heart sink. He wondered about himself, still fit and trim, thanks to making time for exercise. Sixty-five years old and he could still run three miles in a half hour. But would the mirror soon be betraying him as well?

How old she had gotten … How helpless she looked …

Had she been this bad the last time he had visited? Had her hands been so frail and bony, her wrists swollen with the disfigurement of arthritis? Even from this distance Rothstein could see how rapidly she was breathing. He steeled himself and approached her.

“You’re late as always, Ari.”

He had leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek but stopped at the mention of his real name.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him.

“You know no one else calls me that except you. Everytime I hear it …”

“Do you wish to forget?”

“Of course not! You know I don’t!”

“Then remember, Ari. You must remember, especially now.”

“You think I forget, Tovah? Did I not build this place for you? Did I not have the best engineers in the world upgrade your water and irrigation system just six months ago?”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

The old woman grasped a set of press clippings from her lap and raised them toward him. It was all she could do to hold them. And yet when Arnold Rothstein took them, the first thing he noticed was how carefully and perfectly the articles had been trimmed from their newspaper pages.

But his eyes scorned her. “You promised me you would stop.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t. Read them. You’ll see.”

Rothstein started the first one while standing. By the third he was slumped in the chair opposite the old woman.

“This … doesn’t mean anything,” he said, without looking at her.

“Doesn’t it?”

“Just a few articles, Tovah …”

The old woman’s face had flushed red. “They’ve come back, Ari. I can feel it in my heart. They’ve come back.”

“Impossible! You know that’s impossible!”

“I only know that’s what you’ve always said. I always knew you were wrong. I knew what we unleashed would never retreat quietly; that kind of power never does.” The old woman tried to steady her breathing and failed. “And now it has returned, they have returned, and one way or another it is our fault, our responsibility.”

“That was forty years ago. My God, forty-five now …”

“And I’m supposed to believe such a responsibility fades over any time?”

Rothstein held the clippings before him as if they were burning his fingers. “Three incidents, Tovah …”

“There have already been others, and still more will follow, Ari, unless they are stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“By you. You are the only one who can do it.”

“How? The logistics would prove—”

“Enough!” She struggled to rise out of her wheelchair.

Arnold Rothstein saw that she could not straighten her spine. The sight made his eyes fill with tears. His throat felt heavy, and he unbuttoned his shirt collar.

“You and I, Ari, we remember the beginning.” The old woman raised both her arms to the sides. “We made all this happen, so much good and worthy of every grace God ever gave.” Her lips trembled. “You cannot let all our glorious work be marred by their return. You remember, we both remember …”

Rothstein came around the table to wrap an arm around the old woman’s shoulder to support her. He felt the bones beneath the thin shawl and the meager flesh.

“Yes,” he conceded, “yes …”

“You have power, Ari. You must do something. You must!”

“I will do … what I can, Tovah.”

“So long as it is enough, Ari.”

“For both our sakes.” He nodded.

“And the world’s.”

Chapter 16

“That’ll be seven dollars.”

Wareagle handed the cabby a ten and climbed out of the back seat without saying a word. Joe Rainwater’s two-story house in Chicago’s Rogers Park on Touhy Avenue lay directly before him, and he found himself dreading every step that would bring him to it. It had a small yard and looked pretty much like every other house Johnny could see, except for a beautifully manicured front garden that was already starting to bloom.

Johnny would have known it was his friend’s house, even without the number over the front door.

It was Thursday morning, and Joe Rainwater had not called him at the hotel at six A.M. as promised. Johnny had waited until six-thirty to call him, but there was no answer. He tried the precinct next and found Rainwater had not yet arrived. Johnny heard the soft murmurs of the spirits and knew there was trouble. Halfway up the walk, the murmurs had given way to a nagging in his gut that tried to choke off his breath. On the porch of Joe Rainwater’s small house, Wareagle drew his knife.

The night before, Joe Rainwater and Johnny Wareagle were sitting in an empty office at the precinct when Sal Belamo called back. Rainwater answered the phone and handed the receiver to Wareagle.

“Who you got there with you, big fella?” Belamo asked him.

“A friend.”

“He one of us?”

Wareagle looked at Injun Joe. “Close enough.”

“Then put this on speaker so you both can hear.”

Wareagle hit the appropriate button.

“You guys hear me okay? … Good, here’s how it plays. You’re onto something with this Oliveras killing, something big. Right down McCrackenballs’s alley. Too bad he’s otherwise involved.”

“McCrackenballs?” Injun Joe wondered.

“Long story, Joe Rainwater.”

“Let me give you what I got in a nutshell,” Belamo continued. “Ruben Oliveras isn’t the only bad guy to get snuffed as of late. Far fucking from it. List reads like a veritable rogue’s gallery — and not just in the States, either. You guys hear about Javier Kelbonna?”

“It was on the news,” Joe Rainwater replied. “Last night, I think.”

“The man we couldn’t get to with our smart bombs got toasted big-time. Holes himself up on an island after we force him out of his little dipshit country. I mean, this guy was really holed up. Like he expected us to mount Desert Storm Part Two to get him. We didn’t, boys, but somebody else did. Twenty-seven guards and Kelbonna were all found torn apart. Sound familiar?”

“Oliveras,” Rainwater muttered.

“That’s not all. Sleazebag of a senator named Jim Duncan got whacked in a parking garage, five bodyguards along with him, earlier this very evening.”

Wareagle and Rainwater looked at each other.

“And I got more, boys. Try the entire complement of guards for one Heydan Larroux, lady boss of New Orleans, wiped out. Miss Larroux hasn’t been positively identified yet, but they’re still fitting the pieces together, you get my drift. What the fuck you boys stumble onto here?”

“I don’t know,” Joe Rainwater told him.

“Well, here’s the way it plays from my end. In all the killings, there are no leads, no firm suspects, no witnesses, and no evidence. Several of the sites look like war zones with kills registered only by the assailants. I figure we got maybe a thousand rounds of retaliatory fire here all told that didn’t hit a goddamn thing. So come clean.” And, after neither of them did, “Look, boys, I want in. Somebody’s doing their best to clean up the world’s scum. My kind of guys, let me tell you. You ask me, we should all join up instead of trying to catch them. You want, I can catch the next flight to Chi-town.”

“Not yet,” Wareagle said.

“I just wanna have a little fun, big fella.”

“For now it must involve your computer, Sal Belamo. If there have been this many victims already, there will be more. I need you to generate a list of potential future targets.”

“Gonna be a long one.”

“A place to start, nothing more.”

“Whatever you say, big fella.”

Johnny broke the connection and found Joe Rainwater staring at him intensely.

“I put queries over the wire, John Wareagle. Nothing came back.”

“Sal Belamo has better access.”

Injun Joe stood up and stepped nearer to Wareagle. Though Johnny remained sitting, they were not that far from being eye to eye.

“Sounds like there’s plenty you’re not telling me, John Wareagle.”

“Only that which is not meaningful for you to know.”

“You told me you were out. You told me the woods gave you peace and you had no desire to leave them.”

“Perhaps not desire, Joe Rainwater, but need. I didn’t realize it myself until another came looking for me some years back.”

“This McCrackenballs …”

“Yes.”

“You knew him from the hellfire?”

“I never stopped knowing him, even after we parted.”

“How often?”

“When the need is there.”

Joe Rainwater moved away from the desk, spoke again while facing the wall. “So you could not help me with the cause of your people, but you could help the cause of this whiteface.”

“His causes are the causes of many.”

Rainwater spun and aimed a finger at Wareagle. “The cause of your people is the cause of many. You have abandoned them.”

If Wareagle was hurt, he didn’t show it. “I do what I must, Joe Rainwater.”

“Big battles, not little ones, in keeping with your style.”

Johnny shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Which scares me all the more, because I know now you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t feel this was something right in your ballpark. And it’s turning out that way, isn’t it? Jesus Christ, something’s killing criminals, something not from this world. It couldn’t be in so many places at the same time if it was. Right or wrong, John Wareagle?”

“I don’t know, Joe Rainwater.”

“I do.” Injun Joe paced back to the front of the lieutenant’s desk. “Somebody out there who was fed up, somebody who knows of the old ways, conjured these things up. And now they’re out there and they’re gonna keep on killing until somebody else sends them back to …”

“Where, Joe Rainwater?”

“Back to wherever they came from.”

“And you think I can send them back.”

“I know you, John Wareagle.”

“Perhaps not as well as you think.” Johnny stood up. “I should leave now, Joe Rainwater.”

Injun Joe reached up to place a hand on Wareagle’s shoulder. “No, I’m sorry. Listen to me. I was inside the Oliveras mansion two minutes after it happened. I had put the hellfire and Shadow One behind me, John Wareagle. But what I saw there, what I felt …” His eyes were pleading. “It all came back and it hurt more than it ever hurt before. I could call no one else because no one else could grasp all of what I was feeling.” Injun Joe swallowed hard. “I need you, John Wareagle. Let me go home and grab some sleep. Then tomorrow morning we’ll start over fresh.”

But now morning had come, with foreboding instead of hope.

The front door to Joe Rainwater’s house was locked, the windows all closed. Johnny breathed a little easier. He stepped down from the porch and made his way around to the rear of the house. Not surprisingly, the shrubbery and grounds were immaculate. He could feel Joe Rainwater in every flower and hedge piece. Meticulous, detailed. Joe Rainwater would not have trusted any part of his home to anyone else.

He reached the backyard and saw nothing out of place. All seemed just as it should have been. There was a Florida room Rainwater had built himself, a jalousied door leading into it.

The door was open.

Wareagle held his knife higher as he approached. The latch had been shattered, the door shredded in the area of the knob. Johnny climbed the three steps and entered the Florida room. He glided soundlessly forward, as if weightless, and entered the house. Just outside the kitchen, he smelled it:

Gunsmoke.

He moved through the first floor and climbed the stairs toward the second.

Another smell alerted him even before the feel. Joe Rainwater’s bedroom door was open. Blood trailed out into the hallway. Johnny Wareagle moved to the threshold and stopped.

Joe Rainwater’s head looked up at him from the floor, its tongue protruding grotesquely outward, a puddle of blood still wet beneath it. The rest of his mangled corpse lay near the bed, left arm nearly severed and right hand missing. Johnny’s feet grew heavy. The knife grasped in his hand felt suddenly ineffectual. He tried to feel from the room what had happened, how it had happened. There was nothing, as if the walls themselves had closed their eyes to the killing.

Resting against a wall, not far from Joe Rainwater’s severed hand, was a .357 Magnum snub-nosed revolver. Johnny lowered his nose to it.

It had been fired recently. The empty cylinders told him at least six times.

But Joe Rainwater’s weapon of choice these days was a Smith & Wesson 9mm. Johnny’s eyes began to search anew. There it was, on the floor next to the rest of his corpse. Again he lowered his head, touched the steel of the barrel this time.

The clip was empty, all fourteen shots fired, the heat of the barrel told Johnny within the last hour and a half, just before dawn. Joe Rainwater had not gone without a fight. He had gotten off twenty shots.

Twenty shots and he had hit nothing.

Johnny gazed about the bedroom. Bullets had punctured a mirror and a pair of pictures, one showing Joe Rainwater in full police dress getting a commendation from the mayor. The other showed him receiving his Purple Heart after returning from the hellfire. The walls, too, had small chasms where bullets had ripped home. Wareagle stepped into the corridor and found similar chasms in the wall immediately opposite the door to the bedroom. Joe Rainwater had been ready for whatever was coming, then, and it hadn’t mattered.

Johnny gazed at the phone still sitting on Joe’s night table. Joe Rainwater could have called for help in the end, but he hadn’t. He had been a warrior, and a warrior knows his time to fight. Johnny suddenly felt very empty. Joe Rainwater had been more like him than Rainwater had ever cared to admit.

Wareagle’s eyes drifted to the wall once again. A photo that had been miraculously untouched by blood or bullets pictured Rainwater in the center of what Johnny assumed was a good portion of Shadow One. Arms around each other’s shoulders. Happy. Confident. Johnny wondered if he belonged in that picture. He felt strangely calm now. His grip slackened on the knife in his hand. Whatever had killed Joe Rainwater was long gone.

But it had broken its own rules. Joe Rainwater wasn’t a murderer, criminal, or drug lord. He had been killed simply because he had gotten too close, asked too many questions. Up till now Wareagle had felt a certain reluctance to interfere with a force that was ridding the world of its vermin. But all that had changed. Only a force as dark as those that it aspired to eradicate would have done this to a man like Joe Rainwater. Wareagle felt the familiar fires beginning to stoke deep within.

Another great battle loomed. He could feel the spirits around him, dressing his soul with a warbonnet. Johnny imagined he could smell the feathers.

He was halfway back to the stairway when the first of the policemen charged up the stairs.

“Freeze!” the man screamed his way, gun drawn and leveled with both hands. “Keep your hands where I can see them!”

A second policeman slid by the first and passed Wareagle en route to the second floor.

“Against the wall!” the first one ordered. “Move it! Now! I said—”

“Jesus Christ,” the second officer said when he neared the doorway to Joe Rainwater’s bedroom. “Oh, my sweet Jesus …”

Wareagle heard him retching. The other officer was fidgeting with his handcuffs. He had trouble fitting them around Johnny’s wrists.

“You’re under arrest,” Wareagle heard.

“Look,” the captain of Joe Rainwater’s precinct was saying, “I’m sorry about the arrest. Nosy neighbor saw you enter the house and called 911. Since it was a cop’s house, we … Well, you get the picture.”

Johnny Wareagle looked at Captain Eberling from across the desk. “Yes.”

“But I got this problem, see: one of my best men is dead. And I got you, who I never laid eyes on in my life before today, called in as some sort of consultant and you’re the one who finds Injun Joe chewed up the same way Oliveras and his men were. You mind telling me how you two knew each other?”

“Vietnam.”

“He was a hero over there.”

“Yes.”

“You serve together?”

“No.”

Captain Eberling seemed to take a while to digest that. “Yeah, well, I got it on good information you read a report no one outside the department was supposed to see. I don’t know how things are done back where you come from, but around here we like to keep things in the family.”

“Injun Joe was part of my family.”

“Just what is it that you do, Mr. — ” Eberling had to look down to consult his notes. “—Wareagle.”

Johnny said nothing.

“Injun Joe called you in ’cause he figured he was onto something that was over our heads. Now, you’re a pretty tall guy, but not tall enough the rest of this department couldn’t do anything you could do. Thing is, I got to figure Injun Joe told you things he didn’t tell the rest of us. Things he left out of his reports.”

“Perhaps because he knew you did not wish to read them.”

Eberling’s face reddened. “We want to read everything that might help us find his killers.”

“They are things not important to you, Captain.”

“Joe Rainwater was important to me, Mr. Wareagle, and that makes whatever might have gotten him killed important to me.”

“Nothing I know can help you.”

“Did you know he got off twenty shots in his bedroom before he died?” the captain asked.

“Yes.”

“And did you know the slugs in his .357 were Glasers? Pellets suspended in liquid Teflon. Guaranteed one-shot stop. He fired six.”

“Nothing was stopped.”

“He was ready for whatever killed him.”

“Perhaps.”

“It didn’t help.”

“No, it didn’t.”

Johnny’s seemingly curt responses seemed to further irritate the captain. “What was Injun Joe on to he couldn’t share with the rest of us?”

“Nothing.”

“But he called you.”

“He thought I could help.”

Eberling shrugged. “I told him to take some time off after the Oliveras thing. Eight months he’d been on the case and, boy, the way it ended … This doesn’t happen today, I figure he’s seeing things that aren’t there. Now I know something was there, after all, and I feel like a goddamn idiot for putting a lid on this at the outset.”

Wareagle understood. “He called me because he thought he was dealing with more than he could handle, more than you could handle.”

“Which makes you kinda special, doesn’t it?”

“Joe Rainwater thought so.”

“Well, we’re running your name through Washington, see what they mink.”

“They won’t think anything.”

“Excuse me?”

“There is no file on me.”

“What?”

As if on cue, Eberling’s phone buzzed.

“Yeah,” he said, answering it, and then accepted the news glumly. “Apparently,” he said to Wareagle, the receiver buried in its cradle again, “you don’t exist.”

Johnny looked at him in silence.

“Not even a military record, even though you told me you served in ’Nam.”

Wareagle just sat there.

“Man needs a lot of pull to work something like that out. Or he was involved in stuff maybe the government doesn’t want anyone to know happened.” Eberling waited for a reaction that didn’t come. “You that kind of man?”

“I have been that, and many other kinds of men, Captain.”

Eberling shot a finger his way and kept it there. “You’re starting to piss me off, you know that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What killed Joe Rainwater, Mr. Wareagle?”

“I do not know.”

“Who did he think was behind this? Who did he suspect?”

“He did not know.”

“That’s right; he called you.”

“And I came. To help.”

“You wanna tell me how exactly?”

“He wanted my opinion.”

“On the Oliveras business. Who did he think was responsible? Did he mention names, someone in the department maybe?” Eberling leaned forward, as if he had finally gotten to the point.

“Nothing like that.”

“Like what, then?”

Johnny said nothing and watched the captain lean back.

“You got a phone call, you wanna make it,” Eberling told him.

“I thought I wasn’t technically under arrest.”

“Just extending a courtesy, Mr. Wareagle. Look, don’t take this personal. Injun Joe was a good friend of mine, too. We both want to see whoever killed him put away. But you’re a part of this now and I can’t let you go till I get everything sorted out. See, I figure you’re the kinda man might take things into his own hands, he gets the chance. I can’t have that, Mr. Wareagle, no matter how close you and Injun Joe were.”

Eberling leaned forward again. “Now let me tell you how we’re gonna play this. We’re gonna lock you up downstairs for your own protection until we can get your identity cleared up. I’m gonna know the last time you spit before you walk out of my precinct, and that won’t happen until you come clean with everything Injun Joe told you. That clear to you, Tonto?”

Johnny told him that it was.

Chapter 17

There were six cells in the basement of the precinct building, and Wareagle was the only current occupant.

“I can’t have that, Mr. Wareagle, no matter how close you and Injun Joe were.”

Eberling’s comment confronted Johnny with the reality that they hadn’t been close at all. Johnny had known Joe Rainwater never stopped trying to reach him. He never missed a single message, but neither had he returned the few Rainwater had left for him in the past two years until the most recent one two nights before.

He used his one phone call to dial up Sal Belamo across the country at Gap headquarters.

“I got good news and bad news,” Sal started. “The list of possible next victims for your mystery killers, given what you told me, has gotta be somewhere around the size of a city phone book. That’s the bad news. Makes me think back to the ones they already hit. You remember me mentioning Heydan Larroux?”

“The woman in New Orleans.”

“Yeah, lady crime boss. Get this: turns out her body wasn’t with the others. Turns out she managed to get out of her house through an old tunnel that was part of the Underground Railroad. Police down there are just itching to get their hands on her. The FBI, too. Figure maybe she can tell them something.”

“Then the killers of Joe Rainwater would know they missed her.”

“Bingo! And the way I figure it, that’s something they’re not about to take lightly. You find her first and …”

“I wait for those I seek to arrive,” Johnny completed.

“You mean, we wait. I’m in, big fella. Got some heavy firepower being packed up to help us handle the job. I get away from this desk, I’ll be on the first plane down to help.”

“Thank you, Sal Belamo, but—”

“Hey, I ain’t finished yet. Got a line on one of Madame Larroux’s lieutenants in the field. Guy by the name of Jack Watts, alias Jersey Jack. Apparently Mr. Watts is most eager to relocate but he’s too hot to touch. What I hear, he was with Larroux minutes before the hit at her mansion. Got an address of a bar down in New Orleans where they might know where to find him….”

Johnny memorized it.

“Where do you want me to meet you?” Belamo finished.

“This is something I must do alone, Sal Belamo.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just me.”

Belamo was about to argue, then realized the futility of the effort. “You okay, big fella?”

“Yes.”

“You sound strange, different. You ask me …” Belamo stopped. “Look, you need anything else, you know where I am. Stay in touch. Hey, I hear from McBalls you got a message?”

“Tell him the hellfire followed us home, after all.”

“Sure. Whatever you say.”

Sal’s influence could probably have gotten him out of this cell in no time flat. But Johnny knew that accepting the favor would bring Belamo into this full-tilt, and this was his battle to fight. Alone. Besides, Johnny planned on being out of here long before morning. Then he’d be on his way to New Orleans and Jersey Jack Watts, on the trail of a victim who had escaped the clutches of the killers of Joe Rainwater.

Night fell, and Johnny felt it from deep in the bowels of the precinct building. He had accepted dinner gratefully and watched as the policeman carefully relocked his cell. He hadn’t been stripped down and searched; as Eberling had indicated, he wasn’t a prisoner, just a guest. Accordingly, Wareagle would wait a few hours and then set himself free.

The policeman returned for his picked-at tray one hour later, shrugging at how much Johnny had left.

“You want something different?”

“No, no thank you.”

“You need anything, just holler.” The man started to take his leave, then swung back around. “Injun Joe helped me out a lot when I was starting out. Everyone around here loved the guy. Word is he called you in ’cause you’re something special. You catch this son of a bitch, there’ll be a long line to get a piece of him.”

The policeman stepped out of the cell and locked it behind him.

“Sorry, I got to do this.”

“I understand.”

“Yeah, well, give a yell you need something, okay?”

Johnny nodded. His eyes followed the policeman down the hall and then drifted up to the video camera mounted on the wall over the entry door. He knew his picture was being broadcast up to the desk sergeant, and this would prove the largest stumbling block to his escape. Disable the camera and attention would surely be drawn. Leave it operational and he ran the very real risk of having his entire escape witnessed.

A problem.

His best solution seemed to be to wait well into the night, as close to the six A.M. shift change as possible to maximize the desk officer’s fatigue and boredom. Remain inactive and still through the whole of the evening to lull the man behind the monitor into not paying attention.

He even closed his eyes, but what he saw in his mind disturbed him. The enemy Joe Rainwater had uncovered had exposed itself to kill him. No, it hadn’t been seen, but it revealed its very human vulnerability and fear of detection in the act of killing Rainwater.

And the only conclusion he could draw from this was that he was next on its list.

Wareagle’s eyes snapped open. He was being hunted; he could feel it. And the best response for him was to return to the ways of the hunter himself.

His mind drifted, searching for the scent of his quarry, drifted back to the Oliveras mansion. In his mind Johnny could see the guards that night springing into action at the first sign of trouble outside. They had plenty of time to assume defensive positions. No one was taken by surprise. And yet, and yet …

Johnny thought of the plaster impression of the footprint that Joe Rainwater had told him about. Might it actually have belonged to some demon or monster? Had someone with the powers of the old ways conjured one or more of them up to quell the evil running rampant in the world? He could see why his friend had begun to accept that conclusion; there seemed to be no other conclusion to reach.

Except that Johnny knew of the old ways, too, and not once in all the teaching and training he had undergone had he ever seen evidence that such a thing was possible. The stories Joe Rainwater had referred to had been of warriors visited by spirits on the battlefield, of a ghost rider saving the lives of women and children when threatened by a massacre. But the conjuring of monsters? No, it was not part of even the most mystical Indian lore, not Sioux, anyway.

Still, something was doing all this killing. He had to get out of here now to find out what it was, to find it before it found him as it had found Joe Rainwater.

Johnny rose from his cot and slid toward the cell door. He was well ahead of his planned schedule, but there was no longer a choice. The spirits had taken that from him with their insistent warnings. He removed the bobby pin that helped contain his coal black hair and separated it into the two pieces that formed his picks. He stood there for a time, hands resting on the outside of the lock, the stance innocent enough not to draw any attention. Wareagle angled his body and tilted his head so as much of the task he was about to perform as possible would be lost to the camera.

He slid the L-shaped part of the former bobby pin into the lock to keep pressure on the tumblers. Then he worked the straight part into place after it to pop the tumblers. Wareagle had worked this kind of five-tumbler lock before and figured it would take fifteen seconds.

He was working on the second tumbler when the straight tool slid from his hand and dropped to the floor. Johnny didn’t make any sudden moves to snatch at it; he just followed its roll, thankfully, back inside the cell.

As Johnny knelt to retrieve it, he heard a powerful blast, strong enough to shake the cellblock. The next sound was of exploding glass, followed by screaming, then gunfire. Individual pistol shots, by the sound of it, various calibers. More screaming ensued, horrible screaming.

The enemy was here!

Johnny began working the lock feverishly. Two more tumblers clicked into place, then a fourth. He went to work on the last one.

The enemy had come for him, here in the basement of a police station. Whatever was up there would let nothing stand in its way, not even fifteen or twenty policemen. They had killed Rainwater and now they would kill him.

Click.

The last tumbler fell into place and Johnny jammed the cell door outward. Automatic and shotgun fire were sounding from above now, the screams growing in intensity as more officers joined the battle and were wiped out.

The far end of the corridor contained an emergency exit and Johnny charged toward it. But the pushbar wouldn’t give, the mechanism triggered only in the event of a fire. The door was steel. The lock was on the other side.

He was trapped!

On the floors above him, the sounds of the struggle had already started to abate, the screams less frequent and gunfire reduced as more of the policemen were downed. A part of Johnny wanted to turn round and confront whatever was up there now, but reason prevailed. If he confronted whatever was up there now, it would kill him, just as it had killed Joe Rainwater. There would be another time, another place, when he would understand what he was fighting before confronting it.

Johnny rushed back to the center of the corridor where a fire alarm was set into the wall. He reached a hand up and pulled it. The alarm began wailing immediately. The emergency exit door at the end of the hall would now be unlocked, and Wareagle bolted back toward it. Halfway there, he could hear the door leading down to the basement thrown open, a soft thud as someone or something began to descend.

The pushbar gave this time, and he was halfway through the exit when he heard the crash of the door leading into the cellblock opening. Something stopped him from turning back to look, a feeling he could not articulate or explain.

The spirits warning him, counseling him …

What did they know that he did not?

Another staircase lay before him, and Johnny charged up it toward the night.

Night fell over the bayou, moonless and black as tar. The crickets and night bugs sang incessantly in an eerie harmonic wail. The air was thick with humidity, and the old house was not blessed with air conditioning. Ceiling fans turned rapidly to slice through the heat. They kept the air moving, but could do nothing about the stifling humidity. Heydan Larroux was sweating as she gazed out over the black water that surrounded the house. Built on stilts in ten-foot-deep water, it was accessible only by a narrow, wobbly fifty-foot walkway running out from the shoreline.

Heydan Larroux had come here to hide after fleeing from her uptown mansion. The tunnel beneath it had once been part of the Underground Railroad, but the years had not been kind to it. Most of the city of New Orleans is below sea level. Accordingly, in her trek through the tunnel Heydan encountered a number of coffins washed from their graves by storms over the years. Many of the coffins lay shattered and ruined, their contents scattered alongside. After the first encounter, Heydan resolved to keep her flashlight pointed strictly forward and her eyes following the beam. At the close of the tunnel, on the opposite end of Chappatula, a car, its motor idling, was waiting for her up on the street.

The Old One was already inside.

In the house on the bayou, Heydan turned away from the window and faced the Old One, who sat cross-legged on the floor with a commercial-sized mixing bowl before her. Moving that way, Heydan saw that six stones had been placed on the floor on the opposite side of the bowl. She sat down across from the Old One and picked up the first one, ready to drop it into the water as soon as she completed her question.

“Will it still come for me?”

Plop.

Soft ripples churned through the bowl, slowing, then stopped.

“Yes,” the old woman replied, seeming to read them through her sightless eyes.

Heydan took another stone. “When?”

Plop.

“You escaped its wrath, child. It seethes in anger. Failure is something it cannot accept. But it does not leave echoes the way most living things do. I cannot feel its approach, only its presence.”

Heydan grasped a third stone, having to force herself to ask a question she dreaded the answer to. “What is it?”

Plop.

“Power, child. Raw and pure. It swallows. It absorbs.”

“It does not kill for revenge.”

“A question!”

“Does it kill for revenge or to eliminate those in its way?” And she dropped the fourth stone.

“It kills to kill, child. Its reasons are not comprehendible to me or you. Now that it has been unleashed, it will not be restrained again until all its work is done.”

Heydan grasped a fifth stone. “Unleashed by who?”

The old woman squinted her dead eyes to follow the water’s ripples. “I see the past. The present, too, but not as clear. They have melded, but the years and the ages are clashing. I see a force thought dead, but only dormant. The force reeks of frustration and impatience, of a vision it will not have sullied by anyone. Relentless. Unstoppable.”

“Nothing is unstoppable.”

“I can only respond to a question.”

Heydan gathered up the final stone. “What must I do to survive?”

Plop.

The stone was larger this time, and the result was a louder noise and more ripples through the bowl. The Old One lowered her ear closer to the water. Then she looked up.

“There is a man, a warrior, who will come to know of this force. He alone can save you. Far away now, but soon he will be close.”

“Who?” Heydan Larroux demanded.

“The stones are gone.”

“Who?”

“We must let the waters recharge, revitalize. The streams of constant answers have grown still. We must wait, my child. Tomorrow. The day after.”

Heydan gazed out the window into the night, praying for morning as if that might save her. She had rounded up her most formidable remaining guards and summoned them here, equipped them with explosives and armaments that could kill a small army. But it hadn’t been enough in New Orleans and it wouldn’t be in the bayou.

“You must wait,” the Old One was saying.

“For tomorrow …”

“For as long as it takes for the warrior to find his way here.”

Chapter 18

“Where to now?” Melissa asked when the bus had deposited them in the center of the Turkish city of Izmir just after ten o’clock Thursday morning. They had boarded it in Ephesus an hour after dawn, after walking fifteen miles through the night to a point where sightseers were dropped off and picked up later in the day.

“The Büyük Efes Hotel.”

Melissa knew Izmir well enough to know it was the best in the city. “You’re kidding.”

“You travel with me, babe, you go first class.”

“You know people there,” she realized.

“Izmir still houses the headquarters for NATO’s southeastern sector,” Blaine explained, the wryness gone from his voice. “We get to the hotel, we can press all the buttons to keep our presence as secret as we can hope for.”

She fingered the ragged notebook through the heavy canvas of her pack. “Izmir also houses one of the finest and best-equipped archaeological museums in the entire Middle East. And we need to find out what our notebook says.”

McCracken glanced at her pack. “Too bad it can’t tell us who removed the more recent batch of those missing crates.”

“It might tell us what’s inside them,” Melissa responded, “and that’s the next best thing.”

At last a taxi pulled to a halt before them.

The man waited until the taxi’s occupants were inside the Büyük Efes and the taxi had driven off before entering the lobby. Not surprisingly, his quarries had already vanished from sight. But it didn’t matter now. He moved to a row of pay phones just past the front desk and dialed a number he had memorized just hours before.

“Yes,” a voice answered.

“Büyük Efes,” was all he said.

The taxi driver pulled over at a restaurant just down the street from the Büyük Efes. There was no pay phone inside, but he knew the manager well enough to use the restaurant’s own line. The phone was located in the comer of the kitchen. The driver knew he was being watched as he dialed the number.

“Ja?” a voice greeted in German.

And the taxi driver whispered his message.

Inside the Büyük Efes, Blaine headed not for the front desk, but the desk of the assistant manager. He introduced himself on the pretext of having a problem and was ushered into the privacy of a back office. Less than ten minutes later he and Melissa were settled in a room on the hotel’s seventh floor with nothing signed and no evidence of their presence recorded.

The Büyük Efes was indeed Izmir’s finest hotel. Boasting eight stories and nearly three hundred rooms, it featured three restaurants, two bars, and an upscale nightclub that was a main attraction in the city. The room given to Blaine and Melissa looked out over the inlet which flowed in from the Aegean Sea and the Ataturk Caddesi, the city’s palm-lined seafront promenade.

Melissa took a long bath and then a shower, hoping the surge of water would revive and refresh her. While it could wash the grime and stink of the past two days from her, though, it could not swab clean the memories. The grief returned with stunning impact as her senses relaxed and uncoiled. Since McCracken’s arrival at the dig site less than twenty-four hours before, there had been no time to feel it. Fighting to save her own life had spared her from dwelling on the loss of her father’s. But now she had her thoughts for company again, and they behaved like unwelcome guests. She was exhausted and starving, and that heightened her depression all the more.

She stood with her back to the shower’s jets. The grungy bathwater was still draining from the tub over her feet and now her tears began to drop into it. She cried herself out standing there, arms wrapped tight around her midsection and shaking no matter how hot she made the water. When she could cry no more, she stepped from the tub and wrapped herself in a thick white robe that had been hanging behind the door. She felt a wave of nausea overcome her and leaned over the toilet to vomit. But her stomach was empty and the heave was dry.

“Melly?”

McCracken’s voice came from right next to her. He had entered the bathroom without her even knowing. She looked up at him with hands propped on either side of the sink, fighting to get her breath back.

“You should eat,” he said softly. “The food came while you were in the shower.”

“I … can’t.”

“You have to. Come on….”

He slid an arm over her shoulder and eased her from the sink. She came away tentatively, wanting to cling to her perch there, and then pressed against him. She was trembling horribly, and Blaine held her tighter. He stroked her still-wet hair to comfort her. Outside the bathroom, near the table room service had wheeled in, she clung fast to him.

“My father used to do that,” she said softly. “When I was a little girl.”

“Ladies tell me all the time I remind them of their fathers.”

Melissa eased herself away from him, the aroma of fresh coffee and hot food starting to revive her. “My father was in his late thirties when I was born. My mother was twenty-four, one of his graduate students. He always said he had meant to marry earlier, but there was always a dig, a project, some research to do. I guess the only person he could have married was one of his students.”

“Your mother …”

“She died when I was four.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It hurts more now than it ever did. Does that make sense?”

“No one left to fill the gaps. It makes plenty. Not as much as eating a good meal, though.”

McCracken had ordered generously, and the two of them attacked the covered plates of eggs, bacon, rolls, danish, and small steaks. The food made her feel better but couldn’t fill the deeper hole in her stomach, the one that was hot and burning from the pain of loss.

“What now?” Melissa asked.

“You need rest.”

“No, I’m … afraid.”

“I’ll be here,” he soothed.

“That’s not it. It hurts too much when I rest. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

“You’re exhausted.”

“Then eventually I’ll pass out. But not now, not for a while.” Her eyes fell on the tattered, nearly ruined notebook lying on the room’s desk near the backpack that had held it. “And I’ve got work to do.”

Blaine followed her gaze. “How much of it do you think is salvageable?”

“Impossible to tell until I’ve had a look at it under enhanced conditions. The Archaeological Museum’s right in the center of Izmir, just a few miles from here. They know me there. Shouldn’t be a problem to gain access to what I need.”

“What time do they open?”

“Ten o’clock. What time is it now?”

“After eleven.”

“I’m going to get dressed,” Melissa insisted. “Then I’m going down to the museum straightaway.”

“You need to rest,” Blaine repeated.

“Nonsense.”

“Be sensible.”

She shrugged, relenting.

McCracken went into the shower after she was lying in bed, tucked under the covers still wearing her Büyük Efes bathrobe. He allowed himself to linger in the spray for far longer than usual, trying to plan his next step. The dig site had left him at a virtual dead end. He knew that something had been removed from the secret storage chamber on two separate occasions: first by Jews in the wake of World War II, and then by an unknown party far more recently. With such a vast array of deadly weapons before them, both parties had chosen the crates.

Why? Had the Jews made use of their contents? Did the unknown party intend to?

The only lead he had at present was the potentially useless notebook; he would rely on Melissa to make something out of it. He knew pain well enough to know that working through it was the best medicine.

He emerged from the bathroom in a second hotel bathrobe and found a ruffled space in the bed where she had been lying. The notebook was gone. So, too, was the change of clothes the assistant manager had sent up to the room. Blaine smiled. Melissa was truly an impressive woman, brave and determined. He had sensed how close she was to her father, how much she had come to depend on him for the direction and meaning of her own life. Now she would have to find those on her own, starting today, and Blaine knew he had to let her.

He lay down on the ruffled bed and was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

The men came in five different vehicles, their arrivals separated by precise two-minute intervals. All sixteen slipped into their assigned positions inside the Büyük Efes. All had miniature microphones attached to the lapels of their suit jackets. Thin wires snaked down and around to their backs where their transmitting apparatuses were clipped. A tiny antenna that looked like little more than a stray thread rose up from each man’s collar.

Among themselves the men had wondered briefly about why so many of them were needed for so simple an operation. Questioning orders was something that was simply not possible for them, not today or ever, so they accepted what they were told. The man they were coming for must be very important; that much was certain. And very dangerous; that was certain, too. For this reason, the more-experienced members of the team found the rather peculiar parameters of this mission unnerving. If this man was dangerous enough to require a team so large, their orders should have contained considerably more latitude.

It would take eleven minutes for them all to reach their positions. No one would make a move until everyone was ready. The elevators and stairwells all had to be covered. So, too, the hotel’s service basement, rear area, and lobby. If the initial strike team failed, the idea was to create a circle that could be gradually tightened until the target was caught within it. They had used the method before, but never with this many men, and it had never taken long to close the circle even on those occasions.

The operation began with nothing more than subtle nods. The men checked their watches and dispersed.

Billy Boy Griggs had the driver pull over a block from the Büyük Efes. Behind him he could hear the Twins stirring, whispering between themselves again. Jesus, these guys scared him….

Billy knew all the stories, all the legends, about the pair. How they had killed their way through a hundred guards to slay the sultan of a small Arab country. How they had protected a charge who had hired them from attack by two dozen mercenaries armed with the best weapons available; killed them all, was the story. How they had already laid to rest an even dozen previously indestructible operatives who had finally crossed the line that required the Twins to be summoned.

The same line that Blaine McCracken had crossed.

Billy heard the back door open, but didn’t turn around to watch the Twins exit.

“We won’t be long,” they said in unison.

The leader of the German team dispersing through the hotel was also its oldest member, twice as old as most of the rest. He had the same crew cut he had worn before his hair had turned white, and he had been fortunate enough to keep most of it. He had also kept the same rigid walk, arms swaying robotically by his side. None of the other team members had ever worked with him before and didn’t even know his name. But he was the one who had assembled them and had eyed them stealthily when they entered the hotel.

The leader stepped through the lobby, studying the positions his men had taken up on this level. One glance was all they gave up to him. Good. They were excellent men, each and every one. The German ducked into an alcove and pulled back his sleeve. The watch revealed was scarred and scratched from constant usage, inconsistent with his finely tailored suit. It was a soldier’s watch and had been since his father had given it to him as a boy.

The paradox was symbolic. It had been a long time since he had mounted an active mission. He had grown accustomed to the shadows, but now the light beckoned him once more. So much depended on his success tonight. Everything.

In three minutes his entire team would be in position. It would be time to move.

The German emerged from the alcove, too late to see the identical twins enter the hotel.

Independently of one another, the Twins picked out the presence of the men in the lobby instantly. It was a feeling that alerted them at first. Then their eyes swept the area, stopping at each of the well-dressed men at their posts.

The little man had said nothing about a force protecting McCracken. Could it be that these had come here for the same purpose they had? Fools. Did they really think that ordinary men, no matter how strong in number, could eliminate someone like McCracken? A hundred men posted in a hundred different places meant one man to kill a hundred times.

No matter what they were here for, these men would now inevitably prove an obstacle. They added not only complications, but also unpredictability to what was about to transpire. If four were posted in the lobby, three or four times that many would be scattered at strategic points throughout the hotel. In position already, they would move on McCracken before the Twins could possibly do the same. Alerted, he would be doubly dangerous and prepared. Their best hope was to eliminate these obstacles before they became an impediment. A change in plans, yes, but one that was clearly necessary.

The eyes of the German with the crew cut were glued to his old watch. Tucked back in the isolated lobby alcove, he lowered his mouth toward his lapel microphone.

“We move in one minute. All teams report.”

“Team One in position. All clear.”

“Team Two in position. All clear.”

“Team Three in position. All clear.”

“Team Four in position. All clear.”

“Team Five in position. All clear.”

The German waited. No reply filtered back through his earpiece.

“Team Six, come in.”

Silence.

“Team Six, are you there? … Team Six, can you hear me?”

An equipment malfunction was probably to blame. He’d have to check on it.

“Team One,” he said to the three men on the target’s floor, the initial strike group. “Report status.”

“No movement. Target inside.”

Team Six was one of two posted in the lobby. The German recalled the layout in his mind. They were right out in the open, responsible for the elevators. He could send Team Five to check on them or he could simply let the plan go forward and check on them himself when time allowed.

“Thirty seconds,” he told them all. “On my mark.”

Inside his room, something snapped Blaine McCracken awake. He bolted upright in bed, shoulders board-stiff and neck hackles rising.

Had it been a dream?

No, there had been a sound, barely discernible to all but the long-trained mind.

He slid off the bed quietly and moved for his gun.

Team One approached the door slowly. Two of the three members took posts on either side and waited while the third angled straight for it. From beneath his coat he pulled a sawed-off shotgun loaded with a single antipersonnel round. Obtaining swift entry was of paramount importance here. Explosives took too long to plant and were too iffy to work with. The round was a much better choice, especially in this instance. Once they were inside, surprise on their side and their target too stunned to respond, the rest would take care of itself.

The third member of the team nodded and leveled his weapon. He waited until the other two had covered their ears before pulling the trigger.

The door exploded inward, the entire area around the latch reduced to splinters. The two members on either side of it crashed through the door’s remnants with pistols drawn.

They had just registered the fact that the room was empty, and were turning toward the final team member, when a figure whirled toward them. The first man caught a glimpse of a dark beard before a rock-hard fist impacted on the bridge of his nose and plunged him into blackness. The second swung the figure’s way and tried to right his weapon. Before he could fire it, though, something tore it from his hand and slammed him backward into the wall. His breath fled him in a rush that left him no air to scream with when the final blow smashed into his face.

McCracken watched the final man slump down the wall and backed out into the corridor. One of his own private security provisions in hotels like this was to insist on two rooms across from each other. Then he would purposely leave a trail of phone calls and even room service deliveries that his contact at the hotel would route through the dummy room. It was like setting a trap, Blaine right across the hall in case anyone took the bait. Better to have your enemies reveal themselves than remain obscured, had always been his thinking. And this time, once again, it had paid off.

Killing the assailants would have been excessive, unnecessary. Disabling them, albeit violently, was sufficient. McCracken stowed the unconscious frame of the third man, the one who had fired the round, inside the room before heading off.

He moved back into the corridor and stopped briefly at the fire alarm. The three men wouldn’t be alone. Pulling the alarm would provide him with a reasonable cushion of chaos to aid his flight. But it would also render the elevators inoperative, and that would narrow his options.

Blaine continued on down the corridor. Since it was the middle of the day, few of the rooms along it were occupied, and the explosion had gone largely unnoticed. A maid was screaming in Turkish from behind the cover of her cart. A scant number of people were milling about. McCracken slid past them all and reached the elevator bank. The up arrow on one flashed, the down arrow on another a second after.

Blaine rushed for the stairs.

“Team Two, what’s going on?” the German leader said into his lapel mike.

“Team One has been neutralized.”

“What? Say again, please.”

“Team One has been neutralized. We’re in the room. No sign of target. All members of Team One are down. We must have just missed the target back at the elevator.”

“Close from the top. All teams, please acknowledge. Close from the top!”

“Damn!” the leader muttered in exasperation, as the acknowledgments filled his ear.

What had gone wrong? The better question was what hadn’t? He had reached the lobby to find that Team Six was missing from their posts, equipment failure not to blame at all for their failure to report. Where were they? His first thought was that McCracken had somehow crossed them up and was down there. But then, with the Go signal given, he had heard the blast, then the confused shrieks that followed. McCracken had crossed them up, all right, in a different and equally effective way.

“Team Two, where are—”

“Jesus,” the leader heard in his earpiece, the voice recognized as that of one of the members of Team Two.

“What is—”

The staccato bursts of gunfire followed, then screams. Finally there was laughter, filling the microphone of one of his men before drifting off into a dying echo.

Chapter 19

The Twins were enjoying themselves. Eliminating the two men they had initially seen posted in the lobby had been as easy as brushing up against them. It looked totally innocent, including the moment they jammed the blades deep into the men’s backs. The blades were custom-fitted with detachable handles. Once pulled free and with the blade wedged deep, a simple hand across the back covered all trace of the wound. To anyone looking, the sight was that of a friend helping a drunken companion. The Twins had mastered this method to the point where they could even make it seem as if the corpse were walking.

They deposited the bodies in the men’s room down an empty corridor; left them on the toilets with their pants down to discourage anyone from checking. Then they bolted back out toward the lobby. By this point, an agitated man with a crew cut was nervously scanning the lobby. The leader, they guessed, and they were moving toward him when one of the Twins noticed him cock his head downward and speak into his lapel. Whatever the rest of his men were here for was well under way. They could take care of this man later. Right now they had to reach McCracken. They walked casually to the elevator and boarded it.

They emerged on McCracken’s floor seconds before two more members of the group led by the man with the crew cut appeared. By the time this pair turned, it was much too late. Without a word of coordination, each of the Twins chose a target and blasted away at it, keeping the bullets going well after the killshots. When it was over, they swung down opposite sides of the hallway firing at anything that moved. The lucky guests made it back into their rooms. The unlucky ones ended up sprawled on the hallway carpet, life pouring from them.

They exchanged glances when they reached McCracken’s room, not at all surprised by what they saw. One of the Twins pushed the door open and saw the unconscious frames of three more well-dressed men resting against the wall. The Twins entered the room and cut their throats as they lay there.

Back in the corridor, they broke off in opposite directions. What little the element of surprise might have done for them was gone; the presence of the other party had seen to that. Their primary objective at this point was to locate McCracken before he could leave the building. One of the Twins headed left down the hall, the other right. They would descend on opposite sides of the building, certain that McCracken would be somewhere beneath one of them. Not exactly the way they had planned things, but close enough. And, of course, there was also the possibility that the team, now seven members smaller, might find McCracken for them.

Save time that way. Maybe even allow them to complete the kill together.

McCracken bolted down the stairwell from the seventh floor to the fifth, burst through the doors, and headed toward another exit sign. Since he had no idea of the enemy’s number or position, the first order of business was to confuse them. His escape route through the hotel had to leave them thinking he was still inside, even that they might be closing in. It took longer but was infinitely more effective.

The one thing the hotel assistant manager had been unable to provide for him yet was a gun, so he had stripped a submachine gun from one of the men he had downed. Not his favorite weapon, under the circumstances. He’d much prefer a pistol, something he could conceal easily by his side. With no jacket to conceal the submachine gun, if he had to enter the lobby all eyes would be drawn to him.

By now, hotel officials would be converging on the site of the apparent explosion upstairs. It would be up to the assistant manager to square things once the investigation deepened. McCracken entered a second stairwell cautiously and began to thunder down the remaining floors.

His plan at this point was to bypass the lobby altogether. With any luck at all, these stairs would lead to the shopping and entertainment level contained beneath it. A garage was even possible, though his concern for Melissa’s state of mind had distracted him from making a thorough reconnaissance of the Büyük Efes.

McCracken was swinging over the railing to the staircase leading down from the lobby level when he heard the heavy footsteps charging upward. A single voice spoke rapidly, stopped, and then spoke again. Whoever was approaching must have had a microphone pinned to his lapel, just as the men he had dropped in the room above had. And the language, the language was …

German!

But who were these men? And what had brought them to Izmir on Blaine’s trail?

The man’s shape came within reach. He had his finger on the trigger of a submachine gun and managed to squeeze it just as McCracken pushed off the railing and threw his legs up into the barrel. The bullets stitched a ricocheting barrage against the concrete. The noise stung Blaine’s ears. He grabbed the German’s head and the man responded by butting him just over the eyebrows.

Stars exploded in front of McCracken’s face. The German had lost his grip on the submachine gun and flailed to get it back. That gave Blaine the time he needed to ram the palm heel of his right hand hard into the German’s solar plexus. The man’s mouth dropped to gasp silently for air. His eyes bulged and McCracken slammed him across the side of the head with both fists interlocked. His head whiplashed against the wall, face seeming to meld into it as he slid down hugging the asphalt. McCracken grabbed his weapon as well and continued on.

“I’m heading back up for the lobby now.”

“Go back down!” the German leader ordered one of the members of Team Four.

“I did not hear that. I—”

The leader next heard the thud of impact, followed by a brief burst of gunfire. More thuds followed and then the echoing of escaping footsteps.

“Who is left? Do you hear me, who is left?”

Only four men reported in. He had lost a dozen, dammit, a dozen of the best the movement could provide. But not just to McCracken; that much was clear. Another force was at work here — one equally deadly, if not more so.

“All teams,” the leader started, “converge on the lobby. Repeat, converge on the lobby. The target is coming this way.”

Though several floors apart and on different sides of the hotel, the Twins’ heads snapped up at the sound of gunfire in the exact same instant. It took only an instant more for them to pin down its origin. One was three floors away, the other four. Along the way each had been slowed by the necessary removal of another of the amateurish force. They hadn’t used their guns this time, for fear of confusing the other and perhaps defeating their own purpose. Hands were more than sufficient, a neck broken in one case, a nose bone driven through the brain in another.

Still, the Twins felt the unfamiliar pangs of anxiety. The distance between either of them and McCracken was considerable. He could conceivably be out of the building before they closed the distance all the way. Separated by the length of several floors, the Twins smiled simultaneously. They had forgotten briefly that the remainder of the depleted force would have heard the gunfire, just as they had. Not that these men had any chance against McCracken, but they could slow him down — and that was all the Twins needed.

They rushed on.

McCracken took the stairwell to its absolute bottom, two levels below the lobby, and tried the door. It was locked. He hadn’t anticipated this, knowing it reduced his enemy’s options as well as his own. He had no choice but to retrace his steps and exit one floor up at the lower lobby. But his unfamiliarity with that level made it a poor choice under the circumstances. The lobby was a much better one specifically, because he knew the layout and could thus cut the fastest path possible through it. All his options were fraught with this risk. The trick was to choose the least of all evils and support himself with the forty-five shots remaining in the pair of submachine guns slung from either shoulder if necessary.

McCracken retraced his steps up the first flight and then started up the second leading to the lobby. He had the exit door in sight when a large figure lunged before him from the next staircase up, aiming a strange-looking square pistol Blaine’s way. Blaine managed to get a hand on the bigger man’s wrist and force it upward. A muffled spit rang out. The pistol’s barrel seemed to cough.

Tranquilizers! Blaine realized.

The bigger man slammed him against the wall, still trying to bring his weapon down. McCracken smacked a knee into his groin. The big man fought the pain off and with brute strength began to succeed in angling the tip of his barrel back in Blaine’s direction.

The force of the two men confronting each other resulted in a crunching pirouette, as they spun and slammed each other into the walls, which seemed almost ready to give. One of McCracken’s submachine guns rattled to the floor when he tried to grasp it. The other dangled out of reach.

Suddenly Blaine heard the heavy rattle of footsteps, followed by a few words exchanged in German. Stationary against the big man for an instant, he was able to see another pair of men crouched in combat position on different steps of the staircase that wound toward the floor above the lobby.

“Halt!” one yelled, showing his machine gun just ahead of the other.

Before he had opportunity to use it, a barrage of automatic fire from above tore into both him and the man just above him on the steps. The two Germans crumpled down the stairs, while the giant tottered in utter confusion between McCracken and the staircase. He had taken an uncertain step forward when his huge body was pummeled by an unceasing cascade of bullets — two guns’ worth, judging by the sound and angle. Somehow Blaine managed to keep his feet through the barrage, and the big man’s frame provided enough cover for him to lunge for the door leading out of the stairwell.

The bullets of the new pair of killers traced him all the way through, and Blaine burst onto a short hallway that led to the center of the main lobby.

“Come in! Anyone respond!”

When no response came, the German leader knew the last burst of bullets he’d heard had wiped out the rest of his team. He alone was left to deal with McCracken, if the force that had killed his men hadn’t killed McCracken as well.

He couldn’t let that happen. There was too much at stake.

A fresh burst of gunfire reached his naked ear, followed by screams. The lobby seemed to still all at once.

He saw the only option he had left now and bolted for the lavish front desk across the lobby.

Blaine reached the lobby to find people starting to flood out in all directions, scattered by the sounds of gunfire. He let himself be swallowed by part of the mass and took cover within it.

The sound of terrified screams preceded the all-too-familiar clacking of automatic fire by barely a second. McCracken swung to see a wall of people behind him collapsing.

Innocent people! These animals were killing innocent people, goddammit!

Enraged by that reality, McCracken began shoving the panicked throngs around him aside, searching for a space in the chaos through which to fire the submachine gun still slung on his shoulder. He found a small gap and snapped off a single rapid burst through it toward a pair of figures that had at last emerged. The broad, curly-haired man took a lobby table over with him for cover, while the broad, curly-haired man—

Wait! They were twins!

Their firing resumed without any regard for the innocent bystanders between them and McCracken. Blaine pressed his trigger again.

Click.

The clip was exhausted. His only chance now was to flee. But he held fast to the Ingram to keep the twins guessing.

Blaine joined the surge of chaos in the main exit’s direction, made all the worse by the arrival minutes before of three bus loads of tour patrons. He ducked low to remove himself from sight, but, again, the twin killers simply fired at anything that moved in an attempt to flush him out.

The crowd flooding from the lobby was jammed up at the doors, the wall of panicked desperation stationary and rigid. There was nowhere to go.

Suddenly a new surge of bullets erupted from the other side of the lobby, fired in the direction of the twins. Blaine caught a glimpse of a man with a crew cut ducking back behind the cover of the front desk to avoid the twins’ return fire. Just as fast, the man bounced up again and opened fire with a fresh magazine, forcing the killers to scamper for cover of their own.

McCracken seized the opportunity to charge out of the hotel with the rest of the crowd, the rush absorbing him. On the sidewalk, though, he stopped. Inside, a man had saved his life. The man was a professional, just like the Germans who had tried to take Blaine with tranquilizers. He could be part of that team. He could have answers!

McCracken had to save him.

He swung his eyes desperately about the circular drive fronting the hotel, searching for something to make use of, something—

Blaine’s gaze locked on the lead tour bus in the procession of three. Its engine was still on, the driver having fled with the task of removing the luggage from the underneath compartment only half-completed. McCracken rushed to the open main door and up the steps and got the door closed before he had barely taken the driver’s seat. Then he shoved the big bus into gear and drove it straight forward.

The screeching of the engine almost drowned out the sound of the hotel’s glass front wall disintegrating upon impact. Glass was thrown everywhere as the bus roared right into the lobby, destroying everything in its path. The terrified bystanders managed to dive out of its way, as Blaine steered it for the front desk.

The twins’ bullets began pounding its frame just before the bus got there.

“Get in!” he screamed out the open driver’s vent. “If you want to live, get in!”

The man threw himself up over the counter and chanced a dash round the bus’s front, firing all the way. He lunged up the steps and Blaine jammed the bus into reverse, as the doors hissed closed again. Bullets turned them into spiderwebs of flying glass, and the man with the crew cut returned the fire with his pistol.

The bus’s tail end slammed through another section of the lobby’s wraparound glass, taking a hefty portion of a wall with it this time. Its front hadn’t made it all the way out when McCracken shifted into drive and tore off, turning the entire entryway into a ruined shell.

The windshield shattered under the force of the twins’ gunfire, which peppered the frame as the bus started away. Ducking low beneath the dashboard, Blaine heard a pair of thumps as at least two of its outside tires were shot out. But that wasn’t about to stop him from steering the bus straight onto the main road fronting the Büyük Efes.

“Who are they?” Blaine demanded of the man kneeling on the floor a yard away from him. “Who are you?”

“The man who’s going to tell you what’s going on,” the man said breathlessly in German-laced English. “The man who has the answers you need.”

Chapter 20

“I’m listening,” McCracken said, watching the man’s gun.

“Not here. Not yet. They’ll be coming.”

He bent the bus into a screeching turn and sped on.

“You’re part of the team that came for me in the hotel.”

The man nodded. “Its leader.”

“One of your men was carrying a tranquilizer pistol.”

“It was never our intention to kill you. We need you alive. We need your help.”

“You could have asked for it.”

“You wouldn’t have given it.”

“Why?”

“Because we are Nazis, Mr. McCracken.”

The car’s rear doors were yanked open simultaneously.

“Go!” one of the Twins screamed.

“After the bus!” the other added.

“Now!” they followed in unison. “That way!”

The driver sped off before Billy Griggs could catch his breath. He had seen the bus first crash through the hotel lobby and then screech away, but had thought the Twins were responsible, for who else would have—

“Take a right here!”

“Don’t slow down!”

“A left now!”

“I see it!”

The Twins were out of the car again before it had come to a complete halt, rushing forward as if the traffic around them didn’t exist. It moved in stops and starts. The snarl, they saw now, had been caused by the battered bus being abandoned by McCracken in the middle of the avenue. The Twins checked it cautiously, knowing this might be a ruse to get them to lower their guard. McCracken could be hiding or lurking anywhere, setting a trap, waiting to strike.

Just as they would have.

But he was long gone, and not alone, either. They hadn’t killed the German team’s leader when the chance was there and now McCracken had rescued him. That error seemed certain to compound their failure. The Twins looked at each other.

“Shit,” they said together.

“At the dig, those were your men I found dead inside the find!” Blaine realized. “What was left of them anyway.”

They had abandoned the bus nearly ten minutes earlier. The German was driving one of the four cars he had planted in all directions from the hotel, as an added and ultimately fortuitous precaution. McCracken sat in the passenger seat tensely.

“Not my men, Mr. McCracken. If they were my men, things would not have progressed to the unfortunate heights they did.”

“They killed the head of the dig team.”

“Their orders were to do nothing of the kind. And they never, under any circumstances, should have entered the chamber. They exceeded the parameters of their mission.”

“And what about your mission?”

“My orders were to stabilize the situation in Ephesus and, once your involvement was uncovered, help you in any way possible.” He looked McCracken’s way. “I’m afraid I arrived too late to be of any service to you.”

“The helicopter!”

“Yes.”

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Tessen. Hans Tessen. At least, that used to be my name.”

“Until you were resettled after the war. Who by? ODESSA? The Comrades Organization?”

“We should not dwell on the past with the present in the peril it is.”

“But you were a soldier.”

Tessen’s neck stiffened. “I am a soldier, Mr. McCracken, just as you are, and our enemy this time is a common one.”

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee back at the hotel?”

“They killed my men, disrupted my orderly plan to establish contact with you.”

“Orderly?” Blaine raised disbelievingly. “Your men blew up the door of the room they thought I was in.”

“To take you by surprise, to give them a chance to explain.”

“Hope they were going to do a better job than you are, Hans.”

“Someone else sent those twins, Mr. McCracken. That someone is your true enemy.”

Blaine thought of Billy Griggs and the battle that had spread onto the Golden Gate Bridge. “And just who is that?”

“I don’t know, but if the past is any indication …”

“That’s twice you’ve mentioned the past, Hans. Why don’t we start there?”

Tessen pulled at his collar as if to stretch it. Clearly things were not proceeding in the order he had planned. His eyes drifted to the rearview mirror again, as if expecting the twins to appear at any moment.

“The beginning,” he muttered.

“That would do just fine.”

“A Catholic boys’ school in France during World War II. I do not remember the name.”

“Get on with it.”

“Our division was assigned to ferret out the many Jews such places were known to be hiding,” he continued, his voice soft and almost mechanical. “Our commanding officer was named Erich Stimmel. He was a proud man who felt that such toilsome work was beneath him. If he could not exercise his abilities on the front, then—” Tessen took a deep breath. “We pulled our trucks through the school’s front gate. I remember the day well. It was raining, cold. I was shivering. The trucks stopped and we dispersed. The schoolboys were rounded up and placed in orderly lines, along with the teachers. The school’s headmaster, a priest, stood not far from Stimmel in the front.” Tessen’s voice became harder, colder. “Edelstein, Sherman, and Grouche….” He called them as if off a roll. Then his voice went flat again. “Those were the names of the boys we had come for. A local baker who delivered the school’s bread had informed. We had not come to investigate. We had come simply to punish.”

“Punish,” Blaine repeated.

“The school would be closed, the three boys taken away and shipped elsewhere.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me finish, please. The priest would not turn the boys over. When their names were called, they did not come forward. Stimmel was enraged. He insisted that three other boys would be shot in their place if the Jews did not step out.”

McCracken could see the bulge in his collar as Tessen swallowed hard.

“When they finally showed themselves, Stimmel had them shot. He lined them up against a brick wall and assigned six men to the firing squad. I didn’t think he would really do it, not until the very last when he said ‘Feuer!’ We had made our point. There was no reason to …”

“But you did.”

“Yes.” Tessen sighed. “First the boys, and then the priest. Only with him the firing squad was reduced to five. One still stood there but did not pull his trigger.” His eyes sharpened and peered toward Blaine. “Me, Mr. McCracken.”

“That wasn’t all,” Tessen continued. “Before the priest was shot, Stimmel let him speak.” The Nazi’s words seemed to be coming harder here, an undercurrent of fear rimming each and every syllable. “He placed a curse on us. He swore that he and the boys would be avenged for what we had done to them. He swore that his wrath would live beyond the grave, that we would pay horribly for the acts we had committed. Stimmel just smiled at him and gave the order to fire again. He died glaring at Stimmel. The colonel spit on his corpse and turned his back.”

“A curse …”

“None of us paid it any heed. Only those nearest the wall could hear the words clearly anyway. By the time the war ended in shame, we had forgotten, all of us.”

“But something made you remember, didn’t it?”

Tessen nodded, and the car wavered slightly out of control. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and pulled down a narrow side street. He parked in front of the closed storage bay of some sort of small factory or plant.

“Stimmel was the first,” he replied. “It was two years after the war had ended. He was living in Vienna, also under a new identity. They found what was left of him in a hotel room. He had been torn apart. The other five members of the firing squad were killed in similar fashion. I was the lone survivor, and I have tried to tell myself it was because I refused to aim my bullets as ordered. I have tried to tell myself that the powers that the priest’s curse unleashed spared me because they knew. But I always feared they would still come for me another time.”

“Because Stimmel and the members of his firing squad weren’t the only ones to get what they had coming to them, were they?”

Tessen nodded. “There were dozens of others, all with new identities chiseled for them by those in the party who wished to prepare the way for our rebirth. Some were protected, guarded. It didn’t matter. Nothing could stop whatever force was unleashed that rainy day by the priest. And now, now …”

“Now what?”

Tessen’s face had turned ashen. “It has started again.”

“What?”

“All over the world, vengeance is being dispensed in the same way it was in the years following the war. I have always feared as much,” Tessen said, terror underscoring his voice. “And in more recent days I have expected it.”

“Why?”

“The dig site that the Hazelhurst team uncovered. We were too late to stop them from opening the doorway. With a path reopened to this world, whatever fulfilled the priest’s original curse was able to return.”

Tessen turned and stared at Blaine. McCracken’s eyes returned the look skeptically without wavering.

“Refusing to believe was common among my fellows all those years ago, Mr. McCracken. I suppose some of them refused right up until the curse reached them. You see, the stories you have heard about Hitler’s obsession with the supernatural are underrated. I have spoken with members of the teams that he dispatched all over the world. One of them spent the last eighteen months of the war searching for the entrance to hell. By the time I met him, a month before he died, he was a raving drunk. But he claimed they found it in the end, when it was too late to mount an effort to explore and excavate it properly.”

“Oh, they explored it all right,” Blaine muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. What else did this man say?”

“They hid all traces of their work and made a detailed map of how to find the site, a copy of which led both you and Hazelhurst to it. But the damage had already been done. The original discoverers had opened the same doorway Hazelhurst did, Mr. McCracken, and something emerged from it to extract the justice the priest had called for in his curse.” The Nazi took a deep breath. “The fact that it’s happening again proves the curse was real. We are talking about doorways here, invitations. As soon as Hazelhurst’s team reopened the same doorway, the killings began again, because whatever had laid dormant for all these years was free to return to this world. Perhaps it was summoned to do another’s bidding. Perhaps it is merely fulfilling its original mandate. But it is back.” Tessen paused to search Blaine’s emotionless eyes. “You must believe me. You must!”

“You’re close to the truth, Tessen, closer than you can possibly know.”

The Nazi’s lips quivered with his fear. His whole face paled and began twitching. “You went down there,” he realized. “You saw!”

“I saw, all right, but not monsters or demons — a whole cache of Nazi war machine remnants, stored in a secret chamber for the next Reich to make use of.”

“No, it can’t—”

“And some of the remnants were missing, maybe hundreds of crates worth….” Blaine detailed what he and Melissa had uncovered. Tessen’s eyes bulged when he reached the part about finding the remains of the three Jews.

“So,” Blaine concluded. “Let’s say whatever was in those missing crates allowed the Jews to exact revenge on Stimmel and dozens of others like him. Let’s say when their work was done, they decided to destroy the crates and seal the chamber forever. Only someone killed them before they could finish the job, someone who knew about another passageway.”

Tessen looked utterly befuddled. “Then this person …”

“Very likely had something to do with the removal of the rest of the crates in the much more recent past.”

“Who? Who?”

Blaine looked the old Nazi in the eyes. “Anyone with a desire to see this world rid of scum. Take your pick.”

Tessen stiffened. McCracken didn’t give him a chance to respond.

“Just tell me how you knew I was here, how you knew I was at the site.”

“I didn’t, not at first. I was reached when word filtered out of Turkey that one of Hazelhurst’s teams had at last unearthed what many of us had lived in fear of since the end of the war. If the doorway was opened again, then perhaps none of us would be safe. Perhaps the forces summoned by the original curse would return to finish the job they started forty-five years ago. We dispatched a team to seal the newly found entrance. That was supposed to be the team’s only mission, I swear it! Word that they had not reported in reached us at the same time we learned of your presence in Izmir. The reason for it seemed obvious.”

“The entrance is sealed again now.”

“I saw. Thanks to you and the woman.”

“Jesus,” Blaine muttered, chilled suddenly. “Turn this car around!”

“But—”

McCracken grabbed the old Nazi’s arm. “Listen to me, Tessen. Turn this car around. Back toward Bahribaba. The Archaeological Museum there.”

“I must—”

“Do it!”

Chapter 21

Melissa did her best to deflect questions about her father at the Archaeological Museum in Bahribaba, the name given to Izmir’s town center. Broaching the subject at all could only complicate matters further and cause her more hurt, so she simply smiled at the staff’s pleasantries while tearing herself up inside. Her father was still alive, as far as the museum was concerned. He was well known here, one of the facility’s largest benefactors. Favors were owed, and it was time to call at least one of them in.

She showed the tattered book to some of the research assistants, who frowned at the state of its decomposition.

“We can treat the ink to make it readable again,” one explained. “But the problem lies with the condition of the paper. It’s so brittle and parched, chances are the writing won’t fluoresce even when treated.”

“On the other hand,” another said, “we could have a go at this with the electron microscope. Take about a week if—”

“No,” Melissa said abruptly. “Today. It has to be today.”

The two men looked at each other and shrugged.

“Let’s have a go with the pages, then,” the first said.

“Process takes about an hour,” the second added.

And just that much later, Melissa found herself in a small closetlike cubicle with a single counter and chair. She was wearing special glasses that would allow her to see once the cubicle’s black light was turned on. The pages of the book had been treated with a fluid that interacted with what remained of the ink and its lingering impressions to make the words readable again.

“We’ll be right outside if you need anything,” one of the research assistants offered.

“Thank you.”

The door closed and Melissa locked it before sliding her chair beneath the counter and activating the black light attached to a swinging arm above her. She placed a pad of paper just to her right, so she could make notes on whatever she was able to decipher. Then she opened the book. There, on the inside cover page, the magic of technology revealed a name in bold, blue-tinted writing:

Gunthar Brandt.

Beneath the name was what must have been his home address. The street was indecipherable, but the hometown had fluoresced clearly: Arnsberg, Germany.

She slid the first page over so it was in direct line with the black light and began to read. The first six pages of Gunthar Brandt’s notebook yielded a bit of inconsequential information. The handwriting resembled chicken scratches, and the German dialect used was filled with slang. It seemed to Melissa that this was actually some sort of diary or journal, penned by someone of average intelligence, at best.

Worse yet, this journal seemed to be a continuation of another, so it picked up in the middle: April 1944; the precise date was indistinguishable. It opened with complaints about the weather and the horrible food. Brandt wrote that he spent many nights crying. But his company was headed for the valley of Altaloon in the Austrian plains, where they had been chosen to fight a monumental battle. The mood in the camp was somber. Rumors of the war already being lost were running rampant. Desertion rates were increasing. The diehards, the most strident, feared that another company would be chosen for the battle of Altaloon.

To gauge that much, Melissa had to read between the lines and piece together fragments of sentences. The feeling in the pages remained, even if the words were gone. She had read war journals before. Her stomach panged with disappointment, for, unfortunately, this seemed no different from any of them. Perhaps it had been discarded within the secret chamber on purpose and had nothing at all to do with the mysterious missing crates. Still, she read on, progress slowed by the black light’s inability to make a dramatic enough impact upon the book’s poor state of preservation.

The further she got into the diary, the worse the deterioration became. The black light was able to reveal less and less with each flip of the page. She began skimming what little she could decipher, eager to find anything that might help her decipher the secret of the underground cache at Ephesus.

More than halfway in, a pair of words at the top of the page capitalized in bold print like a tide grabbed her attention:

Melissa leaned closer to the journal and began to read. The early pages in this section were in decent condition, and she found her eyes glued to them. What she couldn’t decipher, her mind filled in for her, and it read like a novel. Brandt’s prose was clumsy and his use of German slang continued to make some of it incomprehensible. But he was able to relate his own fears and anxieties brilliantly. His description of their camp, of the fervor and agitation in the final hours leading up to the battle, were mesmerizing. She came to the bottom of a page and stopped, men reread a line that was actually whole to make sure she had gotten it right:

We are marching to our deaths. Only a hundred and fifty in number, we must confront a force of two thousand. The logistics of the valley will help, but for how long? We are but an infantry unit. We have no artillery. Air support is questionable. We are lost. The war is lost….

Melissa’s hands were trembling when she shifted to turn the page. The condition of the next several pages frustrated her anew. It was like coming to the end of a mystery and finding the pages missing. She grasped what she could, which wasn’t a whole lot.

The company had reached Altaloon and taken up positions looking down into the valley. Several deserters were shot. Men were crying, praying. Some of these were shot as well. The writer made his own final peace.

The Allied troops entered the valley. The writer could barely watch. Not only were they formidable in number, but they were accompanied by a number of tanks and armored personnel carriers. The Germans were going to be cut to shreds.

Two thousand against even less than a hundred and fifty now….

Brandt repeated that phrase again and again. What was the purpose of this? Brandt wanted to know. Why was his company being sacrificed? Resigned to his own death, Brandt steadied his gun in trembling hands and waited for the order to fire.

As Melissa had feared, here in these final pages the writing became even more undecipherable. She could grasp his words only in fitful stops and starts.

The order to fire was delayed.

The enemy regiment entered the valley in a continuous stream, walking like men who knew their war was won. Suddenly an order was passed along the German lines. The words faded again here, but apparently Brandt’s company was being ordered to put something on.

Melissa turned the page.

Out of nowhere … the sound … an airplane. I thought … theirs and … my pain would … quickly. The plane … low. I looked … Ours? Ours? …

The next four pages contained nothing but fragments of words and phrases. All her attempts to fill in context failed. Melissa felt the frustration gnaw at her. To have read this far only to—

Wait, the last pages of Gunthar Brandt’s diary grew nearly legible again. Melissa made out the word massacre and read on.

Her mouth dropped, eyes gaping. She read the legible paragraphs over a second and then a third time. She drifted back in her chair, certain she had it wrong.

She had to be reading this wrong! It was incredible, impossible!

Melissa found herself just staring at the pages now, going over what she had already read three times. She had to be missing something, getting the context wrong because so much was indecipherable. Had to, because this couldn’t be!

After a large gap of lost pages, Gunthar Brandt wrote of the order to fire finally being given. Something important must have been lost, because he kept referring to the “chaos below” in the valley of Altaloon. But what did that mean? More lost space was followed by descriptions of bodies falling without offering resistance, hopelessly outgunned and overmatched, bodies falling everywhere.

The massacre …

But the members of Brandt’s company weren’t the victims; they were the victors! A hundred and fifty against a regiment of two thousand …

And the hundred and fifty had prevailed.

The knock on the room’s door felt like a kick in the stomach to Melissa.

“Miss Hazelhurst,” a voice called from beyond the door, “are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No, no. I’m just finishing up.”

Melissa wasn’t reading anymore. The final page in the journal had been open on the counter before her for ten minutes now. The black light had saved its best magic for last. This final entry must have been made the day after the massacre, or perhaps even longer afterward. She was trying to understand the final words, at the very least believe what could not be.

Two thousand against a hundred and fifty at most … The hundred and fifty had dominated, had slayed them like it was target practice.

Melissa continued to reread the final entry.

… Not a single man left that valley alive. Only four of my comrades fell in the battle and all these, it was believed, to our own fire. A massacre … It had been so enjoyable, so fulfilling, that none of us realized then what had made it possible. But I realize now. The White Death … I didn’t care then. I care now. This must be the last entry in my journal. What I had hoped could be shared with the world must never be shared with anyone. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. I am terrified….

That was as far as she could read. At the bottom of the last page, though, was an unreadable line that looked as though it was the name “Gunthar Brandt” again. His rank and company followed in readable form on the next lines. Here was an eyewitness to what had happened at Altaloon, and Melissa felt certain that event was directly related to the contents of the mysterious crates.

The White Death …

What was it? Might Brandt still be alive, and if so, could he tell her?

McCracken would find him. McCracken would know how.

Melissa gathered up all the notes containing her creative translation of the text and moved for the door.

The Büyük Efes Hotel was still buzzing with activity when Melissa returned at three o’clock. She didn’t notice the congestion of official vehicles and the terrible damage done to the hotel’s front until she was less than a block away. She quickened her pace, heart racing. She was fearing the worst, expecting it. The main entrance had been closed, two sets of side doors replacing it. Melissa cautiously slid into the lobby past Turkish police officers.

The level of destruction shocked her. There was still blood all over the floor and the rugs. Glass and debris were being swept up. Furniture and decorations lay in pieces. The windowed walls had been reduced to splinters, and even now boards were being nailed over where glass had been only a few hours before.

Melissa felt a hand grasp her at the elbow.

“I did not mean to startle you,” the assistant manager said.

“What hap—”

“Please,” he interrupted. “Walk with me. We must make this fast.”

“McCracken.”

“He escaped. Plenty of others did not.”

“How many?”

“Dozens. I don’t even know myself. I don’t want to know.”

Melissa looked at the bloodstains again, the randomness of them. Many bodies had fallen, by all indications slain indiscriminately.

“I have your passport and the money left in your deposit box,” the assistant manager said, producing a manila envelope from his pocket. “I’m sorry I can’t do more.”

Melissa’s legs suddenly felt very heavy.

“Keep walking. Please.”

It was hard, but she managed.

“McCracken knew where you were going, yes?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then, you must return there. That is where he will look for you.”

“No,” she said, thoughts forming with her words. “Whoever did this might know that. They’d be waiting.”

The assistant manager nodded in agreement. The nod gave way to a shrug.

“You must leave now. You are not safe here.”

His voice was laced with dismay and disgust. He wanted her out of the hotel. Clearly he blamed her and McCracken for what had happened here today and, by connection, himself for assisting them.

“I will escort you to the service entrance,” the assistant manager was saying.

All Melissa could do was nod, cold sweat beginning to soak into her clothes. Never had she felt more alone, more lost.

But she wasn’t lost. There was a direction to go in, a beacon to follow.

Unraveling the mysteries of the journal, of the White Death, would go a long way toward unraveling the mysteries of the missing crates. If Gunthar Brandt was still alive, she would find him. The resources and friends of her father would be utilized. More favors would be called in.

Once she reached Germany.

“They’re all assembled, sir,” Arnold Rothstein’s assistant informed him.

Rothstein maintained a residence in Herzliyya, a posh suburb of Tel Aviv, but for security reasons this meeting had been set up in a suite at the Tel Aviv Hilton. His assistant ushered him in through the service entrance and up to the eighth floor by private elevator. It hadn’t been easy coming up with the men he needed for this mission; in fact, it had proven almost impossible on such short notice. Many favors had had to be called in, even more to keep people from asking questions. It was only last night that Rothstein had approved all the dossiers submitted to him.

Recalling their contents sent a chill through him. In his years of fighting for Israel, he had come to know men whose ruthlessness and capacity for violence was unmatched. But these ten men represented another level. The newer generations had proven even more militant and less yielding than the older ones, a process Rothstein felt certain would continue. After all, while the men waiting for him in the suite had grown up in the shadow of the Six Day War, the next would grow up with the memories of gas masks donned from fear of Scud missiles. Israeli history did not move in traditional cycles. It simply ascended on a constant diagonal, each era building upon the one that preceded it.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Arnold Rothstein said after entering the living-room portion of the suite and taking a seat.

The ten faces barely acknowledged him. If anyone was surprised that it was Rothstein who had summoned them, he didn’t show it. All of them simply kept to their chairs as caged predators do to their bars.

The group, meanwhile, was anything but homogeneous. Several of those gathered were among the largest, most powerful men Rothstein had ever encountered. Several others were quite small and might have even appeared frail at first glance. What held them together had nothing to do with appearances.

It was the contents of their dossiers.

The ten individuals gathered before him were the most efficient killers Israel had to offer. Their skills were expertly refined and regularly practiced, first with the deadly and secretive Sayaret, and then later on specially selected missions that routinely went unlogged.

“Allow me to get right to the point,” the old man continued. “You have been chosen for a mission of grave importance to the state of Israel and beyond.”

“There is no beyond,” one of them said.

“There is now,” Rothstein said, and began to explain.