by David Berko
By some dark magic a banner curled into a half circle underneath the pyramid. It was a blank parchment needing a script.
Heather held up a finger with a composed expression on her face. Her eyes were closed.
“Novus ordo seclorum,” she spoke confidently.
“The dollar bill,” Christophe murmured to a confused Damion. The scientist knew about the Latin phrase and its meaning; many people did, but few took its message seriously until the bill went out of print.
Fresh calligraphy wrote itself onto the pyramid’s streamer as Heather verbalized the passphrase. The all-seeing eye then darkened as it transmuted back into a lifeless relic.
Everything seemed to go back to normal like nothing happened.
Josh cleared his throat. “Was there something else?”
Heather stood her ground, not moving an inch. Her patience received its reward after all. Three clicks echoed from an underground subfloor. A low rumble sounded like the beginning to an earthquake. The ground shifted, causing anyone not already in a crouch to totter.
The earth-moving event revealed to the group that one, the furniture was bolted to the floor. Second, Scorpion had an affinity for elaborate hidden passageways.
When the conference room’s floor sea-sawed to a forty-five degree angle. All five bodies slid down on their backsides a good ways.
The team glided with ease along a pitched, polished cement floor. The slope navigated the travellers far beneath the Ozarks installation. Before anyone had the chance to get a friction burn the downgrade gently trimmed into a flat plane.
Josh was the quickest one to get vertical. His innate impulses triggered him into helping Esmeralda up off her back. This chivalry unfortunately stimulated an altogether unmutual feeling between the pair. The CoverGirl model looked ready to pick up where she had left off in Josh’s flying car with her unwanted sexual advances. Josh simply wished to be a gentleman. Anything different would have been less than how he knew to act.
While the Viper agent brought his mother to her feet Damion operated on his own agenda. Heather. In his twitterpated bewitched state he only thought about making a moment with her; even if they got recaptured. What did he care? Besides, the Free Republic of North America needed him bad enough they wouldn’t be stymied by one strike at a rescue.
Damion’s attention somehow alternated from Heather’s beauty towards the live images of Josh bringing his mom to her feet. He unmistakably perceived in that example how the Viper agent separated duty from feelings. After witnessing that snapshot of a professional in action Damion decided that this guy wouldn’t let the group down. Josh really would be their rescuer.
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Chapter 14
“How else did you think it would end?”
….Seth’s own fateful words before the two vehicles made impact.
That pretty much was his last memory before his forehead cracked against the steering wheel. The natural gas explosion that tore through the building shortly after the limo penetrated it actually lifted the long vehicle off the floor two feet before it landed on its never-flat tires somewhere in what used to be the kitchen of an eatery.
Moments later Seth popped one bloody eyelid open. Surprisingly the A-pillars remained intact. The windshield however spiderwebbed because a steel floor joist had fallen and stabbed right through it. Seth shuddered. He turned his hurting neck to the left to see how close he had come to impalement.
A barbecued, twisted beam spanned past the driver’s compartment down the middle section of the stretch limo and out the back. It hung, suspended in air...held in place by the windshield and rear window.
Too close.
Everywhere he could see, from his trapped point of view in the badly damaged state vehicle, there were fires.
Seth wondered if where he now sat was his mind’s illusion of the past events which happened after he lost consciousness. The flames were very real though. The acute temperature in the car’s interior made his skin tingle. Seth sweated profusely. The only benefit he could see to being pinned down inside a sweat box was it protected his lungs from the choking acrid smoke on the outside.
He definitely hadn’t woken up in the literal place called Hell. But it indeed was another kind of hell altogether.
The first-responders were getting closer.
Through the thick bullet-proof vehicle Seth laid in he could start to hear shrill sirens honing in on ground zero of the blast. He didn’t have long until firemen would hose down the place. More worrisome than the fire being put out though was the police. They would be there to apprehend the terrorist who dared crash the interior minister’s limo through a building. With her in it.
He had to escape once more.
The journey that took him through the U-bahn tunnels up until the fiery present wouldn’t end in cuffs. Seth may have been banged up, broken, left for dead. But the mission, no matter how wrong it had gone, could be redeemed still.
Seth could put a check in the box for their plot to masquerade as Spanish terrorists on a vendetta against the German government. What he didn’t know was whether or not the crash had killed German interior minister Sofia Keller. She no longer pointed a gun at him, the car wreck accomplished that much.
Seth knew if Keller hadn’t died already that he would have to finish her. The authorities examining the scene with the mindset that this was the work of terrorists would immediately change their professional opinion on what kind of investigation it’d become if Keller was found alive still.
Almost a full NBA shot clock had ticked down to zero since Seth regained consciousness. In those twenty-four thousand milliseconds he learned how hot the inside of a vehicle could get after a natural gas explosion and the ensuing burnoff fires, his shoulders hadn’t lost their head, and...Seth struggled mightily to tilt forward so his spine could rotate, enabling the neck to pivot...Sofia Keller hadn’t been seat-belted in.
Seth stared at the small woman who looked to be in worse form than the body of her own limo.
Yet, she lived.
The Mossad agent knew what dead people looked like. Working for years as a mobile asset for Israel with the job functions of judge, jury, executioner? He learned to walk the earth more as a grim reaper than an equitable member of the land of the living.
All his targets had their judgement day coming to them. Sofia Keller might as well have been dead already.
--
Tonight she had risked it all. Two years of being in the junior cadet program with only one more season left until graduation. The two deserving medals for being a quick study and consistent performer on the sim circuit would be stripped from her shoulders and given to another.
Esther trudged along between two mercenaries on a premeditated lackadaisical walk of shame to the brig. Nearly halfway there she tugged hard, intent on loosening her right wrist from one of the guard’s vice grips. Sadly she earned a hard elbow in the ribs for her impotence.
The detainee heaved to her left side and gasped.
Ensuing the blow, her words, “I demand to see my mother!” were forced out from lungs burning for oxygen.
The emotions pity and sympathy which Esther hoped to find in an understanding and perhaps irate mom certainly wouldn’t be exhibited by her captors. They shook her out like a wrinkled piece of clothing in a straightjacket hold. Any wiggle room from before got ironed out.
Esther’s body shuddered into submission. Her arms were held in place, crisscrossed close to her chest. The junior cadet’s breathing became progressively irregular and shallow due to the panic and stress of the untenable mediation.
Roll call for junior cadets didn’t happen for another few hours. Not before the sun came up anyways. Yet all of Esther’s peers were standing in attention against either side of the corridor which led to the dungeon of Masada.
Mandatory humiliation. Malach Kemper without question had ordered them to assemble.
The whole ordeal seemed eerily controlled. Orchestrated. It was as if the whole event was planned to b
reak her before she even broke the rules to slip top secret information to Azriel.
How could Malach Kemper, director of the Kidon division at Mossad, have known her business before it even took place?
Spies spying on spies. That’s what this was about. Nothing was against it in the rulebook because in truth the agency had a built-in provision which allowed for internal surveillance based on probable cause.
When the association of Malach Kemper to the night’s outcome had been inseparably linked in her collective thoughts, Esther’s brainwork engaged on the antagonistic faces of the cadets who were woken from their sleep to see her trial.
The only empathy she got was from her roommate whose round eyes, drooping chin and raised forehead skin displayed a certain numbness upon seeing Esther betwixt men in full gear. Even Esther’s not-so-secret admirer failed to show any displeasure at the proceedings.
Finally there her mom was. Not necessarily late to the party, but strangely on the wrong end of things. Esther could metaphorically see herself moving through a rather orderly Mossad mob to the firing squad down the line.
Why?....Stacy?....Have I been living a lie just like Azriel?
The nightmare became more real than the time she spent awake.
The cylindrical instrument she had seen Stacy use to incapacitate Azriel only a short while ago now came out to play with her life. Esther’s memories flashed before her eyes the nanosecond her surrogate mother’s painted nail depressed the button of no return.
To be continued