Cade stared at her intently, trying to imagine life without her. As he looked his eyes glazed over, to a point where he almost missed it.
He looked again. Her lips were forming words.
He leant in further, glass shards digging into his chest and causing multiple minor wounds to bleed on his chest and spread across his shirt.
“I’m here, speak to me.”
She moved her lips, but there was no obvious sound.
He placed his ear up to her mouth.
“The…” she hissed, her lungs barely able to force enough air over her tongue to form the words.
“The w…”
“OK, the water? Yes, we will go to the beach again, I promise.”
“The w…” It was evident that even this action was exhausting her.
She was unable to move so instead directed Cade with her eyes, her beautiful sea-green eyes.
He looked but could see nothing. Think, man, for the love of God think. What is she trying to tell you?
“A wave…?”
Again, her eyes flickered and indicated to her arm.
He looked, studying every minute part.
He looked deep into her eyes, eyes that showed a weakness now, the last few moments of life ebbing away like the very wave she kept referring to.
“OK, this wave, it’s important, yes?”
She closed her eyes, deliberately, then opened them.
“That’s a yes?”
She did it again.
“Do it twice for no.”
She complied. They now had a simple, basic code. It was a start.
All he had to do now was ask the right questions. Surely, it wasn’t that difficult, after all, he’d made a career out of it.
“Right, the wave, it’s important?”
She blinked once.
“Something to do with your arm?”
Again an affirmative.
“A wave, on your arm?” It seemed ludicrous, but it followed, so he went with his base instinct, adding inflection to the word arm.
She blinked one long, purposeful blink.
“A drawing?”
One blink.
“A tattoo?”
A series of positive blinks followed. This was important.
His phone rang.
“JD, I’m busy…”
“Listen, medics are en route, expect some noise in the skies John boy, but hear me when I say I think you need to leave and leave now. Trust my instinct. Go!”
“But John…”
“Just go. She’s in the lap of the gods now Jack and I think you have to do the right thing for her and for yourself, you need somehow to disconnect from her and, if your gut feeling is right, from what she may be connected to. This is history coming back to haunt you, us, I have a bad feeling, my boy. It’s them, Jack. Now either go or so help me I’ll drive there myself and bloody drag you away.”
Cade pressed the red button on his cell phone. Even as the call ended, he knew Daniel was right.
He looked back at Elena one last time. It would be the cruellest departure.
Something made him stop, to take another precious moment.
“Is the tattoo linked to who did this to you?”
Yes.
“Were they in the Wraith, the Rolls Royce?”
Yes.
“The red Golf?”
Again, yes.
“You are going to pull through this, just try to breathe and rest. I will find them, somehow, but I need a start. God, I wish you had told me more.”
He looked back at her, her eyes were now closed.
He shook her, contradicting every rule in his damned training.
She came too, with a start. Her eyes now wide open. Alert again, more so than before.
“Somehow give me a clue beyond the tattoo El, try, please. For me, for your family, for whoever it is you care about.”
This time her expressive eyes indicated left as once more she battled to maintain consciousness.
“The case.”
He looked into the shattered remnants of the sports car. Handbooks, tissues, a drinks bottle, makeup, a cell phone, sections of plastic and fabric; dark, twisted pieces of bodywork all combined to form a catastrophic and confusing mess and somehow she wanted him to look beyond it and find what it was she was trying to tell him.
He hunted with his eyes. It was pointless. He moved further into the cockpit, pressing down on her already torn body, causing her to exhale what was left of her oxygen, to moan gently and begin to cry, but he knew he needed to continue.
His fingertips searched here and there and back again until they stopped on a small case that had been jammed under the passenger seat.
It was the case that she had had with her from the first moment she had arrived at Spindrift – in what seemed like months ago.
He wrapped his fingers around the strap and started to pull, but it was stuck fast, wrapping its own defiant tentacles around the wreckage, refusing to yield.
He turned gently to her and looked into her eyes.
“Is it the case?”
She whispered, “Yes…take it.” She exhaled, “Go.”
“I need to move your left leg, I’m so sorry…”
“Do it, Jack, go.”
Despite the fact that she was clinging to life, her sense of urgency had a profound effect upon him, so he grabbed the strap and pulled, at the same time pushing her hideously bruised leg to one side.
She screamed and somehow used the energy to shout out two words.
“His eyes!”
It was lost on Cade for now, but it would one day drift out of his subconscious and act as a guide, steering him along the path to retribution.
He extracted himself from the cockpit as carefully as he could, slowly pulling the case towards him. His face brushed across hers. He placed his lips onto hers and kissed her, knowing now that she could never reciprocate.
Her exquisite face was covered in dust and minute fragments of glass, her encrusted lips were arid, all that moistened them was a single tear.
She continued to murmur; just eight words were all that she had left.
“I love you, Jack Cade…”
She swallowed painfully, her throat crackled, and then she continued.
“The Seventh…”
Her lips, a mixture of rubicund lipstick and insidiously developing cyanosed cells, were trying to mouth a new word.
She exhaled, unable to form the word. In her mind she could hear it, as clear as she could hear her mother’s voice, her grandmother too.
“Come, dear girl. We are waiting for you. There is nothing to fear.”
Her eyes closed, and her head dropped to one side.
He shuffled out of the wreckage, kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them pushing against her cooling skin, brushing them across her face before he stood and walked as quickly as he could to his car.
He was able to make out a collection of sounds, a car engine, being pushed to capacity, a siren, a throb of blades, somewhere in the distance. Noise travelled a long way in this terrain. It could be twenty miles away or just over the next crest.
His old boss was right. He needed to detach himself from the scene, from the event, and especially from the elevated risk that he had found himself embroiled in.
‘Not good, Jack. Not good in any way.’
The faithful TT started once more. Its sole occupant, darker now than its exterior colour, engaged drive and accelerated along the empty road until the ruins of his anticipated future lay in the past, a disappearing image in his rear-view mirror.
He shook his head and said to no one in particular, “The Seventh. The wave, so what? So, what are you trying to tell me?” He continued to say it as he left her. It helped to focus his mind on driving, as quickly as he could without attracting attention.
“The Seventh…” Her lips had formed a peak, with a circle at the centre, as if she was blowing out a candle or trying to whistle for help. The two words could be
separate, but equally connected.
Desperately she gasped, “It is what he…calls them…now. Al Saptelea Val.”
“The Seventh…?”
His eyes darted to the rear-view mirror, attracted by the arrival of flashing lights and frenzied activity. Another response vehicle hurtled past him, also heading into the chaos, the Doppler effect of the sirens waking him from a daydream.
“Wave.”
Overhead, the rotors of a bright-red and yellow air ambulance chopped at the sky, announcing its arrival and the hope of salvation.
He nodded approval and let out an exhausted, sustained breath. He looked back at himself in the mirror; his eyes reddened, enhancing the intense blue of his irises.
This time they were not passionate, flirtatious and alluring but livid, angry and cold.
What was it his Sunday school teacher used to say?
Know thy enemy…against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Oh, he knew them alright, now all he needed to do was work out the how, and the where, then the when and the who. The why would hopefully never be asked as he intended to leave little, or better still no trace of his intended pursuit of sustained and hideous retribution.
Such a shame he had to work within the boundaries of the law. Now and then he wished, like many of his colleagues, that he could be a normal man in the street, driven onto a path of vengeance that even the harshest of judges would understand.
He knew them alright. Of course he did. He’d spent years hating them.
The Seventh Wave.
Chapter Eight
He returned to Spindrift to find JD waiting for him.
He got out of the Audi and walked towards him.
“Come here, my boy, give me a man hug.”
In the past Cade would have taken the arm and bent it up his back or whipped it around into his favourite judo arm throw, but he didn’t want to kill the old bastard so decided against it, besides, frankly, he needed a bloody hug.
Daniel held him for a moment.
“She’ll be fine, John…she’ll be fine.”
“She’s dead, JD. How do you associate that with fine?”
Daniel raised a hand and gestured to speak, but Cade cut him off.
“Sorry mate, I tried, God knows I tried. I…it’s them, isn’t it? Has to be. Christ, I’ve been blinkered.”
John Daniel wasn’t sure why his pupil was sorry, but he could clearly see the combination of anger and sorrow had already taken its toll.
“Come on my friend, let’s get you inside, I’ll raid your cupboard, you’ve got a bottle of Dark Storm in there somewhere I recall. Looking at the state of you it seems appropriate.”
He found the bottle of Talisker single malt, eased the cork out of the slender neck and let some of its contents empty into two crystal glasses.
Daniel held up one of the glasses and encouraged Cade to take it. When he had, he chinked his own against Jack’s and took a moment to savour the deep, dark tones. It was his new favourite. The heavily charred taste rested upon his palate for a second, an ocean of spice and smoke.
The distiller had intended to recreate a full-blown storm at sea and although that perhaps sounded a little melodramatic, it captured Cade’s mood entirely.
The Seventh Wave meeting The Dark Storm.
“So, now what?”
Cade looked at him. Almost unable to form words he began to sob uncontrollably, but somehow through his tears he said, “Now? I find the bastards that did this and end this once and for all, that’s what I do.”
“Jack, this is not the movies my friend, people will get hurt and most likely that means you. And if that means you it means me too, and my loved ones. Right now you are angry, and as we know anger does not allow you to focus. If you are going to embark on some frenzied counter attack, then you will need help. And we may have to cash in a few favours.”
Cade nodded, wiped his tears away and clashed his glass against his teachers.
“Too fucking right I need help.”
“But what you need to do first is start to formulate a plan and as we all know Jack's plans need detail, fine detail: a start point, a beginning, a middle and an end. And right now I don’t see that you have anything other than a whole pile of twisted excrement and the intense love of a Bulgarian girl who it needs to be said appeared out of thin air and will be OK by the way, I’m convinced of it.”
Cade shook his head pitifully.
Daniel ignored it. “So, correct me if I’m wrong, my boy…” he swallowed another mouthful of the whisky causing him to shudder, “…but do you have anything?”
“I’ve got this.” He raised the small case up onto the stainless worktop. It landed, allowing dust and glass to scatter across the previously pristine steel.
He unzipped the brown leather carrier and opened the case up to reveal its contents. The array of items inside made him stop in his tracks and caused JD to let out a long wolf whistle.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”
“John, I haven’t got a clue. Look, can we do this some other time, I can’t concentrate now.”
“Jack, they, whoever ‘they’ are, targeted Elena, you could guess why but you may be wrong, but this is too close for comfort. Think man, think about your past and if I’m only half right you are a potential target too. You know this, I know this and sure as eggs are eggs old son, they know it.”
Cade nodded, almost defeated.
“It’s them, Jack. It’s them. Now we have to formulate a plan to get you out of here and fast.”
“Where, oh great sensei?”
“No time for sarcasm, Johnathan…” he replied with equal disdain.
“Fair enough, I deserved that. Where?”
“Where you can switch back into operational mode, where you have more ‘friends’ and where you can strike out like the cornered cobra that you currently are.”
“And where would that be?”
“Why Britain, of course.”
“But…”
“But nothing, it makes sense and you’ll thank me if you really want to do this. Besides, I’ve already booked your seat. You travel to Hong Kong for a few days, chance to meet up with an old friend. Seat 11A, CX198, leaves Auckland at 13:20 tomorrow. Then another CX flight to Heathrow. Any questions?”
“How much?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“How did you pay for it?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“How did you know my credit card number?”
“Ditto.”
Daniel smiled, knowing full well that his apprentice could easily afford the business class seat he’d recently booked.
“Now, let’s get you sorted out, you need to pack and arrange for this place to be locked down. I’ll get Gerry to come and tend to your garden, but I’ll make sure the window cleaner never touches that one.”
He pointed to the large glass patio door, still resplendent with the two cheek impressions and handprints from a few nights before.
Cade smiled and then broke down once more. It was deliberate on Daniel’s part; he knew that somehow he needed to grieve or he would never be able to function.
Daniel sifted through the contents of the case, inhaling, tutting and making a few notes in his head. He would study it all later.
“This? This is something alright. Why she had it is another wholly different something. What we do with it is…”
“Let me guess, JD? Something else?”
Cade sat on the kitchen bar stool, staring out of the window, looking at the distant mountain range and wondering just which part of heaven his beloved redhead was inhabiting, and which bar she had walked into.
“Make sure you look after yourself and Lynne, JD.”
His pocket vibrated. It was enough to drag him back into the world of the living. He fumbled for the Galaxy, forgetting for a while that he even had it. The message icon indicated that a new one had arrived.
; He slid his thumb over the screen and read the new communiqué.
‘See you at home. Well done my brothers. Jackdaw will reward you well; our part of this exercise is also complete. Travel safely until we meet again. Stefan.’
He showed JD the screen, and then the other text messages.
“Can you do anything with this phone before I leave?”
“No, but I know a man who can. Besides, you are coming back with me tonight. Lynne and I will take you to the airport, it will look less obvious and if they try anything en route, well, she’s got a mean left hook!”
Cade smiled for the first time in hours. It had been a long day and yet the whole process, chronologically had taken just minutes.
He found himself thinking how minutes had changed his life, just days ago, and now a few more had changed it back again. He had the next few days to dwell on this, and for once he was glad he was booked into a single seat on the Hong Kong flight. He would use every minute to study the brief that his old friend was to write up that evening.
“Come on, my good man; let’s get you and this little case of goodies to my place – oh and Jack…”
“Yes…”
“Bring the Talisker!”
Cade spent the next half an hour packing whilst his old friend garaged the Audi and locked the rest of the property down. He walked around to a neighbour and informed him that Jack was heading overseas, the result of needing to tend to an uncle who was seriously ill. The neighbour being a kindly soul agreed to look after the place until he returned.
With his Samsonite packed and a carry-on bag loaded with a laptop, cables, phones and a couple of different wallets, he walked through the house, closing doors and mentally saying goodbye.
He paused in the bathroom and for a moment found himself back in the shower; the steam enveloping them both and the undeniably wonderful sense of arousal that he had experienced at the hands of a woman he had truly fallen for.
He shook his head, quelled the rising acid in his throat, spat the contents of his mouth into the sink and watched it rinse away. In seconds, he was stood with Daniel on the driveway.
“Ready?”
“Yep, ready as I’ll ever be, mate. Come on, let’s go.”
They got into Daniels’ ‘boring’ RAV4, belted up and moved off.
Seventh (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 1) Page 15