by Dakota Banks
Sacrifice
Mortal Path
Book Two
Dakota Banks
To a special person who believed in me:
Diana Gill
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
JOHN CHEEVER, The Journals
In this desert there are a great many evil spirits and also hot winds; those who encounter them perish to a man. There are neither birds above nor beasts below. Gazing on all sides as far as the eye can reach in order to mark the track, no guidance is to be obtained save from the rotting bones of dead men, which point the way.
CHINESE MONK FA XIAN, DESCRIBING THE TAKLIMAKAN DESERT, 5thCENTURY
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
The diversion would be the wet and bloody kind, though…
Chapter One
Maliha Crayne drove through the Massachusetts countryside on a crisp…
Chapter Two
The car’s cockpit safety net, a body-sized spider web, sprang…
Chapter Three
Maliha Crayne didn’t have a clear view of the terrain…
Chapter Four
Maliha tossed back the thin blanket, pulled up the hospital…
Chapter Five
Mogue considered what the woman had said. So far, he…
Chapter Six
When she got into O’Hare International, Maliha called the lab…
Chapter Seven
Maliha awoke before dawn. She’d been restless all night, and…
Chapter Eight
The next day passed quickly as Maliha turned over in…
Chapter Nine
Maliha made it home that night to find that Yanmeng…
Chapter Ten
Maliha stood naked at the edge of the pool. Clothes…
Chapter Eleven
The shoulder wound from the crossbow bolt ached. Normally she’d…
Chapter Twelve
Dr. Mogue Kane strode across the granite-floored lobby of the Keltner…
Chapter Thirteen
Hound and Amaro had arrived in Maliha’s absence, so it…
Chapter Fourteen
Fynn Saltz’s fiancée worked at Columbia University, in the Morningside…
Chapter Fifteen
A man whose ticket identified him as L. Anthony Cinna sat…
Chapter Sixteen
On board the high-speed train to Washington, D.C., Maliha thought…
Chapter Seventeen
Maliha sat on a bench half a block away from…
Chapter Eighteen
When her awareness returned, Maliha was in a dead-end alley.
Chapter Nineteen
Against his wishes, Saltz ended up traveling with Maliha back…
Chapter Twenty
Maliha produced the jump drive she’d taken from Fynn back…
Chapter Twenty-One
Too easy. If Mogue was there last night, he could…
Chapter Twenty-Two
Amaro had called Maliha with distressing news. An envelope had…
Chapter Twenty-Three
She was on her way back from Jake’s house when…
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rasputin sat in the council’s meeting room at the TGEF…
Chapter Twenty-Five
The city of Tel Aviv-Yafo perched like a majestic golden…
Chapter Twenty-Six
At the hotel, she cleaned up and slept for hours.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Maliha was barely back in Tel Aviv, her emotions as…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maliha was on her way to kill William David Hall.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Maliha phoned Hound. They agreed to disagree on her method…
Chapter Thirty
Maliha dropped the gun and Landry’s body. She was looking…
Chapter Thirty-One
Ouésso, Congo, was on the Sangha River and about a…
Chapter Thirty-Two
Maliha walked out of the rain forest to Ouésso and…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Dakota Banks
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The diversion would be the wet and bloody kind, though not something that really sang to him. Too impersonal.
Dr. Mogue Kane was impatient. He’d had enough of the brown unchanging view, the soft sound of the wind playing in the sand, ripples of heat on the horizon, and the rank smell of the mercenary crouched next to him. In the encroaching sands of the Sahara desert in the Darfur region of Sudan, where the temperature was somewhere north of 110 degrees, any diversion would be welcome. When it was over, he could get out of the sun, the sweat bath he was taking, and the invasion of his personal space by a sniper who went by the name of Long Shot. What little cover there was in this godforsaken shithole had to be shared.
The man probably doesn’t realize the double meaning of his nickname.
The doctor wasn’t used to these dismal conditions. Experimenting in an air-conditioned laboratory was more his style. But the money was good and this appointment—as he called his contract work to imbue it with an academic aura—offered opportunities to watch people die for the purest of reasons: medical research.
Mogue was formerly a member of the Internal Security Unit of the Irish Republican Army, ferreting out British spies through chemical interrogation. Once he’d obtained a confession, the spy, who may or may not have been engaged in espionage, was executed. Then the IRA had gone political and disavowed violence. Mogue, an anachronism from the violent days, was cut loose. As an extraordinarily gifted researcher and not the type to twiddle his thumbs, it didn’t take him long to settle into another organization where his many talents were appreciated.
Long Shot tensed and alerted Mogue with a slight nod of his head. A convoy of Land Rovers, two dozen of them at least, made its way toward the dry riverbed at the bottom of the hill. The riverbed, a remnant of prehistoric times when the area was favored with an inland sea, provided a relatively easy, if meandering, route for travel where there were no roads.
He saw the mercenaries on the hill across from him adjust their positions to focus their sights on the convoy. The two-man crew of an M240 machine gun on a bipod readied for action. Mogue’s hand strayed to the Browning HP 9mm holstered at his belt. It was the same type of pistol used by Saddam Hussein, and that was a source of secret glee whenever Mogue handled the gun.
The twenty or so Land Rovers in the middle of the line bounced along transporting a World Health Organization team and their densely packed supplies. One vehicle at the head and one at the rear carried hired security guards. Where the nearest hospital was hundreds of miles away, the WHO team was a lifeline, one that Mogue was about to sever.
Mogue licked his lips, tasting salt from the sweat that had dried there. He itched to launch the attack, casting himself as Lawrence of Arabia shouting “No prisoners!” Without a word from him, rifles were fired, and then the machine gun came to life, spewing eight hundred rounds a minute into the valley of death.
The windows of the guards’ vehicles exploded inward, hit from both sides by simultaneous fire. The guards, hit by multiple bullets, jerked helplessly in their seats. The vehicles sank to the ground as their tires deflated, like awkward camels lowering themselves to the sand. The mist of blood in the air settled. In a scant ten seconds, the hired guards were dead and the medical team was left without protection.
In between the two disabled vehicles, the remaining Land Rovers halted. Deeply tinted windows revealed nothing. Mogue imagined the fear of th
e people pinned down inside the Rovers. His senses were feeding him information in vivid detail intense enough to make him feel in the middle of the action. He’d experienced the sudden acuteness before and wished he could remain in that state all the time. This was living! He hummed to himself. Memories are made of this….
The wind brought the scent of blood up from the riverbed.
The shattering of glass broke the silence. Someone had smashed the pane of one of the vehicles from the inside. The barrel of a rifle emerged and a couple of shots were fired. A volley of bullets from the hilltop answered. The rifle slid from the loosened grasp of a dead man in the vehicle and landed in the dirt.
Mogue nudged the man next to him. “Do something. It’s hot out here.”
Giving no sign he’d heard Mogue, Long Shot squeezed off a round from his rifle and the driver’s window of the dead man’s vehicle split into shards. It was a catalyst for panic. Doors were flung open and the staff emerged, running for shelter that was nonexistent in the valley. Some fired handguns upward at the hilltops. A bullet pinged a rock near Mogue. He huddled closer to Long Shot, earning a grunt of disapproval. A shooting gallery opened up as mercenaries picked off individuals.
Then all was quiet again as the last passenger emerged from a Rover. It was a woman dressed in a flowing white desert robe, baggy trousers covering her legs. She was stiffly erect, shoulders back, her head carried high. She took a few steps, her dignity forming a fragile shield around her. No one fired and she kept walking, gaining some confidence.
“Shoot her,” Mogue said. His voice was husky, but not from the dry desert air. He was aroused. This was better than killing faceless people inside Rovers.
The man hesitated. Mogue pulled out the Browning, took aim at her torso, and fired at her from the back. The bullet smacked into her hip, twisting her sideways as blood spread across her white robe. She fell heavily, screaming in pain but far from dead. Mogue wasn’t a good shot. One of the snipers put a bullet in her brain and she lay still.
Mogue made a clinical observation. Blood has no time to pool in the desert. The sand is thirsty.
An hour later, the Land Rovers had been pushed or driven into several tight clusters and covered with desert camo nets. The corpses rested inside, bloody cherries wrapped in metal instead of chocolate. A new medical team, Mogue’s, was on its way.
Chapter One
Maliha Crayne drove through the Massachusetts countryside on a crisp October afternoon, patiently keeping pace with the outsiders who clogged the roads on fall color tours. Her black McLaren F1 was made for speed on deserted stretches of highway, not this tourist shuffle, but she didn’t have far to go until she could turn off onto her private road.
In the Northeast, people who hadn’t been born there or at least put in a couple of generations or a few decades on the land were still treated as outsiders, because families there had deep roots. Maliha was no outsider. She’d been born there in 1672.
She had three hundred acres, a mixture of orchard and forest. A farmer, the third generation of his family, ran the apple orchard for her. He kept all the profit and paid no rent for the house where he and his wife raised two children. It was a generous arrangement and returned in kind by scrupulous care of her land.
When she reached the turnoff she had to get out and unlock the gate. Winding through the apple trees, she rolled down the windows and breathed in the air free of car exhaust. On a whim, she stopped and picked some of the heritage apples she’d brought over from England in the mid 1700s. Biting into a Margil apple’s yellowish flesh released an aroma that brought back memories. Juice dribbled down her chin.
She sat in her car for a time watching the clouds move with a high, swift wind barely felt on the ground. She cleared her mind of what was ahead and thought of the recent past instead. The last time she’d seen her boyfriend Jake Stackman, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, she’d stabbed him.
Did I act too soon? Should I have given him a chance to explain?
On a hill far from the farmer’s house, she parked the car and walked a short path to an area with tall maple trees and open areas of grass. Among them were two small slate gravestones, worn and thin, but standing tall. Recently fallen leaves covered the graves. The sight of the leaves cascading down from the trees brought a small smile to her lips. Maliha had brought flowers, but they seemed unnecessary with nature already providing such fine decoration.
When she got within ten feet or so of the graves, it was like passing through a tangible emotional barrier, a bubble that surrounded them and kept the memories fresh and raw. Her hand flew to her chest, where her heart pounded, each beat heightening her fear.
Dragged from my bed in the middle of the night…
Another two steps closer.
The accusations, the trial, my husband turning away…
Her feet shuffled in the leaves. Although she’d come here before, many times, it was still hard.
Tears streaming down my cheeks and onto my stillborn daughter, lying on the dirt floor of the jail cell.
“Constanta! My baby, my little one.” Maliha’s head hung, her eyes staring at the ground, unable to read the writing on the tombstones just yet. Her tears mingled with the yellow leaves. She walked the last few feet in a rush and sat down.
The memories of the stake and the flames came next, and she endured them, crying out at the smell of her own flesh burning. Maliha stretched out her hands to her husband’s tombstone and placed them over his carved name. The slate was cold to the touch, cold enough to keep the flames at bay.
“Here lies Nathan Layhem,” she said without looking at the words. She’d memorized them. “Who was released from a troubled life on October fifteenth 1708, in the thirty-eighth year of his age. Misfortune shadowed this man’s past, he met the King of Terrors at last.”
She was the misfortune in Nathan’s past. As his wife, she’d been accused of witchcraft. His life in the village after that couldn’t have been easy.
Her hands moved over to the next tombstone and when she touched it, pain stabbed through her lower abdomen. Here beneath the ground was the child she’d carried in her womb, her daughter.
The only time in her long life that she’d carried life within her.
“In memory of Constanta, daughter of Nathan Layhem”—she traced the carving with her fingers—“who was Still Born August third 1692. In hope that her rest is peaceful and her spirit be not vengeful.”
Her name was not mentioned on the tombstone. It hurt, but she knew it was the only way Nathan could get the baby buried at all. Otherwise the unwanted, bewitched body would have gone to the trash pit with the afterbirth. The towns people had no doubts that Maliha was a witch. They’d seen her step naked and powerful from the flames that should have blackened her body and ended her life.
Maliha stretched out on the leaves that covered her daughter’s grave, getting as close to Constanta as she could. Though several feet of earth, hundreds of years, and the specter of death separated them, she felt her arms wrap around her baby. Comforted by the feeling, she remained there for hours.
The night was cold and clear when she rose. The full moon lighted her way back to her car. Moving from country road to country highway to interstate, Maliha headed home, for Chicago, over eight hundred miles away. She intended to be in her lakefront condo before lunchtime. The McLaren was in its element, flying through the night like a black arrow. She rode with the windows down, drowning out her memories with the white noise of wind rushing past the car.
Pain streaked across the side of her neck, and then sliced across her left temple. She put a hand to her neck and it came away bloody. Maliha braked hard for an upcoming turn and struggled for control of the car as pain blackened her vision on the edges. She felt the impact as the car scraped along the roadside barrier and then punched through it. When the tires left the road, there was a heart-stopping moment when the McLaren seemed to hang in midair before gravity took charge.
Chapter Two
The car’s cockpit safety net, a body-sized spider web, sprang toward Maliha. Expanding foam rushed into the compartment, rapidly chilling her and blocking her view. She was barrel-rolling down the hill, blind and pinned tightly to the seat. The McLaren’s frame shuddered as it came to an abrupt stop.
The net loosened and Maliha slumped in her seat, barely conscious. In a few minutes, she began to move around. The foam had already started liquefying. She was very dizzy and resisted the urge to throw herself from the car as fast as she could. Instead, while the foam drained, she checked her body. The neck and scalp wounds she’d felt before the crash were bleeding, but her skull was intact and so were her major neck veins and arteries. The shots had been fired at an angle and neither bullet had entered her body. Her left arm had been twisted oddly when held in place by the net, and was temporarily numb. Other than that, she was sore everywhere, like someone had done a thorough job on her with a baseball bat. She flexed her arms and legs and found that she could move.
No broken bones, but I’m one big ball of pain. Not that I’m complaining. I could have been facing much worse pain for dying before my quest is over.
“Thanks,” she whispered, tapping the car’s misshapen dashboard.
Someone hired an assassin to take me out. Ironic, considering.
Maliha was a former assassin herself, a superbly trained and effective one. Having the tables turned didn’t appeal to her, and she started to feel angry about that and about interrupting her trek from the tombstones with something as crass as a contract on her life.
Either an assassin who’s a really bad shot was assigned to me, or the shooter misjudged my speed.