Sure enough there came the Honda, popping over the top of the hill at a fair clip, then braking sharply when the driver saw him much closer than expected. Cam chuckled his amusement and wondered if he should try it again. Eyes on the rearview mirror, he was readying himself to gun the engine when a gold Chevy Corvette came flying over the hillcrest, blasted around the slow-moving Accord, and raced up the incline toward Cam. The coupe blew around him on a double yellow line and thundered up the highway way too fast for the road.
It was still in the other lane as it approached the hilltop when a white cargo van appeared in its path. The Corvette swerved hard right, then left to avoid the shoulder, fishtailing over the crest and out of sight. Cam came over the hill in time to see the car swing wide along the leftward curve, hit the dirt shoulder and go airborne, tumbling off the roadway in a cloud of dust.
By the time Cam caught up, it had come to rest upside down on the grassy slope of a shallow drainage area, front fender smashed into a small yucca. Its roof was crunched, its windows shattered, its wheels still spinning.
Pulling off the road, Cam parked and ran down the hillside, through the ruptured barbed-wire fence, and on to the car. When he arrived, the driver was already wriggling out through the empty windshield frame.
Cam pulled him the last bit out and helped him to his feet. He was a heavyset, balding, middle-aged man, covered with dust. A cut on his forehead bled profusely, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. “You all right?” Cam asked.
“Yeah . . . just shaken up a bit.” The man looked at his car and swore softly.
“Let’s get you up to the road,” Cam said, “and I’ll call an ambulance.”
“I don’t need an ambulance. A tow truck, though, that I’ll need.”
As they climbed back up to the road, the white cargo van pulled off the road in front of Cam’s Jeep. It eased forward to the middle of the curve where the Corvette had gone off and stopped, keeping the engine running. The passenger window lowered, and from his seat inside, the driver asked if the man was all right.
Cam said he was, and after helping the bleeding stranger settle at the roadside, he stepped to the van’s window. “He says he’s okay. Just cut his brow.”
“Could be in shock,” the van driver said. “Could have a concussion, too. I better call.” He picked up his cell phone as Cam glanced back at the Corvette driver, still sitting where Cam had left him, mopping the blood from his face with a handkerchief. At Cam’s back, the van’s side door slid open. Suddenly a bag dropped over his head and he was yanked into the vehicle. The side door slammed, the engine revved, and the van made a hard, screeching left turn, heading east as it had been when it first met the Corvette.
Everything happened so fast, by the time Cam realized he was being kidnapped, it was too late: the strong sweet smell of a soporific was filling his head with black cotton.
The next thing he knew, the hood was gone and he was reclining in a raised-back hospital bed. Rudy Aguilar sat in a chair beside him. The janitor disguise was only partially gone. His white hair fell in thick locks over his shoulders, but he was clean-shaven and minus the wrinkles, his dark eyes a sharp contrast to the pale hair and brows.
“I kinda thought I might see you today,” Cam murmured.
Rudy held up a white plastic cup. “Water?”
Cam took it, drank, then pushed himself up in the bed and glanced around at the tiny featureless room. “Where are we?”
“Command HQ,” Rudy said with a wry smile. “Such as it is.”
Which wasn’t exactly what Cam had meant, but obviously Rudy was going to play things close to the vest for a while.
“Swain had a tail on me.”
Rudy nodded. “Blue Honda Accord. Pulled over to watch when the Corvette crashed. So far he’s still on your tail. Or at least he thinks he is.” Rudy explained that as his men were yanking Cam into the white cargo van, a double had stepped out of it to take his place. The double would stay with the injured Corvette driver—also one of Rudy’s team—until a tow truck arrived. Relieved of his charge, the double would continue on to Tucson, where he’ d do Cam’s laundry, visit the U of A, then lead the Accord on a roundabout journey through town, withdrawing cash from various ATMs. Around midafternoon he’ d head south toward Nogales at the Mexican border, only to change his mind when he got there and turn back for the Institute, stopping at Catalina State Park, just north of Tucson, to eat and watch the sunset.
“There you and he will change places again,” Rudy said, “and you can return to the Institute, hopefully no one the wiser.” He paused, then added quietly, “Or simply disappear, if that’s what you want.”
Cam cocked a brow at him. “Really?” Skepticism soured his voice.
“I can’t force you to help us,” Rudy said. “But neither can I leave you in now that you know we’re involved. Not without a firm commitment that you’re with us.”
He fell silent, waiting. Seconds ticked by. Cam listened to the sounds coming from beyond the partitions—the whir of some machine, maybe a centrifuge, an intermittent bump, the sudden thumping of footsteps, low voices in muffled, erratic conversation. The faint aroma of acetone revealed the presence of a lab . . . most likely one with DNA, fingerprinting, and other forensic capacities.
Cam brought his attention back to Rudy, his anger only a slow burn now. “Give me one good reason why I should trust you.”
“I can’t.” Rudy braced his hands on both knees and dropped his gaze to the side of Cam’s bed. “I’m hoping maybe God already has.”
“You stabbed me in the back in Afghanistan.”
Rudy grimaced and looked up, seeming genuinely pained. “You know we had to shut down that installation. The chance was too great those things would get out.”
“I’m talking about afterward. At the medical hearing.”
The furrow in his friend’s brow deepened. He sat in silence a moment, then sighed. “You were a man raving about monsters and voices in your head.”
“You heard those voices, too. And you saw those . . . monsters with your own eyes. At least the one. You know they were real.”
“Yes, but by that time, they were all dead, the mission abandoned, expunged, nonexistent. Just the little bit Ruyker saw of what happened— before the EM pulse blew out all our surveillance and communications—terrified him. None of us had any idea what we were up against, only that it was far more than we could handle.” He leaned back in his chair. “Ruyker did the only thing he could think to do: he sent in the birds with the bombs, praying it would be enough, praying those monsters would not somehow survive and dig out, wondering how many more of them were down there and if some of them might have survived.
“I still have nightmares about that chamber Khalili showed us full of unopened sarcs. . . .” He paused, rubbed a hand up his forehead and through his hair. “We searched the surface for days—with probes, sonar, everything you can imagine. No sign of life. Little by little we began to hope it was over.
“Then you walked into that warlord’s camp a week later, the lone survivor, terrified out of your mind, raving about things that couldn’t be real. Couldn’t be, Cam, because if they were, that would be the end of us, not just as a civilization but as a species. We had no other way of stopping them. They’d have wiped us off the face of the Earth.”
Cam sat there, staring at Rudy’s crossed arms, knowing what his old friend said was true—they could have wiped humankind off the Earth—without knowing how he knew it. He shivered.
The movement drew Rudy’s gaze back to his. “Have you remembered anything more about it?”
“No.” Cam looked away from his probing gaze. He’ d begun to tremble and sweat again, the restless darkness struggling against its bonds.
“Can you try?”
“No!”
Rudy said nothing. Somewhere beyond the tiny briefing room’s walls a buzzer sounded. Footfalls thumped on the raised floor, followed by the sharp hiss of some releasing gas.
�
��I remember bits and pieces,” Cam said suddenly, hitching himself higher in the bed. “Running through dark, large chambers. Explosions.” A ruined lab, floor puddled with blood, littered with glass and bodies . . .
“Nothing coherent. Some things I think might have happened. Others I’m not so sure.” He caught Rudy’s gaze. “Mostly what I remember is you not coming back. The other guys dead. The rumble of the explosives detonating, the collapsing tunnel, and me trapped there. With them.” His voice had acquired an embarrassing tremor and he fell silent.
“But you did get out. . . .” Rudy said softly.
When Cam did not speak further, he prodded, “You were in there for a week, Cam. You must have killed them all. How can you not remember?”
“Probably because I wasn’t entirely sane.” He toyed with the plastic cup in his hands. “Or maybe I’ve subconsciously done what Commander Ruyker did: declared the mission unacceptable and expunged it from my memory.” He paused. “Except it hasn’t really been expunged from anything, has it? Because here you are dredging it up again.”
Finally he met his friend’s worried gaze. “Why do you think Swain has sarcophagi?”
Rudy leaned back in the chair, brows raised, eyes wide. “Does this mean you’re on board, then?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Rudy, be reasonable. It’s been eleven years since I’ve done anything like this. I’m out of practice, out of shape, far from the cutting edge of whatever’s going on in the spy world these days, and let’s face it, mentally and emotionally unstable. I’m not sure I could be all that much help to you.”
“I’m not asking you to get in on the action, just be our eyes and ears. There may be a few things we’ll want you to do, maybe collect some DNA—we have nothing whatever on Swain, for example. Not even prints.”
“You’ve been in the place for a year and a half and you don’t have prints?”
“He rarely comes to the places I’m assigned, and when he does, he touches nothing. Usually he has others to do it for him. I couldn’t get into his penthouse, or even his fancy office. Even our guy in security hasn’t been able to. But you—”
“I eat with him three times a day. It shouldn’t be too hard to grab a used fork.”
Rudy eyed him in surprise. Then he grinned. “Well, there you go. Mostly, though, we need information, and right now you’re perfectly positioned to look in the places we think it will be found. More than that, I believe you are singularly qualified to see clues the rest of us would overlook entirely.”
“Information only?”
Rudy nodded.
“Because, you know, I’m not an Army Ranger anymore. I’m a geneticist.”
Rudy’s expression turned wry. “Don’t worry. We’ve got a whole passel of young hotshots to do the Ranger stuff. Though I have to admit, in your day you were better than all of them. . . .”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, friend. I get enough of it from Swain. I never believe a word of it, and I always know he’s after something.”
Rudy’s amusement faded. He made a face, turned his attention to his knees, and after a long moment breathed a weary sigh. “All right, I’ll cut to the chase, then. Good as you were, it wasn’t enough to escape Tirich Pazu. God’s the one who got you out of there. For a reason. I’m convinced part of that reason has to do with what’s happening here.”
Cam sat very still, holding his mind carefully blank.
“We may have set up the thing at Stanford,” Rudy went on, “but we didn’t cause you to go into genetics. Nor were we responsible for your successes in that field, which, as I understand it, are pretty phenomenal. We only set you up after we realized Swain was pursuing you. And I have to say, the day I learned he had you in his sights, given what we suspected he was up to even then, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The connections are just too strong and too timely to dismiss.”
His tale made the hairs on the back of Cam’s neck stand up, too. Oh, Lord, do you really want me to do this?
“So why do you think he has sarcophagi?” Cam asked again. Rudy’s pale brow arched in question.
Cam made a face. “All right, yes,” he said, crumpling the water cup and tossing it into the nearby trash can. “I’m with you.”
Rudy smiled his crooked grin and bent to pick up a laptop that had been sitting on the floor beside his chair. “I figured your first question would be about the sarcs.” He adjusted the screen and set the device on Cam’s lap. “These were taken over the last decade, the most recent being five years ago.”
The first photo was of a large helicopter lifting what looked like a boxcar off the side of a mountain. It was taken in the Andes, Rudy told him. The next showed the plume of fuel jettisoned by the chopper so it could get airborne in the thin air while lifting such great weight. Several more showed the helicopter moving away from the lift site.
Then a new series began of three covered military transport trucks backing in turn up to an opening in a hillside near Baalbek, loading something dark and large into their beds, and driving away. The final shot showed all three moving along a dirt track through the desert, a cloud of pale dust churning in their wake. A fourth series, taken at night, showed a large covered mound being transported on a flatbed truck through the sandy deserts of Iraq near one of the ancient ziggurats along the Euphrates River.
None showed a clear shot of anything that looked like one of the sarcophagi, but the locations coupled with the size and shape of the transported containers added convincing support for Rudy’s story.
So did the record Cam was shown next of all the funding that Kendall-Jakes had discreetly been directing toward various archaeological projects. Clearly Swain’s interest in archaeology went beyond the hobby level. The sites included a small dig in the Bekaa Valley near Baalbek in Lebanon, a project in the Peruvian Andes, an effort in Norway, another two in Iraq, and three in Afghanistan, two of them ongoing, the third closed, its name raising the hairs on the back of Cam’s neck: Tirich Pazu.
“Swain was connected with Tirich Pazu?”
Rudy nodded. “We don’t know if he actually got one from those tombs, but we do know he paid the project an awful lot of money. He did it through several fronts. It’s a complicated path, but if you want to study it . . .”
“No. I know how he works. How much does he know about Operation Nimrod?”
“That I don’t know.”
Cam sat silently for a moment, gripping the rail beside the bed, forcing himself to breathe deeply, calmly. Dark memories stirred and shifted, and he knew he could touch them if he wanted to. But he didn’t. All Rudy had asked of him was to be their eyes and ears, and for that he knew all he needed to know.
And fear was a sin. An insult to God. If he ran from this now, it would only follow him, so he might as well give in and face it, test God on that promise of His grace always being enough, His power perfected in man’s weakness. Cam drew a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. “Okay, then,” he said. “Where do we start?”
Rudy, who’d been watching him closely, relaxed in obvious relief and got down to business. “How about you tell me what’s been going on from your end?” he suggested. “Then I’ll add in what we know or suspect.”
Thus Cam had his first debriefing since the days following his emergence from the tombs of Tirich Pazu deep in the mountains of Afghanistan.
That was followed by Rudy’s lengthy verbal download of the intelligence they had gathered so far, and then a tour of the facility, which was comprised of two semitrailer trucks that had been converted into a state-of-the-art forensics lab and surveillance-command post. Ostensibly there as a base for a team of ecologists doing a habitat survey for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, it also sported a small but excellent armory—the narrow, low-ceilinged underground passage that connected the two trailers doubled as a firing range—fax, phone, and wireless facility, a satellite uplink, and other monitoring systems.
From the facility, Ru
dy or his second-in-command, a woman named Brianna, coordinated their fourteen-person team, five of whom were at the command site now. The other nine stayed mostly in the field. Seven of those nine were employed on a full- or part-time basis at the Institute or resort—one in security, though Rudy said no one had heard from him in a couple of days.
The other two served as couriers of materiel and information. Wireless communication was tricky because of the constant danger of interception by the high-power antennae and receiving discs that sat atop the ziggurat—as well as at other locations around the property.
They stopped in the tunnel firing range so Cam could practice shooting. This was the one aspect of his former profession he’ d kept sharp, driven by his residual fears to stay ready to defend himself. Until he’d come to K-J—where personal firearms were prohibited—he’d been a regular on the practice ranges for both handgun and rifle. Thus he acquitted himself favorably with the pistol.
After lunch, Brianna familiarized Cam with the array of equipment and devices he’ d be bringing back with him to K-J: a special BlackBerry Smartphone to replace his old one, a master lock release device disguised as a ballpoint pen, an upgraded pair of binoculars and a replacement iPod, both with special surveillance and transmission capabilities, as well as a Taser and a handgun plus ammunition concealed in two booklike CD cases, all of it distributed throughout his duffle bag and his laptop case—which had been passed by his double to the Corvette driver and brought to HQ shortly before noon.
His laptop would also be replaced by one with larger capacity and greater protection against surveillance. In shadow mode, it would be impervious to Institute monitoring devices designed to pick up and replicate whatever was on his screen. They were still in the process of uploading its contents onto his new machine, so he went down for additional shooting practice. Which Cam had to wonder about— was it really necessary given the fact he was supposedly only doing information gathering. He didn’t ask, though, for it felt good to have the gun in his hands again, and he did considerably better during his second session.
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