Earthquake! The first thought caught in Sheela’s recoiling mind. She struggled against the folds of carpet that had rolled around her. The table tilted sideways, and something heavy hammered her in the middle of the back.
She reached around, feeling cold steel.
When the world canted and heaved, Lymon grabbed Sheik Abdulla, feet milling against the vibrating floor. Together they crashed into the wall, Lymon managing to raise an arm as they tottered. The pistol went off as he shoved the Sheik’s gun hand up; then they fell, each twisting and struggling to find footing in the wadded carpet.
The pistol! Get the damned pistol! Lymon drove his elbow into the Sheik’s side, then again, and again, as the man howled. What the fuck had happened? One minute, he’d been staring right into Death’s face, eternally proud of Christal’s defiance, and the next they were rolling around on the floor while a deafening rumble filled the air and the floor bucked up and down like a Humvee on a mountain two-track.
Abdulla’s head rose inches from Lymon’s as he tried to turn the pistol. Lymon pulled back, and jerked forward, butting his forehead into Abdulla’s face. He felt and heard the bones breaking in the man’s nose.
“Asshole! I’m gonna kill you!” he howled as he got one hand around Abdulla’s throat. His other hand clamped on the flailing wrist below the gun hand.
The Sheik was muttering something in Arabic when Lymon’s iron grip choked it off.
“What the fuck!” Hank Abrams was shouting as he picked himself up off the floor. “What the fuck happened here?”
“We’re grounded!” Neal Gray screamed. “We’re grounded off some damn beach!”
The Sheik hammered a knee into Lymon’s crotch. He gasped, writhed, and felt Abdulla twist free long enough to gasp, “Help me!”
Lymon roared in rage, flopping his body onto the Sheik’s. Another shot rang out as the man’s hand reflexively pulled the trigger.
A harsh order sounded, and Lymon looked up to see the bearded Aziz, somehow on his feet in the wadded carpet, staring down over the sights of an HK MP5.
Lymon swallowed hard and nodded, letting the Sheik go.
The man flailed away from Lymon’s grip and scuttled over Achmed’s slumped body. In the process, he stuck his hand in the hot water seeping from the spilled espresso machine and shrieked.
Lymon rolled onto his side. The room was in shambles: shaken, not stirred. One of the marble columns was splintered, the ceiling hanging, and several of the smaller tables lay on their sides. Two of the large windows had shattered.
“Kill him!” Abdulla hissed, trying to hold the pistol and cradle his burned hand at the same time.
Lymon’s nerves went cold as the guard smiled through his black beard—and flipped the safety off. A gleam filled the man’s black eyes as the sound-suppressed muzzle rose above Lymon.
The staccato burst was too loud. It almost broke his eardrums, and couldn’t have come from the suppressed MP5. It took a moment for his brain to catch up with the vision, but the guard’s sides were jumping frantically, his eyes impossibly wide, and bits of red were making haze in the air.
Aziz seemed to weave in the sudden silence; and the heavy HK rolled out of his grasp as if in slow motion. Then his knees went. He collapsed straight down, then slipped sideways into his own gore.
In the voice that had stopped countless cinematic bad guys, Sheela Marks ordered, “Don’t even think it!”
Lymon lifted his head to see Sheela wading out of the accordioned carpet. She held an MP5 in the finest SWAT team entry form. Her face was a mask of determination as she centered the sights on the Sheik.
“Please relieve Abdulla of that pistol.” Without breaking her gaze, she asked, “Lymon? Are you all right?”
Getting to his feet, he gave her a panic-induced grin. “Yeah.” And reached out to snag the pistol from Abdulla’s hand. “Nice gun work. Where’d you learn that?”
“Weapons expert on the set of Moon of Falling Leaves. But this one shoots real bullets.”
“Hey!” Sid roared as Neal Gray scrambled for the door. “One move and I take you apart myself.”
Lymon tossed his pistol to Sid. “Keep an eye on him.” To the stunned Sheik, he said, “Sorry, pal, but the party’s over.” He bent to slip the remaining MP5’s sling from the dead Aziz’s shoulder.
Then—adrenaline pumping with the postcombat jitters—he walked to Sheela, bent to kiss her lips, and said, “God, I love you.”
She spared him a quick smile. “I love you, too.” A slight frown. “But what the hell just happened here?”
Together, they made their way to the shattered windows. Through the spears of hanging glass he could see a long gleaming stretch of beach. Behind the littoral, an irregular line of trees was cloaked in green through which the afternoon sun shone. People were already appearing on the shore, looking small as they pointed. And yes, wasn’t that a park ranger’s four-wheel-drive truck flying down the sand, light bar winking?
“What the hell happened?” Sheela asked, her MP5 still covering the Sheik.
“I think we just landed in New Jersey,” he told her in an awed voice.
“I’ve never liked Jersey,” Sid muttered as he stood up from checking the dead guard’s body. “God, is my boss gonna give me shit over this.”
56
Christal sat quietly in the darkness and dangled the weight of the gas mask from one hand. She replayed that last instant over and over. Seeing the monitors going black, feeling the shudder and then the jolt. Her chair had thrown her against the control board, and the room had gone black in an instant.
Oddly, the last monitor to go had been the one that showed Copperhead and her four goons tumbling down the corridor floor like broken dolls. It was even better than giving the bitch three good solid belts to the stomach! Paybacks were hell.
Then a silent and eternal night had fallen.
The worst part had been the waiting. Was Lymon alive? Had the Sheik killed him?
She smiled grimly in the darkness, and said, “Hank, you always were a wuss.” She’d seen it in his eyes as he held the gun to Lymon’s head. So, he’d done the right thing, but had it been for the right reasons?
A groan came softly out of the darkness. “Shit!”
“Good morning, Gregor.” She wondered it if was morning. Her universe might have been stopped in time, frozen like existence at the edge of a black hole.
“What the hell? Where am I?”
“Security center.”
“Turn the fucking lights on. I can’t see a thing.”
“Power’s cut.” She made a mocking face in the darkness.
“God, they’ve gone to that extreme? How long have I been out?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Hours.”
He shuffled in the darkness. “How on earth could I have gone to sleep?”
“Gas. Anesthetic, I think. They pumped it into the ventilation. I barely got to the gas masks in time.” She smiled wryly. “Be glad they didn’t use anything lethal. You’d be dead, bucko.”
“You won’t win, you know. They’ll starve you out in the end.”
“Sorry, Greg—”
“Gregor,” he insisted.
“—but you’ve already lost.”
“What?”
“You slept through being slid across the floor.” She leaned back in the darkness. “I don’t know how the hell they’re going to get this thing off the beach.”
“What are you talking about? Beach?”
“Yeah, Brian and I decided on Sandy Hook.”
“What? Where’s that?”
“New Jersey. It sticks up like a thumb on the south side of New York Harbor. It’s a national recreation area. We thought it was perfect.”
“Oh, come now! Stop the bluff.”
She chuckled at the sincerity in his voice. “Greg, you’ve got no idea. You’re through, buddy. Coast Guard is probably swarming around like fleas out there even as we speak.”
“Right, lass, and
if that were indeed the case”—he let his brogue deepen—“ye’d not be sitting in here on yer hands in the dark.”
“Got that right. Problem is, the hatch is jammed. I tried it. You can turn the wheel, but I think the dogs are bent.”
“No way!”
“Way.” She took a deep breath. “Air’s gone stale too. Ventilation’s gone. I hear bangs and creaks every so often, but not much else. This hole’s pretty soundproof. I think it was an eternity ago I heard a clang on the door. God knows what that meant.”
“Assuming you’re not lying through yer teeth, you think they’ve forgotten us?”
“That’s a possibility. They might have their hands full. It was quite a jolt when we beached. Brian would have had them throttle up just before we ran aground.”
“And why would the captain have done that?”
“You remember that black case that sat on the table when you first got us in here?”
“Aye.”
“Turns out it belonged to Lymon. It had a Heckler and Koch subgun and some other equipment in it. Enough that the bridge crew didn’t hesitate when Brian ordered them to set a new course.” She paused. “I hope he didn’t have to kill any of them.”
“Ach, are you trying to tell me that Brian fucking Everly had the guts to commandeer the bridge? And that nobody noticed?”
“Who’d know anything was amiss?” She resettled herself in the darkness. “Look: Neal Gray, Hank, and April were intensely occupied trying to run Lymon and Sid down at the same time they were trying to pry me out of here. My only concern was the Sheik. He was the guy who had the windows, who might have been able to see what was happening and react in time to stop it.” She smiled in the dark. “But God bless Sheela, she played the role of a lifetime. Kept him occupied and didn’t even know it.”
“So, yer telling me that we’re beached in New Jersey, that you and Brian did this all on yer own?”
“Claro que sí. That’s the way it is.”
“Bullshit!”
A slight moan came from behind Vince’s tape. Christal wondered if he’d ever managed to relieve the pressure in his bladder. She sniffed, but wasn’t sure she’d recognize the odor of urine in the stuffy air. She might have already grown used to it.
“Why don’t you pull this tape off me, and we’ll both try to open the damn hatch?”
“Just lie there in the darkness and shut up.”
“Go ahead. Be smug. In the end I’ve had the best of you, Anaya. How will you choose, you sanctimonious bitch? Will you give it life or—”
The clang was so loud she jumped. “Shit!”
“Aye. Someone knows we’re here.”
A slight glow turned from dark to cherry, to light red, then faded.
“What’s that?” Gregor asked.
“I think they’re cutting the hinges, Greg.”
A lower glow could barely be made out, and then it, too, faded. Metal on metal rang out; then a grinding sound came through the steel. A high-pitched whine ended with a drill poking through and being withdrawn.
Christal grinned when a thin voice thick with Australian accent called, “Anybody alive in there?”
“Nobody but us mice,” she shouted back at the hole.
“Be clear of the hatch. It’s going to fall inward when we pry it.”
Christal stumbled across the dark floor, feeling for Gregor’s and Vince’s bodies. Then she shouted, “Clear!”
The grinding sounded, and a thin line of light widened as the heavy hatch leaned, then crashed inward.
Christal blinked in the white light as Brian’s tall shape stepped in, followed by two gray-clad Guardsmen.
Christal grinned as she stepped into Brian’s arms. “Hey, it’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too. You all right?”
“Couldn’t be better.” She turned to the Guardsmen, pointing. “Those two need to be cuffed and confined ASAP. The charges are conspiracy to commit kidnapping, attempted murder, breaking and entering, tax evasion, and any kind of violation of maritime law you want to throw at them.”
Then she reached up and kissed Brian Everly firmly on the lips.
57
TWO DAYS LATER
Sheela padded across the carpet in her corner suite at the Plaza. Through the windows, she could see the street below: Manhattan traffic starting and stopping, joggers making dots of color as they trotted along the winding paths visible through the trees in the park.
On the television, CNN continued to document the evacuation of the ZoeGen as, by groups of ten, the frightened passengers were removed, loaded into vans, and hauled off to the INS detention center for processing.
The press was in the midst of an incredible feeding frenzy. Each story that emerged fed an ever-greater appetite.
“Information on Sheik Amud Abdulla continues to trickle in,” the commentator said. “Apparently, he has been a strong supporter of US policies in the Gulf, playing a hand in the pacification and rebuilding of Iraq. He has been instrumental in helping to stabilize the Gulf during building tensions with Iran. Senior White House officials are hinting that the Sheik, despite the grounding of his ship, has been cooperative and forthcoming during this investigation.”
Dot, looking harried, walked into the room. “God, you wouldn’t believe it! How do they figure these things out?”
“What now?”
“Somehow, angels alone know how, Letterman’s producer has figured out that you were aboard the ZoeGen.” Dot cocked her head. “Do you want to do the interview?”
“Tell him yes, but later. After things have settled down.” She waved at the TV. “Dot, anything I say is just going to complicate matters.”
Dot gave her a thoughtful look. “You understand, don’t you? You couldn’t buy better publicity.”
“Good, because right now, that’s the last thing I’d spend money on.”
The frown deepened on Dot’s forehead. “Tony called. I know you said you didn’t want to talk to anyone, but he’s on pins and needles to speak with you. I have him and Letterman holding.”
Sheela made a face. “Right. Tell Letterman that the next interview I do will be his, and I’ll take Tony’s call here.”
She walked over, settled herself in a settee beside a half-drunk cup of tea, and lifted the receiver. “Hello, Tony.”
“Hey, babe! Wow! Is this some story or what, huh? Listen. I’ve got Soderbergh on the other line. We’ve been talking. You know, throwing some pitches around. He’s hot to do your story. You know, the whole thing! Like from the tampon incident to you traveling incognito to snoop out Genesis Athena. It’s like, name your price, babe! You can produce, whatever. Just give the word!”
“I need to think about it, Tony.”
“Hey, babe! It’s okay. Still too close, huh? Take a day or two to let it sit and digest. This stuff just keeps growing like mold in the refrigerator. I been talking to Benny. He thinks we can cast Patricia Velasquez to play Christal, and maybe even Tom Hanks as Lymon. Wouldn’t that be a rip?”
“Tony, take a break.”
“It’s cool, babe. We’re already working on the script. You know, just things I know. We’ll have a treatment ready by the time you land in LA.”
She hung up, rubbing her eyes and trying to shake off the sense of premonition. “This is going to be a nightmare.”
Dot was watching with neutral eyes. “You were the one who wanted to take a month off.”
“Why the hell doesn’t Lymon call?”
Dot smiled. “Listen, you’re just lucky that Sid Harness managed to get you extricated from that mess. Lymon and Christal are going to have their hands full for days. They’re giving statements, talking to lawyers, filling in details. Thank God you were smart enough to fly Felix out to look after them. And what about this dead guy?” Dot’s face tightened. “Did you really shoot him?”
Sheela glanced up, her face like a mask. “Dot, I think you have things to do. And while you’re about them, make sure that we have a
plane ready the moment the government cuts our people loose.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After Dot left, Sheela looked down, barely bending her right index finger. In her mind, she could feel the gun vibrating in her hands.
“A short burst,” she whispered, remembering the weapons training she’d received in preparation for Moon of the Falling Leaves. “So short. But now, everything’s eternally different.”
On the TV, photos of Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were being overlaid atop the beaming faces of two little babies.
“Are these cloned children really created from Elvis Presley and Princess Diana of Wales? As of this report, we have no reaction from either the Spencer family or the Presley estate.”
Sheela gasped, staring in disbelieving horror at the young woman’s face on TV. Krissy was smiling into the camera, that crazy gleam in her eyes. “Oh, yes,” she was saying. “I went to Genesis Athena months ago.” The camera pulled back to show Krissy pressing her hands to a swelling abdomen. “Mine’s a Sheela Marks baby! And I want everyone to know that I’m going to love her … the same way I love Sheela Marks!”
For a moment time seemed to stop. Sheela pressed a hand to her mouth, stifling a scream. Then, in horror, she bolted from the room, Krissy’s madly gleeful expression burned into her brain.
58
BEVERLY HILLS—TWO MONTHS LATER
“In the end I’ve had the best of you, Anaya.” Gregor’s words echoed hollowly.
The cold rage had continued to grow. Christal considered that as she put the Concorde in park and killed the ignition. “Don’t go there.” Brian’s words hung in her ears.
“Got to,” she muttered, aware of the coiled rage that was growing like a cancer inside her.
“How will you choose, you sanctimonious bitch?”
She had been raised Catholic. In the old church where the santos stared down from the walls. Down deep in her bones she believed in heaven and hell, in the consignment to flames of woe. The decision she now faced tore her soul in two. But the choice couldn’t be made—not yet; not until she had placed her foot atop the serpent’s head and heard him squeal.
The Athena Factor Page 56