The Kafir Project

by Lee Burvine

  Osborn had nearly finished crossing the field, and the homeless man still hadn't spotted him. He was close enough now to shoot him easily.

  He stopped, about twenty feet away, and quietly raised the gun in a two-handed grip.

  He had only been given brief instruction, but he knew how to properly aim the weapon. The homeless man's head was perched atop the front sight now, and centered in the rear sight notch.

  If he didn't shoot this man, he would almost certainly lose what Amsel and others had already given their lives for.

  Just one homeless man that no one would miss and the future of the world very possibly hanging in the balance.

  Osborn tightened his finger on the trigger. He thought about the valise.

  About what it contained.

  And stopped.

  He couldn't. He couldn't do it.

  "Hey! Hey, you there!" Osborn kept the gun aimed at the homeless man. He knew he was taking a huge chance here, but hoped he could win with just a bluff.

  The man wheeled toward Osborn, wide-eyed. Then immediately bolted with the valise. Running with surprising speed, disappearing like a deer through the trees.

  Shaking now, Osborn lowered the gun.

  He plodded up to where the man had been standing just a moment before.

  A large zip-lock bag lay there on the fallen eucalyptus leaves. Next to it ... the lectionary codex with its badly oxidized copper covers.

  Rocks and rusted metal.

  To the untrained eye it must have looked like so much trash.

  The homeless man had dumped the worthless weight and kept the nice-looking, leather valise.

  He would pawn it, most probably. For a few dollars to buy drugs, or a bottle of booze.

  Osborn picked up the codex and the zip-lock bag,whose real worth was incalculable, and began walking back toward the street tohail a cab.

  CHAPTER 47

  ANNA REES LEFT a short message and hung up. No one had answered. No one there. She was alone.

  She would always be alone.

  Because you're twisted.

  And so she decided to get on with it.

  She held her hands out before her, palms up, and looked at the delicate veins there in the wrists. Little blue wires under the thin, translucent skin, carrying the hot current of life through her body.

  She picked up the X-Acto knife. She knew better than to make horizontal cuts, attacking those superficial veins. Deep, vertical slashes. That's what you wanted. Deep enough to reach the larger blood vessels down there.

  She was standing in her bathroom, naked in front of the sink. If she looked up, she would see herself in the mirror there.

  She did not look up.

  With her right hand, she lightly touched the tip of the razor to the skin of her left wrist. She pressed down. The pain made her gasp and back off.

  A droplet of bright red blood beaded up where she'd pricked herself. It blurred as tears welled up.

  She blinked away the tears, grit her teeth, and tried again in the exact same spot.

  The pointed tip of the razor disappeared into the blood droplet. She pressed harder this time.

  The pain made her cry out, but she kept on pressing. This was nothing compared to the agony she felt inside now. She would endure any physical pain to be free from the terrible soul suffering.

  Besides, this pain would stop soon.

  Encouraged by that thought, she pushed the blade in halfway to the shaft, biting her lower lip to stifle the scream.

  She dragged it down toward her elbow. One inch. Two. Three.

  The searing pain made her whole frame spasm. She nearly lost her grip on the pen-like body of the little hobby knife.

  Dark red blood ran down the inside of her left wrist. It dripped, spattering, into the sink.

  She felt something deep inside her wrist squirm.

  She stopped cutting.

  As she watched, something emerged from the slash. Blood-smeared, tubular and ivory white.

  A tendon.

  No, not a tendon. It wriggled. It was slithering out of the bloody gash, like a worm weaving up out of the ground into a rain puddle.

  Then another bloody worm-thing followed and intertwined with the first. Then a third one, much larger, the size of a small garden snake. On this last one she could see a head without eyes.

  But it had a mouth. The mouth gaped open revealing multiple rows of tiny, needle teeth.

  Anna screamed.

  Something awoke within her. Some things. She tried to scream again, but no sound came out this time.

  The skin on her stomach rippled with undulating waves, like an elastic membrane over a writhing ball of eels.

  Something was rising deep in her throat too. It pushed up toward her mouth, pressing against the back of her tongue.

  She looked down at her belly and saw in her skin the outline of an arm. Inside pushing outward. And a hand with fingers splayed. The hand began to inch down. Down below her abdomen. Down between her thighs.

  Whatever the thing was, it wanted to be born.

  Something was tearing now deep in her gut. The pain. White hot, unbearable pain.

  God, please. Oh, God, please make it stop.

  She looked up and straight ahead, into the mirror.

  And Gevin Rees saw himself standing there.

  Bloody and nude. Teenaged again. The wounds from the car accident still fresh. A jagged, white tip of shattered rib bone tearing out through his side. It pumped up and down with each ragged breath.

  At his feet lay his sister, Anna. Dead. Decaying. The gray skin liquefying and sloughing off her skull.

  The putrid smell made him wretch. That jangled the shards of broken rib bones and sent new shocks of searing pain through his body.

  She was dead, yes, but still aware somehow. Her eyes wide open, looked up at him, pleading. Piercing him with a sadness so horrible it would be better that the world itself had never been.

  Rees wept. He wept with an agony too large for time to contain. An agony that only eternity could encompass.

  Anna, Anna. I'm so sorry. Please, forgive me.

  Then, as he watched, his sister began to change down there. She was becoming translucent. The floor beneath her as well. The walls, ceiling, everything was turning insubstantial.

  He could see something through them now. The motel room.

  He had returned. He sat, still duct taped into the chair, his face wet with tears.

  Faraj stood before him, green eyes sparkling. "So you see, Dr. Rees, this would be very difficult to describe in words."

  "Goddamn you." Rees's voice cracked with emotion. And the physical torment that he had been ... what, hallucinating? The echoes of it still bounced around inside his body. It might have all been a hallucination.

  But the pain, the pain had been very real.

  Faraj picked up the syringe and red vial off the coffee table. Holding them in front of his face, he again drew up a tiny amount of the drug. "As I explained, in small amounts the effects are quite short-lived." He paused, then filled the syringe entirely with the drug. Perhaps ten or fifteen times as much as before. "But with a dose of this size, the psychosis is permanent."

  Good God, no. Oh, no.

  Faraj withdrew the needle from the vial, held the syringe upright, and tapped it twice with the nail of his forefinger. He squirted a brief red stream into the air, like an arterial spurt. "There is no outer physical manifestation. To the world you would seem to be in a vegetative state. You are well off, insured I assume? You would be taken care of. You might live perhaps forty years. Maybe more."

  "No. No, please. No, I couldn't..." The horror that filled Rees's mind drove every other thought out. To experience that. For the remainder of a lifetime?

  The fear that gripped him surpassed anything he'd ever felt or even imagined possible.

  "What do you want to know?"

  CHAPTER 48

  AS T
HEY DESCENDED toward San Francisco, Singleton gazed out the window and listened to the hum of the Learjet's engines pulsing. Louder, deeper, softer, higher.

  The pattern repeated every few seconds. Harmonic oscillation. All complex mechanisms had their own rhythms.

  That was the first sign the current operation had gone sideways. No rhythm. In part the result of far too many on-the-fly adjustments.

  Then there was the client, Carl Truby. To say he was getting a bit difficult was like saying that a bullet to the brain-

  "Trying to figure out how to get rid of me, are you?" Truby said.

  Excellent timing, Mr. Truby. Singleton turned toward the only other passenger on the plane.

  Truby sat opposite Singleton, staring at him over a plate of thousand dollar an ounce Caspian Sea caviar that neither of them had touched.

  "What makes you think that?" Singleton asked.

  A smile dimpled Truby's fat cheeks. "I can see the gears turning." He shifted in his seat. Truby was a soft and pudgy man. His suits, though no doubt tailored, never fit quite right. Singleton suspected it was intentional. A camouflage of normalcy for one of the most powerful elites on the planet.

  Singleton found Truby's answer amusing, but kept his face a mask. "If I were that readable, I'd have been dead a long time ago."

  "I need to stay hands on." Truby had dropped the smile.

  "Your best move would be to remain on the jet when we land. Let me fly you straight back to D.C. You're risking unnecessary exposure."

  "Oh, I'll keep a low profile in San Francisco. But I am staying in the goddamn loop from now on. You know my record, so you know what kind of skills I have. Face it, you need me there."

  "You put a moron into the White House once, a very long time ago. That was quite a trick, sure. But I don't see it coming in handy at the present moment."

  Truby smiled amiably at that last jab. "In fact it was quite a trick. A bigger trick than taking out one half-deranged scientist and a goddam TV show host. Which you and your people still haven't managed to pull off."

  "That's why I'm wrapping this thing up personally."

  "And I'm supposed to assume you'll do a better job than Special Agent Merriweather?"

  Singleton didn't react to that.

  Truby cracked a wide grin. "Oh, ho, you do have one hell of a poker face. I will give you that. But you have to be wondering how the hell I knew Merriweather was your guy."

  Singleton had already worked that out. "You have your own resources in the Defense Department. I assume they told you-as my people told me-that a witness saw Merriweather fatally shoot a fellow DCIS agent before he tried to kill that witness as well."

  "Sloppy work there, wouldn't you say?"

  "So, Carl, am I supposed to be surprised that you could put two and two together?"

  "No, asshole, you're supposed to be thinking-if he can work that out, then there's a trail out there someone else can follow."

  "Thank you for your concern. We can take care of it."

  "Can you? What if someone already documented that trail, including large sums of money making their way to your man Merriweather? What if that same someone is perfectly willing to screw you up the ass with it all?"

  Singleton literally couldn't believe what he was hearing now. And that, apparently, did show on his face.

  Truby laughed. "Ah, finally. A reaction. I was starting to think you were a goddamn android or something."

  "Are you threating my organization, Mr. Truby? Be very careful with your next answer."

  Truby looked quite comfortable. He spooned some caviar onto a cracker. "I'm trying to help you see why it's in both of our best interests for me to be directly in charge from this point on."

  "I want to be sure I understand you. You intend to take over tactical command of this operation, with my organization as your resources. Order us around?"

  "You're a little slow on the uptake for a private spook, or whatever you consider yourself, but you catch on." Truby popped the cracker into his mouth. "Mmm. This really is excellent stuff."

  "And blackmailing me with the threat of exposing an operation that you paid for-that's your best play?" Singleton allowed himself a smile. "You have some idea what I do, in the course of my regular work?"

  "Yeah. And I also know what's at stake. If you screw this thing up, my world goes away. I have nothing to lose here, so I could give a shit. You understand? I'll burn you and your people to the ground. So you just step back now and do as you're told, and that won't need to happen."

  "I'm intrigued. How is it you see your whole world going away?"

  Truby loaded up another cracker with caviar. "Well to be clear, it's your world we're talking about too, smartass. You know what Fischer was trying to pull off? Beyond the crazy shit he was supposed to be after?"

  "I do. And so, what? Are you afraid the world will descend into anarchy without the promise of heaven or the threat of hell?"

  Truby was chewing loudly and seemed to be savoring the flavor of the caviar, unconcerned about making Singleton wait. He cracked open a bottle of mineral water and poured himself a glass. Sipped it. Set the glass back down.

  Finally he looked across the table at Singleton. "You really think it's heaven and hell that keeps folks in line?" Truby laughed. "You know, for a sharp guy you're pretty stupid."

  "We've got time. Educate me."

  Truby's eyes narrowed and he cocked his head contemplatively. "What do you think religions are really for, Mr. Singleton? Huh? To teach us right from wrong with stories about blindly following an order to slit your kid's throat? Or how you shouldn't raise your hand against evil, but go ahead and beat your wife into obedience? No. That's not what it's for. It's us and them. That's what it's for. That's the whole point. It's us and them that makes it all work. Come out from among them, and be ye separate. You familiar with scripture?"

  Singleton was not in the mood. "Truly fascinating, Carl, but I fail to see-"

  "Then shut up and I'll explain it." Truby's voice took on an almost giddy tone now as he continued. "All religions create an us, Mr. Singleton. That's the believers. But the genius of monotheism is that it created both an us and a dirty, blasphemous them in one stroke. Right and wrong, baby! No more my god's bigger than your god. There's only my God. We're good, and you're not just different. You're evil. Now there's a reason to fight. Hell, it's a better tool for manipulation than nationalism. Better even than race, and that's saying something, my brothuh." He hit the last word with a parody of urban black diction.

  "All right. I see your point."

  But Truby was on a roll. "Shit, racism looks like sibling rivalry by comparison. He raised his voice. "Listen to me, the people I work for need there to be a true religion. Two at the very least! Without that, there's no goddamn leverage. You see me getting a man into the White House without those buttons to push? Let alone keep him in there for two terms?" He leaned across the table, and slammed his meaty fist down on it. "No! It's unworkable, goddamnit! And we won't let it happen. Do you get it now? Do you understand this yet, Mr. Baxter?"

  In the silence that followed, Singleton heard the jet's engines humming. Louder, deeper, softer, higher.

  He felt his face growing hot. He had believed until this very moment that no one still alive could connect him with his birth name, Richard Baxter. He sat there too shocked even to be impressed.

  Acting intuitively, he picked up a cracker. Grasped the small spoon. Dipped it in the caviar and deposited some on the cracker. Took a bite.

  And breathed. He just breathed.

  Truby leaned back in his seat. "That's right. You play it cool, Richard. I need you cool and calm if we're gonna finish this thing."

  He's made his move. Just chill out. It'll be your turn soon enough.

  Truby was watching him with cold, fish eyes. "I didn't appreciate that late night scare you gave me. I did some looking. You think you know how deep my connections go? The favors I'm owed? Yo
u don't know the half of it. You have a storied past, my friend. Lots of people out there who would love to find out where you are now."

  Singleton looked at the clump of black, shiny eggs on the cracker in his hand. Workers harvested them from a living fish. Three days before it spawned. They stunned the fish with a blow to the head, then slit its guts open.

  He looked at Carl Truby's bulging belly. A knife sat within reach.

  Truby had that face on again. The one he wore when he said he could see the wheels turning in Singleton's head. "Yeah, you could take me out," he said now. "Make it look like one of a thousand different accidents. But you know I know that. You know I'm prepared for that. The bomb, so to speak, is armed. And it's on a dead man's switch. Everything blows up if I'm not around to stop it. Everything I've got on you goes public. And then they come for you, Richard."

  In his mind, Singleton heard the grinding of gears and screeching of metal. The machinery of this operation tearing itself to pieces.

  No rhythm to it. No rhythm at all.

  The landing gear made a whirring sound as it extended, followed by a clunk that Singleton could feel through the cabin floor.

  He finished the cracker and caviar. Truby was right. It really was excellent stuff.

  Money didn't buy happiness, but it did buy all the pleasures that Singleton cared for most. He truly enjoyed his life, and the role he played in the world that men like Carl Truby kept spinning.

  And Singleton was a realist.

  "It's your show," he said.

  CHAPTER 49

  LOUIS THOUGHT HE might enjoy a stroll on the SFSU campus a little more if he weren't worried any second now someone was going to jump out from behind a bush and blow his head off.

  And that was an actual possibility, if the man who grabbed Rees was here already looking for this Herodotus guy. So given the gravity of the situation, it struck him as odd when he heard Morgan start laughing.

  She pointed up at the main library building, dead ahead of them. "The J. Paul Leonard Library. JPL. You know, we could've just looked that up."