Black Order

by James Rollins

  Gray’s response grew heated. “So the bastards try to fry my ass…and now you want me to sit on it?”

  “Commander.”

  Gray’s fingers tightened on the phone. Logan had plainly spent too much time as a paper pusher at Sigma. For a research mission, Logan was adequate as an ops leader—but this was no longer a fact-gathering assignment. It was turning into a full-blown Sigma Force op. And if that was the case, Gray wanted someone with real leadership backing him up.

  “Maybe we should get Director Crowe involved,” Gray said.

  Another long pause followed. Perhaps he had said the wrong thing. He didn’t mean to insult Logan, to go over his head, but sometimes you simply had to know when to step aside.

  “I’m afraid that would be impossible at the moment, Commander Pierce.”

  “Why?”

  “Director Crowe is currently incommunicado in Nepal.”

  Gray frowned. “In Nepal? What’s he doing in Nepal?”

  “Commander, you sent him.”

  “What?”

  Then it dawned on Gray.

  The call had come in a week ago.

  From an old friend.

  Gray’s mind slipped into the past, back to his first days with Sigma Force. Like all other Sigma agents, Gray had a background with Special Forces: joining the army at eighteen, the Rangers at twenty-one. But after being court-martialed for striking a superior officer, Gray had been recruited by Sigma Force, straight out of Leavenworth. Still, he had been leery. There had been a good reason he’d struck that officer. The man’s incompetence had resulted in needless deaths in Bosnia—deaths of children—but Gray’s anger had deeper roots. Tangled issues with authority, going back to his father. And while those hadn’t been completely resolved, it had taken a wise man to show Gray the path.

  That man had been Ang Gelu.

  “Are you saying Director Crowe is out in Nepal because of my friend the Buddhist monk?”

  “Painter knew how important the man was to you.”

  Gray stopped walking and stepped into the shadows.

  He had spent four months studying with the monk in Nepal, alongside his training for Sigma. In fact, it was through Ang Gelu that Gray had developed his own unique curriculum at Sigma. Gray had been fast-tracked to study biology and physics, a dual degree, but Ang Gelu elevated Gray’s studies, instructing him how to search for the balance between all things. The harmony of opposites. The Taoist yin and yang. The one and the zero.

  Such insight eventually helped Gray confront demons of his past.

  Growing up, he had always found himself stuck between opposites. Though his mother had taught at a Catholic high school, instilling a deep spirituality in Gray’s life, she was also an accomplished biologist, a devout disciple of evolution and reason. She placed as much faith and trust in the scientific method as in her own religion.

  And then there was his father: a Welshman living in Texas, a roughneck oilman disabled in midlife and having to assume the role of a housewife. As a result, his life became ruled by overcompensation and anger.

  Like father, like son.

  Until Ang Gelu had shown Gray another way.

  A path between opposites. It was not a short path. It extended as much into the past as the future. Gray was still struggling with it.

  But Ang Gelu had helped Gray take his first steps. He owed the monk for that. So when the call for help reached Gray a week ago, he had not wanted to ignore it. Ang Gelu reported strange disappearances, odd maladies, all in a certain region near the Chinese border.

  The monk had not known to whom to turn. His own government in Nepal was too focused on the Maoist rebels. And Ang Gelu knew Gray was involved in a nebulous chain of command in covert ops. So he had appealed to Gray for help. But already assigned to this current mission, Gray had turned the matter over to Painter Crowe.

  Passing the buck…

  “I had only meant for Painter to send a junior operative,” Gray stumbled out, incredulous. “To check it out. Certainly there were others who—”

  Logan cut him off. “It was slow here.”

  Gray bit back a groan. He knew what Logan meant. The same lull in global threats had brought Gray to Denmark.

  “So he went?”

  “You know the director. Always wants to get his hands dirty.” Logan sighed in exasperation. “And now there’s a problem. A storm blanketed communication for a few days, but now that it’s cleared, we’ve still not heard an update from the director. Instead we’re hearing rumors through various channels. The same stories as reported by your friend. Sickness, plague, deaths, even possible rebel attacks in the region. Only it’s escalating.”

  Gray now understood the strain he’d been hearing in Logan’s voice.

  It seemed it was not only Gray’s mission that was going tits up.

  When it rains, it pours.

  “I can send you Monk,” Logan said. “He and Captain Bryant are on their way here. Monk can be on the ground there in ten hours. Stand down until then.”

  “But the auction will be over—”

  “Commander Pierce, you have your orders.”

  Gray spoke rapidly, his voice tightening again. “Sir, I’ve already set up buttonhole cameras at entry and egress points around the auction house. It would be a waste to ignore them.”

  “All right. Monitor the cameras from a secure location. Record everything. But no more. Is that understood, Commander?”

  Gray bristled, but Logan had his hands full. All because of a favor to Gray. So he had little reason to object. “Very good, sir.”

  “Report in after the auction,” Logan said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The line clicked off.

  Gray continued through the backstreets of Copenhagen, alert to all around him. But worry nagged him.

  For Painter, for Ang Gelu…

  What the hell was happening in Nepal?

  4

  GHOST LIGHTS

  11:18 A.M.

  HIMALAYAS

  “And you’re sure Ang Gelu was killed?” Painter asked, glancing back.

  A nod answered him.

  Lisa Cummings had finished her story, having told how she’d been enlisted from an Everest climbing team to investigate an illness at the monastery. She had quickly related the horrors that followed: the madness, the explosions, the sniper.

  Painter reviewed her story in his head as the pair wound deeper into the monastery’s subterranean root cellar. The narrow stone maze was not meant for one his size. He had to keep tucked low. Still, the top of his head brushed across some hanging bundles of drying juniper branches. The aromatic sprays were used to make ceremonial smudge sticks for the temple overhead, a temple that was now just one large smudge stick, burning and smoking into the midday sky.

  Weaponless, they had fled into the cellars to escape the flames. Painter had stopped only long enough to grab a heavy poncho and a pair of fur-lined boots from a cloakroom. In the current getup, he almost looked the part of a Pequot Indian, even if he was only half-blooded. He had no recollection of where his own clothes or packs had been taken.

  Three days had vanished from his life.

  Along with ten pounds.

  While donning the robe earlier, he noted the prominence of his ribs. Even his shoulders seemed bonier. He had not fully escaped the illness here. Still, at least his strength continued to improve.

  It needed to.

  Especially with an assassin still on the loose.

  Painter had heard the occasional spats of gunfire as they fled below. A sniper was killing anyone who fled the burning monastery. Dr. Cummings had described the attacker. Only one man. Surely there were others. Were they Maoist rebels? It made no sense. What end did their slaughter serve?

  Bearing a penlight in hand, Painter led the way.

  Dr. Cummings followed closely.

  Painter had learned she was an American medical doctor and a member of an Everest climbing party. He studied her glancingly, evaluating
her. She was long-legged with an athletic physique, blond and ponytailed, her cheeks rosy from windburn. She was also terrified. She kept close to him, jumping at the occasional muffled pop of the firestorm overhead. Still, she didn’t stop, no tears, no complaints. It seemed she staved off any shock by sheer will.

  But for how long?

  Her fingers trembled as she moved aside a drying bouquet of lemongrass from her face. They continued onward. As they moved deeper into the root cellar, the air grew redolent from all the sprigs: rosemary, artemisia, mountain rhododendron, khenpa. All ready to be prepared into various incense sticks.

  Lama Khemsar, the head of the monastery, had taught Painter the purposes of the hundreds of herbs: for purification, to foster divine energies, to dispel disruptive thoughts, even to treat asthma and the common cold. But right now, all Painter wanted to remember was how to reach the cellar’s back door. The root cellar connected all the monastery’s buildings. Monks used the cellars during the winter’s heavy snowfall to pass underground from structure to structure.

  Including reaching the barn at the outskirts of the grounds. It stood well away from the flames and out of direct sight.

  If they could reach it…then escape to the lower village…

  He needed to contact Sigma Command.

  As his mind spun with possibilities, so did the passageway.

  Painter leaned a hand on the cellar wall, steadying himself.

  Dizzy.

  “Are you all right?” the doctor asked, stepping to his shoulder.

  He took a few breaths before nodding. Since he had awakened, bouts of disorientation continued to plague him. But they were occurring less frequently—or was that wishful thinking?

  “What really happened up there?” the doctor asked. She relieved him of his penlight—it was actually hers, from her medical kit—and pointed it into his eyes.

  “I don’t…I’m not sure…But we should keep moving.”

  Painter tried to push off the wall, but she pressed a palm against his chest, still examining his eyes. “You’re showing a prominent nystagmus,” she whispered and lowered the penlight, brow crinkled.

  “What?”

  She passed him a canteen of cold water and motioned for him to sit on a wrapped bale of hay. He didn’t argue. The bale was as hard as cement.

  “Your eyes show signs of horizontal nystagmus, a twitch of the pupils. Did you take a blow to the head?”

  “I don’t think so. Is it serious?”

  “Hard to say. It can be the result of damage to the eye or brain. A stroke, multiple sclerosis, a blow to the head. With the dizziness, I’d say you’ve had some insult to your vestibular apparatus. Maybe in the inner ear. Maybe central nervous system. Most likely it’s not permanent.” This last was mumbled in a most disconcerting voice.

  “What do you mean by most likely, Dr. Cummings?”

  “Call me Lisa,” she said, as if attempting to divert attention.

  “Fine. Lisa. So this could be permanent?”

  She glanced away. “I’d need more tests. More background,” she said. “Maybe you could start by telling me how all this happened.”

  He took a swig. He wished he could. An ache settled behind his eyes as he tried to remember. The last days were a blur.

  “I was staying at one of the outlying villages. In the middle of the night, strange lights appeared up in the mountains. I didn’t see the fireworks. By the time I’d woken, they’d subsided. But by the morning, everyone in the village complained of headaches, nausea. Including me. I asked one of the elders about the lights. He said they would appear every now and then, going back generations. Ghost lights. Attributed it to evil spirits of the deep mountains.”

  “Evil spirits?”

  “He pointed to where the lights were seen. Up in a remote region of the mountains, an area of deep gorges, ice waterfalls, stretching all the way to the Chinese border. Difficult to traverse. The monastery sits on a shoulder of mountain overlooking this no-man’s-land.”

  “So the monastery was closer to the lights?”

  Painter nodded. “All the sheep died within twenty-four hours. Some dropped where they stood. Others bashed their heads against boulders, over and over again. I arrived back the next day, aching and vomiting. Lama Khemsar gave me some tea. That’s the last thing I remember.” He took another sip from the canteen and sighed. “That was three days ago. I woke up. Locked in a room. I had to smash my way out.”

  “You were lucky,” the woman said, collecting back her canteen.

  “How’s that?”

  She crossed her arms, tight, protective. “Lucky to be away from the monastery. Proximity to the lights appears to correlate to the severity of symptoms.” She glanced up and away, as if trying to see through the walls down here. “Maybe it was some form of radiation. Didn’t you say the Chinese border was not far? Maybe it was a nuclear test of some sort.”

  Painter had wondered the exact same thing days earlier.

  “Why are you shaking your head?” Lisa asked.

  Painter hadn’t realized he was. He raised a palm to his forehead.

  Lisa frowned. “You never did say what you are doing way out here, Mr. Crowe.”

  “Call me Painter.” He offered her a crooked smile.

  She wasn’t impressed.

  He debated how much more to say. Under the circumstances, honesty seemed the most prudent. Or at least as honest as he could be.

  “I work for the government, a division called DARPA. We—”

  She cut him off with a flip of her fingers, arms still crossed. “I’m familiar with DARPA. The U.S. military’s research and development division. I had a research grant with them once. What’s their interest out here?”

  “Well, it seems you were not the only one Ang Gelu recruited. He contacted our organization a week ago. To investigate rumors of strange illnesses up here. I was just getting the lay of the land, determining what experts to bring into the area—doctors, geologists, military—when the storms blew in. I hadn’t planned on being cut off for so long.”

  “Were you able to rule anything out?”

  “From initial interviews, I was concerned that perhaps the Maoist rebels in the area had come into possession of some nuclear waste, preparing a dirty bomb of some sort. Along the lines of what you were conjecturing with the Chinese. So I tested for various forms of radiation as I waited out the storms. Nothing unusual registered.”

  Lisa stared at him, as if studying a strange beetle.

  “If we could get you to a lab,” she said clinically, “we might come up with some answers.”

  So she didn’t consider him so much a beetle as a guinea pig.

  At least he was moving up the evolutionary scale.

  “First we have to survive,” Painter said, recalling her to the reality here.

  She glanced at the cellar’s ceiling. It had been a while since they heard any gunfire. “Maybe they’ll think everyone’s dead. If we just stay down here—”

  Painter pushed off the bale and stood. “From your description, the attack here was methodical. Planned in advance. They’ll know about these tunnels. They’ll eventually search here. We can only hope they’ll wait for the fires to cool down.”

  Lisa nodded. “Then we keep going.”

  “And get clear. We can do this,” he assured her. He placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. “We can do this,” he repeated, more to himself this time than to her.

  They set off.

  After a few steps, Painter felt steadier.

  Good.

  The exit could not be much farther.

  As if confirming this, a breeze whispered down the corridor, stirring the hanging bundles of herbs with a dry clacking. Painter felt the cold on his face. It froze him in place. A hunter’s instinct took hold—half special ops training, half blood heritage. He reached behind him and took hold of Lisa’s elbow, silencing her.

  He flicked off the penlight.

  Ahead, something heavy stru
ck the floor, the sound echoing down the passage. Boots. A door slammed closed. The breeze died.

  They were no longer alone.

  The assassin crouched in the root cellar. He knew others were down here. How many? He shouldered his rifle and pulled out a Heckler & Koch MK23 pistol. He had already stripped his hands to fingerless wool under-gloves. He stood his post, listening.

  The faintest scuffle and scrape.

  Retreating.

  At least two…maybe three.

  Reaching up, he pulled shut the trapdoor that led to the barn above. The cold breeze died with one last whispered rush as darkness clamped over him. He pulled down a pair of night-vision goggles and clicked on an ultraviolet lamp affixed to his shoulder. The passage ahead glowed in shades of a silvery green.

  Near at hand, a wall of shelves was stacked with canned goods and rows of wax-sealed jars of amber honey. He slipped past, moving slowly, silently. There was no need to hurry. The only other exits led to fiery ruin. He had shot those monks with sense enough still in their addled heads to flee the flames.

  Mercy killings, all of them.

  As he knew too well.

  The Bell had been rung too loudly.

  It had been an accident. One of many lately.

  For the past month, he had sensed the agitation among the others at the Granitschloß. Even before the accident. Something had stirred up the castle, felt as far as the hinterlands where he made his solitary home. He had ignored it. Why should it be his concern?

  Then the accident…and it had become his problem.

  To clean up their mistake.

  It was his duty as one of the last surviving Sonnekönige. Such was the decline of the Knights of the Sun—both in numbers and in status, debilitated and shunned, anachronistic and an embarrassment. Before long, the last of them would be gone.

  And just as well.

  But at least this duty today was almost finished. He could return to his hovel after he cleared out this root cellar. The tragedy at the monastery would be blamed on Maoist rebels. Who else but the godless Maoists would attack a strategically unimportant monastery?