Labyrinth

by Jon Land

  “You will not be around to see yourself proven wrong,” Mandala shot out furiously, “because today I am given the very great pleasure of killing you. If I had more time, I’d make it slow, Grendel, to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused me.”

  Nikki was just ten yards away now.

  Dogan shook his head, the motion sending bolts of agony through his body. “You won’t make it, Mandala. You’re alone, isolated. Kill me; it doesn’t matter because there’ll be a hundred nations coming after you with everything they’ve got.”

  Just five yards away …

  Mandala’s eyes flashed eagerly, still locked on Dogan’s. “Yes, Grendel, I think I will kill you.” He stepped back and tilted the Uzi’s barrel down. “I think that—”

  The sound of a branch cracking behind him made Mandala swing fast, Uzi coming up and ready. Nikki was already upon him, Kukhri knives slicing into his throat on twin diagonal angles.

  Mandala lost the Uzi’s trigger, lost everything as he started to crumble, blood pumping from the gashes across his windpipe. Through fading eyes, Dogan watched Nikki pounce on Mandala’s writhing frame. The blades plunged into flesh. She withdrew them and plunged them in again. There was little left of Mandala’s torso and head when she was finished, trembling as she rose, a look of grim gratification etched upon her features. She let her knives drop over Mandala’s mutilated corpse and moved toward Dogan. He watched her lean over him and he tried to ask her how she had escaped from Switzerland. But he could form no words and it didn’t matter anyway.

  Then Nikki was speaking softly to him but he couldn’t hear her and everything hurt too much, so he closed his eyes and let her disappear.

  Dogan was conscious of being carried down the hillside on a stretcher, the Ranger commander at his side.

  “I guess this finishes it,” the bearded man told him. “You did a helluva number back there on Mandala.”

  “Wasn’t … me,” Dogan muttered.

  The commander turned to a doctor trailing just behind the stretcher holding an IV bottle. “What did he say?”

  “Couldn’t hear him.”

  “The girl,” Dogan rasped, struggling for volume.

  “What girl?” the commander asked. “We didn’t find any girl.”

  Dogan smiled and surrendered to oblivion.

  Epilogue

  “SORRY I CAN’T OFFER you anything but orange juice, Mr. Roy.”

  “Call me Cal, son. We been through enough together to be on a first-name basis.”

  Dogan shifted tentatively in his chair on the patio outside the Bethesda Naval Hospital. His left leg was encased in a cast from the knee down and would be for another two weeks. Across the table Calvin Roy sipped his orange juice out of a paper cup.

  “Thanks for stopping by to visit.”

  “Least I could do, son. Doctors tell me you’ll be up and around in a month tops and I ain’t surprised. Back home they say you can kick a bull in the balls but don’t expect him to flinch.”

  “I guess I can take that as a compliment.”

  “I don’t pass them out lightly, son.”

  Dogan folded his arms across his chest. “Tie up any of the loose ends?”

  “Not many we could find. The girl who saved your life has dropped totally out of sight, and we received confirmation from our team in Austria that the body buried three days ago there was Audra St. Clair. No games this time. Let’s hope Tantalus was buried with her.”

  “Five hundred canisters are still out there somewhere,” Dogan said. “But it’s my guess only Mandala knew where, and they’re probably so well hidden we won’t have to worry about anybody turning up with them.”

  “That’s a comfort.”

  “What about the list of Committee members? Any luck finding it?”

  Roy shook his head. “None at all, son. It’s gotta be on some computer bank, and without the proper access code we can forget about it. That leaves lots of people, thousands even, out there still connected with all this—people in high positions everywhere. As long as they’re out there, the Committee’s still a threat, the way I see it.”

  Dogan shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’ve been cut off from a central command. There’s no one left to direct them and without that direction they’re helpless. They’ll go about their jobs harmlessly until they’re replaced or voted out. Audra St. Clair was the key. Without her, the Committee’s finished.”

  “There’s still her daughter running around somewhere.”

  Dogan’s tone became defensive. “We have nothing to fear from Nikki. Her only connection to the Committee was her mother, and it was buried with the old woman three days ago.”

  “Quite a resourceful girl from what I hear, though. Wouldn’t mind havin’ her on our side.”

  “She’s been playing sides since she was sixteen. I think she’s finished with that.”

  Roy eyed Dogan closely. “And what about you?”

  “I doubt Division would have me back even if I wanted to go.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Division, son. Word is the President wants me to take over as Secretary of State. I don’t fancy that much ’cause you can only see so much bullshit before everything turns brown. I need someone to shovel it aside for me, to be my direct link with what’s really going on in the field.”

  “Sounds like you’re offering me a job, Cal.”

  “I’m offering you anything you want. Make that Russian Vaslov your assistant even. I don’t care. I just wanna keep you on my side, son, on any terms you dictate.”

  “I’ll give it some thought.” Dogan paused, sipped his own orange juice through a straw. “Have you spoken with Locke yet?”

  “Not directly but the right people approached him and handled the resettlement matter and name change for his family as soon as we brought his son back from England. We sent ’em all out to sunny California. Locke’s got a position at Berkeley, as I recall. Charney detailed all the arrangements of their deal in a memo to me. We offered to arrange for both his novels to be published. But Locke said he didn’t want it that way anymore. Said he’d rather write another and get it into print on his own.”

  “What about the old pilot who raided Keysar Flats with him?”

  “Government offered to pick up where the insurance leaves off to rebuild his fleet, but he decided he’d rather start an aerial museum for relics like himself. Told my man he wanted to quit flyin’ while he was on top.”

  “Who can blame him? He went through hell.”

  “So did you, son, running around the world with your own people trying to kill you. Wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on even for a country asshole like me once we got an ID on the body in that Rome hotel room. Man named Keyes I hear you weren’t too friendly with. Division’s out of control, son, and word is somebody’s doin’ their level best to keep that restricted quarantine order in place … on you and Locke.” Roy’s eyes narrowed. “Something’s gotta be done,” he added, his meaning clear. “You had enough time to consider my offer yet?”

  Dogan nodded. “I think so.”

  Four weeks later Dogan met Christopher Locke for lunch at a small café near Berkeley. The noontime rush was over but the place was still crowded with students. Locke arrived first, secured a corner table, and stowed his crutches against the wall. One arm was still in a cast, and it would be another several months before he would be without pain. In all, Locke’s spill from the Warhawk had broken four bones, tore a network of ligaments, and cut wide portions of his flesh to the bone. Nevertheless, his recovery was proceeding well ahead of schedule. He had been teaching at Berkeley for a week.

  Dogan arrived and limped toward the table. Chris pushed himself from his chair to greet him. The two men almost laughed at each other.

  “Look at us,” Chris quipped, “a couple of cripples.” He took his seat again gingerly. “You know, it all started for me in a restaurant. But that day it was Brian who made sure we got a corner table. Today it was me.”

&nb
sp; Dogan eased his chair forward. “You’re safe, Chris. Nobody’s going to touch you.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, but I still hate turning my back on anybody. It never stops either. They used my family once. They might again. I won’t let my kids take the bus home from school, you know.”

  “The paranoia will subside. You’ll see.”

  “If you were talking to the man I was two months ago, I’d probably say you were right. But he’s gone and here I am sitting in his place trying to live his life.”

  “Things aren’t going well,” Dogan concluded.

  “That’s just it, Ross, they are going well. L.A.’s only a bus ride away for my oldest son, and my daughter is being overwhelmed with boys as beautiful as she is. Your people set my wife up in a fantastic real estate job and well, the California life style, as they say, agrees with her. As for Greg, he’s had the best medical care available. That man Roy arranged for one-on-one sessions between him and some professional ballplayers. They’re showing Greg he can still play baseball even with a finger missing from his glove hand, and if he buys that he just might be able to adjust. But his childhood’s gone, and they can’t give that back to him, not even Roy.”

  “That covers all the members of your family except one.”

  Locke shrugged. “I just can’t seem to put everything behind me. I lived in an academic fantasyland for fifteen years and all of a sudden I saw how violent and ugly the world can be. I met up with a mother I never knew and found out I didn’t want to.”

  “She kept you alive, Chris, and in the end it cost her.”

  “She kept me alive because it suited her needs. And she sent Nikki out as my bodyguard, Nikki, who at Whitney’s age was entering terrorist training school. What kind of world are we making for ourselves, Ross?”

  “One a shitload better than the one the Committee envisioned.”

  “Maybe.” Locke had to search for words. “You know what it comes down to in the end, Ross? The running. When you’re running, everything you pass is a blur. I ran myself out in Europe. I can’t run anymore and there’s nothing left to run away from. So I’ve slowed down and everything’s so damn clear. But I think I liked it better before. The blur made it easy to endure.”

  “Then it comes down to pretending, not running, doesn’t it?” Dogan challenged. “In Europe you said it felt like you were trapped in a labyrinth. Well, you made it out of that one only to land in another with just as many passages that lead nowhere. But this time the only way to escape is to accept that it’s you that’s changed, not your wife or your kids or even your job. It’s not the world you’ve got to get used to again, it’s yourself.”

  Locke found himself smiling. “You ever get tired of spy work, we could use you in the philosophy department out here.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve been where you’re finding yourself now. Trouble is, in my business do too much thinking and somebody will have your brains for breakfast.”

  Locke tensed. “Now you’ve come to the real problem, Ross, ’cause how do I know that won’t happen to me … and my family … tomorrow morning? I can’t handle the fear, the doubt, the cringing every time the doorbell rings or a stranger meets my eye. We fucked with a lot of people out there who aren’t used to being fucked with. You told me about that Division of yours. Eliminate the two of us and they walk away from this clean.”

  Dogan stood up without ordering. “It’s time I went back to work.”

  The Commander sat in the shade at his usual table on the Champs-Élysées, sipping warm tea and toying with a basket of croissants. His ever-present newspaper was spread out and he read it mindlessly while awaiting the appearance of the two agents he had ordered to meet him. Division Six had to remain immune from standard government checks and balances. He had weathered worse storms than this, though. It was simply a matter of filling in certain holes now that the time had finally become right. Patience was everything, rashness a quality of the shortsighted.

  The Commander heard the blind beggar’s cup being rattled before him and fished in his pocket for some change to drop in. Damn nuisance. Such human lice had no business ruining the scenery along the Champs-Élysées.

  Glancing briefly up at the cup, he slipped a piece of change in and heard it jingle among the rest. Then he shooed the man away with his hand.

  The blind beggar shook his cup again.

  The Commander looked up from his paper to search for the café manager when he caught the blind man’s face.

  “Grendel …”

  Ross Dogan winked once. Then he fired two bullets from the silenced Heckler and Koch held beneath his bulky brown rags. They entered the Commander’s stomach, the impact pitching the older man backward and toppling him over. Waiters rushed over followed by the manager. When they saw the blood and the Commander’s sightless eyes, they screamed for help. The Commander’s men converged on the area, searching for the assassins, but they found only startled tourists, distracted shoppers …

  And a blind beggar tapping his cane down the avenue.

  A Biography of Jon Land

  Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-nine novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He began writing technothrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.

  Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel, The Doomsday Spiral, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain US security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.

  In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent, The Last Prophecy, was released in 2004.

  RT Book Reviews honored Land with a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction and included in 2010’s The Best American Mystery Stories. He is also the author of the Caitlin Strong series, starring the eponymous Texas Ranger, a female character in a genre that Land has said has too few. The second book in the Caitlin Strong series, Strong Justice (2010), was named a Top Thriller of the Year by Library Journal and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book, Betrayal, written with Robert Fitzpatrick, tells the behind-the-scenes story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and was published to acclaim in 2011. The Blaine McCracken novel Pandora’s Temple won the 2013 International Book Award for Best Thriller/Adventure, and was nominated for a 2013 Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original Novel.

  Land currently lives in Providence, not far from his alma mater.

  Land (left) interviewing then–teen idol Leif Garrett (center) in April of 1978 at the dawn of Land’s writing career.

  Land (second from left) at Maine’s Ogunquit Beach during the summer of 1984, while he was a counselor at Camp Samoset II. He spent a total of twenty-six summers at the camp.

  Land with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which he visited in 1987 as part of his research for The Omicron Legion (1991).

  Land on the beach in Matunuck, Rhode Island, in 2003.

  In front of the “process trailer” on the set of Dirty Deeds, the first movie that he scripted, which was released in 2005. The film starred Milo Ventimiglia and Lacey Chabert.

  Land pictured in 2007 with Fabrizio Boccardi, the Italian
investor and entrepreneur who was the inspiration for his book The Seven Sins, which was published in 2008.

  Land emceeing the Brunch and Bullets Luncheon to benefit Reading Is Fundamental at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in the spring of 2007.

  Land and his classmates and fraternity brothers celebrating their thirtieth class reunion during Brown University’s Commencement Weekend in 2009. He was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity.

  In the fall of 2010, Land attended the first ever Brown University night football game, which he coordinated in his position as Vice President of the Brown Football Association. Brown beat rival Harvard 29-14.

  Land’s most recent publicity shot, taken in late 2010, when he was having, he says, a good hair day.

  Acknowledgments

  ALL MY BOOKS ARE, in a sense, collaborative efforts, for the knowledge, expertise, and patience of many others are duly tried and given. Listing all is not possible. The names that follow are the most select who deserve far more than this simple mention. Any mistakes that appear in Labyrinth are wholly mine.

  For assistance in the scientific realm, thanks once again to John Signore and especially to Emery Pineo, who never fails to solve even the most impossible problems.

  For help with the economic end, thanks to Robin Dumar.

  Thanks to the real Colin Burgess for his help with England’s landscape and geography.

  For technical assistance on the names and capabilities of World War II fighter planes, I am especially indebted to Martin Caidin for his excellent book, Ragwings and Heavy Iron (Houghton Mifflin, 1984).

  For advice on things medical and for providing moral and editorial support, I owe a special debt to Dr. Morty Korn, the only reader to have suffered through all my works.

  I am also ever so grateful to a superb editor, Daniel Zitin, and to Ann Maurer for her creative genius along the way.