Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  Nothing. Wareagle continued his dash east, defenses sharpening at every stoop, building break, and alley.

  “Johnny!” Blaine McCracken’s voice shot into his ear. “Johnny!”

  Wareagle stopped. “Here, Blainey.”

  “El-Salarabi just ducked back inside Bloomingdale’s. Did you find the other—”

  “He’s dead, Blainey.”

  “The case, what about the case?”

  “Gone.”

  Blaine pushed aside the confused disappointment that threatened his focus. “Well, we’ve still got this Arab son of a bitch, anyway. Get over here, Indian, fast as you can.”

  The two well-dressed figures stopped in the Sixtieth Street alley two yards from the huge man. They were frozen as much by an aura of menace as by the stench coming off him. He crouched with his head lowered, yet his yellow eyes peered up at them like those of a predator ready to pounce.

  “‘Quoth the Raven,’” the voice said through dried and cracking lips. “‘Nevermore.’”

  His left hand came forward with the briefcase, and one of the figures extended his right to accept it. Both men turned away from the giant instantly. The one holding the case pulled open its zipper and yanked out the pages contained inside.

  Drawings and scribbles. Schemas and plans like some disorganized architect’s first draft. Utterly meaningless to them.

  What had happened to the contents they had been sent to retrieve?

  The two men looked at each other. At the same time they recalled the man who had without reason tossed the oranges at them back at the fruit stand and then fled with a briefcase that was a virtual twin of this one clutched in his hand. A chill surged through them.

  Ratansky had managed to pull off a switch!

  Whether the man who had fled the fruit stand was actually linked to him mattered not at all. What mattered was the contents of the briefcase he now possessed.

  The two men scampered back to the head of Sixtieth Street in time to see some sort of commotion going on at the main entrance to Bloomingdale’s directly to their left. They eyed each other briefly and then rushed for the door.

  El-Salarabi’s original intent upon bursting through Bloomingdale’s main entrance on Lexington was to escape his pursuers by swinging to the right, down the stairs leading to the subway station that lay beneath the building. But the huge cluster of people jammed on the steps forced him to dart straight into the store instead.

  He dipped down a brief set of stairs into the wood-lined Ralph Lauren Polo section of the men’s department. On this and all the other floors, exits were plentiful and hiding places everywhere. He had spent the better part of the day walking the halls and aisles that separated the merchandise and individual departments. He knew every corner and crevice.

  But his pursuers knew what he looked like, what he was wearing. Change those clothes and he would effectively change himself.

  Yes … Yes!

  Briefcase dangling from a tight grip, El-Salarabi hurried for the Levi’s section, located on the far left. He had judged this to be the department’s busiest area and therefore the one where he’d be least likely bothered by store salesmen. Sure enough, it was teeming with shoppers ambling about the brightly lit stacks of jeans twenty pairs high in countless styles and colors. To El-Salarabi the whole scene typified American excessiveness. How ironic that this very attribute was now going to figure prominently in his escape.

  The terrorist grabbed a pair of stonewashed jeans off one of the stacks and a plaid shirt from a rack squeezed tight with them. Recalling from his schema the alcove where the fitting rooms were located, he hurried over and ducked into a cubicle.

  He closed and bolted the door behind him, then shed his clothes frantically. He pulled the jeans and shirt on in their place and wedged his Browning nine-millimeter pistol into the waistband, making sure the plaid shirt covered it. He had stooped to retrieve the briefcase when the thump of footsteps racing his way made him draw his hand away from the handle and reach for his gun.

  Sal Belamo was waiting just inside Bloomingdale’s main entrance when Blaine McCracken charged through the door. Until less than two minutes ago, the operation had gone smooth as silk. Then, inexplicably, everything had turned into a jumble that had him fearing the worst was yet to come, his mind rife with memories of what had transpired in Luxor the last time he had crossed paths with El-Salarabi.

  “Security guard saw a man looked like our boy head that way,” Sal reported, eyes gesturing toward the men’s department. “You ask me, he’s looking to change his wardrobe.”

  Blaine nodded. “Let’s see if we can catch him with his pants down.”

  He led the way through the Ralph Lauren Polo section of Bloomingdale’s men’s department, stopping next to Belamo just after the Joseph Abboud and Nautica displays.

  “Where to now, boss?”

  Blaine was about to suggest they split up when a trio of Bloomingdale’s security guards in blue blazers charged past the stacks of Calvin Klein underwear and socks on their left.

  “What the fuck?” Sal wondered.

  He and Blaine fell in behind the group of guards and raced with them toward the Levi’s section, where another three guards were approaching the alcove containing the fitting rooms.

  “Shit,” Blaine muttered.

  He sensed what was coming an instant before Ahmed El-Salarabi emerged from a cubicle with pistol blazing. Two of the store security guards fell instantly. The others managed to dive aside as the terrorist surged into the blitz of customers scattering in all directions.

  Pistols out now, Blaine and Sal shoved forward through the clutter of panic in their path. El-Salarabi was starting to angle for the nearest escalator when he saw them coming. Desperately he jammed the handles of his briefcase over his left hand so it dangled from his wrist, then lunged forward and grabbed the long hair of a young man who had tripped over a spilled pile of denim shorts. In the next instant, El-Salarabi’s gun barrel was pressed against the youth’s temple.

  McCracken and Belamo froze when they saw him jerk the kid’s head backward. The terrorist’s eyes locked on Blaine.

  “McCracken! I should have guessed it was you … .”

  Blaine’s SIG-Sauer was trained dead on him, no reluctance to use it shown in the black pools of his eyes.

  “Let him go, El-Salarabi.”

  The Arab had been about to drag his hostage a step sideways. Now he held his ground, yanked the hair closer to him.

  “Stay where you are or he dies! I’ll do it, you know I will.”

  McCracken shook his head. “This isn’t Luxor.”

  “I’ll kill him!”

  McCracken held his ground and sighted down the SIG’s muzzle. “Not this time.”

  In the instant before Blaine’s finger pulled the trigger, a burst of automatic fire rang out, stitching a jagged design across the entire Levi’s department. A mirror just to his right exploded, and Blaine dove to the floor. His first thought was that these unseen gunmen had come to the terrorist’s rescue. But as he looked up, he saw that El-Salarabi had barely managed to avoid the spray from the same barrage. The kid he had grabbed for a hostage had been able to spin out of the Arab’s grasp and dive to the side out of the line of fire. Clearly these gunmen weren’t allied with El-Salarabi.

  Then who were they?

  McCracken’s mind worked feverishly, assimilating his data. At the fruit stand, El-Salarabi had fled from two mystery men in a mad dash that had brought him back inside Bloomingdale’s. Then, barely seconds later, the man who had switched briefcases with the terrorist had been killed on the street by person or persons unknown. A third party was obviously at work here, then, not just Blaine’s and El-Salarabi’s. What, though, was their stake in this? Beyond that, why was El-Salarabi still clinging to a briefcase that should have been nothing more than a prop?

  Blaine chanced a rise in search of a bead on El-Salarabi. But another burst of automatic fire forced him to duck once more. This burst was
instantly followed by a quick series of shots from the Arab. Sal Belamo spun out from his position of cover to answer that fire, but a bullet from the new parties in the rear slammed into his shoulder and pitched him sideways. He went down and took a hanging display of cotton shirts with him.

  The pair of mystery gunmen burst forward, heavy steps clumping against the wood floor. McCracken twisted away from the partition to cover Belamo.

  His eyes found Johnny Wareagle rushing out behind the mystery men. Johnny fired at the same time Blaine did, taking them totally by surprise. One’s head snapped back and then forward as bullets blew it apart. The other man twirled away and fired nonstop in a wide arc that sprayed fire from McCracken to Wareagle. Blaine and Johnny rolled toward fresh cover, opening up a path for El-Salarabi to charge toward a Tommy Hilfager display with the surviving mystery gunman in pursuit.

  Instinctively both Blaine and Johnny rushed to Sal Belamo. His left shoulder was dripping blood, and a grimace of pain stretched across his features.

  “Go get the fucks, boss,” Belamo huffed, kneeling in a splatter of his own blood to pop a fresh speed loader into his .44 magnum.

  Blaine looked up at Wareagle. “Where’d they go, Indian?”

  “Toward an escalator leading to the next level down, Blainey.”

  “The subway!” McCracken realized, back on his feet fast.

  Ahmed El-Salarabi thundered across the women’s department and through one of the glass doors leading into the subway stop beneath Bloomingdale’s, briefcase flapping against his side. The jeans he had pulled on, even cuffed, were much too long, and they sagged low at the waist. His shirt, tags and all, hung clumsily over them. Confusion plagued him. The identities of the gunmen he had glimpsed on the street and then narrowly escaped upstairs remained a total mystery. El-Salarabi’s initial thought upon confronting McCracken in the men’s department was that they had been part of his team. But when their fire included the infidel in its spray, this assumption was proven wrong.

  The terrorist hurdled over the turnstile without inserting his token, nearly snagging the bottoms of his too long jeans on steel in the process.

  “Hey!” screamed a transit worker.

  El-Salarabi turned only long enough to fire at the man before he could offer pursuit. A train was rolling to a halt before him. The doors hissed open. Before El-Salarabi could enter the train, though, a barrage of automatic fire shattered the subway car window just to his right. The terrorist dropped to his knees and tried to use the cover of the panicked throng about him to slide along the train’s length toward the next door. It closed just before he reached it. The train started to move. El-Salarabi rose to a crouch and searched frantically for his assailant.

  A stitch of automatic fire sliced into his midsection and jolted him backward. He slammed into the rolling train as it gathered speed and hung there briefly before the momentum pitched him back onto the platform. The gunman rushed over and reached down for the briefcase still in his grasp.

  Before he could pry it from the terrorist’s death grip, Blaine and Johnny burst into the station with pistols spitting fire. The mystery gunman tried to reach his Mac-10, but bullets from both their guns thumped into his chest and midsection before he could grab it. Impact threw him backward down onto the tracks. McCracken reached the edge of the platform and fixed his gun upon the figure sprawled limply ten feet below, keeping it steady until satisfied the man was dead.

  Johnny Wareagle, meanwhile, had unzipped the briefcase peeled from El-Salarabi’s death grip and withdrawn its contents. He scanned the first few pages before gazing over at McCracken.

  “You better have a look at these, Blainey.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “They’re ready for you, Dr. Raymond.”

  Karen Raymond gathered the bound reports from her lap and rested the videocassette atop them. Steadying herself with a final deep breath, she rose and started for the conference room.

  Gentlemen, the Jardine-Marra Company is now in possession of what may be the greatest discovery in the history of medical science … .

  She had considered a hundred different opening lines for her presentation and summarily rejected them all. This was a moment she, along with the entire pharmaceutical and medical communities, had been anticipating for more than a decade. Dashed hopes and unrealistic expectations had marred those years for hundreds of research teams working for dozens of companies and institutions that dwarfed JM, not to mention the government itself. The best scientific minds in the business had been applied to this problem. That the solution might come from a pharmaceutical company too small to make anything but the daily NASDAQ small-capital listings was nearly inconceivable.

  Jardine-Marra was located, appropriately enough, diagonally across from the Salk Institute in Torrey Pines Industrial Park. Situated in northern La Jolla, in actuality a part of San Diego, Torrey Pines contains a large number of biotech firms of the cutting edge of current technology. JM was the only pharmaceutical representative in the group, and up until today, perhaps the most innocuous of all the occupants.

  Halfway to the conference room, Karen caught her own reflection in a mirror-glass piece of modern art hanging from the wall. She had mulled over her choice of outfits today longer and harder than even her opening line, ultimately settling on a conservative gray tweed suit. She questioned now leaving her hair down and tumbling instead of tying it up in a more conservative fashion. Her normal hairstyle made her look almost too youthful, more a graduate assistant than a research head. She also thought it might have been wise to forsake her contact lenses for glasses. She reflected that perhaps even her athletic, wellmuscled frame might work against her, a look achieved only by daily workouts on her exercise machines no matter how tired she might be after putting her two sons to bed.

  Nonsense, she thought. This wouldn’t be the first time she had addressed JM’s directors, after all; only the first time she had been responsible for summoning them together.

  The seven-man board, nary a woman, rose as their director of research and product development entered the room.

  “I’m sorry we kept you waiting,” the company president, Alexander MacFarlane, greeted, stepping over to meet her near the door.

  MacFarlane seemed to have been chiseled out of this very boardroom where he held court. His suits were inevitably brown, olive, or taupe, the dominant shades of the walls, floor, furniture, even the Oriental rug on which the conference table was perched. He was tall and lean, graceful for his years, with teeth bright enough to be a schoolboy’s. The furniture in the boardroom was for the most part antique, any nicks and scratches carried as furrows of experience rather than scars, just like the creases on MacFarlane’s face. The table itself was rich mahogany, the chairs squared and heavy.

  Alexander McFarlane had picked each piece out personally, testaments to his belief in substance. He approached the hiring of personnel with the same commitment, which meant meeting with each potential employee. It was MacFarlane who had brought Karen into the company, and he had personally overseen her advancement. Any number of companies had expressed initial interest based strictly on her academic record. But a shaky personal life that left her raising two small boys by herself turned all of them away from offering her a high-level position, with the exception of MacFarlane at JM. She had come to the company eight years before. Hard work and proven results had led to steady advancement, culminating in her being named chief of the research and development department eighteen months ago. Alex’s refusal to consider any other applicant despite the board’s recommendations was about to be vindicated.

  Dr. Karen Raymond tightened her grip on the set of seven half-inch binders and curled her fingers over the boxed videocassette.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, gentlemen,” she greeted. “It couldn’t be helped, I’m afraid. But in a few minutes I’m sure you’ll agree the trip was well worth it.”

  Chairman of the Board Roger Updike, who had been the primary opponent to her
promotion, shifted uneasily. Updike was a stocky, big-faced man who for some reason continued to comb hairs that looked to be in the single digits across the top of his head. The effect, coupled with the ever-present frown on his face, reminded Karen of the villainous Simon Bar Sinister character from the “Underdog” cartoon her younger son watched daily.

  Eyeing him subtly, Karen reached the head of the conference table and stopped. The VCR was set up immediately to the right on a shelf beneath a thirty-two-inch Sony Trinitron. She rested the videocassette atop it and distributed the black Velobound reports down each side of the table, one to every member.

  “You have before you the results of five years of research I initiated and have continued to supervise in my new capacity,” she announced.

  The men, none of them chemists other than MacFarlane and having only a rudimentary understanding of the field, flipped through the pages, barely comprehending what was before them.

  “My God,” muttered Alexander MacFarlane, eyes bulging as he read the contents of the third page.

  “Pages three through seven accurately summarize the results of the study,” Karen continued. “In a nutshell, gentlemen, Jardine-Marra is now in possession of a vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

  The men’s mouths dropped as one. A few flipped quickly to the first page in question, adjusting their glasses. The rest simply sat there in dumbstruck amazement.

  “Why weren’t we advised of this earlier?” demanded Roger Updike.

  “You were,” Karen told him. “I have issued quarterly reports for the past four years on our progress with developing an AIDS vaccine. If you recall, my yearly report detailed the rather impressive results of our testing on chimpanzees.”

  Updike’s eyes darted up from the summary material on page seven of the report before him. “Indeed. But at the same time I seem to recall that the federal government didn’t think much of the direction you were proceeding and refused to fund the project further.”