Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  “Gonna need me to help sort things out, boss.”

  “This one might be beyond even you, Sal.”

  All told, Blaine could never recall a more confusing episode. Surprises were nothing new to him; usually they were simply the residue of incomplete planning. But today was different. Today they could not possibly have planned for what ultimately confronted them, a fact that first came clearly to light when Blaine at last had an opportunity to inspect the contents of the briefcase Johnny Wareagle had salvaged from the subway platform beneath Bloomingdale’s. Each page contained names and addresses; single-spaced, sometimes taking two lines to get all the information down. McCracken recalled the apparent involvement of a third party: the pair of mystery gunmen and the man, dead now as well, whose briefcase El-Salarabi must have ended up with.

  The terrorist must not have realized the switch had been made! He thought he was still holding his plans for the destruction of Bloomingdale’s to the very end.

  “Say what?” Belamo snapped, after Blaine had laid it out for Johnny and him once they were inside the suite’s bedroom, Sal resting as comfortably as he could manage atop the bed. “You’re telling me those two guys you whacked were after a guy with a briefcase at the same time the three of us were after another guy with a briefcase?”

  “And then the briefcases got switched.”

  “Only Salami didn’t know it … .”

  “While we figured everything was just going along as planned,” Blaine completed. “Now we know otherwise.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The man Johnny found dead in the street who pulled the switch knew he’d been made by the two gunmen we killed in Bloomingdale’s. He knew he couldn’t save himself but figured maybe he could salvage the contents of the case.”

  Belamo was nodding. “So after the two shits he was running from realized they had the wrong case, they came after the right one.”

  “Which ended up with El-Salarabi,” Blaine affirmed. “Inside Bloomingdale’s.”

  “You ask me, they musta known exactly what was inside it and wanted real bad to make sure nobody else got a look.”

  “Only now we’ve got the pages.”

  Belamo gazed at the stack of papers piled on his lap. “Goddamn mailing list what it looks like.”

  “Three people died because of it today, Sal; four if you count El-Salarabi.”

  Belamo nodded. “You get me a computer terminal, soon as I get off this bed, I’ll tie into the national database, see what I can learn ’bout the people who belong to these names. See what holds them together.” His face paled suddenly and his head lopped low toward his chest. “Uh-oh … Looks like those last painkillers are starting to kick in … .”

  “Get some rest, Sal.”

  He flapped the salvaged pages in his good hand. “Nod off having another look at these …”

  Blaine led Johnny out of the suite’s bedroom into its living room.

  “You were awful quiet in there, Indian. In fact, you’ve been awfully quiet since this afternoon.”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Blainey.”

  “That much I figured.”

  “The man on the street spoke before he died.” Wareagle paused. “‘Judgment Day.’”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “There was more, but the words do not matter so much as what was in his eyes: fear, not of death, but of what life was going to become—for everyone.” Johnny’s eyes were full and cold. “He knew something, Blainey, something linked to that list of names.”

  “In the Book of Revelation, Indian, Judgment Day refers to the end of the world.”

  “I know, Blainey. So did he.”

  “Then this list of names …” McCracken could see Wareagle’s expression was wavering between uncertainty and uneasiness, a stark contrast to his usually stoic self. “What else?”

  “It … does not matter.”

  “Who killed our mystery man with the briefcase? You saw him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes and no, Blainey.”

  “What do you mean, Indian?”

  “I saw the killer … yet I couldn’t have. Because he is dead.” The uncertainty vanished from Johnny’s face, but the uneasiness remained. “I killed him.”

  Wareagle moved to a window overlooking Forty-second Street more than thirty stories down. He spoke without turning away from it. “After the hellfire, Blainey …”

  “We were both sent to Israel to lend a hand in the Yom Kippur War of seventy-three.”

  “And then …”

  “I went to Japan. You retired to the backwoods until I came calling again eight years ago.”

  “No.” Johnny turned slowly, noncommittally. “There is something I have never shared with you, Blainey. When I returned from Israel, they were waiting for me.”

  “They,” McCracken repeated.

  He stared at Wareagle long and hard until the big Indian was ready to speak again.

  “There was a mission … .”

  The mind-control and altering experiments carried out in the late sixties and early seventies, mostly under the auspices of the CIA, were common knowledge now. Only the most clandestine experiments and their devastating results had somehow been kept secret. One of these concerned a variant of LSD designed to increase sensory perception that was tested on a number of willing volunteers from maximum security prisons all over the country. Full disclosure of what the prisoners were actually signing up for was never made. They were told simply it concerned brain enhancement testing.

  Three of the volunteers died horribly within hours of the initial injection, another pair after the second and final one. The surviving eleven were scrutinized minute by minute, put through a battery of tests to see whether the new drug could actually hone their senses of sight, hearing, and smell, too. Even a moderate improvement would be call for celebration in the search to provide an edge for the soldier in heavy combat.

  The experiment could not have been more of a disaster.

  Not a single tangible, measurable improvement could be confirmed. Meanwhile, the minds of the test subjects were slowly and inexorably destroyed. Paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia, and sociopathic behavior were the most commonly observed results.

  The plug was pulled on the project, but it was too late. Three of the surviving test subjects murdered their guards and escaped into the thick woods of Northern California containing the Redwood Forest, not far from where the research lab was tucked away. One of them was a hulking graduate student specializing in poetry and a conscientious objector to the war effort in Vietnam who’d been imprisoned for smashing a rock over the face of a policeman. At the time the cop had been trying to bodily remove the objector’s girlfriend from a protest at U-Cal Berkeley.

  The man’s name was Earvin Early.

  The blow broke every facial bone from the cop’s eye sockets across the underlayer of his cheeks. His nose had been flattened like a pancake, looking bulbous and squat beneath the flow of blood.

  The cop ended up a virtual vegetable, and Early was ultimately sentenced to twenty years to life. The promise of early parole led him to volunteer for the experiment, but a more careful screening job by the overseers would have eliminated him from consideration. Earvin Early was a borderline psychotic even before voluntarily ingesting a mind-altering drug that turned normal men crazy.

  “I killed him, Blainey, and today I saw him again.”

  “Back up, Indian.”

  “They asked me to track the three men down. They showed me pictures of what Early and the two others did to a pair of families who were camping out in California’s north woods.” Johnny stopped, his eyes wide yet distant. “I wasn’t the first who tried to catch them. Another team had already failed. Some of its members were found. Some weren’t.”

  “They let you go in alone?”

  “They wanted to give me a team, but a second team would have been as useless as the first.”

  “You went in because of what E
arly and company did to those families.”

  “Future deaths would be on my conscience if I refused. It was before I learned separation.”

  “You found them.”

  “At night, deeper in the same woods. The first one went fast, the second a little harder. Early was the last. I trapped him on the edge of a ravine. Put two arrows in him. He fell over. I saw him.”

  “But today …”

  “It was him, Blainey,” Wareagle insisted, thinking of the hulking shape of a vagrant cloaked in a patchwork canvas coat, face a nightmare of boils and grime.

  “Resurrected.”

  “I failed. He tricked me.”

  “And now he’s joined the ranks of whatever our mystery man with the briefcase was running from … .”

  “Judgment Day is coming, Blainey, and Early is a part of it. I will track him down again. Finish what I failed to finish all those years ago.”

  “And maybe figure out where it leads?”

  Johnny’s silence provided his answer. It continually amazed McCracken how similar they really were, taking different routes toward the same destination. That thought made him realize something now for the very first time.

  “After what happened in the woods, Indian …”

  Wareagle looked at him, nodded.

  “That’s when you pulled out, withdrew. Gone, no forwarding. Not even rural free delivery in the Maine backwoods.”

  “I had seen enough.”

  “I know the feeling. You see results like Earvin Early and you wonder maybe if we had it wrong the whole time. If those above us could be that far off about one thing, maybe they could have been that far off about everything. Then you begin to believe that you and all you stand for were manufactured the same way Early was made into a monster. And that takes away the only thing they gave us, the only thing they left us: pride, dignity.”

  Whatever reaction Blaine might have expected from Johnny Wareagle, the very slight but firm smile was not among them.

  “Our roles have reversed, Blainey. The counselor has become the counseled.”

  “It’s just that I know what it feels like, Indian. I was there too, remember? Just a different place. For me the reality check came in London … .”

  McCracken, of course, was referring to the most infamous incident of his career. Back in 1980 the tempers of some very mean hijackers at Heathrow Airport were left to smolder while British officials argued and the Special Air Service twiddled their thumbs in sight of the tarmac. Blaine was working with the SAS at the time and was lying prone next to the commander when the plane turned into a fireball. No one was ever sure whether it occurred out of accident or exasperation over another deadline passing. The point was it happened, and the entire planeload of hostages was senselessly lost.

  Blaine took out his frustration for the way the whole episode had been botched on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square. Specifically, he shot out the section of it he was convinced the British were lacking. The incident won him instant ostracism and the nickname “McCracken-balls.” The nickname stuck for good, the ostracism for only five years.

  “If they hadn’t buried me in France, Indian,” Blaine confessed, “I probably would have walked. Difference is, if I had walked on my own, I’m not sure I would’ve ever come back.”

  “I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t called upon me, Blainey.”

  “But getting out for a time made both of us see things clearer, for what they really are. We came back in, we weren’t doing it for the same reasons as before.”

  “For ourselves, then?”

  “For those who matter. We don’t cut into El-Salarabi’s network, how many people die when Bloomingdale’s becomes a parking lot? There’s a lot of shit in the world, Indian. Difference is, we used to be part of it. Now we sweep it aside.”

  “Like I said,” Johnny followed, smile even tighter, “for ourselves. We are hunters, Blainey, preying on the vermin which thin the herd while the shepherds sleep. For us, the hunt is everything.”

  “Better hope we haven’t lost the scent, Indian,” McCracken said, thinking of the force behind Earvin Early and the list of names Sal Belamo would soon be going to work on, “because this might be the most important one yet.”

  “Judgment Day, Blainey.”

  “Not if we can help it.”

  Earvin Early sat huddled against the building, knees tucked against his chest. The name of the building, he did not know. The name of the city did not matter. They were all the same; interchangeable pieces in a puzzle he cared nothing about.

  Early shifted his great bulk, twirled his canvas coat tighter against him to provide further obscurity. Not that he needed to.

  He could, after all, make himself invisible. He could do lots of things if he really put his mind to it. Could go places just by closing his eyes, anywhere he wanted. Do anything he wanted when he got there.

  Earvin Early lived in his mind. The body was nothing to him; a ragged shell the only purpose of which was to shroud the vast temple of his being. For this reason a bath for Early consisted of being caught in a downpour. He liked the stink that rose from his soiled clothes and frame because it kept him in touch with his physical self. So did the pain rising off the boils and open festering sores that dotted his face, neck, and shoulders. The pain kept him from slipping away permanently into one of the worlds his mind created.

  Early suddenly saw rats rushing down the sidewalk, clustering around him, rising on their hind legs and sniffing at him. Early reached out to pet a few and they nuzzled against his fingers, purring. Early blinked his eyes.

  The rats were gone.

  He saw lots of things that didn’t last very long. Long ago he had stopped trying to figure which was real-world real and which was the product of his mind that could do anything. Instead he just assumed everything was real-world real; a kind of compromise.

  Early’s revulsion for his consciousness was what caused him to become a vagrant. But the role evolved into the ultimate disguise. Wherever he went, wherever they brought him, he fit in. He could disappear without really disappearing at all, and that was good because becoming invisible took a great deal of energy, energy better saved for his Freeings.

  That’s what Early called what he did best. He used to know it was killing, but if all he was ridding his victims of were the consciousnesses that chained them to mediocrity, then he was actually doing them a favor.

  Freeing them.

  Early had Freed a man earlier that day. He had made himself not there when he did it so no one would see him.

  But someone did. Early saw the man and recognized him in the flash of sight he allowed himself before he made himself gone.

  The Indian …

  The Indian was one of the last memories he carried before they gave him the power and the real world grew all fuzzy and misted over. When he had survived the fall off the ravine with two arrows stuck in him, he knew he had passed into a higher plane of existence. Great powers had saved him, great powers that were certain to expand beyond his wildest dreams inside him. A world was born only he was fit to inhabit. He let himself grow dirty on the outside while the rest of humanity grew soiled on the in, prisoners of their own consciousness and bodies.

  No matter. Given time, Early would be more than happy to free them all.

  He knew his great powers would serve a purpose, and waited for that purpose to be revealed to him. When the Others found him, he knew right away it would come from them.

  He did not work for them in the traditional sense of the word. He only performed an occasional Freeing when the need arose and then he disappeared once more. The fact that they always knew how to find him proved they could direct themselves anywhere, just as he could. The missions they selected for him, the subjects they selected for Freeing, were part of a much larger program he knew little, and cared nothing, about. He kept his special gifts secret even from them. No one who lived in real-world time could know about those, no one!

  But the Indian had kn
own; the Indian had seen him, recognized him, looked at him, and known everything.

  Earvin Early sat crouched against the building, rocking himself now as he tried to send his mind to find the Indian. The Indian, though, must have known enough to put his psychic shields up, and the efforts of Early’s mind went for naught.

  Of course, Early hadn’t told the others about the Indian; he wouldn’t have even if he still spoke in the words of the many prisoners who needed Freeing. He spoke only in lines of poetry learned in the days before his wondrous changing. In doing so he never let his words give away his true self; the words he spoke were all other people’s.

  But the absence of words did not change things so far as the Indian was concerned. He relied on them no more than Early did, and Early was glad the afternoon had ended without their inevitable confrontation. Early knew fear only for those who saw him as he was.

  Earvin Early would wait for another time, another place. Twice their paths had crossed. They were certain to cross again.

  “What fates impose, that men must needs abide. It boots not to resist both wind and tide.”

  Early quoted Shakespeare out loud to the night and then returned to the inner reaches of his mind, where it was even darker.

  CHAPTER 6

  “You understand why I have summoned you,” the man in formal priest’s robes said to the figures kneeling on either side of him, slightly offset so a slight twist of his gaze could capture both of them.

  The figures nodded, in unison.

  Unlike the priest, they were cloaked in the garb of a novice or a monk: brown robes stitched of scratchy burlap held at the waist by a rope belted as a sash. Their hoods threw dark shadows over the tops of their faces, leaving only their mouths partially visible in the dim light.

  The church around them was huge and dark, unseen recessed lights casting their meager glow from the ceiling far above. The wood of each pew was hand-carved, smoothed and darkened from years of experience and wear. The altar before them stood as it had for over two hundred years. The stained-glass windows, scratched and battered and left to the elements, kept the light out and secrets within. In the background a youthful choir could be heard chanting softly in traditional Latin.