Covenant

by Dean Crawford

  “And you are?” Tyrell inquired.

  “Michael Shaw. I’m responsible for security here on the ward.”

  “We need to speak with Daniel Neville,” Tyrell insisted. “We can arrange warrants if we have to, but we’d prefer to do this on a voluntary bas—”

  “Mr. Neville signed a confidentiality agreement with his doctor upon his admission,” Shaw said firmly. “I doubt that warrants would have any effect.”

  “We can obtain a subpoena from the district attorney,” Lopez challenged.

  Michael Shaw looked apologetic but shrugged his broad shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got my orders and I just can’t let you guys in.”

  “Lives could depend on what Daniel Neville may know,” Tyrell pressed.

  Michael Shaw was about to reply, but the voice that Tyrell heard boomed like thunder down the corridor from behind them.

  “You get your hands off m’boy!”

  Tyrell turned to see a formidable bulk of a woman barreling down the corridor toward them. Her huge frame was draped in a bright floral dress that contrasted sharply with her dark skin, her jowls wobbling as she charged. Michael Shaw tried to block her path as his composed expression collapsed into something akin to panic.

  “Mrs. Neville, you’ve already been asked to leave the building and—”

  “You get your hands off m’boy!” the woman thundered, raising one flabby arm to point like a shotgun at Tyrell as a pair of nurses leaped out of her way. “You get yo’ hands offa him or I’ll take that badge o’ yours and shove it up yo’ ass!”

  The woman sent Michael Shaw spinning aside into the wall with one forearm as though swatting a fly. Tyrell glimpsed even the redoubtable Lopez take a cautious step back. He gave Mrs. Neville ample room as she jabbed a finger at the gates behind him.

  “You ain’t seen enough done t’im yet?” she challenged, glaring at Tyrell and Lopez in turn. “You think m’boy ain’t been through enough?”

  “Mrs. Neville,” Lopez said carefully, “we just came here to ask Daniel a few questions about—”

  “Well, he ain’t got no answers fo’ any of you! I tol’ you all before to leave him be!”

  Lopez shook her head. “We wanted to find out—”

  “Then go ask someplace else!” Mrs. Neville bellowed before rounding on Tyrell. “And I don’t care if you a brother or if you ain’t, you outta here right now before I—”

  “Shut up!” Tyrell snapped.

  A humming silence filled the corridor as Mrs. Neville’s eyes widened in surprise. Tyrell gave her just long enough for what he’d said to sink in before continuing. “We came here to help Daniel. We think he may have been abused, maybe even the victim of a crime.”

  Mrs. Neville stared back and forth between them and her eyes narrowed.

  “How’d I know tha’s the truth?”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?” Tyrell asked.

  “Claretta,” she replied cautiously. “And don’t give me no horseshit now, y’hear?”

  “Daniel is hardly able to commit crimes while inside this hospital,” Tyrell pointed out. “We’re here because we think he’s the victim and we want to know what happened.”

  Claretta Neville looked at him for a long moment.

  “How come none o’ you been here askin’ about this afore now?”

  “Something happened,” Tyrell said. “Another victim whose pathology matches your son’s. We need to speak to Daniel.”

  Claretta sighed mightily, reversing her copious frame and parking it on a chair in the corridor that vanished beneath her floral dress.

  “There ain’t nobody seein’ him,” she said softly. “He’s in quarantine.”

  Tyrell glanced at Michael Shaw before speaking.

  “Quarantine?” he echoed. “You haven’t seen him?”

  “Only briefly, to bring him his meals,” Claretta said. “They say it ain’t safe to be about him an’ all.”

  Lopez squatted down and took one of Claretta’s hands in her own.

  “Can you tell us what happened to Daniel?” she asked.

  “His line was crack cocaine,” Claretta whispered. “Part of their colors, to run with the gangs they had to be on somethin’. He got too high one night and was picked up by the meds on Fourth. Got a trip in th’ ambulance, so they said.”

  “What happened next?” Tyrell asked.

  “He got discharged into the care of the people that run this place—good people, so they said.”

  “He was brought directly here?” Lopez asked.

  “Nah,” Claretta said. “They says he was, but I know he was taken someplace else for a few hours. They’s been lyin’ ever since I came here.”

  Michael Shaw stepped in quickly.

  “We both know that’s not true. Daniel was very sick and probably has no idea what was happening to him after he overdosed and—”

  “The hell would you know about it?” Claretta snarled. “You just some lily-white shit-fo’-brains security guard.”

  Tyrell looked at Shaw.

  “Just give us a moment here, okay?”

  Shaw’s skin flushed red, but he turned and strode a few paces down the corridor. Tyrell looked back down at Claretta, who continued while glaring at the guard.

  “They took Daniel to someplace in the District along with some other guys he knew, and tripped them out on drugs again.”

  “What happened next?” Lopez pressed gently. “Did they drug all of the kids there?”

  “They’s were all gang colors, so Daniel said: Columbia Heights, Trinidad, boys from all over.”

  “Do you know what they did to Daniel?”

  Claretta’s features tightened.

  “He said they’s all crackers about their tests. He said they took their blood, and that some of the kids died in some kind of experiments.”

  A tear trickled down her face.

  Lopez spoke softly to her. “What kind of experiments?”

  “The eternal flame, the covenant of God and man, burns for us in our blood,” Claretta whispered, as though reciting some medieval verse. “We shall take this bread, for it will sustain us. That was what Daniel said they kept whisperin’ to him, that his blood was special and that it would join him to God with the ‘men of renown.’ What the hell does that mean?”

  Claretta’s formidable visage was haunted now as she stared into space. Tyrell looked up at the closed doors beside him, and quickly came to a decision.

  “Claretta, I want you to get up and hit me,” he whispered.

  Claretta looked up at Tyrell with widening eyes.

  “What the hell’s you talking about?”

  “Hit me,” Tyrell said, “and make a damned fuss about it. I need that guard out of here for five minutes, ’kay?”

  Claretta looked at Tyrell for a moment, and then lurched out of her seat and swung a blow that landed under Tyrell’s jaw with enough force to hurl him sideways into the metal gates as Claretta’s voice thundered out in his ears.

  “You goddamn hypocritical motherf—”

  Lopez jumped up to restrain Claretta as Michael Shaw bolted back toward them down the corridor. Tyrell staggered upright, regaining his vision as he saw Lopez twist Claretta Neville’s arm up behind her back as she ranted and raged. Tyrell gestured to her as he looked at Shaw.

  “Jesus, get her out of here! Nicola, help him out.”

  Michael Shaw nodded, grabbing Claretta’s other arm as between them they began hauling her, kicking and screaming, away down the corridor.

  Tyrell waited until they were out of sight, wishing he’d figured out another way of creating a distraction as he massaged his throbbing face, then turned to the young nurse who had witnessed the entire exchange.

  “I need access to Daniel Neville.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I don’t have the authority to let you—”

  “If you don’t open those doors, right now,” Tyrell said, “I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice.
Whoever employs Michael Shaw doesn’t want anybody to see Daniel Neville, and I need to know why. You can accompany me if you wish.”

  “But—”

  “The keys,” Tyrell rumbled. “You’re not paid to obstruct the law, ma’am, and I doubt this hospital will pay your court costs.”

  The nurse was flustered and gasped an expletive in despair, then yanked her keys from her belt before opening the metal gates to the corridor beyond.

  “Fourth room on the right,” she uttered, and handed him another key. “You’ll need this; the door is always locked.”

  Tyrell slipped through the gates and edged his way down the white corridor, looking in through the plastic windows of each door as he passed. Small rooms, half-darkened, held ghostly forms that stared back out at him with eyes devoid of understanding, as though from other worlds.

  Tyrell reached the fourth door, peering into what appeared to be an entirely darkened room, the blinds pulled shut on the window. A figure was just visible lying on the bed.

  Tyrell eased the key into the lock, turning it as quietly as he could until the barrel clicked. He gently pushed down on the handle and opened the door, catching a whiff of disinfectant as he slipped into the darkness.

  The room was bare but for the bed and a small sink, more like a cell than a hospital room. An intravenous line ran from an IV pole down beneath the sheets where Daniel Neville lay. Tyrell could see the boy’s scalp, coils of braided black hair tight against the skin but also scattered across his pillow where they had fallen out. Tyrell edged closer, peering over the top of the sheets to see the boy’s face.

  Tyrell stifled a gag reflex as he caught the odor of putrefying flesh. The boy’s eyes were closed, the lids laced with veins that spread like a web across his face, the once rich black skin now ashen and transparently thin. Forcing himself to overcome his disgust, Tyrell reached out and eased the sheets back.

  Daniel Neville’s body was a graying mass of decaying tissue, the skin dry and breaking up into plates like the surface of a scorched riverbed. Desiccated slabs of skin and flesh littered the bedsheet beneath him, as though his skin was turning to scales and falling from his body. His abdomen heaved with rapid, hyperventilating breaths. Overcome with morbid fascination, Tyrell leaned closer to one of the boy’s scaled lesions.

  One hand jerked up and grabbed Tyrell’s face like a gray spider, the smell of the boy’s ruined skin thick in his nostrils as he jerked back in horror, yanking the skeletal fingers from his face.

  Daniel Neville stared up at Tyrell with eyes as black as night, devoid of iris or pupils as though filled with ink, and a weak but keening cry rasped from his throat.

  “Kill me!”

  As Tyrell jerked backward in shock, he bumped into the nurse who stood behind him at the entrance to the room. Tyrell managed to find his voice.

  “What the hell’s happening to him?” he uttered.

  “Acute hemolytic reaction,” she whispered. “Worst I’ve ever seen.”

  Tyrell staggered out of the room and sucked in a deep breath of air as the nurse closed the door behind him. He slowly made his way back to the gates just as Lopez appeared.

  “You find him?” she asked.

  Tyrell nodded slowly. “What’s left of him. Who owns this hospital?”

  Lopez retrieved a notebook from her pocket as they turned and walked toward the hospital exit.

  “It’s owned and maintained by the American Evangelical Alliance.”

  “Eternal Flame,” Tyrell murmured thoughtfully, hearing Claretta Neville’s words echoing through his mind. “Ain’t that a radio or television show that’s got something to do with the alliance?”

  “Television show.” Lopez nodded. “Got a membership of about eight million. And then there’s the same guy who does a radio broadcast out of DC called This Bread and …” Lopez stopped talking, looking at him.

  “Eternal Flame, This Bread,” Tyrell repeated. “Who’s the pastor who hosts the shows?”

  Lopez turned a page in her notebook.

  “Kelvin Patterson, pastor of the American Evangelical Alliance. Last showed up on a televised stage rally with presidential candidate Senator Isaiah Black—some kind of charity gig involving blood donors for the city.”

  As Tyrell walked out of the hospital, Claretta Neville was waiting for him, her defiance and vigor very much back in evidence.

  “You give me something t’ave faith in, Detective,” she said, pointing a finger at him as he passed. “You give me somethin’ to believe in and find out what they did to m’boy.”

  JABALIYA

  GAZA STRIP

  Breathe.

  Ethan sucked in a mouthful of dusty air, trying to overcome what felt like steel bands encasing his lungs. The flustered beat of his heart reverberated through his chest like war drums, his frayed nerves scraping the lining of his stomach like a convict’s nails against the stone walls of a cell.

  He could see nothing through the coarse sack that was bound with rough cord around his neck, crushing his thorax and filling his nostrils with stale air. His arms were bound behind his back with rope that scoured the skin from his wrists and his knees ground painfully on an uneven floor of bare, rocky earth. He knelt with his head between his knees, kept breathing, and tried to refrain from weeping.

  Fear wasn’t an emotion that Ethan enjoyed checking out, but it scalded now like acid through his veins. Vertigo from his loss of spatial awareness caused his blackened world to gyrate and pitch around him, further fueling his asphyxia. He had been incarcerated by men who would cheerfully kill him with neither hubris nor regret. And so, in all likelihood, was Rachel. The steel bands around his chest tightened at the thought.

  The men who had captured them had wasted no time. His shouts for calm and for Rachel’s safety went unheeded, his body lifted by uncaring hands and shoved without ceremony into the back of a car before being driven through Gaza’s streets.

  His journey had ended with his body being carried from the car and through a doorway. The muted noise of Gaza outside had been brutally shut off with the slamming of a door, and then the cords around his wrists had been mercifully loosened. Any relief he may have felt was swept away as he was forced to clamber blindly down a ladder. He had sensed the closeness of the walls around him, tasted the odors of damp and dust, and felt the warm, heavy air clinging to his skin. He had known then without a doubt that his Palestinian captors were taking him to the only place where they could keep him from any Israeli rescue attempt.

  Underground.

  Ethan had long known of the network of tunnels that perforated the ancient soil beneath Gaza. The tunnels of Rafah were well known to most, the subject of Israel’s wrath on many occasions as Palestinians used them to smuggle contraband from across the border with Egypt. This covert industry might have been left unchecked by Israel were it not for the parallel operations of insurgents bringing weapons and explosives into the Strip. But Gaza City itself was also a warren of interconnecting tunnels used to move men, goods, and equipment beyond the omnipresent eyes of Mossad, Shin Bet, and the Israeli Defense Force.

  Ethan’s captors had prodded, shoved, and jostled him for what he estimated was perhaps fifty meters, the heat oppressive and the closeness of the earthen walls amplified by Ethan’s blindness until it felt as though the entire world were collapsing in around him. They had then led him to a cavity in the floor where he sensed rather than saw a heavy wooden trapdoor being lifted before he was wedged into the tiny space. The last thing he felt was a boot slammed into his back to jam him down firmly into the hole and then the door shut just above his head.

  Breathe.

  Ethan focused, and some of the crushing anxiety eased as he forced images of Rachel and Joanna from his mind. He could only guess at how long he had been incarcerated. One, maybe two hours? Christ, he was losing it already. A real man would have controlled himself, maybe even slept a little to conserve energy, but Ethan was barely able to sleep at home in his own apartment with the
door double-locked and a gun under his mattress, so the chances of his catching some shut-eye while in the grasp of suicidal militants in Gaza seemed mighty fucking remote. He was buzzing now on nervous energy, the kind that powered the muscles but ultimately drained the mind, poisoning it with paranoia, fear, and hallucinations.

  The oppressive heat closed in around him in the darkness. It was joined by a chorus of voices reminding him that he had sallied valiantly forth to free one lost soul and had succeeded only in incarcerating two more. Moron. An image of his father appeared unbidden in his mind.

  “You should have learned by now, Ethan,” the great Harry Warner had said, wagging a thick finger at him, pale eyes glowering above the twisted bayonets of his broad gray mustache. “What the hell did you think you’d achieve resigning your commission and gallivanting around the globe with a damned camera? Why didn’t you get a proper job like everyone else? You wouldn’t have ended up in this goddamn mess!”

  He should have stayed in Chicago and not gotten involved. Doug Jarvis had a lot to answer for. Yet despite everything, somewhere within his tortured soul there remained a spirit that had not yet been extinguished, like a pale candle flame flickering alone in an immense darkness. Maybe he had a bit more of his father’s indomitable gumption than he had realized. If you’ve got nothing, you’ve everything to gain. He could deal with this.

  A brief burst of Arabic punctured the silence. Damn. The pale flame gusted out.

  More voices from somewhere above—muffled, distant. A new and nauseating flush of panic churned within him. Having yearned to be freed, he now feared that they had come for him with murder in their minds. The gumption vanished. A deep thud startled him as heavy wood banged against the roof of his skull, and then he felt a sudden updraft of hot air being sucked from his prison as the trapdoor was yanked open. Rough hands grabbed him and hauled him from the hole. Ethan tried to stand but his legs would not respond and he sprawled awkwardly as unseen hands dragged him across the rough, uneven ground.

  “Get up!”

  Ethan struggled to his knees and somehow managed to command one of his tingling feet to shift beneath him. He staggered upright, swaying as stars of light sparkled in the darkness before his eyes.