by Glen Craney
Cas.
She yawned and stretched, promising again never to say that name aloud. She calculated what time it would be in Saudi Arabia, and realized that her former partner in crime had blown his Doomsday deadline by four hours. No way he could have retrieved the Black Stone fragments and returned them to Mecca in time for this Hajj thing to happen. The entire Muslim world had probably woken up a few hours ago to discover that their mojo rock was missing.
She glanced at the window. As far as she could tell, the planet hadn’t blown up. The only crater she knew existed was the one in her bank account. She waved it off, all of it, anxious to get back to normal and return to South Carolina for the holiday—for grits, cotillions, Gamecock football, and her parents.
She leapt from the bed and padded to the kitchen to put on a teakettle. Hot, finely ground coffee would shake the sleep from her eyes. While her French press worked its magic, she strolled over to her computer and turned it on. She saw a thumb drive inserted into one of the USB ports.
What was that doing there?
As the computer booted up, she remembered that Mossad agent—Avram Isserle or Joshua Silver or whatever the hell his name was—had been fumbling with her machine when he busted in.
Had he left it there?
She clicked on the removable drive’s icon to view its contents. The menu popped up empty, so she checked its properties. The gizmo contained nearly five hundred terrabytes of pristine memory. Wait, that had to be a mistake. She’d never heard of a flash drive with that much storage capacity. This compact doodad was no bigger than a Bic lighter, but if the specs on it were correct, it could contain more information than was stored in Low Library. She bet the über-geeks on the Stardust project would love to get their hands on this little beauty.
Hmm, that was odd: Only one folder—titled Exodus—remained on the flash drive. And it contained only two files, a DAT and an executable program. The entire folder took up less than three hundred and fifty megabytes of space, just a fraction of its capacity. Using a gadget like this would be like taking a commuter flight on the Space Shuttle from New York to Boston.
Uh-oh. The damn thing might have a virus on it.
She clicked on the .exe file anyway, and a dialogue box popped up. A status bar began sweeping across the screen. Wait a second. She clicked open the “Processes” folder in her Task Manager. The menu clearly showed the Exodus program still running! The software was humming along, even though her computer was shut off. Had this bloodsucking techno-leech been running on her computer the entire time she’d been going down the rabbit hole with Cas?
She crouched to look at the underside of the jump drive. The red LED light was blinking its busy state. She yanked the drive from the USB port. The light went black. She clicked through her hard drive and found a file with a table showing several columns of files that had been transmitted with an FTP protocol from her computer. She looked closer at the file names. All of them were from the Stardust project. She looked closer at the file names. All of them were from the Stardust project.
Bastards!
She scoured her memory. Had she inadvertently mentioned the classified NASA project to anyone outside the team? Why would somebody want her private research? She barely understood half of these files anyway. Since leaving the mission, she hadn’t had time to sift through the tons of data she had gathered. She stared at the files now flipping across her screen like shuffled cards.
What did they all have in common?
She opened a keyword-mining program that was designed to analyze reams of data. After typing in the names of the first twenty files cannibalized by this Exodus software, she searched for any word or combination of letters that appeared most frequently. But then she realized that a scan of the entire computer would take all day. She wouldn’t have the time to go through the results before tomorrow morning’s class, so she marked the option to email her a copy of the results. She’d have to go over them at the office later.
Suddenly feeling vulnerable, she leapt from her desk and checked the locks on the door. The windows were secure. She had given Paul Brady a set of keys to her apartment. Thank God for that. Maybe she was just being paranoid. This near-fatal intrusion into her life had her thinking like a spook now.
She laughed off her concern. The dementia known as Casitis had apparently wormed its way into her subconscious. Aching with fatigue, she decided a hot shower would calm her down. She grabbed her coffee cup and trudged into the bathroom, leaned in to turn on the tap, let the water get hot and slid out of her pajamas. When she stood up again, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The image of the woman looking back at her appeared ghostly pale, with dark circles under her eyes and terrible hair. The dye job Cas had forced on her was sloppy, awful, streaks of black coloring, cropped with the haphazard chopping of a skateboarder.
She rubbed her sides, reminded just how much her back ached, probably from having been duct-taped to a wooden chair and launching herself into a fully armed coffee table. She looked at her wrists. The red welts that had popped up from the tape’s nasty adhesive had almost faded. At least, she saw no bullet wound or knife scar anywhere.
Stepping in to the tub, she turned on the shower and lost herself in the rising steam.
Was that a pipe she heard banging outside?
The hot, cascading spray suddenly stopped. Goddamn landlord! Didn’t he pay the water bill? Or did the stupid pipes get clogged? She stepped out of the tub and, wrapping herself in a towel, marched out to the living room to retrieve her cell phone and call in the complaint when …
A hand touched her bare shoulder—she gasped.
“Nobody is here to hurt you,” said a man’s voice beyond the curtain.
She heard the click of a handgun.
“If you give us what we want.”
Terrified, she stood motionless, dripping wet and protected only by the towel.
“I’m waiting, Dr. McKinney.”
She could think of only one way out of this … she threw off the towel.
The man’s eyes nearly jumped out of his head.
The split-second break gave her just enough time to hammer the stranger with a knee to the balls. The man grabbed his crotch and crumpled over, his head banging with a donk on the wooden coffee table as he went down.
His pistol bounced across the carpet.
She grabbed the gun and raced to the kitchen. Yanking open her junk drawer, she pulled out a bundle of yellow garbage-bag zip ties. When she returned to the bathroom, the intruder was just rousing. Still naked as a newborn, she pistol-whipped him.
His lights went out.
She yanked his wrists behind his back and tied them to his ankles. Satisfied that he couldn’t move, she reached behind the closet door and pulled out her terrycloth robe.
She marched back into the kitchen and refilled her coffee mug, stopping to open another drawer and pull out an eight-inch serrated knife. She walked into her bedroom and found that the man, dazed, had crawled in from the living room. She plopped into the chair in front of her computer, leaned over him, and slapped his head until he came back to consciousness.
She stuck the knife’s tip between his vocal chords. “I’m sick and tired of strange men breaking into my place! I mean, how in the hell do you thugs keep getting in? I’ve got three padlocks on the damn door!” Her words trailed off while she kept holding the knife steadily with one hand and reached behind her for her coffee with the other. She never took her eyes off the man.
He didn’t even flinch.
“You’ve got five seconds to tell me what’s going on.” She traced the tip of the blade from the edge of his Adam’s apple to a spot just behind his carotid. “The cut doesn’t have to be deep, just a nice, clean slice, and you bleed to death. Of course, it would be senseless to do it on this ugly carpet.” She sipped her coffee.
The man showed no surprise, nor even a scintilla of hate or fear.
“Five … four … three … two …”
&
nbsp; “Okay,” he muttered.
She eased back the knife, just a tad. “You guys are a regular American Idol contest of inept thuggery. If one of you jokers doesn’t complete the job, do they just call up the next contestant? Who has been sending you and your friends to terrorize me?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ve been getting a lot of practice lately learning what works best on bungling burglars and assorted other jerkoffs. This apartment seems to be Grand Central Station for scumbags in training. I could easily take this scalding hot cup of coffee and splash it all over your face. Of course, then you’d scream, the super would be here in a heartbeat, and we would have ourselves one hell of a mess. Or, I could do what I really want to do, which is to slice you up into chunks and feed you to the Hudson River catfish.”
She couldn’t believe she was talking like this. Between her quick-thinking ferocity in the Hyundai with Avram Isserle and her violent outburst in Abu Dhabi, she now wondered if she had developed some deep-seated anger-management issues, thanks to the time she’d wasted with the Malibu Mess.
“Listen,” the intruder pleaded, trying to talk without severing an artery. “This is just a job for me, see. Nothing else. The bag man gives me half my money and—”
“Oh really? How much am I worth?”
“Depends on what I find in this apartment.”
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret.” She pressed the knife harder against his neck. “I’ve got no money. Actually, that’s no secret. The entire world knows it. Look around this hovel. Why would anybody want to rob me? Over and over?”
The man looked up at her with an almost comical glint of tedium. “I’m suppose to get a stone you’re hiding in here.”
She looked around the apartment, which was stacked with enough rocks to form a Hobbit den. “You’re going to have to get more specific. What kind of stone?”
“All I know is, it’s black and looks sheared off in the shape of a ‘V.’”
She could hardly believe her ears. She wanted to retreat to her desk, where she kept the V-shaped shard she had broken off from the Black Stone fragment, but she didn’t dare alert the guy. She kicked him in the knee to distract him, and then stole a glance at her favorite paperweight.
It was still there. He hadn’t found it … yet.
Her mind raced. How could this guy possibly know that she had broken off a piece of that seventh fragment? Surely Cas wouldn’t have spilled the beans. She played dumb and lied, “I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do, lady.”
“You tell whoever hired you that he’s looking under the wrong rock for the wrong rock.”
The intruder wiped a trickle of blood from his scalp. “Somebody told somebody that you bought the stone from Abdul Baith.”
She shook her head in confusion. “Never heard of her. Is she a collector?”
“Abdul Baith’s a dude.”
“And who’s this, uh, ‘somebody’ you keep talking about?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I’m assigned a go-between for whoever hires me. All’s I know is that somebody says you bought this piece-a rock or whatever from this Baith character, and I have to get it back, or else.”
She gripped the knife tighter. “Enough with the lies already. Five more seconds and—”
The intruder’s eyes widened. “All I’m saying is all I know, all right? I was given two hours to get what you got …” He chuckled nervously and shook his head again. “You and I don’t want to have happen to us what happened to this Baith guy, do we?”
“What happened to him?”
“The West Indies police found his body a few hours ago under a bunch of banana trees.”
She couldn’t make sense of any of this meth-head’s gibberish. Why would someone think she was in cahoots with a murdered thief who stole the Black Stone and got shot up for the effort? She dug the tip of the knife into the burglar’s soft palate. “I want you to draw on your vast experience of wise-guying and answer one question for me.”
The man nodded.
She got up into his face. “Who do you think is after me?”
“Lady, I’m begging you. I don’t have a clue. All I know is Baith was shot six times, up close and personal. There was some talk on the street …” He stopped himself.
“What talk!”
“The bullets formed some kind of star in his forehead.”
Her face twisted in an expression of utter disgust. “A star? Why the hell did the killers do that to him?”
The guy shook his head to plead his ignorance. “I’m just the lowest mug on the totem pole. All I know is, if I walk out of this place without that stone, somebody’s likely to give me a similar facial.”
She figured it was fifty-fifty he was lying through his teeth. Making sure he didn’t move, she edged toward the goon’s gun on the floor and picked it up. Now armed to the hilt like Cap’n Jack Sparrow, she prodded him on hands and knees toward the door. “I know some real bad characters in the underworld intelligence business who would love to strap your nuts to a time machine and conduct a séance with your brain.”
“I’m not exactly following,” the burglar whimpered, his nose now pressed against the door jam.
She stuck the pistol into the back of his neck and angled the knife near the crown jewels for good measure. “Let me make it simple, then, Mr. Bourne-I-Got-No-Identity. I’m giving you a clear and present choice. You see that window over there? I’m going to pull my chair up there and sip a cup of java. And if I’m not watching you running down Riverside Drive in two minutes, I’m calling in the reservoir dogs.”
“Lady, it’s a death sentence for me if I walk out that door empty-handed!” He turned his head cautiously. “At least give me something to take to them, so I got a fighting chance.”
His fear sounded authentic enough.
She grabbed a worthless lump of black basalt sitting on her sill and stuffed it down the back his pants. “There, go tell your Wizard of Oz to get his rocks off with that!” She threw open the door and kicked him out, then slammed home the bolts on her locks.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
A CUSTOMS AGENT IN THE processing hall of the King Khalid International Airport motioned Cas forward to the interrogation kiosk and accepted his passport. “Purpose for visit?”
Exhausted, Cas was having trouble keeping his eyes open. After learning that the owner of Lightgiver Technologies was flying to the Saudi capital, he had booked the next flight out of Dallas. He didn’t even have a toothbrush or a clean pair of underwear, not that he hadn’t gone weeks without either.
Technically, his time had run out to find the Stone. Yet he still held out hope that the Meccan imams who supervised the Kaaba would have sense enough to continue keeping the relic’s disappearance under wraps. He couldn’t suppress his suspicion that this Texan he was chasing knew something about the recent whereabouts of the Stone fragments that Marly had tossed away. Sure, all he had to go on was a set of license-plate numbers that linked a shady BMW with some mystery man who had just hopped a flight to Riyadh. But as long as there was still a chance, however slim, for him to get his son back—
“Sir!” the customs agent behind the counter said, raising his voice. “Again, the purpose of your visit?”
Cas coughed and answered hoarsely, “Pleasure.”
The agent looked at the photograph in the passport, staring at it for nearly a minute. He occasionally glanced at his monitor to compare the photos. He casually reached under his desk, and moments later two officers wearing epaulets and berets emerged from a side door and marched toward the kiosk. The agent ordered Cas, “Please follow these men.”
Cas retreated a step. “What’s going on?”
“Come with us,” one of the arriving officers demanded.
Cas cursed silently. Why had his name been flagged? God forbid, had the Saudis discovered that he and Mar
ly pilfered the Kaaba shavings? No point in resisting these guys—not here, not in public, not now. He had no choice but to be perp-walked past the long expanse of queues, gawked at by the suspecting eyes of the other travelers.
Led into a cold cinderblock room, he was pointed toward a steel table with two chairs. Overhead, a video monitor hung from one corner.
A burly Saudi in a dark suit entered the room with two junior officers. He sat at one end of the table and stared at Cas before lighting a cigarette. “You have no luggage, Mr. Fielding.”
Cas found his mannerisms odd for an Arab. Smoking was a rare habit for a Wahabi apparatchik, not exactly conforming to the dictates of the Prophet. “I travel light. I like to support the local economy.”
The interrogator held the burning cigarette delicately between his thumb and forefinger, as if contemplating what its tip might do to a man’s nerve endings. “You visited the kingdom a week ago. And left after only one day.”
“Last time I checked, staying in a country for just twenty-four hours wasn’t a crime.”
The agent stood slowly. He walked behind him with calculated steps. “No, but falsifying a customs form is.”
Cas was all too familiar with this technique of depriving a suspect of his sightline, the most reassuring of the senses. Most criminals, when denied visual contact, become edgy and less assured. But he slowed his breath to counter the move and summoned an image of the interrogator to his mind’s eye. Then, he muttered indifferently, “Yayup.”
“Are you on medications for a psychological illness?”
Cas laughed, wondering how the lout had come up with such a question. “Seriously, Columbo?” He couldn’t fathom where this could be going. His interrogator didn’t move, but Cas watched a plume of smoke blow over his shoulder. He coughed into his fist and played along, “Okay, medication? Yeah, sure, Johnny Walker. I prefer Red, but Black will do. Medicare covers it.”
Not amused, the interrogator returned to his seat and leaned forward. “I am going to ask you one more time. Why have you come to our country?”