by Jill Gregory
He felt Yael relax beside him as the car resumed its descent. Suddenly his hand shot out to press the button for the second floor.
“I almost forgot, honey. I told your parents we’d stop by their room.”
Yael flicked him a puzzled glance. “Oh . . . they aren’t meeting us in the lobby?” Even as she uttered the words, she exited beside him, waiting until the doors closed before she spoke again.
“What was that all about, honey?”
“It suddenly dawned on me—Gillis doesn’t travel alone. His partner could be staked out in the lobby.”
Yael’s eyes narrowed. “Good thinking. I suggest the stairs.”
David glanced back and forth, pondering the exit signs posted at opposite ends of the hall. “Do you remember if we turned left or right to find our room last night when we came up the stairs?”
“Right. . . I think.”
“Then we go left. That’s the staircase farther from the front door.”
Yael hitched her tote higher on her shoulder. “Let’s hope there’s a back exit,” she muttered as they started toward the stairwell.
Stealthily they made their way down. David took a breath before he inched open the first floor exit door.
So far, so good. The hallway was empty. Glancing to his left, he spotted another corridor branching off it and they hurried toward it.
But it was just an alcove, with dining chairs stacked to the ceiling alongside a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“In here.” David shoved open the door, but Yael spun around at the sound of quick footfalls in the hall behind them.
A dark-skinned man bore down on them—running like a wolf after a rabbit. Gillis’s partner, the Hispanic who’d shot at them yesterday.
“Go! Hurry!” Yael pushed him through the door and slammed it shut behind her.
David grunted as he rammed his shin into the legs of a banquet table stacked on its side. “Shit.”
They were in a storage area littered with long tables, more stacks of chairs, podiums, projector equipment, even a piano.
David skidded to the piano. “Help me with this!”
He braced his palms against its side, leaning in with all his weight. It didn’t budge. Yael ran to its opposite side, and together they succeeded in shoving it several feet toward the door.
“Come on! Again!” Perspiration dripped down David’s temples. His face flushed red with exertion. Yael was wincing, her fingers splayed across the rich wood. This time they managed to shift it nearly to the door.
“Once more,” he grunted, bracing himself for the effort.
At that moment, the door moved toward them, thudding against the piano. Sudddenly hairy fingers gripped the edge of the door and a shoulder rammed against the wood.
“Now!” Yael screamed.
David shoved, every muscle straining. The piano lurched against the door and slammed it into the jamb, trapping the thick fingers. From the other side they heard an inhuman howl, followed by the desperate slams of shoulder against barricade.
“Come on!” Grabbing Yael’s hand, David zigzagged past the banquet furniture and a chest of china into an adjoining room—a huge stainless-steel kitchen, where a red-coated bellman munching a sandwich dropped it at the sight of them.
“Excuse me, sir.” He jumped toward them, palm out, as several startled cooks looked up from their workstations.
“I’m sorry, sir, but this area is off-limits to guests—”
“Where’s your back door?” David shouted.
The bellman looked too astonished to reply, but the Asian cook who’d been chopping onions gestured sideways with his chef’s knife.
They followed the blade, just as the bellman started in the direction of the Hispanic’s howls. “What the . . . hell. . .”
“Don’t open that door—he’s got a gun!” Yael shot over her shoulder. “Call security!”
“What is this?” the sous chef asked, grinning. “Reality TV? We being punk’d, man?”
Outside, David and Yael found themselves in the brightly lit service entrance. They tore around the building to the street side and ran until they finally spotted an empty taxi.
Just as it slid to a stop, Yael’s cell phone rang.
“JFK,” David panted as he slid into the car, leaving the door open. “But wait for the lady.”
He caught his breath as Yael climbed in, her phone to her ear.
“Getting out of that hotel was the easy part,” she gasped at last as the taxi jerked into traffic. She leaned toward David to whisper in his ear. “That call was our first step toward getting you past your Homeland Security.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Hypnotized by the screen, the Serpent worked all through the night.
By dawn, the last two names still eluded him.
He attacked the formulas again. His dirty-blond hair had gone unwashed for two days, and his armpits reeked with sweat as his fingers flew across the keyboard. His mind raced faster than the CPU at his command.
For days he’d forgotten to bathe, to eat, even to use his cane. At one point he’d shoved back his chair and sprung up without it, only to tumble to the floor.
Cursing, he’d struggled back up, grasped the damned cane, and smashed it full force against one of his treasured sculptures.
He was growing to hate the numbers, the graphs, the overlays of transcriptions. Instead of reflecting his brilliance, they now seemed to mock him, hiding their secrets, refusing to part the curtain of mystery. There had been no more breakthroughs, but then, neither had any more papyri fragments been found, none since the summer of 2001.
Everything I need is here. It must be here. I’m so close.
We’re so close.
And it’s all hanging on me. The downfall of God. The end of the world. The victory of the Gnoseos.
They’d tried so hard, so many times. His people’s history never failed to move him.
He thought of the first time they’d come close to wiping out the Hidden Ones. How the imbalance it caused in the world had triggered the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, destroying Pompeii. And of the hero, Attila the Hun, who brutally slaughtered so many in the fifth century he was dubbed the “scourge of God.”
The Gnoseos had rejoiced at the plague, the Black Death that killed nearly half the people in Western Europe in the fourteenth century. They’d prayed it would spread throughout the world.
The Inquisition in Spain under Torquemada, and the Armenian massacres, had killed many of the Hidden Ones, but never enough of them, never thirty-six within a generation.
There had been so many moments of hope—the Yellow River bursting its banks in China, killing nearly a million people in 1887. The sinking of the Titanic. Communism—and the Khmer Rouge—the movement that massacred millions in Cambodia.
In many lands and in many times, slavery was their tool—suffocating hope, drowning the human spirit, destroying those with pure souls as if they were vermin.
The Nazis also did their part—and for a time his great-grandfather had led the Circle of his generation in a valiant campaign to bring down the world. They’d come so close.
But we are closer now, he told himself, closer than at any other time in history. He thought of the Ark, of the provisions newly stockpiled in that subterranean stronghold, and of the two thousand faithful awaiting the signal—the signal to enter their new world, the signal that could only come once he completed his task.
Two more names. Why couldn’t he find them? What was he doing wrong?
He tried a different algorithm, altered another sequence, ran another equidistant letter skip.
Garbage. The screen showed him only garbage.
He bit his tongue until it bled. Stupid blood, what does it matter? Patience mattered.
His youth, locked in the darkness, had taught him about patience. He’d always known the light would come again. And it will come again now, he thought. Light and answers. Patience.
But it was difficult to practice patience w
hen the Circle was pressing him. Even his father seemed distant, disappointed, as the days dragged on. How much more would he despise me if he knew the truth—all of it?
I cannot fail. I will not.
He needed to clear his mind. To go back to the stillness of that dark peaceful place, to hear the sound of nothing.
The answer was within him. He possessed the power to ascend, to reconnect with the Source. It was intuitive—he’d been taught that since the day he received his amulet.
His hand sought out the gold medallion hanging around his neck. As his fingers traced the double ouroboros carved in its center, he pictured the world cracking in two. Head bowed, he chanted the ancient meditation over and over until he slid to the floor in a trance.
Foul earth, sphere of illusion,
I curse your shackles,
Despising the evil flesh that imprisons my mind.
Like a candle flaming upward, I seek the Source,
Striving toward the heavens,
To merge with my Divine.
It was late morning when he opened his eyes again, his mind still, his shoulders relaxed for the first time in weeks.
Suddenly, he knew what he’d overlooked. A subtle variance of the ELS skip, but it could change everything.
And it did.
This time, after only an hour of churning through the server’s myriad data files, there was finally something hew across the top of his screen.
He scribbled down the letters, and ran the variance again. Each time, the results were identical.
It was a name. A name he hadn’t culled before.
Jack Cherle.
Two minutes later, he shot the name across the network. It wouldn’t take long to give the Dark Angels what they needed to know.
If Jack Cherle was currently alive, he wouldn’t be for long.
Without stopping to shower or to eat, the Serpent plunged back into his work.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
QUEEN MARY 2
Jack Cherle threw open the doors to his balcony and watched the moonlit Atlantic roll by. There were two full days remaining before the ship reached Southampton and he intended to savor them both.
This was the trip of a lifetime. His wife had often daydreamed of taking a cruise on the QE2, but the ship’s successor, the Queen Mary 2, was a ship beyond anything either of them could have imagined.
He loved watching Yasmin sigh with delight over the high tea every afternoon that came complete with musical accompaniment. Loved hearing the excitement in her voice as she announced it was nearly time for their onboard course from Oxford. Loved holding her close on this balcony every evening after they’d overeaten meals to die for.
He’d decided to splurge for this trip to mark their thirtieth wedding anniversary. They were treating all three sons and their wives and children to six nights at sea, followed by a week in London. Yasmin could scarcely contain her joy. This was the first family vacation they’d taken since their oldest went off to Cornell.
Their life in St. Louis was comfortable, but their time off from their busy pediatric practice was spent on children other than their own. Each year, Jack and Yasmin packed their sunscreen, shorts, and sandals, took their preventative vaccinations, kissed their grandchildren good-bye, and flew off, as part of Doctors Without Borders, to a different region plagued by war and disaster.
Jack thought about the malnourished children they’d treated last summer in Darfur, and the five colleagues who’d been murdered a mile away from them in Afghanistan the year before. Here, looking out from the balcony at the endless expanse of inky sea and sky, Jack could almost forget about the chaos in the world. Almost.
Still, it tugged at him. They’d almost canceled this trip after the recent tsunami in Japan. If not for disappointing their children and grandchildren, and the fact that they’d booked their passage a year ago, they’d have taken off for Asia. Instead, he and Yasmin had compromised, changing their two return tickets so that they could fly to Tokyo directly from London, foregoing the British Airways flight home.
Some days Jack fantasized about the two of them simply packing up the practice and traveling the globe together for months at a time, tending to the most vulnerable children adrift in the world.
Maybe someday . . .
A knock at the cabin door drew him back inside. Yasmin was brushing her teeth so he opened the door to find their eleven-year-old granddaughter, Emily, grinning up at him, a beach cover-up draped over her pajamas.
“I need another goodnight kiss, Poppa. Timmy’s driving Mommy crazy because he wants to order room service. He claims he’s starving.”
“Thank God your brother will never know what starving really is,” Jack said, smoothing back Emily’s long brown bangs. “That’s better. I can see your beautiful eyes now.” He leaned down and kissed his middle granddaughter’s fresh-scrubbed cheek.
“We only have two days left on the boat,” Emily sighed as she lingered at the door. “Don’t you wish we could all stay here forever?”
Jack chuckled. “You don’t really mean that, Em. You have plenty of adventures waiting for you the rest of your life.”
“I guess,” she shrugged, then brightened. “So do you, Poppa.”
“Of course,” Jack began. Suddenly, a breath of ice wisped down his back and vanished. Now what was that?
With a shiver he glanced at the open balcony door where the sea flowed in foamy caps. But the sudden chill had gone.
Yasmin emerged from the bathroom and Emily ran into her arms. By the time Jack walked her back to the cabin down the corridor, he’d forgotten about the odd sensation. He’d forgotten about everything but the gentle roll of the sea and the precious days ahead with his family.
PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA
Half a world away, a computer secreted in a building owned by the Central Bank of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea pinpointed Jack Cherle’s whereabouts. Within moments, a team of three Dark Angels stationed in Wales set out to greet the Queen Mary when it docked in Southampton.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
JFK was jammed with travelers trapped by all the delays. Amidst the din of thousands of inconvenienced customers, ticket agents worked feverishly trying to rebook tickets and juggle passengers and flights. David was stuck in a line that snaked through roped lanes five deep as he waited to purchase a round-trip ticket to Israel. His nerves stretched taut as he wondered if the ticket agents up ahead were already on the lookout for him.
In another line, Yael looked calm and unfazed as she waited between a mother with two unruly children and a group of teenagers wearing soccer uniforms. They’d chosen separate lines as a precaution in case David was stopped.
He glanced again at the passport in his hand, marveling at the remarkable facsimile Avi had procured on short notice. But as he inched up in the line, he prayed that the harried airport employees didn’t have his photograph taped beside their computers.
“Next.”
The blond ticket agent, who looked so much like Kate Wallace he nearly did a double take, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and regarded him through bloodshot eyes. “What can I do for you today?”
So far, so good. David requested a round-trip ticket to Tel Aviv via London. He knew the next flight, leaving the following morning, was the one Yael was booking, too.
“Let’s see, the next flight leaves at nine A.M. tomorrow. You’ll arrive in Tel Aviv at five thirty-five A.M. There’s only a two-hour layover at Heathrow. And,” she added, still checking her computer screen, “you’re in luck. Five seats left. Most people aren’t getting their first choices today. Name, please?”
For a moment David’s mind went blank. He felt his entire body going cold with terror. For a man obsessed with names, he was having trouble getting this one out.
“Alan Shiffman.” He let out his breath slowly, hoping she couldn’t hear the thumping of his heart as she typed his name into the computer.
“May I see some identification, Mr.
Shiffman?”
David was appalled to see his hand shaking slightly as he slid the passport across the counter. The Kate Wallace look-alike peered at it closely, then handed it back.
“And will you be putting this on your credit card?”
“I’ll pay cash.”
Hotshot Avi Raz had gotten “Alan Shiffman” a passport, but neglected to procure him a matching credit card.
David had been stunned on the way to the airport when Yael informed him they’d be meeting a contact in the bar who was bringing him yet another passport. She warned him to behave naturally—as if they were three business acquaintances having a preflight cocktail.
Still, it had flummoxed him when their “acquaintance,” a middle-aged woman with chin-length red hair and a toothy smile had suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, Alan, you dropped your passport!”
David was about to correct her when Yael kicked him under the table. As the woman slipped off the barstool and scooped a passport from the floor, David caught himself.
“You certainly don’t want to lose this,” the red-headed woman chuckled, handing him the open passport.
David saw it looked identical to the one Avi had brought him earlier, except for the name attached to his face.
Alan Shiffman.
That’s who he was now. Alan Shiffman, whose passport had been issued seven years ago in Chicago.
He’d forced a smile, and downed the rest of his drink. “Thank you very much. I wouldn’t get very far without this.”
He couldn’t imagine how Avi had pulled it off on such short notice, but he was grateful. Still, traveling under a false identity, especially out of the country, especially when you’re wanted for questioning, had to be a crime of some magnitude.
David didn’t want to think about the possible consequences. Right now he had to keep drilling the name Alan Shiffman into his head—as if there weren’t enough names rattling around in there already.
Leaving the ticket counter, amazed he’d pulled it off, he spotted Yael sitting nearby, pretending to organize her tote. She rose from her chair as their gazes met, and started toward the security line. He followed at a short distance.