by Jon Land
She had reached the automatic ticketing machine when Kimberlain grasped her harshly by the arm. “I’ll give you as long as the ride to explain who you are.”
“We’ll have the whole night for explanations, Ferryman, and we’ll need it.”
The car was virtually abandoned. They had a dozen seats all to themselves.
“My name is Danielle.”
“That doesn’t tell me who you are.”
“I’m many things. I’m—”
His face showed disgust. “Please, no riddles.” He grabbed her again at a pressure point in the shoulder, intense pain just a squeeze away.
Danielle didn’t so much as flinch. “Hurt me if you want. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been hurt before.”
“Why did you save me at the museum after setting me up back at the airport?”
“I didn’t set you up. My team was infiltrated, compromised. I was supposed to die too.” She stopped, as if expecting him to interrupt. When he didn’t, she continued. “I’ll start where this began for me. I orchestrated a raid on a Hashi stronghold.”
Now he did interrupt. “You what?”
“Let me start here, please! The rest can come later. For now just accept what I’m telling you.”
“The Hashi don’t get raided every day, miss.”
“Just listen! During the raid certain information was recovered. That information led me to Boston, to Mendelson—”
“And to me.”
“Coincidence, unless I miss my guess. We’re pursuing the same thing along different lines. That’s why we needed you.”
“So you kidnapped me.”
“It was the safest approach. To understand, you have to learn the truth at the source, not from me.”
The train slid to a halt.
“We get off at the next stop,” she told him. “Charing Cross.”
“The source?” he asked.
“Hardly. That will take until morning. The fallback plan is already in place.”
The train was moving again. An older couple and a pair of teenagers had entered the car, the teenagers complaining that the ticket clerk hadn’t believed they were under sixteen.
Danielle lowered her voice. “We can help each other. We must help each other.”
Kimberlain looked at her coldly and released his grip at last. “What I must do is get back to America to stop a madman from murdering a million people on Thanksgiving and then fig—”
“What … man?”
“How could it matter to you?”
“Because this million you refer to must be just the start,” she said.
A train rumbled over the tracks perched on the underpass they were approaching in Charing Cross. Huge steam vents blew hot exhaust air into the otherwise cold night, making this a haven for the city’s destitute and homeless. The authorities had managed to shoo them away successfully for months, but the problems raised by that policy were greater than those they solved, so London had relented and the home of the homeless had become just that again.
“We’ll hide here until morning,” Danielle said. “There’s no choice. The Hashi will still be everywhere. If we’re lucky, they won’t look here.”
Kimberlain agreed with her assessment and followed her toward the smoldering fires and the boxes many of the bums used for sleeping quarters. The stench as they approached was stifling, an amalgam of odors from cheap whiskey to urine to vomit. Even the smell of the greasy restaurants nearby seemed to settle here.
Another train pounded overhead.
“What happens when morning comes?” the Ferryman asked.
“A plane out of Gatwick. We could try for it now, but I’m not sure I could raise the pilot. Besides, morning will bring crowds, and it will be easier to hide. The Hashi may have given up the chase.”
“The Hashi never give up the chase.”
“You’ve dealt with them before.”
“Not as much as you have, apparently.”
They stopped at a large box set slightly apart from the rest. Kimberlain took his cue from Danielle and reached his hand into the box’s dank innards. He grasped a leg and pulled at it.
“Hey,” came the whining, drunken protest. “Get out now. My box. Mine!”
Kimberlain stuck his head into the stink and made sure the meager light showed the five-pound note handed him by Danielle. “I want to buy it from you,” he offered softly.
“Huh? Who the bloody hell are …” Then the bum saw the note and made a move to snatch it.
Kimberlain pulled the bill back. “Out of the box first.”
The bum dragged himself from it, no possessions in hand other than a soiled green department store bag—Harrod’s of all places. Kimberlain gave him the five pounds. The bum noticed Danielle and started to speak.
Kimberlain grabbed him with a suddenness that tore his breath away. “Not a word.”
The bum shuffled off without looking back. Danielle worked her way inside the box and made room for Kimberlain. The box was barely large enough for one person, never mind two, and the stench was revolting. She stiffened as the Ferryman brushed against her, and they settled on their sides facing each other a hair’s distance apart.
Danielle pulled a pistol from a holster in her boot and handed it to Kimberlain. “We should both have one.”
His surprise was evident. “Surprised you didn’t show one of these before.”
“We’re on the same side, as I told you.”
“But approaching from different perspectives.”
“Yes. What led you to Mendelson?”
“A water cannon he developed that was used in a bizarre murder.”
In the darkness he saw her nod. “A similar device was used to drill the pipeline for Spiderweb. It led me to him as well.”
“Yes, he mentioned something about that. But what is this Spiderweb?”
“An installation of oil fields in Antarctica.”
“Oil fields? You’re telling me all this is about oil fields?”
“Only to a point. There are pieces here, fragments that by themselves add up to nothing. You have some, I have others. We must put them together.”
“Fine by me. Just don’t try and tell me a million deaths don’t mean anything.”
“Most of them will die anyway.”
“No more riddles!”
“Give me time, please. What brought you to that doctor in New York? What were you after?”
“A dead man.”
“Now who is posing the riddles?”
“Not me. Does the name Jason Benbasset mean anything to you?”
Danielle seemed to shudder. “Billionaire philanthropist killed by terrorists three years ago.”
“Only thought to have been killed. He was blown up all right, but he didn’t die. His ‘death’ was engineered. He wanted to disappear, and not for the happiest of reasons, I’d imagine.”
“My God,” she said, almost gasping. “It fits. It all fits. Stone mentioned his name. He was part of Spiderweb from the beginning. That’s how the Hashi were privy to the details.” Her eyes flashed in the darkness. “This million, when will they die?”
“At the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the site of Benbasset’s apparent death three—”
“And the meaning of that note I took from Mendelson’s office?” she broke in.
“Lockers in Penn Station that were used as a drop point for Mendelson to deliver the water cannon, used subsequently to store the plastic explosives to be utilized on the parade.”
“Then we have barely four days. Quicker than we expected.”
“Who exactly are ‘we’?”
“An order whose sole reason for existence is the ultimate destruction of the Hashi. In that raid I told you about, pages were salvaged from a fire. Plans mostly. One set for Outpost 10, the main station of the Spiderweb oil network. The other was a set of blueprints for the prototype of the new class of super-Trident submarines.”
“You’re telling me the Hashi are planning to go aft
er a nuclear sub?”
“I’m telling you they must already have it. The timetable you just detailed assures it.”
“What timetable?”
“Thanksgiving Day. The end will come then.”
“End of what?”
“The world, Ferryman, as it is presently known.”
They were silent for a time.
“So we’ve got a bunch of Antarctic oil wells and a nuclear submarine. Mind telling me how that adds up to the end of the world?” Kimberlain said finally.
“That can be explained better tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Your plane at Heathrow tonight was meant to take me somewhere else.”
“Malta.”
“Why not just fly me there direct?”
“Our standard security dictated a change in personnel. Those involved must have their knowledge kept to an absolute minimum.”
“Rather intensive operation.”
“With good reason. We’re vastly outmanned. The slightest leak under normal operating procedures could destroy us. You saw what happened tonight. In spite of all our precautions we were infiltrated, and now everything has changed as a result. The remainder of the order has gone underground. There are only the two of us … and one other.”
“In Malta, of course.”
“He’ll explain what I’ve been unable to.”
“But he won’t know about Benbasset either, will he?”
“No,” she said distantly. “I suppose he won’t.” Then, even more distantly, “The irony of Benbasset hiring the Hashi to do his work for him …”
“Why ironic?”
“Because it wasn’t terrorists who were behind that bomb blast. It was the Hashi.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because I was part of the team.”
Danielle hadn’t intended to tell him the story. It emerged in spite of herself, as if someone else were telling it. She had heard of how the Ferryman was spending his days now, settling the problems of others who sought him out with their lives and their trust. She had heard about what had led him to this and thought perhaps he had found a better way than she to give back some of what he had taken. For the same reason, she believed he would understand her better than anyone else. He was the first person to have heard her tale from start to finish. A confession was what it amounted to, but it did little to purge her. It was more important that someone—that he—understand.
“I never even conceived it could be like that,” he said when she had finished. “The Hashi socializes children who know no better into killers.”
“They choose their subjects carefully, ones they feel they can motivate, and of these only a tenth at most actually become soldiers. The rest, well, in times past they might have become slaves or servants, but these days they just disappear.”
“How civilized.”
“And as such for centuries—since the Crusades,” she told him. “Hired assassins, the first terrorists, trained almost from the cradle. Back then women were impregnated just to supply more potential soldiers to the Hashi cause. The cause,” she added bitterly, “was everything.” She paused. “The end for me came suddenly. I guess it started with the Benbasset bombing in New York, but I didn’t realize it until after. My next mission came three months later. In Lebanon. Even that connection was meaningless in itself, a stray thought lost in a past that had ceased to exist … until we reached our target: a refugee camp.”
“My God.”
“Maybe it was the Israelis who hired us, or more likely someone who wanted the world to think it was the Israelis. Everything was ready. We were going in commando-style against hundreds of unarmed, hungry people. I watched them inside the camp and I started remembering. It was like recovering from amnesia. They had taken my mind, but they hadn’t totally taken my memory. The machine in me seemed to die. Most of the people we were about to massacre were kids, damn it. Kids! I looked in there and saw myself fifteen years before. Then I remembered the incredible carnage that followed the bomb blast in New York. I didn’t know so many would die; I swear I didn’t. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Thanksgiving Day parade. But in that last moment before our commander gave us the order to attack the refugee camp, I superimposed what I had been part of in New York over what I was about to be a part of in Lebanon. I couldn’t allow it, not by me or anyone else. I shot the commander in the throat. Then I killed the rest of the team. It was over very fast. You might even call it a payback.”
Kimberlain strained to see her in the darkness.
“The camp was a panic. The shots scattered the occupants everywhere, and again I could see myself the night the Hashi came for me. I started running. I knew I had nowhere to go and had sentenced myself to a life on the run—and, worse, a life without purpose. I had disavowed everything I was, and before that I had been a nameless nothing.” She hesitated long enough to take a deep breath. “But there was someone else in the area of the camp that day, a man who’d been tracking our team with the intention of doing what I had done, a man who was part of an order bound to destroy the Hashi, just as the Hashi were bound to disrupt the orderly flow of civilization for profit. In his words lay a new purpose. He gave me what I needed. He made me one of them.”
“One of what?”
“The Knights of St. John.”
Kimberlain’s eyes widened at that. He was familiar with the Knights of the Order of St. John, just as he was familiar with all great warrior creeds throughout history. Left in 1565 to defend Malta’s Fort St. Elmo with 120 men against 10,000 marauding Turks, they held the invaders off—incredibly—for thirty-one days. Many referred to that as the birth of guerrilla warfare, because the knights employed strategies such as mining the harbor with chain mail and swimming out beyond the Turks’ lines to toss makeshift bombs onto their decks. The drawn-out seige marked a major failure in the attempt of Sultan Suleiman I to destroy Christianity with a spearhead group of Ottoman Islamics he had joined forces with and who had gained legendary fame during the Crusades—the Assassins, often referred to as the Hashi, shortened from “Hashishi” for their purported use of the drug hashish prior to entering battle.
The Knights of Malta, as they were also called, had handed the Hashi their worst defeat ever but been wiped out themselves in the process, only to reappear in later years as a mundane religious order with all warrior ties lost. At least, that had been the tale.
“A pair of knights survived,” Danielle continued by way of explanation, “and vowed to secretly rebuild the order in its original form, with only one task in mind: to destroy the Hashi forever. Their fervor waned somewhat with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, as the Hashi retreated into the shadows. But the vow lived on to be passed from generation to generation, though the knights were more watchdogs than warriors then, until the last twenty years have returned the Hashi to prominence.”
“Terrorism,” Kimberlain said.
“Exactly. They were available for hire to anyone who wanted them and had the funds to pay. They broadened out and set up chapters of their perverse society in every major and several minor countries. They formed a subculture of sorts, thriving beneath the surface without the world knowing. They had no politics, but they provided an inexhaustible supply of manpower to groups such as the IRA, the PLO, Black September, the Red Brigades. They’ve become professional terrorists, not even worthy of being called assassins anymore.”
Kimberlain nodded, recalling similar words he had spoken to Zeus while he was still with The Caretakers. “I knew they were out there, but I never got close enough, never found hard proof. All I had was innuendo. No one believed I could have been right.”
“Which has served as their greatest ally for a thousand years. People won’t believe in them, so for all intents and purposes they don’t exist. But something changed. We uncovered their stronghold in Nice because suddenly they had begun to surface, leaving a trail where none had ever been left before.”
“Think about it
,” Kimberlain said. “Benbasset sought them out to be of service to him, but I’m betting they agreed to do so only for a unique fee. Imagine a group like the Hashi emerging prepared into the ruins of the world Benbasset’s plot leaves behind. That’s what the surfacing you referred to must be about. They have to surface in order to be ready when the time comes. It’s like being at the point of Suleiman’s charge again, except this time it’s not just Christianity they’re trying to overrun, it’s the whole world.”
“You’re giving them credit for principles they no longer possess.”
“Why wouldn’t they, or at least enough of them? If enough of the Knights of Malta have managed to stay true to their cause for over four hundred years, why not a similar number of Hashi? The world in the wake of whatever Benbasset’s got in store for it would be a world made for them.”
“I’ll accept that, but it still doesn’t explain Benbasset. If he plans on destroying the world anyway, why bother with a separate plot aimed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?”
“For the same reason he bothered killing a number of industrialists with links to the military. I’ve had some experience with this type of thinking before. The ends were different, but the thought processes were much the same. Basically Benbasset isn’t a paranoid or a psychotic; he’s an obsessive, and an obsessive nature requires escalation. All this must have started with the notion of the murders. But even as he planned and began to initiate them, they were no longer enough. So he turned his attention to the event in which his family was killed, Macy’s parade, not as replacement so much as extension. From there his field of focus widened to the whole of civilization he had lost faith in. Why not punish the whole of it? The extension was logical in terms of its progression, and Benbasset won’t pull back, even if he knows we’re on to all phases of his plan, which may give us our only chance to stop him.”
“And yet he’s really not much different from you or me, is he?” Danielle said. “Both of us are here now because we’re trying to make up for the way we led our lives in the past. In the context of the time, they weren’t mistakes, but the context is meaningless. We’ve all formed our own versions of paybacks, not trying to right the wrongs but at least pursuing a balance.”