The Resurrector (The Dominic Grey Series)

by Layton Green

  Hannah’s face hardened, and he could see decades of pain in her eyes, a cancer of grief and rage more deadly than any disease.

  “You were a student. A single mom with no support, and you didn’t live in the best area of Chicago. Two black gang members broke into your home one night and took everything you owned—including your son’s life.”

  Her eyes flashed. “He was trying to protect me. They tied me up, and he thought they were going to do something else. He stood in front of me and refused to move and they shot him. They never even touched me.” She looked away. “Why didn’t they tie him up, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They didn’t have to kill him.”

  “You didn’t have to kill anyone, either,” Grey said. He turned towards the window, giving Hannah his back. “It was a terrible tragedy, Hannah. I’m truly sorry for your loss. But it doesn’t give you the right to kill even one person who wasn’t involved.”

  “What do you know about losing a child? That kind of pain?”

  Grey heard the bedside drawer open, the sound he was waiting for. When he turned, he saw Hannah aiming a Smith & Wesson compact pistol at him.

  “You should have stayed out of it,” she said. “It wasn’t your fight.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken Charlie.”

  Police sirens sounded in the distance. Hannah’s head whisked to the side.

  “Those are for you,” Grey said.

  Hannah lowered her stance and gripped the weapon in both hands.

  “You’re going to kill me in cold blood?” he asked.

  She cocked her head, listening to the sirens draw closer. “You give me no choice.”

  Hannah pulled the trigger but the weapon didn’t fire. She pulled again and again until realizing it was empty.

  “Damn you,” she said, throwing the gun at him.

  He stalked over to her, swatted away her attempt to get free, and pinned her against the wall. “I wanted to make sure you understood the stakes. That I have every reason in the world to kill you—” He took the Smith & Wesson bullets out of his jacket pocket and opened his palm “—and the means to do so and go free. A suicide, quick and easy. Someone who knew the game was up.”

  Fear sprang into her eyes. Grey thought of the victims who had already died horrible deaths at the hands of this woman, and untold more in waiting.

  Most of all, he thought about Charlie.

  Grey squeezed her throat until she gagged. “I came here to kill you.”

  Hannah tried to wriggle away, gasping her words. “You came here just to tell me that?”

  He released her, and she collapsed at the base of the wall. “That’s the only thing you deserve,” he said. “Not a trial, not a sentence, not a long life as a heroine to the white prison gangs.”

  She stared up at him, defiant. “So do it.”

  “I had a realization, while I was waiting for you to come home. I realized that someone has to break the cycle. Lots of people, of course, but I can only affect what’s under my control.”

  Her laugh came cruel and hard. “You and I are tainted. Why bother?”

  “It’s not us I’m doing it for.” Grey stood again as footsteps pounded down the hallway, calls for someone to open the door.

  “If you died here tonight,” he continued, “she would know who did it.” He shook his head. “I can’t teach that lesson.”

  Sounds of the front door splintering.

  Dr. Varela spat on his shoe. “I finally understood, after my son died, that my parents were right. Why they did what they did. It’s us or them, and it always will be.”

  “There’s a difference between fighting for love and fighting for hate,” he said, just before the SWAT team rushed inside. “Hate never changes anything.”

  “Love can’t bring my son back.”

  “No. But it can save someone else’s.”

  -53-

  A yellow-bellied flycatcher warbled in the distance as the pallbearers lowered Akhona’s coffin into the earth. Viktor watched arm-in-arm with Naomi as the boy’s mother smiled through her tears. It was a quiet joy of things remembered, a final farewell, a grieving mother’s resignation that her beloved’s time on earth was done. A smile that could only arise from someone who believed her child was in a better place—or perhaps from someone who had already buried him once, and realized a peaceful death was better than an unholy life.

  Instead of the dusty, weed-choked cemetery for the poor in which Akhona had first lain, his new pewter casket—the most expensive money could buy—would rest beneath a jacaranda atop a hill overlooking the Langeberg mountains. Next spring, the beautiful tree’s blossoms would hang above the coffin like a thousand purple bells, a clarion ode to the heavens about the boy whose rest they shaded.

  A new location. A secure coffin. Van Draker dead and gone. Akhona’s body, recovered from one of the bronze vats, would rest in peace permanently this time.

  At least, Viktor thought, until science took another quantum leap and learned to build a new Akhona from the dust of centuries-old bones.

  Would they be able to inject a soul one day, too? One preserved from the past, made in a lab, plucked from the depths of Grey’s mysterious vision?

  Spades of dirt settled.

  Lamentations rendered to the sky.

  “Come,” Viktor said to Naomi, when the onlookers started to disperse.

  As they walked back to their car, a woman’s voice called out to them from behind, in a heavy Xhosa accent.

  “Professor, please wait!”

  Viktor started. For a moment, he thought he had seen Kristof’s gray face and angular frame in the distance, watching from deeper within the cemetery, slipping behind a headstone just as Viktor turned.

  It was probably just a caretaker. Van Draker’s butler had never surfaced, and the professor had wondered at his fate. Had Kristof taken van Draker’s research and disappeared? Perhaps to begin the experiments anew?

  Instead of the sallow-faced butler, Viktor saw Akhona’s mother running towards him, tears streaming down her face. She clasped her arms around his waist and buried her head in his chest. “Thank you,” she sobbed. “Thank you for this.”

  Viktor embraced her in return, feeling awkward at the public display. Behind her, standing by the grave, her husband tipped his head at Viktor.

  On the way back to the town car, Naomi took Viktor’s hand as a breeze riffled through the treetops in the lovely cemetery. She said, “You paid for the funeral, didn’t you?”

  Viktor tried to conceal his embarrassment. In his circles, such things were not discussed. “I, ah, might have helped defray the cost.”

  “All of it?”

  His silence spoke for itself.

  She squeezed his hand harder. “You’re a good man, Viktor Radek.”

  He accepted the compliment, though he wasn’t sure he agreed. Viktor knew he was someone who cared far too much about the secrets of life and death that haunted mankind. Someone who elevated knowledge too high above simple pleasure, who had willingly put other lives at risk to gain the answers he craved.

  Yusuf opened the door, and Viktor followed Naomi inside the town car. The professor forced away the disturbing memories of Kristof and Robey. “Where to?” he asked. “Lunch? A stroll on the beach?”

  “To the hotel, please,” Naomi called out to Yusuf. She put a hand on Viktor’s thigh and leaned close to whisper in his ear. “I have some things to thank you for, too.”

  Grey slid the wrestling mats onto the concrete floor, creating a makeshift dojo in the basement of the Washington Heights homeless shelter. The sweat-stained, green-and-white mats were coming apart at the seams. Grey hung his oldest black belt, frayed and faded with age, on a peg above the mats. Jujitsu was not overly concerned with tradition, and every school differed. Some kept photos of old masters on the wall, some displayed certificates of rank, some had a favorite piece of Japanese art or a miniature bonsai garden or scrolls of haikus. Most had charts of pres
sure points and a rack of practice weapons.

  Grey kept it simple. Just the mats, his old belt, and a framed yin-yang poster. He knew it wasn’t much.

  But there was no place he’d rather be.

  He was especially excited that morning, since it was the first day Charlie was due to return. She would go light, practice her strikes and toe-up a few throws.

  Before anyone arrived, Grey adopted a simple child’s pose on the mat, taking a moment to center himself and regulate his breathing.

  He was worried about what came next for Charlie. He knew the bleak statistics for homeless kids. In nearly all cases, the damage had been done, and most never left the streets.

  He believed about the only thing that mattered, the one difference maker, was a personal connection to a loving, responsible adult. Something most of these kids had never had.

  Grey wasn’t the parental type, and Charlie had been clear she didn’t want a foster family. The horror stories from some of the other kids terrified her. She had told Grey that she had a family once, and that was enough.

  Grey understood. When he had been on the streets, he had felt the same. While he yearned for a normal family, he didn’t want someone else’s. He wanted his own. He wanted his father to change and his mother not to be dead.

  So while Grey had no illusions as to how much Charlie could be helped, the one thing he could do was be there for her. Watch her back and hold her accountable and provide a blueprint, as best he could, on how to live.

  Charlie swooped into the dojo ten minutes early, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Yo, Teach!”

  “Good morning.”

  “Whatcha doing down there? Is that some new way to kill someone in three seconds?”

  “Um, no. It’s Child’s Pose.”

  Charlie’s face screwed up. “Huh?”

  “A breathing technique, like Qi-Gong. We’re going to start using more of it in class.”

  Charlie gave him a palm. “Whatever.”

  She set down an old backpack held together with safety pins. When she opened it to take out her gi—Grey purchased the traditional cloth uniform for any student who stayed longer than a month—he spotted the top of a book. Not a novel, but a paperback or textbook of some sort.

  “What’s that?”

  Charlie looked both embarrassed and proud. “Oh yeah. I was gonna tell you sometime.”

  “How about right now?”

  She hesitated, then pulled out a worn GED study guide. “I found it in the free bin at Goodwill.”

  “Charlie, that’s fantastic!” They had discussed getting her GED before, but she had never shown much interest.

  She shuffled her feet. “After everything that happened . . . I been doing a lot of thinking. I know it’s weird and don’t you dare tell anyone else because I’ll never live it down, but I think . . . I think I wanna be a cop one day. Like you, Teach. You’ll help me, right?”

  That mysterious lump in his throat had returned. “I’d be honored,” he said softly.

  “I can come over and study sometimes?”

  “Anytime.”

  “Not in any weird way, either. You old, Teach. Hands off the goods. But somebody gotta help me pass that test.”

  “We’ll get you another book. A new edition.”

  “Listen,” she said. “There’s something else you’re gonna do for me. And I don’t want no excuses.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You’re going back to work for Viktor.”

  Grey’s grin faded. “I haven’t decided about that yet, Charlie.”

  “Yeah? I have. And I’m serious. If you don’t go back, then those bastards win. Them and everyone like them.”

  “There are lots of people fighting on our side out there, Charlie.”

  “So?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  “It’s nice and all you’re showing us a few moves in the basement,” her eyes turned uncharacteristically serious, “but people out there need you. People like me. Other victims.”

  Grey averted his gaze, staring at his old black belt and thinking about the origins of jujitsu and how the world had not really changed that much in all those centuries. There were still serfs and lords, villagers and samurai, the privileged and the lost. Only the names and battlefields had changed. His eyes shifted to the yin yang poster and he wondered if there was really any balance in the world, if the old philosophers hadn’t gotten it all wrong and there should be a speck of white in the center of the symbol, swallowed by a sea of darkness. A spark, nothing more. It made him feel as worn and tattered as the cloth of his old gi.

  “Don’t think that I don’t know why you been moping around, either. I know ’bout your girlfriend. Think you have nothing to live for and all that.”

  When he didn’t respond, she poked him in the chest. “All of us here lost big in life, Teach. If life was a bowling alley, we rolled a pair of gutter balls. But you do have something to live for. The most important thing in the world, maybe even in the whole—what do they call that thing in the comics?” She snapped her fingers. “The mul-ti-verse. That’s right, the whole multiverse.”

  “And what is that?” Grey said quietly.

  Charlie grinned and held up the study guide. “Me.”

  -54-

  A few nights later, kicking back with a beer on his futon, thinking about everything and trying to decide what to do, Grey remembered a conversation he had once had with Nya about the afterlife. Whether death meant oblivion or something else.

  Do you believe in God? she had asked him one night after dinner, sitting on her patio in Harare with a glass of pinotage and the insects of the bushveld singing to the night.

  I don’t know, he had said, and I don’t care. Sorry to disappoint.

  She fingered her wine stem. I do.

  Why? he asked finally, after seeing her disappointed look when he didn’t respond. He sensed she needed to get something off her chest.

  I don’t know. It’s not an argument, it’s a feeling. That something more than empty space is out there.

  Thinking about your parents?

  She looked down and took her bottom lip between her teeth. Both her parents were dead, her father the victim of a violent murder.

  You know what I think God is? Grey said. If He exists?

  What’s that, my love?

  Justice.

  Nya slowly raised her eyes.

  He could tell she liked his answer.

  After finishing his lager, Grey kicked his feet off the couch, sighed, and reached for his phone. He dialed Viktor’s number.

  “It’s good to hear from you,” Professor Radek boomed.

  “Where are you? I hear an ocean.”

  “Ah. Yes. I decided to take a few days to relax.”

  “I didn’t know the Czech Republic had a beach.”

  “It’s, ah, I’m actually still in Cape Town. With Naomi.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Did you want something?” Viktor said, rather hastily.

  “I’m not sure how to say this, so I’ll just come out with it. I’m in debt sixty thousand dollars.”

  “Oh?”

  “On your credit card.”

  Silence on the phone. “I see,” Viktor said.

  “I can’t even afford the interest.”

  “Is that how you paid Jax?”

  “Yeah,” Grey mumbled. “Sorry. I didn’t see another option.”

  “You could have come to me.”

  “I know you would have said yes. But I still couldn’t take the chance.”

  More silence. Grey shuffled his feet, wondering if he had enough equity in his loft to sell it and pay off the professor. Probably not.

  “In that case,” Viktor said slowly, and Grey thought he detected a note of satisfaction in his tone, “I suppose you’ll have to get back to work.”

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  Note

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wish I had made all of this up.

  Though I research heavily for the Dominic Grey novels (I probably shorted out an FBI server during the research for The Resurrector), I don’t usually include research notes because I think truth in fiction comes from how the words make you feel, rather than a reference to the facts behind them. That being said, with this book, I’d like to point out a few resources that might help illuminate certain issues for those who are interested.

  The number of books that have been written on the weird beliefs of the Nazis and the quasi-occult forces that helped shaped them are legion. One in particular I recommend, which takes a scholarly approach to the topic, is Hammer of the Gods by David Luhrssen (Potomac Books, 2012). I left countless bizarre factoids out of The Resurrector because I felt they were too fantastical for the novel. Oh, the irony! Also, consider these eerie lines from a poem written by Adolf Hitler himself:

  I often go on bitter nights

  To Wodan’s oak in the quiet glade

  With dark powers to weave a union

  The runic letters the moon makes with its magic spell

  —Adolf Hitler

  As uniquely horrific as the Nazi and Apartheid eras were, the world has a long history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, including eugenics legislation and the colonization of the Americas. In modern times, the number of hate groups in the United States and worldwide appears to be growing, rather than dying out. Recruitment drives have moved online, making it easier for members to join anonymously and for allegiances to span borders. I hate to say it, but it’s my belief the only reason an ethnic bioweapon has never been used on a mass scale before is because the technology was not present. In a way, all genocides are ethnic weapons of mass destruction. The only difference between an army that uses clubs, spears, or guns versus one which employs an advanced bioweapon is the degree to which science impacts the battle. Along these lines, see this chilling 1970 article from the Military Review, where the potential of developing weapons that target specific ethnicities is discussed: www.usa-anti-communist.com/pdf/Military_Review_November_1970_Complete.pdf. Here is a more modern article on the topic: io9.gizmodo.com/5883245/will-the-battles-of-tomorrow-be-fought-with-gene-warfare.