The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels)

by Jon Land

  Starting there, Hedda told the story of her journey; from learning of Lyle Hanky’s transdermal poison in Doha, to PLAS-TECH, to the mysterious toxic strips the ruined plant produced and then shipped to a trio of paper production facilities. By the end of her story, Kimberlain had grasped the total shape of what he had been pursuing. Everything had come together, and the shape was terrifying.

  “TD-13,” he muttered.

  “It stands for transdermal, meaning—”

  “Absorption through the skin. A poison that causes death by mere touch.” He paused. “Hundreds of millions of deaths.”

  “No. Hanley said the quantities produced weren’t sufficient for that kind of destruction. He said it was going to be more limited.”

  “He was wrong. This whole country’s going to die, maybe the whole world in the long run.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The ninth dominion,” Kimberlain told her.

  “Then Leeds, alias Briarwood, is going to use TD-13 to make his vision a reality,” Hedda said when he was finished. “Only according to Hanley, he doesn’t have enough to pull it off.”

  “The key lies in those plastic monofilament strips. Why send them to paper mills?”

  “Because the finished paper is going somewhere else with the poisoned strips inserted within it.” She thought briefly. “Magazines maybe, or newspapers.”

  “No. By your account, there isn’t nearly enough of this TD-13 to infest even one city’s supply of newspapers. And even if there were, most people don’t read them. No, Leeds has figured out a way to get his poison into something everybody touches.”

  “Not everybody,” Hedda said. “That’s what his plan is all about. And that’s where I come in, and the others like me, isn’t it? Because it was Leeds who made me, made all of us.”

  “The guardians of his new order. He thinks he needs them to ride herd over the criminals and madmen he intends to let loose.”

  “Then the criminals and madmen are going to survive TD-13 when Leeds unleashes it on the rest of the country. But how?”

  A thick sigh emerged from Chalmers’s speaker. “It’s coming soon… . He pulled them … off the island… . They must already … be in place… . Waiting. Except … for one.” Chalmers looked Kimberlain tautly in the eye. “Tiny Tim.”

  “My God,” the Ferryman muttered. “Then he’s a part of Renaissance, too?”

  “A part gone … terribly wrong… . Leeds must have … released him … from the island… . I didn’t realize … it until the … second town. Then … I knew the … truth about … Briarwood.”

  “Leeds,” Kimberlain corrected. “And you’re saying he let Tiny Tim loose and set him on his way to find the closest survivors of the original Caretakers. Why?”

  “Felt it was … justified.”

  “By what?”

  “The past … San Luis Garcia.”

  “Travis Seckle …”

  Chalmers nodded. “You wiped out … his family … including a son.”

  Kimberlain nodded. “Garth Seckle. Big brute who massacred a small village in

  Viet—” He stopped when the connection struck him, so obvious he hadn’t been able to see it before. “He survived… .”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Leeds let him out of the stockade so he could get his revenge.”

  Chalmers’s eyes shifted rapidly between Hedda and Kimberlain. “And I know where … Tiny Tim is … going next.”

  “Which one of the other Caretakers is the target? Where’s he going to hit?”

  Chalmers turned away from Kimberlain and fixed his gaze upon Hedda. “That last night … of the Storm Riders … the night you … killed the boy … The piece you … knew was there … but couldn’t identify.”

  “Yes,” she muttered, feeling the truth now, almost close enough to touch it.”

  “You were pregnant,” Chalmers told her. “Sandman’s … baby. Delivered … six months later … just before the … trial. A boy … age twelve now.”

  "I have a son?"

  “No,” Chalmers corrected Hedda. “You had … a son. You … gave birth to … him. Nothing more.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He was … adopted.”

  “The parents, do they know …” Hedda let her question tail off, the intent of it clear.

  “They knew nothing … about you,” Chalmers told her. “No one … knew. But you … have to know now. Whole family is … at a resort … in the Poconos… . That’s Tiny Tim’s … next stop.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kimberlain broke in. “He’s been killing families of the original Caretakers.”

  “And he still … is,” Chalmers told the Ferryman. “I owe you for … what I did… . This is my … chance, my payback.” Breathing replaced Chalmers’s voice briefly through the speaker, and his eyes returned to Hedda. “Before Helena … Cain. Before … Lucretia … McEvil. Before … Hedda …”

  “Finish it! Who am I?”

  “Ellen … Kimberlain,” Chalmers said with his empty gaze turning back toward the Ferryman. “His sister.”

  The Eighth Dominion

  The Towanda Family Resort

  Friday, August 21; 3:00 A.M.

  Chapter 32

  “SISTER?’ KIMBERLAIN ASKED in disbelief.

  He and Hedda stared hard at each other, wanting to deny the revelation but knowing they couldn’t.

  Chalmers continued. “We learned the … truth after … releasing you from … prison, Hedda… . It was quite … a shock to … us all. Briarwood … kept close track … of you. But … then it was … he who insisted … you be the … one I use … in Lebanon.”

  “Because you were a threat to him,” Kimberlain said.

  “No more than any of the others.”

  “Except you were related to me.”

  Kimberlain remembered his older sister had run away from home when he was six. She was never mentioned by name again, remembered only in the silent tears his mother shed when she was certain her father could not see her. His sister had become Helena Cain, then Lucretia McEvil of the Storm Riders, and now Hedda.

  “Were we born this way?” Hedda asked Kimberlain abruptly. “I mean, think about it. Look at the two of us; what we are, what we’ve been.”

  “We’re only what they made us.” Kimberlain glanced toward Chalmers. “Him and all the others.”

  “No, you’re wrong about that,” she said. “They did it to you, not me. I joined up with the Storm Riders of my own accord. Nobody forced the guns into my hands. I held them because I wanted to and fired them for the same reason. By the time Chalmers and the others salvaged me, I was already a done deal. You were manipulated. From the beginning.”

  “None of that matters now,” Kimberlain told her. “They made us what we are, and like it or not, we’re going to need that to save your son. My nephew.”

  She looked at Chalmers. “Unless we’re already too late.”

  “It’s … possible.”

  “But if we’re in time, we can save him. Call ahead. Warn the people at this resort to evacuate.”

  “They wouldn’t listen. It might make them call in the authorities or put extra security on, but that would only make things worse.”

  “How?”

  “Tiny Tim takes his time, likes to savor the moment. Put him against an army and he won’t bother being subtle. Those families won’t stand a chance. Your son won’t stand a chance.”

  Hedda flinched at that. “You’re saying he will otherwise?”

  “If we can get his family out in time, yes.” The Ferryman turned to Chalmers. “How long are they scheduled to be at the resort?”

  “Three more days.”

  “We’ve got time, then.”

  “We go to the resort as soon as we get back to land, the fastest way possible,” Hedda insisted. “Before we go after Briarwood, Leeds, or whatever he’s calling himself.”

  “Of course,” Kimberlain said.

  Just as Chalmers nodd
ed his acknowledgment, the cruiser’s engine sputtered and died.

  They were adrift for three hours before Hedda managed to get the engine working, but their speed was barely ten knots. It was ten A.M. before they pulled up to a dock on South Carolina’s northeastern coast. All three were ravenous, and Hedda went into a dockside convenience store to get food.

  She emerged seconds later with a newspaper in hand instead of grocery bags. She skirted past Chalmers and Kimberlain, eyeing them furtively.

  “Keep walking,” she whispered, and they fell in behind her to a secluded bench beyond the dock area.

  “What’s going on?” Kimberlain wondered.

  “This,” Hedda told him, and handed over the newspaper.

  The Ferryman opened it, and a headline on the lower half of the front page jumped out at him:

  EX-COMMANDO SOUGHT IN FBI AGENT’S BEATING

  “Talley,” he muttered, and read on.

  His name appeared in paragraph one. Next to a picture of Lauren Talley was a poorly drawn sketch of him. Talley had been horribly beaten and lay near death in a Maine hospital, found near a secluded cabin that—

  Kimberlain’s breathing stopped. Lauren Talley had been found in the cabin where Peet had been living. He could picture it all now: Leeds must have uncovered his whereabouts and lured Lauren there, after intercepting Kimberlain’s phone call to her. Then he had arranged the evidence so all indications would point to the Ferryman as her assailant. Kimberlain read on. There was no mention of Peet in the article. Fingerprints would be checked, of course, and once Peet’s were identified even more accusations would come Kimberlain’s way.

  But where was Peet now?

  The only possible answer chilled him to the bone. Peet was with Leeds. Perhaps Peet had been Lauren’s assailant; the way the wounds were described certainly made it seem possible.

  What have I done?

  Kimberlain looked at it all and blamed himself. Blamed himself for involving Peet in the first place. Blamed himself for letting Lauren Talley see inside the dark world he inhabited when the ultimate costs should have been obvious.

  The Ferryman went back to the article. He was considered armed and very dangerous, the object of a massive national manhunt. He lowered the newspaper and handed it to Chalmers.

  “There’s nothing about the Towanda Family Resort, though,” Hedda noted, “nothing about Tiny Tim. That means we’ve still got a chance.”

  Kimberlain walked away, speaking with his back to her. “Seckle will see the story. He’ll strike tonight while I’m still at large.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I’m dead or captured, there’s no sport.”

  “There’s more,” Chalmers said. “This … is Leeds’s insurance.”

  “We get off the island and Tiny Tim kills us,” Hedda followed.

  “Or we get caught somewhere along the way trying to stop him at the resort.”

  “Either way Leeds wins.”

  “No, because there may be something he failed to consider.”

  Kimberlain called Captain Seven from a phone near the parking lot. It rang and rang. Which meant the captain was gone, out of the picture at least for now. Leeds had indeed considered him.

  “We’re in this alone,” Kimberlain told Chalmers and Hedda.

  “Without a single weapon, except my pistol.” She pulled her gun from under her jacket. “One clip left. Fourteen shots. Not much of an equalizer against Tiny Tim.”

  “Then we’ll have to get creative.”

  Garth Seckle’s van sliced through the rain. Night was coming fast, the sky was already dark gray from the storm. The lights of approaching cars barely made a dent in it. Seckle shifted uneasily.

  He had redesigned the driver’s seat to accommodate his bulk. Too often in the past he’d had to squinch at the shoulders to keep the top of his six-foot-ten-inch frame from rubbing the roof. Seckle hated feeling confined; he liked to leave himself as much breathing space as he possibly could. He figured he had it coming to him after all those wasted years.

  His home in the stockade had consisted of a single eight-by-eight windowless cubicle. Not that lacking a window bothered him. No. There was plenty to see inside his own soul, and it was there that Seckle’s vision turned during those long years of incarceration.

  Sometime in those months the passage of time lost meaning to him, at least in the conventional sense. He measured it not in hours and minutes, but rather in thoughts and visualizations. People were going to pay for San Luis Garcia, for his father.

  His father had been a great man, misunderstood but wonderfully gifted. He had possessed a vision that allowed him to see what others could not. The island of San Luis Garcia was proof of what one man could accomplish.

  Then The Caretakers had come, and Garth Seckle shivered every time he recalled the bloody battle. He had badly wounded one, he was certain of it, when the room exploded all around him. He was blown through a wall and covered in debris. Unable to move, heaving in pain, he nonetheless never lost consciousness. He heard the screams, gunshots, and explosions, feeling each bullet as if it had penetrated him. The world of his father was crumbling around him, and there was nothing he could do.

  Garth Seckle supposed the planning had actually begun then, in those stretched-out moments when he needed something to take his mind from the pain and loss. When it was over, there was no one to help him. His last reserves of strength were spent dragging himself from under the debris that had buried him. His wounds were much more serious than he had thought originally. It seemed certain he would die. The left foot, of course, was the worst, a chunk of it gone from the second toe across diagonally to the front of the arch. Pulp, sinew, and bone protruded where part of his foot had been.

  But none of that mattered. Finding the bodies of his mother and two sisters, in addition to his father, tore his insides apart. Soldiers all, the way his father had made them in a dream come true. He found them broken and bloodied. A nightmare.

  He supposed he would have died, too, if the mop-up team hadn’t come upon him. The doctors put him back together in sloppy fashion, and he was taken to the stockade. Never a visitor. No one came except the stooges with his meals.

  Garth Seckle didn’t care. He took charge of his own rehabilitation, lived and breathed off the pain. They said his foot wound would make normal walking, much less running, impossible. But Seckle was walking about the cell in a month and running in place eight weeks after that. The sweat would pour off him in the stifling heat, and his mind would fight back the pain with the planning. He never considered for a single minute that he wouldn’t someday be leaving the cell. To accept lifetime incarceration was to accept death.

  Still, the means of his ultimate departure surprised even him. Strangers had simply come to his cell late one night. He was drugged and dragged off. When he awoke, a small man with eyes that looked pushed back into his head was looking down at him.

  “Hello, Garth.”

  “Who … ?” he gasped. His mouth was too dry to speak.

  “Who am I? Why, I’m the man who’s going to give you back your life. And then some.”

  The man had sent him on his way with no conditions. He called it a test, insisted they would meet again another day. The files of the original Caretakers were provided to Seckle, and he began reconnoitering the sites where the closest relatives of The Caretakers lived and worked. It was the isolated nature of so many of the sites that led him to consider going beyond vengeance. After all, they hadn’t just killed his father, had they? The entire world he knew had been destroyed. So it would be for the closest relatives of those who had brought it all on. He had done the same thing in Vietnam and felt fulfilled by the act.

  But tonight was going to top that and all the others, because tonight Kimberlain was going to pay. Seckle wondered if the Ferryman would ever figure out that this visit was meant for him. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Seckle knew.

  The van’s windshield wipers pushed aside the
pelting rain; fresh torrents hit the glass. Seckle liked the symbolism, for no matter how many lives he took, there would remain lives that demanded taking. Lightning threw shadows at him that disappeared instantly into darkness. Thunder crackled through his ears.

  Tiny Tim drove on through the night.

  Because of Kimberlain’s fugitive status, the only completely safe means of transportation for them was by car. He detailed the elements of his plan after they had set out in the first of the four stolen vehicles that would take them up Route 81 to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

  “We’ll have to make do with what we can salvage from gun and hardware stores,” Kimberlain said in the end, “maybe a few—”

  “No!” Hedda broke in. “A high school, even a junior high!”

  “The chemistry labs,” Kimberlain realized.

  “And since it’s summer, what we need will be neatly put away, stored and ready for the fall. Just a lock to pick, maybe an alarm system to bypass. Takes time to assemble what we need, though,” she added. “No matter where we get it.”

  “There are shortcuts, less stable, but we’re not in a position to nitpick.” The Ferryman hesitated. “We’ve got other limitations facing us.”

  “The resort’s layout, for example.”

  “We’ll be coming in blind. He could have been there all day long, waiting for midnight like he always does.”

  “And we’ve got to assume Tiny Tim’s going to be wearing state-of-the-art body armor, so regular bullets aren’t going to stop him. Have to take that into account when we start assembling our wares.”

  “More than that, we’ve got to take him out surgically,” Kimberlain reminded. “We can’t unleash weapons that will help him do his job.”

  “No victims from among the vacationers.”

  “We won’t do Tiny Tim’s work for him, Hedda.”

  She seemed to relax. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For calling me Hedda.”

  “You’re not Ellen Kimberlain any more than you’re Helena Cain or Lucretia McEvil today. The only life you know is your life as Hedda, and that’s who I’m talking to right now.” He hesitated and gripped the steering wheel harder. Chalmers was dozing in the backseat. “And Hedda has no son. Lucretia McEvil does, and she’s dead, isn’t she?”