Panacea

by F. Paul Wilson

  “The Dark Man you mentioned?”

  “I don’t know. That was their thing, not mine. I never read the book. I’m glad I didn’t.”

  She didn’t know what to say. He seemed genuinely disturbed by it. It must have been an awful experience to still affect him this way.

  “Dark matter.”

  “What? I’ve heard of that.”

  “The thought just hit me. It’s the stuff between the stars that’s supposed to make up most of the mass of the universe. They say it doesn’t emit or absorb or reflect energy. It’s just there.”

  “I’m supposed to believe dark matter was walking through the flames?”

  Put that way, it did sound ridiculous. But she was just trying to help.

  “Or it could it have been some sort of illusion, a trick of the heat and flames.”

  He drained his glass. “Sure. That sounds good. Let’s hope so, okay?”

  “But—”

  “Enough of me. I’m tired of talking about me. In fact I hate talking about me.”

  “Okay, fair enough. But one more thing about you: What am I supposed to start calling you? Garrick? Or Gar?”

  “Oh, please no. Neither. Garrick Somers is gone. I’ve been Rick Hayden long enough to think of myself as Rick. So leave it Rick.”

  “But if you were framed, don’t you want to clear your name?”

  “Nope. Don’t care. And which name? Rick Hayden’s name is clean. That’s all I have to care about.”

  “Well, don’t you at least want to know who framed you?”

  “Oh, I know who. This Company guy I used to butt heads with all the time. He hated my guts and I’m sure he was behind it. Name was Nelson Fife.”

  LEANDER

  1

  Laura awoke with a name running through her head.

  Fife … Nelson Fife. It hadn’t clicked until after she’d left Rick. No relation, she was sure, but the same last name as James Fife, the man she’d run down as a teen.

  She hadn’t thought about him in years and wondered if he was still alive. Hearing the name had awakened that awful memory.

  Driving along, two weeks with her driver license, applying mascara in the rearview mirror when she blew through a stop sign and hit a man. She could still hear the sound of his head smashing against the windshield.

  She’d been a basket case. She visited him in the hospital every day until he was transferred back east. He still hadn’t regained the use of the left side of his body when he was released. The prospects of his ever recovering that were virtually nil.

  The relentless guilt over James Fife was why she had gone to medical school, why she had originally wanted to be a neurologist—to help people like the man she had crippled.

  And look at her now: a pathologist traipsing around her third continent in four days, chasing a wild goose. How far she’d wandered from her goal.

  She was glad Rick had mentioned that name. She’d forgotten about James Fife, and she couldn’t allow that. Ever.

  2

  “They’ve chartered a helicopter to Midi-Pyrenees,” Bradsher said as he entered Nelson’s makeshift office in the farmhouse.

  “‘They’?”

  “Doctor Fanning and Hayden or Somers or—”

  “Call him by the name on his passport—for the sake of consistency if nothing else.” He rubbed his temples. “She’s still with Hayden?”

  “Most definitely.”

  He slammed a fist on the table and the noise shot a bolt of pain through his brain. He had another blinding headache but he’d lasted through the night without suffering another seizure.

  “Damnation! Why? Is it something sordid? Have they become intimate? Is that it?”

  Somers/Hayden had always had a way with women, and many, many notches in his belt.

  “They spent some time talking on the street after I sent your text. I assumed she was confronting him. They spent the night in their own rooms but were back together for breakfast early this morning. Doctor Fanning made some calls—she speaks fluent French—and just moments ago the two of them took off from Charles de Gaulle in a pontoon-equipped five-seater Colibri EC120.”

  Nelson nodded in grudging admiration. “They’re not wasting a minute. They’ll land on the lake within a stone’s throw of the Abbey. Is that drone team in Toulouse?”

  “They arrived last night as per your instructions. I just sent word that they are to head into the hills and await instructions. They have the coordinates of the Abbey.”

  He hit the table again, but more gently this time. “This means that if and when we have to deal with her, we’ll have to deal with him as well.”

  “I’m sure we can handle him.”

  “I’m sure we can too. It’s just that he’s well trained and will not go quietly or easily.”

  “You said you’d tell me your history with him.”

  “Did I?” Nelson couldn’t remember.

  “Yes. And since we’ve nothing to do until they arrive at the Abbey, I thought now might be a good time. They’ve got a couple of hours in the air and their copter doesn’t have the range to make the trip without refueling.”

  Nelson leaned back. Oh, why not?

  “One of my projects as an analyst was a group of German nihilists, the kind who would have been kicked out of the Baader-Meinhof gang of the seventies for being too violent. They popped onto the Interpol—and consequently the Company’s—radar when they proclaimed their conversion and devotion to the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam. Garrick Somers—our present-day Rick Hayden—was assigned to infiltrate them to see if he could get wind of any schemes of mass destruction ahead of time. Hayden’s father spent years working for Schelling, a Swiss pharma giant, so he was raised in Geneva where he grew up with German as a second language.”

  “Perfect for the job,” Bradsher said.

  “Right. But here’s where the story gets interesting. By the time he’d infiltrated the group they’d abandoned Wahhabism for something much darker. What mattered to the Company was that, whatever rites this crazy cult was practicing, they did not involve terrorism or a threat to the U.S. or its interests, so my recommendation was that Hayden be pulled.”

  Bradsher leaned forward. “I have a feeling that’s not the end of the story.”

  “Not by a longshot. He refused to leave. He refused to say why, just that he hadn’t finished the job. I suspected he’d gone native.”

  “Joined the cult?”

  “Exactly. And that posed a threat to other agents, of course. We had an extraction team ready to move in when the old farmhouse the group called home—much like this one—exploded and burned. We knew they’d stored explosives and incendiaries of various sorts, and something or someone must have set them off. Since our man was the only survivor, we suspected him, but couldn’t prove anything.”

  “Was that the ‘mass murder’ mentioned in his file?”

  “Yes. Eleven adults—six men and five women—and fifteen children under age ten.”

  Bradsher gave a low whistle. “Children.”

  “Yes. He was brought home but never seemed to adjust. PTSD, I assume. Then he was suspected of selling intelligence to his old friends in Mossad. Again nothing could be proven so he and the Company decided both parties would benefit if they went their separate ways. As a parting shot, he killed Ramiz Haddad—who had changed his name to Rick Hayden—and assumed his identity.”

  “We know that?”

  Nelson nodded. “That we know. Haddad’s death was no loss to the gene pool. He had ISIS connections and was stockpiling explosives—only a matter of time before he attempted a catastrophe. The Bureau was upset because they were watching him in the hope of following him to a bigger fish, but c’est la guerre.”

  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, Nelson thought.

  He wasn’t about to tell Bradsher or anyone else that Hayden had nothing to do with the intelligence that wound up with the Israelis. Or that Nelson had arranged all the evidence to point to him.<
br />
  As the analyst who had been collating the intelligence Hayden reported from Germany, Nelson debriefed him on his return. The man had been a mental and emotional basket case, babbling about some “dark man” he had seen in the fire and spouting one blasphemy after another. Totally unreliable. A major security breach waiting to happen. Nelson had decided it would be better for the Company if he were booted out. When the opportunity presented itself, he hadn’t hesitated.

  And now he wanted a change of subject.

  “What about the doctor’s communication with home?”

  “We’re on it around the clock, though we don’t expect her to call home until it’s at least one P.M. here. Maybe later, depending on how long she stays in the hills. No cell service up near the Abbey.”

  “You have messages set to go?”

  Bradsher nodded, smiling. “We have a terrible storm front coming through that will cancel all flights. So even if the husband suggests she charter a flight home, it’s no use.”

  Nelson knew the weather forecast was for a beautiful day.

  “This could all go to hell if the husband checks the weather on the Continent.”

  “I can’t see him doing that,” Bradsher said. “He’s too involved with his sick daughter. She’s not doing well.”

  Nelson might have felt a pang of guilt for keeping a mother in the dark about her daughter’s illness, but this was Laura Fanning. She deserved it.

  Besides, Dr. Fanning’s presence back home would not improve the child’s prognosis one iota. And no matter where the trail led, Laura Fanning would not see her daughter again, would not be heading home … ever. He was convinced now that the Lord had cast him in the role of Moses and was using her as a Pillar of Fire to lead him to the Promised Land.

  As for her daughter, the child was with good doctors and her fate was in God’s hands.

  Let go, let God.

  3

  “Looks like we won’t be alone there,” Rick said as they paddled toward the island.

  Their helicopter had stopped in Toulouse to refuel, then followed the pilot’s GPS locator straight to the coordinates Rick had copied from Google Earth last night.

  Where they’d found themselves hovering over the Wound.

  Not a cheap ride by any stretch, but Stahlman was paying for it.

  The copter settled on the water where Rick inflated the raft they’d brought along. The pilot drifted and smoked while they headed for the island. Laura sat in the bow, paddling, while Rick paddled and steered from the rear.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  He pointed over her shoulder at the rowboat tied to a sapling near a short set of steps carved into the rock of the island. He’d noted a couple of crude wooden boats pulled up on the lake shore as they’d landed, but hadn’t noticed this one until they’d approached.

  “Somebody’s here ahead of us. Is that a fishing rod leaning out the stern?”

  “Looks like it,” she said. “But why are there crosses on the building? I thought we were dealing with pagans.”

  Rick had been staring at the boat. He raised his gaze and, yes, those were crosses.

  The building appeared to be a single-story rectangle fashioned of beige stone blocks. From this angle they had a good view of the narrow end that appeared to be the front of the structure. The entrance was a round arch with a prominent keystone. A simple Christian cross had been carved into the stone blocks above it. He could see three similar arches along the building’s right flank, and each of those sported a cross as well. A narrow tower, open on the top, rose from the roof near the front end.

  A bell tower?

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “A church.”

  Laura was shaking her head. “Who in their right mind would put a church on this tiny island in the middle of a lake in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Why do you assume they were in their right minds?”

  “Good point. But—wait. It looks more like a monastery.” She gave him a wide-eyed look over her shoulder. “The 536 Brotherhood?”

  A monastery made more sense. The original purpose of monastic orders was to retreat into prayer and study, cloistered from the temptations of the world. As for 536 …

  “Who else could it be?”

  She lowered her voice. “But the panaceans directed us here.”

  “While 536 was trying to keep us from getting here. Makes sense now.”

  She was shaking her head. “No, it doesn’t. It makes no sense at all. None of this makes sense. If this is some sort of revered place to the panaceans, why would 536 build a monastery here?”

  “To purify or sanctify the site? Or maybe just to get in their pagan faces.”

  They were closer now and he could see how the place was overgrown with vines and the bell tower had partially collapsed on a side.

  “But whoever built it doesn’t appear to be devoting much effort to upkeep.”

  “It looks abandoned,” she said.

  That it did. All the better.

  “Aim for the boat,” he told her. “We’ll tie up next to it and use those steps.”

  “I’ve got a big question about that boat.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Like whose is it?”

  “Only one way to find out. Unless you want to turn back. Your call.”

  He knew her answer in advance, but felt he should offer the option.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He smiled. This gal was not a quitter.

  “Okay. But let’s do a quick reconnoiter first.”

  He could tell she was anxious to get up to the monastery, but he insisted on paddling all the way around first. He wanted to minimize the chance of an ugly surprise once they left their boat.

  He steered them to starboard as Laura paddled her heart out. She wasn’t very adept with the oar but she’d insisted at the start on grabbing one and helping. He liked that in a woman.

  He liked a lot about her. Especially the fact that the text she’d received last night hadn’t sent her running off in a panic. She was just too damn smart and levelheaded for that, and it had to be driving 536 nuts.

  What he didn’t like so much was her backgrounding him. He hadn’t expected that. And he should have. As ME she worked with law enforcement and he should have anticipated that she’d want to learn more about the guy she was traveling with and would know just how to find out.

  He’d underestimated her, but not as bad as 536 had with that text.

  He’d been shocked by its accuracy. It hinted that whoever was birddogging them from 536 had deep connections into the government, and into the Company itself. Garrick Somers had proved an embarrassment to the CIA and the higher-ups had wanted him not only gone but forgotten.

  Not that he blamed them. After what he’d seen and done in Germany, he’d returned with as bad a case of PTSD as any of the downrange casualties of the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. But he’d tried to hide it. Being up front would mean he’d have to talk about it. And he couldn’t talk about any of it, especially the night of the fire.

  When Fife framed him for the Israeli leak, Rick had known his time was up. Fife probably thought he was doing the Company a favor, but he’d done Rick a bigger one.

  Knowing that surveillance of Ramiz Haddad would lapse when Rick left, maybe long enough to let him place his explosives around the Golden Gate supports, he’d terminated him, sent his body to stay with Davy Jones, and adopted the Rick Hayden identity.

  The new persona worked psychological magic. Garrick Somers had suffered horrendous mental trauma, and now Garrick Somers was gone. Rick Hayden had done nothing to be ashamed of. As Rick Hayden he’d slept peacefully for the first time in years.

  It had shaken him when Laura asked if she should start calling him Garrick or Gar. No way. Garrick Somers was gone, and Rick wanted him to stay gone. Nobody wanted Garrick Somers back.

  On the far side of the island they spotted the fisherman: An old guy with long gray hair and a ratty white bea
rd who sat with a line in the water. He peered at them from under the wide brim of a straw-colored, sweat-stained slouch hat, then waved.

  Rick and Laura waved back.

  Laura called out, “Pouvons nous venir à terre?”

  “I speak English,” he replied in a high-pitched, fragile voice. “And this is not my land. So … yes, of course.”

  “What did you ask him?” Rick said as they continued their circuit.

  “If we could come ashore.”

  They tied up to the same shoreline sapling the rowboat had used. Rick led the way up the steps.

  “Welcome,” said a voice from within the shadows of the entry arch, pronouncing the “W” as a “V.”

  Rick instinctively put himself between the building and Laura. He had a hunting knife he’d picked up in Paris, but he left it in its sheath on his belt.

  “How did you know we spoke English?” he called back.

  The old man stepped into view with his fishing rod over his shoulder. He had a bent spine and wore a ratty sweater over faded denims. Muddy, unlaced boots completed the picture. Looked harmless enough, but Rick had a sense of something not quite right about him. He couldn’t go so far as to say wrong, just … not right.

  “Voices carry over water. I was listening to you on your way in.”

  Definitely a German accent.

  “Were we right?” Laura said, stepping forward. “About this being a monastery?”

  His clear blue eyes fixed on her from the shadow of his hat brim. “You are…?”

  “Laura Fanning … from the U.S.”

  He smiled. “I knew the where from your accent. I am Leander.” He looked at Rick. “And you?”

  “Rick.” He leaped right to the important question: “Are you here alone?”

  A crooked smile. “I was until a moment ago.”

  “You speak English pretty well for someone who lives in such an isolated area.” An idiotic statement, he knew, but he was looking for a way to get the codger to spill.

  “I speak French and German and Spanish as well. I have traveled much but I always return to this area. It is home.” He looked from Rick to Laura and back again. “I cannot remember the last time I saw anyone else on this island. It is good to have company.”