by Blake Banner
She blinked a few times, then sat up. She stared at me. “Who?”
“Abdul Abbassi, he was Taliban. I don’t know who he is with now.”
Her frown deepened. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but we haven’t time to think about it now. Get dressed, we have to go.” She didn’t move for a moment, then she climbed out of bed and started dressing. I stood. “Where is Gibbons?”
“In his room.”
“Here?”
She nodded.
“Will he agree to come with us?”
She drew breath to answer, but the door opened and I saw Gibbons in the doorway. He was holding a revolver and had that obstinate look on his face that told me he would use it if he had to. He stared at me, then glared at Marni. “Have you lost your mind? Don’t you realize what is going on here?”
“Philip, put that gun away. What do you think you’re doing?”
“He works for Omega, Marni! Can’t you see he is manipulating you?”
“Philip! Put the damned gun away!”
“No!”
I spoke quietly, but I let him hear the danger in my voice. “You’d be wise to listen to her, Professor. I can give you all the proof you need. Abbassi is planning to detonate a bomb tomorrow.” I checked my watch, it was twelve fifteen. “In less than twelve hours. It will rupture a canister of SF2, do you know what that is?”
He sneered at me. “Of course I know what it is. It’s theoretical, that’s what it is! And why on Earth would the Taliban, or any of the Muslim fundamentalists, want to bomb our talk? We are advocating helping them!”
I snarled. “Oh, you think they need a logical reason? Like when they murdered the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo? When they behead children for watching TV? When they flew two planes into the Twin Towers?”
“I’m not getting into a political discussion with a reactionary Neanderthal like you!”
“No, you’re not, because we haven’t got the time. You can either come or you can stay, but we are leaving this house in the next two minutes.”
“Over my dead body!”
Marni snapped at him, “Are you kidnapping me, Philip?”
He stared at her and did a goldfish impression. “Well, you can’t… Surely you’re not going to go with this… this… ape?”
“Philip! Who I go with and what I do is not for you to decide! Now put that gun down!”
His jaw stiffened and he squared his shoulders. “He is not leaving this house. I am going to call the police. He is a burglar and a menace!” He thrust out his arm, pointing the revolver at me. His hand was steady. “Now lie on the floor with your hands behind your head!”
I could feel the anger building inside me. I gave him the dead eye and said quietly, “No.” I held his eye and carried on talking. “Marni, get dressed, we are leaving.”
She sighed. “Philip, you are being stupid.” Then she started pulling on her clothes. I walked around the bed. His face went taut and he waved the gun at me. “Don’t come near me! I’ll kill you! I swear it!”
I looked hard into his eyes. “I could use your help, Professor. You are mistaken about me. I am not with Omega.”
He spat his reply. “Your father was their lackey and so are you! You’re a murdering fascist and you disgust me!”
Marni snapped, “Philip, if you pull that trigger, I will see you go to jail for the rest of your life! I swear it! You are out of control and you need to get a grip.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then lowered the gun. “Are you going to give the talk or not?”
“I don’t know. I need to see the evidence, assess the facts, and make an informed decision. It’s what scientists do, Philip.”
He stared a moment longer, then his face seemed to scrunch up into a ball of sullen hatred, and he hissed, “Traitor!”
I held out my left hand. “Give me the revolver, Professor.”
“No!”
I put a right cross through his jaw. His eyes rolled up, his legs went to jell-O and he fell gracefully to the floor. I crouched, emptied the shells out of his pistol, and put them in my pocket. I looked up at Marni. She was staring at Gibbons. She looked unhappy. I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to get shot in the back tonight. He’s out of control.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“You got everything?” She glanced at me, then nodded again. I said, “Good, let’s get out of here. You got keys to the gate?”
“In the kitchen.”
As we moved down the stairs, I asked, “How about a car?”
“Yeah, I have my car.” She frowned at me. “How did you get here?”
“It’s a long story.”
Two minutes later we were in her Jeep, the gates were swinging open, and we headed out, into the night.
As she drove along Boston Road into the heart of the Bronx, headed for Manhattan, I filled her in on everything that had happened since the prince’s party, up to and including my escape from the Institute and my arrival at Echo Bay. She was quiet for a long while after I’d finished, like she was thinking over everything I had told her. Eventually she gave a small laugh. “You don’t take no for an answer, do you?”
I shook my head. “Not when I know it’s the wrong answer, no.”
I watched the city lights wash in a slow rhythm over her face, mainly amber, but occasionally red and green. She took a deep breath and sighed loudly. “So Ben, huh? What’s his story? He seems to carry a lot of weight.”
I nodded. “I have a couple of theories. One is that he was assigned to my father, and now he’s been assigned to me.”
“It could be. We don’t really know how they operate, do we?”
“No, but we do know that they will go to extreme lengths to avoid killing you and me.”
“Me because I have my father’s research. You because they believe they can get to me through you.”
“Apparently. But that being the case, why do they plan to bomb the conference tomorrow?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. For that matter, what does Prince Awad gain by bombing the conference and killing me and Gibbons?”
“I don’t get that any more than you do, and what confuses me even more is that after Gibbons’ debate with Hennessy was broken up by those guys shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, I followed Ben and Hennessy to the Prince’s house. Somehow, in a way I don’t understand, they seem to be in bed together, both enemies and allies.”
We had turned onto Third Avenue and were moving through south Bronx toward the bridge. She sighed again. “Is that how they operate?” She glanced at me. “They are subtle, Lacklan. They are very subtle. Isn’t that what they do with you? You are their arch enemy, along with me and Gibbons, but you visit Ben at his office in Washington, he visits you here in your apartment, you have an arrangement with him: he helps you and you lead him to me, even if you don’t plan to honor that arrangement in the end.” Our eyes met for a moment. “It’s exactly the way you described his relationship with Prince Awad.”
I stared out the window at the passing buildings in the desolate light of the streetlamps, at the people on the sidewalks, the cars driving this way and that through the sickly amber wash. All of them expendable, all of them sentenced to die for the greater glory of whom? Allah? Or Omega?
“You’re probably right,” I said. Then I turned to study her face. “How damaging is your father’s research? Can it really hurt them that badly?”
She nodded, glanced at me a moment, and then nodded again. “They have enough enemies worldwide who would use that information to destroy them. There are also still…” She hesitated. “People,” she said at last. “People like Philip, who are organized, loosely, who have financial power…”
She trailed off. I said, “Ben told me they could not go after Gibbons for some reason. He didn’t tell me why.”
“Gibbons, and some of his friends, pull strings in very high places.” She smiled. “It’s not like the Illuminati in fiction. They don’t have absolute power. If t
hey did, they wouldn’t need to operate in the shadows. But they are powerful, and they are very dangerous.”
I nodded. “I know.” We were speeding over the bridge into Manhattan. I looked at her and smiled. “You believe we can break them, don’t you?”
“Yes. We have to.”
“Marni?”
She smiled. “Yeah?”
“Don’t run away again. We can do this, but we have to do it together.”
She nodded and her smile deepened. “I know. I’m not going anywhere.”
Fourteen
My laptop was where I had left it on the table. The two whiskey tumblers had been washed and left in the rack to dry. There was no trace that Ben or his apes had ever been there. While I looked around, Marni closed the door, locked it, and slipped the deadbolt. Then she stood staring at the living room.
“It’s been a long time.”
I switched on the laptop to check my files. I was wondering why Ben hadn’t taken it, and I wanted to see if he’d tampered with my recordings of Ali, Hassan, Aatifa, and Abbassi. While I waited for them to load, I looked at her, thinking about what my father had meant for her. “He loved you, you know. Probably more than he loved Robert and me.”
She hung up her coat and came to stand beside me. She gently laid both her hands on my chest. “They’re painful memories, Lacklan.” She paused, hesitated. “I went a bit crazy after you told me he’d killed my dad. I idolized my father, you know that. After he died, your dad became a surrogate father for me, and I loved him and trusted him so much for that. When you told me…” She shook her head, unable to say the words. “I couldn’t believe it. I hated you for it, for telling me, and I hated him for taking my dad, and for betraying me. I guess for a time I lumped you both together, father and son, you had both robbed me and betrayed me…”
I nodded. “I know, Marni. It was the last thing on Earth I wanted to do. But right now we have to face the fact that we misjudged him. He was complicated, he was a pain in the ass and in many ways he was not a good man. But neither was he the monster we thought.” I shrugged and half-smiled. “You only misjudged him at the end, but I misjudged him all my life.”
“I don’t think anybody could blame you for that, Lacklan. He was a very hard man, hiding secrets you could not have understood.”
I saw with relief that the files were still there. I listened to snatches here and there. They seemed to be intact and I forwarded them to Gantrie for safe keeping. I noticed Marni had stepped away from me and was gazing out at the night.
I said, “You want a drink?”
She nodded without looking at me. I opened a fresh bottle of Bushmills and poured us a glass each. Then we stepped onto the terrace and leaned on the parapet. Riverside Park and the vast darkness of the Hudson beyond stretched beneath us. I didn’t face her, but spoke out at the city lights.
“When he was dying, in the hospital, he told me what had happened. Do you want to hear it?”
She nodded.
“Your dad was engaged in his research. I think he was beginning to discover the existence of Omega...”
“He was. He had found out about them.”
“Did he know my dad was a member?”
She shook her head. “But he was getting close. He would have found out.”
“They warned him off. Apparently they told him several times to desist from his investigation. But he seems to have been a brave…” I hesitated, stumbling over the word. “A brave and a very moral man. He refused.” I paused, strangely and intensely aware of the night air on my face. I was surprised at how difficult it was to talk about our fathers. “They were close—very close. And that’s why Omega told Bob, my dad, to kill him. He refused, but the alternative was that, if he didn’t do it, they’d have a professional hit man do the job…” I paused again, staring into my whiskey. “And take out your mother and you, as well as me and my brother. When they gave him that option, he went and told your father. They discussed it and your dad accepted.”
She came close and rested her head on my shoulder. I felt her small convulsions and knew that she was crying. After a while, she wiped her cheek with her fingers and took a deep breath. She said, “You’re not so different to him, Lacklan. You’re a very hard man. You are very ruthless and secretive. You make it hard sometimes… At least, you’ve made it hard in the past.”
I thought for a long while about that, about how to answer. Finally, I shrugged and said, “We are what we are, Marni.” She drew breath and I stopped her with a smile. “You can say we are what we choose to be, and that’s true, but it’s also a cliché. Who is that that chooses? And what makes you choose the way you do? It becomes an infinite regression, and in the end you wind up right back in the same place where you started. We are what we are, and the choices we make, we make because of who we are, not who we try to be.”
She heaved a big sigh and nodded. “I guess.”
“When you disappeared, my father asked me to find you and look after you. He did that because of who he was, not what Omega had tried to turn him into. And I could have walked away, but I chose to go after you, and stay with you, because that’s who I am.” I hesitated again, then added softly, “It’s something I should have done a long time ago.”
She didn’t answer at first, but after a moment she drew close and took hold of my hand. “We have some catching up to do.”
I nodded. “I need to know what’s in your father’s research. I need to know why they are so scared of it. I need to know about your congressman in Washington…”
“She’s a friend of Philip’s.” She smiled. “But that’s not exactly what I meant by catching up…”
I smiled back. “I know, but I have…” I looked at my watch. “A little more than eleven hours to find that canister and the bomb, and by the look of it, I can’t count on the help of the Feds. It seems they have dismissed me as a nut.”
She narrowed her eyes at me and shook her head. “There are things about that, Lacklan, that don’t make a lot of sense.”
“I know, but we can’t afford…”
She was shaking her head. “I know, but I don’t mean that. I mean, what Philip said is true. SF2 is theoretical. It was never fully developed. It wasn’t practical. There were just too many problems with it.”
“Well, maybe Omega…” But I trailed off because I saw the flaw in my reply before I even said it. Marni put it into words.
“If it was Omega, maybe, though Omega have access to much deadlier agents than a theoretical, genetically modified Spanish flu. The point is Al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or whoever these people are, must have bought this agent on the open market—and they can’t have because it doesn’t exist yet. It probably never will.”
I gestured in at my laptop on the table. “I have the recording of Abbassi telling the guys in his cell…”
She shook her head and put her hand on my arm. “I am not questioning that, Lacklan. I believe you. I just don’t necessarily believe them.”
I frowned. “What are you getting at?”
She sounded a little exasperated. “I don’t know. I just know that this explanation doesn’t quite hold water. I mean…” She hesitated and spread her hands. “Do we know who supplied them with the SF2?”
I stared at her. “No.”
“But we do know that Prince Awad and Ben are cozying up…”
It was there, for a fleeting moment, and then it was gone again. I stammered, “But—but why would…?”
“I’m not offering an explanation, Lacklan, and I may be way off base. But we have been assuming that Prince Awad knows Ben is Omega—what if he doesn’t?”
“When I saw them, they were with Hennessy…”
“The Hennessy Foundation has been involved in facilitating the sale of weapons to regimes that support terrorist groups. That is a fact. Now the question is, if we are right and the Hennessy Foundation brought Awad and Ben together to facilitate the sale of this canister, what does the canister really contain?”
I rubbed my eyes. My brain was aching trying to take in the magnitude of the problem. The same question kept repeating itself. “Why would Omega do that? What would Omega gain…?”
She turned to face me and placed her hands gently on my chest. “OK, baby steps. Let’s start by assuming that everything that Omega—Ben—says is a lie.”
I nodded. “It’s a good place to start.” I looked down at her as the night breeze coming off the river moved strands of hair across her face. I felt an ache of emotion that was too powerful to put into words, and forced myself to go on. “We have assumed that they want to keep you alive because they fear your father’s research. But let’s assume for a moment that that, also, is a lie. Let’s assume that what they want is, somehow, to capitalize on your death…”
She went pale. “They want me to die, but they want me to die at the conference…”
“In a spectacular way.”
We were quiet for a long time, staring at each other. Finally, she said, “We have seen this before, Lacklan. But this time it will be even bigger, and the consequences…. We have to stop them.”
I nodded. “9/11. I have to find that canister.”
“How?”
“Abbassi.”
I went back inside, collected some things I knew I was going to need, including three sets of cuffs, grabbed my cell, and called Gantrie.
“Dude, I got the files. What happened to you? You disappeared…”
“Listen to me. We are very short of time. Did you track the cell I gave you the other day?”
“Yeah. I still have him.”
“Tell me where he is right now. Is he still in the jammed area?”
“No. He’s at…” There was a pause while I heard him rattle at the keyboard. Then, “He’s at the 49 Club, on 49th Street, right by the Hennessy Foundation. Go figure.”
“Gantrie, are you in New York?”
“No, man. Don’t ask. You don’t need to know where I am. Ever.”
“If anyone you care about is, tell them to leave. Now.”
“…shit, man!”
“Stay available for the next twelve and a half hours, Gantrie. I may need you. If the mark moves, let me know.”