The Omega Covenant

by Richard Holcroft

  THE OMEGA COVENANT

  Richard Holcroft

  Copyright 2016 Richard Holcroft

  a Windstorm Press publication

  All right Reserved

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be resold or given away. If you would like to share this ebook, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you want to share it. If you're reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please return to the bookseller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. In certain cases, descriptions of airports, public buildings, military bases, and organizations on Kauai have been changed in the interests of telling a story.

  Editing by Emilie Vardaman

  Formatting by Debora Lewis arenapublishing.org

  Cover design by Damonza

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Kauai, June 26th

  It all started with the man at the bar.

  Attorney Mike Marchetti and investigative reporter Vicki Steele were relaxing in the Tiki Lounge after a dinner of fresh ahi and sea scallops. The hard rain had ended and darkness fell on Kauai’s East Shore as Kekoa-somebody played a romantic Hawaiian number on his slack-key guitar. Exotic looking waitresses hustled about the room, serving wine coolers and umbrella drinks to sunburned patrons in orchid leis and flowery tops.

  It was their second night on the island after a flight to Lihue from Dallas-Fort Worth two days earlier. They’d spent the afternoon on a helicopter tour of the Na Pali coast and then headed to a cozy dinner place at the Bayview Hotel on Hanamaulu Bay. As they slow-danced for the first time in months and toasted rekindling their relationship, they vowed to spend less time on their careers and more time enjoying each other’s company in exotic places like Kauai.

  Then things changed in a hurry.

  They decided to have one more after-dinner drink at the bar before heading back to their hotel in Princeville, twenty-seven miles northwest on the Kuhio Highway. Marchetti ordered a single-malt scotch, Vicki a Napa chardonnay. From behind a screen of bracken fern and peace lilies, Marchetti studied a man seated at the bar. With his swarthy complexion and gaudy tattoo on his right forearm, he looked like a career criminal Marchetti once prosecuted as Dallas County assistant DA. But what were the chances he and a defendant from seven or eight years ago would end up in the same bar, the same night, on Kauai, when the man he’d prosecuted should still be serving time in Huntsville for his third armed robbery conviction?

  “Recognize that guy?” he asked Vicki, finally, nodding to the man nursing a beer thirty feet away.

  She looked in the man’s direction and shook her head. “Should I?”

  “Guess not,” Marchetti said. “But he keeps looking over at us.”

  Vicki took another sip of wine and caressed his arm. “You’re going to have to unwind, Michael dear, or this won’t be a very enjoyable stay for either of us.”

  Marchetti agreed. After he and retired detective Tom Shannon risked their lives exposing a phony televangelist and his buddies as terrorists in Texas and defusing two of their deadly plots, a vacation on Kauai should be ten days of bliss. But he’d been preoccupied by the stranger’s glances for the past half hour and couldn’t shake the nagging thought that he’d seen him someplace before.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said and reached for his wallet.

  “What?” She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head and grabbed her purse. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Michael, but I’ll bet it’s hard to pronounce.”

  He slid off the bench seat and helped an annoyed Vicki to her feet. He slipped a ten and a twenty into the waitress’s bill folder, and he and Vicki headed for the exit.

  Marchetti glanced over his shoulder one last time as they walked across the parking lot toward their rented Ford Mustang. Satisfied they were alone, he pulled the fob from his jacket pocket and unlocked the doors. Vicki slipped into the passenger seat and barely had her seatbelt fastened when Marchetti cranked the engine and squealed out of the lot onto the two-lane highway.

  Five miles down the road he looked in his rearview mirror. He slowed to thirty and held it for awhile, then stomped on the gas pedal and sped up to sixty. “Bastard’s following us,” he muttered.

  Vicki turned around to look for herself. “So there’s a car behind us, I don’t–”

  He checked the instrument panel to make sure they had enough gas to get to Princeville. “He keeps the same distance behind us, no matter what I do.”

  “You’re acting crazy, Michael. Instead of wasting our time freaking out over some stranger, we ought to be thinking about mai tais, snorkeling… sex.”

  Marchetti managed a smile. “Especially sex.”

  Vicki shrugged, exasperated. “Please lighten up and get us back to the hotel… safely.”

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  After another few minutes, Vicki looked behind them again. “Okay, so assuming you’re right, what do we do about it?”

  He’d been considering their options. “He may just want to know where we’re headed and nothing more. But I don’t want to assume that.”

  “How far is it to the hotel?”

  He thought for a moment. “Eighteen, twenty miles, maybe.”

  She looked at him and shook her head. “This is nuts. We’ve only been on the island thirty hours, and already someone is–”

  “I can’t believe it, either, but it’s not my imagination.” He slowed as they approached a series of tight turns, but it wasn’t slow enough. The car swung wide right and caught the rough edge of the highway, rattling the front wheels and spitting rocks up against the undercarriage. Vicki gave him a dirty look and braced herself against the dashboard. Once the highway again straightened out, Marchetti maneuvered the car back into the westbound lane and sped back up to sixty.

  What looked like a gray pickup truck hung back a while longer, then quickly began closing on them. The wind had picked up out of the northeast, causing an increasingly dense fog to settle at t
he base of the rocks just off the highway. Visibility was deteriorating, and Marchetti had trouble anticipating several of the sharp turns ahead, though he could see well enough to discern a hair-raising drop-off to their right, where the lush green embankment met a line of jagged rocks at the shoreline below.

  Approaching a stretch of open road, Marchetti watched the pickup accelerate and change lanes to move up alongside them. He took a quick glance to his left. “Shit!” he snapped. The man on the passenger side had his window rolled down and a rifle pointed at them.

  An instant later, Marchetti saw a flash and heard the gunfire. A bullet smashed through his side window, grazed his forearm, and tore into Vicki’s armrest with a thud. She let out a scream and covered her face with her hands. Seconds later, another round ripped through the lower left corner of the windshield. He heard a loud gasp and looked over to see Vicki hunched over, clutching her chest.

  The third and fourth shots appeared to hit the left front fender. “Bastard!” he swore. He resisted the impulse to brake hard, make a U-turn, and head back to civilization. Instead, he braked lightly and eased the wheel to the left. He made contact with the truck’s right rear fender with a faint crunching noise. He continued nudging the Mustang into the truck’s rear fender until the pickup broke traction and began a slow, clockwise spin across their lane.

  Marchetti backed off on the gas as the vehicle careened out of control and slammed off the right side of the road, rear end first. He braked to a crawl to watch the truck roll down the embankment into the rocks and brush fifty feet below.

  Stopping the Mustang on the shoulder, he turned on the emergency flashers. That’s when he first became aware of blood running down his right forearm. When he stretched to unbuckle Vicki’s seatbelt, he saw blood seeping through her white blouse, as well.

  He called her name and lifted her head to check her eyes. She slid her hand to the open wound on the upper left side of her chest.

  Marchetti tore away the buttons on her blouse and saw the bullet wound on the top part of her breast. The extent of his first aid training had been a cursory, two-day course in the Marine Corps fifteen years ago, but he hadn’t forgotten the basics of treating bullet wounds. He grabbed a plastic bag from her purse, dumped her newly bought sunscreen and cosmetics onto the floorboard, and pressed the plastic bag tight against the oozing wound. She moaned and lapsed in and out of consciousness, but her pulse continued to beat strong.

  Marchetti reached for the cell phone in the inside pocket of his jacket and dialed 911. When the emergency operator answered, he shouted all the information he could, as quickly as he could: the extent of Vicki’s injury, their location, and a brief description of the truck and its occupants. He pleaded with the operator to dispatch an ambulance immediately since they were at least ten miles from Lihue with no way of knowing how long it’d take paramedics to arrive. The operator assured him EMS was on its way and reminded him to make sure Vicki’s mouth was unobstructed and not to move her or give her any liquids.

  Marchetti continued to hold the plastic bag to her wound and the cell phone to his ear, doing his best to ignore the pain in his own arm. He eased back in his seat every few minutes to conserve his strength, his heart beating furiously now.

  He focused on the dashboard clock. Ten thirty. Vicki’s chin lay slumped against her chest and her right shoulder pressed against the door.

  No sounds came from the direction of the gray pickup at the bottom of the hill, except for the faint splash of lapping waves. Other than the dispatcher’s steady, reassuring voice and Vicki’s labored breathing, the night again was deathly quiet.

  2

  Detective Sergeant Luke Kalani of the Kauai Police Department sat waiting for Marchetti in the emergency reception area. The muscular, dark-skinned Kalani introduced himself and led him to a small anteroom down the main corridor.

  “Can we make this quick?” Marchetti asked. “My friend’s in ICU.” Doctors at Wilcox Memorial were calling Vicki’s condition critical, so he was anxious to get back close to the nurses’ station in case they’d received further news.

  Kalani shook his head. “It won’t take long,” he said and gestured for him to take a seat.

  Marchetti hesitated and then sat down near a small table.

  “What’s the prognosis on your injuries?” Kalani asked, pointing to his arm

  “Bullet just grazed me,” Marchetti said. When he felt the few stitches and numbed wound under his bandage, he realized how lucky he’d been. He had no way of knowing how serious Vicki’s injuries were, but he suspected the worst.

  “Give me a rundown of what happened,” Kalani said.

  Marchetti took a moment to recreate the events in his mind, then began, “When Vicki and I left the Bayview Hotel bar, someone began following us almost immediately. I’m positive he was a guy we saw at the bar.”

  “Had anything gone on between the two or three of you before then–a comment or argument, possibly?”

  “No, nothing. That’s what shocked the hell out of me. Never met or spoke to the man in my life.”

  “Why do you think you were being followed?”

  “I don’t think, I know. He kept looking over at us the whole time we were in the bar. Shortly after we left, I noticed a vehicle tailing us. Wouldn’t have thought a thing about it except, for the next several miles, every time I changed speeds, he did, too.”

  Kalani occasionally glanced up at Marchetti, as if measuring him for veracity, then returned to tapping notes on his iPad.

  “I’m not a paranoid kind of guy,” Marchetti continued, “but someone tried to kill me a few times back in Dallas the past couple of months, so I’ve become acutely aware of my surroundings.”

  “Kill you why?”

  “I don’t know, retribution, maybe, or frighten me off a case? But I figured all that was over. Never imagined someone would try to get us our second night on Kauai.”

  “How long had he been following you tonight?”

  Marchetti thought a few moments. “From the time we left the restaurant–eight or nine miles, maybe. I remember passing through Kapaa a few minutes prior, but I still wasn’t sure where we were at the time, or how long we’d been driving.”

  Kalani reached into his folder for a map of the island and placed it in front of him. “EMS found you and the pickup right here,” he said and made a small mark on the map along the Kuhio Highway, just north of Kapaa, before Kealia Beach. “The pickup was at the bottom of the embankment, almost to the beach.”

  Marchetti nodded. “Yeah, he was really flying. I saw them roll a couple of times before hitting the rocks.” He studied the map a couple more minutes and then passed it back across the table.

  “Tell me again why someone would want to kill you?”

  Marchetti hesitated to give Kalani details of what’d happened the past couple of months... felt he wouldn’t believe it anyway. He decided to give him an abbreviated version and let him ask questions afterward if he wanted more.

  “A retired cop friend and I were investigating a ranch for troubled boys run by a sleazy televangelist. Among other things, he’d been using some of the boys in a prostitution ring.”

  Kalani raised an eyebrow and stopped taking notes for a moment. “You law enforcement?”

  “Nope. Just looking into a client’s murder and stumbled into it.”

  Kalani stared at Marchetti for a moment. “Okay, continue.”

  “Soon thereafter, someone blew up my car and killed a friend of mine. Then they tried to murder me while I was in the hospital recovering from the bomb blast. That’s what makes me think they were trying to finish the job tonight.”

  He nodded. “What eventually happened in that case?”

  “Our investigation led to two planned terrorist attacks–both of which ended in shootouts before they were able to carry them out. We killed the terrorist leaders; police and FBI killed or captured most of the others, now being held in Dallas on federal firearms and terrorism charges.”r />
  Kalani set down his pen on the table. “If what you’re telling me is true, I’d say you were in over your head and damn lucky to be alive.” Marchetti couldn’t disagree, although the tone of Kalani’s voice suggested he was skeptical.

  “Check with Agent Beth Henley at the Dallas FBI office. She’ll confirm my story.”

  Sergeant Kalani wrote down her name and continued. “And the guy at the bar... can you describe him?”

  “Stocky, with dark brown complexion and short, curly, almost black hair. Had a large tattoo on his right forearm running from just below his elbow to right above the wrist. Couldn’t tell what it signified, but it had a creepy look to it.”

  Kalani checked his previous notes and continued, “Description matches what we have for the deceased.”

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “Halfway down the hill, thrown from the truck. Died instantly, they figure.”

  “Not surprised.”

  Kalani asked, “After you realized you were being followed, what’d you do?”

  Marchetti grabbed a travel magazine from the table beside him and sketched a diagram of the two-lane Kuhio Highway in a blank space on the back cover.

  “After hanging well back of me for ten or fifteen minutes, I saw him in my side mirror suddenly accelerate and move across the solid white line to our left, as if going to pass.” Marchetti paused to go over it again in his mind and continued. “When he got alongside us, I saw the passenger had a rifle stuck out the window. He started shooting–four times, I believe, seconds apart. The first round passed through my side window and grazed my arm. The second went through the windshield and hit Vicki on her upper chest. The last two hit the hood or left front fender, near as I could tell.”

  Kalani thought about it for a few moments, then asked, “So the shooter was firing left-handed?”

  Marchetti again tried to visualize the scene and nodded. “That was the only way he could have done it without twisting and sitting forward in his seat.”

  “Could you tell if his seatbelt was off?”

  He shook his head at the question. “Too bad he’s dead; maybe you could have written him a ticket.”