Covenant (29 page)

“They’re willing to play dirty,” Ethan murmured, thinking about the MACE troops shooting at them in the desert.

“They are,” Hassim agreed. “You can see how such an organization might react to Lucy’s discovery out here.”

“They’d do anything to cover it up,” Ethan said. “Even kill.”

“When you believe you’re doing God’s work, anything is justifiable.”

“But what if they’ve got it all wrong?” Ethan said. “Those remains could be something else, a freak of nature or a deformed species of some kind. Even someone as experienced as Lucy could have got it wrong. What’s the chance of there being life in space at all for that matter?”

Hassim Khan seemed surprised.

“Life is known to be everywhere in the universe.”

“No, it’s not,” Ethan said. “Nobody knows if there’s intelligent life out there.”

“I didn’t say
intelligent
life,” Hassim said. “I said life.”

“How would you know that for sure?” Rachel demanded. Mahmoud and Yossaf were also frowning uncertainly at the scientist.

Hassim shrugged as he looked at her.

“The origin of life,
sadiqati,
is the formation of the chemical elements themselves, the very things from which we are made. Each and every form of life and structure on our planet and every other planet in the known universe were conceived in the hearts of giant stars: everything that we see, everything that we breathe, touch, taste, and are physically made of. All life on Earth is quite literally built from the chemical ashes of dead stars. We are stardust.”

Ethan experienced a fleeting bout of vertigo.

“Ashes? You mean life is, like, the leftovers?”

Hassim Khan nodded.

“All life as we know it is quite literally debris, nothing more. Lucy knew this, and understood its connection to what she found out here in Israel.”

NAHAL OZ
GAZA STRIP

T
he night was a blessing that shielded his movements and deadened the sound of his footfalls. Car horns sounded from a main road nearby, voices responding in a babble of angry Arabic and Urdu, then fell silent as the whisper of a vehicle’s tires faded into the distance. The Gaza Strip slumbered beneath a heavy blanket of heat as Rafael drifted through alleyways and across rubble-strewn ground.

The Gaza Strip was never silent. Voices carried on the warm breeze from the coast, sometimes seeming almost upon his shoulder, as though the entire population were watching him. Sound travels farther at night, and among the densely packed buildings it seemed to turn corners, taunting his movements as idle conversations spilled from darkened houses onto the night air.

It was not the first time that Rafael had been required to infiltrate the Gaza Strip. From time to time he had been paid by Byron Stone to eliminate troublesome figures that haunted this land and the innumerable wretches who scratched out an existence from its unyielding soil. He had few qualms about lancing such abscesses of violence. Men killed. It was not cultural, tribal, or even a family thing. As a young soldier he had witnessed both the horror of conflict and the macabre euphoria of taking a life in the defense of one’s own.

Rafael killed only those whom he judged unworthy of life, and killed silently and quickly no matter how grotesque the crimes of his victims. Once they were dead, that was the end of it. The flatulent wittering of psychologists and philosophers did not interest him, especially since killing had earned Rafael far more money than he had ever earned in the service of his country.

He slowed and crouched like a cat in the darkness as a small knot of Palestinian teenagers sauntered past nearby. The tips of their cheap cigarettes glowed like beacons in the night, flaring into life and illuminating dark faces scarred by years of hardship.

Rafael had earned his battle honors in a dozen conflicts, the last of which had been fought amid the derelict streets of Chechnya. Working as a mercenary in the north of the country, he had been caught in the midst of a brutal firefight between Chechnyan rebels and Russian Spetsnaz forces. Rafael had killed a Russian radio operator and captured his set. Fluent in Russian, as he was in so many languages and dialects, he had quickly called in an air strike against a militant position while giving the coordinates of the Russian forces.

Somehow, the coup failed: the Spetsnaz had foiled his plan, probably possessing a backup radio set within their team. The air strike arrived and decimated half of his fellow fighters. Instantly, the hard-core fanatics suspected betrayal, and the
mujahideen
were upon him. Overpowered by men of his blood and his lands and yet ignoring his explanations, he was bound and taken to a place in the bleak eastern hills where he learned the true nature of faith and what it made men capable of.

There was no Geneva Convention for those held by men who opposed the very society that created it. Rafael was stripped naked, beaten with hoses and batons, and then drenched with ice water before being locked in a tiny basement cell, the stones in the walls worn smooth by the clawing of desperate fingers from time immemorial. The militants wanted to know for whom he had been working, where they were based, and how to obtain access to them, for they believed that his mind had somehow been violated and that Allah had sent him to them for what they euphemistically referred to as “cleansing.” When Rafael was unable to provide them with suitable answers, they attached electrodes to his genitals and cranked them from the mains, searing his body with white pain that left him weeping. When that failed to bring forth the answers they required, they severed two of his fingers with jagged, rusty knives and abandoned him in his cell, accompanied by crippling cold and the raging infections that coursed through his body.

Somewhere in the bleak hours between life and oblivion he was liberated by a small handful of his captors who opposed his detainment. From within the depths of his suffering, Rafael realized that even in the presence of utter barbarianism some souls harbored morsels of humanity, like lonely flowers blossoming amid smoldering plains of ash. Having correctly deduced that Rafael could not have endured such torture unless innocent, and at great risk to themselves, his saviors had spirited him away and placed him in a safe house until he recovered.

Since then, Rafael had been a man on a mission for both himself and for humanity. His work had carried him around the world in the pursuit of criminals and terrorists; Mafioso henchmen in Palermo, Sendero Luminoso assassins in Peru, corrupt police organizing abductions in Colombia, and al-Qaeda cells all over the globe. Ironically, taking out the terrorists had turned out to be far safer than working as a soldier. Hatred of extremists seemed a universal theme. Rafael had realized that nobody cared if an al-Qaeda operative was found facedown in a sewer conduit in Berlin with a crowbar lodged in his skull, or in flames by the side of a lonely desert road in Kashmir, or hanged from the roof beams of a church in Santiago. Rafael’s work was the only perfect murder: one where nobody gave a damn about finding the perpetrator, and he was proud to serve MACE in eliminating terrorists.

The sound of a distant car jerked him from his reverie. The kids had vanished, and Rafael moved out across the open ground and disappeared into an alley. At the end of the alley was a narrow street faintly illuminated by a light somewhere off to the left. Few of the streetlights in this part of the Strip worked with any reliability, a further aid to his movement.

Opposite the alley was a four-story building, one side of which hung in chunks of tattered masonry and steel shattered by countless mortar rounds and aerial incendiaries. The other side of the building was intact but clearly abandoned.

It was a common tactic of insurgents to occupy recently bombed buildings. The Israelis, having blasted them to pieces, would consider their job done and move on to other more interesting targets. Insurgents would occupy those shattered hulks and use them as storage depots, hideouts, and, in this case, entrances to tunnels dug beneath the foundations of the abandoned buildings. It was much harder for Israel to spot tunnels that began beneath buildings than it was to identify those that fed from the Gazan border into the smuggling network beneath Egypt.

The building was the third such location that Rafael had checked since slipping into Gaza an hour previously. The first two had been empty, a fact quickly confirmed by Rafael’s observation that they sat unguarded. This one was different. Sitting on a doorstep outside the building, a watchful Palestinian teenager smoked a cigarette. The building had no visible lights and indeed was unlikely to have any running water. Therefore, the foot soldier was guarding something that lay within. Insurgent groups used a network of teenage layabouts to run errands or keep an eye on sensitive locations, far too many for Israel’s intelligence organizations to run tabs on or interrogate.

Quietly, Rafael slipped out of the shadows and sauntered with his hands in his pockets across the road. Although he looked directly at the young man, his senses scanned like radar up and down the street on either side of him. The area was deserted, as he had expected at this time of the night. Gaza was not so much governed by Hamas’s police as ruled with an iron fist, and anybody out at night was likely to attract their attention. For that reason, he would have to be quick.

The teenager saw him the instant he emerged from the shadows, suddenly trying to look tough rather than bored. He flicked the butt of his cigarette away.

Rafael, having removed his scarf, revealed a set of neat white teeth.

“Salaam,”
he said softly.

The boy nodded once, looking Rafael over. “You should not walk the street at night. It is forbidden.”

“I’m on my way home,” Rafael replied easily, producing a packet of his own cigarettes. “Would you care for one?”

The youngster looked at the proffered packet, and then at the butt he had flicked onto the street before him. “I just had one.”

“Ah,” Rafael nodded, “but these are American, Marlboro. Have one for later.”

The teenager’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and he reached out for the cigarette that poked from the open pack.

There was no haste in Rafael’s movement, even though it happened in a blur. As the teenager’s fingers settled on the cigarette, Rafael let the packet go, gripping the boy’s left hand in his own and twisting it sideways across the palm, yanking it hard as he stepped in.

The boy’s shoulder turned in sympathy with the pain as he struggled up onto one foot, his mouth gaping open to cry out. Rafael’s right hand whipped between them, a blade glittering in the streetlight before he slammed it hilt deep into the young man’s throat, slicing into his windpipe and snatching the call from his lips.

The boy lurched but Rafael picked the body up under his arm with immense strength and rushed across the street into the darkness of the alleyway opposite. He crouched down and clamped one hand across the boy’s mouth before turning the blade in his throat and pulling it hard to one side. A crisp sound like splitting fresh lettuce issued as the blade left the boy’s throat, followed by a deep gurgling as blood flooded his lungs. Rafael closed his eyes, holding the boy and gently stroking his hair until he stopped struggling, only the occasional twitch of his limbs betraying the last vestiges of life. A final gush of blood onto his grubby T-shirt and the boy fell limp.

“Go in peace, my young friend,
ma’assalama,
” Rafael whispered softly, and set the body gently down in the darkness.

He turned and walked back across the street, slipping the blade into his jacket and pulling the scarf up across his face before reaching the door of the building and quietly slipping inside.

T
hat’s ridiculous.”

Rachel Morgan gazed at Hassim Khan as though he had just grown horns. Ethan too found himself intrigued by Hassim’s casual degradation of the miracle of life.

“Life is debris?” he asked.

“And nothing more,” Hassim replied. “It is a scientific fact that was uncovered decades ago. It concerns the fabric of our entire cosmos, everything that we are and everything that we’re made of, changing over time.”