Covenant (48 page)

E
than propelled Rachel in front of him as the sound of the exploding Hellfire missile silenced the sniper, and they dashed for the cover of the vehicles in the street outside.

“You sure they got him?” Ethan asked Lieutenant Ash as they ran.

Ethan looked up at the apartment building that was now billowing smoke as Lieutenant Ash spoke into his microphone. A man in traditional Bedouin clothes appeared on the street outside the apartment building and looked up at the billowing clouds of smoke.

“He’s dead,” Lieutenant Ash said to Ethan. “The UAV got him.”

“A good sniper would change positions,” Ethan pointed out, tucking his pistol into his belt.

“They saw him on camera before the missile hit,” Ash insisted grimly. “They got him.”

Ethan frowned and shook his head, one eye on the distant Bedouin.

“He fires his shots and then sits around to get blown to pieces?”

Ethan watched as the Bedouin turned toward a narrow alley. He glanced over his shoulder at the IDF cordon before looking briskly away, a red scarf concealing his features and black gloves on his hands. Ethan recalled the man in the tunnels beneath Gaza, wearing black gloves when he had stolen Ethan’s rucksack. For a brief moment, a spectral image of Joanna drifted into Ethan’s field of view. He gasped softly, losing his balance and trying to blink the hallucination away. She stood on the sidewalk, watching him intently, superimposed over the Bedouin man hurrying away from him and beckoning Ethan to follow.

“Get your men together,” he said impulsively to Lieutenant Ash as the bizarre vision faded away.

“What the hell for?”

“I doubt you’ve got the man you think you did,” Ethan shouted over his shoulder as he broke into a sprint, aiming for the Bedouin.

Ethan looked to where the man was vanishing into the side alley. As he did so, Ethan saw him peer sideways again in his direction from beneath the veil of his headdress, and in that moment he knew that the Bedouin was the man MACE would have tasked with abducting Joanna: Rafael, the assassin. Ethan shouted back at the lieutenant.

“Get some backup and meet me on the other side of the block!”

Ethan didn’t give the officer a chance to reply, concentrating on the alley into which the Bedouin man had disappeared. He plunged headlong into it, the shadows enveloping him as he ran, his footfalls echoing off the narrow walls. From somewhere in front of him he heard a dog howl in alarm.

Ethan burst out into a square enclosed on all four sides by featureless apartment buildings. A skeletally thin dog stood on scrawny legs near a long-dry fountain, having clearly just picked itself up off the dusty earth. Ethan felt the skin on the back of his neck tingling and staggered sideways as his balance failed him, his hands trembling freely now and his knees weak with fatigue.

Ethan guessed that the man he had seen would keep heading directly away from the scene of his crimes, so he hurried across the square to an alley that led off toward the east, running hard and splashing through puddles of dirty brown water.

An open area of wasteland appeared as he reached the end of the alley, while on his left was a main street filled with scattered pedestrians and cars parked outside cafés. To his right, a narrower street that seemed devoid of life led between tall apartment blocks.

Ethan headed down the narrow street, running hard as he found his stride again, looking left and right into dingy alleys passing between the blocks. At the third he glimpsed someone moving out of sight at the last moment and he plunged through the shadows in pursuit.

A bright rectangle of light at the end of the alley was blocked by a low, mangled chain-link fence. Ethan took three long running strides and leaped up, vaulting over the fence. As he arced through the air he glimpsed abandoned apartment buildings that overlooked another square in greater disrepair than the last.

The blow came from his right as he landed hard, a whisper of movement in the air, and in an instant Ethan realized that he had vaulted over the fence without regard to anyone waiting for him out of sight against the walls.

The Bedouin slammed into him, his face obscured by the red scarf above which dark eyes blazed with unrestrained fury. Ethan threw his hands up in desperation as a rusty length of scaffolding pole whipped toward his skull. The cold metal smashed into his forearm, a dull but terrible pain shuddering along the length of the bone. Ethan cried out, the ragged edge of the pole barely deflected from his face as he was driven backward.

The man lunged forward with the point of the pole and Ethan twisted aside, swinging a wild left hook that connected with the Arab’s temple but barely checked his movement as he ducked aside and turned, swinging the pole up.

Ethan jerked left and raised his right arm, catching the pole under his armpit. He closed his arm around it and yanked his left knee up into the assassin’s rib cage. The man grunted and Ethan felt brittle bones somewhere in the man’s chest crunch against his kneecap. The Arab lost his grip on the pole as he fell sideways, and Ethan saw that the index finger of his left hand was missing.

Ethan grabbed the pole from under his arm and swung wildly for the man’s head but the Arab was too fast, ducking low and leaping back up, a fist flashing into Ethan’s vision and smacking across his cheek. Ethan reeled away, managing to hang on to the pole and his balance, but before he could regain his advantage the assassin slammed one foot into the inside of Ethan’s left knee. The leg buckled with a lance of bright pain that bolted up his thigh as he crashed down onto the unforgiving concrete.

The assassin swiveled expertly on one foot, driving the other toward Ethan’s chest. Ethan struggled to bring the pole up in both hands to deflect the blow, but the Arab’s foot smashed into his chest and hurled him onto his back, chunks of gravel painfully driving through his shirt and into his skin. Somehow he managed to keep the pole defensively in his hands as the assassin whipped a slim, glittering blade from his waistband and plunged down toward him.

Ethan brought one leg up against his chest and pushed out with the pole, catching the Arab in free fall with the blade a hairbreadth from his throat. Dull pain throbbed though Ethan’s skull as he struggled against the weight and insane strength of his assailant. He pushed hard on one end of the pole and thrust out with his leg, rolling the assassin off balance. The Arab toppled over and onto his back as Ethan rolled with him and forced his way on top, pinning the pole across the assassin’s throat while trapping the man’s arms beneath his knees. Ethan saw the Arab’s thorax collapse beneath the weight, his dark eyes bulging and something rattling deep in his esophagus.

Ethan felt a sharp jab in his flank. He looked down to see the blade held with its tip nestling under his rib cage. Needles of ice prickled Ethan’s skin as he realized that they were in a stalemate.

The assassin looked up at him without mercy as though he were examining a peculiar form of insect. Ethan shook his head. “It’s over, Rafael.”

The assassin gritted his teeth in a brutal smile, raising the blade as he rasped a few short words. “It is for you, my friend.”

Ethan grunted with effort, twisting away from the blade as he felt the tip lance him with a stab of exquisite pain. He pressed down on the pole, crushing the Arab’s throat further, and managed with one hand to retrieve a crumpled photograph from his pocket.

“Joanna Defoe,” he gasped above the supreme effort of keeping the killer on the ground. “Disappeared from Gaza, thirty-one, a journalist.”

Rafael smirked over his pain.

“Go to hell.”

Ethan felt a surge of anger course through his veins. He jerked away from the blade and shoved down hard on the pole. An agonized rattle escaped from Rafael’s mouth amid a spray of spittle. He looked up at Ethan through the pain.

“Release me, and I’ll tell you.”

“Not a chance.”

“Your loss.”

The assassin whipped the knife across Ethan’s exposed flank, causing him to jerk farther away from the bright pain. Instantly, Rafael’s right leg hooked up and curled around Ethan’s neck, arching his back and slamming him down onto the rocky earth. Before Ethan could respond, the Arab was upon him, the knife pressing against his throat.

He squinted up into the bright blue sky above and saw Rafael looking down at him.

“I am not a dishonorable man,” the Arab said softly, “but you should have let me leave. Without me, you and your friends would be dead.”

“You stopped it?” Ethan asked.

“Who do you think tipped off the IDF and disposed of Byron Stone? MACE deceived all of us, and I was making amends. Now you have again forced my hand, Mr. Warner.”

“Joanna,” Ethan said, twisting the photograph of her in his left hand and holding it up to Rafael once more. “Please.”

The assassin considered the picture for a moment.

“Joanna must have gotten too close to the truth long before I did, in Colombia and then again here in Gaza. She learned that MACE was abducting wealthy civilians and then negotiating their release with their own agents in order to reap the ransom payments. I learned this only today from a man named Spencer Malik, recently deceased.”

Ethan stared up at him. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Rafael muttered. “The only man left alive who will know now is an American, a pastor named Kelvin Patterson. But I do know that she was not killed.”

For a brief moment in Ethan’s awareness, time ground to a halt.

He stared up at the man who had so casually erased the pain that he had harbored for so many years. He felt something released from his chest, the dense and festering abscess suddenly lanced. He closed his eyes, not feeling the hot tears that rushed down his cheeks and spilled onto the ancient earth.

Rafael stared down at him, surprised.

“You have fought bravely,” he said in a somber tone, “but now I must protect myself. And for that, you have to die.”

Rafael leaned his weight into the blade.

And Ethan fired the pistol in his right hand.

The bullet slammed upward through Rafael’s hip, shattering bone and plowing through his internal organs before bursting from his shoulder in a fine mist of blood. Ethan smashed the blade aside as Rafael shuddered from the blast, pushing him away and leaping to his feet as Rafael collapsed onto the dust.

Ethan looked down at the assassin as he lay on the ground, blood leaking from his wounds.

“Remember Hassim Khan?” he asked rhetorically, and saw a shadow of recognition flicker behind the pain in the assassin’s eyes. “You’re done, asshole.”

Ethan aimed between Rafael’s eyes and pulled the trigger once. The assassin’s head quivered and the life in his eyes vanished as quickly as the bullet punctured his skull and buried itself in Gaza’s baked soil.

A swarm of Israeli soldiers burst into the courtyard around Ethan.

“What happened?” Lieutenant Ash demanded, looking down at the corpse.

“I found your informant.”

Lieutenant Ash shook his head, a disapproving look on his face. “Well done, he’s useless to us now. What do we do?”

“We find Byron Stone.”

“That could prove a problem,” Lieutenant Ash said. “We just heard on the radio that the vehicle he was traveling in has been hit by an explosive device. Byron Stone is dead.”

“What about the MACE jet? Can we ground it?”

“I don’t know.”

Ethan thought furiously for a moment, and then turned to the lieutenant.

“Can you get me to the airport, quickly?”

“Why should I?”

Ethan wiped his dirt-stained face with his sleeve, trying to stave off the exhaustion that was now tilting the earth beneath his feet as though he were standing on a boat on a rocky sea.

“Because it’s the last chance I have to end all of this. They abducted my fiancée, Jerah, might even have killed her, and I don’t want to see a single one of them get away with it.”

Jerah Ash looked at Ethan’s bedraggled form.

“I’ll call it in. Come with me.”

“I’ll need to pick up some friends along the way,” Ethan added.

BEN GURION INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
ISRAEL