Covenant (57 page)

Patterson grunted as he fought this new and unexpected counterattack. Ethan let the pastor’s body weight help him, placing all of the strain on Patterson’s wrists. The pastor gagged as he struggled to control his balance.

The syringe turned between them, facing down toward their feet, and Ethan changed his grip on the pastor’s hands, ready to push the syringe upward. Patterson panicked, scrambling up and away from the needle. Ethan hooked one leg over the pastor’s and kicked it out from beneath him, twisting him by his hands and wrists as his body flipped sideways and over onto his back. Ethan scrambled on top of Patterson, the needle now pointing down at the pastor’s chest.

In the faint light, he saw Patterson’s eyes swimming with panic.

“Joanna Defoe,” Ethan hissed, glowering down at the pastor.

A tremor of recognition flickered across Patterson’s features.

“Let me go,” he gasped, “or I’ll tell you nothing.”

“I know she’s alive.” Ethan grinned coldly. “I know MACE took her.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” the pastor croaked, straining to hold the syringe away from his skin. “I don’t know what happened to her, I swear.”

“Then what use are you?” Ethan growled.

“No, please, don’t—”

Ethan slammed his entire body weight down on the syringe. Patterson screamed as the needle plunged deep into his chest and the fluid flooded into his body.

Ethan hauled himself off the pastor, yanking the syringe free and tossing it to one side. Behind him, he heard a clatter of footsteps as flashlight beams sliced into the darkness and a handful of FBI agents burst into the chamber, Axel Cain at their head.

“Hands up, don’t move!”

Ethan complied, not resisting the FBI agents as they cuffed him. He saw Lopez being cuffed alongside him.

“Illuminated?”
she said.
“Darkness?
You’re a riot, Warner, you really are.”

“You got it, didn’t you?”

He watched as they lifted Patterson to his feet, the pastor holding his chest where the needle had pierced him. Slowly he straightened, and began to chuckle as he looked at Ethan. For a terrible instant, Ethan wondered if the insane old man had been right as he stood four-square and looked Ethan in the eye.

“The Word has been spoken, and this is God’s judgment upon us all for …”

Patterson’s voice trailed off, and the fevered delight vanished as his face folded in upon itself in agony. Ethan took a step back as, bowing over at the waist, Patterson looked up and wailed a scream that sounded as though his innards were being doused in flames.

Patterson lurched to one side, the FBI agents leaping out of his way as the pastor slammed into the side of the gurney and sprawled onto his back, his eyes bulging and his mouth wide open as a foamy mess of bloodied mucus bubbled out to spill onto the tiles beneath him. Ethan winced as the pastor gargled and thrashed, dark blood spilling from his cavities as his internal organs turned to mush inside him.

Patterson gave a last anguished cry of despair, his limbs contorting at impossible angles as his spine arched over to the sound of cracking bones, his head twisted back to almost touch the back of his legs before he froze in position, his eyes staring wide and empty toward the exit of the chamber.

Ethan stared at his body for a moment, and then looked at the FBI agents.

“You might want to seal this room off. It could be contaminated.”

“You think?” Axel Cain shot him a look of mock surprise. “Get out of here.”

Ethan gave the dead pastor one last glance, and then let himself be led out of the chamber and into the light once more.

J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING
WASHINGTON DC
AUGUST 28, 1 P.M.

I
’ve told you everything.”

Ethan sat in a hard metal chair with his wrists cuffed to the legs. A camera in one corner of the cell recorded the conversation, an FBI agent guarding the door as Ethan sat staring at the pockmarked face of Special Agent Axel Cain.

“Everything,” Cain repeated cynically, smiling with his lips only. “Mr. Warner, you’ve been embroiled in an international conspiracy that has resulted in several deaths, one of which was at your own hands and witnessed by a half-dozen FBI agents, myself included.”

“It was self-defense.” Ethan shrugged, beyond caring by now.

“You injected him with something that caused his innards to melt and pour out of his eyes, ears, and ass!” Cain shouted. “Overkill, don’t you think?”

“Not for a man who committed the crimes he has.”

Cain looked down at his notes, shaking his head.

“The district attorney won’t see it like that. You left Israel without passport or papers, entered the United States as an illegal immigrant, and then proceeded to injure several men, acquire a firearm for which you were not licensed, and commit the homicide of a respected local pastor.” Cain grinned coldly. “And that’s the way I’ll be presenting it.”

“Bullshit baffles brains,” Ethan muttered.

Cain’s grin didn’t slip as he stood.

“Sticks and stones, Mr. Warner. You’re going away for a very long time, make no mistake about that.”

The cell door opened as Cain made his way out, only to be pushed back in by two men in smart suits. Before Cain was even able to protest, the two men flashed badges at him.

“We’ll be taking Ethan Warner into our custody,” the taller of the two said in a voice that brooked no argument.

“He’s our suspect,” Cain blustered. “We’ve got evidence, witnesses, and—”

“Presidential pardon,” said the shorter of the two men.

Ethan experienced a brief sensation of disbelief.

“Presidential pardon?” he echoed, as though he were as appalled as Agent Cain.

“If you’ll come with us,” said the taller man, who then turned to Cain. “Release him, now. This case is closed.”

Cain, his blotchy face flushed red with restrained fury, nodded to the guard, who quickly released Ethan from the chair.

“This is insane,” Cain protested. “Who the hell has the authority for this? The president doesn’t even know about what’s—”

“That’s classified, Defense Intelligence Agency information and well above your pay grade,” the tall man said. “Any more questions and we’ll take you into our custody as well.”

Cain blanched and stepped back as Ethan walked out of the cell, following the two men down the corridor.

“Seriously?” he asked them. “Presidential pardon?”

“Not quite,” said the shorter of the two, “but close enough.”

Ethan saw two more suited men appear ahead, Nicola Lopez wedged between them and looking equally bemused.

“How do we keep meeting like this?” he asked her.

“Bad luck and timing?”

Ethan said nothing as they were led to the underground parking lot of the FBI headquarters. Three black SUVs were waiting, an ad in themselves for government-agency business. Once inside, they were driven out of the parking lot and turned for the District.

“You tell them anything?” Ethan asked Lopez.

“I’d barely sat down when Secret Service turned up,” Lopez explained. “Cain’s got sand up his ass about the case being shut down.”

“So I noticed. He a friend of yours?”

“You think?”

The SUVs drifted down Pennsylvania Avenue, and for one moment Ethan thought that they were really heading to meet the president. He felt slightly deflated as the vehicles rolled past and on toward the Capitol.

“We’re not that important,” Lopez said with a wry smile.

“That’s what worries me,” Ethan said. “Where are we going?”

“For debrief,” said one of the agents in the front of the vehicle. “Then to the Hart Senate Office Building.”

“How’s Senator Black?” Lopez asked.

This time the agent looked over his shoulder and winked.

“He’s fine, you did good.”

Ethan and Lopez shared a glance, and Ethan wondered what the hell was going on as the vehicle turned away from the District and headed through nondescript industrial areas near the Anacostia River. They finally pulled up outside what once was part of the old navy dockyards, the towering old storage warehouses. Nearby, extensive building work was under way converting the unused buildings into flashy new apartments.

The SUVs rolled toward a particularly battered-looking warehouse that faced away from the city, and as they approached a loading door raised automatically, allowing the three vehicles to roll inside. Ethan looked over his shoulder and saw the rollers close up again as though swallowing them whole.

“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine?” Ethan asked the agents.

“Keeps you out of the media eye,” one of them explained. “FBI would have broadcast your arrests to the world, and we don’t want that to happen.”

Ethan felt a slight tension return to his body.

“Are we going for a swim wearing concrete flippers?”

The two agents laughed, but said nothing as the SUVs rolled to a halt. The doors were opened by agents from the outside, all of them competent-looking men with earpieces and carefully concealed weapons.

Ethan stepped out, and was quickly hurried away by two agents in the opposite direction of Lopez.

Y
ou understand the importance of the situation?”

Ethan nodded.

“I can understand why you’re doing this, yes.”

Ethan was sitting in a comfortable room buried deep in the center of the old warehouse, his voice sounding oddly muted and monotone in the anechoic chamber built into the solid concrete of the dock. The differences between this room and Patterson’s macabre operating theater were the soft couch, the coffee and doughnuts, and the straight-talking man who sat opposite. In his forties and with a long, serious face, he was the epitome of the discreet but capable government agent, and called himself Mr. Wilson.

“The DIA can’t afford this kind of security leak right now,” Wilson explained. “People think that to maintain security around delicate matters people like us use violence or intimidation, even murder. We don’t, if at all possible. We prefer to keep people on our side and explain to them why we are doing what we’re doing.”

Ethan nodded.

“That’s very reasonable and convenient, as I quite like being alive.”

Wilson smiled.

“The simple fact is that we don’t know what these aliens were, what they were doing here seven thousand years ago, or whether they visit us now. The remains found in Israel by Dr. Lucy Morgan will remain under lock and key for further study, and will not reach the public domain for some decades yet.”

Ethan frowned.

“Surely people are ready for this kind of thing?”

Wilson nodded in agreement.

“Absolutely correct, Ethan, if you’re referring to the educated, prepared countries of our Western world: barely one sixth of Earth’s population. We in the West might be mentally prepared for the presence of extraterrestrial species and their visitation of Earth, but what about the rest? What chaos might be caused in the Middle East, the former Soviet States, South America, and elsewhere?”

Ethan raised an eyebrow.

“Surely they’re prepared enough not to commit mass suicide.”

“Perhaps,” Wilson conceded. “But combined with that uncertainty is the fact that we ourselves don’t know why these … beings visit us. We don’t know what they want. We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know if they’ll arrive in greater numbers in the future. All the talk about conspiracy by government to conceal the truth, like Roswell, is utter crap. We don’t know the goddamn truth ourselves and are just trying to keep a lid on things until the rest of the world stops blowing itself to hell. Then, maybe, we’ll start seeing how we might deal with all of this.”

“If they’re hostile, we need to work together,” Ethan said.

“Exactly,” Wilson said. “And even if they’re not, we don’t want one country welcoming them with open arms as another opens fire or tries to steal technology to get the upper hand. It’s just the kind of shortsighted thing that some dictatorships might try, and God knows what would happen if we pissed these beings off. As it is, they can infiltrate our airspace with impunity and make a mockery of our defenses even when we do detect them.”