The Council of Ten (34 page)

“Ellie, no!” he tried to shout, but he couldn’t be sure if the words had emerged.

Then feet trampled forward in their direction, police officers alerted by the shots and probably certain that one of their number had been cut down. Elliana rushed off, boot heels clicking against the cement floor. Wayman rose to follow her, but first the police had to be neutralized. Not by shooting, though. They were innocent men here only to do their job.

The echo of gunshots stung his ears as the officers fired wildly at the fleeing Ellie. The Timber Wolf stayed low and waited until they passed him before making his move. He had twelve bullets in his nine-millimeter Beretta and he used eight of them to rip chasms in the heating pipes strung across the ceiling. Water sprayed in all directions, gushing out in fast jets. Steam followed almost immediately and enveloped the front section of the basement in a hot gray cloud that seared everything it touched while temporarily blinding those within it.

Wayman heard the screams as he bolted forward with a handkerchief ready to cover his eyes. Orders were being shouted by some, pleas of help by others who writhed painfully on the floor. A few lucky officers missed the assault of steam and rushed through the stairwell on Ellie’s trail. Wayman thought he saw two, but in the darkness he couldn’t be sure. He crashed through the door and turned the locking bolt as he slammed it shut and followed the pounding steps up the stairs.

He took them quickly, the loudest concentration of activity almost two flights above him. A single shot rang out, ricocheting, and he pictured Ellie waiting ahead in the alcove where one staircase gave way to another, lunging out when the guards rushed near. One of them had gotten a shot off, harmless probably, before Ellie had dealt with both.

The Timber Wolf kept climbing. He saw her just up ahead now, between the fourth and fifth floors. As he rushed toward her, she fired a single shot, which went wild. When she turned to better her aim, he lunged on her, forcing her wrist down and stripping her of her balance. The gun’s bore flashed orange. They tumbled together down to the fourth floor landing.

At impact, the Timber Wolf raised his free arm to strike her but Ellie deflected the blow and rammed a half fist into the soft flesh between his lower ribs. Wayman grasped and tried to power her backward, but she was too seasoned to be taken by simple bull strength and used his own momentum to slam him face first into the wall.

He felt her gun wrist stripped from his grasp and felt the hard steel pound him in the back of his neck. A numbness grasped his head. He slumped to the floor, never feeling impact, and gazed up at the hatefully determined look on Elliana Hirsch’s face, her pistol aimed straight for his face.

“You should have killed me in the cellar when you had the chance,” she snapped, finger ready on the trigger.

Doors slammed closed above and below them. Guards were massing from both angles, ready to converge.

“We’re on the same side, damnit!” Wayman heard himself say. “Don’t ask me why or how. I came here for Goltz, too!” Footsteps were hurdling up and down the steps toward them now. “We’ve got to get away from them. There’s a way, but we’ve got to move. Keep your gun on me. If you’re not convinced we’re on the same side in five minutes, you can blow my fucking brains out. Come on!”

With the footsteps almost on them, Wayman grabbed Ellie’s wrist in a sudden motion and yanked her through the fourth floor entry door, the very floor on which Goltz had died.

“You’re mad!” she said as Wayman forced the door closed behind them.

“Been that way for lots of years. Now let’s find someplace to hide.”

Consciousness skipped and darted from Drew Jordan. He was aware of pain and numbness and of the dull haze that encircled his eyes every time he was able to open them. He saw no distinct figures, just shapes and outlines. Occasionally words were thrust at him, but they sounded slurred, unintelligible. A few times he tried to speak himself only to find that his mouth was a stranger to him, a foreign part of his body he had no control over. Night and day meant nothing to him. One hour swirled into the next.

His longest grasp on consciousness came Monday night when he awoke with his mouth parched and dry. A huge shape hovered over him, still just a shape, although the face held its context long enough for him to recognize the bulbous features of Jabba the Hutt holding a water glass complete with straw down to his lips.

“Jabba,” he muttered.

“Drink this.”

“Where am I?”

“Safe.”

Drew sipped at the straw gratefully and took in as much water as his stomach would let him. He felt better immediately. Fragments of memory returned to him like selected shots off a movie trailer too fast to make sense of.

“You’ve got to go back to sleep now,” Drew thought he heard Jabba say.

“The fire! Oh God, the fire!”

He tried to sit up and Jabba held him down by the shoulders.

“It’s over.”

“No! No! I’ve got to save Pam! I’ve got to save her! She’s burning!
Burning!
”

“Sleep, Drew, sleep.”

“But Pam, what about Pam?”

Jabba the Hutt pulled the water glass away and patted Drew’s forehead.

“Sleep.”

Wayman yanked Ellie through the door of a supply closet down the hall and around the corner from Goltz’s office not far from the checkpoint where she had been searched a second time. In the darkness, they felt their way to the rear and huddled behind two large crates. Wayman felt Ellie’s gun still close to him and possessed no illusions that the darkness might inhibit her aim.

“This is crazy,” Ellie said. “Goltz’s office is right around the corner.”

“Precisely why it’s the last place they’ll look for you—us now. The scene of the crime is always the best place to hide out until things cool off. Now put that damn gun down.”

“I haven’t decided whether to trust you or not.”

“Damnit, Ellie, if I wanted you dead, they’d be carrying you out of the building by now. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Then listen. Reach over to my left hip and pull out my pistol. If I’d been sent to kill you, I could have already used it while you were distracted.”

“I knew it was there. I was waiting for you to use it.”

“What do I have to do to convince you?”

“You can’t.”

“What about Goltz? I’m telling you
I
came for him, too. Only you beat me to him.”

“It’s more than just Goltz. He is—was—just a small part of it.”

“A part of what?”

“If you don’t know that, then you’ve got no business here in Bonn.”

“What I know is that all of a sudden somebody’s been building underground shelters all over the United States that can house thousands, tens of thousands of people. Goltz was behind the construction of at least one and that’s what brought me here. He—or this thing he’s a part of—is preparing for a catastrophe only they seem to know about, which means they’re behind it.”

In the darkness Wayman could feel Ellie stiffen. The crack under the door provided just enough light for their eyes to use and he saw her lower the gun.

“That means something to you,” he said. “Tell me.”

“It’s the one thing I didn’t ask Goltz about,” she muttered more to herself. “Those who were a part of the plan in America would have to be protected once the powder was released.”

“Powder?
White
powder?”

“What does the color matter?”

“Just tell me if it’s white!”

“Yes. Now tell me why that’s important.”

“Because, my Israeli counterpart, it was supposed to look like cocaine. That’s been the cover from the start.”

“Cover …” Ellie’s voice came up slightly. “Yes, that fits!

It fits! The powder was produced in Berga, Spain, and then transferred to Getaria for shipment to the Bahamas.”

“Nassau? Freeport?” asked the Timber Wolf.

“I suppose so.”

“Oh my God …”

“What is it?”

“Everything makes sense now. That’s why the grandmothers had to die.”

“Grandmothers? You’ve lost me.”

“This powder, just tell me about it. What is it really?”

Footsteps sounded just outside their closet along with voices too muffled to make out. When they departed, Ellie told Wayman the truth about the white powder and the transports as related by Heinrich Goltz.

“
Ninety percent of the population asphyxiated because there’s no air left to breathe
… .”

“No,” Ellie corrected. “The air will still be there, but drained of oxygen.”

“It’s the same damn thing with 200 million deaths any way you describe it. America will crumble, be reduced to ashes.”

“Not quite. The shelters, remember? Their people will survive and re-emerge organized and ready to take over with the help of the thousands arriving on the transports. Yes, it would take such a plan to explain them surfacing at last.”

“You keep speaking in the plural.”

“With good reason. The force behind this rivals any government in the world—the Council of Ten.”

“The Council of what?”

“Ten. Don’t tell me the great Timber Wolf has never heard of them.”

“Unless you want me to lie …”

“They’re an international cabal composed of outcast leaders from around the world, if I’m reading my cards right.”

“Goltz,” Wayman noted, “a former Nazi who still keeps links with revivalist parties of the Reich.”

“Yes, he perfectly fits the pattern of what I would expect the Council members to be: desperate, fanatical, ruthless, and all with large followings of their own. It all goes back to the time of Alexander the Great. His plan to rule the world was to divide his conquered lands into ten nations or territories, each ruled by a minister directly responsible to Alexander. To prevent revolution and rebellion, along with possible wars among the separate nations of wholly divergent peoples and cultures, a system of laws, decrees, and policies would be laid down for each to follow loyally—to be determined by the ministers meeting together under Alexander as a … council of ten.”

“So, Goltz and these others have picked up where he left off.”

“More accurately, they’ve succeeded where he failed.” Ellie’s tone turned eerily contemplative. “I know. I’ve tracked them for five years. They killed my husband.”

“David Hirsch,” Wayman recalled. “He was murdered shortly after being forced to resign from the Israeli cabinet.”

“His killers were never found because the Council of Ten never leaves anything that might lead back to them or even suggest their existence. Their work is carried out invariably by intermediaries who know only what they have to. The chain is long and complex, roundabout in many areas, but such precautions are everything to them.”

“Yes,” the Timber Wolf said knowingly. “I’ve seen that. The grandmothers, Trelana, the whole drug chain.”

“That’s twice you’ve mentioned grandmothers. What does it mean?”

“Hold onto your hat, Ellie, because here’s where my story starts to get good… .”

And the Timber Wolf proceeded to relay the story told him by Drew Jordan and later confirmed by his Washington contact after his guilt over the young man’s incarceration and subsequent disappearance led him to investigate the affairs of Trelana. Wayman explained how this investigation had turned up a trail of distribution points all over the country, each apparently housing an underground shelter of the type found in Wapello or Dearborn. He finished by rehashing his interrogation of Edgar Brown, which had led here to Bonn and Heinrich Goltz along with alerting him to Corbano’s involvement in the chaos.

“The White Snake,” Ellie reflected at the end. “I’ve met up with him before.”

“Haven’t we all?” Wayman shook his head in mock disbelief. “Even telling the story as it’s happened doesn’t make it any easier to believe for me. This Council seems to have gone through a pretty elaborate scenario just to get a few tons of white powder into America. They could just as easily have disguised it as sugar.”

“Not necessarily,” Ellie countered. “It’s like I told you—everything comes down to control. The Council had to be aware of the powder’s exact status every step of the way. Even shipping Federal Express doesn’t ensure that. Utilizing Trelana’s network was elaborate all right. But since it was already in place, the strategy was actually the safest.” She thought briefly. “Brown told you he received an allocation every six or nine months. That leads me to believe that the shipments of powder brought in by the grandmothers were distributed by lot regionally. Thus, the importance of that man Lantos delivering
specific
shipping instructions each time to the Riveras.”

“Along with the need to eliminate the entire chain thanks to Drew Jordan’s grandmother.”

“The Council leaves nothing to chance,” Ellie acknowledged.

“Okay, so we’ve got to nail this Council at the source,” noted Wayman grudgingly. “Did Goltz tell you where they could be found?”

Ellie shrugged. “The Council never leaves traces, remember? They haven’t met together yet, the ultimate in security precautions. And when they do rendezvous, this coming Wednesday, they will be escorted to the Council’s headquarters from contact points throughout Lisbon, if I’m reading my cards right.”

“That narrows it down a bit.”

“Not enough. But I’ve got an idea how we can make it work for us. It’s a long shot and we can’t put all our faith in it, but I don’t see we have much—”

More footsteps raced past their hiding place. They grew silent and still, hardly daring to breathe. A hand twisting the knob had them both rigid and ready to spring, but the door never opened.

“The distribution points for the powder,” Elliana whispered when the hall was quiet again, “you know them all?”

“I memorized them.”

“Iowa, then Michigan. Where would you suggest we head next?”

Wayman’s eyebrows flickered at Ellie’s use
of we
. “An address in the back country of Georgia.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only one on the list
not
near a body of water.”

“Corbano’s headquarters?” Ellie raised.

“And maybe the means to find the Council’s.”