The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (26 page)

“You mean he died?”

“I mean I lost him.”

Poe told the story from a soft leather chair set next to a wall of cherry-wood bookshelves holding an extensive collection of leather-bound medical books. He still hadn’t turned any lights on, and only a little sunlight penetrated the cracks in his half-drawn vertical blinds.

“I was working on another patient when a pair of men grabbed me. They seemed to know who I was—I don’t know how. They said they were with Jason Benbasset at the hotel when the explosion happened. Or maybe they were waiting for him in the lobby—it’s been so long I can’t remember for certain. Anyway, Benbasset had just been brought in—or more accurately what was left of him had. His injuries were … extreme. He was behind one of the partitions, and as soon as I learned who he was I went to him immediately.”

Poe stopped for a moment to take a deep breath.

“I looked at what was left of him and thought surely he was dead. He had to be, right to the glazed eyes. But then the eyes blinked. His lips moved. He was conscious, damn it. Don’t ask me how. Medically I can’t account for it, but there he was, trying to talk. I lowered my head so that my ear was next to his mouth, and I heard him speak. The words bubbled up inside him, but they emerged clear enough: ‘Save me.’ ”

“And did you?”

“I tried. I’ll spare you the technical details. There wasn’t much left to work with, but with the help of machines I stabilized him. I tried to tell the two men how futile it was, how cruel it would be to prolong his pain when there was no chance of survival. But they were adamant. Obviously Benbasset had issued his orders to them as well. I’ve never seen such loyalty.”

“It must have taken hours,” Kimberlain said, “and required an entire surgical team.”

“Right on both counts. We never could have spared it under the circumstances, but the men fixed things. I never asked how. I didn’t want to know. In all the chaos, I suppose anything was possible. After I failed to persuade them against the surgery, one of them handed me a death certificate that had already been filled out for Benbasset. All I had to do was sign it, perform the operation, and I would be taken care of. I didn’t really understand what that last phrase meant, so I stood my ground and refused to falsify a document.”

The breaths were coming harder now.

“They pulled out a piece of paper with an address on it, the address of my current office. They said it and the practice of the man then occupying it would be mine if I signed. Beneath the note was a folded check. The amount was staggering. There it was, my dream placed within reach, and I grabbed for it because it didn’t seem to make a difference. There was no way Benbasset could survive even the night. I wouldn’t really be lying about anything except the time of death.”

Now Poe’s breathing slowed.

“After the surgery I went back downstairs and worked for hours more on the incomings. It was well after dark when I returned to Benbasset’s room. He was gone without leaving a trace. It was as if he had never been there. No life-support machines. Fresh sheets on the bed. Nobody knew anything. I asked them. I confronted a few of the nurses who’d been on the surgical team. They looked at me like I was crazy, pretended they didn’t know what I was talking about. That’s what I meant when I said I’d lost Benbasset. Literally. I tried to tell myself he died after the surgery while I was downstairs. But then why would the nurses be covering up? Then I realized he
did
die. The death certificate with my signature was already filed.”

Kimberlain assembled the facts in his mind. He looked for openings, holes in the story he had just been told. “Thirty-seven DOAs were recorded that day, but only thirty-six bodies were claimed,” he noted.

“And I’m sure if you check the log at St. Vincent’s, a similar anomaly will show up in the form of a body that vanished before the family could claim it.”

“Then substituted for Benbasset’s …”

“It wouldn’t be hard,” Poe said, “once they found a corpse with reasonably similar wounds. So long as the facial features were obliterated, no one would know the difference.”

“You’re telling me Benbasset survived. That’s what all this comes down to.”

“He survived that day, yes, but he couldn’t have held out much longer. Physically it wasn’t possible. There just wasn’t enough of him functioning to support life. Both his legs were crushed. One of his arms was gone, and the other was close to it. The right side of his neck was … Well, you get the idea.”

“Yes,” said the Ferryman, “I think I do.”

Kimberlain considered it all in the time it took the elevator to arrive and then descend back to the lobby of Poe’s building. Jason Benbasset had survived the attack that claimed his family through sheer force of will, a will that would have formed a purpose for him in survival even then. Those who advanced the technology of the military would have to be punished for perpetuating the world that had destroyed him. On that level his desire for vengeance would be intensely personal, as if Lime, Lisa Eiseman, and the others had somehow rigged the bomb at the Marriott Marquis.

Benbasset’s pattern of thinking was linear, predictable in the same ways as that of the killers he had stalked previously. Peet, Quail, and the others had created a purpose for their actions until the actions came to justify themselves. His strike on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade would have evolved with the actualization of his own power. A symmetrical and logical progression culminating in a twisted but fitting end. The difference between the madman and the sane one is that the madman can rationalize anything he wants to do and as a result can do far more.

The elevator doors slid open, and Kimberlain emerged into the lobby. If all this was going to be stopped, the search for Benbasset had to begin as soon as possible. The possibilities would be analyzed, reduced, investigated. A good start would lead ultimately to a satisfactory finish.

The doorman was holding the door open for him, and Kimberlain noticed that he was a different man from the one he had passed not even an hour ago. He was already lunging for the man when several others sprang forward from the lobby’s recesses and alcoves. His gun was drawn now, but the doorman managed to lock it against his body as the figures converged upon him. The Ferryman felt the sting of something in his shoulder and then the long fall into darkness.

In a month long past …

The Mind had stirred after fighting for rest. Long ago, in the first life, its rest would have been called sleep, but the rest no longer felt like sleep—it felt more like sliding into a daydream that runs on and on. Often, too often, the daydream had presented surreal visions of what had been, as if to taunt the Mind with memories of what was now so far removed as to seem never to have been. In the memories there was still the body, so incomplete, so utterly helpless against the shapeless wrath of man.

But the Mind wasn’t helpless.

Of the moment when the first life gave way to the second, there was virtually no recollection—just an instant of blinding heat and somewhere deep the realization of a transition as intense in form as it was in meaning. From the body’s perishing, the Mind was born. Since it could not feel, it feared nothing. It was immortal, invincible, in search only of purpose. Often, though not often enough at first, the Mind grasped its reason for being from the dreamlike state it found itself drifting into.

There had to be retribution. What else could account for its very existence? In the daydreams it could see those who had destroyed the first life and brought the pain. But not its own pain. Something far beyond the body had been lost, something infinitely more precious. The Mind saw the faces and strove to touch them. It could not feel and yet it felt pain, and the only thoughts that eased the pain were of retribution. The makers of death would be vanquished, one at a time, in ways fitting the establishment of the madness they perpetuated. Not one would be spared. Not one.

For a brief time these thoughts served the Mind well. Yet the vastness of the retribution that was required soon mirrored that of the pain the Mind could not force from its being. It could not feel and yet it felt. A paradox. The memories conjured up the faces again and again, and perhaps it was the faces that at last showed the Mind how to alleviate the pain.

Where the pain had begun lay the means to vanquish it forever.

Yes
!

Another instant of blinding, terrible heat and the Mind would be soothed. Strange how everything had become so clear so quickly. With the craving for more had come more. Desire and attainment were merely different sides of the same coin.

The Mind’s rage eased. It rested. For a time.

Because passion was fleeting. The coin had a third side in which satisfaction was again denied. More, always more. Each time one vision began to crystallize to soothe it, another began to take form, and the pain would flame anew, different yet the same. Pain from the first life that thrived on beyond the world the Mind had constructed for itself. Thus, the answer. It had escaped the first life, but the first life continued. Another paradox.

And with that the Mind had begun to ponder on the ways to resolve it.

Chapter 24

HE WASN’T SURE
what awakened him—not a sound so much as a motion, or a sudden change in it. He awoke to the awareness of figures around him, realizing it just too late to keep his alertness secret from his captors.

Those around him tensed and shifted uneasily.

All the men were seated, Kimberlain noticed, and some had twisted themselves around at strange angles in order to face him. This was a small jet, a twelve-passenger craft, with only four guards and himself presently seated. The motion that had stirred him had been that of the wheels locking down as they approached some airport in the night.

His head throbbed badly. He wasn’t sure how long he had been out, but the effects indicated somewhere between six and eight hours, allowing ample time to fly to any number of places. But the darkness beyond the window was the late-night kind, which meant that perhaps he had been brought to Europe; the time change would account for the degree of darkness.

He didn’t have to move much to find the tight wire binding him to the seat’s arms. The slightest tug brought a grimace of pain to his face. Whoever these people were, they were experienced. All the rope in the world isn’t as effective as well-placed wire across the wrists. If he pulled too strongly he’d run the risk of severing his own arteries. The guards would be needed for when the time came to remove these bonds—on the fast-approaching ground, perhaps.

The small jet’s tires grazed the runway, and Kimberlain felt himself bounce slightly in his chair. He tensed, squeezing his hands tight to the arms to keep the wire from digging in, but his captors knew how to leave just the right amount of slack.

With the squeal of brakes in his ears, he looked around from one set of cold eyes to the next. The men’s role had simply been to deliver him here from New York. Someone else would undoubtedly be waiting outside the plane. But not the Hashi, or he’d already be dead. Who then?

The small jet ground to a halt, and already his captors were positioning themselves strategically throughout the cabin to thwart any possible escape maneuver on his part. And if all else failed there would always be the wire laced to his wrists, with the other ends held by men who could disable him instantly if they needed to.

Wordlessly a pair of men beckoned him to rise after they disconnected the wire from the armrests; as Kimberlain had expected, each held one of the now free ends, almost as if they were leashes. Kimberlain rose, secure only in the notion that he would have been dead already if that was the ultimate plan for his capture. All he needed was time. If they were bent on keeping him alive, then the chances of escape were all the greater.

They were leading him toward the jet’s exit door now. Another of his captors pushed it open to allow a flood of damp cold air to pierce the cabin’s warmth. As he reached the door, one of the men holding the wire was starting down the steps while the other lagged a few paces behind Kimberlain. Arms thus forced into a spread, the Ferryman began to descend.

The throaty sounds of jets taxiing and taking off drowned out all others. A blanket of fog was draped over the scene, but a blanket not thick enough to obscure the lights in the back and foreground. This was London’s Heathrow Airport. They had taxied to a distant runway closed down by the fog. The damp mist chilled Kimberlain to the bone: any speed would be hard to summon, and he would need all he could muster when the time came. The procession moved onward, the pair of men attached to him by wires on either side and another pair keeping a steady distance to the rear. They knew who he was. They had been warned.

Twenty yards later, Kimberlain made out another series of figures through the mist on a runway standing near a similarly small jet. He counted five, but the mist was thickening and could have affected his vision. Drawing closer, he saw his original count to be correct, along with something else.

In the center of the group stood a woman dressed in slacks and a brown leather jacket. She was barely discernible through the thickening mist, which was starting to swallow the area, but Kimberlain could nonetheless see that her hair was blond and knew somehow that it was the woman from Boston, the woman who had taken Mendelson’s dying message from him. Brutish-looking men flanked her at every angle—more deterrents against his trying anything.

Kimberlain’s captors stopped when only a single macadam strip separated them from the group. The blonde advanced a few steps. His eyes were drawn from her to the brutish-looking men. Something about the way they held themselves was wrong, the way they seemed to be trading glances with one another. The Ferryman realized the truth an instant before they broke into a spread, but the instant was long enough to take him into a dive beneath the first barrage of their gunfire, ignoring the pain from the wires tightening across his wrists. The roar of a jet hurtling into takeoff swallowed the blasts, so all that remained were orange flashes from the bores and the crumbling bodies of his two captors.