The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (33 page)

And Zeus felt the scent that was near death itself grow strong enough to touch.

Chapter 29

“SOMETHING’S WRONG,” KIMBERLAIN
said, foot squeezing the brake and bringing the car to a halt at the edge of Zeus’s driveway.

He had followed Danielle’s instructions precisely, leaving the hotel just after six to begin the fourteen-hour journey that would return him to the States to face the end of a plot he now realized threatened the entire world. A ferry to the Maltese island of Gozo was the first order of business, followed by a private plane to Sicily, where he just managed to catch a flight to London’s Heathrow that would connect with another bound for Dulles Airport. Danielle had left plenty of cash with her instructions, along with a perfectly forged passport bearing his likeness.

Upon arriving at Dulles, he had rented a car and driven straight up to the safe house where Zeus had stowed Peet and Lisa Eiseman, relieved to find them okay, with only the ebb and flow of the currents for company. They were also awake, which meant little delay was required before the three of them set out for Zeus’s. Dawn was no more than an hour away on what, for the Ferryman, had become a night without end.

Zeus’s home was tucked in the woods off the George Washington Parkway, far enough from the road so the lights and sounds were barely perceptible. The house itself could be glimpsed only in late fall and winter when the natural camouflage formed by the leaves was lifted.

“Ferryman?” Peet said from the seat next to him.

Kimberlain’s hands tightened across the wheel. “It’s the lights. Only the outside ones are on.”

“Zeus is blind, you said.”

“But his bodyguards aren’t, and there’s something about those outside lights …”

“We’d better check,” Peet said, a huge hand moving to the latch on the passenger side.

Kimberlain turned around to Lisa in the backseat. “You stay here.”

“Wrong, Jared. After what you guys have just said, the last thing I want to be is alone. I’ll take my chances between the two of you.”

Kimberlain nodded and wondered why he had bothered with the suggestion. Seeing her alive and well at the safe house had made everything feel right again for a brief time. Then the truth of the situation flooded quickly back, along with a nagging uneasiness. He found himself comparing her to Danielle, the love she could give him versus the love of another he could never have. He felt distant from Lisa, separate. What they had shared together at the cabin was only a memory.

Together the three of them climbed out of the car after Kimberlain had unscrewed the dome light to mask their exit. He had cut his headlights off well back on the approach road as a precaution he prayed was unnecessary. There were enough trees and brush around to hide their moving shapes in the darkness, and they left the car doors open so no distinctive clicks would betray their presence. They clung to the darkness as they approached the big house, Zeus’s last testament to the power he once wielded and remained determined to again. With Peet in the lead, they squeezed up against the house’s frame, moving from the side to the front, then lunged quickly onto the porch, with the front door just a grasp away. Kimberlain eased Lisa behind him as Peet tested the knob.

“It’s open,” he reported, and the Ferryman knew then that it was going to be bad.

They passed inside, with Peet still in the lead and Lisa silently bringing up the rear. Their eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness broken only by the spill of the moon through the windows, and they found themselves in a spacious entry foyer. A set of double doors was open down the corridor and to the right—the living room or library perhaps, or even Zeus’s study. They started toward it.

The sole working floodlights they had noticed outside must have spent most of their spill in this direction, because snakes of light tracing the outlines of the windows were reflected on the hardwood floor as they drew closer. Kimberlain had moved to the front, and now he looked into the room while staying in the hallway. He gazed past Peet at Lisa. “Stay here.”

“I want to—”

“I said stay here! Don’t look in. Do you hear me? Don’t look in!”

He entered just ahead of Peet, the two of them taking in the scene to the music of trees and bushes whistling in the wind just beyond the windows.

The room was a shambles, furniture spilled and shattered, papers strewn about and still blowing in the wind coming through a number of shattered panes. The bodies lay separate from each other, two large ones framing a much smaller one in the middle, about ten feet from the others. The bodyguards had done their best to defend Zeus all right, done it by the book as well. But it hadn’t been enough.

The first bodyguard’s corpse was lying facedown, and Peet turned it over. Its entire front was drenched in blood; it was impossible to tell what weapon had caused whatever wounds there were. The giant gazed closer, intrigued by something.

“He was here,” Peet said softly.

“Who was?”

“Quail.”

“A feeling, Peet?”

“More than a feeling this time, Ferryman,” the giant said, angling the body so its chest was caught by the spill of light.

Kimberlain saw the chest, or rather what was left of it. The ribs and bones over the heart had been shattered and splintered out. He wondered if the heart itself still lay inside. With all the blood and the darkness, it was impossible to tell.

It was Quail all right, recognizable by the one trademark he had occasionally allowed himself. That the Dutchman would leave his trademark here could mean only one thing: He wanted whoever found the bodies to know it was him. He wanted Kimberlain to know.

They found Zeus’s body next, half on its side, with its head twisted obscenely around. The sightless eyes bulged open, locked in their death stare. Kimberlain knelt alongside the old man’s body and thought strangely how this was the first time he had ever seen Zeus up close without his ever-present sunglasses.

Peet inspected the body of the second bodyguard, then eased himself around the room, stopping regularly.

“The guards did their best,” he explained, “but they didn’t know what they were up against. Bullet marks dot the walls in a dozen places. Quail was taunting them. The second guard’s arm was shattered and yanked out of its socket. Quail must have let that man get close to him.”

“The lights,” Kimberlain realized.

“What about them?”

“Floodlights shouldn’t be pointing in. He moved them, damn it; he moved them before he left. He wanted to make sure we found his work.”

Peet tensed. “I’d have felt him if he were still around.”

“But he was here, and not very long ago either.”

For the first time since the
Rhode Island
was taken, Mac wanted Jones to appear in his quarters. It had been a day since the madman had yanked up his sleeve to reveal the mark of a ship he had once captained for the navy:
Thresher
.

The U.S. nuclear sub
Thresher
, lost undersea twenty-five years ago, with all its crew members presumed dead. Its captain was a man whose name Mac couldn’t recall but whose face he had somehow held in his memory. Jones’s face.

“But we never were on board,” Jones had told him, his own eyes never leaving the tattoo. “No, that’s not quite true. We were placed on board just long enough for everyone to see us steam out to sea. We were picked up a day into our patrol, two hundred and fifty miles off the coast of New England, where the story was we went down.”

“I … I don’t understand.”

“Neither did we. All except me, of course, because I was the captain. Orders, always orders. A strong element in the Navy believed robotics was the way to go with subs. Perfect control that way, with computers running everything. It was to be a brief mission.” He took a deep breath. “But something went wrong on her robot patrol. Her missile systems snapped on close to Soviet waters. The story was a Russian jamming device had rescrambled our signals for the computers to interpret. The ship went to countdown.”

“My God …”

“Of course we couldn’t let it get that far, so the brass panicked and shut all systems down, every one. Parts of the story began to leak out, and to cover their asses the Navy devised the cover that a power failure had sunk the
Thresher
with all crew members on board. Except, of course, we weren’t on board. We were still alive, but we couldn’t be permitted to ‘live,’ could we?, because there’d be too much explaining to do. We became prisoners, Commander. Oh, we ate well and had a whole isolated base to ourselves, but we were prisoners, all right, and it didn’t take us long to figure out it was going to become a permanent condition. The Navy people told us to just give them time. They promised resettlement, different identities, with our families intact. We tried to be patient. After six months it got hard. A few of us tried to escape. I made it.”

Mac looked at him from across the desk. Jones’s forearm was throbbing, the letters of his tattoo lengthening with each pulse.

“They took my family, Commander,” he continued. “The message was plain. If I talked, they’d be killed. I didn’t talk; I focused instead on finding them. I followed a trail. Lots of cities, lots of jobs. It was about six years ago when I finally got … lucky.” Jones seemed near tears. “My wife had remarried. My kids were teenagers and didn’t even know I was still alive. Maybe I wasn’t. And the worst of it all was that the government had set everything up. My family was moved to ease the pain of grief and reduce the onslaught of reporters. Everything was so neat and clean. What choice did I have? I kept wandering.”

“But you’re here now.”

“Because somebody found me. I still don’t know how, and I didn’t understand why at first. I’d been working on the docks in San Francisco, waiting for a first mate’s position to open up on a merchant vessel bound for the Orient. There was a bar we all spent our nights in, and maybe there were a few of them where I said more than I should have. The next time I was alone a man approached me. We got to talking. I drank. He didn’t. The man said he had a job for me, said just enough to raise my interest. A few nights later I met another man in the backseat of a limousine, a dark man with a face that could freeze you. He knew my whole story, goddamn it. Somehow he knew everything. I could barely stand to hear him tell it. But in the end he told me it wasn’t finished. He told me there was one more chapter to write.” Jones’s eyes held Mac’s. “He arranged for me to learn how to run your ship, Mac, and he gave me the means to get back at the bastards who had stolen my life away. I owe them this much. I owe them more.”

“What about your crew?”

“The dark man’s people. But I supervised their training, all six months of it. I’m not really sure how much they know. I’m not sure if they know what we’re going to do.”

Fear slid down Mac’s spine. “What exactly
are
we going to do?”

“We’re going to change the world, Commander, and you’re going to help us.”

It was clearer than ever to Mac that Jones was mad, but his madness was singular in purpose, making him doubly dangerous. Mac was the only one who could stop him, stop this bizarre plot of revenge. They had searched his quarters up and down for possible weapons but had missed the razor-sharp Sandvik knife he kept taped to the underside of one of his drawers. Jones was the key. The plot lived or died with him.

So there was no choice. Mac had to use the Sandvik blade on Jones the next time he stepped through the door alone. The guards left in the corridor would almost certainly kill him, yet this strategy seemed to hold the best chance for his family. If Jones really was going to use the
Rhode Island
to destroy the world, then bargaining for their lives would be useless anyway.

Jones was in charge, and Mac was the only one who could enable the missiles that were needed to complete the plan. With both dead, the intruder crew might as well abandon ship or head for home.

Mac’s eyes locked again on the door latch, willing it to turn, with the Sandvik blade within easy reach.

Quintanna stood in his accustomed spot before the black curtain, listening to the raspy sleep of the man within. The news of the blind man’s murder, and thus the Ferryman’s isolation, could wait until later. Quintanna found himself glad to be able to finally relay some good news. The string of recent failures culminating in the events in London and Malta had proven both embarrassing and unsettling. Kimberlain was much better than he had imagined, but alone even the Ferryman would be unable to prevent the plan from proceeding.

And he was alone now.

Quintanna reflected on what it all meant, on how far he had brought the Hashi he had been chosen to lead more than a decade back. Financial compensation had taken the place of ideals as motivator long before that, so long that the original purposes of their existence seemed lost and forgotten. But Quintanna had never forgotten. At night in his sleep or after taking deep drags from his hashish pipe, the spirit of the Hashi founder, Hassan ibn al-Sabbah, appeared before him to show him the way. And when he had first been summoned by the man behind the curtain, Quintanna was certain it was the work of al-Sabbah himself.

Tomorrow the man would provide Quintanna with locations deemed to be the safest from the coming cataclysm. Stockpiled equipment and men would be transported to these places, and when the new world settled, the advantage of organization and supplies would translate into power. Quintanna would take his destined place at the forefront of a great marauding army, just as al-Sabbah had led the Hashi forces at the spearhead of the Crusades. Those in their path would join as subjects or face destruction. With each day more land and territory would fall to the Hashi, until all of the new world forged out of the corpse of the old belonged to them.

The man behind the curtain had labeled him a scavenger. But a scavenger lives off the dead with no thought of life or the living, moving from one corpse to the next. Quintanna and his Hashi weren’t fighting over the dead: they were preparing to overtake those left
among
the living. For nearly a thousand years their destiny had lingered unfulfilled. But a new series of Crusades was about to begin. And this time they would emerge victorious.