The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (47 page)

But Jones twisted, and Mac saw the steel of his rifle barrel coming around. Mac fired a burst from the M-16 he had lifted from inside the commandeered Snowcat, knowing that Jones would never allow himself to be taken prisoner. The body of his captor was tossed backward and twitched toward death as the snow gathered in what would become his tomb.

Epilgoue

“JUST TELL ME WHAT
I’m supposed to do,” Lisa Eiseman said to Kimberlain outside the Benbasset Towers in midtown Manhattan Friday morning.

“Wait in the car right here,” he told her. “If I haven’t come out within ninety minutes, call Senator Brooks at the number I gave you and give him the message.”

“About Jason Benbasset being … inside.”

“He’ll understand,” Kimberlain said and started to step out of the car.

Lisa’s hand gently restrained him. “You could call Brooks now. You don’t have to go up there alone.”

“Yes, I do.”

And with that the Ferryman was heading for the entrance to the huge office building. He had realized the truth the night before, an anomaly that made itself known out of the darkness.
We searched all sixty-three floors of the Benbasset Towers and didn’t find a thing
, Zeus had assured him. But his eyes showed him something else as he thought he remembered it: the Benbasset Towers had sixty-
four
floors. The obscure fact had turned up somewhere in his research into Benbasset himself. Somewhere along the line a floor had been lost … or redirected.

New York City had survived Thanksgiving virtually intact. Miraculously, the Macy’s parade had finished without incident, the only disruptions occurring at the various subway stations bordering the route as authorities scrambled to bar entry at all points of access. Earlier, the stalled cars had all been evacuated in time to avoid the flood of water which spared no station running the IRT line through Manhattan and Brooklyn. But only fortune was to blame for avoiding what would still have been a disaster of awful proportions. The blast beneath the East River created such shock waves that the last two subway tunnels on the Manhattan side collapsed, in effect creating a massive dam which greatly reduced the flow of water under the city. Otherwise streets would have collapsed, perhaps even the skyscrapers resting atop them. The tunnels had been further sealed overnight, and the system was being flushed of water even now. It would be weeks, months probably, before the subways were running at relative normalcy again. The disruption of service was a crisis in its own right, but nothing when compared to what might have been.

As for Outpost 10, an airlift was risked at the first break in the storm, the troops arriving to find cleanup operations already underway at the station.

“Hell of a battle went on down there,” Senator Brooks had told Kimberlain. “The facts are still sketchy, but it’s obvious a skeleton force at the outpost was able to fight off the assault by forces from the hijacked submarine, which, by the way, has been recovered unharmed.”

“Anything about a woman?” Kimberlain posed hesitantly.

“Plenty. Apparently a woman was the spearhead behind the whole defense setup, but she got herself wounded in the final shootout.”

“Wounded?”

“This is where it gets strange. As soon as the storm broke, they whisked her to McMurdo and from there to Christchurch, where they pulled a few bullets out of her. They kept her in intensive care overnight and put her in a private room when she seemed to be recovering. Then when they returned a bit later to check on her, they found her gone. She had completely disappeared.” The senator paused. “You don’t seem surprised.”

Kimberlain thought back to Danielle’s fierce resolve in fighting the Hashi. This failure wouldn’t destroy them, but it would severely weaken them, perhaps enough for the Knights of St. John to destroy their murderous society at last. With Brother Valette’s murder, Danielle would take it upon herself to reorganize the Knights with that goal in mind.

“She had unfinished business,” he told Brooks at last.

And so did Kimberlain. He gazed one more time at Lisa and entered the building. He didn’t have to bring her; he didn’t have to bring anyone. In truth he wanted an excuse to see Lisa, to work out in his own mind what was coming for him next and whether or not she would be a part of it. Every time he closed his eyes to think of her, though, a picture of Danielle flashed through his mind. The Ferryman was wise enough to understand why. Danielle was gone from his life, so there was no harm in thinking of her. His feelings for Lisa, on the other hand, had to be faced directly, making them infinitely less appealing.

The river now flowing beneath the city had subsequently caused a massive power failure by shorting out thousands of underground cables. The governor had declared a state of emergency, and Manhattan was basically shut down this Friday, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Benbasset Towers was eerie in its desolation, but Kimberlain knew the front door would be open, just as he knew the elevators would be functioning.

The upper elevator bank deposited him in the dead quiet of the sixty-third floor, and twenty minutes later Kimberlain found the private elevator that rose up a single last flight. It was operated by key, and he used one of Captain Seven’s picks to activate it. The elevator shot upward and stopped, opening into a long corridor that led directly forward.

The Ferryman simply followed it along, aware of an antiseptic hospital-like smell permeating the air. He could sense life somewhere on this floor but not life as he had ever felt it before. At last he reached a pair of sliding white doors which opened automatically when he approached them. The alcohol smell within stung his nose. The room was spacious but stark, its only ornament a shiny black curtain forming a separate room of sorts against the far wall.

Beep … beep … beep …

That sound reached him along with a breathing that emerged in rasps and wisps, each one a struggle.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Kimberlain,” a voice said through a speaker, and Kimberlain froze, pistol in hand an instant later. “You have no need for that here, Ferryman,” the voice continued. “I’ve dismissed my keepers. Left myself alone to wait for you, as I’m sure you suspected I would.”

Kimberlain reached the curtain and saw the video camera that had allowed the man residing behind it to view his approach.

“I’ve looked forward to this, Ferryman,” the voice resumed. “I really have. You have no idea how much. We have much to discuss. Please, come in.”

And hesitating only slightly, Kimberlain found the break in the curtain and stepped into the private world of Jason Benbasset.

The large number of machines grabbed his attention first, then the shape of a figure lying in the bed enclosed by them. Lights blinked, and squiggly electronic lines danced across a quartet of screens.

“This has been my home since my death, Ferryman,” Jason Benbasset said and followed the words with the twisted semblance of a laugh. “Not a bad resting place, I suppose.”

Kimberlain started to approach the bed but stopped in his tracks. He was close enough to see the figure partially covered by a dark blue sheet, and the sight was enough to assure him he didn’t want to move closer. What remained of Benbasset was little more than a lump. Even with the sheet Kimberlain could tell both his legs were gone, one severed at the hip, the other just beyond the thigh. His left arm was a memory, and his right descended only as far as the elbow. One side of his neck and throat was covered in thick bandages, the edges of which revealed thick, raw scar tissue. Benbasset’s exposed face, though, was almost normal-looking in spite of its paleness. He looked like a freshly made-up corpse, his features blank to the point of seeming part of a snapshot, right to the dark wisps of hair combed neatly in place. The only trace of motion came from the blinking of his eyes.

“There’s no pain, Ferryman,” the rasp from within the shell said. “In fact, I feel nothing at all, except in my thoughts. I should have died three years ago, but something kept me alive and kept me going, and I did not bother to question what. Last night, when my failure was made known to me, I gave up the will that had kept me breathing through all these months. But, alas, out of habit I couldn’t let myself perish. I knew you would come here, and perhaps that is why I was not yet ready to accept my passing. Please, come closer.”

The raspy voice spoke gently, calmly. Kimberlain approached to where Benbasset could see him.

“You of all people cannot tell me I was wrong in my aims. It was an evil and coarse world I sought to punish for its acts. War has raged over religion, land, politics, money for twenty centuries and more. The names change, the causes too, but always people die for reasons they either can’t or won’t understand. Tell me you can’t see that.”

Kimberlain said nothing.

“Fanatics drive truckloads of explosives into buildings, taking their own lives along with a thousand others. What does it prove? What does it show us? Life is too often defined in terms of death. The fanatics of the world can justify anything in life, because true life begins in their minds only when death starts. Such an empty justification … Yet it typifies all of them, even those of this very country. Are we any better than the rest of them? We think ourselves to be and thus we are not.”

Benbasset’s lung machine was working more quickly with each word, struggling to give him the breath he needed to keep speaking. Ultimately it fell behind, and he gasped for air, wheezing uncontrollably. Kimberlain came right up to the bed, as if there was something he could do. The medicinal smells flooded his nostrils, almost dazing him.

Beep … beep … beep …

“I was right to do what I did, was I not?” Benbasset managed. “I was right because the world took my family from me along with my life. I tried to help that world, and this was my payment. Surely you understand that I had to have my vengeance!”

“No,” Kimberlain said suddenly, a chord in him struck, “because to achieve it you had to employ the very type of group you claim to loath. You hired the Hashi, Mr. Benbasset, cold-blooded assassins like none the world has ever known. And in doing so you became what you hated most.” He paused. “The Hashi and others like them define the world in terms of its ugliness. The Caretakers were formed to rid the world of this, or at least keep it from America, but in the process we had to become what we were resolved to terminate. It’s the same for you. You blame the world, yet people are basically helpless against the ugliness. Become part of it or hope it steers clear of you—there’s no convenient third alternative.”

“There was for you, Ferryman. The paybacks. You bridged the gap.”

Kimberlain shook his head. “I
was
the gap, Mr. Benbasset. I was, am, merely a crevice that some people who’ve been wronged by the ugliness slide into. I give them a boost back up. I try to keep them from becoming a part of what nearly destroyed them.”

“All the more reason for what
I
tried to do,” the shape on the bed persisted between lips that barely moved, air drawn deep from within to force the syllables out as best he could.

“You can’t destroy the ugliness if doing so means you have to join it first.”

“It’s not like that. I didn’t employ the Hashi, I
used
them. It was all undertaken in return for my providing them with coordinates of safe zones from the coming cataclysm. What I didn’t tell them was that those coordinates would have assured their destruction after the cataclysm. You see, I agree with you, Ferryman. Quintanna and his people would have begun the ugliness all over again. I could never have allowed that.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Kimberlain told him, “because it wasn’t just the ugliness you tried to eliminate, it was everything. You blamed the world because you couldn’t change it, and you blamed yourself for what happened to your family. But you couldn’t hurt yourself any more than you’d been hurt already, so you turned your anger on the world.”

“Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing. You
have
done the same thing.”

“I would have gone about it in a far different, more personal way. I would have gone after those who planted the bomb and maybe the ones who ordered it. I don’t expect to be able to destroy all of the ugliness. Getting rid of some of it is enough.”

Benbasset grew silent, and the sounds of his breathing machine emerged like a series of disappointed sighs.

“I had hoped you would understand,” he said with as much sadness as he could manage.

“No, you hoped I would approve. That’s up to God.”

Beep … beep … beep …

“I knew you would be coming,” Benbasset said again. “I needed you to come because I require a … payback. Life punished me first with the attack that left me as I am and now has stripped me of purpose. Life is the greatest enemy all of us must face, Ferryman, and I have faced it twice only to lose both times. My payback is to deny it a third victory. I have lingered and labored against my own mortality, and when at last I am ready to relent I cannot—life’s final little joke.” Benbasset’s eyes sought Kimberlain’s out and held them. “The plugs, Ferryman, pull them all. Strange, isn’t it, that despite all I’ve accomplished I haven’t even the power to end my own life.”

Kimberlain stood quietly and gazed at Benbasset. Then he nodded and reached for the first switch.

Beep … beep … be
—

“I was getting ready to call Brooks,” Lisa told Kimberlain as a blast of windy air entered the car with him. A cold front was swooping in, and temperatures were already plummeting.

“Not necessary now,” he told her.

“Was he up there, as you thought?” she asked.

Kimberlain’s stare turned upward to the tower’s top. “He was up there. Not as I thought.”

“Oh?”

“He was dead.”

“Really?”

“For three years now.”

“We’ve got to talk, Jared,” Lisa said before Kimberlain started the engine. She continued speaking quickly so that he couldn’t interrupt. “I know you’ve been thinking that I don’t fit in your world. I could feel you trying to make up your mind about me every time you looked at me. You don’t want to be dependent on anyone, and you’re going to tell me it’s all for my own good.”