“Love him the same way you are loved,” he said.
She looked at Petrus and he held her gaze for a long time. His brow lifted mischievously. “I knew a priest who died for a village once. He was crucified. Would you like to feel the love he felt, Tanya?”
Feel love? The silky voice of B. J. Thomas crooned through her ear,
Hooked on a feeling.
“Yes,” she said.
Petrus smiled and closed his eyes.
Tanya looked away. Abdullah still sat across the way, staring at them. The birds still called in the afternoon heat. A warm breeze swept over her—a breeze laced heavily with the odor of sweet gardenia flowers. Like the gardenias around Helen’s house. The ones from Bosnia.
Tanya’s heart hammered. She felt the scent caress her nostrils and then sink into her lungs. Heat surged through her bones, like an electric shock.
She gasped and fell back to the grass.
The euphoria followed almost immediately, swallowing her whole. An ecstasy unlike any she had ever felt. As if her nerves had been injected with this drug—God’s love flowing through her.
But it wasn’t simply her nerves or her bones or her flesh. It was her heart. No, not her heart, because her heart was just flesh and it was more than a drug that wrapped itself around flesh.
It was her soul. That thing in her chest that had long ago taken to hiding in her bowels. Her soul was doing backflips. It was leaping and twirling and screaming with pleasure.
She threw her arms wide on the grass and laughed out loud, thoroughly intoxicated by the love. She felt hot tears run down her cheek as if a tap had been turned on. But they were tears of ecstasy. She would give her life to swim in a lake of these tears.
In that moment she wanted to explode. She wanted to find a lost orphan and hug him tight for a whole day. She wanted to take her tears and sprinkle them on the world. She wanted to give. Give everything so that someone else might have this feeling. It was that kind of love.
Then an image of a cross stuttered through her skull and she caught her breath. Her arms were still spread wide in laughter, but her chest had frozen. A man bled on the towering wooden beams. It was a priest. No, it was Christ! It was God. He was loving. All of this came from him. These tears of joy, this euphoria that had raged through her bones, her soul doing backflips—all because of his death on those beams.
The image burned into her mind like a red-hot branding iron.
And then it was gone.
Tanya lay prostrate, shaking in sobs. She wept because for the first time in memory everything was starting to clear. The purpose of life lay before her, crystal and breathtakingly beautiful. It all made sense. It not only made sense; it made lovely sense. And she was reduced to this . . . this blubbering lump in the face of it all.
Yes, something terrible had happened. But God was taking care of that. It wasn’t her concern now. What mattered now was that she had been loved. That she was loved.
That she had been called to love.
Shannon, oh Shannon!
How her heart ached for him. It was as though this breath flowing through her body had given her a transfusion of love. Love for Shannon.
Tanya lay on her back and stared past tears at the sun. She was barely aware that Father Petrus was crying softly beside her. The jungle slept in the noon heat. To think that history lay cradled in the bosom of a young woman lost here in the deepest of jungles while the rest of the world went mad seemed absurd. High above, a macaw flapped lazily through the blue sky. It showed no concern for the humans by the river. Maybe it didn’t even see them.
Tanya closed her eyes, once again consumed with an image of the tall, muscular man who had dragged her here. Shannon Richterson.
Father, I will do as you will. I will do anything. I will love him. Please bring him back to me.
Will you die for him, Tanya?
Tanya heard a rustle and opened her eyes just in time to see Abdullah grinning, swinging his gun down. Its butt struck her head and her world exploded with stars and then went black.
BY THE time David Lunow followed his superiors into the final transport out of Miami International, less than three hours remained until the Brotherhood’s twenty-four hours expired. And Bird’s men had found nothing.
The Bell helicopter rose slowly and then skimmed north over deserted streets. Stragglers could be seen wandering the main streets of the downtown districts and farther north the highways were clogged, effectively shutting down any retreat for the millions of stranded motorists. One thing became crystal clear as the helicopter wound its way out of danger’s way: If another bomb did detonate inland, a lot of U.S. citizens would die despite the evacuation. A million. Maybe more. And if the bomb went off in another city, then many more.
David turned to Ingersol and noted that the man had been watching him with a hazed stare. “If this thing goes, you’re toast; you know that, don’t you?”
For the first time in many days, Ingersol did not respond.
“In fact, regardless of what happens, you’re toast.”
Still no response.
“If you would have listened to me a week ago, we might not have had the first blast and we probably wouldn’t be running for cover now. Someone’s gonna take the fall.”
When he received no response to his third charge, David turned back to the window.
“God help us,” he mumbled. “God help us all.”
OF THE nearly three hundred million people living in the United States of America, the only ones
not
awake and watching the real-time satellite picture of southern Florida were those fleeing southern Florida.
It was an event that shut down the world. The cities near Miami had been deserted, the hospitals had been evacuated, and the air space had been cleared. It was a looter’s paradise down there and nobody cared. Not even the looters. They were too busy trucking north.
The talking heads hosted an endless lineup of experts who stammered their way through hours of speculation. In the end, nobody looked good; nobody looked bad. They all pretty much looked desperate.
Someone in the White House had leaked the twenty-four-hour detail and every station now had a clock on-screen, ticking down the time from the last blast. Give or take a few seconds, the clocks now read one hour, thirty-eight minutes.
John Boy sat eating a sandwich in his home in Shady Side, watching NBC’s coverage of the nation’s meltdown, shaking his head. All seaports had been closed, but not before he’d lowered anchor in the bay. The terrorists had finally done it.
John Boy’s boat
, Angel of the Sea,
sat in silent waters, and if anybody had been listening with a highly specialized listening device, they might have heard the faint electronic ticking in the bowels of her hull. But nobody was listening to
Angel of the Sea
. Nobody was even thinking of her.
Except Abdullah, of course.
And Jamal.
LOST IN the madness, barely aware of himself, Shannon came upon the bank where he’d left the woman.
The sun was dipping in the west. Ahead lay an endless sea of foliage, rolling and climbing and falling and plunging. And under it somewhere crept a single man running from him. The Arab Abdullah. It was madness. They both were mad.
But deep in his mind, beyond the madness, an image replayed itself in an endless loop, drawing Shannon forward despite it all. An image of a thick green lawn, and on the lawn his father. And beside his father, his mother. Father was cut in two; Mother’s head was missing. And in the machine hovering over them, Abdullah was grinning. And beside the Arab, a thousand men in brown suits, with plastic grins.
The miles passed underfoot steadily, with pounding monotony. But the thoughts were anything but monotonous—they were hell.
As his feet ate up the miles, a few new frames joined that clip running through his brain. They showed a young woman trapped screaming in a box while her own father soaked up the bullets above her.
Tanya.
She had latched her claws into him. He couldn’t shake the images. In fact, they seemed to work their way deeper into him with each footfall, like barbed spurs.
She was as beautiful as the day he’d last seen her, swimming in the waters beneath the waterfall. His mind drifted to old memories. To tender moments that seemed grossly out of place in his mind. Snapshots from a fairy tale of happy endings. Pages filled with laughter and gentle embraces. Sweet delicate kisses. Windblown hair across a fair neck. Soft words whispered in his ear.
I love you, Shannon.
Tears blurred his eyes and he gave a grunt before clenching his teeth and shoving them back.
Abdullah, Abdullah, Shannon. Think of Jamal. Think of the plan.
Tanya, oh, Tanya. What has happened? We had paradise.
But Abdullah had snatched it away, hadn’t he? And the CIA. They would all die. All of them.
Shannon ran under the canopy, desperately fighting the terrible ache lodged in his throat. Then years of discipline began to win him over to his mission. He had come to this jungle to kill. He had waited eight slow, agonizing years for the perfect timing, and now it was here.
Sula . . .
He lowered his head and replayed the brutal slaying of his parents, isolating each bullet as it spun through the air and landed into flesh. With each slap of his feet, another bullet bit deep. With each breath, the helicopter’s rotors rushed through the air. A knife to the throat would be too good for Abdullah. His death would have to be slow—the blood would have to flow long.
When Shannon came upon the bank where he’d left Tanya, he was barely aware of himself. He swam through a black fog.
He entered from the south, through tall trees and scarce brush. The murmur of flowing water carried in the stillness. A gentle breeze played over the grass.
Tanya lay in the grass.
Shannon pulled up.
She was on her back in the middle of the grass. Not that he expected her up and working, but she lay folded with one leg under her torso—odd for sleep.
Shannon scanned the tree line quickly. He tested the air but the wind was at his back. She could be sleeping, still exhausted from the long trek.
He watched her chest rise and fall with each breath. For a long time, he watched her and the ache in his throat returned.
Dear Tanya, what have I done? What have I done to you?
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, his vision was blurred.
You are wounded, my dear Tanya
. Thinking like that—using those words,
dear Tanya
—released a flood of emotion in his chest.
A stake was driven into your heart when you were a tender woman. And now I have pushed it deeper. I just wanted to show you, Tanya. Can you understand that? Killing is all I have. It is what Sula gave me. I meant to show you that. I didn’t mean to hurt you.
Shannon leaned against the tall Yevaro tree beside him and let the pain roll through him. The jungle sounds fell away and he allowed himself to wallow in the strange sentiments. The field before him lay in surreal stillness, peaceful with Tanya resting on the grass. He stood at the perimeter, wreaking of blood. Like a foul monster peering from the shadows at a sleeping innocent beauty.
He clung to the bark and felt his torso buck with a dry sob.
It was the first time he’d ever felt such ravaging sorrow. She lay out there so innocent, breathing like a child, and he . . . he had nearly killed her.
Kill her, Shannon.
He blinked. The fog was washing through his mind and for a moment he thought he might be dying. Kill her? How could he even think of killing her?
Sula . . .
Shannon closed his eyes and swallowed hard. He stepped out into the clearing and then saw the dark stain in her hair when he was halfway across the clearing.
His instincts took over midstride, before he formed the clear thought that this was blood on her head. He dove and had the knife from his belt before he hit the grass.
“Stand up, you fool!” a voice sneered across the clearing.
That
voice. A chill flashed down Shannon’s spine.
Tanya was still breathing—the wound hadn’t been fatal. A blow to the head had left her unconscious. And now Abdullah was screaming at him.
“Stand up or I will shoot your woman!”
Abdullah had found his way here! In a thousand square miles of jungle he had stumbled upon Tanya. It was the river, of course. He had taken the river as most would. The crocodiles hadn’t gotten to her, but Abdullah had.
Shannon’s mind had already climbed back into its killing skin. Now he would kill Abdullah. And he would do it in front of Tanya.
He stood slowly and saw Abdullah step from the trees, dragging a man by the collar. The priest! He had Father Petrus.
Shannon cursed his own carelessness. He had given Abdullah the upper hand. It was the insanity plaguing him, the voices screaming in his skull, the foolish sentiments—they had made him weak. Now he faced a man bearing a gun at a distance of twenty meters without the least element of stealth in his favor.
The terrorist’s white teeth flashed through a wicked grin and he forced the priest to kneel. Father Petrus’s head lolled—he was barely coherent.
He shifted his gun to cover Tanya. “Throw your knives down. Slowly. Very slowly. And don’t think that I won’t kill her. If you even flinch, I will kill her, do you understand?” He held the gun three feet from Tanya’s prone body, which still rose and fell in deep sleep.
Shannon ground his teeth. If he moved quickly enough, he could flip the knife backhanded and stick Abdullah in the throat. From this distance he could kill the man easily. Bleed him like a pig.
But Abdullah would have time to squeeze the trigger. If the gun had been trained on him, he might avoid the bullet, but Abdullah had the gun on Tanya.
“Throw them down!”
Every muscle in Shannon’s body begged to hurl the knife now. He hesitated one last second and then tossed the knife. It landed with a soft thud. He clenched his jaw.