The Illumination (37 page)

 

January, 7, 1986

Hartford Hospital, Connecticut

 

Dr. Harriet Gardner was slumped on the lumpy armless couch in the hospital lounge contemplating her first bite of food in twelve hours when her beeper summoned her right back to the ER.

Chomping at the apple, she raced down the hallway. This has to be a bad one, she thought, or Ramirez would be handling it on his own. She tossed the half-eaten apple in the wastebasket as she pounded past it, wondering if this was a car crash or a fire. She burst through the white metal doors to find three trauma teams working at warp speed. There were three kids on
gurneys, one of them screaming. Five minutes ago the only sounds in this wing had been the quiet murmur of monitors, the periodic whoosh of blood pressure cuffs, and the occasional whimper of the five-year-old in bay six waiting for X-ray to confirm a broken leg.

Now paramedics and police swarmed the ER, and the surgical resident, Ramirez, was shoving an endo tube down a teenage girl's throat.

“Get that kid up to CT stat,” he yelled to Ozzie, as the male nurse jockeyed a boy on a blood-soaked gurney toward the elevator. The teenager lay unmoving, his leg twisted at an impossible angle. There was a gash over his right eye and blood dripped from both ears.

“What do we have?” Harriet flew to the boy in the #18 Celtics jersey, and Teresa, the intern on rotation, stepped aside. The boy's jersey had been cut apart up the center, revealing a bloody chest.

“They fell off a roof,” a paramedic answered. “A three-story drop with a gable in the way.”

Kids.
“Get some blood gasses over here,” Harriet bit out. “And a stat portable chest X-ray.” Even after three years in the ER her stomach still dropped when she had to work on kids.

Get over it,
she told herself, as she peered at the monitor. His pulse was 130, blood pressure 80/60.

This kid was in trouble.

“This one is Senator Shepherd's son.” Doshi wheeled the oxygen tank to the head of the gurney. “And the kid Ozzie took to CT is the son of the Swiss ambassador.”

“What's this boy's name?”

Doshi peered at the chart. “David. David Shepherd.”

Harriet frowned at David Shepherd's battered upper body. “Looks like flail chest, broken clavicle, dropped lung.”

Deftly, Doshi inserted a plastic oxygen tube into his trachea. “The others have been drifting in and out, but he hasn't regained consciousness.”

The cuff whooshed again. Harriet's gaze swung to the monitor. The kid's blood pressure was dropping like a rock.

Shit.

 

United Nations, New York City

 

Thunderous applause rang through the room as Secretary-General Alberto Ortega concluded his remarks to the assembled nations. Smiling, Ortega made his way through the diplomats, shaking hands and accepting congratulations on the adoption of the Amendment of the Slavery Convention first signed in Geneva in 1926. His long-lidded gaze roamed the room and at last fell upon the familiar figure of his attaché.

Ortega's expression didn't change, not even when Ricardo slid through the throng and slipped a folded scrap of paper into his palm.

Once inside his own office, away from the noise and the press of bodies, he locked the carved oak door and unfolded the yellow square of paper. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the message.

LaDouceur bagged a prime specimen. The hunt goes on.

 

Hartford Hospital, Connecticut

 

Nothing hurts anymore.
David gazed down at his body on the hospital gurney and was startled to see so much blood on his chest.
Five . . . six . . . seven . . . there were so many people leaning over him . . . so much commotion . . . why didn't they just leave him alone . . . let him sleep?

Now Crispin was walking toward him. Strange, there was no floor under his feet either.

As he reached David's side they both looked down and noticed that the activity in the ER had reached a fever pitch.

David heard someone call his name, but at the same time Crispin pointed upward toward a brilliant light.

“Isn't that incredible?”

Yeah
, David thought.
It is. Even more fantastic than the Northern Lights I saw last summer.

Crispin started toward the light and he followed. Suddenly the dazzling brightness enveloped them. They were inside it, drifting down a long tunnel. A still more brilliant light glowed ahead and they quickened their pace.

David felt so peaceful now, so exhilarated. So safe.

Suddenly he saw movement within the lustrous aura ahead and a strange murmur began pulsing through the luminous silence. Crispin dropped back, hovering where he stopped, but David was pulled closer, as if a giant magnet was tugging him.

And then his mouth dropped open.

The murmur became a roar, filling his head. Before him he saw faces. Blurry, begging faces. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

Oh, God. Who are they?

He heard a long scream. It seemed a millennium before he recognized it was his own voice.

 

“We're losing him. Code blue!” Harriet yelled.

Doshi positioned the paddles over David's chest. “All clear!” she warned. And then she zapped him.

“Again!” Harriet ordered. Bending over the dark-haired kid, Harriet felt perspiration bead along her upper lip. “David, come back here. David! Listen to me now. Come back!”

Doshi stood by with the paddles ready as Harriet frowned at the monitor. Still in V-Fib. A heartbeat away from flatlining. Damn it.

“Doshi—again!”

 

Three hours later Dr. Harriet Gardner finished her paperwork. Some day. It started with a thirty-five-year-old female with a heart attack and a toddler with the tines of a fork embedded in his forehead. It ended with three kids who'd risked their lives on an icy winter afternoon climbing a fucking roof.

One got off with only a bruised larynx and a broken arm.

One had shattered his right femur and was locked deep in a coma.

And one she had barely snatched back from the jaws of death. She wondered if he'd seen the light.

Sighing, Dr. Harriet Gardner shoved the files across the nurses' counter and went home to feed her dog.

 

 

Raoul LaDouceur hummed as he opened the trunk of his rented Jaguar. As he slid the rifle from beneath a plaid wool ski blanket, he became aware that his stomach was grumbling. Well, not for long. He'd spotted an open air taverna some ten miles back and had a sudden irresistible yen for a platter of braised lamb shanks and a glass of ouzo.

He checked his watch. There should be time. He'd already dispatched the two security guards and rolled their bodies down the hillside. He was ahead of schedule and still had five hours before he had to return the rental car and fly back to London to await his next assignment. Time enough even for two glasses of ouzo.

He walked purposefully through the olive grove, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. Despite his sunglasses, he was aware of the waning, still-hot Mediterranean sun. He preferred to do his work in darkness.

But as he'd learned to tolerate the sun on so many scorching digs during his younger years, so, too, he would tolerate it today. Ignoring the perspiration running from his armpits, he selected his position, the one that best afforded him a view of the entire rear of the house. Then he took a puff from his inhaler and settled in to wait.

The fragrance of these olive trees made his throat burn. It
brought back memories of his grandfather's farm in Tunisia, where he'd labored as a grafter from the age of six. Slicing off branches and rooting them into new olive trees, he'd spent ten hours a day at monotonous work beneath an unforgiving sun, his throat dry and raw as pipe ash.

And what did he get when he was done—a crust of bread, a scrap of cheese? And more often than not, a beating with a switch made from one of the very branches he had cut.

His grandfather was the first man he'd killed. He'd beaten him to death on the day he'd turned fifteen.

Today, too, must be someone's birthday, he thought, his gaze flitting over the balloons tied in bunches to the lounge chairs, then to the table piled high with gaily wrapped gifts.

The party was about to begin.

 

Beverly Panagoupolos had been baking all afternoon. It wasn't that her brother's chef was incapable of making a birthday cake, it was just that for
her
grandchildren, she liked to do it herself.

Her littlest granddaughter, Alerissa, was nine today. In an hour the birthday girl and her big brothers, Estevao, Nilo, and Takis, would all be gathered around the pool deck with their parents, their cousins, aunts, and uncles. Alerissa was so timid she would be shy throughout the party, then would talk of nothing else for days to come.

Beverly licked the cinnamon frosting from her thumb and strode outside to check that the pink and silver balloons and bright array of gifts were arranged as she intended.

She paused for a moment, gazing with pleasure at the silvery blue water of the pool, where soon all the children would be splashing before dinner.

She didn't hear a thing until the gunshots cracked through the palm trees.

She didn't feel a thing until the bullets razored across her back.

She didn't see the silvery blue water turn crimson with her blood.

She died with cinnamon frosting at the corners of her lips.

* * *

The car snaked out from the secluded hilltop and roared down the road. Flipping the radio dial in search of a classical station, Raoul caught the tail end of a news broadcast. Terrorists had blown up the Melbourne Airport's international terminal and thousands were feared dead inside the collapsed building.

He smiled to himself. He was good. The best. The proof was written across the ever-increasing chaos in the world. Soon he'd be hailed as one of the principal heroes of the new order.

The thirty-six Hidden Ones were dwindling. Beverly Panagoupolos was the fourteenth to die by his hand. No one else had ever killed so many. Now, only three of the thirty-six remained. Once they were eliminated, Raoul thought with pride, God's foul world would be finished.

Already it was deteriorating. War, earthquake, famine, fire, disease—one by one, every type of natural and man-made catastrophe was proliferating across the globe like never before. It was merely a matter of days now.

When the final three were gone—the light of the Hidden Ones extinguished—the time of the Gnoseos would dawn and the world would be no more.

 

Brooklyn, New York

 

Time was running out.

Nearly five thousand miles away, in his small office on Avenue Z, Rabbi Eliezer ben Moshe closed his rheumy eyes and prayed.

Throughout his eighty-nine years, those eyes had seen much tragedy and evil,
simcha
and goodness in the world. But of late, the evil seemed to be multiplying. He knew it wasn't a coincidence.

Desperate fear filled his heart. He'd spent his entire life in the study of Kabbalah, meditating upon God's mystical secrets, calling upon His many names. He'd murmured them, praying for protection—not for himself—for the world.

For the world was in peril, a peril greater than the Flood.
The dark souls of an ancient cult had found the Book of Names. He was convinced of it.

And all of the
Lamed Vovniks
listed in the ancient parchment were being killed, one by one. How many were left? Only God and the Gnoseos knew.

Sighing, he turned to the talismans arrayed on his desk. Some he understood. Some he did not. He picked them up, one by one, and stuffed them back inside the cracked leather satchel sitting open on his desk. His fingers ached from arthritis as he pulled the ancient volumes of the
Zohar
and the
Tanach
away from the bookshelf and spun the dial of the safe hidden behind them. Only when the lock clicked and the satchel was again secured within the fireproof metal did he pick up his worn Book of Psalms and shuffle toward the door.

His long silver beard quivered as his lips moved in prayer.

Dear God, give us the strength and the knowledge to stop the evil ones.

Beneath his desk, the tiny microphone carried his prayer.

But not to God.