Darkness at Dawn (22 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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It had been a terrifying, chaotic time. The gunfight, her parents’ deaths, Paso disappearing, grim-faced men coming for her, forcing her to identify her parents’ bullet-ridden bodies before watching them put into a casket and the cover nailed over . . .
She remembered it mainly in her nightmares, chaotic chiaroscuro flashes of blood and violence.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said gently, and leaned forward to kiss Paso’s soft cheek. “What matters is that I’m here now, and I want to help. So tell me what’s going on.”
Paso looked at her, at Mike, then back. Her body language betrayed indecision.
Lucy smiled. “You know, Paso, you can consider me an . . . emissary of my government. I am here to help the Nhalan people by restoring a manuscript, but—”
“Pah!” Paso cried out. “The manuscript is a fake! Changa is not the Snow Dragon! He created the manuscript so he’d have acceptance from the people when he has himself crowned the new Khan, the Snow Dragon of legend! It’s why he’s killing my brother and why he wants me! And why he’s planning something terrible. So terrible I can hardly understand it!” Paso looked up into the handsome, still face of the captain. “You tell them, Mohar.” She shuddered, her entire slender body shaking. “I cannot believe such evil exists in the world.”
Lucy remembered that until Changa’s appearance in her life, Paso had led a very sheltered existence in the Royal Palace. She’d been the joy of her parents, the king and the queen, and Jomo had always been a protective older brother. It was entirely possible that what was happening now was her first glimpse into the evil at the heart of the world, an evil Lucy had seen and known from earliest childhood.
Paso’s love, the captain, however, was a soldier and clearly had no trouble at all believing in the evil of the world. He turned Paso’s head into his shoulder and absorbed her shudders. He met their eyes over her head. “You tell them,” she mumbled.
The captain gave a sharp nod. “Two weeks ago, one of my soldiers came to me. He is a cousin of mine and he has a friend who is a member of the regular army. You understand that the first loyalty of the Royal Guards is to the Royal Family?”
The captain’s English was clear, though heavily accented. Lucy nodded. The Royal Guard was an elite group protecting the Royal Family, much as the Secret Service protected the president of the United States.
“As such, we are not always aware of political currents in the armed forces. But what my cousin’s friend said was very troubling.”
Lucy leaned forward a little and so did Mike. She glanced up at his face, grim and focused. “Yes, go on,” she urged the captain.
He hesitated. “You are a friend of Paso’s, Dr. Merritt,” he said, looking at Mike. “And you said you were an emissary of your country. But your fiancé . . .”
“Is a former soldier,” Lucy said firmly. “And he was briefed by our government before coming here, as was I. My government is aware of the fact that something is happening here in Nhala.”
The captain’s eyes sharpened. “Soldier? What kind of soldier? CIA?”
Mike said the truth. “No, not CIA. Tenth Mountain, army.”
The captain’s eyes lit up. “Elite mountain troops! Excellent! I trained with Major Khalid Aslam himself.”
Mike’s mouth lifted slightly. “I met him once. It was an honor.” He looked down at Lucy. “Major Aslam wrote the book on mountain warfare. Literally. We used his book as a basic textbook. He really knows his stuff.”
Men
. Lucy nearly rolled her eyes. They were in a desperately serious situation, and here these guys were, bonding over another soldier who was good with crampons. “That’s nice. But we need to find out what’s going on.”
The captain nodded. “The army man said that a year ago, a man came. He was a Pakistani. A man of science, but also a member of Al Qaeda. He stayed for a week in General Changa’s home. Shortly afterward, work started on a secret underground laboratory north of Chilongo, in the Begwal Mountains.”
She touched Mike’s arm. “The Begwal Mountain Range is in the foothills of the highest Himalayan ranges. It’s desolate country. Year-round glaciers, almost completely uninhabited.” She turned to the captain. “Did your source tell you anything else? Any specifics about the lab? Did he give an indication of what they were producing? How many scientists were working there? What kind of timetable they are on?”
His head was shaking slowly. “All I know is what I told you. It’s a bioweapons lab and has a level-four section. I do not know how many scientists work there. The Pakistani scientist was here a few days ago. They tested a disease on some political prisoners. They died terribly. That is why one of the soldiers spoke to my cousin. He was horrified. He said something bad was going to happen soon, but he didn’t know exactly what. That is when I contacted a man in Thimphu that I knew was either CIA or had worked for the CIA. I know nothing further.”
“We need to speak with your cousin, as soon as possible. And his friend.” Lucy clutched Mike’s hand.
The captain shook his head. “I am afraid that is impossible.”
“He has information that might be vital,” Lucy said tightly. “If we plan the meeting carefully—”
“You can’t plan a meeting with dead men.”
Lucy covered her mouth with her hand.
Captain Thakin nodded grimly. “My cousin met with an accident. While training. Or so I was told, though no one actually saw the accident. His friend has just disappeared. The general has reopened the dungeons. If he took my cousin there and tortured him, then the general knows my cousin talked to me. And I am already a dead man.”
“No!” Paso’s voice rang loudly. She lowered her voice. “No,” she whispered fiercely. “I will not let him take you.”
A look of tenderness crossed the soldier’s handsome face. He ran the back of his finger down her cheek. “And I will not be taken,
dosha.
I will kill myself first. He will not get to you through me.”
“How many men do you have who are loyal to you?” Mike asked.
“About four hundred.”
“And how many men are loyal to the general?”
“On paper, the entire army. But only because the general rules with an iron fist. He is not loved. Any subordination is punishable by death. There have been many killings by firing squad in the last six months.”
“My father would never have allowed this,” Paso said harshly.
“No, my
dosha
, he wouldn’t. Nor would your brother have allowed it. But he is dying.”
Paso hung her head. “General Changa poisoned him.”
“What?” Lucy started. It hadn’t even occurred to her, but it made sense for a man planning on taking over a country and who had a bioweapons lab available to him. Take out enemies from the top down. “I thought he had leukemia.”
Paso lifted one shoulder. “My brother was perfectly healthy until six months ago, when he had a series of routine tests done. Several required taking blood. The next day he fell ill, and all the doctors in our country cannot cure him. I called in a French oncologist, and he said it was leukemia, fulminating leukemia, of a type he’s never seen before. I would have taken him out of the country, but he is so weak, I don’t think he’d survive the trip. Then Changa closed the airport. For repairs, he said. But the fact is that Jomo would never survive the helicopter ride down to Thimphu, nor would he survive the road trip in an ambulance.” A lone tear ran down her face. “Changa killed Mohar’s cousin, he’s killing Jomo and now he’s going to kill who knows how many people before he’s done.”
“Absolutely not.” Lucy felt an electric pulse run down her spine, looking over at Mike. His hand in hers was hard, tough, and that was great because she needed him to be hard and tough. And she needed to be hard and tough, too, because they were going to stop this monstrous man. Her parents hadn’t died to keep Nhala from the Chinese Communists only to see it fall into the hands of a monster. “He’s not going to kill anyone else, is he, Mike?”
“No. He must be stopped.”
Oh God. Just the sound of his voice, deep and calm, reassured her. She saw Paso, bright, vivacious Paso, gentle and funny and kind, almost completely beaten down by this man, the general. And her lover, risking his life just to be with her.
They were going to stop him. She and Mike and Paso and the captain, backed by the US military. Changa was planning on killing millions and they’d stop him. They had to. Anything else was unthinkable.
Her parents had died because they wanted and were willing to fight for a world in which the General Changas didn’t win. Lucy remembered them talking quietly in the evenings. Her parents had had an unusually close relationship and had shared everything in their lives, including a hatred for bullies, which spilled out into a hatred of dictators.
There were faint noises from outside the big door, muted by the door and the plants. Lucy could feel Mike tense up against her side, his arm tightening around her shoulders. They all fell silent until the noise passed.
Lucy lowered her voice. “I think we need to get back, Paso. There was a ceremonial guard outside our room, but I don’t know if he reports back to the general.”
Paso frowned. The captain answered. “They don’t report directly to the general, but the guard will file a report that the general will have access to. You’ve been gone about an hour. Any longer would raise suspicion. Do you need anything?”
Lucy looked up at Mike then back to the captain. She was treading carefully here, unsure whether they could trust the captain completely. He was here with Paso and he loved her. But love never precluded betrayal. “Would it be possible for Mike to have use of a Jeep or an off-road vehicle without anyone knowing? He’s . . . a former soldier. Maybe he can find something out. I’d like for him to have a look around while I’m working on the manuscript.”
She ignored Paso’s soft grunt of disgust at the mention of the manuscript.
Mike needed to find that flash drive. He had the GPS coordinates of the last place the flash drive had been.
The captain glanced at Mike, a frown between his eyes. “All right,” he said slowly. “I’ll leave one of our vehicles in a small clearing just behind the South Gate tomorrow morning.”
“I know where that is,” Lucy said.
“With a full tank,” Mike added. He was right. It would not be good for a
shishin
—a foreigner—to stop at gas stations.
“With a full tank,” the captain agreed.
“Just . . . hurry,” Paso whispered. “I think something terrible is going to happen.”
“Do you have a timeline?” Mike asked the captain.
“A . . . timeline?”
“Some kind of schedule, an idea of when General Changa is going to make his move, whatever it is.”
“Ah.” The captain’s brow cleared. “No. I don’t think my cousin knew. But not before the Dragon Feast, he said. General Changa wants to make a big announcement then. And show off the manuscript then, maybe.” He bowed ironically to Lucy. “General Changa is counting on you to present it and its tale at the festivities, which start the day after tomorrow.”
A tale that would undoubtedly be of a Snow Dragon looking remarkably like General Dan Changa, whose life history would be magically intertwined with the Snow Dragon myth, coming to restore Nhala to its lost greatness. Well, if it bought time, she was willing to do anything. If it was written on toilet paper with a Sharpie, she would be willing to swear it was the long lost manuscript that was so important to Nhalan mythology, if she had to.
The captain made a sound, and they all looked at him. He was clearly struggling with something. Lucy and Mike gave him the time to work it out in his head. Paso watched him, puzzled.
Finally, the soldier came to a decision.
“Here.” He pulled something from a bag on the ground. “If anything happens to me, I think your government needs to know about this.” He held out what looked like a pistol, though not any kind of pistol Lucy had ever seen.
It was small, for one thing. When Mike took it in his big hand, it looked tiny. It was precisely engineered, barrel small and without sights, with a shiny metallic sheen. It looked like an alien artifact or a gun from the future. Mike turned it over in his hand, then looked up. “It’s not a weapon.”
“Indeed it is, only not a firearm.” The captain’s face was grim and pinched. “It is for injections. It injects a tiny cylinder into the human body. The cylinder is divided into two parts with a wall between them. Depending on the amount of acid in one half of the cylinder, the wall will dissolve in twenty-four hours, releasing a disease. My cousin didn’t tell me the nature of the disease, he only said it was horrible. He saw . . . tests carried out in the lab. There are many of these guns to shoot the cylinders into people, who then will become—” He stopped and turned to Paso, speaking in Nhalan.
“Carriers,” Paso said.
“Carriers.” The soldier nodded. “Yes, indeed. They will have something terrible inside them, and that something will explode and they will carry the disease.”
“You said there were a number of these pistols.” Mike turned it over again in his hand, so well engineered it was almost a thing of beauty. “Do you have any idea how many cylinders have been manufactured?”

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