Darkness at Dawn (26 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings

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

BOOK: Darkness at Dawn
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The temperature in the room was falling rapidly. The general hardly seemed human. He looked more like some ancient evil god who could summon death from the sky at any moment. Which, of course, he could.
Lucy placed fist in hand and bowed. “Of course, General,” she murmured. “It will be ready and mounted on a Plexiglas stand for the people to admire by the Feast of the Snow Dragon. You can count on it.”
When she rose from her bow, her face was calm and serene. Did she understand the situation? Understand what kind of danger they were in?
General Changa stared coldly at Lucy for an entire minute. Lucy stood calmly under his gaze.
The general spat a command, and the soldier behind him sprang to attention, walked briskly to the door and opened it. The door closed firmly behind them and Mike heard an explosive exhalation.
Lucy, needing air. Bending forward. “God,” she said in a strangled voice.
“Yeah. That was creepy.” He placed his hand on her back and felt her shuddering.
Lucy rose, and he saw how pale she was. She hadn’t underestimated the danger at all. She’d understood it yet kept her cool. “You did good, Lucy Merritt.”
“Yes.” She sketched a shaky smile. “I did. Particularly considering that that manuscript is a complete fake. The ink will probably be chemically the same as ancient ink—which was usually burnt bones, tar and pitch—but everything else will be inauthentic, and the parchment will prove to be modern. Someone buried it in the ground to give it a false patina of age. It’s an old trick. Together with staining the pages with tea.”
“And you’re going to have to pretend you have no idea it could be fake.”
“I will, yes.”
“That chemistry stuff sounded pretty damn convincing. What was that stuff anyway? You really blinded him with science.”
Lucy gave a smile the Mona Lisa would have envied. “I gave him the chemical composition of tea.”
T
HIRTEEN
 
ON THE
STAR OF ORION
MID-ATLANTIC
 
DR. Imran Mazari stretched out his maps on the tabletop. His quarters were very small, but that was fine. He’d grown up in four cramped rooms in the Galwandi, the oldest part of Lahore. His only knowledge of the West was through television programs, and more than the otherworldly wealth, the brazenness of the women and the unfathomable social mores, what had astonished him was the space.
How big the houses and the squares and the buildings were! And inside the buildings and the houses—huge rooms, in succession. It seemed that each person living in the West had more room than ten Pakistani families.
Imran had never said so to his strict Muslim father, who railed against the godlessness of the West, but Imran had secretly dreamed of living in empty spaces. Having a room of his own, one of those enormous rooms on TV as large as a house, instead of the cramped room he shared with his three brothers.
The TV programs also showed broad, empty avenues, tree-lined, inviting. Public squares that instead of teeming with merchants screaming their wares had only a few men— and women!—strolling about, the women with their heads uncovered, unaccompanied by a male relative.
And when he’d won his scholarship to study microbiology at Stanford, he secretly wondered, as he embraced his stiff father and weeping mother, whether he would ever come home again.
But he had. Because although the spaces in America were beautiful, enticing, they were filled with evil, godless men and women, who didn’t deserve their country.
How could Allah have given such an evil people such a beautiful and empty land, when his brethren throughout Islam could hardly breathe in their crowded spaces?
Look at Cairo or Damascus or Lahore or Dhala. Or the Camps. The reeking camps, forty to a tent, sewage running through the muddy alleyways . . .
And the Americans, with hundreds of millions of square miles, empty.
And yet the Americans were befouling the land Allah had bequeathed them, so quickly you’d think they were in a race to despoil their country, all in the name of trinkets. Cheap clothes, cheap TVs, cheap toys, cheap sex.
In the four years he spent at Stanford, Mazari had watched as orchards and olive groves tended for generations had fallen to the bulldozer for yet more shopping malls.
Appalling. They didn’t deserve their land because they didn’t tend it. They wanted more and more and more, in an ever-expanding cycle of waste. Mazari had had two sets of clothes throughout his childhood, his mother carefully washing and hanging out to dry the set he wasn’t wearing. Had they had the money to buy new clothes, there would have been no space for a closet in their home. Each morning, he awoke to find his clean set carefully folded on a chair, yesterday’s clothes already hanging on the line in their living room.
Once in California, he had accepted a fellow student’s invitation to visit his home in Chico over the weekend. The house was as large as a palace. His friend’s closet was larger than their apartment in Lahore. Mazari had actually felt nauseous seeing that enormous closet filled with enough garments to clothe an entire village.
No, the Americans didn’t deserve their spacious country. It was why he had spliced in the extra mutation, to rid the earth of the bodies fast and cleanly. His backers had been enthusiastic, because, of course, it was a way to clear out Israel, once and for all.
By the time any international authorities could act, his brethren would have filled the empty cities of Zion. The borders would go down instantly, manned only by empty clothes and dust that had once been human. A great dam holding back a tide of humanity, dissipated in a cloud of dust.
And America, with all its Zionists, would not react, because they would have their own huge tragedy to deal with.
There would be chaos, a thousand times greater than the chaos following the great victory of 9/11, the repercussions spreading from the center of the financial world outward.
No, it would be years, perhaps decades, before they could turn their eyes outward from the tragedy that had taken place in their world. And by that time, Israel would be occupied, permanently a part of Greater Palestine.
But first, Manhattan. Then America.
Mazari looked at the detailed map before him, following his finger along the predestined route of the great event. Hundreds of thousands of people in the city and, all of it broadcast live to the entire country. And to much of the world.
He could envision it easily,
see
it, in his mind’s eye.
Locals and tourists, in their hundreds of thousands lining the streets, jammed against the barriers, in colorful winter wear, noses red, holding balloons, waving to the TV cameras. Happy and relaxed. There would be police officers, sure, but they would be happy and relaxed, too. There for crowd control, though they knew from eighty-four years of experience that no one would get rowdy. It wasn’t that type of crowd. The morning duty would mostly consist of rounding up lost kids and restoring them to their parents and carting away anyone who had a heart attack.
Mazari’s men would fan out, fitting right in. College students, business executives, ad men, writers, professors, office workers—all would have different looks, different accessories. But with one thing in common—a tiny cylinder shot into a shoulder twenty-four hours previously, containing the most virulent form of the virus. They’d have thousands of tiny cylindrical canisters in their backpacks and briefcases, to be scattered wherever possible, in trash cans, bathroom wastepaper baskets, down grates. Left in Starbucks and Saks Fifth Avenue. Behind trees and bushes in Central Park. Dropped casually on the ground in the crowd.
Mazari had timed it, too. If all went well, the first victims would start falling to the ground in the first hour of the parade, between 9 and 10 a.m. The first would be his men, of course. They knew they would be in paradise by noon. They were all volunteers. And their families would be compensated until the end of time. Their families would be given large land holdings in the new Greater Palestine, their mothers honored. None of the
shaheed
had wives or children. They’d been chosen for that.
But they wouldn’t need children to perpetuate their memory. It would live on in eternity.
Mazari could visualize it clearly. One man down, spraying bloody vomit. The crowd would back away fast. Overhead helicopters, filming the festivities, would see something happening, veer that way.
And another would fall, and another. Half the people there inside of an hour. The other half by noon. The overhead helicopters would be filming perhaps a million people dying. If the news anchors were outdoors, they would start dying, too, in front of the cameras.
America, then the world, would be riveted, then appalled, then terrified.
No troops would dare enter what was clearly a place of contagion. It would take time, finding enough Level A hazmat suits, suiting up.
By the time troops entered Manhattan, encased in what looked like space suits, with closed-circuit air, they would be entering a charnel house.
It took America, with all its wealth and military might, two months to begin retaliation for 9/11. That had been trifling in comparison. Two buildings, several thousand dead.
This would leave Manhattan
empty
. A wasteland. With no clue who to retaliate against. There were no advanced biowarfare labs in the Middle East or the East Asian Islamic countries. None. The West could try to invent one, but after the fiasco of the missing WMD in Iraq, who would believe them? Who would think to look for a lab in a neutral country in the Himalayas?
Mazari’s finger retraced with pleasure the route of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in four days. The last one ever, in the history of the world.
CHILONGO DUSK
 
Mike parked the Jeep exactly where he’d found it, at the rear of the Palace, and hurried into the Palace through the nearest entrance. The place was so amazing. Even this relatively insignificant entrance was elaborately decorated, painted, gilded, swathed in silks, flooring covered in precious rugs.
At any other time, he’d have stopped to admire it, but he was anxious to get to Lucy, and he knew there would be at least another half hour’s trek through the vast building before he got to the lab, even walking fast. He could run it. He was a fast runner and could run for hours. But why on earth would Michael Harrington run?
Shit, it was hard being undercover. He hated it. War was bad enough when you could do what had to be done. But this—this constant weighing of what he should do as Mike Shafer with what Michael Harrington would do—it was nerve-racking.
So he settled for a brisk walk, trying to pretend it was the brisk walk of a man hurrying to make a million bucks, when it was actually the walk of a man trying to get to a special woman as fast as he could without triggering an alarm among the many soldiers in the building.
Last night and this morning he hadn’t seen many soldiers at all, but now the building was lousy with them. At every door there was an alert soldier, it seemed. Certainly one in every corridor.
Armed.
Fuck, had something happened while he’d been scrabbling in the snow up in the foothills of the vast mountain range hovering over the country? Had something happened to
Lucy
?
His heart rate decelerated. His vision sharpened. He was aware of every limb and of exactly where his body was in space.
Time slowed down. His lungs pulled in more air. He was getting ready for combat.
He walked with a hand in his parka pocket, as people do in cold climates. The hands are the first to feel the cold.
He kept his hand in his pocket because the flash drive he’d been looking for was in his fist.
The GPS location had been correct. He’d discovered it four hours after starting off. He’d driven to within five miles of the location, parked the Jeep behind a giant spruce and taken off straight uphill. The snow had turned firm, making for relatively easy walking.
He’d uncovered the site where the CIA operative had died fairly easily, a little after 1300, as the sun was just starting its descent behind the western range of the Delahari Mountains, exactly where his GPS locator had said it would be. The CIA had programmed the last known location of the body into his GPS to tell him where the death had occurred.
The area around where the head had been had lost its almost violently red tinge and was now only faintly pink. There was a high-tech balaclava, fleece-lined Carhartt cargo trousers with long underwear inside, mountain boots with the socks still in them. One boot had rolled two hundred meters down the hillside.
No parka.
Mike had checked every single inch of the clothing for the flash drive, fingering the linings, turning the clothes inside out. Checking the boots carefully.
Nothing. The operative had clearly put the flash drive into one of the pockets of the parka.
He buried the clothes in case a stray peasant came across them and reported that a crazy Westerner had stripped naked in the snow, then stood for a moment, thinking.

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