The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection With EXCLUSIVE Post-Shiva Short Story (97 page)

Brandt took in a deep breath. The boy would not grow up a bastard. This marriage without love would provide for the boy even if Brandt died here. The child would get all of the military benefits due. Given Brandt’s line of work, and the frequency with which he found himself in such situations, how could he not give such comfort to his child?

But at what cost to Rebecca?

He tucked a stray blond strand behind her ear. He’d robbed her of her future to secure his son’s.

Like he said, the situation was fucked up.

* * *

Rebecca reached out and took the picture from Brandt. The grainy photo showed the most perfect little baby. Brandt’s baby.

“He’s got your chin,” she whispered.

“You think so?”

“No,” she laughed softly. “Not really.” The baby didn’t look a thing like Brandt, but what baby looked like their parents at this age? The child also didn’t look like some kind of brunette bombshell either.

“Rebecca…” Brandt whispered. “I am so sorry.”

She shook her head though as she handed the picture back. “Don’t.”

The child had been theoretical. An intellectual chit in her mind’s machinations. She’d shuffled the weight of the baby against Brandt’s love of her. She’d measured and divided up worth, still not understanding how Brandt had left her.

Now? After seeing that picture? There were no scales in the world or the heavens above that wouldn’t find in favor of the baby.

Tears streamed down her face as she realized that she’d lost Brandt. For good. There was someone, so tiny, so precious, who needed him more than even she. Rebecca looked up into Brandt’s eyes to see him crying as well.

Brandt
crying
. If that didn’t prove his love for her, despite everything else to the contrary, nothing else would.

“Forgive me,” he breathed out.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said, then ducked under his arm. “But we’ve got to stop this.”

“What do you mean? We’re just—”

“We know exactly what we’re doing.” She scooted back from him. “What we have been doing this whole time.”

Brandt looked away.

“You’re married,” Rebecca stated, trying to keep the tears from her voice. “And we’ve been trying to have our cake and eat it too.”

Brandt slowly nodded. All those subtle touches. How not by accident they kept getting paired off. There still was nothing platonic about their relationship. They were like magnets finding their way together no matter what lay between them.

“They can’t find us…” Rebecca almost lost her nerve and dove into his arms, but she had to be strong. They
both
had to be strong for that little baby in the picture. “They can’t find us dead, arm in arm. In an embrace.”

“Who said anything about dead?” a tinny voice announced.

What the hell?

Brandt swept the light around their tiny hiding spot.

And between two rocks a thin metal tube jutted through the snow.

* * *

“Well?” Davidson asked Lopez. “Are they alive?”

“Um, yeah,” the corporal answered. “And having some kind of touchy-feely moment.”

Davidson let out a sigh of relief that started in his soul and flushed away the ache in his heart. Bunny squeezed his hand. “Told ya.”

Her skin glowed in the morning sun, bouncing off the freckles and making her red hair glow like a warm fire. He turned away, unable to take in the sight, totally happy to have the distraction of freeing Rebecca and Brandt.

“Hang tight, you guys,” Lopez spoke into the mic. “Now that we’ve got your four-one-one, we should be down there in a few.”

The corporal pulled out the long piece of metal that had their quasi-communications device attached to it. They’d cobbled the thing together from the Bombardier’s shattered radio. The whole thing had been Talli’s idea. They’d used the broken struts to poke into the snow until they hit rock. From there they’d attached some insta-heat packs to the tip of the strut, melting enough snow to form a mini-tunnel to send down the jury-rigged mic. They couldn’t waste time digging until they knew for sure they’d found the right spot.

Talli and Harvish carried four “shovels” from the Bombardier’s crash site. Basically they’d taken pieces of damaged metal, bent two edges over, and duct-taped them into a functional handle.

Lopez grabbed his with gusto. “First one to break through doesn’t have to write up the after-action report on this one.”

Davidson had never seen men dig so fast.

CHAPTER 19

══════════════════

Air over Jordan

8:55 p.m. GMT

Brandt tried to focus on what the hell Davidson was saying, but after the forty-eight hours he’d had? No chance. Just getting the hell out of Slovenia hadn’t been a remake of
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
. It had been
Snowshoe, Broken-Down RV, and Stolen Crop Dusters
. Not the most efficient extraction, but it had gotten them out of Europe and on their way to the Middle East.

He glanced to the back of the plane where the women were holed up poring over the new fragments of the tablets. So far all indicators pointing to the tablets, and therefore Amed’s storage facility for the Rinderpest, was located in Western Jordan. Rebecca and Bunny were working to narrow down that rather large search area a bit.

For the moment though they were flying to Queen Alia’s International Airport. It was the westernmost airport in Jordan. From there they would head to the Kempinski Ishtar hotel and spa. Not for R & R although they could all use it, but because it was located on the Dead Sea just a few miles off of the route Moses took through the desert to the Promised Land. It was a good enough as any place to start. Plus a nice big sprawling luxury resort like the Kempinski was used to their fair share of strange American tourists.

And his group couldn’t get much stranger.

They all looked like they’d played a game of hockey against the NHL and taken a few sticks to the face.

“Sarge?” Davidson asked.

“Yeah, sorry,” Brandt apologized since he hadn’t heard the last ten sentences Davidson said.

The younger man pointed to the screen of some random laptop they’d acquired in their journey from Slovenia to here. “As I was saying, the Knot…”

Brandt waited, but Davidson’s face screwed up into a grimace, accentuating his tapestry of scars.

“The Knot?” Brandt prompted. The word wanted to stick in Brandt’s craw too, but if Davidson had any information from the organization that had hounded and hunted them down last year, Brandt would take it. He was fucking tired of being blindsided by that Disciple bitch.

Davidson cleared his throat. “During my time with them, I never heard of the Disciples of Moshe, however there were rumors of The Chosen. A group that predated the Knot.” Davidson absently licked where his lip should have been before continuing. “A group that the Knot was actually afraid of, but I’d assumed them to be like the boogeyman, made up to keep members in line.”

Apparently Davidson was grossly mistaken, given the number of bullets that had been fired at them since London. The Chosen were as real and dangerous as the Knot had believed.

“Anything more specific than ‘the Chosen will get you if you don’t eat your spinach’?” Brandt asked.

“My father…I mean Petir,” Davidson corrected.

Brandt felt, just a little, for the kid. He’d been picked up by the Knot after being abandoned by his birth mother at a church in Baltimore. Davidson had never known any other life than that the Knot showed him. How could you not call somebody father after being raised by him for two decades?

“Tok…” Davidson stated and then stalled again.

Now that name, the name of the man who had ordered the execution of Svengurd, that name made Brandt’s jaw clench. Even a year later Brandt could see the startled look on his point man’s face as a bullet made a hole in his forehead.

That same bastard who kidnapped Rebecca had been Davidson’s “brother.” Talk about a fucked-up family tree. The struggle to separate his love for the “brother” from the horrible actions of a religious terrorist was clear on Davidson’s face.

Would Brandt have turned out any differently from the private if he’d been raised by a bunch of fanatics? And not just fanatics, but fanatics descended from a millennia-old cult? That was some serious baggage.

“He did what?” Brandt asked, avoiding speaking the bastard’s name. He couldn’t do that without some serious hostility behind it.

“When we were children, Petir was chiding Tok for something,” Davidson continued, “invoking the Chosen, but Tok challenged him. Demanded that Petir prove the Chosen existed.”

“And did he?”

Davidson pointed to the laptop showing a picture of a previous king of Jordan, Abdullah I bin al-Hussein. “Petir told Tok once he crossed to the afterlife, to ask King Abdullah of the Chosen’s power if Tok did not believe him.”

Brandt scanned Abdullah’s biography. The king had been instrumental in helping the British in World War I and had encouraged his Arab neighbors to enter into a peace treaty with Israel. It looked from all accounts that his assassination had been politically motivated to keep that peace accord from ever happening.

“I don’t see how this has anything to do with the Disciples,” Brandt commented.

“Look at the date,” Davidson urged.

July 20, 1951. Besides Hank Williams being a pretty big hit back then, Brandt drew a blank.

Davidson switched the screen to reveal the history of the Dead Seas Scrolls. They were “discovered” between 1947 and 1956. Abdullah’s assassination fell right in the middle of those dates. But it still didn’t make much sense. A lot of things had happened between 1947 and 1956.

“When Tok pressed Petir about Abdullah, he just shrugged and said that one had to have stood by the king’s side to know the truth.”

“I’m lost,” Brandt admitted.

Before Davidson could answer, Lopez came over the intercom. “If everyone could please take their seats, we will be landing shortly.” Brandt turned back to the private, but the corporal wasn’t done. “And to make sure that I have the same landing difficulty as in Slovenia, I will be placing a blindfold.”

“Lopez,” Brandt growled.

“Fine. I will only close one eye. So buckle up.”

Brandt complied, indicating for Davidson to do the same. Whatever point the kid was trying to make, they would find out at the hotel. If they made it that far as the plane bucked and bounced on the landing.

* * *

Rebecca let the last rays of the sun bake down on her skin. The Dead Sea lay before them, twinkling a dark blue. The shoreline was encrusted with bright white salt. A tourist floated in the water, buoyed by the sea’s high salt content. Hence why the sea was “dead.” Very little if anything could grow in its briny waters. Across the calm sea lay Israel. If only relations between the Arab world and the Jewish nation could be so tranquil.

The hotel’s grounds included over a half mile of shoreline. Besides direct access to the beach, their private courtyard featured palm trees and their very own pool in case you wanted to take a dip without getting your hair salted. Not that any of them were going swimming anytime soon.

Although it was a slightly different experience developing a plan of attack while lying on a chaise lounge chair…with overstuffed pillows. Rebecca could get used to it. And Bunny? Bunny didn’t seem inclined to leave their private villa anytime soon. The girl clearly needed the cold chased from her bones.

“Back it up,” Brandt asked Davidson. “I still don’t see what the assassination of Abdullah has to do with Amed’s cave.”

Davidson had tried to explain several times now his concerns, but it wasn’t until Rebecca got Wi-Fi access to read the files herself that she understood.

“May I?” Rebecca asked Davidson, who seemed more than happy to turn over the floor to her. “I think that Petir was implying that the Disciples killed Abdullah or at least manipulated the killer.”

“But why?” Brandt asked. “I thought it was about sabotaging the peace process.”

“Yes,” Rebecca answered, “that is the official story, but if Petir thought it was the Disciples, I am inclined to believe him.”

Brandt got up from his lounge chair and paced. “That still doesn’t explain why.”

“It comes down to the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Rebecca explained. “They were unearthed during the same time period.”

“People,” Brandt pleaded, “connect the dots. I need a location to hit.”

Rebecca brought up a map of the Dead Sea. Long and thin, the sea not only currently provided a long border for Israel and Jordan, but historically it created a natural boundary for many other ancient civilizations. Not that Brandt would care much about that. He would care though that the Dead Sea had been a major obstacle to Moses finding the Promised Land.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls were found a few miles inland from the Dead Sea at an ancient Jewish settlement called Khirbet Qumran between 1947 and 1956.”

“Then why aren’t we looking over there?” Brandt demanded. Although he definitely kept to the other side of the courtyard. They hadn’t been closer than a few feet since they left Slovenia. Each keeping up their side of the “you are a married man” bargain.

“Wait for it,” she chided, trying to overcome the awkward distance between them. He did not seem amused. “The Dead Sea Scrolls were written far after the time frame we are looking at. They were written once the Jews
found
the Promised Land. We need to be searching on this side of the Dead Sea because Moses more than likely would have wanted to hide the tablets
before
they got to the Promised Land.”

“I’m still waiting,” Brandt grumbled.

“Fine,” Rebecca sighed. She usually like to give a thorough historical primer before getting to the meaty stuff, but with Brandt’s vein at his neck nearly bounding out of his skin, now was not the time. “Did you know that one of the first Dead Sea scrolls discovered was called the Manual of the Disciples?”

“What?” Brandt said as every head turned her way. Even Bunny sat up in her chair.

“That’s right. It was later renamed the Community Scroll, however it is the only scroll known to have been altered from its original state,” Rebecca explained. “It was either cut in half, stolen, or burned, depending on which account you want to believe.”