the Second Horseman (2006) (39 page)

The quickest of the guards already had a bead on them and Brandon watched for the muzzle flash, praying his half-assed theory was right.

Nothing.

Two more men managed to get their rifles off their shoulders and aimed, but the
y d
idn't fire either.

The razor wire ripping apart on their hood sounded a bit like shattering glass and Brandon leaned toward the middle of the truck to avoid getting cut.

"Why aren't they shooting?" Catherine shouted, as they came into range of the Jordanian machine gunners.

"They think we're Arab terrorists!" Brandon yelled back, grabbing the wheel and aiming them at a similar line of razor wire on the Israeli side. "Get down!"

The sound of gunfire started and a moment later the windshield exploded, filling the air with shards of glass. Brandon crammed himself as far as he could beneath the dash, trying to hold the wheel steady with one hand and to pull Catherine down with the other. She hung up for a moment and by the time she managed to work her way to the floorboard, she was bleeding badly from a series of gashes across her forehead.

"Keep going!" he shouted. "Hold on! We've got --"

The front of the truck suddenly dipped and he was slammed forward as the back wheels came off the ground.

It all seemed to happen in slow motion, just like everyone said: the truck beginnin
g t
o tip, his sweaty hands sliding from the wheel, the increasing momentum as he fell backward. Despite the realization that he was going to end up on the ground with the truck on top of him, he managed to remain surprisingly calm. Mostly he felt regret. Not sharp. Just kind of nagging.

When the truck finally hit, though, he wasn't under it. The cab skidded along on its side and he could feel the sand building up behind him, pushing him toward Catherine. It was then he noticed her hand gripping the front of his shirt and realized that it had kept him inside.

The increasingly familiar sound of bullets hitting metal grew loud enough to drown everything else out. It seemed inevitable that the gas tank would be hit, enveloping them in a ball of fire. Or maybe a bullet would penetrate the vehicle and make its way through Catherine and then into him . . .

But the old truck held. Whatever weapons the Israelis were using couldn't penetrate the heavy steel it had been constructed from. Eventually, someone realized that, and everything went silent.

"Americans!" Brandon shouted, though not as loudly as he'd hoped. His second try was better. "We're Americans! Don't shoot!

We're Americans!"

He used his sleeve to wipe the blood from Catherine's forehead as she tried to blink it from her eyes. "Told you it would work."

Chapter
FORTY-NINE

"Kind of dicks, aren't they?" Brandon said, motioning with his head toward the angry
-
looking soldier sitting across from them.

"Brandon, don't make things worse than they already are, okay?"

He and Catherine were sitting next to each other in the back of an Israeli army truck, speeding along in what most people would agree was the wrong direction. He stretched his legs out and rested them on a wooden crate, prompting the kid guarding them to start shouting and shaking his rifle. Brandon's Hebrew was pretty much nonexistent, but the meaning was still clear: Don't use the thermonuclear weapon as an ottoman.

"Shut it," Brandon said, adjusting himself into a more comfortable position and trying to get the blood flowing into his shackled hands. The soldier aimed his rifle, and Brandon gave him a bored frown. He'd never expected to survive their border crossing. Or his prison escape. Or the Ukrainians. Hell if he was going to be intimidated by a high school kid with a bad afro.

He let his head loll to the left and looked at the similarly restrained Catherine. "So how are we doing?"

"Maybe not quite as well as I'd hoped. I figured the Jordanian guards wouldn't speak any English, but for some reason it never occurred to me that none of the Jewish soldiers would, either."

The Israelis were understandably upset that someone had just tried to crash through their barricades with a nuclear weapon in the back of their truck. There had been a lot of shouting, sign language, and brandishing of weapons, but it quickly became clear that this was a situation that demanded a bit more nuanced communication.

"Can't plan for everything," Brandon said.

"Go ahead and say it. You would have." She forced a hopeful expression that was barely visible through the dried blood on her face. "But, hey, we're not dead."

In truth, he'd been fishing for a little reassurance, but it looked like "we're not dead" was the best she was going to do.

"So, what now?" he said, not sure he really wanted to know.

"When we get where we're going, they'll separate us. Interrogate us."

"Great." He leaned his head back against the canvas behind him. "That's just great."

"I told you not to come. I told you --"

"It's not your fault," he said, turning toward her and trying unsuccessfully to get her to look at him.

"Just tell the truth. Okay, Brandon? Tell them everything they want to know."

"Everything?"

She nodded, still not meeting his eye. "Don't try to be clever. I know you're good at it, but these people . . . They'll see through it."

The implication was clear. Tell the truth and maybe they won't turn the electrodes taped to his balls up to eleven. Why were they trying to save the world again?

"Are you looking for something?"

Brandon ducked out from under the table and sat upright in his chair. "The electrodes."

"Electrodes?" A broad smile spread across the man's face -- an open, easy, friendly smile. A smile that said he'd just returned from coaching the local Little League team and was about to start his volunteer shift at the old folk's home. It wasn't real, of course.

but as a professional, Brandon could appreciate the effort that must have gone into developing it. The truth, just visible behind it, was that this guy was about an inch from pulling out a knife and starting in on Brandon's fingers.

Beyond that subtle vibe, though, everything was quite pleasant. They were sitting in something that felt more like a conference room than an interrogation room and Brandon had a cup of really good coffee steaming away in front of him.

"I think you've been watching too many movies," the man said in slightly accented English, squinting at the screen of his laptop. Finally, he pushed the computer aside and raised his reading glasses to the top of his head. "That's quite a story, Brandon."

"Yeah. I guess it is."

It had all happened exactly like Catherine said. They'd been separated the moment they arrived in this empty, spooky, little town, and an hour later the man sitting in front of him had arrived to politely listen to Brandon's stream-of-consciousness recounting of his past few weeks.

"Where's Catherine? Is she okay?"

The man nodded, but seemed preoccupied with the difficult task of finding holes in Brandon's story. He'd been on the
Internet through the entire interrogation, verifying what he was being told. The bottom line was that there just weren't many paths that could take Brandon from an American jail cell to delivering a nuke across the Israeli border.

"So they're still liking me for the Fed heist, huh?" Brandon said, trying to break the silence before it broke him.

The man ignored the question. "You still want to stand by your statement that you've never met Edwin Hamdi?"

"Like I said, I think I did -- when he had me pulled out of the condo --"

"It seems a bit incredible that he would involve you to this level with no prior issues."

"Issues? What do you mean, issues?"

"For instance, maybe you don't like Jews? Or perhaps you are a supporter of the Palestinians?"

Brandon took a slow sip of his coffee, being careful not to burn his mouth. "I want to be completely clear on this: If you put a gun to my head -- and I'm not suggesting you should -- I couldn't find Israel on a map."

"Brandon!" Catherine threw her arms around his neck as the door was bolte
d b
ehind him. "Are you okay? I thought I was never going to see you again!"

"Wasn't so bad," he said, losing himself in her warmth for a few seconds before pulling back to look at her face. It was clean and he could see black stitches peeking out from the edge of a bandage on her forehead. "How was yours?"

"Okay, I guess," she said, taking him by the hand and pulling him over to a sofa pushed up against the wall. Once again, the room wasn't what he'd been expecting. More college apartment than gulag.

"They'll be cross-referencing our stories now, trying to figure out if we're lying. But I think they believed me. What about you?"

He shrugged, still looking around nervously. "They didn't want to believe me, but why would I lie? Their whole country's going to be gone in three weeks."

She agreed. "It's a little late for tricks."

"Okay. So they'll think about it for a couple hours and figure out we're telling them the truth. What then?"

"They'll try to find --"

"I mean what about us?"

"Oh."

He waited, but she remained silent.

"That's it? Oh?"

"How would I know? I don't --"

"Yes, you do."

She stood and walked across the room, getting as far away from him as she could before turning and pressing her back against the wall. "I told you not to come with me, Brandon. I told you to run."

"I think we've established that."

She stared at the blank wall above his head. "If they can't find the bombs with the information we've given them, then they'll probably just leave us here to die in the blast."

"And if they do find them?"

"Then . . . Then they'll probably just kill us to keep the whole thing quiet. I imagine they'll let the U
. S
. government know what happened and hold it over their heads. The Israelis have never been very happy with the Morris administration's conciliatory stance toward the Arabs."

Brandon nodded slowly, feeling a wave of sadness that actually obscured the fear of the past few hours. He'd almost gotten to the point that he could imagine a real life for himself. A life where he came up with a way to get his rush from something more productive than stealing. A life that maybe included Catherine. Of course, he'd always known it was nothing but a dream, but at least it had been a vivid one. Almost vivi
d e
nough to think about it becoming real one day.

Chapter
FIFTY

Edwin Hamdi sat quietly in the backseat of his car, staring past his two bodyguards into the darkness beyond the windshield. It was after ten P
. M
. and the traffic was almost nonexistent as they pulled off the exit leading to the quiet neighborhood he'd lived in since his move to Washington.

He turned in his seat and watched the trees lining the road as they were briefly lit and then swallowed up again. There was a certain serenity to be derived from the familiarity and stillness, though he knew it was nothing more than an illusion. The chaos he'd created was out there -- building and destroying, killing and saving. Reshaping the world.

The evacuation of Israel was going as well as could be expected. After endless promises and reassurances -- as well as a number of outright bribes -- the Jews were finally crossing into Jordan and Egypt. Combine
d w
ith the massive airlift effort as well as the involvement of thousands of ships from all over the world, it appeared that the Jews would once again be saved. Deserving or not.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Palestinians were not faring as well. While they were on track to achieve a more or less full evacuation, the question of what would happen afterward was still unanswered. In many ways, they were a people unwanted by the world. The West wasn't anxious to absorb an uneducated mass that it considered largely radical and violent, and the Arabs weren't particularly interested, either. While the Jews were moving toward new and eventually permanent homes, the Palestinians were flooding haphazard refugee camps.

Of course, there were also those who refused to leave. Some estimates put the number at a quarter of a million -- primarily fanatical Jews who would not let the land they thought they so richly deserved be pried from their fingers.

The sound of crunching glass and subsequent deceleration interrupted Hamdi's train of thought and he put a hand out to brace himself. "Did we hit som--"

He fell silent when he saw two small hole
s i
n the windshield, one in front of each of his men. A moment later, a dark figure with a rifle appeared in the street, running hard toward the car.

"Drive!" Hamdi shouted throwing himself forward and wedging himself between the front seats. The man on the passenger side was completely still, his head resting against the side window, while the driver was slumped forward against the steering wheel.