The Eden Prophecy (2 page)

“… they’ve taken the American embassy now, they’re parading around in the streets, burning flags, shouting death to America …”

“We have to go.”

Bashir nodded, slowly coming to terms with it. But as McKenzie stood and gathered a few things, Bashir found
his mind drifting inexplicably back to the tablet. Where had he seen that symbol before?

Jan Davis disappeared from view. McKenzie was halfway out of the tent. “Ahmad, you have to come.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

“You won’t,” he said. “They know you work with Americans. They’ll take it out on you when they can’t find us.”

Bashir couldn’t fight the logic, but he did not want to leave. He felt they were close to something important, something that mattered more than revolutions and guns and the ugly transfer of power.

“This symbol,” he said, pointing to the tablet. “I’ve seen it.”

The wind howled and the tent shook and Bashir’s mind whirled.

“It doesn’t matter,” McKenzie said.

“It does!”

“Not if you’re dead.”

McKenzie looked away and then stuck his head back inside. “The truck’s leaving.”

There was no choice. Bashir knew he had to go. He looked at the symbol one last time, burning it into his brain, and then he went to leave. At the last moment he turned back and grabbed the copper scroll from the skeleton’s grasp.

Stepping out of the tent, Bashir was determined not to let the revolutionaries destroy what he’d found. He ripped one stake from the ground and the wind did the rest, filling the tent like a balloon and carrying it across the desert like a kite.

Forty yards away, a big diesel truck waited. McKenzie and Davis were already running toward it.

“Come on!” McKenzie shouted.

Fighting the wind and shielding his eyes, Bashir made his way to the truck. He climbed into the back along
with the two Americans and three others. The cab up front was already full.

In the distance behind them, he could see sunlight reflecting off several vehicles. There was no time to spare.

The truck lurched forward and Bashir lost his balance. He stumbled, put a hand out to brace himself, and dropped the scroll. It hit the back edge of the truck bed and tumbled out onto the sand as the truck accelerated away.

Bashir cringed. He stepped to the edge, ready to jump, but the truck was moving too fast. He grabbed McKenzie. “Tell the driver to stop. Tell him to stop.”

Between the roaring of the diesel engine and the howling of the wind, his words were barely audible.

“It’s too late!” McKenzie shouted.

“No!” Bashir said.

Desperate beyond reason, he tried to climb out but McKenzie held him back.

“Let me go!”

“No, Ahmad. It’s too late.”

By now the truck was rolling away at thirty miles per hour. The revolutionaries were approaching from the east. There would be no jumping free, no stopping or turning back.

As this reality seeped into Bashir, he stopped straining. McKenzie relaxed his grasp and then cautiously released him. Bashir squinted through the storm at the scroll, and his heart sank.

It might take hours or even days for the grave to fill with sand, but the scroll would be buried in minutes. And without any marker to lead the way, it would disappear from the world as if it had never existed.

C
laudia Gonzales flashed her ID badge at the security checkpoint outside the United Nations General Assembly building. There was no real need to do so; the guards knew her well and at this hour of the morning—just after six on the East Coast—she was one of the few diplomats on the scene.

They waved her through posthaste. With a briefcase in one hand and a tall mocha latte in the other, Gonzales made her way to a secure elevator and up to the eleventh floor of the iconic monolith.

Reaching her office before any members of her staff did was a habit she’d kept since graduating from law school. For one thing, it set a good example; it was difficult for her staff to slack off or complain when the boss was working harder than anyone else. It also had a practical purpose. Not only did the early bird catch the worm, but for the busy people of the world, the early morning hours were often the only available moment to actually look for the proverbial morsel.

In an hour the phones would start ringing. Shortly after that, the appointments would begin and then the afternoon teleconferences, followed by press briefings and public hearings. In the blink of an eye it would be
closing time, and the pile of work on her desk would look exactly as it had eight hours before.

To Claudia Gonzales, that was the equivalent of running in place.

She stepped into her office, set down the latte, and turned on her computer. As the machine booted up, she stepped outside, checking the items on her assistant’s desk that had come in during the night hours. The world ran 24/7, even if government offices didn’t.

There was a report on the continuing blockade of Gaza, another on a human rights situation in East Timor, and an internal-use envelope that lay unopened.

It read “Diplomatic Materials, Private and Confidential.” It was listed as coming from the secretary general’s office, with Gonzales’s name scrawled in the recipient’s slot. She grabbed all three items and returned to her office.

Fairly certain there were no earth-shattering details in the two reports, she placed them in her inbox and proceeded to open the big manila package.

Inside was a legal-sized envelope on the secretary general’s stationery. Intrigued, she took a sip of her latte, placed it down, and used a letter opener to slice the top of the envelope. There was an odd rubbery feel to the envelope, almost as if it were waterproof. It made her wonder how much the secretary general spent on his office supplies.

She pulled out a folded sheet of paper and began to read.

Her mood instantly changed. The UN got a hundred threats per week, mostly from crackpots and mentally
unstable individuals who imagined the UN taking over the world with black helicopters. What made these people think the UN was even remotely capable of dominating the world boggled her mind. In the best of times, they had trouble keeping the peace in remote, undeveloped areas.

She read on.

Normally Claudia took these threats with a grain of salt, but this letter had come to her internally. Whoever sent it had access to things they should not have had access to. She began to feel sick, her face and hands flushed and sweating.

Her heart went cold as she read the words. With her hand shaking lightly, she jabbed at the intercom switch on her phone.

“Security,” a voice said.

“This is—” She stopped midsentence, noticing some type of reddish liquid left behind on the phone key. She
glanced at her hand, turning her palm up. The tips of her fingers and her thumb were stained reddish brown.

She noticed a strange smell and heard a quiet sizzling sound. Her left hand, still holding the sheet of paper, felt as if it were burning. She flung the letter to the floor with a shout, pushing her chair backward. She jumped up out of the seat, knocking the latte off her desk.

Her palm and fingers were red and bubbling with the crimson liquid. Her heart was pounding.

“Madam Ambassador?” the voice called over the phone. “Are you okay? Madam Ambassador?”

Unable to speak, she stared at the sheet of paper, watching as a red stain soaked through the page from the corners like blood or dye. Despite this strange effect, the words remained clearly readable. The last sentence, in large bold font, read:

Welcome to Hell
.

T
he sprawling warehouse looked to be buttoned down for the weekend. No activity, no traffic on the inadequate, narrow road that ran in front of it, no noise coming from inside. Even a row of parallel loading docks that stuck out behind it sat empty, their garage-style doors down and locked.

A man wearing dark sunglasses and a black leather jacket hopped up on one of the platforms. Despite the apparent lack of operations, he expected that one pallet of goods would be waiting for him.

He approached the door, briefcase in one hand, a .45-caliber pistol in the other. He looked through a small window that rested at eye level.

At first all he saw was his own reflection: close-cropped dark hair, crow’s feet streaking from eyes now hidden by sunglasses, two days’ worth of stubble coating his face. He noticed the small horizontal scar that ran across one cheek.

He pressed forward, bringing a hand up to block the light. The distorted image vanished, and inside the warehouse he saw four armed men looking bored and impatient. He tapped the window with the barrel of his gun and stepped back.

The men he was meeting would know him as Hawker, a name that had become his persona during ten years spent living on the run. Once he’d been a fast-rising star in the CIA, but an incident he’d pressed too far had spiraled out of control and wound up costing him everything. He’d spent the years since plying his trade as a mercenary, an arms dealer, and a hire of last resort for people who got into situations they had no hope of getting out of.

In a violent world where he could trust precious little to be what it actually seemed, Hawker had learned to hide even from himself. And his real name, like any thoughts of living a normal life, had disappeared like whispers into a swirling wind.

It was a fate he’d come to accept, a self-inflicted wound that had scarred over but would never really heal. And yet, just when he’d thought all hope was lost, a door had opened, a deal had been made with the very government figures who considered him a loose cannon. If he would act on their behalf, he would be taken in and freed from his past.

There was hope now. Hope that one day he’d be able to take up his real name again and that meetings like the one he was about to attend would become the distant, if not forgotten, memory.

Latches clanked as someone released them from the inside. The door began to slide up. As it rose above his head, Hawker took a calming breath and stepped inside.

The four armed men remained where he’d seen them. To his left, a fifth man slammed the door back down and locked it into place.

“This way,” the man said.

Hawker followed as they crossed the warehouse floor. Expensive goods filled the place. Crates of electronic equipment by one wall, fur coats hanging in rows, even
a pair of pearl-white, twelve-cylinder, turbocharged Jaguars, still wrapped in protective plastic like they’d just come from the factory.

The guide seemed to notice his stare. “They fell off the back of a truck.”

“You mean rolled,” Hawker said.

The man smiled. “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

They continued on, passing the stolen cars and other items and then stopping near the center of the building. Two different sets of long rectangular crates rested there. NATO designations on the crates had been hastily covered with spray paint but were still partially visible. The alphanumeric code FIM-92 was easily readable.

These were the weapons Hawker had come to see, Stinger surface-to-air missiles. An
XR
designation that hadn’t been painted over meant these were extended-range variants. Deadly up to five miles.

The weapons had disappeared from a NATO convoy several years before. The CIA figured they’d been taken for a prearranged buyer or that the thief quickly realized they were too hot to move, for until now they’d never cropped up for sale. But the black market never closed, and eventually rumors began to circulate about a shipment of such weapons.

Hawker glanced at the longer, broader crates to the left.

“Reserved for another buyer,” a deep voice said from the shadows.

As Hawker turned, the owner of that voice stepped forward. Bald head polished and shining; jowls, neck, and shoulders forming one great slope. He wasn’t overly fat, just incredibly compact, short and stocky beyond what seemed reasonable. He might have been five foot four and two hundred pounds. A tank, a fire hydrant, a bulldog of a man.

His name was La Bruzca, and the ease with which
he’d hidden himself reminded Hawker that the building was essentially a maze and he was a rat in the center of it, with no way of knowing how many men were hidden in the labyrinth. Despite the weapon he carried and his own considerable skills, there would be no fighting his way out of this. He slid the .45 into a shoulder holster.

La Bruzca studied him. “I have heard much about you. They say you are a lost soul, and until you are found, woe unto anyone who gets in your way.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Hawker said.

“If I believed even half of what I’ve been told, you’d be dead,” La Bruzca replied.

Hawker wasn’t sure what to make of the taunt, but there was something ominous in La Bruzca’s words. He wondered if it was a jab at the number of times Hawker had survived near-certain death. Or if there was some greater meaning.

Could La Bruzca know who Hawker was working for? Hawker doubted it. Then again, this meeting had come about suddenly, through a third party that Hawker didn’t know. The middleman was a ghost broker, an unseen player who communicated with both sides for a fee. The possibility of a setup was not beyond reason.