Authors: Duane Swierczynski,Anthony E. Zuiker
Dark Revelations (40 page)
Glass beads rained down as Hans Roeding rappelled down from the skylight, gun in hand, trained on Labyrinth’s head. And it stayed trained on Labyrinth all the way down, until Roeding’s boots landed with a dull crunch on shattered glass. At the same moment, Natasha and O’Brian came smashing through the doors to the operating theater. The cavalry had arrived.
But then Roeding surprised them all by swinging his arm around so that he was aiming at Blair.
“Drop the gun, Blair,” Roeding said.
Both Natasha and O’Brian cried out, confused—what the fuck are you doing? Why are you threatening Blair? What’s going on? Dark, however, knew what was going on. The note he’d received in the hospital had been a taunt from Labyrinth, but it also was the truth. He had infiltrated the ranks of Global Alliance. He’d turned Hans Roeding. God knows what it took to run the tough old soldier through the tortured maze of his own mind.
“Hans, no—don’t tell me . . . not you . . .”
“The gun.
Now.
”
Now.
”
Blair turned his attention back to Labyrinth, who had a beatific smile on his face.
“Heads, you lose,” Labyrinth said.
An anguished wail blasted from Blair’s mouth, a cry of betrayal, of frustration, of ultimate rage, and suddenly, he didn’t care that he had a gun pointed at his own head. All that mattered was killing his creation.
But when he squeezed the trigger—it, of course, did nothing.
That’s because Hans Roeding took care of all weapons for Global Alliance, from blades to handguns to shoulder-launched rockets.
Hans Roeding had been working for Labyrinth all along, which meant he had installed cutoff devices triggered by the sound of his master’s voice. Try to shoot Labyrinth with one of Roeding’s guns, and the gun would shut down. Revert to a useless lump of iron. Roeding—the Global Alliance weapons master—could also easily fill a Glock 19 with blanks. That’s what had happened in Edinburgh. Dark had been shooting with fucking blanks! If Dark had been using a gun with live ammunition, Labyrinth would have been stopped back then.
Blair realized the depths of Roeding’s betrayal as his finger and thumb squeezed hard again on the trigger, and absolutely nothing happened.
“No,” he said. “No no no, I vetted you, I vetted all of you. . . .”
“Enough,” Roeding said and snapped off two shots. Tandem bursts of blood sprayed out of Blair’s chest as he was lifted off his feet and thrown backward. The cry that escaped Blair’s mouth was surprisingly shrill, like from a child who’d suffered his first pair of skinned knees.
Natasha put her own gun to Roeding’s head and squeezed the trigger and—
Nothing.
Roeding spun around, gun now pointed at Natasha’s midsection. There was the hint of a smile on his face, the first time Dark had ever seen such a thing. He wasn’t just carrying out his master’s orders. He was enjoying this.
Dark reacted instantly—crouching down, picking up the bloody scalpel and winging it through the air. It embedded itself in the side of Roeding’s throat.
The soldier coughed, took a step to the side. Blood dribbled past his lips.
“Bitch.”
Natasha leaped out of the way as Roeding fired anyway, bullets blasting through wooden benches over two centuries old, before he fell to his knees and dropped the gun. A puppet with his strings cut.
Before he bled out, however, Roeding whispered something. Dark caught it on the edge of his hearing:
“Enter the maze.”
What did that mean?
Hans Roeding was dead before he could answer.
On the floor, Labyrinth was still gloating. All of this was just too vastly entertaining.
“Well, so much for Global Alliance,” he said. “Let’s see, we’ve got one team leader dead, one betrayer dead . . . leaving the emotionally compromised newbie, the fetching linguist, and the drunk geek.”
Dark crouched down so that he was eye to eye with Labyrinth. “You’re going to be locked up for the rest of your life. That is, until they decide to stick a needle in your arm. All in all, I’d rather be the emotionally compromised newbie.”
Labyrinth smiled. “Don’t worry. I can still lead you to the promised land. You can still complete your mission, even without Mr. Blair. Do you want the next riddle, team?”
“Fuck you,” Natasha said, then checked Roeding’s vitals—there were none—before prying the gun loose from his dead hand.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
The man who called himself Labyrinth smiled and closed his bruised eyes and recited aloud in a mock stentorian tone:
NEVER WAS, AM ALWAYS TO BE. NO ONE EVER SAW ME , NOR EVER WILL. AND YET I AM THE CONFIDENCE OF ALL, TO LIVE AND BREATHE ON THIS TERRESTRIAL BALL. WHAT AM I?
Dark knew the answer. The riddles were never the problem. Once you started to think in terms of metaphor and code, the answers began to appear more clearly. The keys in the riddle were the words
was
and
to be
. Tenses. Past, and future. The speaker wasn’t a person, it was an abstract concept.
was
and
to be
. Tenses. Past, and future. The speaker wasn’t a person, it was an abstract concept.
Dark said,
“The answer is
the future
.”
the future
.”
“Say it, Steve Dark. Tell me I am the future. Say it! I AM THE FUTURE!”
But Dark ignored him.
“Where are the other clues?” Natasha asked. “The who, and the when?”
“Well, you interrupted me before I had a chance to leave them. You’ll find
the who
up on the third level. As for the when . . . did you know that all surgeries in this theater used to be conducted in the daylight only?”
the who
up on the third level. As for the when . . . did you know that all surgeries in this theater used to be conducted in the daylight only?”
Dark glanced over at Natasha, who was already on the move, racing up the creaking wooden stairs to the third level. But was she racing into another trap? Dark was overcome with the horrible feeling that Labyrinth had engineered all of this, every last move, in this operating theater.
Maybe Blair had been right all along. That the only way to beat Labyrinth was to enter the maze with him.
“I didn’t know that,” Dark said. “Why the daylight?”
“Because there was no electric lighting. Come on, Dark, I thought you were sharper than that. The surgeons had to rely on optimal daylight, streaming in from above. Most procedures were performed from eleven A.M. until about two P.M.”
Natasha called from above, “I’ve got a locked trunk up here. I’m going to open it.”
“Don’t,” Dark said, then grabbed Labyrinth by his throat and squeezed. “I’m going to make him open it for us.”
Yeah—enter the maze with him, then kick his ass and
force him
to show you the way out.
force him
to show you the way out.
“I assure you, Natasha Garcon,” Labyrinth said, his voice strained, “that there is nothing dangerous inside that trunk. You may open it without fear.”
Never trust the fucking monsters. Never.
Dark implored her—
Dark implored her—
“Goddamnit, don’t do it. . . .”
The crack of a gunshot echoed through the amphitheater. “Lock’s off. Opening it.” Labyrinth smiled, shaking his head gently back and forth. He kept his eyes—which seemed to grow blacker by the second—locked on Dark.
“Well?” O’Brian called out. “What’s inside of it?”
Natasha’s voice was hesitant, uncertain. “Photographs,” she said. “Appears to be hundreds . . . maybe even thousands of baby photographs. Recent, vintage, color, black-and-white, all kinds.”
Dark’s mind raced. A trunk full of baby photos. The second artifact, beyond the timepiece, always pointed to the victim. Was Labyrinth trying to say that he was going to kill thousands of children? Or already had?
“So . . . what the bloody hell does it mean?” said O’Brian.
Labyrinth rolled his eyes.
“So impatient that you don’t even want to flex that fat gray muscle in your skull, Mr. O’Brian? Actually, you’ll like this one, since your Irish Catholic mother no doubt squeezed out you and your multiple siblings as often as bowel movements.”
“Dark, you’re closer. Will you push some teeth down the fucker’s throat?”
Labyrinth continued,
“The notion of family has become corrupted. With adultery, divorce, stepfamilies, single families, family doesn’t mean anything anymore. The idea of the nuclear family will be reimagined! We’ll treat everyone as family! One family under Labyrinth! We should equally love and support each other, regardless of heritage. Wipe the slate clean. Start over.”
Start over . . .
Dark realized what Labyrinth had done.
“The photos . . . in random order. He’s fucked with the birth records.”
“Good,
good
,” Labyrinth said. “How did I do it? What gave me access?”
good
,” Labyrinth said. “How did I do it? What gave me access?”
“Shut your fucking face before I put a bullet in it,” O’Brian said.
Natasha said, “The previous attack was just a warm-up. He messed with the hospital systems today—people were coding at hospitals all over the country.”
“Ms. Garcon, I’m quite proud. I know our dearly departed friend Mr. Blair here would have been proud, too. Yes, while everyone was scouring their little hospital systems for errors, a team of independent contractors in Indonesia were busy exploiting the security breach.”
Labyrinth smiled at them all.
“They took away my name. But I’ve come to learn that
names mean nothing whatsoever.
”
names mean nothing whatsoever.
”
Thousands of newborns around the world were about to have their new identities erased in a flash. And Dark had no idea when.
Instantly Dark thought about his daughter, Sibby. He couldn’t help it. It was involuntary. A baby brought into the world in a monster’s dungeon, with no idea that her own mother was dying, or worse—that the monster’s blood ran through
her
veins, too. There was something especially horrible about the torment of innocents—the deck stacked against you from the moment of your birth.
her
veins, too. There was something especially horrible about the torment of innocents—the deck stacked against you from the moment of your birth.
Dark couldn’t let this happen.
He pulled the scalpel from Roeding’s neck, walked over to Labyrinth, crouched down next to him, smiled.
“I’ve been tortured before,” Labyrinth said.
“Not like this you haven’t,” Dark said, then grabbed the man’s face with one hand, turning it to one side. “I think I’ll start with the eardrums.”
“This won’t work. I think you know that, Steve Dark, and you’re simply trying to scare me into cooperating. Do you really think I’ll succumb to the threat of torture? I’ve been the torturer! I invented this game!”
“Dark—what the fuck are you doing?”
O’Brian said, “Let the man work.”
“Or maybe an eye.” Dark pressed the tip of the scalpel against the fleshy hollow under Labyrinth’s right eyeball.
“You can stop me at any time.”
“Ho-hum.”
Labyrinth moved his tongue around his mouth as if he were trying to pry a seed from between two molars.
“See you in a while,” he said.
All at once Dark realized what he was doing. The superoperative was engaging a fail-safe—no doubt buried in a tooth. A time-honored spy tradition. If you’ve been captured and you want to avoid spilling vital secrets under torture, you pop a false tooth and swallow the cyanide capsule inside.
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