The Book of Names (18 page)

The man moved closer. The son-of-a-bitch was smiling like a man who'd just turned over a royal flush. Rix tried to blink the sweat out of his eyes, to raise his arm a little to the left. He spit out the blood gathering in his mouth so he wouldn't choke on it and give himself away.
He thinks he's got me like a squirrel in a stew pot. But I've got another shot in me, one more shot.

The blaze of fire blinded him as his finger squeezed the trigger. The world turned red. Then black.

Raoul kicked the gun from the man's lifeless fingers and shot him once more through the head just to make sure he stayed dead.

Without any wasted motion, he sprinted to the Firebird,
feeling jaunty for the first time in days. Death always put a bounce in his step.

 

The sound of tires spitting gravel split the air as a yellow Firebird convertible fishtailed around the outcropping and came to a stop. It purred at right angles to the Explorer, effectively cutting off any path of escape.

The storekeeper fired, but his shot missed the convertible's front tire and ricocheted off the bottom of the passenger door.

Stacy recognized the man who stepped from the Firebird.

“Mom, it's
him!”
she sobbed, and dove for the SUV.

Grabbing Hutch's gun, Meredith struggled to aim it. But her arms were trembling uncontrollably and she'd bitten her lower lip so hard she could taste blood. The man wasn't paying her any attention. He was fiddling with something on his belt.

She watched, numb, as he brought his arm back and threw something toward the store.

Shoot him, now! Shoot him
, a voice inside her screamed. She squinted her eyes and pulled the trigger, toppling back onto Hutch from the kick of the gun. At that instant, a deafening explosion lifted the store from its foundation and flames burst from the windows.

Shock froze her for a full second. Then she was on her feet, trying to get off another shot.

“Give me . . . the gun.” Hutch's voice was barely audible. “Just drop it,” he whispered, “like you're giving up.”

She sank to her knees and let the gun fall into Hutch's open palm. Her eyes found Stacy's as her daughter stared
back, shivering under the Explorer.
Stay there, baby
she prayed silently.
Stay right there.

Coughing, the dark-haired man turned his back on the inferno and moved toward Meredith with long, sure strides. As he came to a halt less than six feet from her, terror throbbed through every cell in her body. Yet all she could see was the oddness of his eyes. They were two different colors—one brown, one blue.

She was so fixated on them she never saw Hutch raise his arm. She only heard the shot and saw the man with the strange eyes reel.

For an instant, hope surged through her.
Again, Hutch. Shoot him again. This time in the heart.

But the man moved with remarkable speed, even as blood stained his right shoulder.

“No!” Meredith cried, as he fired four times across the length of Hutch's body. “Oh, God. No!”

“Stacy!” the man barked.

The sound of her daughter's name on his lips chilled Meredith to her core. She'd never imagined such evil.

“Leave her alone!”

“Shut up. Now!” The gun was pointed at her head. “Stacy, if you don't come out here like the good little girl we know you are, your mother's going to be as dead as your bodyguard.”

“Don't listen to him, Stacy!” Meredith screamed.

Wind whipped smoke and glinting ashes from the burning store. The man coughed, then aimed the gun lower, at her heart. But at the last second, he jerked his aim inches to the left as he pulled the trigger. The ground beside her exploded in a spray of rock and dust.

“Mom!” Stacy shrieked and came scrambling out from under the Explorer to throw herself across her mother.

“Leave us alone!” Meredith sobbed. “What do you want from us?”

“I want
her.”
He pointed the gun at Stacy. Then flipped it in his hand so he was holding it by the barrel, and sprang at Meredith like a panther.

The last thing she saw before he cold-cocked her were those indifferent, mismatched eyes.

The girl threw herself on her mother, sobbing. It took Raoul no longer than six seconds to uncork the vial of chloroform and soak the square of cloth he pulled from his pocket. This time, the sharp-toothed little mouse would not make so much as a squeak.

 

7. . .6. . .5. . . the elevator whooshed downward. As it neared the fourth floor it slowed for a halt. David pulled Yael closer in case they needed to get out fast. They tensed as the doors slid apart, but the sharply dressed businesswoman who stepped on dragging her luggage barely gave them a glance.

He felt Yael relax beside him as the car resumed its descent. Suddenly his hand shot out to press the button for the second floor.

“I almost forgot, honey. I told your parents we'd stop by their room.”

Yael flicked him a puzzled glance. “Oh . . . they aren't meeting us in the lobby?” Even as she uttered the words, she exited beside him, waiting until the doors closed before she spoke again.

“What was that all about,
honey?”

“It suddenly dawned on me—Gillis doesn't travel alone. His partner could be staked out in the lobby.”

Yael's eyes narrowed. “Good thinking. I suggest the stairs.”

David glanced back and forth, pondering the exit
signs posted at opposite ends of the hall. “Do you remember if we turned left or right to find our room last night when we came up the stairs?”

“Right. . . I think.”

“Then we go left. That's the staircase farther from the front door.”

Yael hitched her tote higher on her shoulder. “Let's hope there's a back exit,” she muttered as they started toward the stairwell.

Stealthily they made their way down. David took a breath before he inched open the first floor exit door.

So far, so good. The hallway was empty. Glancing to his left, he spotted another corridor branching off it and they hurried toward it.

But it was just an alcove, with dining chairs stacked to the ceiling alongside a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

“In here.” David shoved open the door, but Yael spun around at the sound of quick footfalls in the hall behind them.

A dark-skinned man bore down on them—running like a wolf after a rabbit. Gillis's partner, the Hispanic who'd shot at them yesterday.

“Go! Hurry!” Yael pushed him through the door and slammed it shut behind her.

David grunted as he rammed his shin into the legs of a banquet table stacked on its side. “Shit.”

They were in a storage area littered with long tables, more stacks of chairs, podiums, projector equipment, even a piano.

David skidded to the piano. “Help me with this!”

He braced his palms against its side, leaning in with all his weight. It didn't budge. Yael ran to its opposite side, and together they succeeded in shoving it several feet toward the door.

“Come on! Again!” Perspiration dripped down David's temples. His face flushed red with exertion. Yael was wincing, her fingers splayed across the rich wood. This time they managed to shift it nearly to the door.

“Once more,” he grunted, bracing himself for the effort.

At that moment, the door moved toward them, thudding against the piano. Sudddenly hairy fingers gripped the edge of the door and a shoulder rammed against the wood.

“Now!” Yael screamed.

David shoved, every muscle straining. The piano lurched against the door and slammed it into the jamb, trapping the thick fingers. From the other side they heard an inhuman howl, followed by the desperate slams of shoulder against barricade.

“Come on!” Grabbing Yael's hand, David zigzagged past the banquet furniture and a chest of china into an adjoining room—a huge stainless-steel kitchen, where a red-coated bellman munching a sandwich dropped it at the sight of them.

“Excuse me, sir.” He jumped toward them, palm out, as several startled cooks looked up from their workstations.

“I'm sorry, sir, but this area is off-limits to guests—”

“Where's your back door?” David shouted.

The bellman looked too astonished to reply, but the Asian cook who'd been chopping onions gestured sideways with his chef's knife.

They followed the blade, just as the bellman started in the direction of the Hispanic's howls. “What the . . . hell. . .”

“Don't open that door—he's got a gun!” Yael shot over her shoulder. “Call security!”

“What is this?” the sous chef asked, grinning. “Reality TV? We being punk'd, man?”

Outside, David and Yael found themselves in the brightly lit service entrance. They tore around the building to the street side and ran until they finally spotted an empty taxi.

Just as it slid to a stop, Yael's cell phone rang.

“JFK,” David panted as he slid into the car, leaving the door open. “But wait for the lady.”

He caught his breath as Yael climbed in, her phone to her ear.

“Getting out of that hotel was the easy part,” she gasped at last as the taxi jerked into traffic. She leaned toward David to whisper in his ear. “That call was our first step toward getting you past your Homeland Security.”

 

Hypnotized by the screen, the Serpent worked all through the night.

By dawn, the last two names still eluded him.

He attacked the formulas again. His dirty-blond hair had gone unwashed for two days, and his armpits reeked with sweat as his fingers flew across the keyboard. His mind raced faster than the CPU at his command.

For days he'd forgotten to bathe, to eat, even to use his cane. At one point he'd shoved back his chair and sprung up without it, only to tumble to the floor.

Cursing, he'd struggled back up, grasped the damned cane, and smashed it full force against one of his treasured sculptures.

He was growing to hate the numbers, the graphs, the overlays of transcriptions. Instead of reflecting his brilliance, they now seemed to mock him, hiding their secrets, refusing to part the curtain of mystery. There had been no more breakthroughs, but then, neither had any more papyri fragments been found, none since the summer of 2001.

Everything I need is here. It
must
be here. I'm so close.

We're so close.

And it's all hanging on me. The downfall of God. The end of the world. The victory of the Gnoseos.

They'd tried so hard, so many times. His people's history never failed to move him.

He thought of the first time they'd come close to wiping out the Hidden Ones. How the imbalance it caused in the world had triggered the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, destroying Pompeii. And of the hero, Attila the Hun, who brutally slaughtered so many in the fifth century he was dubbed the “scourge of God.”

The Gnoseos had rejoiced at the plague, the Black Death that killed nearly half the people in Western Europe in the fourteenth century. They'd prayed it would spread throughout the world.

The Inquisition in Spain under Torquemada, and the Armenian massacres, had killed many of the Hidden Ones, but never enough of them, never thirty-six within a generation.

There had been so many moments of hope—the Yellow River bursting its banks in China, killing nearly a million people in 1887. The sinking of the Titanic. Communism—and the Khmer Rouge—the movement that massacred millions in Cambodia.

In many lands and in many times, slavery was their tool—suffocating hope, drowning the human spirit, destroying those with pure souls as if they were vermin.

The Nazis also did their part—and for a time his great-grandfather had led the Circle of his generation in a valiant campaign to bring down the world. They'd come so close.

But we are closer now
, he told himself,
closer than at any other time in history.
He thought of the Ark, of the provisions newly stockpiled in that subterranean stronghold, and of the two thousand faithful awaiting the signal—the
signal to enter their new world, the signal that could only come once
he
completed his task.

Two more names. Why couldn't he find them? What was he doing wrong?

He tried a different algorithm, altered another sequence, ran another equidistant letter skip.

Garbage.
The screen showed him only garbage.

He bit his tongue until it bled. Stupid blood, what does it matter? Patience mattered.

His youth, locked in the darkness, had taught him about patience. He'd always known the light would come again.
And it will come again now
, he thought.
Light and answers. Patience.

But it was difficult to practice patience when the Circle was pressing him. Even his father seemed distant, disappointed, as the days dragged on. How much more would he despise me if he knew the truth—all of it?

I cannot fail.
I
will
not.

He needed to clear his mind. To go back to the stillness of that dark peaceful place, to hear the sound of nothing.

The answer was within him. He possessed the power to ascend, to reconnect with the Source. It was intuitive—he'd been taught that since the day he received his amulet.

His hand sought out the gold medallion hanging around his neck. As his fingers traced the double ouroboros carved in its center, he pictured the world cracking in two. Head bowed, he chanted the ancient meditation over and over until he slid to the floor in a trance.

Foul earth, sphere of illusion
,

I curse your shackles
,

Despising the evil flesh that imprisons my mind.

Like a candle flaming upward, I seek the Source
,

Striving toward the heavens
,

To merge with my Divine.