The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (32 page)

Danielle chose the Dragonara, both because it was nearby and because it was situated away from downtown, where the search for them would likely be concentrated.

Ten minutes after she checked in there was a knock on the door. She let the Ferryman in, and he moved immediately to the phone. A call to Zeus was first on his agenda, but the operator had difficulty finding an open overseas line and promised to ring him back when one became available.

“I ordered from room service,” she told him.

“Not for two, I hope.”

“I ordered fish, the largest portion available. A salad and soft drinks as well.”

“That will do fine.” He regarded her gently. “I’m sorry about Brother Valette.”

She tried to hide her sorrow. “Besides you, he was the only other person alive who knew my entire story. But it was always something he anticipated and planned for. We of the Knights do not operate as traditional agencies do. Information is funneled on a shared basis. Our means of contact between various levels proceeds through very direct channels.”

“Will you utilize them now to regroup?”

“There isn’t time. My place is where Brother Valette would have wanted me: Outpost 10.”

“That’s insane!”

“Our entire quest is insane, Ferryman.”

“But look at the reality of the situation. There’s nothing you could accomplish at that station, even if you could reach it, that Zeus’s people can’t accomplish better.”

She looked at him derisively. “The Knights exist purely to destroy the Hashi. Our mistake in the past has been to rely on others to do our work for us. They’ve seldom been up to the task.”

“It’s different this time.”

“Maybe, but maybe not. The Knights gave me my life back, and in return I took an oath. Right now that oath dictates that I go to Outpost 10. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”

“I wouldn’t. The difference between us is I know when to let go, when I’ve taken something as far as I can. Dedication is one thing, obsession something else entirely.”

“Your definitions are only a matter of degree.” And with that her stare grew sad. “And they articulate only one of the differences between us. In the church today I would have killed those children if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“It might have been the proper strategy, given the circumstances.”

“Don’t patronize me, Ferryman. You talk about drawing lines, and there are several you flatly won’t step over.”

“A lesson I learned long ago—and not the easy way, either. As a Caretaker I was forced to use others’ values, pushing mine back in the face of what the orders made me do. But they couldn’t stop me from looking at myself, and by the end of three years I couldn’t stand the sight anymore. I vowed never to be faced with it again. I did plenty back then I could barely live with. Killing those children would have brought it all back.”

“You would have preferred their killing you?”

“They didn’t.”

“They could have.”

The phone rang.

“Ah, Ferryman,” said Zeus, “I was starting to worry.”

“Don’t stop yet,” Kimberlain told him. “I’ve got plenty to say. Might want to record this.”

“The reels are already turning, old friend. You mentioned nothing about leaving the country.”

“I wasn’t given much of a choice. Suffice it to say that I was ‘grabbed’ by a network you’ve never heard of, with a purpose running parallel to our own.”

“A network
I’ve
never heard of? Impossible!”

“This one’s got a rather singular purpose. Details later. Let’s start with what I learned before my removal. Jason Benbasset
is
alive.”

“But I’ve searched for him everywhere, including all sixty-three floors of his crowning Manhattan achievement, the Benbasset Towers.”

“Never mind. The key isn’t where he is, but what he’s about to do. The parade’s just a part of it and a relatively insignificant part. The real plot’s centered at the bottom of the world: Antarctica, specifically an installation called Outpost 10.”

“You’re speaking gibberish to me, Ferryman.”

“Have your contacts at Defense yank the file out of Def-Net under
ULTSEC
seal. I doubt even the President knows.”

“And what will the file tell me?”

“Lots about oil, but that’s just for starters.” And Kimberlain told him the rest as Danielle and Brother Valette had related it, a story even more chilling to tell than it had been to hear. When he elaborated on the potential theft of the submarine it was all Zeus could do to keep himself from shouting.

“Yes! There are rumors afoot that the prototype for the Jupiter class of super-Tridents has been lost at sea during its maiden voyage.”

“Not lost, Zeus, taken—and for a very good reason. They’re going to use the oil pipeline and the missiles to somehow fragment the continent. I’m no scientist, but it doesn’t take one to figure out that we’re facing the end of a good portion of the civilized world here.”

Zeus sighed sadly. “To believe that such an installation could be set in place without my knowledge.” His voice turned forceful now. “But my knowledge will be what assures the world’s continued existence. I’ll crack Def-Net personally,
ULTSEC
or not. I’ll see to it that forces are marshaled and dispatched. Outpost 10 will be reached and protected.”

“There’s still the Macy’s parade to concern ourselves with.”

“The proper forces have been alerted. A simple phone call from me and an apparent strike will force the parade into a one-year hiatus.”

Kimberlam felt a warm rush of triumph as he realized that at last they were winning. “There’s something else,” he said. “Something I need you to do while I’m on my way in.”

“Of course. Anything.”

“I took it upon myself to have Lisa Eiseman protected. But there’s been too much penetration. I’m not sure her present placement is safe.”

“Just tell me where she is and I’ll have her delivered to a safe house.”

“Tell whoever you send to be careful. The bodyguard I arranged for her doesn’t have a lot of patience.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll want him included as well.”

“Certainly,” Zeus said. “Know just the place. Cottage with a view of the Chesapeake.” He proceeded to provide the address, after which Kimberlain furnished him with the details of where Lisa and Peet could be found.

“Hurry home,” Zeus told him.

But getting home would be no easy task.

“The airport is out of the question,” Danielle explained. “The Hashi will have it covered, and maybe the authorities as well. We’re murderers now, remember?”

“We don’t know that.”

“I do. I know how they work. They’re masters at short-circuiting legitimate processes or circumventing them to their best advantage.”

“There must be alternative routes.”

“Several, the best and safest of which open up after dark. We still have a number of hours.”

“We,” Kimberlain echoed. “I wasn’t sure I was going to have company. Thought you were going south.”

“I trust you,” she said softly. “And right now I need that trust more than anything.”

Danielle drew the blinds, shutting out as much of the daylight as she could manage. Neither of them had slept the night before, and they were exhausted; they could see it on each other’s face.

Kimberlain started toward one of the room’s chairs, but Danielle grasped his arm gently as he passed her. “Please,” she muttered shyly, almost childlike. “Lie with me. Just … hold me.”

She lay down on the bed atop the covers. Kimberlain joined her and wrapped his arms around her gently at first, then in a tight embrace. She clung to him, and the Ferryman thought of Lisa back at his cabin in Maine. He wanted Danielle more than he had wanted Lisa, but he knew he could never have her. Sex had happened only twice in her life, on both occasions violently. There could be no third until the bitter memories were put behind her for good. So they lay together with their arms entwined, Danielle for comfort and Kimberlain acting out of compassion, with thoughts of sexuality forced back. They hugged tight, and he felt her warmth before drifting off to sleep.

When he awoke it was to the awareness of darkness filling the room and his arms wrapped around cleverly arranged pillows instead of Danielle. He stumbled from the bed and located the light switch from memory. Her note was there in plain view, stuck against the mirror over the bureau. Kimberlain skimmed it the first time, eyes lingering on the detailed set of instructions she had left for getting out of Malta. He read the top last, because he already knew what message it would hold.

She had left, left him, to make a senseless journey to Antarctica and Outpost 10.

Kimberlain crumbled the note in his hand and felt anger flush through him. The similarities between the two of them were indeed striking. But equally striking were the differences. For her there were only two points connected by a straight line. For Kimberlain it was following the line that had become everything. She was caught up in beginnings and ends. The Ferryman had turned his life over to all that occurred in between, as if his existence had evolved into one continuous line, with no points to begin or end it.

He pushed his thoughts of her aside and retrieved the crumpled paper to better review her instructions for escape. They were complicated but shouldn’t take too long to carry out. His mind calculated that, given the overseas time differential, he could be in Washington by the early-morning hours of Tuesday.

That would give him two full days before the start of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and not much more than that before the coming of what Brother Valette had called the Eighth Trumpet.

The strain was starting to tell on Zeus. He had followed Kimberlain’s phone call with dozens of his own. Men had been rousted from meetings, meals, conferences. All had been reached over an emergency channel very few were even aware of.

“Who the hell is this?” demanded the first he’d managed to get hold of.

“Is that any way to greet an old friend, Colonel?”

“Zeus? You’re calling on a dead channel, goddamn it. It’s not cleared. I can’t talk to—”

“You’ll talk, Colonel, because far more than codes and clearances are hanging in the balance. I need information from you on one of your Def-Net installations. Outpost 10.”

“Outpost
what
?”

“No games, please.”

“This isn’t a game. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

It had been the same for hours now. Everyone he reached using outdated channels, long replaced since his reassignment, professed to know nothing of Outpost 10—and Zeus believed them. This puzzled as well as frightened him, because it meant that Outpost 10 was sealed so high up that it could conceivably resist all his attempts to penetrate it.

But it was a matter of pride as well as of necessity now. Hearing old voices—and new ones—rekindled in him the old fires of power, when he had held the reins and sent out orders without need to account to anyone else. It was a strange sort of retirement they had created for him—the illusion of power more than the reality of it. Yet the two were close enough for him to believe he could get the proper authority on the phone and ensure that the right precautions were taken at Outpost 10.

It was past midnight when one of his four lines rang.

“I shouldn’t be calling back,” a voice told him.

“We all do things we shouldn’t.”

“Outpost 10 doesn’t exist.”

“Really.”

“Listen to me. We’re talking levels here. Not the President, not the Secretary of State. Behind the scenes, yet above them.”

“Good. I want the control for the project. I want him on this line within an hour. This isn’t the kind of story one wishes to tell twice.”

“Then use me as a conduit.”

“Zeus doesn’t use conduits, old friend.”

The speaker still persisted. “Damn it, you don’t know what you’re dealing with here!”

“Unfortunately,” Zeus countered, “I do.”

The blind man sat by the odd-shaped phone on his desk in the near blackness of his study, the lights on only for the sake of his two bodyguards. He heard one of them approaching now.

“I brought you some coffee, sir.”

Both the men were fiercely loyal to him, assigned originally by the government as much for its safety as his own. A man like Zeus couldn’t be allowed to wander on too long a leash. No telling who he might talk to or what he might say. It was strange thinking back now to his reassignment following the dissolution of The Caretakers. Through it all, his greatest concern was whether they would let him keep his anonym. Stripping it away would be as bad as killing him. But they had left the blind man that much, a slice of identity large enough to build from.

Zeus raised the coffee mug to his lips. The steam rising off its top told him it was too hot, and he merely grabbed a taste before he heard a clatter of steps rushing down from upstairs followed by the second bodyguard’s hurried entry into his study.

“There’s someone outside,” the man reported.

Zeus stilled his thoughts, tried to feel about the outer perimeter of his grounds with his senses. Yes, there was something out there, something big and evil, a disturbance not unlike a great storm announcing itself with soft lightning in the distance.

The second bodyguard was at the closet tearing out weapons. Zeus busied himself by identifying each by the clamor it made on contact with the floor or wall.

There was a loud click, followed by a drawn-out sizzling sound.

“Lights are out!” one bodyguard blared.

“They’ve cut the power!” followed the second.

“Not they,” Zeus corrected. “He.”

He wasn’t sure how he knew that so certainly, any more than how he could tell that his bodyguards had stopped to stare at him briefly.

A smell reached his nose, a smell of the cold outdoors intruding with a wisp of wind into the warmth of his house. Another scent followed with it, that of something stale and worn and oddly terrifying.

“He’s in the house,” Zeus said very softly.

His huge bodyguards tensed like jungle cats, commandos again now, back to the life they had been brought here from. They readied for the invasion, and Zeus could sense the change in their auras as they made sure he was sitting low and safe behind the cover of the desk, then taking up positions on opposite sides of the room with a clear view of the doorway.