The Omicron Legion (32 page)

“But it didn’t go as planned, did it?” said Pierce. “Your Mr. McCracken—and the people working with him—ended up dangerously close to the truth, and now all of them have vanished.”

“I’m doing my best to correct that,” Virginia Maxwell said.

“How?”

“McCracken, Belamo, and the Indian have been red-flagged, marked for immediate execution. Shoot on sight, is the old terminology. Every intelligence agency in the book has gotten the word.”

“Your voice is not exactly brimming with confidence, Miss Maxwell.”

“I’ve done what I can.”

“But it isn’t enough, is it?” Pierce challenged her. “McCracken’s been red-flagged before and all it did was make him madder, more determined. I don’t like having him as an enemy.”

“That’s why I came to you with the problem.”

“You came to us because you are no longer capable of handling it!”

“What is it that you want?” the darkened shape asked from the front of the hall.

“He’s going to come after me,” droned the voice of Virginia Maxwell. “I want to let him.”

“Fine with me,” muttered Pierce.

“To set a trap,” the head of the Gap continued.

“Have you come for our blessing?” This question came from the shape.

“No. For your help.”

“You have the resources of an entire organization, an entire intelligence community, behind you.”

“They’re no match for McCracken. I want to draw him out, but once he surfaces I’ve got to be sure he can be taken.”

“Yet by your own admission…” The shape broke off his own words. “Yes, I see what you’re getting at.”

“They alone can stop McCracken and his Indian friend.”

Pierce got to his feet. “They? Are you suggesting we use the disciples against
a pair of men!
”

“The security of this operation may well depend on it,” Virginia Maxwell insisted.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Think of the risk involved if we do this!”

“Think of the risk involved if we don’t.”

Pierce’s eyes fell proudly on the huge wall map dotted with red lights to denote the targeted nuclear power plants. “Our operation is less than two days from activation.”

“There may not be an operation if McCracken remains at large. I submit to you, gentlemen, that he disappeared in Brazil because Takahashi reached him before we could. That means he knows everything—and knowledge in the hands of a man like this is the most dangerous weapon of all. Don’t you see? If he met with Takahashi, he has the list! He knows our names, our identities, all of us. Even if our operation is successful, he will hunt us down.”

“He could not know the location of these bunkers,” the shape told her.

“He’ll find them. He’ll find us. It’s what he does. We’d be playing right into his hands.”

“You sound very certain of all this, Miss Maxwell.”

A sigh preceded Virginia Maxwell’s next words. “I’ve been in the intelligence game for over two decades now. The operatives I haven’t worked with I’ve read about, and McCracken stands apart from all of them. He’s not the best in any single facet of the game, but he’s the best by a long shot when you consider all of them together. Goddammit, he killed a disciple. He killed someone we made to be unkillable.”

“You’re sure he’ll go after you and not one of the others on the list?” asked the shape.

“Absolutely.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows I’m still available, and he’s already familiar with the logistics involved.”

“That being the case,” said Pierce, “it’s conceivable even the disciples won’t be able to help you.”

“Just give them to me and let me worry about the rest.”

“We’d be risking the entire operation if we did.”

“You’d be risking it even more if McCracken is left at large.”

The shadow projected behind the shape showed the semblance of a nod. “I want to hear your plan first, Miss Maxwell. If I approve of it, we’ll do as you say.”

The car was an ancient Yellow Cab pockmarked with rust. “Ain’t much, but she runs,” said Sal Belamo, slamming the driver’s door with a creak.

“Always nice to travel in style.”

“Good to see you, too, McCracken,” Belamo said, and scooted around to open the door for Patty. “Scuse my manners, but being red-flagged tends to stress me out. You ask me, I’d be better off taking up boxing again and hoping Carlos Monzon comes outta retirement to finish the job.”

After leaving Takahashi, Patty and Blaine had left Japan on a commercial airliner. No way, McCracken figured, could every flight coming into the country be watched. As a further precaution, on the chance the enemy knew of their brief stay in Japan, they changed planes at Heathrow and boarded a flight bound for Chicago. The last leg was a nonstop to Boston’s Logan Airport, where Sal Belamo was waiting. With the hours lost to plane changes and time zones, they arrived late in the morning on Thursday, forty-eight hours before the disciples would begin their deadly work.

“You get ahold of Johnny?” Blaine asked Sal.

“We’re on our way to pick him up now, boss. Things ain’t been great for him, either. Had a bad experience in Philadelphia, where one of the six killers got himself dead in a bad way.”

“Aren’t many good ones.”

“Even fewer worse than this. Somebody twisted his head like a bottle cap. Johnny said it was one of those Thunder whatevers.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Then check this out. Four of the other killers are toast, too, and the last one is probably floating in some river. That surprise ya?”

“Not in the least.”

Sal honked the horn in frustration. “When you plan on telling me what the fuck went down in Jap land?”

“After we pick up Johnny.”

Wareagle met them in a rest area just north of Boston, as planned. As soon as he got into the back of the cab, Blaine could feel something wasn’t right. He couldn’t explain exactly what; the big Indian simply felt, well,
different.
In all the years they had known each other, Johnny had been unflappably measured, existing on a keel so even it was maddening. But today an uneasy edge hung about him, something sharp and new.

“Hey,” Sal Belamo broke in as their stares held, “you ask me, this tub doesn’t make for our best route of travel south. Not exactly inconspicuous, if you get my drift.”

“We’ll find the nearest shopping center and make a change.”

“Big Lincoln if I can spot one?”

“Sounds good,” Blaine replied. “Give me a chance to tell you boys about our unscheduled trip to the Orient….”

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Sal Belamo muttered after Blaine had finished detailing the incredible story of the Children of the Black Rain. “This goddamn albino hires six icemen to whack a bunch of people the Japs planted as
babies
?”

“All grown up now and holding the fate of this country in the balance.”

“Not them alone, though, is it? Shit,
that
we could handle. They got your Omicron legion in their corner, and that changes the odds.”

“In our favor, maybe.”

“You got an idea, chief?”

“The makings of one, anyway.”

“What comes next?”

“We ride south.”

“Washington?”

“Not quite.”

“I’m not afraid of you. I want you to know that.” Abraham looked up from the fire he was kneeling in front of in Virginia Maxwell’s study that night. The flames lent their color to his straw-colored hair and glistened off his ice-blue eyes.

“Nice of you to say so,” he replied.

“The others will be arriving at the rendezvous point shortly. You, of course, will be there. I leave it to you to brief them on what they will be facing tomorrow.”

“You’re that sure you can predict McCracken’s actions?”

“He has no choice,” Virginia Maxwell insisted. “This is the only course of action available to him, under the circumstances.”

“Yes,” Abraham said, with a smile Maxwell did not understand. He rose and stood there in front of the fireplace. “Is this the way you treat all your people?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You haven’t come within eight feet of me since I arrived, Ms. Maxwell. I had hoped our first meeting would have been more pleasant.”

“This is business.”

“Everything is business to me.” He shook his head as if disappointed. “I can understand it coming from the others, but I expected more from you.”

“We have a task before us and nothing more.”

“No, Ms. Maxwell. You are scared of me, because you don’t understand me. And what you don’t understand, you can’t control. Would you like me to tell you about myself? Would you like to hear about the feeling that rushes through me when I kill? I live for those opportunities, Ms. Maxwell, and when they are not provided, I create them. This bother you?”

“Er…no.”

“The Indian understood me. I saw it in his eyes. He understood me because we’re the same. It’s the same with McCracken. I can feel it. That is not good.”

“They’ll be there together.”

“I know.”

“You’ll have your chance.”

Abraham glided close enough to Virginia Maxwell for her to see his lean face clearly for the first time. “And perhaps then you’ll understand me and the others. Without McCracken and the Indian, we’ll be all that is left.”

They checked into the Days Inn-Oyster Point in the center of Newport News; they would be using it as a base. Patty Hunsecker retired to her room for a bath, and Sal Belamo went out for supplies, leaving Blaine and Johnny alone.

“What gives, Indian?” Blaine asked Wareagle, who was staring into the mirror suspended over the room’s dresser. It was too small, of course, to accommodate him, and he had to bend slightly at the knees to look into his own eyes.

Wareagle said nothing.

McCracken spoke again. “When you got into the car, you felt different, Indian, like I never felt you before.”

Wareagle turned his gaze toward McCracken. “Look in the mirror, Blainey, and tell me what you see.”

“Let me open the blinds and turn the lights on first.”

“Without the light.”

“A pair of outlines without much detail, Indian. Yours is bigger than mine.”

“Before facing his
Hanbelachia,
such is the true warrior. A figure from a child’s coloring book before any shades have been added between the lines.” Wareagle turned slowly from the mirror and looked at Blaine. “Facing Abraham across the sky in Philadelphia should have faced me with the
Hanbelachia
that is my fate, but instead it faced me with something else.” Johnny turned back to the mirror. “I looked into his eyes and I saw a looking glass, I saw myself. I realized that my shape had been filled in by the will of others.” Wareagle turned his gaze hard into McCracken’s “The
Wakinyan
are what the country made us into first.”

“Or tried to.”

“No, Blainey, succeeded. We were trained and tempered, and then the hellfire forged our souls in an image that has held us hostage ever since. We hide behind the illusion we are doing right, but that is only from the perspective they gave us.”

“What about justification?”

“Each act finds its own. The doing provides the context, but in the end the act is the same.”

“You’re saying we’re no better than the disciples are?”

“I’m saying we’re no different.”

Blaine came a little closer; his reflection sharpened next to Wareagle’s in the mirror. “No, Indian, you’ve got it wrong this time, and you said how yourself. Nam—the hellfire—forged our souls because we had souls to forge. The disciples had their souls stripped away. That’s what made them. That’s what
makes
them.”

A slight smile from Johnny flickered in the mirror. “It seems, Blainey, that you have forgotten the first lesson we learned in the hellfire: Never judge the enemy by your own values. The Black Hearts did not consider themselves soulless, and in another way neither do the
Wakinyan.
”

“This is more than just us against them.”

Wareagle’s bear claw of a right hand flattened out against the mirror and seemed ready to tear through the glass. “It is our vision quest to face them. Passing the rites successfully means smashing the mirror. We trap their reflections inside, at the same time we free our own from what others have made us.”

“Eleven of them left. Plus Abraham.”

“Yes, Blainey.”

“We can do it, Indian, but only if we meet them on our terms.”

“Not an easy task.”

“But you said it yourself, Johnny:
I
know how they think, and I know how the Children of the Black Rain think, too.”

“Your plan is to outguess them, Blainey?”

“My plan is to do exactly what they expect me to do, and take it from there.”

Wareagle’s head tilted slightly. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“I never said we could reasonably expect to be able to handle the
Wakinyan
alone.”

“It appears we have no choice.”

“Appearances, Indian, can be deceiving.”

Chapter 31

VIRGINIA MAXWELL’S LIMOUSINE
rolled into the underground garage constructed beneath the Oyster Point office building housing the Gap at 9:00 Friday morning. Access to the organization’s floors could be gained only through a single entrance at the garage level. The entrance had a single door that looked utterly innocuous except for the small electronic slot that accepted identification cards to permit access. The doorknob was just for show. It opened and closed mechanically and was formed of eight-inch plate steel.

Maxwell’s limousine slid through the serpentine garage structure and parked in its accustomed spot. Seconds later, surrounded by four guards, the head of Gap was ushered to the door and led through it. Two more armed guards were waiting in the claustrophobic entry, one already pushing the button that opened the elevator doors. Seconds later, the compartment was whizzing straight to the eighteenth floor, where Virginia Maxwell’s office was located.

The guards were still enclosing her when the compartment doors slid open on Maxwell’s floor.

McCracken and Wareagle had watched the limousine arrive through binoculars from the top floor of one of the soon-to-be completed buildings adjacent to the one housing the Gap. It had taken all of the previous afternoon and evening to get the logistics of the operation in place and, even now, too much remained unsure.