The Vengeance of the Tau (19 page)

Johnny rushed back to the center of the corridor where a fire alarm was set into the wall. He reached a hand up and pulled it. The alarm began wailing immediately. The emergency exit door at the end of the hall would now be unlocked, and Wareagle bolted back toward it. Halfway there, he could hear the door leading down to the basement thrown open, a soft thud as someone or something began to descend.

The pushbar gave this time, and he was halfway through the exit when he heard the crash of the door leading into the cellblock opening. Something stopped him from turning back to look, a feeling he could not articulate or explain.

The spirits warning him, counseling him …

What did they know that he did not?

Another staircase lay before him, and Johnny charged up it toward the night.

Night fell over the bayou, moonless and black as tar. The crickets and night bugs sang incessantly in an eerie harmonic wail. The air was thick with humidity, and the old house was not blessed with air conditioning. Ceiling fans turned rapidly to slice through the heat. They kept the air moving, but could do nothing about the stifling humidity. Heydan Larroux was sweating as she gazed out over the black water that surrounded the house. Built on stilts in ten-foot-deep water, it was accessible only by a narrow, wobbly fifty-foot walkway running out from the shoreline.

Heydan Larroux had come here to hide after fleeing from her uptown mansion. The tunnel beneath it had once been part of the Underground Railroad, but the years had not been kind to it. Most of the city of New Orleans is below sea level. Accordingly, in her trek through the tunnel Heydan encountered a number of coffins washed from their graves by storms over the years. Many of the coffins lay shattered and ruined, their contents scattered alongside. After the first encounter, Heydan resolved to keep her flashlight pointed strictly forward and her eyes following the beam. At the close of the tunnel, on the opposite end of Chappatula, a car, its motor idling, was waiting for her up on the street.

The Old One was already inside.

In the house on the bayou, Heydan turned away from the window and faced the Old One, who sat cross-legged on the floor with a commercial-sized mixing bowl before her. Moving that way, Heydan saw that six stones had been placed on the floor on the opposite side of the bowl. She sat down across from the Old One and picked up the first one, ready to drop it into the water as soon as she completed her question.

“Will it still come for me?”

Plop.

Soft ripples churned through the bowl, slowing, then stopped.

“Yes,” the old woman replied, seeming to read them through her sightless eyes.

Heydan took another stone. “When?”

Plop.

“You escaped its wrath, child. It seethes in anger. Failure is something it cannot accept. But it does not leave echoes the way most living things do. I cannot feel its approach, only its presence.”

Heydan grasped a third stone, having to force herself to ask a question she dreaded the answer to. “What is it?”

Plop.

“Power, child. Raw and pure. It swallows. It absorbs.”

“It does not kill for revenge.”

“A question!”

“Does it kill for revenge or to eliminate those in its way?” And she dropped the fourth stone.

“It kills to kill, child. Its reasons are not comprehendible to me or you. Now that it has been unleashed, it will not be restrained again until all its work is done.”

Heydan grasped a fifth stone. “Unleashed by who?”

The old woman squinted her dead eyes to follow the water’s ripples. “I see the past. The present, too, but not as clear. They have melded, but the years and the ages are clashing. I see a force thought dead, but only dormant. The force reeks of frustration and impatience, of a vision it will not have sullied by anyone. Relentless. Unstoppable.”

“Nothing is unstoppable.”

“I can only respond to a question.”

Heydan gathered up the final stone. “What must I do to survive?”

Plop.

The stone was larger this time, and the result was a louder noise and more ripples through the bowl. The Old One lowered her ear closer to the water. Then she looked up.

“There is a man, a warrior, who will come to know of this force. He alone can save you. Far away now, but soon he will be close.”

“Who?” Heydan Larroux demanded.

“The stones are gone.”

“Who?”

“We must let the waters recharge, revitalize. The streams of constant answers have grown still. We must wait, my child. Tomorrow. The day after.”

Heydan gazed out the window into the night, praying for morning as if that might save her. She had rounded up her most formidable remaining guards and summoned them here, equipped them with explosives and armaments that could kill a small army. But it hadn’t been enough in New Orleans and it wouldn’t be in the bayou.

“You must wait,” the Old One was saying.

“For tomorrow …”

“For as long as it takes for the warrior to find his way here.”

Chapter 18

“
WHERE TO NOW?
” Melissa asked when the bus had deposited them in the center of the Turkish city of Izmir just after ten o’clock Thursday morning. They had boarded it in Ephesus an hour after dawn, after walking fifteen miles through the night to a point where sightseers were dropped off and picked up later in the day.

“The Büyük Efes Hotel.”

Melissa knew Izmir well enough to know it was the best in the city. “You’re kidding.”

“You travel with me, babe, you go first class.”

“You know people there,” she realized.

“Izmir still houses the headquarters for NATO’s southeastern sector,” Blaine explained, the wryness gone from his voice. “We get to the hotel, we can press all the buttons to keep our presence as secret as we can hope for.”

She fingered the ragged notebook through the heavy canvas of her pack. “Izmir also houses one of the finest and best-equipped archaeological museums in the entire Middle East. And we need to find out what our notebook says.”

McCracken glanced at her pack. “Too bad it can’t tell us who removed the more recent batch of those missing crates.”

“It might tell us what’s inside them,” Melissa responded, “and that’s the next best thing.”

At last a taxi pulled to a halt before them.

The man waited until the taxi’s occupants were inside the Büyük Efes and the taxi had driven off before entering the lobby. Not surprisingly, his quarries had already vanished from sight. But it didn’t matter now. He moved to a row of pay phones just past the front desk and dialed a number he had memorized just hours before.

“Yes,” a voice answered.

“Büyük Efes,” was all he said.

The taxi driver pulled over at a restaurant just down the street from the Büyük Efes. There was no pay phone inside, but he knew the manager well enough to use the restaurant’s own line. The phone was located in the comer of the kitchen. The driver knew he was being watched as he dialed the number.

“Ja?”
a
voice greeted in German.

And the taxi driver whispered his message.

Inside the Büyük Efes, Blaine headed not for the front desk, but the desk of the assistant manager. He introduced himself on the pretext of having a problem and was ushered into the privacy of a back office. Less than ten minutes later he and Melissa were settled in a room on the hotel’s seventh floor with nothing signed and no evidence of their presence recorded.

The Büyük Efes was indeed Izmir’s finest hotel. Boasting eight stories and nearly three hundred rooms, it featured three restaurants, two bars, and an upscale nightclub that was a main attraction in the city. The room given to Blaine and Melissa looked out over the inlet which flowed in from the Aegean Sea and the Ataturk Caddesi, the city’s palm-lined seafront promenade.

Melissa took a long bath and then a shower, hoping the surge of water would revive and refresh her. While it could wash the grime and stink of the past two days from her, though, it could not swab clean the memories. The grief returned with stunning impact as her senses relaxed and uncoiled. Since McCracken’s arrival at the dig site less than twenty-four hours before, there had been no time to feel it. Fighting to save her own life had spared her from dwelling on the loss of her father’s. But now she had her thoughts for company again, and they behaved like unwelcome guests. She was exhausted and starving, and that heightened her depression all the more.

She stood with her back to the shower’s jets. The grungy bathwater was still draining from the tub over her feet and now her tears began to drop into it. She cried herself out standing there, arms wrapped tight around her midsection and shaking no matter how hot she made the water. When she could cry no more, she stepped from the tub and wrapped herself in a thick white robe that had been hanging behind the door. She felt a wave of nausea overcome her and leaned over the toilet to vomit. But her stomach was empty and the heave was dry.

“Melly?”

McCracken’s voice came from right next to her. He had entered the bathroom without her even knowing. She looked up at him with hands propped on either side of the sink, fighting to get her breath back.

“You should eat,” he said softly. “The food came while you were in the shower.”

“I … can’t.”

“You have to. Come on. …”

He slid an arm over her shoulder and eased her from the sink. She came away tentatively, wanting to cling to her perch there, and then pressed against him. She was trembling horribly, and Blaine held her tighter. He stroked her still-wet hair to comfort her. Outside the bathroom, near the table room service had wheeled in, she clung fast to him.

“My father used to do that,” she said softly. “When I was a little girl.”

“Ladies tell me all the time I remind them of their fathers.”

Melissa eased herself away from him, the aroma of fresh coffee and hot food starting to revive her. “My father was in his late thirties when I was born. My mother was twenty-four, one of his graduate students. He always said he had meant to marry earlier, but there was always a dig, a project, some research to do. I guess the only person he could have married was one of his students.”

“Your mother …”

“She died when I was four.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It hurts more now than it ever did. Does that make sense?”

“No one left to fill the gaps. It makes plenty. Not as much as eating a good meal, though.”

McCracken had ordered generously, and the two of them attacked the covered plates of eggs, bacon, rolls, danish, and small steaks. The food made her feel better but couldn’t fill the deeper hole in her stomach, the one that was hot and burning from the pain of loss.

“What now?” Melissa asked.

“You need rest.”

“No, I’m … afraid.”

“I’ll be here,” he soothed.

“That’s not it. It hurts too much when I rest. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

“You’re exhausted.”

“Then eventually I’ll pass out. But not now, not for a while.” Her eyes fell on the tattered, nearly ruined notebook lying on the room’s desk near the backpack that had held it. “And I’ve got work to do.”

Blaine followed her gaze. “How much of it do you think is salvageable?”

“Impossible to tell until I’ve had a look at it under enhanced conditions. The Archaeological Museum’s right in the center of Izmir, just a few miles from here. They know me there. Shouldn’t be a problem to gain access to what I need.”

“What time do they open?”

“Ten o’clock. What time is it now?”

“After eleven.”

“I’m going to get dressed,” Melissa insisted. “Then I’m going down to the museum straightaway.”

“You need to rest,” Blaine repeated.

“Nonsense.”

“Be sensible.”

She shrugged, relenting.

McCracken went into the shower after she was lying in bed, tucked under the covers still wearing her Büyük Efes bathrobe. He allowed himself to linger in the spray for far longer than usual, trying to plan his next step. The dig site had left him at a virtual dead end. He knew that something had been removed from the secret storage chamber on two separate occasions: first by Jews in the wake of World War II, and then by an unknown party far more recently. With such a vast array of deadly weapons before them, both parties had chosen the crates.

Why? Had the Jews made use of their contents? Did the unknown party intend to?

The only lead he had at present was the potentially useless notebook; he would rely on Melissa to make something out of it. He knew pain well enough to know that working through it was the best medicine.

He emerged from the bathroom in a second hotel bathrobe and found a ruffled space in the bed where she had been lying. The notebook was gone. So, too, was the change of clothes the assistant manager had sent up to the room. Blaine smiled. Melissa was truly an impressive woman, brave and determined. He had sensed how close she was to her father, how much she had come to depend on him for the direction and meaning of her own life. Now she would have to find those on her own, starting today, and Blaine knew he had to let her.

He lay down on the ruffled bed and was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

The men came in five different vehicles, their arrivals separated by precise two-minute intervals. All sixteen slipped into their assigned positions inside the Büyük Efes. All had miniature microphones attached to the lapels of their suit jackets. Thin wires snaked down and around to their backs where their transmitting apparatuses were clipped. A tiny antenna that looked like little more than a stray thread rose up from each man’s collar.

Among themselves the men had wondered briefly about why so many of them were needed for so simple an operation. Questioning orders was something that was simply not possible for them, not today or ever, so they accepted what they were told. The man they were coming for must be very important; that much was certain. And very dangerous; that was certain, too. For this reason, the more-experienced members of the team found the rather peculiar parameters of this mission unnerving. If this man was dangerous enough to require a team so large, their orders should have contained considerably more latitude.