The Vengeance of the Tau (42 page)

“She says that the priest’s curse is finally complete.”

Bertlemass nodded, and the others led Tessen out of the room. Blaine and Johnny took their time in following. They had just started from the room when a sudden stirring behind them made both turn around fast.

The toymaker stretched his arms behind a yawn and looked their way.

“Did I miss something?” he wondered in a sleepy voice.

“No,” Blaine told him. “It’s over.”

Epilogue

“
WHEN DOES IT END
, Indian?” McCracken asked Wareagle outside the mansion, when all the explosives had at last been planted.

“With those who began it, Blainey, as we saw tonight.”

“We got lucky tonight.”

“Did we? Or is this merely the way of all things? My people have a legend that tells of a demon who rises to wage war on an entire tribe. The tribe fights bravely with its most valiant warriors, but to no avail. The demon’s evil cannot be overcome. It is fueled by the killings as it consumes the warriors’ spirits with their flesh. When all is over, and the demon has consumed all of the tribe, his lust is still not satisfied. His hunger insatiable, he consumes himself.”

“Evil doesn’t always destroy itself, Indian.”

“But it inevitably leaves us a means to help it on its way.”

Blaine’s stare had turned reflective. “It left Rothstein a means, too, and I can’t help thinking that he had things more right than we ever did. I can’t help thinking that maybe I just should have left him and his Tau alone to finish what they started.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I was afraid it would leave me—us—with nothing to do.”

Wareagle smiled ever so slightly. “Each battle we face leads us to the next one. My people have a ghost dance, Blainey, in which the spirits recognize them and inscribe their names on the totem of our ways. There is a similar totem for our ways in the hellfire, a black granite slab incised with those whose journeys ended in the jungle. But the names of the ones we lost, the ones who traveled the jungle with us, are not there. I wonder if they can rest or if they are lost, as my people would be if the spirits bid them no regard.”

“They knew the rules, Indian. What we did over there never happened, no accounts made in Uncle Sam’s daily log. The steps of our ghost dance were different.”

“Except I never performed it with my people, Blainey. With you and the others, yes, but never with those Joe Rainwater wanted me to stand up for. And since our work in the hellfire can never be acknowledged, perhaps my name remains inscribed nowhere.”

“Better nowhere than that black granite slab.”

“True enough. But I must stand up for my people now. In my own way, my own time. I must be faithful to all that remains a part of me.”

Blaine frowned. “Maybe that’s my problem. Somehow I feel I wasn’t true to myself in destroying Rothstein.”

“It wasn’t Rothstein you destroyed so much as the White Death. You came to understand that true essence lies not in proposed ends, but in prescribed means. The White Death was wrong, Blainey, it was evil. Anyone who reached out to grasp it, then, could only be the same.”

“But more people are grasping, Indian, if not for the White Death, then something else.”

Wareagle smiled ever so slightly. “In the hellfire, we entered the dark world and survived it. When we returned, the world above lacked many things but at least it always had light. Somewhere.”

“The trick sometimes is finding it, and it seems to be getting harder. Less of it out there, if you know what I mean.”

“Not less light, Blainey, just more clouds we must part to find it. And this time, perhaps, we have a chance to part the greatest one of all.”

McCracken nodded. “Just maybe we do.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Melissa protested.

She stood before the narrow opening on the bank of the dry riverbed that she and Blaine had climbed out of ten days before, stood before it as if to block the way down. She had been mounting arguments ever since McCracken had informed her of his intentions. But this last-ditch attempt seemed to be her most determined.

Blaine and Johnny looked at each other before McCracken spoke. “I think we do, Melly.”

“Please,” she begged, “not until I have an opportunity to explore what lies beneath the chamber we found. Let me figure out when it was built and by whom. The Nazis didn’t choose this site randomly. They came here because the chamber was already in place! They came here because they suspected what this site truly holds!”

“All the more reason to bury it forever.”

“The Nazis didn’t have time to explore what else might lie down there. If they had, if
we
could …”

McCracken shook his head.

Melissa turned her impassioned gaze on Wareagle. “Talk to him.
Please!
”

“He is right,” Johnny said softly. “All that can ever be allowed to emerge from here is what we have seen already. We must prevent any further evil from escaping. Further discoveries can only serve to release more secrets the world is not yet ready to bear.”

Melissa’s eyes bulged in response to the Indian’s last words. “You believe it, then. You believe my father was right. You can feel it. You
know
it. This really is hell.”

“There are many hells,” Johnny explained after exchanging a quick glance with McCracken. “This is one of them.”

“And I suppose the two of you plan to blow all of them up?” she said cynically.

Blaine looked at Johnny, thinking back to the conversation they’d had before the mansion and the White Death had been destroyed. “The world will never run out of its hells,” he told Melissa.

“Please! You don’t know what you’re doing, I tell you!”

“No, Melly. I think we do.”

They entered the tunnel that led into the storage chamber minutes later, weighted down slightly by the necessary supplies. A work crew hired by McCracken and supervised by Sal Belamo waited back near the find itself to level the land soon to be ruptured and pitted by the explosion. Otherwise, the invitation would always be there for future parties to try to find and explore what Blaine had come to feel quite certain was better left alone. The crew would not only level the land, they would also disguise it so that it would blend in with the rest of the surroundings. Virtually no trace whatsoever of the discovery would be left behind, even to aerial photography.

Melissa insisted on leading the way, for her own good as well as theirs. With the proper equipment and lighting, the trek should have been much easier, but her legs were lead-heavy and her mouth dry beyond water’s ability to help. She waited for them while they set the explosives within and around the chamber, feeling in her heart that far more than its contents would be lost to the world when they were set off. Blaine and Johnny were careful to plant the charges to ensure that the contents of the cavern would be entombed, not exploded, even though samples taken from containers bearing stockpiled nerve and chemical agents had revealed that the years had stripped them of their potency.

The three of them emerged into the light of the dry riverbed with plenty of time to spare, and waited. Remote detonation wouldn’t work, given the logistics involved, so they had set the timers to the one-hour mark. The blast at that moment came as a mere rumble that barely shook the ground about them. It was enough, though, to tell Blaine and Johnny that they had been successful, that the final remnants of the Third Reich had been sealed from the world at last.

And that all doorways leading to what might have lain beneath them had been closed forever.

A Biography of Jon Land

Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-eight novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He wrote techno thrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.

Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel,
The Doomsday Spiral
, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain our security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.

In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent,
The Last Prophecy
, was released in 2004.

Recently,
RT Book Reviews
gave Land a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction. Land is currently writing his fourth novel to feature Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong—a female hero in a genre which, Land has said, has too few of them. The first three books in the series—
Strong Enough to Die
(2009),
Strong Justice
(2010), and
Strong at the Break
(2011)—have all garnered critical praise with
Strong Justice
being named a Top Thriller of the Year by Library Journal and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book,
Betrayal
, tells the story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and will be released in 2011.

Land currently lives in Providence, not far from his alma mater.

Land (left) interviewing then–teen idol Leif Garrett (center) in April of 1978 at the dawn of Land’s writing career.

Land (second from left) at Maine’s Ogunquit Beach during the summer of 1984, while he was a counselor at Camp Samoset II. He spent a total of twenty-six summers at the camp.

Land with street kids in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which he visited in 1987 as part of his research for
The Omicron Legion
(1991).