Mark of Evil (39 page)

Finger ID required
.

She pressed her thumb and index finger on the screen and hit
Send
.

After the confirmation was received, her screen read:
Eye scan required.

She placed her wide-open right eye to the screen of her Allfone and hit
Send
again.

Ten seconds elapsed. Then the word
Confirmed
appeared
.
Another ten seconds went by, and then she received the message.

Meet us 300 yards south of the air base. Come alone. Look up.

She clicked off. In the cockpit, the pilot was looking down at her. Rivka took a deep breath and then called up to him, “Can’t come with you. Thanks for everything. Godspeed.”

The pilot gave a weary look, nodded, and closed the canopy, and a few moments later he was taxiing down the runway. A few seconds after that the tail of the jet lit up like a flame thrower and the fighter plane blasted up into the sky.

On the ground, Rivka pulled out a little compass from her flight suit to figure out which way was south. When she found it, she started sprinting full speed in that direction, out into the empty desert.

FIFTY-THREE

DESERT OUTSIDE NEW BABYLON, IRAQ

Pack McHenry sat behind the wheel of a vehicle that was dressed up like an Iraqi bakery truck, complete with a logo with a picture of pita bread and falafel on the side. But beneath the clever veneer the truck was armor plated, with heavy-duty suspension and a super-high-performance engine. His old days with the CIA and the contacts that he’d made there in the field always proved useful in providing him with some classy equipment.

Victoria sat in the back of the truck, along with Andre Chifflet and Vincent Romano. They were surrounded by a small depot of high-powered grenade launchers, ground-to-air shoulder-mounted missile launchers, and an assortment of automatic weapons. The bread truck had been parked there only a few minutes when Pack spotted a Range
Rover off in the distance coming their way. He’d hustled them all into the back of the truck, then got out and cranked open the hood as if it were having engine troubles.

Now the Ranger Rover pulled off the road and slowly crunched over the gravel and hard-packed sand until it was about twenty feet away. Pack noticed there was a Red Cross insignia on the side of the vehicle. The driver was either a plant from the Global Alliance or he was for real and had just passed successfully through the military roadblock a few miles down the highway.

Pack strode up to the driver, an Englishman in a sweat-soaked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The two of them sized each other up and engaged in some cautious conversation as Pack studied the Brit, who kept looking over at the pictures of pita bread on the side of the truck. Pack wondered if this guy was trying to piece the scene together, what with the fact that the bread truck was being driven by an American in the middle of the desert, just outside New Babylon, with a military roadblock not far away. It was clear the man had something on his mind; he kept meandering in his conversation, talking about an alert that had been sounded back at the New Babylon administrative sector and about the roadblock behind him, but he avoided specifics. Then he asked Pack what he was doing on the side of the road. He didn’t ask an obvious question like, “Engine problems?”

Either the man was a professional actor along the lines of the Royal Shakespearean Theatre, or he was what he appeared to be—a nervous civilian sitting on some information. Pack knew when he needed to call in his wife to apply her talents. He asked the Brit if he could have a seat in his vehicle because Pack had someone who wanted to talk to him.

Pack went to the rear of the truck and knocked three times on the back of the truck, then twice slowly, then twice quickly. He then
swung open the truck door—to be greeted with the barrel of Victoria’s Glock semi-automatic with the pretty pink-colored grip. “Hello, dear,” Victoria said cheerfully.

He explained what he needed. She quickly disappeared into the Red Cross vehicle.

Thirteen minutes later she came sashaying out of the Range Rover and back over to the bread truck. She sat down next to Pack in the front seat and told him everything the Brit had said—about the circumstances of his meeting Ethan March, about Ethan’s apparent injuries, and how he had dropped him off at the ruins of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And that Ethan told the Englishman to be on the lookout for a rescue mission that he hoped was coming for him.

“Is he lying?” Pack asked.

Victoria gave it only a moment’s thought. “Well, there was consistent musculature of the face during my questions. No inappropriate micro-expressive bursts. And no hint of deception in the dilation of the pupils. So, remembering that you are putting me under the gun here in terms of time, I would have to say no, he is not being evasive or deceptive.”

Pack ginned. “You’re the best.”

Victoria smiled back. “Isn’t that why you married me?”

“No,” Pack said with a smirk. “It was a purely physical attraction.”

With a grin of her own she slapped his shoulder.

Pack jumped out of the truck and trotted over to the Englishman, who had an anxious look on his face. The British man started first. “You know, I felt a little guilty leaving him back there. Is there anything I can do now?”

“Yes,” Pack said. “You can drive toward Karbala and keep going. You don’t want to be here when things start getting hairy.”

SATHER AIR BASE, IRAQ

Rivka was about two hundred yards away from the air base, still at a full run across the desert, when she glanced back and saw the cloud of dust way back by the airfield. She slowed down just slightly so she could pull out her military spyglass and check it out. It looked like a jeep with two men in it, heading her way at a fast clip. It had to be Global Alliance air base security. Rivka had been an accomplished long-distance runner when she lived back in Israel. But all of that seemed like a long time ago. She was surprised that she was already getting slightly winded, so she slowed her pace a bit so she could fall into her stride and control her breathing.

There was a slight drop-off ahead to a lower plateau. Perhaps there would be somewhere for her to hide. She searched the skies but saw nothing. Who had sent the cryptic text to her Allfone? Was she following a wild-goose chase that would lead her nowhere—except into a Global Alliance jail cell? She was unarmed and had no survival provisions and was trying to outrun a vehicle in the Iraq desert.

This is
not going
to end well.

She reached the four-foot drop-off and jumped down, then picked up her pace again. Glancing to her left, she noticed a smooth transition area about a hundred feet away that could provide an easy ramp for the jeep to use in pursuing her down to the lower plateau. She abandoned the idea of pacing herself and pushed hard, sprinting full out with her legs wheeling like an engine. It was do-or-die time.

The jeep was getting close enough where she could hear its engine roaring up behind her. As she sprinted across the open desert with nowhere to hide, she heard gunfire and saw a puff of dust to her right and some to her left as the bullets from the Alliance airport security started zinging past her and hitting the ground.

The text message on her Allfone from the classified source had read
Look up
. She knew that she must be very close to three hundred yards by now. She tried to dismiss the echo in her head that kept saying this was crazy. She was now running pell-mell through the scrubby little bushes across the hard-packed sand. This had to be the spot, whatever it was, and so she looked up. But she saw nothing.

A desperate sinking feeling lodged in the pit of her stomach as she heard the vehicle of the Alliance security guards closing in. But she kept looking up . . . and finally she saw something. There was a black dot way up in the sky, and as she watched it she could see that it was hurtling down fast, like a huge anvil, making almost no sound as it descended.

Then the object in the sky fired on the Alliance jeep. Bullets ripped through the front tires and shredded the hood. The two Alliance airport security guards scrambled out of their vehicle and ran off in the opposite direction.

The object in the sky was still dropping fast and getting closer. Now she could make out what it was. She would have called it a helicopter except that it was clearly an advanced experimental model. It was black and strangely angular from the front tip to the rear tail that housed a fan-like propeller. The angular configuration was clearly designed to confuse radar detection. There was a large circular blade on the underside and larger chopper blades on the top and in between a large cockpit where she could see two men. Behind the cockpit that had two spare seats, there appeared to be a small booster rocket. The whole thing looked like a jazzed-up version of the older Comanche recon and attack helicopter developed by DARPA—the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—for use by the CIA.

When the superchopper reached a hover about fifteen feet off the ground, an alloy ladder dropped down to Rivka. She scampered up until she made it to a small opening where a bearded American in
military fatigue pants and a black T-shirt pulled her in. Another man wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt was piloting the chopper. “Strap in,” he told her.

She belted herself into her seat and started asking questions. “Do you know who I am?”

“Sure,” the bearded man said. “You’re Rivka. Actually, we’re looking for your boyfriend. We figured the best way to find March was to connect with his girlfriend. We were given your GPS coordinates from the DOD. They got them today from a friend of yours. A Mr. Pack McHenry.”

She beamed. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you!”

“You’re one tough gal,” the pilot yelled back as he put the chopper into a fast climb, “trying to out-run an armed jeep on the open desert.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” she said. “Do you have any fix on Ethan?”

“No, ma’am. We were hoping you did.”

She snatched her Allfone out of her flight suit and hit Pack’s number. This time he picked up on one ring. “I was going to call you, Rivka,” he said. “Did the U.S. military guys pick you up yet?”

“I’m flying with them right now.”

“Good. Okay, we just received a credible report on Ethan’s position,” Pack said. “Hang on, we’re pulling up the coordinates right now. He’s hiding in some ruins south, southeast of New Babylon. The Hanging Gardens.”

“What’s his condition?”

“He’s conscious and mobile. Some injuries. If we do this quickly we can get to him before the Alliance does.”

Pack read off the coordinates for the ruins to Rivka, who yelled them over to the pilot. His copilot fed them into their onboard navigational computer.

“I assume you’re American agents?” Rivka asked after finishing up with Pack.

“Red, white, and blue all over,” the copilot yelled back.

“Time to ride the comet,” the pilot called. “Hold on.”

He pushed the turbine button and the small jet engine fired up. The chopper started streaking across the Iraqi flatlands toward Al Hillah and the ancient ruins of Nebuchadnezzar.

FIFTY-FOUR

DESERT OUTSIDE NEW BABYLON, IRAQ

Ethan could hear the drone-bot approaching overhead. He scampered underneath the shade of a big slab of stone. Off in the distance, and getting louder, were the sounds of the Alliance ground troops with their tracking dogs. They were close now, maybe a hundred yards, not more than that.

He stared at the weeds hanging down from cracks in the stonework that had been fashioned by Nebuchadnezzar’s stonecutters twenty-six hundred years ago. In his gut, he felt that his own extinction might be rapidly approaching.

Then he heard the voice of Joshua Jordan in his head. It was something he’d said once about Moses being pursued by the army of Pharaoh. About Moses finding himself in a tight spot, with his face to
the Red Sea and the Egyptian soldiers bearing down at his back with their chariots and their spears. What was it, exactly, that Josh had told him about that?

But then, Ethan really didn’t feel like Moses. Not by a long stretch.

He remembered something else, and his mind shot back to the bedroom in Zhang Lee’s penthouse, early in the morning of the day he’d met with Jo Li in Hadley Brooking’s Hong Kong office. He had gone out to the porch of Zhang’s beautiful high-rise residence and spent some time reading his Bible. It was a fine day, and the sky was clear blue and the sun was bright. Then Ethan had clicked on Josh Jordan’s video log to catch a few more minutes of it before he left for the meeting.

Ethan had noticed a calm certainty about Josh in that video message. He spoke about Jesus and His excruciating moments in the Garden of Gethsemane. How Jesus knew exactly how bad things would get—that He would soon be led to the place of crucifixion. And that once there, even though He was the holy and perfect Son of God, He would be drenched with the putrid sins of the human race—not unwillingly, but intentionally taking them on Himself. He headed willingly to that place of torture and pain—that abysmal, blood-soaked hill—to be made a sacrifice, once and for all, for all sin. For all time.