Panacea (30 page)

“You're operating under the assumption that a panacea would be a good thing for the human race.”

She couldn't help making it personal … thinking of Marissa if her stem-cell transplant hadn't worked.

“Ultimately, yes. Lots of turmoil in the beginning, but in the long run—”

“Nothing from outside can be good in the long run. And in the long run you'd only be rewarding the U-I's. Enabling them. And encouraging them.” He shook his head. “Don't you want to thumb your nose and raise a middle digit?”

“I might … if I believed in these vast intelligences. But I don't. Just as I don't believe in the panacea. This is a fun intellectual exercise, Rick, but no more than that. Right?”

“A guy named Charles Fort spent much of his life documenting weird, inexplicable occurrences. His conclusion: ‘We're property.'”

“Oh, I can't buy into that,” Laura said.

“Maybe by the time we finish this you will.”

Not likely, but she remembered something else he'd said.

“You started to say something yesterday. You said, ‘I've seen…' but you never finished. What did you see?”

He stood. “I think I'll hit the bar for a drink. What can I get you?”

“Conversation over?”

“The topic's run out of steam, don't you think? What can I get you?”

She sighed. After the last twenty-four hours, she could use a drink—a stiff one. But she didn't do well with hard liquor, and since she was operating on next to no sleep, she'd be snockered.

“A Pinot Noir if they have it, otherwise a glass of Cab. I'm not particular.”

He nodded and strolled away.

What had he seen—or thought he'd seen—that he wouldn't talk about? Was that why he'd dropped everything in California and moved across country?

She pulled out her smartphone—no need for a sat phone here—and dialed her voice mail. One message. Now what?

“Hey, Doc, Phil again. You're not gonna believe this. Your not–ex-SEAL changed his name to Rick Hayden from—wait for it—Ramiz Haddad. Can you believe this? He's some sort of Arab. I've never seen the guy. Does he look like an Arab? Anyway, now that I have his birth name, I can go deeper into his background. I'll be back in touch as soon as I find something.”

After ending the call, Laura sat and stared into space pretty much as Rick had done.

An Arab? Rick didn't look a bit like an Arab. And he spoke Hebrew.

What the hell was going on?

 

9

“I found her,” Bradsher said.

Nelson was seated in the Avianca area of Benito Juarez International Airport, awaiting their connecting flight to Miami. He knew Fanning was also in the airport and had sent Bradsher in search of her. For some reason he could not fully explain, he wanted to see her in the flesh.

“Where?”

“Near the Iberia gates. She's with Hayden.”

“You mean Ramiz Haddad.”

Bradsher had backgrounded this so-called nobody ex-SEAL and learned he wasn't a SEAL at all but an ex-cop from the sleepy town of Sausalito who had changed his name from Ramiz Haddad to Rick Hayden. It made some sort of sense because one could see why he'd think he'd have a better chance of advancement in a little town like Sausalito with an American rather than an Arab name.

The reason didn't matter. What mattered was that this Haddad, who wasn't a SEAL at all, had somehow neutralized Miguel and Jorge. Nelson had informed the Company's Mexico City office of the situation and they were sending someone into those jungles to find Miguel. His satellite phone's battery had not yet run out and so they'd been able to ping it and triangulate on his signal for an approximate location. But that meant only that they'd be able to find Miguel's phone. It didn't mean he was with it.

Nelson had a terrible sense of events spinning out of control—not that they'd been exactly under his thumb in the first place, but the tumors, Stahlman entering the picture, Simon gone, Miguel and his hireling in the picture and then out of it, Fanning heading to Israel …

The Serpent's work, or the Lord's?

Nelson sighed and rose from his seat. “Show me.”

“Are you sure?”

Bradsher didn't know the connection between Fanning and Uncle Jim; Nelson was content to leave it that way.

“We've sent three men against her and none has returned. She's the target but her companion is frustrating our every move. So, yes, I'm quite sure I want to lay eyes on both of them.”

Bradsher led him to the gate where passengers awaited their Iberia flight to Madrid. They stopped near a cell phone kiosk.

“She's over there, by the window.”

Searching out of the corner of his eye, Nelson found her—jet-black hair, trim figure. A surge of rage flowed through him as he watched her blithely flipping through a magazine. Uncle Jim may have forgiven her, but he could not.

“Where's her guard dog?”

Bradsher looked around. “He was seated next—here he comes.”

A tall man, a drink in each hand, was winding through the other passengers. His face was turned away at first, but became visible when he sat.

Nelson felt as if he'd been punched in the chest. He grabbed Bradsher's arm.

“No!”

“What's wrong?”

“I know him.”

“How? Who is it?”

“One of our own. Or at least he used to be.”

His presence explained so many things.

Why him, of all people?

This was terrible. Worse than terrible. This was the absolute worst.

Because Nelson knew all too well what this man was capable of.

 

GAN YOSAIF

 

1

By the time they found Gan Yosaif—or what was left of it—the sun was resting on the horizon, readying to slip below.

Just as well. They needed night to find Polaris.

They'd chosen another Jeep, but Rick—or should she think of him as Ramiz now?—had driven this time while Laura navigated them south into the Negev Desert. He pulled to a stop before a broken gate that hung canted from a single hinge across the dirt road. A weathered sign dangled next to it. The word on the left had been obliterated, leaving …

“That's the word for garden,” Rick said. “This must be it.”

Beyond the gate, on a rise, they could make out a few buildings.

“Good thing I talked to that guy in Mexico City,” he said, getting out and stretching. “We'd have never found this place on our own.”

No argument there. Gan Yosaif was on no map.

They'd spent the latter part of Monday and most of today in airports and airplanes. When they arrived in Tel Aviv they bought the most detailed map they could find, and searched through guide books, but Gan Yosaif might as well have been on a moon of Jupiter.

So they took the Orthodox fellow's advice and visited the Israel Land Authority, but had to travel to Jerusalem to do so. The trip took less than an hour and turned out to be in the general direction they needed to go anyway.

It didn't take the woman at the ILA long to pinpoint Gan Yosaif for them. The location remained in her records but was no longer on the maps because it was among the many kibbutzim that had failed decades ago.

She directed them south into the Negev to a point east of Rahat and south of a tiny town called Dvira. When she asked why they were looking for a forgotten kibbutz, Rick had told her it was the birthplace of a recently departed dear friend. Laura could almost admire the glib way he mixed fact and fiction on the fly. The woman warned them to be careful since Gan Yosaif was just a couple of miles from the Arab sectors of the West Bank.

“I can't believe it,” Laura had said as she'd watched Jerusalem recede in the rearview mirror. “We rode through Jerusalem and I didn't see a damn thing except the inside of a government office.”

Rick shrugged. “Didn't miss much. I've been here before. Mostly a jumble of old buildings. Most of Israel's historic sites are just old buildings. Great if you like that sort of thing. Personally, I hate them.”

“Are you kidding me? Israel is more than old buildings.”

“No argument there. Mostly desert—as you'll appreciate for the next couple of hours.”

“You, sir, are a Philistine—and I use the term advisedly.”

“Good choice, considering the locale.”

“Do you know how much history has happened here? The course of western civ was determined by events that occurred—or are believed to have occurred—right here a couple of millennia ago. Ever think about that?”

“All the time. I think about something out there taking notice of a preacher wandering around the Jerusalem area back then, and watching the Romans torture and kill him because he was getting too popular, and then after he's dead and buried, that something starts thinking—”

“Oh, no. You're not…”

“Yeah, that something starts thinking, ‘Hey, what would happen if I raised this guy from the dead? Wouldn't that cause a major freak-out?' Which, of course, it did.”

“Probably no one more freaked out than that poor preacher.”

“Right. But it's a perfect example of the chaos effect we were talking about. That isolated anomaly in Palestine—”

“You mean
belief
in that anomaly.”

“Whatever, it's had an enormous effect on the complex system of human history over the past two thousand years.”

And so it had gone, across miles and miles of desert …

Rick dragged the kibbutz gate open enough to admit their Jeep, then drove them through. They passed spindly olive trees and overgrown date groves until they came to a cinder-block building with peeling paint and a collapsed roof. It backed up against a silo of some sort. Or was it a cistern?

She opened her door and was about to step out when Rick said, “Wait.”

He turned the Jeep around so it faced down the driveway.

“What's that for?”

“In case we need to make a quick getaway.”

She didn't like that. “What are you saying?”

“Just that I like to be prepared.”

Wary now, she stepped out. The sun was already gone. She'd read somewhere that night comes fast in the desert. No kidding. That sun had dropped like a stone into a pond. She could already feel the temperature falling, but her legs appreciated the chance to get out and walk around.

With the motor off, the silence crashed in. She heard the faint rustle of the wind through the olive branches, the ticking of the cooling engine, and nothing more. The sense of isolation lay thick on the forbidding terrain. A little creepy out here.

“Speaking of prepared,” she said. “You didn't happen to get a special shipment like in Chetumal, did you?”

He'd sent his pistol back to America from Chetumal, saying he wouldn't even think about trying to sneak a weapon aboard an El Al flight.

“I wish. Didn't have time. But even if I had, it's so much more difficult to ship a weapon into Israel. The country's a freakin' fortress.”

She looked around. “I wonder why this place failed.”

“Debt, I gather,” Rick said from the other side of the hood. “A failure of will, a failure of economics, or maybe a little of both. A kibbutz is a commune, you know.”

“Like the hippies in the sixties?”

“Somewhat, but a lot better organized.”

“How many hippy communes left, you think?”

He shrugged. “Don't know. Can't imagine many. From what I've read they were mostly organized around free love and drugs. The original kibbutzniks here were serious about communal farming, and you joined one to work, not to get high. There's still hundreds of them left and they're responsible for a lot of Israel's agriculture.”

She looked around. “What do we do until the stars come out? Explore?”

“I'm going to record our exact latitude and longitude just to get that out of the way. But feel free to wander.”

She looked at the dilapidated buildings and decided against exploring. She didn't believe in ghosts, but the place looked haunted, almost menacing.

She could phone home again. She'd had to wait until three this afternoon when they were in Jerusalem to call—at just barely eight
A.M.
back in the States—and Steven had assured her that everything was fine, although Marissa seemed to be feeling her mother's absence more and more. Laura promised to be home as soon as possible. She'd checked her voice mail then but nothing more from Phil.

Instead of wandering, what she really wanted to do was confront Rick about his identity problem. But was twilight in the middle of nowhere the right time and place to do that?

Probably not.

Not that she feared him. In fact, despite the incongruities in his personal history, she took comfort in his presence. Not because he seemed devoted to her; more devoted to the job of protecting her—a matter of pride or a sense of duty. Still, she couldn't imagine being out here on her own.