Saint (32 page)

“They survive. I doubt this is over. The X Group has never failed to make good on a contract. Feroz has paid for your death—it doesn't matter that he's now dead. If you implicate the Iranian minister of defense with even a shred of evidence, two things will happen. The first is that his support for the initiative to disarm the Middle East will evaporate. A major victory. For this alone I would think you'd want the evidence needed to implicate him, particularly knowing it's true.”

“And second?”

“The X Group will pull out all the stops to silence those who expose a paying client.”

“Meaning they will come after me hard.”

This much David had already accepted.

“And you're hoping Johnny can stop this so-called Englishman,” the president said.

“He may be your best hope.”

“Assuming that Johnny, not Englishman, has this supernatural power.”

“Yes. Assuming that.”

“I'm not sure which is harder, being caught in the wake of this Project Showdown, or believing it even exists.”

“Clearly, being caught in its wake.”

“Don't you ever doubt?”

This silenced him. They both knew he did on occasion. Anything unnatural was not naturally believed. Faith, in essence, was unnatural. “On occasion,” David said. “This isn't one of those occasions.”

Stenton looked as though he'd aged ten years in the last two days. Perhaps he had.

“I want a sworn statement from you. I'll pass all of this by Ed Carter as soon as you leave. If the director is in agreement, we'll hold a press conference in the morning explaining how Feroz's own hired guns took him out to keep him from ever fingering them. There'll be plenty of international fallout, but I think you're right. When the dust settles, it'll go our way. If, and I do mean if, you're right about all of this, your Johnny may have just saved Israel.”

“Which was undoubtedly why Samuel received the vision he did.” “Doesn't mean this Johnny is innocent. I've been given the green light to be discharged tomorrow. I think I'll move it up.”

“Where will you be going?”

“To my ranch in Arizona. I think disappearing for a few days is in order considering all that's happened.” He caught David's concerned surprise. “Don't worry, my ranch is armed to the teeth.”

THE DIRECTOR of the Central Intelligence Agency, Ed Carter, now faced an impossible decision. He had thought betrayal would get easier with time.

It didn't.

What he and a small group of well-informed U.S. leaders were doing wasn't a true betrayal in that they weren't betraying their nation. Only their president, and only for altruistic reasons grounded in sound moral principles. The large sums of money flowing through their hands were enough to grease the wheels, but hardly motivation for assassination. So he'd told himself a thousand times.

There was good reason why virtually every nation in the world supported the Iranian initiative to disarm the Middle East. After more than a thousand years of bloody conflict, it was time to bring the region under control. The Iranian initiative had a better than average chance of doing just that.

The only person who stood in the way was Robert Stenton. One gunslinging president who had no right to subvert the will of the world or, for that matter, the will of the United States. They all knew that on balance the American people supported the Iranian initiative. If, as Stenton had repeatedly warned, Israel was ultimately destroyed by her neighbors, well then, the world would go on with one less brewing conflict.

As he saw it, disarming the region and putting a United Nations peace force in place was far less risky than allowing ideologically driven conflicts to fester.

His role was strictly to provide intelligence. Schedules, names, weaknesses in security. None of it traceable to him. With Assim Feroz now dead, Stenton would fan the shocked world into flame and kill the initiative. The agency couldn't contradict the evidence that Feroz was behind the attempt on the president's life without themselves appearing complicit.

The only way out of this mess was to continue as planned. Deal with the president. There would be a dozen Assim Ferozes willing to carry his torch in the absence of opposition.

Ed pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose and picked up the satellite phone. He called an attorney in Brussels. From there he was passed through no fewer than six filters before finally reaching Kalman within fifteen minutes. An amazing network the Russians had established, superior in every way to their own.

The phone clicked twice. “Yes?”

“The operative has fixed the customer. The other will be going home immediately. His withdrawal papers will be handled through normal New York channels.”

Translation:
Johnny killed Feroz. The president will be going to his
ranch in Arizona. Details of his location and the planned security
measures will be left in the same subway tunnel used last time.

“Yes, sir.”

Ed Carter, trembling, set the phone down.

It was now out of his hands.

34

C
arl decided to do the thing expected of him.

Children did what was expected of them, and he felt more like a child now than he had since last entering his pit. But that wasn't entirely true, because when he'd last entered the pit's familiar darkness, he felt warm and secure. Now he felt cold and afraid.

But he returned to Paradise anyway.

He caught a red-eye out of New York to Dallas and then an early-morning flight to Denver and on to Grand Junction. He was going back to Colorado because the blue pickup truck was there. He was going back to Paradise because the cabin was there, hidden up in the canyon where no one waited.

He struggled with the decision to find Sally again, but in the end realized that he couldn't go back to his mother because he wasn't sure that he was her son anymore. How many times had he been led down a path of “truth” only to discover that it was simply part of a grand scheme to convince him of a lie? More times than he could remember.

All he wanted was to be a son and a lover. Sally's boy and Kelly's lover. But by being Johnny he could be neither—not really, not if it meant that Sally and Kelly would be hounded by hell. If Johnny could be a normal person and an ordinary lover, then he would like to be Johnny. But Johnny wasn't ordinary and Carl hated him for it.

The problem was, Johnny hated Carl even more. For this reason alone, Carl decided that he would call himself Johnny, the lesser of two evils.

In the end he was just a lost boy who didn't belong.

In the end he was rejected by both worlds.

In the end he was numb, flying and driving and walking up the mountain in a haze, choking on the lump that had lodged itself so firmly in his throat that he was sure it would never leave.

He was regressing. He was becoming a boy. The only problem was that he didn't
know
that boy, and he didn't want to know the boy who had become Carl.

Johnny stopped on the ledge high above Paradise, trying to recall some of the fun boyhood memories that must reside somewhere in his mind. Running down Main Street chasing a girl with pigtails. Lazing behind the community center on a hot summer day, bragging about impossible feats.

Nothing came. There was only his blue truck parked behind the community center. No memories, no friends, no sign of Sally.

Johnny hated another thing about himself. He hated this sentimentality that riddled him with weakness. Carl would detest such a show of self-degradation. Carl did.

Johnny impulsively gripped his hands into fists and screamed at the valley. He closed his eyes, leaned into the cry, and shredded the still air with a blood-boiling cry until his lungs were exhausted.

Then he opened his eyes and listened.

There was no answer. No reaction at all. No one ran out into the streets of Paradise to attend to the call for help. Wind passed softly through the trees around him. Birds chirped nearby. A lizard scuttled through the underbrush on his right, undeterred by the boy's wail.

He was alone. No one cared.

He hated himself.

The tears broke through his protective shell when he stepped back on the path that led up to the canyon. If Kelly saw him now, eyes leaking, she might suggest a treatment from Agotha for his own benefit.

The suggestion sent a shiver through his arms. It was Agotha who'd hurt him, never Kelly. Kelly only protected him. She was as much a victim as he had been.

And neither of them was really a victim, because both had been made strong by the training. Carl was perhaps the best sniper who had ever walked the face of the earth! You couldn't get much better than that. As for Kelly, Agotha had saved her from a lonely and abusive childhood.

Kelly. She was another reason he was going back to the cabin, wasn't she? He knew that Kelly could find him here.

He walked into the canyon, bearing an ache in his heart that hurt worse than any needle he'd received through the shoulder. If Agotha could find a way to inflict this kind of pain on her subjects, she would strip them in less time than it took with electroshock or sensory depravation. Physical pain was a faint shadow of this pain in his mind.

Then Johnny was there, standing on the rocky sand, facing the cabin at the end of the short canyon that had once hidden Project Showdown.

He felt nothing but utter loneliness.

He wanted Kelly to come and hold him.

He wanted to die.

Johnny sat on the sand, failing to find the energy required to walk into the cabin. There was no reason to approach the cabin. No reason to leave the cabin.

He lay on his side, pulled his knees into his chest, and continued to cry.

SAMUEL HEARD the soft sobbing and ran to the cabin's window. He'd come?

His childhood friend lay on the ground twenty-five yards from the porch, rolled into a fetal position.

Samuel sat hard on the bench facing the window. Both he and Johnny had known that Johnny would pay a significant price for going under, but he'd never suspected the terrible lengths that the X Group would go to unmake his friend.

Johnny was only a shadow of the child he'd once been. And no one knew as well as Samuel that being a child was what it was all about.

Unless you become like a child . . .
Unless you become like a child, you can't do much of anything good in this world
.

But at what cost? What was the cost of following the path into this kingdom where power flowed beyond the comprehension of most?

Samuel stared at his friend, unable to hold back his own tears. Not only because he empathized with the pain Johnny felt as he lay in a heap, but because Samuel knew that the price had not yet been fully paid.

Johnny was desperate for the end, but he was only at the beginning.

Samuel's father had made the right call when he'd guessed that Johnny would return to the cabin. They both knew that if anyone could reach Johnny now, it would be Samuel, but even he wasn't sure Johnny could be reached by anyone.

Samuel's mind flashed back to that day in Paradise a dozen years ago when they'd first met. When heaven had collided with hell. Neither he nor Johnny had been normal since that day.

They were both outcasts. Unless Johnny embraced his alienation and stepped willingly into the role, he would fade into powerless obscurity—so it was with all of the faithful.

It took Samuel ten minutes to compose himself and wipe the evidence of tears from his face. Then he took a deep breath, stepped up to the door, and went out to meet Johnny.

THERE WERE only two places Kelly thought Johnny might go.

The pit in Hungary.

The cabin in Colorado.

The pit would be the more difficult destination. So she went to Colorado.

If there was a way to flog herself and thereby accept punishment for what she'd done to him, she would gladly accept each blow. If she could find a way to repay him, no matter how ludicrous or how great the cost, she would do so. Betrayal was a terrible, terrible thing.

She had betrayed Johnny by making him someone he wasn't. By stripping his identity and forcing another one upon him. By pretending to love him only to win his allegiance.

She'd never expected to fall for him. It cost her dearly, but not a fraction of what she was willing to pay to win his trust one more time, this time as the Kelly who truly loved him.

She wept openly on the plane, leaning against the window to hide her face from the other passengers but not caring if they stared, which they did. It was another lesson she was learning: when this much sorrow ravaged the heart, the mind shut down any respect for etiquette. Assim Feroz was dead. That was good.

The president was alive. That was good.

Englishman was not only alive, but brimming with a power that Kelly had only dreamed about. This was bad.

But Kelly didn't care, because there was another power at work within them all, and this power was intent on destroying the only man she'd ever loved, with or without Englishman's help.

Back in the Egyptian desert, she'd been abandoned and abused before escaping. She remembered how it had felt to be rejected and alone, without a mother, a father, or a true sense of belonging. Humans went to great lengths to belong. To fit in. Agotha had taught her this, and together they'd leveraged the tendency against Carl, luring him to belong to them. To her.

They'd done the job well. Too well.

If they survived this ordeal, Kelly would take him to the desert, where they could heal together. To Nevada, where no one knew them. To the place she had always intended to take him.

If they survived. And if they died, she wanted to die in his arms no matter how melodramatic that sounded. They were all a page ripped from the story of life anyway. All humans were, whether they realized it or not.

Dear Johnny . . . Dear Johnny, what have I done to you?

THE FACT that Johnny had outwitted him turned all of Englishman's happiness into bitter anger. It didn't matter that he was the Terminator or that in the end the Terminator always won. This setback was humiliating.