The Jericho Deception: A Novel (46 page)

“Almost there,” he encouraged. “One more and then grab my hand.”

Rachel’s lips were pursed in determination and sweat trickled down her temple, but she no longer displayed the fear she had earlier.

Then he watched as Axe surged upward, propelled by an unseen force. The face of their pursuer was twisted in the expression of someone pushing through intense pain toward a goal he would stop at nothing to reach. With the metallic taste of fear on the back of his tongue, Ethan realized that Rachel wouldn’t make it to the ledge in time. The dread in his chest was overwhelming. But he couldn’t let fear prevent him from saving the woman he loved.

He dropped to his stomach. The smooth stone was warm, but the ledge wasn’t wide enough for his torso. His right shoulder hung off the side; the sharp edge dug into his hipbone. He knew that a sudden movement to his right would cause him to plummet to the ground four stories below. He stretched his hand toward Rachel’s extended fingers. When he closed around her delicate wrist, her fingers cinched around his arm.

The moment Ethan felt her weight, she was jerked downward. The force almost toppled him from his perch. He leaned with all of his strength into the wall. Whatever happened, he would never let go.
Even if I’m pulled off the wall too,
he decided.

They’d only needed another fifteen seconds. Then she would have reached the ledge, where he could have protected her better. His plan had been to put his body between hers and their pursuer. When Axe tried to climb onto the ledge, he would have stomped on his fingers. But now his worst fear was realized. Axe had grabbed her ankle. He watched Rachel turn her head toward her attacker and let loose a scream of pure terror.

He tightened his grip, feeling the strain from the tendons in his forearm to the muscles in his shoulder and neck. Then he noticed the headache that was starting in the back of his head.

Please, God, not now.

The fire from the devil’s ankle that was burning Axe’s hand was spreading down his arm and into his shoulder.

The cargo net had beaten him before, but this time was different. This time God Almighty Himself had forsaken him. All of the sacrifices he’d made over his life—the suffering as a child, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, the dedication to building his body into something that belonged on Olympus, the part he’d played in helping stamp out the misguided religion of the Middle East—had counted for nothing.

“Where are you, God?” The plea from his lips didn’t even sound intelligible to him.

But God didn’t answer; only Satan did, taunting him with his own terrible scream from above.

He experienced the sensation of the last of the glycogen in his muscle cells burning out as if his body were melting. The slabs of muscle that had instilled fear and awe in smaller men as he walked past them on the street evaporated from his skeleton. The cargo net had won again. He would fall to the sand pit below. In the depths of his soul he wanted nothing more than to pull the creature that the lieutenant had become down with him. If he fell, he would take the devil with him.

Just like on the night of Natalie’s death, Ethan hadn’t taken a Topiramate in some time. Environmental conditions—whether external, like the flashing lights of the drunk driver’s car, or internal, like the stress he was now experiencing—could trigger his epilepsy. A seizure now would condemn Rachel to her death. His fear exacerbated the oncoming headache. He wanted to will away the terror, to fight against his body, just as he was fighting against gravity by holding on to Rachel. Then a memory flashed through his head that felt out of place in his desperate struggle. He was sitting with Rachel in her room at the Monastery. She was taking his hands and explaining how by suppressing his pain, he only magnified it.

He exhaled.
I am terrified
, he admitted to himself. He turned his attention to the physical sensations of fear in his body—not in the clinical way he’d done in the past, analyzing their biological origins, but instead by just feeling the physicality of them. He felt the pulse in his carotid artery expand and contract the skin on his neck. He noticed how each breath he took pressed his tight chest into the smooth stone of the wall that had stood for millennia. He felt the heat that radiated from every pore in his skin. The tension in his head began to ease. Then he focused on the sensation of his fingers wrapped around Rachel’s wrist. Rachel was not Natalie, and that afternoon in Luxor was not the rainy night three years ago in New Haven. His mind cleared.

A roar from Axe snapped his attention to the bulky man, who was now teetering on the edge of the rock. If he fell while holding on to Rachel’s ankle, he would pull both of them from the wall too. Without taking his eyes off her, Ethan reached with his left to the stone above him, searching for something to
hold on to. The sweat from his right hand and Rachel’s arm was loosening his grip.

There!
His fingers found a reveal in the rock. He dug them in, leaned to his left, and pulled her upward with his right. Maybe if he pulled hard enough, Axe’s grip would fail first. But the rock under his fingers must have been cracked, because it suddenly gave way. A chunk the size of a softball pulled off in his hand.
Damn!
He slid back closer to the edge. Rachel screamed again.

They weren’t going to make it. The thought landed with cool detachment. He was past fear. Then a realization came to him.

The rock!

He now possessed a weapon. He would have one chance. The chunk of stone was heavy. His odds of hitting Rachel were about equal to those of hitting Axe, and he was using his left hand. But what other choice did he have? He held the rock over the side and lined it up with Axe’s beet-red face. He wouldn’t risk throwing it. Gravity should work for him.

Rachel’s face was contorted with the effort of gripping his hand. They locked eyes.

“Duck,” he said.

When she did, he dropped the stone.

The scene unfolded in slow motion. The devil’s fire in his hand and arm was as excruciating as the fire that had burnt his legs years before. But this time Axe was older and stronger. He could endure the pain. But Satan had other weapons at his disposal as well. The brimstone fell from heaven, blackening the sun. He flinched when he saw it, but his only defense was to blink his eyes closed. The impact to his forehead sent a shock down his spine as if he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. The shock caused his right hand, the one holding his two-hundred-and-seventy-pound frame to the cargo net, to open. The pull of gravity drew him backward, beckoning to him from the earth below. The fire had spread to his head and seemed to radiate outward from his mind. He opened his eyes to see that he no longer held the devil’s ankle either; he’d released the beast.

He never felt the stomach-lurching sensation of his free fall to the ground. He seemed to float downward instead. The sensation was almost pleasant. As he dropped, the scene silhouetted by the blue sky transformed again. No longer was he falling from the cargo net on Coronado Island. He was dropping instead from a beige stone wall, part of the ruins of an ancient temple in Luxor, Egypt. The leg that dangled from the wall, the one that had belonged to the Dark One, was attached to the frightened but harmless-looking Rachel Riley. Professor Ethan Lightman was lying on a ledge above her, holding her arm.

When the impact came, he experienced no pain. He felt as if he’d been hit with a giant pillow, one that suddenly and permanently obscured the vision above him.

Ethan winced at the crunching noise as Axe’s head hit the stone forty feet below with a loud crack. He felt no pleasure in the violent man’s death. But he felt safe.

The feeling of relief lasted for only a second, as the tendons connecting his arm to his shoulder were threatening to snap under Rachel’s full weight. Axe’s fall had pulled her other leg off the wall. If Ethan let go, she would meet the same fate Axe had. But he felt a strength like none he’d ever experienced before. His hand and Rachel’s arm were no longer two separate appendages joined by the force of their respective grips. He sensed how his body, Rachel’s, and the wall were connected with each other, just as the ripples of water he’d seen transform on the Nile had been connected to each other by the great river itself. The connection was as strong as the nuclear forces that bound the individual molecules within each of them. He knew intuitively that they would be okay.

“I’ve got you,” he called to her.

He lifted her, allowing her toes to find the lip of the stone below them. Her free hand slapped the stone ledge by his face.

“Just one more,” he said.

He pulled again. She pushed with her free hand, swung her legs up, and collapsed on the ledge in front of him, their faces inches apart. Tears streamed from her eyes.

“You saved my life.” Her breath came in short gasps.

He brushed the tears from her cheek, moving the damp strands of hair from her face. He thought she’d never looked more beautiful. He kissed her. She eagerly returned the kiss, her mouth yielding to his.

Then she drew back and asked, “Did you mean what you said? You really love me?”

Peering into her eyes, he knew that words were inadequate to describe his true feelings. Any language he used would come from his head, not the energy vibrating in his heart.

“With all my soul,” he said. For the first time, he truly understood what that word meant.

W
olfe stared at the secure phone on his desk. Silent. He ran his hands through his silver hair. His last conversation with Deputy Director Richards had been hours earlier. It hadn’t gone well.

“Call off your men,” Richards had instructed. “I’m terminating Jericho.”

“Give me a half-hour, an hour tops.” He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves as he cradled the phone on his shoulder. The AC in the building was not functioning well since the explosion. “My men are on top of them as we speak. They’re trapped in the ruins of Karnak.”

Richards had paused as if contemplating whether to trust his latest assessment.

“I guarantee I can contain this,” he’d added, forcing a note of confidence into his baritone voice.