The Solomon Key (21 page)

I
t was Operation Midnight Climax, and he was feeling the affect of the LSD. He was in San Francisco, in a hotel room with Cindy. But he was more interested in the two-way mirror across from them than he was in Cindy. He knew there was a CIA agent watching them, taking notes, waiting to observe the results… But it
wasn’t
Cindy, wasn’t anyone he knew. Just a prostitute on the CIA’s payroll who had taken him to the safe house after lacing his drink with the LSD. No, not him…
He
was the CIA agent observing from the other side, taking notes on the prostitute’s ring. It was glowing.

Demons began crawling out of the walls, out of the ceiling. Sick, scorpion-like creatures salivating over the scene. But he couldn’t see what was happening because their saliva was setting the room on fire. And bombs were exploding. And then he was across the street, watching the safe house collapse. The demons were circling like vultures over its ruins. He recognized their faces — world leaders. There was a flag in their clawed grasp, its picture showing ten stars arching over a pyramid. He watched as they tore it to pieces, watched as they all became one, a third eye opening in its forehead. And now its face was no longer one that he recognized.

Looking around, he realized that he wasn’t in San Francisco anymore, but in Africa. There were piles of dead bodies as far as he could see in every direction. There were syringes sticking out of them, men in white suits walking around and spraying something. There were Swastikas on their arms but CIA written on their backs. Then, without warning, the ground swallowed everything, introducing a few seconds of stillness. Until a volcano of sand erupted from out of the ground, building a tower that stretched upward so high that it eventually disappeared into the clouds. That’s when he noticed the ring on his finger, that it was glowing.

****

Scott opened his eyes, or at least he thought he did. There were flames licking the air around him and gunshots echoing back and forth. Sure that he was still dreaming, he closed his eyes again.

But then he felt the heat, and his eyes snapped wide open — it was no dream. He tried to move, but his hands and feet were still bound. Had the plane crashed? Looking up, he found that he was actually looking down. Vertigo swept him away, pounded his aching head. The fire was getting hotter, closer. He could feel a body leaning against him, and he tried to push it away with his shoulder. It rolled away from him and floated up to the ceiling. Even more confused, he looked over to his right. He could make out a road, rays of light, and feet running back and forth. But it was all inverted.

And then he understood that it wasn’t the plane that crashed.

Oh no.

He was hanging upside-down, still strapped in, but not to a seat in any plane. He was in the backseat of an overturned SUV! He swore, knowing that the flames dancing close by would soon reach the fuel tank. He tried desperately to wiggle his body free, twisting at his waist and trying to reach the seatbelt with his bound hands, but it was no use. As he struggled, he noticed that the driver was still sitting behind the wheel, covered in blood and staring hypnotically through the holes sprinkled across the windshield. A soft, miserable moan came slipping through his lips.

The sight stirred an intense horror that began to push Scott’s mind to the brink of hysteria. A second later, the driver erupted into flames and started screaming.

Scott yelled, shaking his body like a lunatic attempting to escape a straightjacket. He knew it was useless, but the thought of catching fire made him crazy with desperation.

The dead guy lying on the roof below him caught fire, and the flames were now licking his hair. The driver was still screaming, the flesh melting off his body.

Finally, his own jacket caught fire. He screamed, joining in with the driver, and looked around, hoping for a sign of salvation. The fire was spreading up his arms, and he started stomping his feet up against the floor. He could smell the flesh dripping off the bones of the driver.

But then the door next to him swung open, and someone was leaning across him. The seatbelt suddenly unlocked with a
click…
hands grabbed him, pulled him, and he was flying through the air. He landed in the street, and something starting whipping at his face. He was turned over… his hands came free…

He rolled around in the street like a madman, trying to put out the flames. Finally confident that he wasn’t on fire anymore, he jumped to his feet, adrenaline, fear, and anger all looking for some kind of an outlet. Ripping the tape off his mouth, he stood breathing hard, his chest heaving. Half of him wanted to kill something, and the other half wanted to cry, but he did neither. Instead, he looked up and noticed Mayhew and Cindy standing in front of him, waving frantically. And then he heard what they were screaming.

“It’s going to blow!”

Scott forced his legs to move and ran with them away from the burning SUV. Stealing a quick glance over his shoulder, he got a snapshot of the scene and understood in part what had happened. The lead SUV that he was in was completely upside-down, fire reaching out of the windows and up into the night. Two men in suits were lying next to it, their blood pooling onto the street and reflecting the blaze. Another SUV was lying on its side, four men sprawled around it, spent casings scattered everywhere.

A gunshot sounded from the other direction, and Scott instinctively ducked his head while turning to see a third SUV that had apparently gone off the road and slammed into a tree. There were more dead bodies in suits, but among them was a man blindly shooting an automatic rifle into the darkness, using the SUV as cover. A wave of bullets suddenly exploded from out of the night air and engulfed the SUV, the tree, the road, and the man.

Scott, Mayhew, and Cindy were thirty yards away from the overturned SUV when it exploded and plunged their world into heated oblivion.

****

Scott figured that he had been out for just a minute or two, though it certainly felt longer. He was lying on his back in a field of grass and staring up into the cold starlit sky. Turning his head, he saw Cindy lying beside him. Her eyes were closed, and she wasn’t moving. Groaning, he moved over to her. “Hey,” he said, nudging her.

No response.

“Cindy.” Still nothing. He looked her over and saw a piece of shrewd metal sticking out of her back by her left shoulder blade.

“Is she okay?” came a voice from behind him. It was Mayhew.

Scott shook his head, still half convinced that he was dreaming. “I don’t think so.” It was too dark to see the extent of her injuries, but she was still alive. He just didn’t know for how much longer. “She needs help.”

Suddenly, there were people moving in the grass around them, their shadows stretching across the ground in the flickering light of flaming debris. Mayhew ducked down, and Scott held his breath.

“Stand up,” a voice commanded.

Scott and Mayhew could barely see each other, so there was no use in trying to communicate.

“Stand up, please,” the voice insisted.

With little choice, they obeyed, their reward a blinding light in the face.

“Don’t move.” The voice was calm but firm.

Blinded by the light, they couldn’t see the person patting them down, could only hear him utter something into a radio. Something in Hebrew.

The light dipped away from their faces and came to rest in the grass at their feet. That’s when Scott realized the flashlights were fastened to the underside of loaded assault rifles.

Two bright beams sliced through the darkness, and a black van pulled up beside the fiery wreckage sixty feet away from them.

“Come on,” a softer voice said. A ray of light from another man’s weapon passed over the one who had just spoken and revealed him to be wearing all black, flight gloves and all. He put a hand on Scott’s back, gently nudging him toward the van. “It’s okay.”

Scott looked back over his shoulder. “What about her?”

“She’s coming too.”

He watched as more men materialized out of the blank night and carefully picked Cindy up off the ground. They carried her to the van, and Scott and Mayhew followed.

As Scott waited for the men to secure Cindy’s broken body into the back of the van, he looked over to the SUVs. Because two of the vehicles were burning upside-down, he figured they’d been struck by rockets. The lead truck, the one that had crashed into the tree, would have been the one transporting the ring…

These people knew ahead of time the exact route the CIA would be traveling, where they were heading, and what their cargo was. This was one person’s elite playing chess against another’s. And Scott had become one of the pawns on the board. He stepped up into the van just as four of the mysterious men started going through the only vehicle they’d left intact. Their dancing flashlights revealed an urgent search for an artifact that the world was suddenly dying to get its hands on. If only he knew why.

The door slid shut and locked into place. The van was a long cargo model with windows only in the front and plenty of space in the back.

“You okay?” Mayhew asked.

Scott looked over at him and nodded. “Sure.”

The two front doors swung open, and the driver and another guy climbed in. It was hard to tell what they could be capable of, though the fact that they hadn’t already shot them seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. The driver looked back at them and spoke through his mask.

“Are either of you injured?”

They shook their heads, no.

So the driver put the van in drive and headed off into the night, leaving behind a half-dozen of his men to find the ring and cover their tracks.

Scott had a lot of questions, but the simple fact that these people could have easily killed them by blowing up the trucks they were riding in kept him silent. Their true allegiance belonged to whatever their mission was, and his well-being, along with Mayhew’s and Cindy’s, was far lower on their list of priorities. He didn’t want to utter the wrong question and accidentally find himself conflicting with their cause. For right now, they were safe.

As the van drove through the night, Cindy barely holding on to life in the back, Scott sat paralyzed by an internal struggle that had been years in the making. It was the guilt he felt about getting Cindy involved that was calling for reinforcements from an ocean of past sins. Sins that could never be forgiven. Sins that tempted thoughts of suicide. But he knew that suicide would only be a copout, that he deserved to feel this way. And so he
wanted
to feel it,
needed
to feel it. It was his punishment. And yet a strange voice within rebuked him for such thoughts, scolding the logic as being utterly foolish and circular. It responded by telling him that feeling guilty couldn’t possibly be any kind of payment for sin, just the evidence of its presence. That no matter how horrible he felt, feeling was no retribution. The guilt of having sinned didn’t cancel out the sin. But then, he argued back, he never wanted to cancel it out, just wanted to pay for it, to absolve his debt. And going through life with this burden made him feel like he was serving his time. The voice in his head, however, reminded him that it wasn’t a satisfactory punishment, that there was no redemptive quality to his suffering. Such guilt wasn’t a payment for his sins but merely a natural consequence of those sins. It was his cycle of insanity, and he wanted to stop thinking about it. There were more important things at hand. Like why the guy on the jet had called him Joshua Cavanaugh... his real name.

He wasn’t sure how they knew, but what he was sure of was that he was now back on the grid, and that was going to make his life much more interesting. They would be coming for him now whether the ring was in his possession or not. Sighing, he turned in his seat and looked back to Cindy. “How is she?” he asked the man working on her.

He looked up from her wound, about to put a bandage over it, and answered softly, “Not good. This is all I can do for her here.” His two brown eyes peered out from behind the mask. “I am sorry. We did not mean for this to happen.”

“Me neither,” Scott mumbled, trying to keep the images of Cindy smiling at him in the diner out of his mind.

24

T
hey made a few stops and
switched vehicles twice in order to ensure that no one was following them. So far there was no sign of any kind of pursuit.

The sun was rising above the skyscrapers ahead and shining in Scott’s eyes. It’s what woke him up. Rubbing his bruised and cut wrists, he turned to look in the back seat of their new minivan. Cindy was lying down, but the masked man who was watching over her had driven the cargo van away in the opposite direction after one of their stops. Cindy woke up only once for a few minutes and hadn’t spoken, but the fear and uncertainty in her eyes communicated more effectively anything that she could have said with words. Scott spent most of the time trying to fall asleep but only managed to do so in short increments. Mayhew woke up only when ordered to switch vehicles.

“What do you think?” Mayhew whispered, nodding toward Cindy.

But Scott just shook his head.

The man riding shotgun turned and looked back at them. There was a twinge of sympathy present in his eyes.

Mayhew sighed. “Well, I’m going to pray for her.”

Scott didn’t say anything. He just watched Mayhew bow his head in silence. Then he looked up and made eye contact with the guy looking back at them.

Pulling the ski mask off, the guy ran his hands through his curly black hair. The driver did the same.

“You understand that we could not take her to a hospital,” the driver said.

“I know,” Scott replied. Then he finally asked, “Who are you?” It sounded stupid coming out of his mouth.

The driver exchanged looks with his partner before answering. “We are almost there, and then you can ask your questions.”

Scott nodded.

They were driving into a city that hadn’t been blown off the map last night, though which city it was, Scott couldn’t be sure. It didn’t look familiar to him. Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be anyone around. No police or military, no traffic, no one walking the streets. The clock on the dashboard read 7:14. Surely, people should have been on their way to work by now. And while most might not have the stomach for work after the events of the previous night, Scott still expected to see
some
people walking around. Demonstrations, prayer vigils, protests, riots, breakfast, shopping…
something
.