Amid the Shadows

Michael
C. Grumley

Copyright © 2013 Michael Grumley

All rights reserved.

xv.i

ISBN:

ISBN-13: 978-1492874249

ISBN-10: 1492874248

BOOKS
BY MICHAEL C. GRUMLEY

BREAKTHROUGH

AMID THE SHADOWS

THROUGH THE FOG

DEDICATION

To Mikayla and Amber, two perfect girls to
whom I want nothing more than to be your daddy.

And to Linda and Shannon, we miss you both
terribly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Susan, Kim, Gail, Bryan,
Dennis, Karen, and Dan for all of your expert help.

1

New
York City – 1871

They were being followed again.  He could feel it.  The man squeezed his son’s hand and quickened
their pace.  He pulled his coat tighter,
feeling the cold morning chill penetrate through his thick wool coat.  Above them, the rising sun was obscured
behind the thick layer of smoke from the sea of chimneys dotting the horizon.

The man looked over his shoulder and spotted the
large figure behind them.  He was getting
closer.  This was not the first time Dean
Kelly had been threatened.  His success
as one of New York’s largest merchants had made him and his family a common
target by those less fortunate.  This
time was different though.  Whoever this
person was, he had been following Kelly and his son for some time and always
watching them from a distance.

Behind Kelly, the dark figure quickened his pace
as well and began to close in.  He could
feel his heart rate increasing rapidly, and his hands were beginning to shake.
It was growing nearer.  He kept his head
down and mostly hidden beneath his coat’s large collar.  As he drew closer, his eyes narrowed.  He splashed through a deep puddle without
slowing.  Fifth Avenue was busy with
people walking back and forth, all trying to avoid the water-filled potholes in
the dirt road.  A large, horse drawn
carriage passed unnoticed as the man’s vision and hearing began to tunnel and
zoom in on the Kellys ahead of him.  What
Dean Kelly did not know, however, was that it was not Kelly in whom he was
interested.  It was his young,
eight-year-old son.

Kelly and his son walked faster.  He knew the man behind them was getting
closer.  They neared a large construction
site where dozens of men worked in the drizzling rain, shaping large stones for
the foundation of a building behind them.
The ringing of their metal chisels could be heard far down the busy
road.

As they neared, one of the large men put down his
tools and stood up.  He spotted Kelly
approaching by his dark hair combed straight back and, after locking eyes with
him, Kelly gave a firm nod.  The large
workman put his hands inside his overalls and nodded back.  He then turned and motioned to several men
behind him, who all stopped and followed, heading for the road.

The shaking intensified as the figure was now
within fifty feet of Kelly and his son.
It was going to happen.  It was
time.  He could feel his body flushing
with adrenaline.

A large man dressed in work clothes suddenly
stepped in front of him and put his hand up.
“Ah, where ya goin’ there, laddie?”

The stranger pushed past him without a word but
was stopped by the workman’s hand around his arm.

“Hold on there, yeah?” Another man approached from
behind and grabbed him from the other side.
“You wouldn’t be following the Kellys now, would ya?”

The figure looked to each side then back to Kelly
and his son.  His crystal blue eyes widened
as they began to move away from him.  He
pulled his arms free and tried to run, but was caught again.  This time by more men who crowded around him,
grabbing his coat firmly.

“We can’t have that now.”  Without warning, the workman to his right
slammed a fist into his stomach, causing him to lurch forward.

But the stranger still barely acknowledged
them.  He quickly rose to his feet and
surged forward, pulling the other men with him.
His blue eyes now began to show signs of panic.

The other men were surprised by his strength and
delivered two crushing blows to his back and kidneys.

The stranger fell again, this time onto a
knee.  The shaking in his hands became
almost uncontrollable.  He abruptly
looked away from the boy and turned to the men around him.  When he stood up, he did so with incredible
strength, pushing the surprised men back in an instant. When they tried to grab
him again, their hands now met a much greater force.  The figure seized one of the arms around him
and snapped it at the elbow, causing a large man behind him to scream out in
pain.

The others instantly jumped on the stranger,
beating him savagely, but this time he did not fall, or even kneel.  Instead, his body moved like a whip, spinning
and kicking the largest man square in the chest, lifting him off the ground and
sending him crashing into a nearby wheelbarrow.
The stranger’s arm lashed back and forth, almost too quickly to
see.  He struck one man in front, and
another behind him, in nearly the same instant.
Both men stumbled backwards with blood streaming down their faces.

“Get his legs!”

Dozens more workmen were suddenly upon him as
others fell to the ground.  The figure in
black spun again and two more men collapsed to the dirt beneath them, one
unconscious and the other slowly dying from his smashed throat.

In a fury, Kelly’s men crowded around.  Their constant blows raining down on the
stranger, but with little effect. Many of the strikes were blocked, or missed
entirely, as the man in the middle seemed to move faster and faster.  Flashes of metal were seen as long weapons
appeared from under his thick black coat.
They instantly found their targets and two more workers collapsed.  Another shrieked blindly feeling for his
eyes.

Finally, one of Kelly’s largest men launched
himself at the figure in the middle and struck him hard with a large heavy
leather sap.  The stranger reeled back,
dazed, trying to find the weapon.
Another sap was quickly pulled and slammed against his head.  Then another, and another.  The stranger’s vision began to blur, yet he
continued taking his attackers down, one at a time.  But the saps continued to find their
mark.  He stumbled and managed to grab
one of the weapons, striking the sap’s owner with it harder than any of them
would have imagined.  The man was killed instantly.

More blows caused the stranger’s vision to
darken.  He could barely make out Kelly
and the boy in the distance.  He
desperately tried to push out of the circle and run after them.  Just as he finally managed to get through the
group of men, a gunshot rang out.

He lurched sideways as the bullet ripped into his
side.  A second shot immediately pierced
his thigh, destroying a lateral wall of muscle and causing the stranger to fall
onto his left side.  His entire body was
shaking now as his eyes desperately searched past his attackers for Kelly and
the boy.  He pushed himself up onto his
right leg and managed to hobble two small steps forward when the next bullet
dug into his back, toppling his body forward, onto his chest.

Kelly pulled his son, Ryan, forward.  He tried to keep him from looking back at the
commotion, but when the shots were heard, the boy pulled away and turned back
to look.  He saw the strange man fall to
the ground, his piercing eyes finding the boy and staring straight at him.  Their eyes locked for a moment as the man
continued crawling forward with his hand outstretched toward Ryan.

Frightened, the boy suddenly stumbled backward
over a large stone.  He slipped beyond
the grip of his father, falling backwards into the crossroad behind them.  “Ryan!” Kelly yelled, and reached for his son
just as several passing horses snorted. The boy fell directly into their path
and was trampled beneath them.

Seeing the boy trampled, the stranger, still
trying to drag himself forward on the ground, let out a gut wrenching
howl.  His entire body convulsed and his
eyes rolled up into their sockets.  The
eerie howling continued until the final blow to his head, and his body
collapsed into the thick mud.

2

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was one of the largest
and oldest in the entire city.  Able to
accommodate over twenty two hundred people, its decorated Neo-Gothic spires
towered three hundred and thirty feet above the street below.  Inside, the Pietà, sculpted by William
Ordway Partridge, was three times the size of Michelangelo’s Pietà, and
the cathedral’s combined organs numbered over nine thousand eight hundred
pipes.  It was also the seat of the archbishop of the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of New York.

The
cathedral was a national historic landmark and a popular tourist attraction,
bringing tens of thousands of visitors every year.  The architecture was so impressive that few
could resist taking a picture on the steps of its giant entrance and, with the
warm spring weather, today was no exception.
Hundreds of visitors milled in and out of the cathedral, setting off a
continual stream of flashes from their digital cameras, then visiting the gift
shop on their way out to take home a souvenir and a piece of the city’s history.

Across
the street, hundreds more stood back to snap pictures of the entire
structure.  Outside a nearby café, people
dined on a late morning snack of scones and coffee while enjoying the view.

At one
of the outermost tables sat a man in a suit, taking in the scene.  His hair peppered with small amounts of gray,
he looked more like a local businessman than a tourist.  Sitting calmly with his hand wrapped around a
cup of coffee, he watched the mass of people entering and exiting the church.

A
young, attractive barista with round glasses approached with a hot pot.  Seeing his cup was still untouched, she
continued on to the other customers.  She
thought it odd that he had been sitting there for almost an hour and not even
taken a sip.  She gave him a curious
glance before heading back inside.

A
newlywed couple giggled and ran past the man’s table. The young husband pulled
his bride in for a quick kiss before they turned and trotted across the street,
holding hands.

The
newlyweds were soon followed by a small group of Japanese tourists who crossed
to the other side where they stopped and took pictures of each other, beaming
in front of the church.

The man
looked down at his Rolex and calmly looked back up to the cathedral.  He did not want to miss this.

At five
minutes past eleven, the bombs went off.
A deafening explosion could be heard from within the church, and smoke
burst through the giant front doors.
Everyone screamed and started to run when part of the ceiling began to
collapse.  Huge sections of the beautiful
stained glass windows broke apart and fell onto the people below.  The force of the collapsing roof pulled the
west wall inward and down upon itself.

The
screams were muted by a thunder emanating from the cathedral’s enormous
spires.  One began to move, wobbling from
side to side until cracks appeared.  It
too collapsed downward, pitching at its base, and causing it to lean and smash
into the second spire.  Together, they
came down in a deadly heap of smoke, dust, and rubble.

People
came streaming out of the café in horror, including the barista.  No one noticed the well-dressed man stand up
and walk to the corner.  There, he
continued to watch the carnage as people ran screaming in all directions.  Many of them bloodied, and covered in dirt
and ash.

Moments
later sirens could be heard in the distance.
The man took one last look and began to turn away when something caught
his eye.  He looked back to the
smoldering building where, among the confusion, a mother was whisking her young
daughter away to safety.  She ran, pulling
her daughter behind her.  However, the
girl was not looking at her mother, nor the terrible scene behind her.  The young girl was looking across the street
and directly at him.  He watched
her for a long moment as the girl continued staring at him.

Suddenly
feeling uneasy, the man turned and walked quickly down the street, disappearing
into the chaos.

3

Detectives
Danny Griffin and Mike Buckley pulled their sedan into the parking lot of the
Marriott Hotel.  Several patrol cars were
already there and an ambulance was parked near the main entrance.

After getting out and slamming the car doors
behind them, both men approached the area near the ambulance that had been
cordoned off with yellow tape.  As they
passed an officer holding back a group of onlookers, Griffin looked up and
counted the floors to the broken window; eight floors.

They
reached two more officers in blue standing over the coroner, who was kneeling
down and examining the body.

“Jumper?”
Buckley asked, looking down.

The coroner
shook her head.  “Hardly.  She screamed all the way down.”  She adjusted her rectangular framed glasses
and looked carefully at the victim’s hands.
“Got quite a bit of blood under the fingernails too.”  She wrote something down in her notebook and
then turned her attention back to the body.
“No, I’d say this lady put up quite a fight before going through that
window.”

Griffin
popped a piece of gum into his mouth.
“Where’s Roberts?”

The
coroner tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear and made more notes.  “Upstairs, room 811.  Tell her I’ll be up in a few.”

Griffin
nodded and looked around.  He and Buckley
scanned the group of onlookers for anyone who might be watching the crime scene
with a little too much interest.

“Check
out that guy.”  Buckley nodded toward a
man standing in the crowd with orange hair and piercings covering his
face.  “He looks a little weird.”

Griffin
looked at him and shook his head.
“That’s Cleveland weird, not New York weird.”

They
backed up and surveyed the area, noting the basics: the glass, the distance
from the building, and the position of the body.  A few minutes later, they entered the hotel
and headed for the elevators.

Cheryl
Roberts was the lead investigating officer on duty.  At five foot six with dark, shoulder-length
brown hair, Roberts was known for being all business.  She greeted Griffin and Buckley with a nod
when they entered.  Several other
investigators were moving around the room, taking measurements and
pictures.  The detectives looked around
the room and walked toward Roberts, who had just finished with another
officer.  Virtually everything in the
room was either broken or completely destroyed.

“What
do we have?” Buckley asked, stepping over some broken glass and a large piece
of a picture frame.

Roberts
sighed.  “Well, it’s not a suicide.  The other guests reported one hell of a
fight, including gunshots.”  She pointed
to bullet holes in one of the walls.
“They said it sounded like several people.  It ended with someone screaming and the sound
of breaking glass which, not surprisingly, we’re assuming was the victim.”  She took a few steps over the debris and
studied the couch laying on its side.
“By then, security was on their way up but found the room empty.  Whoever did this left in a hurry.”

Griffin
got closer to the window and examined a piece of the broken edge.  “This glass has to be a good quarter-inch
thick.”  He knocked on it with his
knuckle.  “That must have been one hell
of a push.”

Buckley
looked around the other side of the room.
“Anything missing?”

“Not
that we can see,” replied Roberts.  “Her
purse still has her ID, money, and credit cards.  Earrings and a watch are on the nightstand in
the other room, but they’re cheap.”

Griffin
noted more bullet holes on the far wall.  “How much money did she have?”

“Forty-six
dollars.  She wasn’t rich, that’s for
sure.  We’re doing a full rundown on her
now.”

Griffin
looked at his watch.  “So, we have
someone breaking in on what appears to be an average, middle-class woman at one
thirty in the morning for something other than a simple robbery.”

“Even
if it was a robbery,” Buckley said, “they wouldn’t have gotten downstairs
before she called security.  So, at the
very least, they had to know that she wasn’t going to be in any condition to
make a phone call when it was over.”  He
raised an eyebrow.  “Rape?”

Griffin
shook his head.  “The body was fully
clothed on the pavement downstairs.”  He
looked around the room.  “I don’t see
fragments of clothing up here either.”

Buckley
looked at Roberts.  “You got the
ID?”

Roberts
nodded and motioned at one of the officers.
He was talking on the phone and holding up her driver’s license.  “Her name is Barbara Baxter.  Lives upstate.  We’re guessing she was here on vacation.”

Another
officer stuck his head around the corner.
“Hey, you guys are gonna want to see this.”  He motioned down the short hallway and all
three followed him into the bedroom.  He
crossed the room to a large dresser and pointed to one of the lower drawers,
which was open.  Inside were several
pieces of clothing, neatly folded.

Roberts
bent down and looked at the clothes.
“These clothes don’t fit a woman.
They’re for a child.”  She turned
to the officer with a look of urgency.
“Find out how many people checked into this room!”

The
officer hung up the phone.  “Two checked
in, a mother and daughter.  They guessed
her age to be about six or seven.”

“Jesus
Christ,” said Roberts, looking around the room.
“Search these rooms!” She got down on the floor and looked under the
bed.  They all quickly searched every
nook of the small rooms, but found nothing.

“Get
downstairs and find someone who saw the girl.
See if we can get a picture or drawing.”
The officer nodded and ran for the door.
“And check the security cameras!
See if they got a shot of her!”

Griffin
watched Roberts’ focus sharpen.  She was
a great investigator, but she was also a mother; and there was no greater
instinct than that of a mother regarding a child.

“If
she’s not here,” Roberts continued, “then they probably took her.  I think that woman fought to protect her
child, and lost.”

Griffin
could see her beginning to get angry.
Roberts instructed everyone in the room, except Griffin and Buckley, to
drop everything and search first the floor then the entire hotel.  She also had the hotel’s security team
checking all footage from the cameras.  A
kidnapping was a different priority to cops.
A kidnapping meant there was still hope.

“Get
everything,” Roberts said, “ballistics, tire marks, every fingerprint we can
find, everything.”

Suddenly,
one of the investigators burst into the room.
“Come quick!”  He disappeared back
out into the 8th floor hallway with the others running after
him.  They ran down to the end of the
hallway where a laundry cart sat next to one of the doors and another officer
was waiting.  They all came to a stop and
looked at him expectantly.  The officer
calmly motioned toward an oversized cloth laundry bag.  At the bottom sat a small blond girl, looking
up, and scared to death.

4

Christine Rose parked her old, silver Honda in
front of the 19th Precinct station on East 67th Street and climbed
out from behind the wheel.  She looked up
at the five-story gray and red building, swallowed hard.  Slowly climbing the half dozen steps, she
reached for the large blue door and jumped back when the door suddenly flew
open.  She turned and watched an angry
teenager storm down the steps.  Being one
of the nearest police stations to Central Park, the 19th was always
busy and filled with interesting people.

She walked in and showed her ID to the sergeant
behind the front desk who gave her a pen and slid a thick book in front of her
for a signature.  He then pointed her to
the elevator and turned to help the next person.  She walked gingerly down the hall and waited
for the elevator, watching people pass back and forth.  Christine took a deep breath when the doors
opened and stepped inside.  It had been
over two years since she had last been there.

A few moments later, she stepped out onto the
fifth floor.  She peered through the
double-glass doors and spotted the person she was looking for.  She took a deep breath, pulled the door open,
and walked through.  Crossing the room,
Christine stopped just outside the last office.
Through the glass door, she could see Cheryl Roberts sitting next to a
tiny girl, holding her hand.

“Christine?”

She turned to see Detective Griffin behind
her.  “Oh…hi Danny,” she said, with a
brief but nervous wave.

Griffin looked around with a confused
expression.  “What are you doing here?”

Christine took a breath.  “Well, it’s nice to see you too.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I just meant…”

“That’s okay.”
She looked at the little girl and then back at Griffin. “I, uh, was
assigned this case.”

“Really?” he asked, surprised.  “You’re with Social Services now?”

Christine nodded and gave him a meek shrug.  “I got reassigned.  That’s why it took so long.”

“I see,” Griffin said, looking over her shoulder
at the girl.  “Listen, Christine.  I’m not sure if you’re ready for this.  This little girl has gone through some
serious trauma.”

Christine fumbled for her purse and pulled out a
folder.  “I know.  I read the report.  How is she?
They said it was a homicide.”

Griffin sighed and shook his head.  “It’s hard to say.  Roberts has been with her all morning, but
she hasn’t said anything.  Looks like her
mother was thrown out of a window, and she may have heard the whole thing.  She hasn’t slept all night.”

“Right.” Christine nodded, watching them.  She suddenly remembered something and reached
into her bag.  “I brought her some food.”
She pulled out a small package.

Griffin looked at the package and frowned.  “Donuts?”

“What?” Christine said innocently.  “Kids love donuts.”

Griffin’s frown turned into a smirk.  “I hope you don’t have a soda in there too.”

Christine didn’t answer.  Instead, she looked at the man approaching
from the other direction.

Griffin turned as Buckley reached them.  “Oh, Christine.  This is my partner, Mike Buckley.  Mike, this is Christine Rose with Social
Services.  She’s here for Sarah Baxter.”

Buckley shook Christine’s hand.  “Nice to meet you.”  He pulled out a small doll and handed it to
her.  “I found this in the lost and
found.  I thought maybe she’d like it.”

Christine smiled and took the doll.  “Thank you.”
She gave Griffin one more look and turned away, knocking gently on the
glass door and cracking it open.  She
walked softly across the room, hoping her nervousness was not entirely
obvious.   When she got to the couch,
Roberts patted Sarah’s hand and stood up while Christine slowly sat down on the
other side of her.

“Hello, Sarah,” she said softly.  “My name is Christine.”

Sarah looked at her apprehensively with big green
eyes, but said nothing.

Christine nodded to herself and looked at the
other three standing outside watching her.
She remembered the doll and held it up for Sarah to see.  “Sarah, do you like dolls?”

Sarah stared at the doll and nodded.  Christine held it out, and Sarah cautiously
took it from her hands.  Okay,
Christine thought to herself.  Here we
go.

She cleared her throat.  “Sarah, I work with these nice policemen, and
we just want to make sure you weren’t hurt.”

Sarah did not answer.

“Sarah, I know you’re scared, but I’m here to help
you.  Can you tell me if you were hurt?”

She remained focused on the doll.  After a few moments, Sarah slowly shook her
head.

“You were not hurt?”

Eyes still down, Sarah shook her head again.

“Okay.”
Christine put her hands between her knees and looked at Sarah’s
doll.  “So, you like dolls?”

Sarah nodded.

“Me
too.”  Christine smiled, watching her
begin to play with it.  “Sarah, can you
tell me how old you are?”

She held up six fingers.

“You’re six?” Christine said, with raised
eyebrows.  “You’re…really getting to be a
big girl.”

Christine looked at Griffin outside and reluctantly
pulled the donuts back out of her bag.
“Are you hungry?  I brought you
something to eat.”

Sarah looked at the donuts and mumbled something
under her breath.

“What’s that?”

Sarah said it again a little louder.  “I’m not supposed to eat that.”

Christine frowned.
“Ah, okay.”  She reached into her
bag again and brought out a small juice box.
“How about orange juice?  Are you
thirsty?”

Sarah looked up at her and then to the box.  She nodded and took the juice when Christine
nudged it into her hand.  She carefully
unwrapped the straw, poked it into the top of the box, and took a long
drink.  When she was finished, Christine
took the empty box back and very gently placed her hand on Sarah’s knee.

“Sarah, I want you to come with me so I can take
care of you.  Would that be okay?”

“Okay.”

Christine smiled.
“Okay!”  She slowly stood up and
reached for Sarah, who also stood, placing her tiny hand inside Christine’s.

Christine took a deep breath and smiled.  She began to walk forward when little Sarah
suddenly pulled on her hand, stopping her.

“Did my mommy die?”

Christine’s smile promptly disappeared.

5

“So, that’s Christine,” Buckley said.  They stood at the window upstairs watching
Christine down on the street, fumbling with a car seat in the back of her
Honda.  She finally managed to get it
right and buckled Sarah in.

“Yeah.”

Buckley nodded.
“She’s cute.”

“Shut up,” Griffin replied, watching the car drive
off.

Buckley turned from the window and looked at
him.  “So, what was the problem again?”

“She has…some issues.”

He nodded.
Both men turned around when someone called out for them.

“Phone call on line six!”

Griffin walked to a nearby desk and picked up the
phone. “This is Griffin.”

Buckley turned and watched a large television on
the wall where several officers were following the coverage of the explosion at
Saint Patrick’s.  All of the major news
channels were onsite.  As he watched,
another officer approached and handed him a Post-it note.

After a few minutes, Griffin thanked the caller
and hung up.  He turned back to
Buckley.  “Do you know a Glen Smith over
at FBI?”

Buckley shook his head.

“Said he was supposed to meet with Barbara Baxter
today.”

“About what?”

Griffin shrugged.
“He didn’t know.  Says she
wouldn’t tell him over the phone.”  He
paused.  “What did she do for a living?”

“Secretary for a law firm.”

“Right.” Griffin looked out the window thinking.

Buckley held up his note.  “We just got a message from forensics; looks
like they found blood in the stairwell at the hotel.  And it doesn’t match the victim.”

“Let’s check it out.”

In the forensics lab, Patty Eisendrath sat across
the room on a stool, dressed in her usual white lab coat and staring into a
large electron microscope.  Eisendrath
was arguably the best forensic scientist in New York state and, according to
Buckley, one of the prettiest, too.  So
far though, his queries had resulted in zero dates.  Which was just another reason why Griffin
considered her about as smart as they came.

They walked up behind her and waited quietly.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said without taking
her eyes from the microscope lenses.

The detectives looked at each other.  Before they could speak, she answered their
question.

“It’s Buckley’s cologne.”

Buckley, shorter and stockier than Griffin and
showing the first signs of losing some hair, almost blushed.

Patty turned away from the instrument and held up
a finger while she jotted down some quick notes.  She looked up expectantly.  “You obviously got my message.  Did you check out the hotel?”

Griffin nodded.
“We just came from there.  Saw the
blood in the stairwell.  Looks like he
made a run for it out the back parking lot.”

“He and the others,” she said standing up.

“Others?” Buckley asked.

They followed her to a large desk where she sat
down and brought up a computer file, displaying several pictures of blood
drops.  “These are the blood samples we
found descending the stairwell and out through the parking lot.  Same blood type, same DNA, so one person was
bleeding.”

Griffin leaned in for a closer look.  “You said others?”

Patty nodded and pointed to one of the drops.  You can see a pattern here in this
drop.”  She zoomed in to display a higher
resolution image of shapes within the drop of blood.

“What is that?” Buckley asked.

“That’s a shoe print.”

“A shoe print?” he asked again.  “It just looks like some random markings.”

“Most of it is, but here,” she highlighted an area
of the screen, “you have a few impressions that are clearly part of a design
from a shoe tread.”  She zoomed in on
another large drop.  “And here we have
part of a tread again, but this one’s a little different.”  She spun her chair to face them.  “And since it’s nearly impossible to step on
your own blood drops while running, that means there was a minimum of three
people fleeing the scene, probably at the same time.”

Buckley raised his eyebrow.  “So we need to start tracking down sole
patterns of popular shoes.”

Patty smirked.
“No, I just thought you might find it helpful.  There’s not enough here to determine what
kind of shoes they  were.  Besides, we would have to factor in
additional variables such as speed of the run, the body’s natural tendency to
pivot the foot while running, and a host of other things.”

“Okay,” Griffin said, looking at her.  “I’m guessing you didn’t call us in to show
us something that was just helpful.”

Patty frowned.
“Of course not.  What I wanted to
show you was the other sample, which is much more interesting.”

“What other sample?” Griffin asked.

“They didn’t tell you there was another sample?”

Both Griffin and Buckley looked at each other and
shook their heads.

Patty smiled.
“Well then, this is really going to cook your noodle.”  She brought up another sample.  This one was much larger.  “The blood on the stairs was noticed first,
which is why those were the first samples.
However, when the investigators came back upstairs, they checked all the
floors and carpets with Luminol.”

Griffin and Buckley were both very familiar with
Luminol.  It was the crystalline agent
used to make blood visible in a darkened room, primarily by reacting with the
hemoglobin in blood.  Every forensics
team used it.

“When they sprayed the hallway outside the room,”
Patty continued, “it lit up like a Christmas tree!”

“So there was more blood in the hallway,” Buckley
surmised.

“Not just more blood,” Patty corrected, “a lot
of blood!  And from a different person.”

She brought up a picture of the hallway.  “It wasn’t noticed originally because the
carpet is dark red.  But judging from the
sheer amount detected, this person stayed in that hallway for a long time.”

Griffin looked at Buckley.  “So someone else was injured, and they just
decided to hang around?”

Buckley shook his head.  “But security was there in a few
minutes.  How much could someone bleed
standing in the hallway for three or four minutes?”

“Well, let’s put it this way,” Patty said folding
her arms. “I’ve never seen that much blood without a dead person lying next to
it.  Whoever it was, I would say they had
less than twenty minutes to make it to an emergency room, at the most.”

6

The site of the Saint Patrick’s explosion was
somber, with only a third of the cathedral still standing.  The rest of the area was leveled and covered
in dust and rubble over twenty feet high.
Every pane of glass, even from the walls that were still standing, was
gone and now scattered in millions of fragments, some landing as far as two
hundred yards away.

On three sides, the site was surrounded by
emergency vehicles and construction equipment.
Three days later, the crews were still finding bodies beneath the
destruction.

Several bulldozers and backhoes belched smoke and
picked through the rubble, lifting and moving the largest pieces so the search
and rescue crews could comb below them.
From a distance, hundreds of people watched and hoped for miracles, for
another person to be carried out with a stretcher instead of a body bag.

Among all of the rescue workers, one individual
was not looking for survivors.  He was
looking at something else.  Carefully
stepping through the large pieces of crushed stone, he examined the walls that
were still standing.  He looked at them
thoughtfully, then turned and traced out where the cathedral’s multiple altars
had been located.

His tanned, bald head was covered in a light
coating of dust as he methodically cleaned the debris from an altar and
examined it.  Flipping up a pocket on his
khaki style shirt, the man withdrew a small camera.  He zoomed in and snapped several high
resolution pictures before standing up, pushing the debris back in place with
his boot.

7

Christine sat at the table with the phone to her
ear. While she listened, Christine watched Sarah slowly wander around the small
living room looking closely at all the framed photographs.  Most of the pictures were of Christine in her
younger years and included what appeared to be her parents, always smiling with
their arms around her.  Sarah continued
studying the pictures and noticed that her father was missing from a number of
them.  The more recent photos included
only Christine and her mother.

Christine was speaking to Liz Iverson, a longtime
friend and now her boss.  Christine’s old
department had been disbanded due to budget cuts. Luckily Liz had been able to
make a position available for her in her city social services department, in spite
of her lack of experience.

“Okay, that’s fine,” Liz said through the phone’s
speaker, “but she’ll need to see a doctor tomorrow.”

Christine shrugged and looked across the room at
Sarah.  She kept her voice low.  “I’ll try, but she was really reluctant.”

“That’s normal.
Where are you now?”

The pitch in Christine’s voice changed
slightly.  “Um, my apartment.”

Liz’s sigh could be heard through the phone.  “Christine, it’s against policy to take them
to our homes.”

“I know,” she replied.  “But she fell asleep in the car, she wouldn’t
go to the doctor’s, and she didn’t want to go into the office.  I didn’t know what else to do.”  Christine watched Sarah bend down and gently
pet the top of her cat’s head.

“Alright, alright,” Liz
said.  “It’s not the end of the
world.  Just get her into the office as
soon as you can.”

Christine nodded.  “Okay, I will.”

“Don’t worry Chris,
you’re doing fine.  I’ll see you
tomorrow.”  With that Liz hung up, and
Christine pushed the button on her cordless phone to end the call.  She sighed and looked around her tiny
apartment.  How did she manage to get
herself into this?  It was her first real
assignment and it felt like she was already doing everything wrong.

She looked up when she
heard her cat hiss.  Sarah was grasping
the cat by the tail, trying to keep it from going through the cat door.

“Oh honey!” Christine
exclaimed and ran over to help.  “It’s
okay, she’s allowed to go outside.”  She
grabbed Sarah’s hand and gently pulled the cat’s tail free.  Sarah whined as the small calico quickly
darted away, jumping through the tiny plastic door and leaving it swinging
behind her.

“It’s okay, she’ll be
back.”

Sarah frowned and
abruptly pulled away from Christine.  It
was hard to tell whether she was sad or irritated.

“Are you hungry Sarah?”
she asked, standing back up.

Sarah nodded and
lowered herself down on the couch.

“Do you like eggs?”
Christine walked into the small kitchen and opened the refrigerator.  “I think I have some cereal, or maybe…a piece
of pizza?”

There was no answer.

She turned and looked
back around the corner.  “Sarah?”

Sarah was looking at
the pictures again.

“Is this your
mommy?”  Sarah asked pointing to one of
the pictures.

Christine walked up
behind her.  “Yes.”

Sarah looked closer at
another.  It showed Christine’s mother
standing next to her wearing a white lab coat with her shoulder length brown
hair put up.  “Why is she wearing that?”

Christine leaned in and
looked at the picture.  “My mother was a
pharmacist.”

Sarah raised her
eyebrows excitedly.  “She worked on a farm?”

“No, no.”  Christine chuckled. “A pharmacist is someone
who gets medicine for people.”

“Oh,” Sarah said with a
hint of disappointment.  She pointed to
another, older photo.  “Is this your
daddy?”

“Mmm hmm.”

Sarah looked up with
her large green eyes.  “What happened to
him?”

“He’s…in heaven.”  Christine frowned and changed the
subject.  “Hey, do you want to sleep in
my big bed tonight?”

Sarah shrugged her tiny
shoulders.

“It’s a great bed, and
I’ll be right here on this couch.  Just a
few steps away.”

Sarah nervously looked
at the couch and then back at the bedroom door.

“And you know what?”
Christine added. “My kitty cat Cassie likes to sleep in my bed.  Maybe she’ll sleep with you.”

“She won’t,” Sarah said
sadly, looking down at the floor.

“Well, she probably
just needs to get used to you.”
Christine bent down and gave her an awkward squeeze around the
shoulders.  “Okay then,” she said
clearing her throat, “let me see what I can find to eat.”

8

Griffin paid Lenny and
picked up both hot dogs.  Lenny Markowitz
was small and boisterous, almost 70, and had been selling hot dogs on the same
street corner in Manhattan for 43 years.
And he was proud of it.  He had
survived recessions, natural disasters, and every kind of struggle life could
throw at him, and he did it by selling hot dogs.  That was perseverance.  Griffin and Buckley liked him immensely and
faithfully bought his dogs for lunch twice a week.

Griffin walked back to
the car, where Buckley was leaning against the fender, and handed him one.  “So,” he said, taking a bite, “no hospital or
clinic within ten miles reported having someone show up that night with a wound
bleeding that badly.”

Buckley nodded.  “Apparently not.”

“So if Eisendrath is
right, and this person had less than twenty minutes to get help,” he paused,
“let’s call it forty minutes…he would either have had to get help from
somewhere else or left in a way that didn’t involve hundreds of downtown
traffic lights.”

“Or both,” Buckley
added with a swallow.

“Or both,” Griffin
acknowledged. “Or they were not wounded that badly after all.”

“But how could someone
bleed that much if they weren’t hurt that bad?”

“Exactly. Which means
they had to be that hurt.”
Griffin took a bite.  “I guess
they just disappeared.”

“What I don’t
understand,” started Buckley, “is if there were three people running out the
back, or at least three that we know of, why was the fourth still upstairs?”

“Maybe he was in the
hallway before the other three came down the stairwell, and he came down with
them.”

Buckley shook his
head.  “Then why didn’t we see huge
amounts of blood on the stairs or across the parking lot too?”

Griffin took a drink of
his soda.  “Maybe they bled out by then
which means the other three would have had another body to carry…”

“Which slows them down,
adds more weight, another source of blood droplets…all of which we don’t see.”

Griffin shook his
head.  “It doesn’t work.”  He thought for a minute, absently watching a
woman walk by with her dog.  “Okay, let’s
forget the other three in the parking lot for the moment.  Why would the person in the hall, who was
hemorrhaging, simply be standing there?”

Buckley shrugged and
downed his last piece of hot dog.
“Deciding which way to run?”

“I don’t think so.  It doesn’t take that long to pick a
direction, a few seconds maybe.  And even
if he did, there was no other trail of blood downstairs or around the hotel.”

“So where did he go?”
asked Buckley.

“I don’t know.”

Buckley finished his
soda and tossed his cup in a nearby trash can.
“So, let me ask you something else, is it just me or are you wondering
why it would take four guys, at least, to take down one single mother?”

Griffin folded his
arms.  “I’ve been wondering the same
thing.  And the amount of damage to that
room was incredible.  How much fight does
one woman have against four attackers?”

“Or more.”

“And when and how did
little Sarah escape?”  Griffin wondered
out loud.  He suddenly looked at
Buckley.  “What if the person in the hall
was looking for Sarah?”

“And simply stopped
looking because he was bleeding too badly.”

“That fits.”  Griffin said.
“But why would they not go with the other three?  Wouldn’t that be their best chance at getting
treatment somewhere?  It still doesn’t
make sense.”

Buckley reached into
the car and grabbed his cell phone.  It
had a voice mail on it.  He dialed the
number and listened.  With the phone
still next to his ear, he looked at Griffin.
“Roberts says she left you a voice mail.”

Surprised, Griffin
pulled his own phone out of his pocket.
He frowned and rolled his eyes, holding it up for Buckley to see.  “Damn thing turned off again.  I think my battery is dying.”

“You’ve got to get a
new phone,” Buckley said pulling out a small notepad and writing on it.

“What’s the message?”

Buckley finished
writing and hung up his phone.  “She says
they have an address for Barbara Baxter’s work.
Ready for a ride upstate?”

Albany, New York, was
just over two hours away and had the distinction of being one of the oldest
surviving colonies from the newly discovered Americas.  First settled in 1614, it was located at the
north end of the Hudson River and now served as the state capital of New York.

Just three blocks away
from the state capital building, Griffin and Buckley arrived at Simon &
Meyer, a small but prominent law firm.  Both
men were escorted to a conference room where they were joined by Aaron Meyer
and Karen McClay, manager of the firm’s support staff.  The two were devastated when they heard the
news about Barbara.

“Who on earth would do
something like that?” asked Meyer incredulously.  McClay sat beside him weeping.

“That’s what we’re
trying to find out,” said Griffin.  He
reached for a tissue box behind him and passed it to Karen.

“Can you tell us how
long Barbara worked here?” asked Buckley.

“Years,” replied Meyer,
trying to think.  “Five, maybe six years.”

“Did she have any
problems that you’re aware of?”

Meyer shook his
head.  “At work?  God no, she was incredible.  She worked hard and was as sharp as a
tack.”  He looked at Karen, who was still
struggling.  “I don’t really know much
about her home life. Karen might.”

Karen looked up, but
still couldn’t stop crying long enough to get the words out.  After a long time, she finally shook her
head.  “N-not that I know of.”

“Do either of you know
what she was doing in New York?”  Griffin
asked.

Meyer shrugged and
again looked at Karen.  She wiped her
eyes and said “It was a last minute thing.
A vacation for her and her daughter.”
Karen’s eyes opened wide.  “My
god, is Sarah okay?”

“She’s fine.” Griffin
nodded.  “She’s being tended to until we
sort everything out.”

Buckley cleared his
throat.  “Do you know if she was in any
trouble?  Anybody she was arguing with or
not getting along?”

“No!” Karen shook her
head.  “Not a single person that I know
of.”

“Any boyfriends or bad
relationships? Bad breakups maybe?”

“Not that I know
of.  As far as I know, she hadn’t dated
anyone in a long time.  It was just her
and Sarah.  She was all Barbara cared
about.”

“Any idea if she was
meeting anyone there?”

“Mmm…I think so.  But you’d have to ask one of the other legal
secretaries she worked with.  They talked
to her more often than I did.”

Both detectives nodded
and continued to write in their pads.
Griffin looked up at Meyer.
“Would you mind if we talked to some of the other staff?”

“Of course not.”

Griffin turned to Karen.  “Have you ever met her daughter Sarah?”

Karen looked
surprised.  “Of course I have.  We all have.
She’s a wonderful child, simply incredible.”

Griffin looked at
Buckley.  “What do you mean incredible?”

She shrugged.  “She’s just about the nicest little girl I’ve
ever met.  Always polite, mature, and
very perceptive.”

“Perhaps we can see
Barbara’s employment records and a list of phone calls?”

Meyer managed a polite
smile.  “I’d like to detective, but I’m
afraid we have some rather paranoid clients.
You’d have to get a warrant for that.”

He looked at
Meyer.  “How about a look at her desk?”

Meyer thought about it
for a moment.  “I’ll tell you what, you
can take as long as you like at her desk, provided I stand next to you and keep
you away from any client related data that might be proprietary to the firm.”

“That would be fine,”
said Griffin.  “You do realize, however,
that we will come back with a warrant.”

Meyer smiled.  “I certainly do.  But for the sake of our business and
reputation, we have to be diligent.”

9

Christine and Sarah
walked through the lobby of the Human Resources Administration building on 8th
Avenue.  They crossed the marble floor
and found a long line forming in front of the elevators.  Sarah spotted the stairs behind them and
tugged on Christine’s arm.

Christine looked at the
sign on the door and smiled.  “Okay, I
probably need the exercise anyway.”

They reached the fifth
floor a little out of breath and found the cause of the delay.  One of the two elevators was offline for
repairs.  A technician could be seen
inside with his head stuck in an open panel.

Christine opened the
door and Sarah walked in ahead of her, looking around at the giant open office
area.  They headed down a long hallway,
turned a corner, and stopped in front of Liz Iverson’s office.

Several minutes later,
Christine was standing next to Liz.  They
both watched Sarah in the small room next door, sitting at an oversized table
with a giant box of crayons.

Christine sighed.  “I really didn’t think she would come.”

“I’m glad she did,” Liz
replied.  “Let’s see if she agrees to an
exam.”  She handed Christine a small
business card.  “I made an appointment
for you this afternoon at the Children’s Hospital.  Just in case.”

“Thanks.”  Christine took the card and looked it over.

Liz looked at Sarah
again.  “How is she?”

“It’s hard to say,”
Christine said.  “She’s talking and
starting to open up a little bit.”  She
looked back and gave her a nervous look.
“I just feel like I’m fumbling a bit here.”

“You’re doing fine,”
Liz said, putting a hand on her arm.

Christine managed a
grin.  “Thanks.”

“So listen, I spoke
with Officer Roberts at the police department.
They’re trying to track down next of kin and find out if there was a
will or trust that addresses her mother’s wishes for custody.  Has Sarah said anything about brothers or
sisters, maybe aunts or uncles?”

Christine shook her
head.  “So far she hasn’t said a whole
lot of anything.”

“Okay,” Liz
nodded.  “Well, if she continues to open
up, see what you can find out.”

“I will.”

“You might also see if
you can find out anything about her father, like whether he is still in the
picture at all.”

Christine frowned.  “Liz, what if there is no one or we
can’t find anyone?”

“We usually do, even if
it takes some time. If it’s a lengthy process, we will have to find a foster
home or a temporary family she can stay with until we figure things out.”

Christine said nothing
and Liz knew what she was thinking.
“Look Christine, it’s normal to become attached.  And to some extent that’s okay.  But we have to keep our heads here.  The hardest part about our job is putting
aside our emotions and personal interests to make sure we do what’s right for
these children.  In the long run, that’s
the most help we can give them.”

“I know,” Christine
replied watching Sarah.  “You just feel
so bad.  I mean no one should have to go
through what she has.”  She looked back
at Liz.  “We’re going to get her some
counseling right?”

“If the new guardians
have no will or money to work with, then yes, we’ll try to help.”

Christine thought about
that term, new guardians.  It
sounded so matter of fact, so detached.
These children were so innocent and vulnerable, how could people detach
themselves so easily? How could they just let some procedure or checklist
determine the outcome?  Maybe she had
trouble with kids, but she sure wasn’t heartless.  Not that her colleagues were either, but
where exactly was that line?  How long
did it take to eventually close off enough of your sympathy to function
effectively in this job?  And if they
turn that off, how were they supposed to really feel and sense the kind of
relationship the children might have with their new guardians?  It wasn’t just about finding someone who
would take good care of them was it?
Wasn’t their job really about finding someone who would truly love these
kids like they were their own?  Or was
that just a romantic vision that everyone new to the job brought with them,
until they were finally beaten down by the reality of life?

Christine tried to sound
professional.  “So, how long…you know, do
I…”

“How long do you look
after her?”  Liz asked.

“Right.”

“Usually a few
days.  Obviously the sooner we get her
into a positive environment, the sooner the healing can begin.”

The healing.  How long, Christine thought, does it take to
heal from hearing your mother being thrown out of a window?  Decades?

Liz gave Sarah one last
look.  “Okay, I’ve got to run.  Stay in touch and let me know how it goes
this afternoon.”

“I will.”

With that, Liz ducked
back inside her office and grabbed her purse.
She patted Christine on the arm once more as she passed and headed out.

Christine turned her
attention back to Sarah.  Watching Sarah
sitting there coloring all alone stirred so many emotions.  She looked so alone and vulnerable, and yet
she also somehow looked strong at the same time.  It was simply amazing how resilient some
children could be.

Christine opened the
glass door and quietly walked in.  Sarah
remained focused on her drawing as Christine approached and stood next to her,
peering down at what she was working on.
It had a small, blue house in the middle and a bright, yellow sun in the
upper left hand corner.

“What are you drawing,
Sarah?”

“My house,” Sarah
replied without looking up.

“And who are these?”
she asked, pointing to some stick figures.

“Me and mommy and
kitty.”

“Ah, very nice.  And is this the sun here?”

Sarah nodded.

“And what are these?”
Christine asked, pointing to small circles around the stick figures.

“Shadows.  Kitty has one too but it’s little.”

Christine smiled.  “It’s beautiful Sarah.”  She looked up when the door opened and the
receptionist entered.

“Christine, I have a
call for you,” the receptionist whispered.

“Who is it?”

“Not sure, she didn’t
give a name.”

“Okay.  Thanks Jen.”
Christine reached for the phone and picked up the line.  She held the phone up to her ear.  “Hello, this is Christine.”

“Is this Christine
Rose?” a female voice asked.

“Yes it is.”

The caller was silent
for a moment.  When she spoke again, she
sounded reserved.  “I have some
information about the Baxters…”

“Oh.  You know I don’t…I think you want to talk to
the police, I’m not-”

“I don’t want to talk
to the police,” the woman interrupted.

“Um, okay,” Christine
said.  “Well you probably know-”

“I know about the other
night, that’s why I’m calling.  This is
not about Barbara, it’s about her daughter…Sarah.”

Less than two minutes
later Christine was walking quickly down the hallway and back towards the
elevators with Sarah in tow, barely keeping up.
If she walked any faster, she would have been dragging Sarah.  They reached the double doors of the
elevators and Christine quickly pressed the down button.

“Where are we going?”
Sarah asked.

“To talk to the
policemen.”

The elevator doors
opened. Several people looked up at them and stepped back to make room.  Christine took a step forward but was
stopped.  She looked down behind
her.  Sarah was pulling hard on the arm
of her blouse.

“Come on, Sarah.”

Sarah looked up at her
and shook her head.

“It’s okay, Sarah.  Elevators are safe.”  She put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders to
help her forward but Sarah dug her feet in.
“What is it honey?  Have you not
been on one of these before?”

Sarah shook her head
even more and backed away.

Christine frowned.  “Okay, we don’t need to go that way.  If you’re afraid of elevators, let’s take the
stairs again.”

Sarah ran ahead to the
stairs as Christine apologized to the others and waved for them to go
ahead.  She trotted after Sarah as the
elevators doors closed gently behind her.

“Hold on, Sarah.  Not so fast.”
She grabbed the heavy stairway door that Sarah was trying to pull open.

Suddenly a terrible
screeching of metal against metal sounded from the other side of the elevator
doors, followed by a loud blast.  The
giant silver doors instantly bulged outwards, and a loud banging could be heard
as the elevator car plunged five stories to the bottom of the shaft.  Within seconds, the car smashed into the
bottom floor.

Christine screamed and
instinctively pushed Sarah into the stairwell and stared at the elevator
doors.  Sarah held on tight to Christine,
looking into the stairwell with a frightened look on her face.  Shocked and horrified, Christine stared at
the elevator and covered her mouth with her hands.  “Oh my god!
OH MY GOD!”

Several people came
running out of their offices.  They
reached the elevator just in time to see smoke and dust seeping through the
twisted doors.

10

Griffin and Buckley
left the small building and walked back toward their car.  Other than a few pictures from Barbara
Baxter’s desk and a colleague thinking she was supposed to see someone in New
York, they did not have much more than when they arrived.

As they reached their
white unmarked car, Buckley’s phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket and answered.

“Buckley here.”  After a moment, he mouthed the word Roberts
to Griffin.

Griffin instinctively
pulled out his own phone to find it dead again.
“God dammit.”

“Yeah,” Buckley
replied.  “I’m with him right now…we’re
just heading back from Albany.”

“What?!” he said,
freezing with one hand on the driver’s door handle.  “When?”
After a long pause, he replied with a simple “Okay.” and hung up.  He looked immediately to Griffin.  “Get in the car, Danny!”

Buckley opened his door
quickly and jumped in behind the wheel.

“What is it?” Griffin
asked, peering through the passenger window.
The sound of Buckley starting and revving the engine was all he needed
to jump in.

Buckley floored it, and
the car shot out onto the four lane boulevard.

“What? What the hell is
it?”  Griffin instinctively grabbed the
siren, reached outside, and stuck it to the roof of the car.

Buckley was still
accelerating as he wove in and out of other cars.  “There’s been an accident at the Human
Resources Building on 8th.”
He looked at Griffin.  “At Social
Services.”

11

Christine looked at
Sarah’s tiny figure and then returned back down the hallway.  “She’s asleep.”

Griffin and Buckley
nodded as she sighed and collapsed down onto her couch.  She was dressed in sweat pants and a large
Patriots T-shirt.  Her hair was a mess
and her eyes were red, betraying how exhausted she was.

“How are you?” Griffin
asked.

Christine closed her
eyes and shook her head.  “I just can’t
believe it.”  She was quiet for a moment
and then looked at Griffin, sitting across from her on a chair.  “It was so horrible.  Did they find anything yet?”

“They’re still
looking.”

She shook her head
again.  “I’ll tell you what, if it
weren’t for Sarah being afraid of elevators…I mean if she hadn’t insisted we go
down the stairs instead…god, it would have been us.”

Both Griffin and
Buckley looked at each other as she reached forward and picked up her tea
cup.  They were thinking the same thing.

“And Sarah.”  Christine made a halfhearted chuckle and
leaned back on the couch sideways, folding her feet beneath her.  “I can’t believe what that girl is able to
deal with.  I mean look at me, I’m a
total wreck.  While she’s six and already
asleep.”

Christine suddenly
remembered something and looked around.
“Where’s Cassie?”  She eyed the
cat’s food bowl which was still half full.
“Have you seen her?” she asked the detectives.

They both frowned and
looked around the room.  “Uh no.”

“She’s a tough cat,”
Griffin said reassuringly.

Christine remembered
how Griffin used to say that a lot.

Buckley took a step
forward.  “When we got here, you said you
had something to tell us?”

Christine looked away
from the food bowl as if coming out of a trance.  “Yes, I do.”
She took another sip of tea and set the cup down again on the table.  “Someone called me today, at the office.  Someone who wanted to say something but was
afraid of the police.”

They both looked at her
attentively.  “Who?” Griffin asked.

“I don’t know.  She wouldn’t say.”

“She?”

“Yes, she,” Christine
repeated.  “She said she was a friend of
Barbara Baxter.”  She looked at Buckley
who was already scribbling on his notepad. “She said they were friends and she
had been worried about Barbara.”

“Worried how?”

“She said Barbara had
been acting weird lately, when she suddenly decided to take some time off.”

“Jobs get stressful,”
Griffin said. “Maybe she needed a break.”

“That’s kind of what I
said,” Christine replied.  She picked up
her warm cup again and nestled it between her hands.  “But she told me Barbara had done some things
that didn’t make sense.  For one, she
yanked Sarah out of school in the middle of the day.  Then she disappeared with just a day’s
notice.  The caller said that Barbara had
never done either of those things before.”

“Did she say anything
else?”

“Yes,”  Christine said slowly.  “And that is where it got a little weird.”

Buckley stopped writing
and looked up. “What do you mean?”

Christine took a deep
breath.  “She said that Barbara was
afraid for her.  For Sarah,” she quickly
clarified.

Griffin’s brow
furrowed.  “Sarah’s mother was afraid for
her?  How close is this friend?”

“Pretty close, I
think.”

“How do you know?”  Buckley asked.

Christine looked at
him.  “Because of what she said
next.”  She glanced back down the hall
and lowered her voice slightly.  “She
said there was something special about Sarah.”

“What does that mean, special?”

“I don’t know.  The woman said that Barbara Baxter had
brought it up a few times but would never go into detail.  I got the impression that this wasn’t
something Barbara would share with just anyone.
I could be wrong, but that was the feeling I got.”

“A woman we met today
at Barbara’s work said something similar,”
Griffin said.  “She talked about
how wonderful Sarah was; how she was a such an incredibly nice little girl.”

Christine thought about
it and slowly shook her head.  “I don’t
think that’s what this woman on the phone was referring to.”  She shrugged.
“It was a different…tone.”

“What kind of tone did
she use?” asked Buckley.

“I don’t know.  I can’t really explain it.  It’s just one of those things you feel.  I could be wrong.  It was just a feeling.”

Buckley’s phone
rang.  He excused himself and walked into
the kitchen to take the call.

While he was in the
other room, Griffin leaned closer to Christine.
“Chris, I’m getting a little worried, for you and Sarah.  I think there might be something else going
on here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he
shrugged.  “It’s just a hunch.  Something is not adding up.”

Christine did not
respond right away.  Instead she mulled
over what he said.  Finally she looked at
him.  “I don’t want to abandon her,
Danny.  I know that probably sounds weird
coming from me, but right now she has no one else.”  She paused.
“She trusts me.  I don’t know why
and I’m not even sure I want to know.  Maybe
everything changes tomorrow.  Maybe we
find some family or maybe you find whoever did it and arrest them, but, for
now, she needs me and it feels good to be able to help her.”  Christine stared down into her tea.  “I know it sounds strange, but it feels like
maybe I’m growing.”

Griffin stared at her
and smiled.  “It doesn’t sound strange,
Chris.”

Buckley could be heard
hanging up the phone.  He returned from
the kitchen with a grave look on his face.

Griffin looked up.  “What is it?”

Buckley looked at Christine
and then back to his partner.  “The
investigation team says it was not an accident.
The elevator was sabotaged.  The
explosion was not caused by a malfunction; it was designed to sever the
elevator cable.  And the emergency brakes
had been disabled first, which was the screeching you heard.”

Christine gasped and
dropped her cup on the rug, spilling the last of her tea.  She covered her mouth and looked at Griffin
who was now standing above her.

“That’s it,” he
said.  “We’re moving you.”

Thirty minutes later
they had three patrol cars waiting outside, and Christine had everything packed
for several days.  On Buckley’s shoulder
lay Sarah, half asleep.  Griffin held
Christine’s bag and stood behind her as she looked over the apartment one last
time.  She looked at the three bowls of
cat food on the floor, trying to decide if that would be enough.  Her cat Cassie was still nowhere to be found,
probably because of all of the recent visitors.

Christine closed the
door firmly and locked the deadbolt from the outside.  She turned around and looked at the others
waiting for her.  Three uniformed
officers stood on the sidewalk watching the darkened street.  She nodded to Griffin who turned and followed
Buckley and Sarah down the short walk.
As they neared the street, Christine noticed something on the far side
of the lawn area.  Something under the
hedge.  She froze and her eyes opened
wide.  “Oh no!  Is that-,” she started to cry.  “Is it…”

Griffin squeezed her
arm.  “Easy, it’s probably not what you
think it is.  Let me take a look.  Stay here.”
Sarah lifted her head off of Buckley’s shoulder and watched Griffin
cross the grass.  When he got to the
hedge, he knelt down to look at the object.
The others watched from behind as he knelt motionless for several
seconds.  Finally his head dropped
forward in disappointment.  He slowly
turned and looked over his shoulder, back at Christine.

“No!” she cried and ran
toward Griffin. He quickly jumped up and raced back to stop her mid-way.  Grabbing her arms, he worked to block her
line of sight.  “Don’t Chris,
don’t!”  He looked at her tenderly.  “I think a dog got her.  And you don’t want to see that.”

Christine had been
pushing to get past him but now stopped and looked at Griffin, hearing what
he’d said.  She kept crying, but through
her tears she knew he was right.  That
would be her last memory of Cassie and it would be more vivid than she could
bear.

Christine lowered her
head onto Griffin’s shoulder and continued to cry.  Gradually her breathing became less labored,
and suddenly she felt something in her hand.
She looked down to find Sarah standing next to her, her tiny hand inside
of Christine’s.

Griffin touched
Christine’s shoulder gently. “We’ve got to go.”

12

The safe location was a
nondescript house in a suburban neighborhood, forty minutes outside of
Manhattan.  The property was larger than
usual for the area, and the half acre lot allowed most of the house to be
hidden by a large group of beautiful Northern Red Oaks.

The two cars that
transported them, now parked in front of the small house, were unmarked to
avoid attracting attention from neighbors.
Fortunately, it was late in the evening and few people noticed them come
in.

Christine stood in the
small living room looking like she was in a daze.  In less than forty-eight hours, she had been
assigned a young child to care for, been the target of a deadly attack, lost
her twelve-year-old cat, and been forced out of her apartment and into a safe
house owned by the city of New York.  It
seemed so surreal.  She struggled to
believe any of it had happened, let alone all of it.

“Christine?”

She shook herself out
of her daze and realized that her name had been spoken several times.  She realized Cheryl Roberts was standing
right in front of her.

“Are you okay?” asked
Roberts.

Christine focused on
her and nodded.  “Sorry…yes.”

Roberts looked at
Christine and then down at Sarah who was standing next to her, still holding
Christine’s hand.

“Look, I know things
have been moving fast and that it’s probably all a little disorienting for
you.  But don’t worry, we’re going to
help you through this.”

Help me through
this? Christine thought incredulously.
What part exactly?

Griffin came into the
room from down the hallway.  He had
insisted on inspecting the entire house himself.  “How you doin’ Chris?” he said, falling in
behind Roberts.

“Okay, I guess.”

The small room was
filled with old, but relatively clean, furniture.  The carpet was about twenty years old judging
from the color and shag, and on the far wall was a fireplace that looked like
it hadn’t been cleaned since the carpet was put in.  A wide-open doorway led into the kitchen
where a nice granite countertop clashed with the old kitchen table.  Behind that was the back door with a window
and faded curtains.  Through the
curtains, she could see the outlines of the security bars on the outside.

Roberts hoisted a small
duffle bag up onto the old coffee table.
She unzipped it and pulled out several articles of clothing.  “I stopped at the store and got some things
for Sarah.”  She fumbled through some of
them.  “Some pants, shirts, undies, and
socks.  There should be enough to last
several days.  I also got her a jacket.”
She pulled it out and showed Christine. “Since we don’t know how permanent this
warm weather is.”  Roberts looked down at
Sarah.  “Do you see any outfits you like,
honey?”

Sarah just shrugged and
moved further behind Christine.

Griffin came
closer.  “Listen Chris, I know this all
seems crazy, but don’t worry.  We’re
gonna find out who did this.”  He
motioned to the room behind him.  “This
is just to keep you comfortable and out of sight.  Keep in mind that there’s over a thousand safe
houses in New York, which means if anyone’s looking, you won’t be easy to
find.”

Christine was sure
Griffin’s comment was supposed to make her feel better, but it didn’t.

Roberts nodded.  “That’s right.  And no one knows you’re here, except
us.”  She moved past Buckley to the front
window and drew back the curtain.
“You’ll have two patrolmen watching from a car across the street,
twenty-four hours a day.  If you need
them, just flick this switch near the door.
It turns on the porch light.  If
they see that porch light come on, they’ll be here in seconds.”  Roberts looked back to them.  “You have nothing to worry about.”

Christine thought again
how every time someone talked about how safe they were, she felt more nervous.

After a few more
minutes of instruction on how things worked, what they should turn on, and what
they shouldn’t turn on, the three officers seemed satisfied.

Griffin gave
Christine’s shoulder a squeeze.  “Don’t
worry.  We’ll get this guy.  Just stay here and relax.”  He looked down at Sarah.  “And get to know each other.”

With that they backed
out and shut the door, waiting for Christine to lock the deadbolt behind them.

Once outside and back
to the cars, Roberts turned to Griffin and Buckley.  “Ramirez has an update on the technical
investigation.  You guys cover that, and
I’ll see if I can find any witnesses on the elevator job.”

Michael Ramirez was a
technical expert and one of the department’s best in computer forensics.  He had been with the NYPD for three years
after moving over from a stressful consulting position in the private sector,
culminating in a system meltdown which he had been warning his client about for
months.  He decided to try something a
little more fulfilling.

At six foot one inch,
with a barrel chest and shaved head, Ramirez did not fit the geek image by a
long shot.

Griffin and Buckley
walked into his lab, at almost 10 p.m., to find Ramirez at his desk with a hard
drive connected to a thick cable.  He was
slowly and methodically “peeling back” bytes from the drive that had been
written over several times in hopes of making the data unreadable, a common
situation during financial corruption investigations.  What he had been able to recover so far was
not going to help the banker’s case.

“Hey guys,” Ramirez
said, saving his progress and looking up.

“Hi Mike, appreciate
you staying late.  We were told you have
an update for us on the Baxter case.”

“I do indeed,” he said
and pushed his chair back from his desk.
Ramirez spun around and slid a few feet over until he was in front of
another keyboard and screen.  “So I took
a look at all of her stuff: credit card activity, financials, phone records,
the whole thing.”

Griffin and Buckley
knew what Ramirez had done used to take days with a warrant, but now could be
accomplished in hours or even minutes.

Ramirez logged into the
second computer and ran down a list of cases, until he got to the one with
Barbara Baxter’s name.  Typing in a few
commands, he brought up a list of line items.

“This looks like a
bill,” said Buckley.

“It is.  Her cellular bill actually.”  From the top he scrolled down several lines,
highlighting a few.  “I didn’t spot
anything unusual in her call records, but I noticed these lines in the
carrier’s system logs.”

Griffin looked closer
at the screen.  “Those don’t look like
calls.”

“They’re not,” Ramirez
replied.  He swung his chair around to
face the detectives.  “They’re
identification queries, or what you might call triangulation calls.”

“What are those?”

“A triangulation call
is when a carrier uses multiple towers to zero in on a cell phone’s
location.”  He shrugged.  “You can think of it like a cellular search light.”

Griffin looked at
Buckley then back to Ramirez.  “So what
does that mean?”

“It means someone was
looking for Barbara Baxter, as in her physical location.”  He turned back to the monitor.  “Normally, I would not have caught that, but
some strange characters in the logs got me curious.  But that’s not the best part.”

“What is the best
part?” Griffin asked for the both of them.

“The best part is when
I asked the carrier for more detail, they didn’t want to tell me, even though
they have to.  It was the first time I’d
run into that.  My guess is, whoever was
requesting these queries wanted it kept quiet.”

“Did the carrier reveal
who they were?”

“They did.”  Ramirez slapped his enter key and printed out
a few pages for them.  “Care to take a
guess who it was?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

Griffin and Buckley
looked at each other and shook their heads.

Ramirez handed them the
printout.  “It was the State Department.”

They were both
surprised.  “As in the U.S. State
Department?”

“The one and
only.”  Ramirez looked at both of
them.  “And there’s something else.  These queries only started a few days ago.”

13

Cheryl Roberts stood
inside the yellow caution tape examining the terrible scene where the elevator
had smashed into the bottom of its shaft, almost at free fall speed.  The bodies had long since been removed and
taken to the morgue for identification and contacting next of kin.

The inside of the car
was covered in gruesome amounts of dried blood, and most of the interior’s
metal walls had collapsed violently inward.
What little of the car’s outside that could be seen showed it to be
deeply scraped, damaged on all sides and covered in dust and debris.  It looked as though a giant hand had
descended upon the car and crushed it like an aluminum can.

She took the stairs to
the fifth floor and examined the small entryway in front of the elevator
doors.  The damaged doors were open,
revealing the area above where the charges had been planted to sever the
cables.  The emergency brakes had been
tampered with to prevent them from engaging when the cable gave way, but the
team had not yet identified exactly how they had been disabled.

What they had
discovered was the explosive was not set off by a timer; it was done by remote
detonation which meant the person had to have been relatively close by.

Christine had told
Griffin and Buckley that she and Sarah noticed someone working on the elevators
that morning as they entered.  But when
they left, they had never actually gotten on the elevator.  This suggested that the person with the
transmitter had armed the bomb once he saw the two approach the open elevator
and then quickly fled himself.  It
probably never occurred to him they might not get in.

After dozens of
photographs, Roberts left through the front door.  The Human Resources Administration building
was still closed off, but a thin crowd of people watched intently from behind
the police line.  Roberts glanced around
as she walked toward her car.  She never
noticed the bald man watching her from across the street.

Once back at the 19th
Precinct, Roberts put her things down and attached her phone to her computer
which began downloading the pictures she had taken.  She sighed and leaned back, watching them
display one after the other as each file was copied.

After making a few
notes in her folder, she got up to get a cup of coffee from the break room when
she heard someone call “Chaplain” from the adjoining room.  Roberts poked her head in and spotted the
department’s Chaplain, Douglas Wilcox.
She smiled and strode in carrying her Styrofoam cup.

“Hiya Chaplain,” she
said, catching his attention.  Wilcox
turned his thick head of white hair in her direction and smiled when he saw
her.

“Well hello, Cheryl!”
he exclaimed.

Roberts smiled broadly
and gave him a hug, prompting him to move a thick folder from under his arm and
put it down onto the table.  A few years
back, they had worked together on a number of cases and developed a tight
bond.  She still smiled when thinking
back on how hard it was keeping up with him, even though he was twice her age.

The chaplain leaned
back and squeezed her shoulders in both hands, as a father might admire his
grown child.  “It’s been a while now,
hasn’t it?”  he grinned.  “You look as spry and pretty as ever.”

Roberts gave a playful roll
of her eyes.  He was always so
complimentary.  “What are you doing here
at the 19th?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve
been helping over at Saint Patrick’s after the bombing, and I thought I would
stop in to see if one of the investigators were here.”  He looked around.  “Unfortunately, it looks like I missed him.”

Roberts grimaced.  “Oh right, Saint Patrick’s.  Its been all over the news.  How’s it going over there?”

The chaplain shook his
head.  “Rough, I’m afraid.  But we’re making progress.  And what about you?  What big cases are you working on?”

Roberts shrugged.  “Primarily a homicide, and a strange
one.  In fact, the more we dig, the
stranger it gets.”

“Well, I hope you don’t
have as many cooks in the kitchen as we do at Saint Patrick’s.  Things are starting to turn into a bit of a
mess.”

She looked down at his
thick folder lying on the table.  “What
are you working on there?”

“We’re piecing together
what was recovered of the cathedral’s registry, so we can identify anyone else
we might still be digging for and to contact others who were there that
day.  A lot of people fled and may still
need some counseling.”  He frowned
sympathetically.  “We’re trying to be
proactive.  Terrible events like this
often take a far deeper emotional toll than most realize.”

“I’m sure they do,”
Roberts replied.  “Any decent leads on
who did it?  Earlier they had some
experts who were suggesting it was part of an attack by Muslim extremists.”

“Ah yes,”  the chaplain sighed,  “the terrorist theory.”

Roberts tilted her head
inquisitively.  “Something tells me you
don’t agree.”

The chaplain exhaled
and hesitated for a moment.  They had
gotten to know each other well during their time working together, and he
always found her to be surprisingly objective compared to the other officers.  It was one of the reasons they had such
interesting conversations.  She reminded
him of himself when he was younger.
“Well, I suppose I find the terrorist theory rather…convenient.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know,” he
said. “It just doesn’t feel like it fits.
There are details about the attack which don’t seem to make sense under
a terrorist plot.  Terrorists or
extremists, call them what you like, usually want to cause the most damage
possible, to really upset the enemy’s psyche and hopefully shake their belief
system.  You see it’s not just about the
deaths, it’s about damaging the belief system itself.”

Roberts continued
listening.  She remembered the chaplain
had degrees in both Theology and Philosophy.
He was, of course, a man of deep faith, but he was also curious and
genuinely interested in understanding other faiths outside of his own.  “We’re all God’s children,”  he used to say to her.  “We often just have different
explanations.”

“What’s different about
Saint Patrick’s,” he continued, “is if the attackers wanted to achieve the most
damage possible, then their timing was very poor.  They attacked on a quiet Saturday
morning.  If it was really about damage
and terror, anyone else would have attacked during mass.  Which makes me wonder whether timing was a
real consideration.”

Roberts leaned back,
sitting on the edge of the desk and listening.

“That’s just one
puzzle.  Another was where the bombs were
located.  Again, if the death toll were
the real objective, the bombs should have been placed in the center of the
church where most people tended to spend time and take pictures.  But these bombs were almost the
opposite.  They were placed along the
walls and set up in series, which means they didn’t go off at the same
time.”  He looked at her.  “There is another group of people I can think
of who set off bombs in series like that.
They do it to complement each other.”

Roberts shook her head
slowly and raised her eyebrows.  “What
group?”

“Demolition
teams,”  he answered.  “The teams that are tasked with taking
structures down.”

“You see,” the chaplain said, now with a
deliberate tone, “Jihad, or a religious war, is usually just that, a war or struggle
for a religious or secular cause.  But
that doesn’t seem to be what this is about.
Instead of targeting the individuals or the believers, it almost seems
as though the target was the church itself.”

“So you think it was
someone unrelated to terrorists?” Roberts asked.

He shrugged again.  “Well, if it was someone else, would
it not be more useful to have it blamed on a more convenient enemy?”

“I suppose it would.”

The chaplain suddenly
smiled.  “Ah well, I’m sure I’ll prove
myself wrong in the end, but I’m always a little leery of a group
consensus.”  He looked at his watch with
a start.  “And I’m afraid I just
remembered that I need to catch someone before they leave for the night.  So if you will excuse me.”

“Of course,” she said,
standing and hugging him goodbye.  “Can
we please have lunch the next time you’re around?”

“I would like that very
much.”  With a wink, he hurried across
the room and turned down the hallway back toward the stairs.

Roberts stood there,
thinking about what he had said.
Objectivity was always the straightest path to the truth.  She wondered if she was being objective
enough in her own case.

She looked down and
realized that he had forgotten his folder still lying on the table.  “Oh no, Chaplain wait!”

Roberts turned to run
after him but fumbled and accidentally knocked the folder to the floor,
spilling the papers everywhere.  “Dammit!”
she yelled under her breath.  She looked
up hoping he had heard her, but he was gone.
Roberts frantically worked to gather up the papers and put them back in
the folder.  Several pages were filled
with columns of names from the church registry.
She was trying to quickly put them back in order when she suddenly
froze.

In her hand was the
second page in the list, and her eyes instantly recognized a name near the
bottom.  A name she had been looking at
in her own file just a few minutes before, Barbara Baxter.

14

Ron Tran was one of the best
computer hackers alive.   He sat quietly
in a small internet café, drinking a latte in downtown Beijing, dressed in
jeans and a faded T-shirt with a Pepsi logo on the front.  While Tran waited, he watched the rows and
rows of teenagers glued to their giant computer screens, each playing one of
the many popular, virtual world computer games.
Some of whom were still in their seats from the day before.

Tran smiled to himself.  He resembled at least half of the males in
the room; intentional, yet none of them had any idea who he was.  He was known to the hacking community as GtheWhite,
yet his official identification showed him to be an accountant at a small
fertilizer company living in a small apartment with seven other friends.  As far as anyone knew, he was saving money to
buy his first car and had aspirations of starting his own accounting company
someday.

In reality, Tran had become
extremely disillusioned with the reality of the world around him.  The Chinese government ran the country with a
stranglehold grip on over a billion citizens who only seemed to stop and ask
questions when their television or internet service was interrupted.

Yet, the other major
countries were no better.  They were
simply controlled by other secret groups, oligarchs, or bankers.  They merely manipulated and controlled their
citizens through different languages, different constitutional loopholes, and
from beneath different colored flags.
They all lied and they all obfuscated.

What made Tran different was
that he despised the herd.
Opinions and conventional wisdom were nothing more than affirmations for
each other.  They were barely aware of
each new squeeze on their collective throats.
They were cattle being driven straight toward the slaughter house, but
some of those cattle knew the truth and he was one of them.

Ron Tran hated what the world
had become.  The core of human existence
was now deeply corrupt.  It needed to be
changed from the inside out, and he was one of the few who had the skills to do
it.

He continued watching the
herd in front of him, imperceptibly shaking his head.  Not only did they not know who he was, but
they didn’t know why he was there either.
Just a fellow gamer waiting for a friend to drop by with a new game.

Finally, the person he had
been waiting for walked in and looked around.
He ignored everyone’s face and hair color since he didn’t know what
GtheWhite actually looked like.  Instead
he looked for a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo.

The man spotted Tran and approached
casually.  He was also dressed in jeans
and a T-shirt, but being a government official, he wasn’t pulling it off quite
as well.  Nevertheless, he sat down next
to Tran and handed him a DVD case with a picture of a popular game on the
cover.

“Here you go,” he said in
broken English.

“How is it?” Tran asked.

“It’s great,” the stranger
said.  “You’ll love it.”

“Awesome.” Tran raised his
voice just loud enough to be heard by some of the others.  “Are you going to stay and play?”

“No,” his friend said.  “I have to get back to the restaurant.  My father needs me.  I’m already gone too long.”

“Okay.
I’ll play for you.”  Tran laughed
out loud and handed a second DVD back to him.
“In the meantime, try this game.
You’ll like it.”

“Cool, I will.”  His friend nodded, then got up and gave him a
friendly departing wave.

Tran flipped over the cover,
pretending to take interest in the description of the game.  Instead he was just wasting time, waiting for
a machine to become available.

More than an hour later, Tran
finally got an available computer.  He
was glad to see that it was far toward the back as he collapsed into the chair
and pushed his black hair out of his eyes.
Inserting the DVD into the computer brought up a big splash screen,
displaying the game’s artwork.  Like many
modern games, there was a deep back story to this one, and Tran let the
computerized animation play out.  What no
one around him noticed, however, was the small window he opened and moved to
the bottom corner of the screen.

He immediately started
typing, opening up a connection to another machine over the internet and
several cities away.  Once he was on the
second computer, he opened up another connection to a third, then to a fourth
and a fifth.  From those five he launched
a small computer script that automated the process and created new connections
in every direction and many levels deep, connecting to more and more computers
in more and more countries, until he had taken control of over a thousand
computers in less than thirty minutes.
One by one, each of the remote computers proceeded to route themselves
through encrypted proxy servers which would protect him behind a very
complicated and confusing wall of misidentification.  If anyone tried to trace his connections,
they would end up in Kenya before they would end up in Beijing.

What the thousand computers
then proceeded to do, was nothing.  Their
primary instruction was simply to wait until they received a special
command.  For now, he would let the scripts
run on each new computer, which would then quietly reach out and connect to
even more.

Tran closed the small window
on his screen and looked around.  Had
anyone noticed?  No, they were so
engrossed in their games, they probably wouldn’t notice if he was wearing a
pink dress.  Satisfied, Tran removed his
disc and stood up.  He took one last look
at the sheep around him.  They had no
idea what was coming.

15

Christine woke up on
the couch, still in her clothes.  She
looked down to see Sarah lying against her with her head nestled against
Christine’s arm.  From the window, a thin
sliver of early morning light beamed across the small living room and lit up
part of the wall behind her.

She winced and
carefully adjusted her neck, then looked at her watch.  It was almost seven thirty.

The room looked
different in daylight and quite a bit dirtier.
She wondered how long ago it was last used.  She grabbed a small pillow from the floor and
slowly pushed it behind her head.
Staring up at the dusty ceiling, she went through the last couple days
in her head.  Her feelings were a jumble
of worry and confusion, but strangely not as much fear as she would have
expected.

She looked at the light
switch near the front door, the switch that Griffin told her would bring two
officers running if she turned it on.

Sarah began to stir,
taking a deep breath and slowly looking up from Christine’s arm where her small
head was resting.

Christine smiled.  “Hey there, girlie.”

Sarah made a tired
smile and looked around, stopping at the clothes on the table that officer
Roberts had given them.  She looked back
at Christine and then lay her head back down gently.

Christine reached down
and gently stroked her hair.  “How did
you sleep?”

Sarah nodded without
raising her head.

“Are you hungry?”
Christine asked softly.

Sarah paused for a
moment to think about the question, then nodded again.

Christine waited a
moment, then slid Sarah off to the inside of the couch and got up.  She walked into the kitchen and looked
around.  There were some folded grocery
bags on the counter, and opening the small refrigerator revealed a jug of
orange juice, eggs, bread, and some other basic staples.  She walked back and looked at Sarah, who was
sitting up and examining the room.

“How about toast and
orange juice?”

They both sat at the
small metal table in the kitchen which reminded Christine of the table they’d
had when she was a little girl, back in the late seventies.  Along with the chairs, the set almost looked
retro if she hadn’t suspected they were originals.

Sarah quietly made
quick work of the toast and juice, all the while peering outside through the
small window at the large trees.  She
looked at Christine.  “Are we going to be
here for a long time?”

Christine frowned and
shook her head.  “I’m not sure.”

Sarah nodded and kept
looking around the room.  “Is that your
phone?” she asked, pointing to the object on the counter.

“Yes.”  Christine only now remembered Griffin’s
instructions from last night to keep her cell phone off.  He had turned it off and placed it on the
counter in front of her for effect.

“Are you scared?” Sarah
asked shyly.

Christine thought about
her question and finally nodded her head.
“A little bit.  Are you?”

Sarah nodded too.  “A little.
Are we safe here?”

“I hope so.”  Sarah trusted her, and Christine had decided
to be as honest as possible.  The last
thing she needed now, on top of everything else, was lies.

Sarah seemed to accept
her answer and continued looking around.
She spotted an old doggie door at the bottom of the kitchen’s back door.  It had long been rusted shut.  Sarah frowned and looked back to
Christine.  “I’m sorry about your kitty.”

Christine gave a
painful nod.  “Thank you, honey.”

“I tried to stop her.”

“I know.”

Sarah’s face
saddened.  “But you wouldn’t let me.”

Christine nodded.  “I’m sad, but I guess it was just one
of-”  She suddenly stopped and looked at
Sarah.  “Wait, what?”

Sarah shrugged
innocently and looked down at her bare feet.

“I don’t-”  Christine stuttered.  “What does that mean?  What were you trying to stop, Sarah?”

“It was happening.  Her shadow was black.”

Christine looked at
Sarah with a puzzled expression.  “Her
shadow was black?  You mean Cassie?”

“Mmm hmm.”

Christine still wasn’t
following.  “I don’t understand.  Where was her shadow?”

Sarah looked back at
her shyly.  “All around.”

Christine remembered
the picture Sarah had drawn the day before at her office.  She quickly got up, went to the counter to
dig through her purse, and pulled it out.
On it were the three figures with circles around them.  The circle around the small stick figure cat
was colored black.

“You mean these
shadows, Sarah?”

“Yes.”

Christine studied the
picture for a long moment.  “What does a
black shadow mean?”

Sarah looked up from
her picture to Christine.  “It means
you’re gonna die.”

Christine was
speechless.  She stared at Sarah trying
to decide if she heard her right.  “Did
you say die?”

“Uh huh.”  Sarah looked at her empty plate and was
considering whether to ask for more.

“Do you see other shadows?”

“Yes,” Sarah
answered.  “Everyone’s.”

Christine felt a tingle
run down her spine.  “You see everyone’s
shadow?”

“Mmm hmm.” She nodded
again.

“Are other people’s
shadows black?”  Christine asked.

“Sometimes, like the
people in the elevator.”

16

Christine sat frozen at
the table, trying to comprehend what she had just heard.

“What?” she said
quietly. “What was that about the elevator?”

Sarah looked at her
innocently.  “Their shadows were
black.  The people inside.”

Christine thought back
to what had happened.  “You’re not afraid
of elevators?” she asked.

Sarah shook her head.

“Not at all?”

Sarah shook again.

Christine found herself
searching for some other explanation, but couldn’t find one.  Was it possible?  Could she really see what she claimed?  “So you knew something was going to happen to
those people?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know what
was going to happen to them?”

“I was just scared
something was going to happen to us too.”

Christine could see the
fear in Sarah’s eyes.  She reached out
and covered Sarah’s tiny hand with her own.
“You did good, honey.”

After breakfast,
Christine sat on the couch looking at Sarah’s picture again.  She looked curiously at the little girl who
sat in front of her playing with an old set of Legos she’d found in one of the
closets.  She hummed quietly to herself
while she pushed the pieces together, then reconsidered and pulled them apart
again, searching for another in the box.

Christine leaned
forward with the paper in her hand.
“Sarah?”

“Mmm hmm.” Sarah
replied, still sifting through the old cardboard box.

“Do you see anything
else when you look at people?”  When
Sarah turned and looked at her, she held up the picture.  “You and your mommy have different colors in
this picture.”

Sarah looked at it
again and then back up at Christine.  “I
see lots of colors.”

“Besides black?”

Sarah nodded.

“What do the other
colors mean?”

She pointed to the
small stick figure which had a light colored circle around it.  “Kids are always white.  But grown-ups are different colors.”

“And what do the colors
mean?”

“Yellow means good,”
she said.  “And orange means a little
bad.  Red means really bad.  A lot of grown-ups are orange.”

Christine looked back
at the picture and at the stick figure that Sarah claimed was her mother.  There was a large yellow circle around
it.  “Your mommy was yellow?”

Sarah nodded again.

Christine took a deep
breath.  “Sarah, what color am I?”  She realized she was suddenly afraid to hear
the answer.

“You’re yellow.  Like mommy was.  Until the bad men came.”

Christine felt her
heart sink.  She thought about when she
first met Sarah at the police station.
“Honey, is that why you came with me, because I was yellow like your
mom?”

Sarah was back to
playing with her Legos, but she nodded.
“Mommy said I could trust yellows.”

“Are there a lot of
yellow grown-ups?”  she asked.

“No.”  Sarah said, adding another block to her Lego
house.

17

Griffin exited the
store and let the glass door close slowly behind him.  He walked across the small parking lot where
Buckley was leaning against the side of the car, waiting.  They had hit the morning commute traffic in
Baltimore about three hours into their four-hour drive from New York to
Washington D.C.  Since they still had a
couple hours before their appointment, they decided to stop at a cellular phone
store in Baltimore to kill some time and wait out rush hour.

“You all set?” Buckley
asked, taking a sip of his coffee.

Griffin held up his new
phone.  “Yep.  Guess it takes a little while to move my
number over to the new carrier.  The good
news is that I now have access to over ten thousand applications that I will
never have time to use.”

Buckley laughed.  “You can always quit your job.”  He put the cup down and folded his arms
across his chest.  “So listen, I’ve been
thinking.  Barbara Baxter suddenly took
her daughter out of school and time off work…at the same time that someone was
trying to find her.”

Griffin nodded.  “She was running.  We already talked about this.”

“Right,” Buckley
replied.  “She was probably running and
came to New York to see someone.  Maybe
someone who could help her, like that Glen Smith at the FBI.”

“That’s the most
logical explanation,” Griffin agreed.

“But,” said Buckley,
“what if she wasn’t coming to see someone?”

Griffin paused and
thought it through.  “Then why come to
New York?”

“Exactly.  Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume
she wasn’t coming to see someone.  Why
else would she run and come into the city of all places?”

He saw where Buckley
was going.  “Because it was the most
densely populated location available to her.”

“Right.”  Buckley nodded.  “So either she came to New York to meet
Smith, or she came to hide in one of the largest crowds on the planet.”

“Okay, I’m with you,”
Griffin said.  “So why all this talk
about a plan B?”

This time Buckley held
up his own phone.  “Because while you
were inside, I called the FBI office in New York.  There is no Glen Smith.  In fact, they only have two Glen Smiths in
the entire bureau. One in Texas and one in California.”

Griffin’s eyes
narrowed.

“Now I’m really hoping
she came here to hide,” Buckley continued.
“Because if she didn’t, then she may have ended up walking right into
the arms of the very person who was tracking her down.”

“That could explain her
going through the window at the Marriott.
She and Sarah show up and Smith, or whoever he is, is waiting for her
with a few friends.”  Griffin gave
Buckley a disturbed look.  “Maybe there
is a Glen Smith working at the State Department.”

Buckley stood up and
walked to the driver’s side.  “Well,” he
said, opening the door, “I guess we’ll find out.”

The US State Department
is the federal department responsible for all international relations.  It was the first federal department,
established in 1789 under the country’s new constitution.  The original responsibilities of the State
Department included management of the U.S. Mint, being keeper of the Great Seal
of the United States, and acting as the depository of more than 200
multilateral treaties.

In essence, the State
Department advances U.S. objectives by implementing the President’s foreign
policy, and it also supports the foreign activities of other departments such
as the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency.  With an annual budget of more than $50
billion, the State Department’s global reach was massive, operating in over 270
locations, 172 countries, and conducting business in 150 currencies.

Located just a few
blocks from the White House, it took Griffin and Buckley almost two hours to
drive from Baltimore, through traffic, to reach the Harry S. Truman Building on
C street where the Department had been located since 1947.

Housing over 1.5
million square feet of usable space with a roof over 7 square acres in size and
over 4,000 windows, the giant buff-limestone building gave off a look of raw
power and influence.

It was a little after
11 a.m. when the detectives were escorted into the Deputy Secretary’s office.
Many claimed the Deputy Secretary actually ran the department, as opposed to
the political figurehead appointed as Secretary whose job consisted of little
more than photo ops and golfing with other government elites.

Even the Deputy’s
office was massive, decorated in an old turn of the century architectural theme
with a view overlooking much of downtown D.C.
It was clearly a position of appreciable power that most people knew
little about.

Griffin and Buckley
turned away from the giant window as William Zahn walked in with his aide.  At six feet three, Zahn was an atypical
bureaucrat.  He had a muscular build, was
exquisitely groomed, and had a focused look on his face that was all
business.  His aide was similar in size,
but with shorter hair, and appeared to be of middle eastern descent.

Zahn looked at the
detectives and crossed the room.  “Hello
gentlemen, you must be the detectives who wanted to see me.”  He reached out and shook their hands.  “This is my aide, Kia Sarat.”  Sarat nodded and silently extended his hand
as well.

“Thanks for your
time.  I’m Dan Griffin and this is Mike
Buckley.  We’re detectives with the 19th
in New York.”

Zahn raised his
eyebrows.  “New York?  That’s quite a long way.  What brings you down here?”  He glanced at his phone and walked around his
large desk.

The detectives
approached from the other side.  “We’re
investigating a homicide,” Buckley said.

“I see.  And how exactly does this homicide bring you
here?”  Zahn smoothly sat down in his
chair, motioning for them to use the chairs in front of his desk.  His aide, Sarat, moved to the side and remained
standing.

“Actually, we were
hoping you could tell us,” Griffin said, filling his seat.

“I’m not sure what I
can do, but I should warn you, I have to leave to catch a plane in a few
minutes.”  Zahn extended his arm and
looked at his watch.  “So what is it
about your investigation that involves the State Department?”

“Well,” Griffin cleared
his throat.  “A woman was thrown out of
an eighth-story window just days after she suddenly left town with her
daughter.”

Zahn looked at Sarat
and then back at the detectives, spreading his arms in a curious gesture.  “I’m sorry to hear that.  So what does that have to do with us?”

Griffin leaned
forward.  “During those few days, it
looks like someone was trying to locate her.
We spoke to the phone company and someone had instructed them to track
the victim’s location through her cell phone.
That instruction came from your State Department.”

Zahn looked
confused.  He remained quiet,
thinking.  “Perhaps there is a connection
between this woman and some investigation we have underway.”

“Perhaps,” Buckley
said.  “It just strikes us as a little
odd, since the Department of State is an international organization, not
domestic.  So why would the department be
following, or trying to find, a woman who has never traveled outside the
country?”

Zahn shrugged.  “I’m afraid I don’t know.  Again, perhaps she was involved in something
or with someone that -”

“She didn’t have a
criminal record either,”  Griffin
interrupted.  “And while it’s possible
that she was involved in something or with someone who did, in our experience
that’s pretty uncommon.  People who stay
out of trouble generally tend to have relationships and friends who also stay
out of trouble.”

Zahn shrugged
again.  Griffin noted that he was
beginning to look a little irritated.
“Well then, perhaps she was romantically involved with someone who she
didn’t know very well.  We do have an
office in New York.  Maybe she was
involved with someone within our employ and things did not end well.”  He shook his head and looked at his watch
again.  “I’m sorry detectives.  I cannot even begin to imagine the range of
personal or professional issues that my thousands of employees might have.  My schedule is extremely busy and I’m afraid
I’m just not briefed in the details of everyone’s lives within this
department,” he added with sarcasm.

“We understand,” Buckley
said.  “And we know that you are very
busy.  It would be helpful if we could
have a look at some of your phone records to see if we might learn who it was
that made the call.”  Buckley tried to
maintain a non-threatening tone.  “Of
course, this can be a little tedious, so we’re happy to do the grunt work to
ensure we don’t waste anyone’s time.”

Zahn gave a coy
smile.  “Well, I appreciate the offer Mr.
Buckley, but as you can imagine, communications within the department are
frequently of a confidential nature.  You
can understand the challenge it would pose for us, turning over internal
information without first reviewing it.”

Back in New York in the
forensics department, Mike Ramirez sat in front of his computer looking through
the telephone company’s phone logs.  He
looked closely at the digital entry that had originally launched the searches
for Barbara Baxter’s location.

There were some special
characters included in the record details that he did not recognize.  He looked at the byte count, or size of the
record, and noticed that it was significantly larger than the rest of the log
records.  Ramirez thought to himself,
tapping his nose with his index finger.
It looked like some kind of attachment to the actual record.  He looked at the initials of the person who
had added the entry.  It read KL.

Ramirez picked up the
phone and dialed a number.  It only rang
once before it was picked up.  “Hey
Steve, this is Ramirez again.  So listen,
I’m looking through the logs you sent me, and I see that the person who entered
the search instruction has the initials KL.
Does that ring a bell?”

After a pause,
Ramirez’s contact at the cellular company replied, “Yeah, that’s Kelvin
Lu.  He was a manager, but he doesn’t
work here anymore.”

“Hmm…,” Ramirez sat
thinking.  “It looks like this record has
more data to it.  Like something
appended; like an attachment.  Can you
open it up?”

On the other end, Steve
started typing quickly and fell silent.
After several seconds he came back on the line.  “Unfortunately, I can’t get access since he
was a manager.  You’ll need to send a
formal request to his replacement to have a new password applied to Kelvin’s
account.  And that usually takes a couple
weeks.”

Ramirez grimaced.  They didn’t have a couple of weeks.  He needed it now.  “Any chance we can break into his account?”

Steve lamented,  “You didn’t just say that.”

Ramirez smiled on the
other end of the phone.  “Say what?”

Ramirez suddenly
noticed something show up in the chat window on his computer.  It was from the same person he was speaking
to.

Can’t say on the phone.  Chat is encrypted and safer.

Ramirez cleared his
throat and spoke into the phone again.
“Okay, thanks Steve.  Hey you want
to go to the game next weekend?”

“Sorry can’t,” Steve
replied.  “Maybe next time.”

“Sure, I’ll catch you
later then.”  Ramirez hung up, put down
his phone, and immediately typed a reply.

What system are these requests accepted
from?

After a few moments, a
reply appeared on the screen.

System is called nadcsub01.  That’s all the help I can give you.  Am now deleting these messages.

Ramirez smiled.  That was more than he needed.  He immediately went to work trying to resolve
and find the server in their giant network.
Once he had it, he closely examined the server and discovered existing
security vulnerabilities in the operating system that had not been
patched.  He was not surprised. Few if
any companies kept their network systems perfectly up to date.  When a computer team is responsible for
maintaining and troubleshooting those servers, the common mantra was “If it’s
not broken, don’t fix it”.  As a result,
almost every system server had patches that were waiting to be applied until
the computer team was sure the upgrade would resolve their issue without
creating technical problems at the same time.

Where Ramirez was
really lucky was in the particular vulnerabilities this server had.  There was a little known cheat to gain
control of the operating system by using a command to fool the machine, making
it believe Ramirez was the authorized administrator, and then resetting the
password for him.  It was an old
vulnerability and an old hack which made him wonder how many other servers had
been neglected.

Once he was in, it took
less than thirty minutes to find the old user account for Kelvin Lu, reactivate
it, and then reset the password to something that Ramirez could actually use to
log in.  Finally, the last step was
finding the right record he was looking for.
When he did, he opened it up in the system and looked at the attachment.  It was a letter from the State Department,
and it was signed by the person who had ordered the search for the Baxter
woman.  Ramirez picked up his phone.  Griffin and Buckley were going to owe him big
for this.

Zahn’s time was up; he
had to catch his plane.  He stood up and
straightened his jacket.  “I’m sorry
detectives.  I simply do not have time
for this as I must leave.  Rest assured,
I will submit an inquiry on the matter and see if we can get an answer for
you.”

At that moment
Griffin’s cell phone chirped loudly.  He
reached into his pocket and pulled it out, looking at the text message that was
sent to him.  It was from Ramirez.

The person who signed the request for
Baxter’s searches was the Deputy Secretary.
His name is William Zahn.

Griffin stared at the
text message, not believing what he had just read.  He realized his eyes had opened wide, and he
tried to quickly regain his composure.
He turned to Buckley and showed him the message.  Buckley had a similar reaction.

In front of them stood
Zahn, standing behind his desk and watching.
He was watching them closely, observing the sudden change in their
positions and ease.

Zahn looked up at
Sarat, then slowly back down to Griffin and Buckley who were still seated.  He calmly reached over to his desk phone and
pushed a button.  A female voice answered
immediately.

“Yes, Mr. Zahn?”

Zahn spoke, never
taking his eyes off Griffin and Buckley.
“Dorri, hold my plane.”

“Yes sir,” she
answered.

Zahn ended the call and
stood up straight.  He continued looking
at the detectives until a smirk appeared.
His aide, Sarat, moved back a few steps as Zahn came around to the front
of his desk.  He stopped and sat on the
edge between the two detectives, just a few feet away.

“You may not know this,
but my aide, Mr. Sarat, is one of our top liaisons for our middle eastern
allies.  He’s also one of many experts on
the countries that are not so friendly to us.
Iran for example.  He even knows
some extremists personally, though most of us western nations call them
terrorists.”  He glanced at the
ceiling.  “It is, of course, a little
more complicated than that.”  He looked
back at the men.  “But one thing they
have in common, the one thing that seems to run through all Persian blood, is
they can be extremely ruthless.”

Both Griffin and
Buckley looked at him with confusion.
Zahn raised his eyebrows and motioned for them to look at Sarat.  Both detectives turned around to find Sarat
standing six feet behind them, pointing a gun at Griffin’s head.

Both men jumped in their
seats.  “Jesus Christ!”  Griffin said.
“What the hell are you doing?!”

“I wouldn’t do that,”
cautioned Zahn, as Buckley’s hand instinctively moved around his hip.

Buckley withdrew his
hand.

“Mike Buckley,”
continued Zahn.  “Born on April 3rd,
1978, in the Bronx to a plumber and teacher.
Graduated high school with a B average in ’96 and applied for the New
York Police Department two years later.
Now divorced with a young eight-year-old daughter.  Tell me Mr. Buckley, how is your daughter
enjoying the second grade at Kennedy Elementary?”

Buckley looked at him
with eyes wide, completely stunned.  He
slowly turned and looked at Griffin with a mix of shock and fear.

Griffin was already
watching Zahn.  “You can’t be this
stupid.  We’re police officers!”

Zahn frowned.  “And only marginal at best as I understand
it.”

Griffin’s mind was
racing.  He was trying desperately to
keep his wits and think, but panic was quickly overwhelming him.

“Do you have any idea
how much trouble you’re about to get into?”
he tried reasoning.  “Look, I
think we have a major misunderstanding here.”
He turned slightly to see if Sarat was still in the same position.  He was. “Just put down the gun and let’s
figure out what happened!”

Buckley nodded
desperately in agreement.

Zahn looked at
Sarat.  “The detective feels we have a
misunderstanding Kia.”

“Listen to me!” Griffin
said.  “Don’t take this any further.  Look, we can work this out!  If we don’t, things are going to escalate and
then it will be out of our hands.
Christ, our people know where we are!”

Zahn looked
amused.  He reached for the phone again
and pushed the same button.  “Dorri, get
me the New York Police Department, 19th Precinct.”

“Yes, sir,” she
replied.

Zahn raised his fingers
to his lips instructing the detectives to remain silent.  As an extra incentive, Sarat took a step
forward and lined his gun’s sights with Griffin’s right ear.

Zahn’s secretary
transferred the call and it began ringing.

After four rings, a
voice announced, “Police department, 19th.  Can I help you?”

“Yes,” Zahn said
calmly.  “I’m calling from the State
Department in Washington D.C.  I had two
detectives, a Mr. Griffin and Mr. Buckley scheduled for 11 a.m.  It looks like they are no shows.  I’m afraid they will have to call back and
schedule another appointment.”

Griffin’s eyes widened.

“Uh, okay,” replied the
loud voice on the other end.  “I’ll let
the Lieutenant know.”

Zahn calmly returned
the phone to its receiver and hung up.
He looked at Griffin.  “You were
saying?”

Griffin still could not
understand what was happening, but he could feel his heart about ready to jump
out of his chest.  “What the hell are you
doing?  What do you want?!  We’re just working a goddamn case here!”

Zahn watched him
silently for almost a full minute.  He
was enjoying the look on their faces.
“How did she do it?” he asked simply.

Griffin shook his
head.  “What?”

Zahn sighed.  “Don’t test me Mr. Griffin.  I want to know, how did she do it?”

Griffin quickly looked
at Buckley who was as confused as he was.
“What are you talking about?  How
did who do what?”

Zahn stared at
him.  Finally, he sighed again.  “I was hoping it wouldn’t have to come to
this.”

“Wait, wait!” Griffin
blurted.  “Don’t…do anything crazy.  Just tell us who you’re talking about.  We’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Zahn watched him
carefully, trying to decide if he was being sincere.  He finally replied.  “The girl,” he said, “Baxter’s daughter.”

If the detectives
looked confused before, they looked completely baffled now.  “What?”

“The girl!” Zahn said,
raising his voice.  “Sarah Baxter!”

Griffin began shaking
his head.  Sarah?  How did he know about Sarah?  What in the hell did she have to do with
this?  “I-I don’t understand-”

Zahn lunged
forward.  “She saw me!  How did she do it?  Did someone tell her?”

“What do you mean, ‘she
saw you’? I don’t-”  Griffin still could
not comprehend what Zahn was saying.

Zahn was watching him,
waiting for an answer.

Griffin and Buckley
looked at each other again.  Neither of
them were following any of it.

“At the cathedral…she
saw me, didn’t she?  Was it the mother?”

Griffin shook his head
again.  “What cathedral?  When?”

“Saint Patrick’s,” Zahn
said.  “She spotted me.  When no one else did.  Someone must have told her!”

In that moment, it
began to dawn on Griffin.  Saint
Patrick’s Cathedral was the one that was blown up.  Was Zahn there?  Was Sarah?  “You were there?” Griffin asked.

Zahn leaned back with a
look of disappointment.  Neither one of
them knew.  He looked at Sarat who had
not moved an inch.  “Hmm…,” he said,
thinking.  “Well, I suppose if you don’t
know, then there’s really only one thing you can tell me.  Where is she now?”

Now Griffin’s
expression changed from fear to terror.  He
wanted to know where Christine and Sarah were.
He could see Christine’s face in his mind.  He had to warn her.

Zahn watched Griffin
and then turned to Buckley.  “You know, I
don’t think he’s going to tell me.  But I
think you will.”

Buckley slowly shook
his head.

Zahn smiled.  “Ah, don’t play hero, it doesn’t fit
you.  You see, Mr. Griffin is single,
never married.  But my dear Michael, you
are a father.”

Buckley immediately
stopped his head, nervous.  At that
moment he could feel the tip of Sarat’s gun touch the back of his head.

“Yes,” Zahn
continued.  “You love your daughter don’t
you?  Of course you do.  Daddy’s little girl.”  He crossed his arms.  “So…Michael Buckley, father to Amanda
Buckley, do you want your little girl to grow up without a father?  Or would you rather she not grow up at all?”

Buckley didn’t
reply.  He didn’t say anything.  Instead he just sat there and stared at Zahn,
as tears began to well up in his eyes.

18

The New York City
Public Library was the largest public library system in the United States,
founded over a hundred years earlier in 1895.
It hosted over 51 million items, all contained within 58 different
locations throughout the city.  Some of
the system’s historical treasures included Columbus’s 1493 letter
announcing his discovery of the New World, George Washington’s original
Farewell Address, and John Coltrane’s handwritten score of “Lover Man.”

Cheryl Roberts ran up
the four short steps of the Yorkville branch, barely a dozen blocks from the 19th
Precinct station.  She swung open one of
the heavy doors and quickly ducked inside.
She walked briskly, but quietly, through the library’s
Palladian-inspired décor, looking around the lower level for the person she was
supposed to have met there twenty minutes ago.

There were dozens of
people in the lower level, silently reading or browsing through books and
magazines.  Near the back, she spotted
the person she was looking for and hurried over.

Wilcox was sitting at a
long table with a few books spread out before him.

She bent down and
surprised him with a hug from behind.
“Sorry I’m late, Chaplain.”

“Ah, that’s alright
there lassie,” he said with a smile.  “I
was just doing some reading.”

Roberts circled to the
other side and sat down, then dropped her purse on the table and scooted her
chair in.

Wilcox grinned.  “So what is it you wanted to meet and talk
about?”

She took a deep breath
and looked around.  “I wanted to talk to
you more about what we were discussing last night.  About Saint Patrick’s.”

“Ah,” Wilcox said
leaning back in his chair.  “Well
remember, that’s just a theory.  The ramblings
of an old man really.”

Roberts smiled,
acknowledging the comment as his standard clause for what came next,
being “just his opinion”.  She cleared
her voice.  “You said you thought this
may not be a terrorist attack, which is the story all the news channels seem to
be trumpeting.”

The chaplain made an
innocent gesture.  “I have my
doubts.  Primarily for the reasons I
explained last night.”

“Right,” she said with
a small nod.  “You said terrorist attacks
target the highest number of people, but the attack on Saint Patrick’s was the
opposite.”

“More or less,”
acknowledged the Chaplin.  “Terrorism is
about damage, or retribution.  The
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers in 2001 is an example.  A truly horrifying event, but the attack was
largely in retribution over a long standing level of oppression and control
over their sovereignty, as a country and as a people.  In essence, we had military bases and a
presence that were allowing us to take their oil, which was pretty much their
only natural resource of any value.  The
point is, the attacks targeted a very large number of people for a very
dramatic result.  Something that would
truly scare, or terrorize, their enemy.
Of course, the reason they used airplanes was because they did not have
any weapons that could come close to the arsenal the United States had.  Therefore, they made do with what they
could.  The bombing of the USS Cole is
another example,” the chaplain went on, “They wanted to achieve the most visual
and emotional damage possible.  They
wanted to make a statement.”

“And what statement was
that?” Roberts asked.

The chaplain
shrugged,  “Leave us alone.”

“I thought they hated
our freedom?”

The chaplain almost
laughed.  “Please.  I am not a believer in the Muslim faith, but
the literal words of the Qur’an share many values and principles with our
Bible.  And while many see the Arabs as
being backwards, which they’re not, they are certainly not stupid.  In other words, they don’t travel halfway
around the planet to attack a way of life that doesn’t affect them.  They don’t do that unless, of course, it does
affect them.  Which means, unless we are
doing something to them.”

“Like stealing their
oil,” Roberts answered.

“Correct.”

“So you’re saying they
had no reason to attack Saint Patrick’s.”

The chaplain
sighed.  “I’m saying, that if they were
making a statement, it’s pretty unclear what that is.  And if they really were trying to achieve the
most damage, to gain the most attention and sympathy to their plight, why
wouldn’t they wait another twenty-four hours, when they could hurt or kill
three times as many innocent people?”

“And this is why you
think the target may have been the church itself?”

“It might make more
sense, but only on the surface.”  He
turned one of the books around which showed an older, full-sized picture of
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. “Why travel all this way to destroy a church?  If they wanted to destroy a big church, there
are dozens, hundreds, of other candidates that are much bigger and much
closer.  And it would be far easier than
here in the United States.  Why this
one?” he asked rhetorically.  “Saint
Patrick’s holds no historical or religious significance above the others.  The only real significance is that Saint
Patrick’s is the seat for the archbishop of New York, but a lot of churches
serve as seats for archbishops.”

Roberts looked at the
picture in the book.  She turned the page
and then another and another.  Page after
page showed pictures of other giant churches and cathedrals around the world.  “Maybe they were after the archbishop.”

The chaplain shook his
head.  “He hasn’t been there for weeks.”

Roberts sat silently,
considering what the chaplain had said.
He was right, the terrorist angle did not make much sense.  Without a motive like self-preservation or
revenge, it simply did not fit with an extremist mindset.

Roberts had a
thought.  “What if this is not the
end?  What if more are coming?”

“So instead of
attacking the cathedral, the attack may be one in a string against the
establishment?”

“Possible?”  Roberts asked.

He continued thinking
it over.  “That’s a frightening
thought.  It’s a little too reminiscent
of the crusades.”

“The Crusades?” asked
Roberts.  “You mean The Crusades?”

Wilcox nodded.  “Yes, the two hundred year war between the
Muslims and Christians with their ultimate goal of retaking Palestine.”

“My god,” Roberts
whispered.  “You don’t think this could
be the start of something…like that.”

“It’s possible,” the
chaplain replied.  “But if it is, it
could be far worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“The battle between the
Turks and the Franks, as they were known, was gruesome and unrelenting.  But it was largely between Europe and the
Middle East.”  He took a breath.  “Today the Christian and Islam faiths are
much, much bigger and they span the entire globe.  They are now the two largest religions in the
world.  The warring that surrounded The
Crusades was, for the most part, geographically localized.  Today it would be global.”

“So,” Roberts said, “I
guess we hope that this attack is not part of something larger.”

“Not hope, pray,”
he replied.

“And we still don’t
know who did this, or why?”

“Correct.”

Roberts fell against
the back of her chair and thought to herself.
Nor do we know what this has to do with a six-year-old girl.

19

Christine turned on the
small table lamp in the living room to give them some light.  The sun was down, and they were trying to
remain distracted.  She taught Sarah how
to make a paper airplane which had kept her busy for the last hour, and Sarah
was now making her most colorful version yet.

Behind her, Christine
moved through the rooms and double-checked the doors and locks.  She had to admit some doubt was beginning to
creep in on how much danger she was really in.
Things had been incredibly quiet since they got there, and she was
wondering if some of this had been an initial overreaction.

She certainly didn’t
know why Sarah’s mother was killed or under what circumstances.  Was it possible that she had some terrible
skeleton in her closet?  Maybe she had
made the wrong person angry, or maybe she had an ex that was jealous or
crazy.  Even in her old job, Christine
had seen so many life tragedies first-hand that she didn’t think anything could
surprise her at this stage, including what Barbara Baxter might have had in her
history.

And what about the
elevator?  That horrible memory would
keep playing itself out in slow motion if she let it.  The police were sure it was sabotaged,
but…could it have been sabotaged for someone else?  There were other people on that elevator.  Was it possible that she and Sarah were just
in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Sarah’s gift had saved them?

No.  She shook her head.  Chance didn’t work like that.  A homicide and a near-homicide that close
together could not be an accident.  And
Danny was sure they were in danger.  He
wouldn’t have moved them to a safe place unless he was really worried.  She had to trust him.  She may not have romantic feelings for him
anymore, but she sure as hell remembered how smart he was.  She wondered where he was right then.

Christine turned after
she was hit in the arm by what looked like a flying rainbow.  She faked a troubled look at Sarah and
reached down to pick it up.  Just as she
stood back up and pointed the paper airplane back at Sarah, she heard something
outside followed by a loud knock on the door.

They both jumped and
stared at the front door.  She motioned
at Sarah who quickly ran around the couch and stood behind Christine. They both
remained frozen wondering who it could be.
How could someone just walk up to the front porch?

The knocking came
again, this time louder.  Christine and
Sarah did not move.

“Ms. Rose?” a man’s
voice called.  “Ms. Rose, are you in
there?”

She slowly looked down
at Sarah, and then back to the thick brown door.   She took a deep breath.  “Who is it?”

“Ms. Rose, I’m from the
FBI.  I need to talk to you.”

The FBI?  That would explain how he made it to the
porch.  “Who are you?”

“My name is Glen
Smith,” he shouted through the door.
“Ms. Rose, I just need to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

“About Barbara Baxter,”
he replied loudly.  “She called me before
the accident.”

Christine glanced down
at Sarah at the mention of her mother’s name.
She just stared back up at her with her left hand clinging to
Christine’s pant leg.

“Ms. Rose, I can show
you my ID.  Just look through the peep
hole.”

Christine slowly
approached the door.  When she reached
it, she instinctively put her hand on the deadbolt handle to make sure it was
locked and turned as far as it would go.
She glanced back at Sarah one more time and slowly put her eye to the
small hole.  “Okay, show me.”

On the other side of
the door, a badge came into view.

Christine studied it,
but it was too small to make out any details.
The picture looked blurry and far away, but she thought it showed
someone with light brown hair.

“Please, Ms. Rose,” he
said.  “I just need to get some
information on what you know.  We’re
trying to find out who did this, and you might have some details that can
help.”

Christine did not reply.  Instead, she stood still thinking.  The badge did look official, and she’d seen
enough to remember generally what they looked like.  Reluctantly, her hand moved to the deadbolt.

Suddenly, Christine
heard something behind her.  She quickly
turned and looked through the kitchen at the back doorknob.  It was moving back and forth.  A moment later, the deadbolt higher up on the
back door could be seen turning from the other side, slowly unlocking itself.

Christine gasped and
instantly flipped up the light switch on the wall next to the door.  The warning signal.

Standing on the front
porch, Glen Smith shielded his eyes when the bright light came on.

Just over a hundred
feet away, the unmarked police car sat silently in the dark.  Inside, the two officers sat in the front
seats, each with a trickle of blood running down their neck and pooling around
their collars.

Christine backed up,
away from the door, and waited to hear the running footsteps from outside.  She kept waiting and reached back to grab
Sarah’s arm, feeling her way down to her tiny hand.  There was still no sound of the officers
running toward them.  Christ, how long
could it take?!

Christine turned to see
the deadbolt on the kitchen door finally complete its turn.  Next the doorknob moved again, but it was
locked too.  The knob was quietly being
turned from the other side, but this small lock was preventing it.  It stopped turning.  Then it began to shake.  Someone was trying to break it.

“Oh god!” Christine
cried and pushed Sarah into the corner.
“Somebody please help!”

Just then the back door
burst open, and four men dressed in black rushed through.  They scanned the kitchen in a fraction of a
second before spotting Christine at the far end of the adjoining room.  They covered the distance quickly, raising
assault rifles to their shoulders.

Suddenly without
warning, a figure came crashing through the front window of the living room,
sending glass in every direction.  Before
hitting the floor, he fired from a large gun in his right hand, and the first
two shots hit the lead attacker approaching from the kitchen.  The black-clad figure crumpled to the floor
in front of the other three.

The man in the living
room jumped out of the way as bullets tore into the floor where he was
kneeling, and pieces of wood and carpet jumped into the air after him.  Bullets continued to follow the man across
the room as he crossed the floor and ducked into a corner, out of direct sight
of the kitchen.  In a blur, he took
advantage of the momentary safety and raced to the edge of the wall where the
men in black were simultaneously trying to step over their dead friend as well
as swing around the large door jamb to get another clean shot at him.  The second attacker, now in front, came
around quickly but saw two flashes before he could squeeze off his own
shots.  He fell face first next to his
lifeless friend.

Christine screamed and
dropped to the floor, pulling Sarah down with her.  She grabbed the girl’s small frame and
quickly pushed her back behind the large sofa.

Three more shots went
off. She could hear the sound of powerful punches landing and things getting
smashed.   It sounded like the whole
kitchen was getting demolished.
Christine flinched when she heard something huge crash against the floor
on the other side of the couch.  She kept
her head low and frantically grabbed Sarah’s arm.  In one quick motion, Christine pushed off of
her knees and they ran for the front door.
She grabbed the doorknob and quickly unlocked both it and the dead bolt,
flinging the door wide-open just as she heard a grunt behind her. Someone fell
to the floor with another thud.

They were out and
running!  Christine came to a sudden
stop on the grass and looked around.  She
spotted the unmarked police car and sprinted towards it, still pulling Sarah
behind her.  “Where were you?!” she
yelled, reaching the driver’s side and yanking the door open.

She shrieked when she
saw both men sitting in the front seats, dead.
“Oh god!” She looked back at the house.
More gunfire could be heard inside.
She shuddered and grabbed the driver. Cringing and with her eyes half
closed, she pulled him out and let his body fall with a crunch onto the hard
pavement.

Christine quickly ran
to the other side of the car while Sarah hid behind the driver’s open
door.  With a disgusted look, she pulled
the second officer out and onto the ground.
“Get in!” she cried to Sarah.

They both jumped into
the car and crawled over each other to the opposite sides, where Christine
grabbed the keys still in the ignition and started the car.  Instantly, without seat belts or even closing
the doors, she dropped it into gear and punched the accelerator.

With a giant surge, the
car lurched forward with both doors slamming closed from the momentum.  Spinning tires left long skid marks as
Christine peeled out, sideswiped a nearby truck, and sped away.

20

The large, thick door
buzzed and slid open, allowing Cheryl Roberts to step in from the lobby
outside.  She held up her ID and badge
and lay them on the small table in front of her.  The officer before her, dressed in body
armor, scanned the ID.  He then typed in
her badge number and waited to see if the photo in the database matched.

Roberts looked around
the large room where two more armor-clad officers stood by watching her
carefully.  Behind them, the rest of the
room looked more like a common office than the first floor of an ultrahigh
security building.

The nondescript, gray
building was the new electronic and security nerve center of New York
City.  All computers, security systems,
phones, and electronics for the largest police department in the world came
through this stronghold.

Most people, even
residents, did not know that New York had more than 6,000 security and
surveillance cameras installed throughout the city, monitoring tens of
thousands of citizens daily.   They also
had thousands of microphones planted in public buildings, airports, bus stops,
and many other places where groups of people formed.  The microphones were constantly listening and
feeding the audio back to the nerve center which searched every stream for
patterns of words that were considered interesting.

A young man approached
Roberts.  With red hair and light
freckles, he looked like someone new to both the uniform and the
workforce.  In fact, he barely looked out
of high school.

“Officer Roberts?” he
asked.

“Yes.”

“Hi, my name is Justin
Fischer.  I’m your tech.”

“My tech?” she asked.

He nodded.  “Everyone accessing the cameras is assigned a
tech for assistance.”

“For assistance or
supervision?” she asked.

He grinned but did not
reply.

“Okay.” She reached out
to take her identification back but was cut short by the officer behind the
table.

“We keep these until
you come out,” he said dryly.

“Both?”

“Yes.” He finished
typing and clicked his mouse, then turned to retrieve a printout.  He lay the paper down in front of her and
handed her a pen.  She looked it over,
surprised how much of her information was on the form.  After signing, she looked at Justin who was
waiting patiently with a slight slouch.

The larger officer
picked up her paper and filed it.  “You
get your ID and badge when you leave.”

She rolled her eyes and
shrugged.  “Okay.”  She walked past him to where Justin was
standing. “I guess I’m all yours.”

Justin smiled
politely.  “Follow me, please,”  he said and led her down a long hallway to
the stairs.  After descending two floors,
they wound their way through a series of twists and turns.  As they walked, they passed several large
rooms each with walls completely covered with hundreds of video screens.  In front of the screens sat a dozen team
members watching as the views automatically switched from street to
street.

“Wow,” Roberts mumbled,
passing their fourth giant room.  “This
is amazing.”

Justin stopped at a red
door labeled simply with a number 6.  He
opened the door and waited for her to walk in first.  Inside was a huge desk with three giant
monitors in front of the keyboard, all displaying dozens of small windows from
different street cameras.   “So, you said
you needed to look at a specific camera,”
Justin commented as he sat down.
He motioned for Roberts to sit down next to him.

“That’s right,” she
said, taking the seat.  She looked at the
images.  “I can’t believe how clear the
pictures are.”

“All cameras installed
in the last three years are high def,” Justin replied.  He typed in his ID and password and brought
up a map of the city.  “Where are we
looking?”

Roberts squinted and
looked at the map.  “Between 5th
and Madison.”

Justin typed in
“Madison Street”, and the map quickly zoomed in.  An older picture of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
was easily recognizable from the top.
Justin looked at her.  “Saint Patrick’s?”

“Mmm..hmm,” Roberts
answered, studying the map.  “Do you have
a view of the north side?”

Justin zoomed in further.  “Well, we have a camera here on the corner of
Madison and East 51st.”  He
used his mouse to bring up a separate window with a list of all connected
cameras.  He then entered the two street
names which displayed an icon on top of the map.  Clicking the icon instantly filled the right
hand monitor with the live video feed from the Madison intersection.

Roberts was
impressed.  She stared closely at the
picture, trying to get her bearings. “Which direction is this facing?”

Justin pointed to a
small compass display in the right hand corner.
“This is facing east.”

Roberts looked
disappointed.  “So it’s facing the wrong
way?”

“Not necessarily.  They’re bidirectional.”  Justin said, moving the mouse.  “Let me see if we can view the opposite
direction.”  He clicked another button,
and it switched the view to west.  “Most
of these cameras are actually quad units which means we can view each of the
four directions.”  They both watched the
camera feed switch to a disturbing view of a black and smoldering block of
rubble.

“What time and day?”

Roberts looked at
him.  “Saturday morning at 11:00 am.”

Justin began typing in
the date when he stopped and looked back her.
“The time of the attack?”

She nodded.

“Some of us have spent
a lot of time with the FBI going over these feeds.”  He entered the date and waited several
seconds while the video picture changed.

The picture switched to
an older video feed showing the giant cathedral still standing tall and
majestic in the morning sun.

“Can you freeze that?”

Justin clicked his
mouse and froze the picture.  Roberts
leaned in over his shoulder and looked closer at the screen.

“This is five minutes
before the explosion.”

“Correct.”

“Can you roll it
forward in slow motion from here?” she asked.

“Yep,” he replied and
adjusted the video speed.

They both sat silently
watching the scene slowly unfold.  The
crowd outside the cathedral consisted of several groups of varying sizes, most
likely tourists, and many more individuals looking, talking, and pausing for
pictures.  Just as the timer on Justin’s
screen approached 11:05, he slowed the video further until they were viewing
almost frame by frame.

A black and gray cloud
of smoke suddenly burst from the giant double doors which stood wide open.  Giant pieces of debris followed in the same
instant, showing what looked like large chunks of rock and wood.  One piece moved through the video screen so
fast that Roberts had no idea what is was.
Another giant piece right behind it was clearly a large piece of a pew
bench.

Many of the figures
standing in front of the church before the explosion disappeared into  a cloud of debris that enveloped
everything.  When it began to clear,
Roberts felt a sick feeling in her stomach when she saw how many of the people
were no longer there.

The scenes were
awful.  Watching in this level of detail
made her feel like it was happening all over again.  She wanted to close her eyes and turn it off,
but she was afraid she might miss something crucial.  Then finally, after several painful minutes
of watching frame by frame, she saw it.

While dozens of people
ran back and forth, two figures caught her eye.
They were running down the steps, away and toward the outside edge of
the camera’s coverage.  It looked like a
mother and daughter.  What was strange
was that while everyone else was running away, these two figures suddenly
stopped and remained still for a few seconds before continuing.

“Can you zoom in on
those?” she asked.

Justin complied, and
the computer isolated the frames from the camera and zoomed in, self-correcting
for pixilation at the same time.  He
zoomed in as far as he could, and even though the picture was stretched due to
the angle of the camera from down the street, Roberts could clearly make them
out.  It was Sarah and her mother.

Justin froze on the
clearest frame while Roberts studied them.
It looked as though Sarah was tugging at her mother, and yet she was not
looking at her.  Sarah was looking at
something else, something out of camera shot.

“Can you determine what
angle this little girl is looking at?”
Roberts asked.

“Hmm,” he said.  “Maybe.”
He brought up a new window and began typing in it.  To Roberts, all computer syntax looked like
Greek.  “If we can correct the angle of
the picture,” Justin said, watching as the computer squared the dimensions,
“then we can overlay our cardinal points of direction.”  Next, the video screen was covered with four
lines labeled north, south, east and west.
“And if we can approximate the direction the girl’s head is
facing…”.  He typed more lines and the
computer then zoomed out to an overhead view of the street, with a red line
approximating the angle that Sarah had been looking in the frame.  “It looks like she may be looking
about…here,” he said.  He pointed to the
street corner almost directly across the street from the cathedral.

Roberts frowned.  “But we can’t see it.”

Justin shrugged.  “Well, not on this camera.  But we might be able to see it from the
camera facing the opposite direction one block down.”

After another ten
minutes of angle adjustments and computer enhancements, Roberts could see what
she believed Sarah had been staring at.
A tall man, in a dark suit, standing on the corner watching the chaos
unfold.  Unfortunately, she could not see
his face.  What was very strange to her
though was that everyone was running or reacting to the carnage of the
explosion, even people on the other side of the street.  Everyone except this man.

Roberts collected her
badge and identification and signed out.
She walked purposefully across the lobby and through the double, sliding
glass doors, and was crossing the parking lot when her cell phone rang.  She immediately recognized the extension from
the 19th Precinct and accepted it.

“This is Roberts,”  she answered.

“Cheryl, this is
Deborah from the station.  I was told by
the deputy to give you a call.”

“Hey Deb, I was just on
my way back, what’s up?”

“Cheryl, there’s been
an incident.”

Roberts’ pace suddenly
slowed.  “What incident?”

“Darlington said you
were using one of the safe houses.”

Oh no, thought
Roberts.  She closed her eyes and took a
deep breath.

Deborah continued.  “There were shots fired.  We’re on the scene now, but I don’t have a
lot of detail yet.  You might want to get
over there.”

“Oh god!” she said,
ending the call and running for her car.
She fumbled for the keys as she ran.
When she got to her car, she swung the door open and quickly jumped in,
jamming her key into the ignition.

In her rush, she did
not notice the dark figure crouched down in her back seat.

21

Liz Iverson stood in
her kitchen cooking dinner for her husband, who sat in the next room in a large
recliner, watching a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes.
She turned the steak over in the pan and turned her attention back to
the small pile of mail on the large granite countertop.  She spent a few minutes flipping through an
advertisement for the local supermarket.
As she turned and dropped it into the recycle bin, her cell phone rang.

Reaching inside her
purse, she pulled the phone out and looked at the number.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Liz!” yelled Christine
through the phone.  “Liz, thank god!”

“Christine?  What is it, what’s wrong?”

“Liz!” Christine
cried.  “They tried to kill us!  They tried to kill us!”

“What are you talking
about?” she asked.  “Who tried to kill
you?”  Liz looked through the doorway at
her husband who had overheard and was now staring at her.

“I don’t know!”
Christine said, still frantic.  “They
came to the house!  I think it was the
FBI!”

Liz’s brow
furrowed.  “The FBI?  Why on earth would they want to hurt
you?  What happened?”

“They came to the
house!  But when I turned the emergency
light on, they didn’t come!  They were
dead Liz, they were both dead in the car!”

Liz was utterly
confused.  “Who was in the car?  And what emergency light?  You’re losing me, I don’t understand what
you’re saying.”

“I know,” Christine
said anxiously.  She tried to slow her
breathing.  “I’m just scared and I don’t
know what’s happening.”

“Christine, take a deep
breath and tell me exactly what happened.”
Liz spoke slowly into the phone as her husband approached and stood
behind her.

“Okay, okay.”  Christine took a deep breath, and then
another. “They came to the house.
Someone knocked on the door and said they were the FBI.  I didn’t want to let them in but more of them
broke in through the back door, with rifles!
And then the FBI person on the porch smashed through the front
window.  But then they started shooting
at each other, so I don’t…I just grabbed Sarah and ran out.”  She took another breath.  “But when we got to the car, the two
policemen inside, they were supposed to be guarding the house, but they were
dead.  They were dead in the car.”

Dear god.  “Okay, take it easy.” Liz said.  “The first thing we need to do is call the
police.”

“No!” yelled Christine,
suddenly excited again.  “I mean, I
just…I just don’t know who to trust.
They killed the police before they could even get out of the car.  The ones that broke in, they all looked like
professionals, like killers or something.
I mean what if someone in the police is in on this?”

Christine was scared,
but she had a good point.  Liz’s husband
whispered something in her ear.  “Is
Sarah okay?”

Christine looked at
Sarah who was standing inside a McDonald’s restaurant, just inside the glass
doors, to keep warm.  “Yes.”

“Good.  Listen carefully Christine, my husband is a
retired police officer, remember?  Let us
come get you.  Until we know what’s going
on here, let us come and get you and bring you someplace safe.  He has friends that he can trust, they will
all help keep you safe.”

Christine thought it
over briefly before replying.  “Yeah,
okay, but hurry!”

“Okay,” Liz said.  She grabbed a pen and paper.  “Now where are you?”

Christine looked
around.  “We’re in Quakertown,” she
said.  “At a McDonald’s.  I see a road called West Broad Street.”

“Okay,” Liz said,
writing it down.  “We’ll find it.”  She quickly turned off the stove and followed
her husband down the hallway toward their garage.  He grabbed coats for both of them.  “Christine, stay right where you are.  You’ll be safe in a public place.”

Christine hung up and
walked toward the entrance.  People
walked in and out of the restaurant, barely noticing either one of them.  Was anyone looking at them strangely?  As she opened the door, Christine looked back
at the unmarked police car with a damaged right fender.  At the very least, she thought, someone would
be looking for that car.

Christine sat in a
brightly-colored, plastic chair while Sarah quietly sat next to her, eating
French fries.  The restaurant was filled with
loud and obnoxious children running up and down the aisles while their parents
appeared oblivious and went on with their conversations.

Christine tried not to
jump every time the door opened, slumping with disappointment when she saw it
was not Liz.  She tried to distract
herself by watching the customers, marveling at how many did not even have to
look at the menu, but instead had their order memorized in what she considered
a sad display of social repression.

She watched an
unusually large woman order several items of food and a diet soda.  She looked down at Sarah who was watching the
other children.  Sarah looked up and
smiled.

Christine smiled
back.  “You doing okay, honey?”

Sarah nodded.  “Are you scared?”

Christine frowned.  “Yes.”

“Me too,” said
Sarah.  She turned and looked at the
front door.  “Is your friend going to be
here soon?”

“Yes.” Christine forced
a smile and patted her leg.  “She should
be here any minute.”

Sarah nodded again and
looked over to a child screaming at another table.

They both turned when
they heard the sound of screeching tires.
Outside, Liz and her husband jumped out of their Jeep Grand Cherokee and
ran for the door.

Christine grabbed
Sarah’s hand and turned anxiously to face the door as Liz stepped inside and
scanned the large dining room.  She
spotted Christine and immediately crossed the room, barely avoiding a customer
with a large tray of food.

“There you are!” she
said, approaching.  She looked from
Christine to Sarah and then back again.
“Are you two okay?”

Christine took a deep
breath and nodded.  She smiled quickly at
Liz’s husband who walked up behind her.

Liz sat down across
from Christine.  She reached out and held
her hand.  “Okay, we’re just going to
wait here for a few minutes until Tim’s old partner shows up.  And then we’ll get you someplace safe.”

Christine nodded.

Liz then looked at
Sarah.  “How are you, dear?”

“I’m okay,” Sarah
said.  She finished the rest of her
orange juice through the straw and sat back in her chair.  With a timid look, she peered up at Liz’s
husband standing behind her.  She noted
his large belly sticking out beyond his jacket and the slight bulge of his gun
underneath, on his hip.

“Have you eaten
anything?” Liz asked Christine.

Christine shook her
head.  “Not really hungry.”

“When is the
last time you ate?”

“A while,” she said
with a shrug.

“Okay well-”  Liz was interrupted when her husband Tim
looked outside at a pair of headlights screeching into a parking space on the
other side of the large dining room.

“Steve’s here,” he
said, patting Liz’s shoulder lightly.  He
watched the large man pass along the windows outside and enter through the far
doors.  He waved Steve over.

“Christine,” he
said.  “This is my old partner, Steve
McCaullah.  We’ve been friends for more
than twenty years.”

McCaullah nodded and
looked at them. He then looked carefully around the dining room.  “We’d better get you girls out of here.”

Liz smiled and stood up
next to her husband.  “You two
ready?”  As Christine began to stand, Liz
turned to lead them out.

Christine was suddenly
stopped by Sarah’s hand on her arm.  She
glanced at Liz who was already starting to walk away and then looked back down
at Sarah.

Sarah was leaning in
close to her with a scared look on her face. “He’s a bad man,” she whispered.

Christine froze halfway
off the chair.  “Who?”

Sarah whispered again,
quieter.  “Him.”  She motioned to McCaullah who was watching
the Iversons walk away from him.  He
turned his attention to the glass doors as three darkly dressed men walked in.

Sarah gasped. Peering
back at Liz and her husband, she watched both of their shadows change from
orange to black.

“What is it?” Christine
said, and then followed Sarah’s fearful gaze to Liz.  “LIZ WAIT!”

It was too late. When
Liz and her husband turned back around, they found McCaullah pointing his gun
at them.  A confused look on their faces
were just forming when McCaullah pulled the trigger repeatedly, firing two
bullets into each of them.

Dozens of customers
screamed and ran for the doors in a panic.
Some made it out while others tried to hide behind something or searched
for their children, screaming at them to get down or out of the way.  Liz was killed instantly, but her husband
desperately ran his hand underneath his coat as he fell.   He barely managed to withdraw his weapon but
fumbled it onto the floor.  The gun was
quickly kicked out of the way by one of the three men approaching behind him.

Tim Iverson struggled
on the floor and turned onto his back.  A
thin line of blood began seeping through his lips.  As he was trying to speak, McCaullah leaned
down over him and pushed his gun into his chest.  “Sorry Timmy,” he whispered with a
disappointed look.  “This is bigger than
both of us.”

Iverson was still
trying to move as McCaullah fired two more bullets into his heart.

Everyone was still
screaming.  Some parents had managed to
get to their children and were now trying to force one of the emergency doors
open to get out.  Christine grabbed Sarah
and looked around the restaurant, but there was no way to get past them, much
less to an exit.    She squeezed Sarah
tighter and tried to think of something to do, anything, but she was stopped
when McCaullah stepped in front of her and reloaded his gun.

“A lot of people have
been looking for you two,” he said, putting the used magazine into his jacket
pocket.  “We couldn’t find you, and then,
imagine that, Tim calls me from out of the blue.”  He smiled at the other three standing to the
side.  “With that kind of luck, I should
be playing the lottery.”

He looked curiously at
Christine.  She didn’t seem as frightened
as he would have expected.  She was
obviously afraid, but there was also a hint of determination as she kept Sarah
behind her.  Pity.  He pulled the slide back on his gun to verify
the chamber was loaded.  He then released
it and held the gun in his right hand with a relaxed grip.  “So the question for you is…do you want to
come with us, or not?  I have to warn
you,” he said with a smile, “the second option may have some bad results.”

McCaullah gripped the
gun and began to raise it when the wall of glass suddenly exploded and a large
car drove through it.  One of the few
areas of empty seats ripped from the floor and tumbled forward in front of the
car’s bumper, and a giant wave of glass slid down, and then off of the
hood.  Just before it stopped, the front
of the car struck McCaullah hard, and his body disappeared from where he was
standing.

The man that Christine
saw at the safe house, who identified himself as Glen Smith, stepped quickly
and calmly out of the driver’s side as McCaullah’s three friends took a few
steps back and pulled out their own guns.

Behind them, the
screaming got even louder with people pushing through any possible exit,
even the open wall of glass.  Behind the
car, Smith’s movements were fluid and fast.
He shot two of the three before any of them got a single shot off.  The third opened fire forcing Smith to duck
down.  In a panic, the man unloaded his
entire magazine, with most of the bullets missing completely and shattering
another set of windows at the far end of the room.  Smith waited for him to run out of bullets
and then dropped him with a single shot.

He scanned the
restaurant and then looked outside.
Satisfied, he swiftly stepped over the debris between himself and the
girls.  He looked down at Sarah and then
to Christine.  “We need to leave, get in
the car.”

Christine was shaking,
looking as though she might be in shock.
Slowly she blinked and looked up at Smith.  “Why…what…” she shook her head and grabbed
Sarah’s hand again.  “What in the hell is
this?” she cried.  “Who are they…who are you?”

“Glen Smith,” he
answered calmly.  “I was the one standing
outside your front door.”

“What…happened?” She
looked around the dining room.  Several
innocent people were lying motionless on the floor.  “Why are they doing this?”  She looked back toward the front, and her
eyes fell on Liz’s body.  “My god!  They killed Liz!”  Her eyes began to well up.  “Why?
Tell me why!”

Smith watched her and
holstered his gun beneath his jacket.
“I’m sorry, this is not the time for questions.  We need to leave.”

In stunned silence,
Christine did a full scan of the restaurant and thought she could hear the
faint sound of sirens in the distance.

Smith heard them too,
glancing in the direction from which they were coming and then back to
Christine.  He looked at Sarah again,
then took a few steps over some twisted bench seats and opened the passenger’s
door.  “Getting arrested by the police
will not help.  It will make things far
worse.”  The sirens grew louder over the
sobbing of people outside.

Christine turned to
Sarah and whispered, “Is he red?”

Sarah shook her head
no.

What was she
supposed to do?  Christine
thought.  No one in the police department
had been able to protect them.  They
still didn’t have any answers.  And Smith
was the only one offering protection now.
It had to be protection, didn’t it?
If he wanted to kill them, he would have already.

The sirens were getting
closer.

“Okay,” Christine said
meekly.  She rose slowly and pulled Sarah
with her to the car.  She scanned the
inside, both front and back, and pushed the seat forward, letting Sarah into
the back.  “Put your seat belt on,” she
said with a trembling voice.

Christine watched Smith
circle back around to the other side of the car and slide in.  He closed his door and looked at her.  With reluctance, she closed the passenger
door and continued to watch him.

Smith quickly started
the car and dropped it into reverse, then drove backward until he could turn
around.  He turned off his headlights and
headed east on the main street, away from the approaching lights and sirens.

“Are either of you
hurt?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
They both shook their heads.
“Good.”  He continued to drive,
watching the rearview mirror.  After
several minutes of silence, Smith turned to Christine.  “Can you drive?” he asked.

“Yes,” was all that
came out.

“Can you drive now?”
Smith asked again.  “Are you hurt, are
you tired?”

“No.”  Christine frowned.  “Why?”

Smith leaned forward
and looked carefully out the window for a place to pull over.    “Because I’m about to lose consciousness.”

“What?”

Smith pulled into a
dark parking lot behind a convenience store.
He put the car in park and turned off the engine, then reached down
gently and pulled open his blue jacket.
The left side of his torso was covered in blood.

Christine’s eyes
widened.  “Oh my god!”

Smith grimaced slightly
when he pulled his shirt up; some of the blood was already dried.  The bullet had gone straight through.  He blinked twice and turned to her.  “Listen carefully.  I don’t have much time.”  He pulled his jacket off and reached across
Christine, opening the glove compartment.
He pulled out a roll of duct tape from the inside.

“What’s that for?” she
asked, watching him rip off a large piece.

“It’s for repairing
ventilation ducts,” he answered dryly.

She frowned
sarcastically.  “I know that.  I mean what-” she stopped when he stuck the
tape to the steering wheel and then pulled his shirt off and ripped it
lengthwise.  He folded one half of the
shirt a few times and pressed it against the wound while securing it with the
tape.  He ripped off more tape from the
roll and did the same to the wound on his back.

When he was done, Smith
turned and looked at Sarah who stared nervously back at him from the rear
seat.  He turned back to Christine.  “Where is your phone?”

“It’s right here.”  She looked in her purse and pulled it
out.  “Why?”

“Turn off your cellular
signal,” Smith said.  His breathing was
beginning to sound labored.  “They can
find you that way.  Do you know how to
turn it off?”

“Yes.”  Christine nodded and fumbled with her phone,
finally turning off the signal.

“Just…use the
GPS.”  Smith said.  He reached back into the glove compartment in
front of Christine and pulled out a piece of paper and pencil.  He wrote something on it and handed the paper
to her.  “Use your phone’s navigation to
get to this place…as quickly as you can.”

Christine took the
paper apprehensively and looked at it.
On it was scribbled a set of numbers.
“Is this an address?”  she asked.

He took a deep breath
and shook his head.  “They’re GPS
coordinates.  Just type them into your
phone.”  He blinked again, longer, then
turned and focused intently on Sarah.
“Get to that location.  Your lives
depend on it.”

He managed to get the
last words out before losing consciousness and sliding with a thud against the
driver side door.

22

Zahn exited the jet and
stepped out into the arid Dubai morning air which was already approaching
ninety degrees.  A large delegation waited
for him at the bottom of the stairs.
Several photographers stood in front, while the black limousines could
be seen behind the crowd.  He descended
the stairs and waved with a perfect smile.
When he reached the black tarmac, he bowed to the Arab diplomats before
him, continuing down onto his knees and kissing the ground, symbolizing his
respect for their sovereign land.

It took over an hour
for the photographs and respectful exchanges with nearly a dozen sheikhs.  Zahn finally continued with his small
entourage to the limousines and climbed into the back of the middle car.  A few minutes later, the three cars rolled
forward, away from the crowd, circled the west end of the terminal and headed
for the large metropolitan skyline in the distance.

Dubai was originally
established in 1833 by Sheikh
Maktoum bin Butti Al-Maktoum when he persuaded 800 members of his clan to
follow him from present day Saudi Arabia to the Dubai Creek.  Since then, and due to the advantage of its
strategic, geographic location, the city had grown from an important trading
hub into a major international and cosmopolitan center for the Middle East.

Zahn peered out of his tinted window at the hundreds of
skyscrapers that had come to symbolize the wealth of Dubai.  All funded by the United Arab Emirates’
untold billions in oil money, it was a city that was now one of the most
expensive in the world.

He looked at his watch.
He was ahead of schedule.  His
next meeting with Mohammed bin Manal Al
Maktoum was not due to begin for another hour.
But it was the very last meeting that he was thinking about.

The man that sat across from
Zahn lowered his cigarette and exhaled
the last of the cigarette smoke.
Being Iranian, he was not a sheikh, but closer to an ayatollah with one important difference:  Ra’ad was a warrior.  He had long since rejected the path of a
religious scholar and instead maintained a humble existence, fighting for his
people and more importantly for his God.

Zahn
sat two hundred miles north of Dubai and across the Strait of Hormuz in a dark
underground complex inside the Iranian border.
His entourage patiently waited for him in a downtown Dubai skyscraper,
maintaining the illusion that Zahn was still there, deep in discussions with
various heads of state in the Middle East, all of whom had secretly left hours
earlier.

Ra’ad
put his cigarette out in the ashtray and looked to his men, one on his left and
one on the right.  Unlike most of the
“scholars”, Ra’ad’s English was perfect.
He took Sun Tzu’s code of know thy enemy very seriously.  “So we have come to it at last,” he said.

A
smile crept across Zahn’s lips.
“Finally.”

“I
will admit,” Ra’ad said with a grim smile of his own, “I did not trust
you.  Until the church.”

Zahn shrugged.
“Words prove nothing.”

Ra’ad
nodded in agreement.  From his demeanor,
not to mention his worn turban and clothes, no one would believe the power the
man wielded.  After all, most Muslims
believed his reputation to be more akin to a ghost than a man.  And it was a distinction that no one ever
wished to find out.

Ra’ad
studied Zahn as he always did.  He would
never have imagined that a westerner would come to him with this kind of a
plan, and certainly not a bureaucrat.
Never in his lifetime would he have thought it.  He put his hands together in front of his
chapped lips.  “You are sure he will
come?”

Zahn
smirked.  “Of course he will.  There will be no choice.”  He watched Ra’ad light another
cigarette.  “When will your men arrive?”

“Two
days,” Ra’ad replied, dropping the match into the ash tray.  “And then they will be yours, for whatever
you need.”

Zahn
understood Ra’ad and, more importantly, he understood his men.  They were not trained in silly desert camps
using wooden planks and jungle gym equipment.
Instead, Ra’ad’s men were converts of the deepest kind.  They were all trained in a special forces
group before being turned.  All highly
trained, thoroughly disgusted with the evil western empires of greed and sloth
and now happy to share every piece of their expert training with those willing
to take a stand.  More importantly, they
believed in Ra’ad, a man who rejected every form of self-indulgence, ate the
rotten rice that his men ate and drank the same dirty water.  He knew the history and struggle of his
people almost verbatim.  He knew the
difference between taking a side and taking a stand.  And Ra’ad was about to take the ultimate
stand.

Yes,
Zahn trusted Ra’ad and his men.  He knew
what they were capable of.  After all,
his man Sarat, who was sitting to his left, used to be one of Ra’ad’s best.

Zahn
smiled again at Ra’ad, who was still watching him very carefully with his dark
eyes.  His rough and leathery face was a
testament to what he was willing to endure for his people.  Zahn admired the man’s determination, his
righteousness, his faith.  What he had
promised Ra’ad was going to shock the world, and it was a promise he fully
intended to deliver upon.  Yet if Ra’ad
could see deeper into Zahn’s eyes, if he could only read his mind, he would
never have imagined what was to come after that.

23

The
New York Archives stood less than a mile from the Simon & Meyer law firm
that Griffin and Buckley had visited in Albany.
Established in 1971, but not open to the public until 1978, the massive
building housed 200 million public records dating all the way back to the 17th
century which meant it held nearly the entire history of New York state on
microfiche.

The
man sitting in front of one of the microfiche machines slowly moved through the
images, the large monitor creating a dull glow that reflected off of his
tanned, bald head.  On the table next to
the machine were twelve large boxes of the special film and a small laptop with
its screen displaying a list of historical documents.

A
young clerk walked by with an armful of books and glanced over at the man
again.  It didn’t look like he had moved
since she started her shift almost seven hours ago.  The clerk wondered what he was looking for.  Usually people asked her for help on a topic,
but this man simply kept asking for more boxes of film.  She shrugged and kept walking.

The
man at the table suddenly leaned in and studied the screen carefully.  He wrote something down and then turned to
his laptop, bringing up a new window filled with names and dates.  He scrolled carefully down the long list
until after several minutes he spotted what he was looking for.  He held a finger to the computer screen and
looked back at the microfiche data.  He
compared them both several times and then jotted more down on a piece of
paper.

The
man removed the microfiche from the machine and looked around.  He gently slid it back into the small storage
box, putting it into the middle of the deck.
Stacking all of the microfiche boxes neatly together, he shut down his
laptop and put it back in his bag.

As
the man walked to the exit, the clerk glanced up and watched him leave.  Strange man, she thought.  I wonder what kind of a name Bazes is.

The
man named Bazes approached a black Mercedes in the parking lot and pressed a
button on his keychain to open the trunk.
It was late in the evening.  He
casually removed his coat and placed it into the trunk alongside his
laptop.  When his phone rang, he removed
it from his shirt pocket and answered it.

“Yes?”  He listened for a few moments.  “What happened?”  He continued listening and looked around the
parking lot, which was almost empty, and glanced at his watch.  “Where?”

“I’ll
be right there.” He reached up and slammed the trunk closed.  He walked forward and slipped the phone back
into his pocket as he opened the driver’s door, then slid in behind the
wheel.  As the engine roared to life, he
pulled the door closed and dropped it into gear.

24

Christine
slowed the old Dodge Charger, looking back and forth between her phone’s
navigation system and the dark road in front of her.  A dark forest surrounded her on all sides
making it impossible to see anything that might give her even a clue as to
where they were.  Even the stars were completely
blocked by the giant trees.

She
turned and looked at Sarah in the back seat, curled up and asleep.  She gazed over at Smith who she had barely
managed to push into the passenger seat after he passed out.  She stared at his chest looking for movement.  His breathing was very weak, but he was still
alive.

What the hell have I done?  She thought to herself.  Some guy shows up, gets himself shot, tells me to drive to god knows
where, and I just say yes?
Well, she hadn’t just said yes.
The fact was that she sat contemplating what to do before getting behind
that wheel.  She had no idea who he was
or how he had found them, but he did save them.
Had he not arrived just in time, and twice now, she was sure they both
would have been kidnapped or dead.

She
snuck a peek again at Sarah who even in an uncomfortable position looked like
an angel.  Her blond hair was covering
part of her face with her tiny hands resting together under her cheek.

Even
as innocent and helpless as Sarah was, now many hours later, Christine’s
anxiety was really beginning to set in.
It had been years since she’d been around kids, much less in charge of
one.  Slowly but surely, the emotions
were beginning to flood back, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to
contain them.  But Sarah needed
help.  She was all alone, and even if it
wasn’t her, the poor girl needed someone.

Christine
peered hard past the bright glow of her phone but could barely see
anything.  Her phone’s navigation program
was telling her that she had arrived, but she had no idea where she was or what
she was looking for.  She looked at the
fuel gauge.  Less than a quarter tank
left.

Exasperated,
she finally stopped the car and turned off the engine.  She pushed the button forward and killed the
headlights, then turned the screen off on her phone.  After letting her eyes adjust, she quietly
opened the door and stood up on the old, gray, asphalt road.  She looked around for anything -- a driveway,
a mailbox, a sign -- anything that might give her some comfort that they were
not lost or, worse yet, in another dangerous situation.

She
heard a noise on the far side of the road and froze.  She heard it again.  Something was moving through the brush under
one of the trees.  It sounded like it was
something large and moving slowly.  It
also sounded like it was moving directly toward them.

Christine
ducked down a little closer to the door and gripped the steering wheel with her
right hand.  She shifted her weight and
got ready to jump back inside the car.

Just
as she was about to launch herself back into the seat, something appeared out
of the darkness.  It was the barrel of a
gun.

She
froze again.  The barrel inched forward
until the outline of a man’s face appeared.
His short white hair and face eased slowly out of the darkness followed
by his body.  He was holding what
appeared to be a scary looking shotgun.

“You
alone?” he asked in a low voice.

She
nodded, careful not to move anything except her head.  She continued to remain still, watching as he
approached the car and the passenger’s door.
The man shined a red flashlight into the car and spotted Smith’s still
figure.

“What
happened?”  He looked surprisingly calm.

Christine
spoke quietly.  “He’s hurt.”

The
man gave her a sarcastic frown.  “I can
see that.  How hurt?”

“Bad,”
she answered.  “He’s been shot.”

The
man looked at Sarah, asleep in the back seat.
“Is she hurt?”

Christine
shook her head.

He
finished looking the car over and turned back to her, placing a finger over his
lips for her to be quiet.  He looked back
down the dark road and stood very still.

After
a long silence, Christine realized that he wasn’t looking for something, he was
listening.

Satisfied,
the man lifted his Mossberg shotgun and slung it over his shoulder.  He leaned against the car door and released
the handle, letting it open quietly.  He
then reached in, pulled back Smith’s jacket and examined his makeshift
bandages.

He
placed a hand on Smith’s right side and let the door swing fully open.  “We need to get him inside quickly.”  He motioned to Sarah.  “Get the girl.”  With that, the man grabbed Smith’s arms and
pulled him out in a rolling motion.  In
one quick movement, he ducked down and pulled Smith over his own shoulder,
lifting him up and away from the car.

He
looked at Christine who was watching with wide eyes.  The man looked like he was in his sixties or
seventies and yet he put Smith’s body over his shoulder with little
effort.  “Are you going to get her?” he
asked, standing motionless with Smith.

Christine
blinked and nodded nervously, then circled the car.  Through the open passenger door, she flipped
the seat forward and pulled Sarah forward into her arms.

The
old man waited and when Christine was ready, he turned and peered down the dark
road once more before leading her back the way he came.  “Be careful,” he said and slipped back into
the shadows.

She
could barely follow him through the darkness, even with wisps of moonlight
fighting their way down between the thick forest of trees.  She stumbled several times and began picking
her knees up higher with every step.
After several minutes of tromping through knee-high grass and with her
arms beginning to ache, Christine spotted a small lit window in the
distance.  As they got closer, she could
see the larger outline of a cabin, and when they reached the front door, she
leaned against the railing for support.

The
old man checked over his shoulder and quietly opened the door.  He stepped inside and waited for her as she
took a deep breath and lifted Sarah again.
She walked into what appeared to be a dimly lit living room and moved to
an old couch set against the wall.  With
her arms beginning to shake, it took all she had to set Sarah down smoothly.

Christine
looked back as the man pushed the door closed.
His leathery face told her she was right about his age, but he still
seemed barely uncomfortable carrying Smith.

“I
need to get a look at him.  With a lot of
rest, he may make it.”  He locked the
door.  “I’ll go back out to hide the car
when I’m done.”  He nodded toward a cedar
chest against the wall.  “There are
blankets in there.  You should both be
able to sleep comfortably on the couch.
In the morning we’ll talk.”

Christine
instinctively began to nod but suddenly stopped.  “Wait.”
She glanced around the old living room and noticed the kitchen off to
the side.  “Where exactly are we?”

He
was headed for the hallway when he stopped and turned back.  “Someplace safe.”

Christine
awoke with a start when she felt something brush her arm.  She opened her eyes to a dark room and the
old man leaning over Christine.  He was
quietly laying a blanket on top of her.
She looked down to see Sarah curled up against her, breathing easily and
quietly.  He removed her tennis shoes and
pulled the end of the blanket over her feet.

“How
is he?” Christine whispered.

The
man stood up and gave a sigh of relief.
“He’ll be alright.  Thanks to
you.  If you hadn’t driven him here…”

Christine
wasn’t sure if he could see her grimace.
“I almost didn’t.”  She stared at
him for a moment.  “I still don’t know
what the hell is going on.”

“Well,
you had the right instinct.”

She
glanced down again at Sarah to make sure she was asleep.  “Why are they after her?”

His
head shook in the darkness.  “I don’t
know.”

She
thought about his answer, then changed the subject.  “I don’t know your name.”

He
smiled.  “Sorry.  The name is Avery, Jonathan Avery.”

She
smiled back and carefully wiggled her hand out from under the blanket.  “Christine Rose.”

He
shook it gently with his rough hand.
“Pleased to meet you Christine Rose.”
He smiled down at Sarah lying against her.  “You’ve done well.”

Christine
almost scoffed.  “I don’t know about
that.  All I’ve been doing is running
without any idea what I’m doing.”

She
could see Avery shake his head again in the dark.  “No, Ms. Rose, what you’ve done is keep that
little girl alive.”

Christine
looked down again and gently stroked Sarah’s head.

“Is
there anything I can get you?”

Christine
smiled.  “How about a couple
toothbrushes?”

Avery
chuckled quietly.  “My pleasure, young
lady.”  He leaned down and patted her
leg.  “Now get some sleep.”

25

Chaplain
Wilcox looked out the window as the 737 banked and began its decent into
Washington D.C.  A sickening feeling
welled up inside him when he saw the smoke visible, even from twelve thousand
feet up.  The sun was rising in the east
and casting an eerie shadow across most of the city.  Only as they dropped further could he begin
to see the site clearly.

Within
just minutes of each other, another two cathedrals had been attacked in the
middle of the night, and like Saint Patrick’s, they had been utterly destroyed.  The first target was the Washington National
Cathedral in Washington D.C., one of the largest and most historic cathedrals
in the world and a national icon that had hosted many U.S. memorial services.

The
second collapse was the Old Saint Mary’s Church in Philadelphia, the second
oldest Roman Catholic church in the city.
It was founded in 1763 and had a particularly significant history as a
frequent meeting place of the Continental Congress.

Both
attacks, just days after Saint Patrick’s, had instantly set off a panic among
the public that was already spreading across the nation as people woke up to
the horrifying news.  Fortunately, the
loss of life was again small, but even the dozen or so casualties were enough for
the media to latch onto.  The news channels
were quickly billing this as an attack against Christianity.  A generalization that the chaplain feared may
be too narrow and premature.

With
the panic spreading quickly, Wilcox was one of a dozen chaplains asked to help
assist in trying to bring any comfort possible to the scene and to the
community.

As
the plane continued its decent, the chaplain thought about Cheryl Roberts.  She had not returned his phone calls, and he
was beginning to grow concerned.  It was
not like her.  He hoped he would have a
message waiting on his cell phone when he reached the ground.

There was no message waiting,
but Wilcox was quickly distracted when he and four other chaplains were whisked
away upon landing.  Their first stop was
an early morning mass at a nearby church where several public figures were
giving speeches, including the vice president.
This was the first time he had welcomed having politicians at the scene
in a long time.  The public desperately
needed to be calmed.

When they arrived at the
nearby Saint John’s Church in Lafayette Square, it was a little after 9:00 am,
and the place was already a zoo.  Located
across from the White House, both H and 16th streets were completely
blocked off.  Over a hundred police
officers tried to keep the crowd orderly with barricades while dozens of
television reporters and their crews were already set up and broadcasting.

The chaplains were quickly
ushered out of their van and into the church’s side entrance where a sizable
group of parishioners had already gathered and were overflowing through the
double doors in front.  Many of those
inside were sitting in the benches, crying and holding each other while pastors
moved through the large crowd hugging and consoling as many as they could
reach.  Chaplain Wilcox jumped right in.

Hours later, reinforcements
arrived and gave some pastors a chance to take a break.  Several, including Wilcox, volunteered to go
to the National Cathedral to look for anyone else.

When he arrived though,
Chaplain Wilcox was dumbfounded.  He
climbed out of the van and stood staring at the site from a distance,
thunderstruck.  If he thought Saint
Patrick’s was horrible, then the National Cathedral was beyond words.  In New York, the damage to Saint Patrick’s
was truly terrible, but here the damage was total.  It was gone, the entire cathedral was simply
gone, leveled completely to the ground.

Everything was smoldering and
a thick cloud enveloped everything and everyone within a two block radius.  Everyone except the search and rescue teams
met and operated out of a large plumbing and parts warehouse four blocks away.

Wilcox sat and held
parishioners who had come to see for themselves.  Most broke down immediately into tears.  He held their hands and prayed, quoting many
verses in the bible explaining that God was still watching over them.  More than anything else, Wilcox sat and
listened.

Eventually, he was able to
visit what was left of the Cathedral itself.
The smoke rose into the air in giant thick columns, then slowly widening
and spreading out overhead.  Unlike Saint
Patrick’s, where some of the walls had remained standing, nothing at the
National Cathedral was still vertical.
Considered to be the national house of prayer for all people, nothing
was left standing at all.  Both the
famous Gloria in Excelsis Tower and Pilgrim Observation Gallery were reduced to
mere rubble.

Wilcox thought about the
enormity of the National Cathedral and guessed that it must have taken three or
four times the explosive power of Saint Patricks’ to do that.  The nauseating feeling in his stomach
suddenly grew worse as he realized that the attacks were much more powerful
this time which meant the possibility that this was escalating.

He slowly walked around the
perimeter, unable to believe the destruction, even after Saint Patrick’s.  As he walked around the outside, he watched
the rescue crews slowly and methodically turn over pieces of wreckage.  It was then that he noticed something.  Not far from where he stood, near the remains
of the altars, was a man who looked oddly familiar.

Wilcox had a keen memory for
faces, but it was not triggered by the man’s middle eastern look or his bald
head.  It was what he was doing.

The chaplain looked around
and spotted a man behind him that appeared to be one of the crew’s supervisors.  He walked over to the man and introduced
himself.

“What can I do for you,
Chaplain?”  The man was polite but curt.

The chaplain pointed back the
way he came.  “That man over there, near
the back.  Do you know who he is?”

The man glanced up briefly
and squinted his eyes.  “Uh…no,”  he said, looking back down at his
clipboard.  “Some special investigator I
think.”

The chaplain nodded, still
watching the man.  “Did you catch his
name?”

The supervisor stopped for a
moment and raised an eyebrow.  “Mmm…I
think his ID said Bases or something.  I
can’t remember exactly.”

The chaplain nodded
again.  “Did he say what he was looking
for?”

“Nope.”

The supervisor was clearly
busy.  The chaplain thanked him and
walked back toward the wreckage, watching the man.  He was sure it was him.  He had seen him at the wreckage of Saint
Patrick’s a few days ago.  He remembered
the face, but what really seemed curious was why both times he’d seen the man
digging in the same area of the church’s remains.

26

The sound of running water
woke Christine.  She slowly opened her
eyes, squinting at the ray of sunshine peeking through the dark curtains.  Sarah was asleep on top of her again with her
tiny hand laying across the bottom of Christine’s face.  She slowly removed Sarah’s hand, trying not
to wake her, and set it softly on her own tiny stomach.

Ever so gently, Christine
rolled off the couch and onto a knee, standing up and stretching.  She followed the noise into the kitchen where
she found Avery washing out a dishcloth.

He spoke quietly over his
shoulder.  “Sorry, I was hoping that
wouldn’t wake you.”

“That’s okay,” she said with
a yawn.  “What time is it?” she asked,
peering around the two darkened rooms.

“A little past two.”

“Wow.” She couldn’t remember
what time she had fallen asleep, but she sure didn’t think she would sleep that
long.

“How’s Glen?” she asked.

Avery smiled.  “He’s better.
Still needs more rest though.”  He
turned off the water and hung the cloth over the faucet.  “Would you like some tea?”

“I would love some,” she
said.  She eyed the smaller kitchen
window and walked over to it, pulling back the curtain a little.  She looked outside at the dense wall of giant
pine and cedar trees.  Outside and
directly beneath the window was a large wooden deck with two chairs and a small
table.  On the other side of the table
was a large pile of firewood.  Christine
let the curtain fall back over the exposed window and looked closer around the
dimly lit kitchen.  The place looked
rugged and void of any frills, highlighted by the wire rack on the counter with
dishes drip drying.  To the right was an
old gas stove, and next to that was a refrigerator that looked even older.  It reminded her of the small, rounded looking
fridge her grandmother once had.

In front of her and next to
the window was a small wooden table with four matching chairs.  She quietly pulled one out and sat down with
a creak.

She watched Avery pour the
water into a tea cup and wondered where he had gotten the hot water.  She didn’t remember hearing the whistle of a
teapot, and there was certainly no microwave.
She could not have been that tired.

He walked across the small
room and put her tea down in front of her.
Avery then sat in the chair next to her and took a sip from his own cup.

“So,” Christine started,
curling her fingers through the handle.
“What exactly is going on here?
Why is everyone after us?”

Avery put his cup down.  “They’re not after you.  They’re after Sarah.”

Deep down Christine knew
that.  “She’s six-years-old, what could
they want with her?”

Avery looked at her
curiously.  “You tell me.”

“I-I don’t know,” she said
looking baffled.

Avery watched her with a
dubious look.  “I see.”

Just then Sarah appeared near
the open doorway.  Christine waved her
over.  “Hi Sarah.  Come on in.”

Sarah walked quietly over and
sat down in the chair next to Christine.

“Sarah, this is Mr. Avery. He
helped us last night.”

Sarah smiled shyly and gave
him a polite wave.

He grinned, revealing deep
dimples in his old cheeks.  “Did you get
a good night’s sleep Sarah?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Would you like something to
eat?” he asked.

Sarah glanced at Christine
and then back to Avery.  “Yes, please.”

Avery rose and opened the
refrigerator, withdrawing a bowl of fruit.
“Here you go.”  He placed it on
the table in front of her.

Sarah grabbed some grapes and
started popping them into her mouth while she looked around the room curiously.

They both watched her eat for
a minute before Avery spoke again.
“Sarah, I was just about to tell Christine that you are both safe
here.  We’re here to help you.  So don’t you worry, okay?”

“Okay,” Sarah replied again
politely as she reached for more grapes.

Christine smiled, marveling
at Sarah.  She had such good manners,
better than she’d seen in a child for a long time.

Avery turned to
Christine.  “Can I get you something?”

She shook her head.  “No, thank you, I’ll just nibble on some of
this fruit.”

“Okay then.  Let me check on Glen again.”  With that Avery left the kitchen and strode
down the hallway toward the back of the cabin.

Christine remained still,
surprised at how happy she was just watching Sarah eat.  After a few moments, she broke the
silence.  “Is Avery a nice man?”

“Mmm hmm.”  Sarah said with a quick bob of her head.  “Very nice.”

Christine nodded with relief.
She decided to change the subject.  “Sarah, are you missing school this week?”

“Yeah,” Sarah replied. “My
mommy took me out of school.  She said
we’ll have to do a lot of homework to catch up.”

“I see.”  Christine put her cup down and leaned toward
her a little.  “Sarah, did your mommy
tell you why she was taking you out of school?”

Sarah took a break from
chewing.  “Because of the bad men.”

“What bad men?”

Sarah looked at her
innocently.  “The bad men that tried to
get into our house.”

Christine tried to suppress
her look of surprise.  “They came to your
house?”

“Yes.  Just like they came to the hotel and the hide
house.”

“The hide house?” asked
Christine.  “Oh, you mean the place we
were hiding at, the safe house?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “But the bad men keep coming.”

Christine sighed.  “I know honey.”  She patted Sarah’s hand and was struck by how
natural it felt.  “But I think we’re safe
now.”

She wanted to get back off
the subject.  “So, do you have a lot of
friends in school?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, picking the
last grape off a small bunch.  “Muna is
my best friend.  She’s black.”

Christine’s eyes grew
wide.  “What?  She’s black?”

“Yeah, her mommy and daddy
are black too.  They’re from South
Africa.”

Christine laughed a little in
relief.  “Oh, you mean black.  As in, their skin is black.  I though you meant…oh never mind.”

Sarah looked curiously at
Christine.  “Do you think I’ll be able to
go back to school soon?”

Christine felt her heart
sadden but forced a smile.  “I sure hope
so.”

Together they finished the fruit
in the bowl, and Sarah put it carefully into the sink.  They went into the living room and opened the
curtains a little, allowing more sun in.
Together they folded the two blankets and stacked them neatly on the end
of the couch.

Christine looked at Sarah’s
clothes and then her own.  “I guess we’re
both dressed already.”

Sarah giggled and nodded.

They found the remote control
to a small television in the corner of the living room.  Christine managed to turn it on and flipped
through a few channels with some reception before stopping on a relatively
clear cartoon show which Sarah was very excited about.  She quickly dropped down and sat on the
floor.

Christine stood back and
grinned again at the thought of Sarah being able to be a kid, if only for the moment.  Christine absently brushed a strand of hair
out of her face and realized how dirty her hair felt.  She needed to freshen up.

She peered curiously down the
hallway.  There was a light under one of
the doors which she assumed was the room that Glen Smith was resting in.  It was across from the bathroom she had used
in the middle of the night.  Quietly, she
stepped inside and closed the door, this time noticing behind it a tub and
shower.  She was surprised at how clean
it was.

Christine turned on the
light, and stared into the large mirror above the sink.  She looked terrible and needed a shower
badly.  She turned on the sink faucet and
pooled some water in her hands, rinsing her face off several times.  She then took the band out of her thick,
dark, red hair and let it fall forward.
There was no brush, so she did her best by running her fingers through
it and pulling it tight into a ponytail, doubling up the band to secure it.

She already felt better, but
this wasn’t the time for a complete overhaul.
She reached for the door but stopped when she looked at the mirrored
medicine cabinet on the side wall.  She
looked around instinctively and then reached for the cabinet door, gently
tugging it open and waiting for a loud squeak that never came.  Curious, she looked inside to find it almost
empty.  Only the bottom shelf had
anything on it: a razor with blades, a few sticks of deodorant, and some
aspirin.  Strangely disappointed, she
began to shut it when a noise outside in the hallway made her jump.  It sounded like the other door had been
opened abruptly.  She quickly closed the
cabinet and double-checked herself in the mirror.  She then casually turned the door knob and
pulled the door open.

She saw that the other door
was cracked open.  She looked up and down
the hall curiously.  Avery must have
already reached the kitchen.

Christine quietly stepped
across the hall and positioned herself in front of the small opening in the
second door.  She leaned in and put one
eye close enough to look through.

She gasped!  Inside, she could see the figure of Glen
Smith, and he was standing up.  Christine
slipped and pitched forward, accidentally pushing the door open, and realized
she had been helped by Avery who had silently appeared behind her in the
hall.  She abruptly stumbled into the
room to find Smith standing in front of a mirror, wearing a long sleeve shirt
which was unbuttoned down the middle.

If Christine had been
startled at seeing Smith on his own two feet, what she saw when he whirled
around truly frightened her.  The skin on
his side looked smooth and showed no sign of injury, much less a bullet hole.

“Oh my god!” Christine cried,
trying to back up.  “How? How?” She
bumped into Avery who was still behind her.

Avery put his hands slowly on
her shoulders.  “Easy, Christine,” he
said in a calm voice.  “Take it easy
now.”

Christine was petrified.  She kept staring at Smith and slowly tried to
back up and around Avery.  “My god,
w-what are you?”  She turned and
realized that Avery was between her and the door.  It didn’t look like he had any intention of
letting her out.

Avery spoke again.  “Easy.
It’s not what it looks like.”

“No?!” Christine shot
back.  “Well, it looks like he was shot
and bleeding to death last night, and now it looks like he’s pretty…unshot!”

Smith stopped trying to hide
his abdomen and straightened.

“Okay, well maybe it is
what it looks like,” Avery said with a weak smile, trying to break the ice.

Christine turned and made a
deliberate effort to get past him and through the door, but Avery stayed in
front of her.

“Don’t do anything rash, just
let us explain.”  He looked in her
eyes.  “There is a lot for everyone
to explain here.”

Christine gave him a
suspicious look.  “What is that supposed
to mean?”

Avery shook his head.  “I mean there’s a lot happening here.  Let’s not freak out.”  He held his hands up in front of himself as a
calming gesture.  “You’re in no danger
here.”

Christine stared at him and
then at Smith.  She held a finger up and
motioned to the door.  “Just let me say
something.”  Avery stepped aside while
Christine called down the hall.  “Sarah,
are you okay out there?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” Sarah’s
voice called back.

Christine swallowed and
looked back at both men.  “Okay…explain!”

Smith nodded and stepped away
from the mirror.  “Okay, we’ll explain
everything.  But first you need to tell
us something.”

“What?” she asked.

Smith glanced at Avery.  “What is it about Sarah?  What’s so special that people are trying to
kill her over?”

“It’s clear that you know,”
Avery added, before she could speak.

Christine thought about the
question.  She had already lied once
about it, and she was a terrible liar; she knew that.  But if she was going to talk, she didn’t want
to be the one to do it first.  Yet, she
had a feeling they were going to tell her a lot more than she was about to tell
them.  “Okay,” she relented.  “But then you tell me what the hell is going
on.”

Smith looked in her green
eyes.  “Agreed.”

Christine took a deep
breath.  “She can see things,” she
said.  “Sarah, I mean.  She can see inside people.”

Smith and Avery looked at
each other again.  “What do you mean?”

“I think she can see people’s
auras, like…their energy.  And it tells
her what kind of person they are inside.”

The men stared at her for a
long time.  “Auras?” Smith asked.

“Yeah, you know, like a
person’s…reflection or essence or something,” Christine explained.

“And what does she see?”
Avery asked.

“She says she sees colors.  And they mean different things.”

“Colors,” Smith repeated.

Christine nodded.  “Colors.
She said that children are white, and adults are yellow, orange, and
red.  Yellow is good, orange not so good,
and red apparently means you’re bad…evil or something.”

“Is that all?” asked Avery.

She took another deep
breath.  “No.  She also said that the color black…means
someone is going to die.”

Again, both men looked at
each other curiously.  After a long
moment, Smith nodded and looked at Christine.
“Okay, our turn,” he said, leaning against the footboard of the bed behind
him.  “You may want to sit down for
this.”

“I’m fine,” she said with a
smirk, folding her arms in front of her.

“To begin with, my name is
not Smith.”

Christine raised her
eyebrows.  “You’re not Smith?”

He shook his head.

“Are you at least Glen?”

“No.”  He shook his head again. “My real name is
David Rand.”

Christine did not say
anything.

“And,” he continued, “I’m
here for Sarah.”

“What?”

He frowned.  “What I mean is, I’m here to help her.  To protect her.”

“Well, I guess that’s kind of
obvious.”

“No, that’s not what I
mean.  I mean I’m here to protect
her.  From whoever is doing this.”

“Yeah,” she said
sarcastically.  “I understand that.”

Rand sighed. “I’m not sure
that you do.”  He considered his words
carefully.  “I’m not exactly like
you.”

Christine’s expression became
confused again.  “And what does that
mean?”

It was his turn to give her a
sarcastic look.  He pulled back his shirt
and she looked down at his muscular stomach.
“How many people do you know that heal like this?”

Christine’s mouth dropped
open as she finally understood what he was trying to say.  “Oh…my…god!” she gasped.  “You’re an alien!”

Rand glanced at Avery and
rolled his eyes.  “No, I’m NOT an alien.”

“Then what are you?” she
said, shaking her head.

“Christine,” Rand said.  “When I say I’m here to protect Sarah, I mean
I’ve been sent here to protect her.
Someone is trying to kill her, and I’m here to make sure that doesn’t
happen.”

Christine stood motionless,
staring at Rand.  “Sent?  Sent by whom?”

Rand was surprised by her
question.  “By God.”

27

One of the officers poked his
head in the door to find Deputy Inspector Kim Darlington sifting through a
large manila folder.  As Deputy
Inspector, Darlington was in charge of the 19th Precinct in New York
and was frequently asked by the district attorney’s office to run through cases
when they found discrepancies that might weaken the case.  It was their last chance to tie up loose ends
and make the case as strong as possible before going in front of the judge.  The one on her desk was one of those cases.

“Hey Kim,” the officer
said.  “Got a call for you on line four.”

“Who is it?” Darlington asked
without looking up.

“It’s Chaplain Wilcox.”

Darlington looked up,
considering whether to take the call.
“Okay,” she said, leaving the folder carefully in place.  “I’ll take it.”

The officer nodded and ducked
back out.

With an almost irritated
look, Darlington picked up the phone and pressed the 4 button.  “Hi Chaplain.”

“Hello Kim, how are you?”

“Coming from all directions,
just like usual.”  The chaplain had a way
of getting people to put down their pens for him, partly because he was so
well-liked, and partly because everyone was afraid of picking up bad
karma.  “What can I do for you?” she
asked.

“I don’t know if you’ve
heard, but I’ve been sent down to D.C. to help after the bombing here.”

Darlington glanced back to
her folder.  “I did hear something about
that.  How’s it going?”

“Well,” he replied, “it’s a
tough situation as you can imagine.”

“I sure can.”

“The reason I’m calling,” he
continued, “is I was hoping to get your help with something.”

“Sure, Padre,” she mused and
turned another page in the folder.

“If memory serves, I believe
you have a friend at the FBI.”

“That’s right,”  Darlington replied.  “In the Boston branch.”

“Well Kim, I’m wondering if I
might get your help in trying to get something expedited.  I have some pictures I need to submit for
analysis and was hoping we could get it turned around quickly.”

“I can give it a try,”
Darlington answered.  “What kind of
pictures?”

The chaplain cleared his
throat on the other end.  “This may sound
a little strange, but they’re pictures of someone here I’d like to find out
more about.”

Darlington stopped perusing
her folder and looked up, thinking.  “I
take it this is someone you can’t ask, or no one there knows?”

“That is correct,” the
chaplain answered.  “It’s someone on the
investigation team.”

“Doesn’t the investigation
team require clearance?”

“Yes, they do,” he
replied  “That’s where it gets a little
curious.  He has clearance, but evidently
it’s a very high clearance.”

“Hmm…” Darlington thought out
loud.  “So, this guy has some special
clearance and no one knows who he is?”

“Exactly,” the chaplain
said.  “I managed to snap some pictures
of him on my phone, and I’m hoping your friend at the FBI can quickly run them through
their system and see if they can get a visual match on him.”

Darlington shrugged.  “Like I said, I’ll give it a shot.  You want to email the pictures over to me?”

“Of course.  I will do that right now.  Thank you.”

“My pleasure, Chaplain.”  She was just about to hang up when he
interrupted.

“Oh Kim, one more thing,” he
said.  “Have you seen Cheryl Roberts
lately?”

“Mmm…I saw her a couple days ago.  If I’m not mistaken, she had today off.  Why?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve left a
number of messages for her in the last couple days but haven’t heard back.”

Darlington frowned.  “That’s strange.  She’s pretty responsive.  I’ll look into it and see if anyone has
talked to her.”

“Wonderful, thank you
Kim.  I do appreciate your help.”

“No problem, Padre,” she said.  “I’ll give you a ring when I hear something
back.”

She hung up the phone and
turned back to her case.

Darlington was still
engrossed in the folder twenty minutes later when someone knocked on her door.

“Come in,” she answered with
a hint of exasperation.

“Deputy Inspector?” asked a
large man as he opened the door.

“Yes.”

Ramirez took a small step
inside.  “Hi, my name is Mike
Ramirez.  I’m part of the computer
forensic team downtown.  Am I bothering
you?”

Darlington inhaled and leaned
back in her chair.  She shook her head
and motioned for Ramirez to sit down, which he did.

“I’m trying to find officers
Griffin and Buckley.  I was told you
might know where they are.”

Darlington furrowed her
brow.  “You know I haven’t seen
them.  I know they had to drive to
Washington D.C. a couple days ago.”  Now
curious, she leaned forward and looked out through her glass door.  She could see both of their desks on the far
side of the room, but both were empty.
“Strange, they should be here.
Did you ask the officer at the front desk downstairs?  Maybe they’re sick.”  Both sick at the same time?  She didn’t believe that as soon as it rolled
off her tongue.

“Yes, I did.  The woman downstairs didn’t know anything
either,” Ramirez answered.

Darlington was getting an odd
feeling.  “Why are you looking for them?”

“They came to see me just
before they left for D.C.  It was about
their case.  I had some more information
for them, but I can’t get a hold of either one of them on their cell phones.  I sent one text to Officer Griffin a few days
ago that went through, but everything I’ve sent after that has bounced
back.”  He leaned forward in his
chair.  “I took the liberty of looking at
the system, and it looks like both of their cell phones may be turned off.”

“Both of them?”

“It looks like it,” Ramirez
said.  “I believe Officer Griffin was
having a problem with his phone before they left, so I thought maybe that was
the reason.  But checking the carrier’s
system logs, it looks like his service was successfully ported to a new phone
he purchased just north of D.C.”

Darlington looked at him
curiously.  “How did you get access to
the carrier’s system logs?”

He gave her a quick
wink.  “I’d rather not say.”

Darlington leaned forward and
dialed a number on her phone. She left it on speakerphone.  A voice quickly answered.  “Personnel, 19th Precinct.”

“Hi Tina, it’s Kim upstairs,”
Darlington announced.

“Oh, hi Kim.”

“Tina, is there any time or
special hours submitted for Griffin or Buckley in the last few days?”

Tina paused for a moment.  “Nooo…I haven’t seen anything come over.”

“They had to drive down to
D.C. a few days ago to see someone at the State Department.  Do you remember when they came back from
that?”

“I don’t.”  Tina went silent as she looked again.  “Oh wait, I have a note here.  Looks like we got a call from that State
Department office saying our guys missed their appointment.  Said they would have to reschedule.”

Darlington looked across her
desk at Ramirez.  Something didn’t feel
right.

28

Oh
boy.  Christine
thought to herself.  These guys have
gone off the deep end!

Rand watched Christine take a
step backward.  “You’re not a
believer,”  he said matter-of-factly.

“In God?” she said.  “Oh sure I am, of course.  Although, I haven’t been to church in a
while.”

“But you don’t believe me?”
Rand asked.

She looked over her shoulder
at Avery and stepped away toward the other wall so she could see them
both.  “Look, maybe you have some special
genetic thing going on here, but I think that’s quite a leap from, you know, being
sent by God.”

“I see,” Rand said.  “Are you sure about Sarah’s gift?”

“Her gift,” Christine said, a
little taken back. “Meaning what, the aura thing?”  She shrugged.
“I can only believe what she tells me, but she saved our lives by
keeping us off an elevator that fell eight stories.  And she knew what was about to happen in that
McDonald’s.  She also tried to save my
cat.”

Rand lowered his head
slightly but kept his eyes on her.
“Christine, I think you need to prepare yourself for the possibility
that what Sarah sees is something entirely different than what you think.”

“What do you mean?” She
watched Rand and Avery exchange looks again.
They were doing that a lot.

“What Sarah sees,” Rand said,
“is not an aura or some energy field.
What Sarah is able to see is a person’s soul.”

Christine did not reply.  She simply stood there, stunned and staring
at Rand.  Eventually, she blinked and
looked at Avery who made it clear that she was the only one startled by what he
said.

“What did you say?”

“It’s not an aura,” Rand
repeated.

“You said it’s their soul?”
she asked slowly.

“That’s right.”

Christine continued to stare
at him.  She didn’t know what to think,
but she was coming around to the conclusion that even though these men came to
her rescue, they were nutty, to put it mildly.
She felt her brain shift into a different gear.  How do I get out of here?

Rand watched her calmly.  He expected this was going to be difficult
for her.  It sounded like she was not
religious which didn’t help matters.  She
was going to need some extra convincing.

“Can I,” she started, “just
chat with Sarah for a few moments?”

“Of course.”  Avery took a small step to the side and
opened the door.  “Sarah!” he
called.  “Can you please come here for a
minute?  Christine’s eyes opened wide.  That was not what she had in mind.

A moment later, small
footsteps could be heard coming down the hall.
When she reached the door, Avery opened it up wide, and when Sarah
looked at everyone, she seemed less surprised to see Rand than Christine was.  Instinctively, Sarah crossed the room and
stood in front of her.

“You okay?” Christine asked
and patted her shoulder.

“Mmm…hmm.”

“Sarah,” Rand began, “do you
recognize me?”

Sarah looked up at Christine
with her big eyes.  “What does recog-nice
mean?”

Christine smiled.  “It means, do you remember him?”

Sarah nodded.  “He came to the safe-” she wrinkled her
nose.  “What did you call it again?”

“The safe house.”

“Oh yeah,” said Sarah  “He came there.  And to McDonald’s too.”

Rand smiled.  “Sarah.
We wanted to talk to you, about how you can see people in your special
way.”

Sarah tilted her head,
unsure.  “My mommy said I wasn’t supposed
to talk about it to other people.”

Rand nodded.  “We understand.  But we think this is a time when your mom
would have wanted you to share with us.”

Sarah silently looked up at
Christine who put her second hand on Sarah’s shoulder and nodded back.

“Okay,” was all she said.

This time Rand looked at
Christine.  “Sarah, what do you see when
you look at Christine?”

“A yellow shadow.”

“Can you show us where?” he
asked.

Sarah turned and looked at
Christine.  “It’s all over, but mostly
here,” she said, circling her hand in front of Christine’s chest.

“And what do you see when you
look at Mr. Avery?” Rand asked.

Sarah looked over at Avery.  “He’s yellow too.”

“And yellow is good?” Rand
asked.

“Yes.”

Rand spoke to Sarah again but
was still looking at Christine.  “And
Sarah,” he said.  “What do you see when
you look at me?”

Sarah’s expression became
nervous.  She looked at Rand but quickly
turned back to Christine.

Christine looked down at
Sarah supportively.  “It’s okay Sarah,
you can tell us.”

Sarah slowly turned back to
face Rand.  “He doesn’t have one at all.”

29

The cabin abruptly bounced as
the jet’s wheels touched the runway, and the high pitch of the engine’s reverse
thrust shrieked loudly outside, slowing the aircraft.

As the plane slowed and began to taxi, Aaron
Bazes remained slouched in his leather seat, looking out the window at the
bright lights of Tel Aviv.  The last several
days had painted a grim picture, and he was now the unfortunate messenger.  This was a trip home he was not looking
forward to making.

The new Learjet 85 passed the
terminal’s main gates and proceeded to a smaller private section of the
airport.  When the doors opened, Bazes
reluctantly stood and walked down the empty aisle to the front of the cabin
where the attendant handed him his bag.

“Is there anything else I can
get you, sir?”  the attendant asked.

Bazes never heard him.

The private gate afforded him
a distinctly better experience traveling in and out of the country.  To begin with, it was spacious and plush and
void of any security personnel whatsoever.
In fact, the entire building was designed for and dedicated to just a
handful of people, and Bazes was one of them.
He passed only one person on his way to the driver waiting for him
outside, and that one person was the sole customs agent who sat at the desk as
more of a formality than anything else.

The agent bowed his head
slightly as Bazes approached and stopped on the other side of his desk.  He withdrew and swiped his Ambassador
passport under the scanner.  He then
placed his hand on the small, brightly lit screen as it passed up and down,
capturing a high resolution image of his hand print.  With that, he quietly walked down a long,
well-decorated and immaculate hallway into the chilly air outside.

The dark underground corridor
was very old and lined in rough limestone with a finer limestone serving as the
exterior finish.  It was the same stone
used to construct the Egyptian pyramids.
And while the stonework were of similar age, the difference was that
everyone had seen the pyramids, but only a handful of people on the entire
planet knew this hallway and the chambers ahead had ever even existed.

Bazes’ footsteps echoed as he
walked calmly down the dimly lit corridor.
At the end, it opened into a larger room.  In the middle of the room was a giant,
six-pointed star carved into the floor and emblazoned with gold.  Bazes stopped before the circle and closed
his eyes.  After a short prayer, he
stepped inside and smoothly slid down onto his hands and knees.  Without interrupting the motion, he continued
down until his lips touched the cold floor.
He silently rose and rocked back onto his knees before falling forward
and pressing his lips to the floor again.
His twelfth time was as slow and deliberate as his first, symbolizing
the original Twelve Tribes.

Bazes slowly raised his head
and looked at the glass structure before him.
Standing at nearly ten cubic feet and made of thick, clear glass, it was
vacuum sealed and maintained at a perfect temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit
and zero percent humidity.  Before the
structure, engraved in the stone floor and also lined in gold was a single
sentence in Hebrew.

“…for my house will be called a house of
prayer for all nations.” (Isaiah 56:7)

Behind the glass stood a
large, cube-shaped, wooden box and behind it a thick canvas fabric made of
cotton, layered neatly atop dozens of long, wooden staves bundled on the
floor.  Beside the folded cloth was a
chest made of ancient acacia wood with a bronze cover, and next to that, sat a
heavier cover made of solid gold with two angelic statues at either end.

Bazes stared at the artifacts
and finally closed his eyes once more, dropping down and touching his forehead
to the golden lettering.

What stood before Bazes was
one of the most sacred artifacts in all of human history, moved when necessary,
but hidden and protected for thousands of years.  Together the pieces made up the fabled Tabernacle
of Moses.  The sacred place where God
chose to meet his people during their forty-year wandering in the desert.  On the floor behind the glass was the
legendary Atonement Cover on which Moses stood to communicate directly with God
and which served as the lid to the Ark of the Covenant.

Bazes sat in a chair with his
hands folded on an ancient wooden table before him.  Around him were twelve men dressed in
Techelet blue, hand woven Talliths with golden tassels along the arms.  They were seated in a semicircular arc around
Bazes, six on each side.  Few people knew
who these men were, yet they were secretly some of the most powerful men on the
planet.  Their faces were just barely
recognizable in the dim candlelight, but it didn’t matter; Bazes knew each
voice and seat position by heart.

“We are happy to have you
back,” the man in front of him began.

“Thank you,” Bazes replied in
a low voice.

“What did you find?”

Bazes lowered his head
gently, dreading what he was about to say.
“It is him.”

All twelve men looked at each
other grimly.

“Are you certain?”

Bazes nodded.  “I am certain.”

“How do you know this?”

“Inscriptions were left in
the cathedrals.  They were not difficult
to find.  I believe they were left for
us.  A message, to mock us.  I also had some traces analyzed and they all
matched.  The type, issuance, and grade
are all the same.”

“What did the inscriptions
say?”

“Prepare,” Bazes
frowned.

“What about the written
records?”

Bazes nodded.  “It took some time and the records appeared
to be altered, but the details and signatures are unmistakable.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“I don’t believe so,” Bazes
said shaking his head.  “We are the
first.”

An old man to the speaker’s
right lamented,  “What do you think he
will do?”

“I do not know for
certain.  I only have fears.”

The old man nodded.  “Then what do you fear he will do?”

Bazes glanced around at some
of the other men before looking forward again.
“Something very terrible.”  If
they didn’t like what he just told them, they were going to like what he said
next even less.

30

Rand opened the front door
and quietly stepped out onto the front deck.
Christine was sitting in one of the chairs, her hands propped up on her
knees and covering her mouth.

She said she needed to be
alone for a little while, so Rand was careful to keep his distance.  He stopped several feet behind her.  There were no sounds around them except for
the breeze moving through the trees.

“As you can probably guess,
I’m a little freaked out right now,”  she
said without turning around.

Rand said nothing.

After another long silence,
she lowered her face into her hands and shook her head.  “Why would he do this to us?”  She stood up and looked at Rand then turned
and looked in through the kitchen window.
She could see Avery and Sarah sitting across from each other in the
small living room.  Sarah was watching
the board very carefully while Avery taught her how to play checkers.  “What god would do this to her?”

Again he said nothing.

“What god would put her
through this…horror?  Why would he
surround that perfect little girl with nothing but death and destruction?  Why would he kill her mother right in front
of her?”  She shook her head.  “What kind of god is that?”

Rand took a deep breath.  “It can be hard to understand.”

“Oh please!” she
snapped.  “Spare me the God works in
mysterious ways dribble!  I’ve
seen my share of cruelty from the same god who supposedly loves his children!”

Rand looked at her curiously.

“That’s right,” she
said.  “I went to church, I know the
scripture.  He loved us so much that he
put us here to prove ourselves, by worshiping him.  What kind of free choice is that?”   She looked at Rand accusingly.  “Tell me, who creates a universe, an insanely
complex planet, and then the human race and everything else, just so he can
watch them spend their tiny lives worshipping him?  I mean how much more ridiculous could an
explanation be?”

“It’s not that easy,” Rand
replied quietly.

“Not that easy?” she
scoffed.  “Not that easy but still easy
enough to put an unimaginable gift into a beautiful little girl and torment her
at every turn.  What a wonderful test of
our faith!”

Rand shrugged.  “Well, that’s one belief.”

“Yeah, well I DON’T believe
it!”

“I can see that.”

“And then-” Christine said.  “And then he picks someone like me.  Of all the people in the world, he picks me.”

“I think he made a good
choice.”

“He couldn’t have made a
worse choice!” she said angrily.  “Geez,
you could throw a dart blindfolded and hit someone better.”  She turned and looked back out at the trees.

Rand frowned.  “Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s true!” she
cried.  “Sarah’s not alive because of me,
she’s alive in spite of me.  I’m
not a fighter.  I’m not tough.  I can’t protect her like you.”

“She responds to you,” Rand
said.  “She needs someone like you,
someone not just to protect her body, but someone who can help protect her
heart.  To make sure she comes out of
this okay.”

It was then that Christine
began to cry.  She wiped the tears away
as they ran down her cheeks.  “You don’t
know what you’re saying.”

“Look at me, Christine,” Rand
said.  “This is not some joke, or some
twisted irony, and God does not look down from a pearly throne deciding who to
bless each day.  Nor does he guide every
step and every decision that we make.  He
gives us what he can and has faith in us just as we have faith in him.”

“What does that mean?” she
sniffed.

“What I’m saying is, this is
not about the things people wish they had and then pray for, or about helping a
friend who might be down on their luck.
This is a fight!  God
created a place of hope in a sea of darkness and evil, and he is locked in a
struggle for every second of every day.
He fights endlessly for this world he created and the survival of his
children living upon it, against forces that want nothing more than to destroy
it all.”  He glared at her.  “He chose you to help him.”

Christine looked
dumbstruck.  “Why didn’t he pick someone
better?”

Rand’s expression showed her
he didn’t understand her question.

“I told you; I used  to believe,” she said.  “And I was devout.  But he destroyed it all and left me to pick
up the pieces.  God showed me just
how cruel he could be.”

Rand watched as Christine
began to walk away and then turned around to face him.

“I was sixteen.”  She closed her eyes for a moment and took a
deep breath.  “God, I was so young and so
stupid.”  Her eyes were quickly welling
up.  “One night I asked my parents to
drive me over to the house where my friend was babysitting so I could help
her.  But they couldn’t because they were
both sick.  So I begged my dad to take me
over.  I kept begging him.  And even though he felt terrible, he finally
agreed to drive me.”

Tears began running down
Christine’s face.  “But I lied to
him.  We were babysitting, but we were
doing it so some boys could come over to meet us. And my dad, as sick as he
was, drove me all the way across town.
Not knowing that I was lying to him the whole time.”  Her voice began to shudder.  “I remember how hard he was coughing while he
drove me.  And on his way home… he was
killed in a car accident!”  Christine
lost control and started sobbing.

Rand took a step closer but
didn’t speak..

Christine shook her head and
backed up.  The sobs kept her from
speaking.  She quickly pushed past him,
ran down the wooden steps, and headed for the trees.

He watched her run to a giant
pine tree and rest her head against the trunk, crying into it.

Christine slowly began to
regain her emotions when she heard Rand’s footsteps in the grass behind
her.  She sniffed and wiped her eyes
before turning around.

“I killed my father,” she
said, her voice still trembling. “And the guilt has haunted me every day
since.  Every single day.  I not only lost my father, but I widowed
my mother.  And you know what?  Those boys never even showed up.”  Her voice began to quiver again, but she
forced it back.  She took a deep breath
and looked up at the tree above her.  “I
must have cried for a whole year.  The
guilt was so bad I couldn’t even go on a date without breaking down.  Even in my late twenties, when I was finally
in a relationship, I would cry constantly.
And children,” she said rolling her tear filled eyes.  “Every time I saw a child, I saw my dad, sick
but with a glint of pride in his eyes…for his daughter, the babysitter.”  She looked directly at Rand.  “Now do you see what a terrible choice he
made?  Why would God do that to poor
Sarah?  Why would he give her someone
like me?”

Rand thought about her
question.  “Sometimes we don’t need to
understand, we just need to believe.”

She looked past him.  “You know I’ve never told that to
anyone.  I can’t believe I told you.”

Rand was quiet for a long
time before speaking.  “You were supposed
to.”

“What?”

She gave him a puzzled look,
and Rand cleared his throat.  “Listen to
me,” he said.  “Since I was born, I knew
what I was here to do.  From my earliest
memories I knew who I was.  I knew I
would find Sarah, and I spent my whole life preparing for it, and training,
every single day.  Constantly doing
another new exercise to get stronger.
Nothing else mattered to me.  And
nothing else matters now.”  He took a
step closer.  “All that time I knew
things.  Not everything, but some.  Who I was, who God was.”  He frowned at that.  “Not what the churches preach today, but who
he really is.  I also knew what
Sarah looked like and where I would find her.”

Rand looked into Christine’s
eyes as she sniffed and wiped her nose.

“But there was something else
that I knew, one piece of information I never understood.  I never knew why I was supposed to know
it.  It never made any sense.  Until right now.”

She tilted her head,
curiously.

“Christine.  You did not kill your father.”

She was suddenly startled,
trying to understand if she heard him right.
“What?!”

“You did not kill your
father.”

Her expression changed to
bewilderment.  “Wh-why are you
saying-”  She took a step back as Rand
moved toward her.  “What are you doing?”

He looked at her sternly and
followed her as she backed up even farther.
“Listen to me, Christine.  Even
without that accident, your father would have died less than five months
later.  He would have died of a heart
attack.”

Christine gasped.  She just stared at him, shocked and unable to
breathe.

Rand did not stop.  “Your father’s name was Louis Richard Rose,
wasn’t it?”  She didn’t answer.  “Wasn’t it?” he repeated.  “He was born in October of 1935.”  Christine began sobbing again.  “He was a craftsman, and he loved you.  He loved you, but there was nothing you could
have done to save him.  He was going home,
with or without that accident.”

Christine looked up at
Rand.  Tears were streaming down her
face.  “No, it was me, it was because of
me!”

Rand grabbed her
shoulders.  “No, it wasn’t.  That accident was bad luck.  God cannot control everything.  It was just bad luck!”

Christine’s wobbling legs
gave out, and she fell just an inch before Rand grabbed her and held her up
with his own arms.  She finally let her
head fall forward into his chest and continued to sob uncontrollably.

It took almost twenty minutes
for Christine to cry it out.  Exhausted,
she leaned her head back and looked at him, her face covered in tears.  “Are you…sure?”

Rand nodded.  “I’m sure.
It was not your fault, and none of that guilt belonged to you.  I was meant to tell you this.  You must believe me.”

She closed her eyes and let
her head fall softly back against his chest.
“All that time…and all that guilt.”

“It never belonged to you,”
he whispered.

31

Christine sat on the ground
cross-legged on a thick layer of pine needles.
Rand sat across from her with his back leaning against the tree.  One leg was propped up in front of him while
his other lay flat on the ground.

Christine spoke in a low
voice.  “So are you immortal?”

Rand smirked.  “Uh, no.”

“Then how did you…” she
trailed off, pointing at his stomach.

“I heal quickly,” he
shrugged.  “One of my assets.”

“One of your
assets?  You have others?”

“I also age slower.  One of the side effects of the healing.”

She tried to keep from
rolling her eyes.  It was beginning to
feel like for every answer Rand gave, he was creating three new questions.  “So why can’t Sarah see your soul?  Or
your shadow?” she asked with an understanding smile.

Rand inhaled deeply.  “Because I don’t have one.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not like you,
Christine.  Not exactly.  You are one of his children, and he
loves his children more than anything.
So much that he gave all of you the most precious thing he could, a
soul.”  Rand looked around at the trees.  Millions of green pine needles swayed and
seemed to glitter from the soft breeze.
“You don’t know how lucky you all are.”

“Are you saying you’re not
one of his children?” she asked.

He shook his head.  “No, I’m a soldier.  Sent here to help him fight.”

“Fight who?”

Rand nodded back toward the
cabin. “To protect Sarah.  He gave her a
gift, and I’m here to protect it.”

“For how long?” Christine
asked.

“Not much longer.  Soon it will happen.”

“What will happen?”

“My reason for being here,”
Rand replied.  “All of the years of
preparation.  All of the training.  There will soon come a point when she needs
me the most.”

Christine frowned, trying to
understand.  “And then what?”

At this question, a genuine
smile spread across Rand’s face.  “Then I
get to become one of you.”

“One of us?”

“I will be awarded a soul,”
he said.  “It’s what all of us wish for.”

“All of who?” she said.

“Those of us who are sent to
fight, the lochem.”

“Lochem?”

“God’s warriors.”

Christine was surprised
again.  “You mean there’s more of you?”

“Not now, not today.  But there have been before,” Rand explained.  “At different times we have been sent, to
fight in your world, in the flesh.”

“And this is one of those
times,” Christine finished.

“Yes.”

Christine stared at him and
finally nodded.  She took a deep breath
and looked around at the tall grass.  The
silence was deafening and peaceful at the same time.  She had never realized how much noise she’d
grown accustomed to while living in a city.
The difference was incredible.

She looked at Rand with a
hint of regret.  “I guess you were pretty
upset then, when we ran out of the house last night and took off in the car.”

She was surprised when Rand
smiled.  “Well, it wasn’t my preferred
choice, but it did show me how well you think under pressure.”

Christine rolled her
eyes.  “Uh yeah, most people refer to
that as panic.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Rand
replied.  “It may feel like you panicked,
but you would be surprised how many people would have simply frozen.  Mental paralysis in an emergency is what gets
most people killed.  But you were
thinking.  And you knew enough to realize
that you didn’t have any good options available to you, other than to
flee.  So you took it.”  The admiration was apparent in his voice.  “You and Sarah are both alive because of
it.  Don’t underestimate the abilities
you have within yourself.  You were
selected for a reason.  Embrace it.”

Christine opened the front
door and stepped through with Rand following closely behind.  Sarah looked at Christine excitedly and ran
to her.

“I won!  I won!” she squealed.

Christine looked at the
checker board where Avery was still sitting.
He looked up from his chair, impressed.
“She’s sharp,” he said, standing up.
“Beat me fair and square.  And
that time I was trying.”

Sarah squeezed Christine then
looked up and noticed her red face.  “Are
you okay?”

Christine smiled down at
Sarah and gave her a giant squeeze back.
“I’m good honey.”  She glanced at
Rand.  “I’m really, really good.”

Sarah was still looking
up.  “Can we go outside?”

Christine looked at Rand and
Avery with raised eyebrows.  “That okay?”

Avery opened a panel on the
wall, not far from the door.  There were
over a dozen lights tied into the panel displaying the status of various
sensors all surrounding the cabin.  They
were all green.  He nodded.  “Sure.
But please stay close.”

Sarah giggled with excitement
and instantly pulled Christine back out the front door.  Rand closed it quietly behind them.  He looked at Avery who was watching the girls
through the window.

“She gonna be okay?” Avery
asked.

“I think so.”  Rand turned and looked through the window
too.  “She’s a lot tougher than she
thinks.”

Outside Sarah and Christine
stomped through the tall grass and approached an old bird bath, long forgotten
and dry and covered in dark mold.

Sarah examined it
curiously.  “What’s this?”

“It’s called a bird bath,”
Christine explained.  “You fill it with
water so the birds come and drink out of it.
This one is old and dirty though.”

Sarah looked at her
eagerly.  “Could we clean it for them?”

“We’ll see,” Christine
answered in her best noncommittal tone.
She watched Sarah trace her finger along a small stone flower, one of
the only clean areas on the small statue.
She cleared her voice.  “Um,
Sarah?” she said.

Sarah looked up at her.

Christine took a deep
breath.  “Listen, I know things have
been…hard.  Especially what happened the
other night at McDonald’s.”  She frowned
trying to find the right words.  “Are
you…okay?”

Sarah considered the question
and then nodded her head, looking back down at the bird bath.

“I mean,” Christine
continued, “some bad things happened.”
This was not coming out the way she had hoped.  “Do you want to, you know, talk about it?”

Sarah stared at her for a
moment and then gave her an innocent shrug.
“They were bad men.  They were
reds.”

“Well, I don’t know if all
reds are supposed to die,” Christine offered.

Sarah shook her head.  “They were really red.”

Christine cocked her head and
thought to herself.  Did that mean all
of the colors had different degrees or shades?  She suddenly realized that she didn’t know
what to say next.  Fortunately Sarah
spotted a tree over her shoulder, with branches close to the ground.

“Can we play on the tree?”
she asked without actually waiting for a response.  Instead she ran to the tree and grabbed the
lowest limb, but she could not get any higher.
“Can you lift me up?”

“Sure,” Christine said, “but
don’t go too high.”

Slowly and determinedly,
Sarah climbed up several more branches and then stopped to peer out.

Something beeped and
Christine looked around wondering what made the noise.  She realized what the familiar sound was and
felt around the pockets of her pants.
Reaching into one of her front pockets, she pulled out her phone.

I
thought I turned this off, she said to herself.  She then realized that the power button must
have somehow gotten depressed while she was sitting on the ground.  Looking at the display she could see there
was no cellular signal, but not surprisingly the phone still managed to receive
a text message.  She was a little
startled when she saw who it was from.

Christine,
where are you?  Are you okay?  Danny

She grinned.  It was almost beginning to feel that the
whole world was after them.  Reading
Danny’s message set her mind a little at ease that everything, eventually, just
might turn out okay.  Still grinning she
typed a response.

Yes.  Am fine.
Thx.  Just not in the area
now.  Will call you soon.

She hit send and watched the
screen confirm transmission.  With a
feeling of growing optimism, she turned the phone off and dropped it back into
her pocket.  Christine smiled back up at
Sarah who was trying to entice a small squirrel with a pine cone.

It was a good day.

32

Zahn sat comfortably in his
oversized seat aboard the Boeing 757, watching the television affixed to the
wall in front of him.  To his right sat
Kia Sarat and behind him nearly two dozen more of his staff.

Zahn watched his boss, the
secretary of state, give a speech on the latest bombings in D.C. and
Philadelphia.  The impassioned speech was
filled with platitudes and empty promises, just as they always were.  Zahn could not think of a more worthless
politician and stopped listening after he heard the fifth promise for justice.  However, even with his disgust, Zahn remained
somewhat elated.  Had it not been for his
boss, all of this would have been significantly harder.

He switched channels to
another program and listened to the anchors discuss the news that the Pope
himself was planning to visit the United States in a couple days as a gesture
of faith and solidarity.  The man and woman
on TV were tripping over themselves to agree on what an important gesture it
was to the US citizenry.

He looked at his watch and
pulled out a small phone he had purchased in Dubai.  He powered it on and waited until he could
turn on the GPS feature.  After a few
minutes, it finally reported them flying just south of Shanghai.

Zahn typed a short text
message on the phone and sent it.  He
then turned to Sarat, who had intentionally cleared his throat after reading a
message off his own phone.

“We’ve received communication
from Rose.  We’re working on their exact
location now,” Sarat reported.

“Well, that wasn’t too
difficult.”  Zahn said, leaning his chair
back a little.

“It was a good idea.”

“It’s time to reign them
in.  Send everyone in the area.  I don’t want another hole for them to slip
through.”

Sarat nodded.

Zahn looked down when the
phone in his hand made a chirping sound, indicating the receipt of a new
message.  He opened the small window and
read it.

Systems
locked and loaded.  Virus in place and
verified.  Bots waiting for command.

Zahn pursed his lips and
nodded approvingly.  He remembered
finding Ron Tran.  Finding someone who
wanted to change the world was difficult enough, but finding someone who also had
the skills to do it, and was a world class hacker, was far more difficult.  So much so that it caused him to consider
whether perhaps fate had somehow intervened.

Zahn was surprised at how
smart Tran had turned out to be after their first meeting.  A little young, but he had a firm grip on what
made the world tick, who benefited, and how the elites would do almost anything
to keep it that way.

Zahn typed a message back.

How
many bots?

Tran’s reply was short.

Almost
7,000,000.

Zahn smiled.  He was not as tech savvy as he would have
liked to be.  Having to immerse himself
deep within the political system in order to pull this off was hard enough, but
Tran made up for it and then some.

In fact, knowing what was
involved, Zahn was a little surprised Tran was able to actually deliver.   Seven million compromised computers, more
than he had promised, waiting for the command to do his bidding.  He was impressed.  Seven million, all standing at the ready to
carry out what was going to be the largest ‘head fake’ in human history.  It was enough to make Zahn grin from ear to
ear.

Sarat watched Zahn’s exchange
with Tran with interest.  Sarat had never
liked Tran.  He was a young kid, or bache,
amongst an entire generation addicted to self-servitude.  But he also knew that Tran was an integral
part of the plan.

Sarat thought of how he and
Tran could not have come from more different experiences.  Tran was raised in a world of gluttonous
technological wonder, while Sarat was raised in the deserts of Afghanistan
trying to survive.  He wondered how Tran would
have turned out after being told since the day he was born, as Sarat and his
friends were, that the Russians had killed their fathers.  To be born and bred for hatred and revenge,
and dream of the day they could strike deep into the heart of the very beast
that had robbed them of ever knowing their own fathers.

In the end though, it was not
just hatred that drove him.  It was also
desire.  Desire to rise from his humble,
even desperate beginnings, to greatness.
He wanted to destroy the monster that had consumed the world and to
become a king in the process.

Zahn ended the text exchange
with a single word and closed the phone.

Begin.

Zahn turned his attention
back to Sarat.  “Continue.”

“Argentina is ready.”

“Excellent.”  It was getting close, he thought.

“Another thing,” Sarat
said.  “Your boss sent you an email
congratulating you on the progress in Dubai.”

Zahn almost laughed.  He wondered how many trips and “talks” he’d
made representing the country in the last several years.  The State Department was the perfect
organization to use.  They had tremendous
clout in Washington, although he always found that rather laughable. They
thought as highly of themselves as almost anyone else in government, and that
was really saying something.  In the end,
Zahn likened the department to an old guard dog that couldn’t see, couldn’t
hear, had no teeth, and just barely could find his food bowl.

Yes, the State Department was
the perfect place from which to justify his many trips to the Mideast and forge
the relationships he needed.  In fact, he
doubted that when it was all over they would even be able to put enough
together to realize the sheer depth of that irony.

“Send him my standard, humble
reply.”  It was virtually too late to
stop anything now, but being thorough, right up until the last minute, was the
smart thing to do.

The television caught their
attention.  They both turned to listen to
another newscaster talk about the Pope’s arrival to New York in two short
days.  The city was working to quickly
put together a reception worthy of the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church.

The news channels spoke at
length about the support the Pope’s visit would provide, but Zahn and Sarat
knew the real reason was to prevent a nationwide panic.

Uninterested, Sarat turned
back to Zahn.  “So, what are we doing
when we get the girl?”

Zahn thought about the
question.  What was so special about that
Baxter girl?  She’d spotted him in front
of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral just moments after the bomb went off.  Why was she staring at him?  There were hundreds of people running in
every direction; smoke and debris were everywhere, and she was staring at
him.  Did she know who he was, or was she
just wondering why he was the only person not running?  Did someone tell her?  The mother admitted nothing before her death,
but someone had to know.  How else would
the girl have known?  He had to find
out.  Until now, his planning and
execution had been perfect, without anyone suspecting a thing.

The easy solution from the
beginning was to just kill the girl.  He
wanted to get rid of her quickly before she could tell anyone else, but now it
had been too long.  She must have told
someone by now, which meant things could still unravel quickly.  The frustration over not knowing how she saw
him was gradually turning into anger.  He
had to know.

“Get her.”  He finally replied to Sarat.

Sarat’s eyes opened showing
his surprise.  “You mean take her alive?”

“If at all possible.  If not, kill her and the woman.”  Zahn’s tone was matter of fact.  He could not take the chance of being
exposed.  Not now.  Not this close.

Sarat nodded without
objection.  What Zahn didn’t know was
that his man Sarat was beginning to have thoughts of his own regarding little
Sarah Baxter.

At that moment, twenty-five
thousand feet below Zahn and in downtown Shanghai, Ron Tran exited another
internet café and walked south toward the Huangpu River.  It had been four days since his visit to the
café in Beijing where he had begun compromising machine after machine and
adding them to his bot network.  The
process had gone viral and was now secretly inserting itself into nearly 50,000
computers per hour and accelerating.

The afternoon was warm and
overcast with an unusually thick curtain of dark pollution.  Sadly, every year China was experiencing more
and more days declared unsafe by their government and was advising citizens to
stay inside.

On that day, many people who
needed to be outside, including Tran, wore a thin surgical mask over their nose
and mouth as they quickly walked from building to building.

Tran could taste the smog
through his white mask, and it made him nauseous.  It was a shining example of how another
government was in the process of killing its own people, as they struggled to
maintain an iron grip on their power base.

Tran covered the last few
blocks and crossed over the large street.
He waited for a long line of cars to pass, then walked along the paved
sidewalk running beside the river.  He
finally stopped at one spot near a restaurant where the water met the pier just
a few feet away.  Tran walked to the edge
and looked down into the small swells lapping at the wooden pillars.  The color of the water was a dull gray.  He shook his head and looked around
casually.  A few people wandered by, but
no one seemed to pay him any attention.

Tran reached into his pocket
and pulled out the phone he had just used to exchange messages with Zahn.  With one quick motion, he tossed it up and
over the rail, watching it splash into the polluted river.  He smirked to himself, realizing that his
sudden act of polluting had just made him part of the problem.

What
the hell, he thought.
Soon it won’t even matter.

33

As the spiritual leader
of over one billion Catholics worldwide, Pope Pius XIV was arguably the most
recognized and influential person on the planet.  As the latest in a line of successors to
Saint Peter, to whom Jesus gave the keys of Heaven, the Pope was also
one of the most protected individuals on that planet.

The level of security
required to ensure his protection at all times was an enormous challenge, one
that fell on the shoulders of Dario Burk, the head of the Pontifical Swiss
Guard, the sole military arm in charge of protecting the Pope since the 15th
century.  Their efforts to protect a
leader who liked to maintain a level of human touch at every turn made their
job far more difficult to deal with than any other security team,
anywhere.  And a sudden public appearance
of the Pope in another country was Burk’s worst kind of problem.

He hung up the phone
with Carolina Flores, the Director of the Secret Service, and leaned back in
his chair.  This was going to be a
nightmare.

Being surrounded by
thousands of people, outdoors in an open area, was bad enough.  But adding several other high ranking political
figures, including the U.S. President, was like pouring fuel on a fire.

On top of it all was
the crisis emerging from the church bombings and the mass hysteria spreading
across the United States.  God forbid
should an attack happen in another country; the panic could go global.  They had to get the Pope in front of this,
but the danger was significant.  The only
possibility was to revert back to more conservative and, frankly, older
tactics.  No one within a twenty meter
perimeter, no touching, and no one within two hundred meters who had not been
patted down.

But even those
precautions barely relieved his anxiety.
Flores assured him there would be spotters and sharp shooters on almost
every rooftop in a six block radius and every item larger than an apple would
be physically examined by weapons inspection teams.  Then there were the Popemobiles with their
bullet-proof Plexiglas and reinforced, armored side panels.  Frankly, to put him into anything less
visible would just add to the fear and nervousness of the public.

Burk looked at the
phone.  It had been his twenty-eighth
call to Flores in just two days.
Everything he and his team could think of had been addressed as well as
it could be, given the compressed timeline.
But Burk knew it wasn’t the things he could think of that worried
him.  It was the things he couldn’t
foresee that kept him up at night.

They had less than
twenty-four hours before they were due to be in the air.  He knew he would not be able to sleep through
any of them.

34

Kim Darlington stood at
the window in her office, looking slightly pale.  Never before had she opened a case for a
missing officer, let alone three.  She
felt sick to her stomach.  Griffin and
Buckley had now been missing for four days, and Cheryl Roberts for three.  And so far, they had no leads.

She looked down at the dark street a few
floors below, and watched the cars and people passing back and forth.  It had to have something to do with that
social worker and the little girl they were protecting.  But how?
They both disappeared shortly after the attack at the safe house,
which meant they could be anywhere.
There was no word from any of them.
No phone records, no credit card activity, and no eye witnesses.  In the end, she hated doing it, but nothing
got people’s attention like an abducted child.

Darlington turned from
the window and stood over her desk.  Her
eyes had just wandered to her laptop screen which had her email program open,
when she noticed a new email had arrived from her FBI friend in Boston.  The one from which the chaplain had asked for
help.

At that moment,
something occurred to her.  Why hadn’t
she thought of that?  She quickly
leaned down and scanned the email before picking up the phone.  The chaplain!

The phone rang several
times before Chaplain Wilcox answered.
“Hello?  This is Douglas
speaking.”

“Hi Chaplain, this is
Kim Darlington.”

“Oh, hi Kim,” he
replied.  “I’m glad you called.  I’m on my way back to the hotel and was
getting ready to call you.”  He sighed on
the other end of the phone.  “I heard
about the investigation.  I’m very
distraught.  Do you have any more
information?”

“I’m afraid not,”
Darlington said, pulling her handset cord with her as she stepped back to the
window. “We’ve got over a hundred officers on it now though.  We’ll find them.”

“Good.”  The chaplain’s voice was low and didn’t sound
very confident.  He had seen enough
missing person’s cases to know if they didn’t have any leads after the first
three days, the odds were not good.
“What can I do?”

“Well, it’s funny you
should ask.  I called for two
reasons.  First, when was the last time
you talked to Cheryl?”

“Let’s see.”  The chaplain stopped to consider.  “I believe it was Tuesday evening.  We met at the library.  She wanted to talk about the bombing at Saint
Patrick’s.”

Darlington
frowned.  “Why did she want to talk about
Saint Patrick’s?”

“She said she thought
there may have been a connection with one of her cases, the one with the little
girl.”

Darlington froze.  The Baxter girl!  “What did she say?”

“Mmm…we didn’t really
get that far.  She said they had a girl
and her social worker in protective custody and someone was chasing them,”
Wilcox said.  “We were supposed to talk again
the next day.”

Darlington sat down in
her chair and rested an elbow on her desk.
“How was her case connected to the explosion?”

“That I’m afraid I
don’t know,” the chaplain replied.  “And
I don’t think she knew either.”

Darlington remained
still, listening and thinking.  She
twirled a strand of her thick, curly hair and leaned back.  If Roberts thought the bombing was
related, and she was working the Baxter case with Griffin and Buckley, then the
bombing may very well be a link to their disappearance.  But what was it?  What had Roberts learned?

Darlington
frowned.  She just didn’t have enough
yet.  She took a deep breath and changed
the subject.  “Okay, well listen, I just
got some information back from my friend in Boston.  Are you ready?”

“Yes, of course.”

Darlington looked back
at her computer screen and the email.
“She didn’t have much, but what she did have may leave you with more
questions than answers.  The man’s name
is Aaron Bazes.  He’s from Israel and,
you’re right, he has one serious security clearance.  In fact, he’s got an ambassador level
passport which means he pretty much comes and goes as he pleases.”

“Wow,” the chaplain
replied through the phone’s earpiece.

“That’s not all.  My friend says his passport has a special
flag on it.  She says that if it’s
scanned by anyone, it says ‘not to be delayed or detained.’”

“Delayed or detained,”
Wilcox repeated.  “I’ve never heard of
that before.”

“Neither have I.”

“So what else did she
find on him?” he asked.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?  What do you mean?”

Darlington shook her
head.  “I mean that’s it.  That’s all she could get.  A name, picture, his country and
clearance.  She has a physical
description, but you already know what he looks like.”

“Wow,” the chaplain
said again.  “That’s not a lot.  He’s from Israel and can go wherever he
wants.”  His voice disappeared for a
moment while he mulled it over.  “So,
what was he doing poking around the bomb sites?”

“You got me,”
Darlington said.

“Hmm…”  He realized that Kim was right.  He did have more questions than answers.  “Okay, I’ll have to think on this a bit.  I was hoping for more.”

“Sorry Padre.”  Another light on her phone lit up, and she
looked at the number.  “I’m sorry Padre,
I’m getting another call.  I’ll call you
when I have more.”

“Okay, no
problem.”

Darlington clicked over
to the other line.  “This is Kim.”

“Hi Kim, I have a call
coming in.  From a Mike Ramirez.”

Darlington recognized
the name of the computer forensics expert that had come to see her.  “Okay, put him through please.”  She waited for the line to transfer before
answering.  “Kim Darlington speaking.”

“Hello Ms. Darlington,
this is Mike Ramirez.  We met a couple
days ago when I came in.”

“Yes, I remember.”

Mike cleared his
voice.  “I wanted to call and tell you
about something.”

“Okay,” Darlington
said.

“So, I was telling you
that I hadn’t heard from Detectives Griffin or Buckley.”

Darlington leaned
forward on her desk.  “Correct.”

“Right, well I saw your
announcement tonight on the news, about your investigation, and I think there’s
something odd here,”  Ramirez explained.

She raised an eyebrow.  “What is that?”

“So,” Ramirez
continued, “the other day when I got back to my office, after speaking with
you, I wrote a small program.  I was
thinking I could create an app that would periodically parse through the server
logs and search against their phone numbers and, if it found anything, to email
me.”

Darlington perked
up.  “Did you find something?”

“I believe so,” Ramirez
answered.  “I got an email not too long
ago.”

“What did it say?”
asked Darlington, now eagerly leaning into the phone.

“It shows Detective
Griffin’s phone connected briefly to a cell tower, which means if it was turned
off before, then it was just turned on.”

Darlington suddenly
stood up.  “You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.”  Ramirez was staring at his screen on the
other end of the phone.  “I’m guessing it
was turned on for about six or seven minutes before it was turned off again.”

“Where?  Can you tell where they are?!” Darlington
almost yelled into the phone.

Ramirez was expecting
this as her first question.  “Well, I can
tell you what tower they connected to, but unfortunately I can’t pinpoint their
location.”

Darlington’s heart was
racing.  “That’s a start.”

“Maybe,” replied
Ramirez.

“What do you mean
maybe?”

“They were connected to
the tower for several minutes, but the weird part is where the tower was
located.”

Darlington squinted her
eyes.  “Where was the tower
located?”

Ramirez had checked his
data three times.  He had to be sure
about this.  “China.”

“China?”  She hoped she hadn’t heard him right.

“China,” he
confirmed.  “And it gets stranger.  His phone was turned on, sent and received a
text message, and then turned right back off.”

35

Sarah sat patiently on
Christine’s lap as Christine brushed her wet hair.  Avery was straightening their bed atop the
large sofa while Rand stood near the kitchen window, looking outside into the
forest.  He turned and looked at Sarah
with her blond hair combed straight down, then calmly returned his gaze to the
window.

Avery patted the
blankets and stood up.

“Sarah, would you be okay out here if I took a
quick shower?” Christine asked, peering around the side of her tiny
shoulder.

“Sure.”

She set the brush down
and began to stand up when Sarah whispered into Christine’s ear.  Christine looked at Avery then back to
her.

“I don’t know,” she
whispered back.  “Ask him.”

Still shy, Sarah looked
at Avery who was watching her with interest.
After appearing to contemplate something, she slowly walked across the
room to him.  Avery bent down slightly as
she approached.

“Can we please play checkers
again?” she asked.

Avery gave her a hard
stare which turned into a soft grin.  “Do
you promise to take it easy on me?”

Sarah smiled.  “Yes.”

Avery straightened with
a satisfied look and motioned to the small table in the kitchen.  “Do you remember how to set it up?”

Sarah smiled and
trotted over to a shelf and retrieved the game, then began laying it out on the
table in front of Rand who was watching her with a grin.  Christine had noticed that Rand’s stone like
expression softened when he watched Sarah.

Christine looked at
Rand and Avery.  “That okay?”

They both nodded.  “I got the things you asked for and left them
in the bathroom.” Avery said.

Christine opened her
other eye and then carefully handed the .40 caliber Springfield back to
Rand.  “How was that?”

“Good, but remember to
keep your shoulders more forward.”

“It’s a lot to
remember,” she said with a frown.

Rand took the gun,
smoothly replaced the magazine, and slid it back into his holster without
looking.

“I think I’m just going
to need a lot more practice.”

“We don’t have much
time,” he replied.

Christine gave him a
hopeful look.  “Maybe whoever was doing
this is gone.  Maybe he was one of the
men that you killed.”

He shook his head.  “It hasn’t happened yet.”

“What, what hasn’t
happened?”

Rand squinted and
peered out over the field.  “I don’t know
exactly.  But it’s coming.  And I must be there.”

“And what if you’re
not?”

He turned and looked at
Christine solemnly.  “Then I fail.  I fail her, and I fail him.  I fail everyone.”

Christine took a deep
breath.  She had wanted to say something
for a while.  “Listen, I have to admit
I’m still struggling with this.  I mean
God and this constant battle of good and evil; it’s a little hard to imagine.”

Rand stared at
her.  “Do you believe in God?”

“Of course I do.”

“Do you believe he
cares for you?”

Christine nodded.  “I do.”

“And do you believe
evil is real?”

“You mean like Satan
and demons, that sort of thing?”

“If that helps.”

She sighed and folded
her arms.  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Then why is it such a
leap?  If you can believe that he created
you, why are you unable to believe that he also fights for you?”

“I don’t know,” she
said with a shrug.  “I guess that’s just
not how I learned it.”

“You learned
wrong,”  Rand replied, reaching down to
pick up his AR-15 assault rifle.  He
turned it over and checked the chamber.

“What’s that supposed
to mean, ‘I learned wrong’?”

“The religious teachings that most people
believe in today are far from the truth.
The Bible was not intended to be a book of interpretation.  Interpretation and time are the enemies of
truth.  What you have today is a version
of the Bible that has been twisted so many times that it can now be used to
vindicate almost anything.  It’s no
longer the true word of God.”

Christine tilted her
head, her arms still folded.  “Then what is
the truth?” she asked.

He began turning away
but then stopped abruptly and looked at her.
“The truth?  The truth is that
your God fights for all of you, for all of his children, and he’s losing!”

Christine stepped
back.  “Losing?  I thought he was all powerful.”

“He is.  But evil is far stronger than anyone
believes.  They’ve successfully led you
all down a road of sloth and apathy, a path you are all too eager to travel.  Even your churches have strayed.  They have compromised for little more than to
guarantee their tithe, and now even they struggle to fill their seats.  The number of God’s children who still speak
to him is diminishing.”  Rand looked away
with a look of disgust on his face.  “He
fights for you, but who fights for him?
I mean really fights!”

Christine frowned and
looked out over the open field in front of them.  Another thick wall of trees stood behind them
and separated the pair from the cabin.
“Maybe it’s the suffering,” she said.
“Maybe it’s the pain of watching terrible things happen in this world,
like millions of innocent people being wiped out by horrible dictators, or
thousands of children being molested and ruined for life.  Or maybe it’s the countless people wasting
away, dying of cancer right in front of the ones who love them most.”  She looked back at him.  “I think it can be easy for people to lose
faith when they see things like that every day.”

“That may be true,”
Rand replied, slinging the rifle over his shoulder.  “Except for one thing.”

Christine looked at him
expectantly.

“Those are not God’s
decisions or choices.  He’s not the one
making those things happen.  It’s
them.  God is the one trying to stop it.  He has a plan, but he’s losing the
fight.  He’s losing the fight, because he’s
losing his children.”

Rand began walking back
when Christine called after him.
“Rand.”

He turned back to face
her.

“If he chose me,” she
said with a solemn expression, “then I’ll fight.”

The sun finally dropped
behind the mountains as Christine and Rand walked in through the front door to
find Avery and Sarah making dinner in the small kitchen.  Sarah stood beside him on a folding stool,
reaching almost to his shoulder.  She was
looking inside a large pot and had dropped the dried pasta in  just as Christine cleared her voice.

Sarah looked up and
climbed down the stool to run over.

“What are you doing?”
Christine asked with a smile.

“I’m helping Avery
cook,” she explained.  “We’re making
pasta.”

Avery smiled from his
spot next to the stove.  “She likes to
cook too.”

“Wow.” She looked down
as Sarah hugged her.  “That’s very
impressive.”

Sarah looked up at
Christine and then over to Rand.  “Dinner
is going to be ready in ten minutes,” she said.

“Twenty minutes,”
corrected Avery.

“Dinner’s going to be
ready in twenty minutes!”

Christine laughed while
Rand smiled.  They watched Sarah run back
into the kitchen.

“She’s a great kid,”
Christine said.

“Indeed.”

Over her shoulder,
Christine realized the TV was still on in the other room.  She walked over to it and grabbed the remote
control, trying to turn it off, but accidentally hit the wrong button which
changed the channel instead.

Two news anchors
instantly filled the screen, talking about the first New York church
bombing.  But it was what Christine saw
on the screen next, and more specifically what was pictured at the top, that
caused her to freeze.  Pictured on the
screen were headshots of three people she knew!

“...Griffin, Michael
Buckley, and Cheryl Roberts, all officers from downtown’s 19th
Precinct have been confirmed missing for three days.  The statement was issued today by the
precinct’s Deputy Inspector Kim Darlington.”

Christine gasped and
turned around to face Rand as the anchor continued on the screen.

“The department
reported that there are no leads as of yet, but confirmed the three officers
were working together on a case involving a woman and child.”

“Oh my god!” Christine
took a step back and placed a hand on her chest after pictures of her and Sarah
also appeared on the television screen.

“Police say the
woman, Christine Rose, may have abducted the girl who was at the time under
police custody…”

“No!” Christine
cried.  “No!  You’ve got to be kidding!  I’m WANTED?!
What the hel-”  She turned to look
at Rand again and found that Avery was now standing next to him, peering at the
screen too.

“…ask that if anyone
has any information that they call the number below…”

Christine leaned
forward and turned the sound down just as Sarah grabbed her hand.

“Those are the men who
helped us at the hide house,” she said.

Christine was staring
at the screen, speechless.

“Aren’t they?”  Sarah asked expectantly.

Christine nodded.  “Yes.”

Sarah studied Christine
and spoke softer. “Did something happen to them?”

Christine looked at
Rand and Avery again and then finally down to Sarah.  “Maybe.”

“Did the red ones get
them?”

Christine covered her
mouth with her other hand as her eyes began to fill with tears.

“It’s only begun.”  Rand said quietly.

Christine took a few
steps and collapsed down onto the couch.
Still holding her hand, Sarah silently climbed onto Christine’s
lap.  She tried to wrap her other tiny
arm around her.

“My god, what’s
happening?”  Christine cried out through
her tears.

Both men looked at her
quietly, and Rand took a step forward.
“It’s okay; we’re safe here for now.”

Christine blinked and
suddenly looked up at Rand with a frightened expression.  “Oh my god!
Danny!”  She pointed to the
screen.  “Danny!”

“What?”

“Oh no!  Oh no!”
she said, feeling a sickening sensation spreading through her gut.  “We’re in trouble.”

Rand and Avery looked
at each other.  “What do you mean?”

She abruptly stood up,
still holding onto Sarah.  “He texted
me.  HE TEXTED ME!”

Neither of the men were
following.  Christine took a deep breath
and tried to slow down.  “He texted
me.  Danny.  Yesterday.
I accidentally turned my phone on, and a text from Danny came through.”

Rand and Avery’s eyes
widened.  “What did you do?”

Her face filled with
guilt.  “I replied.”

Rand raised his
voice.  “You did what?”

“I’m sorry,” Christine
cried.  “I didn’t know.  I just told him that I was fine and would
contact him later.”

Rand instantly had his
gun in his hand without Christine even having seen it drawn.  He turned to Avery just as all the lights
went out, and the cabin was plunged into darkness.

36

Avery’s silhouette ran
to the wall and opened the panel, revealing the security system and all of the
sensors around the perimeter of the cabin.
All the lights were red.

“We have company.”

In the darkness, Rand
reached under a bookshelf near the television, pulled out several magazines,
and stuffed them into his pocket.

“Get them in the back,”
his voice said in the darkness.  Avery
had already grabbed both Sarah and Christine and was rushing them down the dark
hallway.

Outside, over two dozen
dark figures spread out in a perfect circle, were closing in on the cabin.  Their progress was slow and methodical as
they took small, quiet steps through the grass.

Murad Sarat led the
team forward.  Unfortunately, cutting the
power and warning whoever was inside was unavoidable.  They needed to sever all forms of
communication, including what might be powering any transmissions.  He held up his hand and gave the signal to
lower their night vision goggles, a signal that was passed around the circle to
everyone almost simultaneously.

Rand waited
quietly.  He needed them closer, a lot
closer, or they would see him.  He felt
the familiar surge of warm blood course through him.  He waited, eyes closed, listening to the soft
steps through the grass.

Murad and his team
slowed even more as they neared the structure.
He was near the front and gave a ‘stop’ signal as he and another of his
men approached the first step of the wooden porch.  They both aimed their rifles and scanned the
entire porch carefully.  They couldn’t
hear anything moving inside, just the warm breeze behind them.

He unclenched his fist
and gave the signal to move in just as Rand’s feet left the roof, near the back
of the cabin.  He came down hard,
crushing one of the dark figures below him into the ground.  In a flash he was up, pulling the unconscious
figure back onto his feet as a shield to block the gunfire that immediately
erupted from the side.

Rand turned to his
right and simultaneously fired his Springfield, dropping three men
immediately.  Without any hesitation, he
wrapped his right hand around his dead shield and fired, killing two more
attackers with two shots each to their neck and face, the only vital areas not
protected by armor.

Even through the
gunfire, Murad’s men did not scatter or break position.  Instead, they all flattened themselves
against the outside walls of the house.
The two nearest to the shots on each side instantly teamed up and inched
themselves slowly toward the back, while Murad and the others held their
position.

The four men quietly
approached the back and spotted bodies on the ground, but all were
motionless.  Each two man team scanned up
the exterior wall and along the roofline. Finding nothing, they turned back to
the bodies.  Still no movement.

The four men then
turned their attention to the small back porch and closed in.  The old door had been boarded up.  What they hadn’t examined closely enough,
however, was that one of the bodies on the ground was not bleeding.

Murad heard several
more shots and froze again.  What the
hell was happening?  He wasn’t going to
wait outside forever while someone picked them all off.  He quickly gave the signal and all of his
men rushed into the house.  He and two
others stormed the front porch firing several shots into the front door as they
barreled inside.  On the sides of the
house, three windows were smashed as the rest of Murad’s team hurled themselves
inside.

Rand heard the smashing
windows from the rear of the house.  He
replaced his magazine and stepped over one of the bodies.  He heard movement behind him and turned back
toward the trees to see seven more muzzle flashes appear from the
darkness.  Dirt and wood exploded around
him as the bullets tore through the ground and into the wood planking of the
house.   Already running, Rand fired
several shots into the trees and bolted up the steps, smashing through the old
boarded door.

He stumbled inside,
past the door now hanging from one remaining hinge and around a corner just as
hundreds of rounds destroyed the porch and door frame behind him.   Rand unslung his rifle in one smooth motion
and, in complete darkness, fired a volley down the long hallway heading forward
to the living room.  He ducked back out
of the way and slammed his fist several times against a large, blank wall.  A moment later, a thick, hidden door opened
with Avery behind it.  He grabbed Rand,
yanked him inside, and pulled the door closed behind him.  Once the thick door was closed, Avery slid a
giant bolt lock back into place.

Through the dim light
inside, Rand could see Christine and Sarah huddled in the middle of the empty
room.

“There’s too many,” he
whispered to Avery.  “We can’t get out.”

Christine stared at him
with a look of determination.  “We have
to do something!”

“Well, I’m fairly
certain negotiating is out,” Rand said, withdrawing another magazine from his
pocket and slapping it into the bottom of the rifle.  The movement was so fluid that Christine was
not entirely sure what he had done.

“Is there another way
out?” she asked, trying to keep her voice down.

“No.”

“So we’re screwed?” she
yelled under her breath.

They could hear someone
on the outside tapping their rifles along the wall, looking for the latch.  A moment later it was joined by what sounded
like two more rifles.

They all sat silently
as the men outside found the hidden latch and began trying to pry it open.

“Oh god!” Christine
whispered, as she watched the large bolt on the door begin to wiggle.

“They won’t get in,”
Avery replied calmly.  “This room is lined
with two inches of solid steel.”

Christine rolled her
eyes.  “Wonderful, but unless you have a
bathroom and a hell of a lot of food, we eventually have to come out.”

She pulled Sarah in
tight and watched both men in frustration as they sat listening to the sounds
outside.  The giant bolt had stopped
moving and now the sounds were spreading around the room while Murad’s men
examined all sides, looking for a sound of weakness in the wall and a way in.  Then, all at once the tapping stopped, and
some shuffling could be heard on the other side of the door.

Christine jumped when
she heard three shots hit the other side of the wall with a loud thunk thunk
thunk.

She looked worriedly at
Rand.  “They’re going to shoot their way
in!”

Rand looked at
Avery.  “Checkmate.”

Avery nodded.  “They’re on all sides now.”

Rand slowly stood up
and looked down at Christine and Sarah.
“Both of you lay down on your stomachs.”

Oh my god!  They going to try to shoot their way out!  Christine thought to herself as she let Sarah
pull away and slide down onto the floor.
Nervously, Christine lowered herself down next to her, while Sarah
watched both men curiously.

Rand nodded silently to
Avery who nodded back.  With that, Rand
turned and pushed on a small area of the wall causing a door to pop open.  He pulled the small door all the way back
revealing a single, large button.  He
looked down at the girls and, without pausing, he smashed his palm against it.

Murad lined up several
of his men and instructed them to fire at the door where he believed the lock
to be located on the other side.  He
wanted them to fire into the same spot, from the same angle, and to use a hail
of bullets to drive a hole through the door.

What he did not hear,
however, was the strange sound coming from out in front of the house, as the
old bird bath tipped over and fell to the ground.  Nor did he realize, a second bird bath was
located behind the house which fell over at the same time.

Below the ground and
from where the broken statues had stood, something large and black rose up from
below.  The two objects were both M134
Miniguns, each electrically driven with six Gatling-style barrels that were
capable of firing 4,000 rounds per minute.
Both were connected to a large belt of ammo and sat atop an auto rotating
platform.

Inside the small room,
Rand and Avery fell to the floor and covered both Sarah and Christine with
their bodies.  Rand above Sarah, and
Avery covering Christine.

In less than a second,
a small, red light on each gun changed to green, and the miniguns opened fire
directly at the cabin from both ends.
Instantly, the powerful 7.62mm bullets ripped through and began
shredding everything in the house like tissue paper.  As the screaming barrels spun, both guns
rotated back and forth within a thirty degree angle, covering the entire
structure.

Rand brought his arms
and legs in tight, protecting every inch of Sarah’s small body.  All around them, the bullets tore through
Murad’s men and slammed into the thick steel walls, causing large dents to appear
on the inside.  Some dents grew larger as
bullets hit the same spot, but Rand and Avery kept their heads down and
remained motionless.

In the front of the
cabin, the support beams gave way and the roof collapsed onto the porch.  The weight and impact pulled down even more
of the roof, exposing what was left of the front living room and kitchen areas.

The noise inside their
tiny room was deafening as the giant dents continued appearing on the walls
inside, but no one moved.  The men held
them both tight until, after an agonizingly long two minutes, the guns ran
through their ammo belts and spun to a stop with smoke rising from the black
gun barrels.

The terrible noise
ended as quickly as it began.  Rand and
Avery did not move immediately.  Instead,
they waited and then slowly looked up around them.  The walls held.

“Stay down,” Rand
whispered as he got to his feet.  He
grabbed the AR-15 and checked the chamber.
Behind him, Avery picked up a second rifle and knelt down on one knee in
front of the girls.  He held his gun
ready and pointed at the door.

Rand slowly slid the
bolt lock open, surprised that it still moved smoothly.  He gently pushed the door open and peered
through the open crack.  After a moment,
he turned to Avery.  “I’ll be right
back.”

Several minutes went by
before three shots were heard in the distance, followed by silence.  It was another ten minutes before Rand
stepped over Murad’s men and poked his head back in.

Avery stood as Rand
stepped into the room and put his hand on Christine’s back.  “You can both get up.  It’s safe.”

Christine and Sarah
looked up and around the room, and then gradually got to their feet.  “Okay,” Christine quietly.  “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“We have to go.”  Rand looked down.  “Will you come with me, Sarah?”

Without any hesitation,
Sarah walked into his arms and he picked her up.  She wrapped her arms around his thick
neck.  “I’m not scared with you,” she
said.

Rand smiled at
her.  “Good.”  He gave her a gentle pat on her head.  “Now, I need you to close your eyes, okay?”

Rand looked at
Christine.  “You might want to do the
same.”

37

Their
eyes were closed tight, and Christine tried not to think about what they might
be stepping over as Rand and Avery led them out.  After they stepped over the last obstacle,
she could feel the chill of the evening on her face followed by the tall, soft
grass brushing against her shins and knees.

After
a long pause, Rand gave the okay and she and Sarah both opened their eyes and
looked around.  With a little moonlight
through the clouds, they could just make out the shape of the dark and eerily
shaped cabin they had left behind.

Rand
lowered Sarah to the ground and unslung the Bushmaster rifle.  He held it in both hands and scanned behind
them, while Avery walked to a nearby tree and rolled a large boulder to the
side.  He reached down and silently
pulled up a handle to a door hidden underneath the thick layer of pine needles,
then reached further down and retrieved a large dark object.  When he returned, Christine could see it was
a giant duffle bag and, judging from Avery’s posture, a heavy one.

They
walked over a half mile to reach the car, kept in a small building painted a
combination of earth tones, which Christine assumed was a mountain version of
‘camouflage’.

The 1969 Dodge Charger
R/T was considered by many one of the toughest cars ever made.  Cranking out an astounding 425 horses, the
426 Hemi engine weighed nearly half a ton.
Furthermore, unlike modern cars, the R/T was made of strong steel and
could take a real beating if it had to, especially with some modifications.

Christine rested her
head against the copper colored vinyl in the back seat with Sarah asleep in her
lap.  An hour after they left, Rand
killed the headlights and pulled off the empty road onto a smaller dirt
one.  He slowly rolled beneath the
outskirts of a small forest, coming to rest under a thick canopy.

When he turned off the
car, the sudden silence from the engine’s absence was almost deafening.

Avery opened the
passenger door and stepped out.  “I’m
going to scout.”  He grabbed the 12 gauge
tactical shotgun from off the floor and carefully shut the door as quietly as
possible.  As he walked away, Christine
heard him work the slide action of the shotgun to chamber a shell.

Rand remained in the front
seat, keys still in the ignition, watching the darkness around them.

After several long
minutes, Christine broke the silence with a whisper.

“Rand?”

He turned his head
sideways, viewing her from the corner of his eye.

“Can I ask you a
question?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you grow
up?”

He furrowed his
brow.  “Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering
what your life was like,” she said softly.
“Are your parents still alive?”

Rand took a deep breath
and exhaled, turning his head forward again.
“No.  I was an orphan.”

Christine’s eyes
saddened in the back seat.

“We’re always orphans,”
he added.

“Always?”

He nodded.  “It makes it easier to focus.  Emotionally.”

“Did you have parents?”

“Foster parents,
yes.”  Rand could still see the image of
his foster mother’s gentle, round face in his mind.  She was older, in her late fifties by the
time he left.  She was kind and gentle,
as was the father, and their relationship was caring and…polite.

“Did they know?” asked
Christine.  “You know, about you?”

Rand almost chuckled.  “Yes, they knew.  Not many kids have scratches that begin to
heal before they even get the band-aid out.”

Christine watched him
as his thoughts turned inward.

“And school was a
distraction,” he continued.  “I did it
primarily to blend in.”

“Did you ever tell
them, your parents?”

“I did.  When I was a teenager.”  He still remembered it vividly.  “They were devout Christians which helped.  In the end, I think they were secretly
relieved.  It explained why all I ever
asked for was more exercise equipment.”

Christine nodded but
couldn’t quite bring herself to smile.
“Did you ever have fun?”

“There were times of
happiness, but probably not what you would consider fun.  I’m not here to have fun.”

Christine rolled her
head to the side and looked out her small triangular window.  She felt a pang in her heart when he said
that.  What a lonely life he must have
had.  After a while she looked back.  “Can I ask you something else?”

As Rand turned his head
sideways again, she could see some of his eyelashes highlighted by the
moonlight reflecting off the hood.

“If we’ve really lost
our way, like you said, why would you want to become one of us?”

He thought about the
question.  “I can see why he loves you so
much.  You are capable of so much, more
than you even know.  Your connection to
the world around you is almost limitless.
Just look at your artists and your musicians.  So many of you can connect with the world in
ways that we never will.  You are so much
more like him than you know.”  He
paused.  “There is nothing you cannot do,
if you can just get beyond your weaknesses.”

She stared at him
quietly.  “What kind of weaknesses?”

“You’re drawn too much
to pleasure.  It’s what they use against
you.”

“They?”

“Those from the
darkness.  The Evil.”

She was quiet again,
thinking about everything that had happened.
“Do you think Danny and the other officers are okay?”

His gaze dropped.  He couldn’t lie to her.  “No, Christine, I don’t.  I’m sorry.”

In the back seat, she
nodded and looked back out the window.
Through the rearview mirror, Rand could see the tears glistening in her
eyes.

“Rand?” she asked with
a shaking voice.

“Yes?”

Christine spoke before
the lump in her throat stopped her.  “Is
there a heaven?”

This time he turned and
looked back at her.  “Yes.  There is a heaven.”

She wiped the tears
away and tried to grin.

“It’s not what most
people think, but it’s a good place.”

“What do you mean?”

This time he smiled at
her.  “Well, you don’t fly around and eat
whatever you want.”

She saw his smile and
couldn’t help but chuckle.  “I guess
that’s a bit much to ask, isn’t it?”

As he turned to watch
out the front window again, the smile slowly faded from his face.

Behind him, Christine
nestled against the door trying not to wake up Sarah.  They were both quiet for a long time before
she broke the silence yet again.

“One more question?”

She asked a lot of
questions.  Rand turned back again.  “You should really try to get some sleep.”

“I will,” she
promised.  “After this.”

“Okay, what?”

“Avery.”  She turned her head back to the window,
looking out and in the direction he had left.
“He’s one of you isn’t he?”

Rand didn’t answer
immediately.  “Yes.”

“He was a soldier too?”

“Yes.”  Rand turned his head toward her again.  “Each soldier helps the next.  If he can.”

“What was he here to
do?”  Christine asked.

Rand let the side of
his head fall gently against the headrest.
“It was during World War II.  The
Germans were trying to build a nuclear weapon, but they needed an important element,
something called “heavy water”.  It’s
required to produce Plutonium.  There was
a fertilizer plant in Norway that produced heavy water, and the Germans
eventually captured it.  They extracted
enough to ship back to Germany.  On the
way back, a single commando was able to fight through the German occupation,
reach the boat, and sink it.”  He
paused.  “Avery was that man.”

Christine was
stunned.  “What would have happened?”

“If he hadn’t destroyed
it?”  Rand finished her question.  “The Germans would have developed the first
atomic bomb, in time to avoid Berlin being taken.  They would have vaporized much of the British
and American alliance and scared the Russians enough to withdraw
temporarily.  Germany’s second and third atomic
bombs would have achieved a surrender by enough countries to break the back of
the Allies, and Hitler would have won.”

“Oh my god.”

“They thought they were
going to win.”  Rand said and looked
outside.  “But God sent Avery.”

38

Stuxnet was the
scariest computer virus most of the world had never heard of.  When it was first detected in 2010, it was
mistaken for a common, run of the mill virus; it was not until experts started
to dissect its computer code that it became deeply frightening.

The very first computer
virus was little more than a friendly prank when, in 1982, a young 15-year-old
kid played a trick on his friends by writing a tiny computer program that could
pass between Apple II computers via floppy disk.  It then displayed a funny message every fifty
times the computer booted up.

Later that year, a
graduate student at the University of Southern California by the name of Fred
Cohen demonstrated his computer code, running on a giant UNIX mainframe, which
allowed him to take over the entire system within 30 minutes.

However, it was not until 1986 that the first self-replicating
virus was spotted in “the wild”.  It was
a small piece of computer code written by two Pakistani brothers, whose purpose
was to guilt users of a non-copyrighted program into contacting them to obtain the
“vaccination” and to undoubtedly pay up.

Since then, viruses had quickly grown in both frequency
and sophistication, giving birth to a multi-billion dollar industry dedicated
solely to fighting computer viruses and “worms”.  Yet, the damage inflicted with most of these
modern viruses was mild, usually ranging from deleting data to collecting
personal information.  But in 2010,
Stuxnet changed everything.

Originally flagged as a common worm, engineers at a
large anti-virus corporation spotted and categorized Stuxnet’s software
characteristics as something called “malware”.
Their job was to study it and find a way to clean the worm so the
corporation’s anti-malware programs could
defend against it.

Yet the study of this particular worm was unusual from
the very beginning.  One unique characteristic
was how it propagated or traveled from machine to machine, which was
primarily by detachable memory sticks called flash drives.  Another oddity was the size of the program,
which was much larger than usual.

The mystery deepened as the layers of the code were
seemingly peeled back, and the worm appeared to grow more and more complex,
using multiple programming languages including C and C++.  The mystery deepened further still when the
worm was found to take advantage of four different computer vulnerabilities,
called zero-day attacks, while other viruses and worms used only one.

But when the encryption
certificates were stolen from two separate and well known corporations, the
investigating engineers knew Stuxnet was much more than a simple worm.  It was too complicated and far too
sophisticated to have been created by kids in high school or college students
hyped up on Mountain Dew.  The level of
expertise and funding needed to create something like Stuxnet meant it had to
have happened at the corporate or state level.

Yet, the largest
mystery of all was how it behaved.
Most viruses and worms were designed to infect and act upon as many
computers and systems as possible.  But
Stuxnet was different.  Stuxnet wanted to
spread, but once it did, the program would essentially “look around” and
determine what kind of computer it was on, then disable itself.  This was extremely odd and told the engineers
that Stuxnet was not looking for just any computer system; it was looking for a
very specific computer system.

Rumors began to spread
across the internet since the majority of Stuxnet infections were in the
middle-eastern countries, such as Iraq and Iran.  It did not take long for some experts to
suggest the program was created to target one of those two countries.

Finally, when the worm
gave up the last of its secrets, it became clear what it was after.  Stuxnet was looking for a very unique
computer environment, one that was used for refining nuclear material.

When Stuxnet found the
system it was looking for, what it did was revolutionary.  The process for refining uranium is extremely
delicate and time consuming.  What
Stuxnet did was change the spin of the centrifuges just enough to render the
material unusable, but it would do so while it told the computer’s monitoring
system the process was running smoothly.
This meant that Stuxnet was able to sabotage the process without anyone
noticing.

When this behavior
became known, many intelligence specialists believed the creator of the worm
was Israel.  Not surprisingly, just a few
months after the computer industry learned of Stuxnet, the country of Iran
confirmed that it’s enrichment facility had indeed been infected.  Intelligence experts surmised the
cyber-attack likely set Iran back one to two years in their enrichment efforts.
And soon after, the creator of Stuxnet was actually found to be the United
States.

In the end, Stuxnet
changed history in one very remarkable way; up until then, cyber-attacks
remained anchored in cyberspace, a virtual world made only of computer bytes
and silicon chips.  What made Stuxnet
truly frightening, was that for the first time, a virus or worm within
cyberspace, had been able to jump the virtual barrier and create real physical
damage.  In other words, it was the first
virtual world weapon to cause real damage in the physical world.

Ron Tran sat in front
of a large monitor in yet another computer gaming cafe.  He was again surrounded by teenagers and
young adults glued to their own screens, weaving in and out of dark rooms, shooting
at someone who often sat in another part of the world, in front of their own
screen.

Some of the “gamers”
had even pushed themselves past the absolute limit by playing for almost 96
hours straight, fueled by nothing more than soda and junk food, only to pay the
ultimate price by collapsing dead onto the floor.  But the deaths did not deter the rest.  Their addiction was total.

Just like before, it
provided the perfect cover for Ron, since no one ever managed to look away from
their own screens to observe what he was doing.

He now had almost ten
million infected computers waiting for his command.  Tran triple checked the details in his window
before hitting the Enter key.  This was
it.  There was no turning back after
this.  But he was ready and had been for
over a year.

He purposefully hit the
Enter key with his forefinger and watched the letters scroll slowly in the
window, showing the command was being sent to all bots in a daisy chain.  They were being loaded with all the computer
network addresses of their intended targets.
Phase One had begun, and when all of the bots had received their data,
they would wait for the next command, or Phase Two.

Tran looked around at
the crowded room of gamers.  They were
the personification of the world around him.
Bright but completely under the spell of an electronic drug that turned
them into cattle.  It was complete
sensory addiction.

These kids spent
thousands and thousands of hours every year playing the latest games.  When they finished or got bored with one,
there was always another waiting for them.
Tran thought about his last two years, spent in front of a monitor for a
very different reason.  He was
collaborating with dozens of other secret hackers, all having no idea what each
other looked like, yet working for a common goal.  It had not been hard convincing them, since
many shared his anti-government, anti-greed views, but he still kept them
segregated and working on smaller pieces of code.  Tran had divvied up the job to ensure none of
the others knew what the final virus would do.
Of course, some already had relationships with each other and probably
talked, but they would need many pieces of the puzzle to really know what it
would do.  Frankly, some of them did not
even care.  They knew Tran’s reputation
and were excited to have a hand in changing a horribly corrupt system.

Tran logged out of his
computer session and removed the DVD.  He
stood up and took one last look at the screen. Stuxnet was nothing, he
thought.  They had taken its original
design and framework and created something truly incredible.  In fact, they were about to show the entire
world the original Stuxnet was child’s play.

39

Zahn was furious.  “No contact?
How in the hell did we lose contact?!
How many did you send?”

“Thirty,” Sarat said
quietly.  “Led by Murad.”

Zahn closed his eyes
and put his hand over his face.  Murad
was one of the best they had.  He was
ruthless and a natural warrior.  By
comparison, Murad considered the Taliban and Al Qaeda to be nothing more than
sloppy, religious zealots.  If you wanted
to affect real change, you did it from within.
Murad was as committed as anyone, but worst of all, he was Kia’s
brother.

“How long has it been?”
asked Zahn.

“Almost six hours.”

There was only one
conclusion to be drawn.  The girl and the
woman were not alone.  They had help, a
lot of help.  Zahn let his anger go.  He had to think about this.  He didn’t know who or how many others were
involved, but the girl clearly had talked!
Time was growing short, yet it was still possible for things to unravel,
and quickly.  He couldn’t take any
chances.

“Get me their last
coordinates,” Zahn said.   He reached for
the phone and picked it up.  There was no
one on the other end at this hour, so the phone automatically forwarded to one
of his staff at home.

“It’s me,” he said when
she picked up the other end.  “I need to
talk to Benecke at Homeland Security right now.”  Zahn hung up and looked back at Sarat.

“Do we go after
them?”  Sarat asked.

“No, god no,” said
Zahn.  “They’re most likely all
dead.”  He saw Sarat visibly flinch, but
it had to be said.  “They could have driven
all the way back by now!”  He looked at
his watch.  “Christ, they could have done
it without even breaking the speed limit!
No, we need to find out where the girls are and where they’re headed.”

The phone beeped, and
Zahn quickly picked it up.  He waited a
moment while the phone was transferred to Ron Benecke, the Director of Homeland
Security.

“Hello?” answered
Benecke on the other end.  There was no
doubt he had just been woken up.

“Benecke, it’s Zahn.”

“What is it?”

Zahn glanced at Sarat
as he spoke.  “I need one of your
drones.”

“Foreign or
domestic?”  Benecke asked.

“Domestic.”

There was a short
pause.  “Do I want to know why?”

“No,” Zahn
replied.  “And I need full access,
including all archived data.”

Benecke sighed.  “Let me make some calls.”  He promptly hung up.

Zahn stood up and
walked over to the window.  He looked out
over the sleeping city of Washington, D.C.
Its golden lights sparkled across the low lying hills as far as the eye
could see.  “Get another team ready.”

Unfortunately, using a
drone for the strike was out of the question.
It would draw immediate attention from nearly every arm of the
government, and he couldn’t distance himself from something like that.  But using the drone’s surveillance capability
and picture quality, they could still find them.

40

Chaplain Wilcox walked
through the empty lobby of the hotel and headed for the elevator.  He had spent the entire day meeting with
families, holding group prayer and counseling sessions, and he didn’t want to
look at his watch to see what time it was.

He smiled and waved to
the young clerk at the check-in counter before heading down the carpeted
hallway toward the elevators.  Once
inside, he sighed, pressed his floor number, fell softly against the elevator
wall, and watched each floor light up at an agonizingly slow pace.

Finally, the doors
sounded a ding and opened, revealing the green patterned carpet running
down the long hallway to the far end.
Wilcox stepped out and walked two-thirds of the way down the hall to his
room.  He found his card, slid it in and
out of the slot, and waited for the small light to turn green.

The chaplain opened the
door to find the lights were off, so he felt for the wall switch and flipped it
on.  Still nothing.

Is the power out?
he wondered.  The chaplain quickly caught
the door behind him before it closed.  He
peered out at the bright lights in the hallway and wondered what was wrong,
when he suddenly felt the tip of a gun barrel press into his soft back.

The chaplain gasped and
froze where he stood.  Someone behind him
reached out and pushed the door handle out of his grip, letting the door close
shut and plunging the room into darkness.

Wilcox stood shaking,
now unable to see anything at all.

“Are you alone?” a
man’s voice whispered into his ear.

The chaplain nodded his
head nervously.

“Move forward.”  The man prodded him away from the door, and
the chaplain slowly walked forward in the darkness, trying to remember where
the coffee table and small couch were located.
After several steps, he abruptly ran into the arm of the couch.

“Sit down,” the voice
said.

The chaplain felt
around the cushioned arm and lowered himself down.  His eyes were beginning to adjust, and he
could see a silhouette standing in front of him.  Without warning, a bright flashlight came on
and blinded him momentarily until it was set down onto the coffee table,
pointing toward the ceiling.  The
chaplain was stunned to see the man’s face.
It was Aaron Bazes.

“What are you doing
here?” the chaplain stuttered.

Bazes stared down at
him.  “Why have you been investigating
me?”

The chaplain was
petrified.  “I uh…just saw you at some of
the sites. I didn’t…I was just curious…”

Bazes watched him
fumble and then reached behind himself, causing the chaplain to stop when he
spotted the semi-automatic pistol.

The chaplain closed his
eyes hard, trying to remain calm, then looked back up at Bazes.  “Listen, I’m just here to help.  I saw you at the church and remembered seeing
you in New York…”  He trailed off as
Bazes continued glaring at him.

Bazes lowered his
gun.  “You’re lucky you did.”

“Lucky?”

“Otherwise, I wouldn’t
be here right now.”  Bazes’ expression
relaxed.

“What do you mean?”

Without a word, Bazes
motioned to the chaplain’s right.  Wilcox
turned and peered into the darkness.  “OH
LORD!” he cried.  Wilcox jumped off the
couch and backed away quickly, staring at a dark figure sitting motionless in
the chair in front of the window.  After
a few moments, he looked back at Bazes and then back at the large man in the
chair.  “What’s happened?!”

Bazes calmly looked at
the chaplain and then back to the chair.
“He was waiting for you when I got here.”

“What?”

Bazes reached behind
himself and re-holstered his gun.  “He
was already here.  And he didn’t seem
very friendly.”

The chaplain felt like
his head was spinning.  He kept looking
back and forth trying to understand.
“What?  Why?  Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” Bazes
replied.

The chaplain took a
worried step forward.  He could barely
make out the man’s features.  Dark hair
and dark skinned.  His head was tilted
onto the back of the chair with his mouth slightly open.  “Is...he dead?”

“No.  But he’s going to need some medical attention
when he wakes up.”

Wilcox took the
hint.  “He was here to hurt me?”

“That’s my guess since
he broke all of your light bulbs,” Bazes said sarcastically.  He picked up the flashlight and shined it
directly on the man.  He was dressed in
black clothes with what appeared to be a gun tucked under his thin jacket.  “Then again, maybe he’s just a light bulb
salesman.  Either way, neither one of us
should probably be here when he wakes up.”

The two men exited the
hotel through the front doors, with Bazes walking slightly behind the
chaplain.  They continued down the long
driveway where Bazes nodded toward a small park across the busy street.  They crossed and headed through the trees,
far out of sight from the hotel, and toward a small round fountain. A small,
gray statue of George Washington stood next to it.

“The bench closest to
the fountain,” Bazes instructed.

The chaplain walked to
the bench.  It was shorter than usual,
but he managed to lower himself down onto it with a quiet grunt.

Bazes wasted no
time.  “Who else is trying to find out
about me?”

The chaplain could see
him clearly now.  He guessed him to be in
his late forties with a shaved head and slender, yet muscular frame.  He looked military but definitely not a front
line soldier.  “No one else, just me.”  He shook his head.

Bazes looked
around.  They were alone and the fountain
was loud enough.  “What do you want?”

The chaplain held his
hands out innocently.  “As I said, I was
curious who you were.  I saw you both in
New York and then again here, looking through the rubble.”

“A lot of people were
looking through the rubble.”

The chaplain shook his
head again.  “Not the way you were.”

“And what did you see?”
asked Bazes.

“I don’t really
know.  You looked like you were poking
around in some pretty specific places.
Like around the altars.”

Bazes stared at him
quietly.  “And what did you find out?”

“You mean from the
FBI?”

“Yes.”

The chaplain
shrugged.  “Not very much.  You seem to have the shortest file of anyone
I’ve seen.  All I know is your name,
where you’re from, and that you have a security clearance higher than any of us
have ever seen before.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.  That’s it.
Just your name and country.  Both
being Israeli.  Actually your name is
Hebrew if I’m not mistaken.”

Bazes continued to study
him.  “I find it hard to believe that you
were just curious.”

This time the chaplain
was quiet for a moment.  He finally
sighed and continued.  “Well, I suppose I
was a little suspicious.”  He glanced at
the fountain.  “This whole thing…these
attacks…they’re more than a little weird.”

The expression on
Bazes’ face became curious.  “What do you
mean?”

The chaplain rested a
hand on the bench.  “I just think there
are some things about these attacks that don’t make a lot of sense.”

“Such as?”  Bazes pressed.

“This is a strange
interrogation.”  Wilcox rocked back on
the bench and took a deep breath.  “In a
younger life, I used to be a theologian, or a research scholar.”  He looked at Bazes.  “I’m going to assume you already knew
that.”  Bazes’ lack of reaction told the
chaplain he was right.   “These bombings
look a lot more like an attack on faith than terrorist attacks.”

“Terror attacks are
an attack on faith,” Bazes replied dryly.

“That’s true,” the
chaplain conceded.  “They can be
considered that, yes.  But when I say
faith, I don’t just mean Christianity, I mean all faiths.  I originally thought this might be some kind
of resurfacing of the ancient Crusades by some fanatical group, as Saint
Patrick’s was a Catholic cathedral.
However, the Washington National was different.  It is dedicated to all faiths.  And when you consider the bombs were not set
off to yield the highest casualties, it makes me wonder what denomination or
sect might be next.”  Bazes was listening
to him intently.  “Even leaving some important
things out, like the real meaning of jihad, something here still feels awfully
strange.”  He tried to manage a small
smile.  “And you putting a gun in my back
doesn’t help.”

Bazes continued
watching him carefully.  He sensed Wilcox
to be a much more intelligent and knowledgeable man than he let on with his
grandfather-like image.  “What else?”
Bazes asked.

“I think that’s
enough,” frowned the chaplain.  “At least
until you tell me who you really are.”

Bazes tilted his head
slightly.  “Do you have more
information?”

“I might.”

Bazes shook his head
and looked away.  He was frustrated.  What he was about to do was forbidden, on
every level.  But time was running out and
the stakes were too high.  Besides, he
certainly wasn’t about to the kill the man.

Bazes scanned the area
around them again and kept his gun easily accessible.  “Okay,” he said.  “What do you want to know?”

The chaplain
sighed.  “Son, I’m an old man.  I’ve had a long life, raised a couple boys,
and got to marry a miracle of a woman.”
He dropped his head and looked at the dark grass in front of him.  “Unfortunately, my wife was called home many
years ago, and I’ve been alone for a long time.”  The chaplain cleared his voice and looked
back at Bazes.  “In my life, I’ve seen
darn near everything: the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.  At my age, there is only one thing that any
man wants…”

Bazes raised an
eyebrow.

“The truth,”
added Wilcox.  “I’m near the end of my
road now, and all I care about is the truth.”

Bazes let a small grin
creep across his lips.  This was no
ordinary chaplain.  He nodded his
head.  “Okay.  The truth you will get.  But then you must help me.”

“Agreed.”

Now it was Bazes’ turn
to take a deep breath.  He was suddenly
nervous.  “You’re right, my name is
Hebrew, and it’s one of the oldest.  It’s
an Israelite name.  I belong to one of
the oldest and purest Israelite bloodlines in existence, going to back to
Levi.”

The chaplain’s mouth
opened in surprise.  “You’re a Levite?”

Bazes nodded.  “Of the Twelve Tribes, the Levites were
tasked by Moses with the highest responsibility and the highest honor of
all.  To protect the word and the truth,
of God.  That not only means the word of
God but everything related to it.  We
have dedicated our lives, and given those lives, without hesitation for over
3,000 years to ensure the truth of God is never lost.”  He paused.
“But now…now I believe we face the greatest threat to that task in the
history of humanity.”

Across from him, Wilcox
sat speechless.

“I agree the attacks on
the churches were not acts of terrorism, at least not as we know it.  I believe they were carried out by a group of
people, led by one specific and evil man, who intend the greatest harm to God’s
children that we have ever known.”

41

Christine woke up when
the car’s engine started and roared to life.
She blinked and opened her eyes, squinting into the bright morning
light.  Rand pulled the car forward,
rounded several trees and slowly rolled back down the dirt road the way they
came.

Sarah stirred on her
lap as the bumps shook them gently from side to side.  She looked up at Christine and smiled.

“Good morning,
Sunshine,”  Christine whispered and
stroked her hair.

Sarah blinked and
glanced at Rand and Avery in the front seats.
She lay her head back down and snuggled in closer to Christine with her
arms tucked in tight.

Christine watched
her.  She was so beautiful and so
innocent.  The thought of someone trying
to hurt Sarah caused a feeling of rage deep inside of her, and it was growing.  She no longer cared about herself; all she
wanted to do was keep Sarah safe.  And
she would fight to the very end to do it.

Rand pulled the Dodge
back out onto the road and continued south, while the girls in the back watched
the rising sun through the opposite side window.

Avery tucked the
shotgun down next to his door and reached into the back seat next to them.  He pulled a second bag out of the larger
duffle bag and unzipped it, handing each girl an energy bar and bottle of
water.

He smiled.  “I know it’s not exactly a continental
breakfast.”

The girls took them
appreciatively.  After Avery turned back
around, Christine opened a wrapper and handed the bar to Sarah with a
wink.  She grabbed it with her small
hands and winked back.

“Is that what a grandpa
is like?” Sarah whispered.

Christine almost
laughed.  Aside from his white hair and
some wrinkles, Avery was almost as far as you could get from a traditional
grandfather.  But just as quickly,
Christine suddenly felt a sadness in her heart, wondering what had happened to
Sarah’s grandfathers.  How much
disappointment did this girl have to endure?

They merged onto a
larger two-lane road and joined a steady line of traffic.  Both men scanned the thick, tree lined
highway and watched as much of the sky as they were able to see from the front
seats.

Christine leaned
forward.  “Where are we going?”

“We’re vulnerable and
can’t hide under trees forever,” Rand said, still scanning.  “They know where we were, so they’re likely
trying to find us from overhead satellite or aircraft.”  He looked up again through his side
window.  “Our best option is to hide
somewhere they can’t easily track us.”

“Where is that?”

“In plain sight.”

Christine had just sat
back and put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders when she heard a loud chime.  She lifted her hips, reached into her pocket
and was startled when she pulled her cell phone out.

“Oh my god!” she
cried.  “My phone is on again!”  She looked back and forth between Rand and
Avery.  “I didn’t turn it on this time, I
swear!”

Rand’s eyes stared at
her in the rearview mirror.  “Your phone
has been compromised.  Get rid of it!”

Christine looked
around.  “Now?”

“NOW!”  they both said in unison.

Christine immediately
grabbed the metal handle on her door and cranked it counter-clockwise, rolling
down her window.  The loud, cold air
rushed in as she took one last look at her phone, and threw it out.

Rand accelerated and
passed the car in front of them.  He
wished the trees were not cut so far back away from the road.  They could use some cover.

They rode silently for
several miles.  Sarah, now sat on the
driver’s side behind Rand with her legs on top of the large bag.  She watched quietly as the cars and signs
went by.  After a few minutes, she slid
back over to Christine and whispered in her ear, “Do you know how to play
I-spy?”

The traffic became
increasingly dense as they merged onto highway 206, but when a string of brake
lights could be seen ahead, Rand and Avery grew concerned.

Soon the cars slowed to
a crawl as some kind of obstruction could be seen ahead in the distance.  It was a road block with three police cars
creating a barrier across both lanes, letting just one car through at a
time.  Several state troopers took turns
surrounding the cars as they came to a stop.

Trooper Williams
watched the other team let a car through before he sighed and waved the next
car in his lane ahead, up to where he was standing.  As the car stopped next to him, the driver
lowered her window and he leaned in.

“Hello, ma’am,” he
said, looking through her car.  “You traveling
alone today?”

The elderly woman
nodded.  “Yes.  What’s wrong, are you looking for someone?”

“Yes ma’am.”  Williams smiled.  “Sorry for the inconvenience.”  He straightened up and waved her forward
between the parked police cars, to the open highway beyond.

Williams glanced again
at the other officers while he waved a copper colored Dodge forward.  The driver, an older man, wore sunglasses and
looked up at the officer as he brought the car to a stop.

“Morning, sir,”
Williams said.  He looked into the car
and glanced at the passenger, a younger woman with long, dark red hair.  She was wearing large sunglasses, but
something looked familiar about her.  He
looked over the top of the car at his partner who looked back with a raised
eyebrow.

“Where are you headed,
sir?” Williams asked the driver.

“Into town,” Avery
replied.  “Why, what’s going on?”

“Just a routine
stop,”  the trooper said.  He looked at the girl again.  “And who are you traveling with?”

“This is my
granddaughter,” Avery responded.  “This
isn’t a routine stop.  I come through
here all the time.”

“Well, we’re just
looking for someone who may have stolen a car.”
Williams straightened and nonchalantly took a piece of paper out of his
back pocket.  He held it above the roof
of the car and quietly unfolded it to reveal pictures of Christine and Sarah.

“Why would you stop
everyone if you’re looking for a specific car?” asked Avery.

Williams didn’t hear
him.  Instead, he was showing the picture
to his partner over their heads.  His
partner, on the other side of the car, slowly motioned downward to the back
seat.  Williams glanced through the back
window and saw a large bag on the seat and what looked like a lump on the floor
covered by a blanket.

“What’s in the bag,
sir?”

Avery remained
calm.  “Just some odds and ends.”

“What kind of odds and
ends?” asked Williams.

“Some car parts that I
need to have repaired.  I’m a
collector.”

“Hmm,” said the
trooper.  “And what’s that lump on the
floor?”

“More car parts.”

“I see.”  Williams turned his body to block the view of
his hand reaching back and unclipping the safety strap on his holster.  “Sir, would you mind stepping out of the
car?”

Avery frowned.  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid it’s difficult for me
to stand up easily.”

“Well, I’m sure-”
Williams began but stopped abruptly.  He
peered curiously back over the roof of the car.
He couldn’t see his partner.
“Rog?”  Williams got no response,
so he leaned down and looked through the car to the other side.  Still nothing.

Williams’ heart started
to beat faster.  He stepped back and ran
into something.  He never found out what
it was, as his body stiffened and a painful jolt of 500,000 volts ran through
his system.  Before he could scream, Rand
grabbed him from the side and smashed his fist into the trooper’s lower jaw,
triggering the cranial nerve and instantly knocking him out.  At the same moment that Williams’ knees gave
out, Avery thrust his left arm out the window at a 90 degree angle and grabbed
the front of his uniform.  He pushed him
up and then pulled him against the car to keep his body upright.

The car horn behind
them began blaring when the driver witnessed Rand’s attack on the trooper,
which caused the troopers in the other lane to turn their attention to the
honking car.  The driver inside was
waving at something.  It was all the
distraction Rand needed.

By the time the other
three troopers had turned away from the honking car and back to Williams, who
appeared to be leaning on the car, Rand had already covered the distance.  He quickly pushed the stun gun into the
stomach of the first trooper, an older, overweight man who screamed and fell
onto his knees.  As the trooper collapsed
to his knees, Rand yanked the trooper’s yellow Taser gun from its holster and
fired over the top of the car, hitting a taller officer and sinking both
electrodes into his neck and shoulder.
The second trooper’s lips immediately curled down, exposing his teeth,
and his body jerked backwards, already beginning to convulse on the way to the
ground.

The third trooper
watched wide-eyed in a moment of shock as the other two fell , but he was young
and reacted much faster than the others.
He reached for his gun and already had it out of the holster when Rand’s
boot found its mark. His eyes instantly rolled into his head, and he fell
forward into his older partner, taking them both to the ground.  With a single strike, Rand knocked the larger
man out and spun with the momentum, launching himself over the hood.  The tall and lanky trooper was still shaking
violently. The image of Rand standing over him was the last thing he would
remember when he woke up again.

Rand returned to the
Dodge and withdrew his pistol, shooting out two tires on each patrol car. Avery
lowered trooper Williams’ body down to the pavement.  They both turned and looked at the line of
cars behind them.  Not a single vehicle
made a sound; instead, the shocked drivers simply stared at them with open
mouths.

Rand knelt down and
examined the gun in Williams’ holster.
Satisfied, he pulled the magazine out and took two more from the
trooper’s belt.  It was not the same
model of magazine, but it was the same caliber bullet.  He stood up and pushed them into his back
pocket.

Rand looked inside the
car.  “Everyone okay?”

Avery smiled, looking
over his shoulder at Christine and the small lump on the floor behind her.  He opened his mouth to reply when they heard
an ominous sound, the distant, thumping blades of a helicopter.  They turned and saw the shape of an Apache
AH-64D attack helicopter approaching in the distance.  The roadblock was not intended to stop them;
it was merely meant to slow them down.

Rand immediately
reached behind Avery and pulled the large bag closer.  He reached in and retrieved an AR-10 and
several magazines, two of which had thick bands of red tape around them.  He stuffed the magazines into his remaining
pockets and wrapped the rifle’s sling around his shoulder.  He then ran around the back of the car and
stopped at Christine’s window.  “You’d
better get in back and stay down.”

Christine was instantly
out of her seat, scrambling over the top and into the back.  She settled down onto the floor and lay on
top of Sarah.

“Are you okay, honey?”
she whispered.

Sarah peered out from
under the thick fabric.  “Yes!”

Rand stepped forward
and planted himself on the edge of the hood.
“Go!”

Less than a mile away,
the helicopter slowed to a hover, just forty feet above the empty highway.  Behind it, Rand could see a second chopper;
it was a Blackhawk.  Six ropes trailed to
the ground, and dark clad soldiers quickly descended.  They reached the ground and squatted low,
assessing their position before fanning out.
The Blackhawk quickly turned and retreated while the Apache continued
hovering in place.

Avery zigzagged the
Dodge through the police barricade and stopped, facing the empty road
ahead.  The attack helicopter tilted
forward and began accelerating in their direction.

Avery revved the engine
and looked at Rand through the windshield.
“This car can’t take anything that thing has!” he yelled. He floored it,
and the Dodge Charger instantly leapt forward.

They both accelerated
towards each other, quickly covering the distance.  Inside the cockpit, the pilot’s integrated
helmet display slaved the 30mm gun to his line of sight.  As they grew closer, the pilot’s display
zeroed in on the car, and the giant barrel located just beneath the aircraft’s
nose, adjusted accordingly.

At the same time, Rand
peered through his high-powered, red dot scope and tried to adjust for the
shaking of the car.

The pilot targeted the
car and wrapped his index finger around the stick’s trigger.  Suddenly, three bullets hit the cockpit glass
in front of his face.  They didn’t
penetrate, but it startled the pilot enough to disengage and dive for
cover.  The aircraft dropped close to the
ground, and the pilot pulled up just as the Dodge sped under him.

The pilot’s mouth
tightened in anger as he continued further away and swung around in a wide
arc.  The large cracks in the window were
now too large to use the 30mm Chain Gun accurately, but the Hellfire’s could
target by themselves.  He just needed
enough room.

Avery slowed the car
less than a thousand feet from the soldiers running toward them.  Unless they were carrying something really
big, the extra thick steel and glass on the car could take whatever they
had.  He turned the car and stopped in a
broadside position.  Rand jumped down
from the hood and ran forward towards the Apache which was finishing its turn.  As the helicopter straightened its approach,
he replaced his magazine, inserting one with red tape.  Inside it was armor piercing rounds.

He quickly lay down on
the gravel and pressed the stock of the rifle securely into his shoulder.  The large distance the pilot took to circle
back meant he was preparing to fire an air-to-ground missile, and that meant a
Hellfire.  And if the aircraft were fully
loaded, it would be fired from the pilot’s right side rails and arm itself
within the first fifteen feet of flight.

Christine suddenly
screamed, as bullets began pelting the side of the Dodge.  Dents appeared on the inside, and two rounds
hit the window and froze inside the special laminated glass, cracking it.

Avery looked at the
dents and yelled out the other window to Rand.
“We’re okay!”

Rand’s heart
slowed.  He closed one eye and watched
carefully for the one sign he would have when the missile fired.  Then he saw it.  For only a split second, the fire and smoke
from behind the missile could be seen igniting.  At the same instant, Rand began shooting, and
kept shooting, pulling the trigger as quickly as he could.

The Hellfire armed
itself but traveled only thirty-six feet before it was struck head on by a hot
loaded, armor piercing bullet, then was hit again at forty-four feet.  It detonated immediately, and the helicopter
was too close to avoid the explosion.
All of the armaments were ripped from the sub-wing pylons, with one of
the rails tearing a hole through the right wing.   Two large chunks of metal shrapnel punched
larger holes in the aircraft’s side body armor, severing one of the main
hydraulic lines, and a third piece of shrapnel removed almost two feet of rotor
blade.

The pilot felt the loss
of control immediately, as the helicopter began a horizontal wobble of which he
was rapidly losing control.  Within a few
seconds, the secondary hydraulic line took over for the primary.   Control was restored, but the wobble from
the now unbalanced blade was increasing and had the potential to shake the
helicopter apart.  The pilot had to beat
it to the ground before that happened, which meant a very hard landing.

Rand was back on his
feet as several more slugs hit the far side of the Charger.  He reached the passenger door where Avery had
both hands on the steering wheel and the engine running.

Rand peeked around the
curve of the front windshield, looking for the soldiers who had dropped from
the Blackhawk, but quickly ducked back when a bullet ricocheted off the
hood.

“Get past them and then
get the car out of sight,” he said to Avery, scanning the sky above them.  He knew they could easily be seen from a
number of aircraft, perhaps even a drone which could fly high enough to remain
completely invisible.  No matter where
they went, they were undoubtedly being watched from a live video stream.

Behind them came a
terrible noise as the Apache helicopter smashed hard into the ground, breaking
itself in two.  Rand looked at it over
his shoulder and turned back to Avery.
“Find a safe place, and I’ll meet you on the other side.”

Avery nodded but said
nothing.  He dropped the transmission
into drive and punched the accelerator, causing the rear tires to kick up a
wall of dirt before speeding away.

Farther down the road,
one of the six soldiers shooting at the car paused and raised his eye from his
scope.  He watched the tiny figure of a
man run into the trees.  He’d never seen
anyone move that fast before.

42

“Hold on!’ Avery yelled
over the roaring engine.  The car bounced
off-road and over the brush as he circled away from the men shooting and then
rounded back in their direction.  “We’re going
to have to drive right through them!  And
we’re going to take a lot of fire.  So
stay down!”

Christine settled her
arms on both sides of Sarah, keeping most of her weight off her tiny
frame.  Nothing was going to get Sarah
that didn’t go through her first.

Downrange, the black
clad men watched the Dodge turn back in their direction.  They lifted their rifles up and waited.  Just moments before, they had all watched the
attack helicopter come smashing down to the ground.  Fortunately, the fuel was contained, and
there was no explosion, leaving it to be enveloped in a giant cloud of dirt and
debris.  How the hell did they bring
that down?

Avery was now heading
in their direction at full speed.  His
eyes scanning the area ahead, trying to judge the best angle that would receive
the minimal damage.  He finally decided
there was no best angle, and instead stayed on the road and kept the pedal hard
against the floor, opening the engine into a thundering scream.  Bullets began peppering the front windshield
and gradually moved to the right-hand side door as Avery pushed quickly past
their positions.  Once the car was past,
the soldiers halted their firing.  They
had to save their ammo.  There was still
someone in the trees.

The soldiers moved
together in a slight arc, rounding and coming in toward the area of trees where
they saw Rand disappear.

The third man in line
motioned with hand signals, telling the men to move in slowly.  They were Delta Force, some of the best in
the military, and they had hunted plenty of human targets before.  They were also extraordinarily good at it and
not the least bit rushed.

The man they had seen
was not a runner, he was a fighter.  The
natural human reaction was to find the first decent shelter and dig in, which
meant he was likely less than a hundred yards from where he entered the
forest.  He was also unfamiliar with the
immediate area.  This increased anxiety
and the sense that a person being pursued had less time than they actually did,
which meant rash decisions.

The head of the squad
was a man named Fish.  He was strong,
methodical, and savored the act of hunting another man down.  He halted the team and then motioned for the
two men on the outside to spread out and widen the circle.  They would enter about a hundred yards
further down, then form a circle and slowly tighten the noose.

It took several
minutes, but once in position and almost like clockwork, all six members began
closing in slowly and silently.   As the
noose continued to close, Fish could taste the slaughter.

They were more correct
than they knew; Rand had not gone far.
He sat waiting to see if any of them entered the thick wall of trees
behind him.  After a long wait, he could
finally hear one of them approaching, but what Rand didn’t know was that the other
five were already in as well.

One of Fish’s men, a
short, stocky ranger with his face painted in black stripes, moved in, making
almost no sound.  He moved his rifle in
step with his head, sweeping side to side at a 45 degree angle, occasionally stopping
to listen.  Hearing nothing, he continued
on.

He was now just twenty
feet from Rand.  They were also right
about Rand’s general vicinity, but what the Delta members were not expecting
was where he would be waiting for them.
Rand was not twenty feet in front of the man.  He was twenty feet above him.

Almost all soldiers
were trained to look up in a pursuit, but under stress very few actually
did.  The fact was, ascending a tree took
far more time and energy than was practical, and it was a veritable trap,
leaving the person very little room for movement.  No one in their right mind would paint
themselves in that kind of corner.  Only
a person who could climb effortlessly, or knew how a trained soldier thinks
under pressure, would do it.  Rand was
both.

43

Natirar Park was a
411-acre park dedicated to the preservation of the farming and agricultural
history of New York State’s Somerset County.
Named after the Raritan River which ran through it, the park included
trails and many farming and residential buildings from the late 18th
century.  The park was also a popular
field trip destination for many of the surrounding elementary schools, and the
early spring trips had begun the preceding week.

Two large buses and a
few dozen cars filled most of the large, shaded parking lot, and children and
parents walked back and forth to the main building where the tour was about to
begin.

Avery let the engine
idle quietly and drove around to the far end of the lot to avoid attracting
attention.  He found a large maple tree
to park under and shifted the car into park before turning off the engine. Both
Christine and Sarah emerged slowly from the floor behind him.  They looked over his shoulder at the crowd
gathering in the distance.

“Is this a school?”
asked Sarah, eyeing all the children.

Avery shook his
head.  “No, Sarah, it’s a park.  Do you like parks?”

Sarah nodded and
continued watching.

“What do we do now?”
asked Christine.

“We need another
car.”  Avery eyed the large canopy of
trees overhead.  “They can see where we
are, and no doubt where we just pulled into.”
He turned and eyed Christine.
“How’s your dexterity?”

“Huh?”

Christine watched the
crowd, and followed one of the mothers who held the hands of two little boys as
they stood in line waiting to buy tickets.
She had followed the woman from the parking lot, noting the large, baggy
purse she carried.  It looked to
Christine like the woman had simply tossed her car keys into her purse which
she hoped meant they were sitting on top of everything else in the bag.

Christine edged closer,
trying to look casual.  The woman was
less than two feet away and had her purse slung over her right shoulder as she
struggled to pull a small cooler chest behind her and the boys.

Not far away, Avery and
Sarah both waited under a shady tree, watching.
As Christine nervously tried to get even closer to the woman, Sarah
noticed a park ranger emerge from the large building.  He was overweight with a balding head of thin
hair, and he walked excitedly toward the children who were waiting.

The man suddenly
clapped his hands and said in a loud voice, “Hi kids!”.  Most of the children just looked at him.  “I said HI KIDS!  Who’s here for the big tour?”  This time several children answered and
raised their hands.

At the ticket booth,
the woman in front of Christine stepped up to the small window and bought her
tickets.  She pulled her keys out and put
them on the wooden counter to retrieve her wallet.

“Mom,” one of her small
boys whined, “it’s gonna start!”  He
pulled at his brother’s hand.

“Hold on, hold on,” she
snapped and fumbled with her tickets and wallet.

“Okay,” called out the
park ranger nearby.  “I need some
tickets!”  He knelt down as the children
surrounded him, holding out their paper tickets.  The man smiled broadly at the children and
patted the head of one of the boys.  “And
what’s your name?”

The mother at the
counter was pulled forward by both of her boys now.  She frantically stuffed everything into her
purse with a quick glance backward; then she trotted forward to catch up.

Christine walked as
fast as she could away from the group without looking back.  She gripped the woman’s keys tightly in her
hand.  The sign on the ticket booth
showed the tour to be a little over an hour long, and if those three were part
of a larger group, it could buy them a little more time before the woman
noticed her car was missing.

She reached Avery and
Sarah and motioned for them to get moving.
But Sarah didn’t move.

“Sarah!”  Christine whispered loudly.  “Come on!”

Sarah turned slowly to
Christine who was holding out a hand for her.
“That man over there,” she said, looking back at the park ranger who was
still kneeling down and was now resting his hand on another boy’s shoulder.

“What about him?”

Sarah looked back at
her and Avery.  “He’s a bad man.”

Christine’s heart
skipped.  She looked back at the
ranger.  He continued to play with the
children.  “How bad?”

Sarah had a look of
forlorn on her face.  “Very bad.  He’s really, really red.”

Christine watched him
closely.  Knowing something was wrong,
she could see it now.  It was very
subtle, but he was being a little too friendly with the children.  She noticed he kept his hand on the boy’s
shoulders just a little too long.
Christine felt her stomach turn.

Avery saw it too, but
they had no time.  “We can’t do anything
about it.  We have to go.”

She forced herself to
turn away, pulling Sarah gently along with her.
Sarah kept watching the man over her shoulder until they reached the
parking lot.

The car was a recent
model Honda sedan, not too old but not too new either, which Avery explained
would blend in well.  They transferred
the large bag as the girls climbed into the back seat and fastened their seat
belts.  They quietly pulled out of the
parking lot and headed south again, but immediately pulled off at the next
exit, following two other cars.  Avery
then followed an older road away from the highway where he reached a row of
large trees and parked.  He turned the
car off and placed his shotgun on his lap.

“Now what are we waiting
for?” asked Sarah.

Avery scanned the area
around them.  “Rand.”

Fish was growing
concerned.  His team was tightening the
circle, and they were going to be upon each other at any moment.  They should have engaged the target by now,
or at least found more tracks.  What Fish
didn’t know yet was that two of his men were missing.  He slowly continued forward with his finger
hovering just above the trigger.

He also didn’t know
that Rand was gone.  Fish was not his
priority, Sarah was.  Rand merely needed
an exit and made one.  While Fish and his
team were crawling through the thicket, Rand was running south at full steam.

Avery heard a noise and
had his gun trained on Rand by the time he emerged from a group of tall, wild
ferns.  He ducked down and peered in the
back seat again.

“Everyone alright?”

They both nodded.  Rand opened the front door and got in.

“We don’t have much
time with this car,” Avery said, and slowly pulled out from under the
trees.  He drifted back toward the
highway and joined in behind another car.

Christine leaned
forward in the back seat.  “We’re heading
back to New York aren’t we?”

Rand turned around to
face them.  “Yes.  With overhead surveillance, it’s too easy for
them to see us now.  We have another safe
place to go but we need to lose them first or they’ll track us the entire way.”

“And how do we lose
them in New York?”

Rand shrugged.  “We find a large crowd.”

44

Dario Burk burst into
the small, private cabin aboard the Airbus A320, where Pope Pius sat surrounded
by several of his cardinals.  The Pope
looked up at him as he approached.

“Forgive me, Your
Holiness,” he said with a bow, “but we must abandon our plans immediately.”

The Pope was a slight
man, humble, but very sharp.  He looked
up at Burk from under his white eyebrows, unsurprised.

Burk continued.  “We have received a credible threat to your
presence in New York.”

“How credible is it?”
asked the Pope in a quieted voice.

“Very credible.”  Burk’s expression was respectful but
intense.  “From Israeli intelligence.”

The Pope looked at his
aide sitting across from him and then to the other cardinals.  He turned and peered out the window to his
left.  The sun was beginning its ascent
over the Atlantic Ocean.  The bright
sunlight was glistening off the deep, blue water far below.

There were always
threats, and the Israelis were known for the best intelligence in the world,
but even they were not perfect.  Was
this another false alarm or was it real?
The Pope leaned back in his seat.
Did it even matter?  The
world was frozen in a grip of terror from the attacks.  Participation in their Catholic churches had
plummeted around the world as the public feared the attacks would spread, and
their church could be next.

The Pope took a deep
breath.  He was the leader of the Roman Catholic
Church.  He was the one that hundreds of
millions looked to for spiritual guidance in a difficult world.  And what was more difficult than this?  If there was one thing that everyone needed,
beyond the cars, the televisions, the expensive vacations, beyond all
materialism, was safety.  Safety from all
that was dark and evil in the world.
What would happen when they no longer felt safe in the house of God?  And what message would it send if he were to
turn around and run because someone thought he was in danger?  Wasn’t everyone in danger now?

The Pope slowly shook
his head.  “I’m sorry,”  he said to Burk.  “We cannot.”

Burk’s eyes widened in
surprise.  He was refusing?  Burk stood motionless.  His priority was the safety of the Pope above
all else.  All else.

“Pardon me, Your
Holiness?”

The Pope smiled
warmly.  “My son, you have sworn to
protect me,” he said.  “I understand
this.  But you must understand
that I have sworn to something much greater, and to someone much more
important.”

Burk had no reply.  He stood looking respectfully at him.  In a single sentence, the rug had been pulled
out from under him.  He sighed, and
quietly turned around.  Before reaching
the door, he quickly turned back.  “May I
at least assume the threat is valid and take all appropriate precautions?”

The Pope nodded.  “Of course.”

Burk left the room and
closed the door gently behind him.
Please let this be another false alarm.

Zahn picked up the
phone and held it to his ear.

“Zahn,” came Benecke’s
voice, “we’ve lost them.”

“You lost them?”  Zahn was incredulous.

“Only for the moment,”
replied Benecke.  “We think they switched
cars, and we’re trying to verify, but we’re 90% sure.  If we’re right, then it looks like they’re
headed for the city.”  He was quiet for a
moment.  “Do you want to tell me what
they did?”

“They’re involved in a
plan to assassinate one of our diplomats.”

“Isn’t that under the
jurisdiction of the CIA?”  Benecke asked
calmly.  “Because I spoke with Mr. Ha at
the CIA and he knows nothing about this.”

“No,”  Zahn raised his voice.  “This is State Department jurisdiction!”

Zahn wanted them, and
he wanted them without interference from any other agency.  They would all know soon enough, but if
someone else picked up the girl and she talked…he couldn’t afford any cracks,
not this close.

Benecke sighed.  “I don’t suppose you have anything resembling
a warrant?”

“When was the last time
any of us used a warrant?”  Zahn
answered sarcastically.  “Besides, they
fired on, and brought down, one of our helicopters!”

“I don’t believe all of
the details have been confirmed yet.”

“Just tell me when
you’re sure of their location.  My team
will be ready.”  He ended the call.

On the other end,
Benecke hung up the phone and shook his head.
Zahn was not someone to be screwed with, everyone knew that.  But where on earth did he get all of that
power?

Zahn pounded the desk
with his fist.  He hadn’t spent years
carefully forming alliances with other department heads and politicians to
allow some new boy scout to start asking questions now.  He thought about what Benecke had said.  If they were headed back to the city,
it must be for a reason.  What were they
planning?  He leaned back in his
chair.  If they were able to bring down a
helicopter all by themselves, then he had a pretty good idea.

45

Hundreds of thousands
of people surrounded the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the largest
cathedral in New York City covering an area of over 121,000 square feet and
towering over 232 feet tall.  It was here
that both the President and Vice President were set to appear with the Pope,
along with several other dignitaries from around the world.  The Pope’s speech would be short, but he
hoped it would show the world that his message was for all faiths and on
all continents.

Dario Burk stood next
to Carolina Flores, the head of the Secret Service.  The crowd was enormous and spread nearly half
a mile in every direction.  What they
wanted, what they needed, was to see and hear their Pope.

He looked up and
scanned the nearby buildings.  Every
rooftop was either manned or watched by the Secret Service, FBI, or New York
Police Department, including swat teams from all three.  Overhead, dozens of helicopters watched from
the air, while on the ground thousands of police officers milled through the
crowds, watching for anything out of the ordinary.  As if there was such a thing as ordinary in a
crowd this large.

There would be
absolutely no physical contact of any kind with the Pope.  He would appear on the large platform
constructed outside the cathedral, wave, and speak to the world.  He would end with a long prayer and be
quickly swept away as soon as he was out of sight.  The Swiss Guard had every member of their
team present, and they would surround the Pope as a veritable wall, both on his
way to the platform and away from it.

The only time the Pope
would not be completely covered by security was when he was safely inside the
cathedral, relaxing before his appearance, and that was only when he was far
away from windows.  Burk and his team
were taking absolutely no chances.

Fish and his team had
found their missing members.  They were
alive, but just barely, and had been airlifted to the nearest hospital.  Just minutes after the evacuation chopper had
left, another Blackhawk landed to retrieve them.

Once Fish and the rest
of his team were aboard, the pilot lifted into the air and dipped the craft
forward, heading East.  Intelligence had
confirmed the targets were headed toward Manhattan Island, and Fish now wanted
them more than ever.

Avery pulled away from
the toll booth leading into the Holland Tunnel and watched through his rearview
mirror.  Rand did the same out of his
side mirror while he pulled his rifle back out from under his legs.

They listened to the
car’s radio as the newscaster spoke about the thick traffic headed into New
York to see the President and the Pope.
Once out of the tunnel, they turned south on highway 9A, away from the
giant crowd amassing near Central Park.

Suddenly, the small
radio on the dashboard came to life.  It
was the radio Rand had taken from one of the attackers.  He turned it up as a loud voice came through
the speaker.

“Alpha Bravo Team
pursuing East.  Over.”

“Confirmed Alpha
Bravo,” came a reply.  “Vehicle is a
silver sedan.”

Rand and Avery looked
at each other.  The leader of the attack
group had just made a mistake.  Surely he
was aware one of the radios was missing.
And if he were, he had forgotten to change to the backup frequency
before using it to broadcast again.

Rand looked at
Avery.  “Head north instead.”

Avery frowned.  “You realize with that size of a crowd it
will be packed with police.”

“I know.  But judging from that message, they can
probably see us, and with everyone gathering north, it will make it even harder
to hide anywhere but there.
Besides, the majority of security is likely to be concentrated closer to
the Pope and the President.”  He watched
a car speed past.  “We can skirt the
outside of the crowd and continue north on foot until we can get back out of
the city.”

Rand looked at the
assault rifle laying across his lap.
They certainly wouldn’t be able to bring the rifles, which meant
concealed handguns only.  Not what he was
hoping for as it meant they would have to move very quickly.  They wouldn’t be a position to fight back.

He turned and looked at
Sarah in the back seat.  She was sitting
up straight, looking out the left rear window at the Hudson River.  “Sarah, we’re going to need you to stay very close
to us okay?”

Sarah nodded
calmly.  “I know.”

He then looked at Christine
who smiled back at him over Sarah’s response.

The crowd was bigger
than anything Christine had ever seen.
Columbus Avenue, which eventually turned into Morningside Drive near the
church, was simply a wall of people.
They were packed in much tighter than she expected.  Incredulous, she walked behind Rand and
Avery, holding Sarah’s hand tightly.

“My god,” she whispered
as they entered the very outskirts of the crowd.  They walked their next block; the crowd
quickly grew dense, prompting Christine to reach out and hold the back of
Rand’s jacket.

He felt her behind him
and glanced back.  He slowed and took
Sarah’s other hand as Avery forced his way through the crowd, where everyone
was pushing to get any kind of view.  As
they continued walking, Christine watched some people trying to scamper up onto
the small roof of a bus stop.  Rand and
Avery continuously scanned the crowd as they pushed forward.

Between them, Sarah
looked back and forth with wide eyes.
She had never seen so many people in one place, nor had she seen so many
shadows.  It was incredible.

Christine watched her
expression.  “What does it look like,
Sarah?”

She shook her head in
disbelief.  “Colors, everywhere!”

Ahead of them, Avery
turned a corner and continued down a side street, when Sarah tripped and lost
both Christine’s and Rand’s hands.

An older Asian woman
behind them reached down to help Sarah up.
As she stood, the woman’s gaze fell onto Christine who was reaching back
for Sarah.  Something looked familiar about
them.  The woman continued watching them
and suddenly remembered, they were the two she had seen on the news program.

“Hey!” she said, with a
trailing voice.  “HEY!”

Almost in slow motion,
several of the others in the crowd looked at the woman and then followed her
gaze to both girls.

“It’s them!”  The woman began pointing.  “It’s them!
The two on the news!”

The faces of the
others, staring at Christine and Sarah, flashed a look of recognition as they
studied the pair closer.

“I think you’re right.”
hollered a man standing behind her.  He
pointed along with the woman.  “It’s
them!”

Christine turned to see
several people staring at them now.  As
more people turned around, more eyes widened, and the same phrase was repeated,
louder.  “It’s them!”

Christine grabbed
Sarah’s hand tighter and rushed after Rand who was now pushing through the mass
of people with Avery.

More and more people
turned to follow the noise which finally reached three policemen on a nearby
street corner.  The officers looked up
and peered over the crowd to see people shouting, and something or someone
surging forward through everyone.

Rand stopped and put a
hand on Avery.  He could see three
uniformed officers approaching.  He
turned and looked over Christine’s head at the crowd behind them, and found two
more officers trying to get through from the rear.  He spotted a small storefront less than
twenty feet away and grabbed Christine and Sarah, pushing them forward toward
the building.  It was a small dentist’s
office which appeared to be closed.

Rand kept the girls
back and kicked in one of the tall narrow windows.  Instantly, an alarm began shrieking from
inside as Rand jumped through and reached back out for Sarah.  He then ran toward the back of the dark
office with Christine and Avery right behind him.

Less than a minute
later, the officers reached the front and flattened themselves against the gray
wall on both sides of the broken window.
With guns drawn, one officer quickly leaned out and peered through the
broken pane then ducked back.  He
immediately did it again, taking a longer look.
He pulled back again and looked at the other officers, shaking his
head.  One by one, they began jumping in
through the window and over the broken glass.

Rand reached the back
of the office and opened the back door, which led into a long, white
maintenance hallway, connecting a string of neighboring offices.  He spotted the large exit sign at the end of
the hall, hanging above a large metal door.
With Sarah still in his arms, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Christine
and Avery were still behind him and ran the length of the hallway.

The door at the end of
the complex opened out near the street, which like the others, were crowded
with even more people.  Some of them were
standing just a few steps away and turned, curious when they noticed the door
behind them opening.

Rand peered outside and
scanned the crowd.

Sarah, suddenly
squeezed his neck and began screaming when she saw several shadows change color
in front of them.  “BLACK!  BLACK!
BLACK!”

In the moment Sarah
screamed, Rand recognized someone across the street who spotted them and
immediately raised his rifle to his shoulder.
It was one of the men from the Delta Force team.

Rand instantly turned
to shield Sarah and grabbed the door handle, pulling it back in as quickly as
he could.  As it was closing, one large
man slammed against the wall, lifeless, just before the door clicked shut.  Immediately, large dents appeared on the inside
of the door, as it became a giant shield.

Still carrying Sarah,
Rand turned and looked back down the hall.
He knew there was no escape without putting her at risk.  She had to survive, yet any moment the
officers would reach the back of the office and find the hallway they were
in.

Several blocks away,
Burk rushed back inside the cathedral.
He, along with everyone else, heard the warning over their tiny
earpieces.  Gunshots fired nearby!

Burk entered through
the west end of the church and ran past a large group of security agents who
were running the other way.  He passed
the altar and the church’s famous stained glass windows and sprinted for the
large sacristy.  When he burst into the
room, Burk found the Pope kneeling in his gold and silver striped vestment.  Outside in the distance, he could hear the
Vice President’s speech abruptly end as he was rushed off the large stage.  Burk was certain the Secret Service already
had the President in his limousine and headed away from the church.

The Pope looked up at
Burk as the three Swiss Guards already in the room stepped in behind him.

“We’re
evacuating,”  Burk said firmly.

The Pope nodded at Burk
and stood up.  He could hear that
something was wrong.  The crowd outside
was beginning to yell out questions.  He
could also hear shouting within the church as the various security teams
scrambled to get all of the dignitaries out.

Burk looked over the
Pope’s shoulder at the three guardsmen.
“Benziger and Gavin are getting the others and securing a path to the
car.  We’ll escort him in standard two by
two positions.  Once we-”  Burk was suddenly interrupted when four men
walked into the room with AK-47 assault rifles shouldered.

Irritated, Burk turned
and began to wave them away, insisting they were already moving the Pope, when
he noticed the make of their guns.  He
jumped in shock when the men raised their rifles and fired on the three Swiss
Guardsmen next to the Pope.  Burk’s hand
was already in motion, reaching for his sidearm when he was shot in the arm and
the gun tumbled to the floor.  The impact
caused him to stumble backward and fall over one of the large chairs.  He quickly scrambled to reach his dropped
weapon with his left hand, but was shot twice more in his other shoulder.

Burk cried out and fell
back onto the thick carpet.  Without the
use of either arm, he couldn’t reach, or even prop himself up.  With his head on the floor, he quickly looked
around the room and used his legs to push himself away, but he froze when Zahn
stepped forward and pointed a gun at the Pope.

“Stop!”  Zahn warned.

Burk stopped, but his
mind was racing.  He had to keep the Pope
alive at all costs. He had to do something, even if that meant changing
tactics.  “Don’t shoot,” he cried.  “You want him alive.”

Zahn watched Burk,
lying on the floor with his chest heaving.
He turned to Sarat standing next to him and motioned toward the
door.  Immediately, Sarat ran to the door
and looked outside.  Seeing no one, he
closed and locked it, then returned to Zahn’s side with his gun raised again.

Taking a few steps
toward Burk, Zahn stood over him, watching as he tried still to maneuver with
two arms that didn’t work.  “Mr. Dario
Burk.”  Zahn said with a smirk.  “The famed head of the Swiss Guard.”  He dropped his chin in a sympathetic
gesture.   “No doubt your brain is now
frantically working through scenarios to keep your dear Pope alive.  However, in a few minutes you’ll come to the
uncomfortable and ironic conclusion that ‘throwing him to the wolves’ is your
best and only option.”  Zahn displayed a
sick grin and watched Burk’s eyes, waiting as he desperately tried to think of
any other way.  After a short pause, Zahn
continued.  “And judging from the look of
despair in your eyes, I can see that you’ve just reached that point.”

Screams could be heard
now from the crowd outside as people began to panic.  Zahn cocked his ear.  “That doesn’t sound good,” he said
sarcastically.  “In fact, that sounds a
lot like pandemonium.  I know
English is not your first language, but I suspect you know what that
means.”  Burk was still scanning the room
looking for anything, any tool, any helpful item at all, but it was
futile.  He could barely move.

Zahn tried to
relax.  His plan had been long in coming,
and he didn’t have much time, but he wanted to savor every second he
could.  “I imagine now you’re probably
wondering how and why.”  He
raised his eyebrows at Burk.  “Yes?”  He shrugged when Burk didn’t answer.  “The how was easy.  Easier than you think.”  He turned to the Pope, now speaking to them
both.  “You can thank terrorism.  After all, it was the 9/11 attack on our Twin
Towers that gave the United States the new enemy it so desperately needed.  It gave us both an enemy and a perfect
distraction for the entire world.  Put
enough fear into the people, and governments can do anything, least of which is
to justify and expand its military empire.
And that constant fear of terrorism allowed us to do just that.”  Zahn looked to the Pope then back to Burk on
the floor.  “Unfortunately, politicians
are rather stupid, and there were terrible consequences they didn’t bother to
think about.  Do you know what I am
referring to?” he asked, chiding him.
“Why the laws, of course.  Laws
that called for all departments to act in tighter concert.  What could go wrong?”  A fiendish smile returned to his face.  “Now, you lay there on the floor slowly
bleeding to death and asking yourself how in the world we ever got past your
security.  The reason, is because we
were the security.”

Sergeant Fish watched
silently as Rand and Avery lay face down on the sidewalk, both bound in
handcuffs.  His team members stood behind
him.  The hysteria was still growing with
more of the crowd beginning to panic and run, while the police officers tried
to keep the stampede away from them and their prisoners.  Fish smiled when he saw one older officer
look around and then quickly kick Rand in the face with his boot.  He promptly stepped back as blood began to
appear on the cement under Rand’s mouth.

Fish scanned the area,
looking for the woman and girl, but there was no sign of them.  He knew it wouldn’t be long before the
officers began to realize that neither of their prisoners on the ground could
have been the one who shot into the crowd behind the building.  They had to move fast, prompting Fish to step
forward and show his military ID.  “We
have orders to investigate.”

“We’ve got it
contained,” an officer growled.

Fish shrugged.  “We can see that.  But we still need to have a look and report
back.  Orders.”

“Whatever.”  He motioned to the broken window.  “We already searched the place.”

Fish nodded and walked
past him, examining the window pane momentarily before stepping inside what
appeared to be the office waiting room.
The rest of his team followed, and one by one they searched all the
rooms and ended at a back door leading into a maintenance hallway.  Fish looked up and down the hallway, noticing
the dented circles in the far door.
There were several other doors in the hallway too, all connecting to
other offices or store fronts in the complex.
They walked up and down the hall, trying all of the door handles,
starting with the doors nearest the end.
They used a standard entry technique with one man forcing the door open
while two more swept in behind him with guns raised.

The first two doors led
to a lawyer’s office and a CPA firm.  The
two teams moved silently, through the various rooms and around desks, looking,
but found nothing.  They were
undeterred.  The two men had to have done
something with the girls before they were taken.  But what?

The next few doors led
to similar businesses or empty spaces, but they found nothing.  Fish knew that soon the police would be
looking for them, wanting to ask more questions.  He found the last door was unlocked and
opened into the back of a small convenience store.  The soldiers entered quietly and could hear a
commotion up front which sounded like looting.
There was yelling and screaming between multiple voices.  Fish held up his hand for the team to stay
back as he swept the back room with the barrel of his gun.

He opened a large,
metal refrigerator door and stepped inside.
After a few minutes, he stepped back out and shut it again quietly.  On the other side of the room were columns of
boxes, stacked almost to the ceiling, most of which were empty.  There appeared to be little room between them
for anyone to hide.  He began to turn
back to the door when he noticed several tall, thin CO² tanks stacked neatly in
the corner.  He studied them
closely.  With the noise increasing from
the front of the store, Fish slowly stepped forward toward the tanks.  Without letting go of his rifle, he wrapped
his left arm around one of the tanks and pulled it forward.  He then bent down and looked through the gap
and into the green eyes of Christine.

The sound outside was
becoming chaotic as people badly wanted out from the middle of a frightened
crowd.  Hundreds of security personnel
tried to keep the movement orderly, but their barricades were simply getting
overturned or destroyed.

Zahn leaned on the back
of an upholstered chair looking at the Pope, who stared back at him.  The man did not seem the least bit
afraid.  Zahn was impressed.

Behind him, Zahn’s men
watched the Pope with disdain.  Perhaps
he would be more afraid if he knew, beneath the makeup these men were wearing,
they were Islamists right down to their bones.

Zahn turned back to
Burk on the floor, who was still fidgeting with two bad arms.  The man just wouldn’t give up.  “Are you wondering why yet?”

Burk did not
answer.  He simply stared back with a
look of defiance.

“Of course you
are.  Let’s just say…this is payment for
services rendered.  A debt, if you will.”

“Listen to me,”  Burk said with a strained voice.  “Just keep him alive and unharmed.  If you keep him unharmed, they will give you
anything you ask.  Anything!”

Zahn looked back to the
Pope and then raised his eyebrows at Burk.
“Oh, I know.”

46

The death of the Pope
was absolutely devastating.  It was as if
the entire world cried out at once.
Millions of people simply burst into tears or fell to their knees,
shocked at the news.  Hospitals were packed
with people who had collapsed or fainted, and from almost every developed
country in the world came reports of people who had fallen dead right where
they stood.

Brazil and Mexico, the
two most populous catholic countries, suffered a nationwide freeze when almost
no one showed up for work.  Instead, the
churches were overwhelmed with mourners.
Italy fared even worse where in Rome the utter shock resulted in an
eerie silence of nearly three million people.
In Vatican City, the long held tradition of closing the papal apartment
and destroying the Fisherman’s ring following a pope’s death seemed to be
forgotten.

His death was horrific
enough, but murder was beyond all comprehension.  And while the devastation was unimaginable,
the retribution was immense.  Millions of
Catholics immediately blamed the entire Middle East, including anyone with
relations to them, even those who simply shared their skin color.

Worst still, no one had
any idea who had done it.  It had
happened during the hysteria in New York, where Pope Pius and the entire Swiss
Guard team responsible for protecting him were slaughtered.  Every possible security department within the
United States was scrambling for clues or information.  It had happened quickly and in the church’s
sacristy, the chamber reserved for formal preparation.  But during the mania, no one had seen anyone
enter or exit the room.  Never had the
world demanded answers so forcefully and with such little information
available.

Zahn took a drink of
his scotch and leaned back into his chair.
He flipped between news stations thoroughly reveling in the absolute
chaos that was unfolding.  It was even
more delightful than he’d dreamed.  After
years of planning, it had gone off without a hitch.  Without a single hitch.  Doing something like this without a serious
problem was virtually impossible, and it left him feeling as though he was destined
for it.

He thought back over
the two decades it had taken him to bring all of it to fruition.  Years spent at the Department of Defense, the
National Security Agency, and finally the State Department, all critical in
arranging and achieving the greatest attack on the “church” ever imagined.  So great was the impact, that talk spread
around the world of the ancient Crusades and whether a war between Christianity
and Islam had reignited.

The television screen
showed scene after scene from around the globe of people sobbing, unable to
believe it.  And in the end, it was all
due to one man, a man who had just changed the world forever.

Finally, Zahn smiled
when he thought of the bonus, the second prize that clearly proved his
destiny.  He had the girl too. In
fact, he had both her and the woman aboard the very plane he sat on.  He wondered if it could get any better.

Kia Sarat approached
with a serious face.

“Well?”  Zahn asked.

“Iman put them both
out,” Sarat replied.

“And it will last the whole way?”

“He is sure it will.”

“Good.”
Zahn sat thinking for a few moments and then finally nodded.  He then looked up at Sarat and raised his
glass. “Care for a drink to celebrate?”

Sarat did not
appreciate the humor.  Zahn knew he did
not drink.  Alcohol was a poison and
nothing more.  He disregarded the comment
and decided to let Zahn boast.  After
all, it was a great accomplishment.
Something no one else could have done.

“We will be out of US
airspace in two hours,” Sarat said.

Zahn took a sip of his
scotch.  Two hours.  And then he would never see the United States
again.  He felt no emotional loss at
all.  It was just a country, and by the
time they figured everything out, it would be too late.

“Tell the pilots
they’re on radio silence.  They’re not to
respond to anyone, for any reason!”

“They will respond to
no one.”

Their new home was
Argentina.  A beautiful country, ruled by
a blatantly corrupt government, which was just what he wanted.   He sure as hell didn’t want to be in the
northern hemisphere.  “Are we sure we
have everyone?”

“Everyone is aboard,”
Sarat replied.  “Soon, we’ll be home
free.”

Zahn smiled and took
another sip.  Home free.  That phrase had always seemed a little ironic
to him.

Rand thought about his
decision and prayed.  He simply didn’t
have a choice; he couldn’t risk Sarah’s life.
And it was clear something had changed.
Whoever wanted Sarah was no longer trying to kill her; they wanted to
capture her.  Ever since the elevator
bomb, they had not shot or attacked until after Rand had.  He prayed again and hoped, more importantly,
that she and Christine had escaped.

He had no idea where
Avery was, somewhere close most likely.  Rand hoped he was still alive, as he himself
lay on the floor barely able to breath.
His entire body was black and blue, a keepsake from the guards after
they learned where and why he was arrested.

Something bad had
happened.  What it was, he didn’t know,
but it was clear they blamed him for it.
Rand tried to open either one of his eyes but couldn’t.  He tried to remain as still as possible.  Every part of his body screamed in pain, and
he could feel bones broken, but what frightened him the most were the injuries
inside.  Each breath felt like a knife
slicing through his abdomen, and it felt like it was getting worse.

Lying on the cold stone
floor, he couldn’t see it, but he could feel it begin.  It was subtle at first, but steadily growing
stronger.  His hands were beginning to
tremble.

47

Benecke walked into the
large office and stood before Carolina Flores who was on the phone.  She was tall with straight hair and motioned
him to a seat in front of her desk.  After
a few minutes, she hung up and shook her head.

“Hello Ron,” she said
with a sigh.  “Things are going downhill
fast.  The riots are spreading, and Italy
is losing control.”

Benecke knew what she
was referring to.  The first riots to
take to the streets were in Italy, not far from Vatican City.  They spread quickly through the other
European countries, then across to Mexico and Brazil.  If the number of rioters multiplied as
quickly as they did in Italy, the other governments would have little hope of
stopping them.

He looked at her for a long
moment, trying to think about the best way to tell her.  His drive over to CIA headquarters in Langley
was full of questions, and given their friendship, she was the first person he
needed to talk to, and fast.

She watched Benecke
curiously as he took a deep breath.
“What is it?”

“I need to tell you
something,” he said quietly.  “And then
we need to get everyone together.”

Flores leaned
forward.  “Okay.  And who is everyone?”

Benecke frowned.  “The Joint Chiefs…and probably the
President.”

Less than an hour
later, Flores and Benecke climbed out of the President’s Marine One helicopter
and descended the steps onto the green grass of the White House back lawn.   The high pitch of engines faded as they
ducked under the slowing rotors and were ushered toward the large glass doors,
where more of Flores’ agents stood waiting for them.

They were escorted
downstairs to the Cabinet Room where the others were waiting.  The Chief of Staff met them at the door and
waved them in.  Flores and Benecke looked
around the table and nodded to the others, all of whom they knew well.

As they sat down and
scooted forward, they were informed the President and Vice President were on
their way down.

Flores and Benecke
nodded to Marc Ha, the CIA Director, on the other side of the table, then to
the other seven men at the table, comprising the President’s Joint Chiefs of
Staff.  Sam Foley, the Secretary of
Defense, with his balding hair and hawkish eyes, was sitting next to Ha and
nodded back, peering out from under thick grey eyebrows.

Less than a minute
later, the President entered the room followed by the Vice President.  President Lee was tall and lean and had the
distinction of choosing the country’s first female Vice President.  Glena Ward, who followed him in and sat down
at the table next to him, was no puppet or figurehead for the VP position.  She was as tough as anyone in the room.

The President leaned
forward and put his elbows on the dark mahogany table.  “Okay, let’s hear it.”

Benecke glanced at
Flores, the only person who knew what he was about to say, and then back to the
President.  “I’ll make it short sir,” he
said.  “We have evidence that we believe
identifies the Pope’s murderer.”

Lee raised his eyebrows
in surprise.  “Really?  Who is it?”
With all that was going wrong at the moment, he was excited at the
prospect of removing at least some of the pressure he was under from the other
countries.  The case was not going
quickly enough for anyone.

Benecke didn’t reply
immediately.  “Mr. President, I think
it’s better if I share the evidence.”

The President looked
puzzled but gestured to continue.

Benecke reached into
his pocket and pulled out a small digital audio player.  “As you know, four of the Swiss Guard were
killed in the same room with the Pope.”
He paused and looked around the table.
“It appears that one of them managed to start a recording on his phone
before he died.”

Everyone gave a
surprised look as Benecke put a recorder gently on the table in front of
him.  “The recording is almost four
minutes long and ends with the final slaying of Pope Pius.”  Benecke waited a moment for questions, and
hearing none, he reached forward and pressed the play button.  The recording started abruptly, and a deep
voice could be heard clearly in mid-sentence.

“-you lay there on
the floor slowly bleeding to death, and asking yourself how in the world we
ever got past your security.  The reason
is because we were the security.”

There
was a long pause and everyone instinctively looked at Benecke’s device on the
table.

“Are you wondering
why yet?  Of course you are.  Let’s just say…this is payment for services
rendered.  A debt, if you will.”

“Listen to me.  Just keep him alive and unharmed.  If you keep him unharmed, they will give you
anything you ask.  Anything!”

“Oh, I know.”

Everyone in the room
jumped when they heard two successive gunshots, and a few seconds later two
more.

“Paid
in full.”

Benecke pressed the
button again, stopping the recording.  He
looked at the President whose face, like everyone else’s, looked ashen.  No one moved; they simply could not believe
what they had just heard.

“Is that,” Lee began,
with a whisper, “Bill Zahn’s voice?!”

Benecke nodded.  “Yes, it is.”

The room was silent
again.  After a long wait, Ward spoke
up.  “Are you sure?”

“We analyzed the audio
multiple times and each time the characteristics were a perfect match.”

“There’s no possible
chance it’s someone else?” Ha asked from across the table.

Benecke shook his
head.  “Very little.”

“How little?”  President Lee said, raising his voice.

“As in practically
none, sir.”

“My god.”  Lee closed his eyes and leaned his face into
his hands.  “Where…is Zahn now?”

“His plane took off
almost two hours ago on a flight south.
He will reach international waters in a little over thirty minutes.”

“Why in god’s
name…”  Lee’s voice trailed off.  He looked up and back at Benecke and
Flores.  “Tell me you’re right about
this.  Tell me there is no way in hell
you’re wrong.”

“We’re right, sir.”

Ward cleared her voice
and spoke up with a more objective tone.
“This may be a dumb question, but exactly how much do we know about
Zahn?  I mean, really know.”

Benecke placed a thick
folder on the table and pulled out some papers.
“He’s held three other government positions of significance over the
last twenty-two years of service.  The
first was in the DOD for nine years as a nuclear and weapons inspector, then in
the NSA for six years running their data encryption department, and the rest of
his time in the State Department, as a political liaison and second in command.”

Ward shook her
head.  The man was plugged in.  “So, you’re saying that Zahn, a high ranking
member of the government, murdered the Pope.
Why in the world would he do that?”

“I cannot even begin to
imagine,” the President said shaking his head.

The Chief of the Army
spoke up.  “This just doesn’t make any
sense.  We’ve got to have something wrong
here.”  They all turned back to Benecke.

He cleared his throat
and went back to his folder.  This time
he pulled out several copies of paper and passed them around.  Everyone picked theirs up and studied
it.  They were pictures, small pictures,
that were arranged to fill the single page, and in each picture was a small
group of men at different angles and different locations.  “These are photos from the Cathedral of Saint
John.  As you all know, installing
security cameras where none are present is common procedure for this level of
protection.  The four men you see in
these images are the same men that we believe carried out the
assassination  If you look closely at the
tallest of them, it’s Zahn.”

Simultaneously everyone
stared harder at their picture.  “Jesus,”
whispered Foley.

“Okay, he was
there,”  Ha said.  “How do we know they were the ones that did
it?”

Benecke looked around
the room.  “Do you notice anything
strange about these pictures?”

Everyone continued to
peer at them.  Ha looked up.  “I recognize the man to Zahn’s left in
pictures four and five.”

“That is Kia Sarat,”
Flores spoke up.  “He is Zahn’s right
hand man and has been working with and for him for years.  He checks out.”

“What about the other
two?” asked the President.

Flores took a deep
breath.  “Their ID’s initially checked
out, but now that we’ve had some time to do some digging, we’re finding
discrepancies.”

“Discrepancies?” barked
the head of the Army.  General Hall was a
bear of a man.  Both tall and muscular,
he looked like he could still get into the ring with someone half his age.

Flores spoke up.  “One of the men we thought was named Ahmad,
but we now believe he is Ferran Kamal, the nephew of an Islamic terrorist by
the name of Malik.  The fourth man, Iman,
we believe also has a radical background.”

The Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs rolled his eyes.  “And these
guys just walked right by you?”

“We don’t have time,”
Flores shot back with a look of irritation, “to do an exhaustive background
check on every single person!”

Landeen, the Chairman,
did not back down.  “Well, why the hell
NOT?!  What the hell good is your check
if we can’t tell whether they’re friend or foe until the damn attack is over?”

Flores was not
intimidated.  “Because they weren’t
passing through security!  They were
security!”

Everyone at the table
froze.  “What was that?” asked Vice
President Ward.

Flores turned to
address her.  “What I’m saying is, these
were not normal clearance checks.  Those
are for people not on the security team.
But Zahn and his men were part of the security team.  Almost all major departments were.”  She motioned to the recorder.  “Zahn said it himself.”

“Why the hell was the
State Department part of the security team?
They have no military authority,” Foley said.

“Technically, they
didn’t have to sir,” Benecke answered.
“The passage of the Patriot Act was intended to improve communication by
breaking down walls between government departments.  The State Department does have some
international authority, but the Patriot Act, in an effort to force the
departments to exchange information more freely, essentially equalized them as
part of a larger cooperative system.
Security has been flattened, which means having Zahn and his team there
was completely acceptable.  This is why
Ms. Flores’ teams in the Secret Service had no reason to further investigate
them.”

Foley shook his
head.  “Christ!  You’re telling me that these bastards got
through because of a giant loophole in the law?”

“Yes, sir.”

Foley rolled his eyes
and looked back to the President.

“Several of my team saw
them there,” Flores continued.  “But they
never saw them again, even when my men were getting everyone out.”

“And there is also the
oddity in the pictures,”  reminded
Benecke.  Everyone remembered his
question and looked back at their sheets of paper.

Ha finally looked
up.  “I don’t see it.  What stands out?”

“They are the only ones
in the pictures wearing long coats.”  The
realization struck them all at once.  It
was clearly out of place and they could see it.
“Those coats are not just hot; they’re also long enough to hide AK-47s
beneath them.  And the AKs are another
item.  They’re old, but they’re extremely
reliable.  And Islamic freedom fighters
have tens of thousands of them.”

President Lee leaned
back in his chair.  “Is that it?”

Benecke glanced again
at Flores.  “No, sir.  We’ve gotten information on a few diplomatic
missions that Zahn had made for the State Department.  It looks as though some of those meetings may
have never taken place.”

“What?”  Ward said.
“He never went there?”

“Not exactly,
ma’am,”  Benecke replied.  “He was certainly there, as we can tell from
the plane’s navigation and GPS history, but it looks like he may not have
actually been talking to the people we thought he was talking to.”

Ha leaned forward.  “You told me yesterday Zahn wanted a
drone.  And that you later gave him
access to an Apache and a Blackhawk.”

Benecke nodded.

“So what was that for and
who was aboard?”  Ha pressed.

Benecke frowned.  This was the part he was truly dreading.  The reluctant admission that he had
inadvertently helped Zahn.

“He said he was after
some individuals involved in an assassination attempt.”

“Dear god,” the President
moaned.

Ha continued.  “And who did you put onboard that Blackhawk
helicopter?”

Benecke lowered his
head.  “A Delta team.”

The President stood up and walked to the
window.  He stared straight out across
the lawn at the trees beyond.  “Do you
have any idea,” he said, “what everyone is going to think when they find out we
killed the Pope?  That the United States
Government killed their Pope?”  He shook
his head.  “God almighty.  This is going to start a war.”

The room remained
silent as everyone contemplated what the President said.  Lee almost chuckled out of sheer exasperation
when he turned around.  “Well, I guess
we’re damn lucky we have the biggest military on the planet, because we are
sure as hell gonna need it now.”

Benecke looked around
the room and then at the President.  He
raised his hand gingerly.  The President
looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Sir,” Benecke
started.  “We have a little time to
figure out what our explanation is.  Not
much but a little.  Might I suggest,
whatever that is, it will look far worse if Zahn escapes as well?”

The President squinted
his eyes.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean that, whatever
our story is, I think it would be very bad if Zahn were still alive to dispute
it, let alone offer details we don’t want known.”

Silence filled the room
until Landeen broke it.  “I agree.”

“So do I,” added
Ha.  The President looked at the others
in the room who nodded their agreement.

“So, we take him out
while we still can.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to Will
Douglas, the Air Force Chief.  “Where’s
the nearest base, Will?”

Douglas, the tallest
and youngest of the chiefs, responded immediately.  “MacDill, sir.  Near Tampa Florida.  We have F-16s on the ground that should be
able to reach them before they leave US air space.”

The President absently
reached up and rubbed an eye.  Things
were moving damn fast.  But Benecke was
as sharp as they came.  He was still new
to the post, and while not much for playing politics, he hadn’t been wrong
yet.  Then again, was it possible he
wanted to put it all on Zahn because he’d helped the man?  Doubtful.
He was a straight shooter, and Lee was sure he was right.  Zahn did this, and now they had to clean up
the mess as quickly as possible.  How
he was going to explain this to the world, he had no idea.

The President gave
Douglas a solemn nod.  “Bring ‘em down.”

48

The early spring was
affecting Florida just as much as the rest of the East Coast, and the
temperature was almost 90 degrees when the two pilots sprinted across the hot
tarmac at MacDill in their flight suits.
Barely out of breath, each reached the ladder for their plane and walked
in a tight circle underneath, quickly checking the weapon racks and pneumatic
pressures.  Satisfied, they grabbed their
steel ladders and climbed into their cockpit.
They had very little time, but the preflight check was something every
pilot did religiously, even those with a crew.

Once inside, they
finished connecting their harnesses and zipped their G-suits up the rest of the
way.  Their crew chiefs quickly appeared
over them atop the ladder and forcefully strapped them in.  The chiefs then grabbed and attached the
G-suit hoses to their left console before slapping their pilot on the head and
climbing down to remove the ladders.

Inside, the pilots
finished adjusting their switches and trim adjustments before putting their
helmets on and attaching their oxygen hoses to the harnesses.  They brought their main power online only
seconds apart as every movement had long since become simple muscle memory.

Finally, after starting
their main engines and with clearance from the tower, both planes immediately
pulled forward and headed for the runway with the second pilot falling in
behind the first.  All told, both planes
were airborne in less than six minutes.

The Boeing 757 was the
preferred aircraft for heads of state, including the office of the State
Department.  With a twin jet design, the
plane carried two crew members and up to 280 passengers in the single aisle
fuselage.  The 757 was also capable of
almost 4,000 nautical miles, depending on variant, which gave it an impressive
range.

This 757 was traveling
due south at 530 miles per hour when the F-16 fighters appeared and fell in
directly behind it.  The lead pilot
verified the 757’s call letters near the tail and gradually faded back to
within a quarter mile.

The pilot spoke into
his microphone.  “MacDill, this is
Falcon’s Talon, do you copy?”

“Copy Talon,” came the
reply.

“Aircraft sighted,” he
said, “identification is November-Six-One-Seven-Alfa-Juliet.”

“That is affirmative,
Talon.  Repeat, identification is
affirmative.”

The pilot nodded and
switched frequencies.  He shifted in his
seat then stretched out his hand and relaxed it again around the stick.  “Aircraft November-Six-One-Seven-Alfa-Juliet,
this is Colonel Ainsworth of the United States Air Force.  You are instructed to change course and
return to MacDill Air Force Base immediately.
I repeat, you are instructed to change course.  Confirm.”

Ainsworth waited for a
response.  After thirty seconds he hailed
again.  “I repeat, Aircraft
November-Six-One-Seven-Alfa-Juliet, this is Colonel Ainsworth of the United
States Air Force.  You are instructed to
change course.  You are to confirm
immediately.”

Still in the conference
room, Will Douglas looked up at the President, the phone still pressed against
his ear.  “Mr. President, Zahn’s aircraft
is not responding.”

Lee shook his
head.  “Try it again.”

Douglas nodded and
relayed the command.  After two long
minutes of silence, he turned back to the President.  “Still no response, sir.”

Dammit.  Thought the President.  What the hell is he doing?  Did Zahn think this was some kind of
game?  Or does he think I won’t do
it?  The President paced back to the
window and stared out.

“Mr. President, we have
eight minutes before they reach international waters,” Landeen said.  “If we wait, we’ll have some questions to
answer.”

The President glanced
over his shoulder and then back through the window.  He was fully aware of the questions he would
receive from other countries when they saw an explosion in international
waters.  “How many people are on that
plane?”

Benecke spoke up.  “The ground crew estimated twenty to thirty
people when it departed Stewart, sir.”

“Are they all Zahn’s
team?” the President asked.  When no one
replied, he turned and looked back at them.
“I said, are they all combatants?”

“Yes, sir, we believe
so,” replied Benecke.

Lee shook his head
again.  Zahn didn’t know he was being
recorded in that room, which meant he wasn’t expecting to be identified, at least
not this early.  He probably directed his
pilots not to respond to any other aircraft to avoid accidental detection.  Was he even aware there were two Fighting
Falcons behind him?  Or did Zahn think he
could play him just like he played everyone else?

Ainsworth watched the
large aircraft in front of him carefully.
When the reply came back over his headset, he nodded and loosened his
grip slightly.

“Copy that, MacDill.”

He tried to relax as he
locked the computer onto the target and waited for the missile under his wings
to activate.  He then re-gripped the
stick and flipped the small cover off the top with his right thumb.  He waited two seconds before firmly pressing
the red button.

Below Ainsworth, the
AIM-9E heat-seeking Sidewinder launched from his F-16.  The ten-foot, 188-pound missile reached
nearly Mach 1.5 before it slammed into the tail of the 757 and exploded in a
giant ball of fire.  The entire tail and
part of the rear fuselage separated from the plane as the explosion ripped into
the left wing, lighting half of the aircraft’s fuel on fire and causing it to
instantly engulf most of the cabin.  The
giant plane began to twist as both parts separated in midair and spun away from
each other.  The intense fire spread
through the cabin and traveled through the fuel lines to the other side,
causing part of the right wing to explode seconds later.

Both Ainsworth and his
wingman watched the 757 disintegrate in the wind and fall away into thousands
of pieces of burning metal.

49

It was widely
controversial, and even considered a political and economic failure by
some.  The 1994 North American Free Trade
Agreement was signed by the United States, Mexico, and Canada in an effort to
improve economic free trade between the countries.  Hotly debated, both at the time of signing
and even years later, neither the economic benefits nor drawbacks of such an
agreement were ever proven.  In addition,
many diplomatic and political holes remained, which simply underscored the
agreement’s deep faults.

One such hole was a
secret relationship between Mexico and the United States providing a channel
for “special” and “regulated” trade across the border of the two countries, and
all with little or no oversight.  Special
cargo planes were flown almost on a daily basis and delivered goods to either
country based on the sole discretion of government officials.  The cargo planes were originally supposed to
be packed with products such as medicine, clothing, and food, but, not surprisingly,
all too often they were instead filled with drugs or guns.  It was another loophole in the corrupted
world of modern government.

What was different
about this loophole, however, was that the program, called the Cross Border
Assistance Program or CBAP, was pioneered by a man named William Zahn who at
the time worked at the Department of Defense.
While the CBAP was eventually considered by everyone to be a failure and
a waste of 840,000 gallons of fuel every year, it would prove to be Zahn’s best
laid plan.

The ATR-42 twin prop
regional airliner was old but extremely reliable, requiring much less
maintenance than jet engine aircraft.  It
was noticeably slower than more modern cargo planes, but on that day,
reliability and safety were paramount.
Furthermore, with the program considered a failure, very few people
noticed when the ATR-42 flew past its usual destination and quietly continued
on toward Argentina.

The blackness
disappeared as the hood was pulled off, and Christine was blinded by the room’s
small light.  Her head was still foggy,
and she tried to focus through blurry vision on the person in front of
her.  Her head felt heavy, and she rolled
it from side to side, trying to discern where she was.

“Where am I?” she
mumbled.  Her ears felt hypersensitive,
as if she could hear her own breathing.
The blurry figure in front of her didn’t answer, and she tried harder to
focus her vision.  “What happened?”

Zahn watched her look
around in a daze.  She had been kept
under the whole trip, which meant the readjustment would take a little longer
than usual.

The picture began to
clear, and Christine blinked hard to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.  The person in front of her appeared to be
sitting in a large upholstered chair, and the room behind him looked like…a living
room.  Christine looked down
apprehensively when she realized her hands wouldn’t move.  It felt like she was on a hard chair, and her
arms were nowhere to be found.  She
wondered if she were tied.

“Where am I?”  she asked again.

“It doesn’t matter,”
Zahn said.  His voice sounded loud in her
head, like someone left a radio on too high.

She shook her head
sluggishly, feeling as though she was rolling it back and forth.  “What happened?”

“I kept you
asleep.  It’ll take several minutes to
wear off.”

For some reason, she
accepted that and wondered if her head was nodding without her permission.  Her mind was becoming clearer, but she had
trouble thinking beyond any single thought.

“Where’s…Sarah?” she
asked.

“She’s fine,” was all
Zahn offered.

Christine blinked
several times which seemed to help.  The
man in front of her started to become clearer.
He looked like he was in his fifties or sixties with salt and pepper
colored hair.

“What’s your name?”
Zahn asked, testing her coherence.

“Christine.  Christine Rose.”

“Where are you from?”

“Mmm…New York,” she
answered, struggling to remember what had happened.  She remembered Rand and Avery in a crowd,
pushing people away, and a store with large windows.  She seemed to remember Rand smashing
them.  And the hallway, a white hallway
with a door at the end.  And gun shots.

She could now see the
man in front of her.  She didn’t
recognize him.  “Who are you?”   She looked around the room again, this time
noticing a large couch along a wall covered in paneling.  On the other side of the room was a large
door.  “Where’s Sarah?” she asked again.

“I told you, she’s
fine.”

“Fine how?” Christine
pressed.  Her vision was now clear enough
to see his grin.

“You should be worried
about yourself,” he said with his arms folded across his chest.

What happened?  She wondered again to herself.  She could remember the doorway and the
gunfire, then hiding.  She remembered
Rand and Avery moving some large tanks around her.  She felt a sudden surge of panic as she
remembered being caught!

Zahn watched her expression.  “Ah, now you’re awake,” he grinned.  “Good.”

Christine squinted
through the last of the fog and stared at Zahn.
He looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t remember from where.  He was clean shaven and dressed comfortably.  She looked down and found that she was indeed
sitting on a small wooden chair with her hands bound behind her.

“Why am I tied up?”

Zahn shrugged.  “We won’t need that forever.”

Christine took a deep
breath.  Even through the rope, she could
feel the blood slowly returning to her muscles.
She leveled her gaze back at Zahn. “Who are you and where is
Sarah?”

“You’re
persistent.”  He leaned forward
slightly.  “I told you Sarah is
fine.  As for who I am, right now, I’m
the one in charge of how long you live.”

“You’re the one, aren’t
you?”

Zahn could see her lip
turn up into a snarl.

“You’re the one that’s
been chasing her.  Chasing us.  Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he replied.  “I lost several good men trying to get
her.”

“What do you want Sarah
for?”

“You tell me.”  He leaned toward her a bit more and stood up.

Christine looked
confused.  “What?”

“Tell me.  Tell me what it is about your little
friend.  How did she do it?”

Christine looked
incredulous.  “You don’t know?”

“What I know,” said
Zahn, stepping toward her, “is that she saw me.”

Christine watched him
from the chair.

“She saw me!” he
said again.  “How did she do that?”

Christine shook her
head, still confused.  What on earth
was he talking about?  She saw him?  What did that even mean?  She started to mumble something when it finally
hit her.  Sarah had seen him
somewhere.  Somewhere before.  My god, was that why he’d been after
her?  Is that why he was trying to kill
her?

“She saw you?”  Christine asked.

“You know she did.  She must have told you.”  His eyes flared.  “Now tell me how!”

She’d seen him.  Christine thought to herself.  She’d seen him and yet he didn’t know
how.  How much did he really know then?

“So, you’ve been
chasing us this whole time without even knowing why?”  Christine found herself almost wanting to
laugh.  All of this time, he didn’t know
what Sarah could do.  He didn’t know she
could not only see him, but she could see everybody.

Zahn stared at her with
a look of amusement.  The woman sitting
in front of him was tied up and had no idea where she was.  She was helpless and yet she was angry.  She did not match the profile he had on her.

Zahn looked at his
watch.  He still had time.  “You cannot possibly know what you are in the
middle of.  Christ, you weren’t even
alive yet,” he said with disdain.
“You’re all so blissfully unaware of what happens in your world, what
happens in the shadows.  A world so free
of real fear that all you can manage to do is fight with each other.”

He stared at Christine
with his crystal blue eyes.  “You could
never imagine where I came from, or why.
You’re just like them, so simple and ignorant, and yet, I’m the
one who had to pay.  I was the one who
had to suffer, abandoned and forgotten.”

She watched as Zahn
walked over to a nearby wall.  He looked
at an old black and white photograph hanging in front of him, but she couldn’t
quite make out the image.

“Have you ever killed
anyone?” he said, still looking at the picture.
“Of course you haven’t.  You’re
just another sheep.  I made my first kill
in 1914.  And you know what?  I did it for people like you.  I even spent forty years trying to redeem
myself, forty long years, for something I had failed to be worthy of.”  He raised his voice and scowled.  “I spent all those years helping people,
carrying the word forward, trying to rightfully earn it.  But the others hadn’t.  The others hadn’t, but I was somehow
unworthy. So I continued, I did everything I could possibly think of.  I gave, and I gave, and you know what I
got?   NOTHING!”

Christine jumped in her
chair.

“And what was most pathetic…was
I still thought it just wasn’t enough!”
Zahn turned back to Christine angrily.
“But I was wrong.  I was
worthy and the truth, no matter how much I wanted to deny it, was that I was
simply abandoned!”

Zahn snapped out of his
trance, and a dark smile began to spread across his face.  “I look pretty good for a hundred and seventy
years old, wouldn’t you say?  Of course,
I was supposed to be made whole, but when that didn’t happen, I noticed
something else.  I continued getting stronger.”  His sick smile deepened.  “I don’t know why, but over time I healed
faster and faster.  In fact, it’s odd,”
he said running his hand through his hair, “I’ve begun to grow wrinkles and this
grey hair, yet I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.”

He realized he was
losing focus and turned back to Christine, raising an eyebrow.  There was something strange about her
expression.  “Only three people have I
ever revealed myself to,” Zahn said.
“Unfortunately for you, each time was just before they died.  And frankly,” he shrugged, “none of them ever
understood what I was telling them anyway.”
He studied her closer.  She was
watching him, but there was something unusual in her eyes.  Her face didn’t show the slightest hint of
confusion.  Fear, yes, even a little
desperation, but not confusion.  She
couldn’t possibly have understood what he had just confessed.

He reached for a small
remote control near the chair and turned on a monitor behind him.  Christine gasped when she saw Sarah appear on
the screen.  The monitor showed her in a
large, empty room, tied to an oversized chair, but there was nothing else in
the room, nothing at all.  She was
completely alone.

Christine’s eyes began
to well up when she Sarah crying, tears running down her tiny cheeks.  The fear she must have been feeling sent a
jolt of pain through Christine’s heart.

“No!” Christine
whimpered.  “She’s just a child.  For the love of god, leave her alone.”

“TELL ME!” Zahn
suddenly shouted.  “Tell me how!”

When she didn’t answer,
he sighed.  “Maybe it’s me, but I get the
impression you’re not going to tell me.”

Christine glared back
at him resolute, her tears beginning to fall.

Zahn shook his
head.  This was certainly not the woman
he was expecting.

Christine inhaled
deeply and tried to push back the tears.
“You know what I think?” she said in an icy tone.  “I think you’re afraid of her.  I think you’re actually frightened by that
little girl!”

50

The “Dead Hand” system
was a Cold War era nuclear control system used by the Soviet Union.  Its design was to automatically launch the
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles if a nuclear strike were detected by
seismic, radioactivity, light, or overpressure sensors.  Called a “Second Strike” capability, it
ensured the Soviets could retaliate against a nuclear attack even if the Soviet
Union had already been destroyed.

In other words, it
allowed an automated nuclear attack without any human intervention
whatsoever.  It was also considered
highly dangerous by every other country, and even by some inside Russia.

In the 1990’s, several
Russian military officers confirmed the existence of the Dead Hand system but
would not confirm as to whether it was still in use.  Many suspected it was.

Ron Tran sat on the
famed Yalong Bay Beach, just outside of China’s southernmost province
Hainan.  He dug his feet into the warm,
white sand and looked past his laptop screen, out across the emerald blue
water.  He turned and peered down to the
southern end of the crescent shaped beach with its dozens of giant hotels,
frowning at the construction cranes in the background.

He wanted to spend his
last days in China at one of its most beautiful locations.  He had always remembered Yalong fondly from
his childhood, when his parents would bring him during their summer holiday.  It seemed so long ago, before they both died,
and it looked a lot different now.  Tran
shook himself out of his daydream and reminded himself that Argentina had
beaches too.

He turned back to his
computer screen and watched one of the American news channels over the
internet.  The coverage on the Pope’s
death was everywhere, covered in every country around the world.  The Pope was dead, and that was his
signal.

The Pope’s death was
the trigger for initiating Phase Two of their attack.  Nicknamed Stux2 after its more simplified
predecessor, Tran’s new version was truly impressive on a technical level.  On an emotional level, it was terrifying.

Tran opened several
windows on his laptop and prepared to send the final command.  There was no one on the planet who knew what
was coming, except Zahn.

Stux2 improved not just
on the speed and ability to traverse and infect networks, but it benefited from
a second, simultaneous attack that Tran liked to think of as the “mother of all
head fakes”.

With well over ten
million drones or “bots” standing by, Tran would use them to launch a massive
viral attack against the country least expecting it, China itself.  The virus would attack all of China’s public
facing systems and servers from the outside.
All public and government systems would be targets, and knowing how
poorly government computer networks were maintained, many, if not all, would be
brought to a veritable standstill within hours.
After spending too much time attempting to stop the attack, they would
eventually have to concede that cutting off access was their only option.  But they would soon realize that was not
easy, especially using computer systems that simply would not respond.  In a short time, panic would spread as they
became more desperate to stop an attack that would appear to be originating
from everywhere in the world at once.

It was that panic that
Stux2 would take advantage of.  Most
worms used one or two vulnerabilities to gain access to servers and networks
which had not been properly patched.  However,
as Stux2 traveled, it would periodically create copies of lists and databases
with all current known vulnerabilities.
And since few computer systems were ever fully patched, it would allow
Stux2 to move quickly through virtually any network, identifying its computer
environment and looking for China’s Command and Control System for the
country’s nuclear arsenal.  It was here
that Stux2 would go to work.

China was arguably more
careful than Russia and never considered implementing a Dead Hand system, but
China’s computer systems were far more shoddy.
At its very core, what Stux2 was designed to do was to “reprogram”
China’s control system into a Dead Hand system.

Tran expected the
reprogramming to take only hours, which meant also reprogramming the system’s manual
safeguards.  But when it was done, it
would do the unthinkable…it would then simulate a nuclear launch against China
from both Russia and the United States, and the Chinese Command and Control
system would no longer be able to tell the difference.

In the end, China’s
systems would believe it was under attack, and automatically launch its
entire nuclear arsenal against its attackers.

The United States’
original Stuxnet worm was the first to leap the barrier from the virtual world
to the real world.  Stux2 would use that
leap to launch a full-scale, global, nuclear war.

Tran stared at his
screen for a long time.  The world had
become so terribly dirty and corrupted.
He regretted having to do it, but he had realized long ago this was the
only way to cleanse the system, all of the systems.  Mankind had to start over.

He looked at his screen
again and pressed the Enter key, which sent the command for the attack to begin
in six

hours.  By then he would be on a plane and far over
the Pacific Ocean.

51

Robert Correia wanted
revenge.  He wasn’t supposed to, but he
did.

Born and raised in the
Bronx, he’d spent almost as many hours in church as he had in school.  It was because of his mother, a devout
Catholic.  She was a believer through and
through and would often tell her children when their actions went against God’s
will, so it was no surprise her four children grew up as close to the church as
she had.  They were true to their faith,
and none of them had married outside the church.  As far as his mother was concerned, their
hearts and souls were pureblood.

But Correia stared
through the bars with a pain like he had never felt.  His Pope was gone, murdered in broad
daylight.  And worse, his mother was also
dead.  So distraught by the news, his
elderly mother had fainted and collapsed.
Two hours later, she was dead.

Correia was
seething.  His mother, his life, and his
faith were all shattered because of the man lying on the floor on the other
side of those bars.  Correia was a deputy
sheriff at Rikers Island, and at 2 a.m., he was standing silently before the
cell of the man who destroyed it all.

He watched the dark
shape on the floor and could hear a faint gurgling sound as the man tried
desperately to breathe.  The world was
simply not meant for men this evil.  He
didn’t deserve to be here.  Correia
gripped the metal baseball bat in his hand, looking left and right down the
dark corridor.  Everyone was asleep, and
the two other deputies had conveniently decided to go downstairs in search of
something.

Correia had already
unlocked the door from a distance and now reached out and grabbed one of the
thick bars, pulling the door outward.  He
looked up and down the corridor again and quietly stepped forward into the dark
cell.  The man at his feet had been
beaten as close to death as anyone he had ever seen.  In fact, no one could believe he was still
alive, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he unexpectedly died during the
night.

The hate welled up
inside Correia as he raised the bat up over his head.  There would be no turning of this cheek.

“Don’t you dare,” came
a voice from behind him.  It was followed
by the sound of the safety being released on a semi-automatic hand gun.

Correia froze.

“Put it down.”

The deputy slowly
lowered the bat down over his head, quickly trying to think of an
explanation.  “I…uh,” he stammered.  “I was just…angry.  I wasn’t really going to do anything.”

“Lay it down and back
up out of the cell.”

Correia complied.  As he exited the cell, he was thrown
forcefully against the bars without warning and felt his nose break.  “AHHH!”
He groaned and stepped back but was slammed into the bars a second time,
even harder.

The face of Bazes
appeared from a shadow behind him, followed by the older chaplain.  Bazes whispered into the deputy’s ear.  “If I see you move one inch, I’ll make sure
you never walk again.”

“I can’t believe he’s
still alive,” the chaplain said as they eased Rand down onto a table in the
infirmary.

Bazes simply nodded his
head.  He’d never seen anything like it.  He reached up and turned down the brightness
of the overhead lamp.

Below them, Rand
managed to open one eye.  “Who are you?”
he whispered through swollen lips.

“That’s a long story,”
Bazes smiled.  “But we’re here to
help.”  The chaplain nodded from over his
shoulder.

Rand slowly rolled his
eye back and forth.  “Where am I?”

“You’re at Rikers
Island,” Bazes answered.  He looked down
at Rand’s arms and noticed they were still shaking.  Bazes put his hands on one arm trying to calm
him but realized the tremors ran throughout his body.  “I think you’re having a prolonged seizure.”

“It’s not a seizure,”
Rand said quietly.  “What time is it?”

The chaplain looked at
his wristwatch.  “It’s two twenty-five
a.m.”

“What day?”

The chaplain looked
curiously at Bazes.  “It’s Monday, the 8th.”

Bazes looked into
Rand’s eyes.  “Listen, I don’t know who
you are, but I have some idea.  And I
think you and I are looking for the same person.”

“What happened in
here?”  Rand grimaced in pain when he
tried to move.

Bazes looked at the
chaplain.  “They think you killed the
Pope.”

Rand let his head fall
back onto the table and stared straight up at the ceiling.  “The Pope is dead?”

“Yes, and I think the man we’re both after is
the one who did it,” Bazes said.  “And I
don’t think he’s finished.”

Rand’s brow
furrowed.  “What do you mean?”

“I think he’s planning
something else, something worse.  But I
don’t know exactly what.”

Rand closed his
eye.  The trembling was getting
stronger.  There wasn’t much time.  He opened both eyes and looked back at
Bazes.  “Where’s Avery?”

Avery was also lying
motionless on his cell floor, but he was in worse shape.  Due to his age, they hadn’t beaten him as
badly, but no longer having the ability to heal like Rand, his injuries were
terminal.

Bazes and Wilcox helped
Rand down onto his knee beside him.  He
couldn’t hear Avery’s breathing, and when he checked his pulse he could barely
feel it.  He was slipping fast.  Rand put his shaking hand gently on the back
of Avery’s head.  Then he ran it over the
top and down over his eyelids.

“Go home,” Rand said
softly, squeezing his shoulder.  “You’ve
earned it.”

As he tried to stand
up, Avery’s hand suddenly moved and reached out for him.  Rand quickly grabbed it.  His lips were moving and Rand knelt down,
trying to hear.

Avery whispered
something, but it was still too faint.
His strength was gone, but Bazes and Wilcox helped Rand down even
further, so his ear was just inches from Avery’s mouth.

“Tell Sarah,” Avery
whispered, “to be strong.”

With that, Avery let
out his last breath, his body relaxed and rolled back onto the cold floor.

Rand stared at him for
a long time.  Avery had given him so
much, trained him, taught him and prepared him.
Rand’s jaw tightened as he took a deep breath and pushed himself up.  With his teeth clenched tightly, he rose
enough to get a shaking leg under his weight. Both Bazes and the chaplain
reached out, but Rand stopped them.

“No!” he growled,
rising up into a kneeling position and then sliding his second leg beneath
him.  Finally, with everything he had, he
pushed himself up and onto his feet.

He turned and looked at
the two men.  “Can you get me out of
here?”

“Yes.”

“I need a plane, and I
could use some help.”

Bazes looked at the
chaplain, then back at Rand.  “I have
resources.”

52

“Well, if you’re not
going to speak, I suppose we’ll need to help incentivize you.”

Christine glared at him
as Zahn walked to a nearby table and picked up an old style phone.  She could still see Sarah crying on the
monitor.

Zahn lifted the handset
and pushed a single button.  Kia Sarat’s
voice answered on the other end.  “Our
guest has decided she doesn’t want to talk,” Zahn explained.  “Why don’t you pay the little girl a
visit.  And feel free to be…creative.”

Zahn hung up and
watched with a smile as Christine’s eyes grew larger upon seeing Sarat enter
Sarah’s room on the monitor.  He
retrieved a small blindfold from his pocket when Christine blurted out, “Okay
Okay!  I’ll tell you!  Just don’t hurt her.”

Zahn rolled his eyes
and picked the phone back up.  God,
they were all so predictable.  He
rang the extension again, and Sarat stopped short of putting the blindfold over
Sarah’s eyes.  He put it back in his
pocket and left the room to pick up the call.

“Wait a minute,” Zahn
told him.  “Someone’s had a change of
heart.”  He hung up the phone again and
turned to Christine.  “You were saying?”

“She can see things,”
Christine said reluctantly.

“What kind of things?”

“Souls.  She can see people’s souls.”

Zahn wasn’t just
surprised; he was stunned.  His mouth
dropped open and he turned and stared at the monitor again, as if seeing Sarah
for the first time.  His expression was
quickly replaced by one of fascination.
“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

That was how she did
it.  That’s how she saw him!  Never in his wildest dreams.  He stared at the monitor for a long time and
eventually began to chuckle.  His chuckle
then turned into a laugh.  “My god,
that’s what this is about!”  He kept
laughing.  “Why did I not think of
that?  I never-”  He stopped and turned back around.  “Oh, Ms. Rose, you are quite the idiot.  You don’t even know enough to realize you’ve
given me the greatest gift of all.”

Now it was Christine’s
turn to be surprised.

“You haven’t the
slightest clue what’s happening here,” Zahn said, regaining his composure.  “I knew you had help protecting her, but I
never thought it was this.  This is truly
the icing on the cake.”  His dark grin
grew wider.  “He doesn’t know, does
he?”  Zahn cried with excitement in his
eyes.  “He doesn’t know who I am!  He’s after one of his own, and he has no
idea!”

Christine was
stunned.  One of his own? He
was like Rand?  But how could he be
so old?  It was impossible to live that
long.  Her mind raced, trying to put the
pieces together.  Rand said there would
be a point where he must be there for Sarah.
That was his mission.  But what
happened if he wasn’t?

Christine gasped.  “Oh my god, you failed!” she shouted at
him.  “You failed your mission!”

Zahn was taken aback,
and his eyes quickly flared.

That was it!  Sarah had seen him somewhere.  She’d spotted him.  And if he failed his mission way back
then…then he never earned his soul.  Which meant that if Sarah saw him, he would
have looked like Rand, SOULLESS!

In a single moment,
everything became clear to Christine.
Sarah spotted Zahn, and he knew it, he just didn’t know how!  He simply couldn’t figure out how she did it,
until Christine actually told him.  And
that meant she was right; he was afraid of her!

Christine flashed back
to her decision sitting in the back of the Charger, that she would fight to
protect Sarah with every breath she had.
And she realized her fight for Sarah wasn’t then; it was now.

This time, it was she
who smiled.  Zahn stared at her
curiously.

“You are afraid
of her, aren’t you?” Christine accused him.
Her smile grew.  “You’ve been
afraid of her the whole time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

Christine continued to
press.  “That’s why you always sent
someone else to do your dirty work.  If
you’re truly like Rand, or even stronger as you say, you could have simply come
yourself and been done with it.  But you
didn’t.”  She sneered at him.  “You were afraid of her.  You were afraid of a child.”

“Shut up!” Zahn
snapped.  “I had other
responsibilities.  You can’t imagine what
it took to make this happen.  Do you
think it happened overnight?  Can you
even fathom how many people I had to involve, most of whom never even
knew.  You have no idea!”

Christine glared back
shaking her head.  “How in the world does
someone like you become so sick?!”

“HE ABANDONED ME!’  Zahn suddenly flew into a rage.  He stood over Christine with his nostrils
flaring and eyes that were now black.  “I
tried to be everything I thought he wanted from me!  I followed the path.  I protected others.  I even saved others, but he didn’t
care.  He never cared!”  Zahn caught himself.  He tried to calm down and looked at a
different picture on the wall.  This time
it was an old photo of a group of soldiers.
“I even went to war for him.  One
of your wars.  But I still fought
for him.”  Zahn’s focus drifted off
again.  “I’d stolen a British identity so
I could fight on the front lines, and once there, I could switch identities
with no effort at all.  Just grab another
card from a dead soldier.   It let me use
my skills without being noticed.  And
that’s when it happened.”

Zahn’s gaze seemed to
push deeper into the old photo.  “That’s
when everything changed.”

While he stared into
the picture, Christine silently traced the ropes with her hands down and around
the bottom of her chair.  But she could
not find how they were tied.

“That’s when the
killing began,” Zahn said.  His voice
slowed.  “I did it for the good of god,
for the side of the righteous.  It was my
chance to fight for him again, to prove myself again.  So I killed the enemy, over and over and
over, relentlessly.  And I was good at
it.  After all, fighting is what I was
made for, what all of us were made for.
But instead of proving my faith, something else happened.”  He stopped briefly again, still staring at
the wall.  “Do you have any idea what
it’s like to kill hundreds of people, thousands?  It’s almost indescribable: sick, twisted,
dark…but powerful!”  Zahn closed
his eyes.  “Immensely so.  There is something incredible that happens
when you watch the life fade and disappear from another person’s eyes.”  He opened his own eyes again.  “Ironic isn’t it?  For years I fought for him, and in the end,
it not only drove me to kill, it taught me to love it.”

His voice grew
cold.  Christine wasn’t sure if he was
still talking to her.  “I didn’t realize
it then, but after all those lifeless bodies, after I’d finally lost count,
something broke.  The world gradually
became darker and darker, and I eventually began to understand the truth.  And the truth is that he doesn’t really care
about any of us.  We’re just pawns to
him, in a giant game, to use as he pleases and to throw away when he’s done.”

Christine kept her eyes
on him and quietly tried to trace the ropes again.

“And when I realized
that, when I realized he’d already lost interest in me decades ago, I finally
felt it.  I felt the freedom of truth,
freedom from the belief we Lochem are born with, that he loves and
fights for us all.”  Zahn shook his
head.  “It’s not true, any of it.  It is the ultimate lie.  The ultimate lie about who we are and why we
are here.  You want to know what our
purpose is?  To be sheep, just sheep, all
helplessly controlled until he is done with us.”  His gaze remained locked onto the wall,
almost in a trance.  “But he made a
mistake.  He left someone here who
refused to be one of his sheep, who refused to live and die by his whim.  He abandoned the wrong person, a person who
knows nothing except how to fight.”

“And one day I saw the
light.  It was as if, after all those
years, my destiny had finally found me.
As the life left yet another person I had killed, and he slowly fell
from my grasp, my revelation crystalized.
With that kill, and every kill before it, I was doing what I should have
done all along, rejecting him.  I was
sending his precious children back to him.
The ultimate insult, and the ultimate power.”

Christine froze when
Zahn suddenly turned to her with a strange, twisted look on his face.  “It was then my destiny became perfectly
clear.  Send them all home.  SEND THEM ALL!”

53

Sarah sat shivering in
the cold metal chair.   Her tiny face was
covered with glistening lines, tracks left by countless tears.  She was so scared.  She didn’t know where she was or what had
happened to everyone.  When she woke up,
there was no one to help her and no one to protect her.  The only person she’d seen was the red man
who would come into her room and stare at her for long periods of time.

The empty, grey room
was completely featureless, except for the small camera and tripod at the far
end.  A single light bulb overhead was
the only other item in the room with her.
She tried to twist around to see the door but couldn’t.  She was so hungry.

Sarah didn’t know she
was being watched from a distance.  She
quietly squirmed in her chair trying to relieve some of the pain in her
legs.  She thought of Christine and felt
the tears begin to fill her eyes again.

It was then that
something stirred inside of her.  She
felt it in the deepest recesses of her little heart, something warm and
comforting.  She could feel the tears
slow and some of the fear subside as the feeling grew stronger and
stronger.  Rand was coming.

54

Even
in the evening, Bogota Colombia was hot and humid, much more than Ron Tran was
expecting when he exited the plane.
China had humidity, but not like this.
The sweat began almost immediately as he walked across the tarmac toward
the terminal.

All
of his belongings fit into four large suitcases and a backpack which bounced
lightly against his back.  The computer
in his bag looked like any other, and frankly any agent that asked him to boot
it up would never have known what he was looking at anyway.  Nevertheless, Tran never let it out of his
sight.

He
breathed a sigh of relief to find the terminal building air-conditioned, and he
stopped to catch his breath.   Looking
around, he could instantly see the difference in security that a third world
country had to offer.  He spotted just
two security agents, both eating dinner and engrossed in a conversation with
each other.  The rest of the travelers
walked by them without attracting a second glance.  Drug trafficking was the number one concern
in Colombia, but not when it came to arriving flights.  After all, who would bother bringing drugs into
the country?

Tran
checked his watch and subtracted some hours in his head.  He browsed the video screen and found the
gate number for his connecting flight to Buenos Aires.  He had over two hours to wait.  Tran spotted several televisions mounted from
the ceiling in a larger waiting room and walked over.  He could see what he was looking for before
he even got close.

Only
two of the seven screens displayed live video feeds from China.  The rest were covering the rioting in South
America which was still escalating over the loss of the Pope.  The two locations of the China feeds were
different, but the images of the crowds were very similar.  Unable to read the Spanish captions at the
bottom, Tran watched silently as the effects of his super virus took hold.  Behind the reporters were huge lines outside
government buildings with hundreds, even thousands, of Chinese yelling and
frantically pushing forward.

Tran’s
attack was in full force with millions of computers around the globe attacking
every government controlled server or system they could find.  Most were outward facing systems such as
government controlled banks, social service departments, public utilities, and
even airports.  With millions of people
unable to travel or access their bank accounts, fear quickly spread and a run
on the banks ensued.  Thousands more
gathered around the country’s limited social program buildings, demanding their
assistance checks in cash instead of deposits into their bank accounts.  To make matters worse, many of those working
within the areas hit worst by the enormous crowds had left work when the panic
began, leaving critical services such as gas and electrical plants mostly
unmanned, and the ripple effect quickly began to spread through the country’s
economy.

Politicians
and other public officials desperately tried to calm the crowds, which only
seemed to deepen the fears of the citizenry.
The panic was spreading rapidly, and the Chinese government was trying
to identify the sources of the attacks and find a way to stop them.  But the sources were far too numerous and
distributed.  The attacks were coming
from virtually every country in the world with the highest concentrations
originating from both the United States and Russia.

Yet,
what no one was watching was the internal systems and networks where Stux2 had
silently begun spreading the moment it detected the global attack on the
outside.  While both the government and
the public continued to panic, Stux2 moved from server to server at lightning
speed, finding vulnerabilities and compromising them, then checking for the
unique technical characteristics of China’s Command and Control System.

Tran
continued watching the monitors as the chaos unfolded.  The attack had begun barely eight hours
prior, and the country was already in turmoil.
He thought about what things would be like in another twenty-four hours,
or forty-eight.  They were all sheep.

Tran
covered his mouth and shook his head, trying to show just the right amount of
concern in case someone was watching him.
He displayed a worried look and searched for a public phone.  He found one and stood in front of it,
pretending to dial and then speak to someone for several minutes.  Finally, he nodded and hung up the dead
receiver.  He looked around again; no one
was watching.  Satisfied, Tran walked to
a small café and sat down.  He guessed it
would take twenty-four more hours for Stux2 to find what it was looking
for.  When it did, it would quickly
disable the overrides and safety switches by informing the system that all
switches had already been turned off, and the nuclear authorization
codes already entered.  Finally, after it
had found and programmed all 240 of the remote warheads, it would take full
control of China’s nuclear arsenal.

If
people were afraid now, they would be absolutely petrified when they saw the
exhaust trails of China’s missiles overhead.
By that time, everyone in the airport would be crowded around
those televisions.  And he would be gone.

55

The XB-70 Valkyrie had
the honor of being labeled one of the most exotic airplanes on the planet.  First conceived in the 1950s for the
Strategic Air Command, it was a bomber prototype capable of traveling at a mind
numbing Mach 3.  But in the end, only two
were built due to funding limitations, and they ultimately served only as
research aircraft.  Their hulls, still
unique to this day, were made of stainless steel and titanium and their design
allowed the Valkyrie to drop its wingtips by sixty-five degrees, radically
improving stability during supersonic flight.
They were also the fastest way to get two people all the way to Chile in
time for another flight.

In contrast, the C17
was much slower and served as the primary means of transporting one of the
world’s toughest and deadliest Special Forces teams, the U.S. Army’s 82nd
Airborne Paratroopers.

While many Special
Forces teams were well-known to the public, paratroopers were more obscure and
trained in conditions that many could not even fathom.  Put through every stressful environment and
every mission challenge conceivable, paratroopers were the result of numerous
secret military programs, all with the same goal: to create a truly and utterly
fearless fighting force.

One such program, and
the Army’s most controversial, was termed COHORT, short for Cohesive
Operational Readiness and Training.  First documented by James Pulley in 1988, the
COHORT program was designed to regain a fighting ability not seen since the
United States’ Civil War, where a soldier's ability to fight and resist was in
the realm of legend.  Nowhere in history
was that ability found to be stronger, and after studying it for over a
century, the Army finally knew why.
Resistance ultimately came down to a single underlying factor…the
strength of the group, and the COHORT program was America’s modern
equivalent.  Yet, while official records
showed mixed results in other brigades, the results in the 82nd
Airborne were very different.

Captain Daniel Clausen
stood at the back of the giant Boeing C17 transport plane, packed with exactly
half his company.  Men filled both
“sticks” of the fuselage, with their ninety-pound packs wedged between their
knees.  The second plane with the other
half of Clausen’s team followed directly behind the first, both racing just 800
feet above the ground to avoid radar.

Clausen’s COHORT
company was as tight as any in the Army.
No one had rotated in or out of the company since it formed, which meant
his men had spent nearly every waking minute together for years.

Clausen eyed the two
strangers at the front of his plane with disdain.  He didn’t know who they were or why they were
aboard, and he had no intention of finding out.
As far as he was concerned, they were on their own.

Near the front, Bazes
watched Rand slide back and forth as both aircraft flew along the nap of the
earth.  Thundering along at 180 mph, they
constantly dipped in and out of canyons like a giant roller coaster, sending
Rand back and forth against the cold metal wall.  He did look a little better than when they
left, but Bazes could still see Rand grimacing with every sudden jolt of the
plane.  This flight was much worse on
Rand than the supersonic Valkyries.
Their rides to South America on the Valkyries was a dream compared to
the C17.

Bazes turned to look at
the rest of the paratroopers.  They sat
quietly with their heads and helmets bobbing along with the movement of the
plane, patiently waiting.  The
paratrooper maxim was “anywhere in eighteen hours” but Clausen’s company had
been in the middle of high altitude maneuvers in the Chilean Alps.  This put them just over 400 miles, or two
hours, from Argentina and the identified target.

The White House had
managed to get a forensic team on the ground immediately after shooting Zahn’s
757 down, only to find far fewer remains than they expected.  But Benecke already had his team working around
the clock and found Zahn’s old aircraft before their ruse was complete.  Just thirty minutes before landing in Buenos
Aires, Benecke found the old ATR-42 airplane.
He watched from a satellite feed as Zahn’s team exited the plane and was
whisked away by several Argentinian military trucks.

Clausen’s paratrooper
company was immediately called upon, but they were instructed to sit tight
until Bazes and Rand arrived.
Fortunately, it gave the men more than enough time to restock their
supplies and ammo.

The giant plane dropped
again, causing Rand to lurch forward.
Bazes instinctively reached out just as Rand caught himself.  They were less than an hour from the drop,
and he was having serious doubts about Rand.

56

Zahn stared at
Christine and grinned.  “So, how do you
like the place?”  he asked looking around
the room.

Christine followed his
gaze but remained silent and defiant.

“Do you know what this
place is?  It’s a tad outdated as you can
see.”  He picked up a magazine from a
corner table.  It was seven years
old.  “This, my dear, is a genuine Nazi
bunker.”  He enjoyed watching her try to
suppress her surprise.  “You may not
know, after World War II ended, many high ranking Nazis managed to escape
Europe and relocate to Argentina where President Peron offered them
sanctuary.  Discretely, of course.  But you see, the Nazis, while demented, were
not stupid.  They knew many people would
never forget and would never stop looking for them, people like Simon
Weisenthal who found many of them.  So
the Nazis, never much for accountability, built this bunker as a place to hide
if and when that time came.”

Zahn dropped the
magazine back onto the table.  “It was
built to house dozens of people for years without any communication to or from
the outside world.  Alas, I had to make
some modifications.  And since all of
those good Nazis are now dead, I found it an ideal place to watch my finale.”

Zahn watched Christine
with a tilt of his head.  “Still not
talking?”  He shrugged and walked toward
her, suddenly grabbing the back of her chair and picking her up with it.  Christine slumped forward, almost falling out
of the chair, and was caught only by the ropes that bound her.  She hung forward as Zahn demonstrated his
incredible strength and carried her across the room with one hand.

When he reached the far
side, he opened the large, metal door and carried her into a hallway, then
turned right into another brightly lit and much larger room.  With a jarring impact, he dropped Christine
back onto the chair and its four legs, causing her to rock momentarily from
side to side.  She gritted her teeth hard
but made no sound.

In front of her was a
wall of monitors with several desks before them.  On each of the desks were large computers and
even larger screens showing a myriad of video camera angles around both the
complex and what appeared to be the darkened jungle outside.

However, it was the
wall of monitors where Christine could not help but look.  On each of the four-dozen monitors were live
news videos from all around the world, covering scenes which Christine could
only describe as chaotic.  Huge crowds of
people from Spain to the United States to South Africa, all rioting and
destroying cars and buildings.  Reporters
cowered behind large objects and continued to film from a distance.  One monitor caught Christine’s attention as a
giant department store window was smashed into hundreds of pieces and people
surged inside, grabbing any merchandise within reach.

She was shocked.  She shook her head in disbelief as she watched
the carnage on a global scale.  After
several moments, she noticed a different set of channels broadcasting from the
streets somewhere in China.  The people
looked different, but the panic in the crowds was the same.

“Behold,” Zahn said,
spreading his arms out wide.  “My
vengeance!”

Christine blinked
hard.  “What, what did you do?”  Her eyes caught sight of giant pictures of
the Pope held high over the crowds, and she gasped.  “The Pope!
What happened?”  No sooner had she
finished the sentence than she stared at Zahn in horror.  “You did this?  You…you killed the Pope?!”

Zahn turned and looked
at the same monitor.  “I sent him back to
god!  If I could have put a bow on him, I
would have.”  He quickly stepped forward
and pointed at another monitor.  “And
there is the nexus of it all, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

“What?”

Zahn turned back to
Christine.  His eerie expression had
returned.  “It’s where it all began, so
very long ago.  It was only fitting that
the end of the world begin where this all started, where young Ryan Kelly was
trampled to death, and where I was denied my destiny.  Irony at its best.”

“Ryan Kelly?”

“He was my mission,”
Zahn said almost in a whisper.  “The
young boy who I was supposed to protect.
A boy with a gift of intellect the world had not seen in a hundred
years.  Killed right before my eyes.  At the very steps of where Saint Patrick’s
was being built.”

Christine couldn’t
believe her ears.  She was in total
shock.  “So you killed the Pope?”

“Oh, you’ve missed so
much,” smirked Zahn.  “The Pope was
merely a favor.  A gift to those who have
given so much to help make this happen.
I owed them that much.  And while
they are fierce, my Middle Eastern friends are not exactly the sharpest tools
in the shed.  They haven’t given much
thought to what comes next.  To them, the
Pope was their mission, the end goal.  To
me, he was merely a stepping stone.”  He
paused.  “I was the wrong person to
abandon, wouldn’t you say?”

Christine was beginning
to shake.  “What are you going to do?”

Zahn took a slow, deep
breath.  Oh, how he was enjoying
this.  He had waited so long.  It was all decades in the making.  Now, all of the anticipation, all of the
anxiety, the frustration, the excitement, it was all bubbling out…and it was
intoxicating.

“Observe China,” he
said, pointing back to the Chinese news feeds.
“Surely, you don’t think they’re rioting because of the Pope.  They’re not Christian; well, at least most of
them aren’t.  No, China is under
attack.  After years of Chinese hackers
attacking other countries, they now get a taste of their own medicine.”  Zahn watched a huge crowd of people screaming
and throwing rocks and bottles in downtown Beijing.  “I’ve always found it fascinating that with
so many different human emotions available to them, you people will inevitably
act the same way under various types of extreme stress.  You panic.
Which, I can see, is precisely what you are starting to do.”

Christine closed her
eyes and tried to control her shaking.
She could feel the fear and hopelessness edging inward.  There had to be something she could do.  There was always something.

Zahn could barely
contain his gloating as he continued watching the carnage on the screen.  Oddly, he had no particular ill will toward
the Chinese as a people; in fact, in some ways he admired them.  But, unfortunately, they were the country
that served his purpose best.  “The
Chinese,” Zahn continued, “have been in such a hurry to catch up with the
modern world that they’ve progressed too fast.
Too fast to establish sufficient protocols and manual safeguards to
protect themselves against the very technology that will destroy them.”

Zahn knew, due to their
explosive growth over the last few decades, China’s nuclear arsenal and their
Command and Control systems were more modern than those of the other super
powers.  This meant, in China, technology
was more relied upon to maintain and control certain safeguards with their
nuclear missiles.  It was, therefore,
more vulnerable to Stux2, which had already found and circumvented safeguards
for 22 nuclear warheads.

“In just a matter of
hours, the most insidious computer attack known to man will overcome and change
the programming behind China’s nuclear system and make it fully
reactionary.  Our virus will assume
control of their early detection and warning system and convince it that a
full-scale nuclear attack is occurring.
And when China launches their missiles in an automatic response, the
United States and Russia, who have very clear protocols after verifying real
missiles are airborne, will retaliate in kind.
Then comes Germany, France, Israel and India.  And in case you haven’t picked up on the
irony, most of the world’s nuclear warheads are both located and targeted
within the Earth’s northern hemisphere, which is why we’re in the southern
hemisphere.  And no,” he smirked, “I
don’t expect to survive, but I do intend to live long enough to enjoy watching
the end of it all.  Unlike those in the
North, down here we won’t simply go poof!”

Christine’s mouth hung
open.  She was speechless.  It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be true.  No one could do that.  No one would do that.  But the longer she stared at him, the more
she began to believe it.   “My god,” she
said, “you are completely insane.”

“Insane?” Zahn
scoffed.  “Mengele was insane.  I’m unforgiving.  God left me here.  I never got to go home.  So now, as my revenge, I’m going to send billions
home.”

57

At the ten-minute
warning, the bright lights went out in the C17 and were replaced by the plane’s
low, red, combat lights.  The Jumpmaster
standing near Clausen cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled as loud as he
could over the deafening engines.  “TEN
MINUTES!”  He held up both hands and
flashed all ten fingers.

The paratroopers near
the front nodded and turned to the men directly behind them, repeating both the
message and hand signal.  One by one, the
message was passed down the line with a nod from each paratrooper.

Both planes thundered
forward, continuing to hug the ground through every fold of the terrain below
them.

Zahn turned when one of
his men stepped into the room.  He was
dressed in black fatigues with his face painted to match.  Zahn looked past Christine at him.  “What is it?”

The man glanced briefly
at the monitors behind Zahn and then replied.
“Something just showed up on radar and disappeared again.  Something big.”

The look on Zahn’s face
changed instantly.  “How big?”

“Very big.  Probably four engines.”

Zahn narrowed his
eyes.  That meant a transport plane,
probably a C17.  And if they saw one, that
meant there were probably two.
“Paratroopers,” he said.  They
were coming in with a company of paratroopers, which was one of his most likely
scenarios.  But how did they find him
so quickly?

“How far away?”  Zahn asked.

“About eight minutes.”

Zahn looked at his
watch and thought for a moment.  “Get
your men ready.  They’ll drop about
twelve to fourteen kilometers out and in the dark it should take them three or
four hours to hike in through this terrain.
They’ll want to strike about 4:30 a.m. so the sun is rising by the time
it’s finished.  These men are some of the
best in the world, and they’re going to come in hard.”

The man nodded and left
the room, leaving Zahn staring at the empty doorway.  They must have somehow tracked down his old
NAFTA transport plane.  He shook his head
and pushed it out of his mind.  It didn’t
really matter how; he had known this was one of the possibilities.  It just happened faster than he thought.  Either way, this would be their only
chance.  The Stux 2.0 attack was well
underway.  There wouldn’t be enough time
for a second attack; this was it.

Paratroopers were very
tough, and Zahn had a big surprise for them.
What he hadn’t noticed was Christine furtively loosening the rope’s knot
located below her chair.

The large red and green
jump lights lit up next to the plane’s large, metal door as it opened into the
howling wind outside.  The door continued
turning outward and locked into place, becoming a shield for the paratroopers when
jumping into 180-mph winds.

The Jumpmaster moved
next to the door and yelled again.
“Inboard personnel stand up!”
Instantly the line of men closest to him stood.  “Outboard personnel stand up!”  The rest of the men on the far side of
fuselage stood.  “Check equipment!”

All of the paratroopers
checked the front of their equipment and the back of the equipment of the man
before them.

Near the front of the
plane, Clausen watched Bazes struggle to help keep Rand on his feet and run
through the checks they had been shown.
Rand gritted his teeth and gripped the overhead strap tight.

“Hook up!” yelled the
Jumpmaster.  All of the paratroopers
reached up and hooked their static lines to the overhead cable, then pushed the
cotter pin through with the other hand to secure it.

Bazes did the same at
the front and then reached for Rand’s line but couldn’t find it.  He tried to keep himself steady with one hand
and checked around Rand’s leg for the strap.

“Oh, for Christ’s
sake!” growled Clausen watching them.
Keeping a hand pushed against the ceiling, he quickly crossed over to
them and pushed both of their hands out of the way.  He reached around the right side of Rand’s
leg and immediately brought his hand forward with the strap.

“Three minutes!” yelled
the Jumpmaster.

Clausen immediately
reached up and attached Rand’s clip to the cable, closing it with the cotter
pin.  He then checked Rand’s gear, both
front and back, to make sure it was secure.
Like the rest of the paratroopers, these two men were jumping with full
rucksacks too.

When Clausen finished
checking Bazes, he leaned in close and yelled in his ear, “You go last!”

Bazes nodded his head.

“We’re all out of here
in 35 seconds!  Understood?”

Bazes and Rand both
gave a thumbs up.

Zahn picked up the
phone again and held the receiver to his ear, waiting.  After a few moments, he spoke.  “Get the MANPAD’s ready and get them as close
as you can to the path and direction of the object your radar spotted.  Don’t forget those planes are flying low and
fast which means they’re going to fly past you and your men in the blink of an
eye.  As soon as you hear them, fire the
missiles immediately.  If you wait for a
visual, it will be too late.  And save
half for the second plane.”

Zahn hung up and stood
calmly thinking.  His first surprise was
going to deal the paratroopers a terrible blow.

It was not unlike the
blow that Zahn was too distracted to see coming from behind him, when an untied
Christine raised her chair up and smashed it over his head with everything she
had.

58

Bazes noticed that the
shaking in Rand’s arms and legs was getting worse.  He leaned in and yelled to him, “How are
you?”

Rand winced.
“Never better.”

Bazes smiled back.  That was as far from the truth as it could
be.  Still, Rand was stronger than when
they left, and Bazes was not entirely sure how, but he wasn’t about to start
asking questions.  “Are you going to be
able to make this?” he yelled.

Rand opened his mouth
to reply when they were interrupted by Clausen.
He was standing in the open doorway, facing out, and yelling at the top
of his lungs.  “Let’s take it to the
barn, men!”

Next to him, the
Jumpmaster smiled and called out, “Stand in the door!”  The line of men shuffled calmly and quickly
to the door.

Clausen peered out in
the howling darkness and gave one last look over his shoulder.  “Let’s go get these bastards!”

With that, the
Jumpmaster yelled “Go!” and Clausen was gone.
Immediately behind him, the paratroopers surged forward, pushing out the
door as fast as the Jumpmaster could repeat his command.

Nearly half of the men
had disappeared into the darkness when an explosion suddenly rocked the
airplane.  It was immediately followed by
a second explosion which ripped a giant hole in the tail and demolished its
fins and rudder.  The hole became
enormous as a chunk of the fuselage dislodged and fell away.

The plane’s yaw and
pitch were instantly lost without a working hydraulic system, and the nose of
the plane pitched up wildly.

The unexpected jolt
caused the remaining paratroopers to lose their balance, and the heavy weight
of their packs pulled them back toward the damaged tail.  The overhead cable came apart at the ceiling,
and over a dozen of the men tumbled backward out of control, right out the rear
of the plane.  Without their static
lines, their chutes did not deploy and they fell straight down, hitting the
ground at full force.

Those still inside,
including Rand and Bazes, grasped for something to hold onto as the plane’s
nose quickly changed direction and began to turn into a dive.

The rest of the paratroopers were already
pushing forward in a desperate attempt to exit the doorway, and the Jumpmaster
began grabbing each man and throwing him out as fast as he could.  Under normal circumstances, they would have
fifteen seconds before they hit the ground.
Now, the urgency was to get out while they still had time and the
control to deploy their chutes, and that window was closing quickly.

Rand and Bazes
struggled to get their clips off of the second overhead cable.  Other paratroopers took the faster way out, and
instead they unclipped, wrapped their lines in their hands and threw themselves
out the back.  Better to make it out with
enough altitude and try to manually deploy their chutes than to make it out
when it was simply too low to matter.

Rand unclipped his line
and turned to Bazes who was struggling.
His line was stuck, blocked by a protruding bulkhead support beam that
had dislodged in the explosion.  Over
Bazes’ head, the cable was taut against the beam, pinching his large metal
clip.  Rand tried to pry it out, but the
clip did not move.  He pried his own
shaking fingers between the clip and cable and tried to twist it, but it still
wouldn’t budge.

The nose of the plane
dropped further, heading into a terminal dive.

With only seconds left,
Bazes grabbed Rand’s shaking hand and pulled it away.  Bazes pushed him hard backwards, yelling over
the screeching and shaking of the plane.
“GET OUT!”

Christine swung the
chair hard a second time, but Zahn twisted and grabbed it in mid-air.  His eyes flared as he yanked it from her
hands.  He threw the chair across the
room, glaring at her as he touched the side of his head and pulled it back to
reveal a palm full of blood.

She did not cower as he
would have expected.  Instead, even
without a weapon, she stood her ground.
In fact, she looked like she was about to attack again.  “You’re quite the fighter,” he said, taking a
step closer.

Christine glanced past
him at the monitor showing Sarah sitting all alone.  She snarled at Zahn.  “I’m not afraid of you!”

“Oh, yes you are,”
smiled Zahn.  “And you should be.”

Christine gritted her
teeth.  “I’m not going to let you do
this, and I’m not going to let you hurt her!”

Zahn looked at her with
a fleeting glimpse of admiration, and then it was gone.  In one sudden movement, too fast for her to
even see, he struck Christine hard in the face, sending her several feet back
and into the stone wall.  Her body
crumpled to the floor like a rag doll.

Sarat stood high up the
mountain dressed in his black fatigues.
He watched through his binoculars as the distant fireballs rose high
above the jungle canopy, the smoke and flames slowly curling under to form
bright, yellow mushroom clouds.  Both
transport planes had taken direct hits by the surface-to-air missiles and
crashed into the ground in less than a minute.

Just minutes later,
Sarat could see the bouncing headlights of his three Humvee’s heading back
uphill through the thick terrain.  He had
told them to get out quickly.  The place
for engagement was not there.  It was
higher up where they had the advantage.

The question he was
wondering now was, how many survived?

59

The lights were
blinding.  She painfully rolled onto her
side and tried to shield her eyes from the overhead lights.  Her face felt like it was on fire.  Christine worked her hand down and touched
her jaw.  The swelling felt immense which
meant it was likely even worse.

She groaned and peered
through her tight eyelids, watching the grey concrete floor slowly come into
view.  The outside edges in her vision
were still fuzzy when she saw a set of boots walk across the floor toward
her.   She remembered they were Zahn’s
just before he swung a boot and kicked her hard in the face again.

Blackness.

60

Clausen had lost nearly
half his men.  Most were either unable to
get off the C17s before they exploded or never had enough altitude for their
chutes to open.  It was the greatest
single loss of paratroopers ever.

But those who did
survive reached the ground and still had the area secured within minutes.  The enemy withdrew immediately which allowed
them to search for all survivors, but those who were still alive were in no
condition to fight.

Clausen left four men
to protect the survivors while the rest prepared to advance.  They were losing time and had a long way to
go.  His men instinctively slung the
heavy packs on their backs and checked gas masks on their left side.  After the remaining checks, they pulled their
night vision goggles down over their eyes and leveled their M4 assault rifles
forward.  Payback would be unmerciful.

Clausen and his men
moved steadily and silently, managing to cover the distance in record
time.  At two kilometers out, they
stopped and scanned the open field in front of them with their Bi-Ocular FLIR
goggles.  Using infrared, the
paratroopers could see any object with a heat signature for almost a quarter
mile, which meant anything with a respiratory system.   The field ahead was black, showing only a
few white shapes of tiny animals scurrying away.  When Zahn’s men did appear, the paratroopers
would see them as clear as day.

But what Clausen didn’t
know was that Zahn’s men were expecting them, and their fatigues were invisible
to the paratrooper’s FLIR goggles.  Each
pair of black fatigues was designed with a mylar-aluminum prototype liner that
created a perfect and complete seal around the wearer.  Along with a flexible hood and special face
mask, Zahn’s men gave no external heat signature at all, allowing them to
appear as black to infrared as the bushes they lay in.

Sarah jumped when she
heard the gunfire outside.  Her small
lips quivered and she cringed at the loud, constant bursts which quickly grew
louder and longer.  She heard yelling
outside and several minutes later the door opened behind her and closed again.

She heard footsteps
cross the room behind her and knew immediately who it was.  As he stepped in front of her, she looked up
into the dark and deadly face of Kia Sarat.

“You’re coming with
me,” he said and bent down to untie the rope around her tiny legs.

“W-where are we going?”
she asked quietly.

“A long way from here,”
he answered, raising his voice over the shooting outside.  “Where you can show me, and some others, what
it is that makes you so special.”

“W-what about
Christine?”

Sarat paused with the
rope in his hand and looked at her.  He
continued without a word, unraveling the line from her body.  He had just stood up and grasped her arm in
his giant hand when the door was suddenly ripped off its hinges from the
outside.

Sarat instantly reached
for his gun, but it was too late,  Rand
was already in the room pointing a rifle at him.  Covered in mud, bruises and blood, he aimed
the gun at Sarat.  “She’s not going
anywhere.”

Sarah screamed when
Sarat picked her up and held her in front of him as a shield.  “I know you want her; don’t be stupid,” he
said, peering past her ear at Rand.

“The only way out is
through me.”  Rand leveled his
sights.  “If you hurt her, you’ll die
right here.”

Sarat said
nothing.  He stared at Rand,
thinking.  He looked closely and noticed
that the barrel of the gun was shaking.
Yet, it wasn’t the gun that was shaking, it was Rand.  He smiled and wrapped his hand around Sarah’s
tiny neck.  “Drop the gun or I squeeze.”

“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.” Rand’s face
turned to steel.  “Then I’ll track down
everyone you know and I’ll kill them, parents, brothers, cousins,
everyone.  And when I’m done, I’ll find
every person who has ever known you or talked to you.”

“You’re lying!”

Rand shook his head
again and tried to control the shaking.
“I don’t lie.  You hurt her and
everyone you have ever known dies; that’s a promise.  And believe me, I’ll have plenty of time to
do it.”

Sarat looked at Rand
nervously.  He kept watching as Rand’s
shaking grew steadily worse, and the barrel increased its bouncing back and
forth.  He can’t even aim.  Sarat slowly passed Sarah to his left hand
and dropped his right down next to his holster.

Sarat glanced down to
make sure his gun was still there.  When
his head came back up, Rand was no longer looking at him.  Instead, Rand was looking at Sarah who was
staring right back at him.  Before Sarat
understood what was happening, Rand gave Sarah a tiny nod.

Immediately, she closed
her eyes tight, and Rand shot Sarat in his right leg.  He howled in pain and dropped Sarah onto the
floor just before Rand fired another round into his chest.  Sarat’s body fell backwards and lifeless onto
the floor.

Rand let his gun drop
and looked at Sarah who still had her eyes closed.  When she opened them, she saw Rand and ran
forward, jumping into his arms and burying herself in his neck.  She hugged him tightly, and Rand wrapped his
muscular arms around her little frame.

She leaned back and
rubbed her eyes.  “I knew you would
come.”

“No matter what,” Rand
smiled back.  And for that moment, he
felt no pain at all.

With Sarah still in his
arms, Rand turned away from Sarat’s body.
He walked to the overhead camera and yanked the power cord out of the
wall.

Several minutes later,
Rand peeked around the corner of the small brick house where Sarah had been
kept. Walking behind him, she held Rand’s hand and tried to look out from under
his legs.  Rand raised his FLIR goggles
and looked out over the open area.  The
firefight had stopped momentarily, and he could see paratroopers lying in the
tall grass.  But there were no white
shapes for Zahn’s men further up the slope.
Where were they?

What Rand could see was
the entrance to some kind of bunker, but there was nowhere to hide between him
and it; it was all open field.  They
could go around, but it would take far too long, even without a six-year-old
girl.  He looked back up to the
bunker.  There was only one way.

Without warning, Sarah
gasped loudly behind him.  Rand whirled
around to see her astonishment and dropped down onto his knee.

“What is it, Sarah?”

She stood there with
her mouth open.  “You have a
shadow!”  Sarah watched as a faint shadow
began to envelop Rand, finally covering his entire body.  It slowly brightened until it became a bright
yellow.  “It’s yellow!” she cried.

Rand felt a strong,
warm sensation deep within his chest.  As
it grew, it became warmer and warmer and expanded out from his torso down to
his arms and legs, all the way to his fingers and toes.  Then, all at once, his shaking stopped.  He was whole.

Rand hugged Sarah again
before looking back up at the dark hill.
“We have to get Christine.”

Sarah stood before him,
still grinning from ear to ear, but her excitement faded almost
immediately.  Rand’s shadow became
yellow, but it didn’t stop.  It continued
to change, quickly turning to pink, orange, red and finally black.

61

Christine awoke and
gasped through the cold water being thrown on her head.  She wiped it from her face and coughed
violently, spitting blood onto the wet floor.
In a panic and blinded again, she protected her face with her right hand
and scooted back against the wall.

“Wake up, you’re
missing the fun,” Zahn’s voice echoed from somewhere in front of her.

Christine spit again,
not sure whether it was more blood or water this time.  “What?”

“Your rescue team has
arrived,” Zahn replied dryly.  “But
sadly, they’re not doing too well.”

She shook her head and
peered up at his silhouette.  “I don’t
want to see it.”

“Of course you do,” he
snapped.  He reached down, grabbed a
fistful of her hair, and pulled her to her feet.

Christine yelled in
pain and stood up.

Zahn pulled her across
the room and shoved her face toward the wall of monitors.  They all showed the outside perimeter now and
from different angles.  Random muzzle
flashes could be seen everywhere as the fight raged.  Zahn leaned forward and whispered into her
ear.

“These men are your
only hope.  And they’re all dying.  How does that feel?”

It felt sickening.  She wanted to throw up over what was
happening.  Christine stumbled to
maintain her balance when Zahn pushed her head forward even more.

“Do you still believe?”
he hissed.  “Do you still think this can
be stopped?  It can’t, and you’re going
to watch it all happen, with me.”

Christine rolled her
eyes weakly, trying to look away from the monitors.  She fought hard against Zahn’s tight grip and
managed to turn just enough…when she saw it.
She saw it and her eyes opened wide in shock.  Sarah was gone!  “What did you do?!” she screamed.

A startled Zahn looked
around, trying to understand what Christine was screaming about.  She was staring at his computer screen.  The video feed of Sarah was gone, replaced by
nothing but static.

“What happened?” Zahn
yelled with bulging eyes.  He pushed
Christine out of the way and sent her stumbling to the side.  Zahn smashed the table with his fist.  “Dammit!
Who did this?” he screamed.  “I’ll
kill them!  WHO DID IT?!”

“I did.”

Zahn and Christine spun
around to find Rand standing in the doorway, his face white and his body
covered in blood.  He gave Christine a
weak smile and tried to step forward but he collapsed and fell onto his knees,
catching himself with his hands on the floor.
After a few moments, he leaned his head back, gasping for air.  His jacket had over a dozen holes where the
bullets had torn into his body and blood now oozed out.

“Rand!” Christine
cried.  She tried to run to him, but Zahn
grabbed Christine and pulled her back.

He looked at Rand
curiously.  “This is him?” he finally
said.  His pursed lips turned into a
broad smile.  “This is him?”  Zahn burst out laughing.  He peered down at Rand who barely managed to
keep his knees under him.  “This is who he
sent to protect you?”  Zahn laughed
again, harder.  “The big man must really
be in trouble.”

Rand swallowed
hard.  “Sarah?” he said in a weak voice.

Christine opened her
mouth to answer when Rand spoke again, louder.

“Sarah?”

The ruck sack on Rand’s
back began to move.  Christine and Zahn
watched in stunned silence as his pack shifted again, and Sarah’s tiny head
popped up over Rand’s shoulder.

“You okay?” Rand
whispered.

“Yes,” Sarah said and
climbed off his back.  Christine couldn’t
believe her eyes.  Sarah was wrapped from
head to toe in Rand’s bullet proof vest.

Christine pulled hard,
breaking Zahn’s hold and running to Sarah who wrapped her arms around
Christine.  She looked at Rand.  “What did you just do?”

Sarah answered for
him.  “We came to get you.”

Zahn’s laugh was now
almost hysterical.  “Christ, how much
more perfect could this be?”  He looked
at all three of them as he stepped forward, barely able to contain
himself.  “A woman who can barely stand
up, her great warrior who is about to lose consciousness, and,” he tilted his
head, “God’s newest miracle, right here before me and as pretty as a little
flower.”  He shook his head and continued
laughing.  “This truly could not be any
sweeter!”

With the last of his
strength, Rand grabbed Sarah and Christine and pushed them both behind
him.  He fumbled over his pants and
jacket looking for his gun, but it was nowhere to be found.

“This is the icing on
my cake,” Zahn said as he stood in front of them.  “To send all three of you right back to him
and at the same time, no less.”  He
looked at Rand who was leaning over and fighting to breathe.  “And I’m going to start with you.  For as you know, when you die without a soul,
you don’t go home, ever.”

Zahn withdrew his gun
from the holster and made sure it was loaded.
Satisfied, he let the slide spring forward.  “And then our little girl here.  Because I want you, Christine, to watch it.”  Zahn held the gun up and pointed it at
Rand.

Rand looked up at the
barrel of Zahn’s gun as darkness closed in around him.  His vision was failing, and he could barely
move.  After all of this, after
everything he’d fought for, this was the way it was going to end.

Quietly, behind Rand
and Christine, Sarah slowly stood up.
She looked down at them and stepped forward, putting her little body
between Zahn’s gun and Rand.

Zahn looked at her
curiously.  He smirked at the thought of
Rand having to be protected by a six-year-old in his final seconds.

“He didn’t forget you,”
she said softly.

Zahn froze.  He looked as though he didn’t quite hear
her.  “What?”

She stared up at Zahn
who towered over her.  “He didn’t forget
you,” she repeated.

The look in Zahn’s eyes
changed from delight to confusion, and he took a small step back.  Without saying a word, Sarah matched him by
taking her own step forward.

Zahn nervously looked
at the others and then back down at Sarah.
“What is she doing?!” he said and took another step backward.

“He never forgot,”
Sarah said in a hushed voice.  She closed
the gap again.

Zahn yelled at Rand and
Christine.  “Did you tell her to say
this?  Tell her to stop!”  He nervously grabbed a small metal table and
slid it between them.  It wasn’t
possible!  What she was saying wasn’t
possible!  He was left here; he was
abandoned!  He backed up even further
away from the table when he saw it, something in Sarah’s eyes.  He had seen those eyes before, a long time
ago, in the young boy Ryan Kelly.  His
voice began to tremble.  “Stay away from
me.”

He watched in fear as
the tiny girl walked around the table and came closer.  “He loves you,” she said.  “He’s always loved you.”

“No, he doesn’t!”
yelled Zahn.  “He left me!”

Sarah looked at him and
shook her head.  “He never left you.”

Zahn backed into the
wall and, in a panic, he pointed his gun at her and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

His finger would not
move.  Zahn pulled again harder, but his
finger remained frozen.  He tried to
switch to his left, but his entire hand became frozen, both unable to let go of
the gun and unable to fire it.  As Sarah
came closer, Zahn kept moving away.  He
looked back at Christine, who was watching and moved next to her, away from
Sarah.  “Stop her!  Tell her to stop!”

Christine said
nothing.  She only watched in amazement
as Sarah continued to approach Zahn completely unafraid.  Zahn’s composure had suddenly changed.  He was no longer a violent monster; he was
now a monster who was afraid of a mouse.
As Sarah closed in again, Zahn was now pushed into the corner of the
room, paralyzed with fear.

Sarah stopped in front
of him and stood there quietly.  Finally,
she whispered, “He wants you to come home.”

Christine watched Sarah
reach down and take Rand’s limp hand in hers.
With the other, she reached out and grabbed Zahn’s hand.  Slowly Rand’s body began to glow and his
black shadow became visible.  The
blackness spread from his torso and traveled up his arm to Sarah’s hand where
it continued through her and into Zahn.

Zahn’s body instantly
and violently arched backwards, as the blackness slowly enveloped him and his
eyes rolled into his head.  His jaw
tightened and his body began to shake after Sarah let go, letting Zahn fall to
the floor still convulsing as if in a giant seizure.  Soon, the shaking began to fade, taking
Zahn’s strength with it.  He opened his
mouth, gasping for air, just as Rand had.

Finally, his head
slowly fell forward, and he stared at nothing.
His vision was nearly gone.  “I’m
going home,”  he mumbled and tears began
to appear in his eyes.  “I’m going home.”

“Wait!” Christine
cried.  She scurried across the floor to
where he was propped against the walls.
“You have to stop the attack!  You
have to stop the missiles!”

Zahn continued to stare
straight ahead.  He could no longer see
nor hear anything.  With the last of his
energy, he suddenly gasped.  “Oh god,
what have I done?”  His voice faded into
a whisper, “He’ll never forgive me.”

With that, Zahn’s head
rolled to the side and he was gone.

62

“NO!” screamed
Christine.  She grabbed his jacket and
shook him hard, but Zahn’s body simply slid the rest of the way down the wall
to the floor.  She looked up at the wall
of monitors, some still showing the rioting in China.  She moaned and desperately turned back to
Rand who lay still behind her.  “Rand!”
she screamed and grabbed his shoulders.
She pulled his head up to hers and brushed his hair out of the way when
her left hand felt something: a pulse.

Christine gasped and
looked up at Sarah.  “He’s still
alive!”

Sarah nodded,
smiling.  “He’s yellow again.”

Two soldiers stumbled
into the room with one hopping and leaning on the other.  They both looked down at all four of
them.

Bazes spotted Rand on
the floor and then looked at Christine and Sarah, whom he noted was much
smaller than he expected.  He then looked
at Zahn’s body sprawled out with his mouth open.  “What happened?”

“Who are you?” asked
Christine through swollen eyes.

“My name is Bazes,” he
nodded at the other man, “and this is Clausen.
We came with Rand.”

“What the hell took you
so long?”

“Those bastards were
wearing some kind of cold suits!” growled Clausen.  He immediately realized what he had said and
looked at Sarah with a guilty frown.
“Sorry ‘bout that.”

Bazes turned and looked
around the rest of the room, stopping at the monitors on the wall with the
video feeds.  “What is this?” he asked.

“Listen to me!”  Christine pleaded.  “We have to do something.  It’s a nuclear attack!  The missiles in China are going to go off!”

Bazes’ eyes opened
wide.  “What?!”

“It’s a massive
virus!  The attack on China is some sort
of decoy!”

“Dear God.”  He pushed away from Clausen and hopped on one
leg, quickly searching his pants.  Bazes
found what he was looking for in the right leg pocket and ripped it open,
extracting a small satellite phone.  He
flipped up the oversized antennae and pressed a button.

“It’s Bazes.  He’s dead.”
He looked back at all the monitors.
“And we have an emergency!”

63

Guo Cheng was the
Minister of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China, which was
charged with the security and safety of the entire country.  He slowly returned his phone to its receiver
and pushed a red button on the base.
Less than ten seconds later, his assistant came running into the
room.  Cheng looked at him urgently.  “Get the Prime Minister and the President on
the phone right now.”  His
assistant bowed and disappeared.

With a deep sigh, Cheng
leaned back in his chair and stared at his phone.  The call had been from Benecke, head of
Homeland Security in the United States.

Before the call, he
thought he had enough problems.  The
riots had escalated, and their only option for stopping the global cyber-attack
was to kill all internet connectivity in and out of the country.  But it would come at a price.  That attack was on the Chinese government
only, but to stop it meant stopping all electronic communication and commerce
for over a billion people.  The
economic impact, especially in the current economy, was going to be horrific.

That was before
Benecke’s call.  Now what they had to do
was much worse, and it was going to be absolutely disastrous.

Ron Tran exited his
gate in the Bueno Aires airport along with several hundred other passengers,
all arriving on the first wave of morning flights.  His inability to sleep on planes left him
exhausted, but the excitement of the last three days had kept him awake purely
from the adrenaline.  He spotted a group
of people standing around a giant television and walked quickly to join them.

Something was
wrong.  He pushed in closer from the back
of the crowd and tried to understand what was happening.  He couldn’t translate the words of the
newscasters, but he could see words in Chinese inside a window in the upper
left hand corner.  China was dark.

A wave of anxiety began
to form inside him as he peered harder at the screen trying to understand what
that meant, but the Chinese message just kept repeating the same words.  China is dark.

Suddenly he realized,
China was not just offline; China was literally “dark”.  China had turned off the power for its entire
country, all at once.  Every single one
of its nuclear and coal power plants, over 70 in total, were all taken
offline, plunging the entire country into total darkness.

Tran shook his head; he
couldn’t believe it.  He instantly
thought of Stux2 and China’s Command and Control system.  The systems, as well as the missile silos,
all had back up power, but those were from other plants.  With all of the plants offline, there was
no redundant power.  Even the plants
that had backup generators wouldn’t have enough juice to power the systems and
connections all the way back to the country’s central command system.  They had stopped it.

Tran backed up and
tried to think.  How did it all
happen?  What did it mean?  Where was Zahn?  After several minutes, Tran stood up and
calmly walked down the giant hallway, blending in with the huge crowd of
arriving passengers.  As he walked, he
calmly unzipped his backpack and slid his laptop computer out.  He held it casually in his hand until they
passed the next garbage can, where he quietly let it fall in.  He then walked downstairs and circled back to
the ticket counter.

“I’d like to purchase a
one way ticket, please,” he said, handing his ID to the agent.

She peered at the card
and placed it back onto the counter.  “Of
course, Mr. Chang.  Where are we headed
today?”

“La Chinita,
Venezuela.”

64

Christine sat on the
cold floor, leaning her head against the wall.
She had one hand on Sarah who lay asleep in her lap and her other on
Rand, who was still out.  Bazes sat in a
chair nearby watching the video feeds on the wall.

“Did they stop it?” she
asked Bazes quietly.

He turned and looked at
her, considering the question.  “Yes.”

She nodded and looked
down at Sarah.  After a few minutes, she
spoke again.  “Are you with the
government?”

This time, Bazes
smiled.  “Actually, you can probably say
the government is with me.”

She wrinkled her brow,
unsure of what that meant.  “So does that
mean you have some authority?”

“Yes.”

“I’m wondering if you
can help me with something.”

Bazes raised an
eyebrow.  “Such as?”

“There is someone I
need the FBI to investigate.”

“And who would that
be?” he asked.

“I don’t know his name,
but he’s a ranger at Natirar Park in New York.”

65

Three years later…

Kingston Estates was
the largest youth house in Kansas City, situated on a sprawling ten acres along
the Missouri River and less than fifteen miles from downtown.  Lawrence Grayson, Kingston’s Director, walked
down the large hallway leading out to the main yard.  He was proud of the house, and it showed.

“As you can see,”
Grayson boasted, “this is one of the nicest facilities in the state and we
pride ourselves on it.  We also place
more children than all of the others combined.
As “houses” go, the children are fortunate to be at ours.”

They turned left and
walked down two sets of steps out into the sun.
The lawn and surrounding bushes were well-kept and looked as clean on
the outside as the two-story building did on the inside.  After walking up a small hill, Grayson
stopped at the top and gestured to the large field in front of them, where
dozens of children were playing.  They
were all different ages with the smaller children running around together,
while the older children clumped and played in smaller groups.

“Mr. Grayson!” one of
the smallest boys called, running up to him.
He smiled and bent down as the boy approached.  “Yes, what is it?”

“I have to go potty.”

Grayson turned and
smiled with a mild look of embarrassment.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be right back.”  He grabbed the young boy’s hand and hurried
off.

Sarah, now nine,
quietly stood on the grass scanning the yard.
After a moment, she looked up at Christine and pointed to the far
corner.  “That’s him.”

Christine’s gaze
followed her hand and spotted a young boy just four or five years older than
Sarah.  With sandy brown hair, he was
alone on the opposite side of the field, doing pull-ups on an old rusty bar.  He didn’t notice them, and as she watched,
Christine realized he was not interacting with any of the other kids.

“Are you sure?”

Sarah nodded.

Christine smiled.  They had been searching for a long time.  She turned to her left.  “Well?”

Next to her, Rand
watched the boy carefully.  After several
seconds, he nodded with a satisfied look.
“He looks trainable.”

Christine smiled again
and slipped her hand back into Rand’s.

EPILOGUE

New
York City – 1871

Dozens of people leapt
from their wagons and carriages, running through the puddles to help.  A crowd was beginning to form, and several
people darted away to find a doctor, but it was too late.

Dean Kelly sat on the
muddy ground cradling the body of his young son in his arms.  “My Ryan!
My perfect little Ryan!” he cried out over and over, tears streaming
down his face.  Kelly just stared at his
son’s pale face, so peaceful and calm, and rocked his still body back and
forth.

The pain was
overwhelming and unimaginable.  His boy
was gone.  His perfect boy.  His little Ryan was so smart and so gifted.  Even his father, a man of high intelligence,
was stunned at his own son’s abilities.
Ryan never had to be told something twice. He remembered virtually
everything from almost the day he could speak.
At the age of ten, he was better at mathematics than any tutor Kelly
could find.  But what Ryan loved more
than anything else was biology.  Now,
that was all gone, Kelly thought to himself.  All of Ryan’s dreams were gone.

What Kelly did not know
was the greatness his son had been destined for, a destiny that would now never
come: to become a prodigy like few the 19th century had ever
seen.  To be the youngest to finish Yale
University at thirteen years old; and, to gain a doctorate in medicine by the
time he was sixteen.

In the late 1890s, he
would have gone on to make numerous biological breakthroughs which would have
radically advanced the understanding of the human body.  In 1912, after joining the famed Institute
for Cancer Research in London, he would have made the greatest contribution of his
life: discovering unique cellular characteristics that could later identify and
predict mutation behavior.

However, the discovery
would go misunderstood for decades until Ryan Kelly’s daughter, following in
her father’s footsteps, would uncover important clues and take it even
further.   In 1952, she would develop the
biological knowledge and foundation for the first prototype: a prototype for a
cure of human cancer cells.  And less
than forty years later, by the end of the twentieth century, cancer would rank
just below chicken pox on the list of most dangerous global diseases.

But young Ryan Kelly
was gone and his future suddenly erased.
Neither his father, nor the rest of the world, would ever know about his
discoveries and his gifts to mankind.

God would try again.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR

Michael
Grumley lives in Northern California with his wife and two young
daughters.  His email address is
mgrumley@gmail.com, and his web site is www.michaelgrumley.com where you can
also find a supplemental Q&A page for this story.

Message
from the author

Thank you
for reading my second book Amid the Shadows.
I hope you enjoyed it.  As
some of you may know, I’m a part-time, self-published author, with the hope of
one day being able to write full-time.  I
still have a lot of stories stuck in my head, waiting to get out.  Not surprisingly, a self-published writer’s
only real means for accomplishing this is through reviews and referrals.  If you could please spare two minutes to
leave a review for Amid the Shadows, I would be deeply grateful.

Click here to leave a review for
Amid the Shadows

I know it can
be a little bit of a pain, so if you do write a review, please email me at my
address above and I will forward you a short bonus chapter revealing some of
Jonathan Avery’s mission against the Nazis.
I thought it would be a fun way to say “Thank You” for taking the time.

Michael