Black Sun dl-2 Page 4

“Aren’t we all?” Hawker replied, only half joking.

  The priest sat down opposite him. “Of course we are. It is the nature of our existence. But perhaps I can help you.”

  Hawker considered the offer. He felt somewhere beyond help. “What happened to you?” he asked, touching his hair in a spot corresponding to the scar on the priest’s head.

  “In the early days of Jumbuto, a man who worked for him attacked me with a machete.”

  Hawker’s jaw clenched for a moment as he imagined the crime. “Well, perhaps he’s gone now.”

  “Oh, no,” the priest said. “He’s quite well, thank God.”

  Confused, Hawker narrowed his gaze.

  “The man who attacked me was Devera,” the priest explained. “He was young and wanted the kind of life he saw the warlords having. But it was not in him, or, if it was, God took it from him. One day, months afterward, Devera came to me for forgiveness. His eyes were red with tears, his face stricken, his arms covered in blood where he’d gashed them over and over in some form of self-inflicted penance.”

  The priest shook his head sadly. “Even after I forgave him, it was a long time before he chose to forgive himself. But he worked day and night to help this village and the people here. Eventually he was one of us again. Part of something more. Part of us, part of life instead of death. And then finally the darkness left him.”

  Hawker stared at the priest.

  “If he had not attacked me,” the priest said, “he would have killed others, perhaps many. He might not have found his way back to the narrow gate.”

  “You could have died,” Hawker noted.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” the priest replied. “Change is often arrived at only through enough pain.”

  For the second time since meeting this man, Hawker was struck silent. He looked down at the floor and then away.

  “I did not mean to disturb you,” the priest said, “but there is someone here to see you.

  “To see me?”

  “A white man. He says he flew into Dwananga and then drove up.”

  “When did he get here?”

  “An hour ago,” the priest said. “He insisted that he needed to see you right away, but I made him wait outside. This place is a sanctuary. Here one should not be disturbed.”

  An hour. Had he really been in the church for that long?

  “Did he give you his name?”

  “He did not,” the priest replied. “He said that you would not speak with him if you knew who he was.”

  It seemed like a strange admission from someone who’d come to see him.

  Hawker stood. “Thank you, Father.”

  He walked to the door and pushed through, leaving the darkened quiet of the church for the brightness of the outside world. Squinting across the courtyard, he saw a gray-haired white man wearing slacks and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The man stood with his back to Hawker, talking with Devera beside the water pump.

  As Hawker walked up, Devera looked his way.

  The white man turned with him. “By the pricking in my thumbs …,” he said, loud enough for Hawker to hear.

  The man was Arnold Moore, director of the NRI.

  CHAPTER 6

  The words came screaming from the darkness. “What are you looking for?”

  Danielle strained to see their source. She felt her body shaking, extreme cold and hot all at the same time, as if poison were coursing through her veins.

  A blinding flash of light scalded her eyes.

  “What are you looking for?” the voice demanded again.

  It felt like a nightmare, like a disjointed dream of terror. Her head was swimming, as if she had vertigo and was falling. She reached for something to hold on to, feeling behind her, but there was no back to the chair, nothing to lean against, only edges like on a countertop or table.

  The blinding light vanished and a more subdued light came on. A face moved close. It was Asian in complexion and features, slight and fine-boned. He came so close that all she could see was his eyes. His hands grabbed her. They were cold and shaking. He gazed into her eyes, as if he were searching her soul.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “We know what you’re looking for. More artifacts, like the one you found in Brazil.” He pulled away, laughing a sickly laugh.

  He began to laugh harder and it terrified her. She forced herself to move, scurrying backward and then falling. The jarring impact with the floor sharpened her senses for a minute. She looked back toward her oppressor. He sat in a motorized wheelchair, his body twisted and withered, shaking slightly from some internal tremor.

  As strange as it seemed, a feeling of pity came over Danielle. And when the man seemed to recognize it, his face contorted in fury.

  “Take her,” he shouted.

  Two large men grabbed her, picked her up, and slammed her back onto the examination table. A third man approached with a dripping hypodermic needle.

  “No!” she screamed, struggling to break free.

  The men held her down. The blinding light flashed again and then the needle pierced her flesh and everything vanished.

  * * *

  She woke, curled up in the fetal position, her heart pounding in her chest. It was more than a dream, but how much more she couldn’t know. As the images faded, she struggled to parse them into coherence, to separate reality from what must only be nightmarish imagination. Try as she did, she could not be sure where the boundary lay.

  She sat up slowly. White walls and beige furniture surrounded her, including an art-deco-like desk and several chairs that occupied the far side of the room. There were no windows in the room. No clocks, radios, or televisions; no computer sat on the desk. It was as if she’d fallen asleep in some downtown office building and woken up in the Twilight Zone version of it.

  If only that were the case.

  She was a prisoner. One who had been treated roughly for some period of time, a few days or even weeks perhaps. She had no concept of how long it had been, of where she was, or what she might have told them.

  Her last clear thought was of Professor McCarter lying dead on the side of the hill, wrapped around a tree, like a car that had gone off a cliff.

  A wave of depression swept over her.

  She felt great responsibility for McCarter. To begin with, he’d only been exposed to the NRI after she’d talked him into joining the Brazilian expedition two years before. He was a civilian and at the time not even cleared to know the truth behind the mission. Yet together they discovered a precursor of the Mayan religion, one that predated the rest of the culture by at least a thousand years.

  And then they’d been attacked, first by a group of mercenaries, later by a tribe of xenophobic natives, and finally by a relentless pack of mutated animals that seemed to spring from the Mayan underworld itself.

  They’d never found what they were looking for — elements that NRI scientists believed could lead to a working cold-fusion device — but just prior to departing, they’d recovered something else: a large, glasslike stone, which seemed to radiate energy in a manner that no one could yet explain.

  The NRI hid the stone in a vault beneath its Virginia headquarters and began to study it. McCarter went back to New York to begin teaching again and Danielle watched the machinery of government move on, unconcerned with those who had suffered for what they’d found.

  It was enough to change her long-held beliefs of what mattered in the world. She quit the NRI and become a lobbyist for causes she believed in: education, health care, the war against cancer. For the first time since college, her life had taken on a sense of normalcy. There was peace and contentment and traffic; there were office parties, shopping malls, and bills.

  And there was Marcus.

  She sat back, trying to fight the waves of nausea. Deep, slow breaths helped calm her, but tears welled up in her eyes as she thought of the man she’d spent her year of civilian life with.

  Leaving the NRI had been harder than it app
eared. There was a definite disconnect with the regular world, a feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. But Marcus Watson had been at the NRI when she started there. They knew each other, even had a past together. He’d already made the transition to the real world and he helped show her the way.

  It had been a great year, an easy year after so many hard ones. Their joint experience with the institute gave them common ground to work from, and in many ways it had been nice to let someone else hold the reins for once. But even as Danielle took to this new, normalized version of life, a strange reversal of circumstances had begun.

  At his university in New York, Professor McCarter had grown increasingly interested in the artifacts they’d found. He soon began pestering her for information and then, realizing she no longer had access, he went directly to Arnold Moore.

  As it turned out, McCarter wasn’t the only one with the artifacts on his mind. The NRI scientists were becoming concerned with a growing wave of energy emanating from what they now called the Brazil stone. When McCarter explained a theory he’d developed, that the stone was one from a group of four, Moore decided it was imperative that the NRI find the remaining stones before anyone else did.

  McCarter volunteered to begin the search, but shortly afterward, he was attacked in Guatemala. It became clear that he needed protection, but McCarter didn’t trust the NRI. It was an uneasy alliance to pursue something he wanted to find. He wouldn’t have some gun-toting bodyguard at his side like a chaperone.

  Fearing for McCarter’s life, and for the success of the mission, Moore came to Danielle and begged her to return.

  The timing could not have been worse. Marcus had just asked her to marry him, and she had hesitated. Moore’s arrival was gasoline on a fire and it triggered endless fighting. It was a special kind of hell, having someone she loved ask her to leave a friend to the wolves.

  She spent three days trying to make him understand and then, after an argument for the ages, she’d gone to the airport, bought a ticket, and left for Mexico. She’d boarded the plane fairly certain that she’d destroyed everything. And after all that, she’d failed to help McCarter anyway.

  “What have I done?” she wondered aloud. “What have I done?”

  As a new wave of sickness broke over her, she felt a great urge to lie back down. How much easier it would have been to just give up and die. But the thought disgusted her. As guilt-ridden as she felt, she knew that any hope of making up for what had occurred, any hope of seeing the people she cared for again, began with getting out of that room.

  Relying on sheer willpower, she stood and crossed the floor. The carpet felt soft and well padded under her bare feet.

  She reached the door, checking it just to be certain. Of course it was locked. There was an electronic keypad on her side, probably a card reader on the other. She moved to the desk and opened every drawer, one after another.

  Empty, all of them.

  She slammed the last one shut and sat down, her head throbbing ever harder. Either the lights were absurdly bright or something was wrong with her eyes. It almost felt as if her pupils were dilated, which suggested that strong drugs had been used against her. The terror of her dream and the disjointed, fragmented pattern of her memories and sense of time since her capture only made it more likely.

  She looked at her right arm. There were at least four needle marks, maybe more. Bruising around the injection sites made it hard to tell.

  Sodium pentothal, she guessed. Or scopolamine. Both drugs were barbiturates that could be used as truth serum. They didn’t exactly work that way, but people had a tendency to talk and give up secrets they might otherwise have withheld, especially under higher doses, doses that were dangerous and often resulted in amnesia.

  She thought that might explain the dryness in her mouth and the flaring of the lights.

  Before she could consider the thought further, the door clicked open and two Asian men came in. Both were muscular and fit, wearing suits, pressed shirts, and silk ties.

  The leader stepped toward her.

  “Put these on,” he said, placing her boots on the desk. She noticed a small bruise under his eye, a scabbed cut. She hoped it was her doing.

  She took the boots. “Why?”

  “Because you’re going to want them where we’re taking you.”

  Not liking the sound of that, Danielle pulled the right boot on. As she tied it, she thought of using the left as a weapon, but even if she were to overpower these men, where would she go from there?

  Out into the hall? Which led where, exactly? To what? For all she knew there would be another locked door twenty feet away. She would only get one chance, if that. She could not waste it.

  She pulled the other boot on and the men walked her out the door to an elevator. Entering, they used a key to access a panel beneath the other buttons. It popped open and the man who’d given her the boots pressed the lowest of the buttons. The indicator illuminated, the doors shut, and the car began to descend.

  Danielle did a quick count of the buttons, three rows of twenty, but the way the elevator was moving — and her ears popping — she guessed it was the express. That meant the building would be closer to a hundred floors than sixty. She tried to think of the buildings in China that were over a hundred stories. There were a number of them, but one in particular came to mind: the Tower Pinnacle, owned by Kang and sitting on prime real estate at the edge of Victoria Harbour.

  She was in Hong Kong.

  “I want to talk with the American consulate,” she said.

  “No,” the man with the cut said. “You’ve done enough talking. At least to us.”

  The elevator slowed and then stopped. The doors opened, not to a spacious lobby, as Danielle might have hoped, but to a metal threshold beyond which lay darkness and what looked like aged and blackened stone. The place had a dank smell, like garbage or urine.

  “What the hell is this?”

  The man with the scab got off the elevator.

  “Please step out,” he said, holding a Taser and energizing it. The electricity snapped across the prongs.

  Reluctantly Danielle moved forward into a hallway of some kind. It looked to be made of natural rock and mortar, like the interior of some medieval castle, only dark and wet with condensation. A heavy wooden door to her right was rotting off its rusted hinges. A single bulb attached to a bare cable cast little light.

  Danielle came to a gate made of iron bars.

  Before she could react the men shoved her forward. She tripped over a slight ledge and sprawled to the ground, skinning her hands on the stone.

  She sprang back up and rushed the gate, but they slammed and locked it in her face.

  “Why are you doing this?” she shouted. “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing,” the scabbed man said.

  She glanced into the darkness around her. She heard movement: shuffling, groaning, and breathing, as if her arrival had disturbed some resting beast. The stench of the surroundings grew suddenly worse.

  “What is this place?” she shouted.

  The men were in the elevator now, the doors closing, cutting off the light. One of them replied as the doors slammed shut.

  “This is your new home.”

  CHAPTER 7

  In the heart of the African village, Hawker stared coldly at Arnold Moore. He knew Moore from a mission he’d taken with the NRI two years earlier, the same expedition to the Amazon that had involved Danielle Laidlaw and Professor McCarter. Hawker had been promised a certain type of absolution for his efforts, but in the aftermath that followed, the deal had fallen through.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Looking for you,” Moore said.

  “You’re not exactly dressed for the bush.”

  “No,” Moore said in agreement. “Our intel had you in Kinshasa, drinking and spending money like you’d printed it yourself. But after three days of looking it became clear that you weren’t there. I almos
t went home. But then I heard about a firefight going on up here, where the bad guys were getting the worst of it for once.”

  “Sometimes bad things happen to the right people,” Hawker said.

  “And sometimes to the wrong ones,” Moore replied cryptically. “I need your help.”

  Hawker studied Moore, acutely aware of their differences. Moore was an important piece for one side of the world. Not the white king, perhaps, but a bishop at the least. A mover of pawns and a shrewd one at that. Hawker had once been a part of that side, but no longer. In fact, he wasn’t part of any side at this point in his life. In some strange, surreal way he’d become a type of third player, a red knight on a board of black and white. He had no alliances, no one to answer to, and thus no real limits. Reaching out to him could mean only one thing. Moore had a job no white piece could do.

  “The last time I worked for the NRI it didn’t turn out so well,” Hawker said. “In case you forgot, you guys never came through on your end. Though you seem to have set yourself up pretty good.”

  “The CIA got involved,” Moore said. “They think you still owe them a few chits.”

  “They must. They sent a couple of thugs out to try and collect.”

  Moore nodded, grinning. “Yes, well … once you put those men in the hospital, I lost any say in the matter.”

  “You also lost the right to ask me—”

  “It’s Danielle,” Moore said, stopping Hawker mid-sentence and speaking bluntly, like a man running out of time. “She’s been abducted. I know who took her and where she is, but she’s out of my reach.”

  Hawker stared at Moore as if he’d been punched. He and Danielle had initially clashed in Brazil. But as things had gone from bad to worse, he’d watched her change from a win-at-all-costs alpha female to a person who cared more about her team than she did about herself. At the darkest moment of their journey, she’d even been willing to sacrifice herself to give the others a chance at survival.

  Going through that had created a bond he could still feel when he thought of her. Enough that not getting a chance to see her again had been the worst part of how things ended.