The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon

  “Please,” Hannah said under her breath.

  “I want to come with you when you go for your man,” Costas said.

  “Can’t allow it,” Chloe said. “We have our papers, our uniforms, and we’re covered, for now, on the computer. It would take days to do the same for you.”

  “I could get a GC uniform, and you could cover for me. I—”

  “No,” Chloe said. “We appreciate it, but it’s not going to happen. We have a plan, and we will follow it, succeed or fail.”

  “You need more firepower?”

  “We do. It would have looked suspicious, bringing in heavy weapons that are not GC issue. Mr. McCullum is trying to get something, either from our man’s plane or his car.”

  “Where is the car?”

  “According to Plank, Sebastian’s captors also have his car, which he talked his way into at the airport.”

  “And they wouldn’t have searched it for weapons?”

  “We don’t know and we haven’t heard.”

  Costas motioned the women to follow him to a corner where a large wood trunk was buried under piles of blankets. It was full of Uzis. “Don’t ask,” he said. His mother provided a large laundry bag into which Costas placed three cloth-wrapped weapons and several clips of ammunition. “Now, you’d better go.”

  George Sebastian had been told that you never hear the shot that kills you, but how could that ever be proved? He fought to remain composed, not wanting to give his captors the satisfaction of even tensing before the death blast. He held his breath way past what he believed were his final ten seconds, and then could not contain a shiver as he exhaled.

  “All right,” the leader said, “get him presentable, and fast. Food and water first, then the shower. And do something about this lip. Think of a story for that. We didn’t do it.”

  George opened his eyes and blinked.

  “You’re still in trouble, California, but none of us is getting fried because of you. I’m taking the cuffs off, but you’ve got two weapons aimed at you, and all we need is a reason.”

  When his hands were free, George rubbed them together, making Plato flinch. George was tempted to scare him with a feigned swing or even a shout.

  “Do something about his wrists,” the leader told Elena. “Let’s go, we’ve got to move.”

  They shoved George up the stairs and gave him two sandwiches stuffed with what tasted like summer sausage. The bread slices were nearly two inches thick and dry. He had to press them hard together over the meat to fit them into his mouth. His split lip stretched and bled as he chewed. He sucked eagerly from a bottle of warm, stale water.

  George wanted to sit back and take a few deep breaths, but this was clearly not supposed to be a leisurely lunch. He gagged and coughed, but he made sure to force down all the food. His best chance to escape or do some damage would be when he was unbound and they were moving him. He didn’t want to invest the mental energy guessing what it was all about, but he felt relieved to be alive and to have accomplished his one objective so far—silence.

  When he finished, George quickly scooped bread crumbs from the table and pushed them into his mouth. He chased them with the last few drops of water, tipping the bottle all the way up. Elena snatched it from him and pointed toward a tiny room where he would just barely fit into a shower.

  “Clothes there,” she said, pointing to the floor. “You probably can’t fit through the window anyway, but someone will be outside and armed.”

  She left and shut the door, and though he knew she and probably the others could hear what he was doing, he looked under a cot and found only dust. He yanked open three drawers of a spindly wooden dresser. Empty. There was nothing else in the room except a window he guessed faced west. He pulled back a paperlike shade, and Socrates leveled his weapon at him.

  “Get going!” Elena called from outside the door.

  He shed his clothes and edged into the shower. He turned on the left faucet first and was blasted with icy water. He stepped back out and reached in, trying the other. Also cold. He turned both on and let them run a minute. He tried angling the showerhead away from him, but it was rusted into place.

  “The tap water is not drinkable!” he heard from outside. He wanted to ask if there was soap or a towel, but he would not speak. Gritting his teeth, George forced himself under the spray. His body jerked and shook, but he let the frigid water flood him from his short hair to his whole body. He vigorously rubbed everywhere for as long as he could stand it, and just as he was turning off the water, he heard the room door shut. He peeked out. Where his clothes had been lay a pile of clean stuff, clearly belonging to Plato, his supposed look-alike. Great. He doesn’t appear nearly as tall.

  A single hand towel lay on the bed. George made it work and threw on the clothes. A nondescript undershirt protected him from a prickly brown sweater. Military-issue underwear was tight. Gray wool socks started to warm him, and khaki pants with a canvas belt were tight around the middle and rode three inches above his ankles. The GC-issue boots were snug but okay.

  George pushed the door open, and Elena motioned that he should follow her back to the table where he had eaten. Plato stood watching, weapon in hand, but George wondered how valued the girl was. He could have had her in a headlock before the others noticed, and he could have killed her before they fired.

  She awkwardly dabbed at his lip with ointment and massaged his hands and wrists. He studied her face for any sign of weakness. The blood he had seen on her when he thought she was his underground contact was obviously not her own. She was a killer.

  Elena pressed a bulge over his eyebrow that smarted, but George would not recoil. If he couldn’t stand a little pain, how would he fight his way out of this? It seemed incongruous that she could find ice in that place, but she wrapped some in a cloth and held it against his swollen forehead. She did the same to a knot on the back of his head. Why couldn’t she have spared a cube or two for his drinking water?

  The food, whatever it was, lay heavy and troubling in his stomach, but he also felt a surge of energy from it. Part of him wanted to do some damage, to show these yokels what an American captive was capable of. Oh, he could do more than clam up. He had already broken one guard’s knee, if he had to guess. And all during her administering to his wounds, George had sat close enough to Elena to have blinded her with a two-fingered shot to the eyes, broken her jaw with a punch to the chin, or crushed her to death by flipping the table onto her and dropping his whole body atop it.

  Little would have been gained, of course, as he would have been shot. He fantasized about ignoring her and charging Plato, disarming him, butting him with the weapon, shooting Elena, and taking his chances with the two camped outside. That had better odds, but still not good ones.

  They were making him presentable and moving him. Why? Someone above them must have wanted to try eliciting information. And they wanted to be sure he was being treated right. George was apparently as close as they had come to anyone connected with the Judah-ites, and that was why he was still alive.

  He relished the idea of performing for GC brass. His silence would infuriate them. Better, from his perspective—the higher up you went, the less prepared they were for creative escape attempts. At some point these people would realize he was not going to help them. There would be no information volunteered or beat from him. Finally, at long last, he would be expendable. They would either use him as an object lesson, claiming he had ratted out the enemy, or they would execute him. Or both.

  George’s goal formed slowly in his mind. He wanted to stay alert, to be aware of every nuance. He wanted to know when the GC finally lost patience and realized he was a hopeless, lost cause. Because when they had finally had enough and his end had come, he wanted to be sure to take one or two with him into eternity. He knew from their marks they wouldn’t be going where he was. But they’d get to their destination sooner than they thought.

  George had to fight a smile as they led him to a Jeep. He was
cuffed again, but not until after he had been fitted with a large pair of gloves. How thoughtful, he decided. Protect my tender wrists.

  By the time Mac rendezvoused with Chloe and Hannah at a clearing in the woods north of Ptolemaïs, all had been in touch with the rest of the Trib Force. “I can’t wait to see how New Babylon spins Petra,” Hannah said. “How can anyone remain an unbeliever now?”

  “Who knows when Daddy and Abdullah will be able to leave?” Chloe said. “For all we know, Tsion will want to stay there, if they have the technology to let him continue cyberteaching around the world. I have to think the GC will kill anybody who leaves.”

  Mac told Chloe and Hannah that squadron headquarters in Ptolemaïs was expecting him, but that he wanted to downplay everything.

  “How so?” Chloe said. “Sounds like your way has been paved.”

  “Yeah, but if I go in there, buttons shining, it’s like I’m on display, tryin’ to impress. I could give off the smell of a rat without even trying. Plus, if that headquarters is anything like the rest of this place, I’m gonna look suspicious if I don’t start rippin’ on anybody who’s supposed to be in charge.”

  “Tell us about it,” Hannah said. “I hated working at the palace, but the organization and decorum made this place look sick.”

  “If I was really a senior commander, I’d be pushin’ paper to New Babylon for a week about this place. I had hoped to just rush in there, get what I needed, and get going. I wasn’t even going to ask ’em for any support, ’cause I oughtn’t need it. Now I’m of a mind not to even show up.”

  “What?”

  “Myself, I mean.”

  “Us, then?”

  “One of you.”

  “I’ll go,” Hannah said.

  “Now, wait a minute,” Chloe said. “I—”

  “Frankly, I’m leaning toward Chloe myself, Hannah. I don’t expect any suspicion, but if worse came to worst and they checked your iris or your handprint, you know you’re on file in the palace.”

  “As a dead woman.”

  “Well, yeah, but then how would you explain an Indian lady havin’ the exact ID marks of a dead Native American?”

  “As long as it’s not that you don’t think I can pull it off.”

  “You kiddin’? Half the time I look at you and forget who you are. But Chang has entered Chloe’s readings under her new name, so even if they got feisty and made a member of my executive staff prove her identity, she’d sail through.”

  “What do you want me to do, Mac?” Chloe said.

  “I want you to be bored.”

  “Bored?”

  “And irritated. You got grunt duty. While the fat-cat boss you came with and his other personnel are takin’ a nap at a nice place—where is none of anybody’s business—you got assigned to go get the info he needs. Any red tape, any holdup at all, and you’re ticked off. Can you work that up?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Your approach is that this is bottom-end stuff—just give me the info and let me be on my way. Make sure the hostage takers know we’re comin’ so they don’t get spooked, but they’d better have their man ready. The boss is none too pleased that they haven’t gleaned anything from him yet, so make way for somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “That flyboy friend of Abdullah’s believes if everything goes well, we can take Sebastian—in cuffs, of course—right back to his own plane and fly out of here tonight.”

  “Does local have any idea you’re planning to take the prisoner?”

  “No, and by the time they find out, we oughta be out of here.”

  “Not going to be easy,” Hannah said. “Even if they buy everything up to where we visit him.”

  “It never is, Indira,” Mac said, smiling. “The key, though, is not trying to convince them of anything. You sting somebody by getting them to come your way. Follow?”

  “Not sure.”

  “For instance, if I hinted to you that Rayford or Tsion wanted you to do something you didn’t want to do, like head straight back to Chicago right now, your first reaction would be negative. You wouldn’t want to do it, you’d refuse, and I’d say, okay then, I can’t tell you the rest of it. You’d say what’s that, and I’d say, no, you made your decision, so you don’t need to know. Now I don’t know for sure about you, but if I was in your shoes, I’d be all over me trying to find out what the whole story was and whether I made the right decision.”

  “You bet I would, and I’d wear you down too. You know I would.”

  “You probably would. But see, you’d be comin’ my way then. It wouldn’t be me trying to convince you of something. It would be you trying to drag it out of me. I tell you whatever I need to, to get you to do what I wanted in the first place, and you don’t realize until later, when you realize I manipulated you, that you were stung and it seemed like your idea.”

  “Other words,” Hannah said, “you’re going to somehow make these people beg you to take Sebastian off their hands.”

  “You got it.”

  “And they’re going to think you’re doing them a favor.”

  “Exactly.”

  “This I’ve got to see.”

  “You will.”

  “And where am I while Chloe’s doing her thing at headquarters?”

  “Waiting in the Jeep, eyes and ears open. The impression is, yeah, there are two of you, but it takes only one to pick up directions for the boss.”

  “And where will you be?” Chloe said.

  “On the phone to Chang and then to the kid at the airport. I want that Rooster Tail gassed up and ready to go.”

  “You going to tell him we’ll have a prisoner with us?”

  “I’ll play that by ear. If we don’t find a weapon in George’s car, I’ve got one for him and one for me anyway. You’ve got your sidearms.”

  “Think we’ll need them?”

  “At least for show. There’s nothing suspicious about a superior officer bringing armed staff with him on a visit like this.”

  Chang hurried as casually as he could to his quarters during his afternoon break and flew across his keyboard, trying to track his sister. She was better at this than he expected. He wished only that she had let him in on it so he could have helped pave the way. Maybe if she arrived somewhere and discovered he had precleared her for transport on assignment, she would know he was watching.

  Peacekeeper Chow was already in the system. Apparently “he” had gotten out of Chicago and found himself a ride to Long Grove, Illinois. Chang was glad his sister had avoided Kankakee and the old Glenview Naval Air Station. Though short-staffed like everywhere else, they had been burned by Judah-ites for the last time and were impossible to hoodwink. But Chang had never before seen anything on his system that mentioned even an airstrip in Long Grove.

  He finally found an executive runway that had recently been reopened for limited commercial routes. With his break time running out, Chang contacted the tower there as a high-ranking official in the GC aviation administration, “requesting routine confirmation of a Peacekeeper from international sector 30 catching a ride on a commercial cargo plane bound for Pawleys Island, South Carolina.”

  Chang couldn’t wait for the response and hurried back to his desk. There it became clear that Suhail Akbar himself was interrogating the first pilot to return from Petra. Chang could only assume that the second was also bound for Suhail’s private conference room. With a few keystrokes, he activated the bug in that office to record, and later he would download it from the central system.

  Chloe appreciated that Hannah seemed sensitive enough to leave her to her thoughts on the drive back in to Ptolemaïs. “You’re okay with my doing this, right?”

  “Makes perfect sense,” Hannah said. “If I was going to get checked, this would be the place.”

  Chloe tried to slow her pulse by breathing deeply and trying to doze. It didn’t work, but she knew her life depended on what Mac referred to as her ability to p
lay bored. Irritated was all right, if it came to that. But bored would play truest.

  Squadron headquarters was on the top three floors of a four-story building with an abandoned first floor that appeared to have been some sort of business.

  One of the men Chloe and Hannah had encountered on the street sat in the dark near the elevator at ground level, smoking and reading by the sliver of light from the street. He stood when he saw her and saluted. “Elevator’s broke, ma’am,” he said. “You want the stairs there behind you.”

  “As you were. This your assignment?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Somebody’s got to tell people or they’d wait all day for that thing.”

  “No one thought of a sign?”

  “Yeah, but the commanding officer wants the personal touch.”

  She nodded. “He’s the one I’m here to see. Could you tell him that I’m—”

  The young man held up both hands. “I have no way to tell him, ma’am. There’s a receptionist up there.”

  “Thought you people were understaffed.”

  He shrugged. “Doing what I’m told, ma’am.”

  The stairs led to a dingy, tiled room with about half the fluorescent lights working. No one was at the receptionist’s desk, but another Peacekeeper began to rise from the end of a tired couch. Chloe stopped him with a wave. “What’s your role here, son?”

  “GC Morale Monitor, ma’am. And telling people the receptionist is not here.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Well, telling them she will be right back.”

  “How soon is ‘right back’?”

  He looked at his watch. “Supposed to have been ten minutes ago, so should be any minute now.”

  “Couldn’t you just as easily inform Commander Stefanich that Ms. Irene is here from Senior Commander Johnson’s staff?”

  “Well, I could, ma’am, but I was instructed to—”

  “Just do it. I’ll take the heat.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Ms. who from what?”

  “Never mind, I’ll find him,” Chloe said, reaching for the door.