Part 5 (1/2)
Lara gave a slow nod. ”You have powerful friends. It was a problem that they might go looking for you, so the Padre found a way to cover for a while that you were missing. But then you arrived a day early from Baghdad. The Padre did not have everything ready to s.n.a.t.c.h you.” He gave Ryder an earnest look. ”It is not necessary to shoot me. I will leave as soon as I fetch something from the Padre. It will be as if you and I never met.”
Ryder gestured at Eva and the teenaged girl. ”Unarmed. Innocent. No reason to kill them unless someone's afraid they'd identify you-or what you're taking. You're working for the snipers. Who are they?”
Sweat broke out on the man's forehead. ”Eli Eichel hired me. He partners with his brother, Danny. They were the shooters. Eli is retired Kidon.”
Ryder paused. He had expected the Carnivore to be the man's employer. Kidon was Mossad's highly regarded kill department, renowned for orchestrating successful wet jobs around the globe. And now a Kidon-trained a.s.sa.s.sin and his brother had killed six people and Eva so they could get their hands on something the Padre was carrying.
”Keep searching,” Ryder ordered.
Lara sat back down on his heels. He pulled a leather pouch from inside the Padre's coat. Using his teeth, he loosened the drawstring and spilled three leather bags onto his palm. He opened them. Each contained a chunk of limestone.
Ryder frowned. ”What are they?”
”Eli said they are special rocks. See, there are marks on them.” He turned one over.
Ryder recognized the symbols. Cuneiform writing. ”How are you getting them to Eichel?”
”I am supposed to phone him. Then he will say where to meet.”
Ryder considered. ”Tell him to come here.”
The man's eyebrows rose in fright. ”They will kill me if I betray them.”
”I'll kill you if you don't. Make the call. Put it on speakerphone.”
As if in slow motion, Lara took out his cell and tapped numbers.
Ryder listened as a man with a deep ba.s.s voice answered: ”Shalom.” The low growl of a car engine sounded in the background.
Lara took a deep breath. ”Shalom. I have the rocks. They are just as you said.”
”You've done well. Walk out of the hunt club and turn left-”
Shoulders tensing, Lara interrupted, his voice quivering. ”Come here. Please. It would be better than someone seeing me on the roadway.”
The ba.s.s voice sharpened. ”You're afraid. Why?”
Ryder caught Lara's gaze and stared hard at him.
Lara sighed. ”There are many dead people. Much blood. More than I-”
”We'll be there soon.” The connection went dead.
Lara pocketed his cell phone, his expression wretched.
”You're Jewish?” Ryder asked, remembering the exchanges of Shalom.
”Yes, from Bilbao. Most Basques are like the Padre-Catholic. But plain-door synagogues have always been around; you just have to know where to knock. There is an old Basque saying-we know who the Jews are because we used to be Jews.”
Lara's being a rare Basque Jew would give Eli Eichel a powerful link to him.
Ryder nodded. ”Put the rocks away.”
As the man bent over to do so, Ryder quickly lifted his knee and slashed the heel of his boot down hard onto his skull. With a thick grunt, he toppled, unconscious. Ryder scooped up the limestone pieces, put them into their individual pouches, and then all into the larger leather pouch. He b.u.t.toned them into his peacoat's inside pocket.
Taking a deep breath, he walked over to Eva. She was on her right side, crumpled like a broken doll, her face turned away. A bullet had severed her carotid artery. Her head lay in a pool of freezing blood.
Breathing shallowly, he crouched and cupped her face in his hands. She was still warm. Steeling himself, he turned her face toward him. Her eyes were open, such a beautiful cobalt blue. Her chin was soft and round. Her lips full and sweet. He remembered the violent deaths of comrades, friends, and family. Of his fiancee. And now, Eva. His eyes burned with grief.
Gently releasing her, he started to get to his feet, then stopped. The sunlight reflected on her unblinking eyes in such a way he saw she was wearing contacts. Eva had never worn contacts. Puzzled, he studied her. He frowned. His heart rate accelerating, he cradled her head in his hands again and used his thumbs to feel around her cheeks, then around her lips. Her skin here was different from her cheeks, softer, more flexible.
Again he probed along her cheeks until he found a line, a subtle demarcation under his thumbs where one side of her seemed normal while the other was more dense, a bit rigid. He heard Tucker's voice in his mind: ”The ME says the devices fit on snugly and are flexible, but when pressed they feel a little stiffer than human flesh.” He pressed deeper until he found a slit, an opening, where the denser ”skin” rose along the line of the natural skin. Using his fingernail, he tugged along the edge, slowly lifting up a rim of fake flesh. A prosthesis.
His gaze returned to her eyes. He pried off one of her contact lenses and stared at a pale blue eye. Not Eva's rich cobalt blue color. Not Eva. Not her.
He let out a long breath. Eva had been doubled, just as he had been. Lifting his head, he looked around at the b.l.o.o.d.y carnage and felt relief sweep through him. Somewhere Eva was alive.
16.
As a cold wind swept down the timbered hills, Ryder looked at his watch. The snipers could arrive at any moment. Jumping up, he took out the tracker he had used to follow Eva's double and pried open the back. There it was, just as Toms Lara had said-a paper-thin electronic bug the size of a s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton.
He ran back to Lara, loosened the top laces of the unconscious man's boot, and pried open the lining. Sliding the bug inside, he pressed the lining back against the shoe and tightened the laces again.
Hustling from corpse to corpse, he looked for the tracker. At last he found it, a small handheld, under one of the fallen guards. Its miniature screen showed the bug as a motionless green dot, with data about longitude, lat.i.tude, and alt.i.tude. Now Ryder would be able to follow Lara electronically wherever he went.
Hefting Lara up onto his shoulder, he carried him to the Explorer, opened the rear door, and dumped him inside. He had the urge to beat the s.h.i.+t out of him, but he needed him to be able to talk when the snipers arrived.
He hunted through the vehicle and found rope under the front seat. He tied Lara's hands and feet. Checking his watch again, he swore. He had burned through ten minutes.
Picking up Lara's phone, he saw it was a disposable cell. He touched the MENU b.u.t.ton and went to RECENT CALLS. The most recent had to have been to Eli Eichel, the sniper whom Lara had just phoned.
There was another number. Ryder dialed it. In moments he heard ringing-from a distant corpse. He ran, s.n.a.t.c.hed the ringing phone from the dead man's hand, and answered the call. Now he had a line open between the two cells.
Putting Lara's cell on speakerphone, he slid it inside Lara's breast pocket. He held the other cell to his ear and aimed his voice at the one in the pocket.
He spoke in a normal voice: ”One ... two ... three ... four ... five.”
He smiled grimly. He could hear his voice with clarity. Now he should be able to listen to conversations between the snipers and Lara. He put the cell in the front pocket of his jacket where he could quickly access it.
Swinging on his backpack, Ryder scooped up one of the Uzis. It was not the semiautomatic version but instead its cousin, a far more efficient killer-a fully automatic weapon, illegal in the United States except for police and Cla.s.s-3 dealers. The magazine was located in the grip a.s.sembly. He checked it-all twenty-five rounds were loaded. He grabbed two boxes of ammo from the back of the Explorer and shoved them into his backpack.
Slinging the Uzi over his shoulder, he gave a last look then sprinted past the limousine, around the line of juniper bushes, and back up into the forest. As he climbed, afternoon shadows spread black across the animal path and ice-covered stream. Winter birds chattered. Reaching the hilltop, he turned and looked back down on the scene of the ma.s.sacre. For a moment he wondered who the dead women were and felt bad for their families.
The snipers had still not arrived.