Covenant (18 page)

Ethan opened the two cases beneath and found several more of the devices, each identical and attached to cell phones of various different types.
What the hell are these people doing?

Ethan quickly fired off several photographs of the IEDs, before on impulse grabbing four of them from the box at the bottom and shoving them into his pockets. He closed the remaining boxes and carefully stacked them as he had found them, then turned and crept toward the tent flaps.

“Come on,” he whispered to Rachel, who got up to follow him.

If he could get these samples back to Jerusalem undetected, then Israel would have to listen to him and—

“Halt!”

The word punched through the silence like a gunshot. Ethan and Rachel froze barely a meter from the tent flaps.

“Come out with your hands in the air! No sudden movements!”

Shit. Ethan checked his pockets for the IEDs and cursed himself for staying too long in one place. He’d disregarded too many of his own golden rules from his days as a journalist working in hostile environments.

“Move, now!”

Ethan sighed and walked to the tent flaps, reaching out and hoping that the MACE soldiers weren’t the sort to shoot first and ask questions later.

“Get down on your knees!”

Ethan hesitated at the entrance and looked at Rachel, wondering how the soldier could see him standing in the interior.

“Stay down! Guys, I’ve got him!”

With a sudden rush of realization Ethan backed up from the tent entrance, listening as heavy boots thundered past outside. Shadows flickered frighteningly close past the tent, and a flurry of curses followed.

“Who the hell is this?”

A voice muffled by the dust of the desert floor spoke out.

“My name is Ayeem.”

FIRST DISTRICT OFFICE
M STREET SW, WASHINGTON DC

L
ucas Tyrell sat at his desk and twiddled a pen with surprising grace between his bloated fingers in an effort to curb his frustration. That was something he needed to be careful of, so his doctor had warned him: reduce stress and perform moderate exercise frequently. The fact that he was a cop in the murder capital of the United States of America seemed to have escaped the learned physician, as had the futility of exercise in his current condition.

He sighed and took a handkerchief from his pocket, mopping the sweat from his brow. The infernal heatwave cloaking the District made life hard for most all the city’s population, but for Tyrell it placed an intolerable strain on his laboring heart. Cardiomyopathy, so they’d said. Should have had it checked out years ago. Why hadn’t he seen his physician, his sister had asked him. Why had he not sought help?

Truth was, he’d already known that his clogged heart was suffering. It had gotten to the point where he’d get light-headed just walking up a staircase, so he didn’t need some spotty kid with an MD to tell him he was sick. But he hadn’t cared then any more than he cared now. Cardiomyopathy had taken his mother decades before, and apart from his sister and her family there seemed little left to hang on for.

Maria Tyrell had borne her husband three children. Lucas Tyrell Jr., named in his honor, was serving as a fighter pilot with the United States Navy, a fact that Lucas Tyrell Sr. would relate with a mighty sense of pride to anyone not already tired of hearing about it. Maria’s daughter River was married and living in Michigan with one child, Lucas Tyrell’s beloved great-nephew Mitchell Sears, while Maria’s third and youngest child, Harriet, was working for a big bank in Manhattan and earning the kind of money that Tyrell had thought existed only in the accounts of Saudi oil princes.

Their family would continue happily after he was gone, his suffering long forgotten. The loss of his own family so many years before might have tipped another man over the edge, but even with a past tinged with such sadness Tyrell had carried on stoically until now.

“Who pulled your chain?” Lopez asked as she glided elegantly toward him and tossed a fat wad of papers onto his desk.

“Powell,” he said. “What are these?”

“Results of the ICMP search. Worth a look, if I were you.”

Tyrell reluctantly picked up the papers and sifted through them.

“Fourteen possible matches,” he observed, scanning images of individuals broadly matching the search criteria he had advised.

“Fifteen, actually, but one of ’em turned up dead this morning over in Prince George’s with a bullet through his skull.”

“Any links?”

“Nope, he was a loner and bum,” Lopez said. “He’s not a match.”

Tyrell scanned the rest of the sheets, and then began recognizing images. “That’s one of our guys.”

“I put the other two with him at the back,” Lopez smiled brightly.

Tyrell scanned the next two sheets quickly before looking up at her. “When were they reported missing?”

“All three of them vanished from the DC area in the last three weeks. Two are more or less regular guys, some petty misdemeanors between them. But our man Alpha was straight as an arrow, not so much as a parking ticket on record.”

“I’ll be damned, abduction. And in this case that means homicide.”

“You wanna get ready to give me an even bigger pat on the back?”

Tyrell leaned back in his chair and grinned at his beaming colleague. There weren’t many people who could make him smile these days, but Lopez could.

“Go for your life.”

“I called the examiner’s office and got Fry back on the line, had him run a quick analysis of the hydrogen sulphide he found in Alpha’s body. Fry couldn’t trace it to an origin because the component chemicals are common enough, so I ran the results of his autopsy through the database instead to see what came up.”

“Stop tugging my dick and cut to the chase.”

“MPD recorded an identical trace mixture in the blood pathology of a victim who turned up on Fourth District two weeks ago. They were unable to determine anything except that it probably occurred as a result of an unspecified medical procedure.”

“Another cold lead?” Tyrell asked.

“Well, the victim doesn’t recall much about the procedure itself.”

Tyrell almost fell out of his chair. “The victim’s alive?”

“He is. He’s a twenty-six-year-old former crackhead from Columbia Heights, an African American of Ethiopian descent, apparently. The Heights are not our zone so we don’t have any jurisdiction.”

“Is he a reliable witness?” Tyrell demanded, ignoring her last comment.

“The kid’s not quite all there, Lucas. Whatever he went through must’ve scrambled his brain. He’s been sectioned into a private hospital.”

“Goddamn,” Tyrell murmured. “You did good, Nicola.”

“Maybe,” Lopez said. “However, the subject’s history doesn’t match our victim in any way. He’s a first-rate gang color from the Heights, well known to the MPD before this happened.”

Tyrell looked back at the three missing-persons sheets. “Who were these guys?”

Lopez frowned as she glanced at the pages.

“Well, all of them had families and, holy of holies, Alpha had thigh surgery in his early twenties after an automobile accident. The serial code matches the titanium pin pulled by Dr. Fry. The families have been informed and Fourth District PD is talkin’ to them right now.”

Tyrell felt a sinking melancholy as he considered the loss that the families would be feeling.

“What did they do for a living?”

“That’s the weird thing,” she replied. “Two of the guys worked construction, but Alpha was some big-shot scientist, a man named Joseph Coogan. He had a PhD in biochemistry and had worked at MIT of all places.”

Tyrell took a deep breath before heaving himself out of his chair.

“Let’s go and see what our survivor has to say for himself.”

NEW COVENANT CHURCH
IVY CITY, WASHINGTON DC

Kelvin Patterson sat in silence in the broad office that dominated the rear of the purpose-built church. Broad windows behind him looked out over the distant rolling plains of New Jersey beyond the surface of the Potomac River, the light reflected off the water shimmering across the wall of the office. The towering chrome crucifix dominated the wall to his right, looming over a small altar, while before him on his mahogany desk a monitor beside a large bronze eagle displayed a newsfeed showing Senator Isaiah Black being interviewed by jostling news crews outside the Capitol.

One of the hacks barged his way past the senator’s barrier of bulky security guards and shoved a microphone under his nose.

“Senator, how will you justify your association with the New Covenant Church after the inflammatory sermons conducted by its pastor were condemned by the wider church?”

Senator Black’s neon smile flashed like a lighthouse at the correspondent, but his eyes were hard as he spoke.

“Free speech is part of our nation’s Constitution. It doesn’t mean that I agree with the sermons or that they reflect my party’s policies.”

Patterson chewed on his lip, a habit born of irritation.

“Free speech is one thing, Senator,”
the journalist shot back.
“Incitement to hatred is something else. Analysts are saying that you’re walking a fine line between policy and popularity that could backfire if your party sees you as a liability.”

Senator Black stopped on the steps of the Capitol, turning to face the media mob from behind an impenetrable line of secret service agents who turned with folded arms and fixed expressions to bar the journalists’ way.

“I cannot choose who supports me, nor can I dictate what they should or should not say,”
Black intoned smoothly with his hands extended out to his sides.
“That would be a dictatorship, would it not? I can only say that the policies I have placed my faith in include a peaceful resolution to all conflicts in which the United States of America has an interest, and that I put my place in office above my personal beliefs.”

“Do you agree then,”
another voice shouted from the mob,
“with Pastor Patterson’s views on the Middle East?”

Patterson leaned forward as the mob suddenly fell silent, waiting for the answer from the senator to the pointed and unavoidable question. Isaiah Black took a deep breath, his hands falling to his sides.

“No, I do not. Conflict cannot ever be ended by further conflict, that much has proven true for decades, millennia even. War is the easy option, and there is nothing easy in office when it comes to diplomacy between nations divided.”
He fired off a broadside smile again.
“That’s why the Senate and Congress exist—to find other ways. We can be influenced by the American people, but not through their rhetoric, only through their vote. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Senator Black turned and hurried up the steps and into the Capitol, pursued by a wave of questions that broke against the shore of his security team. Patterson switched off the monitor, chewing his lip until it hurt before picking up his phone and dialing a number. The line connected on the second ring.

“Yes?”

“Black’s not going for it,” Patterson said simply. “Arrange a press conference for the rally, so that we can get our message out to as wide an audience as possible. We’ll take the voters away from that bastard and rip the rug out from under his feet.”

“That could be risky, Pastor. There’s no guarantee the people will turn away from him, regardless of what we do. He’s too well established, too well known.”

“So are we,” Patterson snapped. “Make it happen.”

NEGEV DESERT
ISRAEL

A
yeem watched as the three guards encircled him with their rifles pointed down at his prostrate form. One of them shouted a command and the old guide got slowly to his feet, his hands behind his head but defiance etched clearly into his features. Nearby, Ayeem’s Bedouin companions stood under the watchful gaze of the other three soldiers.

A tall bearded man walked up to Ayeem.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he rumbled. “Where’s Ethan Warner?”