Heartbreaker (28 page)

“Not when they were busy apologizing.”

“I already apologized.”

“Not good enough. You’re going to have to make it up to me.”

“With pleasure.” A slow smile curved Lynn’s lips as she considered ways and means.

“Yeah?” He looked interested.

“Yeah.” Her smile widened, and she scooted over to kiss him.

Glancing down, Lynn’s heart nearly stopped. A pale oval face stared up at them from the shiny black water some eight feet below.

J
ESS’S EYES WERE CLOSING
in anticipation of the touch of Lynn’s lips on his mouth when she let loose with what must have been the mother of all screams right in his face. Shocked, he leaped back, his eyes popping open, so startled that he nearly tumbled off the ledge into the water.

“What? What’s wrong? What is it?”

Recovering his balance, he looked where she pointed wordlessly, saw the white, sodden face staring up at them, and felt his stomach clench. Maybe it wasn’t manly to be scared. If so then he was about as manly as a drag queen, because for just a moment after seeing that face in the water, he felt scared to death.

And it wasn’t the first time in the last twenty-four hours either.

Of all the things he had not needed to be confronted with, it was another wacko cult preaching God and wreaking death. One Waco was more than enough for any lifetime. Ever since they had stumbled across the bodies he’d been waging a mental battle with phantom killers alongside the physical battle with real live ones. Once or twice he’d caught himself wondering if maybe he was simply imagining the whole thing, as if somehow he’d failed to wake up from one of his own nightmares.

That way, he feared, lay insanity.

Common sense reasserted itself with comforting firmness. The face in the water belonged to a corpse, of course. And the corpse belonged to one of the men who’d been trying to kill them and instead had died himself when the stone collapsed. Creepy, yes. Scary, no. Not anymore.

The eyes of the creepy-not-scary corpse were wide open, and they seemed to be staring into his own eyes. Unable to help himself, Jess stared back.

“H-help!” the blue lips said.

Beside him Lynn gasped. Jess felt like gasping himself.

Then he saw the man’s arms moving and realized that he was treading water; he was, in fact, alive, not dead.

Jess couldn’t decide which was scarier: a live bad guy or a dead one.

“Help!” the man said again.

Jess leaned over, letting the meager light of the Bic shine full upon the man in the water.

It was the doubting Thomas—er, Louis.

“Oh, my God,” Lynn said. “He’s alive!”

She looked wildly around the ledge as if searching for a weapon. Fortunately for the dude in the drink, they were down to nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

“Please,” Louis said. He sounded as if he were tiring fast. Jess remembered the temperature of the water. All they had to do was exactly nothing, and the problem would take care of itself in less than fifteen minutes. The guy couldn’t save himself. There was nowhere to go but the ledge, and eight feet of slick, vertical, unclimbable rock loomed between the surface of the water and their perch.

“Should I try to sink him?” Lynn nudged him. Jess glanced at her and had to smile. She was armed with a handful of rocks, the largest about the size of a golf ball, with which she obviously proposed to bean the guy.

It was weird to look at this blond-haired, blue-eyed, outrageously sexy female—who wasn’t much bigger than a minute and wouldn’t from the looks of her put fear into the heart of a gnat—and find himself thinking, That’s one formidable woman.

“I don’t think we need to stone him to death. If we leave him alone he’ll sink in about ten to fifteen minutes. From the looks of him the water temperature is already starting to induce hypothermia.”

“Please, help me!” Louis sounded and looked pitiful. Jess watched him bob up and down, his arm movements growing less and less coordinated, then scanned the surface of the water and the walls of the chamber warily. It had just occurred to him to wonder: Where had this guy been for the last hour or so?

Unless he had gills, not underwater.

Jess blinked at a hideous thought: If Louis could survive, so could his cohorts. The question was, had they?

“Where’ve you been?” Jess called down to him. “You haven’t been underwater all this time.”

“When everything fell I got sucked into an underground tunnel. There was an air pocket. I crawled into it, but I started running out of air. So I tried to swim out. I came up here.”

“What about the others?”

“Can you help me, please?”

“What about the others?” Jess insisted.

“Dead. All dead.”

“You sure?”

“How could they have survived?”

“You did.”

“By a miracle,” Louis said, his voice sounding weaker. “A miracle. Please, will you help me?”

“I don’t think God would waste a miracle on you.” Jess sank back on his heels and looked at Lynn. “What do you want to do?”

“Oh, God,” Lynn groaned under her breath. “I don’t think I can just sit here and watch him drown.”

“He would have watched us get shot,” Jess pointed out. “Or shot us himself. In fact, he might have been the one who shot me, or Tim. They were all firing pretty good out there today. And last night.”

“Still …” Lynn’s voice trailed off as she glanced over the side. Louis’s white, pinched face floated just inches above the surface of the water.

It was a sad sight. Jess felt a stirring of compassion himself.

But just a small one.

“Please, lady. Please,” Louis begged, obviously having pegged Lynn as the soft touch of the pair staring down at him. “Help me!”

Lynn looked back at Jess. “If we’ve got to do this, maybe you should put out the lighter. That way at least we wouldn’t have to look at him.”

“No way,” Jess answered positively, though he neglected to add that the idea of waiting in the dark while one creep died and the others might or might not be alive and trying to sneak up on them gave him the willies.

Real men didn’t get the willies. Or at least they didn’t admit to getting them, if they did.

“You want to watch?” Lynn sounded appalled.

“I want to make sure that this time he’s dead.” Jess kept his thumb firmly on the little wheel that kept the flame alive.

“You have to help me! I have a mission. I must tell …” The rest of Louis’s plea trailed off into an unintelligible mutter as he sank a couple of inches and swallowed water.

Jess glanced at Lynn, who appeared both scared and heartsick, then looked back over the edge.

“The end of the world,” Louis gasped, bobbing up.

“What a bunch of crap,” Jess muttered.

“It’s coming … the end of the world!” Louis was more agitated now, as if he sensed that his time was growing short.

“I don’t want to hear any more of that religious bull, you hear? Or I’ll let you drown for sure.”

Just the thought of how brainwashed the guy was made Jess angry. He knew it was ridiculous, knew it had nothing to do with him how many stupid sheep allowed themselves to be gulled by a cleverly disguised wolf, but he couldn’t help it: The unmitigated idiocy of it made him mad.

He guessed it had something to do with the memory of those children at Waco.

Which he promptly banished from his mind.

“It’s the truth!” Louis cried. “It’s the end of the world! It’s coming! Monday at nine
A.M
.! I swear!”

All at once Jess remembered the sign carried by the Healers at the airport on the day he and Owen had picked up Lynn and her group. They, too, had prophesied that the world would end, on a specific date he couldn’t quite remember, at nine in the morning.

Bunch of kooks.

Jess frowned, pursed his lips, and fought his anger by glancing at Lynn again. She was looking at him, wide-eyed. Kneeling, her fingers closed around a handful of dirty rocks, her delectable body shrouded in his favorite red plaid shirt, her face dirty and scratched, and her hair tousled into a yellow halo around her head, she looked fuckable, not formidable. Jess imagined fucking her, felt his tense muscles relax at the images thus conjured up, and gave her a slight smile.

“He really believes it,” she whispered.

“They all do,” Jess replied, and shook his head at the man in the water.

“Wrong answer, dude,” he told him. “You’ve been brainwashed. I know all about your Reverend Bob, and he is a first-class lunatic as well as a first-class con artist. I bet you signed your life savings over to him, didn’t you? I bet you sold your house and gave him the money. He says jump, and you ask how high, isn’t that right? Man, you have been taken for a ride. The world is not going to end on Monday at nine
A.M
. Trust me. He’s wrong.”

“No, you’re wrong!” Louis argued. “It’s true! On my mother’s grave, it’s true! The Lamb is going to make it happen!”

Going to make it happen?
That caught Jess’s attention.

“What?” he asked slowly.

“The Lamb is going to make it happen! Two years ago after a session of prayer and fasting, Yahweh—God—appeared before the Lamb and told him the sacred time: June twenty-third, nineteen ninety-six, at nine
A.M
. And He also told him this: The Lamb is to be the blessed instrument that brings about the end of the world!”

“He’s nuts,” Lynn whispered.

Jess nodded, but something in Louis’s tone bothered him. He sounded both desperate—and truthful. Of course, as Lynn said, he was nuts. Probably the fact that he believed what he was saying accounted for the authenticity Jess thought he detected in the man’s demeanor.

“And just how is Reverend Bob intending to be the instrument that ends the world?” Jess asked.

“Pull me out and I’ll tell you,” Louis bargained with frantic cunning.

While Jess engaged in inner debate Louis went under once and came back up, gasping. His face was turning purple around his mouth and at his temples. The rest of his skin was so white it appeared waxen. Jess figured he only had about five minutes left until the hypothermia rendered him unconscious and he sank.

Five minutes to determine whether or not Reverend Bob really had hatched some half-baked plan to destroy the world. Even as Jess put the thought into words in his mind, it sounded ludicrous.

There had to be a limit to what one maniac could accomplish.

“Please,” Louis said again.

Jess made up his mind abruptly. He passed the lighter to Lynn and started taking off his jeans.

“We can always throw him back in,” he said to Lynn as he pushed the denim down his legs. Clad only in his briefs, he lay flat on the ledge and dangled one leg of his jeans at arm’s length, over the edge.

“Grab hold,” he told Louis. “If you can climb up you’re in business. If you can’t you’re out of luck, because I can’t lift you. Blame yourself: You and your pals shot me.”

“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” Louis shook his head, as if to fight off lethargy induced by the cold. Then he dog-paddled the few feet necessary to reach the denim lifeline and latched on.

The first try was unsuccessful. Louis fell back into the pool with a splash before his body was out of the water as far as his waist.

The second time was the charm. Louis locked on to those jeans like a pit bull grabbing a poodle and refused to let go, dragging himself up hand over hand, his feet slipping against the stone. Jess felt his unaccustomed lack of strength more with every inch the man rose above the water, but one-handed or not he managed to hang on until Louis was within reach. Then he grabbed one arm, Lynn grabbed the other, and they dragged Louis up onto the ledge.

Good thing Louis was a scrawny man.

“Now,” Jess said, patting Louis down as the man sprawled gasping on the rock, “tell me your fairy tale. How is Reverend Bob planning to end the world?”

“With nuclear bombs.”

Louis was clean. Jess sank back on his heels, eyeing him. Clad in the seen-better-days white dress shirt and dark polyester slacks that Jess was starting to think of as the cult-nut uniform, Louis lay shivering in the puddle he created, his eyes closed. His teeth were chattering so hard that Jess wasn’t sure he had heard correctly what the man said.

“With nuclear bombs?” he repeated in disbelief, pulling on his jeans. “Where the hell is Reverend Bob going to get nuclear bombs?”

“We made them.” Louis opened an eye, sounding proud. “At Yahweh’s behest, the Lamb liquidated all our assets and bought enriched uranium from the Russian mafia. We smuggled it into this country. A hundred pounds of it in a suitcase with a detonator is enough to blow a three-square-mile area to smithereens, you know.”

Jess felt a tingle at the base of his spine that warned of the seriousness of what he was hearing. Still, “A three-square-mile area is not the world.”

His gaze never leaving Louis, Jess zipped and fastened his jeans. Louis’s lips twitched in what could have been a would-be smug smile. If it was he was too cold to pull it off. Lucky for him, Jess reflected. If Louis had smiled he would have been hard-pressed not to punch the man’s face in.

“We have six of them. Six bombs in suitcases, already in the hands of our True Disciples. Early Monday morning they will stroll like tourists into the hearts of what Yahweh says are the most strategically important cities in this country: Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and Seattle. At nine
A.M
. the Lamb is to detonate them by computer from the compound.
Whoosh!
The centers of those cities gone in a blink; hundreds of thousands of citizens dead.”

There was a pause as Jess considered.

“That won’t end the world.” Jess’s voice was harsh. He was still hoping this was no more than a sick fantasy, but the feeling he was getting in his gut was not good. “There would be many survivors.”

“There is a second wave of destruction scheduled to be launched at the same time. Did you know that there are six sites in the middle of the country where huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons are stored? Sarin—you’ve heard of it, perhaps, from the Tokyo subway attack? Ricin, which is so powerful a Baggie full of it can kill three thousand people. Lots more. All these man-made instruments of death are slated to be destroyed, but the U.S. government can’t seem to come up with a way to do it that won’t contaminate everyone for miles around. But the Lamb has said that there is a divine purpose for the government’s hesitation. The weapons are meant to further Yahweh’s plan. The Lamb has simpler bombs slated for the weapon-storage sites, but they’ll do the job. Some of the harmful agents will be burned off in the blast, no doubt, but enough should escape to wipe out a great many who survive the nuclear blasts.”