In the Grey (2 page)

The horse made a quick
stop at the edge of a rocky outcropping, and she hopped off. She
raised her micro-compound bow to cover her brother. He tossed his
heavy backpack on the ground and jumped off his horse. Six foot
five inches and solid, he slung the backpack on his back, and
copied her gesture. Jesse waved them forward.

With their bows raised and
ready, they hiked through the delicate tundra of the alpine meadow.
They occasionally stopped and turned back to back to scan the
pine-covered, ragged mountains rising on either side of the meadow
for any sign of danger. They had almost reached the ruins when she
was jumped by a man dressed in black. He kicked the micro-compound
bow from her hands and knocked her to the ground. Before Colin
could help, he was attacked by two assailants.

She jumped to her feet.
The man threw a classic Sanshou punch. She reacted with a swift
roundhouse kick, which he blocked with a front kick. She threw a
straight punch to his face, which he avoided. When he lifted his
knee, the clouds shifted to reveal more of his face. His blue-hazel
eyes flashed, and she recognized him. She, her identical twin
brother, and her younger brother had trained in the Chinese
military martial art of Sanshou under the instruction of a visiting
martial arts delegation. Steve had arranged the training and
insisted they become not good, but great at Sanshou.

She’d never liked it. She
preferred the power of kickboxing, the deadly precision of Krav
Maga, and the subtleties of jujitsu. This Chinese man with the blue
eyes had been her sparring partner. About her age and size, he
relished the opportunity to prove that his Chinese martial art was
better than anything she had to offer.

She would never be able to
beat this opponent using Sanshou, a fact he made clear when his
foot bashed into her cheekbone. She fell to the alpine turf. When
he did not follow her to the ground, she knew he wasn’t there to
kill her.

Why was he
here?

She sprung to her feet and
fought hard. All grown up, her old sparring partner was fast,
strong, and probably the best fighter she’d ever faced. He launched
more punishing blows than she was able to defend. She slipped her
foot between his feet and pulled back on his calf. The moment she
had control of his balance, she pulled him toward her. His face met
her elbow. She heard his nose break with a satisfying pop. He
responded by grabbing her shoulder, and they tumbled to the
ground.

They rolled together.
Exchanging blows when they could, they tumbled down the alpine
meadow. He hit the ancient temple’s surrounding wall with a
bruising thud. She managed to shift out from under his unconscious
body.

She heard a scraping
sound. Something moved above her.

“
That’s it!” Jesse
yelled.

She jumped to her feet and
looked where he pointed. A small package moved from behind the wall
to the front. The size of a deck of cards, the package was wrapped
in brown paper. She knew in her very soul that this had belonged to
the Fey Special Forces Team. When she reached up to get the
package, she heard the distinctive two-note call of a shikra. The
small bird of prey rose off the temple roof and flew close
overhead. She shoved the package deep into her pocket. The bird
snatched an unseen mouse from the meadow in front of her and
carried it away. When she looked down, the man she’d been fighting
was alert.

“
Did you get it, lao-wei?”
he whispered in Mandarin.

She gave a curt
nod.

The shikra flew so near
that she felt her short hair ruffle in its wake. She looked up.
Noting the leather tether on the bird’s leg, she glanced back at
the man.

He was gone.

“
Alex!” her younger
brother yelled. “Alex!”

“
Colin! Over here!” she
yelled.

He jogged down the meadow
to her. For a moment, their military training evaporated, and he
was just her little brother. They held each other tight before
remembering where they were and what they were doing. She stepped
back.

“
You okay?” he
asked.

“
Bruised,” she said.
“Battered.”

“
Me too,” he said. “They
were . . .”

“
Good,” she said. “Best
I’ve ever fought.”

“
They just bowed and
stepped back into the . . . ,” he gestured to
the dark around them. “Disappeared.”

She nodded.

“
You remember when
we . . .”

“
Yes,” she cut him off
quickly. “Let’s get out of here.”

He ran to get his
backpack. Together, they climbed down the open alpine meadow to
their horses. They took a slower, more careful journey back to the
farm and drove the jeep back to the border, crossing at a second
check point with their alternate passports. They were back at the
resort on the Caspian Sea before she dared dig the package out of
her pocket.

She nodded to her
operations assistant, Major Joseph Walters, and he followed her to
her room.

“
Is this it?” she asked
him.

The only other remaining
member of the Fey Special Forces Team, Major Joseph Walters, took
the package from her. He looked at it, turned it over, and nodded.
She sat down at the table and flicked open her knife. As if she was
a surgeon, and the package her patient, she worked with great care.
Using her knife, she sliced open the packing tape and leaned
back.

Nothing
happened.

She lifted an edge of the
paper with her Leatherman Freestyle knife.

Nothing
happened.

She pulled off the outer
layer of brown paper.

“
That’s Tommy’s
handwriting,” she held up the package for Joseph to see. He nodded.
Feeling more confident, she unwrapped another layer of paper. She
held up the package.

“
Mike’s handwriting,”
Joseph said.

She nodded and went back
to work. Another layer revealed Scott’s writing. She pulled off the
final wrapping to find a small cardboard box with Dwight’s writing
on it. She looked up at Joseph and he nodded. Using her knife, she
sliced through the tape.

She closed her eyes and
said a silent prayer. She hoped this object would help her unravel
the mystery of her life: the reason ten soldiers, her friends and
team, were murdered under the streets of Paris. If it didn’t solve
the mystery, she bargained, may it take her one step closer to
knowing why an AK-47 had destroyed her body, her life, her team. If
not one step closer . . .

“
Just open it,” Joseph’s
voice broke into her silent pleading prayer.

She opened the box. She
made one last begging prayer and opened her eyes.

“
What the hell?” she
asked.

Inside the small box lay a
gold honeybee about the size of small potato. The body had been
darkened by a patina technique. The delicate wings were made of
bright gold, while the bee’s bands were made of small rose cut
diamonds. She picked it up and turned it over. A gold pin spanned
the bee from head to tail. The art deco bee brooch was heavy and
old.

“
What is that?” Joseph
asked.

“
Hell if I know,” she
said. “Why . . . ?”

“
We’ve been over this,”
Joseph turned his back to her and looked out the window at the
Caspian Sea. He took a breath and repeated what he said every time
she asked why they had done this. “We took the jobs because we did.
We kept it a secret because we knew it was stupid. When we tried to
get out of it, we couldn’t. Finally, Dwight picked up that package
and . . .”

“
This package,” she said.
“You’re sure.”

“
I’m sure,” Joseph nodded.
“Aren’t you?”

“
I feel it in my bones,”
she said.

“
Jesse?” Joseph
asked.

“
He agrees,” she said.
“Did Dwight open it?”

“
It doesn’t look like it,”
Joseph said. “And I didn’t think so.”

“
So
why . . . ?”

“
He thought it was evil,”
Joseph said.

“
By touching the package?”
she asked.

“
That’s how he
was.”

“
Yes, he was like that,”
she said. “Do you think everyone was killed
for . . . ?”

She held up the gold
bee.

“
Hard to imagine,” Joseph
said. “You’ll check it out?”

“
I will,” she said.
“Quietly. Off channels.”

“
You’ll let me know?”
Joseph asked.

Lieutenant Colonel
Alexandra Hargreaves nodded. In the morning, the Fey Team began the
long journey home.

F

Three weeks
later

Friday, early
morning

November 5 – 3:23 a.m.
MDT

Denver,
Colorado

Alex felt the weight of
the comforter across the front of her naked body. She was in bed,
her bed. She didn’t have to open her eyes to know that her husband,
John Kelly Drayson’s arm was resting across her body. Her nose
picked up the distinct musty odor of rain dropping on fall leaves.
She heard the “tat, tat, tat” of cold rain on the roof shift to the
patter of heavy wet snow. She nestled down in the warm
bed.

The alarm hadn’t gone off,
so it wasn’t four in the morning yet. She could sense the dark
still of the house. No one stirred. No one was awake. Her husband’s
brother, the earliest riser in the house, had left for work a few
hours ago.

She lay in the warm, safe
silence, not asleep, not quite awake, under the patter of the
season’s first snow.

Without warning, she heard
the distinctive sound of a needle scratching across a vinyl record,
and in the distance a mechanical voice said “Awaken.” Like a train
moving in her direction, the sound of the repeated word “Awaken”
grew closer. Soon the voice spoke over itself. “Awaken.” The sound
rose into a loud cacophony repeating the same word,
“Awaken.”

Like the deep rumble
before an earthquake, she felt more than heard a deeper tone moving
under the noise. Infrasound. Her father had taught her to feel this
inaudible sound in her jaw bone. Infrasound moved under the
cacophony of “Awaken.”

She opened her
eyes.

The voices stopped. The
vibration in her jaw stopped.

She saw the dark. She felt
the silence. She smelled the wet leaves. She heard the
snow.

Alex must have shifted
because John’s large hand grabbed her right shoulder. He’d just
started doing this. When she’d asked him about it, he’d shaken his
head and changed the subject. Yet every morning for the last year
or so, when she shifted away from him, he grabbed on to her
shoulder for dear life. With her eyes open, she listened to the
snow for a while. Maggie, her English springer spaniel, jumped onto
the bed and lay down next to her. She stroked the dog’s
ears.

Safe and sound in her own
warm bed, she closed her eyes.

The sound rose again:
“Awaken. Awaken. Awaken. Awaken. Awaken.” The chorus had grown to
thousands. The word “Awaken” folded upon itself as the same voice
repeated it over and over again.

She felt the infrasound
vibrate the bed she was laying on. Her teeth rattled with its
intensity. And then, the words changed.

The voice repeated: “Your
assignment awaits.” The phrase formed a backbeat to “Wait to be
assigned.”

The phone rang.

Her eyes popped open. Her
heart pounded in her chest.

John’s hand went to the
phone.

“
No!”

Alex jumped from bed.
Maggie scooted into her crate. Alex ran to the phone.

“
Do not answer it,” Alex
yelled. “Don’t touch it. Whatever you do, please, don’t answer
it.”

She yanked the phone cord
from the wall. John’s worried cobalt-blue eyes looked almost black
in their dark bedroom. She held the phone cord against her
chest.

“
Please,” she begged.
“Whatever you do. Don’t answer the phone.”

“
What is it?” he
whispered.

Unable to come up with the
words, she shook her head.

She went to the rooming
house dividing wall. She raised her fists against the
wall.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

A few seconds later, she
heard the reply.

Bam!

Max, her identical twin
brother, had heard it too.

“
What is it?” he
whispered.

“
Awaken,” she
said.

“
Oh my God.”

Even in the dark, she
could read the horror on his face. Her cell phone rang only a
fraction of a second before his rang.

“
Don’t answer it,” she
said.

“
How is this possible?”
The tone of his voice spoke his horror.

“
How is anything
possible?” she said.

“
You’re sure?”

She nodded.