The Council of Ten (35 page)

They gazed at each other in the darkness.

Part Seven:
Back Country

Chapter 29

“HOW MUCH DO
you remember?”

Drew sat huddled before the fire, shivering slightly in spite of the blanket wrapped about his shoulders.

“Everything. I think.” He steadied his coffee cup with both hands as he raised it to his lips. “Tell me about Pam again.”

Jabba eased his bulbous frame forward. “She’s resting as comfortably as can be expected just a few miles from where we are now at a rather discreet hospital being treated by a team of rather discreet doctors who still, incredibly, make house calls.”

“On me?”

“On you. You’re quite lucky, my boy. A deep slice out of your side and a graze to your head is about the size of it. Virtually no burns whatsoever.” Jabba hesitated. “Pam suffered several, enough to cause severe trauma. She hasn’t regained consciousness yet, but there’s reason for optimism I’m told.”

Drew gazed out the living room window at the open spaces of land around them, filled with trees shedding their autumn leaves, which he couldn’t see now that night had fallen.

“Where did you say we were, Jabba?”

“Virginia. In the country about a hundred miles west of Arlington.”

“Safe?”

“No guards outside, if that’s what you mean. But I’ve got the best electronic surveillance system you can lay your hands on.” His gaze turned toward a pair of monitors flashing atop a nearby desk. “Designed by experts to be used by fools.”

Drew almost smiled. “Who are you, Jabba?”

“You asked me that once before, my boy, and I gave you a selection of answers. Which one would you prefer today?”

“The truth.”

“I told you weeks ago that myths create their own truth. In this case it was a matter of truth creating its own myth. The rumors about me, my boy, were surprisingly close to the mark. My days before holding court at Clyde’s were spent with a secret subdivision of the CIA. The details don’t matter. Suffice it to say that I was damn good at what I did until the pressure closed in and the brandy bottles started opening up.”

“CIA,” Drew muttered. “If only the gang could hear you now.”

“They wouldn’t like it. I made a much better pompous ass drunk than I did a spy. The company eased me out to avoid embarrassment for both of us and took care of me financially, but couldn’t do much about my life, which wasn’t much of a life at all.” Jabba cleared his throat, sending waves of flesh rolling along his jowls. “Let’s talk more specifically about your health now.”

“No,” Drew told him, “my health can wait. If you left the CIA, what am I doing here? How did you find me?”

The fat man’s voice lowered. “I owed you, my boy, long before and for much more than just your rescue of me from those ruffians weeks ago. Jabba always pays his debts, always did. The news of your exploits in Florida was easily attainable in these parts. Add to that a plea from Pam that I send down a lawyer or something of that sort. She knew we were friends, thought I might be able to reach you.”

“And how did you end up learning I came back to town?”

“By tapping your phone line … and Pam’s. The monitoring took me away from Clyde’s for a while, but it was for the best. I knew sooner or later you’d make contact in a deceptive, clever way based on your lessons from the soldier camp. But your use of the computer surprised even me… .”

“Wait. The bad guys must have had my line tapped, too, but they couldn’t have caught on.”

“Correct. But there are several ways to tap a phone, several devices to choose from. Mine relied on electronic signals passing through the line; theirs was voice-activated. I was actually able to play back your entire computerized conversation over my terminal by decoding the electronic signals. Fascinating, my boy, and brilliant.”

“And then?”

“I tried to locate you at the library, of course, and when I failed I simply followed Pam to the lab and waited for you to show. Alas, I neglected to consider that I am not the locksmith you are. I wasn’t inside until that awful blast sounded.”

Drew shuddered at the memory.

“If I had been earlier,” Jabba said guiltily, “if my damn hands could work without trembling …”

Drew cut him off. “You saved my life, Jabba. Mine and Pam’s. That’s enough.”

“No, my boy, it’s not. I hid myself at Clyde’s so I’d be left alone. Retire quietly and you’re never left alone, not by your former enemies or friends. But become a public joke who drowns himself in brandy and people leave you alone.” He paused. “Yet you, Drew, always treated me with dignity. I wasn’t a joke to you no matter how hard I tried to be one, and you don’t know how much I’ve appreciated that. Saving you at the lab was not enough to repay that debt. Keeping you alive might be. It’s a wretched business you’ve gotten yourself in, my boy. Indications are that you infringed badly on someone’s private property, someone with a rather low regard for human life. I need to know everything. From the beginning.”

Drew told him and Jabba regarded his story with varying degrees of shock and fear through its course, stopping him occasionally for questions and then reclining back in a trance at the conclusion.

“Incredible,” he muttered dimly. “Far worse than anything I could have imagined. The intent of this powder in all its volume is obviously an attack on the United States. My God, all these trips your grandmother made to Nassau …”

“A lot of powder, Jabba. I saw it work. Millions will die, everyone maybe.”

Jabba stood up, face staunch as if he were trying hard to be someone else. “No, we can stop them. I still have contacts. People will be mobilized. Yes! Yes!”

And he started for the phone, stopping when a steady beep on one of the alarm monitors started up. He lumbered over to it and adjusted a few dials. Another series of beeps followed.

“Probably just dogs, or kids maybe,” he muttered unconvincingly, grabbing for the phone off a nearby end table and raising the receiver to his ear.

Jabba’s huge face paled. Drew didn’t have to ask because he knew—a dead telephone line.

Suddenly the second monitor flashed its warning signal. Drew hovered over Jabba’s shoulder.

“They’re here,” the fat man said helplessly. “We’ve got to get—”

He was interrupted by a continuous squeal that sounded like birds chirping from a third monitor poised on the mantel. The intruders had passed the last perimeter alarms and were closing on the house. Just seconds away now.

Jabba steadied himself with a deep breath. “What matters is that one of us makes it out of here. The authorities must be alerted. We must pray there’s still time to stop this force you’ve described.” He grabbed Drew’s shoulders and lowered him to the floor as shapes flashed in the narrowing distance through the window. “I’ll give you names, numbers, people to contact. They’ll know what to do. I can hold them for a while,” Jabba promised. “Long enough to give you the time you need.”

“No, I can’t do it! I can’t get through them!”

Shapes flashed outside the windows. Jabba scribbled several lines of writing on a note page grabbed from his desk, tore it off, and thrust it in Drew’s pocket.

Which was when the largest of the windows exploded in a hail of gunfire. Jabba pulled Drew with him all the way to the floor. Impact sent waves of pain through his racked body. Lights faded and the room was suddenly drenched in darkness.

“Listen to me,” Jabba whispered quickly into his ear. “There’s a cellar beneath us with a door at the rear leading into a tunnel. The tunnel will take you into the surrounding woods. You’ll be safe.”

More gunfire peppered the walls as they crept toward the entrance to the cellar.

“I’ll hold them off as long as I can,” Jabba said when they reached it. “Call those numbers I gave you. The men on the other end will take it from there.” He opened the door. “Go! Now! Quickly!”

And Drew pushed himself down the stairs into a dank basement lit by a single emergency light. He tried to stand three steps from the bottom and ended up tumbling to the floor. The pain that engulfed his body made him want to vomit as he hurried across the tile toward the escape door that would take him into the tunnel.

Above him the gun blasts came more frequently, mostly in rapid spurts indicating automatic fire. A new series, individual reports that were the loudest yet, started up and Drew could tell they came from within the house instead of out. Jabba was trying to buy him the time he needed.

Drew tripped over a crate and crawled the rest of the way to the tunnel door, throwing it open from his knees. The tunnel was totally black, not even the slightest spill of light to break the emptiness. It was narrow, too, and short. Drew hunched at the back and knees as he forced himself through, using the walls as his only guide, his eyes useless. A few times corners and turns confused him and he went sprawling, the pain so great at impact that even a scream was denied him. Always he regained his footing and pressed on; his clothes filthy, flesh on his hands raw and bleeding from breaking his many falls.

Above him the blasts had stopped. Jabba’s resistance had ended, indicating that he was now on his own, left only with the hope that his head start in the tunnel would be sufficient.

Drew lost track of how much ground he had covered and distracted himself with reviewing the passage of time. It was Wednesday morning now, a few hours before sunrise. He had been at Jabba’s since Sunday night, had changed into the clothes that the fat man had brought him late Tuesday.

Suddenly, the dirt path curved steeply upward.
I’m almost out!
Drew thought, thirsting for the moonlight about to welcome him. Get to a phone and call the numbers stuffed in his pocket. Tell whoever answers everything. Yes, he could do it! He rushed up the last of the steep incline and nearly collided head first with a wooden trapdoor.

It took all the strength his shoulders could muster to force the door open. He pulled himself back to the surface with his raw, scraped hands.

Three flashlights blinded him immediately. Through the glare he made out a single man standing ahead of several others, made him out because of the startling whiteness of his hair and skin that seemed no different than the shade of his suit.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Corbano.

Chapter 30

“IT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” SAID ELLIANA,
returning the binoculars to the Timber Wolf.

“Drew’s inside, Ellie. I’ve got to get him out.”

And Wayman gazed back into the binoculars so he wouldn’t have to meet her disapproving stare. Before him stood a twenty-room, three-story fortress in the middle of Eastman, Georgia, fronted by a four-foot stone fence that effectively formed a huge courtyard presently lined with guards.

It was midafternoon on Wednesday. Flying first from Germany to the United States and then making their way into Georgia’s back country had proved difficult on all accounts, an agonizing journey that saw them at the whims of the weather, twisted airline schedules, and ill-functioning rental cars. At each turn more and more of the precautions deemed necessary to keep the Council of Ten from catching them were abandoned in the more pressing interests of time.

The only luxury Ellie insisted on was a phone call to Tel Aviv.

“Isser, thank God I reached you!”

Isser’s voice emerged in a dull monotone. “You have no reason to thank Him, Ellie. I can’t confirm your version of what happened in Prague. That agent you said tried to kill you has been off our active list for months and has disappeared.”

“That doesn’t matter anymore! Just listen to me. The Council’s ready to make its ultimate move. Tomorrow, Isser, it’s going to start tomorrow!”

“What’s going to start?”

“The worst horror you can imagine. A total realignment of the world as it’s known. I can’t explain everything. I don’t believe it all myself.”

“And you expect me to?”

“Yes, because you have to. I’m not going to worry about the length of this call because if you don’t believe me my fate won’t matter. I have information that can stop them, but I can’t follow it up alone. You have nothing to lose by helping me.”

“Ellie—”

“Stop it, Isser. How many years did I lay my life on the line for you? How many bullets did I narrowly avoid? I was the best,
am
the best. This is all real, no illusion. Thursday will mark the beginning of a new kind of world. No one will be safe, especially Israel. Trust me, you have to!” She paused, seizing the offensive again when he made no response. “The Council’s headquarters is somewhere near Lisbon. It doesn’t matter how I know. What does matter is that sometime tomorrow a number of exceptionally powerful men are going to be arriving in the city. If you could catch onto one, follow him …”

“Ellie, what you’re asking, it’s impossible.”

But she could feel him giving. “No! I’ve headed up similar operations before. With full intelligence mobilization even on short notice, you can pull it off. You
have
to pull it off. There’s too much at stake.”

“Lisbon,” Isser muttered, and she knew she had him.

Twenty-four hours later Ellie and the Timber Wolf had arrived in Eastman. They followed ten miles of dirt-paved roads and then abandoned the car. Camouflaging it with brush, they covered the rest of the distance through the woods on foot, hoping not to attract attention. The trek was longer than estimated and took a solid forty minutes before they reached the break in the forest beyond which lay the fenced-in compound. A few minutes later a black car mired with dirt and scratches wound down the narrow, private road. A heavy chain was pulled aside to let it pass. Wayman and Ellie watched its occupants with interest as all four doors opened together.

The first one they saw was Corbano, a dapper white suit over his muscular frame, his milky white features giving him the air of a corpse. The coloring he was cursed with made him a fearful sight, deadly and cold.

Two of his men emerged next dragging a figure whom Ellie didn’t recognize but who took the Timber Wolf’s breath away.

“That’s Drew Jordan,” he muttered in shock over seeing the young man still alive. “My God, he’s—What’s he doing here? What’s Corbano want with him?”