The Ragnarok Conspiracy (16 page)

Cubicle dividers and desks continued to explode around him, and Jordan crawled toward the side of the building and away from the doorway. He placed his back against the wall and brought his Uzi forward, gazing through the room. Women were still running to the far end of the building. Dust and sparks filled the air from the massive weapons assault. He saw two of his men on the ground, likely dead, riddled with bullet holes. Others were crouched down, weapons drawn, looking over to him for guidance. His mind raced. To follow the women out the front seemed the easy solution and also provided the advantage of cover. He and his remaining team could race inside that crowd and seek to escape in the chaos, perhaps commandeering one of their vehicles and heading straight for the safe house.

He rejected that strategy immediately. He knew if he were leading the assault from outside, this would be the obvious response, and Jordan could expect a welcoming gunfire spray should he take that route. Less obvious would be to face head-on the devastating firepower that had just wreaked havoc in the building. He motioned to the back door. His men did not hesitate, he was proud to see. They moved forward with bursts of speed and crouched on either side of the doorway. The firing had stopped. The targets were out of sight, and no doubt an ambush was being readied at the front of the building. Jordan prepared to give the signal to rush through the door.

Suddenly, a man toting a submachine gun darted through the doorway, weapon aimed over the heads of those who crouched low to the ground. The man scanned the room as an operative to his left
rolled onto his back into the line of sight of the door, less than a foot in front of the man, and opened fire from the floor. Three shots struck the man in the chest; he staggered backward in retreat and fell onto the ground outside the building. Jordan and his team then leapt through the doorway, weapons firing.

Shots rained around them. Several gunmen had taken cover behind vehicles parked directly in front of the entrance. Another trap, and his men paid a high price. They had the disadvantage in position but the advantage in skill. Jordan sprayed fire with his Uzi toward three gunmen behind one of the cars. Each fell back, one wounded and disoriented, spinning around and firing rounds into the air.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the movement of a figure and sensed a hostile intent. He dove to the ground for cover, feeling at that moment a sharp, searing pain in his right leg as the sound of a gun blast reached his ears. He looked down and saw blood darkening in crimson the white of his robes. Behind him he heard a laugh.

“You stupid man,” screamed Kharitonov, standing near the entrance with a pistol in his hand. “You think I have no way to send message?” Jordan tried to spin around to aim the Uzi, but his right leg was badly wounded, and he knew he would not make it in time as the Russian raised his weapon and fired. Jordan's shoulder exploded in pain as he twisted sideways. He was still conscious, however, and turned around in time to see Kharitonov arch his back as red bursts exploded out of his abdomen. The Russian dropped immediately to his knees, cradling his stomach and rolling over. The CIA operative who had shot him was then pinned by submachine gunfire against the wall of the building, shaking violently as multiple bullets wrecked his body. All Jordan's men were now down.

He grabbed the Uzi with his left arm and fired on the last of the men behind the cars. His aim was poor, but the Uzi made up in spray for what it lacked in precision. The man fell backward, moaning, crawled several feet, then did not move.

Jordan guessed he had less than a minute. The noise must have alerted the team placed at the front of the building, and they would
be racing back at this moment. The bullet-ridden car of the dealer's hit men was less than twenty feet away from his current position. He raised himself to his feet using all his strength and willpower, the pain in his leg flaring bright like a nova in his mind, eclipsing that of his shoulder as he staggered toward the vehicle. It seemed to sway and tilt as he moved, and Jordan hoped he could cross this distance and remain conscious. He turned toward the other two cars and opened fire on them, the tires rupturing.

Reaching the open door, he dropped his weapon, stepped over a dead body, and clasped the frame with his hands, pulling himself around and into the driver's seat. He grimaced, realizing that his right leg was useless. He grasped it with his left hand and screamed in pain as he awkwardly shoved his right foot over into the floorboard of the passenger side.

He was lucky it was an automatic. He turned the ignition and the car started. Using his left foot on the brake, he closed the door and shifted into reverse, then gunned the car backward, smashing closed the door of another car and, after about thirty feet, turning the wheel sharply to the left. The car spun around, and he shifted into forward gear and hammered the accelerator. Shots shattered the rear window, but he was not hit, and within seconds, he was shielded by parked cars and other buildings on the left side.

With his left hand steering, he pulled out toward the highway. Blood covered his clothing, the steering wheel, the seats, and the gear shift. Jordan knew that he was losing blood quickly and would not be able to stay conscious for long. He also knew that men were soon likely to be following him.
The safe house was where?
His mind blanked, his memory blurry and threatening to fail him.

The backpack.
He froze, remembering nothing of taking it or what had become of it. He glanced around the front seat of the car and breathed in relief. Somehow he had carried it looped over his left shoulder, and it was wedged in the car against the door. He had the records. The records that would show them the trail to those who had purchased the S-47, their only lead, their only hope to discover the
identity of this new terrorist group. He tried to focus. The data in the backpack. It was everything.

Now he had only to reach the safe house before he was run down or bled to death on the highways of Dubai.

In New York, a crowd circled a large flat-screen monitor hanging from a wall in Larry Kanter's division. The news station played over and over the footage of the collapse of the Martyrs Monument, narrated by a quickly assembled expert commentary to put the significance in context for the American viewer. All watched in silence, memories of nearby towers falling close in their thoughts. The video was grainy and shook in a jarring fashion, shot from a tourist's handheld device, and yet all the more powerful for it. The footage cut from the tower collapse to the afternoon rescue efforts at the Great Mosque and around the monument. People who appeared to have been bathed in ash shuffled past the camera. Some fell to their knees with arms outstretched, crying up to the heavens. Bodies could be seen lining the roadway.

“Dear God,” said Kanter to the hushed room.

“It's them,” said Cohen flatly, not taking her eyes off the scene. Tears welled in her eyes. “I don't think there can be any doubt anymore.”

“Yes,” said Savas. “Same MO.”

“Yeah, I'd say,” said Miller. “Blow the shit out of some important Muslim building and leave bodies all over the place.”

Kanter let their argument pass.

“Someone's got to stop this, Larry,” said Rideout. “These are major, major hits, one after the other in a span of months. There's never been anything like this before. Al-Qaeda at their best needed years between each major terrorist attack. These guys are like fucking commandos or something.”

Kanter shook his head. “It's unprecedented.” The screen showed the wounded being loaded on stretchers, or, more commonly, carried
by hand. The footage turned to showing angry crowds filling the streets in Algiers, chanting “Death to the infidels.”

“This will turn into World War Three if it keeps going,” said Savas.

Kanter turned to face his division members. “OK, everyone. If we all needed any reminders about what we're up against, or why we get up every morning, well,” he said, pointing back to the screen, “it's right up there for you to see in full color. Now, I want to call…”

He was interrupted by the sound of a woman shouting his name. Everyone turned to see Mira Vujanac running across the room, dodging personnel and desks in her black pumps. Breathless, she stopped near Kanter and Savas.

“Larry, I'm sorry,” she gasped. Seeming to recognize herself again, she straightened her blouse and hair quickly. “It's Agent Jordan. The CIA just phoned me. Their base in Dubai left a message. He's critically injured, shot up pretty bad. They don't know if he will survive. He is being flown to an army hospital in Germany.” She paused and caught her breath. “They also said he got the records.”

“Mira, come with me to my office. Everyone, back to your groups and back to work. Intel teams, we'll update you as soon as we can on this.” He took Mira's arm and led her toward his office.

King looked over at Savas. “What the hell did he get into?”

Savas could only shake his head.

“I hope he's alright,” said Cohen. Savas turned to her and saw the real anxiety in her eyes. He realized with some annoyance that he shared her concern.

“He's being taken to some of the best military doctors around. He'll be in good hands.”

Angel Lightfoote swept beside them and stopped as Savas finished. She turned her head slightly toward him and said in a distracted tone, “He's closer to God now. Much closer.”

With that, she turned and walked off toward her desk.

Late that evening, Savas was trapped in thought. Rain was pouring against the windows of his office, the darkness outside nearly impenetrable to the eye. As the night drew on, a weight increasingly settled on him, one he could not simply dismiss as related to the cloud fronts rolling in, plunging the city into blackness hours before sunset. The offices were emptied, and he felt a loneliness descend that he had not felt in some time. There were just too many reminders, too many conflicts stirring long-constrained emotions within him.

Jordan's heroics, his very existence, was like a stone kicked off a ledge, leading to an avalanche below. He triggered so many clashing thoughts in Savas's mind that it forced him inward, toward his own demons, monsters he had thrown into a pit and covered but that now stirred inside.
My own private Tartarus.

He wanted to hate this man. He
did
hate this man in many ways. He could not wrap his mind around how an American citizen could embrace a religion whose practitioners around the world likened his nation to the Devil, burned American symbols, and supported and carried out murder against its citizens. Yet, here he was, this Muslim CIA agent, having risked his life
on a lead
. It was like an immovable object of prejudice was meeting the unstoppable force of a real man's character. In the middle of it was Savas's dead son Thanos and what had happened at the World Trade Center.

The rain worked in earnest against the windows of his office, like some maniacal typist drumming incessantly in the night. Savas opened a desk drawer and pulled out a fraying envelope. He opened its contents. Addressed to Thanos Savas from the NYPD—his letter of
acceptance to the force. Savas was not sure who was more proud the day that letter arrived—him or his son. Not one year later, he was sitting next to his ashen-faced wife at the memorial service. He felt his eyes well up with tears.

A soft knock sounded on his door. His lights were off, the lightning like a strobe light flashing through his room. He got up awkwardly, rubbed his eyes on his sleeve, and stepped over to the cracked door.

It was Cohen. In the darkness he could not be sure whether she had seen his face, seen the pain etched across his features, but her expression told him that if she had not, she was clairvoyant. “John, are you OK?” she asked.

“Yes, Rebecca. Just tired is all,” he said with difficulty. Crazily, he felt his defenses dissolving, and his emotions, rather than demanding to be further suppressed, were raging all the more to be freed. “Not feeling well. I think I'll head home.”

Astonishingly, she placed her fingers to his mouth. Her soft skin brushed his lips, and a shudder ran through his body. He felt like a great wave was rising from the sea, and there was no place to flee from it. With her other hand, she took off her glasses and laid them on a shelf. Looking into her eyes, he saw what seemed to be an endless sea of compassion, focused on him, and it took all his strength to hold back the tears that wished to pour out. He could smell her breath, the scent of her body, its warmth like fingers stroking his skin. Her hair curled over her shoulders, spilling across her chest as she cupped his cheek in her hand and brought his lips to hers. For an instant, it was as if a creature, long split in two and languishing incomplete for an eon, had found its other half. He felt a life force rush through him, a force more than his life or her life alone. A force that promised magic and miracles.

John Savas pulled back, stumbling backward. Cohen looked into his eyes, her own eyes wide and concerned yet filled with longing. He grabbed his coat off the hook on his door and brushed past her, rushing down the corridor. “John, please!” she called out behind him, but he did not turn or respond as he cut past the elevators to the stairway and sprinted recklessly down the steps. When he reached the ground floor,
his chest heaving, out of breath, he opened the door and stepped into the alley behind the FBI building. Rain rushed down over him, and he lifted his face to the skies to receive it.

The icon of Saint Nicholas glittered, reflecting the candle flames that lit it from below. A thousand shards of light from hand-placed mosaic pieces, each no bigger than the nails on John Savas's fingers, glinted in the smoky darkness. Each stone was a different color and had been collected by monks and shipped across the seas to churches during the Greek Diaspora: deep reds and blues, turquoise, magenta, gold-plated stones of yellow, white marble. Shaped and placed, up close resembling a pixilated image on a computer screen, merging from a distance into a unified whole.
A window to the soul.

Father Timothy sat across from him, troubled yet purposeful. His eyes were like the mosaic stones reflecting the dancing candlelight, and his face was lit harshly by the flashes of lightning outside.

“John, I'm not going to quote to you verses on loving your enemies or forgiving your brother seventy times seven. You've read them or heard them so many times that you can't listen to them. But there is one thing I know, and that is that hatred eats at us from within, and if we let it take root, it will slowly burn away at everything we are, and the life-blood of our soul, our ability to love, will die. You have carried a hatred within you for too long. Inside, you know this; you can feel it. You are being asked now to make a choice, John, between taking your life and turning it into a sword, or letting the pain flow through you, so that from that place inside, a stronger love will be born.”

John Savas lowered his head to stare at the floor between his feet. He could not accept a sermon; no words would touch the place within him that burned. He knew the priest was right about something; he did burn, and choices were being asked of him. He wondered whether it wasn't, after all, about a choice between love and hate, as simple as it sounded. Tonight, he had turned his back on a woman who had opened herself in vulnerability to him, even for a short moment. It was the most beautiful moment he had known in many years, and yet the
fire inside of him would not let him embrace it or accept her love and return it with his own. The fire demanded something different, something harder, where tears did not flow, where vengeance ruled. He felt the church walls closing in on him; felt that God Himself was probing with a scalpel, reaching out from the burning eyes of Saint Nicholas before him. Savas stood up, surprising the priest in the middle of a sentence that he had not heard, apologized, and quickly stepped through the church and into the rain.

The downpour seemed to have only intensified. He walked through the pelting drops and slumped into his car. Ten minutes later, he was standing at the entrance of his apartment building, the rain so thick he could barely see five feet in front of him. Water pooled in his shoes, seeping into every surface of his body. The sound of a car door closing was muffled in the storm. He pulled out his keys, fitting them to the lock, then turning to the side at the sound of approaching footsteps. The light above the door spilled directly over him, and he could see only partially into the shadows on his left. Squinting, he saw a dark form approach, and he tensed instinctively, expecting the worse.

She was as wet as he was, her brown hair turned black by the pouring water and the darkness of the night. Her clothing was completely soaked, her white shirt transparent, revealing the pink of her skin, the swell of her breasts taut against the rain-washed fabric. Even in the rain, he saw that she had tears in her eyes, and she stepped up to him with a sharp desperation cut into her face.

“Rebecca, please, you didn't—” and once again she placed her hand to his mouth to silence him.

“John, please. I shouldn't have come here, I know. But so much has happened, such madness. Let me speak, before I lose the courage. I know you have suffered, and you have tried to find your way back from this suffering. I've watched you, from the first day I came to the Bureau. I watched you try to turn your pain into something good. I've waited for you, John, at first only as a dream, and then with the growing realization that you wanted me, too. I tried to give you your time, but I am built of flesh and blood and needs, too, John. I have my own pains,”
she spoke, choking back tears. “I can't wait anymore. Tonight I am here for you to make a choice. To choose me, all of me and what I offer you, good and bad, or find your own way in this world without me. I need to offer you my heart, John, to reject it or to take it. I've loved you for too long and for too many lonely days and nights.” She stood inches from his face, her eyelashes wet with droplets of rain. “I love you, John Savas. Will you love me?”

Savas felt her cut through him like a warm blade. In that instant, he understood what was being offered to him, and from deep within, he answered, without hesitation, with his whole heart. He wrapped his arm around her waist, and with his other hand cupped the back of her head, pulling her to him.

They embraced. The water poured over and between them, and he held her so tight he could feel her breath escape through her lips. For a short moment, everything that he had built around him seemed to collapse, and his shoulders shook from the muffled sobs he tried to suppress.

They kissed. With the thunder reverberating around them, they kissed deeply like two starved things, oblivious to the storm's rage, knowing a personal shelter, a space protected from all that assailed them from without. Entwined, hands exploring, lips uncovering, breath in gasps, in pain and in ecstasy, with joy and sorrow, swirling wildly in the evening gusts.