The Thieves of Faith (56 page)

The enormous castle-like structure stood silhouetted upon the cliffs, its moonshadow seeming to stretch forever. Michael couldn’t help thinking of Susan trapped inside the grand stone structure that presented itself as the house of a holy man, but, in actuality, was the antithesis. He prayed they’d find her in time. He checked his compass and was moving them northeast toward the guard shack. He had committed the compound’s map to memory and was hoping the map would prove accurate.

They came upon the runway. Zivera’s jet sat idle and dark, the lone jet on the airstrip; but for a few trucks, the place was deserted.

They moved up through the hedges to the stucco building that sat just behind the runway. The structure was designed to replicate an eighteenth-century farmhouse, but that was where the similarity ended. Michael peered through the window; it was a segmented great room: a TV was on in the corner, three guards were slumped upon a large L-shaped couch, the other corner was strictly business. Michael could just see the glow of the security monitors and the guard at the console. He turned back to his friends and held up four fingers.

Simon glanced through the window and turned back. “I’ll get the three on the right.”

“The one at the desk is mine,” Busch said.

They moved through the shrubbery to the door. They each checked their pistols, tightened up their silencers, and chambered a round. Looking at each other, they nodded. Busch lifted his leg and kicked in the door.

Simon rolled into the room, coming up in a crouch position, his silencer-equipped gun already firing. The three guards sat there stunned as bullets tore into their heads and punctured their chests. They were dead before they hit the ground.

Busch took aim at the desk jockey, but the guard was quicker, already turning with his gun in hand, beginning to open fire.

Busch spun left and with a single bullet, shot the man in the right arm, his gun hand falling limp at his side. Busch and Simon were on him in seconds, wrestling him to the ground, strapping his arms and legs behind his back, shoving a gag in his mouth.

Simon leaned over him. “You are going to answer me, or you are going to die.”

Michael turned away, unable to handle what he knew was coming.

“Where are they holding the American woman?” Simon asked as he pulled the gag from the man’s mouth.

The guard stared at him defiantly and turned away.

“Wrong answer.” Simon shoved the gag back in the man’s mouth, placed his gun against the guard’s right shoulder and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore straight through the man’s muscle and shoulder and buried itself in the floor. The muffled scream from behind the gag pleaded for mercy as the man frantically nodded his head. But Simon just looked at the man, shook his head no, and jammed the red-hot barrel of his gun in the man’s open wound. The man screamed anew.

“Now, I am going to ask you one more time,” Simon said. “And if you don’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll work my way through your entire body.”

The man violently nodded, sweat pouring off his brow as Simon removed the gag.

“The business side of the mansion.” The man gasped between his words. “Third floor. Southwest corner.”

“How do I know you are not lying?” Simon lay the gun against the guard’s other shoulder.

“Stop, stop.” The man struggled to stand, wincing in pain. “I’ll show you.”

Simon helped him to his feet and seated him back in the chair. “I need my hands,” the man said as he alluded to his computer keyboard.

Simon glared at him. “One act of aggression or non-compliance and it will be the last time you use those hands.” Simon cut his bonds.

The man began typing with his left hand as his right hung dead at his side, both wounds crimson through his shirt, blood running down his arm, dripping onto the floor. And an image rose up on his monitor; Michael and Busch watched it come into focus.

And then she was there, her face as beautiful and defiant as Michael remembered. A sudden relief came over him. The thought of her death before his arrival had sat in the back of his mind, but here she was, alone in a room tapping her foot, looking about.

Michael sat down at the adjacent computer and started to work. The security system ran through a large communication mainframe on a dedicated server. The system stored three days of digital video from the compound’s cameras. Michael checked for a live Internet feed and found two T1 lines. It took Michael less than two minutes to reprogram the computer and begin feeding out the data he would need via the Internet.

Simon spun the guard about in his chair. “And where is Julian’s mother?”

“Who?”

Simon raised his gun to the man’s head.

“No, no, no. I…Medical lab, lower floor.” The man worked the keys again and a lab came into focus.

“Where?” Simon asked as he looked around the lab.

“She is in that freezer.” The guard pointed to a large box on the far side of the room.

“Freezer?”

The man looked at Simon as if stating the obvious. “She’s dead.”

Simon’s face hid his emotion but Michael couldn’t conceal his grief, his anger.

“I don’t believe you,” Simon said, as if he was questioning a simple fact.

“I swear she is in there, she is scheduled for a full autopsy tonight.”

“Why an autopsy?” Busch said with disgust.

“Not anymore,” Simon said as he hit the man at the base of his neck. The man fell forward, unconscious on the desk.

They retied and gagged the guard and pulled him out of the way. Michael regained focus, frantically riffling the keys again, and found the routing configuration for security cameras, all labeled by location. He found the medical lab and brought up the image of the vacant room on the monitor before him. The image was static, no movement. But that changed as Michael was able to rewind the recorded image. Suddenly, it was hours earlier, two people in the room. Michael allowed the recorded image to play. And he saw her, Genevieve, strapped to the gurney, an IV in her arm. Julian stood at her side, his hand around the IV drip, he brought his face in close to hers, standing just above her, their eyes locked upon each other. The silent image haunted Michael as he saw them converse without hearing a word, watching her struggle against her binds, imagining what was coming. Busch turned away, unable to watch the inevitable, but not Michael, not Simon. They couldn’t tear their eyes away as Julian thumbed down the plunger of a syringe, injecting something into the IV. Genevieve’s body went suddenly rigid in contorted agony, her eyes wide as her mouth formed a silent scream. The moment seemed to hang on for eternity before she finally went limp. And throughout the entire ordeal, Julian continued to stare at his agonized mother, his eyes only inches from hers, his face an emotionless slate as he watched the life violently ripped from her.

Not a word was said as Michael, Simon, and Busch internally dealt with the repulsive matricide. As Michael turned and looked at Simon, he had no doubt what he would do. Simon would kill him, and neither Michael nor Busch would stand in his way.

The computer beeped with the completion of the file transfer, pulling Michael back to the moment. Michael turned his attention back to the monitor with Susan on it. She was at a conference table covered in food; she sat there quietly without emotion or fear. Michael tore himself away from her image and crouched down under the desk. He found the wire going to the computer and traced it to a large cabinet at the far end of the workstation. He found two servers, both humming and alight with diodes. Michael pulled a memory stick from his pocket, reached around the back of the server, and inserted the stick in the USB slot. Within seconds, the program entered the system; it would shut down the entire server and all of its correlating functions in ten minutes. It was his favorite homemade virus and it never failed to erase his tracks with utter certainty.

“We can go,” Michael said quietly as he closed up the computer cabinet.

A somber air had fallen over the room with Genevieve’s death. The three of them moved to the door.

“My plans have changed,” Simon said.

“You can’t go after Julian until we get Susan out of here.”

“I’m not leaving Genevieve’s body to be dumped somewhere.”

“Simon, we can’t carry her out of here.”

“She was murdered, Michael. She asked, and I always promised, that when she passed I would fulfill her final wish.”

“Which is?”

“You’ll see.”

As much as Michael wanted to argue, he knew there was no changing Simon’s mind. “You’ve got fifteen minutes and we’re out of here.”

“You sure you can get to Susan?” Simon asked.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Bullshit,” Busch said. “I say we stick together.”

“We don’t have time. Go with him,” Michael said to Busch as he pointed at Simon. “If one of us fails at least the other one may be able to succeed. You guys do your thing with Genevieve; God rest her tortured soul. Fifteen minutes. No more.”

They poked their heads out the door. And without looking back, they disappeared into the night.

Chapter 60

T
he medical lab was a quarter mile down the
drive from the main house. It was orginally the carriage house, accommodating an oversized stable and riding ring built from the same fieldstone as the monastery. While the exterior had maintained its original European manor design, the interior had been entirely gutted and updated as a state-of-the-art medical lab, designed not only for twenty-bed hospital care and emergency treatments, but also possessing a cutting-edge research facility in the rear quarter and sublevels.

Dr. Lloyd and three associates left their offices and convened in the research lab where the refrigerated containment units had been installed for Vladimir Skovokov’s experiments. In addition to the morgue-like refrigerators, a special cooling system was installed in the actual operating room, sustaining the temperature at precisely thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, one degree Celsius. In this way, body decomposition of the subjects would be minimized during the numerous research procedures.

Lloyd opened the three-by-three door and slid out the tray, thinking of too many parallels between a morgue and a restaurant kitchen. Genevieve Zivera’s body was mercifully covered in a sheet, while her face remained exposed to the world. He averted his eyes and blessed himself, hoping it would somehow diminish the nightmares he knew her serene, innocent face would cause him for years to come.

They had been charged by Julian to cut the body before them, to harvest the organs for medical research, a directive that created a momentary pause. After all, this was his mother they were working on, yet Julian showed no sign of sorrow, no signal of emotions for the woman who had raised him, for the woman he had killed while trying to get her to reveal the secrets of the box not an hour earlier.

Unlike with the box, they were told nothing about this woman beyond the fact that she was Julian’s mother. Birth mother or adopted mother, they couldn’t tell. They had all known he was raised in an orphanage, but were not privy to any details of his life beyond what was published by God’s Truth. They knew his story was embellished. They had all read their fair share of corporate and medical puff pieces where poetic license had been taken to enhance appearances, and Julian was no different. But the reasoning behind the autopsy and the harvesting of his mother had not been broached.

Lloyd and his team stood over Genevieve. They marveled at her flawless skin, without blemish, freckle, or scar. Her teeth bore no sign of cavities and looked as new and white as the day they emerged from her gumline. She was strikingly beautiful, Lloyd thought, and it filled him with a sense of pity. Here was a woman who possessed the potential for a long life yet died during an interrogation. It reminded him of the people who had exercised vigorously, avoided all vices, and ate nothing but the blandest of health foods to ensure a long life, only to be struck down without warning by a bus. All of their pleasures sacrificed in hopes of extending their days for naught. A forgoing of the indulgence of the senses for an existence of quantity over quality.

Lloyd watched as his breath coalesced in the frigid air and was glad for the extra sweater he had put on before donning his scrubs. But no matter how many sweaters he wore, nothing could warm the chill that ran through his system. She was beyond perfect in his mind and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was desecrating her soul, stealing her essence without her knowledge. He felt as if he was violating God.

But as so often happens, his scientific mind pulled his heart back, soothing his conscience. Justifying in his own mind that he was simply doing his job.

He looked at his fellow doctors and smiled. “Gentlemen, shall we begin?”