But Anatoli hadn’t gone through the fence; he was continuing along the perimeter and now he was out of sight. Aharon heaved himself forward. If anything could be worse than being chased through the dark woods in Auschwitz by armed men, it would be being chased alone! How had a devout, quiet-loving man like himself ended up in this situation?
He sprinted, his breath rasping in his ears. Anatoli had stopped to wait and Aharon soon caught up with him. Wyle, too. The woman and Nate jogged up last.
“What’s the point of this?” Dr. Talcott asked no one in particular. Her breathing was labored.
“Let’s keep moving, for god’s sake,” Aharon urged, through clenched teeth.
Anatoli said nothing, just slipped away with the stealth of a shadow. The rest of them followed.
Calder Farris was livid. Talcott and her little boy toy had made him chase them all the way to Poland. What the hell was she doing here? If she thought she could get away from him by the mere act of leaving the country, she had no idea who she was dealing with. Even Rickman had agreed they should follow her—discreetly, of course, which meant him and three other guys with bogus ID. The United States was not here “officially.” But he’d still insisted it was an XL3 and so… they were here.
But Calder’s superiors were not happy. They were running out of patience. And neither was Calder happy to be running through the woods in fucking Auschwitz!
He felt a surge of hate and it kept him warm, kept his legs sprinting despite the thick bandage on his thigh and the uncomfortable pull of his stitches. Around him his agents fell behind, unable to match his muscles or his rage.
Jill spotted the others up ahead. Nate was pulling her on, relentlessly, and she wasn’t arguing. She didn’t have the breath. She couldn’t run like this, was too out of shape and had been too ill too recently. Nate was clinging to her as mindlessly as a man clinging to a suitcase as he runs for a train, and she was getting fed up with it. Was he going to let her think for herself or what? What if the people chasing them were not the Mossad? What if they were DoD? Could she take that chance?
No. Not really. Up until this moment, she hadn’t given her alleged abduction in Seattle much thought. But suddenly the idea that the men chasing them might not be American was pretty damn terrifying. For all she knew, men like that might well torture and kill her to get the information. That kind of thing went on all the time in some parts of the world.
Up ahead was a small clearing where lights flickered in the trees. And there, in the glow of the moon, she could see Anatoli, Wyle, and Handalman waiting. She tried to let go of Nate’s hand, but he gripped harder.
“What is this?” she asked, her words huffing between breaths. “Why have we stopped?”
Aharon wanted to know himself. He was itching to keep running, terrified of getting caught. Maybe it was the fear, but time had taken on a strange quality. The night felt dreamlike. As he had in Jerusalem, walking the streets, Aharon was more than capable of putting himself here in his ancestors’ shoes. Only those shoes were not so old and they smelled of the ovens. Looking at Anatoli, Aharon could almost see the old man’s face morph into his younger self, emaciated still, with a shaved head, prisoner’s stripes, staring eyes. He could sense the presence of Kobinski.
Anatoli himself gave off this illusion of being back in time. He stood tensed; his eyes were mad. “This is the spot, Rebbe. Three hundred paces north, fifty south. This is it.”
“What’s he talking about?” Dr. Talcott leaned over to catch her breath.
Aharon felt a cold hand on his neck at Anatoli’s words, as if the angel of death were touching him there. He could now see that the glints in the trees were long metallic strips nailed to the bark. Someone had marked this clearing—Anatoli, probably. And if Aharon was not very much mistaken he knew why it had been marked.
Aharon’s feet felt pinned to the earth. He had stepped into someone else’s nightmare. They were here, at the very spot where Kobinski and his group had made their last stand. And chasing them through the woods were men with guns, maybe dogs.
The blond goy, Wyle, was looking around the place wide-eyed and grinning, his hands out in front of him as if he were in a fun house. “Oh, man!” he breathed. So Wyle knew, too.
Dr. Talcott waved her hand at Anatoli. “Hello? What is this place? Why have we stopped?”
“Shhhh!” The old man put a bony finger to his lips. “They’ll hear you. Now everyone, we must pray! Fill your hearts with prayer, and you have to mean it!”
“Goddamn it, we have to move!” Talcott looked at all of them as if to ask why they weren’t doing something. “If we’re going to run, then let’s at least do it properly.”
“Shhhht!” Aharon hissed. He’d heard something.
They all froze. There was the rustle of brush, just barely there. Someone was right behind them.
Anatoli moved with a speed and ferocity that seemed beyond his years. He snatched the manuscript from Aharon’s hand and held it up maniacally.
“Is this what you want? It this what you all want?” he screamed.
As if in slow motion, Aharon saw the old man’s arm come up, and then he threw the thing. It spun end over end in the air, its pages ruffling, straight into the heart of the cluster of trees, into the heart of those silver strips.
All Aharon could see was that bright white paper in the moonlight. All he could feel was the need in every part of himself to protect that sacred—and dangerous—knowledge, to keep it safe. The worry and fear of the past few months bore down on him at this one moment. Without a thought he found himself flying in the air, hand outstretched to catch the manuscript.
Jill ran forward knowing that she had to get her hands on that sheaf of paper or die trying. She was so sudden and so ferocious that she pulled Nate, still gripping her hand, right along with her.
Calder had them in his sights. He could see them huddled together, arguing, in a small clearing. He had his gun drawn, but he realized, looking around, that his agents were not with him. They’d fallen behind. He cursed under his breath, was debating whether to step forward on his own, when the old man, a stumbling corpse practically, grabbed something from one of the others and threw it into the air. Calder saw Dr. Talcott run after it. She was heading for the trees! No fucking way would he lose her again.
Calder came barreling out from his cover, gun cocked and aimed in his outstretched arms. “Freeze!” he shouted. He was prepared to shoot. Hell, he wanted to shoot.
Just then there was a flash, like an explosion, only noiseless, like flashbulbs, only a million times brighter. Except the color was not just light but something that seemed to echo in his very cells, not a sound but penetrating deeper than any sound he’d ever heard. Calder squinted, cursed, tried to regain his view of the clearing.
In a halo of an afterglow—Calder wasn’t sure if the glow was really there or if it was an aftereffect of the flash on his eyes—he saw that several people had disappeared, including Dr. Talcott.
Calder pushed past the old man. “Stop! Stop!” he shouted. He peered into the woods beyond, rubbing at his eyes, but he couldn’t see anything thanks to that damn flash, nothing but an eerie bluish glow.
And then there was another flash. This one seemed to come from inside him, as if the explosion originated in the center of his brain. Reality fell apart.
Denton stood to one side of the clearing, hands gripping his poor mistreated ribs, mouth hanging open. Bam! Bam, bam, bam! One by one the others had disappeared: the rabbi, Dr. Talcott, Nate, and then some lunatic police guy with a gun.