She spun and twisted, danced and leapt, her heavy, curved blades cleaving through bone as easily as they parted flesh. The Kevlar body armor some of the men wore offered no defense. It was made to stop bullets but was of little use against the scalpel sharpness of her knives. A few shots rang out, but her first kills had been the men with the flashlights. The melee proceeded in a boiling darkness in which she could see very well, while they saw nothing that would help them.
Harry groaned and rolled over onto his knees. Pain exploded along his back and in his shoulders and legs. He heard a nearby rattling breath and he turned to see one of the guards crushed up against the base of the pillar, legs twisted and hanging over the edge of the stairway, gasping and trembling. The man’s head was angled weirdly on his neck, and Harry realized with a sick jolt that his fall had broken the guard’s neck but hadn’t killed him.
“Sorry,” mumbled Harry, which was an absurd thing to say in the middle of a bloodbath like this. He fumbled for his pistol, found it, drew it too fast, and instantly lost it. The gun went bumpity-bumping its way down the stone steps into the green glow.
“Shit,” he growled, and cast around to see if he could find the AK-47 the guard had been carrying. It was ten feet away and he lunged for it, caught the stock, clawed it to him, sat up with it in his hands, looked for a target, and stared straight into the horrified, stricken face of Professor Nasser. The man was blind in the dark and nearly mad with fear. However, he had a gun in his hand.
“Drop it!” yelled Harry.
The professor flinched at the sound and his finger involuntarily twitched on the trigger. Harry felt himself falling backward as white-hot pain detonated in the exact center of his chest. As he fell, his hands both clenched and the rifle chattered out a ragged speech of death.
INTERLUDE FOUR
Gadyuka made another of her nighttime visits. What the Americans referred to as a booty call. Valen still hadn’t decided if he was appalled or enchanted.
However, as before, the sex was a prelude to talking business. She came at it in a roundabout way, talking politics first and sharing a few exciting details about the New Soviet. Then she hit him with a very strange request and encouraged him to bring Ari Kostas in on it. The mad Greek’s connections were crucial.
So, when he was alone, Valen called Ari.
“How are you at finding books?” asked Valen.
“What kind of books?” asked Ari, not particularly intrigued.
“These are books both sacred and profane. They are holy and unholy.”
“Are you quoting her?”
“Yes,” Valen admitted. “Though from what she’s told me, if we were not trying to save our country, I would burn them all.”
“Oh, please,” laughed Ari, “you must tell me more. These sound like books I should read.”
“Have you ever heard of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum?”
“Valen,” said Ari slowly and with no lingering trace of humor, “you’re talking about the Pauline Index, yes?”
“I am, yes.” The Index was a list of books deemed heretical, lascivious, or anticlerical. The list had been created at the behest of Pope Paul IV in 1559, and many horrible and cruel things had been done in the name of the Church to suppress those works.
“Books of black magic,” mused Ari. “I will say this for you, Valen, you are never ever boring. Now, let me think about this. Some of those books are supposed to have been destroyed. Some aren’t even supposed to be real — they were added to the list because someone in the church thought they were real. I’m talking about books made up by horror writers. H. P. Lovecraft and that lot. Pulp writers. The Necronomicon and all that bullshit.”
“Yes.”
“And now Gadyuka wants us to find those books. Books that probably aren’t real.”
“Yes. Gadyuka believes they are real.”
“How many of these books does she want?”
“All of them, Ari. Can you find them?”
“Me?” laughed Ari. “No. Not a chance. But… I may know a guy.…”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“What do you have for me, General?” asked the president. “Do you have the list of names I told you to prepare?”
General Frank Ballard felt like a big green bug on a plain white wall. Easy to spot, easy to swat. He’d been called to the Oval Office without the support of the other Joint Chiefs. The only other person in the room was Jennifer VanOwen.
“Well, Mr. President,” began Ballard, “let me first say that in terms of what Majestic Three accomplished… that all of the information related to the development, construction, and deployment of the T-craft has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” asked VanOwen.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ballard. “Destroying all of that material was the agreement when the, um, situation involving the former president was resolved.”
They sat with that. The situation in question was the abduction of the previous president by person or persons unknown. His safe return was conditional on the recovery of something called the Majestic Black Book, which was the repository for vast amounts of technical information supposedly reverse-engineered from a crashed vehicle of unknown origin.
“How can we recover that information?” demanded VanOwen.
“We can’t,” said Ballard. “And I think it would be a very dangerous thing to attempt.”
“Why?” asked the president.
“Sir, it was all in the briefing I gave prior to your taking office.”
“Little green men from outer space?” The president laughed. “My predecessor left a lot of that kind of stuff behind. Lies and misinformation left in the hopes of disrupting my presidency.”
“Sir, I was there when this happened. I was in the Situation Room when—”
“When you were fooled, General. Don’t embarrass yourself by saying that you believed that nonsense.”
“With respect, Mr. President…”
But the president waved it away with an annoyed flap of his hand. To VanOwen he said, “Put someone on recovering the Majestic Black Book.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Tell me, General, who was specifically responsible for destroying the T-craft data?”
“The, ah, physical records were stored at Howard Shelton’s estate — Van Meer Castle in Pennsylvania. The T-craft were also built and launched from there. After one T-craft was deployed, an order was given to have a flight of Thunderbolts destroy the launch site with missiles. The entire facility was incinerated and the mountains above the hangars collapsed. Shelton’s mansion and labs were stripped of all remaining materials and everything was incinerated.”
“That’s a loss,” said the president, “and typical of my predecessor. He had no real patriotism and no vision.”
“The decision was made to protect the country from a threatened disaster.”
“So, we’re negotiating with terrorists, General?” asked VanOwen.
“Ms. VanOwen, excuse me, but you were not there.”
“Then tell me this, General,” said VanOwen, “what exactly happened to the computer records for the entire Majestic Three program? If they built T-craft, some of the information had to be in computers for the groups handling manufacture and assembly.”