Pulling the zip gun from his pocket, he fired once and ducked behind the ironwork. For a moment he was hidden, but the crowd was thinning quickly and he would soon be hopelessly exposed.
“You can’t fight them,” Bashir said. “Give them what they want. It means nothing without the scroll.”
“You’re wrong,” Ranga said. “It means everything.”
Seeming to disagree, Bashir grabbed the satchel and tried to run, but Ranga tripped him up, the satchel hit the ground, and the tablet spilled out onto the deck, chipping one corner.
A voice with a Mediterranean lilt rang out across the platform.
“Ranga Milan, you have strayed from the faith. The Master has sent us to bring you home.”
He recognized the voice. Marko. The Killer. The Man of Blood.
Grabbing the clay tablet, Ranga scrambled for better cover. He wasn’t quick enough. A bullet hit him in the leg, taking his feet out from under him. He fell hard, rolled, and began to crawl, only to have another bullet hit him in the shoulder.
Wincing in agony, Ranga pulled himself into a more covered position. He grasped the tablet and gazed through the iron lattice of the tower.
The “policemen” were moving to new positions, surrounding him from three sides, cutting him off from any hope of reaching the elevator or the stairwell. He could not escape, and with only a few bullets in his small gun, he could not hope to fight his way out.
He looked around in despair.
“Just give it to them,” Bashir said. “They will let you go.”
“They will never let either of us go,” Ranga replied.
From the streets below he could hear alarms blaring. The men surrounding him would not wait long.
He glanced toward the edge of the platform. Out beyond lay the void of open sky.
He could not save himself now. He could not save those he wished to save, but he knew what these men would do with the secret contained in the tablet. He could not allow that to occur.
He ran his hand over the smooth surface and the carved markings. He studied the symbol at the center. A circle with four notches in it, within which lay a square and a smaller rectangle.
Bashir had called it the Mark of Eden. And he’d been right, but it would do neither of them any good. For if there was no God, as Ranga thought, then his existence was about to end brutally with nothing to show for it but misery. And if there was one, damnation surely awaited for what he had done.
He inched toward the edge.
“Give up, Ranga!” Marko shouted.
“So that you can use me to kill and destroy?”
“Your work will die alongside you,” Marko shouted. “Is that what you want?”
Ranga slid a few more inches. “Better than the hell on earth you want to see.”
“We do only what is necessary,” Marko said. “What you suggested so long ago.”
The thought sickened Ranga. It had come full circle, the arrogance he’d always been accused of, the indictment of his profession. Geneticists playing God. And now …
What had he done?
Despite a decade of effort, he saw the truth plainly. His work must die. He must die with it.
He inched closer to the edge. He whispered to himself, “I’m sorry, Nadia. I tried.”
He turned, fired his last shots blindly, and then lunged for the edge without hesitation.
He made one full step before the crack of a gunshot cut him down.
Ranga’s back arched as blistering pain racked his body. He slumped to his knees, one hand on the railing. The tablet fell from his hand, landing on the deck, the Mark of Eden staring back up at him.
He tried to stand but lacked the strength. He reached for the tablet, felt its smooth surface in his hand once more, and then heaved it.
He watched it fall. It spun and tumbled, dropping silently through the air for what seemed like an eternity. Farther and farther down. And then it hit. Shattering into a thousand fragments on the concrete below.
Collapsing facedown, Ranga drifted toward darkness, expecting a bullet to find his skull. But instead of a finishing shot, he felt rough hands yank him up.
“Take him with us,” he heard Marko say. “Take them both.”
“What about the tablet?”
The second voice sounded nervous, fearful. Ranga understood that, too. The Master would be furious.
Marko was less afraid. “We will find the others, once we have the scroll.”
Marko grabbed Ranga by the hair and shook him awake. “And we will force the truth from your lips before you die. I promise you that.”
Ranga heard these words through a fog. He saw Marko’s unforgiving eyes and felt the hatred in his soul. He knew it was not a lie.
He had failed. He would die in horrendous pain. His dream would be twisted into an endless, living nightmare and hell would come to the earth after all.
CHAPTER 6
Danielle Laidlaw sat in the passenger cabin of a Citation X business jet as it idled on the ramp at an airport forty miles south of Dubrovnik. The main door stood open, the stairs down and locked. Activity was at a standstill.
This jet would be Hawker’s method of extraction, a departure in a style appropriate to the people he was supposed to represent. If anyone was watching, all they’d see was Hawker boarding a jet owned by a mysterious corporation chartered out of Malta and known to be involved in international weapons sales.
The only possible link to the United States would be Danielle herself. For that reason she stayed inside, window shades down, restricted to watching the ramp via a closed-circuit camera feed that displayed on a flat-screen monitor at the front of the cabin.
Hawker was late, twenty minutes so far. Not an overly concerning amount, but enough to stir a small degree of worry. She cared a great deal for Hawker. He had a way of bringing out the best and most honorable parts in her own personality. Parts she had lost in her initial climb up the ranks of the National Research Institute.
Her job often required lying, stealing, and deceiving in the name of the greater good. She didn’t really have a problem with that. But a time had come when it all went too far, when the NRI began hiring civilians, putting them at risk and lying about the dangers they would face.
Two and a half years ago, on a mission like that, they’d also retained Hawker. He’d been little more than a hired gun at the time, but as the mission frayed at the edges and then blew itself apart, Hawker had been the one factor that kept the damage from becoming all-encompassing.
The final tally was grave, with more than a dozen deaths and a barely contained scandal that led right back to the agency’s then director, Stuart Gibbs. He’d disappeared before Danielle and the team made it home, and the NRI itself had almost collapsed, maintaining its existence by the thinnest of margins.
In the words of one critic, the mission had been “cataclysmic in the scope and magnitude of its failure,” but she and several others, mostly civilians, had survived, almost exclusively due to Hawker’s efforts.
The experience had been so intense that it took Danielle a while to work out her feelings. Only later had she come to realize the irony of Hawker, the fugitive mercenary and pariah, showing her, the upstanding straight-A government agent, what mattered and what didn’t.
It reminded her of deep-seated beliefs about honor and righteousness that she’d somehow buried or rationalized away as a hindrance to getting the job done. It had been the beginning of the way back to herself. And when the dust cleared, she found that she liked new her — the old her — better.