Ark of Fire (4 page)

Unable to crawl any farther into the pile, she came to a halt. Tucking her legs beneath her body, she made herself as small as possible. Invisible would have been better. Better because she knew with a sickening sense of certainty that if he found her, the man on the fire escape wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.

Hearing the rattle of a metal door, she peered through the jumble of furniture, keeping watch as the killer exited the fire escape. He’d removed his ski mask, and Edie could see that he sported a military-style buzz cut. His face mottled with rage, he looked to be on the verge of a steroid-induced rampage.

In hunting mode, the killer swiveled his head from side to side, perusing the alley. Edie saw a large bulge at the back of his waist.
A gun.
The very same gun that had killed Dr. Padgham.

Methodically, the killer’s gaze moved from target to target: blue Dumpster, green condenser, white service van. And then his gaze zeroed in on the furniture pile.

Edie envisioned her bleeding body sprawled beneath a pile of discarded chairs put out for the trash. No doubt, that’s who would find her—the orange-suited guys in the sanitation department.

Holding her breath, Edie slowly counted backward from ten.

The killer’s gaze suddenly swung to the other side of the alley, where a group of recycling bins overflowed with aluminum soda cans.

She’d gone undetected.

Surprisingly light-footed for such a large man, the killer walked all the way down the alley toward Twenty-first Street before turning around and heading back to the fire escape. As he did, a police cruiser pulled into the alley from the opposite direction.

Relieved beyond words, Edie released a pent-up breath. Opening the door to the fire escape had obviously triggered a silent alarm, and the D.C. police had arrived to investigate.

Although for some strange reason the killer didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by the sudden appearance of the cop car, actually raising his hand to flag down the cruiser.

Why would he do that?
she wondered.
Might as well announce that he set off the alarm.

A few seconds later she had her answer. A uniformed police officer got out of the cruiser and approached the killer, who removed a duffel bag from his shoulder and handed it to the cop.

The bejeweled breastplate.

The cop was in on the murder.

The cavalry had come to kill her.

“Looks like the op is a go,” Edie overheard the cop say as he took custody of the stolen relic. “We fly to London at nineteen hundred hours.”

The killer shook his head. “We’ve got loose ends dangling. Someone else was in the museum besides Padgham and the two guards. The little shit escaped down the fire escape.”

A resounding bang ensued as the cop pummeled his fist against the hood of the police cruiser. “Shit! We’re fucked! The English fag was supposed to have been the only staff person in the building.”

“It gets even worse,” the killer said. Reaching into his breast pocket, he removed the same notepad that Edie had seen earlier. “Padgham e-mailed photos of the breastplate. I notified the tac team at Rosemont. They’re hunting down the person at the other end of Padgham’s e-mail.”

Watching the exchange, Edie took slow, deep breaths, willing her cramped legs to stop quivering, her body protesting the straitjacket confinement.

“This was supposed to have been a simple snatch-and-go,” the cop muttered.

“And sometimes a mission gets bogged down in the mire. What we need to do is find this fucker—what’s his name?—E. Miller and get things tidied up.”

Thank you, God.
She’d caught a small break. They mistakenly thought she was a man. That’s who they would be looking for—a man, not a woman. They also didn’t know that Padgham never sent the e-mail. But that wasn’t her problem. Her problem was getting free and clear of the alley.

“So far, there’s been no calls made to 911.”

“When Miller does call, I want to know ASAP.”

“Don’t worry. I’m on it,” the cop said before getting into his police cruiser.

At hearing that, Edie felt the knot in her stomach tighten painfully. If she contacted the police, the killer would know where to find her. And because one of the killer’s cohorts—maybe more—wore a police uniform, she’d have no way of distinguishing the good guys from the bad.

More scared than ever, Edie watched as the police cruiser drove away. The exchange ended, the killer walked over to the service entrance of the museum and punched in a code to buzz the locked door open. As if he owned the place, Padgham’s killer went inside the museum.

Edie hurriedly backed out of her hidey-hole. Standing upright, she took a big gulp of air. The alley reeked of old urine and rotting garbage, the stench so strong her eyes welled with tears.

Hearing a loud mechanical rattle, she spun on her heel.

Across the alleyway a garage door slowly opened. Meaning she could exit the alley without having to go past the museum.

No sooner did a black BMW emerge from the underground garage than Edie broke into a run. Or at least tried to. Severely hobbled by cramped leg muscles, she awkwardly lurched forward.

The driver turned his head and glanced at her—a wild-haired terrified woman with an ungraceful gait—then just as quickly glanced away.

“Obviously, one of the apathetic multitudes,” Edie mumbled under her breath as she dodged into the garage.

Seeing an elevator, she headed toward it. Not until she was safe inside the elevator, the doors closing with a melodic chime, did she permit herself a sigh of relief. Although in actuality it was more like a sag of relief as her body went into an old-lady slump, her legs barely able to support her weight.

A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened onto what looked to be an upscale apartment building lobby. Straight ahead, a pair of plate glass doors beckoned. Overcome with a sudden burst of giddiness, she limped toward those beautiful glass doors with their big beautiful brass handles. Yanking the door on the right side wide open, Edie barely restrained herself from running up and hugging the mailman in the vestibule who was busy inserting mail into rows of identical-looking postal boxes. Instead, she smiled at him. A big, toothy, glad-to-be-alive smile.

Just then, a cab pulled up to the curb in front of the apartment building.

Free at last. Thank God Almighty, she was free at last.

ROSEMONT SECURITY CONSULTANTS THE WATERGATE COMPLEX

 

 

Like a man who’d just been baptized in the cool waters of the Jordan, retired Marine Corps colonel Stanford J. MacFarlane stared at the jewel-encrusted breastplate.

The Stones of Fire.

Arguably one of the most sacred of all biblical relics, third only to the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.

Stan MacFarlane knew from his Bible studies that the twelve inlaid stones had originally been entrusted to Lucifer when he was still God’s favorite. After Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, God retrieved the stones and later gave them to Moses, who created the breastplate according to God’s specific instruction. Worn only by the Hebrew high priest, the breastplate came to be known as the Stones of Fire. Hidden within the sacred confines of the Jerusalem Temple, the breastplate was plundered by the Babylonians when Nebuchadnezzar’s army sacked the holy city in the sixth century B.C. For the next twenty-six centuries, the holy relic had remained hidden in the deserts of Babylon, in what is now modern-day Iraq.

When the U.S. military forces liberated Iraq, Stan had ordered a special-ops team to find the relic. Much to the team’s chagrin, someone beat them to the prize. Shortly thereafter, he learned from paid informants that Eliot Hopkins, the director of the Hopkins Museum of Near Eastern Art, had uncovered the Stones of Fire in Iraq. Not about to let the relic elude him a second time, Stan sent his most trusted aide to retrieve the breastplate.

Except his trusted aide had made a very careless mistake.

“ ‘And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood,’ ” he hissed to the man who stood at attention in front of him. His temper bridled with a loose slipknot, he stared down the red-faced subordinate. “So tell me, Gunny, how did this Miller woman get away from you? Do you think she hitched a ride on Satan’s dinghy?”

The penitent, former gunnery sergeant Boyd Braxton, shook his head. “I told you, sir, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t even know that she was a woman until I found her purse in the museum.”

“The weaker sex, yet still she eluded you.” MacFarlane stepped toward the gunnery sergeant, jabbing him in the chest with his finger. “Boy, you’re not going soft on me, are you? I hate to think that you’ve been pussy whipped.”

“No, sir. You don’t need to worry about that, sir.”

“You make certain of it, Gunny. Each and every day, you make certain.”

His subordinate properly chastened, Stan MacFarlane stepped back. Such discipline was necessary to keep order in the ranks—a lesson he’d learned during his thirty-one years in the Corps.

A full-bird colonel when he left the service, he’d still be in uniform had his career not been abruptly derailed two years ago by the Pentagon watchdog group Freedom Now! The godless cabal made up of left-wing lawyers and activists had targeted him soon after he’d been promoted to the intelligence office of the Undersecretary of Defense. Hypocrites one and all, they claimed their purpose was to protect religious freedom in the U.S. military. Because of his strict adherence to the word of God, Freedom Now! branded him a religious fanatic bent on converting the whole of the U.S. military to the evangelical faith.

Well, guess what, you godless hippie freaks? It was already happening.

When Freedom Now! caught wind of the weekly prayer meeting he held in the Pentagon’s executive dining room, they wasted no time blowing the whistle, somehow getting their lily-white hands on a photo of him standing in a prayer circle with other uniformed officers. The photo made the front page of the
Washington Post
. In the accompanying article, several junior officers claimed that he’d personally harassed them, told them they would eternally burn in hell if they didn’t attend the prayer meetings.

The left-wing pundits had had a field day, and the Washington politicos and military-bashers were unwilling to let the story drop. Soon thereafter, he’d been relieved of command.

God, however, worked in mysterious ways.

No sooner did the furor die down than Stan founded Rosemont Security Consultants. In recent years private security firms had become the mercenary might behind the U.S. military; tens of thousands of private fighters had been hired in Iraq alone. With his top-level Pentagon contacts, he was soon making money hand over balled fist. Made up of entirely of former special-ops soldiers, Rosemont numbered twenty thousand strong. As leader of this well-armed flock, Stan had made certain that there wasn’t a pluralist or atheist or agnostic among them. Holy warriors, each and every one.

“Sir, what do you want me to do about the woman?”

MacFarlane glanced at his subordinate; the former gunnery sergeant was a member of his handpicked Praetorian Guard. This elite team, which served as his eyes and ears in the nation’s capital, was embedded in law enforcement agencies all over the city. Contemplating how best to clean up the mess, he opened the satchel that had been retrieved from the museum and removed a leather wallet. For several seconds he stared at the driver’s-license photo of a thirty-seven-year-old curly-haired woman.

“You heard the gunny . . . what shall we do with you, Eloise Darlene Miller?” he contemplatively murmured.

A quick background check uncovered the fact that the Miller woman had been arrested in 1991 for protesting the first Gulf War. In his book, that made her a Chardonnay-sipping left-wing tree hugger. Like the bastards who’d derailed his military career.

“Any word on the whereabouts of”—Stan glanced at the name scrawled on a sheet of paper—“Caedmon Aisquith?” A similar background check had turned up a noticeable dearth of information, prompting Stan to order his intelligence team to dig deeper.

“Aisquith managed to slip out of the bookstore undetected. We’re keeping a close watch on his hotel, but he’s yet to show up,” the gunnery sergeant informed him.

“Hmm.” Stan MacFarlane contemplatively rolled the silver ring that he wore on his right hand, the intertwined crosses worn smooth over the years. “This man Aisquith is another loose end we can’t afford to let dangle.”