Covenant Page 10

  “I’m not his mother. If he decides to go after something, he’s not going to turn around and ask for my permission.”

  “No, but he asks for your advice,” Powell countered. “Make sure you give it to him, but if he goes off the range, then you make damned sure you come back here and tell me.”

  “You’re asking me to spy on him,” Lopez said. “He’s my partner.”

  “I can’t afford to lose either of you right now, especially not on another one of Tyrell’s goddamn conspiracies. That clear?”

  Lopez stood from the desk and turned to leave.

  “That clear?” Powell repeated.

  Lopez hesitated at the door and sighed. “Clear.”

  WADI AL-JOZ

  WEST BANK, OCCUPIED PALESTINE

  The darkness changed shape.

  From a deep and featureless blackness came distant textures, touching her skin and caressing her hair. Slowly, the fragments of her awareness began reassembling themselves one by one as they tumbled from the abyss.

  She opened her eyes, but could see nothing. Her limbs and back ached and she tried to move, but she was bound firm. Her throat was parched, and for one terrible moment the belief that she had been buried alive injected panic into her synapses. She fought to free herself, and a gasp erupted from between her cracked lips as she squirmed.

  A noise came from the darkness somewhere to her right, and she fell silent and still. She turned her head, the stiffened muscles in her neck protesting at the movement. Beside her a thin muslin sheet hung from a tall rail, like a hospital shroud. She could see that she was lying on a bed, her limbs tied down with canvas straps as though she were an incarcerated psychotic patient.

  She looked down at her body and saw an intravenous line in her right arm, and from the dull ache she guessed that it had been there for some time. Where was she? What was happening to her?

  Another noise, like two pieces of metal being tapped together, then a voice whispering softly in the darkness.

  Through the muslin she could see a ghostly light. The orb was intermittently broken as a shadow passed back and forth before it, and she could hear the sound of soft footfalls and a rhythmic beeping.

  Through her confusion and fear, the tiniest flame of hope flickered into life. This could be a hospital. But the darkness and the stale smell in her nostrils seemed out of place, even if this were Gaza or the West Bank. Where were the nurses? Could it be nighttime, hence the darkness? Gaza suffered regular blackouts due to the Israeli blockade. But then, why was she in Gaza?

  Fragments of memory spiraled like falling stars through the field of her awareness, briefly illuminating the spaces in her mind before passing on into the darkness. The dig site. She remembered the magnificent specimen, her efforts to retrieve it before … before …

  A flare of recall jolted her. The men who had burst into the site. Balaclavas, black clothes, rough and heavy hands. She recalled running, being tackled from behind, pulling a bowie knife from her shorts and plunging it into the leg of one of the intruders before she was overpowered. Then something being placed over her face, and then blackness. Christ, what have I got myself into?

  “Pulse is steady.”

  The voice sounded close, scaring her. Her breathing rasped and she could feel her heart trying to thump its way out of her chest.

  “Temperature is rising, seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit.”

  A figure moved past beside her, the muslin sheet rippling in the draft and parting slightly. Perhaps fifteen feet away was a metal gurney, upon which lay the naked form of a man.

  Tubes protruded from his body and she could see his chest rising and falling in slow rhythm, but she could not quite make out his features. An intravenous line rose up to a saline bag suspended above his head, and a series of monitors were arranged behind him recording heartbeat and body temperature. Beside him stood a video recorder on a tripod, aimed at the gurney.

  “Seventy-seven degrees.”

  As she watched, she could see another intravenous line coiling out from the man’s left arm, an almost black fluid passing through it. The rhythmic beeping from the machines was slowly increasing in tempo and the body was showing vague signs of movement, crooked fingers twitching sporadically.

  “Seventy-nine degrees.”

  She squinted as she tried to see what was on the monitors, but they were too far away. The figure obscured the screens, leaning over the body to examine it closely.

  “Will this one survive?” the voice murmured rhetorically, as though speaking to itself.

  A chill rippled down her spine.

  “Let us pray that he does. Eighty degrees.”

  She turned her head and began twisting her wrists back and forth, seeking a weakness in her bonds. The straps were tight, but her wrists were narrow and her hands small. If she could just fold her hand slightly and tuck her thumb in, she might be able to squeeze it through the straps.

  She tried first with her right hand, but the pain from the intravenous line in her arm scared her, so she tried with the other. She forced her thumb inward, twisting and pulling against the strap. The thick canvas scraped against her skin, but she felt the edge slipping. Encouraged, she pulled harder, rolling her wrist into a better position before pulling again. The strap slipped farther over her hand, crushing it. She gritted her teeth together, dominating the pain and taking a deep breath before pulling hard.

  The strap slipped across her hand and then it jerked free. She clenched her hand a few times before reaching across and loosening the strap on her right wrist.

  “Eighty-one degrees.”

  She sat up in the bed, looking down at the intravenous line in her arm. She reached down to begin easing it free when a strange, unearthly sound caught her attention. It was a distant, feeble whimper, as though someone were crying out for help from deep underwater.

  “He’s coming round.”

  She leaned toward the gap in the muslin sheet, watching as the figure, wearing a white doctor’s coat, stood back from the body on the table. The body quivered, a shuddering that seemed as though the patient were suffering some kind of seizure.

  “Pulse is good,” the voice said again. “Hypothermically viable.”

  The body shivered again as though live current were bolting through the muscles. Another murmur came from deep within the chest cavity, infected with something that sent little insects of fear scuttling beneath her skin, the tones of an endless suffering freed at last.

  The body jerked wildly and the man’s mouth opened as from within came a ghoulish cry of anguish, of a terror primal, pure, and undiluted that soared from its prison somewhere deep within him to fill the room.

  The body flailed wildly, the man sobbing and screaming as he thrashed about on the table.

  She saw the doctor reach across to a nearby table and grab a syringe, while struggling to hold the flailing patient’s arm and get the needle into a vein, but the man was fighting with insane strength, screaming all the while.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The doctor’s voice interrupted the screams, and in the half-light she saw the crazed patient staring wide-eyed at him, blubbering incoherently, his face stained with tears and his eyes filled with something incomprehensible that caused her bowels to lurch in sympathy. A gabbling torrent of unintelligible noise fell from the man’s mouth amid a stream of bile and spittle. His eyes wobbled in their sockets, limbs jerking frantically in the doctor’s grip.

  “Can you hear me?” the doctor repeated.

  The man began frothing at the mouth, choking on his own fluids as his head began slamming violently against the table with deafeningly loud cracks that reverberated around the room.

  The surgeon stood up with the syringe in his hand, pinning one of the patient’s arms down on the table and jabbing the needle deep into the flesh. The patient continued to flail, and to her horror she saw him suddenly snapping his mouth open and shut. His teeth smashed together with loud cracks, a thick torrent of dark blood spi
lling across his lips as he crunched through his own tongue. In a moment of sheer terror she recognized the guide who had arrived at her camp, the Bedouin. Ahmed Khan.

  Slowly, the sedative began to take effect, and the man’s insane thrashings rippled away until he sank back onto the table, his ruined tongue dangling by threads from his mouth and strings of blood drooling away toward the floor. The doctor released the body, the limbs dangling from the table at awkward angles.

  “How disappointing,” he said into a voice recorder. “I shall dispose of him.”

  A wave of panic flushed across her body and she reached down, grabbing the restraints around her ankles and yanking them free. As they parted the metal braces clattered loudly against the side of the bed. She sensed the doctor turn toward her and panicked further, yanking furiously at the other restraint.

  It was almost free when the muslin sheet was whipped aside and the doctor lunged at her.

  “No!”

  She struck out, her left fist smacking into his temple, but her weakened muscles were no match for him. The doctor moved into view above her as he pinned her down, his features obscured by the light glowing from behind him so that she could not see his face.

  “Not now, Lucy,” he said as though admonishing a wayward child. “Your chance to take the ultimate journey will come soon.”

  Lucy Morgan watched as the doctor reached up and turned the valve on the intravenous drip in her arm.

  “Let me go,” she begged weakly.

  She saw the doctor smile, the shadows around his face creasing.

  “Soon, I shall do just that,” he said. “And then you will be truly free.”

  Lucy struggled against the man holding her down, looking at him with pleading eyes blurred with tears of fear and frustration as the room faded to black before her and the pain in her body drifted away into oblivion. With the last vestiges of her conscience, she heard the doctor speak into his voice recorder.

  “I must hurry, and prepare her for surgery.”

  HERZLIYA AIRFIELD

  TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

  This isn’t a good idea.”

  Rachel sat next to Ethan in the rear of an open-topped jeep as Aaron Luckov drove them alongside ranks of light aircraft parked on the servicing pan of the airfield.

  “Trust me, this is the quickest way to find out what happened to Lucy,” Ethan said.

  “Assaulting our escort and disobeying an order from the Israeli Foreign Ministry?”

  Aaron Luckov spoke over his shoulder above the noise of the engine.

  “The whole Negev Desert is controlled by the military for training purposes. If there’s anything they want to keep hidden, it’ll be out there somewhere.”

  “Not you too?” Rachel asked.

  It was Ethan who replied. “There is no real reason for MACE to prevent us from having a look around unless they’re afraid of what we might stumble across.”

  “Maybe they don’t want an investigative journalist poking around in their own backyard.”

  “Possibly,” Ethan conceded. “Neither Shiloh Rok nor Spencer Malik like me being here. But what bothers me more is that this is not the first time people have gone missing from the Negev under suspicious circumstances.”

  Rachel’s green eyes locked onto Ethan’s, a wisp of her dark hair blowing in front of her face.

  “What do you mean?”

  This time it was Aaron who replied. “The Negev Desert is a large area, but there are one or two hot spots where people seem to vanish regularly and your daughter was working in one of them. In the past few years several scientists have vanished without trace into the wilderness.”

  “Somebody,” Ethan said, “may have been working out here before Lucy arrived.”

  Luckov changed the jeep’s direction, aiming toward a bright-red-and-white aircraft parked nearby.

  “We’re going to meet an old friend,” Luckov said. “He’s a member of the Bedouin tribes living in the Negev, near Masada. A number of Bedouin have also disappeared over the years in the area where Lucy was working, and this man’s son was one of them.”

  Rachel frowned. “That’s not quite the same as Western scientists being abducted.”

  “No,” Ethan agreed, “but this Bedouin vanished at exactly the same time as Lucy did.”

  The jeep rolled to a halt alongside the aircraft, Luckov killing the engine. Ethan turned to see Safiya Luckov clamber from the interior of the plane, smiling brightly.

  “Good morning and thank you for flying Luckov Air.”

  The aircraft was a de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver. A huge Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine powered the fifty-year-old vintage machine, its broad wings sweeping across the top of a boxlike cockpit with simple windows. Aaron and Safiya had flown tourists across the Israeli wilderness for almost a decade, the business their main source of income.

  “Are we all set?” Aaron asked, glancing at Ethan and Rachel.

  “Let’s go,” Ethan replied. “I want to be back before sundown.”

  The interior of the aircraft was filled with canisters of water and a row of seats on either side of the fuselage. Ethan and Rachel buckled themselves in as Aaron and Safiya settled into the cockpit. A few minutes later, and the entire airframe rattled under the torque of the spluttering engine as Aaron taxied onto the runway and applied full power. After a brief take-off roll the Beaver rotated gently and surged into the hot sky.

  Rachel looked out of the opposite window at the city of Tel Aviv in the distance, a chaotic sprawl of metal and glass stark against the hazy blue strip of the Mediterranean. Safiya turned in the cockpit and pointed to headphones dangling from clips against the fuselage wall along with several parachutes, and Ethan and Rachel promptly donned the sets.

  “It’ll be about twenty minutes before we run south for Be’er Sheva. Then we’ll head east for Bar Yehuda airfield,” Safiya said, jabbing over her shoulder with one thumb. “The IDF control the airspace very tightly here, and will intercept any aircraft that strays from its flight path. Bar Yehuda is an old airstrip two miles from Masada, and also the lowest airfield in the world.”

  Ethan listened as Aaron spoke to air traffic control in the warbling dialect of Hebrew. After a few exchanges with the controller, Ethan felt the Beaver bank left, turning to avoid the built-up urban areas and heading out over the broad and rolling hills of Israel.

  “You okay?” Ethan asked Rachel as the aircraft banked over.

  “Daughter’s been abducted, we’re flying into God knows what, and you’ve assaulted our escort—I couldn’t be better,” Rachel uttered. “Where is Gaza?” she asked Safiya.

  Safiya pointed out of her window ahead, toward the starboard wing.

  “Out there, to the right and in front of us.”

  Ethan unclipped his seat buckle, joining Rachel in looking out over the Gaza Strip as it appeared through the haze ahead.

  Although there was no singular marker at the edge of the Strip, it was still clearly defined by a band of undeveloped no-man’s-land that separated Israel from its entrapped neighbor. Whereas the greenery of Israel was speckled with modern buildings and farmlands, the Strip was a morass of densely packed sandstone, narrow roads, alleys, and derelict buildings baking beneath the sun, like a medieval city stranded in the twenty-first century.

  “That small town almost below us is Sderot, a place often hit by makeshift Qassam missiles and rockets fired from within Gaza,” Safiya said, gesturing to the little town far below. “If we flew overhead, we’d be intercepted by Israel’s fighter jets and shot down within minutes.”

  “The Gaza Strip looks so small,” Rachel commented.

  “It feels it too, when you’re in there,” Ethan replied, moving back to his own seat and tapping Luckov on the shoulder. “Who is the Bedouin we’re going to meet?”

  “Ayeem Khan,” Luckov said, keeping one eye on the skies ahead. “He’s a Bedouin elder. Safiya and I have known him for some time.”

  “Can he be trusted?”

 
; “Absolutely. The guide who went to search for Lucy was Ahmed Khan, Ayeem’s eldest son.”

  The jumbled sprawl of the Gaza Strip and the elegant greenery of Israel fell far behind them into a thickening haze that obscured the horizon. Beneath, the green symmetry of occupied land gave way to the random swirls of desert plains, wadis, gulleys, and canyons that split the epic landscape in winding eddies of erosion. The major roads six thousand feet beneath them vanished, turning instead into lonely threads of dark tarmac winding their way across the vast wilderness of timeless sand and stone. Occasional dusty tracks veered off from the highways into open desert peppered with lonely thorn scrub and isolated trees.

  Under Luckov’s skilled control the Beaver cruised over the vast desert wastes for almost twenty minutes, Safiya pointing out various towns like Be’er Sheva, an oasis of glittering buildings encrusted like jewels into the ancient desert. Ahead, Ethan could see the broad blue line of the Dead Sea appearing through the haze as Aaron Luckov responded to the chattering air traffic commands and began to descend. Leaning out of his seat, Ethan could see below them a vast canyon system carved by long-extinct rivers, opening out onto a parched floodplain that had probably once fed into the Dead Sea itself. A barely discernable airstrip scarred the terrain ahead of the aircraft, close to the sparkling expanses of the Dead Sea.

  “So, Karowitz thinks that Lucy was right about finding alien remains,” Ethan said to Rachel. “When do you think that these beings started helping mankind?”

  “The Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia is the earliest known civilization,” she said. “They began building their cities and mining copper around the same time as Amerindians in what is now Michigan and Wisconsin, around six thousand years ago.”

  “They were definitely the first?” Ethan asked.

  “Sumer was our Eden,” Rachel said, “the cradle of civilization. They used agriculture, invented the wheel, centralized government, set up social stratification, kept slaves, and organized warfare. They were experts in astronomy and mathematics and their cuneiform script existed almost six thousand years ago.”