Tank rounded on him, his eyes flaring. “Friends? Friends! The notion of friendship is nothing compared to the rank humiliation of a nation. In 1945 my country was dishonored, not just beaten in battle, but beaten like a dog before the whole world. Our Emperor, sent to us by God himself, the last in the longest line of kings on this planet, was belittled in front of the entire world. This was a slur that no Japanese has ever forgotten.”
Julius said, “But Japan is strong again. One of the richest and most advanced countries in the world.”
“Robots and electronics do not rebuild honor, Julius. Only vengeance does. I have studied this Machine for twenty years, all the while with vengeance on my mind. In their hearts, all Japanese agree with me, and they will all rejoice when our vengeance is made manifest.”
“But they’ll be dead, ” Julius said. “If you succeed, all life on this planet will be extinguished.”
Tank shrugged. “Death is not death when you take your enemy with you.”
A few times when Tank was out, their Japanese guards conversed in the twins’ presence, assuming that as gaijin the twins did not understand Japanese.
On one such occasion, as he typed on his computer for them, Lachlan, listening discreetly, snapped up.
“What is it?” Julius whispered.
“They’re saying that they just got word from ‘their man in Wolf’s unit,’ some guy named Akira Isaki?”
“Isaki?”
“Whoever he is, he’s not loyal to Wolf. He’s working for these assholes. He just called in and told them—oh, shit—that Jack West is dead and that Wolf is now heading for the Congo, going after the Second Pillar. This Isaki will report back when that’s over and tell our guys whether they have to move or not.”
“Huntsman’s dead?” Julius said. “You think it’s true?”
“I don’t know what to think. But I do know this: our time is limited. It’s time we flew the coop.”
Twelve hours later in the dead of night, one of the Japanese guards came to check on them.
A sensor had detected that one of the windows in the library had been breached, but the motion tracker still showed the twins to be in the library, moving very little, probably sleeping.
The Japanese guard opened the library door, and stopped dead in his tracks.
The library was empty.
The twins were gone.
The only moving object: Lily’s little robot dog, Sir Barksalot, stomping up and down on his little metal legs, barking soundlessly at the dumbstruck Japanese guard.
The alarm was sounded and the grounds lit up with floodlights, but by the time Tank and his men had searched the area for the twins, they were already sitting in the back of a pickup truck speeding east, heading far away from Land’s End.
“So where do we go now?” Julius asked, the wind whipping his hair.
Lachlan grimaced in thought. “There’s only one place I can think to go.”
MINE COMPLEX
SOMEWHERE IN ETHIOPIA
DECEMBER 11, 2007
AT THE SAME TIME Zoe was guiding her group through the wilds of the Congo, and the Twins had been making good their escape from Tank’s Japanese Blood Brotherhood at Land’s End, Pooh Bear was languishing in the mysterious Ethiopian mine, suspended above the arsenic pool in his medieval cage.
Six hours after the shocking death of Jack West—and since his own brother, Scimitar, had left Pooh to die— the working day came to an end, and the Ethiopian Christian guards in charge of the mine shepherded the Ethiopian Jewish miners into their subterranean quarters—dirt-walled caves with planks for beds and rags for blankets. Moldy bread and a soup-like gruel was served up for food.
Once the slave miners were safely locked away, the thirty or so Christian guards gathered around the arsenic pool and stared up at the imprisoned Pooh Bear.
Torches were lit.
Chants were intoned.
A great drum was hammered.
A full-sized Christian cross was erected and set alight.
Then the tribal dancing began.
Once the cross was burning, all the other torches were extinguished, so that it was the only light source in the vast cavern—it lit up the great underground space with a haunting orange glow that bounced off the stone towers half-buried in the mine’s high dirt walls.
Pooh Bear looked out from his cage in horror. His time, it seemed, had come. He shot a sad look at the deep pit about thirty yards from the arsenic pool, the pit in which Jack had met his end.
Then, with a clunking jolt, Pooh Bear’s cage suddenly began to descend toward the steaming pool on its chains. At the edge of the pool, a pair of Ethiopian guards were slowly uncranking a spooler, lowering the cage.
The other guards began chanting quickly. It sounded like the Lord’s Prayer, in Latin, and uttered feverishly fast:“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”
The cage descended.
Pooh Bear shook its bars.
