be part of this.”
“Well that’s not going to happen,” Reece retorted angrily. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to get them all the hell away from here as soon as possible.”
“I can’t let you do that, Dom.”
The words seemed to freeze Reece in his tracks. “What do you mean, you can’t let me do that?” he said defiantly.
A pregnant silence greeted his question. Danny could just visualize Reece processing it.
“So what are you saying? You’re not going to . . .” Reece’s voice trailed off for a beat, then came back, with the added urgency of a sudden, horrible realization. “Jesus. Have you completely lost your mind?”
The outrage in the old man’s tone froze Danny’s spine.
He heard Reece say, “You son of a bitch,” heard thudding footfalls striding toward him, toward the door, heard the second man call out to Reece, “Dom, don’t,” then heard a third voice say, “Don’t do that, Reece,” a voice Danny knew, a harsh voice, the voice of a man who’d creeped Danny out from the moment he’d first met him: Maddox, the project’s shaven-headed, stone-faced head of security, the one with the missing ear and the star- shaped burn around it, the man he knew was nicknamed “The Bullet” by his equally creepy men. Then he heard Reece say, “Go to hell,” and the door swung open, and Reece was suddenly there, standing before Danny, a surprised look in his eyes. Danny heard a distinctive, metallic double-click, a sound he’d heard in a hundred movies but never in real life, the all-too-familiar sound of a gun slide, and the second man, the man who’d been arguing with Reece all along and who Danny now recognized, turned to the Bullet and yelled, “No—”
—just as a muffled, high-pitched cough echoed from behind Reece, then another, before the scientist jerked forward, his face crunched with pain, his legs giving way as he tumbled onto Danny.
Danny faltered back, the suddenness of it all overwhelming his senses as he struggled to keep Reece from falling to the ground. A warm, sticky feeling seeped down his hands as he struggled to support the stricken man, a thick, dark red liquid gushing out of Reece and soaking Danny’s arms and clothes.
He couldn’t hold him. Reece thudded heavily onto the ground, exposing the inside of the tent, the second man standing there, horrified, frozen in shock, next to the Bullet, who had a gun in his hand. Its muzzle was now leveled straight at Danny.
Danny dived to one side as a couple of shots cleaved through the air he’d been occupying, then he just tore off, running away from the tent and the fallen professor as fast as he could.
He was a dozen yards or so away when he dared glance back and saw Maddox emerging from the tent, radio in one hand, the gun in the other, his eyes locking onto the receding Danny like lasers as he bolted after him. With his heart in his throat, Danny sprinted through the temporary campsite—there were a few smaller tents, for the handful of other scientists who, like him, had been recruited for the project. He almost slammed into two of them, top minds from the country’s best universities, who were emerging from one of the tents just as he was nearing it.
“They killed Reece,” he yelled to them, pausing momentarily and waving frantically back toward the main tent. “They killed him.” He looked back and saw Maddox closing in inexorably, seemingly carried forward on winged feet, and took off again, glancing back to see his friends turn to the onrushing man with confused looks, crimson sprouts erupting from their chests as Maddox gunned them down without even slowing.
Danny had ducked sideways, behind the mess tent, out of breath, his leg muscles burning, his mind churning desperately for escape options, when the project’s two ageing Jeeps appeared before him, parked under their makeshift shelter. He flung the first car’s door open, spurred the engine to life, threw the car into gear, and floored the accelerator, storming off in a spray of sand and dust just as Maddox rounded the tent.
Danny kept an eye on the rearview mirror as his Jeep charged across the harsh gravel plain. He clenched the steering wheel through bloodless knuckles, confused thoughts assaulting his senses from all directions, his heart feeling like it was jackhammering its way out of his chest, and did the only thing he could think of, which was to keep the car aimed straight ahead, across the deserted terrain, away from the camp, away from that crazed, insane maniac who’d killed his mentor and his friends, all while fighting for a way around the horrifying truth of his predicament, which was that there was nowhere to run. They were in the middle of nowhere, with no villages or habitations anywhere near, not for hundreds of miles.
That was the whole point of being there.
That fear didn’t have much time to torment him as a loud, throaty buzz soon burst through his frazzled thoughts. He looked back and saw the camp’s chopper coming straight at him, reeling him in effortlessly. He pegged the gas pedal to the floor, hard, sending the Jeep bounding over the small rocks and undulations of the outback, slamming his head against the inside of the car’s canvas roof with each jarring leap, avoiding the occasional boulder and the lonely bunches of dried up quiver trees that dotted the deathly landscape.
The chopper was now on his tail, its engine noise deafening, its rotor wash drowning the Jeep in a swirling sandstorm. Danny strained to see ahead through the tornado of dust, not that it made much difference since there was no road to follow, as the chopper dropped down heavily on the car’s roof, crushing the thin struts holding up the roof and almost tearing Danny’s head off.
He veered left, then right, fishtailing the car as he fought to avoid the flying predator’s claws, sweat seeping down his face, the car careening wildly over rocks and cactus bushes. The chopper was never more than mere feet from the Jeep, connecting with it in thunderous blows, slapping it from side to side like it was toying with a hockey puck. The thought of stopping didn’t occur to Danny: He was running on pure adrenaline, his survival instincts choking him in their grasp, an irrational hope of escape propelling him forward. And just then, in that maelstrom of panic and fear, something shifted, something changed, and he sensed the chopper pulling up slightly, felt a spike of hope that maybe, just maybe, he might make it out of that nightmare alive, and the twisting cloud of sand around his Jeep lifted—
—and that’s when he saw the canyon, cutting across the terrain dead ahead of him with sadistic inevitability, a vast limestone trench snaking across the landscape like something from the Wild West, the one he’d seen in countless cowboy films and had hoped to visit someday but hadn’t yet, the one he now knew, with a savage certainty, that he’d never get a chance to see, as the Jeep flew off the canyon’s edge and into the dry desert air.
II. Wadi Natrun, Egypt
Sitting cross-legged in his usual spot high up on the mountain, with the barren valley and the endless desert spread out below him, the old priest felt a rising unease. During his last few visits to that desolate place, he’d sensed a more ominous ring to the words that were reverberating inside his head. And today, there was something distinctly portentous about them.
And then it came. A question that sent a straightening spasm shooting up his spine.
“Are you ready to serve?”
His eyes fluttered open, blinking against the soft dawn light. He glanced around instinctively, as he’d done many times before, but it was pointless, as it had been each time before. He was alone up there. There was no one around. Not a soul, human or animal. Nothing at all, as far as the eye could see.
Despite the early morning chill, sweat droplets sprouted across his baldpate. He swallowed hard, and concentrated again.
And then it came, again.
The voice, the whisper, coming from inside his own head.
“The time of our Lord will soon be upon you. Are you prepared to serve?”
Hesitantly, with a tremor in his voice, Father Jerome opened his mouth and stammered, “Yes, of course. Whatever you ask of me. I am your servant.”
There was no reply at first. The old priest could feel the individual droplets of sweat sliding down the rugged skin on his forehead, one after the other, skating across the ridge of his brow before dropping onto his cheek. He could almost hear them trickling down, a slow, tortuous progress across his tightened, weather-beaten face.
Then the voice inside his head came back.
“Are you ready to lead your people to salvation? Are you prepared to fight for them? To show them the errors of their ways, even though they may not want to listen?”
“Yes,” Father Jerome cried out, his voice cracking with equal doses of passion and fear. “Yes, of course. But how? When?”
