“When I’m
He headed across the rubble and knelt beside McKay’s body.
He gently rolled his lifeless body to the side. He kept his eyes off the ruin of his friend’s throat, resting a hand on his shoulder. He held back memories of his friend’s barking laugh, his habit of peeling labels off of beer bottles, his hangdog look when confronted by a beautiful woman.
All gone.
He freed the backpack and returned to the wall where Erin waited. He didn’t want her to be alone with the priest. He didn’t know what the man might do. The holy man was full of secrets, secrets that had cost his men their lives. What would Korza do to keep those secrets if they escaped this prison?
No matter what was planned, the mountain would probably crush them first. Jordan hurriedly unzipped the backpack. As the team’s demolitions expert, McKay carried explosives, originally brought along to blow up canisters and neutralize any residual threat. Back when they thought they were dealing with something simple, like terrorists.
He worked fast, fingers inserting blasting caps into blocks of C-4. McKay could have done this faster, but Jordan shied away from that well of pain, unable to face the loss. That would come later. If there was a later.
He shaped and wired charges, doing fast calculations in his head while keeping an eye on Erin as she talked to the priest.
“The girl,” she said, waving an arm toward the child on the wall. “You’re telling me that she was two thousand years old when she died?”
Korza’s voice was so low that Jordan had to strain to hear his answer. “She was
As he worked, Jordan pictured those grisly events unfolding:
Erin pressed, clearly seeking some way to understand all of this, to insert it into a scientific equation that made sense. “So the Church used this poor girl. Forced her to be its guard dog for two thousand years?”
“She was no
“Wait,” Erin scoffed. “
“No. Peter carried the book here himself.” The priest’s hands fiddled with his rosary. “Accompanied only by those he trusted best.”
Jordan suspected he wasn’t supposed to be telling them any of this.
“That can’t be,” Erin argued. “They crucified Peter during the reign of Nero. Roughly three years
Korza turned away, his voice quiet. “History is not always recorded with precision.”
On that cryptic note, Jordan finished his preparations. He stood and lifted the wireless detonator. Erin looked a question at him.
He wished he had more comforting words.
“Either this will work … or I’m going to kill us all.”
11
Sitting in his hospital bed, Tommy fingered the IV port sticking out of his chest. He did this numbly, not out of curiosity. He knew why the nurse had inserted it there. He’d had one before. After so many blood draws, they were afraid of collapsing a vein.
His doctor—a thin woman with sharp cheekbones, olive-green scrubs, and a grim expression—had not bothered to tell him her name, which was weird. Usually doctors kept introducing themselves and expected you to remember them. This one acted as if she wanted to be forgotten.
He hiked up the thin flannel blanket and looked around. It seemed like any other hospital room: motorized bed, intravenous lines pumping who knew what into his blood, a table with an olive-green plastic pitcher and cup.
He did miss that there was no television stuck up on the wall, not that he would have understood anything on the Israeli channels. But after his months in the hospital before, he knew there was comfort in the familiar movement on the flickering screen.
With nothing else to do, he got out of bed and pulled his IV pole along with him toward the window, the linoleum tiles cold against his bare feet. The view outside was only moonlit desert, an endless expanse of rocks and shrubs. Beyond the parking lot, not a man-made light could be seen. The Israelis had dragged him out to the middle of nowhere.
Hospitals were in cities, places with people, lights, and cars. But he had seen none of those things when the helicopter landed in that parking lot, just a cluster of mostly dark buildings.
In the chopper, he had been strapped in the middle seat, between two Israeli commandos. Both had leaned as far away from him as they could, as if they were scared to touch him. He could guess why. Earlier, he had overheard one of the American soldiers mention that he had chemical breakdown elements of that toxic gas still on his clothes and hair. No one dared touch him until he was decontaminated.
Back at Masada, he had been stripped naked inside the contamination tent, his clothes taken. And once he got here, they forced him into a series of chemical showers, seeming to scrub every dead cell off of his skin. Even that dirty water had been collected into sealed tubs.
He bet that was why he was here in the middle of nowhere: to be a guinea pig so they could figure out why he had survived that gas when everyone else died.
After all of that, he was glad he never mentioned anything about the melanoma lesion vanishing from his wrist. One finger absently rubbed that spot, still trying to fathom what that meant. His secret was an easy one to keep. Hardly anyone spoke to him—they spoke
Only one person looked him in the eye.
Father Korza.
He remembered that dark gaze framed in a gentle face. His words had been kind, asking as much about his mother and father as about the horrors of the day. Tommy wasn’t Catholic, but he still appreciated the Father’s kindness.
As he thought again of his parents, tears threatened—but he put them in the box. He’d invented the box to deal with his cancer treatments. When things hurt too much, he boxed them up for later. With his declining health and terminal diagnosis, he’d never imagined he would live long enough to ever have to open it.
He stared down at his bare wrist.
Now, it seemed, he would.
