THE ONLY jump Thomas had ever executed was more of a cannon shot than a one-two-three leap, and that one out the back of a military transport that had been cut in half by a missile two weeks earlier. This time he would buddy-jump with Major Scott MacTiernan, army Ranger.
The French defenses weren’t accustomed to engaging enemy aircraft over their soil—the sudden shift in power was only two weeks old, and the military was being coerced. All of this played into the Americans’ hands. The C-2A Greyhound cargo plane came off the USS Nimitz five hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, and flew south over Spain and then up western France, hugging the land below radar. As soon as they neared the drop point, the pilot pitched the nose up and let the plane claw for the dark skies.
Air defenses painted them at two thousand feet.
“You got ten seconds,” the master snapped. They’d estimated the window based on the time it would take the French radar to confirm and respond to the sudden blip on their screens. The parachute was made of a fabric that would give them little if any signature, and even so, they wouldn’t be in the air long enough to cause alarm.
“Remember, relax,” MacTiernan said, facing the wind over Thomas’s shoulder. He checked the straps that lashed Thomas to his chest. “On three.”
Thomas fell into the darkness, eyes wide behind the goggles. The aircraft’s roar was immediately replaced by the rush of wind beating his ears. He was along for the ride—a very short ride, the major had warned.
MacTiernan pulled the cord. The chute tugged them skyward. MacTiernan guided them in with night vision. The ground was a mixture of black swaths, which Thomas assumed were forest, and slightly lighter fields. They were on top of them, then drifting into a field.
“Watch your legs! Coming up in five. Run with me, baby! Hit the ground running!”
They feathered in for a landing, hit hard, and stumbled forward. Silence.
The parachute flapped once as it folded in on itself and settled to the ground. Thomas shrugged off the harness and checked his gear. Black pants with a knife strapped to one thigh and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic strapped to the other. Canteen, compass, radio with a homing device that could be picked up from Cheyenne Mountain. Black T-shirt, black ski cap, black sweater wrapped around his waist. NightI watch an armed man climb my roof, vision goggles.
The prospect of using a weapon gave him mixed feelings, but he wasn’t sure that he was meant to be a pacifist here in this reality. He still wasn’t sure what he felt about a whole slew of issues here, particularly religious issues. He wasn’t a man of the cloth, for crying out loud. He was a man deeply affected by his dreams of another reality, but in his short few weeks of tripping between the worlds, he hadn’t had the time to unravel theology here as he had there. He might never have the time.
“One piece?” MacTiernan was kneeling, penlight on a small map, compass in hand.
“Looks like it,” Thomas said. “Where do you put us?”
The major pointed to their right. “One mile that way. I have you on GPS; if you drift left I give you one click. Right, two clicks. You got it?”
“Left one click, right two clicks.”
“No other communication unless absolutely necessary. Remember, two hours. We have to clear this sector and make our rendezvous in five hours. We miss the window, we miss the chopper. It’s already en route. Missing it would cost us ten hours—this isn’t like a fixed wing.”
They’d come in on the much faster transport to make the drop tonight, but they wouldn’t have the same luxury on the return trip. With any luck they wouldn’t need it.
“Two hours.” Thomas checked his watch.
“You get in a bind, I come after you. That’s the plan.”
Thomas didn’t bother responding. He was up to much more than this, and much less at once, depending on the reality, depending on the enemy, depending on the day.
He reached the edge of the compound in thirty minutes of careful going. MacTiernan corrected his course only twice. The return trip, assuming there was one, would take only ten minutes. He had an hour and twenty minutes to execute the mission.
The farmhouse sat in the middle of the field, a hundred yards distant. Except for a dull glow from the windows on the first floor, it was dark.
Thomas pulled on the night-vision goggles, squinted at the green light, and then slowly scanned the perimeter. One guard on the north side. Two by the road that snaked into the forest on the far side. Lighter than he would have guessed. Had they already vacated? Their cover here was blown; they knew that. They’d depended on secrecy, not high-tech security for protection, but they’d never planned on one of their corpses coming to life and escaping to tell the world of the location. Their only option would have been to abandon the facility.
He ran in a low crouch, straight toward the basement window that he and Monique had escaped through before. The effectiveness of his mission now depended on speed and surprise.
He squatted with his back to the stone wall and caught his breath. No light from the hallway past the window. No light from the upper floor. That would be his entry point.
Three weeks ago an ascent like the one that dared him now would have been unthinkable. Climbing the stones that formed the fifteen-foot wall would be difficult, but not impossible. Transitioning to the roof that jutted out at least four feet was the problem.
Night goggles still in place, he checked his surroundings, and then, hand by hand, foot by foot, he scaled the wall. The soffit stuck out just above his head. He leaned back and gazed at the gutter, two feet up, four feet back. Or was it five feet back? Missing this leap would end the mission as quickly as a bullet to the head.
He set his feet, thought of how Rachelle would have laughed at the ease of this particular attempt, and sprang backward like an inverted frog.
He’d overestimated the jump. But he arched his back and corrected. Still upside down and flying with good speed, he grasped the gutter, folded at his waist into a pike position, then whipped his legs back to continue their natural arc. He treated the gutter as a high bar, and his momentum carried him up and over like a world-class gymnast.
The gutter creaked and began to give way, but his weight had already shifted. He released, floated over the edge of the roof, and landed on his hands and feet, like a cat.
A shingle came loose, slid over the edge, and fell into the grass below. No other sound. He scrambled to the only dormer on this end of the house and listened beside the window. Still no sound.
The room inside was dark, and with the goggles he could see that it was also vacant, unless someone was crouching behind the boxes. Storage room.
Thomas fumbled for the duct tape he’d brought and ran three long strips down the glass. Then he unwrapped the sweater around his waist, covered the window to muffle sound, and smashed it with his elbow. A crunch but no shattering glass. Good enough.
He shoved the tape roll and sweater in his belt and carefully pushed through the broken glass. Two minutes later he stood in the dark storage room, staring at a dozen stacks of boxes.
Thomas withdrew the gun and cracked the door. Small hall. One other door. Clear.
He stepped out carefully. Only one way to do this.
The first door looked as though it led to a closet. It did.
The second appeared to lead to a larger room. It did. A bedroom. Thomas extended his gun and pushed the door open.
The blinding light hit him then, while he had one foot in and one out, door still swinging.
The goggles! He swept at his face and knocked the contraption from his eyes.
“Hello, Thomas.”
Voice to his right. This was Carlos.
“I see you insist on coming for me until I finally kill you for good.”
Easy, Thomas. This is what you expected. Play the game.
He dropped his gun and lifted both hands. “We need to talk. It’s not what you think.”
Carlos held a gun on him at five paces. He still wore a bandage over the cut on his neck. A grin nudged the corner of his mouth. Small red dots peppered his face. So the man hadn’t taken the antivirus. Or the antivirus didn’t work.
“I watch an armed man climb my roof, sneak through a window wearing night-vision glasses, and am expected to consider the possibility that my judgment of his intentions is false?” Carlos asked. “Don’t tell me: you came to save me.”
“I came because I know that you met with Armand Fortier yesterday,” Thomas said. “He showed you a list of the people he expects to survive the virus. Now you have to ask yourself how in the world I could possibly have this information.”
The grin faded. Carlos blinked. “You’ve tricked me one too many times. This time you will fail.”
“And if I do, then you will die. We both know that your name’s on that list only as a lure for you and only for the moment. Tell me how I know so much. Tell me how I walk off your gurney after two days without a pulse. Tell me how any of what you’ve seen me do with your own eyes is possible.”
Carlos just stared at him. But his mind was bending—Thomas could see it in his eyes.
“I came here for two reasons. One, I’ve come with proof. If you let me, I can show you beyond any possible doubt that my dreams are real and that you play a significant role in those dreams. The second reason I’ve come is to save your life. The simple fact of the matter is that we need you, but you’ll do us no good if you’re dead. You may hate Americans and Israel and all that, but unless you know what’s really going on here, you can’t possibly be in a position to make informed decisions.”
He said it all in a rush, because he knew that he had to plant these seeds in Carlos’s mind before he pulled the trigger. His words seemed to have made an impact. But the man wasn’t unnerved as much as he was irritated.
“I don’t know what kind of sorcery—”
“We don’t have time for this, Carlos. I just came five thousand miles to make contact with you, and what I have to show you may save the Arab world from extermination. What does it take to get your attention? You still have a cut I gave you last time without touching you, for goodness’ sake! You have to let me prove myself.”
Too much had happened for Carlos to dismiss this as a game of wits. His neck, Thomas’s escapes, the knowledge of his conversation with Fortier—all of it unexplained.
“How?”
“By letting you dream with me.”
The man’s face reddened. “Do you take me as some kind of fool?” His fist clenched. “I cannot accept this! This . . .”
Thomas moved while the man was momentarily distracted by his frustration. Dropped shoulder to his left, single spin, heel to the man’s gun hand. Even if Carlos had fired, the bullet would have gone wide.
Fortunately, he didn’t even manage that.
His outstretched hand flew wide. Thomas followed with an open palm to the man’s solar plexus. Carlos stepped back, shocked. Unable to breathe.
“Sweet dreams.” Thomas hit him on the side of the head, and the man dropped.
Working quickly, he pulled out his knife and cut his finger. Then he ran a thin slit along Carlos’s forearm. He smeared his own blood along the cut.
“Make him understand, Johan. Please make him understand.”
Thomas let the man dream ten minutes before waking him. A minute probably would have sufficed, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He shook the man hard, slapped him once on the cheek, and stepped back to the cot, gun extended.
Carlos groaned, went silent, then jerked up with a gasp.
Thomas knew immediately that Carlos had dreamed with Johan. He was far too seasoned to wake in this state of disorientation for any other reason.
“Where were you?” he asked.
Carlos looked at him, glanced at the gun, ignored it, and stared into Thomas’s eyes.
“With Johan, I mean. Where were you?”
“In . . . in the forest.”
“The forest?”
“Going to the Horde city.”
That made no sense. Johan was coming after him? The man had left his post for a mission to rescue Thomas? If he’d done anything to endanger Chelise, Thomas would have his head.
Carlos stared at his gun again. Now the real question. “Do you believe me now? There’s another reality beyond this one, and in that reality you and I are on the same side. There’s more.”
“If I die here, then Johan will die there,” Carlos said. He was hardly more than a child who’d just learned the truth.
“And I’m depending on Johan,” Thomas said. “I would never let him die. So you see, I am here to save your life.”
As long as Carlos believed the dream was more than a simple dream, Thomas was sure he would succeed.
They stared at each other for a full minute. It was one thing to believe that another reality existed. It was another thing altogether to change your plans because of that reality.
“If we don’t stop Fortier, we will both die,” Thomas said. “Along with most of the earth’s population. Is this what you had in mind?”
No answer. But his eyes showed no defiance. He was still caught up in the wonder of it all.
“There’s only one way to stop Fortier, and that’s to take away his teeth.”
“The antivirus,” Carlos said.
“Yes. The United States must have the antivirus. It’s the only force that has a plausible chance of dealing with Fortier.” Thomas paused. “Can you get the antivirus?”
“No.”
Thomas lowered his gun. “Do you believe that I won’t harm you?”
“Yes.”
Carlos slowly stood. “I don’t know how . . .” He stopped and looked at his hands.
“And you may never know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we stop them. You may be our only chance to do that. You’re sure that you can’t get your hands on the antivirus? It does exist. Please tell me that it exists.”
“It exists, but Svensson’s protected himself by separating it into two components somehow. He alone controls one, which will be used only at the last moment.”
“Then we have to take Svensson. If we control even one component of the antivirus, we will have a bargaining chip. At the moment we have nothing except for the weapons. With any luck we can force Svensson’s hand.”
“Will you give them the weapons at the exchange?”
It was a moment of truth. If he told Carlos their plans, he might be tipping his hand to the enemy. On the other hand, doing so could earn him the trust he needed. Without the antivirus, all was lost.
“No,” he said.
A moment passed between them. Carlos understood what Thomas had just done.
“Does Fortier plan on giving us an antivirus that works?” Thomas asked.
“No.” Case settled. They were now together.
Carlos took a very deep breath and tilted his head to the ceiling. “What do you want me to do?”
“Take Svensson. Don’t kill him—we have to protect the antivirus. Who’s taken it?”
“Only Fortier and Svensson,” Carlos said.
“Good. If we go down, so does everyone except those two. I doubt that’s Svensson’s idea of paradise. He’ll be forced to deal.”
Carlos nodded. “Maybe. But you have no idea how dangerous this is.”
“Dangerous? We’re way beyond dangerous, my friend. This history’s already been written once, and in that history most of us die. I would say it’s more like impossible. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try. They say with a little faith you can move mountains. That’s all I’m asking. Move a mountain. Will you?”
The man from Cyprus frowned deeply. “Clearly, I don’t have a choice.”
“The fate of the world may very well rest in your hands.”
“Not yours?”
“No, my presence would only compromise you. Do you see this?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Did you hear what Carlos told him?” Fortier demanded into the phone.
“No.”
“How long? How could you have allowed this?”
“Forgive me, sir. He slipped past our guard. We don’t know how long they were together. By the time we understood what was happening, he was gone.”
“You’re absolutely sure that it was an American?”
“No, but it was clearly no one we knew.”
The phone was silent while Fortier considered the matter.
“Shall we take any action?” the man asked.
“No. Carlos stays there. Under no circumstance is he to leave. Consider the compound his prison, but he must not know. Business as usual. If he tries to leave, kill him.”