BERNIE PHELPS’S MIND WAS ALWAYS SPINNING. IT HAD GONE AROUND and around from one thing to the next, bang, bang, bang, his whole life. He knew what nobody else knew about that, though. He knew it was the spinning that kept him upright and moving in the right direction. Like the gyroscopic action of the tires on a bicycle, his whirling mind powered him. If he ever calmed down, stopped rushing, making deals, playing the odds—and the ponies—chasing the babes and corralling his golden-egg-laying goose, he was certain he’d fall over dead like a bike that hits a wall.
But his mind was spinning now with the force of a tornado—fast even for Bernie. No, make that a hurricane. His mind was spinning so fast it might just lift up out of his head, unhook from his spinal cord and float up into the sky like those stupid balsa wood helicopter toys you could buy on the street corner in New York with the rubber-band launchers that fired them up into the nearest tree.
And no, he wasn’t high on coke. At least, not right this minute. But as soon as the thought entered his mind, he could feel a yearning itch in his bones and longed to suck a line of power and competence up his nose.
Oh, he wasn’t an addict. He could stop anytime he wanted to. Anytime. And right now he didn’t need cocaine or ecstasy or meth or any of the growing list of recreational drugs with which he entertained himself. He could get stoned for a week on the words in the email on his computer screen.
He glanced at his reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite his desk. Then examined it more closely, ran his hand over the top of a head as perfectly round and smooth as a marble. Maybe he’d get a hair transplant. Why not? He’d be able to afford it. With $5 million, he could afford anything.
No, not $5 million. Four million five hundred thousand. The other half million would go to some member of the Rebecca Nightshade Fan Club.
Bernie had it all figured out. His whirring mind had sliced and diced it and come up with a plan half an hour after he learned Yesheb Al Tobbanoft had offered to pay $5 million cash to whoever located Gabby. And Bernie had an edge on all the other guys. He wasn’t just one investigator. He was thousands of investigators. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of people in big cities and small towns all across America. Rebecca Nightshade’s fans.
Al Tobbanoft might have financial resources, but Bernie had human resources. He had access to an army of rabid fanatics who would drop whatever they were doing to beat the bushes for their literary heroine. Rebecca Nightshade had a cult following; her fans were like the Grateful Dead’s Dead Heads and Star Trek Trekkies. Bernie’d even heard that one of them, some wack-job in Tacoma, had used a razor blade to give himself a forked tongue like the Beast. That was hardcore. When Bernie set them loose, all those fanatic fans would turn America upside down and shake it looking for the Beast’s creator. One of them would end up $500,000 richer and Bernie would be set for life.
And that meant he wouldn’t have to wait to reap the rewards of the marketing campaign he’d designed to launch a merchandising machine associated with The Bride of the Beast to rival The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. He’d been shrewd enough to exclude those rights from her contract with Hampton Books. Zara and The Beast action figure dolls. Replicas of Zara’s black heart necklace and her ruby scorpion broach. Gabriella was set to make a fortune—with his 15 percent off the top, of course, just as soon as the sequel was released. Pure genius!
But like so many other geniuses, Bernie was underestimated and undervalued. He knew that. It was impossible to miss Al Tobbanoft’s disdain for him. The man would be singing a different tune, though, when he handed Bernie $5 million in exchange for Gabby’s whereabouts.
Bernie wondered as he had dozens of times before what a filthy rich, drop-dead gorgeous man like Yesheb Al Tobbanoft—probably in the top ten of most eligible bachelors in the world—saw in a scar-faced woman like Gabby. Oh, she’d been pretty once, but now … What was the man’s fascination with her? Bernie didn’t buy that the guy was crazy like Gabby claimed he was, that Al Tobbanoft thought he was the real Beast of Babylon. You didn’t get to be a billionaire oil baron with that many screws loose. No, there was something else, some other reason for the man’s attraction to Gabby, but for the life of him, Bernie couldn’t figure out what it was.
Well, whatever his motive, it was clear he would stop at absolutely nothing to find Zara/Rebecca Nightshade/Gabriella Carmichael.
For a moment, Bernie allowed himself to wonder what Al Tobbanoft intended to do with her once he found her. It certainly didn’t seem to Bernie like the man’s obsession had anything to do with the slander and murder charges he’d lodged against her. Those were merely ruses to get her back to Pittsburgh. But once he got her here, or went out and found her somewhere else, what did he plan to do with … or to her?
Bernie believed that Yesheb had broken into Gabby’s house—sailed right past that pricy home security system Bernie’d sprung for to shut Gabby up when the guy first started to get weird. Like Gabby’d said to the police—she didn’t bite off her own earlobe.
Which meant Al Tobbanoft did. What did that say about the guy’s marbles? And there was the other nagging issue—what happened to that armed guard and Lassie? Neither of them had shown up yet—more than three weeks after they disappeared.
Maybe Bernie was mistaken here. Maybe this Al Tobbanoft guy really was the psycho Gabby claimed.
So what if he was? That wasn’t Bernie’s problem. He had to look after Number One. Right now, Gabby’s legal problems splashed all over the press, coupled with her disappearance, had launched her book sales off the charts. But the public was fickle. Who knew what—
Bernie had a horrifying thought: What if she never came back? Never did any more book promotions? Never finished the sequel?
Yes, sir, $4.5 million in the bank was worth a whole herd of books in the bush.
Then his jaw tightened. She’d slapped him. In his own house after he sheltered her family in the middle of the night. Called him a slimy, bottomfeeding lowlife.
“If you’re holding your breath waiting for me to feel sorry for you, sweetheart,” he said aloud, “you may now resume your regularly scheduled respirations.”
He squared his thin shoulders and began to type. It didn’t take long to tell the story, not long at all to seal the fate of Rebecca Nightshade. As the administrator of her Facebook fan page, he was the only one who could make changes to its content. He read what he had written another time through before he hit post.
Hey there, Rebecca Nightshade fans. Listen up!
How’d you like to win $500,000? CASH!
That’s right—half a million bucks. No tricks, no gimmicks. All you have to do is FIND REBECCA NIGHTSHADE.
She’ll be introducing a NEW book just in time for Christmas. Yes sir, the rumors are true and you heard it right here first. Rebecca Night-shade is working on a sequel to The Bride of the Beast! That’s why she DISAPPEARED!
You’ve all been wondering what happened to her. Now, you know. She vanished to give her loyal fans a sneak peek into Apocalypse in Babylon—because that’s what happens in the book—Zara vanishes! I won’t tell you any more than that. You’ll have to read it to find out.
But you know all you need to know right now—she’s gone and if you can find her, you’ll win $500,000 in cash. And you’ll become a part of her national marketing campaign, too, appear with her on Good Morning America and The Tonight Show, talk to Ellen DeGeneres and Jerry Springer.
You’ll get all that if you can FIND REBECCA NIGHTSHADE!
She could be anywhere. She might be the woman who just moved into an apartment down the street from you in Missoula. Maybe she’s in that beach house in Hilton Head where you clean the swimming pool. Or in a brownstone in New York where you deliver the mail.
She’s out there somewhere. And with a face like Rebecca’s, she should be easy to spot.
Half a million dollars. Think what you could do with that kind of money—and start LOOKING.
Message me here if you’ve seen her. Leave a name and phone number where you can be reached. When your sighting is confirmed, we’ll turn over the cash.
Happy hunting!
That should do it. Give these people a few days and they’d flush her out. Bernie hit “post” and got up to get himself a cup of coffee. He noticed his reflection in the mirror again, turned his head from side to side, looked at it from different angles. Yeah, a hair transplant. It’d make a new man out of him.
* * * *
Gabriella sat on the deck outside her bedroom and watched darkness drain out the hole in the sky created by the rising sun. A chill rippled through her, raised the hairs on the back of her neck and she nestled deeper into the Snuggie she’d found in a closet.
Theo had snorted in disdain when he saw one advertised on television when they were in a motel room in Amarillo. Said it was a scam, aimed at the same “witless idiots” who actually paid for water in a bottle.
“I’ve had a Snuggie all my life,” he’d said. “Just didn’t give it no advertising department name.”
Ty had taken the bait.
“What’d you call it, Grandpa Slappy?”
“Called it Wearin’ My Bathrobe Backwards.”
Gabriella liked the blanket with arms, especially in the chill of early mornings in the mountains. She shivered again; she never should have come out here in the first place, should have stayed in her bed where it was warm.
And lie there staring into the dark?
No, it was better to watch the sun come up out here than to jump at every little creaking sound in there. Even though she’d placed P.D. on guard downstairs, she could not force herself to close her eyes. Hadn’t been able to last night either. The average person couldn’t manage two nights without sleep. But then the average person wasn’t waiting for a crazy man to show up and bite off her other earlobe—and worse.
The average person wasn’t awaiting The Beast on a night when the moon was full.
Thirty days ago, Yesheb had shown up at her house in Pittsburgh. She unconsciously reached up and felt her mauled ear. Hadn’t had time to determine if her plastic surgeon could repair it. But really, what was the point? It’s not like it was detracting from an otherwise beautiful face.
When the moon cleared the horizon a few hours ago it had filled the valley below with a light bright enough to read the ingredients label on a bottle of aspirin. And the Moon Cliffs on Mount Princeton to the north had glowed like the banks of stadium lights at Heinz Field.
When the sun that was coming up now began to set ten or twelve hours from now, the full moon would rise and shine even brighter. More beautiful. And infinitely scarier. The maddeningly rational voice in her head tried to convince her she was safe, of course, that she’d found the perfect hiding place, but she still expected to see Yesheb bopping up the jeep trail in his Mercedes.
Her heart slugged away in her chest, fear a cold sludge in her belly that sloshed when she moved, made her nauseous.
The sun slowly climbed up the sky behind the mountains on the other side of the valley, sending beams of brilliance over the peaks. As the light struck Gabriella, a beam of clarity did, too. She was so tired she couldn’t fight it anymore; all her defenses collapsed. Staring out over the valley in the gray light between night and day she faced what she’d been dodging for so long.
The truth still in the husk was chilling: She was afraid of way more than Yesheb Al Tobbanoft. The terror she felt right now was far beyond a reasonable fear of what Yesheb could do to her, what he planned to do to her and to her son. All of those things, any one of those things, was reason enough to be terrified. But she knew her fear was bigger than that.
She finally shook hands with the reality that she was reacting in some visceral way to the presence of evil itself, an evil she had created. Or had called forth from some great source of evil. One or the other; she didn’t know which. Did it matter?
What is it they say—when you realize you’re in a pit, the first thing you should do is stop digging. But she hadn’t stopped digging. Garrett’s death had knocked her off the world and down into a deep place that was below the planes of the universe, a place where the usual laws of reality didn’t apply. And she sat down in the muck at the bottom of that pit and kept digging, deeper and deeper, until she found herself staring into the bottomless dead eyes of total Despair. It spoke to her in a voice like the hiss of serpents and the cries of dying children and she embraced it, gave it free rein in her heart. The Despair within her spawned images that her immense talent, her great gift, turned into words on a page.
For days unnumbered, she breathed only because it happened without her willing it, ate only because food was set in front of her, connected to nothing and nobody in the real world, survived by going through the motions of life. And then slowly, agonizingly slowly, the motions began to have meaning again. The relentless darkness began to recede, the great open wounds that caused such agony if she touched them scabbed over and she started to heal.
Maybe she would have continued to heal until she became a normal human being again. But the thing, the evil she had created—or encountered or somehow awakened— lived and breathed in the pages of her book. Even before Yesheb, she feared it. He gave it human form, but the fear of what loomed in the shadows beyond Yesheb—not fear for her life and her son’s life but the mindless terror of evil incarnate—that overwhelmed her.
That was the real Boogie Man.
Gabriella took a deep, trembling breath. There was something freeing about facing reality at last, however awful. She sank back into the chair, temporarily at peace. Pulling the Snuggie up to her chin, she closed her eyes.
She awoke with a start, momentarily disoriented, in the chair on the deck. The sun had cleared the mountains across the valley and rode high in the sky. It had to be ten or eleven o’clock at least. Theo and Ty had let her sleep.
She got to her feet and stumbled into the house to take a shower. When she passed her dresser, she stopped, captured by the beauty of the rock that rested on top of it, the lone possession she had brought with her from Pittsburgh. She picked it up and gazed at its crystals. Surely there was no rock anywhere on the planet as stunning as this one. It was perfect. That’s what the old jeweler had said, too. Perfect and utterly impossible. And she wondered as she had wondered for almost as long as she could remember where the rock had come from and what had happened to the other half of it.
After a quick shower, she toweled her butter-colored hair dry and shook her head—the natural curl would take over as it dried. It certainly didn’t take her long to get dressed here on the mountainside. No long hair to straighten, and she didn’t bother to hide her scar behind makeup with no one to see it but Ty and Theo. By the time she was ready to face the day, the image of the rock in her mind had been replaced by a different image. Not a beautiful one. The gun, the .38 Theo’s friend had left for her in the glove box of their getaway car. Every day since the day after she arrived at St. Elmo’s Fire, she had faithfully practiced with it until the weapon felt as comfortable in her hand as a blow dryer.
By mid-afternoon, Theo was seated in his rocker on the back porch and she stood just beyond it. Ty had drawn a bull’s-eye on a shoebox lid—that already had holes in it, hmm—and was setting it up in the meadow behind the cabin. Gabriella’s accuracy was improving. And though she harbored a totally irrational fear that it would take more than a mere bullet to stop Yesheb, being proficient with the gun made her feel a bit safer.
She’d just finished reloading when she heard Ty cry out. He stood alternately shaking then holding his right hand.
“Mom!” he shouted and started to cry.
Gabriella’s heart was in her throat as she raced to him. It couldn’t be a poisonous snake! Rattlesnakes didn’t venture up this high. But she carried the pistol along with her as she ran, pointed away from her and at the ground. She intended to kill whatever had bitten him!
By the time she got to him, tears were streaming down Ty’s face and his eyes were red and swollen. He was crying so hard he could barely catch his breath.
“It hurts!” He held out his hand. She examined it as he hopped around in pain. There was a nasty red welt on the back of it but no puncture wounds. She leaned closer and saw a tiny black hair sticking …
“It was only a bee,” she said.
Relieved, she held up the pistol, found the safety and engaged it.
“Come on, Honey, we need to put some ice on ...”
When she saw his hand, she stopped. In the few seconds she had looked away, the swelling had traveled down to his fingers and puffed them out like sausages.
She lifted the crying boy’s chin and looked at his face. His eyes weren’t red and puffy from crying; his lips were swelling, too. And the raspy breathing was getting worse.
“That boy must be allergic to bee stings.”
She hadn’t even realized Theo had followed her into the meadow until he spoke up at her side, voicing the fear that had expanded as quick and huge as a Navy dinghy in her chest.
Benadryl. If only she had some Benadryl!
“You got to get this boy to a doctor!”
Gabriella dropped the pistol in the grass, scooped Ty off his feet and ran as fast as she could with him in her arms toward the jeep. Theo hobbled awkwardly along behind her.
* * * *
Bernie hadn’t bothered to check the Rebecca Nightshade fan page in three days. What was the point? It was patently obvious his magnificent plan had blown up in his face.
What had he been thinking? If he’d reasoned it out instead of leaping in with both feet, it might have occurred to him that half a million dollars was the tiniest bit excessive. He’d have been a whole lot better off if he’d offered say … $100,000 instead. But even that was enough money to drive most people bonkers. And the half mil offer he’d posted had chucked thousands of fools completely over the edge.
He’d gotten more than 250 messages in the first half hour after he posted the reward offer.
Rebecca Nightshade was absolutely working as a short order cook in a diner in San Francisco.
Oh, no, no, no. Rebecca Nightshade was dating a shrimp boat captain in Louisiana.
Oops, wrong again. The real Rebecca Nightshade was on a tourist bus in the Catskills.
And the messages kept coming.
The most exasperating part was that Bernie was absolutely convinced a genuine Gabriella sighting was hiding in there somewhere in the herd. Somebody really had seen her and had sent in her location like a good little doobie. But the sighting had been lost in the avalanche of people who were either sincerely mistaken or con artists trying to milk the system.
He glanced over at the computer screen. Knowing she was in there somewhere and he couldn’t get to her made him want to pull all his hair out. If he’d had any hair.
So much for a transplant. Lean over and kiss the “new man” goodbye, Mr. Phelps. Sayonara, Sucker.
Gabriella flew down the jeep trail with such reckless abandon she could barely keep the vehicle on the road. Theo sat in the backseat cradling a gasping Ty in his arms. They’d ignored P.D. and the dog was too wellbehaved to hop into the jeep uninvited. But nobody told him to stay, either, and Gabriella saw him in a side mirror, running behind the jeep. He raced around the switchbacks or cut through the trees between the higher and lower roads. At one point, he scrambled out of the brush just as the jeep passed and came close to getting crushed under the tires. She had no time to stop for him, and there was nobody to hold him in the bouncing jeep if she had. The vehicle leapt into the air when she hit rocks and tree stumps and slammed down into potholes with teeth-jarring force. She made herself keep her eyes on the road, only occasionally snatched quick glances at Ty in the backseat. The boy’s eyes were so swollen she was sure he couldn’t see. He gasped for every breath.
She roared under the sign into Heartbreak Hotel with her hand on the horn to announce her presence. The lotions, potions and elixirs van was nowhere in sight. Two teenage girls, a blonde and a redhead, stood on the porch of the large building. The blonde had her phone out taking pictures of the redhead posed on the porch railing.
Gabriella skidded to a stop in a spray of dirt, killed the engine, leapt out of the jeep and was two steps up the sidewalk before the blonde girl said. “If you’re looking for Grandpa, he’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“In St. Elmo at a birthday party.”
Gabriella turned, ran back to the jeep and jumped in. As she cranked the engine, she spotted P.D. standing behind the jeep panting. She made the “get in” hand motion and the dog leapt up into the seat beside Theo. They’d be on smooth road the rest of the way.
THE REDHEADED GIRL noticed the dog running along behind the jeep before it skidded to a stop. Cheyenne loved golden retrievers. Her little brother back home in Cleveland got one for Christmas—just a puppy. The woman who was driving the jeep jumped out and the girl saw an old, black man in the backseat cradling a little boy about the age of her brother. The kid’s whole face was puffy, he had a rash and his breathing was noisy and labored. His eyes were swollen, but not shut. He looked terrified. She knew instantly that the little boy had—
When Mary Beth said their grandfather wasn’t home, Cheyenne dragged her gaze momentarily away from the choking little boy and noticed the woman who’d gotten out of the jeep—saw her face. Saw the scar.
After the woman ran back to the jeep, Mary Beth turned and gestured for Cheyenne to lean back against the railing again, but Cheyenne reached out and snatched the phone from her cousin’s hand.
“What are you do—?”
“I need this,” Cheyenne said, focused and intense. “I have to do this right now!”
The woman in the jeep motioned for the dog to get in. When she did, she turned her face momentarily toward where the girls were standing. The huge scar on the right side of it was plainly visible.
Cheyenne raised Mary Beth’s phone and punched a button.
* * * *
Most people didn’t consciously think about learning from their mistakes, but Bernie Phelps did. He bobbed and weaved his way through life, went to school on what he did wrong so he’d be more clever next time.
That’s why he was sitting at his computer in his underwear and bathrobe on a Saturday afternoon scrolling down the huge list of Gabriella sightings. Not because he actually believed he’d find the needle in the monumental haystack he’d created. He was there as an exercise in self-discipline, using this colossal blunder to teach himself a lesson about going off half-cocked, being impulsive, not considering the possible ramifications of his decisions. This was an expensive lesson. It was going to cost him millions so he wanted it to count.
And there was no better way to do that than to force himself to face the result of his poor judgment.
So he sat and scrolled.
Didn’t read the postings, of course. It’d take weeks to read them all! Oh, every now and then he’d spot a word or phrase and he’d pause, see if the comment was unique in any way. Because in addition to teaching himself a lesson, Bernie was doing what he did best—making life’s lemons into lemonade.
The idea had come to him at his lowest moment, which is when he sometimes did his best work. And he’d been coming down off a coke, high, too.
All those people out looking for her; Gabby could move the masses when she wasn’t even there!
In a flash, he had the perfect advertising campaign for her new book—which she’d better turn in on deadline or he and Hampton Books would sue her for every dime she’d ever made. The campaign would center around the overwhelming response to the contest and how it demonstrated her popularity with her readers.
He planned to—
There was a ding and a new sighting posted. He glanced at it, then stopped and read it. “I’ve seen her and her dog. I’ve got a picture to prove it.”
… and her dog.
There was no mention of a dog anywhere on Gabriella’s fan page or website. She was private about her personal life. Wouldn’t allow him or her publisher to use pictures of her family or private information about her. Bernie had made lemonade out of that lemon, too—portrayed her as a mystic, a seer, reclusive and inscrutable.
Oh, he was sure if you wanted to know bad enough, you could find out about P.D. Google was the Wicked Witch of the West’s magic ball—it would show you whatever you wanted to see. But it wasn’t like Gabby’s dog was common knowledge.
He shook his head, then. Yeah, but if he’d been the guy on the other side of this offer looking to make half a million bucks, he’d have found out how many fleas Rebecca Nightshade’s dog had!
Still …
So he clicked on the link to a photo website in the message. He expected to see some vague outline of a woman and a golden retriever—as dark and blurry as pictures of Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster.
But he didn’t. He saw Gabriella. Not P.D., just Gabby. The picture was obviously taken with a cell phone, an older model. The face was angled away from the camera. But the scar! It was perfectly clear and unmistakable. And if anybody knew what that scar looked like, it was Bernie Phelps!
Bernie would never admit it, of course, but he had become morbidly fascinated by Gabriella’s injury. In the beginning, when she first got out of the hospital, Bernie had stared at her ugly wound with macabre interest, captivated by how her face had … dissolved, the skin and tissue. He was both horrified and mesmerized by how her beauty had melted like candle wax. Over the ensuing months, he’d watched the wound heal, noted the pits and lumps of the resulting scar, its texture, how a thick vein of it pulled up centimeters short of her eyelid. She’d come perilously close to losing an eye! He knew exactly where her eyebrow stopped, burned off.
Bernie Phelps knew Gabriella’s Carmichael’s scar. And he was certain he was looking at it right now!
His hands shook as he picked up his phone and dialed the telephone number listed in the message.
* * * *
Yesheb stands perfectly still, looking out over the skyline of Chicago from his penthouse office, and gathers himself, summons his strength, calls forth power from another world to make his mind quicker, more clever. He must act swiftly and decisively and there is no time for error.
And he had come close to making a grievous error, was seconds away from blowing off the sniveling little literary agent’s babbling rant about a teenager with a cell phone and a photograph.
But a voice spoke to him, stayed his hand before he could hang up. “Wait,” the voice said. Only the one word.
It was a voice he’d never heard before, neither male nor female, with a soft purring sound—cards shuffled in the hands of an expert blackjack dealer.
Yesheb is obedient. He waits, hears Bernie Phelps out. And he is rewarded with a photograph of his darling Zara. Seeing her face—mostly her beautiful deformity—reduces him to speechlessness. He might even be crying—from relief as much as longing—when his mind shifts from celebration to calculation.
He must get to her quickly, before she has a chance to move on. He must find her and then … and then summon the rain.
There is a buzz and a voice issues from a black box on his polished cherry desktop.
“The chopper is on the roof, ready to take you to the airport, sir.”
“I will be there in two minutes.” He picks up his cane and his sunglasses and starts for the door. He barely breaks stride when he pauses to snatch his jacket off a hook by the door. It’s hot in Chicago in June but it will likely be chilly in the mountains.
On the way across the city to the airport where his private jet is gassed up and ready for take-off, Yesheb confirms the sequencing his minions have set in motion. He will arrive at Chicago Midway Airport in ten minutes. The flight across four states will take about two and a half hours—that’s with all the stops pulled out. Another chopper will be waiting when he lands to take him to a small town at the base of the mountain. By then it will be dark—and stormy weather is in the forecast—so he will travel by car the last half hour from the town up into the mountains to the little berg where he will find Zara.
“I’m still trying to locate a car rental on short notice in a place as small and remote as—”
“Then don’t rent one.” Yesheb’s voice is as cold as liquid nitrogen. “Buy one. Buy a whole car lot full of cars if you have to. There will be one waiting for me when I arrive. With the engine running!”
“Yes sir!” Former military. Most of the men Yesheb has hired over the years were once soldiers—who fought a great cause and lost, or who were bloodied in a futile war on some nameless, forgotten battlefield. Evil is the petrie dish in which the cells of war divide and multiply; hatred is the soil in which it grows. Both have fueled battles uncounted in Yesheb’s realm, where he has led legions of demons to victory. And one day soon he will rule supreme over a kingdom without end. He and Zara.
“How many operatives will you require, sir? I have my two closest men en route now and six more—”
“Call them off.” Yesheb’s voice is stern. “There is to be no one else there. Is that understood? I require no assistance. I will do this alone.”
Yesheb sits tense on the sculpted leather helicopter seat and watches Chicago fly by below him.
A thousand miles away, Gabriella sits tense on the flat leather jeep seat and watches the mountains fly by above her.