No Survivors sc-2 Read online

  His first thought was the hill of Megiddo itself, but it was just an outcrop in the countryside northeast of Tel Aviv, nothing much else around it. For sure it was the site where the final battle concluded. But it wasn’t the best place to start a war. For that, he needed a place that was already a flashpoint, somewhere sacred to both Christ and Antichrist alike.

  He was sitting at his desk, wondering where to look next, when something caught his eye, a letter he’d recently received, asking for donations to assist the preservation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Recently, the evangelical movement had found common cause with the Jews because both of them hated the Arabs. Now the Arabs were being accused of disrespecting the Jewish relics on the Mount. A lot of folks had been upset by that.

  McCabe’s mind started turning over. He had little knowledge of Jewish theology and none at all of Islam. But he had as good an eye for an opportunity as anyone. He could see that different religions were already arguing over Temple Mount. That sounded worth his while to check out.

  The significance of the Mount soon became very obvious. The Jews believed that the exposed bedrock on Temple Mount was the very Foundation Stone from which the world had been created, the center of everything. When Abraham had offered up his son Isaac in sacrifice, that happened on Temple Mount, too. Solomon had built his temple there, and he’d placed the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies right over the Foundation Stone. So that made the Mount the most sacred site in Judaism.

  It was the Muslim angle, though, that really made McCabe’s head spin. He looked on Muslims as godless heathens, but the thing that blew his mind was not how different the teachings of Islam were from those of Judaism, but how similar they were.

  They believed in the Foundation Stone, too. The Dome of the Rock, the oldest Islamic building in the world, had been built right on top of it. Muslims also agreed that Abraham had come to the Mount, which they called the Noble Sanctuary. Difference was, they held that he offered up his other son Ishmael for sacrifice, and that Ishmael was an ancestor of the Prophet Mohammed.

  Muslim scripture stated that the Prophet had been visited in Mecca by the archangel Gabriel, who brought an animal called al-Buraq, on which he rode through the night to the stone on the Mount. Then the Prophet ascended to heaven, and met Adam, Jesus and John, Joseph, Enoch, Aaron, Moses, and Abraham, before coming face-to-face with Allah himself.

  McCabe couldn’t understand how the Muslims could claim prophets and angels from the Holy Bible. And what was Jesus doing in their heaven? Bottom line, though, there were now two ancient Muslim shrines on the Mount-the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque-which put it right up there with Mecca and Medina on the list of their holiest places.

  Looking on a map of Jerusalem, McCabe also saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Christ’s burial place. That was as important a shrine as existed in the whole Christian world, and it was just a few hundred yards away, in the heart of the Old City, well within range of any nuclear blast.

  Suddenly the pain and fear of his disease was replaced by a glow of true contentment. Temple Mount was the flashpoint he’d been looking for. Nuke that, and all hell would break loose. Oh, yeah, that would do the trick, all right.

  24

  He was standing in the middle of the road and a black car was driving straight toward him. Its headlights were blazing right into his eyes, blinding him. He tried to close his eyes but his eyelids wouldn’t move. He struggled to turn away, but no matter how hard he wrenched his neck, his head was held fast. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t move. Now the roar of the engine was filling his head and he couldn’t lift his hands to cover his ears and his brain was about to explode with noise and light and he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t because his mouth was gagged and his teeth seemed loose against the leather strap. And he was cold, so terribly, terribly cold…

  Carver came to, his pulse racing and his throat constricted by a pervasive, unfocused panic. For a while, he could not focus his eyes, so he reached out blindly for her hand… and felt nothing.

  He frowned and shook his head quickly from side to side, banishing the last bad fragments of his nightmare from his brain. Then he opened his eyes… and Alix wasn’t there.

  Now he really had something to panic about. Carver told himself to calm down. There were very few things he knew for sure anymore, but one of them was that Alix came to see him every day. She had been there earlier, he was sure, and she’d be back again. It was just a matter of waiting. Maybe she was getting a meal or something to read. She did that sometimes, when she thought he was asleep. Yes, that was it. She would be back soon.

  “Hello, Samuel.” There was a woman at the door of the room. She was smiling at him and her voice was friendly. But she wasn’t Alix. She was Nurse Juneau, bringing him food and medication.

  She looked around as she came into the room, frowned to herself, then gave Carver another smile.

  “Alix not here?” she asked perkily, then her voice took on a huskier tone: “At last, Samuel, we’re all alone.”

  She looked at him over one shoulder teasingly. “After all this time-now what shall we do?”

  She picked up one of his hands and stroked it.

  Carver flinched at her touch. He found people confusing. He didn’t always understand what they meant by the things they said. He couldn’t work out what they were feeling when they spoke. Their intentions were unclear. He could see that Nurse Juneau was flirting with him, but he had the sense she was mocking him, too. He didn’t like that.

  He decided to ignore her and concentrate on what was on his mind.

  “Where’s Alix?” he croaked.

  Nurse Juneau put the tray down across his bed and shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Samuel.”

  “Where has she gone?”

  “I don’t know. Samuel,” Juneau repeated, with a little more emphasis, holding out a little paper cup in which sat three brightly colored capsules. “She’s just not here.”

  She meant nothing by the remark. Nurse Juneau couldn’t see anything wrong with Alix giving herself a break. The poor girl deserved it, the amount of time she spent in this room.

  But her words hit Samuel Carver like a shock from the belt that had tortured him. He gasped. His eyes widened in shock. He gripped his sheets. Then he flung his arms upward, throwing off his bed linens and sending the tray flying as plates, glasses, and cutlery clattered down onto the floor.

  Nurse Juneau was used to Carver’s tantrums, his infantile fear of abandonment. But this time, she suddenly realized, his reaction to Alix’s absence had a whole new intensity.

  As she screamed in alarm, Carver got out of bed, with an energy she had never seen in him before, his eyes blazing, his face twisted with a primal, unfettered rage. She backed away, but he came after her. He wrapped his fists around her upper arms, gripping them so hard she winced in pain, then he stuck his face right up close to hers and hissed, “Where is she?”

  His voice had lost any trace of childlike innocence. It carried the threat of real fury, ready to tip into violence.

  Nurse Juneau shook her head. “I don’t know,” she pleaded. “I promise I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where Alix has gone. But don’t get upset-you know she always comes back. Always.”

  Carver threw her away from him, across the room. She crashed into the door frame, crying out with the pain of the impact.

  “Alix!” shouted Carver, standing beside his bed. “Al-i-i-i-x!”

  He stumbled across the room, almost tripping on the nurse’s dazed body, and headed out into the hallway.

  Stabbing bolts of pain cut through Carver’s skull. His heart was palpitating. Images from his dreams were flashing before his eyes. But now, in this waking nightmare, everything was different. He knew where and when he had fought in that desert: a mission deep into Iraq in the midst of the Desert Storm campaign in 1991. He knew that he and his men had blown the cables and returned safely to base. And the woman in the
dream was Alix. She’d been there, in that chalet outside Gstaad. But what else had happened there?

  The memory would not come. Just another stab behind his eyes.

  He made his way down the hall in his T-shirt and pajama pants, crashing into a cart laden with patients’ medications, barging past the nurse who was pushing it from one room to the next, shoving a patient out of the way as he tried to get to the stairs that led to the exit and the outside world. The dream visions had gone now and he realized he was seeing everything around him with a new clarity, born of comprehension. It was as if there had been a thick glass wall between him and the world-a wall that had suddenly been shattered. He understood his surroundings, appreciated the function and significance of things and people that had been meaningless to him for months. Above all, he understood who and what Samuel Carver really was.

  From behind, he heard hurried footsteps, scurrying down the hall. He turned and saw two of the clinic’s male orderlies, men chosen as much for their physical strength as their caring natures, charging toward him. He tried to fend them off, but they ignored his flailing fists and charged right into him, knocking him over and pinning him to the ground.

  A few seconds later, Dr. Geisel was kneeling beside him, holding a syringe.

  “This is for your own good,” he said, sticking the needle into Carver’s upper arm.

  Before the sedative hit him, Carver looked Geisel right in the eye.

  “I know,” he hissed. “I know.”

  Then the drugs hit his system and oblivion overcame him.

  A minute later, as the orderlies were dumping Carver’s inert body back onto his bed, Nurse Juneau approached Dr. Geisel. She was rubbing the back of her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and welling with tears.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think so,” she said, wincing. “It is Samuel I am worried about. He seemed so shocked to be alone. I have never known him this bad before.”

  “You think so?” Geisel replied. “It seems as though the opposite is true, in fact. One shock has reversed another. The trauma may be his catharsis. Now, at last, he has started to get better.”

  25

  The bierkeller’s dressing room reeked of stale smoke, hairspray, and cheap perfume. Alix stubbed out a cigarette and steeled herself to go back to work. She tugged at her short white stockings, snapping the elastic just above her knees. The waitresses all wore tarted-up Heidi costumes: a short red skirt with a petticoat frill at the bottom; a lace-up black bodice, and a skimpy, low-cut white blouse. She pulled the laces tight, tying the ends in a bow beneath her breasts. Then she put her wig back on. It was bright blond, with pigtails, tied at the end with little red bows. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the bar.

  Alix scanned the room, apparently greeting the customers with a smile or a flirtatiously blown kiss, but in actual fact examining each of them, watching for any indications of those who were likely to be particularly drunk or obnoxious. On the far side of the room she saw a woman sitting by herself at a table for two, next door to the banker and his clients.

  The woman was small and wiry. Her pantsuit-plain, but perfectly tailored-was as black as the hair that framed her face in a severe, geometric bob. The dim light of the bierkeller had turned her thickly painted lips from vivid crimson to the dark, rich purple of a ripe eggplant. For a moment, as she looked at Alix, her face was utterly expressionless-until their eyes locked and the woman smiled back at Alix and kissed the air, mimicking her gestures with a sort of contemptuous mockery.

  Alix stopped dead in her tracks. She seemed unable to process the information her eyes were supplying. Then she gasped, darted her eyes around the room, turned on her heel, and fled back to the dressing room.

  As Alix turned and fled, the woman in black caught the eye of two men sitting at a nearby table and nodded in the direction of the dressing room. They got up and started walking toward the door through which Alix had just disappeared. The woman left thirty francs on her table and strolled to the main exit.

  Alix hurried through the dressing room, barely breaking her stride as she grabbed her coat and handbag. She was pushing a fist through the arm of the coat as she burst through a second door at the back of the room and ran down a short corridor toward the staff exit. By the time she stepped out onto the street, she had pulled the coat tight around her and was huddling against the sharp winter wind, just like the other pedestrians scattered up and down the street, her collar up, one hand clutching the coat lapels tight around her neck.

  Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to run, but she forced herself to walk at a normal pace. She had no hope of escaping her pursuers if it came to a foot race. Her only hope was to look inconspicuous.

  She was about twenty yards down the road before she realized she was still wearing her wig. It wasn’t such a big deal. The pigtails were tucked away out of sight. In the sulfuric glow of the street lamps, one blond head would look pretty much like another. But Alix was too tired, too stressed to make such dispassionate calculations on the run. She panicked and tore the wig from her head. She threw it into a public garbage can, then pulled away the nylon stocking cap from her hair, letting it fall to the pavement.

  The sudden movement gave her away. Alix immediately heard the sound of quick, heavy footsteps behind her. She turned her head and saw two men striding toward her. One of them was speaking into a wrist mike. Desperately, she started to run, her ankles twisting every time her high-heeled shoes hit the ground. She stopped for a second to kick off the shoes, helpless as her pursuers drew closer, still marching, inexorably, as though they knew they did not need to break a sweat. Then she set off again in her stockinged feet.

  The pavement was ice-cold and the soles of her tights tore through in a matter of seconds, but at least she could run properly now. She cut right onto another street, the rue du Prince. A group of men, clad in tight jeans and leathers, were clustered outside the entrance to Le Prétexte, the city’s leading gay club.

  “Help me!” Alix screamed, pointing an arm behind her at the two men. They were running now, too.

  The men parted to let her through, then one of them, the club’s bouncer, stepped into the path of the two men. He was massive, dressed entirely in black. His head was shaven, but the lower half of his face was covered with a thick, piratical beard.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “What are you-”

  One of the men chopped the bouncer to the ground with a single blow before he could even finish the sentence. The clubbers fled from the two men’s path; then, once the men had gone, clustered around the bouncer’s unconscious body.

  Alix was on her own. She was in no shape to run. She smoked too much and exercised too little. But it was not far to the end of the street now, where it hit the rue du Rhône, one of the city’s busiest roads. Half a dozen bus and tram routes connected here, and its pavements would be crowded with people. If she could just keep going, she stood a chance.

  She dashed across the street, cutting across it diagonally to the corner, where it met the rue du Rhône. A car passed down the pavement behind her, briefly forcing the men to stop as it went by, buying her a few precious seconds. She looked up and down the main road, searching for a bus or a cab, and suddenly her luck changed. About fifty yards away, a taxi pulled away from the pavement, into the far lane of the broad one-way street. The driver flicked on his FOR Hire light and Alix waved frantically.

  The cab was driving forward, the driver seemingly oblivious to her desperate attempts to attract his attention. Behind her, the men had started crossing the road.

  “Please…” Alix implored and then, in answer to her prayers, she saw the taxi’s indicator flicking as it cut across the traffic toward her.

  One of the men had spotted it, too. He gestured to his partner and they seemed to find an extra gear, sprinting even harder toward her.

  Alix did not wait for the taxi to reach her. She dashed out into the road, ignoring the oncoming traffic, forcing the cab
driver to brake in front of her. He flashed his headlights at her in protest, forcing her to put up a hand to shield her eyes as she dashed around the cab, wrenched open the passenger door, and threw herself onto the seat, yanking the door closed behind her.

  Wheezing for breath, her eyes still dazzled, she managed to gasp the words, “Cornavin Station, fast as you can.”

  It was only when she sank back onto the seat, her chest heaving and her throat gagging, that Alix noticed that she was not alone in the back of the cab.

  The woman she had spotted at the bierkeller was sitting, half turned, with her legs crossed and her right shoulder leaning against the side of the car. Her arms were crossed above her lap, with her right wrist resting on her left forearm, supporting the gun she was pointing directly at Alix.

  “Good evening, my dear,” said Olga Zhukovskaya.

  She was one of the most powerful women in Russia, the deputy director of the FSB, the intelligence agency that was the direct descendent of the Soviet KGB. Yet she spoke with an affectionate familiarity that suggested long acquaintance, even a family tie.

  Zhukovskaya had indeed been a kind of mother to Alix. She was still the wife, rather than the widow, of Yuri Zhukovski when she spotted Alix at a Communist Party youth convention in Moscow a dozen years before-a gawky provincial teenager, hiding behind thick-lensed spectacles. Yet the older woman’s practiced eye had spotted a natural sexuality of which the girl herself was entirely unaware. And just as years of training can turn a raw recruit into an elite fighting man, so the gauche, unsophisticated Alexandra Petrova had been transformed by diet, exercise, surgery, and education.

  Zhukovskaya had observed Alix bewitch generals, politicians, and industrialists. She had watched her own late husband-once, like her, a KGB officer; then a ruthless industrialist-fall under Alix’s spell, and been content to let the relationship flourish as long as it suited her own purposes.