Page 108 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
“They’re separating!” Thirteen watched in dismay as one of the black sedans took a right-hand turn at full speed, squealing off onto a dark side street, while the other zoomed straight ahead toward the entrance to the two-lane highway that led out of the city and up into the hills.
“Which way?” spat the albino, and Thirteen’s mind, accustomed to thinking under pressure, offered up a little gem: the Chairman’s list.
If they were headed for the hills, they might be headed for the only place on it that lay outside the city limits.
The abandoned Civil War bunkers.
“Follow him!” shouted Thirteen, pointing to the car speeding away in front of them. Jahad punched it and the SUV leapt forward. In the side mirror Thirteen saw the line of SUVs filled with Jahad’s men follow. They passed the street the other car had turned down and as he watched, a pair of red taillights disappeared around another corner.
Hoping he’d made the right choice, Thirteen gritted his teeth, sat back, and hung on.
The air this high in the atmosphere was chilled and thin and much easier to maneuver through than the heated, thicker air of the city, which was one of the reasons Christian had decided to approach the bunkers from the forest side.
The earth below gently curved as it bled off into the night horizon. Over the pointed dark tips of the sea of pines, he spied his destination, magnified by his intense concentration like the crystalline lens of a spyglass. Off in the distance, the lights of Barcelona blazed Christmas-tree-bright right up to the dark indigo strip of the Mediterranean; beyond that there were only the tiny, twinkling pinpoints of stars.
He was grateful he couldn’t feel emotions as Vapor. Grateful the rage and anguish he’d felt reading Ember’s letter at the house had disappeared when he’d shed his human form, like a snake shedding its skin. The short time it took him to travel through the night sky from his home in the forest to the bunkers perched far above the city offered him a reprieve of sorts; without all that emotion short-circuiting his brain, it was much easier to think.
Using a narrow channel of fast-moving air, he descended silently toward the back of an outlying cement structure in the compound, swift as smoke, stretched as thin as possible to avoid detection by any curious eyes that might happen to look up.
He counted six sentries above ground at the complex. Armed with rifles, they prowled the exterior walls and barbed wire fences, silent and watchful.
Not watchful enough, however. Christian materialized right behind a muscular male farthest away from the oth
ers and broke his neck before he could whirl around or even make a sound of surprise.
He dragged the body into the opaque shadows beneath an Aleppo pine and stripped it of clothes, weapons, and a small mobile satellite phone.
He stared at the phone for a beat, surprised. Depending on the architecture of the system, the coverage of a sat phone might include the entire Earth—and would also include the GPS coordinates of the other phones on the system. He didn’t have time to think more about it though, because his ears picked up the sound of cars driving up the winding road to the bunker.
There were perhaps a dozen, one slightly ahead of the rest—and they were moving fast.
He dressed in the dead man’s clothes, slung the rifle over his back, stuffed the sat phone into the zippered pocket of the cargo pants, covered the body with fallen branches and brush, and set off at a silent run toward a gaping hole in the ground about three hundred yards away from the main bunker entrance that he’d spotted on his descent, avoiding four buried landmines in the process. He suspected the hole was one of the hidden exits to the labyrinth underground tunnels, and when he stepped down carefully into its pitch black opening, his suspicions were confirmed.
He smelled hundreds of Ikati—males and females both—spread out over several acres, a few dozen human females in close proximity to one another to the east who he assumed were captives, the sour metallic tang of a large cache of weaponry to the north, stores of food and water to the west, the dull organic smells of damp earth, dead rock, and vegetation all around, and underlying everything a cloyingly sweet chemical scent he didn’t recognize.
He held still for another moment, stretching his senses, opening his nose and ears to probe the deepest recesses of the tunnels, allowing the night air to waft over his body, bringing with it all the evidence of everything unseen.
Then he began to panic.
No vanilla. No orange blossom.
Ember wasn’t here.
Caesar’s sat phone rang just as he stepped into the opulent burl wood and butter crème leather cabin of the motor yacht he kept docked in the harbor of Port Vell.
Since he’d killed the captain who’d sailed it south for him when they’d fled France, Caesar had taught himself to operate the hundred-foot luxury craft, and spent quite a bit of time cruising the glistening waters off the golden coast of Barcelona, daydreaming and scheming, imagining in vivid detail the outcome of the operation he’d aptly dubbed “The Hammer.”
Depending on how dire this little road bump turned out to be, a serious crimp could be made in his plans.
And he simply couldn’t allow that to happen. He’d worked too hard. He’d waited too long. He’d arranged everything, and now all he was waiting for was Easter Sunday when he’d pull the trigger and watch the world implode. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like being chased by inferior life forms in SUVs stop him.
So when he looked at the ringing mobile in his hand and saw it was Armond, one of the guards who patrolled the bunker, he experienced a brief thrill of dread.
This couldn’t be good.
“Armond!” he barked into the phone. “What’s happening?”
There was no answer. Only a brief burst of static crackled through the line, then it went dead.
