Page 86 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
She went to a tiny door in one corner of the tiny bedroom and pulled it open. From it she produced the pair of jeans and sweatshirt he’d given her that fateful day two weeks ago, when he’d thrown her out of his house. She’d washed them and kept them among her things—the thought of it made his heart do a funny little flip inside his chest. She handed them to him with a
pointed look, then turned back to the dresser and began to fill a small bag with clothes.
She was ready in less than five minutes. He hurried her downstairs to the Audi and Corbin, awaiting them in the back alley. She and Corbin exchanged muted hellos, and the car pulled silently away.
“This is only temporary,” she said quietly, staring out the window, deep in thought. “I can’t hide forever. This is just temporary, until you…until…”
Gripped by the sudden, awful realization that temporary could mean anything from one day to one week to one month, depending on how long it took him to find Caesar and his colony, Christian murmured his assent. He reached across the seat and took her hand. He gave it a squeeze and she glanced over at him. All traces of humor and anger and confidence were gone, and now she looked at him with only deep worry and more than a little fear on her face.
“What about work?”
Christian slowly shook his head.
Her brows rose. “Volunteering at the shelter?”
Another head shake and her voice climbed an octave. “Asher?”
“Not until I find them. You can’t go anywhere you usually go. Your normal routine is off-limits, it’s too dangerous. In fact…I think it’s best if you don’t leave the house at all.”
She pulled her fingers from his and dropped her head into her hands. “This is unbelievable,” she whispered, and Christian had the sinking feeling she was beginning to rue the day she ever met him.
Just as they turned the corner onto the main street, he saw through the window a trio of rangy, unkempt young men, fighting beneath the flickering fluorescent glow of a street lamp over a small pile of clothing. A suit jacket, trousers, a shirt, and a pair of polished, gleaming shoes. When he recognized the items as his own, his skin crawled with the sudden memory of a reading an archbishop had given at the pope’s funeral just months before. It had been an international event, televised all over the world, full of pomp and somber regalia, but the reading had stuck with him more than the pageantry. As the pope had died a martyr, that theme permeated the proceedings, and the line that stuck like a burr was from the gospel of Matthew, about the death of the most famous martyr of them all.
“And after they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.”
Because Christian believed every little thing had some kind of meaning, that all the seemingly inconsequential details and coincidences of life are quite the opposite, the sight of those young men dividing up his stolen clothes on the street sent a shiver of cold, black premonition straight down into the darkest corners of his soul.
“Everything is going to be fine,” he murmured to Ember. “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be just fine.”
But even to his own ears, it sounded like a lie.
Doctor Maximilian Reiniger—also known as the Doctor, Agent Doe or simply Thirteen—was a man with a plan.
A former German Special Forces soldier who’d lost his mother in a gruesome animal attack when he was a small child, he’d developed a hatred for cats that was the very definition of pathological. It had been a cat, after all, that had taken his beloved mutter, a Bengal tiger that had suddenly decided during a traveling circus act that it was finished with jumping through hoops—and was also in the mood for a snack.
Under the yellow and white striped big top, little Maximilian and his mother had been sitting in the front row of the bleachers. He’d seen up close what those long, sharp fangs could do when applied with vigor to vulnerable human flesh.
By the time the tiger had sated its hunger, there was nothing recognizable left of his poor mother but a few bloodied shreds of floral print dress, and a single patent leather shoe.
After witnessing such a horrific mauling at such a young, impressionable age, little Maximilian’s mind warped like wood exposed to water, and he became obsessed with only two things:
Killing cats. And saving people.
So after he was grown and finished with his secondary education, he entered medical school, where he excelled. Not satisfied to merely go into private practice or work for one of the government-run hospitals where he would spend his life tending to the sick, but doing nothing to protect people from the multitude of threats they faced from enemies human and otherwise, the newly minted doctor decided to round out his medical education with a stint in the army. There he learned to shoot, blow things up, operate with a clear mind while under extreme physical duress, and obey commands from higher-ups without question.
That last one would prove his most valuable asset of all.
He rose through the ranks and was recruited by the Special Forces Command. Only forty percent of new recruits are able to pass the initial three-week-long psychological training regimen, and only about eight percent of those pass the subsequent physical endurance phase. Reiniger passed all with flying colors and was sent to El Paso, Texas for his three-year special instruction cycle in desert and bush training. With more than twenty jungle, desert, urban and counter-terrorism courses at seventeen schools worldwide, it was pure chance he was sent to the one where he would be introduced to the man who would eventually change his life.
He still did not know this man’s real name. No one did. He was known simply as the Chairman, or One.
To Reiniger—who would later be named Thirteen when he was recruited to the Chairman’s organization and advanced near the top—the Chairman was only ever a voice on the other end of a telephone line. There were no face-to-face meetings, no videoconferences, no emails, or even a physical address that could be traced to him by any one of the thousands of people who worked under his umbrella of multi-national companies, most of them in the bioengineering industry. The Chairman was a shadowy figure who, according to legend, had learned on a trip to Africa of an old, old local myth about the Ikati, creatures with superhuman powers that could manipulate their shape.
Who could turn into, of all things, cats.
Panthers, to be specific. Big, black ones.
The Chairman, whose wife had died of a rare neurological disease that his daughter had inherited, had made it his life’s mission to find a cure. He believed the answer lay only partly in medicine and science…the other part lay in capitalizing on the abilities of the nonhuman life forms he wholeheartedly believed lived alongside man, hidden in plain view.
