Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

“SO WHAT do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?” the man sitting next to Annika said. When she hesitated, he said hastily, “That’s all right. If you’d rather read, I understand completely.”

She laughed softly. “No, I was getting bored anyway.”

They were wearing their seat belts. The plane, slicing through the night on its way to Rome, had encountered a powerful storm, and they had experienced some unpleasant turbulence before the pilot had taken them up to 43,000 feet. Below them, vicious streaks of lightning flashed in the remote blackness of their time-annihilating flight.

“May I see what you’re reading?”

She handed him the book. He had the face of a Roman senator, aggressive without being arrogant. His tan almost camouflaged the pockmarks on his cheek. The backs of his hands were scarred; they were work hands, which she liked. His gray eyes scanned the book jacket.

“The Copenhagen Interpretation : the Orthodoxy of Quantum Mechanics, or The Wavefunction Collapse.” He glanced at her as he handed back the book. “That’s quite a title. Are you a scientist?”

“A detective, of sorts,” she said with a mischievous smile. “A very specific sort. I’m looking for the Higgs boson.”

“The what?”

“A particle so small it’s virtually beyond human comprehension.” She waved a hand. “It’s complicated and, for a layperson, probably boring.”

“Not to me.” He settled in, apparently content to listen to her as long as she wanted to talk.

“I work for CERN at the LHC,” she said. “Also known as the Large Hadron Collider.”

He tapped a finger against his lip. “I’ve heard about … didn’t your team just break a record once held by Fermilabs?”

“That’s right.” She appeared delighted. “The LHC is in a massive tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland, in a space that’s the coldest in the known universe.”

In time, she could see him becoming infatuated. Not with her, precisely. He was in love with the lie she had spun, the image she had projected on the screen of his mind. It was an art, really, this ability to understand the power of lies, the way a lie—even a small one—had the power to bore its way through anyone’s defenses. Her genius was in making this lie, no matter how small, into a truth that someone could believe in, because believing was the same as falling in love. Someone in the throes of infatuation had no defenses.

This is what she had done with Jack because it was the only way she knew how to live life. But then somewhere in the midst of the Ukraine something had changed. That lie had become a bitter pill, poisoning their relationship. She began to hate herself, and then to hate him for believing her lie. She had wanted, more than anything, for him to pull aside the curtain of her lies, to reveal her as Dorothy revealed the Wizard of Oz.

It was only afterward that she understood why she had defied her grandfather and confessed to Jack. She wanted him to hate her, she wanted to push him as far away from her as possible, and then to see if he would come back. Because if he did she would know that for the first time in her life she had met a man for whom the lies didn’t matter. She would know that he loved her, not the persona she had presented.

The man in the seat beside her—Tim or Tom or Phil—was laughing at something she said. She could read his lust for her in every expression, every gesture he made. He was a wealthy businessman. He owned his own firm, which he was about to take public. The IPO would net him over a billion dollars. He was under the mistaken impression that she would be impressed, but her current persona had no interest in wealth or status. He readily admitted that he’d never met anyone like her.

“If you’ll excuse me.” She unbuckled her seat belt.

A tentative smile played across his lips. “Would you find it offensive if I accompanied you?”

As a gift, she presented him with her softest laugh. “Not at all. What a perfect gentleman you are.”

He unbuckled his seat belt and followed her up the aisle to the toilet. It was nearly 5 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time and everyone in first class was either asleep or absorbed by the electronic flicker of their personal video screens. One of the attendants appeared from the galley and asked if they’d like some fresh-baked sugar cookies. They declined and she vanished the way she had come.

Opening the toilet door, Annika was aware that she didn’t really want to do this, but her body was so conditioned that it was working on its own momentum. She did not stop Tim or Tom or Phil when he stepped into the toilet after her and awkwardly closed the door. Nor did she stop him when his hand groped beneath her skirt, the hem rising up his forearm as he found what he was grasping for.

Through it all, she clung to him. She felt unmoored, as if she weren’t here on this plane, or over dark and troubled water, deeper even than the void in her chest. She was wherever Jack was at this moment. Her mind was filled with him.

She was oblivious to Tim or Tom or Phil’s grunts, his bull-like lunges, the pain cutting across her buttocks as they rhythmically struck the sink edge.

She barely heard herself moaning she was weeping so copiously.

“HE’S NOT here. The fucker’s not here!”

Thatë was in a state. They were inside what was left of Xhafa’s stronghold. Burned bodies lay everywhere. The stench of roasted flesh was nauseating. Here and there in the corners of what had once been rooms, flames still flickered and danced. Otherwise, all was black ash, but that didn’t stop the kid from kicking every corpse he came across, turning the ones on their stomachs over so he could examine the faces.

“What the fuck? What the fuck?” His equilibrium had shattered at the bitter taste of Pyrrhic victory. They had won everything, but had lost the only prize any of them cared about: Arian Xhafa.

Jack and Alli were examining a laptop computer, twisted out of shape by the explosion and resultant fire, when Thatë began screaming.

“Tell me! Tell me!”

Jack ran over and pulled him away from a badly wounded guerilla. There was spittle on Thatë’s face; he was virtually frothing at the mouth. For his part, the guerilla slid to the floor. His body was a mass of deep burns and his face was bloody and distorted out of all proportion.

Paull tried to hold the kid back, but he just shook the older man away. Jack looked at Alli and she went over and took Thatë by the arm. It was a restraint, the only one he would tolerate at the moment. He gave the guerilla a venomous glare over her shoulder.

Jack squatted beside the guerilla. He could see at a glance that his wounds were mortal. “What’s your name?”

One bloodshot eye stared back at him. “Bek … Bekir.” The other eye was swollen closed, so heavily bruised it looked like a fist.

“Where is Arian Xhafa?”

“He isn’t here.”

Jack sat back on his haunches. He gave Thatë a querying look, but the kid was still livid with rage.

“Give me five minutes with him,” Thatë said.

“The poor bastard doesn’t have five minutes,” Jack told him. “Besides, what can you do to him that hasn’t already been done?” Turning back to Bekir, he said, “Where is Xhafa? Where did he go?”

“In … into the wind.” Bekir’s mouth was red and black, the lips so distorted it was unclear whether even his mother would recognize him. “He left a little while ago.”

“How little?” Jack pressed.

“Twenty minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“Christ, we just missed the fuck,” Paull said.

Bekir started coughing. His condition was clearly declining rapidly.