The Judas Strain (Page 91)

And not just nature.

Harriet felt the weight of the unused pills in her sweater pocket.

Tears welled up and streamed down her face.

Annishen spoke, finishing her call with a snap of her cell phone. She faced Harriet and motioned to another of the guards. "Undo her cuffs."

Harriet did not object. She lifted her arms to allow the handcuffs to be keyed open. Their weight fell away. She rubbed her wrists.

What was going on ?

Obeying a signal from Annishen, one of the men dragged her in her chair over to the table. The loud squeak of steel on cement drew up her husband’s bleary face.

"Harriet. . ." he mumbled. "What time is it?"

"It’s okay, Jack," she mumbled tenderly. "Go back to sleep."

Annishen stepped over to him. "I don’t think so. He’s done enough sleeping. Those little pills you gave him finally kicked in, really knocked him out. But now it’s time to wakey-wake." She cupped his chin and pulled his face up. "Hold him like this," she instructed his guard. "He should watch the show."

Jack did not offer any fight as the man pinned his head.

Annishen returned to the table, wiping Jack’s drool on her pant leg. She nodded to the guard beside Harriet’s chair. He reached over, grabbed Harriet’s left arm, and yanked it hard over the tabletop, pinning her wrist against the wood.

Instinctively, Harriet fought back, but the man just dragged her arm farther, stretching her limb until her armpit was jammed against the table’s edge. She felt the cold muzzle of a pistol against her cheek, held by the third guardsman.

Annishen sauntered over. "It seems we must teach your son a little lesson, Mrs. Pierce."

She picked up the blowtorch and pulled the trigger on the self-igniter. A blue flame spat out the torch’s muzzle with a sharp hiss. She settled it to the table near her hand. "For cauterizing the stump."

"What. . . what are you doing?"

Ignoring her the woman picked up the bolt cutters, pulling the handles wide. "Now which finger shall we cut off first?"

6:01 a.m.

Gray rode in the backseat of a white van. Seichan sat pressed against his side, the pair of them pinned between two armed guards. Nasser faced them from the bench seat ahead, flanked by more guards.

Kowalski and Vigor rode in the vehicle behind theirs. Another two vans followed front and rear, piled in with more khaki-dressed gunmen.

Nasser was taking no chances.

Through the windshield, Gray dully watched the spires of Angkor Wat rise out of the mists ahead, five massive corncob-shaped towers, lit by the first rays of the rising sun. Angkor Wat was the first of many temples spread across a hundred square miles of ruins. It was also the largest and best preserved, considered a Cambodian icon, with its immense jumble of chambers, walls, scalloped towers, carvings and statues. This temple alone covered five hundred acres, encircled by a wide moat.

But it was not their goal.

They were headed to Angkor Thorn, another mile north. And while not as large as Angkor Wat, the walled ruins of Thorn housed the great Bayon temple, considered to be the heart of all of Angkor.

A resounding bump shook the van.

Gray caught his own reflection in the rearview mirror. His cheeks were sunken, shadowed, his lips cracked, the stubble over his jaw and chin looked like a black bruise. Only his eyes still shone flinty and hard, fueled by his anger and vengeance. But deeper in his chest, there remained only grief and guilt.

Seichan, perhaps sensing him sinking into a numbing despair, gripped his hand in her own. It was not a tender gesture. She squeezed hard, nails biting, refusing to let him slip away, dragging him from the edge of that well.

Nasser noted her gesture. A shadow of a sneer appeared, then vanished away again. "And I thought you were smarter than that, Commander," he muttered. "Is she f**king you yet?"

Gray focused back at him. "Shut the hell up."

Nasser laughed, once, sharp, amused. "No? Too bad. If you’re being screwed over, you should at least get something out of it."

Seichan slipped her hand from Gray’s. "Fuck you, Amen."

"Not anymore, Seichan. Not after I kicked you out of bed." Nasser’s eyes turned to Gray. "Did you know? That we were once lovers?"

Gray snapped a glance toward Seichan. Surely Nasser was lying. How could she . . . with the bastard who had just ordered his mother’s torture? Just the thought of his mother spilled more acid into his stomach.

But Seichan refused to meet Gray’s eye, glaring instead at Nasser. Her fingers curled into a fist on her knee.

"But all that ended," Nasser said. "The ambitious bitch. We were both vying to rise to the next station in the Guild hierarchy. The last rung to the very top. But we came to a difference of opinion. About how to acquire you."

Gray swallowed. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Seichan wanted to use her wiles to lure you into cooperating of your own volition, to help the Guild follow Marco’s trail. I, on the other hand, believed in a more direct approach. Blood and coercion. A man’s way. But when the Guild decided against her plan, Seichan sought to take matters into her own hands. She murdered the Venetian curator, stole the obelisk, and fled to the United States."

Seichan crossed her arms, glowering back in disgust. "And you’re still piss-sore that I beat you to the prize. Again."

Gray studied Seichan.

All her talk of saving the world. . . could it have all been a lie?

"So I followed her to the States," Nasser continued. "I knew where she’d be going. It was easy enough to lay a trap."

"Where you missed killing me," she scoffed, "once again proving your incompetence."

He pinched his fingers up between them. "By a fraction of an inch." He lowered his arm. "Still, you kept to your original strategy, didn’t you, Seichan? You still sought Commander Pierce out. Only perhaps as more of an ally now. You knew he’d come to your rescue. You and Gray against the world!" He laughed coarsely. "Or are you still playing him, Seichan?"

Seichan merely sniffed in derision.

Nasser turned back to Gray. "She is nothing if not ambitious. Ruthless. She’d step over her own dying grandmother to rise up in the hierarchy."

Seichan leaned forward, glaring. "But at least 1 didn’t kneel quietly while my mother was murdered before my eyes."

Nasser’s face clenched hard.

"Coward," Seichan mumbled, falling back into the seat with a satisfied sneer. "You even murdered your father while his back was turned. Still couldn’t face him."

Nasser lunged at her, a hand going for her throat.