Kitabı oku: «Rules of the Game», sayfa 2

MACCABEE ADLAI, LITTLE ALICE CHOPRA
South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India

Maccabee thumbs a Zippo lighter. The flame pops and flickers. They are in a small and pitch-black chamber, one that Maccabee doesn’t recognize. Apparently, Maccabee has been teleported somewhere beyond his control yet again.

He lowers the flame and there, yes, is Sky Key. She trembles before him. Big eyes, beautiful dark hair. Fists balled at her chest. A terrified child.

All the girl can manage is, “Y-y-y-y-y-you.”

“My name is Maccabee Adlai. I’m a Player, like your mother.” His words are muffled, his voice twangy from the beating he took from Jago Tlaloc before he woke up here in the darkness. He reaches up and shifts his jaw back into place with a loud snap!

“Y-y-y-y-you.”

His whole body hurts, especially his groin, the pit of his stomach, his left pinkie, and his jaw. The pinkie is bent completely backward. At least he has his ring. He flips the ring’s lid shut so the poisoned needle is covered, then he cracks his finger straight by pushing it against his thigh. A line of pain shoots up his arm and into his neck. The finger won’t bend at the knuckles, but it’s not sticking out at an odd angle anymore.

When I do win this thing there’ll hardly be any of me left, he thinks.

“Y-y-y-y-y-you,” the girl says again.

He moves toward her. She recoils. Color drains from her face. She can’t be older than three. So young. So innocent. So undeserving of what’s happened to her.

The game is bullshit, Shari Chopra said. And in that moment Maccabee agreed with her. He realizes that this sentiment was probably the one that saved Shari’s life—the one that prompted him to knock her out instead of gun her down. Looking at Alice now, he doesn’t regret this decision.

So young.

“Your mother lives,” Maccabee says. “I saved her from a bad person. He came for her and I … I stopped him.” He almost said killed, but that would be inappropriate, wouldn’t it? With a child? He says, “She lives, but she’s not here—wherever we are.”

“Y-y-y-y-you,” she repeats, her eyes widening.

Maccabee shuffles forward another foot, his chin tucked to his chest, the back of his head grazing the stone ceiling. The air is damp. The only sound is their breath. Maccabee wiggles his fingers at her, the unmoving pinkie like a stick growing out of his hand. “It’s okay, sweetie. I won’t hurt you. I promised your mother I wouldn’t and I meant it.” He stumbles over something. Looks down. A clump of cloth.

“Y-y-y-y-you. From my dream. You-you-you hurt people …”

“I won’t hurt you,” he repeats. He lowers the lighter and pushes the thing on the ground with his foot. It’s heavy. He looks. A limb. A leg. A hole burned in the cargo pocket on the thigh. He sweeps the Zippo through the air, illuminating the blood-spattered face of Baitsakhan, his eyes vacant and staring, slack-jawed, the throat torn open by the bionic hand that still clutches the cervical section of his own spine.

Baitsakhan.

Take.

Kill.

…

Lose.

His Endgame is over.

Good riddance.

Maccabee spits on the floor as the girl gasps and points. “No! Not you! Him! He is the one! He took Mama’s finger! He hurt people! He is the one! He is the one!”

Maccabee kicks the Donghu’s body so that it flips facedown. He steps between Sky Key and Baitsakhan. She shouldn’t see that. No child should see that.

“It’s okay. You’re okay. He can’t hurt you.”

“Mama.”

“He can’t hurt her either. Not anymore.”

Maccabee is suddenly afraid that Shari also made the trip to wherever they are. And the Olmec too, and maybe the Cahokian. He spins, searching the rest of the chamber, but no one is there. It is just him and Sky Key and—

“Earth Key!” he says.

WHERE IS IT?

The girl shudders. She jumps up and then her body stiffens as if she’s possessed. Her right hand falls to her side, her left hand juts out, palm up. Maccabee leans closer. She doesn’t move. It’s like her fear has been spirited away and replaced with emptiness. Shock, Maccabee thinks. Or maybe a force more powerful.

He peers into her hand. A little ball. Earth Key.

He swipes it from her. Her eyebrow twitches but otherwise she’s expressionless.

“I’ll keep that.” He slips it into a zippered pocket on his vest and pats it.

“Earth Key,” she says.

“That’s right,” he says. He inspects the small room. Where the hell are we? The floor is earth, everything else is featureless stone. There are no windows, no doors. No way in or out. As he looks around he runs a hand over his torso, checking to see what he’s got to work with. No guns, but he has his smartphone, a pack of gum, and his ancient Nabataean blade.

A wave of pain crashes over him as the adrenaline fades from his system. He realizes that everything that’s happened recently—finding Sarah and Jago in Bolivia, tracking them through the Tiwanaku ruins, getting teleported somewhere through that ancient portal, fighting, killing, fighting some more, and then getting knocked clean out by the live-wire Olmec, who is 20 or 30 kilos lighter than him, and then getting teleported yet again—all of that probably happened in only the last couple hours.

He needs rest. Soon.

“Earth Key says that …” the girl says in a monotone.

His pant leg vibrates.

“… says that one is coming.”

It vibrates violently. He touches his leg—the tracker orb!

Another Player!

He looks left and right and up and down and can’t figure out where to go. Is another Player going to appear in this small room? Is he going to have to fight with a broken-down body in this box? This, this—sarcophagus?

He whips around, the lighter’s flame blows out. He thumbs the flint. Flick, flick, flick—the sparks don’t take. But in the total darkness something catches his eye. Right before his face. A thin white line. He follows it, tracing a faint square on the ceiling. He stuffs the lighter in a pocket and places both hands on the stone overhead and pushes. It’s heavy and he strains and grunts as his panting mingles with the scraping sound of rock on rock. An opening. Light. Hot air pours into the small room as he gets his fingers around the edge of the six-centimeter-wide slab, heaving it away. He gets on his tiptoes and looks over the edge.

They are in a hole in the ground. The hole is covered by a pillared gothic cupola like one that might cover a grave or a monument. A point of orange light from a streetlamp somewhere, the muted glow of dusk in the sky beyond the cupola, the black boughs of leafy trees hanging over everything like a curtain. A dove coos and then flaps away. The muted jostle of a city—traffic, AC hum, voices—in the near distance.

Maccabee grabs Sky Key and pushes her out of the hole. He jumps out. They’re in the middle of a vast cemetery from a bygone era, every grave marker grand and significant and carved from stone—domed Victorian tombs that must hold entire families, and seven-meter-tall obelisks and basalt pedestals that weigh thousands of kilos. Many are covered in moss and lichen and all are splotchily weatherworn. Plants grow in every available nook and patch—grasses, palms, hardwoods, weeds, sprawling banyan trees with their air roots diving down to the ground here and there. It’s one of the most impressive cemeteries Maccabee has ever seen.

Sky Key steps onto the path, her arms glued to her sides, her legs moving like a robot’s. She’s completely zoned out but manages to say, “One is coming. He is close.”

Maccabee gets out the orb with his right hand and pulls his knife with his left. His unbending pinkie sticks out. As when Alice Ulapala closed in on his hideout in Berlin, the orb simply glows its warning, not giving any intelligence as to who is coming or from which direction.

Maccabee knows that for the first time in his life he is going to have to run. He’s too hurt and too unarmed and too disoriented and too vulnerable with Sky Key to stand his ground.

He stuffs the orb in a pocket and snags the girl, tucking her under his arm like a parcel.

He takes off along a dirt path, the cemetery dark and claustrophobic, until the trees and massive graves give way to an open area. A three-meter-high stone wall rises in front of them, plain concrete buildings beyond it on the street side.

Where the hell am I? This doesn’t look like Peru or Bolivia at all. Or even South America!

He goes to the solid wall, peers left then right. It’s rough enough to scale, but not while carrying Sky Key. He turns left and trots along, keeping the wall on his right. The orb in his pocket has calmed a little, so maybe whoever’s coming got thrown off the trail.

Sky Key weighs about 15 kilos. He holds her sideways, her head forward and her legs flopping behind him. It’s like he’s carrying a life-sized toddler doll.

Near the interior corner of the wall Maccabee comes across a cache of gravediggers’ tools: a shovel stuck in a pile of sand, a pickax, a coil of sturdy rope. He carefully puts down Sky Key and cuts a four-meter length of rope. He lashes it around his waist and shoulders and then works Sky Key onto his back and loops the rope under her butt and twice over her back. He pulls her tight, tying a hitch in the X of rope that crosses his chest. She’s secure in this makeshift child carrier, and he has the use of both hands. He feels her quick breath on his neck. She remains zoned out, likely from the trauma of being taken from her mama, and from coming into contact with Earth Key.

He wants to climb the wall and get out onto the street of whatever city he’s in, but the wall is smoother here and there’s nothing for him to grab. He’s about to double back to where he can climb but then freezes. The rope! The pickax!

He ties the rope to the wooden handle and hurls the pickax over the wall, creating a kind of grappling hook. He gives it a hard tug and it holds. He places his feet on the wall and starts up.

But then, at the same instant, the orb in his pocket jostles like a tiny earthquake, and Sky Key shakes off her zombie-like state and grabs a handful of his hair and yanks it. He loses his footing and swings a half meter to the side. The air cracks around him. A chunk of wall explodes next to his face, followed by a pistol report.

“He’s here,” Sky Key says.

Maccabee dives behind a stone grave marker as three more rounds tear by them, each barely missing. Maccabee kicks the shovel into the air and snatches it. He spins to his right, but Sky Key yanks his hair again and says, “Other way.”

That would take them across the line of fire, but Maccabee trusts her. He quickly guesses that the male Player must be the Shang, An Liu. Marcus and Baits are dead, Jago’s with Sarah, and Hilal is probably recovering from his wounds back in Ethiopia.

And if it is Liu, then he’s probably got some bombs.

That means that Maccabee has to MOVE!

He takes a shovelful of sand and throws it into the air, creating a smokescreen, and sprints behind it. He hears a muted clunk, and he spins around a thick tree trunk and throws his hands over Sky Key’s head and boom! An explosion from where they just were, debris showering all around, leaves whipping along on the shock wave, bits of wood and rock pinging here and there. It was a small explosion but big enough to have hurt them if he hadn’t moved.

“Turn right here,” the girl says calmly.

He’s blind in this place and his body aches from everything that’s happened but she did save them, so he listens.

“Left here. Straight. Left. Left. Straight. Right. Left, left, left.”

He follows every instruction, even if it feels like they’re going in circles. They bob and weave, pivot and fly. They’re narrowly missed by several more shots and one more small explosion. She’s transforming the dense cemetery into a maze, and it’s working. Somehow she knows where An is. Maccabee realizes that this girl, at least in this moment, is vastly superior to the mysterious orb that he’s been using to track the Players.

Finally they round a black stone block and find an arched break in the wall big enough for a car. Two small buildings flanking it are painted pink. A wrought-iron fence is on the far side. Past that a wide street, cars moving along, a late-model motorcycle parked on the curb.

The exit. It’s 10 meters away, a straight shot. But those 10 meters are completely exposed.

“It’s too far,” Maccabee says. The orb in his pocket moves back and forth so fast he’s afraid it’s going to jump out. “He’ll kill us.”

Sky Key scratches the side of his neck. “Here,” she says.

“I see the exit, but it’s too far!”

They don’t have more than a few seconds. She scratches harder, begins to claw at his flesh. “Here!” she whispers into his ear.

Then Maccabee understands. Something is in his neck: a tracker. One that An and who knows how many other Players have been using to follow him!

He whips up his knife and expertly carves a lump of skin from his neck. He’s careful not to nick anything important or shred a muscle or tendon. The pain isn’t too bad, but there’s a lot of blood.

“That’s it,” the girl says.

Maccabee pulls the knife away and stares into the lump of flesh and, yes, there it is. A small black blob.

He balls up the flesh and chucks it away. The bloody projectile sails over a gravestone and disappears. He gets ready to run, but the girl digs a nail into this latest wound and whispers, “Wait.”

He stifles a cry and does what he’s told. One second. Two. Three.

“Now. Straight.”

He drops the shovel and runs as fast as he can for the exit. No shots come. They were waiting for An to take the bait of the discarded tracker, and apparently he did.

The exit gets closer and closer and they’re going to make it. A person walks by outside, a woman wearing an orange sari. A bus drives past and Maccabee sees a cigarette ad on the side. The writing is Hindi.

India. We’re in India.

They’re going to make it. The orb in his pocket is going crazy now. He reaches down to secure it but then it pops out and he skids to a stop.

“Leave it!” the girl says.

Maccabee backtracks, the orb glowing bright and yellow and bouncing around on the ground like a living thing.

“No!” she says.

Something catches Maccabee’s eye. There, on the path, is An Liu, a dark pistol in his fist. He hasn’t seen them yet, he’s swinging back and forth and Maccabee almost has the orb but then—too late. An Liu locks onto Maccabee and Maccabee dives sideways and the orb glows so bright that its light eats up the wall and the path and An too. Shots come but all miss since An is blinded by the light and can’t see Maccabee anymore.

“Leave it! I am using it! Go!” the girl implores.

Once again he does what he’s told. He vaults toward the street. He sees the motorcycle and breaks open its ignition switch and hot-wires it in the blink of an eye. He jumps on. It zings to life and they take off, fast. The light from the orb chokes out everything for 20 meters now and people on the street are yelling, pointing, running.

“I am using it,” the girl repeats in a soft voice, her head slumping onto Maccabee’s shoulder. “I am using it.” Her body feels limp. She is exhausted too.

A block later the light gives way to a high-pitched whine and then it’s snuffed out and then—FFFUHWHAM!—the entire street puffs up in a ball of smoke. Maccabee dips the bike around a corner, its rear wheel skidding and his foot planting on the ground as a pivot. Bits of buildings and cars and trees whip through the air at their backs.

The girl passes out, the Indian city is a blur, and for the moment An Liu is no longer hunting them.

For the first time in his life Maccabee ran from a fight. And it worked. With the help of this small, remarkable, maybe possessed Sky Key, it worked.

I won’t let anyone hurt you, he thinks.

And he means it.

AN LIU
South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India

An kneels. He shakes his head, trying to get it clear.

Almost got them.

SHIVER.

Almost.

BLINK.

That was a big blast.

An had thrown a grenade into the light at the last second, but that explosion was from something else. The Nabataean must have planted that glowing thing and set it off in order to create some space and some time. It was successful. The Nabataean is gone now. With the first two keys.

Gone.

BLINK.

An peeks under his shirt at the Chiyoko necklace. Like everything around him it’s covered in a fine dust. He pulls the necklace over his head and shakes it gently, wipes it with his fingertips, blows on it. When it’s reasonably clean he slips it back on.

He brushes himself off, finds his SIG. He loads a new magazine. Sirens in the distance.

Shivershiver.

The world knows about Endgame, and Abaddon is coming, but the law isn’t all the way gone. Not yet.

He trots to the exit. The Nabataean is gone, and An’s bike is gone too.

An spits, the stream thick with black ash.

The Nabataean is gone.

AISLING KOPP, GREG JORDAN, GRIFFIN MARRS, POP KOPP, SARAH ALOPAY, JAGO TLALOC, SHARI CHOPRA
Heading south along the Teesta River near Mangan, Sikkim, India

Aisling looks over her shoulder into the back of the jeep. Shari Chopra slumps in her seat, an IV bag pinned above the window, a tube running into a spike in the back of her hand. Dripping into that line on a regulator is a small dose of BZD, keeping her good and asleep for as long as necessary. All the way to Thailand, where Jordan is taking them and where Stella Vyctory awaits.

The jeep bumps along the road, mountains looming all around. Aisling thinks about Shari. After the standoff with Sarah and Jago, Aisling followed Marrs into the deepest chamber of the Harappan fortress and saw the raven-haired mother of Sky Key, alive and more-or-less well.

This is a wrinkle that has Aisling feeling very conflicted. On one hand, Aisling suspects that Shari is one of the decent Players, one who doesn’t deserve a meaningless death at the hand of a psychopathic Player. She’s glad that Baitsakhan and Maccabee didn’t kill her. But on the other hand, as far as Shari’s concerned, Aisling probably is that psychopathic Player. If it weren’t for Aisling, Shari’s family would be alive. Sure, her daughter would probably still have been taken by the Nabataean, but all the Harappan who’d taken refuge in the mountains would be breathing if it weren’t for Aisling and her ragtag death squad.

Aisling tries to reason out of this by blaming Endgame for what happened—Aisling didn’t make Shari’s daughter one of the fucking keys, Endgame did. Aisling was only doing what she thought she had to do to stop Endgame, and Shari, for her part, was only doing what any mother would do.

All of which makes Aisling want to stop Endgame—and punish the Makers, especially kepler 22b—all the more.

Aisling knows in her bones that when Shari wakes up she won’t be in a very forgiving mood. All Shari will want is revenge, and Aisling knows that revenge is a soul-gnashing affliction that operates completely outside the realm of logic. Sure, Aisling could wave her hands at Chopra and plead for reason, insisting that Endgame killed all of Chopra’s people, but Aisling also knows that’s bullshit. She killed those people, along with Jordan and Pop and the rest of her team. And for better or worse, Chopra is now slumped behind Aisling in the jeep.

Jordan drives, Aisling wedged between him and Marrs in the front seat. Whenever Jordan shifts gears he reaches between Aisling’s legs. He half apologizes each time until Aisling tells him to shut up. He does. Sarah’s in the middle of the backseat, between Shari and Jago, her body folded awkwardly into Jago’s lap, her injured arm, which Aisling patched up, bent into a sling. Jago is awake and mostly silent. His hand rests on top of Sarah’s head, his fingers entwined in her hair. He’s said very little, but when he does speak he’s been even-tempered and friendly.

Pop is a different story.

He’s in the wayback, jigsawed into the gear they couldn’t leave behind—mainly guns and a mobile satellite uplink that Marrs uses for internet access. Pop has not said a single word since they forged this latest alliance. He hasn’t asked about Sky Key or spoken to Sarah or Jago at all. He hasn’t said if he’s on board with the plan to meet Stella, and he hasn’t said he’s against it.

To Aisling, his silence is the same as a full-throated scream. She knows that Pop hates the course they’re charting. It goes against every one of his beliefs. It is not what Endgame is meant to be.

Aisling is not sure how she’s going to handle Pop, but she knows that it will fall on her to handle him when the time comes.

The others don’t seem as concerned. Especially Jordan and Marrs.

Ever since getting into the jeep, Marrs has been tearing around the internet, going from news sites to encrypted government forums to deep-web hovels full of rumor and intrigue, providing an account of recent world events and bantering with Jordan on pretty much every point.

“The space agencies have been scrambling since the kepler’s announcement. At the moment, NASA’s got Abaddon falling in the North Atlantic,” Marrs says in his nasal monotone. “South of Halifax. Gonna wipe out a lot of land. A lot.”

“Fucking hell,” Jordan says. “What’s DC doing?”

“Moving. Lock, stock, and barrel. Looks like to Colorado.”

“NORAD?”

“Naturally. Gold’s going through the roof, New York’s under martial law but seems pretty tame. Boston is coming apart at the seams, though. One of the New England Patriots did a murder-suicide with his wife and kids—dog too.”

“Any flags on other Players?” Jordan asks.

“There’s some indication that the Shang is in Kolkata, but it’s pretty tenuous, and my Bengali is shit. No sign of the Nabataean yet. Oh—and looks like someone’s destroying monuments.”

“Besides Stonehenge?” Jordan asks incredulously.

“Yeah. This morning while we were trekking from the fortress, a group of nongovernmental operators that remains anonymous, at least to our guys, blew up the ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil. That was the Sumerian one.”

“Stella won’t like that.”

“No, she won’t,” Marrs says.

Jordan whips the jeep around a slow-moving truck, guiding them into oncoming traffic, which is de rigueur for India. A motor scooter buzzes out of the way into the shoulder and passes them.

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Jago demands.

Aisling nods. “Yeah, what are you talking about?”

“Your line has a monument that is more sacred than any other—right, Aisling?” Jordan asks.

“Jordan, you know it was Stonehenge.” Asshole, Aisling thinks.

Jordan says, “And you, Tlaloc?”

“We do. It’s on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.”

“La Venta,” Marrs says.

Jago looks a little surprised, and thinks that maybe these guys really do know more than he thought they could about Endgame. “Sí. That’s what we call it.”

Jordan asks, “And your girlfriend?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jago says. He’s lying, though. He knows the exact location of the prime Cahokian monument. It’s called Monks Mound, and it’s in southern Illinois, not far from St. Louis, Missouri. He knows this because it’s where the Cahokian Rebellion of 1613 occurred. The rebellion that the Olmec oracle, Aucapoma Huayna, told him all about. The rebellion that branded the Cahokians as unworthy of winning Endgame, which was precisely why Aucapoma had implored Jago to end his alliance with Sarah Alopay. No, more than that—the Cahokians were so dangerous that Aucapoma had ordered Jago to kill Sarah so he could prove to the Makers that he’d not been poisoned by the Cahokian Player.

Too late for that.

As much as he might want, Jago isn’t about to start talking about all of this. It would be too revealing, too … complicating. So he plays dumb, and they believe him.

“Well, her line has one,” Marrs says. “Called Monks Mound. Big tourist attraction now, kinda like Stonehenge but not as well-known.”

“Never heard of it,” Jago says.

“I have,” Aisling says. “Used to be the center of some huge Native American city.”

“Once upon a time it was the largest city in all of the Americas, long before any Europeans outside of Vikings even knew about the New World,” Jordan says.

“All right,” Jago says, “but why are these places so important to finishing Endgame?”

“What he said,” Aisling adds, sticking a thumb in Jago’s direction.

“I’m going to let Stella fill you in on the details,” Jordan says as he works the jeep through a series of accordion-like turns, “but we’re certain that Sun Key is hidden in one of them.”

Jago leans forward, nearly pushing Sarah’s head off his leg. “No shit?”

“No shit,” Marrs says. “And if they all get toasted before the Player with the first two keys finds it, well …”

“No one will be able to win,” Aisling says.

“Bingo,” Jordan says.

“Who is this Stella woman?” Aisling asks.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Jordan says.

Jago leans back in his seat, resettling Sarah’s head across his thigh. “Whoever she is, you’ve gotten my attention, Mr. Jordan. I look forward to meeting her.”

“I can promise that the feeling is mutual. She has been waiting to meet you—all of you—for a very, very long time.”