The Jericho Deception: A Novel (45 page)

“Damn!” Axe cursed under his breath.
Where are they?

He rounded a corner. An elderly French couple approached him as they argued with each other, both waving their arms in the air. He stopped. He should have reached his targets already. Had he missed a turn? The possibility that they’d eluded him caused his pulse to accelerate further, which only served to worsen the pounding in his skull.

He pivoted and checked his flank. Then he pushed past the couple and jogged to the next intersection of rubble. He was close to the end of the temple. The seventy-foot wall he’d seen earlier was to his right, past a fallen column and another pile of boulders.

He sprinted to the wall. When he was about eight feet away, he could see down the length of it.
A dead end.

Then a movement up on the wall caught his attention. He squinted against the blinding sun that seemed to amplify the pain in his head. The professor and the girl were about fifteen feet off the ground and climbing. They must have reached the wall and discovered they were trapped. Maybe they thought that they could yell for help once they reached a higher point. But he saw the flaw in that logic. Whether they screamed or not, he would reach them before any help did. Now he had an even better opportunity to finish them. He would
toss both of them from the top of the wall to the stone ground. His cover story that they were terrorists the CIA had been tracking would require some finessing with the authorities, and Wolfe would throw a fit that their deaths had happened in public. But they would be gone, and Wolfe’s problems solved.

He moved to the base of the wall, put his palms on the first block that came to his waist, and pressed his feet off the ground. But when he bent his knee, his foot didn’t quite reach the top of the block. He dropped back to the ground and swore. He’d always thought the scrawny men with their yoga mats heading into the aerobics studio with the women were effeminate. Now, he wished for a little more flexibility.

No matter,
he thought,
I’ll just power myself up.
His upper body was stronger than that of his two targets combined. He pushed explosively with his hands as he jumped from the ground. His foot reached the edge of the block. A second later he balanced on the lip of the base block and reached for the next level. Then he encountered his second problem: the space where one block sat on top of the other was only about two inches wide. His tactical boots and thick fingers had difficulty finding holds, and he fought against slipping back to the ground. He plastered his body against the cool, smooth granite, turned his feet parallel to the wall, and dug his fingertips into the next ledge.

Then the memories flooded back.
Coronado. SEAL Indoc training. The cargo net
. The images that flashed through his mind reopened the black void in his chest. He fought back the nausea that rose into his throat. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, focusing his attention on the cool stone underneath his fingers. He could do this. He was powerful. He was superhuman. He started to climb again. The climbing became easier with each block he ascended. Blood warmed his biceps and his quads.

In the weight room, he was famous for the primal screams he emitted as he pushed out squats or hauled up dead lifts. Now, he tried to make as little noise as possible; his prey was so focused on looking upward that they hadn’t yet noticed him.

He closed the gap to ten feet. Rachel Riley was directly above his head; Professor Lightman was to the left, a few feet higher. He eyed the slim ankle
exposed under the leg of Rachel’s pants. In a moment he would jerk it hard enough to rip her fingers from their hold. The thought of wrapping his hand around her bare skin and then throwing her to her death caused a stirring in his loins. The anticipation even caused his headache to subside. He ignored the tightness that was beginning to develop in his fingers and forearms.

Then she looked down and met his eyes.

Ethan had developed a smooth flow to the climb. His limbs were loose; the wall felt familiar. He ascended slower than he did when he climbed at Yale because he didn’t want to leave Rachel behind, and, he reminded himself, because he didn’t have anyone belaying him. A slip to the stone below would be fatal.

“He’s here!” Rachel’s high-pitched scream startled him.

He cut his eyes to the right. She was one block below him, and Axe had appeared several blocks below her. The big man’s face was red, and sweat poured from his temples as he lumbered upward. His climbing technique was counterproductive. Axe pulled with his upper body rather than pushing with his feet.

Ethan recalled his early climbing lessons. He’d had to overcome the mistake most men made when climbing: the tendency to overuse his arms. His instructor had explained that his legs were stronger and had more endurance. Climbing with one’s arms might seem easier for the first twenty feet or so, but then the smaller muscles would tie up, refusing to fire and stranding one halfway up the wall.

Women were often more natural climbers. Rachel seemed to be proving the point. She climbed almost effortlessly, but too slowly. She took her time finding each hand- and foothold before moving to the next. At the rate she was ascending, Axe would catch her in less than thirty seconds.

“Keep moving.” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “Look at me.”

The fear in her face pained him. On the ground, he was no match for Axe, but on the wall he was confident he could elude the bulky man.
But how can I help Rachel?
The thought of what would happen if she didn’t out-climb her pursuer was too horrifying to imagine.

“You’ve got it,” he encouraged.

But then she made the mistake of looking down at her attacker again. She froze on the wall, her arms trembling.
Oh God,
he thought.
PTSD.
The trauma of being chased again by the man who’d kidnapped her in New Haven was paralyzing her.

“Rachel!” he screamed.

She glanced at him. The blood had drained from her face. She still didn’t move.

“Rachel, I love you.” She blinked at the words that came impulsively from his lips. “You’re strong. You can do it. Just climb.”

Her eyes narrowed. Her breath came in short bursts. She reached for the next higher block and pulled herself up despite the obvious terror she felt.
She’s tough,
he thought. He prayed it would be enough.

Ethan moved up another block, still watching her. Then his hands groped a wide ledge—the one he’d seen from the ground. A plan began to form in his head.

Axe had been so close he’d felt the heat from her body. But after the professor had yelled at her, she’d accelerated up the wall. She was petite—
probably not more than a buck-ten
—and she climbed with grace, like a dancer. Watching Lightman climb, though, caused the first seeds of doubt to enter his mind. The professor’s long limbs moved easily, spider-like.
I’ve squashed plenty of spiders in my life,
he comforted himself. Even if they were faster, they would eventually run out of wall.

He paused, dug his toes into the rock, and shook out the fingers from his left hand. He breathed deeply, replaced his hand, and shook out his right. His forearms burned. He looked down for the first time since he’d started to climb. He fought off a wave of vertigo. He was twenty-five feet off the ground.

He was used to pain in the gym, but this was different. He knew what would follow the burning that was spreading to his biceps. The burn was caused by lactic acid building up in his muscles at the same time his cells were
converting their glycogen stores into energy. At the point when the glycogen was depleted, the cells would simply stop firing.
Muscular failure.
He would be unable to move. The same process had caused him to seize up on the SEAL cargo net.

He pushed the fear from his mind, focused his attention back on his prey, and continued his climb. He paused again at the next level and took another deep breath, willing oxygen into his arms. His muscles—now engorged with blood—were starting to quiver. A normal heavy set for him was about twenty seconds in length, after which he’d rest several minutes to let his muscles recover before the next set—the perfect protocol to build mass. Climbing the wall had been the equivalent of four or five sets with no rest in between.

“Goddamn it!” he yelled. He stared at his arms, willing his muscles to recharge. The sun burned the back of his neck. Sweat stung his eyes. He squeezed his eyelids closed. He didn’t dare release his hold to wipe them. The sprouting fear in his chest seemed to fill the abyss that had opened earlier. When he opened his eyes, the scene before him was blurry; sweat obscured his vision. The vertigo returned.

As his eyes refocused, the wall appeared to transform. He was no longer climbing a rock-faced wall in Egypt, but a cargo net high off the ground on Coronado Island. He was back in his last week of SEAL Indoc training. The cargo net had failed him several times before, and he had little energy left in the muscle fibers of his forearms, but this time he wouldn’t give up. An ankle dangled just above his head.

Lieutenant Mills had taunted Axe from the day he’d arrived, delighting in how creatively he could insult the “ballooned-up roid head.” The sinewy New Yorker sat on the telephone pole that ran across the top of the net, his legs dangling over each side. Axe was closer than he’d ever been. This time, he’d not only make it, he’d teach that son of a bitch a lesson.

With the last of his strength, Axe exploded up two rungs of the net faster than he’d ever climbed before. He grasped the net with his right hand, whose fingers now worked like an old woman’s, and he thrust his left up toward the ankle. His cramped fingers tightened around the bare flesh. The lieutenant had narrow bones, not like the tree trunks Axe had for legs.

He pulled on the ankle, determined to toss the man who had taunted him the past weeks from the top of the mountain. He glanced at the lieutenant’s face. He wanted to see his look of fear and shock. But instead of encountering the lieutenant’s tanned cheekbones and salt-and-pepper crew cut, the vision before him almost caused him to fall backward off the net.

The face was long and thin, and it seemed to transform as he watched. The eyes narrowed and elongated, forming diamonds bursting with coal-black pupils. The nose grew to a point as horns appeared out of a mass of hair that wriggled like a nest of worms. He felt his heart catch in his chest. He was no longer looking at Lieutenant Mills; he was looking into the face of Satan, the same Satan who’d plagued his dreams. But now the devil was real, and he had grabbed ahold of him. Axe’s fingers started to burn as if the skin of his hand were on fire.

Then the terrible creature opened its mouth, revealing sharp fangs and a fire-red throat. The scream that came next seemed to pierce Axe’s very soul.

Ethan stood on a ledge forty feet off the ground. The height was unnerving, but he felt secure enough to shake his hands out by his side. He even had room to turn around. Several tourists had seen them and were pointing up from the ground. He didn’t have time to pay attention to them. He had a bigger problem. Axe was only inches from Rachel.

He shuffled over until he was directly above her. She was only three feet below, a single block of stone away. He knelt and extended a hand.