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A mission larger than the people within its dark hungry belly.
Yes, maybe Darkwater no longer needed Benson.
Maybe it was time for him to join Sally in the great beyond, time to take this game past the realm of flesh and blood, see if what he believed about the soul and the spirit was true, if consciousness really did survive physical death, if love really was eternal, if the bonds of man and woman forged in sex and violence truly did connect souls across lifetimes, across dimensions, transcending the borders of space, breaking the barriers of time.
Now that scintillating energy flooded Benson as he followed Jack and Kaiser into the brownstone, closed the steel door behind him after crossing the threshold.
A threshold that might very well be the last one he crossed in this lifetime, this dimension, this body of flesh and blood.
42
Rhett stared at the blood on his knuckles after pulling into his garage. He’d whipped a backhanded smack across Mercy’s face to keep her from struggling on the drive back home. His knuckles had got her square on the cheekbone, rattling her cage enough that she lay gasping on the backseat.
He’d slipped plastic ties over Mercy’s hands and ankles, duct-tape over her mouth as the little girl Cari watched in stricken silence, her body trembling as Rhett finished with her mother and then turned his masked face towards her.
“She’ll be all right,” Rhett had said gruffly, not sure why he even gave a shit about comforting this kid. Hell, they were both as good as dead anyway. No way Rhett could let them walk away after they’d seen his face. “Get in the back with your Mama. There we go. Good girl.”
Cari had clambered into the backseat in a traumatized trance, her breath coming out in hyperventilating bursts, her body still trembling uncontrollably. Once again Rhett had felt an uncharacteristic stab of emotion, a wrenching in his chest from the palpable physical fear he’d put into this little girl.
Had his own infant daughter felt any fear when he’d put her down all those years ago? She was so tiny, Rhett remembered. So vulnerable, the way she’d looked at him with those big trusting eyes which had seemed remarkably focused for a week-old infant.
Once more Rhett had thought of Indy O’Donnell’s eyes, thought of the strange resemblance between Scarlet and Indy, remembered that dreadful moment earlier when he thought heknewabout Indy, could feel it clear like a cut, understood in some inexplicable way that they’d all been drawn together in that weird manner that sometimes happened in the shadows, when you were operating on the edge of reason, the frontiers of common sense, taking risks no ordinary human could handle, making choices that would fry the moral circuits of any mortal being.
The thoughts had spun through Rhett’s mind as he carefully bound the little girl’s wrists and ankles, taped her mouth shut, then tucked her shivering body between her mother and the seatback to make sure the kid didn’t get hurt on the drive back to his home.
Why do you even give a shit if she gets hurt, Rhett had thought angrily as he gunned the black Chevy Suburban’s V-8 engines and left the little convenience store in his exhaust fumes. You’re going to kill them both anyway. Hell, you should have already fucking done it. Would make the drive less risky. Sure as hell make it easier to haul their bodies into the basement, where they would be dissolved into barrels of lye and simply poured down the reinforced drainpipes.
But of course Rhett didn’t want to risk Diego seeing him kill them right outside the damn store. Mercy and Cari were insurance, and although Diego would suspect Rhett wasn’t going to let them walk away alive, Diego would have to believe there was still a chance.
Enough of a chance that a cold-hearted Zeta killer like Diego Vargas would risk his own ass to save a woman with a kid that wasn’t even his?
Logic said no fucking way.
But that strange wrenching in Rhett’s heart said yes, like maybe he’d felt something in the way Diego had reacted when Mercy and Cari got taken, a subconscious signal that Diego wasn’t going to let this mother-daughter combination end up as collateral damage, just two more casualties of whatever private war Diego thought he was fighting.
Rhett’s mind had settled as the black Suburban glided onto the freeway. The license plates were covered with black leather, and along with the tinted windows, it would be clear to any cop or trooper in the DC-Baltimore area that this was a government agency car and was not to be pulled over. His hostages stirred in the backseat but weren’t struggling. And so Rhett had relaxed, pulled off his silk mask, run his fingers through his hair, drifted the Suburban into the fast lane as his mind drifted back to Diego’s CIA dossier.
And something stood out in Rhett’s photograph-precise memory.
A snippet from Diego’s Mexican Special Forces file.
Something about Diego’s family being murdered by one of the Cartels. Retaliation for the government using the military against the Cartel. There were no further details about the killing or about whether Diego himself had been present at the time. But there was one detail that Rhett remembered with scintillating clarity.
Diego’s family.
A wife and a child.
A mother and a daughter.
Rhett had almost swerved into the grassy median as the synchronicity hit him like a slap to the face. Of course it was just coincidence, he told himself ferociously as he steered his mother-daughter cargo back onto the road. He’d pushed away that vivid image of Scarlet’s half-open eyes looking at him just like Indy’s wide-open orbs seemed to glare right into him. That dreadful wrenching pulled stronger behind his chest, tightening his throat as he gripped the wheel so hard his fingers hurt.
That’s when he’d noticed her blood on his knuckles. He’d been wearing those sheer medical-type transparent gloves, and Mercy’s blood had smeared against the latex, clotting and drying to form a curious circular shape that reminded Rhett of those Rorschach inkblot images the CIA used in their psychological testing—What do you see in this inkblot shape, Rhett Rodgers?
You see what you want to see, Rhett had told himself as he came up to his exit, slowing down and pulling off the highway and taking the county road towards his home. As he’d turned the steering wheel the street lamps cast splinters of shadowy light on the shape the blood-smear had formed on the translucent latex. It had startled Rhett, and he frowned and cocked his head.
The shape reminded him of something.
A circular motif, familiar because it had been on Rhett’s grandmother’s kitchen wall, right above the dining table. A standard artistic rendering of Mother Mary with Baby Jesus.