The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) Page 8

  The phone call was a long one because once training began at Fort Bragg, members of Delta Force were allowed no contact whatsoever with the outside world for three months. Security was paramount. Everything about Delta Force was secret, including the identity of its commandos.

  So it was with considerable surprise and concern that Kimberlain found himself called to the commander’s office to receive a message some weeks later. None of the men knew the commander’s name, only that he was a short, powerfully built man who never smiled or gave slack. That day was the first time Kimberlain had seen any expression on his face.

  “There’s been some trouble,” he reported. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Your parents were killed.”

  Not “are dead,” Kimberlain remembered noting in his mind. “Were killed.”

  “I can arrange for you to attend the funeral.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Normally, leaving base would mean the end of Delta Force duties, but, damn it, I knew your father. The Army owes him enough to arrange an exception.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir.”

  Of course his father wouldn’t have wanted any such exception for him, would have preferred that he not leave the base at all to attend the funeral. His father was not a sentimental man. Duty first and foremost; duty always. But Kimberlain knew he had to leave the base to find out what had really happened out there in the California desert where his parents had died.

  Were killed.

  The phrase stuck in his mind. Kimberlain found out the truth little by little, piecing together fragments of the story. Apparently his parents were touring California in their recently purchased RV when mechanical problems forced them to pull over. His father must have stubbornly insisted he could fix it himself, and the problems had dragged on past nightfall, when the aging couple became prey to a gang of bikers who decided to expropriate the RV for themselves. Shots were exchanged, and by all accounts his father had put up an incredible fight. But in the end the sheer number of the bikers had won out, and both his parents were killed. The bikers left the RV behind.

  Kimberlain had been given the day of the funeral plus two additional days leave from the base. At the grave site he ignored the clichéd phrases of the unknown minister and focused his thoughts instead on what had consumed him since he first heard the story back at Bragg. There had to be a fitting retribution here.

  A payback.

  At the end of the funeral the local sheriff asked if there was anything he could do.

  Jared said as a matter of fact there was.

  The sheriff was a flabby man whose heart showed on his face. He told Kimberlain that the bikers were based in Barstow and hung out in a bar only those meeting their approval could enter. Kimberlain had smuggled a .45 off Bragg in his duffel, and if he needed more than twelve bullets to finish the job, he deserved whatever fate awaited him.

  The plan he would use developed quickly. He remained in the civilian suit he had worn to the funeral and pulled a cap over his standard Army haircut. He rented a huge Lincoln at the nearest Hertz, paying cash for the monster that was necessary for his plan. He drove to the bikers’ bar on a recon mission and from the outside found it packed with an unruly crowd of leather-clad drunkards and roisterers. Judging that it would be at least midnight before the crowd began to disperse, Jared bided his time.

  He left a half hour ahead of the first group and drove south. All the bikers lived in a housing development just off Route 15, and Jared picked a spot in the meager spill of a streetlight to pull over and jack up his car, yanking a rear tire off as if it were flat.

  Dozens of bikes flew by him without stopping. A few slowed. Obscenities were shouted. Kimberlain started to consider what he might do if the night finished this way, but he didn’t have to consider long when seven of them pulled up. They had driven by initially, then circled back.

  “We help ya any, mister?” a big, bearded biker offered.

  In the darkness Kimberlain made himself look uneasy. “No, it’s okay. Just about finished.” And he started to roll the tire back onto the wheel.

  “No,” said another, moving forward to hold it in place. “We gotta insist. See, it’s part of our code to help strangers. Kinda gives us a good name in the town.”

  “Oh, well … “

  The biker slid the tire from his grasp, while the others rested their bikes on kickstands. Kimberlain moved slowly away. A big man can conceal his quickness more easily than a small one, mostly because looking at him you don’t judge him to be quick. He looked about warily, sure to place the right amount of fear and uncertainty in his eyes.

  The bikers were smiling at him. Two of them were twisting the lug nuts into place now, belching regularly.

  Kimberlain felt the biggest one of all coming up on him from behind. He knew the biker was going for a grasp and let him.

  “Okay, fucker,” a beer breath voice rasped in his ears. “You’re ours.”

  Kimberlain kicked his legs and thrashed a little. The other bikers stalked forward, led by an acne-scarred one with sunglasses and a ring dangling from a chain around his neck.

  “What you reckon this car’s worth, Mo?” the big one holding Kimberlain asked the acne-scarred one.

  “Don’t know for sure. Twenty maybe, Ax.”

  “Bet we could get fifteen no questions.”

  “Make up for the weekend,” another said, but that wasn’t what spurred Kimberlain into action. It might have before too many more seconds were up, because it was on Saturday that his parents had been killed. But his eyes had focused on the ring the ugly one named Mo had on his neck chain, and a chill like none he could ever remember went through him.

  It was his father’s wedding band.

  What happened next must have seemed impossible to the bikers, because there was Ax, the biggest of them all, being hoisted up and over the stranger’s shoulders and hurled onto the Lincoln’s roof. The thud hadn’t even sounded when the stranger’s hand lashed out toward Mo, who was backing up. Mo saw the blur and felt his air choked off as his neck chain was twisted round his throat and knotted so he couldn’t untangle it.

  As Ax slid unconscious from the dent he’d left in the Lincoln’s roof, the others went into motion. But they’d already lost one step to hesitation and another to beer, facing a crazed whirlwind who was never in the same spot long enough to see.

  Kimberlain killed the next two with his bare hands, using Special Forces techniques that had always impressed him with how easy it was to bring on death. He didn’t draw the .45 from the holster on his hip until he saw the first of the bikers show their pistols. A single shot for each, and then two for the one staggering for the sawed-off shotgun strapped to his bike.

  He left Ax there on the road to wake up and find the bodies of his fellows. There had to be someone left to tell the story of what had happened. The best paybacks were the ones that didn’t stop paying back.

  And on that night, Kimberlain supposed, the Ferryman had been born.

  He drove off without giving the bikers another look, frightened not of the consequences he had been resigned to face from the start, but of the feeling that had surged through him during this first payback.

  He had enjoyed it. And later perhaps, after his encounter with Peet in the hospital, it was the memory of that feeling that had brought him back to the paybacks and kept him there.

  He had proceeded to drive the Lincoln straight to Fort Bragg, where he turned himself in to the MPs and confessed. Military jurisdiction won out, and he was placed in the stockade to await summary court martial. Hanging was a very real possibility, or life in the stockade at the very least.

  He made himself endure those first weeks prior to the trial, but the pain of it eliminated any question of his accepting Kamanski’s offer. He was being given a second chance, and this time he would make it work. He would lose his emotions in his deadly skills and abilities.

  As one of The Caretakers.

  He liked the anonym
“Ferryman” and promised himself to live up to it. His first two years were not marred by a single mission failure. He lived and breathed on raw, animalistic action. Each Caretaker had a specialty, and his was killing. He was ruthless and obsessed with the assignments that Hermes brought him from Zeus. All those chartered for passage across the River Styx completed their journey. He knew the other side very well and enjoyed returning from it alone and successful.

  Like Charon in his passages.

  A comment from a stewardess brought Kimberlain out of his musings, and he went back to the file opened on the tray table before him.

  Upon his death, Burton Eiseman’s struggling TLP Industries was inherited by his three children. Two sons, Thomas and Peter, and his only daughter, Lisa. Company was named for first initials of his children, from youngest to oldest. The sons had no interest in taking over the business, so Lisa took charge.

  Her first task was to deal with a hostile takeover attempt by the Wally Toy Company, then the nation’s largest. TLP board of directors was split on the decision, resulting in a boardroom struggle. By quirk of company charter, Lisa Eiseman was able to dissolve the board and appoint herself acting president and chairperson. Risked financial ruin and almost certain bankruptcy. Cash flow was reduced to nothing. Strikes were threatened, initiated, then quickly and miraculously resolved by Lisa Eiseman personally. Details not available. Shortly thereafter financing was received from an unknown source for interactive POW! project. Discovery perfected and patented. With buy-out of Wally Toys, TLP Industries has emerged as the most successful toy manufacturer in the country.

  Kimberlain struggled to read on, but once again he found his thoughts wandering.

  Something had changed during his final year with The Caretakers. It had happened gradually, and slowly became something much more complex than burnout. It started, he guessed, with his discovery of the existence of a network of assassins called the Hashi. Despite the evidence Kimberlain brought to him, Zeus refused to sanction their pursuit, and that refusal had started Kimberlain thinking. What came into his mind wasn’t pleasant.

  He had survived and excelled as the Ferryman because he was able to tap into the same raw reserves called upon that night against the bikers in Barstow. He was the master of his emotions, and he used them as he did any other weapons. Pursuit of the Hashi seemed an extension of his role. When Zeus failed to see it that way, Kimberlain realized the truth: he was a hired killer and nothing more. His performance was unaffected, but inside he began to seethe.

  His final assignment ended in the confirmation of all his fears. After a successful mission in the jungles of Central America he was abandoned: Zeus opted not to send in a retrieval team, leaving him stranded, and he emerged from the jungle three weeks later more animal than man. His three-year term was up, but the Ferryman wasn’t finished. His own abandonment led to further realization of the folly of his pursuits. To destroy evil he had become evil. Moreover, it was clear that Zeus was escalating his projects and his power. The Caretakers had become dangerous. By alerting the proper authorities, Kimberlain forced the issue. Having their existence revealed in the wrong Washington quarters was more than The Caretakers could take. They were dissolved as quietly as they had been formed. Zeus was plugged into an innocuous security position so the government could keep him under its thumb.

  As for Kimberlain, Kamanski’s assurances that he would never have to worry financially turned out to be true enough, but that was the only area in which he felt secure. He found himself tense and uncomfortable in the presence of others. His paranoia drove him to the woods, where he built cabins to pass the time. With a pair constructed, he started up his hobby of restoring old weapons. Perhaps he could restore the feeling of more civilized times by absorbing the energy of the noble warriors who had wielded them.

  None of it worked. He couldn’t sleep at night and spent long lonely hours seated in a totally dark room watching the same movies over and over again on television. He desperately missed the action of the field and the purpose it provided him. Despite its falseness, it had at least provided a center for his life, and without that center he felt useless. He needed to feel worthy again; he needed to matter.

  The initial solution came to him quite by accident. A former Caretaker he had worked with had become a sheriff in Southern California. His Orange County district was being plagued by a series of stranglings, and he asked for the Ferryman’s help. Kimberlain was reluctant at first, but taking up the chase enabled him to employ the skills he so sorely missed. Now he was in control. His work resulted in the strangler’s capture, and his reward was a deeper understanding of himself. He was a hunter, and a hunter needed to hunt. He began working on his own, uninvited, to track down the most loathsome and offensive of criminals. By the time Kamanski came to him about Peet he had been successful in all but one of his pursuits—finding the man who was doubtless the most devastating killer of them all. A man named Dreighton Quail, known better as the Flying Dutchman.

  Kimberlain had stalked the stalker of the nation’s highways and gotten close—but never close enough. Quail, the giant with no face, was still out there. The fire that obliterated his face had started a rampage that ultimately claimed over a hundred lives.

  And Peet too might still have been free if not for him. To track down these most monstrous of criminals he had to enter their thoughts, and even before Peet, the hate was telling on him. He had thought that tracking them down would somehow vindicate him for his actions as a Caretaker. Yet their victims were just as dead as his were. He lay in the hospital those long weeks after his encounter with Peet and considered the track his life was on, no longer satisfied with it. Everything was death; his entire existence was defined by it. Nothing had changed and nothing would until he found a way to breathe life back into himself. Through others who lacked a vent for their own hate.

  And the paybacks began. Slowly at first, until word leaked out and he was flooded with more requests man he could fill. There was no way to reach him except a post office box. But word continued to spread. People with a need for his services always seemed able to find him, and he helped them because the process allowed him to help himself. How many lives had he taken or destroyed as a Caretaker? Kimberlain hadn’t counted back then, just as now he didn’t count the specific number of people helped by his paybacks. He knew there was a balance to be achieved, and he would feel it when it was reached. Until then, the paybacks would continue.

  But for now there was Lisa Eiseman and a stubborn resolve to keep her alive. From the first of Peet’s letters he had begun to feel there was something here that would lead him to the greatest payback of all.

  Beyond the window, Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport sharpened in view.

  Chapter 10

  “IF THERE’S NOTHING ELSE, I’ll see you all at the demonstration in one hour,” Lisa Eiseman said to close the meeting. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The eleven department heads who reported to her waited for the chief executive of TLP Industries to rise before easing their chairs back. The gesture was born out of respect for a person they could call a friend as well as an employer. In fact, everyone from the workers at the company’s Atlanta headquarters to the assemblers in four factories across the country to the drivers who trucked the finished products felt the same way. Lisa Eiseman had at one time or another shaken the hand of everyone who worked for her, and in that moment each had felt more than a simple grasp.

  They felt that she cared. About them. And in return their loyalty to the woman who sat in the president’s chair high within Peachtree Towers was fierce.

  It was into that chair she now settled after moving through the connecting door from the conference room to her office. She was exhausted. Weekly staff meetings were a necessity, if for no other reason than to reassure her department heads that she continued to maintain a keen interest in the goings-on within their individual domains. But these days that chore did not come easily, with
so many other concerns before her. She had never dreamed that success would bring the kind of complications she faced daily. Rising to the top had been great fun, a challenge at every step; but then the real work had begun. Finishing the day with a sense of accomplishment had always been something she treasured. Lately, though, she would leave the office too close to morning and bed down with the realization that far more had been put off than had been completed. The work just kept piling up, and her refusal to delegate authority allowed only the smallest dents to be made in the vast heap.

  Her intercom buzzed.

  “Yes, Amy?” Lisa said into the speaker built into the phone.

  “Mr. Kimberlain called again while you were in the meeting,” her secretary said.

  “Did you give him my message?”

  “Yes, and he said he was heading over here anyway.”

  “You mean he came down? To Atlanta?”

  “He called from the airport.”

  “Damn. I want you to leave word with security that he is not to be allowed entry to the building,” she said firmly. “Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll call downstairs immediately.”

  Lisa leaned back again, upset she had been so terse with her secretary. Amy wasn’t to blame for her problems, the most recent of which concerned the strange claims by this man Kimberlain, which angered more than frightened her. She had no time for fear.

  She looked around the room. This same office had been her father’s, and she had made no changes in it whatsoever since taking over the business. The oversized soft leather chair, which seemed ready to swallow her frame at any moment, the mahogany paneled walls with matching bookshelves and desk, the imported hardwood chairs and tables, even the paintings on the walls were all too masculine to suit her tastes. But they symbolized something she felt she needed to keep in touch with: her father’s life, and the business he had built and then allowed to tumble.