Chapter 1
“Prepped for entry.” Whispered words came through my earpiece. “Go ahead, Ms Bashir.”
I drew in a breath and punched out with the fused Rings, launching my will like a penetrating bolt. Across the alleyway, the rust streaked door flew off its hinges and spun into the yawning darkness. The rending sound of its impact hadn’t even died away when before the TNC security team swept in, weapons drawn.
A heartbeat later, with no resistance met and no shots fired, Sergeant Stewart cleared the point team to advance, then signalled for the rest of us to follow. I put my hand on Stewart’s taut shoulder as I’d been taught less than a week ago and followed him across the paved street and through the gaping portal I’d created.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom, but once they did, my skin prickled with horror. This safe-house had become a tomb.
In the first room three bodies were strewn across the floor and blood streaked the walls. Through doorways to my left and right were more scenes of carnage. The door straight ahead was only a foreboding shadow.
More bodies, more blood. Men and women lying on the floor or pitched against walls. Some were dressed in casual business attire, khakis and light polos, while others bore more traditional Gandoura or Djellaba of North Africa. Whatever their dress, all their clothing was stained with crimson drying to shades of black and brown, and every last one of them appeared to have been armed.
Later, the emotional impact of what I was seeing would haunt me, but what struck me now was how … conventional it all seemed.
We’d deployed to this corner of Morocco on word that a known Winterthür safe-house had experienced something strange and violent. Marks had insisted that this had to be Sark. Before I could too hard about it, I found myself on a chartered plane to Fes with a team of well-armed men.
Three hours in the air had given me just enough time to wrap my head around what was going on before being thrown into a jeep, then creeping along with the team through hot, dusty streets. I’d been prepping myself for a head to head with Sark, or at the very least seeing his ugly handiwork, but now – in a building full of corpses – I found myself perplexed. These people had been shot. Bullets weren’t Sark’s way.
“I don’t think…” I swallowed my words as Stewart raised a finger to his lips, his look stern.
“Sorry,” I mouthed. The frosty glare softened and the old soldier threw me a wink before looking in to see the rest of the building swept.
With a few sharp hand gestures, he left two of the secondary or “clean-up” team with me and took the other two with him. One manned the doorway while the other motioned for me to join him along an interior wall.
In the dim light, it was hard to make out who was who. It didn’t help that they all seemed to fit a similar type. Compact and muscular. None of them were big men – like Marcus was – except for maybe Stewart, who was more barrel-chested than the rest, but they all moved with purpose, power, and efficiency.
As I hunkered next to my assigned escort, his head swivelled back and forth, the barrel of his polymer combat rifle following his gaze. His hazel eyes took everything in with hawk-like intensity, his focus never wavered. Even when he caught me studying him, he spared me only a curt nod, eyes already moving on.
I could only wish my focus was so tight. Now that the initial rush was over, I had time to process the smell. The intel must have been good because the bodies were probably only hours old, but that also meant their smell was fresh. Sheer determination to not embarrass myself in front of the security team held the contents of my stomach in place, but it was touch and go until Stewart’s thick accent drawled in my ear.
“Right, let’s get this mess sort’d.”
The man at the outer door kept his vigil, but my guardian visibly relaxed, rising from his crouch to move to the doorway leading deeper into the building.
“Go ahead, mum.” He nodded towards the door.
I felt as though the blood-soaked walls were twisting down towards me as I stood, fighting to remain steady in spite of the vertigo. Nausea chewed at my stomach like a grumpy, old mutt. I managed a few steps before my foot caught on a body, sending me lurching against the bloody wall, hands out.
Pulling away, I looked down at my hands in horror.
“No worries, mum.” My escort fished something from one of his many trouser pockets. Before I realised what he was doing, something damp and soft pressed into my sullied hands. In the gloom, it looked suspiciously like a wad of fresh baby wipes.
“Really?” My nerveless fingers folded around the wet fabric. I gave him a crooked smile, the corners of my mouth trembling, and began to scrub the blood away.
“Soldier’s best friend.” He gave me a gap-toothed smile. “Next to spare ammunition, of course.” He stroked the extra magazines with affection.
“Thanks.” I looked my hands over, happy to see they were clean.
“Of course, mum.” He snatched up the used wipes and stowed them in what I hoped was a spare pocket.
“Ms Bashir,” Stewart’s voice was a guttural rumble in my ear. “Are you waiting for an invitation?”
Embarrassed, I moved through the doorway into a dimly-lit corridor at whose end was another door. As quickly as I dared, I crossed the intervening space, grateful not to stumble over any more corpses.
In the next, far larger, room, were several bodies pushed off to one side. Blackened streaks smeared the floor. The bodies here had been dead longer.
“... most likely they wanted to wait for the others,” one of the security team was saying to Stewart. “Let ’em get in and then mop up with a simple ambush.”
Stewart’s gaze probed the floor and pile of corpses until my guardian spoke up.
“Might be for in here, but not up there.” He pointed a gloved hand back the way I’d come. “Bodies and bullet holes being what they are points to that lot having a bloody shootout.”
The one who’d first been talking nodded, his brow knitting. “They’re the fresher batch.”
“Exactly.” All eyes turned to Stewart, who frowned.
I stood outside the ring of armed men, not sure of protocol, much less what insight I could offer. Everything just looked like slaughter to me.
“Ms Bashir?” Stewart didn’t look at me. ‘“What do you make of it?”
Expectant stares pressed down on me. Swallowing roughly, I forced myself not to look at a patch where flies seethed, droning cheerily to one another. “Whatever happened here, it wasn’t Sark.”
“No?”
The question was asked without malice or accusation, but it wrong-footed me all the same.
“The uh … the bodies,” I gulped. “They’ve been shot. Sark wouldn’t need guns, and it probably would have been, uh … messier.”
Stewart’s team looked around pointedly, something like respect glinting in their steely looks.
“Damn place is messy enough,” one of them said.
“So what exactly happened here?” Stewart frowned, putting his hands on his hips. “The conflict looks internal, not external.”
A few of the team nodded, but my brows creased in confusion.
“I’m not following, sir,” I confessed.
“It’s Sergeant, Ms Bashir,” he said in a slow, frosty tone. “I actually work for a living.”
The significance of this invisible line of courtesy was beyond me, but I dipped my head in respectful acknowledgement.
“My apologies, Sergeant. Can you help me understand what you meant by internal?”
Stewart opened his mouth, but my earpiece gave a warning click before a sharp voice came over the line.
“Sarge got a zed here, second floor.”
“Confirmed, on my way.” He moved toward a narrow set of stairs in the back of the room. “Let’s hope for answers.”
I watched him go, wondering if I was supposed to wait here or head back to the front room, when he glowered back at me.
“Double time, Ms Bashir, if you please,” the sergeant barked, pointing up the stairs. “Or the poor bastard will be dead before we get there.”
I didn’t miss the smirks on the team’s faces, but Stewart was a teddy bear compared to Adrian Shelton. Head up and my stride measured, I moved to the stairs.
The second storey was a single square room with large windows centred on each wall. There were two bodies by the southern window, one of the corpses maintaining a rictus grip on the lip of the windowsill.
Another form lay near the centre of the room where a member of security stood, weapon pointed down. Two tables fitted into an L shape stood behind the pair, bowing under the weight of monitors, computer towers, and printer-scanners. Scattered among the tangle of requisite wires and cords were several mobile phones, from modern smartphones to something that looked like a brick with an antenna attached. All was in disarray, and as we drew closer, I could see that they were covered in blood.
“Been secured?” Stewart paused two strides from a the body.
“Yes, Sarge.” A soldier inched back from the prone form, a woman in a khaki romper and hiking boots. “She took a few, then hit her head when she fell.”
Three roses of blood bloomed on her chest. Her skin was washed out and waxy, in stark contrast to the pink stains smeared down one corner of her mouth. Her lifeless eyes contemplated the ceiling, and despite knowing the kind of people she worked for, I wondered who this woman was and what her life could have been if she hadn’t been shot.
“So what makes her a ‘zed’?” I asked, doing my best to say the word just as I’d heard it.
The woman’s corpse gave a rattling cough, frothing at the corner of her mouth before the eyes slowly swung toward my face.
I lurched backward, heart bursting into a gallop, my rings raised in defence.
“That,” Stewart snorted, pleased. He squatted next to the mostly mostly-dead woman, snapping his fingers to draw her gaze.
“What happened?” he asked in a soft, neutral voice.
The woman’s mouth worked a few times, strange clicking and sucking sounds issuing forth. She took a slow breath and coughed again, this time hard enough to twist herself onto her left shoulder. Stewart slid back a step, while the soldier slid forward, but the only danger was the woman smearing the sergeant’s boots as she retched and hacked.
She fell back, chest heaving one shuddering breath after another. She was still looking at Stewart, but her eyelids had slid to half-mast.
Stewart frowned and was halfway through repeating his question when her lips twisted into a lopsided smile full of red teeth.
“The beginning,” she wheezed, her voice low. “We are the first martyrs of the new age.”
Stewart looked at me, eyebrow raised in question, but I barely managed to shrug. Something compelling and disturbing glimmered in the woman’s fading gaze.
“Do you work for Winterthür?” Stewart asked.
A smile spread across the woman’s features, all the more ethereal for her unnatural pallor. Her gaze wandered back to the ceiling, and for a long moment, I thought she’d breathed her last.
“I am a slave no more!” she gasped, her neck arching as her body trembled. “I’ve been set free.”
Stewart’s scowl deepened, but when he spoke, his voice was the same gentle prodding.
“Who set you free?”
She looked past Stewart, her neck craning with an unsettling, almost puppet-like motion, to look directly at me. The smile widened maniacally until I thought her face might split. I recognised the look in her eyes now, and I felt something icy slide into my belly. This was fanaticism. The woman was a zealot.
“The Untarnished King,” she croaked. “He who was and He who has come again!”
Every hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and gooseflesh rippled across my arms despite the stuffy air. I wanted to run, to hide, but I stood transfixed by the madwoman’s dying stare.
“Ninurta returns, and He will make all things new! We have begun the holy work, but He will see it done. Those who stand in the way will join the forgotten dead!”
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