Covenant A Novel

FIRST DISTRICT STATION

M STREET SW, WASHINGTON DC


Lopez leaned back in her chair as she watched Tyrell heft his way laboriously toward her between ranks of desks and computer terminals.

The station covered everything from New York Avenue in the north of First District right down to Buzzard Point and the old navy yard on the Anacostia River, which meant that Lopez got to see America in all its guises. From the immaculate White House down to the decrepit projects of East Side along the border with Maryland, America’s heart bared its soul. One hundred eighteen fatal homicides this year. Better than the last.

Tyrell’s phone began ringing before he’d even had the chance to sit down. She watched him pick it up wearily.

“Tyrell.” He paused, frowned, and sighed. “Be right there.”

Lopez looked at him as he set the phone down. “Problem?”

“We’ve been summoned,” he intoned deeply.

Lopez got up and followed him down a long corridor lined with partitioned offices. The Hall of the High and Mighty housed the district commander’s office. They turned at a door marked Powell, Tyrell knocking briefly before striding in.

“You beckoned?” he asked as Lopez closed the door behind them.

Captain Louis Grant Powell was a robustly built African American with a thick mustache that seemed to be trying to make up for his receding hairline. Lopez had often wondered why Powell, a long-service officer who had somehow never made it past the rank and file to the true upper echelons of the MPD, had never been promoted, despite bearing a name that made him sound like a confederate general.

“Sit down, Detectives.”

“Too kind.”

If Powell was ever amused by Tyrell’s laconic humor, Lopez never noticed it. It was a wonder he knew whom he was actually talking to, given that he had yet to look up from the file he was scrutinizing. The word in the locker room was that Powell was up for retirement and had invested in new real estate, down Tampa way. Lopez waited in silence with Tyrell, and was rewarded with a question as Powell looked up at her.

“The bust over on Potomac Gardens, what’s the score?”

“Alleged crack overdose, three victims locked themselves inside an abandoned property just off the projects.”

Powell closed his file and looked up at them both.

“Victims, alleged,” he echoed thoughtfully. “You sent the bodies down to the medical examiner’s office.”

Tyrell answered, saving Lopez from incriminating herself.

“I didn’t consider it likely that the victims were crack addicts.” Powell folded his hands under his chin expectantly, his jowls bulging as Tyrell went on. “I wanted the pathology before we wrote this one off.”

Captain Powell nodded briefly.

“Axel Cain at the Bureau, the MPD on site, and even the DEA consider it to be a closed case. They’ve acknowledged the discrepancies but see little point in referring it to the district attorney. I agree with them.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Lopez said carefully, “this isn’t a drug-related crime. Dr. Fry has confirmed that they didn’t die from crack.”

Powell smiled thinly at her, and looked at Tyrell.

“From what I’ve read, Surgeon Fry has been unable to determine the exact time of death, let alone the exact cause. Tyrell, this one’s dead in the water and I haven’t got the manpower or the time to allow either yourself or Lopez to run around the District on another wild-goose chase. The border with Maryland and Prince George’s has enough crack ’n’ meth addicts for the entire country. I’d lay down serious bucks that there’s another dozen stiffs out there waiting to be stumbled upon. This isn’t a priority case.”

Lopez watched as Tyrell sucked in his cheeks.

“Last time I looked, death under suspicious circumstances warranted our attention.”

“Not above greater needs,” Powell cautioned. “This country is still under a level-three terrorist alert, and I need officers and men to maintain a vigil against God knows who planning God knows what. This can be left to beat cops. If something comes up that they can’t handle, then I’ll send it back your way.”

Tyrell’s face twisted into the kind of smile that looked to Lopez as though he were trying to bend an iron bar with his lips.

“Local PD will take one look at those bodies and be glad to have swept them off the streets. I doubt a coroner would even glance at the paperwork before signing it off.”

“He probably didn’t,” Powell agreed.

“What?” Lopez and Tyrell asked in perfect unison.

“Recorded a verdict of misadventure.”

“We’ve got a crime scene here and we’re going to shut the door on it?”

“The door, Tyrell, is already shut,” Powell insisted.

“What if this is just a small piece of a bigger picture?” Tyrell pushed. “Those people were moved there after they died. If you give me just—”

“Just what?” Powell asked. “A few hours, a few days, a few careers? We haven’t got the resources for this right now. People die, Tyrell, sometimes for no other reason than their own damned stupidity. Let it go.”

Lopez watched as Tyrell took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. Powell tossed the file into his out box with a flourish as Tyrell hauled himself out of the chair in disgust, walking across to the door and opening it. Lopez got up to follow him. The open corridor beckoned, but she could see that Tyrell couldn’t help himself as he turned back to look over his shoulder at the captain.

“You remember 2000? Y’know, Y2K and all that?”

“My parents’ golden anniversary,” Powell replied without looking up.

“An FBI agent reported high numbers of people attempting to acquire pilot’s licenses in local schools down in Florida. He reported back to the Barn in DC several times, documenting what they were doing and rating the activities as highly suspicious and worthy of extensive resources. He got turned down.”

“Your point?” Powell muttered, finally looking at Tyrell.

“The people he was watching hijacked four American airliners a year later, and killed over three thousand American citizens.”

Powell winced. “Tyrell, your three dead bodies aren’t going to become a national incident no matter how much you might want them to be.”

Tyrell shook his head. “I’m sure that’s what they said back in 2000.”

Before Powell could retort, Tyrell lumbered out of the office. Lopez made to follow him.

“One moment, Detective,” Powell rumbled.

Tyrell glanced back at her, a glimmer of suspicion crossing his features, and then she closed the office door and sat back down opposite Powell.

“He’s onto something,” she insisted.

“Jesus, not you as well?”

“What’s your problem with Tyrell? Why reject everything he says?”

“Because most of it’s bullshit,” Powell said sharply, and then visibly reined himself in. “You haven’t worked with him all that long. Tyrell’s desperate for the big bust and he’s been looking for it for years.”

“C’mon, he’s just willing to look a little further than most all cops working homicide.”

“He looks too goddamn far into everything,” Powell shot back. “He’s been up in front of a committee three times in the past four years for misappropriation of resources, chasing everything from Russian spy networks, JFK conspiracies, and the friggin’ Illuminati. For all I know, he thinks the Apollo landings were faked. Commissioner Devereux’s nearly suspended him twice.”

Lopez’s train of thought changed track. “You sayin’ he’s on an agenda or something?”

Powell ran a hand over his face as though rubbing the fatigue from his body.

“You ever been to the Big Apple?”

“Not yet.”

“You ever do, make sure you visit Ground Zero and the memorial there.”

Lopez’s skin felt suddenly cold in the breeze from Powell’s desk fan.

“The attacks?” she asked, and was rewarded with a quiet nod.

“Tyrell lost his wife and both of his daughters in the attacks and his brother to drugs two years later,” Powell said. “He’s been on the warpath ever since, no matter how carefully he thinks he disguises it.”

“How’d they get caught up in it?” she asked, as gently as possible.

“Amelie Tyrell had family out in Boston,” Powell explained. “She’d traveled to visit them while Tyrell was working in Maryland. She took their daughters with her, Ellen and Macy. Tyrell knew nothing of what had happened until he returned home; it was only supposed to be an overnight stay. They died on the return flight home.”

“He doesn’t talk about it,” Lopez admitted, feeling strangely disappointed that Tyrell hadn’t confided in her, and then guilty for having thought that he should.

“The investigations and commissions all found failings in the intelligence community to prevent the attacks, and that’s what put a rocket up Tyrell’s ass,” Powell said. “He knows that the towers were dropped by suicidal lunatics from another country, but now he can’t help but see neglect and conspiracies wherever he goes.”

Lopez rubbed her temples. “Why you tellin’ me this?”

“Keep an eye on him, okay? He’s a good detective, but he needs a balance.”

“I’m not his mother. If he decides to go after something, he’s not going to turn around and ask for my permission.”

“No, but he asks for your advice,” Powell countered. “Make sure you give it to him, but if he goes off the range, then you make damned sure you come back here and tell me.”

“You’re asking me to spy on him,” Lopez said. “He’s my partner.”

“I can’t afford to lose either of you right now, especially not on another one of Tyrell’s goddamn conspiracies. That clear?”

Lopez stood from the desk and turned to leave.

“That clear?” Powell repeated.

Lopez hesitated at the door and sighed. “Clear.”





WADI AL-JOZ

WEST BANK, OCCUPIED PALESTINE


The darkness changed shape.

From a deep and featureless blackness came distant textures, touching her skin and caressing her hair. Slowly, the fragments of her awareness began reassembling themselves one by one as they tumbled from the abyss.

She opened her eyes, but could see nothing. Her limbs and back ached and she tried to move, but she was bound firm. Her throat was parched, and for one terrible moment the belief that she had been buried alive injected panic into her synapses. She fought to free herself, and a gasp erupted from between her cracked lips as she squirmed.

A noise came from the darkness somewhere to her right, and she fell silent and still. She turned her head, the stiffened muscles in her neck protesting at the movement. Beside her a thin muslin sheet hung from a tall rail, like a hospital shroud. She could see that she was lying on a bed, her limbs tied down with canvas straps as though she were an incarcerated psychotic patient.

She looked down at her body and saw an intravenous line in her right arm, and from the dull ache she guessed that it had been there for some time. Where was she? What was happening to her?

Another noise, like two pieces of metal being tapped together, then a voice whispering softly in the darkness.

Through the muslin she could see a ghostly light. The orb was intermittently broken as a shadow passed back and forth before it, and she could hear the sound of soft footfalls and a rhythmic beeping.

Through her confusion and fear, the tiniest flame of hope flickered into life. This could be a hospital. But the darkness and the stale smell in her nostrils seemed out of place, even if this were Gaza or the West Bank. Where were the nurses? Could it be nighttime, hence the darkness? Gaza suffered regular blackouts due to the Israeli blockade. But then, why was she in Gaza?

Fragments of memory spiraled like falling stars through the field of her awareness, briefly illuminating the spaces in her mind before passing on into the darkness. The dig site. She remembered the magnificent specimen, her efforts to retrieve it before … before …

A flare of recall jolted her. The men who had burst into the site. Balaclavas, black clothes, rough and heavy hands. She recalled running, being tackled from behind, pulling a bowie knife from her shorts and plunging it into the leg of one of the intruders before she was overpowered. Then something being placed over her face, and then blackness. Christ, what have I got myself into?

“Pulse is steady.”

The voice sounded close, scaring her. Her breathing rasped and she could feel her heart trying to thump its way out of her chest.

“Temperature is rising, seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit.”

A figure moved past beside her, the muslin sheet rippling in the draft and parting slightly. Perhaps fifteen feet away was a metal gurney, upon which lay the naked form of a man.

Tubes protruded from his body and she could see his chest rising and falling in slow rhythm, but she could not quite make out his features. An intravenous line rose up to a saline bag suspended above his head, and a series of monitors were arranged behind him recording heartbeat and body temperature. Beside him stood a video recorder on a tripod, aimed at the gurney.

“Seventy-seven degrees.”

As she watched, she could see another intravenous line coiling out from the man’s left arm, an almost black fluid passing through it. The rhythmic beeping from the machines was slowly increasing in tempo and the body was showing vague signs of movement, crooked fingers twitching sporadically.

“Seventy-nine degrees.”

She squinted as she tried to see what was on the monitors, but they were too far away. The figure obscured the screens, leaning over the body to examine it closely.

“Will this one survive?” the voice murmured rhetorically, as though speaking to itself.

A chill rippled down her spine.

“Let us pray that he does. Eighty degrees.”

She turned her head and began twisting her wrists back and forth, seeking a weakness in her bonds. The straps were tight, but her wrists were narrow and her hands small. If she could just fold her hand slightly and tuck her thumb in, she might be able to squeeze it through the straps.

She tried first with her right hand, but the pain from the intravenous line in her arm scared her, so she tried with the other. She forced her thumb inward, twisting and pulling against the strap. The thick canvas scraped against her skin, but she felt the edge slipping. Encouraged, she pulled harder, rolling her wrist into a better position before pulling again. The strap slipped farther over her hand, crushing it. She gritted her teeth together, dominating the pain and taking a deep breath before pulling hard.

The strap slipped across her hand and then it jerked free. She clenched her hand a few times before reaching across and loosening the strap on her right wrist.

“Eighty-one degrees.”

She sat up in the bed, looking down at the intravenous line in her arm. She reached down to begin easing it free when a strange, unearthly sound caught her attention. It was a distant, feeble whimper, as though someone were crying out for help from deep underwater.

“He’s coming round.”

She leaned toward the gap in the muslin sheet, watching as the figure, wearing a white doctor’s coat, stood back from the body on the table. The body quivered, a shuddering that seemed as though the patient were suffering some kind of seizure.

“Pulse is good,” the voice said again. “Hypothermically viable.”

The body shivered again as though live current were bolting through the muscles. Another murmur came from deep within the chest cavity, infected with something that sent little insects of fear scuttling beneath her skin, the tones of an endless suffering freed at last.

The body jerked wildly and the man’s mouth opened as from within came a ghoulish cry of anguish, of a terror primal, pure, and undiluted that soared from its prison somewhere deep within him to fill the room.

The body flailed wildly, the man sobbing and screaming as he thrashed about on the table.

She saw the doctor reach across to a nearby table and grab a syringe, while struggling to hold the flailing patient’s arm and get the needle into a vein, but the man was fighting with insane strength, screaming all the while.

“Can you hear me?”

The doctor’s voice interrupted the screams, and in the half-light she saw the crazed patient staring wide-eyed at him, blubbering incoherently, his face stained with tears and his eyes filled with something incomprehensible that caused her bowels to lurch in sympathy. A gabbling torrent of unintelligible noise fell from the man’s mouth amid a stream of bile and spittle. His eyes wobbled in their sockets, limbs jerking frantically in the doctor’s grip.

“Can you hear me?” the doctor repeated.

The man began frothing at the mouth, choking on his own fluids as his head began slamming violently against the table with deafeningly loud cracks that reverberated around the room.

The surgeon stood up with the syringe in his hand, pinning one of the patient’s arms down on the table and jabbing the needle deep into the flesh. The patient continued to flail, and to her horror she saw him suddenly snapping his mouth open and shut. His teeth smashed together with loud cracks, a thick torrent of dark blood spilling across his lips as he crunched through his own tongue. In a moment of sheer terror she recognized the guide who had arrived at her camp, the Bedouin. Ahmed Khan.

Slowly, the sedative began to take effect, and the man’s insane thrashings rippled away until he sank back onto the table, his ruined tongue dangling by threads from his mouth and strings of blood drooling away toward the floor. The doctor released the body, the limbs dangling from the table at awkward angles.

“How disappointing,” he said into a voice recorder. “I shall dispose of him.”

A wave of panic flushed across her body and she reached down, grabbing the restraints around her ankles and yanking them free. As they parted the metal braces clattered loudly against the side of the bed. She sensed the doctor turn toward her and panicked further, yanking furiously at the other restraint.

It was almost free when the muslin sheet was whipped aside and the doctor lunged at her.

“No!”

She struck out, her left fist smacking into his temple, but her weakened muscles were no match for him. The doctor moved into view above her as he pinned her down, his features obscured by the light glowing from behind him so that she could not see his face.

“Not now, Lucy,” he said as though admonishing a wayward child. “Your chance to take the ultimate journey will come soon.”

Lucy Morgan watched as the doctor reached up and turned the valve on the intravenous drip in her arm.

“Let me go,” she begged weakly.

She saw the doctor smile, the shadows around his face creasing.

“Soon, I shall do just that,” he said. “And then you will be truly free.”

Lucy struggled against the man holding her down, looking at him with pleading eyes blurred with tears of fear and frustration as the room faded to black before her and the pain in her body drifted away into oblivion. With the last vestiges of her conscience, she heard the doctor speak into his voice recorder.

“I must hurry, and prepare her for surgery.”