“Jesus Christ,” scowled Higgins, stomping closer to where Kismet stood, reeling. “What the fuck was that?”
“Car bomb,” murmured Kismet, feeling a fool for stating the obvious. “They booby trapped it. He tried to warn me.”
“They? Who the fuck are they?” And then, phrasing it so it sounded like a curse, the sergeant added: “Sir.”
“I don’t know.” Kismet’s answer was inaudible.
“Well we’re fucked good now, sir.” He jerked a thumb at the column of smoke that spilled up into the night sky. “That’s going to bring everyone within fifty klicks right down on top of us, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re down to three.”
“I noticed,” Kismet muttered. He turned away from Singh’s corpse, fixing the sergeant in his gaze, scouring his memory for the leadership skills he had been taught but never applied. When he spoke again, it was more forcefully. “I noticed, sergeant. Now get your shit together and let’s get moving. Those two can buddy up. You and I will carry Singh.”
He felt like a fraud for saying it, for using a command voice; he had never commanded men before. And as he watched Higgins’ face quivering with barely contained rage, he wondered if he had made a mistake. Higgins would blame him for this. He was the officer, the mission leader, and responsible for the lives of his subordinates.
An image of Hauser leering like a coyote flashed in his mind. No, he decided. I didn’t do this. Hauser had murdered Samir and his innocent children. Hauser’s men had rigged the car to blow.
You and I will eventually meet again…
In that instant, he knew that he would endure. For the sake of revenge, if nothing else, he would survive.
Perhaps Higgins saw that light of resolve igniting in Kismet’s eyes. Or maybe it was simply the product of his years of military discipline. Whatever the case, the Gurkha’s expression softened. He took a step toward Kismet, then knelt beside the shattered form of Singh. When he stood, he held the fallen man’s kukri.
Gripping the back edge of the broad blade between his thumb and forefinger, he extended the hilt toward Kismet. “When we lay him to rest, I’ll want this for his widow. Until then…”
Kismet accepted the knife, acutely aware of the honor Higgins was paying him. He held the blade out, contemplating its balance and the visible keenness of its edge. He then did something that flew in the face of his training. Bringing himself to attention, he saluted the sergeant.
Higgins stiffened respectfully and returned the salute, holding it until Kismet lowered his hand.
“Sergeant, I promise you that we’ll give it to her together.”
You and I will eventually meet again…
And that’s the day I’ll cut your heart out, you sick bastard.
But something else Hauser had said gnawed at him. It was a deeper mystery that he would have to solve before exacting his revenge, a conundrum that would supply impetus to his resolve to survive.
Both Samir and Hauser had known that it would be he, Nick Kismet, coming to supervise the defection. Both men had believed that Kismet would have a particular interest in the ancient — perhaps even holy — treasure unearthed in the ruins of Babylon. But Hauser had added one more dimension to the enigma.
Kismet, if I killed you, your mother would have my head.
Nick Kismet had never known his mother. The woman that had borne him into the world had vanished forever from his life mere moments after completing her labor. No memory or trace of her had remained to prove she ever existed, save for a healthy male child of indeterminate heritage, and a single word, written in the blood of her womb, in a language nearly forgotten; a word that translated alternately as luck, destiny and fate.
A word that had become his name.
Miracle
She came to the waters once a year, not on Christmas or Easter or any of the days reserved for Saints and their feasts, but always on the same day: the second Sunday of May.
Pierre Chiron had once asked his wife what significance that date held but her answer had been vague and insincere. He had not thought to press the issue then. It was on the occasion of her second pilgrimage, and he could not have imagined that her annual tradition would endure through so many turnings of the calendar. Though he did not share her faith, he had always secretly believed she would receive her miracle. Surely it was only a matter of bad timing. Later, when the years of her barrenness stretched out for more than a decade — when the best doctors in France, then Switzerland, and eventually New York pronounced over and again the same sentence with the same requisite apology — Chiron could not find it in his heart to ask again or to call into question her earlier response. By that time there were other questions hungry for answers.
Once, after too many glasses of Bordeaux, he had shaped his smoldering ire into words. “How can you continue to beg this God of yours for a miracle when he repeatedly denies you?” How can you continue to believe?
He was not angry with her, of course, and her answer absorbed all of his fire, tacitly excusing his outburst. “There is a veil between heaven and earth. We cannot always see clearly the will of the Divine. It may be that He is still testing me to see if my faith is strong enough to deserve such a reward.”
He did not want to relent in accusing her God for withholding the blessing of a child from this woman, his devout servant, while any common street whore, too lost in the delirium of a heroin fix to remember or care to employ a condom, might be graced with another bastard child, but her quiet certitude disarmed him, as it always did.
“Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was ninety years old when she conceived Isaac,” she had said, quietly repeating what she surely must have told herself every day. “Hannah, the mother of Samuel, wept openly before God for years, and He listened. I pray only that He will find me as worthy as those women.”
“Well,” he had harumphed, trying to step back from his argument without conceding the point. “If it takes until we are ninety years old, then I shall do my part and keep trying every night.”
Collette had kept trying as well, praying every day in the Basilique du Sacré Coeur and visiting the Massabielle Grotto at Lourdes once every year in May. She was 56 years old now. From a biological standpoint, there was no longer any reason to continue trying. Her menstrual blood had ceased to flow and most of the symptoms associated with the change of life had already abated. Perhaps not as old as ancient Sarah, he thought, but it will nevertheless take a miracle to give me a child.
Millions came to Lourdes every year looking for miracles, and many went away believing they had found them. The history of the place, insofar as the believers were concerned, was rich with divine acts of provenance. The first such blessing had occurred in 1858 when two young sisters had experienced a visitation while gathering firewood in a cave on the banks of the Gave River, just west of the garrison town of Lourdes. In the years that followed, one of the women continued to experience the presence of the Divine, at one point miraculously locating a spring, the waters of which possessed healing powers, at least for the faithful. It was to this holy place in the southwest Hautes-Pyrenees that Collette made her annual journey looking for just such a miracle.