Russell Blake
Upon a Pale Horse
About the Author
Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Chicago Tribune, Russell Blake is The NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of over thirty-five novels, including Fatal Exchange, The Geronimo Breach, Zero Sum, King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, Revenge of the Assassin, Return of the Assassin, Blood of the Assassin, Requiem for the Assassin, The Delphi Chronicle trilogy, The Voynich Cypher, Silver Justice, JET, JET — Ops Files, JET — Ops Files: Terror Alert, JET II — Betrayal, JET III–Vengeance, JET IV — Reckoning, JET V–Legacy, JET VI — Justice, JET VII — Sanctuary, JET VIII — Survival, JET IX — Escape, Upon a Pale Horse, BLACK, BLACK is Back, BLACK is The New Black, BLACK to Reality, and Deadly Calm.
Non-fiction includes the international bestseller An Angel With Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated), a parody of all things writing-related.
Blake is co-author of The Eye of Heaven and The Solomon Curse, with legendary author Clive Cussler. Blake’s novel King of Swords has been translated into German by Amazon Crossing, The Voynich Cypher into Bulgarian, and his JET novels into Spanish, German, and Czech.
Blake writes under the moniker R.E. Blake in the NA/YA/Contemporary Romance genres. Novels include Less Than Nothing, More Than Anything, and Best Of Everything.
Having resided in Mexico for a dozen years, Blake enjoys his dogs, fishing, boating, tequila and writing, while battling world domination by clowns. His thoughts, such as they are, can be found at his blog: RussellBlake.com
When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.
ONE
Flight
Keith stood in line with his fellow passengers, a procession of humanity that shuffled forward with the torpor of a giant multi-legged organism. At the head of the beast, two women checked boarding passes, studiously ignoring any hint of friendly contact as they scanned bar codes with company-issued courtesy smiles.
JFK airport was packed to capacity, in its usual state of chaotic frenzy in the early evening as travelers sought to escape New York, some finishing up their business days and flying back home, others just beginning their journeys. If Keith belonged anywhere in the scheme, it was in the latter group. He was tall, with a leonine head atop broad shoulders, brown hair with flecks of gray just beginning to appear at the temples. His piercing blue eyes scanned the backs of the boarding crowd as the jet that would take them to Rome was fueled and readied. If his fellow travelers had cared enough to evaluate Keith, they would have guessed him to be a tired businessman embarking on yet another trip to cut a deal.
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, clutching his eel-skin briefcase in one hand as he adjusted the shoulder strap of his carry-on bag with the other, regarding the boarding area with casual precision, scanning the faces of the few seated stragglers for any hint of suspicion. His eyes swept the area, but as far as he could tell, nobody was paying the slightest attention to him. He was anonymous, just another in the throng, unremarkable. Just as he’d hoped he would be. He’d gotten away clean.
The icy gray deluge continued from the sullen clouds roiling over the city, occasional gusts of wind slamming sheets against the heavy glass of the terminal. The ground crew wore slickers, loading baggage into the bowels of the plane as they hurried to finish their task and get back under shelter. The squall had blown in unexpectedly — yesterday had been sunny and crisp, as springtime in Manhattan could be. But overnight everything had changed, mirroring Keith’s mood, the turbulent front a fitting metaphor for the storm taking place in his brain.
“Good evening sir. Welcome aboard,” the gate attendant chirped at him with the sincerity of a well-trained parrot.
Keith didn’t reply. Instead, he nodded and hurried forward — only to be stalled by another line at the end of the jetway as passengers waited to board. Hurry up and wait, he mused, but then his thoughts turned to other, less mundane matters.
The flight had been booked online with a one-time use debit card drawn on a bank in Bermuda — an operational account he’d kept off the books from a trip five years ago. He’d been negotiating with a financier who’d been instrumental in laundering funds for the Agency, defining the terms of his disappearance just ahead of federal prosecution for bilking his investors out of billions in a Ponzi scheme that had ensnared the wealthy across the U.S. He’d had an oily charm to him, an ease to his manner and a labile fluidity with veracity that was sociopathic, if highly effective. But as much as he’d been useful for financial errands that couldn’t fly by Congress, his flamboyant lifestyle and lavish expenditures had finally caught up with him, and increasing numbers of his trusting investors had been demanding their money back. Keith’s job had been to figure out how to make him vanish, and to evaluate whether he could keep his mouth shut and find a new life in Malaysia, or become another notch on a wet team’s belt.
The financier hadn’t listened to reason, but the problem had ceased to be a concern when his sport-fishing boat had sunk off Panama, taking all hands with it. Keith didn’t question how that had been achieved — he’d merely done his job, signing off on the report that had sealed the banker’s fate. The details weren’t important, and Keith didn’t feel a trace of responsibility. He was an analyst, and he was paid to analyze, which is what he’d done, rendering a judgment based on experience and his take on the man’s stability, which wasn’t good. What the Agency did with the information wasn’t his problem. His job was to be right. And he was very good at it.
A stewardess greeted Keith at the jet door and directed him down the closest aisle to his row, just behind the expansive business class section, the exclusive pods roomy and lavish in comparison to his economy slot. He hefted his bags and pushed along, and experienced a momentary sense of unease he shrugged off.
Nobody was in business class — the area was unoccupied.
He stashed his carry-on in the overhead compartment and took his window seat, sliding the briefcase forward in front of his feet. Thankfully the flight looked only half full, if that. The online seating map had shown the spot next to him as being vacant on the Boeing 767, so at least he wouldn’t have to contend with a chatty companion for the seven hours it would take to get him to relative safety.
Safety.
He wondered at the innocuous word — how benign it sounded, the promise it offered — and wondered whether he’d ever be safe again. He’d covered his tracks as best he could, erasing any traces of his exploration into forbidden areas of the Agency’s database, a tribute to his ability to hack with the best of them — a skill that had been one of the primary reasons he’d been recruited fifteen years earlier. It had only been once his ability to predict had been noted by his superiors that he’d begun his career climb, ultimately becoming a special situations analyst, which was Agency parlance for a troubleshooter, a Jack of all trades. Keith was very smart, able to see things others missed, to assemble seemingly random variables into intelligible patterns, making sense out of the nonsensical. It had served him well, and he’d been a rising star in Langley, his future bright.