Expiration Date

  Praise for

  Expiration Date

  “With bravado and compelling prose, Eric Wilson is set to leave his mark on the world of fiction.”

  —TED DEKKER, best-selling author of Thr3e and Black

  “Eric Wilson is a great addition to the ranks of Christian novelists. His exploration of God’s hidden workings and how they invade human lives is as needed as it is fun to read. Enjoy the adventure in Expiration Date, but don’t miss its ultimate question. Well done, Eric!”

  —JEFFERSON SCOTT, author of Operation: Firebrand—Deliverance

  “Eric Wilson is creating his own genre: one part factual history, one part present-day fiction, along with a potent dash of spiritual conflict. With plot twists and revelations that will make you hungry for the next chapter, Expiration Date is more proof that Eric Wilson and his unique storytelling style are here for the long haul. This book will leave you wondering how he comes up with such great stories—and how long we have to wait for the next!”

  —ALISON STROBEL, author of Worlds Collide

  “Expiration Date was more than a great read. I experienced this powerful story with the characters, my stomach knotting with each riveting plot twist. Eric Wilson is a master at weaving an intricate tale in which the stakes rise at every turn. Just when I thought I knew what to expect, another level of this multi-layered story would reveal even greater spiritual proportions than I first realized. Because of Expiration Date, Eric Wilson is now one of my favorite writers. I can’t wait to see what’s next from this talented novelist!”

  —TRICIA GOYER, author of From Dust and Ashes and Night Song

  “With Expiration Date, Eric Wilson sets the bar even higher than he did with his debut novel, Dark to Mortal Eyes. Like a classic Hitchcock hero, Clay Ryker is an ordinary man caught in an extraordinary situation that forces him to risk everything to save his wife and child and even his own life. With a premise that won’t let go of you, Eric Wilson builds a story that twists and turns and keeps you going until the final, explosive climax.”

  —STEVEN WOMACK, Edgar Award–winning author of By Blood Written

  “Expiration Date is a first-rate thriller that provides page after page of skillful plots and subplots that climax in an electrifying conclusion. Eric Wilson is a masterful storyteller who writes top-drawer fiction on the level of Robert Ludlum.”

  —HAMP MORRISON, publisher, Nashville Christian Family Magazine

  EXPIRATION DATE

  PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS

  2375 Telstar Drive, Suite 160

  Colorado Springs, Colorado 80920

  A division of Random House, Inc.

  Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. Also quoted: the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Eric Wilson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  WATERBROOK and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, Eric (Eric P.)

  Expiration date : a novel / Eric Wilson. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55131-3

  1. Serial murders—Fiction. 2. Precognition—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.I583E98 2005

  813’.6—dc22

  2005001644

  v3.1

  In cherished memory of

  Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone)

  and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)

  Dedicated to:

  Carolyn Rose,

  your soothing voice convinces me to never stop feeling;

  Cassie Rose and Jackie Renee,

  your fashion and music tips remind your dad to stay in touch.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: The Devil’s Work

  Part One

  1: Haunted

  2: A Part to Play

  3: Dirty Little Secrets

  4: The Envelope

  5: A Stubborn Leech

  6: Dying Breed

  7: Wrestling with Angels

  8: A Basic Slab

  9: Another Note

  10: Bad News

  11: Discoveries and Decoys

  12: No Turning Back

  Part Two

  13: The Deception

  14: Spymaster

  15: Friends and Foes

  16: The Stone Figurine

  17: In the Wreckage

  18: Under Pressure

  19: The Creature

  20: Dog Day Afternoon

  21: On the Wrong Track

  22: Skin to Skin

  23: A Pilgrimage

  24: The Least of These

  25: Double Meaning

  26: Bad Call

  27: At Long Last

  28: The Below World

  Part Three

  29: Two Things

  30: In the Bunker

  31: Forgotten

  32: A Lifeline

  33: Preposterous Claims

  34: Back for Revenge

  35: Under Observation

  36: Three Numbers

  37: The Color of Blood

  38: Downriver

  39: Clay’s Choices

  40: Up the Crooked Stairs

  Part Four

  41: No Physical Proof

  42: Tmu Tarakan

  43: The Switch

  44: Midnight

  45: In Touch

  46: The Backseat

  47: Speaking to the Dead

  48: Digging Deeper

  49: Collision Course

  50: Water and Flame

  Epilogue: A Confession

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Life is a coin toss, flipping us end over end. Some believe we come down on the side of free will, able to choose our own futures. Others think we land on the side of fate, filling our roles in a sovereign scheme. But what if, in a divine twist, we find ourselves balanced on the edge of the coin? In Expiration Date, I want to explore earth’s tension between heaven and hell. Fiction is a tool. With it, I hope to climb high, to dig deep. Join me in this adventure. Together let’s uncover hidden things.

  I will open my mouth in parables,

  I will utter hidden things.

  PSALM 78:2, NIV

  PROLOGUE

  The Devil’s Work

  Russian-Finnish Border, August 1917

  A curse? He rejected the notion.

  As the train lurched through the night, the revolutionary scraped his finger along the object in his pocket. Like skin clawed from an enemy’s throat, sooty residue peeled from the oak tube and pushed beneath his thumbnail.

  He smiled. By finding it, his agents had defied all superstitions.

  This tube and its contents had once belonged to that lecherous priest, Rasputin. After conniving his way into the Russian Tsars’ graces with promises to heal their hemophiliac son, Rasputin had died last December. Poisoned with potassium cyanide, shot by a Browning revol
ver, he’d risen demon-like from the cellar floor of Moika Palace and chased his attackers outside. They had overpowered him. Shot him again. Then shoved his body through a hole in the frozen Neva River.

  Yet his lunacy continues to guide the Tsars! The weak fools.

  The locomotive ascended a steep grade. The bulbous smokestack angled upward, and moonlight slid down the gleaming ironworks.

  “Feed the fire,” the engineer yelled at him.

  He pushed the tube deeper into his pocket. “Of course. Da.”

  With stout arms, he lugged wood from the tender car to the boiler. Flames raged and steam howled in stark contrast to the icy air at his back.

  More firewood … Grrunt.

  Sparks … Pa-hissh!

  Trees thickened alongside the railway, and the revolutionary imagined they were fellow conspirators gathering to conceal him. He hated to leave St. Petersburg, but it was a necessary detour. Since 1914, German bullets and bayonets had killed Russians by the thousands, and recent government documents had put his own life in jeopardy by calling him a traitor, an agent of the kaiser. Wisdom dictated that he cross the frontier into Finland. From hiding, he would rebuild his base of Bolshevik support and reconfirm his allegiance to Mother Russia.

  The revolutionary hefted another armload of wood … Grrunt.

  Soon he would return to this place … Pa-hissh!

  And then he’d hammer the final nail into the coffin of imperialism. For too long, the Romanovs had trusted in icons and artifacts while peasants and paupers starved. The revolutionary’s own brother, Sasha, had resisted such injustice and later swung from a noose at Schlisselburg Fortress for his assassination attempt on a Tsar.

  You will not have died in vain, Sasha. This I promise you.

  “Astergaisya … Beware!” The engineer’s gestures broke through his thoughts.

  “What is it, comrade? We’re at the border already?”

  “Da. Please … pozhaluista. Keep yourself busy.”

  “Of course.” The revolutionary adjusted his stoker cap. “I’m a worker, simply doing my job. We must trust the disguise.” Underneath, he wore a blond wig to hide the thinning red hair of Konstantin Petrovich Ivanov—his name according to his forged factory pass.

  “Well then, get back to work.”

  As the engineer turned away, the revolutionary slipped the tube from his pocket. He could not risk its detection in the event he was searched; it held the key to relics and riches. He poked the object into a crevice between brass and iron, swiped a finger through grease at the base of the tender box, then molded the sludge over the hiding spot.

  He examined his work. Adequate for now.

  Brakes screeched, and the engine belched smoke as it dragged its load between Belo-Ostrov’s barbed wire and guard stations. Beneath light bulbs wearing misty halos, soldiers approached with hand signals and shouts.

  “Stay back,” the engineer said, “as I perform my duties.”

  The revolutionary nodded, pressing himself into the shadows while the engineer uncoupled the locomotive and guided them to a water tower. The tower’s belly burbled as it emptied into the boiler tanks. The revolutionary felt a matching uneasiness in his own gut, an atypical show of nerves.

  Again, he thought of Rasputin’s occultism and the alleged curse on those who tampered with the tube: “misfortune and grief to all but the innocent.”

  He snorted. Such nonsense still infested the Romanovs’ minds.

  “Papers!” A militiaman clomped up the steps and cast a hard eye at him. Slung over the shoulder of the wool uniform, a rifle pointed at the star-studded sky.

  “Here.” The revolutionary relinquished his pass. “The night is cold, nyet?”

  “Comrade Ivanov, you are a factory worker?”

  “At Sestroretsk, sir.”

  “Why then are you here? You’re also a stoker?”

  “I stay warm and get paid. I cannot complain.”

  The militiaman studied his smudged face, then returned the papers.

  The revolutionary pocketed them. “Thank you … spahseebah.” He watched the soldier stride toward the station. He waited, expecting a group of guards to rush him.

  “Vladimir llyich Lenin!” they would call out. “You are under arrest!”

  Yet five minutes later the locomotive was chugging into Finland.

  Without further incident, the night passage led to Terijoki Station, where the train slowed to a halt beside a pine-planked platform. The engineer bid Vladimir Lenin farewell and surrendered him to a cluster of woodsmen, who clambered aboard to greet their leader with bearlike embraces and alcohol-scented kisses.

  Lenin pretended the fanfare was an annoyance, but allowed himself to be manhandled good-naturedly toward packhorses tethered among the trees. His comrades’ whispers of a local tavern hinted at the source of their ebullience.

  Behind them, the locomotive gathered steam and proceeded on its way.

  “The engine car. Oh no!”

  One of the woodsmen turned in his saddle. “What is it you say?”

  “Foolishness!” Lenin reined his mount to a halt. “I’m not thinking straight.”

  “What’s wrong, comrade?”

  Lenin squinted, but the woods blocked the station from view and muffled the clattering of the train’s huge wheels. “This is not good, not at all.”

  “It can wait, I’m sure. Tell us up ahead in the pub.”

  “But it’s already too late!”

  “In your country, perhaps. Bah. Not here. Never too late for a drink.”

  “Don’t you understand? If you hadn’t rushed me, if you—”

  “Come, old man. Take it slow. The night is patient with our bucolic ways.”

  Vladimir Lenin raised a fist skyward, a gesture which only multiplied his frustration. Why blame a god whose existence he denied? He shifted his vitriol to the woodsman. “I let fear and excitement distract me. I let you distract me! I left something behind on that train.”

  “A woman, no doubt. What was her name?”

  “Nyet. Far more important.”

  “If it can’t keep you warm at night, it’s of no concern. As for vodka and women, they’re always in demand.” The woodsman pointed through the trees. The tavern’s light was coy and golden, tiptoeing over the snow to meet them.

  “You miss my point. On that train engine, I hid an object that’d make Rasputin turn in his grave.”

  “Bah. Let the old devil rest in peace.”

  “You think the devil’s work is done?” Lenin hesitated, disturbed by the idea that the curse might be to blame for his loss of the wooden tube. “This is a plague on the mind!” he bellowed. “Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov cling to Rasputin’s mysticism while we freeze. They refuse to see that electricity’s the new god.”

  “Soon they’ll understand.” The woodsman’s gloved hand thumped against Lenin’s back. “With or without your object, you’ll return to St. Petersburg and clear the entire ektenia from this path of revolution. Am I wrong?”

  Lenin knew the ektenia well. Listing the entire Romanov family, it was prayed over weekly in Russian Orthodox services.

  “Their blood will be upon my hands,” he vowed.

  “Then relax. For one night at least, the local spirits can ease your mind.”

  PART ONE

  This strange man …

  was making himself at home … after so long an absence, that the dead people … would have had more right to be at home.

  Ethan Brand, Nathaniel Hawthorne

  He bought a ticket …

  hoping that by going away to the west

  he could escape.

  Jonah 1:3

  1

  Haunted

  Willamette Valley, June 2004

  Enough with the melodrama. He’d had his fill.

  Clay Ryker crossed his arms, pressed his forehead to the window of the Greyhound bus, tried to think of anything other than his wife of ten years and his nine-year-old son. Heaven had slipped through h
is fingers, and hell crouched on the outskirts of his approaching hometown.

  This town. Junction City …

  Like it or not, the place was in his system. Twelve years ago, it’d fashioned him, emboldened him, sent him off a hero. The graduation accolades, the city paper headlines, even the coach of his basketball rivals had lifted him on wings of destiny. With a full scholarship, he’d headed off for the University of Wyoming. He was going places, doing things. He would change the world.

  And it was all a lie. I can’t even change my wife.

  One head thud against the glass.

  Ex-wife. Or soon to be.

  Thud.

  “Hey.” A voice made Clay turn. “Yeah, you. I’m trying to sleep back here.”

  “Oh.”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry.”

  Clay leaned back and imagined Jenni’s face: blond hair and green eyes; freckles dotting a thin nose; a slight indentation in the center of her lips. She’d filed the divorce papers months ago. Would she drop his name too?

  He tilted his head and watched grass seed swirl in the wake of the passing bus. During his senior year in Wyoming, a season-long slump had soured the interest of NBA scouts and ended his athletic dreams. Nevertheless, he’d earned his diploma, moved Jenni and Jason from Laramie to Cheyenne, started his own business, worked seventy-hour weeks, took on a second mortgage to keep afloat—and lost everything in the process.

  Here he was, back where he’d started. Moving in with Mom and Dad at the age of twenty-nine.

  On the window, Clay’s breath blossomed in random patterns, like Rorschach inkblots from his counselor’s office. What do I see, Dr. Gerringer? I see a dollar bill all wadded up and stuffed through a wedding ring. Oh, and it’s on fire … The next one? Pause. Nope, just a mess of ink. What do you want me to do? Lie?

  In fact, he had lied; he had seen something.

  A face along a riverbank. Bloated and wet, with sightless eyes.

  Clay relived the nightmare from twelve years ago. One impulsive act, followed by whispers and suspicion. The memory of that day still lingered, a specter of guilt that had haunted his endeavors and pried at the seams of his marriage.