Also by Richard Phillips
The Ripper/Rho Agenda Novels
Once Dead
The Rho Agenda
The Second Ship
Immune
Wormhole
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Richard Phillips
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477825532
ISBN-10: 1477825533
Cover design by Jason Blackburn
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907523
This novel is dedicated to my loving wife, Carol, and to Sienna Farall and Jeremy Loethen, the most wonderful daughter and son-in-law a man could have.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105
CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 108
CHAPTER 109
CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 111
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
Tupac Inti leaned against the bars, his dark eyes drawn to the gathering storm in the Palmasola prison courtyard a dozen feet below his cell. In the eighteen months he’d been imprisoned awaiting trial, he’d seen lots of violence, much of it initiated by neo-Nazi gang members of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, or UJC. After all, they had access to money, and that meant the Disciplina Interna, the prison gang who ran Palmasola, left them alone. Real guards rarely entered Santa Cruz’s notorious prison town, preferring to maintain a perimeter defense to prevent escapes, leaving the internal governance to the prisoners themselves.
Tupac had been lucky. Lucky to be as big as he was. Lucky to be one of the many Quechua people with muscles hardened by years swinging a pick in a Bolivian mine. As he watched the eight swastika-tattooed pricks converge on the newcomer, Tupac knew that this man had no such luck. The Disciplina Interna thugs were either too disinterested to intervene, or they were looking forward to the show. Tupac suspected the latter.
The object of neo-Nazi attention stood bare-chested in the filth-strewn exercise area, having just completed a vigorous workout that had left his upper body glistening with sweat in the hot, late-afternoon February sun. What he’d done to get on the UJC’s bad side Tupac didn’t know. It didn’t take much. The man had no tattoos that would have placed him in a competing gang, and he was Caucasian, a definite plus with the neo-Nazis. But from the scars that crisscrossed the man’s chest and back, he was no stranger to getting on someone’s bad side. Whatever the newcomer had done, here in Palmasola, being on the UJC’s bad side was the equivalent of a death sentence.
To look at the man, you’d never know he was about to die. He wasn’t big like Tupac, who stood just over six feet, with lean muscle that rippled beneath his skin at every movement. But it was the man’s eyes that fascinated Tupac. As those eyes surveyed the men closing in on him, they held no trace of fear. The sight triggered the memory of a black leopard he’d once spotted in the high Amazon. Hungry, hunting eyes, glistening with animal eye-shine. It sent a sudden chill up Tupac’s spine.
When the UJC’s champion stepped forward, it was no surprise. Clean shaven, with short blond hair, at six feet six he was almost as big as Tupac. Although most Bolivians of German descent were good, honest people, that didn’t apply to Karl Liebkin. Until his arrest during an elite police unit raid on the UJC’s headquarters, he had been a rising star in the neo-Nazi subculture, claiming more than two dozen personal kills. Being in Palmasola hadn’t hurt his body count. Karl liked to keep his victims alive, handing their broken and bloody bodies over to his comrades for final disposition. Their screams often continued for more than an hour.
It was why nobody screwed with these guys. But from that look in the newcomer’s eyes, he was about to.
When Karl made his move, it was as if the newcomer had seen it coming before it began. With an easy grace that wasted no energy, the newcomer shifted his weight, letting the shiv slash by the side of his neck with less than an inch to spare, using the motion to coil for the counterstrike that put all of his two hundred pounds into an open-hand impact. The blow connected with Karl’s windpipe, dropping the bigger man to his knees, sending a bloody froth bubbling over his lips.
The newcomer’s spinning side kick impacted the side of Karl’s skull, directly over his right ear, the force of impact snapping his head to the side and dropping him on his face, with blood from the shattered eardrum leaking down. From the jail cells and the crowded alleys that surrounded the conflict,
shouts and cheers rose up, growing in volume as the newcomer picked up the shiv and cut Karl’s throat from ear to ear, sending a fountain of red neo-Nazi blood spurting toward his stunned companions.
Then, like the black leopard, the newcomer was among them, whirling and slashing, killing the first two before they realized their danger. The first of the survivors to regain his senses bull-rushed the red-eyed demon, but the attacker’s attempted tackle was met with a judo flip that converted his momentum into a flailing arc toward an impact that would break his ribs. In the midst of the flipping motion, the newcomer slid his left hand up the Nazi’s face from chin to eyes, his fingers thrusting, ripping, and tearing the blue and white orbs from their sockets, leaving them dangling down their owner’s bloody cheeks as he writhed on the ground.
Then the shirtless man stood clear, Karl’s shiv in his right hand. Though his breath panted out, it was clearly from battle lust, not exertion. Four down, four to go. And when those four backed away, the newcomer dropped the shiv and turned his back on them, stepping across Karl’s body on his way back to his cell as wild cheers shook the red brick hell-town.
And as the newcomer made that walk, Tupac got a good look into the man’s strange eyes. It was a look that left him cold.
CHAPTER 2
Jack Gregory stripped out of his blood-stained clothes, sluiced the gore from his body with brown water from the sink, and then slid beneath the sheet on one of the cell’s three cots. From the look in his cellmates’ eyes, none of them was inclined to challenge his right to it. When Jack closed his eyes, sleep came almost immediately, unleashing the dream that rode its wake.
There’s no tunnel with a beautiful light to call me forward. I didn’t expect one. But I didn’t expect this either.
A pea-soup fog cloaks the street, trying its best to hide the paving stones beneath my feet. It’s London, but this London has an older, Victorian feel. Not in a good way either. For some reason it doesn’t really surprise me. If there is a doorway to hell, I guess a gloomy old London backstreet is as appropriate a setting as any.
While my real body bleeds out somewhere in Calcutta, I don’t suffer from wounds here. I step forward, my laced desert combat boots causing fog to swirl around me. Long, cool, steady strides. A narrow alley to my left beckons me. I don’t fight the feeling. I didn’t start this journey by running away, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to end it running away from whatever’s around the corner.
The fog isn’t any thicker in the alley. The narrowness just makes it feel that way. I don’t look back, but I feel the entrance shrink behind me as I walk. To either side, an occasional door mars the walls that connect one building to the next, rusty hinges showing just how long it’s been since anyone last opened them. It doesn’t matter. My interest is in the dark figure that suddenly blocks my path.
The man’s face lies hidden in shadow, although it isn’t clear what dim light source is casting the shadows. Still, I see his lips move, hear gravel in his voice.
“Are you certain you wish to walk this path?”
I pause, trying to understand the meaning of the question.
“Didn’t think I had much choice.”
“Not many do.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’ve thought about death?”
“Figured it was just a big sleep.”
I watch as the shadowy figure standing before me hesitates. My uneasiness grows with each passing second.
“Nothing so easy.”
“Heaven and hell then? Enlighten me.”
“Keep walking this path and you’ll find out. I offer you something different.”
“Ahhh. My soul for my life, is it?”
The laugh rumbles deep inside this thing’s chest, and the sound sends a chill through my body.
“I’ve been around a very, very long time, but I’m not your devil.”
“Then what are you?”
For several seconds, silence.
“Think of me as a coma patient, living an eternity of sensing the things going on around me, unable to experience any of them. I know what’s happening, what’s about to happen, but I feel nothing. Such immortality is its own special kind of hell. Humanity offers me release from that prison.”
“I’m not interested in being your vessel.”
“I have limitations. I can only send back one who lingers on death’s doorway, not someone who is beyond natural recovery. There are rules. My host must willingly accept my presence, and the host remains in control of his own being. His nature is unchanged. I, on the other hand, get to experience the host’s emotions for the duration of the ride. I can exist in only one host at a time, and once accepted, I remain with that host until he dies.”
I stare at the shadowed figure’s face. Did I see a flicker of red in its eyes?
“No thanks.”
“I don’t deny that there’s a downside. As I said, I don’t change a host’s nature in any way. But what he feels excites me and some of that excitement feeds back to my host. The overall effect is that he still loves what he loves and hates what he hates, but much more hotly. He’s the same person he always was, just a little bit more so. And because my intuitions also bleed over, my hosts find themselves drawn to situations that spike their adrenaline. Because of that, few of them live to a ripe old age.”
“So you ride these people until they die, then move on to the next person.”
“I never said anything about this being a random selection. I have certain needs, and those can’t be fulfilled by inhabiting some Siberian dirt farmer or his wife. With all my limitations, I have a very clear sense of those who stride the life and death boundary, fully immersed in humanity’s greatest and most terrible events. I always choose a host from this group.”
“Such as?”
“Alexander, Nero, Caligula, Attila, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and hundreds of others, including another Jack who once roamed these London alleys.”
“Not a great references list.”
“It’s not about your notions of good or evil. Whether you want it or not, you are a part of it.”
“So my choice is to die now or to open myself to evil?”
“As I said, I can’t make you anything you aren’t. Hosting me merely amps up your inner nature.”
“And you expect me to believe that?”
Again the dark figure pauses. “You pride yourself on your highly developed intuition, your ability to know if someone is lying to you. What is that inner sense telling you now?”
The truth is that, as I stand here, wrapped in damp fog, my intuition isn’t telling me shit. Or maybe it is and I’m just too damn tired to listen. I stare at the shadowy figure, inhale deeply, can’t feel real breath fill my lungs, and decide.
“I guess I can live with that.”
Tossing away the damp sheet, Jack sat bolt upright on the cot, his naked body bathed in sweat. He rose to his feet, struggling to remember where he was and why he was here. Ignoring the startled cellmates that moved aside to give him a wide berth, Jack walked to the sink, turned on the faucet, and scrubbed his face with the muddy water, letting it wash away the dream that was more than a dream.
Shit. How long had it been since he’d awakened from a peaceful sleep? Jack couldn’t remember. His dreams were so vivid that they seemed more than memories, a past re-experienced. In his sleep, the dreams leaked from the alien parasite that had accompanied him back across the life–death threshold on that awful night in Calcutta. Whatever dying had done to him, Jack couldn’t recommend it. One thing was for sure; if he didn’t find a way to control his post-deathbed adrenaline addiction, he wouldn’t remain alive long enough for it to matter.
As he dressed, he regained some semblance of clarity and, along with it, the memory of yesterday’s exercise-yard bloodbath. He’d known it wouldn’t take long for the UJC goons to make a move on him. After all, he’d set it up. It was all part of the purpose that had brought him here. And the neo-Nazis had played their part, thei
r deaths serving to introduce Jack “The Ripper” Gregory to the rest of the jailhouse population. Most important, it had introduced him to the one prisoner he’d come all this way to find.
But Jack still had to meet the man. And then he had to get them both the hell out of here. In this part of the world, bribery was the best option for making something like that happen. The trick was to find the right people to bribe, and then to make sure that they feared Jack more than they feared the UJC. He’d accomplished the first part before getting in here. Yesterday’s violence had closed the deal. Now, if Jack could avoid being poisoned in the meantime, so much the better.
CHAPTER 3
Feeling all of his sixty-three years, Conrad Altmann stepped off the stairs into the concrete sub-basement, avoiding the dead bodies and pools of blood that might stain his Toscana crocodile shoes. These dead men, the last remnants of Klaus Barbie’s personal guard, had taken their master’s words too literally all those years ago when he’d ordered them to allow no one to enter this secret place. If they had realized that Klaus never intended that order to apply to his bastard son, they would still be alive.
Moving past the half-dozen submachine gun–wielding bodyguards that had preceded him into this secret haven, he reached for the German schrank mounted against the far wall, fitting his father’s special key into the cabinet’s keyhole.
The lock clicked open with a snap that echoed through the dark chamber. Despite his practiced calm, Altmann couldn’t resist the urge to glance back over his shoulder. Dark echo chambers did that to you, squeezed those suppressed childhood nightmares from under your bed into your present. But this glance failed to reveal hell’s demons. If they were out there, they cowered before him, as well they should. The long-dead Führer’s rightful heir brooked no opposition, be it from heaven or hell.
Turning his attention back to the closet door, Altmann pulled it all the way open. The empty shelves that met his gaze cramped his gut.
Impossible!
After all the years he’d spent researching every facet of his family history, of Klaus Barbie’s life, it couldn’t end here.
Running his hand over the neatly trimmed beard that was the same graying blond as his shoulder-length hair, Altmann looked at Dolf Gruenberg. “Tear it out of the wall.”