Читать книгу The Crimson Code - Rachel Lee - Страница 6

Jakarta, Indonesia

Arief Sarwano looked at his children sitting in the pew beside him and smiled. Christmas had been kind to his family this year. The electronics firm that employed him had done well, churning out over two hundred thousand units of CyberJoey, the animatronic baby kangaroo that was the year’s top-selling Christmas gift in Australia. It had been Arief’s project, and he had done much of the design work himself. At that moment, tens of thousands of Australian children were clapping their hands in glee as the plush robot hopped around their Christmas trees and thumped its tail on their floors.

Others might think it absurd that he had poured two years of his life into three pounds of plastic, nylon, silicon and metal that modeled one of the earth’s most recognizable animals in a way calculated to attract the attention of five-to nine-year-old children, not to mention the shopping dollars of those children’s parents. But as Arief saw it, making children smile was a noble vocation.

And, when a project hit big, a profitable one. The success of CyberJoey had meant, not only a promotion and a raise, but also a healthy bonus. That bonus would ensure that his daughter could realize her dream of going to the United States to attend Notre Dame University next fall. She wanted to study medicine, in America, at the Catholic university. Not a Catholic university. The Catholic university, the best in America. He chuckled at the memory of the many times she had chided him on that point.

He looked up at the choir and found her in the alto section, slender and beautiful, her long dark hair falling around a face that each day reminded him more and more of her mother. For an instant, he felt the pang again.

The loss of his wife of twenty years, a victim of cancer, had blighted the past two Christmases. Arief had dealt with that loss by pouring himself into his work. In the past months, however, he had come to think that his wife’s spirit inhabited every CyberJoey. The toy’s eyes had been modeled on hers. And if just one Australian child looked into those eyes and saw love, then Arief’s wife was still alive in that child’s heart.

The Jalan Cathedral was packed, which was no surprise. The noonday Mass on Christmas was always the most crowded. But it was the one Arief had attended for the past twenty years, the continuation of a family tradition that began at seven in the morning with presents and continued through the late-afternoon dinner. His daughter, rather than his wife, would cook that dinner. But the traditions remained alive, and, with them, a sense of hope that one day Arief would feel whole again.

It was that thought which was shattered by the blinding flash, followed immediately by the crushing force of concussion, as the cathedral turned from a doorway to heaven into the depths of hell in the blink of an eye. Arief’s last vision, burned into his retinas, was of his daughter being tossed by an unseen hand through a stained glass window. Then the flames consumed him.

Baden-Baden, Germany

Michael Zeitgenbach could not hear the screams around him. The concussion had shattered his eardrums. In an instant, the still peace of the sunrise Mass had shattered, and in its wake he could feel only the crushing weight of stone on his lower body. His wife, Kirsten, ought to be beside him, somewhere, but the world was black, the air thick with dust and ash.

He ought to be hurting more, he knew. Instead, he could feel only distant pressure from the waist down. As he reached down, trying vainly to push himself free from eight hundred pounds of bloodstained granite, he realized he was going to die. Protruding from his belly was the stem of a chandelier that, seconds earlier, had hung from the ceiling. When he tried to move it, mind-shattering pain exploded through his body. Kirsten, a doctor, would have told him that the metal had pierced his spine.

But Kirsten was not there. She ought to be. They had been sitting together, hand in hand, listening to the traditional Christmas morning readings, when the world had turned upside down in a flash of fire and thunder and darkness. But, reaching around as best he could, he felt no one. No one…except a young girl. Stretching his arm out, he felt the tiny hand.

His niece’s hand. He knew it was her, because the wrist still bore the charm bracelet he had given her that morning. One gift, he had said, then the rest after Mass. The rest would never be given, for her hand was limp in his, and he could find no pulse.

Tears prickled at his eyes as he reached to the other side, above him, anywhere, hoping against hope to spend his last moments touching Kirsten. But it was not to be. She might lie only a meter away, or she might be buried beneath the stone that had crushed his legs. Regardless, he could not find her.

And so he took his niece’s hand once more in his, the limp fingers the last human contact he would carry with him into eternity.

Boston, Massachusetts

Kevin Daugherty worked with the fury of a man possessed. He had felt the rumble through the floor of the firehouse an instant before the thundering boom had shattered the windows around him. Like the other men of his company, he had resented the Christmas Eve shift. He had wished he could be at Midnight Mass with his wife, Mary, and their two children, his parents, brothers, nieces and nephews. Midnight Mass had always been a Daugherty family tradition.

Well, now he was at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Not as a worshipper, but as a fireman. As a son, brother, husband and father, looking for his family. Crouching beneath the wall of water being thrown up by the hose team behind him, he and his partner kicked aside broken glass, and lifted shattered and still burning pews, hoping for any sign of life in the blackened faces.

Kevin’s grandfather had told stories about bomb-shattered buildings in France, back in the early weeks after D-day, and a second cousin in New York had helped to pick through the wreckage of the World Trade Center. A four-year veteran, Kevin had seen his share of burned-out buildings. But nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.

“Daugherty, you have to get out of there.” His captain’s voice crackled over the radio.

“There may be survivors,” Kevin answered. “My family is in here somewhere. I’ve got to find them.”

“We’re going to lose the building,” the captain said. “You have to get out. Now. That’s an order, Daugherty.”

Kevin shook his head and kicked aside burning missals, clearing a path to the next row of pews, until he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him. He turned and saw his partner, Gerry O’Brien, eyes wide behind the breathing mask.

“We gotta go, Kev,” Gerry said, pointing upward. “It’s coming down.”

Kevin looked up at the roof section above him, watching it swell and recede as if breathing with the heat of the flames. It would not last another two minutes, he knew. Once a building started to breathe, it gave way. It was basic firefighting training: Get out.

But his wife was here somewhere, along with Kevin Junior and little Becky. He couldn’t just leave them to the merciless fire, leave them to be nothing but charred forms to be pulled out days later, when the embers had cooled enough for rescue teams to pull apart the wreckage. Mary and Kevin Junior and Becky couldn’t be hauled out like so many slabs of barbecue.

“I’m not going,” Kevin said. “I have to find them.”

“Anyone still in here is dead already,” Gerry said. “And we’re gonna be dead, too. We’re pulling out. Now.”

“You go,” Kevin said.

Gerry shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Kev. You stay, I stay. I go, you go. Are you going to kill me, too, along with them?”

And there was the truth of it. Kevin’s partner, and the hose team, wouldn’t abandon him. If he stayed in the inferno, they would die with him. He had no right to heap their families’ grief atop his own. Slowly, slowly, his fingers opened and the fire axe fell from his hands. The bitter tears clouded his vision more than the smoke around him as he shuffled back behind the hose team and began to make his way out.

He could escape the wreckage of the cathedral. He could not escape the wreckage of his heart.