The Savior's Game (The Daniel Byrne Trilogy Book 3) Page 2

  —now crossing the street. Not running, but moving with a relaxed stride.

  “Daniel,” the man called out. “Stop. You’re only gonna die tired.”

  There was another alley ahead on the right—get around the corner, find cover, find a weapon—but it was still ten yards to the corner. All the other man had to do was jog a few yards and he’d have Daniel in his sights. An easy kill. But the man maintained a leisurely pace as Daniel sprinted away.

  “Seriously, man. Noah says you gotta go. Don’t make me break a sweat.”

  Seven yards to the corner.

  “Trust me, you don’t even want to be here, not really.”

  Four yards.

  “Just stop running, and—”

  Three.

  “—I’ll make it quick and you won’t ever have to come back.”

  Daniel flung his right arm out, slapping the wall of the building, swinging himself around the corner near full speed, skidding to a stop.

  Shit. Nothing to hide behind, not even a recycling bin. He lunged three steps to his right and yanked on the handle of a backyard gate.

  Locked.

  He sprinted down the alley, jerking the handles of a few more locked gates as he passed. A thunderous crash of metal from behind, and he spun to see—

  —two large dumpsters, now blocking the way back, lying on their sides like they’d toppled in from either side of the alley.

  There had been no dumpsters anywhere when Daniel had entered the alley.

  Another metallic crash from behind and he spun forward. A roll-down iron gate, like the kind that protects storefronts in New York City at night, now spanned the distance between buildings, blocking the other end of the alley completely.

  He was trapped.

  Cowboy boots scuffed along the sidewalk behind the overturned dumpsters.

  Something moved to his right. The wooden backyard gate across the alley creaked open. A woman in her forties stood just inside the gate. She wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt that said Wake Up! in white brushstroke. Glasses with purple frames. Wild hair. She invited Daniel forward with an impatient nod of her chin.

  Daniel dashed through the open gate and the woman closed it behind him. Up close, her hair wasn’t quite as anarchic as it first appeared. She clearly cultivated the rebel look, making a statement while keeping it from going full-tilt dreadlock.

  “Daniel.” Her accent pegged her from the Boston area, and although Daniel had never seen this woman before, he knew her voice. It was the voice that had taken up residence in his head a few months earlier, when he was struck with the condition known—to those who knew most about it—as Anomalous Information Transfer, or AIT.

  The last three months had bordered on insanity for Daniel. Intense dreams of being hit by lightning, strange visions that hit like fits beyond his control, and a disembodied voice popping into his head at random intervals, speaking cryptic warnings that only he could hear. A psychologically bumpy ride, even before a man in a yellow suit started shooting at him and large metal objects started crashing into existence out of thin air.

  The gunman’s footfalls echoed closer, now past the dumpsters, scraping on the pavement inside the alley.

  The woman pushed the glasses up her nose and peered down through the twin half moons of her bifocal lenses. She placed her palm flat against Daniel’s chest. After a moment, she said, “Noah’s soldiers are all around. We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  Daniel said, “I don’t know you, but I know your voice. And I don’t know anyone named Noah, but the man out there is trying to kill me, so I’m all for getting me out of here.”

  She nodded once, pulled her hand back, and poked Daniel’s forehead with her index finger.

  The world began spinning. Not like on a carnival midway ride—more like at the flat-on-your-back ending of an alcohol-soaked all-nighter.

  “Let go, Daniel. Just relax and let go.” With each word, her voice receded farther into the distance, until it was just a whisper on the wind. “Go home.”

  Daniel’s vision dimmed and he could feel his consciousness slipping, descending through his body, his legs, flowing through the soles of his feet and into the ground below.

  Into darkness. And silence.

  3

  Bathsheba, Barbados

  Daniel opened his eyes. He was sitting seiza—kneeling on the floor, hands cupped loosely in his lap, zafu cushion supporting his butt. He blinked as his eyes adjusted. A single candle flickered on the floor, four feet in front of him. Beyond the reach of the candlelight, the room was washed in moonlight, which spilled in through the open slats of the shuttered window to his right.

  Sounds also spilled in through the window—the high-pitched bleep-bleep, bleep-bleep of tree frogs all around, and the gentle rhythm of the surf kissing the beach at the bottom of the hill.

  The taste of cinnamon on his tongue began to ease, and he remembered where he was.

  His living room. His rental cottage. Barbados.

  Meditating.

  Daniel felt a smile invade his face. He’d done it. He’d entered the vision on purpose.

  Being there on purpose had changed things. The previous four times, the vision of the apartment in the seaside town had come as spontaneous attacks of AIT. And each time, the vision had ended when he’d tried to leave the apartment by the front door. This time, entering the vision from meditation, he’d had the presence of mind to figure another way out. He’d had more control this time, felt deeper inside the vision, experiencing it rather than watching it unfold. It hadn’t been some dream version of Daniel climbing down balconies and choosing which way to turn along streets and alleys, talking to the gunman, running for his life. It had been his conscious self.

  A huge step. Proof that AIT was susceptible to influence. A milestone. But whatever the hell the visions and voices were actually trying to say . . . he still hadn’t a clue.

  A man in a yellow suit had tried to kill Daniel on behalf of someone named Noah, and a woman—with the same voice as the voice in Daniel’s head—had saved him. In a town where you can’t leave your apartment by the front door and the sun never moves in the sky and certain things glow so brightly you can’t look at them.

  Not much crazier than your average dream while sleeping, but this was not a dream. It was an AIT vision, and it was supposed to mean something. Daniel had absolutely no idea what.

  He stood and stretched, put the candle on his roll-top desk. Walked to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and stuck his face into the cold light. Stood there for a minute, plucking his shirtfront away from his chest, letting a little cool air in.

  He grabbed a bottle of 10 Saints from the fridge, pried the cap off using the wall-mounted bottle opener above the recycling bin. A couple deep swigs of beer washed the remaining cinnamon taste from his mouth. He took the rest of the bottle back to the desk in the living room and switched on the lamp as he sat.

  Kara Singh had lived with voices in her head for six years, and she’d kept journals—transcriptions of the voices and detailed descriptions of her visions. The information she’d recorded hadn’t revealed the cause of her affliction, but it had been key to uncovering a brutal conspiracy—one Daniel could only partially subvert, and at the cost of many lives.

  Kara’s journals had either burned or been stolen by the men Conrad Winter sent to torch her building, and the voices AIT inflicted upon her for six years had simply vanished, with no more explanation than why they’d come in the first place.

  Whatever the cause of this strange condition, most of the world knew it as the Trinity Phenomenon—after Daniel’s uncle, the late Reverend Tim Trinity, television evangelist and grifter extraordinaire. Trinity’s voices and visions had predicted the future. Kara’s had been more opaque but wider ranging, also revealing events of the past. Daniel had also met a plague-infected soldier with the condition, who believed himself possessed by Satan. There were over ten thousand confirmed cases by now, and certainly more than ten tim
es as many unconfirmed. But until two weeks ago, Tim Trinity’s was the only case known to the public.

  Two weeks ago, Julia Rothman’s The Truth (So Far) about Trinity had been published, and published huge. Number one on every list around the world, dissected and debated breathlessly on cable news channels, dominating social media, breaking the Internet. Even here in Barbados, where tourists came to escape the reality of their lives, the book was everywhere. Towering displays in the book department of every Cave Shepherd, every resort gift shop, every newsagent’s store.

  At taxi stands and in supermarket checkout lines, in restaurants and churches and doctors’ waiting rooms, burning from the screens of Kindles under beach umbrellas . . . Bajans and tourists alike—everyone was reading it, talking about it, reporting on it, and debating it. It was the universal topic of conversation around the globe. There was no avoiding it.

  The whole world was having a bumpy ride, adjusting to the reality shift.

  Julia’s investigation revealed six cases of Anomalous Information Transfer. Three cases were only mentioned in brief summary, with no identifying information. In one, the sufferer had been committed to a mental hospital, and the other two were not willing to come forward publicly.

  But the other three—an encyclopedia salesman in New Orleans, a farm wife in Germany, and an unemployed bicycle mechanic in Tokyo—wanted their stories told. They were all under great stress because of their condition, but in Julia’s estimation they were not insane. They all heard voices. All had conscious dreams they called visions. All kept records of what they dreamed and what the voices told them.

  And for each of these three individuals, in at least two verifiable instances, the voices and visions had provided information the sufferers could not possibly have known.

  Somehow, these people had predicted the future.

  That their predictions were mundane was beside the point. Tim Trinity’s predictions had also been mundane, until they weren’t. Until they threw the entire nation into a panic.

  Julia’s book contained no mention of a Dr. Kara Singh, or any details of her case. She had honored Kara’s request to be left out of it completely.

  Julia had found these people by her own investigation, but Daniel had, with the approval of his former boss, given her some other leads. Doctors who studied the phenomenon, allies of the Fleur-de-Lis Foundation who could be trusted to reveal only as much as the Foundation’s managing director, Carter Ames, was willing to reveal at the time.

  Thus Ames had shaped the public story by proxy, and the world learned that there existed “probably a few thousand” cases of AIT worldwide, which underestimated the truth by at least a hundred thousand. The doctors had been sure to emphasize how miniscule a few thousand was, on a planet of seven billion people, and they’d given no indication that it was spreading.

  But it was spreading, and the rate of spread was accelerating. You couldn’t call it a contagion in the traditional sense, but it was acting like one.

  Carter’s puppets were also successful in coining the moniker Anomalous Information Transfer, which seemed like an appropriately scientific, evidence-based name. But such was the mystique of Tim Trinity, that most people still called it the Trinity Phenomenon, even after reading Julia’s book.

  Whatever you called it, whatever it was, it was spreading fast. And Daniel had it.

  AIT had come on strong with him, ramping up over the course of just a week. Intense nightmares about being hit by lightning, a woman’s voice—the voice that belonged to the woman in his most recent vision—imploring him to pay attention and telling of some unspecified past or future disaster that had left (or would leave) over a thousand dead. And now, for the fifth time, he’d had the hyper-realistic vision of that apartment in the seaside town with the frozen sun.

  Daniel pulled a notebook from the top drawer of his desk. His own handwriting on the cover:

  AIT Journal #3

  He flipped about a third of the way into the notebook, to the first blank page, and plucked a pencil from the earthenware coffee mug on the desk. He took his mind back to the beginning of the meditation session—

  Wait.

  The sound of a car pulling slowly up the road outside. But no headlights swept the windows as it turned onto Daniel’s street.

  The driver was running dark.

  The engine noise died, maybe four houses away. Someone opened and shut the door, making as little sound as possible. Daniel shot a glance at his watch. Two thirty-five.

  Not infrequently, one of the English surfer dudes next door stayed out past closing time. Could be he was trying to get home without waking the street. But the surfer dudes drove an ancient Suzuki jeep with a muffler that rattled. This machine was smooth running and rattle-free.

  Daniel switched off the lamp and blew out the candle. He crept to the open slats of the shuttered window and peeked through. Although there were no streetlights on this block, the moon was high and the sky cloudless. He could see the man well enough, but for a second he just didn’t believe it.

  White cowboy boots, yellow linen suit, hair slicked back. The suit had been tailored to minimize the gun’s bulge under the left armpit, but thanks to the vision, Daniel knew to look for it.

  The man was now three houses away, walking a straight line toward this house, a white panel van parked on the road behind him.

  Daniel dashed from the window, snatched a backpack from the closet, and tore through the desk—cash, wallet, passports, cell phone, extra SIM card, journals, locker key, and his uncle’s old switchblade. He ran to the back bedroom and closed the door behind him. He switched on the bedside lamp and slipped into a pair of shoes.

  The bedroom window’s sash was already up—Daniel had left it wide to draw a cross breeze. Now he deployed the switchblade and cut along the bottom and both sides of the screen, making a giant flap.

  He paused, heard his front door’s dead bolt click open. Then the man’s cowboy boots, leather soles scuffing quietly into the living room.

  Daniel tossed the backpack through the screen flap, followed it, and turned to pull the window down to the sill. With the darkness outside and the bedside lamp on, the glass would act to mirror the inside of the room.

  He crept through the tiny, unfenced yard, hitching the pack onto his back, then dashed across the street, ducking behind a rusty Daihatsu hatchback, and ran—staying low and keeping to the shadows—four houses down, then cut through a backyard and stopped between two houses, the white panel van parked ahead on his left.

  The van’s cockpit was empty, but the cargo section was windowless. No way to know if there was someone in back. Daniel crept forward, switchblade in hand, inching closer to the rear doors. He stopped and listened hard.

  No sound from inside.

  He reached for the handle with his left hand while raising the blade in his right, thinking: Good chance this gets ugly fast . . .

  He took a breath, opened the door, and breathed out.

  No one inside.

  Instead, there was a gurney bolted to the floor, thick leather restraints hanging from its chrome rails. Some kind of medical machine next to the gurney, and an IV stand.

  Daniel used his phone’s little flashlight to get a better look, and felt his groin turn to ice.

  It was an ECT machine.

  Electroconvulsive therapy.

  Shock treatments.

  A polite term for scrambling your brain’s electrical wiring.

  Daniel spun on his heel and took off running.

  4

  Greenwich Village, New York City

  The afternoon sun hung just above the rooftops and the temperature stood at freezing and the trees were naked. Although there was no snow on the ground, thousands of fat flakes eddied above the pavement, like hovercraft bumper cars. They would settle in for the night, but tomorrow’s sun would melt them and late November’s dry air would suck them up and it would be as if they’d never existed.

  Daniel reckoned he had a long,
cold night ahead. After only a few hours in New York, he could already feel his tanned face drying out, getting ready to peel. He handed some cash to the cab driver and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He closed the zipper of his new coat, just bought for cash at Paragon Sports on Broadway, along with everything else he wore—Irish cable-knit sweater, Merino wool T-shirt, fleece-lined jeans, gloves, watch cap, and hiking boots. Even his socks were new.

  The cab pulled away from the curb and Daniel scanned the storefronts across the street. A handcrafted leather goods store, a head shop, a chess store, a dealer of antiquarian maps (est. 1937), and an upscale tattoo parlor. A weathered sign above the chess store read:

  MOSCOW RULES ~ CHESS EMPORIUM

  Daniel waited for a bearded hipster on a no-brakes fixie to pedal past, then crossed the street. The display window held exquisite handcrafted chess sets that ran well into the thousands, but also some modest sets and even a plastic ten-dollar magnetic set you could take with your kids on an airplane. He opened the door and stepped inside, pulled off his watch cap, and unzipped the coat.

  The store held the full range of sets, boards, pieces, timers, and scoring paraphernalia. The place hadn’t seen a renovation in easily over half a century, and it smelled a little dusty. Faded red wallpaper peeled an inch where it met the ceiling.

  The young man behind the counter said, “You here to shop, or sit?”

  Daniel said, “I’d like to sit.”

  “That’s cool. You looking for a game? I can put your name down.”

  Daniel shook his head. “I’m just gonna work through some problems.”

  The kid nodded. “For non-members, I gotta collect the first hour up front.”

  Daniel peeled a hundred off the wad in his pocket and put it on the counter, Ben Franklin pursing his face at the kid. “I’m gonna park myself for a while. If this runs out, let me know.”