Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

in One57.
    I wonder if it’s true that Wally paid $60 million for this, Heller wondered.

    SIXTY-ONE YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP, Wannegrin thought, feeling his own mortality. He remembered the first time he set eyes on Manny, a fat little kid from Brooklyn. Emmanuel’s parents had sent him to spend a summer on Walter’s family’s defiant little kibbutz in Palestine. They wanted to toughen Emmanuel up.
    Despite his thick spectacles, his aversion to manual labor, his obesity, his bookish ways, they need never have worried. Emmanuel Heller was one of the toughest men he knew. Give the man a stick and a swarming hornet’s nest, and he was fearless.
    Emmanuel was the one who broke open the hornet’s nest with a stick.

5
    Los Angeles, California
    FAHAD. THE LEOPARD. HE WAS twenty-five years old. Born on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, his Pakistani parents moved to Culver City, just off the 405, when he was nine-years old, to open a restaurant. His tenth birthday party was at the Wonder World Amusement Park in Anaheim, which was to that point, the greatest day of his life.
    But there comes a moment in every young man’s life when he must grow up and look at life beyond children’s games.
    He tightened the wires on the timing mechanism that sat in the top of his toolbox.
    It took him two years at Los Angeles Trade Tech, after high school, to get his degree in electrical construction and maintenance. He spent the next two years freelancing for various contractors before being hired on the support staff at Wonder World, with full benefits and a decent hourly wage.
    He lifted out the timer and looked again at thousands of nails and metal scraps, which rested on a reservoir filled with three gallons of a highly flammable cocktail, including acetone and gasoline, two easy-to-access Class I flammables. When the clock hit 00:00 a flash of fire would ignite the fuel and propel metal missiles into human flesh,maiming and killing hundreds if not thousands. How many? Zoraiz told him to not worry about details. However many infidel lives he took would be enough to remind the soft, sensual West that their sins would not go unpunished.
    Almost sixty thousand visitors would be at Wonder World on Friday night. Most would stay for the fireworks show at ten o’clock. His shift ended at eight p.m. That would give him an hour to place his tool chest in a small garden next to the square of the Enchanted Palace, the area where close to ten thousand people would watch an array of sizzling, dizzying lights explode overhead. It was the most popular and crowded spot in the park at that time. He would open the lid, set the clock, cover it with a thin fabric camouflage, and walk calmly to the employee exit. He would be in his car and on the 405 when the real fireworks started.
    He thought of Zoraiz. He met him at mosque when he was eighteen. Zoraiz was the man who helped him understand who he was as a Muslim in an infidel land. He taught him the Koran and how to be a man. A real man.
    If Zoraiz had asked him to sacrifice his own life, Fahad would have done so willingly and without question. Zoraiz had helped him see that life is much bigger and grander than earthly existence.
    His parents wanted to know why he hadn’t started a family of his own.
    Perhaps now he would. But first he would have to get a new job.
    He closed the lid on the toolbox and took a few steps back. It looked perfect. Just like a toolbox.

6
    New York City
    BURKE WAS TOWEL DRYING HIS hair in a cramped bathroom on the fifteenth floor of a nondescript hotel in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan when his phone chirped.
    He had cranked out three hundred push ups in sets of fifty with one-minute recovery breaks thirty minutes ago. He had to take the call. Thirty minutes ago he wouldn’t have been able to speak.
    “Yes?”
    “Any word?” The voice was mechanical. Whoever his contractor was used an electronic voice scrambler.
    “You’ll know when I know.”
    “No