The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Its sole passenger stood in the center, defying the wind and waves. The concealed man raised a miniature video camera to his eye and depressed the record button. He had to rotate the camera only slightly to follow the launch to its mooring. As the passenger stepped onto the dock, the man zoomed in for a close-up, capturing as much of the angular face as the lens would give him.
    The man’s car was parked off to the side of the road, just beyond the trees that rimmed the shoreline. He removed the tape from his camera and popped it into a video machine resting on the passenger seat. The machine was connected to the microwave parabolic transmitter on his roof. The man hit the SEND key, and instantly the contents of the tape were beamed via satellite to the waiting downlink.
    The machine beeped twice to a signify a successful transmission, and the man returned to his vigil at the water’s edge.

Chapter 5
    HEDDA WAITED IN the darkness. Next to her in the closet the boy Christopher Hanley was shivering again.
    “Just a little longer,” she said with as much reassurance as she could manage.
    It was the one place the Palestinians would not, could not, think to look: the holy residence itself, the very place in which Christopher Hanley had been imprisoned.
    The terrorists had been charging through the front door when Hedda and the boy ducked into an alcove. The alcove led into a central room, from which all furniture and fixtures had been removed. A vast expanse of polished wood bordered by dull areas indicated that there had once been a large rug in the room. At one end Hedda found a door that led to an empty storage closet. Inside Hedda had stripped off her beard.
    “Who are—”
    “Shhhhhhhh,” she had cautioned the boy.
    “I want to know who you are,” he whispered. “Did my father send you?”
    “Yes,” Hedda told him.
    “I knew he would. I knew it!”
    Christopher spoke bravely, and she didn’t want to spoil things by saying nothing had been accomplished yet. Everything that remotely related to success was on the outside of the fence; a hundred yards away that might as well have been a thousand. But since the Palestinians would be massing their search beyond the walls, under cover of darkness she and the boy could make it out. Hedda had cars stashed at three separate locations. Reach any of the three and the required distance could be put between her and the men now determined to catch her. Then she would get to a phone and arrange for pickup from Librarian.
    And now that darkness had come, Hedda could judge the level of light by the amount that sneaked through the crack at the bottom of the closet door. She and the boy sat on the floor, close but not too close. He had wrapped his arms around his knees and was rocking slightly back and forth.
    Hedda mapped the logistics out in her mind once more. The room was situated in the front of the residence, with the main entrance to the complex a hundred yards away. In just a few minutes now she would lead Christopher through one of the windows and then escape through the nearest gate. At last she slid over to him and whispered her plan.
    “I’m scared,” he responded.
    “So am I. But if you do everything I tell you, everything , you’ll be home playing football tomorrow.”
    “Soccer,” the boy corrected.
    Something warm slid up through her heart, forming a stark contrast with the icy perfection with which she had killed today. She wanted this boy to live. Damn it, she was his only hope. Somewhere deep a memory stirred. Another boy, about the age of Christopher Hanley. Her memory struggled for total grasp of it, then faltered as the calming recollections of her childhood took hold. She had grown up on her grandparents’ farm. She saw it now on a midwinter day. Snow coated the meadow. Breath misted before her grandfather’s face as he returned to the house from his morning chores in a plaid mackinaw jacket, white wisps of hair left to the whims of the wind. The