The Shield of Darius Read Online Free PDF Page A

up with another explanation.”
    Ms. Silcox stood abruptly and closed the folder. “We’ll certainly do what we can and will keep in touch. You’re at the Hilton?”
    Kate nodded and stood, wondering as she shook Ms. Silcox’ hand if she really had been paying close enough attention to her relationship with Ben.
     
    By the time Kate walked the five blocks from Grosvenor Square back to the hotel and checked her muted cell phone for messages, a voicemail had already arrived asking her to call the Attaché for American Services.
    “Mrs. Sager….” Sandra Silcox sounded less businesslike over the phone. “I’m sorry this didn’t reach me before you left. I tried to catch you but you were already out of the building.” She hesitated. “Did your husband have his passport with him when he disappeared?”
    “Yes. It was in an inside pocket in his jacket. Have you found it?”
    Again the embassy official paused. “In a sense. We just received a call from officials in Manchester informing us that a person carrying your husband’s passport and meeting his description left the airport there Thursday night with a one way ticket to Paris – accompanied by a young woman on a French passport.”

FOUR
     
    Ben’s mind awoke before his body. He felt only pain. Sharp explosions bursting between his temples. He cracked open his eyes and squinted dizzily at the white, mildew-spotted ceiling above him. With each throb, the ceiling seemed to sag downward, then retreat. Sag. Retreat. His gut twisted into a cramped spasm and he swallowed hard to keep from retching, gagging on his thick, pasty tongue. The room was musty. Smothering. He closed his eyes again and struggled to capture a complete thought, but found only images. The castle ruin above him on the hill. PJ on the tumbled stone wall.
    Feeling a swollen tenderness behind his left ear, Ben wondered fleetingly if he had fallen from the wall himself, and was in one of those colorless London hospitals he had seen in the city. The pain forced life into his other senses and he focused on sounds, finding the irregular drone of distant traffic. This must be London. He struggled again for images, piecing them together until they suddenly coalesced into a memory, capturing the frantic woman in the woods and the race to the van.
    As the memory developed, a pressure in Ben’s chest grew with it, crushing him downward until he could barely suck in a breath. He wanted to groan but as the sound formed, he choked it back, realizing he may not be alone. Letting his lids droop shut, he concentrated again on sounds, straining to discriminate voices from the general din beyond the room. More honking than usual in the grumble of distant traffic. Rush hour. In another direction, the faint clatter of metal against metal. Pans or garbage cans.
    Suddenly Ben’s nose intervened, sending a jolt of olfactory electricity to his brain that caromed wildly about, searching for meaning, then shot to his heart with a surge that charged it into furious pounding. It was not a solitary smell that sparked Ben’s memory, but a mixture of odors that were more vivid than sight or sound. Not the sour-sharp blend of sickness and antiseptic that meant hospital, but a faint acrid odor of fetid water mixed with raw sewage. Strong spices favoring garlic that lingered in the air after a meal was cleared. Earthen buildings that smelled of damp clay, even when dry, and the sour tang of sweat from men and animals. And diesel fumes. A sky full of diesel fumes spewed from the tail pipes of a thousand Mercedes taxis and red double-decked buses. The smell was as distinctive as a signature. Ben Sager was back in the Middle East.
    The smell seeped through his nostrils and into his mouth, swallowed in a dry gulp and sucked into his lungs. It spread like a cold injection through his body, adding lead to his limbs and twisting again into a lump in his stomach. His nose must be lying, playing tricks on his already disoriented brain.