Ted Dekker- Black

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be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photo-copy, recording, or

any other—except for brief quotation in printed reviews, without the

prior permission of the publisher.

Published by WestBow Press, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc., P.O.

Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee 37214.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dekker, Ted, 1962-

Black / by Ted Dekker.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8499-1790-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 0-8499-1833-2 (international)

I. Title.

PS3554.E43B57 2004

813'.6-dc22

2003020542

Printed in the United States of America

04050607 BVG 7654321

For my children.

May they always remember

what lies behind the veil.

Switzerland

CARLOS MISSIRIAN was his name. One of his many names.

Born in Cyprus.

The man who sat at the opposite end of the long dining table, slowly cutting into a thick red

steak, was Valborg Svensson. One of his many, many names.

Born in hell.

They ate in near-perfect silence thirty feet from each other in a dark hall hewn from granite

deep in the Swiss Alps. Black iron lamps along the walls cast a dim amber light through the

room. No servants, no other furniture, no music, no one except Carlos Missirian and Valborg

Svensson seated at the exquisite dining table.

Carlos sliced the thick slab of beef with a razor-sharp blade and watched the flesh separate.

Like the parting of the Red Sea. He cut again, aware that the only sound in this room was of two

serrated knives cutting through meat into china, severing fibers. Strange sounds if you knew

what to listen for.

Carlos placed a slice in his mouth and bit firmly. He didn't look up at Svensson, although the

man was undoubtedly staring at him, at his face—at the long scar on his right cheek—with those

dead black eyes of his. Carlos breathed deep, taking time to enjoy the coppery taste of the fillet.

Very few men had ever unnerved Carlos. The Israelis had taken care of that early in his life.

Hate, not fear, ruled him, a disposition he found useful as a killer. But Svensson could unnerve a

rock with a glance. To say that this beast put fear in Carlos would be an overstatement, but he

certainly kept Carlos awake. Not because Svensson presented any physical threat to him; no man

really did. In fact, Carlos could, at this very moment, send the steak knife in his hands into the

man's eye with a quick flip of his wrist. Then what prompted his caution? Carlos wasn't sure.

The man wasn't really a beast from hell, of course. He was a Swiss-born businessman who

owned half the banks in Switzerland and half the pharmaceutical companies outside the United

States. True, he had spent more than half his life here, below the Swiss Alps, stalking around like

a caged animal, but he was as human as any other man who walked on two legs. And, at least to

Carlos, as vulnerable.

Carlos washed the meat down with a sip of dry Chardonnay and let his eyes rest on

Svensson for the first time since sitting to eat. The man ignored him, as he almost always did.

His face was badly pitted, and his nose looked too large for his head—not fat and bulbous, but

sharp and narrow. His hair, like his eyes, was black, dyed.

Svensson stopped cutting midslice, but he did not look up. The room fell silent. Like statues,

they both sat still. Carlos watched him, unwilling to break off his stare. The one mitigating factor

in this uncommon relationship was the fact that Svensson also respected Carlos.

Svensson suddenly set down his knife and fork, dabbed at his mustache and lips with a

serviette, stood, and walked toward the door. He moved slowly, like a sloth, favoring his right

leg. Dragging it. He'd never offered an explanation for the leg. Svensson left the room without

casting a single glance Carlos's way.

Carlos waited a full minute in silence, knowing it would take Svensson all of that to walk

down the hall. Finally he stood and followed, exiting into a long hall that led to the library,

where he assumed Svensson had retired. He'd met the Swiss three years ago while working with

underground Russian factions determined to equalize the world's military powers through

the threat of biological weapons. It was an old doctrine: What did it matter if the United States

had two hundred thousand nuclear weapons trained on the rest of the world if their enemies had

the right biological weapons? A highly infectious airborne virus on the wind was virtually

indefensible in open cities.

One weapon to bring the world to its knees.

Carlos paused at the library door, then pushed it open. Svensson stood by the glass wall

overlooking the white laboratory one floor below. He'd lit a cigar and was engulfed in a cloud of

hazy smoke.

Carlos walked past a wall filled with leather-bound books, lifted a decanter of Scotch, poured

himself a drink, and sat on a tall stool. The threat of biological weapons could easily equal the

threat of nuclear weapons. They could be easier to use, could be far more devastating. Could In

traditional contempt of any treaty, the U.S.S.R. had employed thousands of scientists to develop

biological weapons, even after signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972.

All supposedly for defense purposes, of course. Both Svensson and Carlos were intimately

familiar with the successes and failures of former Soviet research. In the final analysis, the so-

called "superbugs" they had developed weren't super enough, not even close. They were far too

messy, too unpredictable, and too easy to neutralize.

Svensson's objective was simple: to develop a highly virulent and stable airborne virus with a

three- to six-week incubation period that responded immediately to an antivirus he alone

controlled. The point wasn't to kill off whole populations of people. The point was to infect

whole regions of the earth within a few short weeks and then control the only treatment.

This was how Svensson planned to wield unthinkable power without the help of a single

soldier. This was how Carlos Missirian would rid the world of Israel without firing a single shot.

Assuming, of course, such a virus could be developed and then secured.

But then, all scientists knew it was only a matter of time.

Svensson stared at the lab below. The Swiss wore his hair parted down the middle so that

black locks flopped either way. In his black jacket he looked like a bat. He was a man married to

a dark religious code that required long trips in the deepest of nights. Carlos was certain his god

dressed in a black cloak and fed on misery, and at times he questioned his own allegiance to

Svensson. The man was driven by an insatiable thirst for power, and the men he worked for even

more so. This was their food. Their drug. Carlos didn't care to understand the depths of their

madness; he only knew they were the kind of people who would get what they wanted, and in the

process he would get what he wanted: the restoration of Islam.

He took a sip of the Scotch. You would think that one, just one, of the thousands of scientists

working in the defensive biotechnological sector would have stumbled onto something

meaningful after all these years. They had over three hundred paid informants in every major

pharmaceutical company. Carlos had interviewed fifty-seven scientists from the former Soviet

bioweapons program, quite persuasively. And in the end, nothing. At least nothing they were

looking for.

The telephone on a large black sandalwood desk to their right rang shrilly.

Neither made a move for the phone. It stopped ringing.

"We need you in Bangkok," Svensson said. His voice sounded like the rumble of an engine

churning against a cylinder full of gravel. "Bangkok."

"Yes, Bangkok. Raison Pharmaceutical."

"The Raison Vaccine?" Carlos said. They had been following the development of the vaccine

for over a year with the help of an informant in the Raison labs. He'd always thought it would be

ironic if the French company Raison—pronounced ray-ZONE, meaning "reason"—might one

day pro-duce a virus that would bring the world to its knees.

"I wasn't aware their vaccine held any promise for us," he said.

Svensson limped slowly, so slowly, to his desk, picked up a piece of white paper and

scanned it. "You do remember a report three months ago about unsustainable mutations of the

vaccine."

"Our contact said the mutations were unsustainable and died out in minutes." Carlos wasn't a

scientist, but he knew more than the average man about bioweapons, naturally.

"Those were the conclusions of Monique de Raison. Now we haveanother report. Our man

at the CDC received a nervous visitor today who claimed that the mutations of the Raison

Vaccine held together under pro-longed, specific heat. The result, the visitor claimed, would

be a lethal air-borne virus with an incubation of three weeks. One that could infect the entire

world's population in less than three weeks."

"And how did this visitor happen to come across this information?" Svensson hesitated.

"A dream," he said. "A very unusual dream. A very, very convincing dream of another

world populated by people who think his dreams of this world are only dreams. And by bats

who talk."

Now it was Carlos's turn to hesitate.

"Bats."

"We have our reasons for paying attention. I want you to fly to Bangkok and interview

Monique de Raison. If the situation warrants, I will want the Raison Vaccine itself, by whatever

means."

"Now we're resorting to mystics?"

Svensson had covered the CDC well, with four on the payroll, if Carlos remembered

correctly. Even the most innocuous-sounding reports of infectious diseases quickly made their

way to the headquarters in Atlanta. Svensson was understandably interested in any report of any

new outbreak and the plans to deal with it.

But a dream? Thoroughly out of character for the stoic, black-hearted Swiss. This alone

gave the suggestion its only credence.

Svensson glared at him with dark eyes. "As I said, we have other reasons to believe this man

may know things he has no business knowing, regardless of how he attained that information."

"Such as?"

"It's beyond you. Suffice it to say there is no way Thomas Hunter could have known that the

Raison Vaccine was subject to unsustainable mutations."

Carlos frowned. "A coincidence."

"I'm not willing to take that chance. The fate of the world rests on one illusive virus and its

cure. We may have just found that virus."

"I'm not sure Monique de Raison will offer an . . . interview."

"Then take her by force."

"And what about Hunter?"

"You will learn by whatever means necessary everything Thomas Hunter knows, and then

you will kill him."

IT ALL started one day earlier with a single silenced bullet out of no-where.

Thomas Hunter was walking down the same dimly lit alley he always took on his way home

after locking up the small Java Hut on Colfax and Ninth, when a smack! punctuated the hum of

distant traffic. Red brick dribbled from a one-inch hole two feet away from his face. He stopped

midstride.

Smack!

This time he saw the bullet plow into the brick. This time he felt a sting on his cheek as tiny

bits of shattered brick burst from the impact. This time every muscle in his body ceased.

Someone had just shot at him!

Was shooting at him.

Tom recoiled to a crouch and instinctively spread his arms. He couldn't seem to tear his eyes

off those two holes in the brick, dead ahead. They had to be some mistake. Figments of his

overactive imagination. His aspirations to write novels had finally ruptured the line between

fantasy and reality with these two empty eye sockets staring at him from the red brick.

"Thomas Hunter!"

That wasn't his imagination, was it? No, that was his name, and it was echoing down the alley.

A third bullet crashed into the brick wall.

He bolted to his left, still crouching. One long step, drop the right shoulder, roll. Again the air

split above his head. This bullet clanged into a steel ladder and rang down the alley.

Tom came to his feet and chased the sound in a full sprint, pushed by instinct as much as by

terror. He'd been here before, in the back alleys of Manila. He'd been a teenager then, and the

Filipino gangs were armed with knives and machetes rather than guns, but at the moment, tearing

down the alley behind Ninth and Colfax, Tom's mind wasn't drawing any distinction.

"You're a dead man!" the voice yelled.

Now he knew who they were. They were from New York.

This alley led to another thirty yards ahead, on his left. A mere shadow in the dim light, but

he knew the cutaway.

Two more bullets whipped by, one so close he could feel its wind on his left ear. Feet

pounded the concrete behind him. Two, maybe three pairs. Tom dived into the shadow.

"Cut him off in the back. Radio."

Tom rolled to the balls of his feet then sprinted, mind spinning. Radio?

The problem with adrenaline, Makatsu's thin voice whispered, is that it makes your head

weak. His karate instructor would point to his head and wink. You have plenty of muscle to fight,

but no muscle to think.

If they had radios and could cut off the street ahead, he would have a very serious problem.

He looked frantically for cover. One access to the roof halfway down the alley. One large

garbage bin too far away. Scattered boxes to his left. No real cover. He had to make his move

before they entered the alley.

Fingers of panic stabbed into his mind. Adrenaline dulls reason; panic kills it. Makatsu

again. Tom had once been beaten to a pulp by a gang of Filipinos who'd taken a pledge to kill

any Americano brat who entered their turf. They made the streets around the army base their turf.

His instructor had scolded him, insisting that he was good enough to have escaped their attack

that afternoon. His panic had cost him dearly. His brain had been turned to rice pudding, and he

deserved the bruises that swelled his eyes shut.

This time it was bullets, not feet and clubs, and bullets would leave more than bruises. Time

was out.

Short on ideas and long on desperation, Tom dived for the gutter.Rough concrete tore at his

skin. He rolled quickly to his left, bumped into the brick wall, and lay facedown in the deep

shadow.

Feet pounded around the corner and ran straight toward him. One man. How they had found

him in Denver, four years after the fact, he had no clue. But if they'd gone to this trouble, they

wouldn't just walk away.

The man ran on light feet, hardly winded. Tom's nose was buried in the musty corner. Noisy

blasts of air from his nostrils buffeted his face. He clamped down on his breathing; immediately

his lungs began to burn.

The slapping feet approached, ran past.

Stopped.

A slight tremor lit through his bones. He fought another round of panic. It had been six years

since his last fight. He didn't stand a chance against a man with a gun. He desperately willed the

feet to move on. Walk. Just walk!

But the feet didn't walk.

They scraped quietly.

Tom nearly cried out in his hopelessness. He had to move now, while he still had the

advantage of surprise.

He threw himself to his left, rolled once to gain momentum. Then twice, rising first to his

knees then to his feet. His attacker was facing him, gun extended, frozen.

Tom's momentum carried him laterally, directly toward the opposite wall. The gun's muzzle-

flash momentarily lit the dark alley and spit a bullet past him. But now instinct had replaced

panic.

What shoes am I wearing?

The question flashed through Tom's mind as he hurdled for the brick wall, left foot leading.

A critical question.

His answer came when his foot planted on the wall. Rubber soles. One more step up the wall

with traction to spare. He threw his head back, arched hard, pushed himself off the brick, then

twisted to his right halfway through his rotation. The move was simply an inverted bicycle kick,

but he hadn't executed it in half a dozen years, and this time his eyes weren't on a soccer ball

tossed up by one of his Filipino friends in Manila.

This time it was a gun.

The man managed one shot before Tom's left foot smashed into his hand, sending the pistol

clattering down the alley. The bullet tugged at his collar.

Tom didn't land lightly on his feet as he'd hoped. He sprawled to his hands, rolled once, and

sprang into the seventh fighting position opposite a well-muscled man with short-cropped black

hair. Not exactly a perfectly executed maneuver. Not terrible for someone who hadn't fought in

six years.

The man's eyes were round with shock. His experience in the martial arts obviously didn't

extend beyond The Matrix. Tom was briefly tempted to shout for joy, but, if anything, he had to

shut this man up before he could call out.

The man's astonishment suddenly changed to a snarl, and Tom saw the knife in his right

hand. Okay, so maybe the man knew more about street-fighting than was at first apparent.

He charged Tom.

The fury that flooded Tom's veins felt all too welcome. How dare this man shoot at him!

How dare he not fall to his knees after such a brilliant kick!

Tom ducked the knife's first swipe. Came up with his palm to the man's chin. Bone cracked.

It wasn't enough. This man was twice his weight, with twice his muscle, and ten times his

bad blood.

Tom launched himself vertically and spun into a full roundhouse kick, screaming despite his

better judgment. His foot had to be doing a good eighty miles an hour when it struck the man's

jaw.

They both hit the concrete at precisely the same time—Tom on his feet, ready to deliver

another blow; his assailant on his back, breathing hard, ready for the grave. Figuratively

speaking.

The man's silver pistol lay near the wall. Tom took a step for it, then rejected the notion.

What was he going to do? Shoot back? Kill the guy? Incriminate himself? Not smart. He turned

and ran back in the direction they'd come.

The main alley was empty. He ducked into it, edged along the wall, grabbed the rails to a

steel fire escape, and quickly ascended. The building's roof was flat and shouldered another taller

building to the south. He swung up to the second building, ran in a crouch, and halted by a large

vent, nearly a full block from the alley where he'd laid out the New Yorker.

He dropped to his knees, pressed back into the shadows, and listened past the thumping of his

heart.

The hum of a million tires rolling over asphalt. The distant roar of a jet overhead. The faint

sound of idle talk. The sizzling of food frying in a pan, or of water being poured from a window.

The former, considering they were in Denver, not the Philippines. No sounds from New York.

He leaned back and closed his eyes, catching his breath.

Crazy! Fights in Manila as a teenager were one thing, but here in the States at the ripe age of

twenty-five? The whole sequence struck him as surreal. It was hard to believe this had just

happened to him.

Or, more accurately, was happening to him. He still had to figure a way out of this mess. Did

they know where he lived? No one had followed him to the roof.

Tom crept to the ledge. Another alley ran directly below, adjoining busy streets on either

side. Denver's brilliant skyline glimmered on the horizon directly ahead. An odd odor met his

nose, sweet like cotton candy but mixed with rubber or something burning.

Deja vu. He'd been here before, hadn't he? No, of course not. Lights shimmered in the hot

summer air, reds and yellows and blues, like jewels sprinkled from heaven. He could swear he'd

been

Tom's head suddenly snapped to the left. He threw out his arms, but his world spun

impossibly and he knew that he was in trouble.

Something had hit him. Something like a sledgehammer. Something like a bullet.

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1©2004TedDekker.Allrightsreserved.Noportionofthisbookmaybereproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmittedinanyformorbyanymeans—electronic,mechanical,photo-copy,recording,oranyother—exceptforbriefquotationinprintedreviews,withoutthepriorpermissionofthepublisher.PublishedbyWestBowPress,aDivisionofTh...

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