he stared at the horrific lesions scarring the kid’s body. Across his chest were a scattering of pills, more of them on the floor and an empty pill bottle lying on the tiles. Gomez glanced at the name plate scrawled on the open door: Daniel Neville.
The blond orderly, his features blanched and pale, reached down and picked up the empty bottle, showing it to Gomez. As the nurses flooded into the room, Gomez saw that the bottle of drugs was empty.
JERUSALEM
The Israeli Humvee in which Ethan sat handcuffed to a door handle was hardly a luxury vehicle, but in his exhausted state the rolling of the chassis on the road and the hum of the engine was almost comforting. He wound down a window and let the cool night air blow away some of the weariness aching through his bones.
Along with Rachel he had been safely escorted across the Gazan border at Erez; the Israeli troops there were forewarned of their passing. Now, the glittering panorama of Jerusalem glowed against the horizon while above a thousand stars glistened like jewels adrift on a black sea. Ethan stared at them, hearing Hassim’s words whispering across the empty void above, of gargantuan stars and broiling elements, of supernovas and embryonic solar systems, of the cycle of life replayed endlessly across the tremendous ages that had passed and were yet to come, long after he had been cast back into the dusts from which he had been forged. Life, everywhere.
Somehow, the traumas of his life seemed suddenly trivial against the epic backdrop of the universe. Even Joanna’s shadowy presence, her unknown fate looming over everything that he did, seemed inconsequential. Nothing matters. One day he would be nothing more than a footnote in history, or an image in a photograph, dead and forgotten along with his woes. Maybe he should just quit and get out of Israel before his time came to a premature end.
But then he looked at Rachel, and remembered that science didn’t have an explanation for the human spirit, for courage, fortitude, or love.
She sat beside him, her head nestled against a jacket folded up against the opposite window frame. She had fallen asleep within minutes of crossing the border an hour previously, and despite the hardship and trauma that she had endured over the last few days, her sleeping face was an image of serenity. No regrets. Her inner demons, doubts, fears, and insecurities were temporarily silenced by the solitude of a sleep that still eluded Ethan.
He turned away and looked into the blackness of the Israeli night. Far out to the east, the first faint line of dawn was creeping toward them, broken ribbons of distant cloud black against the deep blue. He looked at his watch: 5:26 a.m.
He looked again at Rachel. Ethan’s past was full of regrets packed, jammed, and shoehorned into every crevice of his existence until some had inevitably spilled out to contaminate his present. He regretted not attending college, regretted resigning his commission in the U.S. Marines and the animosity that had developed between himself and his father as a result, regretted becoming a journalist, regretted the risks he had undertaken and the risks he had exposed others to, and he regretted most of all losing Joanna in this brutal and uncaring corner of the world.
And now he had let Rachel down too.
Rachel yawned, sitting upright and peering out of the window. “Where are we?”
“About ten miles from Jerusalem,” Ethan said.
“You haven’t slept,” she observed.
“Didn’t want to,” Ethan lied, and immediately wondered why.
Rachel’s eyes narrowed slightly, almost playfully, and then it was as though she suddenly recalled where they were and why, and her features sagged. She looked at her makeshift pillow, probably wishing she could return to oblivion.
“Hassim,” Ethan said to her in an effort to distract her. “Before he died he mentioned something called cargo cults. You know what they are?”
Rachel ran her fingers through her long black hair and sighed.
“There’s a few of them, mostly in the Pacific,” she said. “They’re Melanesians who encountered Westerners for the first time during World War II when U.S. Marines were advancing on the Japanese. What’s that got to do with Lucy?”
“Just bear with me for a moment,” Ethan said. “Why do they call them cargo cults?”
“Well, the occupying American forces built runways on the islands, brought in supplies using aircraft loaded with weapons, radios, medicine, and suchlike. They had a good relationship with the islanders. But when the war was over they left,