Pandora's Box: Book 3 of the Crystal Raven Series

As the battle in the gulch wound down to a fiery end, Gabriel parted company with the squads from the Academy of Sardar Pagoda, taking only a small escort with him. Five of the thirteen Brotherhood academies were in Asia, and since China and India accounted for a third of the world’s population, it only stood to reason. A North Korean commando team had been hired to smuggle him in and out of Japan, where the next academy on his list would be found. In some places, the price of a week’s groceries could buy you almost anything. Here, where the writ of the Western Church did not hold sway, travel was easier for the Brotherhood monks. Still, there were other dangers to contend with – totalitarian governments, drug lords, and now the new threat of wandering demon hordes. Travel might be easier, but it was not any safer.

Getting from Vietnam to the coast of Korea was going to be a trek. In China, they would be able to hire a private plane from a local airport, flying into South Korea as part of the army of businessmen who made a weekly commute. Somewhere on the border close to one of the cities in the former Hong Kong territories, where their flight would originate, an agent of the Brotherhood would meet them with a vehicle. A disposable cell phone was used to make the arrangements and now lay shattered on the side of the mountain, its parts unable to tell its tale. Time was more important at the moment than the Brotherhood’s age-long tradition of secrecy, and Gabriel found himself taking risks he would never have considered even a year ago.

For the first two hours of their trek through the jungle, one of the demons followed their scent. He kept on their trail until a truck driver picked them up along a lonely stretch of dirt road and offered them a ride. He was heading towards Mong Cai, a coastal town near the border of China that lay a short distance from Gangkou, where they were to meet their contact. Gabriel kept the hood of his robe up and let his companions do most of the talking. With four others keeping up a constant chatter with the friendly and obviously lonely truck driver, one silent man did not stick out as much as if he were alone. In fact, Gabriel doubted, the truck driver had even noticed he had not said anything beyond the initial greeting. And since his Vietnamese had an atrocious accent, that was probably for the best.

The topic of the day was fish. For centuries before the war, the villagers around these parts had relied on the fish in the rivers and river deltas to supplement their diet of rice. After the war and the heavy use of defoliants like Agent Orange, the catch had been progressively smaller. The environmental damage to the country during the war had been extensive, and even after nearly four decades, much of that damage showed no signs of healing. Fish – both their size and the size of the catches continued to shrink.

Crossing into China could be difficult at any time. Vietnam and China had a love/hate relationship that had inspired border clashes several times in the past. Walking through the unarmed border crossing, through a no-man’s-land, and again through an armed border crossing, was nerve-wracking even with legitimate papers. Their Canadian passports, while printed by the Canadian government, held the identities of people who had died more than a century ago. Canada, fortunately, had a good relationship with both governments, and Canadian businessmen were constantly exploring new opportunities in China and surrounding countries. It helped, but both sets of soldiers had looked at them and their papers so long and hard Gabriel started to wonder if he could get a purple heart for a heart attack.

In China, finding a ride into Gangkou was problematic. In this part of the country, the bicycle was the vehicle of choice. The search for a telephone, a public one, was a quest on its own, and they ended up purchasing an illegal cell phone. Once on the phone to their contact, Gabriel instructed him to meet them along the road. Somehow he would manage to find transportation, even if he had to rent a bicycle – and when that proved the case, he discovered the hard way you can indeed forget how to ride a bike. He wondered if he could find a pair of training wheels in this country and how silly a grown man would look using them if he did? Christmas! He hated anything with peddles, and two wheels were not high on his list either.

Outside the small border town, the Chinese government had built a modern four-lane highway and judging by the number of bicycles versus cars and trucks, it had been for military and not commercial purposes. Gabriel still stood out amongst all the bike riders, and not only because he was the only occidental in an oriental sea of humanity. A turtle with a walker would make more progress than he was on a bicycle, and he began to pray he would meet his contact closer to this end of the highway. Exactly how far were twenty miles anyway? He looked like a drunk five-year-old only now learning to ride a bike, and he couldn’t have stood out anymore if he was wearing a neon sign saying wanted felon. A couple more feet and he would turn himself in to the nearest authorities.

A long crooked mile down the road, a car pulled over and honked. Gabriel gladly gave up the bike. There was no Tour de France in his immediate future, not if he could help it. His contact, a ridiculously short Asian man, got out of the car and opened up the trunk. As he turned to help his superior with the bike, Gabriel lifted it over his head and slid it into the trunk. The front wheel stuck out, spinning faster than he had ever managed to make it turn, and he threw it a one-fingered salute.

“Not fond of two-wheeled transport, I see?” His guide commented.

“It is not fond of me,” Gabriel replied. “I, on the other hand, have no problem with it, as long as it has a motor and no pedals.”

His companion chuckled. “Is it bad across the border?”

“Even worse,” Gabriel scowled. “They don’t have the numbers to move against this country, and that will keep them on the other side of the border, for now.”

“And yet you move our strength elsewhere?” His contact questioned, and Gabriel could hear that there had been talk in some quarters – none of it supportive of their plans.

“With the Vampyre nations gathering,” Gabriel explained, “we cannot fight on two fronts. We have a chance to end one threat completely, and it’s a chance we have to take if we are to survive.”

His guide nodded, surrendering to the inevitable. The threat was too big, and their numbers too few. Did they alert the general populace knowing most humans could not see demons? And what of the widespread panic that could and would follow, if they could even find a government that would listen and believe them? The Turkish government would, and perhaps the Vietnamese and Cambodians, too – if any of them had survived. It was a centuries-old conundrum – remain silent and put the whole of humanity at risk, or sound the alarm and be labelled as part of the lunatic fringe. Who would believe them?

The drive to the airport was a short one. Gabriel had change out of his combat robes and into a three-piece suit. His contact gave him a new passport and a ticket that would take him into Korea, where the North Korean commandos would meet him. At the airport, he had enough time to grab a meal of noodles and vegetables, eaten awkwardly with a pair of chopsticks. After losing a third of his meal to spillage, he was ready to sacrifice virgins to a demon for a fork – even a spoon. He settled for his fingers and hoped no one thought he was uncouth. In Asia, it was a toss-up whether chopsticks, European silverware, or caveman’s fingers were the accepted thing – although Gabriel doubted caveman anything would pass muster in a modern airport.

On the airplane, Gabriel tilted back his chair and caught a brief nap. It had been a long night and would be an even longer day. Once in Korea, he needed to take a train to the coast, where a fishing boat would take him to a rendezvous with the North Korean submarine. Both groups had a lot of experience with smuggling, but neither group were Brotherhood agents. For years more traffic had crossed this border than either government recognized – food to starving relative going one way, letters and news coming out in the other. It was the same anywhere where politics divided a nation, leaving families on either side of a no-man’s-land. Humans would find a way to communicate, to aid, and to interact despite the most stringent security.

Gabriel was miserable and groggy when the plane touched down. Two hours of sleep only whetted his exhaustion and added a headache to his growing list of ailments. He needed to be sharp, especially when depending on agents from outside his outfit. Desperate people could not be trusted, not if they saw the slightest advantage in turning against you. And the temptation had to be there. He was American and was wanted. More than one source would pay a reward for his capture. All he could depend on was the large payment, half up front, and the fear of reprisals from a group who had assassinated a sitting pope. Would it be enough?

At the airport, he collected his ‘luggage’ and caught a cab to the train station. He was a Canadian businessman currently living in Hong Kong, in Korea on business for a few days. Once in Japan, he would become an Australian, naturalized, and in-country to arrange the sale of Australian beef – if, and should a cover story become necessary. It had been a long time since he had spent any serious time in the field, but over the years he had had scores of identities – more cover stories than a dozen spies or of the entire population of his country’s witness protection program. It came with the territory when you belonged to an organization this secret.

On the train, he made his way to the dining car, splurging on a beer and a bowl of rice. After his meal, he retook his seat and indulged in another nap. He was so tired that his exhaustion had sunk into his bones, and even another two hours sleep did little to touch it. When the train rolled into the station, Gabriel did not think he could find his feet, but having reached the coast, it was not going any further, not even for an old man who was missing his beauty sleep.

When he reached the coast, he left without collecting his luggage. He no longer needed the cardboard and rags in it, and the briefcase contained nothing but a few file folders and blank paper. He paused to remove a thin plastic film from his hands that altered his fingerprints. Nothing in either the briefcase or the suitcase would tell anyone anything about his identity, and if by some chance forensic tests were ever done on them, they would find the fingerprints of a man dead some seventy years ago. Some habits die hard, even when security was being thrown to the wind in the press of time. Already he was popping on another set of false prints and putting on contacts that changed the colour of his eyes. He was too old a dog to learn new tricks.

His contact met him outside the train station in a vehicle he did not recognize. Its driver had obviously taken lessons from Jean-Claude, or at least gone to the same driving school. Drifting out of the train station, he barely missed wiping out a man with a cart loaded with fish. Gabriel wondered who was chasing them until they joined traffic on a street choked with insane drivers. At least here, they knew how to use the brakes, and they applied them only a little less often than their horns. If he had any thought of napping during the drive, Gabriel gave them up. It would only give him nightmares.

Before long, they were outside of town and heading towards a small cove. Out on the beach, a black rubber zodiac lay waiting, three men in grey combat fatigues kneeling beside it. Before the son, Kim Jong-un had taken over North Korea, these men had conducted regular raids on Japan for the father, kidnapping Japanese citizens to satisfy his mad passion for Cowboy soap operas. Now, for the right price, their services could occasionally be rented – and that price ran into the seven-figure mark.

Gabriel hastily shook hands with the first man and climbed into the rubber dingy. It was time to roll the dice. These men were either his escorts or his captors, and he would not know which until he reached the sub, and maybe still not then. Gabriel mentally caressed the weapons he had hidden about his person, both the obvious and the unobvious. He had trained with both the ninja and the hassassins – the pen held a pin and a reservoir of deadly poison, the paper fan could be used to slice a throat, the dagger and pistol would kill as they had always killed. He hoped he did not need to use any of them, not tonight, and not for many nights to follow.

The sub was waiting for them a mile out at sea. A small unit, as such things go, it was fully equipped for silent running. It was capable of carrying a crew of eighteen and a commando team of five, and even still, it was crowded down below decks. As Gabriel climbed off the ladder, its captain was already shouting orders to ready the sub to submerge. These people were highly skilled and did not waste a breath. The hatch had not yet fully closed on the dinghy and the last commando when the sub began the slip beneath the waves. No one would ever know it had been there, and with luck and skill, they would not run into either an American of Japanese sub hunter.

It was a tense four-hour passage to Japan. The entire time Gabriel did not know whether he would wind up off the coast of Japan or if they would surface beside some unknown ship. His stomach was a roil of acid and nerves, and his muscles were bunching in anticipation of impending violence. At least a dozen others would pay for him – including his own government, and they were not the worse of those out there. The Church, the Vampyre nations, the demons, and the Inquisition. The list kept growing in length and darkness with every passing minute until more than the roll and pitch of the sea was causing his nausea.

Before he felt ready, the submarine was surfacing. The test had begun, and he felt as if he had hardly studied. Had his short-cut into Japan bought him more trouble than he could handle? With the added security ahead of the G8 Summit flying over had been out of the question. If he was in their database, the new facial recognition software would spot him the second he stepped through customs, maybe before he even got off of the plane. That was the problem with not knowing how deeply being declared a terrorist organization had compromised the Brotherhood. Post 9/11 it was already difficult enough, and travelling without leaving a trace all but impossible.

On deck, the zodiac waited for him. And if it was there, the deeper darkness in the distance had to be the coast of Japan. His escort had not betrayed him. It was a funny twist of fate that brought him to this time and place, almost ironic. More and more, the Brotherhood was dealing with the underworld, the criminal element and other groups placed on the Terrorist Watch list. Gabriel wondered what that said about his organization.

The three-man commando team rowed him ashore to some lonely stretch of coastline. His contact would meet him in the nearest community, a small fishing village whose natives spoke an obscure dialect of Japanese. Neither he nor they would be able to communicate with each other, should it become necessary, and if he did not meet his contact quickly, his presence would attract attention. Everyone noticed a lost foreigner. The whole of the island nation’s police force had to be on alert for strangers or anything unusual. The G8 did that. Ahead of the arrival of the eight First World leaders and their host, an army of human and electronic security had sprung up on the island nation almost overnight, and if he ran afoul of this net, there would be no place to run. Worse than getting caught by a fire aboard a ship – a quick death or a long, impossible swim.

It was a quarter-mile walk into the village, and so he considered the money spent on the North Koreans well worth it. With his flagging energy, any longer of a walk would have done him in. The academy in Japan was hidden within mount Fuji, its secret entrance so well concealed even its masters were known to get lost. Its protectors, truant officers, spent more time collecting lost students from the mountain than protecting the school. He would need a guide, to say the least. Fortunately, his contact was easy to spot. His was the newest, flashiest car in the village and the only import. The German-engineered luxury car stood out amongst the other vehicles, and if that was not enough, its custom paint job – neon green – shone even in the darkness.

Gabriel shrugged. Doing something like that to a BMW had to be a crime against humanity, but at least it was not pink. That colour choice his contact had saved for his hair. It stood out like cotton candy above a face that could only be described as monkey-like. Sho was one of the Japanese Brotherhood’s ten specialists, the incarnation of some household deity, or ancestral spirit. Gabriel would have preferred one of the nine Samurai – at least with them, he would have half a chance of surviving until dawn.

As the car fishtailed and drifted out of the village, Gabriel turned to his guide, “has every driver in Asia watched the Fast and the Furious?”

“It’s the only way to drive,” Sho said with a maniacal laugh that sent a chill down Gabriel’s spine.

Mount Fuji was too far away for this to be considered anything but a nightmare. Twice Gabriel though they would drift right off the road and over the cliff. Did the driver of every car he got into have to channel Jean-Claude? Or had the diminutive French Canadian set this up as some kind of sick practical joke before he died? Somehow Gabriel could picture him doing exactly that. And when Sho drove the car into a garage, slamming on the brakes at the last minute, Gabriel was sure he had. As the back end of the car tipped up and settled back down none too gently, rattling its passengers’ teeth, he turned to his guest.

“We walk from here,” Sho announced.

“On our two feet and not stilts,” Gabriel waited for the other to nod. He muttered as he tried to convince his wobbly legs they could still stand. “Thank God and all the angels for small miracles.”

It took a couple of miles for the Grand Master to stop walking like a drunk. By that time, they were scaling the unscalable side of mount Fuji. Somewhere amongst its tangle of brush was a pagoda, so old and forgotten vines and bushes were all that was holding it up. One of the stones at its base triggered a hidden door, revealing a set of stone stairs that led into the mountain itself. Below, in a world cut off from the outside by time as well as distance, lay one of the oldest Brotherhood Academies.

The truth was that many of these hidden places had existed long before the Brotherhood. Before Pope Sylvester, these schools had been isolated communities preserving traditions as old as mankind. Separate, often unknown to each other, they struggled against the darker forces that haunted their peoples’ folk tales. It was Pope Sylvester who had united their common cause under one organization and created a funding scheme to support them in an age when the Church was still one of the wealthiest institutions on Earth. It was both this wealth and the organization that had drawn these others to the Brotherhood, and with new allies, they were able to make headway where for centuries, there had been none.

Master Yokomoto was there to greet him. One of the nine Samurai specialists, this ancient being ran the school of mortal demon hunters.

“Welcome Grand Master,” Master Yokomoto bowed in greeting. “We were looking for you ever since Suma Yoshio Kagawa’s people left our islands.”

“I thank you for the welcome,” Gabriel bowed in return. “It has been a difficult journey. I suspect his people have moved to Turkey, where we must go to fight him. The relic must be retrieved from Mount Arafat if we are to eliminate that threat once and for all.”

Master Yokomoto nodded, “gather our forces to destroy the weaker enemy so we can concentrate our forces on the larger. It is a strategy worthy of Sun Tzu.”

“And unfortunately, the only one we can follow,” Gabriel grunted. “The Vampyres can increase their numbers faster than can any of the others. Even with the heavy recruiting Jean-Claude had us do over the last decade, I don’t know if we have the numbers to check the Vampyres, let alone what is happening on this continent and in South America.”

“Eat, rest,” Yokomoto offered. “In the morning, I will have two of my people escort you back to China. We will be one day behind you.”

Gabriel accepted gracefully.

There were thirteen of them. Amongst certain circles, they were known as the Inquisition – specialists all, questioners led by a fallen angel. Amongst the Brotherhood, they were known as the Church’s counter to the Brotherhood’s own specialists, their Détente. Their stated duty was to monitor specialist activity and to root out and punish traitors. Front line specialists like Alvaro referred to them as the Church’s Stasi – its secret police. And not only because both organizations shared practices in common, but because of the hatred they held for those they policed.

They stood on a cliff above a lonely stretch of beach, waiting for a small boat that was slowly sailing towards them. One of its occupants was their target – a human. He knew the whereabouts of the group of specialists they were most interested in, the group the Questioners blamed for the death of the last pope. They had t missed him at the train station in South Korea. This time they would not fail. A mere mortal could not foil them twice, yet this one had four times now. They had ways of making even the hardest creature talk, but those who followed this man had proved resistant – the Dark Angel was beginning to doubt his own people, and was perhaps a bit jealous of the loyalty a mere human could engender where he could not.

The boat and its single sail grew large on the horizon. Five of their number melted from the cliff, sinking into the shadows at its base. There was only one place where the boat could come ashore, and they were ready for them. The Dark Angel nodded his head, sending four more of his followers to guard the trail leading up from the beach. Two of the four still on the cliff were lightning elementals, and they would make their attack on the boat from here. From this distance, with nowhere on the open water for their target to hide, they could not miss. Boat and crew would soon be toast, pun intended.

The boat drew close enough for those watching to distinguish the figures on its deck. It was near enough now that anyone on board could swim ashore, but far enough that they would be too exhausted to put up much of a fight when they reached it. Lightning leapt from a clear evening sky. A precision strike, it missed all three figures on board, punching a hole through the centre of the deck. As water rushed in, it tore the boat in two. Its three occupants were knocked into the water.

The Dark Angel watched the three swimmers. It looked like the smallest of the three would not make it to shore. He was lagging badly. Had they miscalculated? It would only matter if he were the Grand Master of these pathetic humans, otherwise the Questioners did not care. The other two were only excess baggage he had no interest in. He pouted as he watched the last two crawl across the surface of the water. This was why he did not like dealing with mortals. They were so fragile. A mere lightning strike and short swim would hardly wind a vampyre or an angel, and a mind probe would leave no more than a lingering headache.

As the swimmers staggered to shore, his companions swept in. The first, they cut his throat before he could raise a hand to defend himself. The second, they grabbed up roughly. The Dark Angel nodded, satisfied. They had the Brotherhood Grand Master.