"Something from my childhood."

She unwrapped the object. A wooden scabbard and hilt appeared. Tai drew the blade. It was a shoto, a Japanese short sword, the blade about eight inches long.

"May I?" Vaughn asked.

Tai paused and then handed it over, handle first.

Vaughn took it. He was surprised how light it was. He turned it and looked at the edge. Razor sharp.

"How many times was the metal folded?" he asked, referring to the process by which such blades were handmade.

Tai smiled, holding her hand out to take it back.

"You know something of swords?"

"I spent time in the Far East," Vaughn vaguely answered.

"The making of this is a family secret," Tai said as she slid the blade back into its sheath. She then put the sword inside her combat vest, on top of the body armor, straight down along her chest, between her breasts.

"Interesting placement," Vaughn said. Tai shot him a sharp look. He held his hands up defensively.

"Sorry,"

"You get one mistake," Tai said.

"And you've made it."

Vaughn nodded.

"It was stupid."

Tai relaxed.

"A man who can admit he's wrong. That's something new."

The truck lurched to an abrupt stop, then gears grinded as the driver threw it into reverse. Vaughn lifted the canvas flap covering the rear and saw the back end of a C-130, ramp open.

"We're here."

CHAPTER 10

The report of Kasama's execution reached Abayon while he was once more hooked up to the dialysis machine. He was not surprised. Abayon knew the power of the Yakuza. And he knew that anyone who could do what had been done to Kasama was even more powerful. He had seen this before. A powerful organization struck by some group that lived in the shadows, one that seemed able to wield power with impunity. Not for the first time – or, he knew, the last – he wished he had not been so quick to cut Colonel Tashama's throat. In the six decades since that event, he had come to realize that it was as close as he'd ever gotten to someone who might have known what this shadow organization was. However, given the security levels he had run into whenever he tried to penetrate his enemy, he realized Tashama had probably known little more than he needed to hide this part of the Golden Lily here.

The nurse pulled the needle out of his arm and smiled at Abayon. He nodded his head in thanks. The dialysis was not a cure – it was a stop-gap measure designed to keep death a handsbreadth away. Time, the most valuable of all currencies, was what he needed. Just a little more time. And then he would embrace death. He had faced it many times before and he did not fear it – he only feared not completing what he'd set out to do so many years ago.

The issue of whether there was life after death had plagued mankind since the beginning of consciousness. For some people, usually those in the bounty of their youth, such a question was often considered in theoretical terms. For those in his situation, pinned to a wheelchair and hearing his life leave him molecule by molecule with each breath, it was a very real consideration.

He had managed to get the doctor to be honest with him, and Abayon knew that he would not be alive that long. What was beyond that increasingly occupied his mind. He was not one of the Muslims who believed heaven was a bountiful place of all the food one could eat and all the beautiful women one could take for one's own pleasure. Those were the naive dreams of ignorant men. A strict reading of the Koran indicated that man could have no concept of heaven because it was so far beyond anything experienced here on Earth.

Abayon liked the concept of something he couldn't conceptualize. It was a spiritual existence, not a physical one. There would be a birth of a soul from his own soul. And that new soul would reap the benefits of the type of life one had lived on Earth. According to his interpretation of the Koran, Heaven and Hell existed in the same place but on a different dimension. It was all relative, depending on what one could perceive and one's state upon death.

Abayon planned for his state upon death to be one of equilibrium. He had suffered much in life and spent decades building himself up to a position of power in order to equal out the scales. It had required tremendous patience, the need to hold back when there was a burning desire to strike out against his enemies and those who had done him tremendous wrongs over the years.

There was evil in the world. The evil of the material world. And looming behind that evil was the United States and its corrupting influence. In that, he agreed with Al Qaeda and the other extremist Islamic groups. But Abayon sensed something more. A power behind the power. He had seen and heard and interpreted too many unsettling things over the course of his life.

Finding this complex and its contents had been disturbing enough over sixty years ago. But it had only been the first of several events that changed his view on the world, just as his learning of Islam had changed his view of the afterlife.

A guard wheeled Abayon from the medical center to his office. Abayon checked the in-box, signing off on the minor details that kept the Abu Sayef running its day-to-day operations. He smiled as he thought it was not much different running a guerrilla organization than a corporation.

Wheels up. Vaughn felt the plane depart from the runway. A small pile of equipment was tied down on the ramp: two parachutes, night vision goggles, and helmets. He loosened the straps and removed one of them.

"I like to pack my own," Tai said as she grabbed the other one.

"I do too," Vaughn said, but they both knew that was impractical in the back of the aircraft. They checked the rigging on the outside as best they could. Everything appeared to be in order.

Vaughn turned to the crew chief, the only other occupant of the cargo bay.

"How long until the drop?"

The crew chief spoke into his headset, listened and then turned to Vaughn and Tai.

"Two hours, twenty-six minutes."

Everyone else appeared to be asleep to David. They were several hours out of Hawaii, and looking out the window, all he could see in the moonlit night was the ocean far below. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his satellite phone, then hooked his PDA to the phone. He brought up a small keyboard display on the PDA, held the stylus over it, and began to enter a text message:

ROYCE THERE WERE SOME THINGS ABOUT THE OR GANIZATION WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT. I AM NOT SURE IF

David paused, the words reflected back at him. He smiled. He still wasn't sure whether he should write and send this message to his old friend. A lifetime of lies and deceptions had wormed its way so deeply into his mind, he wasn't sure anymore what was the right thing to do. A harsh lesson he had learned early in his career in covert operations was that sometimes ignorance was indeed bliss.

He leaned his head back on the seat, the message incomplete, and closed his eyes. Within minutes he had joined the other retirees in slumber.

Abayon paused in his paperwork when there was a knock on the steel door, a dull thud, repeated in a pattern he recognized. He pressed the release for the heavy door and it swung outward.

A young Filipino woman who had just passed her twenty-second birthday stood in the entranceway.