by Simon King
Grabbing his binoculars, Tim tried to see what was happening, but because of the dip in the field, wasn’t tall enough to see across to where the van had stopped. As the pair of them listened, a door creaked open, then slammed shut.
“Let’s go,” Tim whispered, before kneeling down and slowly running across the road. Sam took a quick look both ways, saw the darkness stare back and followed as she relayed their intentions to Mumma.
There was nothing but silence coming from the cemetery as they crossed the boundary fence, a low-swinging chain they simply stepped over. The shuffling sound of someone walking across gravel reached out to them and as Sam froze to see who it was, felt Tim pull her down behind a tombstone.
Torchlight suddenly bathed parts of the cemetery, slowly working its way over the many headstones, including the one hiding them, before returning to its starting location. A moment later the light turned the other way and Tim slowly rose back up. A second later, he gestured for Sam to follow, as he slowly continued creeping towards the van.
As they neared it, two things suddenly struck them, both giving the agents a shock. The first was that the van was the exact same make and color as the killer’s original one, right down to the lack of identifying features.
The second was that there was a shovel leaning against the side of it. Tim reached out and touched the handle, as if making sure it was real. Sam stood beside him, trying to pinpoint the location of the van’s driver as she shared the information via the earpiece.
Nothing but silence greeted them and Tim motioned for Sam to follow again. He crept alongside the van, then slowly stepped towards a big Pine, the dominant feature of the cemetery. As he neared it, a voice suddenly coiled out of the darkness, one trying to be as quiet as them.
It was more of a mumble and Sam stopped to try and listen. It was coming from near the back of the cemetery and Tim motioned for her to head parallel to the way he was going. As they began to walk, the moon suddenly disappeared behind a cloud. The graveyard was abruptly cast into an eerie darkness that turned the headstones surrounding Sam into a million hiding spots for the monsters that filled this place after midnight. As if forced by the moment, she checked her wristwatch, her heart missing a beat as she saw the hands pointing at 12:03.
The voice mumbled something again and this time, Sam was sure she heard the word “die” amongst the jumble of sounds. Tim looked across at her as she continued sneaking between the grave markers.
There was a sudden thump as something was thrown to the ground. A shadow seemed to rise up from the ground just a few yards ahead of her and Sam choked back a scream that threatened to escape. But Tim didn’t hesitate, standing a couple of feet closer than her. He ducked down, saw his opportunity and with spring-loaded legs, jumped at the lonely figure as it hurried past him.
The figure screamed as Tim hit him almost directly in the middle, wrapping his arms around the shadow’s legs. The man let out another scream as he fell to the ground, something now attached to him. Sam snapped on the flashlight she’d been carrying in her pocket and lit up the two men lying on the ground before her.
The man looked to be in his mid 30’s, his face a terrified mass of stubble, blood and tears. Tim had one arm twisted around so the stranger couldn’t move, his other gripping a handful of hair.
“Who are you?” Tim snarled into his face. Sam moved slightly aside so she could keep them illuminated while trying to light up where the man had come from. Once they were sure he wasn’t going to give them trouble, Sam neared the place where the man had been digging, spying the shallow hole he’d started.
Tim yanked him to his feet and walked the back to the van, Sam following slightly behind as she lit up the way for them. The man was crying uncontrollably, his sobs making his words almost completely unintelligible. But as soon as they neared the van and opened the back door, Sam finally understood the man’s grief.
A woman was lying in the back of the van, her bottom half sticking out from under the blanket she’d been wrapped in. There was blood on the floor beside her legs and the smell of it instantly hit both agents.
As the man broke down, his story spilling like the blood of his wife lying before him, Sam relayed the events back to Mumma. The rest of the agents suddenly realized that they were back in the ballgame as they listened to the false alarm.
The couple’s domestic argument had exploded into a violent confrontation as the woman revealed her intention to finally leave her husband. Unable to accept the decision, the man had hit his wife with the first object he managed to grab a hold of, the meat tenderizer still sitting on the sink from dinner making short work of the shocked woman’s skull.
He’d planned to bury her in the cemetery, preferably in the same grave as a recent burial and had driven the short distance from their home in his work van. If it weren’t for Tim and Sam already having the cemetery under surveillance, the man’s plan may have succeeded. But now that he’d been caught, any resistance he held on to, quickly disappeared as his crime was exposed.
Tim was in the process of putting the sobbing man into the passenger seat of his van when Mumma began her quarter-hour checks. And while the Ohio crew answered their call, the Michigan team remained silent, Mumma’s repeated calls going unanswered.
Tim drove the van back to the local police station, while Sam followed in their rental. A strange silence had descended over the airwaves as Sam listened to the back and forth between the agents. They knew what had happened, but given the distance, were unable to offer any sort of assistance. A clean-up crew had already been dispatched and was less than an hour’s drive. Mumma was going crazy as she sat helpless in her control room.
Once they left the still-weeping man walking himself into the police station, Tim left the van around the corner, then jumped in beside Sam. She turned back towards the airport as Tim began to converse with the rest of the crew, all now desperate to rush to their friends’ aid.
10
Loosing agents had always been one of the hardest things John Milton endured during all the years he’d headed the organization known as Pogrom. Whilst it had been his former partner that had suggested the name, it was he that had the biggest hand in recruiting the people that would eventually make the organization’s aim possible. Tim had been one of the more unlikeliest candidates considering his age at the time of them first meeting, but their relationship had never been something to interfere in investigations once he’d agreed to join the organization.
John liked having his agents close. Providing them with a safe community to live in, to raise their children in relative comfort and provide all the things their families could ever want, was something he held closest to his heart. Money had not been in his life for long before he realized just how many lives he could change with it.
Rather than keep his dollars where most billionaires did, John quickly learnt to share the wealth as best he could, by investing in a firm that would ultimately provide his extended family with a lifestyle they would embrace.
Each year, as the December holiday period approached, he would make sure that everyone living inside their tightly-knit community had a seat at his table. Every year, he ensured that not a single person went without a gift, one he’d personally chosen during his many lengthy shopping trips.
But nothing affected him more than when an agent was lost.. These people were so much more than just employees. He considered them his family. And when his family was threatened, he did everything he could to ensure their safety.
Clean-up crews were the kind of back-up John Milton had designed from the ground up. They were a multi-purpose unit that were charged with a single mission: to do whatever was needed to ensure the safety of the agents.
There were a total of fourteen crews, each made up of eight highly trained officers. They travelled in two vehicles that served a number of purposes. The first vehicle was a large plain truck that held the nerve center of the crew. The forward half was a self-contained cubicle with direct links
to Mumma’s control room. Several lockers held cleaning chemicals, weapons, ammunition, uniforms and other bits and pieces the unit might need.
The second vehicle was usually a large SUV, with another weapons cache beneath the rear floor. The four-man crew who travelled in it had all the supplies they needed to work independently from the truck, if a situation called for it. And given the amount of business serial killers had given Pogrom, this would happen quite regularly.
But it was John that hated splitting crews up. He knew that 8 officers served a much better purpose than 4. And so, he had gradually increased the number of clean-up crews around America each year. His current number was 14, stationed around various states. His aim was one per state, but given the cost of operating each, as well as only employing those he knew to be trustworthy enough to keep Pogrom’s secrets, the process was considerably slower than he hoped.
In 2005, there were 4 clean-up crews, by 2010 there were 7. His recruitment had been a lot fiercer in recent years, particularly after losing 6 agents in a single operation. John did everything he could to keep his operatives safe, but even he made mistakes.
Despite sending three teams to separate locations around the country, he doubted the ferocity of the killer the teams were chasing. While Tim had tried to warn him, he didn’t believe that Red was responsible. As far as John was concerned, they were dealing with a new SK entirely, one driven by something other than revenge against the team. This oversight was something that would quickly come back to haunt him.
When the news came through that a team had failed to check in, nightmare visions returned to him from a night long before. The familiar churning in his stomach began almost as soon as the news reached him. Grabbing his cell, there was no hesitation as he pulled units from nearby jobs and allocated them all to catching the culprit responsible. With two agents dead, a third missing and now another two unresponsive, he finally understood that this operation needed everything he had to offer.
John Milton made four phone calls as he sat next to Mumma in her control room. The first three were to clean-up crews in surrounding states which he intended to use as a net to close in on the killer. The fourth call was to his good friend, Wally Norton, a technological engineer with the FBI and someone only too aware of his friend’s “other” line of business. Wally had access to things most people could only ever imagine, including direct access to satellite cams.
After a brief bit of back-and-forth between them, John filled Wally in on the recent developments and the man knew just what to do. It was his ability to create near-instant solutions that John had always found intriguing and with the current situation unfolding, hoped his good friend could weave some of his magic.
Three hundred miles. That was the distance between Tim and the man he was positive was doing this to get back at him. As they reached the airport, John came on the air, speaking directly to Tim and Sam via their earpieces. As Sam listened to John and watched Tim’s reaction, she saw the immediate struggle within.
“I want you guys to fly to Bishop International and sit tight.”
“Bishop International? But that’s like a hundred miles from Lewiston. What the hell are we gonna do there?” Tim snapped.
“You’re going to sit tight and wait for further instructions. That is, unless we have further updates before then.” John sounded calm, despite his own apprehension and Sam could sense his struggles. But sitting beside her was another man with an approaching war building within him. There was no way Tim was going to sit on the sidelines.
“John, please,” Tim tried.
“You will be in a far better position to intercept this piece of shit than if you flew straight to Lewiston.” John paused and audibly sighed. “Tim, think. He’s not going to sit and wait for you. For all we know he’s already a hundred miles from there. I have several other teams closing in from all directions. I really need you there.”
It worked, despite the internal objections. After parking the vehicle, the pair ran back to the plane and climbed aboard. The pilot began taxiing before the door had been properly secured, Tim and Sam taking their seats.
As the plane shot down the runway a minute later, Tim and Sam exchanged a look that neither needed to explain with words. This wasn’t just another lonely serial killer who was shooting his way to infamy. This was an adversary who’d spent time studying his opponent. For whatever revenge was driving him, Tim knew that this man had laid down the groundwork to continue his cat and mouse game until the very end. Unless he was stopped by someone seeking their own vengeance, and lay to rest a grief that had never been fully released.
Twenty minutes before their plane touched down at Bishop International, the first crew arrived at Lewiston. The cemetery was completely deserted, save for the three bodies lying inside an open grave. The first, later identified as Yuri Lebedev, had been placed inside the coffin already living in the hole. The other two, Anderson and Reilly, had been rolled on top of the closed coffin. Each had been shot in the back of the head. The coffin’s original tenant, Carry Orr, was gone.
This time, the killer hadn’t taken the time to fill the grave back in, leaving a neat pile of dirt to one side, complete with the shovel he’d used sticking out of it like a marker. The first team to arrive didn’t hesitate to relay the information back to a shocked control room, John slamming his fist on the desk in despair. His insides were churning like a swollen river, cramping his middle as he stared at the body-cam vision playing on the monitor before him. He stared at the cell in his hand, anxiously waiting for his friend.
The call came through less than five minutes later and was accompanied by an email with a single link. John directed Mumma to follow it to where Wally Norton had created a very unique film clip for them as he thanked his friend.
Even Mumma’s jaw opened as the clip played out, the contents of the vision something she had never experienced before. It was a 3D file of every vehicle that had driven past the stretch of road where the cemetery was. Despite the lack of cameras, Wally had used every available camera he could find, used 3 separate satellites to track the said vehicles and then fed all the information into his specially-designed software for processing. What it returned was a film clip of four vehicles, each traveling along different roads around the state of Michigan.
Two of the vehicles were driving south along Route 127 only a few minutes apart. One was a small Suzuki hatchback, the other a 1979 Chrysler. The third was a Highlander driving southeast along State Route 75, while the final vehicle was a white Savana, traveling southwest along route 131 towards Wyoming.
Mumma found the film clip to be almost hypnotic, a combination of real-world footage, CGI and fill-in footage. She could move the clip in any direction she wanted, as if rolling a Rubik’s Cube around the palm of her hand. If she wanted to see which buildings the vehicles passed, she could twist her mouse in a way that turned the live image, the vehicles continuing to drive as she watched it side-on. She had only played a driving simulator on her son’s X-Box once and this is what it reminded her of.
“This is incredible,” she said as they sat watching the feed. John looked up from his cell and nodded.
“Certainly is. But it does have its limits.”
“Limits?” Mumma asked.
“Yes. It can only provide a 2-hour long feed. After that, the inputs start to get hazy and the information becomes a lot less reliable.”
“Less reliable? But isn’t this a live view?”
“Yes and no. The live view is only from actual cameras. But these don’t follow the vehicles 100% of the time. The satellites only take pictures at regular intervals, while the camera feeds come and go as the vehicles travel along the roads. The gaps between the cameras start to widen the longer the cars drive.”
“So even though we might be watching them here, in a few hours they may not be there at all?”
“Exactly. And Wally can only use the satellites for a very limited time before questions are asked.” John smiled, then sta
red back at his cell. After finishing his text, he turned back to Mumma. “OK, open a channel to everyone.”
As John updated the teams, Tim and Sam finally landed, both feeling like late arrivals to a concert. Their plane taxied them to their waiting car and the pair didn’t hesitate once the door was opened for them. Just as they reached their new vehicle, John’s voice came through loud and clear.
“We have four possibles, which Mumma is sending to your cells now. Each team will take the vehicle closest to them and follow it until we can identify the occupants. Remember, Nicholas is still in the killer’s custody as far as we know. His body hasn’t been found and until we know otherwise, we consider him a live hostage. Please use your utmost diligence when in close proximity to this SK. He’s already murdered four of our family.”
Tim jumped into the driver’s seat as he listened to John talking. Sam hopped into the passenger side, her cell held out for them to see the incoming instructions. Tim started the engine, his eyes fixed on the screen. Sam saw the list of vehicles a split second before Tim, instantly knowing of what was about to happen.
“The van,” Tim half-yelled as he slammed the gear-shift into Drive.
“Tim, we have to take the Highlander,” Sam tried as she was pushed back into her seat by the car’s rapid acceleration. But Tim refused to listen, his face turned into a wall of stone. “Tim.”
“Sam?” John asked, listening to the exchange.
