The Gilded Sanctum

by Keith Veverka

  Walker lowered his head as an awkward sense of relief swept over him. Although he guessed that Meredith was about to kill him, he didn’t fear it. Everything she said had been correct. He had been struggling, was not who he used to be, and could not find peace with his place in the world. He did believe that rescuing Amanda may have given him some relief from the pain, but now he knew it wasn’t real, so in the end, he was right back where he started. He deserved the end that was coming. But before he died, he had one final question, the same question he had posed to Ellis. “Why did you bring me here?”

  Meredith leaned back in the chair and smirked, moving the blade lightly along her lips, as if trying to decide if Walker deserved the truth before she killed him. After a few pensive moments, she made her choice. “We needed you to ruin that son of a bitch Ellis. A disappearance alone was not going to do it. He could hide it too well, especially working for a devil like Arcuri, so we needed something more. We needed a high-profile investigation, headline-grabbing stories of strange rituals and buried backpacks, and a man that would have to admit to his transgressions — ruined by his own hubris. The only way that was going to happen was if you were involved, and Joaquin and I could control how it all played out. You would think you were solving the case, but we were merely pulling the strings.”

  Walker exhaled. “Why Ellis?”

  Meredith laughed loudly. “That was just your part. The entire play was much bigger than that. This isn’t just about Ellis. It’s about three evil men who needed to pay for their crimes. Forget redemption — how about punishment?”

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Walker hopelessly tried to make sense of what Meredith was saying until it suddenly dawned on him in the darkness of the cavern.

  “That’s right,” Meredith said, noticing that Walker was beginning to put the pieces together. “The dean of our esteemed academy, Dr. Robert Ellis, was laundering money for a wicked crime lord, Mr. Lorenzo Arcuri, who hired a private investigator, Mr. Ryan Walker, to hunt down an accountant who was embezzling money from both of them.”

  “Edward Collins?” Walker whispered, the missing link finally falling into place.

  Meredith smiled proudly at the realization. “Yes. He was my husband.”

  Chapter 53

  Stunned by Meredith’s revelation, Walker didn’t say a word, simply stared at her face, seeing the various emotions flicker through her expressions — anguish, loss, and resolve.

  “I had never changed my last name after we were married. I had already started a career with my maiden name, so I decided to keep it. After Edward went to work for Arcuri, we simply decided to keep using my last name as a security measure, allowing me to more easily disappear if something ever happened, which unfortunately, it did,” Meredith said, her voice trailing off. She breathed heavily. “I was the one who actually introduced Dr. Ellis to my husband shortly after he lost his job. I had been working at the school for many years at that point, and I think Ellis was slightly infatuated with me. He knew we were struggling, and so as a way to show how much he cared for me, he approached Edward with a job offer. At first we were grateful, didn’t quite realize at the time that Ellis was in bed with a mafia lord, but eventually it became clear that my husband was now working for the Arcuri crime family. And by that time, it was too late.”

  Walker feigned empathy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Meredith snapped, “because that wasn’t the worst part. Once Edward was in too deep, Ellis approached me again and confirmed that my husband was indeed laundering money for the Arcuri empire. However, he told me that in order for Edward to stay in Arcuri’s good graces, Ellis now needed something in return. That’s right. Dr. Ellis, revered dean of Washington Academy, forced me to have sex with him. Or perform sexual favors for him whenever he demanded. If I refused, he said he simply would tell Lorenzo that Edward was cheating him, and my husband would be killed.”

  “My God.”

  “I never told Edward what was happening. It was just too painful. But eventually I convinced him to get out from under them, and we hatched an escape plan. Edward was a great accountant, so over several months, he skimmed off money for himself — for us — that we were going to use to relocate and disappear. But we didn’t leave fast enough. Arcuri realized he was embezzling the money and sent you after him.”

  Walker closed his eyes and shook his head, a tight knot forming in his stomach over his involvement with this tragic story.

  “They left me alone obviously. Probably because Ellis had asked them to, so he could keep me as his sexual slave a while longer. He called me into his office, expressed his deepest sympathies for what had happened to Edward. But then told me that he and I were going to continue with our relationship unless I wanted him to tell Arcuri that I had been working with Edward to steal the money, too. I went berserk on that son of a bitch, blamed him for everything, and told him that I was no longer going to be his toy whenever he wanted. Ellis became extremely irate and attacked me, just as his student assistant, Amanda Bryson, walked in on us.

  “Ellis told me a different story.”

  “Of course he did,” Meredith replied, “he’s made a career out of telling lies. But now he was caught. Amanda had witnessed him attacking me, so he had no choice. He had to transfer her and leave me alone, at least for the time being. However, I wasn’t going to give that bastard another chance to strip away any more of what was left of me, so I came up with my own plan for revenge. For all three of you.”

  “How?” Walker asked with a morbid curiosity.

  Meredith grinned. “Joaquin and I did have an affair years ago when Edward and I were having some marital issues after he was fired from his firm. It was short-lived, a respite from my life perhaps, but Castillo had always maintained a special affection for me. I knew he was the one person on this campus with the power to help me execute my plan, so I rekindled a relationship with him to learn all I could about how things operated here. And as I’m sure you know, he’s spent a lot of time in the underworld, so he knew all about Ellis, Arcuri, and a former FBI agent named Walker. There was certainly no love loss between him and Ellis, so he was more than willing to help me. Love is blind, right?”

  Walker rocked his head back and forth as Meredith explained the elaborate scheme.

  “A simple text to Amanda, telling her I had to speak with her about Ellis, was all that was needed for her to venture over to my residence, where Joaquin used chloroform to incapacitate her. He also ensured no surveillance techs were working in the security center at that exact time, so he could easily delete the footage of Amanda walking across the campus to my front door. When you control the eyes of the entire campus, you can close them whenever you want.”

  “What are you going to do with Amanda?” Walker asked.

  Meredith glanced over at the unconscious girl tied to the chair, then spoke with an eerie precision. “She’s so innocent, isn’t she? I feel badly for her since none of this was her fault. She obviously doesn’t deserve a brutal death like the one my husband received at the hands of Arcuri’s henchman. I have a syringe for her. I’ll administer the drug while she’s passed out, so she won’t feel a thing. Then I’ll throw her body into that underground aquifer, and Arcuri will never know what happened to his daughter. Not knowing will be my ultimate revenge. A man as powerful as Arcuri will always be reminded that he was powerless to find his own daughter.”

  Walker sighed heavily.

  “But you,” Meredith said, pointing the blade at Walker again, “you will be awake for your death, so you can experience it slowly and painfully. You will feel every inch of this blade, and the pain I inflict upon you will linger until you die.”

  She suddenly plunged the knife into Walker’s abdomen, and he grunted loudly. The pain was intense — a massive burning sensation — radiating into to his chest and arms. His neck stiffened as he wrestled at his ropes, the futile attempts merely weakening him further as she pushed the knife deeper into his body.

>   Walker gasped and grunted, trying to shift his body away from the knife’s blade, only resulting in Meredith pushing harder into his stomach, holding the handle of the knife firmly in her hand as he struggled. Although he had reached a peaceful resignation with death minutes earlier, the excruciating pain gave him second thoughts. Walker almost wanted to beg her to stop. But it was too late now.

  The large blade was nearly gone, had torn through his skin and muscle and was ripping a gaping hole into his torso. Blood was forming around the entry wound, drenching his shirt in dark red and smearing the color along the silver blade, which continued its penetration inside of him. He suddenly felt cold, his arms and legs starting to shake, barely able to perceive that he was going into shock.

  His vision starting to blur, Walker studied Meredith’s face, a maniacal smile forming with her lips as she admired the deadly knife and seemed to take great pleasure in causing him pain. She finally glanced up, a stern expression on her face, as if to say that her fun was over and it was time to finish the job. As an experienced police officer, Walker knew what was next.

  A single knife wound would not immediately kill him. It would take some time as he slowly bled out onto the stone floor and eventually slumped over from blood loss. He would probably lose consciousness before his heart actually stopped pumping blood, so Meredith appeared to want to end his life more quickly, while he was still cognizant of what was happening to him.

  Now that the sharp knife had taken its initial toll, Meredith could end it all and watch closely as the life drained from Walker’s eyes. To accomplish this, she would need to quicken the bloodletting, which meant either stabbing him several more times, or twisting the knife to further open the wound and speed the rate of blood loss, bringing a rapid end to Walker’s life.

  Meredith had enjoyed herself enough. Watching him struggle, seeing the anguish crinkle his face, and feeling his body losing its will to live had given her the satisfaction she had been seeking for so long. She looked back at the knife and regripped her hand, preparing for the final blow: the twist of the knife.

  There was nothing left to do. Walker accepted his fate and a rush of relief washed over him. He sagged into the chair and no longer struggled against the steel object tearing through his flesh. It was over. As a final thought, Walker wondered if anyone would ever follow this tunnel, find this chamber, and solve the mystery of what had happened to Amanda Bryson. He didn’t know the answer to that, but his quest for those answers had come to a tragic end. Shakespeare would have been proud.

  Meredith glared one last time directly at Walker as she gritted her teeth and twisted the knife. Walker could feel the life finally fading from him. Everything went blurry, then black, then was followed by a blinding white light.

  Chapter 54

  The blinding light was instantly followed by a deafening explosion, which rattled the subterranean chamber. The loud noise shattered Walker’s ear drums and an incessant ringing immediately filled the void. Through the intermittent ringing, the sound of dozens of footsteps filled the cavernous space and echoed off the stone walls and floors.

  Walker recognized the familiar sounds. The explosion was a flash bang, a device used to incapacitate a subject with a bright light and loud explosion, and the many footsteps belonged to men with aimed rifles and padded armor. A SWAT team had just breached the room.

  Meredith was abruptly driven to the ground by the two lead officers and her hands were cuffed behind her back with zip ties. Two other agents grabbed Walker’s chair, severed the twine which bound his hands behind it, and gently leaned it back onto the ground. Walker laid on his back, still tied to the chair, his legs dangling above him. The SWAT officers leaned in and took hold of the knife, still protruding from his stomach, as they applied a field dressing around the wound and administered multiple shots to stabilize him as he had already gone into septic shock.

  Two more officers moved past Meredith — face down on the ground — and approached Amanda, who was now bobbing her head slightly, jolted from her drug-induced state by the explosion from the flash bang. They quickly removed her restraints and laid her carefully on the floor to begin a cursory examination of her injuries, which consisted of minor lacerations and bruises, but nothing that appeared to be life-threatening. The remainder of the SWAT team fanned out across the chamber, rifles raised and flashlights beaming streams of light around the underground cavern.

  Walker lay there — still unable to move — as the medicine started to take effect, and he was gently imbued with an extraordinary sense of euphoria. But it was more than the medication. He had been just been saved by his colleagues, rescued by the people he still called his friends. Although his descent had been complete, both literally and figuratively, he was being pulled back to life by the very people he so admired. And this, he told himself, would be the first step in the long road back.

  Another officer knelt down next to Walker, but he wasn’t dressed in a SWAT uniform. He wore only a blue flak vest with the yellow letters ‘FBI’ emblazoned on the front. The agent placed his hand tenderly on Walker’s shoulder and smiled.

  Walker could not help but return the smile before breaking into tears. It was his longtime friend and partner, Mark Lewis.

  Chapter 55

  The bright morning sun blinded Walker as he emerged from the faculty residence strapped to a gurney that was being loaded into a waiting ambulance. Two FBI agents led Meredith out shortly after, her arms still handcuffed behind her back. She was placed in the back seat of an unmarked sedan with government license plates, flanked on both sides by police cruisers. The collection of emergency vehicles, lights flashing, looked out of place on the serene school campus, but that was only half the story.

  The other half of the story was buried several yards below the trimmed lawns and sculpted walkways of the prestigious campus. That half had survived for over two centuries and would remain so, but most people would never get to see it, and the legend of Mosby’s tunnels would soon pass into history. After the investigative work was finished, the Board of Trustees made the decision to seal off all access to the underground labyrinth, lest it become a kind of tourist attraction and detract from the famed reputation and academic excellence of Washington Academy.

  The fantastic story of the abducted girl and the secret society eventually faded from public attention as the academy went to great lengths to rewrite the narrative as a massive hoax on the part of some students to bring notoriety to the school. As a stringent requirement to their continued attendance at WA, all of the boys involved in the Sons of Liberty were required by the Board of Trustees to sign a non-disclosure agreement or face expulsion. All of the boys agreed to the reprieve.

  Josh Easterly — through intense consultation with his mother’s attorneys and the Board of Trustees as well as the local authorities — was transferred to another private school in Virginia, a stipulation which allowed him to avoid criminal prosecution for his leadership role in the Sons of Liberty. Rumors of preferential treatment and a behind-the-scenes deal for the Congresswoman’s son swirled around the case, but nothing was ever proven.

  On a related note, Heather Yates miraculously passed all of her classes during the fall semester, spent the spring semester in Italy on a study abroad scholarship, and was accepted to an Ivy League school the following year. Her academic records from Washington Academy remained under seal, and no news reports of her involvement in the events during that September would ever surface.

  Walker was in George Washington University Hospital for nearly a month, healing from his wounds suffered in the tunnels below the immaculate campus. There was nothing immaculate, however, about the physical therapy he endured afterward, but he liked the strenuous activity. He hadn’t felt this alive in a long time, and so he took full advantage of it, achieving a level of fitness he hadn’t experienced since his time with the FBI. Walker was so committed to his complete recovery that the therapy worked its magic in even less time than his doctors could have pr
edicted. In essence, the hospital stay had actually been a blessing for Walker as there was no alcohol, and he refused any pain medication. It made him stronger, both physically and mentally.

  Mark Lewis had stopped in to see him every few days, sharing with him the most recent revelations from the ongoing investigation. The two bonded again as they worked out together in the training rooms, rekindling the friendship that had been lost. As the difficult recovery ebbed and flowed, Lewis also kept Walker laser focused on the ultimate goal: getting back to his family. He was given a second chance, and he was not going to waste it.

  In an ironic twist of fate, he actually owed his life to Dr. Ellis. After his revelatory conversation with the dean and the sprint to Meredith’s residence, Walker had convinced Ellis that his career was effectively over and the circumstances surrounding Amanda’s disappearance were odd enough to warrant a call to the FBI. It seemed Ellis had feared for Walker’s safety, and so the FBI operator, knowing Mark Lewis was working the Washington Academy case, forwarded the call directly to him. Since Lewis was already in the final stages of a raid on the school, it was easy for Lewis to mobilize an elite strike team on short notice. They arrived at the campus quickly, and Ellis immediately confessed the details of his conversation with Walker. With Ellis able to direct Lewis to Meredith’s residence, the SWAT team simply followed Walker’s trail until they found him. An unlikely ending to a tragic story.

  Meredith Thomas was charged with multiple counts of kidnapping, child endangerment, and attempted murder, but to avoid a lengthy and sensational public trial, federal prosecutors offered her a reduced sentence in exchange for being a confidential informant in prison. She pled guilty to lesser charges and began serving a sixteen-year sentence in the low-security female federal correctional facility in Alameda County, California. She would be eligible for parole in seven.