Prayer

by Philip Kerr

  “Yes. But it’s like this, Agent Martins: The guy coughed his guts all over the woman. She was covered in blood. Like someone threw a beer glass full of it over her. It’s possible there was some preexisting cardiomyopathic condition. Or lung ailment.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Dr. Newman. He wasn’t a smoker. And he had kept himself reasonably fit. He was still only in his forties, I believe.”

  I thanked Newman and reminded him to have Nurse Kendall call me and send me the result of the autopsy.

  I put the telephone down and stared at my computer for a moment before Googling “pulmonary edema” and “Philip Osborne.”

  The stuff about pulmonary edema was disquieting and convinced me that sometimes the human body goes wrong in a spectacular way.

  The Web images of Philip Osborne showed a man with a large bushy beard, and also without a beard, and he looked progressively stronger and more buffed than he had been in his twenties. The man had biceps like a stevedore, but these were not as big as the biceps of the other gay man he was sometimes pictured with—a very muscular-looking guy, also with a beard, holding Osborne’s hand, both of them wearing the same white linen shirt and blue pin-striped pants. It looked like one of those beachside civil ceremonies that you read about in the celebrity magazines, and I wondered why there was no mention in the case file of this man, whose name was John Cabot; and so I Googled him, too, and discovered that they had indeed been civil partners and that Cabot had died of AIDS more than five years ago.

  There were also a couple of more recent pictures of Osborne shaking hands or sharing a joke with Bishop Coogan, and remembering that they had been friends, I thought to give him a call.

  “Sorry, Eamon. But Philip Osborne died this morning.”

  “Thank you for telling me. I’ll go over there and say a prayer for him. Since Osborne was admitted, they’re quite used to seeing me at that hospital. Did they say how he died?”

  “The doctors say he had a cardiac arrest that occasioned a pulmonary edema. But whatever happened left an experienced night nurse feeling like she needed to go home.”

  “Look, I have to go now. There’s a little local difficulty we’re having here right now. Which is why His Eminence is here with me now. Perhaps I might discuss that with you when I call you back.”

  “By all means, Bishop.”

  I put down the telephone and then headed for the men’s room to wash and sanitize my hands while asking myself what the “little local difficulty” might be that required a federal agent to advise a bishop. Returning to my office a few minutes later, I met Jesus Guttiérrez coming the other way.

  There were five bomb techs working in the Houston field office and Guttiérrez—the Gut—was the most experienced, despite also being the youngest and least senior. He was wearing a blue field jacket, and since DT agents and bomb technicians often worked the same cases, I stopped and asked him if there was something going down I should know about.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said, quietly shifting his bulk from one foot to the other like an impatient boxer. “But we got a call from the Pasadena police. It seems like someone found a suspicious object in the Armand Bayou Nature Center, and Mel and I have to go down there and check it out.”

  Mel Karski was the Gut’s line supervisor.

  “It’s a strange place for a suspicious object,” I remarked.

  Guttiérrez shook his head. “This job has JAWOFT written on it in neon letters,” he said.

  JAWOFT was “just a waste of fucking time,” like most of the investigations that came the way of the FBI’s bomb technicians. Every time the Counterterrorism guys flushed out some raghead with a bomb in his sneakers or his underpants, the FBI’s bomb technicians were obliged to field more false alarms than a maternity hospital.

  “But surely the alternative is worse,” I said.

  “You sound just like Mel. He’s checking out the van before we go all the way down there. I don’t know why they think this is BT shit. There’s no package and there’re no wires or panties on show. What do the Pasadena cops think I’m going to do with this thing? Kick it, maybe. Or try to make it fly again.”

  “Fly?”

  “They said the object looks like some kind of fucking model airplane. Hell, it probably is a model airplane. Like I’m an expert on fucking UFOs.”

  “Is that how it arrived in the nature reserve? It flew there?”

  “Looks like, yeah. Lucky it landed in the wetlands, otherwise it might have started a fire.”

  I went back to my desk. There was something about what the Gut had said that troubled me. A moment passed before I realized that Vijay Persaud was hovering over my desk and that he’d asked me a question. Vijay worked in DCS Net, the FBI’s dedicated wiretap system.

  “What’s that you said?” I asked.

  “I asked if I could have a word with you?” he said. “In private.”

  “Now?”

  “If that’s okay.”

  I stood up. And grabbed my jacket, and my cell phone.

  “That’s cool.” Still hardly listening, I started running down the hall. “But it’ll have to wait.”

  “Where are you going?” Vijay shouted after me.

  “The Armand Bayou Nature Center,” I said. “In Pasadena.”

  Mel Karski steered east off the Sam Houston Parkway onto Genoa Red Bluff Road. The van was none too clean, with empty fast-food bags and cigarette packs on the floor and a piece of chewing gum stuck to the dashboard like a shiny gray limpet that had lost its shell. For a while, I rested my head on the passenger-side window; at least I did until I realized that the bird shit on the outside of the window was actually on the inside. After that, I kept my hands in my pockets.

  “You should wash this van,” I said. “It’s like a petri dish in here.”

  “Blends in nicely the way it is,” said the Gut.

  The land on either side of the highway was uniformly flat and arid, and apart from the odd McDonald’s restaurant, gas station, trailer park, and rig hauling a tank full of milk or pesticide, or maybe both, it was mostly empty. There was the occasional church, too, of course; you never have to drive more than five miles in Texas before you find a place of worship.

  A few minutes later we were heading off the main road into the ABNC, which is one of the largest urban wildlife refuges in the United States and named after the river or bayou that runs into Galveston Bay. A white Pasadena Police Ford Crown Vic was waiting for us at the visitor center and two cops wearing black uniforms led the way on foot along one of the meandering trails to where the suspicious object had been found. The local police had missed their breakfast in order to wait for us and they weren’t feeling very gabby about anything very much, which suited me fine. It gave us a chance to enjoy the quiet and the sea breeze off the bay a mile or two to the east. It made a pleasant change from the heat and dust and in-your-face cacophony of the city. The ranger didn’t say much either, although it’s possible we might not have heard him on account of the sizable mustache that covered his whole mouth. Possibly it was this that scared a big white egret out of the tall grass that grew on either side of the trail; as it took off and headed south across Clear Lake, it blotted out the sun for a moment.

  At the end of the trail we climbed aboard a pontoon boat, which wasn’t much more than a rectangular deck with handrails and a steering wheel on top of a couple of long floats. As the ranger started the engine, something living sank silently under the emerald carpet of weeds that covered the surface of the water and moved slowly away with an almost indiscernible wake. On the other side of the bayou the ranger nudged the bank with the square bow of the boat and let us step off onto dry land. He stayed on the pontoon and the cops showed us to the clearing where the object had been found. One of the cops drew his pistol and looked around carefully.

  “They use this clearing to leav
e meat for the gators,” said the other. “Which is how they found it in the first place.”

  “That’s a comforting thought,” said the Gut. “I wondered why the ranger stayed on the pontoon.”

  It was about the size of a large dead egret and similarly colored. Two feet long with a four-and-half-foot wingspan. The tailspan was maybe two-thirds that width. The fuselage was long and cylindrical and unmarked and resembled nothing so much as a small cruise missile. Most of the ground underfoot was waterlogged, which probably explained why the object hadn’t scorched the grass when it landed.

  “The hell is that?” said Mel, kneeling down beside the object. He carefully laid a hand on the metal fuselage and then quickly took it away again. “Hot. Most likely from the sun, though.” He squinted at the rear end of the thing and made a noise. “Interesting. No sign of combustion back here. Looks like it might be electrically powered.” He leaned over the front. “Jesus. There’s a little camera in the nose.”

  “It’s called a Switchblade,” I said, “and it’s the latest in high-tech battlefield wizardry: a miniature drone that you can take out of your backpack and deploy quicker than a grunt’s fucking mess tin. You just fold out the wings like a picnic table and then use a miniature guidance system to fly it through someone’s bathroom window. Assuming the hajis have bathroom windows. The Pentagon calls this little toy plane their magic bullet.”

  “Looks like one hell of a bullet,” said the Gut. “Sure give some Big T a wake-up call.”

  Big T was what people like the Gut who’d served in Afghanistan called the Taliban.

  I shrugged. “This one must have been unarmed, otherwise it wouldn’t have been found.”

  “All the same,” said Mel, “we’d best let the army deal with it. This looks like one for the Too Hard Box. Okay, Gut?”

  The Gut nodded. “I only fuck with that which I know of and about this I know fuck all. I’ll call Explosive Ordnance Disposal at the army base when we get back to the van.”

  “Yeah. Do that.”

  “Even so, I’d like to hang around and see how they do it, if you don’t mind, boss. Just in case there’s a Windows upgrade I don’t know about.”

  Mel nodded. “Sure, be my guest.” He glanced up at the blue sky. “Question is, what the fuck is this thing doing all the way out here? With no targets. No hajis. No bathroom windows. Just floating handbags.”

  “We had a report from Army CID of a group of terrorists, ex-military, called the HIDDEN, who were trying to get ahold of these weapons.”

  “You mean they’re Americans?” said Mel.

  I nodded. “That’s right. Americans. The most dangerous fucking terrorists of them all. They’re planning to use these weapons against the local Jewish community.”

  “The Jews,” said Mel Karski. “It’s always us. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with from Big T and the Reverend Al Qaeda.”

  “My guess is that this was a test flight,” I said. “They could have sat in a Starbucks on Sylvan Beach while flying this bird around the whole of the bay area. Or maybe the vendor arranged a quiet little demonstration for one of the bad guys.”

  I had my cell phone out and was about to dial a number.

  “Either way, it means I now have to telephone my ASAC to arrange a quiet little demonstration of how the FBI handles a five-star crisis.”

  “Uh, no, you don’t. Not here, Agent Martins. Not next to this fucking thing. Better switch it off right now.” Mel turned toward the two cops. “You, too, boys. Just in case. Wouldn’t want a detonation signal hitching a ride on our cell phones, now would we?”

  “Can that happen?” asked one of the cops, edging away from the Switchblade.

  “Oh, yeah,” said the Gut. “Matter of fact, it happens all the time in Afghanistan and Iraq. More angels get made that way in coalition country than in Bedford fucking Falls.”

  TWELVE

  I spoke to Gisela about the abandoned Switchblade and she agreed that we couldn’t afford to wait on the Army CID informer they had working in the HIDDEN group to bring us up to speed with the terrorists’ plans. We had to assume that HIDDEN was now in possession of the weapon and that at any moment it might carry out an attack on Congregation Beth Israel on North Braeswood Boulevard. It was a Thursday and in less than twenty-four hours the synagogue would be full of people. It was imperative that we arrest the group as quickly as possible. At the same time, we knew the HIDDEN group was already heavily armed and, given its military background, it seemed reasonable to assume that the members were likely to put up a violent resistance. All of which suggested that we were going to need full tactical support.

  HIDDEN’s leader, Johnny Sack Brown, lived in an apartment complex on South Gessner Road, on the southwest side of Houston. It’s an area frequented by local gangs—the Cholos and the Broadway Sureños—especially at night when the Southside starts to kick off. From the number of five-point stars, black rosaries, and descending pitchforks I saw graffitied on some of the local buildings, I figured the Cholos were in the ascendant. Either that or there were some militant Rosicrucians figuring to move in.

  Together with some HPD from the seventeenth district who knew the area well, we checked over the site on Google Earth and Google Maps, and decided to park our vehicles in front of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany about two or three hundred feet from the target building, and deploy from there. This church looked less like somewhere you’d have met Jesus or St. John the Divine and more like an all-night place where you might get a prescription filled or a hamburger served up. From the church, one team was going to approach the apartment complex from the north, another team would go in from the south, and a third team from the west. On Google Earth, the apartment complex constituted a couple of dozen concrete boxes, each with one small apartment on the ground floor and another identical one on the floor above. Some of the little houses even had chimneys, although it was hard to see how these might ever have been of use in a city as warm as Houston.

  When the operation went down at six the following morning, these houses seemed no less unprepossessing. South Gessner Road is a four-lane highway with all the charm of yesterday’s doggy bag. Across the road is a You Lock It self-storage building, and from the general look of the neighborhood, it was a useful facility to have in an area where none of the doors and locks gave the impression that they could have resisted an assault by a determined two-year-old.

  Almost as soon as the doors of the bus opened, the team moved quickly into positions with everyone trying to keep their minds on the job at hand. But this wasn’t easy. On average, the Tac Team is called up maybe once or twice a month; and it was an unfortunate coincidence that I had called for a deployment on the morning that another probable victim of Houston’s serial killer had been found in Memorial Park. This meant that several field agents were hauled off duty with Violent Crimes to come and serve on my Tac Team operation with the result that the latest murder investigation, headed by Harlan Caulfield, was immediately stretched to the limit. It made for a very difficult morning and there were rumors of a stand-up row between Gisela and Harlan about which investigation took priority. Harlan was just trying it on for size, of course; once a Tac Team op has been called, it always assumes precedence. No one wants to risk an agent’s life by deploying a half-strength squad. Not for a dead woman in a park.

  In any event, not even a single shot was fired. Johnny Sack Brown and his two friends offered no resistance and they submitted to being arrested and driven to a holding cell at the Bureau field office as meekly as if they’d received gold-embossed invitations to go there from the governor of Texas himself. There was, however, no sign in the apartment of a Switchblade, or any other weapons for that matter, not even a sidearm; and the Tac Team went back to the office feeling less than elated. It was only when I searched Johnny Sack Brown’s desk drawers and discovered a receipt from the You Lock It self-storage facility that I gue
ssed where the group was keeping their new toys. Ten minutes later I was on the other side of South Gessner Road with a couple of our newest brick agents, opening an outdoor storage unit with climate control and a roll-up door, and unpacking an arms cache that included not one but six Switchblades.

  It was still early. I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, but I was too psyched to be hungry. I jumped in the car and was driving back to Justice Park Drive with the good news about the Switchblades when my cell rang. It was Bishop Coogan.

  “I was at the hospital,” he said. “To pray for Philip Osborne. I called you last night, like you said I should, but you weren’t answering your cell.”

  “Sorry about that, sir,” I said. “I meant to call you back only we had something real important going down last night.”

  “I’ve seen a good many passings, you understand, Gil. It’s not everyone who dies with the smile of the saints on his face.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “To be frank with you, Gil, he didn’t look at peace with the world. Sure, there’s a great comfort to be had in a fellow’s last prayer, you know. To die in the arms of the Church, so to speak. And Osborne didn’t have that. I hate to see a soul that’s not at peace when it passes over. And he certainly wasn’t that. You remember that when you pick up your next book by Richard bloody Dawkins.”

  “Fair enough, Bishop. Look, you said there was something you wanted to speak to me about. A little local difficulty, you called it.”

  “That I did. I need some advice, Gil. Perhaps you could drop round to the house again sometime. Tomorrow, maybe. I’ll be here most of the day.”

  “Sure. Come to think of it, I should take some time off. I need to see a real estate agent and look for somewhere to live, among a lot of other things.”

  “Are you two kids moving house, Gil?”

  “Ruth wants me out of her house, sir. And she wants a divorce, too.”

  “Why did she do that?”