by Steven James
Iran.
Even if the US claimed the missile had been fired by hackers or terrorists, Israel would presume who was responsible.
And they would retaliate.
Terry could only imagine how much damage they would do to that country in the eleven minutes between the time the Louisiana’s missile was fired and when it actually struck the heart of their capital.
It would certainly be a memorable day, that much was for sure.
“It’s a deal,” Terry had said simply.
Now, with less than 150 minutes left before the ignition sequence would begin, Terry said to Abdul, “All right. You told me the consequences if I don’t deliver what I promised, now I’m going to tell you the consequences if you don’t.”
“And what are those, my friend?” Abdul’s voice did not sound friendly.
“Jerusalem will not be the only city lying in ruins. Mecca will become one giant crater and Allah will welcome 1.7 million more ‘martyrs’ home. Do we have a clear understanding here?”
“Yes, Mr. Manoji. It is quite clear indeed.”
Solstice was pleased.
The hydraulic lines that powered the lift in the concrete shaft had been disabled. All was set. The base was secure. No one would be coming down to interrupt them.
Although Equator had identified increasing chatter on JWICS about US nuclear subs, nothing specifically related to her mission or the ELF station had come up, which, given the obvious FBI interest in the site, did surprise Solstice a bit.
Since taking over the base, her team had carefully and strategically placed nearly half of the TATP ordnance, leaving, of course, one of the tunnels free of explosives so that no one would be trapped down here when they detonated.
Well, that’s what they thought, but in reality only one person was going to be leaving this base. Solstice had decided it would just be too inconvenient leaving any survivors to tell the story or to point the finger in her direction.
“Finish with the TATP,” she said into her handheld radio. “And then I want Cane, Gale, and Squall back down here so we can film that video.”
72
7:24 p.m.
1 hour 36 minutes until the transmission
The murder videos were viscerally disturbing.
When you watch things like this, knowing that they really happened, that the images weren’t created by computer graphics or by using special effects, it’s terrifying and unnerving.
I’d been at it for over an hour, but I knew that tonight I wouldn’t have time to watch all the videos in their entirety, so I played some parts but fast-forwarded through others. I recognized each of the victims’ faces from the cases I’d worked over the years as I’d tracked Basque—either while I was a detective in Milwaukee or during the last six months when he reemerged and started right where he’d left off, torturing, slaughtering, eating.
Basque was visible in all of the videos, doing his work on the women. Occasionally, I could hear slight laughter from the person filming the crimes, but interestingly enough, Basque’s partner never appeared on screen. The only indication that it might have been Reiser was the fact that we’d found the videos in his trailer home.
But that, of course, was merely circumstantial.
Reiser’s lungs were gone when they found him this week.
Gone.
Basque only abducted women.
Careful, Pat. As far as you know, Basque only abducted women.
My ringing phone interrupted my thoughts, and I received word from Angela that the Defense Department had approved raising the threat level on our fleet of nuclear subs. “I can’t find Director Wellington,” she told me. “She must have left for the day and she’s not answering her cell. But I sent an official expedited request through to the Pentagon for the schematics.”
“How long will that take?”
“They assured me you would have them as soon as possible.”
I cursed under my breath, hiding my frustration from Angela. I wanted a time frame—like maybe five minutes ago.
“I know, Pat,” she said, reading my silence. “Believe me, I made sure they know how urgent it is.”
“All right. Keep me posted.”
Shortly after I hung up, Tait updated me that his officers had found nothing at the cabin, the Schoenberg Inn, or any of the residences or buildings in the area I’d suggested they focus their search; neither had Alexei shared any information or made his one phone call. To make matters worse, when I contacted Antón Torres for an update, he told me his SWAT team had gotten caught behind a truck accident on Highway 8 that shut down the road. Antón figured they were still at least two hours out.
I went back to the Reiser case. Bypassing the videos for now, I spent some time studying his residential history and comparing it to the locations of the crimes. I realized that, while he could have traveled to commit the murders and follow the news stories, the locations didn’t overlap like I would have expected.
Reiser was killed Tuesday night . . .
DNA from two missing people was found on his knife—a man from Milwaukee, a woman from DC . . .
Clippings were found from the Rockford Register Star newspaper . . .
The facts revolved, spiraled through my mind, but I was mentally exhausted and couldn’t seem to sort them out. I rubbed my head, stood, and stretched my back.
I hadn’t noticed before, but now I overheard Lien-hua and Amber talking in the living room, and I found myself being thankful, since the more understanding there was between those two women, the better off everything between me and Lien-hua was going to be—at least that’s what I hoped.
Sean was outside, shoveling the driveway so that we’d have our vehicles available in case we needed to get out of here. Earlier when he was getting his boots, I’d suggested he snowblow it, but he told me he didn’t own a snowblower, and then added in no uncertain terms, “Three things real men don’t do: they don’t tweet, they don’t wear Velcro shoes, and they don’t snowblow their driveways.”
Nope. No arguing with that.
As far as I knew, Tessa was still downstairs reading.
I tapped my spacebar and saw the frozen image of Basque, scalpel in hand, leaning over a dying woman in Monona, Wisconsin, and decided I needed a break from this, even if just for a few minutes.
It occurred to me that with so many things in play all day long, I hadn’t really had much of a chance to talk with Tessa, and, to put it mildly, our short conversation at the motel before I went to meet Chekov hadn’t ended especially well. I had a feeling things were only going to get more complicated from here on out tonight, and I might not even be around the house, especially if we located Kayla, so if I were going to get any chance to connect with my stepdaughter, now was the time to do it.
Besides, I still had the pills Amber had given me to pass along to her. I hadn’t yet come up with a good way of broaching the topic of Tessa’s undisclosed prescription—honestly, I hadn’t thought about it at all in the last hour—but regardless, it was something I needed to at least address.
Going downstairs, I found her lounging on the couch, rereading Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn, a book she’d described to me once as “an underground, anti-establishment creative nonfiction classic.” She looked like she was really into it.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up. “Hey.”
“How’s the book?”
“Sick.”
“Sick.”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that supposed to mean gross?”
“It’s a versatile word.”
“Now it means, what, cool?”
“Sure. It’s like stupid. If I say, ‘That was just stupid,’ it means it was awesome, righteous, wicked.”
I looked at her curiously. “But if you say, ‘That’s stupid—’”
“I mean it’s stupid.”
“Oh. So, stupid means brilliant and sick means sweet.”
“Pretty much.”
; “That’s stupid.”
A tiny smile. “Now you’re catching on.”
Tessa set down the book.
She was totally curious about what had gone down last night between Patrick, Amber, and Lien-hua, and she wanted quite badly to ask him about it but wasn’t exactly sure how to bridge into the topic.
Patrick took a seat on a footstool across the room from her. “Are you still mad about earlier today, at the motel when I had to leave?”
“Naw. It’s all good.”
“So the winter session class at U of M, that was, what, kind of stupid—in the stupid sense of the word?”
“Yeah. But it was nice to see some of the spots Mom used to visit. Dad too.”
Ask him about Amber.
No, start with Sean.
The lights in the house flicked off then on, and a moment later Amber’s voice floated down from the top of the stairs. “Sean? We should really bring in some more firewood, in case the electricity goes out.”
“He’s still shoveling,” Patrick called up to her. “But I can get some for you.” Then he made eye contact with Tessa, and she realized that was probably not a good sign. “Tessa and I will get some.”
“Seriously?” she said unenthusiastically.
“Seriously. Come on.”
A few minutes later she was dressed for the weather and meeting him outside the patio door. He was wearing his snazzy new camo jacket. “Promise me you’ll leave that here when we go back to Denver,” she said.
“Deal.”
He clicked on his flashlight, and they started trudging through the driving snow toward the woodshed.
After a few steps she said, “Patrick, what was it? Whatever happened between you and Sean?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened. It’s always there, between you two. A wall. Was it an argument or something?”
He didn’t answer right away. “It wasn’t an argument.”
“What then?”
“Life,” he answered vaguely. “Schedules, work. His family and my career. Hey, I was really hoping we could talk about—”
“That’s weak.”
“Weak?”
“Every family has that stuff. You either choose to stay close through it all or you don’t.”
For a few moments he walked in silence through the night, holding his flashlight steady against the weather. “I guess we never did.”
“So you’re saying you never did, or that you both never did?”
“Tessa, this isn’t really—”
“Okay, whatever.” She waited. It wouldn’t be long.
She started counting to herself to ten, made it to six before he said, “All right.”
They reached the shed, and he muscled open the snow-sealed sliding door but didn’t enter. “When I was seventeen, Sean and I were driving home from a party one night. The roads were icy and I was dozing off. He swerved. We hit another car and”—Patrick took a small breath—“tragically, Tessa, a woman was killed.”
“Oh, my God.”
Her words weren’t glib or impudent but filled with sympathy, and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have told her the news.
On the other hand, it was probably time she knew what’d happened. I gestured for her to go inside the shed, then I followed her. “Sean always said he was trying to avoid a deer, but I, well . . . I wondered if maybe he’d had too much to drink.”
“Did they do a Breathalyzer test?”
“I don’t know. It would’ve made sense, but if they did, it didn’t raise any red flags.” There were no lights in the woodshed, so I handed Tessa the Maglite, then started scooping up split logs. “I’d seen him drinking at the party. When I asked him about it later, he told me he’d only had two beers.”
“So not nearly enough to get drunk—not for a big guy like him, not over the course of a whole night of partying.”
“No. Not if it was only two beers.”
The way she held the light I could see her face, and she was looking at me questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘if it was only two’? You didn’t believe him?”
“I didn’t see any deer tracks, Tessa.”
“Deer tracks?”
“By the side of the road.” Clutching the logs against my chest with my left arm, I used my right to add to the stack. “I looked for tracks, but I didn’t—”
“Yeah, well, you just said it happened at night. How can you be sure you didn’t just miss seeing ’em?”
“Tessa, it was—”
“He’s your brother. You don’t just distrust someone like that—unless, did he lie to you all the time?”
“No. Not at all.” I finished gathering as many logs as I could. “Are you going to get any?”
“Well, there you go, that’s it, then.” She picked up a few logs, but instead of carrying them herself, she added them to the heap in my arms. “No wonder he pulled away from you. You were the only one who was with him that night; he probably needed you more than anyone else to believe him.” She shook her head disparagingly. “Big surprise things didn’t turn out so peachy for you guys.”
I’d had similar thoughts at times over the years, but I’d never let myself articulate them as bluntly as she’d just done; however, that didn’t mean I was particularly thankful to her for pointing all this out.
She grabbed a couple more logs, laid them on top of my stack so that now it reached my chin, then said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get the flashlight.”
Then she picked up two small branches and left the shed.
Wow, great job there, girl. Way to blame him for all the problems he’s ever had with his brother. Nicely done.
So, she’d royally screwed up this conversation, and they hadn’t even gotten to the topic of Amber.
Tessa aimed the flashlight’s beam onto the snowdrift-littered trail to the house.
As she thought about what Patrick had just told her, she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to accidentally kill someone like that. But then she realized that she shared something macabrely significant with Sean—both of them were responsible for taking the life of another human being.
But you shot a man on purpose; he killed a woman by accident.
You shot a man on purpose.
She tried not to think of that night, of the warm spray of blood splattering the back of her neck, or the soft thud of the man’s body landing on the floor behind her, or the worst part—the iniquitous satisfaction she’d felt squeezing the trigger.
Her answer to the psychiatrist rushed back to her: “It feels like I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own . . . like it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again.”
A place where hope is real again.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Even now as she remembered firing that gun, she sensed it again, savage instinct climbing up through the ages and spreading through her like fingers from an outstretched hand. Something primal, that unspeakable part of human nature that feels comfortable in the dark.
A shiver ran through her, and it was not because of the storm.
“Tessa.” Patrick’s voice disturbed her thoughts. “How did you sleep this week?”
“How did I sleep?”
“Yes.”
Sean and Amber’s house had been built half into a hillside with the basement and garage on the lower level. Since the fireplace was upstairs in the living room, she headed up the hill toward the patio door. “Pretty much like always.”
“You’ve never gotten into a fight at school. Not once since I’ve known you.”
A fight?
Oh, I get it. This is about Sean. He’s mad you said that about Sean.
They reached the house, and she propped the door open. “No. I don’t get into fights.”
“But yet I can see you’re really good at beating people up.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to beat you up or anything, I was just—”
&nbs
p; “No, Raven. It’s not me I was talking about.” With the wood in his arms, he had to turn sideways to make it through the doorway. “It’s you.”
For a moment she stood there, speechless, frozen in place by his words, paralyzed by her past.
Beating herself up?
Yes, yes, she was.
And for good reason too!
She entered, closed the door.
Sean was still shoveling the driveway out front, and Lien-hua and Amber were talking in Amber’s bedroom, so Tessa quietly followed Patrick through the vacant living room to the fireplace.
He bent to deposit his logs. “I’m just saying, I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“You think I’m being too hard on myself.”
“Yes.”
“For killing someone?”
“I was the one who shot that man, Tessa. I was—”
“Don’t do this, Patrick.” She set her branches down and helped him unload his wood onto the pile that was already waiting by the fireplace. “I told you before I’m the one who pulled the trigger of the—”
“Tessa, he turned the gun on himself. He knew it was over for him. He knew he would spend the rest of his life in prison. So he—”
“Tried to put me into another kind of prison. So you’ve said.” She let out a sigh. “Forget it.”
“No, wait—”
“I said forget it. It doesn’t matter.” She gave him back his flashlight. “Is that gonna be enough wood?”
“We can get more later if we need to. And it does matter. This has been eating away at you for months, and it’s something we need to deal with.”
“I’m gonna get changed.” Tessa knew that her words had barbs to them, but she didn’t try to remove them at all.
As she left to stow her winter clothes, she did her best to shake off the thoughts of that night when she’d fired the gun and—whether it was really that guy’s intention or not—had plunged out of reach into her own private little prison.
73
Tessa and I met downstairs again, sans jackets and boots.
