The Pawn

by Steven James

  Meanwhile a team of crime scene technicians was combing the remains of Grolin’s house for any evidence that he’d taken Jolene there. Anything at all. Last I’d heard, they found a video camera in the woods with a remote cellular feed. I’d told them to look for it. After all, I figured that somewhere out there, he’d been watching.

  Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to recover anything substantial from the bomb’s timer or ignition mechanism. That was a big disappointment because it might have led us to a munitions manufacturer or distributor.

  Brent did some checking and found that four of the bodies had been dumped in popular climbing locations featured in Mountain-Quest magazine.

  Still no sign of the remaining half of Jolene’s body.

  They did find Grolin’s other car, though—his Subaru station wagon. It was in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The missing handsaw from his basement was in the trunk, Jolene’s blood on the blade.

  One team was going door to door in Margaret’s neighborhood to see if anyone had noticed someone suspicious near Margaret’s car earlier in the day. So far, nothing. An APB went out on Joseph Grolin, and cops all over the southeast were looking for him. Despite our efforts to keep a lid on the investigation, once the news stations found out Grolin was listed as “a person of interest” in the case and that his house had blown up, the media frenzy began. Within an hour all the major cable news stations were interviewing everyone involved in his life all the way back to his middle school teacher. “How do you feel to have known the Yellow Ribbon Strangler?” After all, in American newsrooms, you’re guilty until proven innocent. And you remain the lead story until the ratings drop enough or the next grisly crime occurs.

  I did a cross-check comparing Grolin’s vacation days, time off, and days missing from work with the times of the murders. Not surprisingly, he was accounted for during the deaths of Bethanie and Alexis but always seemed to be on assignment researching one of his articles or taking a day off at the times of the other abductions and murders.

  Still we had no idea where he was.

  Overall, the day had been a wearying roller coaster of excitement and disappointment, discovery and frustration, and right now I could feel my body plummeting into a downward corkscrew; shutting down physically and emotionally. Not a good sign. I needed sleep, and I still had a two-hour drive in front of me to pick up Tessa from the airport in Charlotte.

  Also, I still needed to check into my new hotel and unpack the luggage that had been following me around the country for the last week. I told Margaret I was heading out for a little while, and she nodded without saying a word. “Call me if anything comes up,” I said. “I got the charger from Ralph. I’m still using his phone.”

  Another quiet nod.

  She was in worse shape than I’d thought.

  Of course I could understand. Finding half of a corpse in your car would do that to you.

  I left my climbing gear in the backseat of my rental but wrestled the rest of my luggage into the lobby of the hotel across the street from the federal building. A college-aged couple stood hand-in-hand checking in at the registration desk.

  The woman was giggling at everything her man said, and when she wasn’t laughing she was giving him a slight smile that was oh-so-shy. He stood with his head back, chest out, and ambled toward the elevator like a cowboy ready to drive a thousand head of cattle across the state for his sweetheart.

  It was charming. They were in love. It was perfect.

  I had to look away.

  I checked in and drifted over to the elevator, up to the second floor, down the hallway to room 217, slid the keycard into the lock, shuffled across the threadbare carpet, and collapsed onto the bed. I barely managed to remember to plug Ralph’s phone into the charger before I closed my eyes and everything slipped into a dreamy haze.

  Sleep came in spurts. Jumbled snatches of dreams mixed with momentary awarenesses of being awake followed by the fading, drifting, helpless tug of sleep once again. I made plans to call the front desk to get a wake-up call . . . plans to set the alarm clock for 4:00 so I wouldn’t miss Tessa’s flight . . . plans to check my email . . . but then the plans withered and faded away, and darkness, rich and deep, settled over me again.

  Sleep.

  In my dreams I mostly saw dead bodies. Beautiful, graceful girls with slit throats and manacled wrists. Giggling and flirting one minute, choking and dying the next. Faces of life and masks of death, laughter and tears rolling across each other in a wash of blood and screams and summer dreams. Swollen and distorted, young and attractive. Eyes laughing. Eyes fixed and staring.

  Jolene. Mindy. Tessa.

  The flirting girl from the lobby.

  Lien-hua.

  Christie.

  During the moments when my eyes flickered open, I would glance at the clock beside the bed and find that the waking world had moved forward a few minutes, or even half an hour. And then I’d slip back into my nightmares of beauty and death.

  A fire alarm went off or maybe it was the phone ringing or maybe it was an alarm clock somewhere. My sleeping mind couldn’t tell and didn’t care. Part of me fought the idea of waking up like it was the thought of dying. Stay alive. Stay alive. Sleep is the only way to stay alive. Don’t wake up. Never wake up. The sound came again. Persistent. It wouldn’t give up. I groaned and rolled over. It wouldn’t stop. Pick up Tessa. You have to pick up Tessa.

  I managed to pry my eyes open.

  3:45 p.m.

  The room was quiet.

  Slowly, space and time began to make sense again. I was in a hotel room with lime-green walls and a creaky bed. Jolene was dead and so was Christie. They weren’t coming back. Wouldn’t ever be waking up. Not ever. I hadn’t set the alarm. There hadn’t been a fire. A house had exploded right next to me earlier today. My shoulder really, really hurt.

  I noticed a blinking glow beside me. Ralph’s cell phone. That was what had been ringing.

  Only the cell phone ringing.

  I had two voicemails.

  The first was from an unknown number: “Yes, um, Dr. Bowers, they told me you’d be at this number. Special Agent Eric Stanton here—the, um, Tessa’s escort, that is, chaperone. We were diverted to Chicago because of the blizzards up here in the Midwest—you probably heard about ’em on the news. Anyway, they’re not letting any planes in or out. Everything’s shut down. We won’t be able to fly out until tomorrow at the earliest. I’ll call you later when I know more. We’ll be in a safe house here in Chicago tonight.” He gave a few details about where they would be staying and what number to reach him at, and then he finished by assuring me that Tessa was fine but that she didn’t really want to leave a message right now.

  Well, that was no surprise.

  Actually, I was relieved I didn’t have to drive to Charlotte tonight. It gave my shoulder a chance to recover. I listened to the second message on my way down the hall to get some ice for my shoulder. It was from Terry Wilson, my NSA friend.

  I returned his call right away. “Hey, Terry, it’s Pat. Sorry I missed your call.”

  “Is this line secure?”

  “Yeah. It’s Ralph’s phone,” I said. “Encrypted to level 5-C.”

  “I’m only 4-D.” He sounded a little disgruntled.

  I filled the bucket with ice. “What do you have for me, buddy?”

  “Pat, listen. Sebastian Taylor was a spy.”

  “What?” I topped off the bucket and turned toward my room.

  “Probably CIA. Maybe NSA. It’s a little tough to decipher all that. Back in the seventies, most low-ranking overseas diplomats were agents of some type. Remember, those were Cold War days. The threat of communism was everywhere. The thing is, he was stationed in South America in November of 1978.”

  Back in my room I sat on the bed with my back against the wall and tied off the bag of ice.

  “And?”

  “Ever hear of Jonestown?”

  “Jonestown? You don’t mean the Kool-Aid drinkers?”


  “Yeah. Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, you remember all that?” “Vaguely.” I slipped the ice in place and leaned back. It stung, but in a good way.

  “Well, listen, Pat. I did some checking, and I stumbled across some CIA communiqués from the Jonestown compound. One came at 3:29 a.m. the night of the tragedy. According to the files, though, no CIA operatives arrived on-site until two days later. So who sent the communiqué? I also found references to a tape, Q875, in connection with Taylor’s name. Someone had tried hard to hide the link, though. Pat, listen, this thing is a powder keg. Lots of international black ops went on in those days. I’m not sure how deep you want to go poking around here.”

  “As deep as I have to go to find our killer. Somehow Taylor is connected to this series of murders. One of the girls called him, apparently tried to warn him—oh!”

  “What?”

  “Transcripts of her calls. I was supposed to read them this morning. I forgot all about that until just now. It’s been . . . how can I say . . . an ‘interesting’ day.”

  “Listen. The governor is a powerful man, Pat. The Democrats have the presidency pretty much locked up for 2008; I mean, we’re only a couple weeks out from the election, and I know you’ve seen the polls. Some people say Taylor is already being groomed to be the Republican frontrunner for 2012.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be careful. How about I call you tomorrow morning. I’ve got a few things to check on. Until then, see what else you can dig up. OK?”

  “Pat, I don’t think I should—”

  “Terry, we found the torso of a girl in the trunk of a car today. Someone sawed her in half, and somehow the governor is involved. Get me whatever you can.”

  He sighed. “All right then, I will. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  I clicked the phone shut, and pulled out my notebook. I needed to clear my mind and sort through what we knew so far. Even if it took me all night, I had to start getting my mind wrapped around this case.

  47

  The foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

  Northern New Mexico

  3:55 p.m., Eastern Standard Time

  “We’re scheduled to arrive in Tennessee at 5:00 p.m. tomorrow,” Kincaid told the video screen. He saw Theodore nod at him from the living room of the house on Larchmont Street in Asheville, North Carolina. “We’ll drive in from there.” He didn’t want to arouse suspicion by flying into an airport in the same state as the luncheon.

  “I’ll meet you at the airport with the van,” said Theodore. “Everything is set.”

  “And have there been any more problems?”

  “No, Father.”

  “I need to tell you something.” There was a stiff reprimand in his voice. “The second girl wasn’t dead when you left her.”

  Theodore shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “I sent you the case files, even found a copy of the right kind of chess set, told you how to tie the ribbon, gave you all the details about the crimes. All you needed to do was make the scenes look like those of the other girls.”

  “I’m sorry, Father. I did my best—”

  “We’ll discuss it further when I arrive.”

  A slight hesitation this time. “Yes, Father.”

  Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid ended the video chat and walked through his library to the main entrance hall.

  Over the years the ranch had shifted from an artists’ colony in the sixties, to a guest ranch that catered to movie stars in the seventies and eighties, to the home of Pulitzer prize–winning novelist Olivia Brine in the early nineties—and even served a two-year stint as the weekend getaway for software designer and billionaire Rex Withering, the man Kincaid had purchased it from a decade ago. But as diverse as all of the owners had been, they’d had one thing in common: all sought a place of solitude and inspiration here at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Spanish for “blood of Christ.”

  Kincaid found it ironic that he and his family lived in the shadows of mountains named for the blood of a savior.

  He’d originally acquired the four thousand acres of land to use as a corporate retreat for PTPharmaceuticals, but after selling his drug company four years ago for $650 million, he’d made the ranch his home and turned it into the living quarters for his family.

  He stepped outside and drank in the desert scents of juniper and pinion. The sandy ground crunched underfoot as he headed toward the building on the edge of the corral. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. At this altitude, October was a brisk and frosty month beneath the lonely, windswept skies of New Mexico.

  Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid had chosen this part of New Mexico because out here in the Enchanted Circle, the government let you do your own thing. Yes, officially, the Enchanted Circle got its name from an eighty-four-mile stretch of road that encircled Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in the state. But all the locals knew that the region really got its name for another reason. Even though the area had originally been settled by Catholic missionaries, over the years it had become the home of a blend of various flavors of spirituality combining Native American beliefs with whatever parts of eastern mysticism were in vogue at the moment. Crystals. Reincarnation. Wiccan rituals. Whatever.

  None of that mattered to Kincaid. He didn’t believe any of it. He was just glad the region provided a place where his family could disappear for a few years while the plans were put into place.

  In addition, for some reason, cattle in this region were often found mutilated in the fields. Some people said it was just the locals doing it to give the tourists something to talk about. Others said it was from extraterrestrial encounters. For Kincaid it was simply a matter of added convenience since he and his family needed to perform certain tests on the livestock. The rumors made it easier for them to dispose of the leftover carcasses.

  Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid walked over to the specially constructed building on the edge of the meadow. It was there that the test room had been set up. It was there that Rebekah and Caleb were dying of tularemia.

  Even though at times the ranch and outbuildings had been the home of more than eighty people, Kincaid’s group had never numbered more than fifty or so.

  Currently, counting Rebekah and Caleb, along with the thirteen children, there were twenty-eight family members.

  Bethanie and Alexis would have made it thirty.

  It was family. His family.

  And since they were family, they would do anything for each other.

  Rebekah and Caleb were sitting together on the sofa in their quarantined room. And, just as Dr. Andrei Peterov had promised, there’d been no visible signs of the bacterial infection until about twelve hours ago. “They’ll be contagious almost immediately,” Dr. Peterov had explained in his nearly impeccable English. “Though they might feel a little nauseous, the true effects of the infection won’t be evident until after the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. By then, of course, it’ll be too late to reverse the effects—even if the doctors were somehow able to correctly identify the agent.”

  After the Cold War it hadn’t been tough to find Russian scientists who still sympathized with communism, who still believed in the cause. Many had been devastated in the months following November 18, 1978, when they saw what the capitalistic Americans had driven a small colony of communists to do. Nearly a thousand comrades were dead, and the world remembered them not as believers dedicated to a cause, to each other, to compassion—but only as lunatic members of a killer cult.

  That was the fault of the media.

  And that’s why the media leaders of the world would be the first to pay.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed, most of the Russian scientists doing research in biological and chemical weapons fled to the Middle East or North Korea. However, a handful had defected to the United States. Kincaid discovered it wasn’t all that difficult to find just the right scientist. Not for someone with money. You’d be amazed what $28 million in cash could buy.

  And D
r. Peterov had proven more than worthy of his salary.

  Kincaid’s pharmaceutical labs had provided the ideal place to perfect the process—all in the name of research and development. Of course, after selling the company he’d brought that research with him to his private labs here in New Mexico.

  But for everything to work out as planned, he needed just the right agent. Bacterial or viral, it didn’t matter to him. Just something contagious, airborne if possible. Silent for a few days; deadly from the start. And Dr. Peterov had delivered the perfect little bug.

  Rebekah and Caleb were holding each other now, struggling for breath. Reading the sacred scripts aloud, bowing in rhythm to the words.

  It was Dr. Peterov’s idea to use the gram negative bacillus called Francisella tularensis. He’d pioneered ways of weaponizing it in Russia before the end of the Cold War. “It’s versatile, able to be spread either through ingestion or as an aerosol, fatal about 35 percent of the time, and very tough to identify symptomatically,” he’d told Kincaid. By splicing in some genes from Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, he and his team had created something nearly impossible to diagnose. Very exotic. And very deadly.

  “What about a cure?” Kincaid had asked him.

  “There is no known vaccine for CCHF, and the vaccine for tularemia, the disease caused by Francisella tularensis, isn’t available to nonmilitary personnel. Of course we developed a way to treat it in case we were exposed, but without our research the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will never find a cure in time.”

  It’d taken six years to find a way to make the bacteria contagious human to human and to make it virulent enough to raise the death toll up to 85 percent—a satisfactory percentage to Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid. After all, when you know you’ll most likely die, it’s a thousand times more terrifying than if you know for certain that you will—in which case you might find peace; or if you discover the odds are actually in your favor—in which case you can survive relatively well on denial.