by Paul Johnson
By the way up your ass, Gordy thought. ‘That’s right.’
‘So we are left with the interesting possibility that someone in authority pulled the surveillance to facilitate the hit, as you call it.’
‘Or the guys went off for a hot dog,’ Gordy said, trying to keep things simple.
The Master ignored that. ‘And, third, what motivated the hit? Did your brother have any enemies?’
‘Only the people whose wiring he screwed up.’ Gordy felt the other man’s eyes bore into him. ‘Shit, no. No one who would have killed him, at least.’
The Master sat back and dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘So why was he run down, Gordy?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea, boss.’
‘Well, I have. Someone wants to get at you.’
Lister felt his stomach flip. ‘Me? What have I done?’
The Master raised a hand. ‘Don’t worry, although your sins are many-not least those involving the young and beautiful twins you supplied me with-I don’t think this action was aimed primarily at you.’ He stood up and gathered his black robe around him. ‘It was aimed at me.’
Gordy watched as the other man walked to the door with his head held high.
He didn’t know whether to feel relieved or worried. On second thought, remembering what he’d heard about Matt Wells and the FBI’s involvement, he went for worried.
I picked up my bags and then stood at a pay phone in the arrivals hall. I wasn’t making a call, but looking at the other passengers at the luggage carousel. Now that I was in the real world again, despite the presence of Quincy nearby, I felt the old vulnerability that Sara used to induce. Even if she wasn’t on my tail now, there was no telling when she might acquire me in her sights. I felt hollow, not just in my stomach, but in my arms and legs. She was merciless, unstoppable, an avenging demon.
I pulled myself together and scanned people as they moved toward the exit. There hadn’t been many women on the flight, and those I could see fell into two groups-business types with smart clothes and leather briefcases, and students going home for Christmas. None of them looked even remotely like Sara, even assuming she had changed her appearance considerably. Then again, she could easily have disguised herself as a male. More of those were traveling business class, though many had a very Texan way of power dressing-cowboy boots under tailored suits and belts with large buckles. There were even a few outsize hats. I had to give up. Nobody looked like my ex-lover. Then again, I had no idea what she would look like when she came for me.
I went out into the main concourse and located the passenger information desk. A pretty girl with turquoise eyes handed me an envelope for Mr. William A. Ronson. Pretty soon, she’d be giving another to Mr. Jerome Quincy-Sebastian reckoned that the soldier didn’t need a major change of identity. I kept my eyes to the front and headed to the luggage lockers. The key fitted the relevant lock and I took out the small bag inside. It didn’t weigh much and I wondered whether going after Rothmann armed was such a good idea. He was bound to be surrounded by trained and probably conditioned personnel. I told myself to stick with the plan. Then again, turning up empty-handed was an even worse option.
I went over to the Hertz desk and picked up the SUV keys. It was a Mercedes with only a couple of thousand on the clock-nothing but the best for the FBI’s brown-eyed boy. Then I took the bus to the parking lot and found the car. It was big, green and a serious gasguzzler. Welcome to the Lone Star State.
The hotel was only half a mile away. I was on the twelfth floor, with a view of the airport lights. I showered, ordered a steak from room service and called my partner in crime fighting.
‘You in the hotel?’
‘That’s a positive.’
‘Anyone on your tail?’
‘I ain’t that lucky, man.’
‘Are you in the bar?’
‘Check.’
‘Don’t get drunk, Mr. Quincy.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Don’t talk to any strange women. I’m serious.’
‘Check.’
‘How are you going to pay?’
‘Check.’
I hung up. Quincy was a good man and I was glad to have him watching my back. But even he could only do so much against Heinz Rothmann and his band of brainwashed Nazi devil-worshippers.
Abaddon had decided that steering clear of Portland was a good idea. She drove north for ten miles, then got off the Maine Turnpike and found a quiet side road to hole up. She drank a bottle of water and ate an eggsalad sandwich that she’d bought earlier. That made her feel slightly better, but she wasn’t looking forward to what she was going to have to do next. She booted up her laptop, checked the wireless connection was functioning, and then accessed the secure site. It was monitored on an ongoing basis.
666-request subject location update, she typed, hoping for a simple answer. As the seconds turned into minutes, she realized she was going to get more than that.
Commander-what happened? r u compromised?
Abaddon groaned. It was the big boss himself and, as usual, he wanted to know everything. She answered as briefly as she could, stressing the role of the woman with long black hair in the parking lot, and waited to be dismissed from the operation since she couldn’t guarantee that she hadn’t been spotted. Long minutes passed. She concentrated on keeping her breathing steady. Failure was not something she had experienced often.
Commander-proceed-subject en route houston tx-assume id watson georgina-meet aircraft lewiston me 1800-ditch rental, came the reply.
Abaddon clenched her fists in triumph. She was still on the case. The truth was, she’d have found a way to stay on it even if she’d been fired. She logged off and packed away the laptop. Then she got out of the Grand Cherokee and opened the bag on the backseat. She had worn gloves ever since she had picked up the SUV, so prints were not a problem. She took out the outfit that she would wear as Georgina Watson, an unironed denim shirt and patched Levi’s, and took off the wig. Instead of short brown curls, Georgina, a tree-hugger, favored blond dreadlocks. She undid the buttons of her blouse and reached for its replacement.
‘You know, this is private land.’
Abaddon froze, then moved her eyes up to the mirror. It showed a large man in a checkered shirt and jeans close to the rear of the vehicle. He was carrying what looked like a tire iron. Her own weapons were out of reach.
‘I said, this is private land, lady.’
She left the blouse unbuttoned and turned to face him. There was a sharp intake of breath as his eyes fixed on her red brassiere and its contents.
‘You…you see,’ he mumbled, ‘we…we get a lot of people stopping here to do the drugs they got in the city. They make a mess, scare the kids…’
The woman looked around. She hadn’t noticed any buildings in the immediate vicinity. The sound of traffic on the turnpike was audible in the distance, above the cackle of starlings.
‘But I don’t do drugs,’ she said, taking a step toward him.
The man raised the tire iron to chest height. ‘They…they attacked me more than once.’
She smiled. ‘Come on now, do I look like I’m going to do much attacking?’ She glanced down at her front.
He laughed uneasily. ‘No, ma’am, that you don’t.’
Abaddon took another couple of steps forward. ‘See anything you like?’
The guy was in his forties and he looked like he hadn’t ever seen a woman in a state of undress before, save maybe in the movies. Lights-off-sex with the wife would be the rule. His eyes widened as she flicked off one of her straps and tugged down the cup.
Then she crushed his windpipe with the back of her hand. He died with a wet smile on his lips.
Twenty
I woke before six the next morning, in a cold sweat despite the warmth of the hotel room. They had come to me again, the ones I had lost, dressed in white like the sheets that had covered them in the morgue. My son’s face wasn’t blue anymore, but corpse-gray like his mother
’s. She had her hand stretched out to me again, her face twisted in pain and longing. And then she turned and started to walk down a rough track between trees. I knew immediately that it was the path everyone eventually had to take, the way to the land of the countless, nameless dead.
I took a shower and pulled open the drapes. It was still dark outside, the static lights of the terminal and the moving ones on aircraft shimmering through the heavy drizzle that pattered against the pane. Our plan had me leaving the hotel at eight, so that I would be in Tyler County before ten. That left plenty of time before dark to find the Antichurch’s facility on the road between Warren and Fred. Quincy would keep a mile or so behind me, using the locating device to track me. He was to use his own discretion about coming to my aid if anything suspicious happened. The Bureau’s Houston field office was involved, but its operatives had been told to keep their distance.
After I’d dressed, I checked the weapons in the bag I’d picked up. There was a combat knife in its sheath and a Glock 19 semiautomatic with two clips. I ejected a shell and examined it. As far as I could tell, it was the real thing. Although I didn’t fully trust Peter Sebastian, I couldn’t see why he would let me go into Rothmann’s den firing blanks.
I logged on to the operation’s secure site and read a report that Major Hexton had filed late last night. The body of a thirty-nine-year-old male had been found near the turnpike about ten miles north of Portland. His throat had been crushed. A few yards from the body was a black Jeep Grand Cherokee. The number plate squared with one logged earlier in the day by a witness in the diner across the road from police headquarters, who had come forward last night. The assumption was that the driver, a woman, had made her way to the turnpike and hitched either north or south. A call was out for anyone who had seen or picked her up, but a lot of the traffic was interstate so drivers either might not have heard it or ignored it.
So what the hell was going on? Could this second woman have been on my tail as well? Why had she killed the man? Had he seen something he shouldn’t have? That didn’t feel right. Who was the woman? The last thing I needed was someone who could kill with a single blow after me. In addition to Sara, that is.
I checked out and had the Mercedes brought to the front of the hotel. I looked around surreptitiously, but there were no women apart from hotel staff in the vicinity. No sign of Quincy, either. All was as it should be.
For speed, I took I-10 to Beaumont and then headed north toward the Big Thicket. At first I thought I was back in Cajun country in Louisiana. I’d gone on a wild trip there with some other crime writers after a conference in New Orleans-we ate gumbo, drank beer, sweated buckets and made enough noise to scare off any man-eating creatures.
The forest grew thicker the farther north I got, and there was no shortage of lumber trucks-in that respect, the area was like Maine, but with more humidity and a lot more insect life. I could believe that runaway slaves and draft dodgers had made use of the Big Thicket in the old days. It struck me that the difficulty of tracking people down in the swampy terrain might have attracted Rothmann, too. Then again, there were signs of the oil industry encroaching, which would have reduced his privacy.
I made it to Warren and stopped for a cup of coffee. There was a pamphlet about the area in the diner. Apparently there were eight different vegetation zones in the Big Thicket preserve, ranging from palmetto hardwood flatlands to stream flood plains, whatever those were. They harbored over eighty species of tree and sixty kinds of shrubs. Since I’d lived in cities on the other side of the ocean all my life, a lot of the fauna was unknown to me: loblolly pine, bluejack oak, tupelo and sundew. I breathed in and got a distinct blast of nature in the raw-swelling, burgeoning and slightly rotten. Again, just the place for Rothmann and his Nazi Satanists.
I sprayed on some insect repellent and buttoned my cuffs. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the humidity was heavy-duty. Fortunately, the Mercedes had a great aircon system. As I drove through the town, I wondered what the locals did when they weren’t working. There was no shortage of churches and I remembered I was in the heartland of the Southern Baptists. Some of them believed in the reality of Satan as much as the Antichurch did, but they expected the faithful to be taken up in the so-called Rapture, while the rest of us stayed on ground level to wait for Armageddon. It struck me that the Antichurch would have found more followers down south than in sparsely populated Maine. Could that be why the annual gathering was happening here?
Then again, where was ‘here’? I found access road 1943 and set off down it slowly, looking from side to side. None of the buildings looked likely candidates. Soon I came to signs on the right for the Turkey Creek Trail. According to the pamphlet, walkers would traverse a pine-hardwood forest cut with sandy knolls, then forests of loblolly and short-leaf pines, white and red oak, and others. Paradise for a nature lover, but the numerous unnumbered gravel tracks made it hell to check out thoroughly. The calls of strange birds filled the woods and I began to wonder if my boots were thick enough to repel snake bites. I was as lost for clues as Hansel and Gretel. Then it struck me that Antichurch members like Nora Jacobsen would be coming from far away and would need help to identify the hidden premises. I continued on 1943, swiveling my head until my neck began to ache. Unshaven guys with disintegrating baseball caps and dented pickups honked at me and I waved at them like a dumb tourist. Maybe I should just have asked where the devil worshippers hung out.
And then, without immediately understanding what it meant, I saw the mark on the left side of the road. It was about six feet up the thick trunk of a tree I couldn’t identify. The bark had been scraped away and in the foot-square space a red cross had been painted, the upper part of the vertical much longer than the lower. The Antichurch’s upturned cross. Eureka.
I got down from the SUV and took out my cell phone to send a text to Quincy.
No signal. That was hardly surprising, given the tree cover. He would be able to track me with the responder, as long as it functioned in this environment. Too bad-I wasn’t going to wait. My heart rate had accelerated. I was going to find the bastard Rothmann and tear his head off. I got back into the car and drove down a narrow track. As soon as I saw a gap in the trees, I turned in and got the Mercedes as far out of the way as I could. When I opened the door, I noticed a fleshy plant where I was going to put my feet. A putrid smell rose from it, attracting flies and other insects.
It seemed I was close to the rotting heart of darkness.
Putting the pistol and knife in my pockets, I struck off through the woods, keeping the track to my right. I took cover behind a tree when I heard a vehicle approach and watched as a pair of worryingly severe guys in a pristine pickup negotiated the track. The vehicle soon vanished behind the foliage. I headed after it.
The first rustle in the bushes ahead didn’t bother me. The following ones did-they got louder and shook the leaves. I stopped and pulled out the Glock. A bundle of bristles with two wickedly curved tusks on the front pelted toward me, swerving at the last moment. I found myself on my backside, breathing heavily. That must have been one of the feral hogs mentioned in the pamphlet. I laughed out loud, having not come across heavily armed suckling pig before.
I should have kept quiet. That way I might have heard what came up behind me. As it was, I turned too late and caught only a glimpse of a demon’s face with fangs much bigger than the hog’s.
Then I lost the light.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our most generous sponsor, Mr. Rudi Crane!’
The toastmaster gave the small man to his right on the raised table a wide and disingenuous smile. Crane did not return it. One of the many blessings that the Lord had conferred upon him was the ability to detect insincerity instantly. That had been a useful tool in his rise to the upper echelons of American business, as well as in his church. He knew exactly which senior Southern Baptists were worthy. Unfortunately, there were very few.
Rudi Crane looked out over the elite of Chicago and t
ried not to blink. He had started wearing contact lenses a few months earlier, and his eyes still rebelled on occasion. He knew how important it was to maintain a steady gaze, so he had disciplined himself not to react to the prompting of his nerves. As usual, his mind prevailed over his body, for which he gave silent thanks. He started out on the address he had memorized-he didn’t like to refer to notes when speaking in public, nor did he allow himself to extemporize. As often happened, the words came out without conscious effort, allowing him to spend the time on more profitable conjectures. Over the years, he had come up with many important ideas while speaking, most frequently when he preached at the church he had built near the family mansion outside Birmingham. He wished he was there now, taking in the winter sun of Alabama, far away from the high society of Chicago, hypocrites all. He only contributed to their ridiculous charitable foundation because it raised his profile in the North and was essential for his business.
Rudi Crane’s thoughts ran parallel to his speech for several seconds. He was explaining how Hercules Solutions had an integrated approach to every contract, and how much the company valued the work it carried out for the U.S.A. Integration was the key. The word had been misused for so many years, he reflected. Racial integration wasn’t important in the modern world. What really mattered was full control of everything. Religion based on the words of great men directed the minds and souls of the people; relationships between great men led to mutually beneficial business activities; great men organized the world according to their desires and rights. He had never had the slightest doubt that he was a great man.
‘My friends,’ he said, moving into the section of his speech that people came to hear, ‘I have been fortunate enough in my time to know many leaders, in many different fields. I have paid homage at the feet of religious leaders, I have had dealings with the kings of industry, I have known the most powerful of statesmen. When I saw the secretary of defense last weekend, he said to me, “Rudi, how do you do it? Hercules Solutions offers the best service with the best personnel for the best price. It’s a miracle.” I took it upon myself to correct the secretary, as only the Lord our God can bring about miracles. But it is true that Hercules Solutions takes its work very seriously, not least because we are responsible for American lives in the most dangerous parts of the world.’
