The King

by Steven James

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I got it.”

  I could tell she was frustrated, but it seemed like more than just the plastic wrap was bothering her.

  She finally managed to cover the plate and slide it into the microwave. “Patrick”—she punched the start button—“how come you never take me to church?”

  “To church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go to church.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t.”

  “No. I think it’d be boring.”

  “Then why would you ask me to take you?”

  “I didn’t ask you to take me, I just asked why you don’t take me.”

  “Okay,” I acknowledged. “That’s true.”

  “Mom would’ve wanted you to. I think.”

  I felt a twitch of guilt. Tessa was right—Christie would’ve wanted me to take her, but in the months following her death, it was a hard time for me to believe in God at all, and I would’ve felt like a hypocrite walking into a church. Over time I’d just gotten out of the habit. “Well, I guess I was hoping I could let you decide what faith to follow rather than imposing my beliefs on you.”

  “Oh, how very PC of you. No, really. I’m impressed.”

  “Okay, I sense a touch of sarcasm there.”

  “Not much gets past you, does it?”

  I stared at her. “What are we talking about here, Tessa? What is this all about?”

  The plate of spaghetti and sauce was beginning to pop and sizzle and it was a little annoying.

  “C’mon, if there was a room with twenty bottles in it and, say, nineteen of ’em were poisonous and one was okay to drink and I was thirsty, would you just tell me to go in there and choose a bottle and drink from it?”

  “No, of course, I— Oh, I see. Some belief systems are dangerous and why would I let you sample those? But what if none of them were poisonous? What if they’re all safe?”

  “Are you actually saying beliefs like Nazism or sexism or fascism or speciism are safe?”

  “Speciism?”

  “Thinking we’re better than other species.”

  “I’m not sure about that last one, but yeah, okay, I get your point. Yes, there are destructive ideas and worldviews out there that I don’t want you adopting. But let’s say most of the bottles are good for you. That only a small percentage of beliefs are destructive. Let’s say maybe nineteen are healthy and only one has poison in it.”

  She looked at me, aghast. “You’d let me go in? If even one of them was poisonous and I was thirsty, you’d still let me go into the room without telling me which one it was?”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that, it’s just . . .”

  She shook her head and started for her bedroom.

  “Hey, okay, I’ll take you to church.”

  “I already told you”—her voice was sharp—“I don’t want to go to church.”

  Okay, starting to get exasperated here. “Then what do you want?”

  Silence.

  I followed her down the hallway. Behind me, in the kitchen, the microwave cut off.

  “What it is you want, Tessa?”

  She turned to face me. “Just the truth. Okay? Alright?”

  “Well . . . Good. I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Yeah,” she said ambiguously. Then she disappeared into her room, leaving me standing there staring at her closed door.

  She didn’t slam it. If she had, I might’ve thought she was just pouting and I could have discounted, at least somewhat, her little outburst. But she didn’t, and I realized that somewhere deep inside she really was searching for answers and all I’d managed to give her was more frustration.

  Obviously she was upset, and trying to talk to her more was certainly an option, but over the last few years I’ve learned that there are times when it’s best to leave her alone—and often those are the times when I feel the most like I want to go and help her out. I had the sense that this was one of those times when I needed to give her some space.

  I called to her that the spaghetti was done and she thanked me from the other side of the door, but when I waited for her to come out, she did not.

  Finally, I put the plate in the fridge and returned to the hall. I paused when I came to her door, tried to sort out what I might say to her if I actually did knock on it, but in the end I passed by and simply went to my room instead.

  Before going to bed I reviewed my schedule for tomorrow: in the morning I planned to look over the case files early, then visit Lien-hua before driving to NCAVC headquarters for the afternoon briefing.

  In the meantime, more than anything I needed some sleep.

  Even though it wasn’t quite nine thirty, I was exhausted, but now, with the case on my mind, as well as this little, somewhat disconcerting exchange with Tessa scratching away at my conscience, I wasn’t confident at all that I’d be able to quiet my mind enough to get the rest I really needed.

  23

  8:04 a.m. India Standard Time

  Keith did not enjoy what Vanessa had directed him to do to Eashan and Jagjeevan over the course of the last twelve hours.

  Eashan had cried too much, which had annoyed Vanessa and caused her to instruct Keith to do more work on him than he would have liked. Jagjeevan had struggled too much for his own good and ended up worse off than he should have.

  Both men were alive. But neither was fully intact.

  Honestly, since she’d threatened to hurt them only if they didn’t get their job done, Keith wasn’t sure all of that was necessary. But he knew better than to second-guess Vanessa, and once she decided she wanted to make an example of someone—or simply to punish a person for her own private enjoyment—he knew there would be no changing her mind.

  And, for fear of what their employer would do to him if he didn’t obey her, he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter and had followed her instructions to the letter.

  Her aggressive attitude last night might have been her way of impressing the man who’d hired them and whom Keith had gotten the sense she had a relationship with—or at least wanted to have one with.

  Regardless, in the end, Keith and Vanessa had accomplished what they’d come to India to do. The hologram had been redesigned. The women who were now coming in to work were already sending the boxes through the two printing machines.

  Each of the printers could imprint one box every fifteen seconds, so, given forty-eight hours, that was more than enough time to package the ten thousand packets that were going to be shipped to America.

  Keith and Vanessa’s flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until tomorrow evening.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked her. “Back to Chennai? Check on the paperwork for the shipment?”

  “We’ll stay here for today, oversee things, then Baahir can take us back tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll see if we can get on an earlier flight. Either way we should arrive in Boston with plenty of time to get ready for Thursday. We’ll need to be prudent about our steps from here on out. You know how he is if everything isn’t in order.”

  Keith nodded soberly, realizing that what he had done to Eashan and Jagjeevan last night would be nothing compared to what would happen to him if he and Vanessa let down their employer, Alexei Chekov. “Yes.”

  Chekov, who was better known under the alias “Valkyrie,” had worked as an assassin for Russia’s foreign military intelligence directorate, the GRU, before launching out on his own last spring.

  It seemed that since then he’d found his real calling and had worked tirelessly to refine his skills.

  He was wanted not only by Interpol for international terrorism and numerous assassinations, but also appeared on the FBI’s most-wanted-terrorists list with a five-million-dollar reward.
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br />   Keith had heard that Alexei used to have his own private code of ethics and never harmed women or children, but somewhere along the line he’d given that up and these days he was as ruthless with them as he was with the grown men who crossed him or let him down.

  To call the Russian Mafia “ruthless” is like calling a sharks’ feeding frenzy a “meal.” And the Mafia was afraid of Alexei. To put it bluntly, when Alexei wanted something, he got it, and he wanted these drugs in the American pharmaceutical supply chain by this coming weekend. It was Keith and Vanessa’s job to make sure that happened.

  The drug they were so concerned with was the same one Corey Wellington had taken for the seven days preceding his suicide.

  As Keith remembered him, he thought about pressing his fingers against a dead person’s neck and feeling no pulse.

  The cool skin. The unblinking eyes. The tongue that lolls to the side.

  Every time Keith had felt for someone’s pulse, both in the States and in the slums of India where they’d done their initial trials, had been difficult for him.

  From the tests he and Vanessa had done, a week, just like it had been for Corey, was the average time frame. It was almost always six to eight days, depending on the dosage, body size, and degree of depression that the test subject was suffering from.

  With Corey, it’d happened abruptly. That was unusual, but it wasn’t unheard-of. Most people had gradual mental disorientation beforehand, but there were always those who simply woke up one day and decided on the spot to end it all.

  Keith and Vanessa had watched Corey for nine days prior to his death. That’s why they’d copied his house key and placed the two hidden cameras in his house—to monitor his progress.

  And it was why they’d switched his prescription medication packets with ones from the facility here in Kadapa, the ones with their own lot numbers on them, so they could better track and monitor their use by the test subjects.

  During Corey’s last three days of life, they’d watched him every morning and evening on the video feed in the apartment they’d rented just down the street.

  As far as Keith could tell, Vanessa hadn’t slept the whole time.

  It was amazing. And a little unnerving.

  Calydrole was prescribed only to people who had suicidal tendencies. In clinical studies it showed a remarkable ability to help steer depressed individuals away from those kinds of thoughts.

  Taking an inert pill would have increased the likelihood of those thoughts recurring, simply because the person’s condition wasn’t being treated. But the drug that Dr. Kurvetek, a neuropathologist with an above-average sadistic streak, had helped Alexei develop, did more than just allow the thoughts to return. It activated the parts of the brain that facilitated self-destructive behavior in depressed individuals.

  Now, within a week, the drugs would be distributed to ten thousand moderately to severely depressed patients around North America, all of whom had seriously contemplated killing themselves.

  And then, within six to eight days of those people taking their meds, the suicides would begin.

  24

  Sunday, April 7 9:03 a.m.

  Considering all that I had on my mind, I slept well. No nightmares haunted me, and I felt refreshed and ready to go at it today.

  After breakfast, I spent some time examining the forensics reports from the apartment where Basque had taken Lien-hua.

  For security reasons, members of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime didn’t meet at FBI Headquarters or at the Academy.

  Our offices were located in a warehouse that the Bureau had purchased ten years earlier near Quantico. The sign for Tarry Lawnmower Supply still hung out front, the lobby still had posters of lawnmowers on the walls, and when you called in, the receptionist cheerfully told you that you’d reached Tarry Lawnmower Supply.

  Every week, semis drove to the back of the warehouse and loaded and unloaded the mowers alternately. All of these precautions were necessary, because the building didn’t just house the NCAVC, but also all the records and computers that made up ViCAP.

  I shared the official definition with our students so I had it memorized: “ViCAP maintains the largest investigative repository of major violent-crime cases in the U.S. It is designed to collect and analyze information about homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and other violent crimes involving unidentified human remains.”

  And the location of that was worth keeping a secret.

  • • •

  Even if Tessa chose not to come along with me to the hospital this morning to see Lien-hua, I figured I should let her know that I was heading over and wouldn’t be back until later this afternoon, when the briefing was over.

  It would probably also be a good idea to inform her that there would be police protection for her if she decided to stay at the house.

  Going to her room, I knocked lightly on the door to see if she was awake. “Tessa?” I heard her gerbil, Rune, running on his gerbil-wheel-thing, but Tessa didn’t reply.

  I eased the door slightly open and caught a glimpse of her still lying in bed, eyes closed, her teddy bear, Francesca, snuggled up tightly in her arms.

  Christie had given her the bear on her fifth birthday, and as far as I knew Tessa had slept with that stuffed animal every night since then. Yes, a girl whose walls were covered with posters of death-metal bands like Boomerang Puppy, Death by Suzie, and Trevor Asylum had a pet gerbil and slept with a teddy bear.

  A quirk? Yeah, I guess that would definitely count.

  I remembered when Tessa first told me she wanted a gerbil. “I figured you for a snake person,” I’d told her. “Maybe a rock python or something.”

  “I like gerbils.”

  “But they’re cute and furry and they don’t really go with the death motif here in the room.”

  “It’s not a death motif. It’s just posters of the bands I like.”

  “Find one without a skull on it.”

  She pointed.

  “The name of that band is House of Blood.”

  “Well,” she countered, “there’s no skull. Besides, gerbils don’t eat meat . . .” She caught herself. “Well, I suppose locusts and grubs—but only if there’s no other food around. Anyway, I couldn’t deal with a constrictor. I could never watch it kill mice like that every week. Totally disturbing.”

  In the end, I’d thought it might be good for her to have a pet to take care of and I’d told her that it was fine with me if she got a gerbil. She’d named him Rune, which came from an Old English word that meant “mystery,” or “secret.”

  “Because I’ll never know what he’s thinking,” she explained, “and I’m always going to wonder about that. What would it be like to think what a gerbil thinks, from a gerbil’s point of view? Kind of like Thomas Nigel’s 1974 paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ There’s a subjective character of experience that’s never captured in reductive accounts. Know what I mean?”

  “Um . . . Sure.”

  Now I called to her again, a little louder than before, using her nickname: “Raven?”

  Finally she groaned and rolled over, turning her back to me.

  “I’m going to leave for the hospital in half an hour.”

  She groaned again in acknowledgment.

  “Would you like to come along or are you going to stay here? I won’t be back until later this afternoon.”

  “Yeah,” she said feebly.

  “Does that mean stay here or come along?”

  “I’ll come,” she mumbled. “I wanna come.”

  “You sure?”

  She gave another groan and I took that as a yes.

  Twenty minutes later she staggered blearily into the kitchen in her pajamas and without a word poured herself a mug of coffee, mixed four heaping tablespoons of sugar into it, and flumped onto the chair acros
s the table from me. “So what are we drinking today?” she asked sleepily.

  “Tanzanian Peaberry.”

  She nodded, cupped the mug in her hands, and took a sip. “So you’re really leaving in ten minutes?”

  “I was planning to.”

  She sipped some more coffee. I had the sense that she’d gotten up about fifteen seconds before entering the room.

  I added a little honey and cream to my cup.

  “Yeah,” she said, “okay—ten minutes.”

  She rummaged through the cupboard for some granola, dumped it into a bowl, and poured soy milk over it. “I’m gonna change. I’ll meet you in the car.” She turned toward the hallway and I wasn’t sure if she was being morning-brain-distracted or if she was going to bring her breakfast with her to eat on the way.

  Before she left the kitchen I cleared my throat. “Hey, listen. I was thinking about last night, when you were talking to me about going to church.”

  “Never mind.” She brushed a hand across the air as if she were erasing something. “It’s all good. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it does. I didn’t want you to think I was blowing you off.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean—”

  “I get it. Okay.” She yawned, started for her room, but then stopped suddenly, leaned against the wall, and rubbed some sleep out of her eyes. “I don’t think I ever told you, but when I was little I was always scared of the dark, scared of monsters in my closet. You know, like what happens with kids.”

  “Sure.”

  “Anyway, Mom told me there was no such thing as monsters.” She scratched uneasily at the back of her neck. “But there are, aren’t there?”

  The transition from church to monsters wasn’t immediately clear to me. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder about vampires and werewolves? Where all the stories come from?”