The King

by Steven James

  The words hit him like a slap in the face and sent a terrifying chill worming through him. “Who is this?”

  “This is the man who can get to your ex-wife’s phone. This is the man who can get to your daughter whenever he wants to.”

  Abigail!

  Graham rushed toward the door but as he grabbed the handle, the man commanded him again not to do it: “Stay in the house. We have your daughter and believe me, if you step out that door you will never see her again. And you would not want to.”

  “You have my daughter?”

  “We do and—”

  “I swear to God, if you touch her, if you hurt her—”

  “It would be best at this point not to threaten me, Graham. She’s safe. For now.”

  Graham went to the kitchen window to try to see the strip of beach from another angle, but his daughter was nowhere to be seen. “Let me talk to her!”

  The man ignored him. “Listen carefully. Tomorrow morning a shipment of pharmaceutical products is going to arrive at Logan International Airport. You’re going to approve the paperwork personally and oversee the loading process onto the semis for distribution. I know that you aren’t always involved in signing off on arrivals like this, but in this case I would like you to expedite the order. If you call the police or contact the authorities we will know. And we will harm your daughter in ways that I would rather not like to describe.”

  Graham peered out the window at the vacant beach. “I don’t understand what any of this has to do with my daughter. Let me talk to Abigail!”

  “Just take care of things tomorrow and we will never bother you or your daughter again.”

  “So you’ll let her go? Tonight? Right now?”

  “We’ll do what we deem necessary to encourage your cooperation.”

  “I’ll do it, I . . .” His thoughts shifted for a second from Abigail to his ex-wife. He might not like her, might not like how much she’d gotten in their settlement, but she was Abigail’s mother, and if anything happened to her it would shatter their daughter.

  This guy has Erin’s phone.

  “Erin. Is she alright?”

  “She is. But if you don’t do as I asked, we will make use of her to hurt Abigail. We’ll make the girl watch and the things we’ll do would not be ones that—”

  “Okay, okay. Stop. I’ll do it. I swear.”

  “Alright, we’re counting on you being a man of your word. You are a man of your word, aren’t you, Graham?”

  “Yes, I’ll do it. Don’t hurt them, please.”

  And then the line went dead and Graham bolted from the house toward the beach.

  “Abigail!” He rushed across the lawn toward the water’s edge. “Where are you?”

  He was almost to the sand when he saw her walking his way along the shore from his right.

  “Abigail!” There was both anger and worry in his voice, the tone a parent can’t keep from using when a child has wandered away and then been found again. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” She sounded a little frightened. “I was just petting the dog.”

  Beyond her the beach was vacant.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Of course, Daddy.”

  “You know better than to wander off. To go out of sight.”

  “I’m sorry.” She lowered her head. “It’s just . . . She told me I could come and see her other dog too.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Abigail turned, looked behind her, and saw the empty beach. “I don’t know. When we got over there she got a phone call and told me she needed to go and that I’d better head back home so you wouldn’t worry about me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “She didn’t touch you, did she? Did she touch you?”

  Abigail shook her head and brushed away a tear. “Don’t be mad, Daddy, I didn’t mean to.”

  “Come here. I’m not mad, baby.” He encircled her in his arms. “I’m not mad.”

  On the way to the house she told him that the woman was nice and that she was “normal-looking” and had red hair and that she’d said she would see her again soon, “if your daddy decides that’s what he wants.”

  Whoever these people were, Graham was not going to gamble with his daughter’s life. And as harsh as his feelings toward Erin were, he wasn’t going to take any chances that she would be hurt in the ways he was imagining. All these people were asking him to do was oversee the transfer of a shipment. There was nothing illegal or unethical about that.

  He took Abigail inside and locked all the doors, although he had a feeling that if the people who were behind this wanted to get in, locking a door wasn’t going to make any difference.

  And, for fear of what they would do to his daughter and his estranged ex-wife, he decided that tomorrow morning he would do exactly as the man on the phone had demanded.

  55

  10:47 p.m. Thursday night

  The last forty-eight hours had passed in a blur.

  The rain returned yesterday and settled drearily over the nation’s capital. It was a gray, somber rain that made it seem like the sun couldn’t possibly exist beyond the thick slabs of clouds hanging so heavily in the sky.

  Between yesterday afternoon and this evening, there’d been four funerals for the men who’d lost their lives on Tuesday in Basque’s killing spree: the Maryland State Police officer, the two federal agents, and a young man who was working at a magic shop on the coast. At first we didn’t know that homicide was related to the others, but when I saw on the news that there’d been a message written in blood in the back room of the store and I heard what the words were, I knew the killer was Basque.

  The message read: I remember my tail.

  The snake in the fable would never forget, and neither would Basque.

  And neither would I.

  I had made it to three of the funerals—the ones for the two agents and the slain officer.

  There are many times when second thoughts become chains on your soul. You scour the past, looking for that small decision you could have made, that tiny choice that would have turned out to be monumental. “If only” becomes the catchphrase that echoes through every moment, every hour. Was there something I could have done to save those men?

  You could have found Basque sooner.

  But we had him now. Since he was such a high-profile criminal we were holding him at the undisclosed detention facility below FBI Headquarters on the Federal Triangle in downtown DC. It was only recently built and was located beneath the three underground levels of parking. The area was so classified that even most of the people in the building didn’t know what that newly added lower level of the building contained.

  Doctors had treated the gunshot wound Basque had sustained in his right side when Lien-hua shot back through the seat of her car at him. His stabbed jaw and shattered teeth hadn’t posed any real threat, just cosmetic damage. From what I heard, he was recovering fine. I wasn’t sure if I was happy to hear that or not.

  So far he’d refused to talk to anyone, including his court-appointed legal counsel.

  Corey Wellington’s funeral was also held yesterday in Atlanta. Margaret flew down for it. Though the cable news networks were clamoring for an interview, she hadn’t granted any. It was still officially considered a suicide. The last time I spoke with her was this morning, and I had nothing substantial to report.

  The bright spot yesterday was Lien-hua’s release from the hospital—minor compared to everything else that was going on, but it was at least one thing to be thankful for.

  For the time being at least, instead of going back home, she’d moved into the one-bedroom apartment in the basement of Ralph and Brineesha’s house. With her injuries and crutches, she wasn’t able to navigate any stairs and there was a lower-level entry, unlike at her place. We’d discussed her s
taying at my house, but this way she would also have a resident nurse in Brineesha in case there were any health concerns that came up regarding her recovery.

  Both of our families—her brothers and my relatives—were excited, relieved, thrilled that she was on her way to recovery.

  Earlier today, I visited the sites of the two apartments Basque had used. I spent more than an hour at each location but didn’t take anything away from them clue-wise, just a reminder of how thankful I was that he was finally in custody.

  Regarding the investigation into the suicides, the Calydrole pills that had been found at the apartment of Natalie Germaine’s boyfriend had arrived in DC this morning and both FDA and PTPharmaceuticals were studying their chemical composition. The team at the FBI Lab was also working on their own inspection, as well as a forensic analysis of the packaging—prints, DNA, and so on.

  • • •

  This morning we’d reviewed the information about the side effects of Calydrole. The FDA requires every antidepressant medication to carry a warning that some adolescents and children may be at increased risk of suicide while taking the medication. The official disclaimer on Calydrole warned: This drug may lower your immunity to certain diseases, cause impotency, abdominal bleeding, dizziness, and nausea. Sometimes fatal events can occur. It may increase the risk of suicide in certain people.

  Talk about covering your bases, that about did it.

  To put it bluntly, our team hadn’t made much progress at all in unraveling the suspicious circumstances related to Corey Wellington’s death.

  Even with Angela’s and Lacey’s help, we came up short in finding any other suicides that might have been related to the two we knew about. Missing packets of depression medication at the sites of suicides was just not the kind of information that was typically recorded on police reports.

  Killing yourself doesn’t usually initiate as much investigation or scrutiny as cases in which someone else murders you. Generally, in cases judged to be suicides, police investigations are brief, the reports are succinct and more often than not, rather incomplete.

  We had, however, pulled up a more detailed background on Corporal Keith Tyree. I’d managed to locate one photo of him in Moscow with Nikolai Demidenko, a known associate of one of the world’s most infamous terrorists—an assassin named Alexei Chekov, but better known throughout the international counterterrorism community by the code name Valkyrie.

  I’d encountered Chekov last winter during an ecoterrorist plot to take over a Navy communication base in the Midwest. As it turned out, Alexei had actually helped us thwart that attack, but since then he’d been responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent people, having masterminded, among other things, a bombing at an elementary school in Kenya, at least half a dozen suicide bombings throughout the Middle East, and the assassination of Olivia Tonneson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt.

  I’m no expert on split-personality disorders, but after Chekov killed his wife he suffered some sort of mental break. In the end, the darker side of who he was had emerged and taken over.

  I wasn’t sure who scared me more, Chekov or Basque. Chekov probably knew more ways to kill you, but Basque knew how to keep you alive while he slowly ate your internal organs, and I couldn’t think of many things more disturbing than that.

  Chekov spoke four languages, had any number of false identities, was an experienced hacker, and was one person who had the resources and contacts to wipe Tyree off the grid.

  We didn’t have enough yet to know anything definitive, but cases are built on threads of evidence. You weave them together until you can see the broader context, and right now the threads were starting to wind into a strand that led back to Chekov.

  So, while the search into Tyree’s background went on, in light of all that’d happened, we’d rescheduled my meeting with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jason Kantsos for tomorrow at one o’clock.

  My insurance company was working on getting me a new car, for now I had a rental.

  Ralph bought me a new Maglite, since mine was lost in the marsh.

  We replaced Lien-hua’s missing cell phone. And the two of us burned the unity candle more than a few times to celebrate our moments together.

  We’d all had a chance to process what’d happened on Tuesday, and though there was by no means any closure, life, as it has to, was starting to move forward, one slow, unsteady step at a time.

  56

  Friday, April 12 6:03 a.m.

  Hoping to clear my head, I went for an early morning swim at the YMCA ten minutes from our house.

  When I was in college, I’d worked as a wilderness guide and had become pretty proficient at rock climbing and raft guiding. I’d tried to stay in shape over the years so I could still play on those days when I’m able to pull away from my job. Running, climbing, swimming—whatever I could find time to do. If I wasn’t in shape, I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with the stress of this job.

  After about an hour I returned home.

  By then the sky was sharp and bright summer-blue, as if it were finally washed clean of the dark deeds that had marked the first couple days of the week.

  At the house, I found Tessa sleepily finishing her breakfast of rice cakes, grape juice, and an orange. She didn’t always wear the black tourmaline necklace I’d given her on her seventeenth birthday, but today she did and it dangled prominently on the outside of her shirt. The necklace looked at home on her and it seemed to signify, to both of us, the day we started to mend the rift caused when her mother died.

  Tessa had on fresh makeup and fingernail polish, and I found myself wondering if all this had anything to do with looking nice for the guy she’d fallen for, the one who she was going to see tonight, Aiden Ryeson.

  Back on Wednesday, when he still hadn’t asked her out, I’d broached the topic with her. “I don’t understand. If you like him so much, why don’t you just ask him out?”

  “I’m a girl. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “This is the twenty-first century. You’re pretty independent. I mean, you’re not someone who’s normally intimidated by—”

  “I’m not intimidated. I just think that if a guy likes you he should be the one to ask you out. It shows he’s serious about it.”

  “So what happens if he doesn’t know you like him?”

  “Oh, he knows.”

  “How?”

  She stared at me. “You are so clueless when it comes to women. No offense.”

  “None taken. So you’re telling me that you made it clear to him, flirting, that sort of thing?”

  She shook her head in exasperation to reiterate how clueless I was. “Whatever.”

  “But still, I mean, you could just pick up the phone and—”

  “If he knows I like him and he doesn’t want to ask me out, then he’s not worth it. If he likes me and he’s too much of a chicken to call me, then I don’t want to go out with him anyway. I want a guy who’s got the—well—”

  “Sure. I know what you meant.”

  But as it turned out, she didn’t need to call Aiden, because yesterday he’d done it: he’d asked her to tonight’s prom.

  In a text message.

  I wasn’t sure how kids did things these days, but from my perspective, he’d definitely waited long enough. And he asked her to prom by texting her? To me, it sure seemed like that at least bordered on being too chicken to call.

  However, she was excited about it and I was glad to see that. In fact, despite how much she hated shopping, she was planning on going out this afternoon after school to buy a dress, just hours before heading out to the dance.

  It was certainly last-minute, but knowing her, I wasn’t so sure she would have gone dress shopping earlier even if Aiden had asked her weeks ago.

  When Lien-hua had been looking for her wedding dress, she must have been anticipating that
Tessa would need a prom dress, because last night after Tessa received her text from Aiden, Lien-hua had informed us that she’d seen the perfect one at a shop in Arlington.

  Of course, she didn’t know if it would still be in stock, but she’d offered to go look for it with Tessa this afternoon. I wasn’t thrilled about Lien-hua trekking out of bed, but she told me she would be fine for an hour, Brineesha agreed, and to avoid an argument, I’d backed down.

  So, it was shaping up to be a big day for everyone.

  Tessa got to go to prom with the boy she had a crush on, Lien-hua was ready to start venturing out into the world again, and, with Basque out of the way, I could start focusing more on the case involving Corey Wellington’s and Natalie Germaine’s suicides.

  • • •

  As I walked into the kitchen I saw Tessa texting with one hand without looking at her phone. She was lifting a rice cake to her mouth with the other hand.

  “I’ll never understand how you do that,” I said, referring to her texting. “I can barely hit those keys when I’m staring at them.”

  She swallowed her bite full of rice cake. “My fingers are smaller. Plus I text a couple hundred more times a day than you do.”

  “True.”

  She yawned. “Besides, you’re good at pickpocketing.”

  “Well, that came out of nowhere.”

  “No, I mean it. You could snag someone’s wallet, check his ID, slip it back into his pocket, and he’d never know.”

  I recalled trying to conceal and reveal the unity candle to Lien-hua, which hadn’t exactly been a stellar performance. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure I’m that good.” I got some grape juice for myself. “Anyway, you learn that stuff, you know, at the Academy, mainly so you can spot it.”

  “It’s cool, though.”

  It didn’t exactly thrill me that my teenage daughter thought pickpocketing was cool.

  I pointed to the package of rice cakes. “How do you eat those things anyway?”

  “They’re good.” She rose and shuffled toward her room, then paused and must have realized she’d forgotten to put them away in their plastic bag. I offered to do it for her.