The Killing House

by Chris Mooney

  ‘And you killed them.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And the information you collected?’

  ‘I stored everything inside a safety-deposit box,’ Fletcher said. ‘The FBI reached it before I could.’

  ‘And then you were on the run.’

  Fletcher nodded.

  ‘You’re a fugitive because you know about the FBI’s involvement in medical testing.’

  Fletcher nodded again.

  ‘And the Behavioral Modification Project? What happened to it?’

  ‘Shut down,’ Fletcher said. ‘All the documentation and evidence was destroyed. It doesn’t exist.’

  M digested this silently.

  ‘Borgia is calling you a serial killer.’

  ‘I’ve killed some men,’ he said. ‘But I’m hardly a serial killer.’

  ‘Did they have it coming?’

  We all have it coming, one way or another, Fletcher thought. ‘They were guilty of their crimes,’ he said. ‘I don’t regret what I did. Do you have any more questions?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘What information have you uncovered on Borgia?’

  ‘Just surface stuff. He’s single – he’s never been married. Nothing jumps out on his credit-card statements. I downloaded his phone records – that took some doing – but I haven’t had a chance to delve through everything. I need more time. I believe you, by the way. What you told me.’

  ‘I’ll never lie to you, M.’

  ‘Machine,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘When I was a girl, Karim would periodically check in with the school staff to enquire about my progress. Dr Franklin said, “She never stops moving, that one. Always on the go, like a little machine.” That’s why Karim calls me M. It’s short for “Machine”. I want to know where we’re going.’

  ‘To get my car. The Jaguar.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked in a casual tone.

  ‘Locked inside the trunk is a netbook computer containing information I downloaded from Corrigan’s cell phone – call history, contacts, everything.’

  ‘Corrigan as in Dr Gary Corrigan, the former surgeon.’

  ‘Karim told you?’

  A curt nod, and she added, ‘I told you I was helping him on this project.’

  ‘Corrigan performed the organ removal in another location. There could be something on his phone that might allow me to find out where Dr Sin and Nathan Santiago were taken.’

  ‘What kind of cell did he have?’

  ‘An iPhone.’

  ‘Then that will make it easier. All iPhones contain a GPS function – the maps icon. The program is always running in the background, recording where the phone travels. We can download that data and analyse it.’

  ‘You said Karim was going to be moved to Manhattan either later today or early tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s what I was told.’

  ‘I want you to call the head of his security detail.’

  ‘Bar Lev,’ she said.

  ‘Call and tell him to speak to Karim’s physician, ask if the transfer can be postponed until tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let me tell you what I have in mind,’ Fletcher said.

  69

  It was a widely known fact within the Bureau that the FBI’s New York field office was considered to be the best in the country. Size was a factor: it boasted the largest office and the greatest number of personnel. Since it was located in the most volatile city in terms of organized crime – and now, because of 9/11, the most volatile in terms of terrorist activities – the Manhattan field office hired only the brightest technical and forensic minds. Their Evidence Response Team was first rate. Consisting of top supervisory special agents, mechanical engineers, computer and program analysts, even forensic K9 specialists, Manhattan ERT could work any major investigation – had, in fact, worked several terrorist cases. Because of the quality of personnel, these terrorist plots had never materialized.

  So it came as a complete surprise to 35-year-old Damon Ortega as to why he and the other eighteen Manhattan agents delivered to Ali Karim’s historic Park Avenue mansion were being asked to perform what amounted to nothing more than watch patrol.

  Bundled into a long overcoat, a scarf wrapped around his neck and a clipboard tucked underneath his arm, Ortega paced the cold garage to keep warm. A four-man team of evidence technicians had been brought here all the way from the federal lab to search for evidence inside the three luxury vehicles parked against the side of the far wall. Another team was in Cape May, New Jersey, processing Karim’s Range Rover.

  They refused to touch the Jaguar.

  A close examination revealed the car contained armour plating and shatterproof windows. They couldn’t unlock it. A tech had tried, using a Slim Jim, and ended up getting shocked – not enough to kill him, but enough to knock the guy flat on his ass. It was the oddest damn thing Ortega had ever seen. Like the others, he kept a safe distance from the car, as though it were a dozing panther that could wake up and pounce at any moment.

  One of the evidence guys – or girl, it was impossible to tell which was which with all of them dressed in the same white Tyvek clothing, particle masks and white hoods – saw that Ortega had wandered too close to their work, and waved him away.

  Ortega resumed his post near the private elevator. He didn’t need any problems here. Some big players from Headquarters had come all the way from Washington to monitor the Malcolm Fletcher manhunt. Like the lab geeks, they looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping before engaging in hushed conversations.

  Why were these Washington suits keeping their cards so close to their chest? Everyone knew what was going on: they were searching for evidence to tie Fletcher to Manhattan’s bigwig security owner, Ali Karim.

  When the news broke about what had happened in New Jersey, the Bureau grapevine went into overdrive. Suddenly everyone at the Manhattan field office had some sort of story about the former profiler and his extraordinary – and some said eerie – talent for capturing serial killers. Nobody seemed to know the cause of Fletcher’s strange ocular condition, and it seemed only to enhance the man’s already overpowering sense of menace.

  It was maddening to be this close to such a major investigation and yet shut out of the inner circle. He had graduated summa cum laude from Yale and Harvard Law schools, and here he was acting as a secretary, keeping a log and writing down the time and name of each and every person who entered and exited the garage. His eight-year-old daughter could do this job.

  By midnight, Ortega was the only one left inside the garage.

  At 1.20 a.m. he called upstairs for a bathroom break. When he came back, along with a fresh cup of coffee, he relieved his temporary replacement. Clipboard in hand, he went back to pacing.

  At 1.43 a.m. the big bay garage door started to rise. Ortega heard a revving engine and caught sight of a dark SUV roaring down the ramp before a pair of high beams blinded him.

  Ortega moved out of the way. A black Ford Expedition whisked past him and came to a screeching stop near the stairs leading up to the elevator. The door flew open and an old woman darted out with surprising speed – no, not an old woman, she was young, with shockingly white hair cut short. She didn’t so much as glance at him, just dashed around the back of the SUV.

  ‘Stop,’ Ortega said, and gave chase. ‘Stop right now.’

  The woman ran up the short set of concrete steps leading up to the platform for the private elevator. Ortega ran after her, reminding himself of what was happening outside, on Madison Avenue, with the news vans and reporters. They had been camped out there ever since the story broke, recording every door that opened, every agent who stepped outside or entered the mansion. And now they had footage of an SUV shooting its way inside the garage.

  The woman pressed the elevator button. Ding as the doors slid open. Ortega reached the top of the steps, hit the wall control for the garage door and then took two long strides and g
rabbed the elevator doors before they shut.

  ‘Step out of the elevator,’ Ortega said. ‘Right now.’

  The woman stared at him blankly. Her face was delicate and beautiful, the skin pale, almost translucent; it brought to mind the Japanese kabuki dolls his mother collected. She wore a dark wool jacket over a tight fitting black shirt. She also wore a hearing aid.

  Ortega spoke loudly, clearly. ‘I said step –’

  ‘I’m Mr Karim’s personal assistant.’ She had a British accent, very sexy, even though she was shouting at him. ‘There’s an emergency at the Cape May Medical Center, and I need to –’

  ‘No, you need to get out of there and get back inside –’

  ‘Shut up and listen. Mr Karim has a history of high blood pressure and heart problems. He’s experiencing arrhythmia, and his physician has asked me to make a list of all his medications – yes, yes, I know, the hospital should have all that information on their computer. For whatever reason they don’t. Now you know why I’m here, so you better bloody well let me upstairs.’

  ‘You aren’t allowed –’

  ‘Let me speak to the agent in charge right now.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Emma White. We can go over all of this upstairs.’

  ‘There are procedures –’

  ‘Upstairs. Now.’

  ‘Miss White, calm down. There are procedures in place.’ Ortega spoke into his wrist mike and relayed the request to his direct report, Jack Porter.

  Porter’s reply came over Oretga’s earpiece: he had to run the request by his immediate supervisor. He told Emma White.

  The young woman paced the small area inside the elevator. Her jaw was set and Ortega could see rising colour in her cheeks.

  ‘What happened to Mr Karim’s cars? What’s all that powder covering the doors and windows?’

  Ortega didn’t answer.

  ‘That shit better wash off,’ she said.

  Porter’s voice came over Ortega’s earpiece: escort the woman up to the fourth floor. Ortega entered the elevator. Karim’s pretty assistant had already pressed the floor number.

  ‘About bloody goddamn time,’ Emma White said as the doors slid shut.

  In the garage’s cold silence, a fibre-optic camera snaked its way from underneath the SUV. It swivelled 180 degrees, paused, and then did a full 360.

  The camera disappeared. Then, from underneath the vehicle, a pair of gloved hands touched the garage floor.

  70

  Ali Karim had stripped one of the ground-level rooms in order to accommodate a large number of monitoring stations that provided a constant, vigilant watch over Park Avenue and the surrounding streets – and over each and every room inside the man’s massive home. The technical agent assigned to remove the hard drives from the monitoring stations, a young woman named Miranda Wolfe, thought the abundance of surveillance cameras was overkill; it reeked of Big Brother paranoia. People who deployed such excessive measures were more often than not trying to hide something – in Karim’s case, the nation’s most wanted fugitive.

  She had finished bagging a hard-drive into evidence when she noticed trouble on the four monitoring screens showing the interior of the private garage.

  When the Ford Expedition had pulled inside, the screens had flickered from some sort of electromagnetic interference. Now those same four screens had turned into an electromagnetic snowstorm. She couldn’t see the garage.

  She put down the bagged evidence and turned to the controls.

  M stood opposite the federal agent as the elevator chugged its way to the fourth floor.

  The man was a neurotypical, a term her doctors used to describe what was more commonly known as a ‘normal’ person. Studying his facial expression, she sorted through the mental list of flashcards, drilled into her head by her teachers, that allowed autistics to understand the emotional dynamics and ranges of neurotypicals.

  This man was … smug. Like he belonged here inside Karim’s home. She wanted to grab him by the neck and smash his face against the elevator panel. She could do it too. Easily. As a child and then later, through her teenage and early-adult years, she had got into numerous fights. She knew which blows could break bones.

  The federal agent turned to her and said, ‘I can’t answer any of your questions.’

  M felt the anger building; she diffused it by thinking of Malcolm Fletcher. Like Karim, Fletcher was a neurotypical. Like Karim, Fletcher understood how she was wired and didn’t judge her. Like Karim, she sensed Fletcher wasn’t trying to manipulate her in any way.

  You’re going to see federal agents inside your father’s home, Fletcher had told her. Everything you see will be in a state of disarray. They’ll be sorting through his things – your things. Your first instinct will be anger. I need to know if you can control it.

  She had told Fletcher she could. Through years of teaching – first in London, and then working with Karim – she had learned to bottle her emotions and store them on a shelf to be dealt with at a later time. Or she could leave them there to collect dust.

  Some of these agents may try to touch you, M – not in a sexual way, but they’ll pander to you because they’ll view you as nothing more than a pretty little girl that Karim hired to be his assistant. Let them. Don’t show any anger.

  The elevator stopped.

  When you feel the anger mounting, think of Karim lying in that hospital bed, Fletcher had told her. Karim is depending on you to manage your rage.

  The doors slid open. M had started to walk down the hall when the federal agent escorting her put out a hand.

  ‘Please stay right here.’

  M looked down the hall. The door to Karim’s English library-inspired waiting room was open and blazing with light. She saw people invading the space, their gloved hands taking books off shelves and examining them. Gloved hands rooted through desks and drawers – and her desk. A woman with long brown hair pinned behind her head ran a forensic light over her antique secretarial desk and iMac computer.

  Unable to bear the sight of someone touching her things, M forced her attention on to Karim’s office. A small group of suited men with badges clipped to their belts had gathered behind her father’s desk, their collective gazes fixed on the computer monitors. The man sitting in her father’s chair wasn’t wearing a suit, just a white shirt. This man was pointing to something on the middle screen.

  She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the group of male faces all shared the same expression: frustration. They hadn’t found a way to bypass Karim’s computer security.

  And they won’t, she thought. There was no way the FBI could bypass it. If I could get to his computer I could –

  A short man appeared in the doorway. He had a phone pressed against his ear. He saw her, said something into the phone and hung up.

  The man approached her, smiling. This was the same man she’d seen on the video recorded inside Karim’s New Jersey home.

  He held out a hand. ‘Special Agent Alexander Borgia.’

  M shook his hand. It took every ounce of willpower not to break the man’s arm.

  Over his earpiece, Fletcher heard Borgia introduce himself to Emma White. The hearing aid he’d given M not only allowed him to speak to her privately; it was also equipped with a separate, hidden microphone so he could monitor her conversations. They had purchased the hearing aids earlier in the day, at a store that specialized in surveillance gear.

  Fletcher was on his back underneath the Expedition, staring up at the padded, hidden compartment. The false bottom, located in the rear of the SUV, was accessed by a square-shaped sliding door. He fitted his gloved fingers inside the grooves for the false bottom’s door and slid it up across his chest and face. Now he pushed up and the door for the false bottom locked into place, the sound producing a noticeable echo inside the garage.

  The security cameras could neither see nor hear him. After M had parked, Fletcher had used his smartphone to activate a device he’d installed ins
ide one of the Jaguar’s panels – an EMP unit that, on a low frequency, sent an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to scramble any nearby circuitry. The Jaguar had been properly shielded so it wouldn’t be affected.

  M had parked next to the Jaguar, which made his next task much simpler. All he had to do was move himself eight feet to his right and he’d be underneath the Jaguar.

  The Jaguar’s false bottom wasn’t as generous as the Ford’s, but his car offered one advantage: the rear seat slid forward, allowing him access to the interior. He would hide inside the false bottom, wait for M to leave, and then make his escape. The spare garage remote M had given him was tucked inside his trouser pocket.

  Fletcher pushed the tactical belt and fibre-optic camera across the floor. He kept his phone. He pressed an on-screen button to increase the height of the car’s suspension. Now he would have enough room to slide underneath the Jaguar.

  Fletcher pushed the phone across the concrete floor and then, lying on his back, began to snake his way out from underneath the SUV.

  Special Agent Miranda Wolfe’s acting supervisor was a man named Stephen Ratner. She didn’t know him personally or professionally. Ratner had been flown in from Washington to oversee the technical aspects of the Malcolm Fletcher operation.

  Ratner, his arms crossed over his burly chest, stared at the four monitors showing the garage.

  ‘Could be the cameras,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Some of the older models when exposed to the cold for long periods of time can –’

  ‘No. Those bullet cameras are top of the line – and they’re fairly new. I can see one experiencing a problem, but all four?’

  ‘Then we’re looking at a faulty circuit.’

  ‘I think it’s some sort of electromagnetic interference.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘The Ford SUV that pulled in. I’ve been here for three hours and the garage cameras have been working fine, no problems. Then the Ford pulls in and all four cameras go down.’