by Tom Clancy
“Okay, Sandy . . . Sandy?”
“What, John?”
“Thanks.” The line clicked off.
You’re welcome, she thought, hanging up. What a strange man. He was killing people, ending the lives of fellow human beings, doing it with an utter ruthlessness that she hadn’t seen—had no desire to see—but which his voice proclaimed in its emotionless speech. But he’d taken the time and endangered himself to rescue Doris. She still didn’t understand, Sandy told herself, dialing the phone again.
Dr. Sidney Farber looked exactly as Emmet Ryan expected: forty or so, small, bearded, Jewish, pipe-smoker. He didn’t rise as the detective came in, but merely motioned his guest to a chair with a wave of the hand. Ryan had messengered extracts from the case files to the psychiatrist before lunch, and clearly the doctor had them. All of them were laid open on the desk, arrayed in two rows.
“I know your partner, Tom Douglas,” Farber said, puffing on his pipe.
“Yes, sir. He said your work on the Gooding case was very helpful.”
“A very sick man, Mr. Gooding. I hope he’ll get the treatment he needs.”
“How sick is this one?” Lieutenant Ryan asked.
Farber looked up. “He’s as healthy as we are—rather healthier, physically speaking. But that’s not the important part. What you just said. ‘This one.’ You’re assuming one murderer for all these incidents. Tell me why.” The psychiatrist leaned back in his chair.
“I didn’t think so at first. Tom saw it before I did. It’s the craftsmanship.”
“Correct.”
“Are we dealing with a psychopath?”
Farber shook his head. “No. The true psychopath is a person unable to deal with life. He sees reality in a very individual and eccentric way, generally a way that is very different from the rest of us. In nearly all cases the disorder is manifested in very open and easily recognized ways.”
“But Gooding—”
“Mr. Gooding is what we—there’s a new term, ‘organized psychopath.’”
“Okay, fine, but he wasn’t obvious to his neighbors.”
“That’s true, but Mr. Gooding’s disorder manifested itself in the gruesome way he killed his victims. But with these killings, there’s no ritual aspect to them. No mutilation. No sexual drive to them—that’s usually indicated by cuts on the neck, as you know. No.” Farber shook his head again. “This fellow is all business. He’s not getting any emotional release at all. He’s just killing people and he’s doing it for a reason that is probably rational, at least to him.”
“Why, then?”
“Obviously it’s not robbery. It’s something else. He’s a very angry man, but I’ve met people like this before.”
“Where?” Ryan asked. Farber pointed to the opposite wall. In an oaken frame was a piece of red velvet on which were pinned a combat infantryman’s badge, jump wings, and a RANGER flash. The detective was surprised enough to let it show.
“Pretty stupid, really,” Farber explained with a deprecating gesture. “Little Jewish boy wants to show how tough he is. Well”—Farber smiled—“I guess I did.”
“I didn’t like Europe all that much myself, but I didn’t see the nice parts.”
“What outfit?”
“Easy Company, Second of the Five-Oh-Sixth.”
“Airborne. One-Oh-One, right?”
“All the way, doc,” the detective said. confirming that he too had once been young and foolish, and remembering how skinny he’d been, leaping out the cargo doors of C- 47s. “I jumped into Normandy and Eindhoven.”
“And Bastogne?”
Ryan nodded. “That really wasn’t fun, but at least we went in by truck.”
“Well, that’s what you’re up against, Lieutenant Ryan.”
“Explain?”
“Here’s the key to it.” Farber held up the transcribed interview with Mrs. Charles. “The disguise. Has to be a disguise. It takes a strong arm to slam a knife into the back of the skull. That wasn’t any alcoholic. They have all sorts of physical problems.”
“But that one doesn’t fit the pattern at all.” Ryan objected.
“I think it does, but it’s not obvious. Turn the clock back. You’re in the Army, you’re an elite member of an elite unit. You take the time to recon your objective, right?”
“Always,” the detective confirmed.
“Apply that to a city. How do you do that? You camouflage yourself. So our friend decides to disguise himself as a wino. How many of those people on the street? Dirty, smelly, but pretty harmless except to one another. They’re invisible and you just filter them out. Everyone does.”
“You still didn’t—”
“But how does he get in and out? You think he takes a bus—a taxi?”
“Car.”
“A disguise is something you put on and take off.” Farber held up the photo of the Charles murder scene. “He makes his double-kill two blocks away, he clears the area, and comes here—why do you suppose?” And there it was, right on the photo, a gap between two parked cars.
“Holy shit!” The humiliation Ryan felt was noteworthy. “What else did I miss, Doctor Farber?”
“Call me Sid. Not much else. This individual is very clever, changing his methods, and this is the only case where he displayed his anger. That’s it, do you see? This is the only crime with rage in it—except maybe for the one this morning, but we’ll set that aside for the moment. Here we see rage. First he cripples the victim, then he kills him in a particularly difficult way. Why?” Farber paused for a few contemplative puffs. “He was angry, but why was he angry? It had to have been an unplanned act. He wouldn’t have planned something with Mrs. Charles there. For some reason he had to do something that he hadn’t expected to do, and that made him angry. Also, he let her go—knowing that she saw him.”
“You still haven’t told me—”
“He’s a combat veteran. He’s very, very fit. That means he’s younger than we are, and highly trained. Ranger, Green Beret, somebody like that.”
“Why is he out there?”
“I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask him. But what you have is somebody who takes his time. He’s watching his victims. He’s picking the same time of day—when they’re tired, when street traffic is low, to reduce the chance of being spotted. He’s not robbing them. He may take the money, but that’s not the same thing. Now tell me about this morning’s kill,” Farber commanded in a gentle but explicit way.
“You have the photo. There was a whole lot of cash in a bag upstairs. We haven’t counted it yet, but at least fifty thousand dollars.”
“Drug money?”
“We think so.”
“There were other people there? He kidnapped them?”
“Two, we think. A man definitely, and probably a woman, too.”
Farber nodded and puffed away for a few seconds. “One of two things. Either that’s the person he was after all along, or he’s just one more step towards something else.”
“So all the pushers he killed were just camouflage.”
“The first two, the ones he wired up—”
“Interrogated them.” Ryan grimaced. “We should have figured this out. They were the only ones who weren’t killed in the open. He did it that way to have more time.”
“Hindsight is always easy,” Farber pointed out. “Don’t feel too bad. That one really did look like a robbery, and you had nothing else to go on. By the time you came here, there was a lot more information to look at.” The psychiatrist leaned back and smiled at the ceiling. He loved playing detective. “Until this one”—he tapped the photos from the newest scene with his pipe—“you didn’t really have much. This is the one that makes everything else clear. Your suspect knows weapons. He knows tactics. He’s very patient. He stalks his victims like a hunter after a deer. He’s changing his methodology to throw you off, but today he made a mistake. He showed a little rage this time, too, because he used a knife deliberately, and he showed the kin
d of training he had by cleaning the weapon right away.”
“But he’s not crazy, you say.”
“No, I doubt he’s disturbed in a clinical sense at all, but sure as hell he’s motivated by something. People like this are highly disciplined, just like you and I were. Discipline shows in how he operates—but his anger also shows in why he operates. Something made this man start to do this.”
“ ‘Ma’am.’ ”
That one caught Farber short. “Exactly! Very good. Why didn’t he eliminate her? That’s the only witness we know about. He was polite to her. He let her go . . . interesting . . . but not enough to go on, really.”
“Except to say that he’s not killing for fun.”
“Correct.” Farber nodded. “Everything he does will have a purpose, and he has a lot of specialized training that he can apply to this mission. It is a mission. You have one really dangerous cat prowling the street.”
“He’s after drug people. That’s pretty clear.” Ryan said. “The one—maybe two—he kidnapped . . .”
“If one is a woman, she’ll survive. The man will not. From the condition of his body we’ll be able to tell if he was the target.”
“Rage?”
“That will be obvious. One other thing—if you have police looking for this guy, remember that he’s better with weapons than almost anybody. He’ll look harmless. He’ll avoid a confrontation. He doesn’t want to kill the wrong people, or he would have killed this Mrs. Charles.”
“But if we corner him—”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“All comfy?” Kelly asked.
The recompression chamber was one of several hundred produced for a Navy contract requirement by the Dykstra Foundry and Tool Company. Inc.. of Houston. Texas. or so the name plate said. Made of high-quality steel, it was designed to reproduce the pressure that came along with scuba diving. At one end was a triple-paned four-inch-square Plexiglas window. There was even a small air lock so that items could be passed in. like food or drink, and inside the chamber was a twenty-watt reading light in a protected fixture. Under the chamber itself was a powerful. gasoline-powered air compressor, which could be controlled from a fold-down seat, adjacent to which were two pressure gauges. One was labeled in concentric circles of millimeters and inches of mercury, pounds-per-square-inch, kilograms-per-square-centimeter, and “bar” or multiples of normal atmospheric pressure, which was 14.7 PSI. The other gauge showed equivalent water depth both in feet and meters. Each thirty-three feet of simulated depth raised the atmospheric pressure by 14.7 PSI, or one bar.
“Look. whatever you want to know, okay . . .” Kelly heard over the intercom.
“I thought you’d see things my way.” He yanked the rope on the motor, starting the compressor. Kelly made sure that the simple spigot valve next to the pressure gauges was tightly shut. Then he opened the pressurization valve, venting air from the compressor to the chamber, and watched the needles rotate slowly clockwise.
“You know how to swim?” Kelly asked, watching his face.
Billy’s head jerked with alarm. “What—look, please, don’t drown me, okay?”
“That’s not going to happen. So, can you swim?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Ever do any skin diving?” Kelly asked next.
“No, no, I haven’t,” replied a very confused drug distributor.
“Okay, well, you’re going to learn what it’s like. You should yawn and work your ears, like, to get used to the pressure,” Kelly told him, watching the “depth” gauge pass thirty feet.
“Look, why don’t you just ask your fucking questions, okay?”
Kelly switched the intercom off. There was just too much fear in the voice. Kelly didn’t really like hurting people all that much, and he was worried about developing sympathy for Billy. He steadied the gauge at one hundred feet, closing off the pressurization valve but leaving the motor running. While Billy adjusted to the pressure, Kelly found a hose which he attached to the motor’s exhaust pipe. This he extended outside to dump the carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. It would be a time-consuming process, just waiting for things to happen. Kelly was going on memory, and that was worrisome. There was a useful but rather rough instruction table on the side of the chamber, the bottom line of which commanded reference to a certain diving manual which Kelly did not have. He’d done very little deep diving of late, and the only one that had really concerned him had been a team effort, the oil rig down in the Gulf. Kelly spent an hour tidying things up around the machine shop, cultivating his memories and his rage before coming back to his fold-down seat.
“How are you feeling?”
“Look, okay, all right?” Rather a nervous voice, actually.
“Ready to answer some questions?”
“Anything, okay? Just let me outa here!”
“Okay, good.” Kelly lifted a clipboard. “Have you ever been arrested, Billy?”
“No.” A little pride in that one, Kelly noted. Good.
“Been in the service?”
“No.” Such a stupid question.
“So you’ve never been in jail, never been fingerprinted, nothing like that?”
“Never.” The head shook inside the window.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“I am, man! I am!”
“Yeah, you probably are, but I have to make sure, okay?” Kelly reached with his left hand and twisted the spigot valve. Air hissed loudly out of the chamber while he watched the pressure gauges.
Billy didn’t know what to expect, and it all came as a disagreeable surprise. In the preceding hour, he had been surrounded by four times the normal amount of air for the space he was in. His body had adapted to that. The air taken in through his lungs, also pressurized, had found its way into his bloodstream, and now his entire body was at 58.8 pounds per square inch of ambient pressure. Various gas bubbles, mainly nitrogen, were dissolved into his bloodstream, and when Kelly bled the air out of the chamber, those bubbles started to expand. Tissues around the bubbles resisted the force, but not well, and almost at once cell walls started first to stretch, and then, in some cases, to rupture. The pain started in his extremities, first as a dull but widespread ache and rapidly evolving into the most intense and unpleasant sensation Billy had ever experienced. It came in waves, timed exactly with the now-rapid beating of his heart. Kelly listened to the moan that turned into a scream, and the air pressure was only that of sixty feet. He twisted the release valve shut and re-engaged the pressurization one. In another two minutes the pressure was back to that of four bar. The restored pressure eased the pain almost completely, leaving behind the sort of ache associated with strenuous exercise. That was not something to which Billy was accustomed, and for him the pain was not the welcome sort that athletes know. More to the point, the wide and terrified eyes told Kelly that his guest was thoroughly cowed. They didn’t look like human eyes now, and that was good.
Kelly switched on the intercom. “That’s the penalty for a lie. I thought you should know. Now. Ever been arrested, Billy?”
“Jesus, man, no!”
“Never been in jail, fingerprinted—”
“No, man, like speeding tickets, I ain’t never been busted.”
“In the service?”
“No, I told you that!”
“Good, thank you.” Kelly checked off the first group of questions. “Now let’s talk about Henry and his organization.” There was one other thing happening that Billy did not expect. Beginning at about three bar, the nitrogen gas that constitutes the majority of what humans call air has a narcotic effect not unlike that of alcohol or barbiturates. As afraid as Billy was, there was also a whiplash feeling of euphoria, along with which came impaired judgment. It was just one more bonus effect from the interrogation technique that Kelly had selected mainly for the magnitude of the injury it could inflict.
“Left the money?” Tucker asked.
“More than fifty thousand. They were
still counting when I left,” Mark Charon said. They were back in the theater, the only two people in the balcony. But this time Henry wasn’t eating any popcorn, the detective saw. It wasn’t often that he saw Tucker agitated.
“I need to know what’s going on. Tell me what you know.”
“We’ve had a few pushers whacked in the past week or ten days—”
“Ju-Ju, Bandanna, two others I don’t know. Yeah, I know that. You think they’re connected?”
“It’s all we got, Henry. Was it Billy who disappeared?”
“Yeah. Rick’s dead. Knife?”
“Somebody cut his fuckin’ heart out,” Charon exaggerated. “One of your girls there, too?”
“Doris,” Henry confirmed with a nod. “Left the money . . . why?”
“It could have been a robbery that went wrong somehow, but I don’t know what would have screwed that up. Ju-Ju and Bandanna were both robbed—hell, maybe those cases are unrelated. Maybe what happened last night was, well, something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe a direct attack on your organization, Henry,” Charon answered patiently. “Who do you know who would want to do that? You don’t have to be a cop to understand motive, right?” Part of him—a large part, in fact—enjoyed having the upper hand on Tucker, however briefly. “How much does Billy know?”
“A lot—shit, I just started taking him to—” Tucker stopped.
“That’s okay. I don’t need to know and I don’t want to know. But somebody else does, and you’d better think about that.” A little late, Mark Charon was beginning to appreciate how closely his well-being was associated with that of Henry Tucker.
“Why not at least make it look like a robbery?” Tucker demanded, eyes locked unseeingly on the screen.
“Somebody’s sending you a message, Henry. Not taking the money is a sign of contempt. Who do you know who doesn’t need money?”
The screams were getting louder. Billy had just taken another excursion to sixty feet, staying there for a couple of minutes. It was useful to be able to watch his face. Kelly saw him claw at his ears when both tympanic membranes ruptured, not a second apart. Then his eyes and sinuses had been affected. It would be attacking his teeth, too, if he had any cavities—which he probably did, Kelly thought, but he didn’t want to hurt him too much, not yet.
