Blood of Angels

by Marshall, Michael

  For one bizarre moment Lee even thought about calling his old home, talking to his parents. Saying: I don't understand what's going on. What am I supposed to do?

  But something told him they'd just gently put the phone down. He wasn't their kid any more. He was Paul's. He belonged to this bigger family now and maybe always had. He should really ask: What was the conversation you were having in the photograph I saw this morning? What was going on? What deal was being made? What did you get?

  What was I ever to you?

  It wouldn't be any use. Did anyone ever really get what went on in their parents' HBO lives? Did they understand your MTV main event? Or were you always walking tracks parallel in direction but separated by time, once in a while waving across a distance about the length of a misty football field?

  Whatever, he supposed. In the end, you walk alone.

  He unzipped the bag and got out one of the little jars. Loosened the lid for easy access, and slipped it into his pocket. He walked up to the gate and ran an eye over the few kids he saw dawdling inside. They dressed the same as kids everywhere. He wouldn't stand out, as Paul had evidently known. Worst case and some teacher called him on what he was doing there, he'd be someone's older brother with a message from home. He'd done this before, in the old days, back when he was eighteen and just starting out. Maybe Paul knew that. Maybe Paul knew everything.

  Lee turned at the familiar rocky sound of hard little wheels, and saw a kid clacking down the road towards him on a skateboard. He was about to give the guy a wave and get straight to business with him, when he realized the boarder was a little older than he looked, and his red backpack looked familiar. The guy winked as he passed and went sailing down the hill, just part of the scenery.

  So Lee turned back and walked in through the gates.

  •••

  Paul took her gag off soon afterwards.

  'Going to ask you to do something for me,' he said. 'You're not going to want to, which I can respect, but if you don't do it I will kill you immediately. No second chance.'

  Now Lee was out of the car, Paul's manner had changed abruptly. Nina realized he put on an act for the young man, that he put on a different act for everybody. He was probably doing one for her now, without even realizing. The machine, doing its job, impersonating.

  'What are you doing here?' she asked. 'A town full of innocent people. What's here for you?'

  'Getting it back,' he said. 'Don't you feel it? Can't you tell?'

  'No,' she said. 'Just feels like a regular town to me. Guess you must be imagining it. Probably a side-effect of being insane.'

  He smiled coldly. 'You feel it well enough. There's other places like it. Areas we lived two thousand years ago or more. Then we moved on. We like to roam. Sometimes we come back, but we always move on. There was plenty of room before everyone else arrived. But in they flooded, and they found useful piles of stone, and tracks, and they said how convenient for the Indians to have left these lying around for us to build our little farms out of, our stupid little towns. Not realizing they're picking through things that belong to somebody else. That we put it here for a reason. That it was all ours.'

  'You should really sit and have a proper talk with John Zandt. He has some pretty whacked-out theories about you guys too. Of course, he would probably want to kill you first.'

  'Oh, I'm looking forward to meeting him again. I've gone to some trouble to engineer it. It's going to be a brief conversation, though.'

  His phone beeped and he paused for a second to examine a message on the screen. 'Not long,' he said. He got a gun out of his jacket pocket, efficiently loaded it and flicked the safety off. Kept it in his hand.

  'Whatever it is you have in mind,' Nina said, 'I'm not going to do it.'

  'Yes, you will,' he said, calmly. 'Or I'll find a way of getting your heart to Ward, with a note saying you didn't care enough about him to stay alive. That it meant more to you to play the heroine. That you only ever slept with him to get closer to me. And that you did it on a suggestion from Charles Monroe.'

  Nina looked quickly out of the window, trying to focus on the town as it passed gently by.

  'That's not true.'

  'Maybe. But he'll never know.'

  Chapter 34

  They didn't believe me at first. Unger was a man with thousand-year timelines in his head, and flat-out said he thought I was trying to stall them in town when they had far more important business elsewhere. I had to shout down the phone to get them to stay around long enough to talk to them. They agreed to wait only twenty minutes. I drove to Thornton as fast as I could.

  When I got to the coffee house they were sitting tensely inside, bulky and incongruous on a burgundy sofa by the window, surrounded by normal people. Unger was talking urgently on the phone. He was turned to the window in an attempt to be discreet, but vigorous hand movements were involved and he was red in the face. He looked like a man who was experiencing difficulty in getting people to take him seriously. I wasn't surprised.

  'What?' John said. 'What the hell happened?'

  I sat close and spoke fast. 'We found where Julia Gulicks grew up. And we found the house of a guy I suspect she saw kill his own wife when she was eleven years old. We went in the house and found a basement, and that's where Nina was this morning. She was in a van the rest of the time. The FBI were never going to find her in a house-to-house search: the abductor had her on the move.'

  'Hang on.' John held up a hand, trying to slow me down.

  I took a deep breath, knowing I had to sell him on the idea of staying here. 'I shot the guy who took Nina,' I said. 'And he says Paul is here. Here in Thornton. Right now. He has a kid with him and he also has Nina. And two hours ago she was alive.'

  'Why would you believe this guy?'

  'Because he wanted me to kill him and I said I would if he told me the truth.'

  'Did you?'

  'No. Fuck him.'

  Unger ended his call. 'Ramona didn't show up for work today,' he said. 'The woman I worked on the email stuff with? She's not answering at home either. Everybody I want to talk to at Langley seems to be elsewhere. The line went dead twice.'

  'What about LA?' John asked. 'Are they going to move into position for us there?'

  'We're going to have to go there and work it in place. There's too much obtuseness going on over the phone.'

  'That means "No", I said. 'They don't believe you and they're right. Nothing is going to happen in LA. We've got to…'

  'Forget it, Ward,' Carl said. 'We've been through this. I have orders from elsewhere. I'm going to the restroom and then I'm out of here.'

  He got up and walked quickly out to the back.

  I turned to John. 'For Christ's sake…'

  'I'm sorry, Ward, I just don't buy that Paul is here.'

  'I've just spoken to a man who…'

  '…is a murderous lunatic. Their grip on reality sucks. Also, they lie. Meanwhile I got another call from Oz Turner. He checked his server again and suddenly it's full of hardcore child pornography. He wiped it and pulled the plug and has now got the hell out of the state. These guys are on the move, Ward. They're locking down for something big. I just do not see why Paul would be in this town today.'

  'Because we are,' I said, angrily. 'He wasn't getting us out of the way: he was gathering us in one place. You know what the last thing Monroe said was?'

  'Whoa,' John said. 'Last thing?'

  'Yes—the killer killed him,' I said, light-headed. 'He took most of his face off with a great big fucking knife. I thought that would be obvious from the fact Monroe isn't here with me right now. Do try to keep up, John. Charles Monroe is dead.'

  'Christ. Look, slow down, Ward. You've got to…'

  'We don't have time.' Around us I was aware of people going up for refills, switching to the sports section, living explicable lives. 'The last thing Monroe said was "Sorry". Got any idea why that is?'

  'Because…'

  I threw up my hands. 'You know. Of co
urse you do, but you didn't think to tell me. When you wanted to talk to Gulicks that night and I got the call from Carl, you got me to take it outside. Because you suspected Monroe had gotten a push from somewhere, that he was told to get Nina to come with him out here.'

  'Yes.'

  'And you confronted him and he didn't actually admit it, but it suddenly became okay for you to talk to a murder suspect.'

  'I just suggested to Monroe that if you got to thinking he'd brought Nina there under anything like an order or suggestion then you would probably kill him right there and then. But I didn't know for sure. It was just a guess. I didn't tell you because…'

  '…you don't trust anyone and think I'm kind of slow and maybe you're right. But I'm right about this. And what the hell is taking Carl so long? We need to get out and start looking.'

  'For what? Even if this is all true, how are we suddenly going to find them?'

  'A big, black car. In a town full of pickups and compacts, it can't be impossible to find. It's worth a try. We've got to do something.'

  Zandt frowned. 'Carl's been a while, you're right.'

  We waited another thirty seconds then got up and walked through to the back, where a twenty-foot corridor led down to the restrooms. We went through into the gents. Three sinks, three urinals, three stalls. No sign of Carl.

  'Strange,' John said.

  'He split on us,' I said. 'He knew you'd waver if I told you Paul might be in town, and so he's taken off for LA without us.'

  'No. That guy needs us. We believe him.'

  'No, you do. And anyway—isn't every hidden elite in the world backing Carl? From the Masons to the charter members of the G8 summit? Can't he just call 1-800-GOOD-GUYS?'

  'No, Ward. They have no idea what's going…Weren't you listening to a single word he said?'

  He pushed the door of the first stall. It was unlocked and empty. 'He needs us,' he said. The second stall was empty too. 'We've dealt with these people face to face. For everyone else they're a myth. Plus, there's no way out of here. Carl would have had to come back out past where we were sitting.'

  He pushed open the door to the third stall. Carl Unger was sitting inside.

  His legs were outstretched, arms hanging straight down. He was leaning back against the cistern, head thrown back. There was a neat hole in the middle of his forehead. It had been made by a bullet from a small-calibre weapon, enough to ruin the contents of a skull without blowing a messy hole out the back.

  We both stepped unconsciously back, stopped, went forward again. The guy was dead without a doubt.

  'How?' I said, feeling very scared. Death knew exactly where I was today. 'How…how did this happen?'

  We hurriedly pulled the stall door shut and stepped warily back out into the hall. John pushed open the door to the female restrooms, went inside. I held the corridor while he checked. There was nobody in there.

  We confirmed there was no exit out back. The corridor dead-ended in a solid wall. The only other access was through the front door.

  We turned and looked over the seating area.

  A couple of grey-haired guys were jawing at each other. Young mothers sat chatting in threes and twos, admiring each other's Baby Gap spending sprees; a sprinkling of homemakers were out by themselves, reading magazines and nibbling at cranberry scones as they watched this hour of the day drift by in cocooned ease. There was a middle-aged guy with a notepad. Two tourists peering at a big map and worrying about making time. An old woman serenely reading the local paper. Nobody looking at us. Like they were all happily in someone else's dream.

  'We're getting out of here,' I said, quietly.

  'Yes we are.'

  We walked out the middle of the coffee shop, straight through the warm, cosy centre. We stayed close together, fast, stiff-legged. A young woman in a fluffy sweater laughed suddenly, and I twitched in her direction and came this close to yanking my gun out, but she was just charming some other woman's kid. In the background the coffee machine hissed and spluttered and baristas shouted about extra shots and soya milk, and ethically sourced coffee remained available.

  We got out onto the sidewalk and turned to look for any sign of someone looking out at us, watching, following.

  There was no one even glancing our way. It was as if we hadn't left, or hadn't been there in the first place. We walked up the hill, fast. Both of us had our hands inside our jackets, guns in our hands.

  John couldn't restrain himself from glancing back. 'What happened in there?'

  'Did you see anyone acting weird?'

  'No—but I wasn't looking for weird. It's a fucking Starbucks.'

  'It has to be Paul.'

  'What—did he come right by us, dragging Nina by the hair? No. That I'm pretty sure I would have noticed.'

  'There's a younger guy here with him too.'

  'That must be Hudek. I guess it…'

  'But no one came in or out, John. I was facing the door. I would have seen.'

  We got to the car and I unlocked John's door and ran around to jump in the other side. We sat stunned for a moment.

  'Unger's dead.'

  'So much for the fucking cavalry.'

  'We're going to want to put some serious distance between us and here,' I said, turning the ignition. 'Before long someone's going to go in the restroom and find a dead man that you've been sitting next to for the last half-hour. We should tell the Feds.'

  'Forget it. Monroe's dead, and he's the only reason we ever got through the door.'

  'True. And I don't see the cops being much help, either. When I was there to pick him up this morning, there was a new guy in there, some cop from out of town. He didn't seem to like the look of me.'

  'Right, but you're certifiably paranoid.'

  I turned to stare at him.

  •••

  We did a rapid U-turn and drove back past the Starbucks, slowing a little while we were level. It looked like a happy fishbowl. Nothing had happened for the people in there. They were inside the postcard, looking out.

  Zandt had recovered fast and had his gun out in his lap. He looked like he wanted to use it.

  'We should go back.'

  'And do what? I said. 'Whoever killed Carl will cut us down before we have any clue who they are. Half the other people in there will get taken down in crossfire, and it won't get us any closer to Nina.'

  'So what, then?'

  'We keep moving.' I picked up speed and followed the road down the hill. People walked up and down on either side. Trees shook autumnal leaves in a light breeze. A UPS van made a delivery, a guy in brown carrying a long flat box into the Christmas store. The whole town was like a moving billboard, an image you couldn't get past, somewhere we didn't belong.

  'Ward, where are you going?'

  'I don't know. We have to find where Paul's taken her. In the meantime we need somewhere where we won't get shot. We're running out of good guys fast.'

  'Is that what we are now? The good guys?'

  'Close as we're going to find.'

  Ten minutes took us to the edge of town and I drove up a hill to a turning that led down a single-track road. At the end was the vague parking lot that looked down over Raynor's Wood. It was empty, which I liked.

  I parked at the far end. Got out of the car and walked in tight circles for a while. I saw I still had some of Monroe's blood on my fingers. Tried to rub it off.

  John got out after a couple of minutes.

  'We should really call the cops anyway,' I said. 'Tell them there's a body. And also about Monroe. Alert them to what's happening here.'

  'In the last week this town has had a cop killed and an FBI agent abducted, plus two dead guys found in various woods. If they're not alert already it's just not going to fucking happen.' John looked down over the forest, shook his head. 'There's something wrong with this place. It's…'

  He walked a few yards down the slope, peering down into the forest below.

  'What are you looking at?'

  'There's a
little hillock down there,' he said. 'Just in the trees.'

  'It's where Lawrence Widmar's body was found. Somewhere down there, anyway. What about it?'

  'It looks like the things I've been all over New England searching for.'

  'John, this is not the time for…'

  He put his hand up, listened. 'What's that sound?'

  I put my hand in my pocket. Pulled out my phone.

  The screen said NINA.

  My fingers had turned to rubber and it took three tries to press the right button. I put the phone to my ear slowly. My head was ringing as blood rushed around it, not yet knowing where to go.

  'Nina?' I said quietly. 'Is that you?'

  'Hello, Ward.' It was a man's voice.

  'Who is this?'

  'Who do you think?'

  It could only be him. 'Paul.'

  John looked up quickly. I held up a hand to keep him quiet.

  'You got it,' the voice said. 'Thought I'd see how you are. You never write, you never call…'

  'Where's Nina? Where are you?'

  'Where do you think I am?'

  'There's a theory something major is about to go down in LA.'

  'Wow—you guys are good.'

  'It's not my theory. I think you're a lot closer than that.'

  'Then you're even better than I thought. Got someone who wants to say hi.'

  I gripped the phone tightly.

  'Hey honey,' she said.

  'Hey,' I said. My throat felt like it was clutched in someone's fist. 'Are you okay?'

  'I'm fine.' Her voice sounded weak.

  'Where are you?'

  'He's holding a gun at my head, Ward.'

  'Don't tell me then. What does he want? What do I have to do?'

  'He wants John.'

  'Stay alive,' I said. 'Stay alive for me.'

  'I'll do my best. I really will. You live and learn,' she said. 'You live and learn. I love…'

  Then she was gone.

  'So there's your motivation,' Paul said, back on the line. 'Is former-detective Zandt with you right now?'

  'No,' I said. 'He went to LA.'