Pray for the Innocent

by Alan Orloff

  A year after that, her third therapist, a kind woman who always wore yellow dresses, called bullshit on the other therapists—although not so overtly—and implored Amanda to come to terms with her feelings. After a few months, she’d managed to get Amanda to express some of those pent-up emotions.

  And how she expressed them!

  At first, there were angry outbursts. King would ask her to clean up her room, and she’d respond by telling him to go to hell. The first few times, they’d gotten into a shouting match, but then King realized the need for Amanda to vent, so he tried to let the name-calling and disrespect roll off his back. For a while, that solution worked. But her behavior got increasingly disruptive. And violent.

  “Hey, sweetie. I seem to be missing a fifty-dollar bill from my wallet. Would you happen to know anything about that?” As soon as he said it, King wanted to take it back, or at least rephrase the question and eliminate the accusatory tone. It had been a hectic day, and he was exhausted.

  Amanda glared at him for a few long seconds, eyes smoldering, then flipped him the bird—an angry fourteen-year-old.

  King stepped forward and started to raise his hand, but Amanda stepped back quickly and pulled a knife out of her pocket. She waved it in the air for a few seconds, then aimed the sharp point with her trembling hand.

  But not at King.

  At herself.

  His heart jumped into his throat. “Put that down, sweetie, and we can talk. Okay?”

  “Talking is bullshit.” The knife danced in the air above her wrist. “I’ll do it, too. I will.”

  “Easy, now.” King inched forward, still too far away to lunge at her.

  Amanda took another step backward and moved the knife from her wrist to her neck. “Stop right there. I mean it.” Tears dripped down her chipmunk cheeks.

  “Your mother’s death wasn’t your fault. Not at all. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  Amanda laughed, a sound so out of place, King actually smiled. Maybe he’d gotten through to her. Then a storm cloud enveloped her face, and King knew his logical arguments hadn’t made a dent. “You’re an idiot, Dad. I know I had nothing to do with Mom’s death. You did. This is all your fault. You. You and your stupid, stupid books. It’s your fault Mom is dead and that I have to live alone with you.” She moved the knife until the tip of the blade was an inch from her left eye. “And I’m not doing this to hurt her. I’m doing this to hurt you.”

  Her hand twitched, and the knife moved, and King leaped forward grabbing for Amanda and the knife, and then there was blood, lots of blood. Hers. And shrieking and crying and that god-awful keening. Amanda’s body went limp, and King removed the knife from her hand, called 911, and cradled her until the EMTs arrived.

  Luckily, the knife had missed her eye, instead opening a gash from her cheekbone to her temple. A few millimeters had been the difference between life and death. If he’d had time to think about and analyze that incident, he might have realized it for what it was: a call for attention. Whenever King saw her, and the scar, it reminded him of that terrible event.

  And of Rina’s murder, too.

  Every time he was with his daughter, he was doomed to remember the tragedy. Of course, Amanda had been right, 100 percent.

  Rina’s death had been his fault. Because of his stupid, stupid books.

  Now those books were causing more deaths.

  King rolled over and put his pillow over his head, trying to conjure some happy thoughts. But sleep, and temporary salvation, never came.

  #

  Emily strolled down the street, wearing a big floppy yellow sun hat and carrying a brown paper bag as if she were coming back from an excursion to the grocery store.

  Never mind that there wasn’t a house or apartment building anywhere at all on that block in Fairfax, only down-in-the dumps auto body shops, with debris in the gutters and the pall of broken American dreams hanging in the air.

  Emily had parked her car a few streets away, and just walking that short distance on the warm and sticky morning, she’d worked up a sweat. Not that she minded; the darkened armpits of her T-shirt added to her disguise as an ordinary citizen. More realistic.

  She paused a block away from Gosberg’s warehouse, and she mentally gave him props for situating his secret lab in such a mundane location—it truly was the perfect hiding place for something Gosberg didn’t want the world to know about.

  Balancing the bag in one hand, Emily removed her hat and wiped the perspiration from her forehead. As before, the air was redolent with the smell of goodies from the bakery, and if there had been a storefront attached, she would be making a stop after she’d achieved her goal. But for now, the doughnuts would have to wait. She put her hat back on and tucked some stray hair underneath the brim.

  As she switched the bag from one arm to the other, she couldn’t help but smile. A loaf of white bread poked out from the top, but beneath it were some things that might come in handy: a handheld compressed air horn and a pair of handcuffs her roommate Jeri had left lying around after one of her sexcapades. If Gosberg et al. refused to talk to her, she was prepared to sound the horn until they did.

  And if that didn’t work, she was willing to handcuff herself to the front door until she got some answers.

  Whatever it took.

  Emily resumed her approach, passing the building next to Gosberg’s, a shuttered printing business with the glass in a few front windows missing. As she cleared its front corner, the warehouse’s parking lot came into view.

  It was completely empty, and the security gate was wide open.

  Emily left the sidewalk and ran ten yards into the lot so she could see it in its entirety. No cars anywhere. She mentally checked her calendar. Not a weekend. Not a holiday. When she was there two days ago, the lot hadn’t been full, but there had been cars there, more than a dozen.

  She checked the time on her phone. Not quite ten. Did secret government lab employees work bankers’ hours?

  Doubtful.

  She forgot all about her grocery-shopper ruse and made a beeline toward the warehouse’s front door. A “For Lease” sign hung there, along with a phone number. She tried the door, and it was locked, so she banged on it a few times. The knocks echoed off the buildings across the street.

  For a second, she thought maybe she was going crazy and had come to the wrong place. Then she caught a whiff of baking bread in the breeze. No, this was the right place, all right.

  Something shifty was going on.

  Emily circled the front of the warehouse and veered down an alley cutting between Gosberg’s warehouse and a neighboring building. There wasn’t another entrance, only sheer corrugated metal walls that ran the length of the building, broken up by three sets of windows, ten feet off the ground. She traveled down the alley, skirting a concrete bollard designed to keep cars out, until she’d gone about forty yards and was standing next to the middle bank of windows.

  Emily set her bag down and examined her surroundings. Farther down the alley, a stack of broken pallets leaned against the other building. What would Nick Nolan do?

  After a few trips, she’d managed to drag enough pallets over to the bank of windows for her construction project. She chose the sturdiest pallets for the foundation, then stacked the rest up until she’d formed a six-foot-tall platform.

  Stepping back, she admired her effort. Not the prettiest structure, but it looked stable. Sort of.

  If Professor King knew what she was doing, he’d go apeshit.

  There was only one way to find out if it would hold her. She sucked in a quick breath, then found a toehold. Then another and another, each higher than the last. In no time, she was standing on top of the teetering pile of wood, feeling a bit like a surfer during rough seas.

  Luckily, she hadn’t decided to become an architect or contractor.

  She shifted her weight carefully, twisting her body so she could see through the windows.

  The warehouse was completely empty. N
o desks. No equipment. No packing boxes or filing cabinets or nuclear missiles. No nothing. Just a big cavernous space with a few bare walls. She couldn’t see the entire inside area, but she had the distinct feeling the place had been gutted, reduced to a gray corrugated metal shell.

  After another minute of staring through the windows at the empty warehouse, Emily clattered down from her makeshift wooden tower.

  What the heck?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dragunov watched the spectacle in front of the White House for a while, but now he was getting itchy. He sidled up to a guy with dreadlocks, in a crowd of guys with dreadlocks, and pretended to pay attention to an older guy in dreadlocks standing on a chair, hollering something into a megaphone. Dragunov didn’t understand most of what the leader was shouting—he wasn’t even sure what language it was in—but from the shouting and fist pumping of his followers, it appeared to be mighty potent propaganda.

  He hung around for a few minutes, eyeing various members of the crowd, searching for someone who fit the bill, then he drifted off to a dueling protest thirty yards away. There, the crowd was slightly more sedate: two leaders, a man and a woman, were performing some kind of responsive reading. The man would recite something from a book, then the crowd would respond, seemingly from memory. Then it would be the woman’s turn, and after she spoke, the crowd again would respond. Their protest had to do with sending foreign aid to some poor, oppressed Southeast Asian country. Laos, perhaps.

  Laos is landlocked, bordered on the west by Thailand, on the east by Vietnam, on the south by Cambodia, and by Myanmar and China on the north. Population: approx. 6.50 million. Official language: Lao, with English, French, and ethnic languages also spoken. Capital city: Vientiane. Terrain: mountainous.

  The chanting continued. Dragunov wasn’t sure if the crowd was in support of providing aid or against. Didn’t matter, not really. He felt a certain kinship with people angry about something, whatever it was.

  For a moment, the dark cloud of confusion descended upon him, and he had difficulty trying to remember what he was angry about. Why he was spending every single waking moment plotting the downfall of the United States. The imperialistic attitude of America had something to do with it, sure, but he couldn’t articulate, even in his own thinking, why—exactly—that bothered him so much.

  So much that he’d kill innocent people who had never done anything to him whatsoever.

  He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing. In, out. In, out. After a few moments, the veil lifted, and he could see clearly again. He stood in front of the White House, mingling with those speaking out against their own government.

  Talk was cheap.

  Dragunov was about to drift over to check out the third group of demonstrators, when they started to disband. The demographic there was different—more Caucasians. More people dressed like typical Americans. More implied wealth, power, and influence. His prime targets.

  He fixed on a lady walking alone, directly away from the White House. About sixty, she was overweight—hard to find an American who wasn’t—and she walked with a slight limp. More importantly, she wore nice clothes and shoes, sported an expensive haircut, and carried a designer purse.

  Exactly the kind of person whose death would be noticed, possibly by someone with status.

  Dragunov broke away from his group and fell in step behind her. He dipped his hand into his pocket and carefully removed a mini-syringe from its case—a custom-built sleeve he’d cobbled together from two plastic pencil cases and a length of duct tape.

  He’d filled the syringes with a blend of nasty goodies designed to guarantee a quick—and permanent—death. Dragunov wasn’t sure how he knew his way around a chemistry lab, but he’d had no trouble breaking into one at George Mason University and concocting a batch of the lethal solution.

  Glancing around, he made certain no one happened to be staring at him, but on this gorgeous summer day, he was just one of a thousand anonymous people enjoying the sights and sounds of the nation’s capital. He walked a little faster—three steps of his for every two of hers. He scanned the area ahead of her, in the distance, in case she was meeting someone—husband, child, friend—who might interfere. When Dragunov planned an assassination of a high-profile target, he didn’t like any surprises. He calculated everything down to the last detail, and he executed flawlessly.

  But when he was working off the cuff, improvising, like he was today, he embraced the feeling of uncertainty. The knowledge that at any moment, some fly might decide to alight in the ointment, and it would be on him to react quickly and efficiently to the changing situation.

  Bottom line, there was something exhilarating and life-affirming about killing someone at random, in uncontrolled circumstances.

  And everyone needed a little exhilaration once in a while.

  As the woman with the nice clothes approached a cross street, she hung a left, and Dragunov took this opportunity to cut diagonally across the grass to close the gap between them. His fingers gripped the mini-syringe, and in his mind’s eye, he visualized how he would make the kill. When he’d mentally rehearsed it a few times, he gave himself a figurative thumbs-up. Go time.

  He got within five long strides of her and slowed, matching her pace, step for step. Ahead, two men approached on the sidewalk, and Dragunov shifted slightly to his right and averted his gaze as the men passed.

  The men’s footsteps receded behind them, leaving Dragunov and his target relatively alone. He reviewed his mental movie one more time, then hit the play button.

  Quickening his pace, he removed the hand holding the syringe from his pocket, keeping it low and at his side. Noiselessly, he came up behind her and grabbed the lady’s left shoulder with his left hand, while he drove the syringe into the lady’s buttocks with his right.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said into her ear, while he grasped her shoulder. Most people would be too startled by a strange man grabbing them to notice a pinch in the butt. Not that it mattered much. A few seconds later and the woman wouldn’t care who had touched her.

  Dragunov didn’t loiter. He withdrew the syringe and pocketed it, then veered off and stepped up his pace, while the lady took a few steps and stumbled to the ground.

  Not looking back, he kept on walking, taking his first opportunity to go left. From there, he’d walk a block, then make a right, then another block and another right. Another block and another right turn, and he’d be heading back toward the fallen woman. So he could admire the result of his handiwork and gaze upon the confused, possibly panicked, onlookers. Not knowing what happened to the lady, in the backs of their minds wondering if it could happen to them.

  Exactly what Dragunov was trying to achieve. The first step toward mass hysteria.

  Five minutes later, after he’d circled the block, he was happy to note the clump of men and women hovering over the nicely dressed woman’s body. Even from where he stood—a block away—he could deduce from their body language and somberly shaking heads what they’d seen. He suppressed his smile.

  Mission accomplished.

  But one woman’s mysterious collapse and death wouldn’t be enough to alarm the populace. There had to be more, a slew of attacks perpetrated by a crazed lunatic walking around the streets of DC killing random pedestrians.

  That would foment panic.

  There were four more mini-syringes in his pocket, loaded and ready for use. He crossed the street to avoid the crowd and resumed whistling as he prowled the streets for his next victims.

  It really was a glorious summer day in America.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At two thirty in the afternoon, King, still in bed, got tired of festering in his own stink, so he dragged himself into the shower. After toweling off, he changed into some of the clothes he’d gotten that morning at Target. The shirt was fine—a generic blue polo shirt—but the chinos were a bit on the stiff side. No matter; it beat wearing the pair of pants he’d worn yesterday as he traipsed th
rough Connelly’s bloody kitchen.

  His stomach rumbled, and he figured it was time for a late lunch—or early, early dinner. Maybe a pecan waffle? He was about to put on his shoes when there was a knock at the door. He froze. Housekeeping? He’d put out a “Do Not Disturb” sign.

  He padded to the door, glad he’d never opened the curtains, preferring to wallow in pity in the dark. He peeked through the peephole, and despite the fish-eye distortion, he recognized the face. Peter Gosberg.

  Gosberg raised his hand to knock again, and from King’s vantage, it looked like he was about to get rapped in the face. He recoiled instinctively just as knuckles hit door. “Dr. King. It’s Peter Gosberg.”

  King considered staying quiet, hoping Gosberg would go away and leave him alone. But someone who’d gone to the trouble of tracking him down probably wouldn’t give up so easily, and the reality was he’d have to talk to Gosberg eventually. Might as well be now.

  “Just a second,” King called out. He unlatched both locks and swung the door open. “How did you find me?”

  “I’m with the government. Not much gets by us.”

  What government was Gosberg referring to? “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “It’s not up to me, I’m afraid,” Gosberg said. He turned and jutted his chin at a Town Car idling in a nearby parking space. “You’ve been invited to a meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “A very important one. Come on.” Gosberg smiled, but it was the kind of smile you never wanted to see, the kind of smile reserved for convicts on death row as they got served their last meals.

  “What if I don’t want to go?”

  “Dr. King. The sooner we find Dragunov, the sooner you can crawl out from behind your rock. Besides, we need your help.” Gosberg turned and walked to the car, not waiting to see if King would follow. Somehow, King got the sense this wasn’t an invitation. More like an order. He could refuse to go and stay hunkered down there at the Stop Inn, or he could try to find out what was going on. He pulled his shoes on and grabbed his messenger bag, then hustled after Gosberg. A moment later he slid into the back seat of the Town Car and tossed his bag on the floor, slamming the door behind him.