The Inner Circle (Man of Wax Trilogy)

by Robert Swartwood

He shook his head, pulled the spare magazine from his pocket.

  “We’re going to have to take out that windshield! Give it everything we have!”

  The pickup suddenly increased even more in speed. The entire bed vibrated. Ronny, who had been keeping low behind the wheel, slid open the rear window.

  “Here comes another one!”

  I closed my eyes. Not another sedan. We were barely keeping this one away, and we were almost out of bullets.

  Ronny shouted, “Make it count!”

  I looked at Drew. Drew looked at me. Ronny swerved the pickup again, creating another lull in the sedan’s gunfire. It gave me enough time to sneak a peek. Nothing was behind the sedan. But ahead of us was another logging truck, coming fast.

  Drew saw it too. He was already getting into position.

  “I’ll cover you and then go for the rear chain!”

  He nodded.

  I aimed again at the sedan’s windshield. My finger tightened on the trigger. I fired twice, then turned to my right, settled my arm on the side of the bed, and took aim.

  It literally happened in a flash of slow motion. The logging truck passed us. The world exploded into a giant cacophony of gunfire. Bits and chips of wood spat up from the logs. Like before, the first chain snapped. Like before, the second chain didn’t.

  At least, it didn’t at first.

  The logging truck roared past just like its predecessor. Unlike its predecessor, it didn’t keep going. The driver slammed on the brakes. The rear began to fishtail. The sudden halting jolt was enough to snap the second chain. The logs started rolling off the flatbed.

  They rolled right into the highway.

  Right into the sedan.

  The sedan was already going at least eighty miles per hour. Maybe that was its undoing. The driver never had a chance to stop. Instead he swerved into the oncoming logs. The momentum and velocity was enough to flip the sedan, sending it reeling off the highway into the trees.

  Drew and I both watched it happen. It took only a second. Then the road curved and the whole thing was gone from view.

  We went to the front of the truck. The rear window was still open. Miraculously it hadn’t been hit.

  I leaned my head in. “You okay?”

  Ronny nodded. “What about you guys?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “That was intense.”

  “Tell me about it.” I looked up through the windshield. “Pull off at the next road. We’re going to need to ditch this thing.”

  “And then what, walk ten miles through the woods?”

  “That or call Maya to come pick us up. Either way, those guys no doubt called in our location. One of those Black Hawks might be coming along at any moment.”

  Ronny was silent behind the wheel for a second. “I can’t wait to be done with this stuff.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  He looked at me. “Do you?”

  There was more to the simple question than I cared to admit. I decided to ignore it for now and said, “But before we officially disband, I think we all need to take a trip to Washington, D.C.”

  “Why?”

  “I figure before we all part ways, Carver’s memory deserves some payback.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Boojum,” I said. “The son of a bitch that sold Carver out. I think it’s time we finally meet him face to face.”

  51

  “This is Stark.”

  “Hey, Ed.”

  “Carver?”

  “I was thinking about our last conversation.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Here? Here where?”

  “Washington.”

  “What—what are you doing in Washington?”

  “I want to meet.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Are you busy?”

  “Actually, right now I am, yes.”

  “I’m at the Holocaust Museum. I want you to meet me outside the main entrance in ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes? I can’t make that.”

  “I already called you a taxi. There’s one waiting outside your building right now along Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  “How do you know where I am?”

  “Ten minutes, Ed. Don’t be late.”

  “Carver, I can’t—”

  I clicked off, slipped the iPhone into my pocket. The Kid had rigged the same voice manipulation application onto the phone that was on his computer. Like before, while it was my voice coming out of my mouth, it was Carver’s voice going into Edward Stark’s ear.

  As promised, a taxi was parked in front of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It had pulled up right when I called Stark. That had been a minute ago. Another minute and it would have to move along. More than a decade had already passed since 9/11, but still people were extra cautious. Especially the FBI.

  I stood across the street, on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th Street, the Office of the Attorney General behind me. I wore a gray suit, dress shoes, my prescription sunglasses. In my left hand was a briefcase. It was Monday, and in Washington a suit and briefcase won’t bring you a second glance. Probably won’t even bring you a first glance.

  I knew Edward Stark was inside the Hoover Building. I had watched him enter it two hours ago. Now it was nearly ten o’clock in the morning. Everyone was in position. Either he made his appearance or he didn’t. If he did, things would progress as planned. If he didn’t, we would need to improvise.

  Less than a minute after I disconnected my call with him, Edward Stark appeared. He came out of the entrance doors, a tall broad-shouldered man wearing a suit. He paused for a moment, scanning the street. He spotted the maroon taxi. He took a step toward it but stopped. Seemed to think something over, then started walking again toward the taxi.

  He didn’t get inside it.

  Instead he went to the curb directly behind the taxi and raised his hand to the oncoming traffic. Another taxi—this one a blue Town Car—eased to a stop. Stark climbed in the back, and the Town Car merged with traffic.

  I touched my earpiece. “We’re a go.”

  Across the street, the maroon taxi pulled away from the curb. Drew was behind the wheel, a driver’s cap on his head. He knew I was standing on the corner but kept his focus on the street as he drove past.

  I turned and started south down 10th Street.

  Based on this morning’s traffic—D.C. is flooded with traffic—it was going to take the blue Town Car several minutes to get to where it was going. Stark had no doubt told the driver to go to the Holocaust Museum. And that was where the driver would seem to be taking him.

  Except the driver had a detour planned—turning left onto 12th Street, then, waiting for the light, turning left again onto Constitution Avenue. It was in the opposite direction Stark would want to go—the Holocaust Museum was west, while he would be headed east—but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Not while the car was in motion. And when it came to the light at the next block, I was already waiting at the curb.

  As the blue Town Car slowed and stopped, I stepped toward it, my hand slipping in my pocket. I opened the door and climbed in beside Stark, who, judging by the way he was reaching for his gun, knew he was in trouble.

  “Hey there, Eddie,” I said, and jabbed the methohexital pen into his neck.

  The light changed, and traffic began to move forward.

  Ronny, behind the wheel, merged us with it.

  52

  When Edward Stark awoke, he was tied to a metal folding chair, naked except for his boxer shorts.

  We had already scanned him for any tracking devices—not just his clothes but every inch of his body in case one had been slipped beneath his skin—and he appeared clean. We also checked and then double-checked his teeth, and besides two capped molars, they were normal.

  Besides two cell phones—a BlackBerry and the burner he had been using to communicate with Carver—he had
his wallet, his credentials, a tiny tin of Altoids, a dry cleaning receipt, and his gun. The piece was a standard issued Glock 22. It, like everything else, had also been scanned.

  Plastic zip ties kept his ankles in place to the chair legs. His wrists were bound behind his back. On his chest, right above his heart, was an inch-wide patch taped to his skin. It, just like a smaller patch taped to his temple, was attached to wires running to a laptop set up directly behind him. Maya sat behind the laptop, monitoring his heart rate and his brainwaves, the program all courtesy of the Kid. Ronny and Drew were outside keeping watch of the perimeter.

  I sat in a metal folding chair directly across from Stark. His head was hanging down. When he started to raise it, blinking, I leaned forward.

  “Hello, Eddie.”

  He looked up at me. First there was confusion in his eyes, followed quickly by understanding. His eyes widened slightly. He tried to speak but couldn’t. Not with the strip of duct tape over his mouth.

  “I don’t want to draw this out. The past two weeks haven’t been very good to me, as you can imagine. Getting shot at, almost getting killed—these are all things that damages a person’s psyche. So why am I here now? To tell you that you win. Well, not you so much as Caesar. Whatever the fuck Caesar has planned, we can’t stop it. I’ll be the first to admit that. All of us—the ones that haven’t yet been killed—will soon be going our separate ways. Before we do, though, I wanted to meet you. In many ways, we’re all connected to you. I mean, if it wasn’t for you fucking Carver over, he never would have started his battle against Simon and Caesar, and he never would have saved us from the games.”

  Stark stared back at me calmly. Almost too calmly.

  “Now, if you think about it, we all probably would have been thrown into the games regardless if anything had ever happened to Carver. But the fact is, we were thrown into the games, and Carver got us out, and our families are all dead, and those of us still alive are still fucking pissed about that.”

  On the ground beside my chair was a knife. I picked it up.

  “Two years ago I never once considered myself a violent man. But ... well, things change. I used to think torture was disgusting and vile. That what the government did at Guantanamo was just wrong. But you know, I’ve started to understand something. There comes a point when you just don’t give a fuck anymore. And unfortunately for you, I’ve long since stopped giving a fuck.”

  I crouched down in front of Stark. I placed the blade of the knife against his pinkie toe. His foot twitched, but that was the only reaction.

  “My wife’s finger was sent to me in a box. Did you know that? They even kept her wedding ring on it.”

  Steel pressed against flesh, but I hesitated. I thought about Jen and I thought about Casey and I thought about just how damaged I had become. It wasn’t that I had wanted to become the person I was now, but that I’d had no choice. Mercy was a word with no definition.

  I pressed down on the knife. Stark’s foot twitched again. His entire body didn’t buck in pain as I had imagined it would, not even when the blade severed the toe. The duct tape over his mouth muffled a slight groan. His eyes slid shut. But that was it.

  Beneath his chair was a box of gauze. I took some and placed it against the wound and applied pressure.

  “I don’t know how long we’re going to do this,” I said, standing back up to look him straight in the eye, “but the last thing I want right now is for you to pass out from the pain. Though, let me guess. Assholes like you don’t feel pain. That’s why you’ve hardly even made a sound yet.”

  Stark just stared back at me. He didn’t move or make any noise. Then, softly, he made a sound. Just one syllable.

  “What’s that?”

  He made the sound again.

  I glanced past him at Maya. She didn’t seem ready to meet my eyes. She’d known what the plan was from the beginning, and she had gone along with it, but she was clearly disturbed by my actions. On some level, so was I. But that didn’t stop me from continuing.

  I turned back to Stark. “Right now we’re in the basement of an abandoned warehouse just outside of D.C. If I take this tape off, you can scream all you want, but nobody will hear you.”

  He made the sound again, that one simple syllable.

  I took a loose corner of the duct tape and peeled it off his mouth. I did it slowly, much slower than was needed, until there was very little tape still sticking to his skin and then I ripped that off.

  “Ben,” he said. His eyes were glassy. His body trembled slightly. He was in pain but was trying his best not to show it.

  “That’s my name. What about it?”

  “You have the wrong idea.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m not who you think I am.”

  “And who do I think you are?”

  “In league with Caesar.”

  “You’re not?”

  He shook his head. “God no.”

  I glanced past him but Maya was still looking away. Her gaze was on the laptop screen but it was clear she wasn’t really watching it.

  Without a word I walked past him to the folding table, stepping over the wires. I leaned down close to Maya and whispered in her ear, “Do we have a problem?”

  She blinked, sat back, looked up at me with surprise. The reaction was of someone snapping out of a daydream. She stared at me for a long moment. “No,” she said, but her voice was so quiet I barely even heard it.

  “If you don’t think you can continue with this, go outside and relieve Drew. He can take over.”

  “No”—her voice still soft as she shook her head—“I’m fine.”

  It was then I first noticed the laptop screen. The graph it showed was the same from the Kid’s computer. Even with the lines bouncing with Stark’s voice. Before, when I had spoken to him on the phone, the lines had been a combination of greens and red like a Christmas decoration. Now they were all green.

  I grabbed the laptop and hurried back to Stark. I pulled my chair closer and set the laptop on the seat and tilted it so only I could see the screen.

  “What’s your name?”

  He stared back at me, confused. His eyes shifted between me and the laptop.

  “What’s your name?” I repeated.

  “Edward Lee Stark.”

  The lines were green.

  “When were you born?”

  “August nineteenth, 1954.”

  The lines stayed green.

  “Tell me a lie.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me a lie.”

  “I don’t—” He paused, thinking. “I know who Caesar is.”

  The lines went red.

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “I don’t know his real name, who he really is. I don’t even know what he looks like. I just know he exists. And that those very high up in the Inner Circle call him Augustus.”

  I watched his eyes, looking for any signs of deceit. I checked the computer screen again. All the lines were green.

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  He shook his head.

  “But as far as you knew, you were speaking to Carver. Both today and last week.”

  “I knew it wasn’t Carver both times. In fact, I was hoping it would be you.”

  The lines were green.

  “What do you mean, you were hoping it would be me. I don’t even know you.”

  “No,” Stark said, “but I know you.”

  “How?”

  “What you wrote two years ago. About your game.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And just because you read that I’m supposed to, what, believe that you’re telling the truth?”

  “Ben, I am not the enemy here. I did not fuck Carver over, either.”

  The lines stayed green.

  “You turned him in,” I said.

  “I didn’t. At least, not on purpose. At my position at the time, I had several different bosses abov
e me. I had been told that if anything strange ever came across the Internet, I was to thank whoever found it and say it would be reassigned elsewhere. And I really believed it at the time. Then Carver came and showed me what he did and I told him it would be reassigned and I thought that was it. I sent it up to my bosses. They told me it would be taken care of. Then, later, Carver came back and showed me even more. I began to suspect something was wrong, so I told him I would put him in charge of the investigation. Next thing I knew, I was notified that Carver had been transferred. They didn’t say where, but that he was doing important work. I’m not sure I even believed them then, but I knew better than to make waves. I did email Carver the next week, and promptly received a reply saying he was swamped and would get back to me. He never did.”

  “That wasn’t Carver.”

  Stark shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. But at the time I believed it was. Then a couple years passed and I was sent your story.”

  “Who sent it?” I asked, but immediately I knew. It all made sense now. While the Kid had helped post it wherever he could online, Carver had made it a point to briefly contact his old supervisor. The man who he believed had been responsible for Carver losing his family. He had sent it as a way of saying, I know what you did and I will never forget.

  “Carver,” Stark said. “At least, I assume it was Carver. It was sent from an anonymous Hotmail account. I replied but there was never any response.”

  “So when did Carver contact you next?” I knew the answer to this too but wanted to hear it from Edward Stark’s own lips.

  “Less than a year ago. He emailed me out of the blue. I wasn’t even sure it was him at first. I was worried Simon and the rest of them were on to me.”

  “How so?”

  “After I read about your game, I started my own investigation. I knew if your story was true—and I believed it was, having double-checked the stories about the bombing in Ryder, Illinois, and that cop getting shot in Chicago—then this went very high up. I ended up in contact with Francis Houser. Her nickname is Frank. She’s a congresswoman for the state of North Carolina.”

  “What does she have to do with any of this?” It didn’t occur to me then that I hadn’t been checking the laptop screen. I did now, and saw that all the lines except that one for the forced lie were green.