The Guardian

by David Hosp

  ‘Is there something I should know?’ Amano asked.

  Morrell looked at the Cambridge detective. The man had shared information with him, and he knew that Amano was expecting Morrell to return the favor. It was fair, after all, and in any other situation Morrell would have honored the code and reciprocated. But this situation was different. It wasn’t some addict or unidentified gangbanger lying in the morgue with his guts drilled out, it was Morrell’s brother, and he’d be damned if someone else was going to get to the girl to question her before he did.

  ‘No,’ Morrell said, his jaw stiff. ‘There’s nothing you should know, Detective.’

  ‘She cannot leave. We need her help.’

  Akhtar’s voice was quiet and calm, but determined. Saunders frowned as he studied the young man’s face. He agreed that their chances of locating the Cloak seemed far greater if Cianna helped them. She had known both her brother and Nick O’Callaghan better than anyone else. If either of them had ever had possession of the Cloak and had hidden it, she would be the person best able to puzzle out its location. But Saunders had also seen the look in Cianna’s eyes, and he understood her need for revenge. It was a powerful human drive, and it fueled so many of the world’s conflicts. He knew that if they pushed her too hard, they would lose her to that drive.

  ‘Let me reason with her,’ Saunders said. ‘I can convince her.’

  Akhtar nodded. ‘I hope so.’

  She was in the bathroom. Earlier she had started to leave the motel room, but Saunders had prevailed upon her to stay. ‘Where are you going to go?’ he’d asked. ‘Are you going to walk the streets blindly, hoping that you will run into him?’ She hadn’t had an answer to that. ‘Maybe we can help each other.’

  Her face remained hard. ‘You don’t care about Charlie,’ she said. ‘ To you this is some sort of geopolitical chess match. I don’t see it that way.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he’d admitted. ‘But at the moment, it seems to me that our interests are aligned, even if our motivations aren’t.’

  Her eyes had blazed back at him and he could feel her hatred. It wasn’t directed at him; it was directed at the entire world. It made her dangerous, and that might make her useful. Her clothes were wet and disheveled, and a single tear cut a track through the dirt and grime on her face from the boathouse. There was a smear of her brother’s blood on her neck. ‘Clean yourself off,’ he’d said. ‘Then we can talk.’

  Without a word she’d walked past him and into the bathroom. She’d been in there for several minutes.

  ‘She’ll stay,’ Saunders said to Akhtar. He didn’t feel as confident as he sounded, though.

  ‘She must.’

  ‘Or what?’ Saunders asked sharply.

  Akhtar said nothing for a moment. ‘Do you not understand how important this is?’ he asked at last. ‘Do you understand what is at stake? If Fasil finds the Cloak, Afghanistan could fall. All of the work that my people have done in the last ten years, all the sacrifice will be for nothing.’

  ‘Americans have been dying in your country for a decade, too,’ Saunders reminded him.

  ‘Yes, they have,’ Akhtar agreed. ‘Nearly two thousand. And for every one of them, more than twenty Afghans have died. If Fasil is permitted to take control of the country back for the Taliban, all of that will be for nothing. More than that, the conflict could spread. People throughout the region will believe that democracy is not the way, and that the United States is nothing more than a paper tiger, unwilling to stand by those who stand with you. It cannot be allowed.’

  Saunders said nothing. He knew Akhtar was right; he just prayed that Cianna would come to the correct decision on her own.

  The door to the bathroom opened a moment later. She stood there, her clothes straightened, her face cleaned, her hair slicked down and parted. Her eyes had turned dark and her face had drawn tight. In so many ways she seemed like a completely different person.

  ‘I’m going after him,’ she said.

  Saunders took a deep breath. ‘So are we. If we work together, we have a better chance of finding him.’

  ‘You don’t care about finding him,’ she said. ‘You care about finding the Cloak.’

  He shrugged in admission. ‘It’s one and the same thing, isn’t it? That’s what he is after. If we find the Cloak, we’ll find him. Either that or he’ll find us.’

  She looked back and forth between Saunders and Akhtar. ‘We’re going to kill him, right? This isn’t about capturing the man to interrogate him, or just scaring him back into his hole in the mountains?’

  ‘We will kill him, yes,’ Akhtar readily agreed.

  Saunders nodded slowly.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m in. On one condition.’

  Saunders waited to hear what it was. He suspected he would not like it.

  ‘What is it?’ Akhtar asked.

  She looked Saunders straight in the eye, fixing him with cold eyes. ‘I want to be the one who pulls the trigger.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ‘Is there anyone else your brother trusted?’

  Saunders paced as he asked the question. It had been over an hour, and they seemed to be plowing the same ground over and over. Cianna was sitting on the chair, leaning over, her head hanging between her knees. Akhtar sat at the edge of the bed, watching the other two. He’d had little to add since the process had begun.

  ‘No,’ Cianna replied, the frustration coming through in her tone. ‘We’ve been through this. There was just me and Nick, no one else.’

  ‘How about your mother?’ Saunders asked.

  Her head shot up, and she glared at Saunders as though he’d just insulted her. ‘No,’ she said. It was definitive.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  Saunders could sense the tension as her shoulders drew in close to her ears and her expression hardened. ‘He hated my mother,’ she said. ‘With good reason. She left us and never looked back. Charlie and me were on our own even before she walked away. Plus, she disappeared. Neither one of us had any idea where she was.’

  ‘Maybe he found her,’ Saunders suggested.

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? You were out of contact with him for two years. Maybe he started looking for her when you went away.’

  She put her head down again. ‘He wouldn’t have done that,’ she said. There was an element of defeat in her voice.

  Saunders watched her for a moment and then abandoned the line of questioning. It wasn’t getting them anywhere. ‘Okay,’ he said with a sigh. ‘What are we missing?’

  ‘I don’t think he took it,’ Cianna said quietly. ‘I think this is all just a huge fucking mistake.’

  Saunders shook his head. ‘People like Fasil don’t travel halfway across the globe unless they’re certain. He’s taken a huge risk coming here.’

  ‘Did you see Charlie’s face just before Fasil killed him?’ Cianna asked. ‘My brother was a terrible liar. Always was. Before Fasil killed him, he was screaming at him, asking him where the Cloak was. If he’d known where this thing was, he would have said. I saw his eyes, and he was terrified. I don’t think he had any idea.’

  Saunders considered that for a moment. He’d had the same sense at the time. ‘He didn’t bring anything else to your apartment with him?’

  ‘Not that I noticed,’ Cianna said. ‘I assume I would have spotted something as spectacular as an 800-year-old cloak.’

  Saunders admitted, ‘I’d assume that, too. I was just checking.’

  ‘What does it look like, anyway?’ Cianna asked. ‘Maybe I missed it. Is it gold? Embroidered? What?’

  The question brought Saunders up short for a moment. ‘I’m not sure, actually. It’s never shown to the public. I suppose I’ve always assumed it was silk. That would have been the common luxury of the time.’ He looked at Akhtar, who was shaking his head.

  ‘Such an American perspective,’ he said with a touch of superiority. ‘The Cloak is not powerful because of
what it is made out of. It is a relic of the Great Prophet. Its power flows from his spirit, not the fabric. Luxury has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘So, what does it look like?’ Cianna asked.

  ‘It is homespun,’ Akhtar said.

  ‘Homespun?’ Cianna said.

  ‘Yes,’ Akhtar replied. ‘A simple fabric woven by peasants, course and gray, but very practical. This is what Mohammed wore into battle.’

  ‘So it would have just looked like a length of regular cloth,’ Saunders said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Cianna shook her head. ‘Charlie didn’t bring anything like that to my apartment,’ Cianna said. ‘I suppose it could be in his duffle bag. We could go look.’

  ‘No,’ Saunders said. ‘It’s not there.’ He was staring off into space as he worked his memory. Something Akhtar had said sparked a recollection. ‘Charlie wasn’t a student of Islam or of Afghan history, was he?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Cianna said.

  ‘So if it looks like a simple piece of fabric, Charlie wouldn’t have had any reason to take it. Unless he was using it for something else.’

  Akhtar frowned. ‘I am not following you.’

  ‘I am,’ Cianna said. She looked at Saunders, her eyes wide. ‘We know where the Cloak is.’

  He nodded back at her. ‘Yes, we do.’

  Morrell ran a finger over the handwritten name next to the buzzer on the first floor of the apartment house in Southie. C. Phelan. It was her. He’d been nearly certain when he heard the name, but he needed to be positive. The dead man who was missing a hand at the Cambridge boathouse was the brother of the young woman he’d talked with the day before. She was the same woman his brother had befriended years before. She was the same woman being stalked by the young Middle Eastern man who managed to get himself released from police custody with nothing but a phone call. And that was the morning after someone had taken a Black & Decker to Nick O’Callaghan in a manner strangely reminiscent of the kinds of torture used in dank buildings in Afghanistan.

  Even if he’d believed in coincidences, those connections would be too many for Morrell. The girl was involved somehow in all of this. What this was and how she was involved were still beyond his comprehension. He intended to find out, however. It was now his singular focus.

  He had to pause twice on the climb up to her apartment. His gut was hanging so far over his belt that it almost touched his crotch, and sweat was pouring down his face by the time he reached her door. Standing there, panting, he took a moment to catch his breath before he knocked. There was no answer, so he knocked harder. ‘Ms Phelan, it’s Detective Morrell, Boston Police Department! Open up!’

  There was still no answer, so Morrell put his ear up to the door to listen to the silence from within for a moment. Once he was reasonably sure there was no one moving inside, he slipped a leather case out of his pocket and pulled out a pick. It took him less than thirty seconds to turn the locks and let himself in. If he found anything useful, he’d leave it there and go for a warrant, inventing a pretext for the search. It wouldn’t be the first time. Nor would it be the last, unless his heart gave up on the hike back down the stairs – a scenario he was becoming acutely aware was a growing possibility with each inch he added to his waistline.

  He cracked the door open. ‘Ms Phelan?’ he said once more, just in case. ‘Police, Ms Phelan.’ He stepped into the empty apartment and pulled the door behind him.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Police tape was draped around Spudgie’s Bar and Grill at the edge of Boston Harbor like toilet paper hanging from a pranked house after Halloween, fluttering carelessly in the breeze. The windows were dark, and the front door, normally lit up in the evenings, was lost in the night shadows of the peaked overhang. Even the streetlight on the corner was out, as though in deference to the aura of death that seemed to have swallowed the place whole.

  Jack Saunders leaned against the corner of the building across the street from the bar. He’d been keeping an eye on the place for two hours, making sure that there were no police there. He suspected that there would not be. It was past midnight and Nick O’Callaghan’s body had been discovered early in the morning. The crime scene had been picked apart for hours by all manner of specialists. Fingerprints had been collected, blood and tissue samples scraped into plastic evidence tins, and scraps of body parts that had been removed bit by bit, undoubtedly while O’Callaghan was still alive and watching in horror and agony, had been bagged and tagged and loaded into the coroner’s truck. They would be kept with the primary remnant of O’Callaghan’s body, which had been left on a table like the picked-over remains of a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Eventually, though, a decision had been made that all the evidence of possible use had been located, photographed, and removed. Notwithstanding the precision with which television shows and movies portrayed the investigative sciences, the process remained one of trial and error, where guesswork and instinct were as important as DNA samples. Often more so.

  Once the decision had been made that nothing else that might provide investigative insight remained, the crime scene had been wrapped in yellow tape and deserted until further notice. All that remained was the ghost of the dead and the echoes of his suffering.

  Saunders contemplated O’Callaghan’s ordeal as he watched the building. As part of his training, Saunders had been schooled in the brutal art of interrogation – both in how to apply torture and how to resist it. As part of his work in the field, he’d been on both sides of real-life interrogations. He, better than most, had a genuine understanding of what Nick O’Callaghan had endured in the final hours of his life. As a result, his respect for him had grown, and the desire to avenge an honorable man was added to his list of motivations to unravel the mystery of the international conspiracy upon which he’d stumbled.

  Once he was satisfied that the bar was deserted, he called Akhtar’s cell phone. ‘It’s clear,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘As sure as I’m going to be. I’m going in.’

  ‘No,’ Akhtar said. ‘You must wait. I will meet you there. I must retrieve the Cloak myself.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Saunders said. ‘Two of us will slow the process.’

  ‘You must not touch the Cloak,’ Akhtar said. ‘Its power cannot be underestimated. My family has had the responsibility of guarding it. I alone must handle it.’

  ‘No offense, Akhtar,’ Saunders said, ‘but the Cloak’s power is symbolic, not literal. I don’t believe that those who are not pure of purpose who handle the Cloak are doomed.’

  ‘You mean people like Mr Phelan and Mr O’Callaghan?’

  ‘That’s different,’ Saunders said. ‘They weren’t killed by a curse; they were killed by a psychopath.’

  ‘The instrument of Allah’s will,’ Akhtar said. ‘Besides, even if you believe the power of the Cloak is symbolic, you must respect that symbolism if you seek to harness its power. I am very nearby. It will take little time.’

  Saunders looked at his watch. ‘I’ll give you five minutes. No more. I don’t like the possibility that someone else might figure this out.’

  ‘I will be there.’

  The rental car pulled up three minutes later, and parked on the side street around the corner from where Saunders was standing. Akhtar got out of the car on the driver’s side. He was carrying an ornate wooden box. Cianna Phelan emerged from the passenger’s side. Saunders cursed under his breath.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Cianna responded.

  ‘Three of us are not going in.’

  ‘My brother was murdered for this thing,’ Cianna said. ‘I’m going in.’

  Saunders shook his head. ‘You’re waiting here. No discussion. Three of us will draw more attention than a carnival. I don’t have time to argue,’ Saunders said. ‘You’re staying here.’ He looked at Akhtar. ‘What’s the box for?’

  ‘The Cloak has been kept in this box for 300 years,’ he said. ‘I mus
t return it in the box so that the people know that it has been treated with respect.’

  Saunders nodded. ‘If you say so. Are you ready?’

  ‘I am,’ Akhtar said.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Cianna insisted again.

  ‘Don’t make me shoot you,’ Saunders retorted. Then to Akhtar, he said, ‘Let’s go.’

  The back door was off an alley that ran from the street toward the water. There was a permanence to the heavy stench of mildew and garbage, and the cracked cement was puddled even though it hadn’t rained for days. Saunders moved silently along the brick wall at the back of the bar, slipping through the shadows cast by the dumpsters lined up in the wan moonlight. Akhtar was behind him – every bit as quiet, Saunders noted thankfully – the wooden box cradled under his arm. Cianna Phelan was back at the car, waiting.

  As he expected, the door was locked, and another roll of crime-scene tape had been used to cover the door like a giant yellow spider web waiting to trap the unwary. Saunders used a knife to slice through the tape and get to the doorknob, and it took him only a moment to have the door opened. He slit through a few more pieces of the police tape and then slipped through the opening he’d made. Akhtar followed.

  The back hallway was pitch black, and Saunders had to feel his way along the wall until he came to the swinging door to the kitchen. He pushed it open just a crack and listened.

  Nothing.

  He continued moving forward and came to the small room at the back of the place that had been used for private functions. There was no door; just a brick archway topped with cedar beaming. He poked his head through, and the smell of death made him pull back sharply. It took him a moment to chase the thoughts of O’Callaghan’s ordeal from his head and keep going.

  At last they came to the large open bar space at the front of the building. Here the light from the moon through the windows was enough for them to see shapes and navigate their way to the far side, where the staircase to the second floor stood. Saunders nodded to Akhtar, and made his way over.