“What city?”
“Paris,” Owen said. “Le Mans, Orleans, Cergy, Beauvais, Reims—vigilante killings in all of them within the last half year. Only two days ago Philippe Gerard, the money manager who drained his clients’ accounts, was found stabbed to death in his home in Versailles. And Paris fits their personal style too. They like big cities, nightlife, culture, enough air traffic that their own frequent trips don’t attract attention.”
“How long would it have taken them to reach St. Cath’s from there?” Jagger said.
“Private jet”—he calculated—“five hours. Add time to get to the airport, then to a helicopter in Sharm el-Sheikh, fly to the monastery—nine, nine and a half hours.”
Jagger nodded. “Creed showed up just after most of the tourists had started up the mountain at closing, about twelve thirty. Someone was watching from the crags. The Tribe attacked about ten thirty.”
“Ten hours, it fits.”
“One thing bothers me about your little plotting of the killings.” Jagger tapped the table the way Owen had done. “You said these guys are globetrotters. They kill all over the world. Why would they kill anywhere near where they live? Why risk it?”
Owen grinned. “They can’t help it. It’s what they do. They may be experts in human behavior, but that doesn’t mean they can completely control their own. They’re Einstein smart, but they don’t necessarily act like it; they’re way beyond that. Their intelligence is a weapon they pull out of a drawer when they need it. Otherwise, they’re just people with their own proclivities and demons, their own habits, compulsions, and hang-ups. One of them’s a firebug, loves torching things. A couple of the killings I plotted around Paris ended in arson fires. Covers their tracks in terms of trace evidence they might have left, but the fires themselves point to them.”
He looked around the room, came back to Jagger, and sighed. “I saw that woman who shot your boy. She was leaving the monastery when I arrived. I recognized her, Nevaeh, unless she’s changed her name recently.”
Nevaeh. What kind of a name is that? Jagger thought about etching it into a live bullet casing.
Owen shook his head. “She’s really something. Gorgeous as all get-out, but mean as they come. She loves her job, and that’s just wrong when your job is killing people. Has a thing for death: graves, tombs, caskets. You can bet wherever they’re holed up in Paris, it has some connection to death. Maybe a former mortuary or a cemetery caretaker’s house.”
“I saw some other tattoos on her,” Jagger said, “besides the fireball thing. Crosses, a skull.”
Owen nodded. “Every one about death—except for the crosses, but I guess you can say that has something to do with death too. She’s got the grim reaper in hooded cloak, holding a scythe; an angel done in all black ink, with huge wings, pulling a man up to heaven by his wrist; lots of skulls, skeletons, things like that.”
Jagger pictured the woman. Something about her—the fluid way she moved, catlike, her exotic beauty—was consistent with his idea of a painted lady: mysterious, rebellious, confident.
“You found all that about her on Google?” he said.
“I tracked the Tribe to L.A. once and spotted her going into a nightclub. She had on this skimpy top thing we used to call underwear, I’m sure just to show off her tattoos. The club was one of those Goth numbers, so she fit right in. The guy at the door wouldn’t let me in, so I went around back to the kitchen and slipped a busboy a hundred bucks. But I couldn’t find her. Found out later a drug dealer who specialized in peddling to middle school kids got knifed in the bathroom that night.”
Jagger felt a faint twinge of admiration for the woman and hated her all the more for it. Even if she hadn’t shot his son, everything about her should have repulsed him. She was a killer who had a strange fascination with death and for all he knew slept in a coffin. Still, he couldn’t help but appreciate her taste in targets. He shook his head, disgusted with himself for acknowledging even the most trivial of qualities in this woman. His body was tired and his mind was numb, that’s all. She had shot Tyler, and if he learned that she had a supernatural ability to instantly rid the world of every murderer, rapist, and pedophile, he’d still want to kill her.
The old men in the back seemed to be staring past the three twenty–somethings at him, as though they knew his thoughts and were waiting for a confession. He turned a shoulder to them and clunked his prosthetic arm on the table.
“. . . tempted to leave them alone,” Owen was saying, “if the only people they killed were drug dealers and other scum who prey on the innocent. But they’re not. The Agag means blood, a lot of it, and it’ll flow from good men, women, and children. They have to be stopped.” He lifted his mug, set it down again. “And you’re right,” he said. “I can’t do it alone.” He paused until Jagger’s eyes found his.
“Jagger,” he said, “I need you to help me stop them.”
[ 59 ]
It felt to him as though the only light coming into the café from the front windows was a single ray of sun falling directly in his eyes. He leaned forward, out of it. “What are you saying, help you stop them?”
“I need you to come with me, to watch my back, help find a way to stop them.”
“But what does that mean, stop them? Kill them?”
“Whatever it takes,” Owen said. “Kill them, take back the chip, find enough evidence to make someone pay attention . . . I don’t know, exactly. But I don’t want to wake up tomorrow or a week from now to find out somebody detonated a bomb in New York or London or anywhere, and know I didn’t try everything to stop it.”
“These guys are good,” Jagger said. “They’re coordinated and well connected, motivated and wealthy. They’re in the middle or maybe the end of a game you haven’t even started, and you don’t know the rules. They’re probably out of their minds. I mean, these are the kind of nuts people write books about and little kids cry over because they might be hiding under their beds. And by the way, they also happen to possess a nuke.”
“Or something equally destructive.”
“Right . . . well . . .”
The twentysomethings were staring at them now as well, and Jagger realized he was standing, leaning across the table to get into Owen’s face. He straightened, pushing back his chair with his calves.
“I wish you luck with that,” he said. “I really do.” He turned and started for the door.
“Jagger . . . ,” Owen said, “please.”
Jagger stopped. After a pause, he returned to the table. He stood looking down at Owen and said, “Why me? Why are you even asking me? Why are you trying to drag me into your secret war?” He pointed at the men and woman three tables away. “Ask them. Wouldn’t hurt, right?”
“You’re not just anyone,” Owen said calmly. “You have the mind of an investigator, the skills of a soldier. And more than anything . . .”
“What?”
“You’re a cauldron of molten hate. You’re furious and frustrated. You have a young son fighting for his life, suffering for no fault of his own, and you want to make the people who hurt him pay. Normally I’d tell you revenge will eat your heart and make a hat out of your soul, but right now it’s a flaming sword, white hot and powerful. And I’d be a fool not to use it to stop the Tribe. Why not avenge your son and in the process save thousands of lives?”
“Because I’m not leaving Tyler. Or Beth. What kind of man would I be if I left them like this?” His voice became quiet. “How would I live if . . . if Tyler slipped away and I wasn’t here?”
“How will you live knowing you could have saved a city and didn’t?”
“It’s a suicide mission.”
“Maybe,” Owen said. “Maybe not.”
Jagger shook his head. He cut through the smoke and stares and pushed out the door. Four blocks away, the hospital rose like a glass pyramid over the roofs of rundown houses. Kids kicked a soccer ball down the street, chasing it and kicking it again. A multicolored Fiat with the word T
axi spray-painted on its side chugged through an intersection, leaving a dense cloud of gray exhaust. He headed into it, toward the hospital.
The world goes on. But it all seemed like a dream. He tried to remember his son’s last words to him, before he was shot, and his heart ached further when they came to him: Dad, I’m scared. Crouched down in the corner by the burning bush, big eyes staring up at him, wanting to be told everything was all right. So that’s what Jagger had told him. And then he’d said, Be brave, son. He wanted to hear Tyler’s voice again, that little-boy voice that could knock a train off its tracks.
He heard a rattle like maracas, and his heart leapt. Turning, he saw two little girls sitting on a front stoop, shaking out the contents of a piggy bank. So much like the sound of Tyler’s utility case. How he loved that junk, and Jagger felt a weird sort of affection for the unknown people who’d dropped their coins or key fobs so his son could find them, making him smile.
Everything went away—the little girls, the houses, the street—as his mind grasped an image, a recent memory: Tyler dropping something in the case, the sound of its hard heaviness landing on candy and rocks. Charon’s obol, the coin-looking thing he’d found in the cave where the teenager had been hiding. Ollie had said it would have been placed in a corpse’s mouth so its soul could pay the ferryman for a ride across the River Styx. Could it be a coincidence that he’d found it where one of the Tribe had been, on the day another of them, a woman with a penchant for death, attacked the monastery?
You can bet wherever they’re holed up in Paris, Owen had said, it has some connection to death.
Was the obol a clue to where they were, something the boy had picked up near his home?
A car horn honked, and Jagger jumped. He had stopped in the intersection. Six feet away, the grille of an ugly Ford sedan rattled in time with a revving engine. The horn blared again, and a hand waved at him out of the driver’s window.
He debated going to the hospital and completely forgetting Owen. Then he headed back toward the café.
X I I I
He found Owen where he’d left him, at the table, his head bowed in prayer. He pulled a chair out and sat. “Owen?”
The man didn’t move. The twentysomethings were laughing again, glancing at him. The old men and their eyes. Another man stood at the counter now, paying and carrying a mug and a fried pita thing on a plate to a table near the door. And Owen was smiling at Jagger.
Jagger raised his hand. “I didn’t change my mind. I’m not going with you, so stop smiling. I have something that might help. Do you have a mobile phone?”
Owen fished inside his pack. “It’s a satellite phone,” he said, handing it to Jagger.
“Can it receive images?”
“Songs too, if you have any Leonard Cohen.”
It was a little larger than Beth’s iPhone, with a touch screen now showing a picture of Owen crouched among a group of children, straw huts in the background. “What do I do?”
“Tap it.”
Jagger did, and a keypad appeared.
“Just dial, no special codes. The satellite assumes you’re calling within the same region unless you enter a country code.”
He dialed Beth’s number.
The 13th Tribe Page 23
