The Tenth Circle

by Jon Land

  “You believe me now about the setup, Hank?” McCracken asked from beneath another bus stop overhang. The rain was still pounding the streets, but the wind had abated and thunderclaps sounded only distantly.

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  “For being a fool or an idiot?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “We need to meet, Hank. We need to sort this out.”

  “Just name the time and place, McCracken.”

  “Something else. Get in touch with whoever Homeland has inside Rule’s entourage.”

  Silence filled the other end of the line, making McCracken figured he’d been cut off.

  “Hank?” he prodded.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. You told me Rule’s been on Homeland’s radar for a while. You know stuff about him you couldn’t get out of news reports or religious pamphlets. That means Homeland must have had someone on the inside feeding you information.”

  A deep sigh filled the line. “You make me feel like a fool and an idiot, McCracken.”

  “You’re neither, Hank, just an amateur. In over your head, and now you’ve dragged me along for the ride, and I was dumb enough to follow.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Forget what you thought. Too much thinking gets you into trouble. Just have your man meet me at the Greyhound bus station on Government Boulevard. Tell him to come prepared to tell me everything he knows about the Reverend Rule, so I can figure out why a two-bit preacher has the kind of security a million bucks wouldn’t buy.”

  “That means my man in Rule’s organization will have to risk exposure.”

  “Execution’s the alternative. He’s on borrowed time already. Take your pick, Hank.”

  “Better you come in from the proverbial cold, McCracken. I’m sorry about this boy in Missouri, but you’re not being objective, not thinking straight. I didn’t even think the personal existed for you.”

  “Neither did I, but the fact is Rule’s only a part of what’s going on, and if you want to stop more bodies from plunging off bridges, you’ll do what I tell you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Mobile, Alabama

  McCracken was watching the bus station from a nearby local version of Starbucks an hour out from the time of his planned rendezvous. The plan was for Homeland Security’s unnamed plant in Rule’s camp to wear an Alabama Crimson Tide football hat so Blaine would recognize him. Since he’d started watching the station, though, no man wearing any such hat had passed through the doors.

  McCracken entered the bus station at the designated hour anyway and searched the waiting crowd for the man in question. Spotted him wearing a baseball cap that read Roll Tide!, seated alone in a bank of four chairs divided by a built-in, table-like platform for resting coffee cups or magazines. A small tote bag, nice touch for the further cover it provided, rested on the floor at his feet. McCracken moved toward the man and took the seat next to him.

  Younger than Blaine had expected, of an age to still be able to wear his hair long enough to push out from beneath the ROLL Tide! cap’s confines. Thirty years old maybe, with a tan bred of spending lots of time at outdoor rallies, services, or whatever you wanted to call gatherings like the one held earlier in Crawford Park.

  McCracken kept his eyes fixed forward, sleeve held in a way to disguise the fact he was speaking. “I’ve got your ticket right here. We’ll talk on the bus. Ninety-minute ride to—”

  He stopped when he realized the man was utterly unresponsive, hadn’t even looked or glanced his way.

  Blaine jostled him slightly at the shoulder. “Hey …”

  The younger man slumped sideways, ROLL TIDE! cap falling off to reveal a thick patch of matted blood on the right side of his head soaking through his hair, evidence of a small caliber bullet.

  McCracken stood up as casually as he could manage, pretending to stretch while paying the slumped figure no heed. Prepared to just walk off, leery of the same killer laying in wait for him, aware the young man must have come here to meet someone.

  He started to back away, stopped when he glimpsed what looked like a magazine that had fallen to the floor when he’d ruffled the man’s shoulder. McCracken stooped and retrieved it innocently enough, noticing immediately it was open to a page featuring a crossword puzzle with only a few of the boxes filled, incorrectly by all measure since a sequence of numbers and letters moved across the page.

  4271FH121

  And running down the page, coming up short of filling all the required boxes for that entry, was a single word:

  CROATOAN.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mobile, Alabama

  McCracken held his ground, fighting against the urge to simply bolt the area. The murdered man’s killers were almost surely­ still on site. They’d be mixed among the crowds both inside the terminal and waiting to board buses in the departure area outside.

  His eyes swept one way, then the other, then back again.

  Nothing.

  Damn!

  Whoever they were had melted away, taken up positions concealed from his vantage point, perhaps with him zeroed in their crosshairs.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are… .

  Easier said than done. They wouldn’t show themselves, so Blaine needed to make them. Strip the advantage from them and turn it to him.

  Also easier said than done. These men were well-trained professionals; anyone brazen enough to murder a man in full view of dozens of witnesses had to be. But they wouldn’t know who he was in all probability, and right now that was the best thing he had going for him.

  McCracken tried to gauge their thinking, starting with the fact that they’d let the Homeland plant get this far to see if he was meeting with someone. So long as Blaine didn’t act rashly, they couldn’t be sure he was that man, at least not sure enough to risk exposure by starting a gunfight that would undoubtedly claim plenty of bystanders in its path here and now.

  Which gave him time.

  “Atlanta bus boarding now. The two o’clock bus for Atlanta is boarding now.”

  The booming voice’s announcement was met with a large exodus from the terminal area, forty or so people rising to clutch their suitcases or loop their carry-ons and laptops over their shoulder. McCracken rose with them, grasping the dead man’s tote bag for cover. He pretended to glance at his phone for the time, when in fact he was using it as a mirror to check behind him, see if there was any activity of note coming his way.

  Nothing he could detect. So far.

  McCracken joined the flow of bodies exiting the terminal. He felt for any disturbance in the mass, a sudden buckling or jostling indicative of men forcing their way forward. Nothing there either and, outside, McCracken found himself waiting in line before the Atlanta-bound bus while the driver collected tickets just short of the open door. With no intention of actually boarding the bus, Blaine would have to make a move soon. The terminal lot was cluttered with buses squeezed against one another with barely enough room for anyone to pass between them. Dozens lined up all the way to the road where a big John Deere front loader was hoisting the refuse of ongoing reconstruction into a dump truck.

  Just before his turn came in line, McCracken veered away from the bus and sliced behind it, entering the tight confines separating it from the next. The buses were parked two, and in some places three, deep all the way to a fence that paralleled the street just short of the sidewalk. Blaine hit the ground and rolled under one bus and then another, a plan forming in his mind even as he caught the first signs of pursuit in the form of heavy footsteps and the soft garble of voices.

  “I lost him, Red. You got anything?”

  “Sorry, Blue. Nothing on my flank.”

  “This is Green, boys. Man just disappeared into the pavement. Fucking shapeshifter.”

&
nbsp; “He’s moving for the street, using the buses,” said Red. “We need to take him before he gets there.”

  “This is White. I’m on it.”

  “White, circle round and enter the maze halfway down. Brown, you read me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “You circle into the maze from street side and work your way back toward us.”

  “Roger that, Red.”

  “Blue and Green, you know the drill. Now let’s go bag this son of a bitch and find a wall to mount the trophy.”

  McCracken heard bits and pieces of the chatter, enough to discern presence though not plan. Five men, he guessed, maybe six. Talking like operatives who knew their way around a bus terminal, but not necessarily a battlefield. He needed to bait them, make them look where he wanted them to instead of where he intended to be.

  “This is Blue, Red, I’m middle in. I just saw someone roll under a bus.”

  “Roger that, Red,” from Green. “I’m middle out. He just rolled under the next bus in line here. I’m closing.”

  “This is White. I’m dead center. No glimpse of the bitch yet.”

  “He’s going for the street for sure,” said Red. “Close in on center of the maze grid, eyes peeled downward, weapons hot. Brown, you hold your position. I’m coming in.”

  As soon as he found a clear aisle, McCracken rose and hoisted himself atop a bus just past the center of the stacked-together assemblage of steel. Hardly a difficult feat, but one that proved taxing to his body, which needed a bit of coaxing to respond to what had once been simple tasks not given a moment’s thought, nonetheless. Intense gym workouts, hours stretching out, could make it all doable at his age, but they couldn’t make it easy.

  Fortunately, the close spacing of the buses left leaping from one roof to the next just that simple, the biggest challenge being to land lightly without alerting any of the patrolling gunmen of his presence. Especially with their eyes aimed low, figuring he was still rolling his way under one chassis through to the next.

  The fence was coming fast and, beyond it, the next phase of his plan.

  “Anybody, got anything?” Brown said from the fence line. “Got nothing here, no sign whatso—”

  “Brown, this is Red Leader. Say again.”

  Nothing.

  “Repeat, say again.”

  Still nothing.

  “Anybody have eyes on Brown?”

  “Negative,” from White.

  “Nada,” from Blue.

  “That’s a negative,” from Green.

  “Move for the street, people. Repeat, move for the street.”

  The men heard a screech, followed by a clanging and the sound of a rippling crash.

  “What the hell was that?” Red demanded. “Anybody got eyes on anything?”

  “Holy shit,” one of the men said.

  McCracken crashed through the fence, the big John Deere front loader he’d commandeered from the construction site obliterating the chain link without even slowing. The driver had been surprised to see him approaching the cab, even more surprised when Blaine climbed up, tossed him to the shredded concrete below, and replaced him behind the controls.

  He wasn’t sure what he was about to try would work, not sure he’d be able to gather enough speed to build the momentum he needed. In fretting over that, though, he’d forgotten about how powerful this particular John Deere 644K hybrid wheel loader was. Twenty tons of unstoppable power under his control.

  McCracken got the shovel up and leveled just before he hit the last bus parked in the endless line of them stacked all the way to the terminal building. He felt the shovel teeth shred the bus’s thin side steel, his intention to tip this bus into the one next to it, and so on, to create a domino effect that would trap his pursuers amid the jammed together mash of steel.

  Instead, though, the massive power of the John Deere slammed the last bus in line into the one immediately next to it. He felt both start to move, crunching together, and McCracken responded by giving the loader more gas and working its gears to continue the process it had started on its own. Bus glass shattered and flew everywhere. The squeal and grind of metal tearing sent a flutter through his eardrums, as the buses folded up tight like an accordion instead of dominos.

  “This is Red Leader! Everyone, get your asses out of there. Report! I want statuses!”

  “Green here.”

  “Blue here.”

  “White reporting!” a different voice chimed in, bus tires exploding around him. “Tight squeeze, but I’m almost out. Jesus Christ, who the fuck is this g—”

  A gasp followed, a thump, then nothing.

  PART TWO:

  CROATOAN

  CHAPTER 24

  Blountstown, Florida

  Jeremiah Rule was praying when the door to his ramshackle church, built with the hands and funds of his own parishioners, opened and closed just as quickly. Rule was conscious of a brief shaft of light, followed by the sound of quick footsteps coming his way.

  “Colonel Turwell, you have a measured step, but your thoughts give you away.”

  “Do they now?” said Turwell, stopping in the shaft of light streaming through the church skylight that leaked in bad storms. The sun slipped behind a cloud, the result being to make his cocoa-colored skin seem almost as dark as his black sport jacket worn over a black turtleneck. His neatly trimmed Afro was sprinkled with gray and he wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses. His chest looked overly large, its size further exaggerated by the fact that he held himself so far forward that it seemed pumped full of air. “And what about your thoughts? How are you holding up after this morning?”

  “I pray for the brave souls who died in my service and protection.” Rule turned from where he was kneeling on the raised dais at the front of the church, covered in a thin carpet that was still damp and rancid after the last hard rain had soaked it.

  “You mean my men, don’t you?”

  “Who were serving me at the time. Who died for nothing less than devotion to the cause and my protection.”

  “Sacrifices to a greater cause to which they gave their lives.”

  “I wish no more to perish in service to me. I have the Lord to protect me, Colonel. If His plan is for the next attack to succeed, then so be it. I want your men gone. I will not have the peace of my sanctuary or my faithful disturbed by such distractions.”

  “My job is to keep you safe, Reverend, so our plan can reach fruition, so the country can be saved. We’re just days from the finish now. You should keep that in mind.”

  Rule had adopted Blountstown, nestled within Florida’s northern Panhandle, as his home because it felt right. He liked the fact that it was bracketed by water, rivers specifically, with the Chipola to the west and the Apalachicola to the east. So too it featured majestic limestone bluffs that he saw as sentinels standing brave and strong to ward off evil, to shield the town from the miseries of the outside world. Blountstown actually boasted its own rich history and tradition, including the Panhandle Pioneer Settlement, an impressive collection of original and replica structures featuring nineteenth-century log cabins, a farmhouse, and a school. There was also a working farm on the grounds that produced its own sugar cane and syrup. And the settlement’s annual quilt shows and peanut boils took Rule back to simpler times long before he’d kicked a dog and beaten a boy to death to complete his transformation and begin his true mission. So enamored was he by the settlement’s ambiance that he’d had his church constructed to jibe perfectly with the nearby settlement, its leaks, uneven flooring, and patchwork roof replicating olden times perhaps a bit too much.

  Turwell took another step forward, stopping even with the front pews that wobbled a bit thanks to the church’s uneven settling.

  “You lost men in Afghanistan, too,” Rule said, still not regarding him.

  “As necessary then as it was tod
ay, Reverend.”

  “Your superiors didn’t see it that way, though, did they, Colonel? You faced an Article Thirty-Two hearing and accepted what was termed a ‘non-judicial punishment’ once you agreed to resign your commission.”

  Turwell came all the way around and stepped upon the dais, placing himself between Rule and the altar. “And are you without sin?”

  “Any man who claims to be stands as a liar.”

  “Three convictions for fraud,” Turwell continued, “taking money from your followers under false pretenses.”

  Rule stiffened and finally met Turwell’s gaze. “I was a different man then.”

  “Two, apparently, based upon the names under which you were convicted. I believe the second time involved you convincing the gravely ill to change you to the beneficiary of their life insurance policies in return for entrance into Heaven. That is what you promised them, isn’t it?”

  “They were sorely in need of spiritual guidance, Colonel. I was doing the work of the Lord, following His word.”

  “Just like I was doing the work of my country in Kandahar Province, Reverend.”

  “The very work we are both doing today.”

  “Then we are both imperfect men joined together by pursuit of the same goal. I’d recommend we leave things there.”

  “It’s not that simple, Colonel. That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. I need to see.”

  “See what?”

  “The means by which we will inflict the tenth circle of Hell onto the world.”

  Turwell stiffened just enough for Rule to notice. “That’s not your concern.”

  “The Lord feels otherwise. He wishes to see the great weapon of change through His servant’s eyes. He instructs that I must see what I am praying for. He who has walked in the darkness has seen a great light. Show me that light, Colonel, or He may choose a new path for me, separate from the one you walk.”

  “Tomorrow,” Turwell relented, “I’ll take you to see our weapon tomorrow.”