“Something like that,” Jack replied.
MaryBeth was still unsure of his rationale. “And do you believe that?” she asked.
“I don’t have to,” he said nervously. “I only have to believe that they do.”
The long, awkward silence returned. It seemed to last twice as long and feel twice as awkward. With the sound of the traffic removed, it also seemed as though this new silence was twice as loud.
It was MaryBeth who eventually broke through it. “Okay. So who are they? And how do we find them?”
Jack had that look. The one that even he did not like. The one that indicated he was being asked a question he could not answer. He did not answer.
“Fair enough. So how do we go about finding out?” she asked, unclipping her seatbelt.
“We speak to Andy and get him to involve the F.B.I.,” Jack replied.
MaryBeth looked dubious. “The Feds? What the hell can they do?” she asked.
They stepped out of the car and walked toward the house. The gravel crackled like flames beneath their feet.
“They have files on nearly every cult in the world,” Jack said defiantly, his tone indicating that he would be issuing a demand rather than a request. “Andy can get them to go through every damn one until they find these bastards for me.”
they shall not appear
Deuteronomy 16:16
The call had come through whilst MaryBeth was doing what she always seemed to be doing when she was at Jack’s house with Nina gone for the night: making coffee. Jack himself was already on the top floor. He wanted to gather as many details as possible to pass through to Andy.
The instant she joined him, MaryBeth knew that something was wrong. Seriously wrong. He was staring vacantly at the wall, his body almost frozen in deep thought. She had needed to voice his name three times just to get a response. Her concern doubled with each attempt.
Then he told her.
“Dead?” she said. “How?”
The word seemed to rattle through Jack’s head, just as it had when Barry had first used it. It took a moment before he could actually say it. “Murdered,” he said quietly. Not killed, as in ‘an accident’, but murdered. Killed deliberately.
Barry had been uncharacteristically subdued on the phone. He was a big guy, perhaps six-three and built like an ox sitting on top of a bull. He had a big heart and an almost aggressively jovial nature. As Head of IntelliSoft Security he was also just as protective of his own staff as he was of Jack’s. The discovery that one of his team was dead was showing a side of Barry that many who met him would never dream of seeing. He was close to tears. It was even worse because Jerry, the security guard in question, had not been the target. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Dave Clearwater was the only one who was supposed to die.
A lot of the security staff knew Dave. He worked late; they were bound to meet him often enough. Jerry was one of those who usually caught him twice on any given shift. He did eight at night until midday; three days on, four days off. He usually watched Dave leave late at night and saw him arrive early the following morning. Sometimes he commented on whether or not the young lad ever got any sleep. He liked Dave; they often shared a joke. Sometimes even a sly beer.
But Dave had not come in to work that morning. It was nothing special, he was probably on holiday or something, but when Jerry had seen MaryBeth he had idly commented on it. She had not been aware of Dave’s absence, she had checked and said that he was perhaps off sick. She had casually mentioned that she hoped he was alright.
Jerry lived just up the road from Dave, perhaps three or four miles. He had seen him sometimes grabbing piles of snacks from the Seven Eleven. Without thinking he had offered to stop by on his way home, just to see if the kid might need anything from the drugstore. Like he said, he liked Dave. Everyone did.
Everyone except the person who had killed him.
Then Jerry’s wife had called IntelliSoft. She never did that, she wasn’t that kind of wife. Where was he, she had asked? What was keeping him so late? He should have been home hours ago.
He had left at midday; it was now six fifteen.
She was right; He should have been home hours ago.
Barry had started at three and was scheduled to leave at six the following morning. Still, he had decided to take an hour out to drive up to Dave’s apartment, the only place that Jerry had been visiting on his way home, just to see if anything was wrong. He had tried phoning but there was no reply. Maybe Jerry had taken Dave for a beer, but if so, why had he neglected to tell his wife?
Barry had no idea what he expected to find when he arrived at the apartment. All he did know was that it bore little or no resemblance to the scene that greeted him when he did.
Ambulances, fire-trucks, police and medical teams. At least twenty vehicles, and all the residents out on the street. Watching. Scared. The bodies were still being photographed in-situ. Then they would be brought out. No resident was to be allowed back into their respective apartment until the all clear was given. They were told to find alternative accommodation for tonight, that it could be many hours, and each was given an injection of atropine before they left the area, just as a precaution. Barry had approached a police officer who had pointed him in the direction of the F.B.I., an Agent Kingston. He had explained who he was, why he was here and had answered some questions about why Jerry had visited Dave. They had thanked him and taken some details. They said that they would speak to Jerry’s wife and would be in touch if they needed to speak with Barry again.
Some kind of gas, poisonous the F.B.I. had said, but not an accident. Murdered, that was also what they said. The gas had been lingering in the apartment when Jerry had arrived. He had tried to crawl back out into the communal hallway but there was no escape. He died a little slower than Dave, but no less completely.
When he got back to IntelliSoft, Barry immediately telephoned his boss, Mr. Bernstein.
Just to let him know.
“Why?” MaryBeth had said. She looked guilty.
She probably felt responsible, Jack thought. Not for Dave of course, but for Jerry. Even though he had offered to look in on Dave, she still felt guilty because she had said ‘Thanks, Jerry, it would be great if you could’. MaryBeth was like that.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. He was wondering if it had anything to do with Dave looking into the postcards. Had Dave been killed, that would have been different, but he wasn’t. He was murdered. Like Lara, killed without mercy to protect her child. Was Dave killed for the same reason? No, he thought, of course he wasn’t. That was a stupid suggestion.
So why did he feel unable to dismiss it as such?
He shook his head in despair, his mind spinning like a bottle.
Round and round and round it goes, where it stops....
“Nobody knows,” he said.
sword without
and terror within
Deuteronomy 32:25
The chill from the long winter night still lingered in the air as Special Agent Frank Warner stepped from his car into the throng of people and vehicles gathered outside the Lancaster apartment complex. Though numerous, the ambulances, vans and mass of official personnel were almost totally obscured by a thick crowd of bemused residents and intrigued rubberkneckers. They parted like the Red Sea as Frank headed toward the building, most of them acutely aware that such a bland car containing a dark suited man was so desperately inconspicuous as to have ‘FBI’ written all over it.
Ducking under the tape he saw the man who had called him to the scene, a younger agent named Kyle McCarthy. Kyle was ‘new breed’; young, finely chiselled and ambitious. Though nearly twenty-eight, he still looked like a child in a suit, his centre-parted blond hair always trimmed close at the back as though his mother had demanded it and his spectacles pushed studiously up his nose. He was also a devout Christian and objected to other agents blaspheming in his presence, a game that Warner often played to the full
. It was one of many reasons that, whilst he pretended to like him, Frank truly hated Kyle’s guts.
Kyle was standing thirty feet away next to a white truck and talking to a man wearing an all-in-one haz-mat suit. Frank approached the pair, his face graphically expressing displeasure at having to attend at all.
“Better have a damn good reason for gettin’ me down here, Kyle,” he said with only the slightest hint of threat. “Because I just caught the news on my way over and it told me a damn sight more than you did. That these guys died from a gas leak, for starters. What the hell you doin’ draggin’ me out to a gas leak?”
Kyle turned away from the man in the suit and raised his eyebrows knowingly. “Because this is no ordinary gas leak, Frank.” He noted his colleague’s look of expectancy. “This, my friend, is a Sarin gas leak.”
Frank’s eyes, normally heavy and impassive, widened. “Sarin? You mean nerve agent?”
Kyle nodded. “Yep. One of the nastier brands too, apparently. We got two dead, third floor apartment. One is the owner and one is a guy who came out to see if he was alright.”
Frank nodded knowingly. “Who’s stiff one, the resident?”
Kyle threw Warner a look and checked some notes he had hurriedly scribbled in his notepad. “David Clearwater. Twenty-four years old, Mojave Indian. No police record, not even an outstanding parking ticket. Seemingly as clean as they come.”
They started walking toward the base of the building. “Seems you can set your watch by this guy arriving at work and he didn’t show this morning.”
“So they sent somebody out to him? Well hell, this must be an important guy?”
Kyle shrugged. “They reckon not. They say that come midday one of the security staff was just leaving his shift and, as he lived a few miles up the road, he offered to stop by. So he gets here, finds the door unlocked, goes inside and bang, before he can even guess why his throat’s getting tight he’s a goner too. He managed to crawl into the corridor and so he probably died a lot slower than stiff number one. Sarin’s not like smoke, you see; it’s heavy and clings near the ground.”
“How do you know all this,” Warner asked. He knew it was too soon to have interviewed the men’s employers.
Kyle gave Warner a knowing smile. “Well, when our number two guy didn’t make it home in time for tea, another guy comes out. He sees all this activity and introduces himself to the police, voicing his concerns. I spoke to him myself, a real big guy by the name of....” he retrieved his black book from his inside pocket and checked the details. “...Barry Turner. He tells me the day’s events.”
“Who gave you the call in the first place?”
“Sheriff’s office,” Kyle said. “One of the neighbours had found the bodies and managed to dial 911 from her own apartment. She’s down in E.R. now, suffering some effects but it seems it had dissipated enough not to kill her by that time. They’re administering injections of atropine and they reckon she’ll live. As soon as the words ‘poison’ and ‘gas’ started to be banded around, I got the call.”
Warner looked up to the third floor, puzzled. “I still don’t see what this has to do with me. I mean, you know as well as me; gas attacks aren’t my thing.”
“Maybe not, but would you class a sarin attack as a terrorist situation?”
“Yeah, I’d say so.”
Kyle’s eyes flashed wide open for a split second. “Well would you like to guess which of this country’s megalithic corporations these guys are - sorry, were - employed by?”
Warner did the mental arithmetic, putting two and two together in his head. “IntelliSoft?” he asked suspiciously.
“IntelliSoft” Kyle agreed. “You see... I heard you were involved in the Flight 320 thing and that it wasn’t widely known but Bernstein’s daughter was on board. Am I right?”
Warner nodded. “He didn’t want the press overshadowing the other victims apparently. Shit, it’ll come out eventually, but I guess Bernstein was hoping that the interest would have died down by then.”
Kyle looked unimpressed. “Well, I’m sure our Mr. Bernstein is just kind-heartedness personified, but when another terrorist event occurs a little too close to the same guy I tend to get a bit suspicious, if you follow my meaning?”
Warner nodded again, pondering the investigative route. “What do we have on a perp and a motive?”
“We’ve got this,” Kyle said, walking toward a colleague and requesting an item from the evidence file. He was handed a gold plaque sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag. “It was taped inside the fridge, just above the bag of tricks that wiped our two friends out.”
“What have we here?” Frank asked with genuine intrigue, taking the heavy item and turning it around in his hands. As he did he saw the inscription. “Knight takes Rook? What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Kyle threw Warner’s expletive a dirty look and then shrugged. “Beats me, but IntelliSoft...? Chess tournament in New York? I see a nasty link starting to show its face here.”
There was a split-second glint in Warner’s eyes. “Bernstein was at the tournament same time his little girl snuffed it.” He held the bag flat, weighing it up in his palm. “It’s heavy this thing ain’t it?”
“That, my friend,” Kyle informed him, “is because what you have there is solid gold, probably twenty-four carat. Melted down, that little baby is probably worth about five to ten grand.”
Frank exhaled swiftly. “Jee...sus. That’s one hell of an expensive calling card.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“And is that all we got?”
“It’s all the boys in white brought down.”
Warner turned the plaque over in his hands again, with heightened respect. Even through the clear plastic he could feel the quality of the workmanship. The letters were very smoothly etched with no sharp edges. Professional.
“And this guy you spoke to...? Security fella...? You didn’t mention this to him?”
“No way,” Kyle said. “That’s not just a calling card; it’s probably a trump one as well.”
Warner looked up at the windows and smiled. “So, you gonna let me take a look at this apartment?”
“If we stick these on we can,” Kyle selected two gas masks from a pile next to another white van. “Sarin’s not like VX, it can’t be absorbed through the skin. They reckon it’s pretty clear now but the building will be evacuated for at least another forty-eight hours. Until there’s an official go ahead, nobody goes in without a mask.”
Warner looked back toward the third floor and wondered what it was that Mr. Dave Clearwater had to do this morning that was so important as to send somebody out to his home to check on him. Regardless of what IntelliSoft might protest, the arrival of the security guard still reeked of something he did not like.
He snatched one of the masks. “What’re we waiting for then? Let’s do it.”
desire a request
Judges 8:24
Jack did not sleep. That was what he would say if anyone asked why he looked so tired.
Which was essentially a lie. He did sleep, but like all those who say ‘I didn’t sleep’, it was really that he had been unable to attain a full sleep; a deep velvet sleep. At one point he had been close, very close, but then the sound of Elizabeth’s name being called had pulled him back from the edge. Like so many occasions since her death he had been lingering on the threshold. Unable to take the final step. Hearing her name had startled him back to the land of the almost living.
His eyes had opened but his body had remained perfectly still. It had only taken an instant to realise that it had been his own voice he had heard calling. A half-dream. Now he was left with nothing but her memory, afraid that if he moved so much as an inch; then the change in his posture would upset the balance. The memory would slide away from him as swiftly as Elizabeth had and he could not allow that. He had to cling on to what little he had.
Just as he should have clung on to Lara. Tight. Protective. Close.
A feeling that had been lacking in his life for way too long now. A feeling of hope.
He laid awake until six-thirty, his sweat steadily soaking into the sheets. His eyes were closed and he held Elizabeth’s pillow tight against his chest. It undoubtedly smelled more of him now than of her, but it still brought a solace. Her faint scent was the only tangible thing he had left.
His thoughts went on a journey. They visited the church and they visited the monastery. They visited Dave and they visited his daughter, though it hurt to stay. Then they visited her child; without even knowing where her child was.
All he saw was a dark place, a shadowy sub-world so very different from his own. The kind of world inhabited by the ‘Dalkamounis’ and the ‘Simons’, where human life was a commodity with which one could obtain the things one needed. Or worse, simply wanted. Dalkamouni did not kill Lara, but he was the kind of man who would have done; if it had served his purpose. Simon did not kill Lara, but he was prepared to use her death, and her child, as a bargaining tool; because it served his purpose. Neither man was any better or any worse than the other. They were both inhabitants of a world that Jack would never understand. A world he did not want to enter.
But a world that he was, nevertheless, knocking on the door of right now. He was almost begging to be let in so that he might collect what was his. He only hoped that he would be able to make his excuses and leave as quickly as possible.
As if it would ever prove to be that simple.
He knew very little about religious cults or the activities with which they concerned themselves, but things he was starting to realise; things he had never wanted to realise, were starting to scare him. Never in his wildest dreams would he have placed a ‘religious cult’ in the same sentence as a ‘terrorist organisation’ but now...?
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