by Brady, R. D.
Jake took a handful of peanuts from the bucket on the table. “What’d he die of?”
“Three bullets to the chest.”
Laney choked on her water and Yoni whacked her on the back.
“Oh my God,” she said when she could finally talk. “Every time I think this can’t get any worse, it does.”
“Well, apparently it gets a little worse than that. The police believe he was shot on his ranch. Then the body was moved. They were never able to find the original crime scene. And the ranch is 300 acres, so that’s pretty understandable. Whoever killed him, carried him back to the house and dumped him on the porch. And then killed Coleman’s dog.”
“His dog?” Jake asked.
“Yeah. Coleman must have left the dog in the house when the murderer showed up. The dog apparently ripped the door to shreds trying to get to him. Guy shot him right through the door. Then he grabbed Coleman’s computer and camera.”
“Do the police have any leads?” Jake asked.
Yoni shook his head, “Nothing. And the daughter didn’t have any idea why either. Before he died, her father had told her that he had a plan for making some more money. He never went into detail, though. According to the police, she’d said he’d been afraid he would jinx it, whatever it was.”
Yoni halted his story to smile at the waitress as she dropped off their drinks. “So I went by the Rusty Nail to see her last night. Nice lady. She’s got it tough, though. One of the kids is sick a lot. In fact, she had to rush home last night to take care of him. I stayed at the bar and talked to the owner who was tending bar, Travis Heymaker. I’d been sitting at the bar for about an hour when one of those political commercials comes on for Senator Robert Kensington. And Travis starts saying how this guy is a real shyster. That’s the actual word he used - shyster. So I start agreeing with him. Saying how you can’t trust any politician.
“And Heymaker just lets loose. He starts telling me how when Kelly’s dad died two years ago, Kensington bought up all his land after the estate was done with probate. Travis said he underpaid, but that he’d scared off anybody else who was interested."
“How’d he scare them off?” Laney asked.
“Anybody who was interested in the land got visited by the IRS or had a warrant issued for their arrest based on old parking tickets, or something else along those lines. Didn’t take too long for people to get the message and stop being interested. And the only money Kelly could get was half of what it was really worth. But she had a sick child and the bills were really beginning to pile up. So what could she do?”
“Does he know why Kensington wanted the land so badly?” Jake asked.
Yoni shrugged. “No. He knows something isn’t right. Apparently, Kensington put a fence around the whole property – all 300 acres. And he has guards patrolling it.”
Yoni stopped talking to give the waitress another flirtatious smile as she placed the food on the table. “So, I did a little checking into the property. I couldn’t do much recon on the land because, well heck, I just got here last night. I did check it out online. Kensington pulled a Cheney on Google Earth and had it removed. He even pulled some strings with the governor to have it declared a no-fly zone so that no planes can even fly over it. Seems like Kensington is trying to keep something hidden.”
“So we can’t get in?” Laney asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Yoni replied, swallowing a pickle slice and licking his fingers. “It’s just going to be a little difficult. I did a little recon last night and again this morning before I came to pick you up. It looks like the guards patrol every twenty minutes or so. The best call would be to go in at night. But there’s not much cover anywhere.”
“Ghillie suit?” Jake asked, a grin beginning to form on his face
Yoni returned the grin. “Ghillie suit.”
“What’s a ghillie suit?” Laney asked.
Yoni gave her a grin that was usually reserved for four-year-olds on Christmas morning. “Oh Doc, you’re going to love it.”
CHAPTER 51
Beaver Creek, MT
Later that night, Yoni and Jake prepared to recon the Kensington site. They were dressed like something out of the Swamp Thing.
After seeing their get-ups, Laney didn’t even attempt to get them to let her tag along. She knew she was out of her league. She might know how to run a hierarchical linear model analysis, but recon a target in the dead of night while dressed like a creature from the black lagoon? Not her thing.
After the last night’s attack, though, Jake wasn’t leaving her unprotected. She had a Beretta to the right of her laptop on the coffee table and a fully loaded shotgun on the kitchen counter across from her. All the doors and windows were locked, the blinds down.
Yoni had even set up trip wires out in the yard and drive as an extra precaution. At the first sign of trouble she was supposed to get to the truck and beat it out of there. And according to Yoni, if anyone tried to stop her, she was supposed to mow them down.
As he left, he’d even slipped her a machete with a wink. “Just in case. Remember, dismemberment will probably work, too.”
She smiled wryly. Her life had certainly taken a turn to the absurd recently. Last week around this time, she’d been settling down to watch a movie about a cat who wanted to sing in the movies with Max and Kati. Now she was sitting in a wired house, armed, trying to find information that tied a U.S. Senator to a bunch of missing cons.
And she was coming up empty. Although Kensington certainly had no love lost for the criminal population, all of it was pretty standard stuff. He was a strong proponent of the death penalty and reducing the number of appeals for a death verdict. He even wanted to increase prison time for all offenses across the board. Basically his motto seemed to be, if you couldn’t kill them for their crime, they should be locked up for the rest of their life.
Laney shook her head. She knew that politicians loved to take strong stances against crime, but the reality was that by the time the criminal justice system got involved, it was usually too late to do anything. Criminals weren’t made when they turn eighteen. They were made through a lifetime of experiences.
Effective crime reduction policies involved early parenting classes, increasing the quality of education that children received, and providing children with a safe environment after school. Those options always looked too soft in the public arena. So Senator Kensington was towing the party line with regards to the appropriate way to deal with criminals – lock them away for as long as possible.
Everything else about him looked normal and above-board as well. Henry had sent over a dossier, and nothing stood out. There were no red flags. Age fifty-nine, Harvard-educated, ran for his first office at thirty-two after running a successful law firm. Married at twenty-seven. His wife had died from breast cancer twenty-four years later, leaving him a widower with two adult sons. One son had taken over his father’s law firm a few years back and the other worked for a hedge fund in Manhattan.
Kensington had made a name for himself on the national scene two years ago when he'd introduced his controversial crime bill. The bill had failed, but his popularity had continued to grow. He’d been considered a shoo-in for the next Republican nomination for president, at least until John Michaels star started rising.
On paper, everything looked good. No scandals, no affairs. He appeared to love God and country. Laney’s additional searches did nothing to change that view. He’d become more conservative in his views in the last decade, at least publicly, but there was nothing that stood out as a problem. He was squeaky clean.
She sighed, clicking on another internet site. “Let’s see if this one is any more useful.”
Her phone beeped and she checked the text message. It was from Rocky. “Pulled his picture off an ATM cam. Emailed you a copy. We're putting it thru facial rec.”
Laney accessed her email and clicked on the attachment Rocky had sent. Even though she knew what to expect, she jolted at the sight. The man gl
ared at the camera, somehow conveying a palpable sense of menace even through the still photo. She shoved her chair back from the table, wanting to put some distance between herself and the picture.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
She shuddered as she remembered the sound of his body colliding with Jake’s car. She forwarded the email to Henry and then closed the picture. She didn’t need that face staring at her. Her nightmares were vivid enough.
She stood up and paced the room. She pulled out her phone and dialed Henry. Absently, she stood at the table and clicked through the pictures of Kensington she’d found. Some of the photos were obviously from the news media, some were surveillance photos. But there was nothing incriminating. Just pictures of the Senator waterskiing, snowshoeing, kissing babies, making a speech, meeting constituents.
He looked normal. Strong, patrician features, the slightest touch of grey at his temples. He looked like he was right out of central casting for a politician.
“But you never can tell, can you?” she murmured.
Her hand stilled over the computer as the next picture flashed across the screen. Paul’s companion’s face stared out at her. “Holy crap.”
She dropped back into her chair, pulling up Rocky’s picture. Her eyes shifted back and forth between the two shots. There was no mistake. It was the same man.
Henry’s deep baritone filled the phone. “Hi Laney. What are you still doing up?”
“Hey Henry,” She struggled to keep her voice even as she paced. “I um, was, um. . .
“Laney?
She gave herself a mental shake. “Sorry. Just got a double hit here. Rocky sent me a photo of Paul’s accomplice. And I just found pictures of him and Kensington. I’m not sure what his role is, but he’s connected to the Senator. I just sent you the picture from Rocky.”
“So now we’ve connected them. Hold on a sec.” She heard rustling and figured he was trying to get his large frame behind a normal desk. It must not be too easy being Henry.
“I can run a facial recognition. But it will take a while.”
“Okay. Rocky’s doing the same. Just let me know when you get something.”
“Will do.” Henry paused. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay.”
“Really?” Henry asked quietly.
She sighed, shutting down the pictures again and walking to the couch. She plopped down, pulling her legs under her. “I don't know, Henry. I mean, I keep trying to make sense of all of this and the one explanation that makes sense just seems impossible.”
“The fallen angels.”
She pulled a wool blanket from the back of the couch over her. “Yeah. When Dom first mentioned them, I thought he was crazy. But with the M.E.'s report and my own experience, what other explanation is there? And I checked out Cayce a little more thoroughly. The man was not a quack. He refused to take money for his work and he helped a lot of people. Research has even been done on his medical predictions, and he had an 86 percent accuracy rate. And I can't help but think...” her voice trailed off.
“If those reading were accurate, why couldn’t the other ones about Atlantis be just as accurate?” Henry sighed into the phone. “I know. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
She drummed her fingers on the side of the couch as her eyes roamed the room. “In Cayce’s work, he speaks of the split between the Children of the Law of One and the Sons of Belial. But before that time, everyone lived and worked together. And Cayce never explains what caused the split. But if Dom’s right, the fallen angels caused it.”
“I came to the same conclusion. I just don’t know where that gets us.”
They both lapsed into silence for a few moments before Laney broke it. “Henry, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
She sat up from the couch and started tracing the outline of the handgun on the table. “When Dom mentioned that quote from the Book of Enoch, you and my uncle seemed to recognize it right away. I get why Uncle Patrick did, but why did you?”
Henry was quiet on the other side of the phone. Laney worried that maybe she had overreached.
But then his voice came through, calm as usual. “When I was a child, my mother didn’t read me fairy tales the way other moms did. Instead, she read me the stories of the angels, both good and bad. They were my bedtime tales. It’s funny you should ask me about that, because ever since Dom mentioned the fallen angels, their stories have been filling my mind.”
“Why was she so fixated on angels?”
“I don't know. Now I’m beginning to wonder if she was trying to prepare me for something.”
“So you think Dom could be right?”
“I don't know, Laney. I just don't know.” Laney could hear the exasperation in his voice. “On the one hand, it seems crazy. Angels walking among us and being reincarnated over and over again? But on the other hand,” he paused, “it would explain what we’re dealing with.”
“And that means we need to prepare for the worst.”
“Yes.”
She picked the gun up from the table and sat back on the couch with it in her lap. “So, we’re preparing to go against a fallen angel who’s using men to dig up an ancient source of power.” She took a deep breath. “And who then plans on using said weapon to destroy the world.”
Henry gave a small chuckle. “Well, at least there’s no pressure.”
Laney smiled, but then it fell away. “You know, Henry, as long as we’re being so straightforward, it seems we’re avoiding one big issue.”
“What's that?
“The name. We keep calling them fallen angels, but that’s not entirely accurate. Because when an angel falls, he’s no longer known by that name. He’s called a demon.”
CHAPTER 52
Baltimore, MD
After the attack, Henry had relocated Patrick, Danny and himself to Dom’s bomb shelter. He told the rest of the staff to take a week off. The Chandler Group was currently closed for business.
Henry, however, was still plugging away, although he debated whether or not to call it a night. He pushed back from the computer monitor and rubbed his eyes. God, am I tired.
He’d been running the picture Laney had sent him through recognition systems since he’d gotten off the phone with her. Two hours later, he had nothing to show for it.
He knew Danny would probably be able to do it faster. He couldn’t, though, bring himself to wake him. Danny was asleep in one of the guest rooms down the hall after Henry slipped a sleeping pill into his tea earlier in the afternoon. He hadn’t wanted to, but Danny needed sleep. When he’d brought Danny into the Chandler Group, Henry had hoped to protect him against the violence that he’d been exposed to in his early life. Today, he’d failed at that task, and it was eating him up inside.
“To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question,” Henry muttered as he watched the program complete its run with no matches. He stared at the email icon on the bottom left of the screen. He thought about the file Dom had sent him about the present incarnations of the angels.
“Oh, what the hell.” He double-clicked the icon.
The file contained two large folders. One labeled “Twentieth Century and Later” and the other, “Nineteenth Century and Earlier”. He clicked on the twentieth century folder and over two hundred files listed on the screen in front of him. He quickly read through the names and a number of them jumped out at him: Rasputin, Mengela, Bundy.
Okay. This was stupid. These names were well known. Their guys were not. He was about to shut down the computer when he saw some names that were dated for the latter half of the twentieth century.
He rubbed his eyes. I check these dozen and call it a night.
He clicked on one of the Word files and a bio of a general in the Egyptian army appeared. The .jpeg file with the same name showed a tall man with dark hair, a scar across his cheek, and a look of complete menace in his eyes.
Definitely not a nice-looking man, but also not the man I
’m looking for.
He clicked through about eight more files and thought he should just forget it. This was ridiculous. He clicked on the ninth photo and his hand stilled. The man staring back at him had high cheekbones, crystal blue eyes, and soft brown hair. His eyes flew to the photo Laney had sent him. The man in Dom’s picture was a little younger, but undeniably the same man.
He quickly clicked the Word file and read the bio. He scanned past the early history to his more recent involvements. Suspected of being involved with Chechen rebels fifteen years ago, the Syrian government about eight years ago, and now he was believed to work for Senator Kensington.
Now they had a link between the attackers – Russian nationals – and their unknown man.
He scrolled farther down the file. Dom had tracked down some reports on people who’d worked with the man. The reports all differed except for one common trend: the man was a ruthless killer who seemed to have almost supernatural fighting skills. He went by the name Gideon but Dom had made a note about what he believed to be his real identity.
“Azazyel.”
CHAPTER 53
Havre, MT
Jake and Yoni crawled up to the eight-foot chain link fence that surrounded the all of Kensington’s property. They lay still, waiting for the patrol truck to pass. It took all Jake had not to storm the grounds. The idea that Tom was only a short distance away and in trouble was killing him.
He and Yoni had made a loop around the exterior of the fence to check for patrols and any gaps in the fence. There weren’t any.
Tom was in there somewhere. Jake felt it. He wanted to sprint in and grab him, taking out anyone who got in his way. But he knew that would only sign both of their death warrants. So slow and cautious was the approach.
