by Tom Abrahams
He backed out of the crowd and started across the Plaça de les Drassanes. He hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him to Parc de Sant Marti. The ten-kilometer trip took twenty minutes in the heavy traffic running northeast along the coast.
The driver pulled up next to the park. Custos paid in cash and waited for the cab to merge back into the lunchtime traffic. Satisfied the driver was gone, he walked three blocks from the park to Bac de Roda.
He found the bright coral and Mediterranean building next to the pharmacy and walked up to the glass front door. He pulled a keyring from his pocket and, after attempting three keys, found the right one. He opened the door and coughed against the blast of heat from the lobby.
He begrudgingly climbed the stairs, cursing the old man, Fernando Barçes, for not having lived in a more modern building.
He reached the third floor and trudged along the terrazzo to flat 310, found the right key, and shouldered himself into Barçes’s apartment. Custos locked the door behind him and made a straight line to the refrigerator. He found a red-labeled bottle of Estrella beer and popped it open, swigging it on his way back to the living area, grabbing a bag from the kitchen table when he passed.
The television was on, the volume low, and BBC World was reporting about the summit. On the screen was an aerial shot of the World Trade Center. Custos didn’t bother turning up the volume as he sat on the floor and crossed his legs. He set the beer on the floor and centered the bag in front of him.
He’d only opened it once since taking it from the pasty Russian, Feodor Ivanovich, in a Roman café. That check had been to ensure he’d retrieved the right goods. Now they needed closer inspection.
He took another sip of the beer, puckered his lips at the sour taste, and unzipped the bag. Custos pulled open the sides of the bag and reached inside to remove its contents.
He held a pair of devices in his hands. They were small, lightweight, and devoid of metal, just as the Russian promised they would be.
For months, Custos had negotiated with black market proxies. One meeting led to another. At one point, after paying a large sum of money to an operative representing AQAP, Al-Qaeda Arabian Peninsula, Custos was ready to give up. Nobody could produce the magic beast he sought. The operative never had a chance to spend the money. Instead, he’d wound up at the bottom of the Euphrates.
Out of the blue, Custos had gotten an email from a man claiming to have what he sought: an undetectable explosive. Custos was told there were only two groups in the world who’d mastered it. AQAP and an off-the-books section of Russia’s 12th Chief Directorate, the military agency in charge of nuclear security. AQAP’s version of the explosion was essentially an IED made in back-alley kitchens. They were cheap but likely effective. Russia’s version was more sophisticated, more versatile, but nearly cost prohibitive.
Since AQAP was out of the question, Custos, with the help of Sir Spencer’s Ukrainian connections, worked to gain the confidence of the Russian source. That source, Feodor Ivanovich, negotiated a fair price on behalf of his employers and agreed to sell two units to Custos.
Custos recalled the hassle, the meetings, the money, and the murder it took to hold the devices in his hands. These were world-changers, he thought, balancing their weight in his palms.
They were better than an underwear or shoe bomb, more clever than a liquid-explosive-filled Gatorade bottle.
They were a unique mix of ingredients meant to catch fire, explode, and emit. Both incendiary and dirty, they were the cutting edge of what was possible: a catastrophic mixture of thermite and nuclear material in an untraceable nonmetal casing.
What made these devices better than the junk AQAP had promised but not delivered was that they were surgically implantable. The carrier, or anyone with the correct information, could detonate the device from a cell phone or a laptop.
Custos turned over the devices in his hands, looking at the genius of them. He should have known from the beginning that one of the devices was meant for him.
He replaced the twin devices in the bag, zipped it up, and carried it back to the kitchen. He went to the bathroom, flipped the toilet lid, and relieved himself.
He stood there, one hand on his hip, and turned to the cast-iron tub on the opposite wall. He smiled as he urinated.
“I’ve got plans for you, old man,” he said to Barçes, who was hog-tied, barely conscious, and lying on his side in the tub. “Tengo planes para ti. Planes muy grande.”
*
Sir Spencer limped along the cobblestone street in the city’s Gothic quarter. He drifted amongst the tourists shopping in the high-walled streets and alleys, occasionally stumbling from a misplacement of his cane on the stones.
It was less hot than he’d found Park Güell, but still not temperate enough. Sweat collected in the small of his back and under his arms, drenching the linen shirt he’d purchased from a shop just an hour earlier.
This was freedom he’d not tasted in months, and despite the heat, he relished it. The bustle, the energy, the optimism of the people shuttling in and out of storefronts and cafés invigorated him.
He found a gelato and coffee stand and stopped for a rest and a cone. He’d taken his first taste when his phone rang. He pressed the encryption key and answered.
“Is your man in trouble?” President Jackson snarled.
“Why are you calling me?”
“It’s a secure line.”
“No government line is secure.”
“I’m in the air. It’s secure.”
“Not sure how that makes a diff—”
“Answer my question.”
“I don’t know if he’s in trouble. Why would you suggest that?” He took a napkin from the tabletop dispenser and wiped the edge of the cone before taking another lick.
“There was a murder in the hotel at the World Trade Center.”
“And you immediately assume our boy had something to do with it?”
“It complicates everything.”
“Not necessarily.”
“It better not,” she growled.
“Before I disconnect the call, might I remind you I don’t typically respond well to threats.”
“It’s not a threat.”
“Don’t confuse your power with my authority.” Sir Spencer ended the call and slid the phone onto the table. His gelato was a mess, having succumbed to the heat far too quickly.
He didn’t like that Felicia Jackson had called him from a government line. That was about as stupid as anything she’d ever done.
She was never his first choice for the Oval Office; Secretary Blackmon was. She’d survived the Capitol explosion. Blackmon, the idiot, got caught. The Brethren were stuck with her.
Jackson, he’d long believed, with her devil black hair and demonic blue eyes, was too quick to light a fuse. She was impulsive. She was dangerous.
He pushed himself to his feet and tossed what was left of the cone in a nearby trashcan, slid his phone into his pocket, and merged back into the flow of pedestrians. He looked up to the wrought-iron balcony of an apartment some thirty feet above. A woman leaned on the railing, her arms crossed in front of her as she gazed out from her landing. Tendrils of cigarette smoke escaped her nose as she exhaled.
Sir Spencer passed underneath the woman and considered Felicia Jackson’s concerns. Despite her impudence, she had a point.
If Custos had erred, it was a serious complication. Custos, as good as he was at what he did, shared the same impulsivity as Felicia Jackson. He was quick to act and less contemplative than Sir Spencer would have liked.
While they were sitting on the bench at Park Güell, Custos had told him he’d procured a hotel room key. Killing someone for the key was unnecessary.
Sir Spencer turned a corner into a narrow alley. The sun was blocked by the tall buildings on either side, and it was considerably cooler in the alley. He stopped and stood in the middle of the cobblestone pathway. He closed his eyes. In the apartments above him, a couple argued a
bout an unpaid bill, a baby cried, someone was cooking curry. To his left, a young man mumbled to himself as he passed. On his right a woman hummed sweetly.
All of them are blind.
He opened his eyes and pulled his phone from his pocket, turned on the encryption, and called Custos.
“Where are you?” he asked when Custos answered.
“I’m in an apartment.”
“What are you doing?”
“Preparing.”
“Is your line secure?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill someone in the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Sir Spencer tapped his cane on the uneven stone. “Why?”
“I needed the key.”
“And you couldn’t have procured the key without violence?” Sir Spencer asked. “You couldn’t have just let a room at the hotel yourself?”
“I didn’t think about that,” Custos admitted. “I did what was easiest.”
Sir Spencer smiled but said nothing.
“Is there a problem?” Custos’s voice elevated an octave.
“Possibly. You left a body.”
“It’s not a problem.” Custos cleared his throat. “It won’t affect the plan.”
“You can’t say that with certainty.” Sir Spencer started walking toward the end of the alley. “It’s likely they have video of you. They’ll know what you look like.”
“I’ll work around it.”
“I trust you will.”
Sir Spencer hung up and stepped gingerly toward the alley’s intersection with a wider, busier street. He was on the edge of the Gothic Quarter, making his way to his flat.
It was smaller than he’d have liked, and without much of a view, but it was better than a cell. He paused at the intersection to let a pair of nuns pass him. They smiled at him and he nodded before rounding the corner to merge into the bustle.
*
Jon Custos looked at the phone, his eyes lingering after Sir Spencer hung up. He clenched his jaw.
“I trust you will?” he mocked. “You left a body.”
Custos gripped the phone, as if to crush it, before tossing it onto the kitchen table. He bit into his lip until his tongue was dipped in a warm, salty mixture of saliva and blood. He yanked open kitchen drawers until he found a lighter and a steak knife.
“I’ve never failed him,” he muttered and moved to the cabinet under the sink. He crouched and yanked open the cabinet doors. “Never. And he doubts me. He doubts me, a martyr for the greater good. I’m a hand of the Brethren.”
He sucked against the wound in his mouth and searched the space under the sink, finding a large bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a bottle of vodka. Custos moved three steps to the pantry, where he grabbed a half-full bag of granulated sugar. He took the bag and the bottles with him to the bathroom.
From a mirrored medicine cabinet, Custos plucked a box of bandages and some cotton balls. He slapped shut the toilet lid and placed his findings atop the bone-colored porcelain.
“Viejo,” he called to Barçes, barely drawing a reaction from the weakened, semiconscious janitor, “donde esta aguja y hilo?” He needed a needle and thread.
Barçes mumbled something unintelligible that was more groan than Catalan. He smacked his lips and tried licking them.
Custos grunted and thumped to the bedroom to rifle through dresser drawers. He found a travel sewing kit and dropped it into his pocket. It would do.
Returning to the bathroom, he grabbed the vodka bottle and uncapped it. He took a swig and winced against the burn then bent down onto his knees, sitting on his heels, and gripped Barçes’s face at his jaw. He held open the old man’s mouth just enough to funnel in a couple of shots’ worth of vodka.
Barçes gulped the drink at first, perhaps thinking it was water, before coughing it up. Custos held onto his jaw and poured in another double. He wanted the man inebriated and feeling no pain.
While he waited for the vodka to take effect, Custos returned to the kitchen. He unzipped the bag containing the Russian devices and removed one of them. He checked to make sure it was properly sealed and marched back to the bathroom.
The old man had slipped from semiconsciousness to virtual delirium and was on his back in the tub, drooling and breathing heavily from his mouth. His legs were splayed and one of them hung over the edge of the tub.
Custos watched Barçes’s chest heave up and down for a minute before he returned to the bedroom. He stripped the sheets from the bed and laid them on the floor, then took a pair of towels and spread them on top of the sheets.
It took him five minutes to move Barçes from the tub to the sheets. He arranged the old man on his back with his arms extended and his legs spread. He looked like an unconscious Vitruvian Man, with his wrists and ankles bound to the heavy furniture in the room. Custos knew if Barçes struggled from the pain, he’d need restraints.
His last preoperative step was music. A clock radio was perched on a bedside table, and Custos switched it on, spinning the tuner to a classical music station. He thumbed up the volume and sat on the edge of the bed, listening for a moment.
To his surprise, Custos recognized the piece. Sir Spencer had long tried to educate him about the virtue of the classics. Most of it had fallen on deaf ears. But a few of the more aggressive composers spoke to Custos. Among them was Dmitri Shostakovich, a Russian composer and pianist who rose to fame during the early days of the Cold War.
He was an obsessive man who often sent letters to himself to test the effectiveness of the postal service. He synchronized all of the clocks in his apartment. He suffered tics. He was a genius.
Custos thought about the man as the clock radio blared the dark, measured angst and anger of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. The strings cried and wailed in the early minutes of the piece, and Custos’s mind flashed to Feodor Ivanovich. Did the Russian gangster share the same appreciation for Shostakovoch? It was fitting, Custos thought, that he should work with one Russian creation as he listened to another.
He pushed himself from the bed and found his place on the floor at his patient’s side. He plucked the knife from the floor and sterilized it with the lighter before pressing the hot stainless steel to Barçes abdomen, above the navel.
Forty minutes later, the work nearly complete and Barçes on the edge of consciousness, Custos poured sugar into the wound and stitched closed the five-inch incision. He stuck the needle downward through the subdermal layer of skin. He didn’t want the stitches tearing. They needed to hold. He passed the needle through the wound and then up through the skin to the other side of the cut. He worked quickly but with precision.
The music was at its crescendo, the woodwinds and brass singing for attention as the percussion quickened its rhythm, thundering to the melancholy conclusion. Custos admired his handiwork. He’d only tried this once before, and septicemia had killed the patient within hours of the surgery.
He knew this time, as he cut the thread and knotted the end of the final suture, he’d succeeded. He doused the edges of the wound with hydrogen peroxide and wiped it dry with cotton. The patient stirred, tugging against the binds with his arms.
“Què va passar?” Barçes gargled in Catalan, his eyes flickering as he questioned what happened to him through the haze of dehydration, alcohol, and pain. “Què vas fer?”
“What did I do?” Custos asked reflexively in Spanish. “I did only what needed to be done.”
He went to the kitchen to get ice from the freezer. He brought a cup back to his patient and told him to suck on the cubes.
“You’ll need your strength now,” Custos said. “We don’t have much time left and I need you to be strong, viejo.”
CHAPTER 30
THE GALLERIA
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Holt rubbed his jaw, staring at the words on his laptop screen.
I’m sending this email from Air Force One. And I’m not in the media cabin.
The implications were ridiculous. He�
��d had high-level sources before: on Congressional committees, Homeland Security, at the Pentagon, and in the State Department. But a potential West-Winger? Someone close enough to the president that he or she was riding on Air Force One for an overseas trip? He uncapped a Gatorade and gulped it.
He responded to the email with his cell phone number, his personal email address, and a note expressing how anxious he was to connect. He hit send and looked at the note he’d scribbled and added a line at the bottom.
THE BRETHREN—NEW WORLD ORDER
SIR SPENCER—THE BRETHREN
SIR SPENCER—ERIK MAJORS
SIR SPENCER—HORUS
HORUS’S DEATH—ERIK MAJORS’S DEATH
HORUS—THE BRETHREN
ALL CONNECTED??
TIMING??
WHAT’S THE GOAL??
IS THE WHITE HOUSE INVOLVED?
Holt checked his phone. Still no messages or texts from Karen. He looked around the hotel room at the unmade bed, the pizza box, his suitcase. He needed to leave. There was nothing more he could accomplish by sitting in his hotel room.
He’d go to the forensics center and check on Karen. If nothing else, he could make sure she was okay. Holt packed up his belongings and within twenty minutes was on his way to the Harris County morgue.
He’d driven a couple of miles when his phone rang. He pressed the Bluetooth button on the car’s steering wheel and answered.
“Dillinger Holt.”
“What have you got?” his editor asked. “I need you to feed the beast.”
“Your entire homepage is my stuff,” he answered. “I’d say the beast is fed.”
“Not hardly,” she replied hollowly, clearly on speakerphone. “The traffic on the site is insane. We’re setting records for unique visitors and time per page. I need more to keep the momentum going.”
