“Like what?”
“First, there was that incident in Tampa that involved a guy who witnesses identified as Whelan from the sketch. His companion was a thickly muscled Incredible Hulk lookalike without the green skin. The guy takes on a gang of toughs and slaps them around like ping pong balls. From what I’ve read of the files on the Sleeping Dogs, that guy could have been the one they called Larsen, the Man With No Neck.”
“You mean there are two of these guys still alive?” Antonelli said.
“Worse. This guy in Hawaii, the suspected serial killer, he could be the one known as Stensen. According to the files, he had a vigilante complex. No perps were safe when he was around.”
“So you’re thinking there may be as many as three of these guys instead of just Whelan.”
“I’m thinking there maybe more than that. Maybe they’re all still alive. Maybe none of them died in that plane crash twenty years ago. Maybe it was all a ruse.”
“Jesus,” Antonelli said.
“Yeah, Jesus. If this is true, then Whelan is visiting each one of the Sleeping Dogs. Collecting the strays, as it were.” He paused; there was a distant look in his eyes. “But why? Is he reuniting them? And for what?” He looked at Antonelli and said, “This thing just got more complicated and probably a hell of a lot more dangerous.”
40 Nashville, Tennessee
Whelan spent the night at Kirkland’s modest cottage on Bayou Dularge Road near the small village of Theriot. After dinner, they nursed a few beers and reminisced. They talked about past missions and the Dogs who hadn’t come back. They talked about Levell and McCoy and Nishioki and Horowitz. They talked about Whelan and his life in Ireland over the past twenty years. And they talked about Kirkland’s recent past. He had found his calling as a white knight for society’s abused and oppressed. He took personal satisfaction in championing underdogs like Remy, and, like Stensen, clearing some of humanity’s cesspools. Like most of the Dogs, he was apolitical. Men who made their own rules didn’t need to subscribe to dogma of any persuasion. But the thought of another mission with the Dogs, of working with Levell and McCoy again, intrigued him.
Despite the lumpy sofa at Kirkland’s, Whelan slept soundly. In a way he was surprised, because alcohol usually interfered with his sleep, and he’d had a lot of beer and tequila over the course of the evening. It was his first decent night’s sleep since leaving Ireland more than a week earlier. It also was the first night he was not the sole guardian of his corner of the universe.
The next morning he left before sunrise on the next leg of his travels. He drove up Bayou Dularge Road to the southern outskirts of Houma, then skirted the town and retraced his path back to Kenner outside New Orleans where he picked up Interstate 10. A short time later he was threading his way between Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas, then north through Mississippi to the outskirts of Memphis. He exited onto Interstate 40 for the final leg to Nashville.
He took his time, and, with stops, it was a twelve-hour trip. He pulled up to his hotel near the campus of Vanderbilt University at exactly five o’clock. There were other routes he could have taken that might have been faster, but he liked sticking with the Interstate system and blending in with the heavier traffic. His initial plan had been to fly from New Orleans to Nashville, but his gut instinct told him to avoid the airports. He knew that the government employed facial recognition technology in airports and other places. Although primarily used by TSA for anti-terrorism purposes, the Bureau could co-opt it for their purposes too. The facial prosthetics given to him in California had been designed to evade FRT, but he doubted the new look given him by Leonie Fontenot would serve the same purpose. He glanced at his reflection in the car’s rearview mirror. His new appearance, with the slicked back dark hair, pencil moustache and soul patch, did create a resemblance to a very husky Johnny Depp. If I was going to look like a movie actor, he thought, I’d rather be a young Clint Eastwood.
He checked into the hotel. It was almost across the street from the university. Later he found the hotel’s modest fitness facility and worked up a drenching sweat. It felt good after the long hours in the car. After showering, he called Caitlin and the boys. Things were in good order at home. He made another call, this time to Levell, to report on his meeting with Kirkland and to get details on his next and final recruit, Quentin Thomas.
The following morning, after a restless sleep filled with dreams in which he was a desperate prey stalked by an unknown force, Whelan went over to the Vanderbilt campus. It was a short but brisk walk through the chilly January air of Middle Tennessee. The university had been founded in 1873 and the campus was beautiful, even in the cold, gray winter gloom. It had been designated a National Arboretum and featured over 300 different species of trees and shrubs.
He found Furman Hall tucked behind the law school. A small plaque near the main entrance identified it as one of the oldest buildings on campus. It also was the headquarters for the school’s College of Arts and Science. Professor Bryson—Quentin Thomas’ nom de guerre— wasn’t in his office, so Whelan asked a young assistant in the Philosophy Department when he might be expected. She seemed hesitant to volunteer any information.
“I’m an old friend and only in town for a short time. I’d hoped to be able to visit with him briefly while I’m here,” he said, thinking this might encourage her.
“Well, he usually comes in around ten…, but if you don’t have an appointment….” She trailed off.
“Perhaps I can meet up with him before then. Where would he be now?”
The girl scrunched her face up in indecision. Whelan smiled pleasantly and waited. Finally she said, “He usually works out in the mornings before he comes to the office. You might find him at the gym. Memorial Gym.”
The gym was located across campus from Furman Hall. Although the trees and ground were bare and few people lingered outside in the crisp air, the scene was almost idyllic to Whelan. He was reminded of parts of Dublin, particularly the area around Trinity College where he’d attended Ireland’s oldest and most prestigious law school. Though not as ancient as Trinity, Vanderbilt’s buildings were old and finely crafted.
He found the school’s gym without difficulty and quickly located the weight room. As he expected, Thomas was lifting. Like all the Dogs, he possessed enormous strength. He was not the strongest—that was Larsen—but he did have the quickest reflexes of any of them. He was finishing a set of bench presses, smoothly raising and lifting the bar with three hundred fifty pounds of weight, ten repetitions, each seemingly as effortless as the first. There were a few other students in the weight room—very large young men, football players from the look of them. They watched Thomas enviously.
“Need a spot?” Whelan said in jest as he approached.
“No,” Thomas said, setting the bar back on the stanchions, “but thanks for offering.” He sat up, perspiration running off his head and body like rain off sharply chiseled black granite. He glanced up at Whelan with pale blue eyes that were a striking contrast to his dark skin. When he saw who it was, he said, “You! Cliff told me to expect you. How the hell are you, man?” He rose and clasped Whelan’s hand.
“Been a long time, Quent. From the look of you, you haven’t missed a day of conditioning.”
“You either, brother, you either. What’s it been? Goin’ on twenty years?”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other for a few moments, then Thomas grinned and said, “What’s with the Johnny Depp-on-steroids look?”
“Long story.”
“Shit, I can’t believe it. Brendan Whelan, the Prince of Wolves. Man, we got some catchin’ up to do. Let me get showered, then we’ll go grab some breakfast.”
Thirty minutes later they were sitting in a small café on West End Avenue across from the campus. The few coeds in the place were stealing peeks at Professor Bryson and his friend. They giggled as they toyed with their skinny caramel macchiatos.
“Don’t you have office hours at ten?�
�� Whelan said.
“Oh, that’s just academic masturbation. Kids today are totally digital. They want to confer with me, they text. If it’s lengthy or involves attachments, they use email.”
“What about classes this morning?”
Thomas made a dismissive motion with his hand. “I don’t have classes on Tuesdays. If I did, I’d have a grad student teach it for me, so I could spend this time getting caught up with you.”
Whelan shook his head. “You, a college professor. I always thought you would have been an all-pro running back if it hadn’t been for the Sleeping Dogs.”
Thomas was suddenly serious. “No, man. I always wanted to study and teach philosophy. It’s a great life. I’m a tenured fulltime faculty member.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Tenured?”
“No. Fulltime.”
Thomas leaned in closer and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “The Dean would have my ass if he heard me say this, but fulltime in academia is far different than in the private sector. With teaching, including preparation and test grading, research and publication, and service on various faculty committees, I work about a twenty-five hour week. Some of the others use grad students to teach and do research. They probably don’t work fifteen hours a week.”
Whelan looked casually around the coffee shop. “Lot of raging hot young women on campus. Got a main squeeze?”
Thomas shook his head. “I was married for awhile, a fellow doctoral candidate, but it didn’t work out after we graduated and started teaching. We’d be in school all day, then come home and rehash it again. It was like there just wasn’t anything else. These days I’m happy playing the field, as they say. But after dealing with kids all week,” he glanced at the giggling coeds, “I want a mature woman as my off-work companion.”
“Of all of us, you were the deepest thinker. It doesn’t surprise me that you chose philosophy as your discipline.”
“Like they say, the mind is a terrible thing to waste. What you don’t use, you lose.”
“Is that Plato?” Whelan said, smiling.
“No. It’s Quentin Thomas.”
At that moment, two of the coeds who had been eying them flounced over to their table. One of them, a blonde wearing designer clothes, said, “Hi, Professor Bryson. Remember us from your Asian Philosophy class? Kailee and Lindsay.”
“Of course, ladies. Nice to see you.”
While Kailee flirted with Thomas, her friend focused on Whelan. “I haven’t seen you before, and I’d remember you if I did. Do you teach here, too?”
Whelan smiled. “No. Just an old friend of the professor’s passing through town.”
Lindsay, wearing a tight sweater, crossed her arms beneath her full breasts and pushed them up. It was an impressive sight. “Do you need someone to show you around town?” She smiled coyly.
“Thanks,” Whelan said, amused, “but I’m not going to be in town long enough to see any of it.”
“Oh,” she said with a little pout.
“Ladies,” Thomas said, “my friend and I have some important business to discuss. See you in class, okay?”
The girls trudged back to their table and sat. The motion hiked up their short wool skirts. There was a lot of firm, bare thigh showing above knee-high, faux fur-trimmed, leather boots. Thomas sighed. “In another life, perhaps.”
They got refills – coffee for Whelan and green tea for Thomas – and Whelan filled him in on Levell, the Society, and the prospective mission. As they finished, Whelan said, “After which, we go back underground; hopefully for good this time.”
Thomas’s silence was surprising. Finally he said, “Do you know when this mission is to take place?”
“No, but it will happen soon. Levell will get in touch with each of us and tell us when and where to rendezvous. After that the game, as they say, is afoot.”
“Thanks, Sherlock,” Thomas said, “but, as Sam Goldwyn famously said, ‘include me out’.” He set his cup down, stood up, and pulled his coat on. He clapped Whelan on the shoulder. “I’ve worked hard to build just the life I want. I wish you and the others luck, brother, but this doesn’t sound like it’s my fight.” With that, he walked away.
PART THREE:
OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS
41 Dingle, Ireland— Six Months Later
Whelan’s adopted home was the only town on the Dingle Peninsula, a mountainous finger of land that stretched some forty miles into the Atlantic south of Tralee in County Kerry. Until the modern era, it had been on the far edge of the known world. But, with the mountains that formed the spine of the peninsula at its back and a protected cove at its feet, over time Dingle developed into an important port on the west coast of Ireland, second only to Galway. Even so, it remained a small town with a population of approximately two thousand residents. With hilly, narrow, ancient streets winding past brightly painted homes and shops, it boasted fifty-two pubs, one for each week of the year.
It was little more than a week since he’d returned following six months in the States. Whelan and his sons had hiked up nearby Mount Brandon. At more than thirty-two hundred feet, it was the second highest mountain in Ireland. On the climb, he told the boys one of their favorite stories, about how the mountain was named for St. Brendan the Navigator; and that legend had it he scaled the mountain around AD 530 and had a vision of the North American continent. St. Brendan’s fame endured as the first European allegedly to sail to the Western Hemisphere and back. The story of his voyage had been translated into every European language by the twelfth century.
The mountain was the site of an ancient Iron Age pilgrimage, as part of the worship of the Celtic god Lughnasa during the harvest festival. In the modern era it had become the scene of a pilgrimage by Irish Catholics in honor of St. Brendan. The route was called Cosán na Naomh or Saints Road, and it ended at the summit near the remains of a small stone building, or oratory, that legend claimed was used by St. Brendan.
Whelan, named for the saint, sat with his boys at the top of the mountain a few feet from the ruins of the oratory. They were gazing west toward the sun, as it settled into the horizon across the gray, cloud-mottled Atlantic. It wasn’t raining, but the air and ground were damp. The breeze off the ocean had picked up, bringing a promise of a chilly evening.
“Da,” Declan, age thirteen, said. “Do you believe St. Brendan really sailed all the way to America? I mean, it was only the sixth century. Way before Columbus or even Leif Erikson.”
“I believe it’s possible,” Whelan said. “A Brit named Tim Severin replicated the voyage in nineteen-seventy using a curach similar to the one St. Brendan’s crew would have used.”
Sean, age fifteen, had been sitting quietly with a handful of pebbles, slowly tossing them down the hillside, one-by-one. Without looking up he said, “What’s a curach?”
“It was a boat made of dried ox hides that were cured with oak bark and stretched over a wooden frame.”
“Wouldn’t that leak pretty badly?” Sean said.
“They used tar to seal the joints, but there would still be leakage.”
Declan thought about that for a moment. “Did they have to row all the way across the Atlantic and back?”
“I’m sure they did a lot of rowing at times, but they usually rigged a sail on a mast in the middle of the boat.”
Sean shook his head slowly back and forth.
“Don’t tell me you’re a nonbeliever, Sean, and you an Irishman at that.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe. I want to believe. It’s just that the boats were so small and primitive and the Atlantic is so big. And there are ferocious storms and all.”
Whelan smiled. He was pleased that his boys were bright and bold enough to express some skepticism. “Can there be a storm more ferocious than a determined Celt?”
Both boys laughed and shook their heads.
“Good point,” Sean said.
Although it was August, the chill was beginning to deepen in th
e wake of the setting sun. The three of them got up and made their way back down the hill to their car.
* * *
The Fianna House Bed and Breakfast sat on high ground overlooking the harbor just south of town. The original part of the structure was built as a small farm bungalow in the late eighteenth century. That was expanded into a two-story manor house early in the twentieth century. Brendan and Caitlin Whelan bought the property after they were married. They modified the structure into a ten-bedroom, ten-bathroom inn with kitchen, dining room, library/sitting area, and a small office. It had taken a lot of work and money, but the two of them loved their lives as innkeepers in an area where tourism was steadily increasing.
Whelan and the boys drove through the gate into a large motor court surrounded by hedgerows. Caitlin was waiting for them at the front door. Her face glowed with a warm and tender smile at the sight of her three boys back from their latest venture. They were opposites in many ways, Whelan thought; yet, in their case, opposites definitely attracted. She was calm, imperturbable, but outgoing, even vivacious, around others. He was quiet, reserved; it took a while for him to warm up to strangers. He was tall and thickly muscled. Caitlin was petite and lithe. Yet, Whelan thought, we fit together perfectly, like two halves crafted for joinder by a master artisan. He smiled.
As Sean and Declan tried to rush past their mother in search of snacks, Caitlin reached out and grabbed them. “Now just a minute. Where’s a mother’s hug?” The boys each gave her a perfunctory embrace, then dashed off. “Get cleaned up,” she called after them. “We’re going to your grandparents’ for dinner.”
As Whelan approached her, a last ray of the setting sun found a hole in the cloud cover and bathed her in a lovely glow. He caught his breath at the sight of her.
She put both fists on her hips and gave him a mock stern look. “You had better show more affection than those lads just did.”
Sleeping Dogs: The Awakening Page 20
