by Tom Savage
Because of Carlin’s worldwide fame, and because his wife, Raina, had been one of the world’s leading concert pianists, the incident took even longer than the first three to play itself out in the papers and on television. Mark glanced over at the silent former agent as he drove, trying to imagine the incredible frustration he and his colleagues had been feeling by that point. He couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t even begin, but he remembered his own feelings when he’d first heard about the Carlin family and, later, the Banes family in Brooklyn.
He had been devastated, horrified, and his first instinct was to go to Green Hills, to attend the highly publicized funerals with all the crowds of fans and statesmen and celebrities from the international music industry. The President of the United States had sent a wreath and a telegram, as he had for the Websters and Mark’s own family. A movie star, a Fundamentalist minister, and two noted musicians had been killed, and even the White House had paid solemn tribute. But Mark, after much soul-searching, did not go to Green Hills twelve years ago, nor did he arrive in Brooklyn for the Banes funerals. He was Mark Stevenson by that time, and Matthew Farmer had successfully disappeared into the ether. Nothing would be served, he decided, by revealing his new identity, by mourning with strangers whose families and friends had met the same fate as his own people.
He was thinking this as they arrived in the town of Green Hills just after nine o’clock. It was not quite a town, more what Mark would call a village, and it was very pretty. There was a main street with charming rows of shops lining it. The town was situated in a valley, surrounded by—Mark smiled in spite of his growing dread—hills thick with evergreen forest. Green Hills.
Then his smile disappeared. Scavenger was here, in this postcard-pretty town, and he had Tracy. Mark thought about her, and about the awful photograph in the black envelope. She had been bound and gagged, and possibly drugged, as he had twice been drugged. He wondered how Scavenger had managed to get her, and when. But these were secondary thoughts compared to his one overriding obsession. It consumed him now, in the car, and he reached into the pocket of his jacket to once more touch the cold, reassuring hardness, the reality of the revolver Ron O’Hara had given him.
He was going to kill Scavenger. Now, tonight. And nobody was going to stop him.
He looked over at O’Hara, wondering if the man could read his mind, if he knew what Mark was planning. If he did, he wasn’t saying anything about it. Good, Mark thought. I don’t want any interference, and I will brook no argument. Scavenger is dead. Period.
O’Hara drove straight through the town on Main Street and continued past it for about half a mile. Then he slowed, looking off to the right in the glow of the headlights, searching. At last they came to what he had apparently been watching for, a drive that led away from the road through the thick forest. It was a paved road, and the entrance was flanked by two high brick pillars. O’Hara nodded.
“There’s the driveway,” he muttered, more to himself than to Mark. Then he drove on, past the turnoff. As ever, Mark did not question his action, merely sat beside him, waiting to be shown what would come next. A couple hundred yards farther down the road, O’Hara once again slowed the car, peering off to the right. There was another road there, this one unpaved, a narrow dirt track between two large trees. O’Hara turned onto this, and the ride became rather bumpy.
“Service road,” he explained, “for the farm closest to the Carlin house.”
Even as he said this, the wall of evergreen trees to the left of the dirt road abruptly stopped. The car emerged from the forest, and Mark could see tall grass in the headlights, stretching off to the left as far as he could see. A field. Thick trees lined the right side of the road.
“Okay,” O’Hara finally said. “We walk from here, and it’s going to be steep.”
He parked the car by the side of the rutted lane and got out. Mark followed him off the dirt track into the first stand of pine trees. It was dark, but O’Hara produced a penlight from a pocket that cast a tiny beam a few feet ahead of them. Even in the near-pitch-blackness, Mark could see that their way was sharply uphill. He took a deep breath and followed the big man into the forest.
“Stay behind me,” O’Hara muttered. He continued to lead the way, and Mark followed by squinting at the weak wash of light a few feet ahead of him. Twice he collided with tree trunks sticky and pungent with pine sap, but he brushed himself off and continued on his way. It was slow going in the forest, especially with the upgrade that seemed to become steeper with every step. But he followed, silent and uncomplaining. Tracy was at the end of this journey. Tracy and Scavenger. The one he would deliver, and the other he would kill.
They made their slow way up through the trees for what Mark estimated was about fifteen minutes. He was just getting used to the disorienting journey, falling into the rhythm of the big man in front of him, when O’Hara came to an abrupt halt, holding out his hand to check Mark’s progress.
“Whoa,” he hissed.
Mark stopped, blinking. “What?”
In answer to his question, O’Hara shone the penlight over to his left. Mark didn’t see anything in the darkness at first, but then the flicker of the beam caught a glint of silver. A small, camera-shaped electronic object was strapped in place on the side of a tree, a tiny prick of red at the center of what looked to be the lens. The light was directed off to their right. O’Hara slowly swung the penlight until he found what he was looking for: an identical object attached to a tree some twenty feet away. Neither he nor Mark had to be told that there were similar units mounted beyond that, circling the property. Off through the trees, perhaps the length of a football field above and in front of them, the lights of a big house shone brightly in the surrounding gloom.
“This is as close as we can get,” O’Hara said, the disappointment clear in his voice though Mark could not see his face. “We’ll have to go back the way we came, and around to the driveway. But even that is probably rigged.”
Mark closed his eyes, feeling the damp wind whistling through the trees that pressed in at them from all directions. They were stuck here, prevented from a surprise approach by Scavenger’s thorough protection system. Tracy might as well be a million miles away. He prayed that she was all right.
“What now?” Mark whispered to the dark shape beside him.
Although he couldn’t see him, Mark was certain that O’Hara actually shrugged.
“We wait,” he said.
49
His employer was playing the piano again.
Ivan Kolnikov, known to his quarry as Scavenger, sat on the overstuffed couch near the center of the room, facing the Bechstein concert grand. He was clad in his usual uniform now, a black suit, white shirt, and black bow tie. The duster was hanging in his room upstairs on the third floor. As big as the couch was, he gave the impression of being too big for it, but he waited patiently enough, his hands folded in his lap, wincing at the terrible, stumbling rendition of a difficult piece by one of his native country’s greatest national treasures. He frowned as he listened: for all his unswerving loyalty to this man, he wished he wouldn’t desecrate Rimsky-Korsakov.
At last the selection was at an end, and the Massenet elegy began. It was his employer’s favorite, judging from the number of times he insisted on playing it, but all the repetition had bred no familiarity with it. What should have been sad, soulful music was rendered sharp, discordant, comical. Ivan knew it was a song for the dead. He also knew his employer’s late mother’s famous recording of it. He wondered if that was why the man played it so frequently.
But so badly. Oh, well.…
He waited on the couch for his new instructions. He didn’t mind the amateurish playing: it had never really bothered him, not in all these years. Besides, now he had something else to ponder. He was excited, filled with a thrill of longing that was almost palpable. He glanced down at his watch: eleven o’clock. Soon, he thought. Very soon.
At midnight, one hour from now, Matthew Farmer w
ould come into this house, and Ivan would be ready for him.
Now the playing stopped. He looked over at his employer as he stood up and came around the piano to stand before him. He rose, awaiting instructions, noting that the man was smiling at him.
“It’s almost time,” his employer said.
“Yes,” Ivan replied.
“Ms. Morgan?”
Ivan inclined his head toward the door beyond the archway under the main staircase. “They’re getting her ready.”
“Good, good.” Ivan watched as the man smiled again and nodded, obviously pleased. He stood at attention, waiting for his employer to speak again.
“Well,” the man said at last, “it’s been quite a week, hasn’t it?”
Ivan nodded. “Quite a week.”
“You’ve done very well, Ivan. Very well indeed. You did everything perfectly, just as we envisioned it.” He paused now, glancing away, and Ivan felt the first icy little stab of apprehension. He saw something in the man’s eyes, in his demeanor, that hadn’t been there before. He waited in silence. Finally, his employer continued.
“But I’m afraid there’s been a little change in plans,” the man said. He gestured with an arm toward the piano, a slightly pained smile on his lips. “A variation on a theme, if you will. I hope you don’t mind too much, but your role in tonight’s game has been … well, rewritten.”
Ivan stared at him, at the expression on his face. The man still would not meet his gaze, and he looked truly contrite, apologetic. Ivan heard the basement door behind him open. His employer was looking past him now, toward the sound. As Ivan watched him, he gave a single, curt little nod and moved away toward the piano. He sat down and began to play again.
The Massenet elegy.
In that moment, just as the mournful music began to fill the living room, Ivan Kolnikov realized that he had been duped. He knew it as certainly as he was standing there. He had been cozened, made promises by this man whose parents were responsible for Ivan’s freedom, for his wife’s freedom, for their very lives. This man whom he had served faithfully all these years had used him to achieve his own goals. Ivan had escaped prison, wandered endlessly through frozen tundra, killed. He had survived the worst event of his life, in this house, eleven years ago. And it had all come to this end. He thought these things in that single moment, and then he thought: Anna.
“Anna!”
He had actually spoken her name aloud, he realized. Still the sad music continued, the song for the dead.
Then Ivan turned around to see the two people coming slowly toward him across the room.
50
The waiting had been the worst part. Mark sat in the passenger seat of the car looking out at O’Hara, who stood leaning on the hood, smoking a cigar. They’d returned to the car in the lane beside the field and sat for two hours. Mark had told him everything that had happened to him in the last few days, from the moment he had left O’Hara’s house in Georgetown and gone back to his parked car, where the black-wrapped cellular phone had been waiting for him.
Telling the story made him relive it in his mind, and he felt the cold anger, the murderous rage slowly growing inside him, permeating him, strengthening him. He remembered it all now in a series of vivid mental images: the computer disk with its bizarre letter, the house in Brooklyn, the mental institution in New Orleans with the tragic revenant that had once been Sarah Tennant, the cemetery in Los Angeles, his family’s home in Evanston. His father’s head: not the genuine article, but an amazing facsimile. He remembered the friendly nurse, Millicent Call, and the handsome police officer, and the photograph on the news program of Robert Gammon. Mark had not met him, only spoken with him on the phone, and the one time he had actually seen him he was dead, his face obscured by the jackal mask. But he felt the loss, the void Robert Gammon’s death caused, just the same.
Most of all, he thought of Tracy. She was in that house, that fortress in the forest above them, being held captive by a crazy person.
No, two crazy people. At least two, possibly more. The blond woman might be there, and others he didn’t know, could not imagine. Mark didn’t care. With his fury came recklessness, a headlong tumbling feeling he was unable to check. He would kill them all, if it came to that. He would deliver Tracy from the evil that was Scavenger. And he had former FBI Special Agent Ron O’Hara here to help him.
Now he saw O’Hara drop the cigar, crush it out under his foot, and come back to open the driver’s door, but he did not get in.
“Okay,” the big man said, “here’s how we’re going to play this. You drive. I’ll be in back, on the floor in front of the backseat. Those pillars will have cameras, probably, and the drive is about two hundred yards long. It’s surrounded by forest until you emerge in the front of the house, the lawn. There’s a bend about halfway up the drive. When you get there, slow down and I’ll get out and go into the woods. I doubt there are cameras or alarms that close to the house. Anyway, it’s a chance we have to take.”
Mark looked at his watch. Ten minutes to midnight. He felt the thrill of anticipation, and of fear. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll be nearby,” O’Hara said. “I can’t come in with you, though. They might get nervous and hurt Tracy. You’ll have to go in yourself, alone. Don’t try any heroics: her life is at stake, and your life, too. Just—I don’t know, try to stall them until I can figure out a way to join you.”
Mark nodded and slid over into the driver’s seat. O’Hara opened the back door, got in, and crouched down, wedging his large body into the relatively narrow space between the seats. Mark heard a grunt of pain or discomfort from behind him as he started the car. He turned it around and drove back through the trees to the main road.
“What about backup?” Mark asked the man on the floor behind him. “Your friends in the FBI, or at least the local police.…”
“Later,” O’Hara said. “Not now. A crowd would just spook them, and then we’d have a hostage situation.”
“We already have a hostage situation.”
“Yeah,” the big man said, “but not like we’d have if we called in the troops. Besides, this way we have something that may be better, that may actually save Ms. Morgan.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Surprise. They’re expecting you, alone. They don’t know I’m here.”
“Of course they don’t,” Mark said. “They think you’re dead.”
The car arrived at the turnoff, the drive that would lead up to the house. When Mark made the turn, he looked out at the brick column on his left. There was a small video camera mounted on top of it, aimed down at the road. As the car passed between the pillars the camera moved, silently tracking its progress.
“You were right about surveillance,” Mark whispered.
“Uh-huh,” came the voice from behind him.
Then everything became very dark as he drove up the steep grade between the high evergreen trees. The headlights pointed straight ahead of the car, reminding him of his approach to Tennant House in the fog. The memory of that house, what he had found waiting there for him, sent another pang of fear through him. He came to the bend in the driveway and slowed to a brief stop.
“They’ll be in the basement, I should think,” O’Hara whispered. “That’s where the family was. The entrance is under the main stairs on the far side of the living room from the front door. Remember: no heroics. I’ll be with you as soon as I can get in.”
The rear door opened and closed softly, and O’Hara was gone, melting into the shadows between the trees. Mark took a deep breath and drove on. Another turn, and then the car emerged into a clearing dominated by the big, dark house. A wide front lawn had been cleared from what must have once been forest, but he could only just make it out in the headlights and the single light that shone from the porch above the front door.
There was a two-car garage at the left of the house, but both spaces were taken up by vehicles, a black minibus and a red sedan. Mark parked at
the end of the drive in front of the garage, first turning it around so that it faced the way he had come. Leaving the keys in the ignition for a likely fast escape, he got out and went up the walk to the steps that led to the porch, which ran the entire length of the front of the house.
Mark looked around as he went up the steps, noting that the front and side lawns ended abruptly in forest some thirty feet in each direction. O’Hara was somewhere in that wood, watching him, waiting. The thought was reassuring, but he couldn’t rid himself of his terrible fear. The feeling grew as he arrived at the big oak door under the porch light.
It was standing wide open, and beyond it was black emptiness. He couldn’t see anything. He stopped, staring into the gloomy depths before him, breathing deeply of the chill, moist night air. Tracy was beyond this door, and so was his enemy.
Scavenger.
Just before he moved, the door and the wall of the house he faced were briefly illuminated by a flash of light. It was followed about ten seconds later by the low rumble of thunder. The sound rolled over him, the house, everything, before subsiding, echoing away through the trees.
One more deep breath, and Mark stepped forward into the darkness. When his eyes began to adjust, he found that he was in a large entryway, a foyer not unlike his own in Evanston. This one was much more grand, and it was obvious at a glance, even in the dark, that rich people had lived here, much richer than his own family had been. The Farmers had been well off: the Church of the True Believers had been a source of great wealth for Jacob Farmer, and he had not changed his will to exclude his estranged son before he died. Mark had inherited everything.
Now he felt compelled to move. If he stood here in this place too long, he might lose his courage, whatever he had that was going to save Tracy from her captors. And he was going to kill them. He had accepted the fact, made it a part of him, and he would not be deterred. He would kill Scavenger, and he would kill anyone who was assisting him as well. He reached up once more to feel the reassuring bulk of the revolver in his jacket pocket.
