“And you have a problem with that because—?”
“Mucking about with a crime scene before Forensics arrives is a great way to lose evidence.”
“We could wait, but this is a matter of terrorism. The murder investigation is secondary. It’s more important right now to find a lead to the terrorists than it is to build a court case.”
“If we cock this it’ll ruin me in the department,” she warned.
“Me, too. So, let’s not cock it up.”
I gave her my very best “hey, I’m a blond-haired blue-eyed all-American guy” smile. That smile would charm the knickers off the Queen. Owlstone’s eyes were cold and her mouth was a stiff line of disapproval, but … she nodded. And she kept her knickers on, which in light of that smile spoke to a great deal of self-control.
We turned and faced the bed.
The stupid smile I wore crumbled slowly into dust and fell away.
“Damn,” I said softly.
Owlstone sighed, and we set to work.
Interlude Twelve
Near Shetland in the Orkney Isles
December 18, 10:21 A.M. GMT
Rafael Santoro pulled the folds of his coat around him and tried not to shiver. The jacket he’d worn around London was inadequate for the wind that blew like knives across the North Sea. His gloves, purchased to allow dexterity, were equally useless.
“’Ere, Father, take this ’fore you freeze.”
Santoro looked up into the lined, weather-worn face of the captain of the hired boat. The man held out a battered tin mug of steaming coffee.
“Bless you, my son,” murmured Santoro as he took the cup and buried his nose in the steam. He preferred tea, but now was not a time to be fussy. He blew on the scalding liquid and took a careful sip, but even then he burned his tongue. He winced.
“Aye, it’s not very good,” said the captain, misreading the wince, “but it’s ’ot.”
“It’s fine, thank you.”
The captain was a lumpy man with a Cockney accent and a bulbous drinker’s nose webbed with purple veins. He lingered, clearly wanting something else. What now? Had the man noticed or discovered something? Did he want a bribe? Santoro looked up, hoisting a smile onto his face.
“Something—?”
“Well,” began the captain, fumbling with it now that he was up to it, “you see … the thing is, Father, it’s about wot ’appened in London. The fire and all. Those terrorists.” He paused. “I try to be a good Catholic, Father, but I can’t understand why God would allow this kind of thing to happen.”
“God gives us free will, my son. He allows us to make our own choices. One day all of the wicked will be called to account for what they have done.”
“Yeah, but that’s just it, Father. Who would want to do something like this?”
Santoro smiled sadly and shook his head. What kind of man indeed?
After the captain shambled away, shaking his head in confusion, Santoro closed his eyes and drifted into a comfortable doze. The question had triggered so many memories, and as the boat rocked on the waves his dreaming mind drifted back to the very first event he had orchestrated for the Seven Kings.
Bombay, India
March 12, 1993
At 1:03 in the afternoon, a small man with a tidy mustache drove into the parking garage beneath the Bombay Stock Exchange, found a spot near the elevator, and turned off the engine. He sat behind the wheel for several minutes, pretending to read notes in a file folder as two carloads of employees from the exchange, returning from a late lunch, walked—laughing and talking—between the rows of parked cars, waited for the elevator, and then piled into the lift. When the doors closed, the small man got out of his car. He walked quickly up and down the rows to make sure that he was alone. When he was satisfied, he unlocked his trunk and pulled back the orange blanket that covered the unconscious Pakistani man.
The Pakistani was drugged but uninjured. Under other circumstances he would wake up in under an hour. He was dressed in the traditional clothing of a Muslim, a dark and formal sherwani and an embroidered velvet kufi. The small man bent and lifted the Pakistani out of the trunk, grunting and cursing with the effort. The drugged man was barely 140 pounds, but he was totally slack, and the small man had trouble pulling him over the lip of the trunk. It took four minutes to drag him to the open driver’s door and another three to adequately position him behind the wheel.
By the time the small man was finished, he was bathed in sweat. He mopped his forehead very carefully so as not to remove the makeup. Though Rafael Santoro’s own Mediterranean complexion was dark, he was not as dark as an Indian. He checked his watch. One sixteen. He smiled. Plenty of time. All that remained now was to close the car door and walk away.
He took the elevator to the lobby and walked out through the revolving door. He paused at a sidewalk stand that served nariel pani and drank the coconut water right there. So soothing after his exertions. He asked the vendor to scrape out the tender kernel inside, then strolled away, nibbling thoughtfully on it as he mentally counted the last three hundred seconds in his head to see if his calculations matched the digital timer in the trunk.
He felt the blast before he heard it. A deep rumble like a subway train rolling beneath his feet and then muted thunder filled the air behind him as the densely packed high-RDX explosives in the car detonated. He turned to see the shock wave ripple along both sides of the street like a waft of heat haze, shimmering in the air and blowing out storefronts and car windows. Santoro wrapped his arms over his head and dropped into a squat beside a wooden kiosk where brightly colored tourist scarves were sold. The shock wave passed him and fled down the street, and he peeked through an opening in his overlapped arms. He smiled at the beauty of it.
He turned as the crowds of people around him shook off their shock and ran toward the burning building. Santoro consulted his watch. His mental calculation had been off by less than fifteen seconds. The watch read: 1:30.
The crowd surged past him and he allowed the tide to pull him back to the scene of the disaster. He stood with the others and watched as the stock exchange burned, and when the flames leaped to the adjoining buildings Santoro hid a small smile. He stayed there for over an hour, and by then news that there had been a second blast was already being circulated. By the time he reached his hotel room and ordered a meal, the news stations were frantic with reports of bombings all across Bombay. The current estimate was eight, but Santoro knew that there would be more. Twenty had been planned. Some in cars, others on buses and even in the saddlebags of scooters.
Room service arrived and he ate a healthy meal of curry, flavored with coconut, tamarind, chili, and spices, with basmati rice. He tipped the boy and settled down to his meal.
He ordered a bottle of wine and sat with it in a comfortable chair. He was glad that he had not been one of the agents who had been ordered to leave a suitcase bomb in his hotel. He liked this place. Maybe next spring he’d come back here. He wasn’t as fond of the Juhu Centaur Hotel or the Hotel Sea Rock, so he didn’t mind when the increasingly shocked reporters told of blasts that tore through each of them. Other bombs destroyed the Plaza Theatre, the Nair and J.J. hospitals, part of the University of Bombay, and the Zaveri, Century, and Katha bazaars. He watched the news all day. He was mildly disappointed that the rail station bombs were found and defused before they could detonate. By day’s end the tally was thirteen blasts that claimed 257 lives and left over seven hundred injured. A nice day’s work.
He could not help but laugh as the police and various “experts” on terrorism discussed and debated the reason for the attacks. The air of Bombay was thick with paranoia.
Santoro showered, washing away the brown dye that made him look Indian. He would apply a fresh coat tomorrow before he checked out of the hotel.
He toweled off and got ready for bed. He knew that the whole plan would succeed. It was like clockwork. Long in the planning, subtle in the orchestration, deceptively simple in execution
. A bread trail would lead the police toward a Muslim crime family who would take the fall. Lovely. There were no loose ends for the police to follow, nothing that would lead them back to Santoro, or to the men who had hired him to plan and execute what had been discreetly referred to as the Bombay Holiday.
Muslims had nothing to do with it. It was not part of any Islamic jihad. It had, in fact, nothing at all to do with any religious ideology and it made no specific theological statement. At least, not as far as Santoro knew. He was fairly insightful, and as far as he could judge, this whole thing was about what it was always about.
Money and power.
With that happy thought in his head, Santoro pulled up the sheet, snuggled into the pillow, and fell into a deep and untroubled sleep, content in the knowledge the world would never be the same again. The Seven Kings would be pleased. His last thought as he drifted off was, The Goddess will love me for this.
THE BOAT THUMPED down over a tall wave and Santoro jolted awake. He looked around, his hand touching the knife beneath his clothes.
The captain saw him and smiled. “Wind’s picking up,” he said. “We’re ’itting some chop, but we’ll be in port before it gets too bad.”
“Yes,” said Santoro, but he was agreeing to a different meaning entirely.
Smiling, Santoro took his iPhone out of his pocket and checked his text messages. There were separate notes of congratulations from each of the Seven Kings. Both the King of Fear and the King of Plagues asked him how things were progressing on Fair Isle. To both, Santoro sent the same message:
Crimson rivers will flow.
He could imagine the champagne corks popping as that was read aloud in the Chamber of the Kings. Just before the boat docked, Santoro received a message from the Goddess herself:
You are the beloved Sword of the Goddess.
The world swam around him and Santoro felt tears stinging his eyes.
He bent his head and whispered prayers of thanks and love to the Goddess, and prayed to her that he might soon be lifted from the flesh of a servant to the spirit of a god. Her God.
Her God and lover.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Plympton Crime Scene
Whitechapel, London
December 18, 10:36 A.M. GMT
Owlstone removed two pairs of latex gloves from her pocket and handed a set to me. I pulled them on and took my camera from my jacket. It’s a special design that takes thirty-five megapixel shots at ultrafine quality, with a three-hundred-image capacity. A prototype from one of Church’s friends in the industry. I clicked off a hundred shots, moving fast, trusting to the anti-shake function to capture everything. At least the forensics team would have some nice pictures to look at.
Nice.
Christ.
When I finished taking the pics I took a small cable from my pocket and connected the camera to my phone and then sent the images via satellite to Church, Benson Childe, Jerry Spencer, Bug, and Dr. Hu.
Photos on the bureau made it clear that the victims were the mother and daughter who had lived here. Laura Plympton, forty-one, and daughter, Zoë, fifteen. They’d both been pretty.
“Look at this,” Owlstone said, her voice dropping into a whisper. She drew a cheap plastic pen from her inner pocket and touched the curled left hand of Laura Plympton. I came around to her side of the bed. I took my penlight and shined it into the dark hollow formed by her curled white fingers. “Is that paper?”
“You have a good eye, Detective Sergeant,” I said, and took some close-ups of Laura Plympton’s hand. “You ought to consider a career in criminal investigation.”
“Oh yes, very funny.”
We very slowly, very carefully worked together to gently spread Laura Plympton’s fingers. She must have been murdered early yesterday morning, so rigor had come and gone, leaving her fingers slack in a creepy, rubbery way. In death her bladder and bowels had released, so the smells that rose from her were eye-watering, and buried beneath them were the beginnings of the sweet stink of decomposition.
Owlstone slid the paper out and I lowered Plympton’s hand back to its resting place on her breast. I knew that she was dead and far beyond any feeling, but I felt like I wanted to apologize to her for this necessary violation.
We carried the paper to the dresser and carefully unfolded it. It was a quarter of a piece of ordinary computer paper folded several times and then rolled into a cylinder. There were several lines handwritten on it in blue ballpoint:
My Sweet Laura and Precious Zoë,
I know that what I have done is unforgivable.
I have damned my immortal soul for all eternity,
but at least what I have done here in our home
will save you both from greater horrors.
It was the only way to save you both from them.
They are everywhere.
I could not let them do those things to you.
Not even if I am to burn in hell.
God accept and protect you both.
My greatest regret is that I will not be able
to join you in paradise.
I will try to make it right if I can, but I know they are watching.
I don’t ask for or expect forgiveness.
They are not kings. They are monsters.
I am only the monster they made me.
It was unsigned. The paper was stained with bloody fingerprints and the distinctive pucker marks of dried water. Tears, without a doubt.
There was a reference to the Kings, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. Was Plympton not part of the Kings?
I am only the monster they made me.
Was that an admission that he had become corrupted by the Kings? Or had they somehow coerced him into this?
They are not kings. They are monsters.
No shit.
I looked at Owlstone and saw confusion and compassion warring on her young face. As one we straightened and turned to look at the bodies on the bed.
“What the hell are we into here, Captain?”
They are everywhere. He had underlined “everywhere” half a dozen times.
“It’s Joe,” I said, “and in my considered opinion as a professional investigator, it beats the hell out of me.”
Though … that was not entirely true. An idea was beginning to form in one of the darker side corridors in my broken head.
I am only the monster they made me.
My phone rang. It was Church.
“Sit rep?” he demanded.
I told him and started to explain, but he cut me off.
“We have what we need from that site. Leave the rest to the locals. I’m three minutes away. Be downstairs.”
“I think I’m on to something here, I don’t want to bug out now.”
“Would you rather hear about it from the Emergency Broadcast System?”
Shit.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Interlude Thirteen
T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State
Three and a Half Months Before the London Event
The range master at Terror Town was slim, swarthy, bearded, and had a beaky nose and dark eyes. The name embroidered on his chest was Muhammad. A few sorry souls had made jokes around him with words like “towel head,” “camel jockey,” and “sand nigger.” They misunderstood his stance on racial epithets, because they thought that if he was working this range then Muhammad could not be either a devout Muslim or a true Arab. Of those sorry souls, the ones who were able to walk away from the range under their own steam were encouraged to pack their bags and go find a clue. The rest received the very best of emergency care in the T-Town infirmary.
Circe O’Tree had been there for one of those encounters. The whole thing was over in a second and a man much bigger than Muhammad lay in a fetal position, hands clutching his groin, faced screwed into a purple knot of silent agony. The sight had bothered Circe for weeks. But she could not find any fault with the range master. He never once started a figh
t; his view, however, was that even small hate crimes should be “appropriately addressed.”
Although she worked around violence all day and though she had logged hundreds of hours on the combat ranges and in the self-defense classes, Circe had never before been a witness to actual violence. Even so, threads of violence were sown through her life. Her mother and sister had died violently, her father was in one of the more ferocious departments of government service, and all of her friends were either current or former military or scientists like her, who studied war and conflict.
The relationship between Chief Petty Officer Abdul Muhammad and Dr. Circe O’Tree was complicated, its parameters unspoken. He cut her no slack, but he always gave her a little extra advice and encouragement. He also let her train in the late evenings after the teams had called it a night. Though most of the men at T-Town respected—or perhaps dreaded—Muhammad, they frequently forgot themselves when Circe was on-deck. She was a very beautiful woman with a figure that drew the eyes of normally focused shooters away from their targets. Range scores plummeted when she was on-deck.
And she found the whole thing exceptionally tiresome. She couldn’t change her genetics, and dressing down in shapeless clothes was an admission of defeat. After ignoring the testosterone-infused nonsense for months, she began coming later and later to the range. Now it was full dark and the sky above glittered with 10 billion diamonds. The August breeze off of Mount Baker was cool and soothing after hours spent with her computer.
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