Jeff couldn’t seem to wake up. He tried, then floated back away into darkness. He bobbed up to the edge of consciousness again and struggled harder to wake up. He had to get out of bed or he’d be late for work. He reached up to swat a fly off his nose and opened one eye. A fat brown cockroach was crawling across his nose, its antennae twitching.
All of it slammed back at once with the force of a piano dropped off the Eiffel Tower. He was sitting up, slapping at the bugs that covered him before he had time to will his body to do so. Someone was screaming. It took a second or two to realize it was his own voice echoing off the concrete walls of the stairwell.
He wiggled and writhed on the floor, slapping bugs away that were instantly replaced by the teeming horde that covered the landing floor and walls.
“No…get off!” he sputtered. “Noooooo!” He had to wipe a handful off his face that tried to get into his mouth when he opened it to scream! “Get off me!” In the background behind his screams, he could hear the raspy, scuttling sounds they made as their bodies rubbed against each other. And the crunching sound when he rolled over onto them, smashing them.
All at once, the bugs stopped moving, or so it seemed to Jeff, though he certainly was not rational enough to accurately record reality. The raspy sounds they made silenced instantly.
Then, as suddenly as they had climbed onto his body, they began to scuttle down to the floor and hurry away. He knocked them off his arms and chest to the floor and they ran up the walls—flowed up the walls in a solid wave—and vanished into the crack beside the ceiling tiles. Some ran up the steps and slid between the carpet and the baseboards. Others ran across the landing and down the steps on the other side.
Jeff staggered to his feet, slapping away the stragglers. One crawled out of his shirt pocket; another ran out of his hair and down his face. He slapped them off and stomped them before they could run. Smashing them made a satisfying crushing sound and suddenly he was chasing the last of them across the floor, jumping on them, pulverizing them beneath his feet, grunting, yelling wordless fury. And crying.
Then they were gone, all of them. He whirled around, looking for more to stomp, wanting to find more to stomp. The floor was a gooey mess of bug guts and bug pieces, but all the live ones had vanished, scurrying away and disappearing so quickly it was almost difficult to believe they’d ever been there at all.
He stood panting, patting his clothing to be sure, sobbing. There was wet on his face, and when he swiped at it, his hand came away red. Blood was smeared on his lip and chin and he wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve. His head hurt, the back of it, and when he touched the spot, he felt a tender lump.
His heart still thundered in his ears so loud its roar muffled sound, but as it calmed, he gradually became aware of the silence broken by nothing but his ragged breathing.
It was only then that he remembered Corrine. His legs felt rubbery, his knees like sacks of water, and he had to hold tight to the railing as he climbed the steps. His vision blurred, his head spun, and he didn’t know if the sensation of the world swirling around him was the booze or the blow to the head. The door to his condo stood open, but no sound came from it.
No sound. Nothing from outside in the atrium, either. The band had stopped playing.
He searched the floor for any sign of bugs—they’d left, but they could come back—as he stepped inside and called out, “Corrine?”
He tried to piece together the jumble of images. Corrine had been in the bedroom, covered in cockroaches. Then she’d rushed past him. The bugs came for him. He ran out the front door. So where was Corrine? Where’d she go?
Then he saw the open balcony doors.
He suddenly became very aware of the silence in the atrium. The Don Henley wannabe was no longer wailing “Hotel California.” The night breeze ruffled the curtains and brought only a muffled crowd sound from below.
He didn’t move, shook his head slowly back and forth and refused to move. Then he was walking, a robot, up onto the landing, through the balcony doors and out into the night air. His neighbors had, indeed, turned out in force to hear the dueling bands that were silent now. They stood in groups on balconies, looking down. Then a woman on a nearby balcony spotted him and pointed, and the four people with her turned and stared at him.
He didn’t want to keep going. He wanted to turn around and go back into his condo and close the balcony door behind him.
In there, closed up, with the roaches?
But he did keep walking, of course. He walked to the balcony railing and looked down. Musicians milled around on the stage. Most of the people in the crowd stood in small clumps, talking. Directly below him was a cluster of people gathered around something. He couldn’t tell what, didn’t want to know. But he couldn’t look away, couldn’t seem to draw in another breath, either, and then the group of people parted briefly and he caught sight of a figure sprawled on the marble floor. Not recognizable from this height, of course. But it was a woman. And she was dressed in pink.
Sebastian Nemo decided he’d missed his calling. He should have been a financial guru like the know-it-all on the radio he’d been listening to on the long drive from Arizona to Ohio. The radio man was giving advice on buying a car, told his listeners to pay in cash.
Show them greenbacks and all the haggling would silence, the man said. It was human nature. Nothing in the world spoke louder than a wad of bills.
Sebastian barked out a laugh. Really? How about a bar of solid gold!
Of course, Sebastian conducted his business enterprises in a world of cash-and-carry, where finance plans were not an option. No ten easy payments of nine ninety-nine ninety-nine and you could walk off the lot with a mortar, a missile and ten pounds of plastic explosive. But even in that world, the arms dealer’s eyes had grown wide when he saw the gold bars. Human nature.
Sebastian had been arranging the purchase of equipment since he’d been notified in the usual fashion that a client was in need of his customized services for a project called Operation Maelstrom. It was the single most ambitious endeavor Sebastian had ever signed on for and it might be his swan song. His fee would set him up for life anywhere in the world, and perhaps it was time to sit on a beach somewhere and sip margaritas. But that was something to consider after. Now, his attention was laser focused on getting the job done—in and out without a trace.
For that, he would need plastic explosives—that was standard. What wasn’t standard was the order he placed for two Javelin missile launchers and missiles—man-portable heat-seeking antitank FGM-148 missiles, according to the spec sheet he’d meticulously prepared. Or “Porsches,” according to the British—a label they’d applied because at almost ninety thousand dollars each, every round fired from a Javelin cost as much as a Porsche 911.
The total price tag for the equipment alone for this job was snug up against two million dollars. But even when you could afford the sticker price—could plunk down forty bars of pure gold!—such weapons were hard to come by. Even more rare was the personnel trained to fire them. Besides himself, Sebastian needed an additional man for the Javelins, one to plant the on-site explosives and two others.
He would personally topple the first domino in Cincinnati that would start the chain reaction in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and New Orleans. This would be no 9/11. But it would be close in fear factor and that was how you graded terrorism—in the level of fear generated and the amount of disruption caused. On that scale, Operation Maelstrom would definitely be the valedictorian of the Terrorism Class of 2011.
He pulled into a rustic restaurant outside Louisville, Kentucky, at the Shepherdsville exit off Interstate 65 and parked his nondescript blue van in the back with the employees’ cars. It was three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so the lunch press was gone and the dinner rush hadn’t started. He courteously requested a table in the corner so he’d have his back to the wall, never made eye contact with the waitress and left a reasonable but certainly not generous tip. A forgettable tip from an unremarkable man. Good habits kept you alive.
The roast beef was a bit chewy, but the blackberry cobbler was superb. His were simple tastes and he made it a point to eat well when he was in the United States. A country boy at heart—a lifetime ago—he’d never developed a taste for international cuisine. In most of the countries where he traveled, food was fuel, nothing more.
He thought about the gold bars as he ate. They had oiled all the equipment purchases so they were effortless and smooth, not a single squeak. Paying the hired help had been another matter, however. Recruiting people like Ricky Harrison was fine for a single job where it was vital to throw the authorities off the scent, but there were too many moving parts to pull something like that off multiple times. To pay for services, he needed cash, so he’d had to convert the gold into spendable currency, a service he provided at no additional cost to the client.
In almost every circumstance, Sebastian would prefer to employ a man of simple motivations. Pay him and he’d kill somebody. Pay him enough and he’d kill a lot of somebodies. Pay him exceptionally and he’d do it flashy if that was what you wanted or stealth if you didn’t, and either way he’d get in and get out without leaving so much as an eyelash to mark his passing. Men like that, men of Sebastian’s caliber, were worth their weight in gold, but even gold couldn’t buy what didn’t exist and there were only a handful of such men in all the world. Fortunately, Sebastian was on a first-alias basis with all of them.
He had also started beating the bushes months ago for idiot whack jobs to fill in where the professionals left off. These days, it wasn’t hard to procure wide-eyed zealots and wild-eyed fanatics and every stripe in between. The trick was picking those who were honestly willing to die for the cause—not histrionics but genuinely willing to take one for the Gipper. His two professional operatives would vanish like puffs of smoke, as they had done countless times before. And the other two—well, that was why he needed nutcases willing to die. People like that never figured out that even if they somehow managed to survive the mission itself undetected, this would be their last job. You didn’t prosper as Sebastian and those like him had all these years by leaving a trail of accomplice/witnesses behind just one offer of immunity away from throwing you under a bus.
As he got back into his van, he wondered momentarily where the gold bars had come from. Sebastian didn’t know the name of the man who’d hired him. The man didn’t know his name either—well, maybe he did, but he had sense enough to realize the name was bogus. Sebastian didn’t know why he’d been hired to blow up the Mall of America, a Phoenix restaurant and five additional targets all across America on Monday. He didn’t need to know. Nor did he need to know why his employer was handing out gold bars instead of thousand-dollar bills or numbers to an account in the Cayman Islands. The less you knew, the safer it was for all concerned. When it was over, Sebastian would insert his own gold-bar payment into one end of a complicated money laundering machine and numbered accounts would pop out the other. He’d keep one of the gold bars, though. No, two of them. Souvenir bookends.
Becca knew that whatever lay beyond the next turn in the cave was not merely waiting there for them. It was coming to get them. She could sense its advance, step by step, could feel the earth tremble beneath its feet with every footfall, could hear the otherworldly roar that wasn’t a sound you could hear with your ears. Terror consumed her. She had to run, had to get away. She turned…and faced What Comes Behind. How could she—?
Bark! Bark-bark!
The sound brought Becca Hawkins bolt upright in the bed, lying in tangled, sweat-soaked sheets, breathing hard.
Biscuit was at her bedroom door, clawing at it, trying to get out, barking in a yapping frenzy. But it wasn’t the growling bark that had rumbled out of his throat when he tore into the rats. The dog wasn’t alarmed. His hackles weren’t raised.
What time was it? She looked at the glowing numbers on the bedside alarm. Three thirty. Her apprehension grew. What was it Theresa always said—folks never came calling before the sun had shone on the day to give you good news.
She pulled on a robe. As soon as she opened the bedroom door, Biscuit scooted out past her and down the stairs in a doggie gallop. He skidded to a halt at the front door and stood there yapping. She could tell by his bark that whoever was standing on the porch was somebody Biscuit knew. Becca didn’t turn on the lights, just went down the stairs in the dark and peeked out the window beside the front door, where the porch was lit by a motion-activated porch light.
Jeff Kendrick.
He balled his hand into a fist and prepared to bang again, but she opened the door before he had a chance.
“Jeff? What are you—?”
He brushed past her into the house, closed the door behind him and leaned against it, trying to catch his breath. Biscuit was still barking his greeting bark.
“She’s dead,” Jeff said, his voice trembling. “She ran out onto the balcony and fell off. The bugs killed her before she had a chance to tell me anything.” He put his head into his hands and his body began to shake. Maybe he was sobbing. Maybe only trembling violently.
Becca flipped on the hallway light, took Jeff’s arm and led him wordlessly into the kitchen, where she parked him against the counter by the refrigerator.
“I’ll make coffee.”
She turned to the cabinet and busied herself with coffee-making activities to allow Jeff time to compose himself. When she turned back to him, there was an odd look in his eyes she couldn’t quite define, like something had shifted. Something was profoundly different about the man who stood trembling in her kitchen. He was not the same man who’d raged with her about the rats attacking Theresa the night before.
She didn’t want to know—absolutely, one hundred percent did not want to know the answer to the question she was about to ask.
“What happened?”
“Roaches.” He strangled on the word. “Everywhere. Roaches.”
He told her the story and she listened with growing revulsion. When he described the sensation of the bugs crawling on him, his voice grew strident, high-pitched, as if he were holding on with his fingernails to keep from screaming.
“And the police?”
“More than a dozen witnesses, people on neighboring balconies out watching the battle of the bands, saw that I had nothing to do with what happened to her. They heard her screaming and watched her run out all by herself…with bugs crawling all over her. She was trying to beat them off, unsteady on her feet.” He paused. “We were both a little…drunk. She got to the railing and just tripped, they said, stumbled and fell over the edge.”
Becca heard the click from the machine on the countertop, telling her the coffee was ready, and she was grateful for the excuse to turn away from him and fiddle with getting cups out of the cupboard, sugar, creamer. When she turned back to him with his cup in her hand, her voice was steady and did not betray the turmoil within.
“Sit down before you fall down,” she told him, nodding at the table. When he sank into a chair, she set his coffee in front of him. He picked it up with shaking hands and took two huge gulps—appearing not to notice that the steaming liquid must surely have burned his mouth and throat.
“The police wanted to know about the roaches, where so many had come from, but what could I say? ‘Oh, those?—they were sent by a demon to kill Corrine Talbot before she could talk, and to tell me to stay out of this.” He looked full into her eyes. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it? A warning.”
Becca nodded. “Butt out or I’ll send worse.”
“Well, if he wanted to scare me, it worked.” He reached out and gripped her hand. “I hope you don’t mind me coming over here tonight. I couldn’t stay there, wondering when Attila the Roach and his conquering hordes would come back.”
There was a glassy look in his eyes. But his words were certainly lucid enough, with the appropriate Jeff-levity to indicate he was firing on all cylinders.
“If he sends any other varmints, we’ll freeze ’em like the rats he sent last time!” she said, trying to match his light tone.
“Freeze?” The total incredulity on his face actually made her smile.
“There are fifty or sixty dead rats, maybe more, I didn’t count, stuffed in a garbage bag in that old chest freezer in the garage.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you.”
“I had to freeze them. The crew you sent cleaned all the blood and mess off everything. But they left the rats in a trash bag beside the can outside the garage door for the garbage truck to remove.”
“I’m still not tracking.”
“We’re on semiweekly service and the garbage truck came day before yesterday. Can you imagine how bad a garbage bag full of dead rats is going to smell after ten days in the sun? I couldn’t figure what to do and then I spotted that old freezer in the garage. It works; there’s just nothing in it. So I plugged it in and put the garbage bag inside. I’ll set it out on trash day.”
The total absurdity of frozen rats somehow eased Jeff’s tension a little, but he was still jumpy, wary.
“I’ll tell you the same thing you told me,” Becca continued. “You don’t have to go back there. Stay here and get your cleaning crew to go over your place tomorrow and make sure there’s not so much as a roach antennae left behind. You’re welcome to sleep on the couch.” Becca gestured toward the living room. “Or in Bishop’s chair. It’s definitely the softest piece of furniture in the whole house.”
Jeff was visibly relieved. “I couldn’t be…alone.” He gestured toward the window, where the pink haze of dawn was chasing away the shadows in the yard. “But it doesn’t make much sense to go to bed now.”
“You should try to sleep, though. You missed a night of sleep tonight and another one last night. Not sleeping will mess with your head.”
“If I closed my eyes, I’d see…besides, I don’t need sleep as much as I need conversation. I need to know what happened to you and Daniel and Jack when you were children that started all this.”
“We didn’t start it!” She realized she’d raised her voice and continued in a softer tone. “Somebody started it by drawing a pentagram on the floor and chanting some ancient incantation in a language nobody’s spoken in thousands of years. At least that’s what I’m beginning to figure out from the books in Bishop’s library.”
“Chapman Whitworth drew the pentagram?”
“Who else? But it was more than just a pentagram. To summon a king of demons requires all manner of other things, implements, statues—stuff like that. It’s all there in Bishop’s books, but you have to dig it out—one bit here, another part there. But Bishop told us about the final ingredient when we were kids: a human sacrifice, the blood of a murder victim.”
“So Chapman Whitworth killed somebody?”
“Must have. And not just anybody—somebody with the ‘mark of evil.’”
“What’s the ‘mark of evil’?”
“Theresa said Bishop tried for years to find out what that meant, but as far as she knew, he never did. She said he had a theory, though.” Images flooded her mind, shifting and changing like the colors in a kaleidoscope. “And if his theory was right, I’ve got more marks of evil on me than zits on a freshman.”