Sebastian Nemo stared down at the maps he’d stretched out across the bed and tables in his hotel room. Coordinating six attacks to go off almost simultaneously was challenging enough without the added wrinkle of ensuring a proper target for them in four different time zones. Fortunately, it was not Sebastian’s responsibility to get the video posted online at the same time. That was somebody else’s headache.
Sebastian had spent several weeks in each of the five target cities—Cincinnati, New York, New Orleans, Chicago and Los Angeles. He’d studied the area between SoHo and Greenwich Village in New York, beginning on Sixth Avenue at Spring Street and following it to Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea. The streets between Bleecker and Fourteenth Street would likely be the most crowded, so he’d concentrated on finding a spot there.
He’d walked streets bordering Halsted and Belmont in Chicago and along Lower Decatur Street in New Orleans, from Molly’s at the Market to Bourbon Street.
He’d already been familiar with Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles—where he might possibly get the highest body count. It would still be daylight there. The Halloween parade in Los Angeles didn’t start until six o’clock, which was nine o’clock on the East Coast—long after he expected to topple the first domino. Still, more than half a million people would attend “the world’s largest Halloween street party,” and with all the major streets in West Hollywood shut down, they’d have to show up early.
His study of the locations had informed his decisions about what kinds of weapons he’d use at each, what he could conceal and which ones would do the most damage.
Oh, he could have chosen bigger weapons with more firepower. He had access to the brand-new M224A lightweight mortar system sent into battle this year. That’d been tempting because it could be fired from four thousand yards away and the survivors would later recount in hushed horror how they’d heard the whistle of the round’s approach. And mortars would produce a high body count, too.
But in the end, it really didn’t matter how many people were killed or wounded. The fact of the attacks was the point, not how effective they were in producing casualties. A week later, nobody’d remember how many people died, but ten years from now they’d remember there’d been an attack. A coordinated assault on five American cities—even if all you did was toss a hand grenade into a crowd—would be paralyzing. Psychological damage was how you kept score.
In that regard, driving the ambulance loaded with explosives into the crowd of freaks prancing around in Los Angeles would likely be the most effective. Mowing people down in broad daylight in full view of who knew how many security cameras—with a bomb-loaded vehicle police had allowed inside the blocked-off streets—made for great footage on the eleven o’clock news. Of course, the explosion at the end was to take out the driver and the evidence, not to increase the body count.
The backpack bomb in Chicago, similar to the one he’d used so effectively with Ricky Harrison in Minneapolis, was its own special horror because it would come out of nowhere, no warning. And expedient because it, too, took out the operative along with the victims.
The on-site explosives in New Orleans, the ones in false-bottomed trash barrels, blue metal mailboxes and other semipermanent structures, would demonstrate that terrorists didn’t even have to be present to kill. And the Javelins…ahhh, they were the coup de grâce. Killing civilians with sophisticated military weapons designed to take out Taliban bunkers, fortified heavy machine guns, T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers rated a plus ten on the horror scale.
Sebastian leaned back and stretched. He’d been hunched over the maps for more than two hours. He massaged his neck as he walked to the window, moved the curtain back an inch, enough to see out a crack. The city skyline was superimposed on the backdrop of a bright red-golden sky, a silhouette backlit by the setting sun. A coal barge was making its way across the glass top of the Ohio River, slowly and silently. Sebastian smiled.
Daniel was having trouble breathing. His chest didn’t want to rise and fall properly. It merely hitched up an inch or two—not far enough to admit enough air—then collapsed and expelled a puff in a gasp. In and out like that, again and again. Daniel’s head began to swim and the scene took on an eerie unreality.
Hyperventilating. Was that what he was doing?
His lips felt numb and he watched through a fog as Billy Ray stopped talking, picked up the phone and moved back and forth around the boxcar, obviously figuring something out. Planning it. He stood back and eyed the two captives near the wall, walked to the other side of the boxcar and back again.
He lifted the cell phone in his hand and held it up toward Daniel and Jeff to take a picture. But he didn’t snap the photo, only looked at the angle, then placed the cell phone—propped up on a bar of pure gold worth probably fifty thousand dollars—and got behind it to see that it was the angle he wanted.
He noticed Daniel watching him and grinned, his eyes far too bright.
“I’m about to take you boys’ pictures,” he said. “You be sure and smile real wide for the camera.”
Then he turned to the cardboard boxes on the floor. He pulled out his knife, slit the sealing tape on the flat one and took something out of it that was wrapped in black fabric. He unwound the fabric—it was a garment, a robe or tunic—and dropped it on the floor and stood gaping at what it had concealed, turning it over and over in his hand in wonder. Daniel heard a gasp beside him. He’d been so fixated on Billy Ray he’d completely forgotten that Jeff Kendrick was lying on the floor next to him.
Billy Ray lifted the huge scimitar above his head, examining it in the bilious light. Its curved blade was about three feet long, much bigger than the one that hung above the bulletin board beside the door in Bishop’s office. The carvings and designs on that one had been on the handle. On this larger one, the whole blade was adorned with runes—words in some ancient language, one nobody on the planet spoke anymore. When Billy Ray moved the sword, the symbols…no, it couldn’t be! But it was. Movement brought the tiny markings to life and they crawled over the blade like so many tiny spiders. The metal was satin gray, not silver like Bishop’s, and there seemed to be a shadow around it like smoke, as if it reflected darkness rather than light.
It looked like—was it?—points of red fire were licking up from the handle where the shiny black wood had been carved into the shape of a serpent with rubies the size of grapes for eyes. Even from where he lay, Daniel could see that the scimitar blade had been honed to a razor edge.
Billy Ray hefted the sword from hand to hand and swished it downward in the air in a hacking motion. Then he held it with both hands like a baseball bat and sliced it through the air horizontally.
Daniel was suddenly nauseous. He struggled mightily, determined not to retch, held on with all his might, tears rolling down his cheeks from the effort, as waves of convulsive retching crashed again and again into his rigid diaphragm. Billy Ray leaned the blade against the wall and Daniel’s heaving subsided. But he still couldn’t breathe.
He and Jeff watched as Billy Ray picked the fabric up off the floor and shook it out, then pulled the black hooded robe over his head. Its long sleeves covered the tattoos on his arms and the cowl hid his face in shadow. He looked like a skinny monk. Or the Grim Reaper. When he had the garment adjusted to suit him, Billy Ray addressed Jeff and Daniel.
“I want you boys on your knees,” he said.
With their hands and feet bound, it was hard to assume that position on their own. Billy Ray went first to Jeff and yanked on his elbow, lifting him off the floor and setting him unsteadily on his knees. Jeff promptly flopped back over on his side on the floor.
“This can go easy, or this can go hard,” Billy Ray told him, the hysterical edge that had been in his voice replaced by a black threatening tone. He nodded toward the heavy metal door on the boxcar. “Want me to slam that door shut on your hand? Becca was so out of it she didn’t feel her finger in the car door that time, but you’ll feel every one of the bones in your hand break.”
Becca’s finger—the one with the blackened nail.
Billy Ray reached down and pulled Jeff up a second time. He wobbled but remained in place. Then he lifted Daniel up beside him so the two of them were kneeling in front of a blank wall—not one with shelves of gold on it.
After he went to the cell phone and fiddled with it, he grabbed the sword and moved with it behind them—but the timer on the camera fired the picture before he was in place. He took half a dozen pictures before he was satisfied. When he finally had the picture he wanted, he lifted his foot and kicked Jeff in the back, propelling him forward. With his hands bound behind him, he could not break his own fall and his already damaged face smashed into the floor.
Daniel winced reflexively and braced himself, but Billy Ray only kicked him out of the way and he landed on his shoulder. Stepping over Daniel, Billy Ray removed his robe and hung it over the post of one of the shelf units that held his gold bars. He slipped his cell phone into his pocket and turned for the door.
Daniel had to say something. “You got any plans for a potty break before you leave?”
Billy Ray had probably used a whole roll of duct tape on the two of them. He’d bound their wrists together in front of them, then wrapped tape around and around them to secure their arms to their bodies from the elbows up. They still had limited use of their hands and fingers—enough—and Billy Ray had set out a pail beside Daniel. He’d also brought in a McDonald’s burger, fries and a soft drink with a straw and set them on the floor. Daniel had managed to get to his knees and kneel over the straw in the soft drink. He’d tried taking bites of the burger on the floor, too, though it was like bobbing for apples. But he gave up after a bite or two—didn’t have much appetite.
Gesturing toward the bucket in the far corner of the boxcar, Billy Ray said, “You need to go bad enough, you’ll figure out a way to scoot over there and use it by yourself. You got nothing but time.” Then he picked up the scimitar. “’Til I use this to stop your clocks—permanently.”
Jack stepped into Ariel Murphy’s hospital room and let the door swing closed by itself behind him. He stifled the reflex that came next. He’d seen it a hundred times. A perp reaches over unconsciously and pats his pocket to reassure himself his gun is still there. He needed no reassurance. The gun he’d shoved into his sweatpants in the motel room had rubbed his back raw.
“Come on over and join the party,” the voice said, and he walked toward the bed on the back wall, where he could see Ariel under the white sheet and Andi perched on the foot of the bed with her feet dangling off the side. The only light in the room was the flickering of the muted television mounted on the wall across from Ariel’s bed. He didn’t look at it and willed himself to move slowly to give his eyes time to adjust to the semidarkness.
The hall downstairs outside the elevator where he’d been talking to Crock and the stairwell had been dimly lit, but still it’d be three—maybe five—minutes before he could make out clearly all the shapes around the bed. No way he’d get five minutes.
He’d have to flush the thing out into the light.
“Uncle Jack, I—”
“Quiet, you—!” Then the voice spilled obscenities into the room as foul as the stench of a stagnant pool, words Jack would wager Andi had never heard in her life. The voice came from the shadows directly behind where Andi sat.
“If this is a party, what are we celebrating?” Jack asked.
There was a giggle, a little girl’s giggle, only it wasn’t. “We’re celebrating death, of course. I only came for one kill. All the rest of you are a bonus. Sometimes, you just get lucky.”
Jack stepped on something and glanced down but couldn’t make out what it was—a piece of black yarn maybe with beads in it. There was blood on one end.
“Shame I won’t get to keep the trophies. You bag one, you’re supposed to get to stuff it and hang it on your wall. Right? Isn’t that the way big-game hunting works?”
The monster was babbling, clearly enjoying itself. Good. Keep it talking. Every second granted Jack a little more edge. If he was going to take a shot, he had to be able to see his target better than he could right now. From here, it was nothing more than an indistinct lump behind Andi. And Jack would rather die than shoot Andi…again.
“I wouldn’t know,” Jack said, edging a few inches to the side as he did to try to get a sight line behind Andi. “I’m a fisherman, not a hunter.”
“Fool,” the child’s voice that wasn’t a child rumbled, a sound so ragged surely it must have shredded the vocal cords of the one making it. “They’ll be dead before you can untangle it from your underwear. Scalpels were designed to slice through flesh, you know.”
Jack froze, remembering the rattlesnake speed of the hyped-up-on-adrenaline monster that had almost killed him last summer.
Suddenly, the voice turned almost cheery.
“Why look at that, Andi,” it said. “Your daddy’s on television, only this time he’s not preaching.”
Andi looked up at the television screen. When Jack saw the shock on her face, he looked, too. Pictured there was a hooded man holding a scimitar, standing behind two bound men on their knees, facing the camera.
“Daddy!” Andi cried.
It took Jack a beat longer. A wound on his forehead crusted in dried blood had spread bruising downward to black both his eyes, but it was Daniel.
Words ran across the bottom of the screen.
“…and other national media outlets received an email containing this photograph from a group identifying itself as ‘Maelstrom’ that claimed responsibility for bombing the Mall of America in Minneapolis on Wednesday and the Desert Dolphin Restaurant in Phoenix on Friday.
“Though we don’t yet have independent confirmation, the two men pictured here on their knees were identified in the email as the Reverend Daniel Burke, senior minister of the twenty-thousand-member Voice of Hope Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Jeff Kendrick, an attorney with the Cincinnati law firm Taylor, Murray and Kendrick.”
Until the words identified Jeff, Jack didn’t recognize him. His face was in much worse shape than Daniel’s.
“The email threatened that a video of the beheadings of these two men would be posted online tomorrow evening—I’m quoting here—‘as we unleash coordinated catastrophic attacks with thousands of casualties in five American cities.’
“The email said the beheadings would mark the birth of a revolutionary movement that would plunge America into chaos. I’m quoting again, ‘We kill one who corrupted the sacred and one who prevented the sword of retribution from falling—to symbolize chopping off the heads of religion and law to expose the rot within.’
“It’s possible that’s a reference to a recent investigation of Reverend Burke on a rape charge that was eventually dropped. Kendrick represented Reverend Burke in that case.”
Andi had leapt to her knees at the sight of her father and was clutching the footboard of the bed, gawking at the images on the screen and sobbing. Now Jack could see the thing on the bed behind her, a horror unrecognizable as the child Cassidy Davenport.
“Noooo,” Andi shrieked. “Daddy! Daaaddy!”
The voice that spoke from the thing was barely a whisper, but its viciousness sliced through all other sound.
“We warned you, sweet meat. We told you we’d chop off your daddy’s head.”
Jack’s heart began to hammer so hard in his chest that little bursts of light exploded in his eyes with every beat.
Billy Ray started out the door of the boxcar with the scimitar, then looked back at Daniel and Jeff with a grin before he reached over and flipped off the light. He’d left the light on while he’d been gone before.
“Finding that bucket’s gonna be a challenge now,” he said, standing in the doorway in the spill of light cast by the bulb that hung suspended from the cave roof outside the boxcar. “It’ll give you something to do to pass the time.”
He stepped out into the cave and closed the door behind him, plunging the room into darkness. Not a single ray of light. Blind-man black. Inside-a-lump-of-coal black. And quiet.
Daniel heard him fasten the padlock in place on the outside of the door, then a muffled clanging as he closed another door or gate of some kind. Then it was silent. Daniel could hear the sound of Jeff’s breathing a few feet away, but he couldn’t see him, couldn’t have seen his own hand in front of his face if he’d been able to lift it up that high.
Beheaded.
Somehow the word wouldn’t fit into his brain. He’d shove it in there and it would tumble right back out. How could you get your mind around a thing like that? Somebody was going to chop off your head. What did you do with that?
“Got any idea what’s up with the beheading?” The words in a stopped-up-nose voice came from the nearby darkness. “You want to kill a man, there are easier, less…messy…ways to do it.”
Daniel hadn’t yet adjusted to the prospect of getting his head lopped off with a scimitar. It was way beyond his bandwidth right now to puzzle out why Chapman Whitworth was going to the trouble. Instead of answering, he began to scoot toward the back corner of the boxcar.
The silence returned, broken only by the sounds Daniel made propelling himself along the floor of the boxcar.
“You won’t feel anything,” the stuffed-nose voice continued. “It’s actually a pretty humane way to kill someone, if you think about it. There’s no pain. You just—”
Daniel felt emotion rise in his chest like vomit.
“Shut up!” He fired the words into the darkness like arrows. “Even now, knowing you’re about to die, you still have to be the big shot, don’t you, the know-it-all. Always playing ‘can you top this?’ Just. Shut. Up. You owe me that much—the privilege of not having to hear your voice.”
There was silence then, and Daniel could hear only his own thudding heartbeat and his heavy breathing as anger coursed through him.
The word dropped into his mind—he could almost see it—a pure drop of water surrounding it as it fell slowly down into the still pool below. Rage. When it hit the surface, the liquid rose around it like in those slow-motion videos where you watched the action of the milk in a bowl of cereal when the first raisin from the raisin brand box plopped in.
That was what he was about. Daniel Burke was about rage. Anger. Fury! He was about bitterness and jealousy. He was about hatred. He hated the man lying only a few feet away in the dark. Loathed him. He had stolen Emily. Images of the two of them together downloaded then with such power he almost groaned out loud. He was too tired, too hungry and thirsty and hurt to mount defenses against them. And so they came and overwhelmed him, visions of Jeff and Emily walking hand in hand, laughing together, staring into each other’s eyes. In bed.
For a long time, Daniel Burke was swallowed up in depths of rage and loathing far darker than the lightless boxcar buried deep in the earth.