16

Gopher Munitions Plant
Rosemount, Minnesota

“Hello?”

Jason relaxed. Carl Barnaby’s voice had always been a balm, so blithe and confident. “I located the two managers in Minneapolis.”

“Excellent! Did they give you any more referrals?”

Jason’s fists clenched, but he smeared butter over his voice. “I’m so sorry. No. Not yet.”

“What?” The word was tinged with shock, or anger.

“I had to unexpectedly fire their neighbor. She showed up for a shift earlier than scheduled and brought her dog into work, of all things. I also had to let one of the two managers go.” Jason rubbed his thumb over the smooth metal of the locket. “I have the remaining manager with me. She has yet to supply the promised referrals.”

There was a pause on the other end. A muffled exchange filtered down the line. Jason imagined he heard the closing of a heavy door, soft footsteps on lush carpeting, the echo of conversation off brocaded walls. Carl Barnaby returned to the line. “That might be all right. We have word that their daughters are on the way to Massachusetts to retrieve a document from the pulpit of one of the oldest churches in the United States.” He took a breath. “We have reason to believe it might be the master referral list.”

Jason shook his head, chuckling. Hiding the names in the pulpit of an old church? He’d seen extreme measures in his fifteen years working for the Hermitage, but this came close to taking the cake. You hunt a group of women for a couple hundred years, though, and it made sense they’d find ingenious ways to communicate with one another.

The Hermitage had always taken care of the obvious targets, like Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, and Anna Mae Aquash, but other than those very public Underground leaders, they’d had to rely on second-or third-hand information to discover who their enemies were. The five women he’d killed before coming to Minneapolis had most likely been high up in the Underground. Same of Grace Odegaard and Vida Wiley, though how high, he couldn’t know without the master docket.

But it sounded like he was about to get his hands on the legendary document. Finally, after all these years of searching.

Cut off the head, the snake dies.

Hot goddamn.

“You want me to obtain the referral list, dismiss the daughters, and continue on to the Crucible?”

Jason wouldn’t utter her name. His phone was disposable, Carl Barnaby’s line secured, but still. Her name would be flagged if anyone was listening, and someone was always listening. They were too close to achieving their mission to risk it on a loose tongue.

“Yes, and in that order.” Carl Barnaby’s voice relaxed into its signature jocularity. “I’ll send someone for your current interviewee. We’ll keep her in case a position opens up. You stay on task.”

Jason nodded, even though Carl Barnaby couldn’t see it. He waited as he heard the familiar click of being transferred. When the man’s secretary came on, he exchanged directions to the abandoned Gopher Munitions Plant in Rosemount, 30 miles south of Minneapolis, for the address of the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts. He didn’t know if the woman would still be alive when the Hermitage Foundation’s clean-up crew arrived.

He glanced at her. She was tied to a chair, her hair hanging in her face. Crusted blood had turned her top a muddy brown. Her smell was strong, even from ten feet away, the uniquely sour, musky potpourri of pain, feces, and terror.

It was happy luck he’d discovered both of his Minnesota targets inside Odegaard’s apartment. He would have loved to bring them back here for questioning, but because of the neighbor and her dog, he’d only had time to transport the one.

He’d cornered them on the fire escape and grabbed the woman nearest him. Whipping her around to face her friend, he held his fillet knife steady on her throat. Its metal reflected the moon back onto his cheek. The soft, distant purrs of cars driving through the night was the only sound. If either woman had screamed, the police would have arrived in minutes. Most women, he found, did not scream.

“Tell me who the rest of the Underground leaders are, or your friend dies.”

The woman in his grasp closed her eyes, silent. The one he faced trembled but did not cry. “I’m the only one left,” she whispered.

The soft ding of the elevator traveled through the foyer, across Grace Odegaard’s apartment, and out onto the fire escape. Jason had locked her apartment door, but that wouldn’t buy him much time. He studied the woman across from him, the chilly breeze ruffling her hair. The woman he held was murmuring, probably a prayer.

He opened her throat in one swift and lethal slice.

He stepped aside so the hot blood wouldn’t stain his pants.

The woman who faced him, despite her earlier courage, melted as she watched her friend bleed out. She spoke from the cocoon of shock, her knuckles white where she gripped the cool metal railing. “You killed her. I told you what you asked.”

He glided forward and held her. His touch was gentle. She recoiled from it. He tightened his grip, slitting her arm with his blade so she’d know not to waste his time. “What else can you tell me?”

When she didn’t answer, he punched her once in the base of her neck. She crumpled. He tossed the fresh corpse of her friend over the side. It hit the ground three stories below with a wet crunch. He heard a scream on the other side of Grace Odegaard’s apartment door, muffled but still clear. They’d found the body of the neighbor and her dog, were surely calling 911 this very moment. He hoisted the unconscious woman over his shoulder and climbed down the metal stairs, loading her into his waiting car.

He grabbed a tarp from the trunk, lifted the corpse onto his shoulder, and tumbled her into the back of his car. Before he could think twice, he sliced off her pinkie, certain that this would be the time he’d have the courage to do it. That impulse lasted until he closed the car door. He tossed the finger into the dumpster, disgusted with his cowardice, and drove away.

Still no sirens. This was good.

He drove straight to the Gopher Munitions Plant, an abandoned, isolated tangle of crumbling monoliths and grasping brown weeds, which he’d selected for exactly this purpose. The woman awoke shortly after they arrived. He’d placed the corpse of her friend next to her as an incentive, and he asked her again, “What else can you tell me?”

He’d asked her this many times over the course of the evening. Despite his persistence, she never spoke another word. He’d started a fire to keep them warm through the night as he sliced and cajoled, cooked his breakfast over it as she bled, and finally, once it was clear he wasn’t getting any information from her, he’d wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and called Barnaby.

He admired her for all she’d withstood. If she truly was an Underground leader, she was worthy of the role, as good at her job as he was at his. He massaged the locket in his hand. The silver was warm from gripping it. He never took jewelry from the women he headhunted, had completely ignored the flimsy half-heart charm at her neck, but this trinket felt different. The word mercy was etched inside.

He shouldn’t keep it.

It was not only against the rules, but out of character. He’d already gone too far by cutting off the finger. Yet, he couldn’t help but drop the locket into his pocket before he stepped outside into the brisk October morning and slid behind the wheel of the rented Chevy Malibu. He updated his face as he drove, the motions automatic, his appearance returning to its normal dimensions. It wasn’t magic. It was biology and a trick he’d learned after the first time his mother had broken his nose. He’d been six.

One punch.

The blood had gushed, drowning him in hot liquid. To save his own life, he’d instinctively put his hand to the meat of his nose and pushed.

It’d popped back into place, thinner than before.

The bleeding slowed.

Curious, he worked on the cartilage of his nose like a muscle, moving bits, suspending them in place, moving others. It hurt a hundred times worse than any punch, but it was worth it when he discovered that he could change the shape of his nose as readily as other people could crack their jaws or blink.

With repetition and a growing tolerance to pain, he learned to alter the shape of the skin around his eyes and mouth and raise or lower his cheekbones as needed. At the time, he figured it was some rare double-jointedness. When he was old enough, he researched it. As near as he could tell, he had sentient Sharpey’s fibers, the microscopic fingers of collagen that connected bone to muscle to skin. If he’d been born a hundred years earlier, he’d have ended up in a traveling freak show, next to the Bigfoot Lady, the Man with Three Eyes, Camel Girl, and two-faced Edward Drake.

Fortunately, he lived in modern times.

The ability to modify his appearance at will made him uniquely suited for this job, the one he’d been handpicked for, trained for, practiced two decades for. With wigs, colored contacts, a variety of clothing, and his fingerprints shaved off, he was impossible to trace.

He glanced at his watch, a gift from Carl Barnaby. He estimated it would take him a half an hour to reach the airport. He was Christmas-morning excited to be so close to the Crucible, the ultimate target.

He was the one who would make history, not her.