Entering the open balcony gave him a fresh, clean taste of the early-morning desert air. The arid environment served to clear his head a bit more, and he welcomed it. Today would be a day of days, and he’d waited long enough for the culmination of his efforts to come to fruition.
Patience was many things, but a virtue? He didn’t think so. No matter. Today would end the way he’d dreamed it would.
After another deep breath, he stepped the rest of the way through the tinted glass door and stood near the railing, glancing down to the street some twenty stories below. The people moving on both sides looked like ants and he thought that appropriate. Piss ants, to be exact. They all deserved to receive what they’d earned, literally and figuratively; shitty lives and slavery to some meaningless job for years on end. For what? To simply live a few more years in pain and misery, riding the wave of medications designed to help them fight any assortment of maladies.
Damn fools. Most people had the power to exercise a new future for themselves, but would never realize it, as he had. Instead, they’d follow the trail of their peers and predecessors.
So be it.
“As they say, more for me,” he said out loud.
Moving back inside his room, he sat in one of the high-backed chairs that resembled an Egyptian throne and began, again, to go over the day’s “activities.”
He suspected that the rest of the BAU was on the way west. Frankly, he was surprised it had taken this long. Each member of that unit had a loyalty button molded in the shape of Agent Williams’s face and was easily pushed. Corner and Downs simply couldn’t help themselves. He had a contingency plan in the event he was mistaken, but he didn’t think he’d need it. After all, men like him weren’t wrong often, particularly when it came to human nature.
The scent of his dark-roast coffee demanded his attention, and he lifted the cup from the ornate glass coffee table and indulged, nodding his approval.
No doubt, by now, Williams had drawn some obvious conclusions, and some not so obvious. There were too many inconsistencies in the FBI’s view of this case to ignore. He supposed if they had already gotten a look at the video footage Williams would suspect that Doctor Fredrick Argyle wasn’t part of this frolic in Vegas.
All of the evidence would contradict any other conclusion. After all, one’s senses are unfailing and in a real truth, don’t lie, right?
Careful little eyes what you see. Careful little ears what you hear. Careful little minds what you think.
He laughed loudly.
“You may need to rethink that one, Special Agent Williams. Rethink it indeed.”
Setting the coffee cup on the table, he gazed at the other man seated in the chair opposite him.
He appeared to be a little under the weather, perhaps a little worn out, yet his inspiration, his mentor, his counsel had offered him far more than most men deserved. He was grateful for that.
Taking another draw from his cup, he lifted it and toasted the man sitting opposite him. “Thank you for your help,” he said.
The silent, powerful grin was brilliant. And all of the encouragement he needed to finish what he’d started.
Finally.