Pearce was sitting in a dining area that lay off the main hall. There were more than forty people spread over three long tables. The food was laid out on a fourth and mourners shuttled between there and the community kitchen to top up the buffet. As in the rest of the centre, the walls were decorated with Islamic scripture embossed on coloured banners in gold thread. High windows opened onto the street and Pearce could hear only the occasional passing vehicle. It was as though the subdued, mournful atmosphere inside the centre had spread throughout the neighbourhood. Pearce wondered how many families across the city had been affected by the atrocity, and how those who’d perpetrated it could live with themselves.
The latter question was rhetorical. He already knew how such horrors happened. People of power, usually men, rarely needed to get their hands dirty. The world offered a plentiful supply of people with personality disorders who could be coaxed or cajoled into perpetrating all sorts of evil. Narcissists without empathy, borderline personality sufferers with poor impulse control; there was a long list of conditions that, with the wrong upbringing and life experiences, could yield people capable of slaughtering others without losing a wink of sleep. Then there were others who weren’t defective in mind, but who had a defect of the spirit, motivated by anger, lust or vengeance, who could be radicalized into violence. Three men had fled Al Aqarab. Ziad, an unidentified American, and Narong Angsakul, the getaway driver and brother of the man Pearce had killed in Islamabad. Pearce suspected one of them was behind the Meals Seattle attack.
Was it Ziad? Pearce wondered. Or had he died in the warehouse?
Ziad had been in one of the trailing SUVs, but Pearce didn’t remember him being part of the crew that came into the building with Rasul, and he couldn’t recall seeing him in all the horror and confusion. He would have to check the footage taken by his surveillance glasses to be sure.
He looked through the folding glass doors that separated the dining area from the main hall and Essi Salamov caught his eye. She was in the female mourners’ section, comforting a handful of women. Pearce wondered what could have happened between her and Ziad. They’d been lovers at some point, that much was obvious. How involved was she in her father’s operation?
Deni and Rasul were sitting further along the table, talking to one another in hushed tones. Everyone else in the dining room either sat in stunned silence or sobbed quietly, their grief coming and going in overpowering waves. The subdued air of tragedy that hung over the gathering had a profound effect on Pearce. This was a community bound together by grief, taking comfort from each other. Sitting there watching them draw strength from their shared suffering, Pearce once again felt the need to belong.
Something distracted him from his thoughts. A noise. At first Pearce thought the sound was another mourner swept on a rising tide of misery, their wail echoing through the centre, but when one voice was joined by another, and then another, and the wails turned to screams, he knew something was very wrong. He ran from the dining room into the main hall. Mourners rose from their seats and turned with shocked concern towards the source of the screams: the entrance corridor beyond the double doors. Pearce sprinted towards them and pushed one open. His stomach rose and fell when he saw the man he’d been hunting, Narong Angsakul, moving along the corridor in silence, his face expressionless, his hands whipping out to touch everyone he could reach. In his wake he left a trail of death. Mourners who’d stepped into the corridor, Deni’s men who were supposed to be guarding the building, all had been afflicted by Angsakul’s touch and were choking to death.
Two members of Deni’s crew emerged from a side room and drew their weapons, but Angsakul rushed forward and disarmed them with a combination of punches that left them reeling. Within each flurry of blows, Pearce noticed the assassin graze the men’s faces with his fingertips, and by the time he stepped back, the toxin had started to do its work. The assassin reached inside his jacket and produced a metal canister, a replica of the one he’d used in Al Aqarab. Angsakul’s touch meant death, and it would come quickly, but Pearce knew what would happen if Angsakul succeeded in getting into the main hall and detonating that device.
If he got through the doors, everyone in the community centre would die.