JULY 13, 1977
SOUTH BRONX, NEW YORK
“Enough!”
Hopper and Martha stopped circling each other, both looking toward the unmistakable sound of Saint John’s voice. The crowd parted around them once more, allowing the gang leader through to confront the two would-be combatants. He looked at them both from behind his mirrored glasses, then stopped and glanced around at the assembled gangsters.
“Everybody get back to work.”
Nobody moved.
Saint John spun on his heel. He swung his arms wide, his purple robe spilling open.
“Get back to work!”
This time, people listened. The gang dispersed, running in every direction to get away from the wrath of their leader.
Saint John moved over to where Hopper and Martha were facing each other, Hopper with his fists raised, Martha with the crowbar in one hand. Saint John ignored Martha, stepping between the two as he faced Hopper.
Behind Saint John, Hopper saw the look Martha gave her beloved leader. It was one of pure, burning hatred.
Hopper found that interesting. Was she angry simply because her sport had been interrupted? Or was her anger part of some deeper animosity toward the gang leader himself?
Saint John addressed Martha, his eyes still fixed on Hopper.
“Martha, you chose this moment to challenge our new friend? You know as well as I that the moment approaches, don’t you?”
Then Saint John spun on his heel, rounding on the woman with a swiftness that surprised Hopper. He towered over Martha, who backed away, the crowbar skimming the floor as she stumbled backward.
“Don’t you?!”
Martha nodded. “Yes, Saint John, yes.”
“Then I suggest you get back to work,” he said, cupping her cheek in one hand, giving her a smile that she did not return. Then he dropped his hand and turned back to Hopper, and Hopper saw Martha give that furious look again to her leader’s back—confirming to him that, yes, her anger was directed at Saint John himself—then she turned and walked away.
“I can only apologize for the behavior of my…associate.” Saint John cocked his head. “You want to know what we are doing here, I take it?”
Hopper said nothing.
“Maybe it is time. Come, I have things to show you.”
Saint John turned and headed back toward the stairs at the far side of the warehouse.
Hopper followed.
“Do you believe in sacrifice, Mr. Hopper?”
Saint John had led Hopper up the gantry stairs and into the second level of the warehouse offices. Again, it was clear the place had been abandoned for years—the offices here were nothing more than empty shells, the brickwork exposed and, for the most part, covered entirely with graffiti. As they moved on, Hopper saw the spaces becoming increasingly filled with crates, the Vipers using the area for additional storage.
Hopper needed to know what was in the crates. As with the ones out in the warehouse proper, they were long but shallow rectangular boxes.
He needed to see for himself.
“It’s a difficult question, I understand that.”
Hopper looked up, his train of thought broken as he saw that Saint John had stopped in the hallway and turned around to face him. Hopper himself had stopped in front of one of the storage rooms. Saint John had been watching him—watching him look.
“Let me tell you what I think the answer is.” Saint John moved closer. Hopper’s eyes fell to the dog tags shining on the chain around his neck. “I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is that you believe in sacrifice like I believe in sacrifice. I think you understand it like I understand it. I can see it in your eyes.”
Saint John paused. He was so close that Hopper could feel the man’s breath on his face.
“They say the eyes are the windows to a man’s soul,” Saint John continued. “And I think that’s true. I think that’s very true. And believe me, when I look into your eyes, and I look into your soul, I can see that truth in there. I can see sacrifice. I can see belief.”
You see exactly what you want to see, thought Hopper. A reflection of yourself, and nothing more.
“I can see a rare understanding that there is work to be done,” the gang leader continued. He nodded. “You and I have been through so much. We have seen so much. And now we are here, ready, waiting, willing. So yes, you understand. Your hands are His hands, hands He will direct as He directs our mission. He will use our hands as His own, wielding us as He wields a tool for a purpose both singular and true. He can see it. He can see the truth of your soul, for that soul is now His. He owns you and He owns me, and for that, we rejoice.”
Hopper breathed slowly through his nose. Saint John clearly held him in high regard, apparently because of the simple fact they’d both served in Vietnam.
Was that why Leroy and Lincoln had taken him to the veterans’ support group? Saint John placed a lot of weight on military experience.
Of course. The support group—groups, plural—were a recruiting ground. Saint John was looking for people. The right kind of people, at least in his mind.
People like Hopper—a veteran with both experience and a burning desire to…do something. In Hopper’s case, both statements were true, but he’d managed to weave the latter into a fantasy that Saint John had grabbed with both hands, turning him from fresh meat into a favorite.
This close, Hopper could see the engraving on the man’s dog tags. The format matched Hopper’s own tags in the drawer at home.
SAINT
JOHNATHAN
RA098174174
A POS
CATHOLIC
Hopper looked up into Saint John’s—Johnathan Saint’s—face. His own double reflection loomed large in the convex silver lenses of the man’s aviator glasses. The office hallway was well lit and, as Hopper watched, he thought he could see a faint shadow of movement behind the glasses as the gang leader blinked.
“If the eyes are the windows to the soul,” said Hopper, “then why do you wear those?”
What are you trying to hide from your followers?
Saint John smiled, then tapped a finger against Hopper’s chest. “I knew you were the right one. In the land of the blind there are some who can see, my brother, there are some who can see. You and I, we are the chosen. He sent you to me to do His work—and what glorious work it is.”
Saint John turned and headed down the hallway. Then he stopped and turned back around when he realized Hopper wasn’t following.
“Who is ‘He’?” asked Hopper. He spread his arms. “Who is this all for?”
Saint John smiled.
“We do it for our master.”
“Our master?”
“The master.” Saint John stepped closer again. “People know Him by many names, but the one He whispers in my ear is Satan. And soon He will walk among us as we lead Him to His throne of fire.”
With that, Saint John walked away.
It took Hopper a few seconds to muster his strength and gather his thoughts and follow, rather than run the other way as fast as he could.
Saint John led the way back into his office on the top level, taking internal staircases now, rather than the metal gantry steps outside. The place was certainly huge, although devoid of activity—at several points, Hopper thought he could hear people at work, with metallic bangs and thuds echoing from somewhere deeper in the complex, as if part of the warehouse was still home to whatever industry had built it in the first place. But by the time Saint John led him to the big office, Hopper still hadn’t seen another gang member anywhere.
The office seemed the same as when Hopper had last seen it, but as soon as they crossed the threshold, Saint John marched ahead, rounding the desk and heading to one of the two doors in the wall behind it. The door was now ajar.
“No, no!” Saint John hissed under his breath as he threw the door fully open. Hopper joined him. The room beyond was a small file room, lined with shelves and file boxes. In the middle of the room were a small round table and two matching chairs. There was no other door.
Saint John spun around and brushed heavily against Hopper as he rushed out of the small room and into the main office, over to the curved expanse of glass that faced out onto the warehouse proper. He opened a panel in one of the windows, and yelled down to his minions far below.
“Leroy, Lincoln! Come up here! Bring your crews. Now!”
Below, Hopper could see the men spring into life, several jumping up from the old sofas by the oil drum fires and sprinting toward the stairs.
“Something wrong?” asked Hopper.
Saint John turned. Hopper could see the pulse throbbing in the man’s neck, echoed in his temple.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” he said, then he pointed at Hopper. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
Then he went back to the desk. Taking one more look into the empty file room, he turned and pulled open the top drawer of the desk. From his position by the window, Hopper couldn’t see what was in it, but the gang leader gave a small nod, then closed the drawer just as the door to his office flew open and Leroy and Lincoln ran in, chests heaving from their run up the stairs. Behind them, several more gangsters gathered.
Saint John looked at them, then went to the long file drawers. Opening the unlocked second drawer, he pulled out a large sheet of paper and swept it through the air, laying it out on the conference table. The others gathered around, Hopper included. Looking down at the sheet, he saw it was a layout of the warehouse and offices. As he had suspected, what he’d seen so far was only a small part of the complex. It looked like the Vipers had taken a couple of the neighboring industrial units as well, the whole block connected by a series of multi-level bridges and walkways.
The gang leader began pointing to different areas on the layout. “Leroy, take your crew and start a sweep of the east side. Divide in two: one group takes the stairs to the top, the other starts at the bottom. Lincoln, do the same, divide up and take the west side. Continue to sweep up and down. Detail some men to cover the exits, north and south sides. If she’s still in the building, we can squeeze her into the middle.”
Her?
The others nodded, apparently following the boss’s instructions without any confusion. Hopper didn’t know what was going on, but he thought he could guess.
Someone—a woman, apparently—had been locked in the file room, and had escaped. He wondered who it could be. Surely not Delgado? No, she knew what Hopper was doing, and, more important, she trusted him. There was no way she’d get involved.
So…who was it?
Saint John tapped the map again. “Hopper, you take some of Leroy’s crew. Start here and work down, covering the central area and offices. Again, if she’s in here, we can flush her out into the open.”
Hopper looked at the gang leader. “Who are we looking for?”
Saint John stood tall and didn’t look at Hopper, his mirrored gaze still directed at the map on the table. “Someone very important. Now go.” He waved them out.
The others sprang into life, quickly grouping themselves into small squads of two and three men. Leroy conferred with some of his group, then nodded at Hopper.
“City and Reuben will go with you,” he said, as two gang members stepped forward. Hopper recognized them from his earlier round of introductions: City was a young man with a long face and long blond hair held back under a red bandanna, Reuben an older black man with a flattop shaved to mathematical precision. As Leroy and Lincoln left with their teams, Hopper nodded at his two men.
He had an idea. Turning back to the table, he gestured to Saint John.
“Look, I have experience here. I was a cop for years, I know how to organize a grid search. May I?”
Saint John spread his hands and stepped backward to give Hopper room. Hopper moved closer, turning the map around to get his bearings. He traced an area with his finger…but his eyes were elsewhere, scanning other sections, trying to imprint the map in his head.
“Okay,” he said, after a moment more. “We split up, we can cover more ground.” He pointed to the map. “City, take this sector. Reuben, head this way. I’ll take the middle. Like the boss said, we act like a pincer. If our target is in the middle, we’ve got them. If not, we push them out to here or here, and the others should pick them up. Got it?”
The other two nodded in agreement and headed off, City giving Reuben a hearty slap on the back.
Hopper ran his eyes over the map again, then stood up. Saint John was looking at him, his arms folded.
“Good planning, my brother.”
Hopper licked his bottom lip, but didn’t reply. Instead he gave a nod, then headed out into the complex.
Hopper had two diametrically opposed reactions to the scale of the Vipers’ operation. On the one hand, it was remarkable, the gang having apparently claimed a whole block of industrial real estate for their own purposes. He didn’t know how many of them there were, but it was clear Saint John needed the space for something.
On the other hand, the fact that they had taken over the warehouse complex so easily was no surprise at all. New York was a city of wild contradictions. At the bottom of Manhattan, the twin towers of the World Trade Center reached for the sky, a testament to the resilience and ambition of a city sliding into the biggest financial crisis of its history. Further up, Midtown continued to boom, while the higher echelons of New York society enjoyed their luxury on the Upper West Side.
How long that would last, Hopper couldn’t even guess. Because, as he’d seen himself, other parts of the city were doing far less well. He’d never been a cop in the Bronx, and he’d never had any desire to serve in that borough. He’d heard enough about it even before leaving Hawkins. Different parts of the city of New York had been hit by the mismanagement of its leaders in different ways, but the Bronx was almost like a different planet, one composed of ruined buildings and burned-out shells between empty lots and rows of tenements on the verge of collapse. To find an abandoned industrial complex in this area and co-opt it for their own use wouldn’t actually have been that hard for Saint John and his followers. It was the perfect base of operations, too: big enough to grow the gang and turn the place into a full-fledged headquarters, with enough space to gather resources, equipment, matériel; far enough away from existing—and occupied—residential and commercial zones that nobody would bother them, cops included, and yet they’d be able to see anyone coming if they tried; central enough to allow easy access to the city.
All in all, Saint John had done well. He might have been suffering from some kind of delusion, if not mental illness, but he was clearly an experienced planner and logistician. He’d mentioned being seconded to “special duties” back in Vietnam. Hopper wondered exactly what that meant.
He also wanted to know what it was Saint John was planning, and why.
And now was the perfect opportunity to find out. With the gang searching for the escaped prisoner—Hopper couldn’t believe she, whoever she was, was here voluntarily—and Hopper part of that search, he had the freedom he needed to look around, to go digging, without arousing any further suspicion.
Perfect.
He stalked through the empty hallways, trying to picture the layout in his mind. The place was a maze. Initially, Hopper had just assumed that the escapee would have found the exit by now and gotten away, but after a half hour of checking room after room, turning into one corridor after another, Hopper wasn’t so sure. He’d lost track of his own location, the map in his mind now long forgotten, but he could hear the others as they searched, apparently happy to be less than stealthy as they tracked their quarry.
Of course, this was just another game to them. More sport.
So far, Hopper’s own search of the storerooms hadn’t quite revealed what he had expected. This part of the building was mostly used to keep food, it seemed. The old offices and meeting rooms were filled to varying degrees with more crates and boxes, but the ones Hopper had checked had contained tinned ham, packets of powdered milk, canned fruit. There was enough here to feed an army.
Hopper didn’t like that thought much.
As for the escapee, there was no sight or sound. Reaching the end of a hallway leading back to a staircase on the west side, Hopper was about ready to head out and try a level down, when he stopped.
There. A sound. As the noise of the search above him reverberated down the west stairs, he was sure he had heard something much closer, on his level—somewhere farther back down the hallway he had just come through.
And there it was again. A creaking door, and the unmistakable sound of a shoe scuffing on the hard cement floor.
The escapee. It had to be. She’d been hiding in an office, waiting for Hopper to leave. Too preoccupied with his own search, he hadn’t detected her presence.
Hopper let the stair door swing shut, then ducked back down the hall until he reached the first intersection. He slipped around the corner and pressed himself up against the wall, his head turned toward the sound, and waited.
The footsteps came again. Someone was slowly but surely making their way down the hallway, around the corner.
Toward him.
Hopper braced himself, unsure who or what to expect. But two things came to mind.
First, if he was the one to catch the escapee, then that would earn him more favor with the Vipers. Their leader had already accepted Hopper into his confidence—and rather quickly too, fueled, it seemed, by their shared Vietnam connection. But the others, Leroy aside, were still an unknown quantity. The gang had enjoyed Martha’s little sport, and Lincoln certainly didn’t like him. Even with Saint John’s support, Hopper wasn’t sure how firm his standing with the Vipers really was.
But, second, if Hopper could get to the escapee first, he could use that to his advantage in another way. Because while he didn’t know who the person was, there was a chance that an enemy of Saint John could be made an ally of his own. Saint John had said the prisoner was someone important—if this was her, perhaps she knew what the gang was up to, what their leader was planning. Perhaps she could provide Hopper with the information he needed to take back to Gallup.
Two more steps, slow and quiet, but in the dead air of the hallway they rang like a bell in Hopper’s ears. He strained every sense, trying to form an image in his mind of the person approaching, judge their size, whether they were carrying any weapons. He knew the prisoner was a woman, but that meant nothing, nothing at all. Leroy’s sister Martha was half his size but more than capable of taking him on. Hopper could make no assumptions.
If only he could read the person through the solid wall like the symbol on a Zener card.
He tensed, readying himself for action. The person was almost at the corner.
That was when he heard another sound—a door opening, heavy footfalls and loud chatter. It was another search party, entering a nearby corridor. At any moment, they would walk straight into Hopper. The person just around the corner was already spooked by the sound, their own footfalls having stopped.
Hopper had to act, and fast.
He gritted his teeth, and swung himself around the corner.
He caught a flash of red and the look of surprise on the face of the woman with long brown hair, then he stopped, almost midstride.
Lisa Sargeson stared at him, her eyes wide.
Behind Hopper came the sound of the gangsters as they approached. Hopper quickly lifted his finger to his lips, indicating for Lisa to stay silent, then he pointed down the hallway she had just come, and nodded. She got the message immediately, and darted back down the hall and through the closest door.
This office had windows running down one wall, starting at waist height, looking out into the hallway they had just been standing in. Lisa ducked down and slid herself underneath the old desk that was all that remained of the furniture in the room. Hopper went to follow, stopping when he saw there was far from enough room for both of them.
Lisa looked at him, worry etched across her face. He gave her a silent okay hand signal, then moved over to the wall, kneeling down so he was underneath the windows. If the gangsters came in, finding him was less of a problem than finding her.
The Vipers walked down the hallway, their movements a cacophony of noise after Hopper’s careful stealth. The office was dark, the hallway was lit; Hopper watched the five shadows move across the office floor and the side of the old desk as the gangsters continued down the hall, moving past them. Hopper lifted himself up, peering over the sill of the office window, watching as the gangsters crossed the intersection of corridors farther along and kept going.
“We clear?”
He turned on his toes as Lisa’s face appeared over the edge of the desk. He nodded, waving her over. She moved out from her hiding place but kept herself low.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she whispered.
“Undercover, part of a federal task force. But why are you here? Saint John had you locked up in his back office.” Hopper checked the corridor again, then turned back to Lisa.
“That’s a long story,” she said.
“So start talking.”
“He offered me a job.”
Hopper stared at her. “What? A job? Doing what?”
Lisa shrugged. “I’m not sure. But it was just a ruse, anyway. He invited me up here, gave me the tour, but then he locked me in that room.” She ran her hands through her hair and shook her head, focusing on the floor rather than Hopper. “He tried to get me to…”
Hopper felt his blood run cold. “To what?”
She shook her head again. “Doesn’t matter. But listen, this isn’t like any kind of street gang I’ve worked with before. It’s weird—it’s like, I don’t know, a cross between a private army and some kind of cult. Saint John has some kind of hold over these people. He’s obsessed with what he calls the Day of the Serpent—it’s some kind of apocalyptic prophecy he believes is about to come true.”
Hopper frowned. “You sure you don’t believe it too?”
“What do you mean?”
“The party on Independence Day. When you went into a trance, you talked about the darkness coming, a night that is serpent black.”
She narrowed her eyes, grimacing in confusion. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember any of that.” She paused. “Is that really what I said? Wow.”
“Yeah, wow is right.” Hopper shifted on his haunches, getting more comfortable. “You’re going to tell me there’s no connection between you and the Vipers?”
“Oh, no, there is. I know Saint John.”
Hopper felt that familiar pang of adrenaline in his chest. “You know him?”
She nodded. “I worked with him before, during an old study I was a part of, at a place called the Rookwood Institute. He was one of the pilot group of felons enrolled in the program. We didn’t get very far before it was shut down, but he was in that group.”
Lisa filled him in on what she had learned from Saint John while in his company. Hopper listened carefully, processing the information. Then, when she was done, he nodded. “Okay. We need to get you out of here.”
“Me? What about you?”
Hopper shook his head. “From what you’ve just said, the Day of the Serpent is something very big. I need to find out what it is.”
“But I can help!”
“Yes, you can. By getting out of here. Go to the 65th Precinct in Brooklyn—to Detective Delgado. Tell her everything you know, and she’ll take it to the task force.”
“Okay,” said Lisa. “But how do I get out?”
Hopper rubbed his chin. “I have a contact here, he should be able to help. But I’ll have to find him first. Will you be okay here?”
Lisa nodded.
“Okay, great. Keep the light off, keep out of sight, okay? I’ll be as fast as I can.”
“Good luck,” said Lisa.
Hopper nodded to her, then stood and left, closing the office door behind him with a click.