“May have?”
He quickly explained what had just happened.
“You have notified the local authorities, I presume.”
“Yes sir, but it’s a rural area, and the closest deputy is fifteen minutes out.”
“Keep me posted. I’ll see what we can do from our side with this new information. He obviously left the country with a different passport. We’ll start by reviewing security footage at every gate that had a flight from London to Dallas since Wednesday and widen it from there.”
“I’ve already contacted the Dallas office of the FBI. Can I ask you to call Agent Johnson?”
“I’ll have an inspector call him right away.”
“Is there anything else we can do, sir?”
“I think the best thing you can do now is pray, son.”
Gilbert closed the Blackberry and stood there with his jaw clenched, staring a hole in the wall for a minute. He turned to find Gary doubled over on his knees.
“Are you okay?” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Exactly what he said to do.”
><><><
T
IRA,
T
EXAS
A late model, white GMC truck belonging to the Hopkins County Sheriff’s Department turned onto the long quarter-mile drive that led from the road to Uncle Henry’s house. The gate was closed and the deputy on the passenger side got out to open it. Then he climbed back into the truck and began working a powerful spotlight, looking for any sign of movement in the trees and bushes that dotted the pasture on either side of the road. The sirens were off, but the lights were flashing. The truck stopped about fifty yards from the house while the spotlight combed every inch of the place. There were no lights on, not even a porch light. The deputy working the spotlight turned to the driver and said, “Well, what do we do now?”
“What kind of question is that? We’re going to have a look around; that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for backup?”
“It doesn’t look like there is anybody home, Leroy. For all we know, the dispatch could’ve taken a prank call. Just walk up and knock on the door. I’ve got your back.”
“You’re the boss, Darrel.”
The deputy got out of the truck, walked into the yard and called out, “Anybody home?”
He waited a few seconds, but there was no answer. Then he called out again.
“Anybody home?”
He had only been on duty for two weeks, and this was the first time that he had responded to a call involving firearms. He was apprehensive. As he walked towards the porch, shining the light in the windows and listening intently for movement, he realized they didn’t pay him enough. He also regretted the fact that he had not filled out the cheap life insurance policy that had come in the mail two weeks ago.
He walked up to the main house and rang the bell.
“This is the Hopkins County Sheriff’s department. Is there anybody home?”
He waited about thirty seconds. No lights came on inside, so he began walking around the house shining his flashlight in the windows.
“Doesn’t look like there is anyone home.”
“Go look at the guest house.”
When he got to the porch, he immediately drew his sidearm and started backing away, yelling to his partner,
“Somebody’s been shot. There’s blood on the porch and empty cartridges.”
“Oh, shit!”
He heard his partner throw the truck into reverse and back up to face the guest house. In twenty seconds, the headlights of the truck and the powerful spotlight had the old farm house lit up like high noon at the OK corral. Darrel and Leroy took positions on the opposite ends of the porch and began moving up to the house. Now they were shouting in earnest.
“If you have a firearm, slide it out the front door and come out with your hands up!”
Again, there was only silence. Darrel had made it to the porch and could see a puddle of blood on the porch. There was some smearing but very little. He had expected to see a trail of blood leading back into the house, but there was no trail at all. He motioned for Leroy to cover him and pushed on the front door. It swung open effortlessly and without a sound. He went in low, expecting at any minute to see a body or a bleeding victim, but three minutes later they had swept the house and found nothing at all. No body, no gun and no sign of burglary. When he came back outside, he could hear the sirens of the ambulance in the distance. Darrel just shrugged his shoulders.
“Somebody needs one, that’s for sure, either that or a hearse, but that somebody isn’t here anymore.”
When the ambulance came roaring up the drive, they found Darrel on the radio reporting back to headquarters, and Leroy examining the bullet holes in the front door and walls.
“Who needs medical care here? We got a report of gunshot wounds.”
“There is a gunshot wound. We just can’t locate the owner,” Darrel said dryly.
He knew that his answer would come off as callous, but eighteen years of domestic disputes, drug traffickers and petty thieves had left him more than jaded.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He means that there is a puddle of blood here, but nobody home. That’s all,” Leroy volunteered, pointing down to the porch.
The medic walked up to the porch, took one look at the blood and said, “Well, they can’t be far. Unless they get medical attention quick, the person with this wound will bleed out in a hurry. Have you guys looked in the woods?”
“We’ve shown the spotlight around the entire house. The problem is there’s no blood trail, so we have no idea what direction to start looking in.”
“No blood trail? Are you sure? There’s no way someone could bleed that bad and not leave a blood trail, even if it were faint. It ought to be pretty easy to pick up with everything so dried up and yellow.”
“Well, if you can find one, we’ll gladly follow it,” said Leroy to no one in particular.
“You don’t suppose someone could have backed a car right up to the porch and thrown the body in the trunk, do you?”
Darrel began shining his light on the grass in the yard looking for tire tracks. He didn’t see any, but the ground was so hard and dry and the grass in the yard mowed so short that he wasn’t sure a car would even leave tracks.
“I suppose the only thing to do is widen our circle a bit. Let’s work in pairs. Backup is on the way. Until they arrive, Leroy, keep your wits about you and your gun at the ready. If there is a wounded person here, we need to find them quick.”
><><><
L
ONDON
Gary could hear Gilbert’s voice fading and felt a wave of nausea rising in the pit of his stomach. He raised his head. There was movement in his peripheral vision, but his brain was no longer processing the signals transmitted by the optic nerve. He was falling headlong, racing through layers of emotion deposited throughout his life.
His mind was a blur of color-coded feeling devoid of rational thought - the anguish of rejection, the disappointment of unfulfilled dreams, the desperation of hopelessness, the security of loving moments with his mom, the pleasure of success tinged with an empty feeling of meaningless vanity, the camaraderie of friends and the pain of their loss. Personalities from the past flashed before his mind. Neighborhood kids from his childhood, cousins, bullies from school, teachers, colleagues, friends, strangers he had seen in airports, orphans and beggars he had seen on the streets in Asia… Each image was a burning brand on his mind, and he saw how the event had marked or scarred his life. All the while, he kept falling.
A newsreel began to play in his mind. A political rally in India turning into a bloody riot, a US naval fleet engaging the Chinese in the Indian ocean, the streets of Tehran filled with invading Pakistani and Turkish soldiers, a mushroom cloud over Damascus and Cairo, worldwide famine and economic collapse, and he was still plummeting downwards.
Suddenly, everything went completely dark, a black cloud of malice deprived his mind’s eye of light, and yet he could sense movement. A twisting torrent of evil assailed his consciousness and bombarded his mind with a harsh,
discordant melee of sound. The dream he’d had the night before receiving news of his father’s death was replayed in vivid detail. It began as a jumble of dissonant noise, like a crowded marketplace or a bazaar, but gradually he was able to identify some of the sounds. There were cathedral bells, Buddhist gongs, the Muslim call to prayer, a Jewish shofar, the chanting of Sioux medicine men, moans and groans from entranced Zulu witch doctors, Hindu hymns of praise to Shiva. All religious, all evil.
The cacophony continued, but the black haze over his mind lifted. What he saw was his father’s body in the morgue. The picture was high-definition. He saw the laugh lines under his eyes. The cold, blue lips... Gradually, this audio vision began to fade, and inexplicably he realized that the sensation of falling was also gone. He could not tell how long all of this lasted, but when the flood of sensation had passed, he felt like a diver fighting to regain the surface, clawing his way back to the top for air after being plunged into a sea of sub-consciousness. When he finally broke through, back into the real world, into his own consciousness, he was looking at the ceiling, and Gilbert was talking on the phone in the background.
“. . . What do you mean there was no one there? I’m telling you I was talking with her on the phone when the guns were fired less than half an hour ago.”
Gary motioned for him to put it on speaker.
“I understand your frustration, Mr. O’Brien. I’m just relating what the deputy on the scene told me. We are doing everything we can to find your sister.”
“Thank you, officer.”
Gilbert hung up and turned to Gary.
“Are you alright? You stood up from praying and passed out. I laid you on the bed and propped you up with pillows.”
“I feel better now. I think that all of this has just left me emotionally exhausted. Sorry, if I scared you. What did the deputy say?” asked Gary.
“Gwyn is not there. They found blood on the porch. There were no bodies and no blood trail.”
Gary put his head between his hands.
“Now what?”
“All we can do is wait and hope those local yokels do their job right.”
“I think it may be a little bigger than that.”
“Meaning?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
Gary took a deep breath. He could guess what Gilbert would say about his dream in Istanbul, and the vision he had just experienced. His brother didn’t buy into metaphysical mumbo jumbo. He hadn’t either until recently . . .
CHAPTER
32
S
ATURDAY,
N
ORTHEAST
T
EXAS
Zeki pulled into the parking lot of the public boat ramp and began looking for the most strategic place to park the car. They were almost a mile from the Farm to Market road. He needed to change out of his blood-stained clothes and review his exit plan before the sun came up. He had always thought that fluorescent street lights seemed a bit eerie. Tonight, the effect was compounded by the circumstances. A chill ran up his spine. After what had just happened, the resources of the world’s most powerful country would be mobilized for the express purpose of hunting him down. The best minds in law enforcement and intelligence would be tracking him day and night, and he knew it had already been set in motion.