Angel Killer (15 page)

So far this entire machination could be the work of one man. It’s frightening to think of what one person can do by himself. There’s some solace in that he’s probably not tied into some kind of terrorist network. But do we really know that?

We exit the SUV and Chisholm briefs us on the location as we enter the hotel. “We’ve done a preliminary sweep with the bomb unit and the dogs. Swabs and barks came back negative. Still, this guy could probably make something that will get past that. So be careful.” He hesitates in front of the elevator.

He’s trying to give me an out to pass on checking the room that raised their suspicions. It’s ridiculous. I’m not going to let someone else walk into something I’m too afraid to. Besides, what difference does it make if I’m here?

Chisholm waves to the front desk. “We’ve checked the registry and already spoken to forty-one guests in the hotel. Nothing stands out. A lot of French Canadians.”

We take the elevator to the fourth floor. Interesting that it’s not the fifth. I guess the Warlock didn’t want to stand out by taking a room on the top floor.

“How did you find this room?” I ask.

Chisholm sighs. “The name. It was registered under A. Baris. Your suggestion about a potential mythological connection gave us some ideas. We pulled all the registrations along the beach and had a computer sift through potential fake names and anything that cross-referenced with something relating to magic or mysticism. Abaris is a rather unusual name. Abaris the Hyperborean was an ancient magician. I know. Sounds like something out of a comic book. Obviously”—he pauses—“it was an intentional clue. He wanted us to find this place.”

The police officer standing guard at the door lets us inside. It’s not a large room. The bed has been pushed up against the wall to make more space. There’s a telescope in front of the large window trained on the beach in front of the sandbar.

I look around. There’s no blood. No bodies. It looks like a normal beach hotel room.

“We’ve had a fiber team in here. Hotel rooms are always filled with fun surprises.” Chisholm points to a spot next to the telescope. “There was another tripod set up there. From the indentations in the carpet we can tell it was a video camera or a digital still camera with some big glass on it.”

“Why the telescope then?” It doesn’t look like a particularly expensive model. It probably doesn’t have anywhere near the image quality of the camera that was there. I walk over to the telescope and have a look. Our footprints in the sand are still visible. Out in the open, part of the show.

Chisholm looks out the slightly open window at the people passing on the sidewalk below us. I wonder for a moment what an experienced profiler like him sees when he people-watches. The thought makes me a little self-conscious. He turns to me, “We think it’s him telling us that he’s observing us. It’s aimed right where we were standing earlier today.”

A breeze blows through the window. The Warlock could have taken us out one by one with a high-power rifle from here if he really wanted to. I kneel down to look at the ledge.

Chisholm sees me looking for marks where a rifle may have rested. “We checked for that. No evidence that he placed a gun on there.”

I guess that’s reassuring. “So he’s not trying to tell us he can kill us?”

“Not exactly.” He draws the words out. This isn’t good.

Chisholm motions me over to look at the ceiling. He points to where a piece has been removed. “We found a slit about a half inch across. We cut it out of the ceiling and sent it to forensics. It was created by a knife with a curved blade. Probably a kris knife. Something with sacrificial implications. Inside the slit we found a sliver of glossy paper. He’d stabbed it to the ceiling while he was here. It was from a cover of a magazine . . .”

Chisholm’s voice trails off as he makes eye contact with me. I know where this is heading. I’m already shaking my head. My magazine. The one on Ailes’s desk. My cheesecake magician photo. The Warlock knows about me. He wants me to know that. He stood right where I’m standing now, watching me.

Chisholm continues. “Ailes told us where to match the paper right away. Everyone thought I shouldn’t bring you back here. But I wanted you to see this. I want you to know what we’re up against. I don’t think we should hide anything from you. I have to go to some pretty dark places to understand the people we deal with. I don’t think sparing you that is going to help you. You need to understand what he sees.”

I stare up at the place on the ceiling where he’d stabbed my magazine cover with a knife. I examine the floor. He must have lain there looking up at it. What was he thinking? Was it sexual? Was it just to throw me off?

I think back to the man on the warehouse roof at the cemetery. Was that my first encounter? Did getting close to him make him interested? Or is it the fact that he sees me as a threat because I’m a magician? A challenger to him.

Chisholm points out several spots on the carpet that have tape markings. “He had five candles lit. We also picked up a faint outline of a body. He’s about five-foot-seven. Probably weighs a hundred and sixty pounds. Athletic. No semen, for what it’s worth.”

“Too bad,” I reply matter-of-factly. That would give us a DNA profile to run through the database.

“How long ago did he leave?”

“Less than an hour before our forensic team got here.”

“An hour? He likes to cut things close.”

“Perhaps . . .” Chisholm has a pensive look on his face. “He didn’t seem rushed. I think you surprised him at the cemetery when you chased him down, if that was indeed him. This time he’s trying to prove he’s in control.”

“How far is he willing to go to prove that?”

“I guess that depends upon how much of a threat he sees you as. He already knows about your background. Today’s little item in the news doesn’t help the situation. Although we might be able to use it to antagonize him a little bit. Maybe play up the idea that the FBI’s Witch sees through all his tricks. Get him off-balance, make him deviate from his script.”

“I don’t want to be a distraction from the investigation,” I reply.

Chisholm shakes his head. “It’s not about that. As we know, this guy is a highly organized thinker. It takes meticulous planning to pull off what he’s done so far. We need to get him to mess up.”

“What if he’s a good improviser?” I ask.

“Nobody is that good. You saw him at the cemetery.”

“I saw someone. We don’t know who. It could have been anyone,” I reply.

Chisholm thinks this over. “This hotel room is proof that he likes to be close to the scene of the crime when it happens. He wants to watch us. He’s choosing these locations so he can do that. The piece of memory card wrapper we found back at the warehouse by the cemetery tells us he’s probably recording what he sees.”

“But now he’s told us as much. He wants us to know how close he can get. If there’s a next time we’re going to clamp down even faster.”

“True,” agrees Chisholm. “I think he’s moving toward more public locations to hide.”

“Or to make a bigger spectacle.”

“Probably. In the meantime we need to play every card we have. And that means you. It’s about catching him off-guard. The telescope is his way of telling us he’s the one in charge. Maybe what we need is someone on the other end staring him down and saying they’re not impressed. What’s it like when you’re onstage and see someone sitting in the audience with their arms folded, looking bored?”

The first image is of my grandfather looking disappointed. Chisholm means regular people. “It’s the worst thing in the world. It’s when you start to slip up. You go out of your way to impress them and that’s when you get careless. You forget everyone else and focus on the skeptic.”

Chisholm gives me a menacing grin. “Think you can make him slip up? I want to push this weirdo away from his plan. Make him react. Act impulsively. Put our Witch against the Warlock. He’s fixated on you. I want you to look back at him and ask, ‘Is that all you got?’”

“You mean give him performance anxiety.”

“I guess you could put it that way,” he replies.

I
DON’T LIKE THE IDEA
,” Ailes tells me for the hundredth time when I get back.

Neither do I.

At his insistence, I flew back last night on an FBI jet and slept in a dorm on campus at Quantico. I resisted any kind of official protective custody but agreed to stay on the reservation, at least for the next several days while we try to figure out how serious of a threat the Warlock really is to me.

Sleeping here or back in my apartment, it’s not like it’s going to affect my social life much. Even when I had a boyfriend, work was still my focus. Going through miles of data in the paper jungle isn’t the most exciting kind of law enforcement, but it is preferable to being a beat cop telling junkies they couldn’t loiter in the bus shelters.

Once I knew magic wasn’t for me, it was my goal to join the FBI. Even as a little girl I had a strong sense of right and wrong. The pinstripes and disciplined reputation of the FBI appealed to this little girl who spent half her time as a vagabond. My love of figuring things out lined up perfectly with my image of an agent solving cases. To get there, working as a street cop was a way for me to acquire some practical experience. A lot of the agents I work with—most, in fact—have never had to draw their gun in a dangerous situation. Most of the real work in the FBI involves chasing down leads on the phone and talking to people face-to-face in relaxed settings. As a police officer, I’d sometimes have to draw my gun two or three times a night answering burglary calls or pulling over suspicious vehicles.

Working under this kind of constant tension helps you develop a bit of a relaxed edge with less life-threatening things. I guess that’s why I’m not as afraid now as I maybe should be. I’ve been shoved down stairs, kicked, clawed, and had guns pulled on me. My sense of fear is different than most people’s. And that’s just the dangerous situations I faced in the line of duty.

The closest I ever came to death was in a magic trick. I tell myself that scrape wasn’t why I quit performing. I think I’ve been trying to prove that to myself ever since.

Ailes is not crazy about Chisholm’s idea of using me as bait. So far he and his cohorts haven’t come back to me with a specific plan for how they want to agitate the Warlock, beyond using the media. The current idea is to have me do interviews with cable news playing up my own expertise and dismissing him. The goal is to get him to break his silence and communicate with us or a news agency we have good relations with.

I don’t know how well it will work. Evidence suggests the Warlock is extremely composed. Ailes even threw the idea back at Chisholm, saying that the whole hotel room was staged to look like he’s obsessed with me so all the behavioral analysis skull fuckers (his words) would spin their wheels trying to come up with a scheme like this.

I’m not sure where I stand. I’ve seen firsthand how obsessive men can be. But then I think about Ailes’s point that the Warlock wants to control every facet of the illusion. Registering under the obvious name, the telescope and the magazine are all desperately transparent.

He set up the hotel room so we would find it and have one more thing to distract us while he plans his next move. I think about the kris knife stabbed through my photo and it makes me realize something. Ailes is half right.

“He already won this battle,” I tell him.

Ailes looks up from his screen. “What do you mean?”

“You had the director pull me out of the field and now he has everyone arguing about what to do with me. Maybe that was the real goal. Not just tie up Chisholm and behavioral analysis, but you and me too?”

Ailes thinks it over. “Cognitive capacity.”

“What?”

“It’s the total amount of brainpower you have. We only have so many neurons in our brains. If they’re focused on one problem, then there are fewer resources to worry about another. I’ve been thinking about something. He knew our number cruncher would take seven days to break his code. It’s how he knew when we would find the girl in the cemetery. One digit too few and we would have cracked the code in hours. One too many and it would have taken centuries. He knew almost to the minute.”

“Inside information?” I ask.

Ailes shakes his head. “You don’t need it.” He points to his computer. “It’s all out there on the Web. There are articles about our main cruncher and how powerful it is. A simple formula would tell you how complex of a code you’d need to tie it up for a certain period of time. The Warlock is looking at this like a math problem. Besides the computing power, he probably has at least a rough idea how many people each division of the FBI has and how many we’ve tasked to the case. It’s all online and in reports to Congress.

“Once upon a time we thought things like computers and DNA would make quick work of solving crimes. Then we got computer crime, multiple DNA samples in a crime scene, and all the other complications that go with that. Sometimes I fear the next technological evolution.”

“Yeah, but it makes catching the dumb ones easier,” I reply.

“True. Our overcrowded prisons are proof. But it’s the smart ones I worry about.”

I think about the telescope and the video camera. “What if he wasn’t just recording the airplane and the response, but counting heads?”

“I’ve thought about that. But how would it change what he does? Does he have a different plan if there are two hundred agents working on the case as opposed to one hundred?” He pauses. “Ah. Of course . . .”

The Warlock may not be a mathematical genius like Ailes, but he’s a very logical thinker. “He’s doing the opposite of you. You look for the one man out of a thousand who can make a difference.”

“Yes. And he looks for the one that might cause problems and tries to figure out how to eliminate them. Only he’s getting us to do that for him by putting you under protection and limiting your involvement. He thought he had the upper hand until he saw the FBI has a magician.”

“How do you test this? How do we know it’s a bluff?” I ask.