Angel Killer (30 page)

“Only if I move.”

Across the warehouse Danielle nods to me. She understands. The only way we can keep our discovery a secret is if they close the door and make it out of the yard while I stay here.

I shut off my flashlight and watch the crack of light from the open door fade as they lower it back down and run back to the front of the property.

“I’m going to shut off my phone so the battery will last,” I tell Ailes.

“Understood.”

I reach into my pocket and power it down. There’s a whir and a clicking sound inside the warehouse as the systems come back online. I can see the red lights of surveillance cameras twinkle on in the dark ceiling like red stars.

I take the first of what will be several low and shallow breaths to avoid setting off the motion sensors. I sit here in the dark alone and wait.

Somewhere at the other end of the darkness I imagine the little girl from the theater looking back at me.

S
PENDING TWELVE HOURS
by yourself in the dark without moving is difficult. If my head moves or my arm twitches, the motion sensors will catch it. The Warlock will get a text notification on his phone and a live feed will show him what the infrared cameras are seeing: me sitting here by myself.

If he sees me here it will burn this location at the very least. He won’t come back and we won’t be able to nail him.

My worst fear is what’s sitting on the other side of the wall. I keep my eyes shut and try to identify all of the different smells and sounds in this warehouse. I found the grave because of the musty odor. I found the wall because of the sound—which I’m pretty sure is a refrigerator.

He’d need one to keep the chemicals he uses in his knockout drug. This one sounds big, like it has a freezer. I can only think of one thing he’d need that much space for behind a secret wall: a body.

Chloe is probably just a few feet away from me. Pulled from life, then dug from the ground so she could be stashed away for her twin to take her place, she’s now shoved into a refrigerated cabinet like some kind of lab specimen.

Did the Warlock put her there so he could go look at her body? Is it some kind of sick thrill for him to walk over to his secret room and stare down at the body of his first victim?

Did Denise know when she was dying, trying to climb out of the ground a hundred feet away, that her twin was already here?

Underneath the smell of wet dirt, concrete and rust is an acrid odor. It’s not machine oil or the thousand other scents you find in a garage. This is a fuel smell, like a high-octane propellant. The scent of dragsters and jets.

There’s also the slightly rotting odor of fertilizer . . .

Jet fuel and fertilizer. A less lethal combination took out half of an Oklahoma federal building. Behind me is enough space for a hundred trucks’ worth of bombs.

How much would the Warlock need? The purpose of the explosion wouldn’t be just to kill any investigators, it would also be to remove any trace of evidence.

During our briefing Shannon explained that on one side of the property is a factory where women toil away at making police uniforms. On the other is a machine shop where a dozen blue-collar men and women work every day. They’re at work right now, with no idea what’s going on next door.

A bomb this big would leave a crater the size of a block. They’d all be gone. How many people? Fifty? A hundred?

My mind races with all of the disturbed possibilities. I try to keep my pulse down so my chest doesn’t start heaving and set off the sensors. If he sees me here, I’m not sure I’ll make it to the rollup door before he can press a button.

To some, the lives we’ve seen lost so far don’t seem as consequential in the devil’s arithmetic. I have a new reason to remain motionless: It’s not just my life, it’s everyone around me.

On the other side of the fence, Danielle, Shannon, and all the agents and police who are waiting for me would be taken out in the blast.

One twitch, one sneeze and the sensors go off.

My heart starts to race again. I concentrate on slowing it down. My left hand is still in my pocket on my phone. I left it there in case I need to turn it on to make a call.

Do I tell them to pull back and clear the area? I think I can make the call without moving more than my thumb. But what about sound?

With a metal roof and thin walls, I’d think audio surveillance would be pointless. Or is it? Wiring the place with microphones is fairly easy. Should I put anything past him?

I decide to wait.

The sunlight coming through the vents begins to fade. I don’t dare check my watch. I just stare into the darkness and keep my mind as clear as I can. In some ways it’s easier than I would have thought.

I’ve always been a solitary person. Since I let work fill my life there hasn’t been much room for anyone else. First magic, then law enforcement. I don’t know if I regret that or not. It’s just the way I am.

Every few minutes I wrestle with taking the risk of turning on my phone or not. I could at least give them some notice to get clear. But what about the people next door? They wouldn’t make it.

In the distance I can hear the wail of police sirens growing closer. Damn, not here!

They may have gotten a full search warrant by now. That’s not going to help if this place is wired to explode. If the Warlock sees police cars barreling through the front gate, it’s all over. Done.

The sirens get louder, then pass by. They’re heading somewhere else. I breathe a sigh of relief. A shallow breath.

There’s another noise now. It’s the distant low rumble of a helicopter. It’s getting closer. The roof rattles as the helicopter passes over the top of the building.

I can hear the engine roaring through the vents. I try to visualize where it’s going from the maps. The helicopter is a block or two away now. It’s probably assisting the chase cars.

There’s a high-pitched whine coming from that direction. Something has malfunctioned. The blades make a sloshing noise and the helicopter’s engine screams louder.

The engine cuts out and all I can hear is the whoosh of the blades as the helicopter auto-gyrates to the ground. There’s a metallic thud and a loud crackle, then an explosion like a transformer blowing.

Oh God.

Right near us too.

What are the chances?

The red lights on the cameras go out. The refrigerator stops humming.

The power is off.

I
TRY NOT TO PANIC
. I don’t understand what is going on. I sit there and wait. I focus on my shallow breaths and not moving. The cameras could come back on at any moment.

Footsteps run across the gravel outside. A metal blade is cutting into something. The middle rollup door slides up and three men dressed in bomb armor run inside. Unsure of what’s happening, I remain perfectly still.

One of the men runs over, throws a bomb vest over me and fastens on a helmet.

“This way, Jessica!” he commands.

I let him pull me to my feet.

All three of them rush me out of the building and into an armored personnel carrier sitting in front of the warehouse. They slam the door shut and the driver takes off out of the junkyard, swerving around the wrecks of planes and cars.

Two of the men stare at monitors keeping a careful watch on the building. We pass through the entrance and another bomb tech shuts the gate then hops onto the running board of the carrier.

We head down to the end of the block and take a side street. In the distance I can see police cars and fire trucks. There’s a cloud of black smoke in the sky.

Our driver pulls us into the open doors of a recycling plant and they slam shut after us. Finally, one of my rescuers speaks into his radio. “We got her.”

I step out of the vehicle into a command center they’d set up in the last few hours. Danielle comes running up and gives me a hug.

“Thank God! Thank God!”

“The bomb?” I ask.

“We know. We checked the swabs Shannon collected and realized what we’d left you sitting on.”

I point to the armored carrier. “He knows we were there now.”

Danielle shakes her head. “No. He doesn’t. We staged an accident.”

“The helicopter?”

“The sheriff’s department pilot is a former Navy SEAL pilot. He offered to do a controlled crash.”

“Oh my God!” My hand flies to my mouth.

“He’s fine. Bruised, but fine. We had to have an excuse to clear the area, so we staged a high-speed chase. It was live on the news along with the crash next to a chemical supply company. We’ve cleared everyone for a half mile. We cut the power and Ailes took over the Warlock’s system.”

It was all an elaborate scheme to evacuate the area without the Warlock realizing what we were doing. Did it work? There hasn’t been an explosion yet, if that’s any indication.

“We’re going to send in techs to take out the bomb,” continues Danielle. “We should have done that the first time. If we’d paid more attention to the thermal imaging we would have noticed something was out of place.”

“That’s my fault,” says Shannon. He’d been standing over a table looking at a map. “I should have known he would try something like that.”

I shake my head. “It’s not your fault. We’re just beginning to understand how the man thinks. If you hadn’t gotten those swabs of the explosives, I’d still be sitting back there next to the bomb.”

A bomb tech walks over to Shannon. “We’re ready to go try to dismantle the thing.”

“He’s devious. Don’t take anything for granted,” I reply, the scent of explosive fuel still fresh in my mind.

“Trust me. We’re going to take things real slow, Agent.”

I take my phone out and turn it on to call Ailes.

“Thank God you’re okay. We never should have let you go,” he says. His voice is apologetic.

“Stop that. Someone had to go. Thankfully I have smart people to work with.”

“Hopefully. We ended up making a virtual version of his entire network and overrunning the routers he was sending traffic through. The satellite was the tricky part, but Jennifer managed that. I won’t get into the details.”

“I’m not sure I’d understand,” I admit.

“The short of it is that his software patches were a few months old. He got a little busy and forgot to update them.”

“It’s good to know he’s just as forgetful as the rest of us. Did anyone have a chance to go over Danielle’s footage?”

“We’ve been making a map of the floor plan. Besides Times Square, we think we can make out some outlines where he traced the observation deck on the Empire State Building.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I reply.

“We’ve been looking at 3-D models of that junkyard of his trying to figure out exactly what he’s got piled out there. We found a stack of aluminum piping cut to the same size as the rails of the observation deck and some screen. He may have actually built a model of the deck and placed projection screens to simulate the walls of the lobby and the outside view.”

“To fake footage?”

“Not quite good enough. More for a practice run. A really intense practice run. The same for Times Square. He probably projected images of buildings and traffic lights to make sure everything would work just right. It’s insane. Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“Yeah. Remind me sometime to tell you about my rehearsals in my grandfather’s basement.”

“Well, the one bright ray of light in all this is that we’re pretty sure some of that IP traffic from the warehouse was being routed to Texas.”

“So everything is still a go?”

“It looks that way. Unless we think revealing his Michigan hideout will deter him, we’re still on the hunt there.”

I turn to Danielle. “How quick can we get to the airport?”

I
LOCK THE DOOR
of my motel room and check my wig in the mirror. It’s dirty blond and much shorter than my own hair. With a pair of librarian glasses, I was able to fool Agent Knoll in the Quantico command center. As I was the most recognizable person on the task force, he didn’t want to send me to south Texas.

Agreeing to use a disguise, plus the fact that the Warlock practically told us where he was going to strike next, convinced him to let me at least come as close as our field command post six miles away. I’m in a motel that’s across the road from a Texas Highway Patrol station. This seemed to be the place we’d be least likely to run into him.

I’ve been having second thoughts on our ability to catch him here. The Santa Lucia clue had a capital C. It was intentional.

He might want us to know where he’s planning his next deception. Or this is just one giant red herring. A fake-out. We’ve got another team outside Boulder, Colorado, the fifth point on the pentagram, and a third team on standby at Quantico, ready to jet anywhere in the United States in five hours.

So far the group in Michigan hasn’t found anything more about what he has planned next. In the warehouse they found an empty freezer inside the hidden passage and several tons of explosives, enough to have taken out the entire industrial area, but no future plans.

The bomb squad opted to dismantle the bomb but leave the warehouse looking as if we’d never been there. To the best of our knowledge, the Warlock still hasn’t figured it out. Ailes turned his computers back over to him when power was restored to the area, and has been monitoring the signal traffic while a surveillance team keeps watch.

My bet is that he doesn’t go back there. The staged police helicopter crash was a close call, but not so close that he pulled the trigger.

I sit down at the table and look over a map with highlighted points of interest around our Texas town. The town church has the unique honor of having been struck by lightning twice, burning down both times. A schoolhouse was wiped away in a tornado twenty years ago, killing three students and a teacher. Since then, the kids have been getting bused to a school near Brownsville.

Part of me suspects that what makes the town special isn’t anything about it, other than the name and it was one of the possible locations on the pentagram. The real reason he singled it out is because it fits a larger pattern of escalation.