Final Sins (37 page)

“What are you suggesting?”

“I think you know.”

And, of course, she did know. She supposed she had known from the moment Abby mentioned the villa in Germany.

“Question is,” Abby went on, “are you willing to play it my way for once? And I mean my way,
all
the way.”

Tess looked at her hand, scarred with the mark of the wolf, the Werewolf. She thought about Josh, who would be a possible target until Faust was stopped. She thought about Hitler with his
lashless
blue eyes. Hitler—and devils. Devils in human form.

“I’m in,” she said quietly.

Abby reached into her purse and produced a leather credentials case. She slid it across the table. Tess opened it and saw a passport with her own photo staring back at her, and the name Melissa Ruth Conroy.

When she looked up, Abby was smiling.

It took Abby seventeen hours to fly from Los Angeles to London, then from London to Bonn. She spent the flights trying not to think about Wyatt.

Later there would be time for memories. Now she was in the present. She was focused on the job at hand. And she was glad to be traveling, glad to be in motion, with an objective, a purpose. Glad, because she could see too clearly the shape of the days to come—the days and, worse, the nights. The loneliness and the helpless self-accusation and the useless anger. The ever-present grief. It was as if her future was drawn only in shades of gray. As if she’d died along with Vic, only they’d forgotten to bury her.

She met Tess at the baggage claim area for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt. They had agreed to take separate flights in order to minimize the chance of being seen together and remembered.

“We need a car,” Tess said without preamble.

Abby flashed a set of keys. “Already got one.”

The car she’d rented was an Opel
Corsa
hatchback. It proved surprisingly peppy on the autobahn, hitting 180 kilometers per hour without strain.

She and Tess said little during the drive. There was nothing to say.

Paderborn lay in the northeast corner of the province of Westphalia, on the threshold of a primeval forest dominated by
Schloss
Wewelsburg
, a sixteenth-century castle perched on a limestone cliff. The hotel Abby had selected was in nearby Buren, overlooking a lake. At the front desk she asked if an express delivery package had arrived for her. It had. She accepted it with a smile, wondering what the desk clerk would think if he knew its contents.

They deposited their luggage in their adjoining rooms, along with the unopened package, then returned to the Opel and scouted Hoagland’s villa. It occupied a remote spot in the forested hills, crouching at the foot of a slope that ascended to a tree-lined ridge. They did a quick drive-by, not daring to linger on the road.

The front door was shut, the windows closed. There was no vehicle parked outside, although there might have been one in the small detached garage.

“Think he’s in there?” Tess asked when they’d passed the villa.

“No way to tell. But it’s nice and isolated. Easy enough to do some B and E once it gets dark.”

“Unless there’s an alarm.”

“Alarms can be defeated. Any security can be bypassed. There’s always a workaround.”

Tess shook her head. “You would know.”

“Yes. I would. Hungry?”

“Not especially.”

“Neither am I. Let’s try out the hotel restaurant anyway. It’s not a good idea to let our blood sugar get low.”

* * *

Westphalia was pork country, as they discovered when they perused the menu. Abby wasn’t ordinarily real big on pork, but when in Rome and all that. She ordered roast pork served on kebabs with diced potatoes and vegetables in a pleasing sauce. Tess ordered the same. Their waiter recommended a white wine, but they demurred, needing to keep their heads clear. They drank ice water instead. The waiter seemed miffed.

After dinner they returned to their rooms and changed into dark clothes. Abby opened the package and took out two
9mm
semiautomatics with spare magazines. The guns had been obtained from a black-market supplier and could not be traced. It would have been risky to put them in the checked baggage. Sometimes those bags were X-rayed.

She let Tess select a weapon. Not surprisingly, she picked the SIG Sauer, similar to her Bureau-issue model. It was always a good idea to stick with a familiar weapon. Abby took the other gun, a
Ruger
. She had no preference. She could handle any firearm.

In silence they loaded the pistols. Then there was nothing to do but wait for nightfall.

“So this is how it feels to be you,” Tess said.

“Come again?”

“Working a mission under an assumed name, using an untraceable gun. No legalities. No rules.”

Abby smiled. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Tess didn’t answer.

Her silence troubled Abby. “Hey. We’re not having second thoughts, are we?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m in for the duration.”

“That’s good. ’Cause there’s no turning back now.”

* * *

Tess wondered how many years it had been since she’d prayed the rosary. She did it tonight, guiltily, sneaking out the beads when she was alone in her room. She prayed for forgiveness for what she was about to do. She prayed that she was not endangering her immortal soul.

But even if she was, she would do it anyway.

When darkness fell, they donned coats against the night’s chill, then left the inn and drove into the forest. Two miles from the villa, Abby killed the headlights and steered by moonlight. After another mile she pulled into a turnout and parked the car.

“On foot from here,” she said.

Tess didn’t argue. Abby was running this show. She got out of the car and started toward the road.

“Not that way,” Abby whispered. “Through the woods.”

“You expect him to be watching the road?”

“No. But it’s always what you
don’t
expect that trips you up.”

They navigated the forest, sometimes finding deer trails, other times simply pushing through the dense underbrush. Tall trees rose up around them, the branches interlaced to form a high, rustling canopy. A ground cover of mist began to curl around their ankles.

In the mist and moonlight, strange rock formations slid into view, an eruption of limestone shapes. Tess thought of Stonehenge. Of druids and spells. Witchcraft.

There was evil here. The thought came to her suddenly. A malignancy, a foulness in the creeping fog, the malformed rocks, the encroaching trees.

Abby seemed to read her thoughts—or more likely, her body language. “Not a great spot for a picnic,” she said mildly.

“No. It really isn’t. It feels like”—words failed her—“something bad,” Tess finished lamely.

“Memories, maybe. If a place can hold memories. And I think some places can.”

“Memories of what?”

“You didn’t read up on the local history, did you? There was a labor camp in these woods during World War Two. Most of the prisoners were worked to death.”

“I didn’t know that,” Tess said softly.

“It was Himmler’s idea. He needed them to renovate the local castle, the one on the hill. It was going to be his Camelot. A spiritual retreat for his knights of the SS. They would come there for training and indoctrination. And for, you know, pagan rites.”

Tess shivered. The forest, enticing by day, was a different world in the darkness. A place of pain and death, old secrets, unspoken crimes.

She knew people who had traveled to Sedona, Arizona, convinced that the spot was a nexus of mystic energies. She doubted it. But this place, in the bone white moonlight, might indeed be the meeting point of occult forces, not the benevolent kind imagined by Gaia worshipers, but something colder, grimmer, darker. Something that had drawn Himmler to this spot.

And not only Himmler ...

“Faust is here,” she said suddenly. “I know he is. It’s where he has to be.”

Abby nodded. She knew it, too.

The only light in the study was a green-shaded banker’s lamp, casting its pale glow over the clippings on the desk. Faust leaned forward, into the small circle of light, and pasted another article into the scrapbook.

This article had run in today’s edition of the
Los Angeles Times
. He had found it on the Internet and printed it out, here in this study. Marvelous resource, the Internet. With it, he had been able to follow the news coverage of his escape from justice in satisfying detail.

The scrapbook was an empty one he had found in the house and appropriated, just as he had appropriated a set of clothes from the closet to replace his pajamas and robe. The outfit was tolerably comfortable, a bit loose at the waist and narrow at the shoulders, but it would serve. It would have to serve. He could hardly go shopping. Since his arrival, he had not set foot outside the house, and he did not plan to do so for some time.

Thus the scrapbook. He must keep himself occupied.

He could not complain. By all rights he ought to be in a prison cell in California, and he would have been, had he not placed a pay-telephone call to Piers Hoagland, waking him with an urgent demand for help. It had taken Hoagland only two hours to make the necessary preparations for his plane’s unscheduled departure from Santa Monica. Hoagland himself had driven Faust to the airfield, after meeting him at the prearranged rendezvous point. Neither man could fly a plane, but Hoagland employed a pilot who was discreet and well paid, and who had flown Faust around the western states, asking no questions. All Hoagland had ever requested in return were the skulls,
defleshed
in boiling water and ready to be used in his art. The arrangement had been mutually satisfactory. Hoagland obtained his models, and Faust had the pleasure of putting his victims on public display.

Hoagland had not accompanied Faust on the flight. It would have been suspicious if he had left town while his exhibit at the art gallery was still in progress. The pilot had flown Faust to a private airfield in Maryland, then to another landing strip outside Buren. Hoagland kept a car there. Faust had driven himself to the villa, following directions he had memorized.

The large freezer was well stocked, and the shelves of the study were lined with diverting books. He would not perish either of starvation or of boredom. And he had his scrapbook, of course.

The old one would be in the possession of the authorities now. He disliked the idea of some officious detective thumbing through those well-loved pages. Worse was the thought of his collection, his beauties—the graceful hands in their formalin baths—reduced to the status of evidence, labeled and stored away with the other detritus of crime.

But he would start a new collection. It was difficult to begin again in middle age, but he was strong. He would do it.

Already he had filled ten pages of his new scrapbook. There were articles on Raven, whose real name, he had learned, was Jennifer
Gaitlin
. There were photos of Elise, and photos of himself, and artists’ conceptions of how he might look under a variety of disguises. In actuality he had not altered his appearance at all. There would be a need for that later.

For the time being he must lie low. That was all right. He liked this place. In the stillness of these woods at night, he could almost believe he was a boy camping in the Black Forest, when a wolf in the moonlight had shown him his destiny.

But he would not hide forever. The public’s curiosity would inevitably prove short-lived. In days or weeks the news stories would fade away, and his photo would no longer shout for attention from every newspaper. Then he would reemerge. He would travel. He would reinvent himself.

Not in the United States, nor in Germany. He was far too well-known in both locales. He thought he would head east, into the Slavic countries of the former USSR. A man could do well in that region—a man with the proper qualities of ruthlessness and daring.

He would have a new identity, new papers. Money could buy him those things, and he knew people who could provide them. His money, protected from lawsuits in Swiss banks, was not altogether lost to him. Some accounts were undoubtedly compromised and frozen; even the Swiss must cooperate in an international manhunt. But there were others, less easily traced, that would remain intact.

With money, documentation, and a minor change of appearance, he would be a new man. He might not succeed in remaining at large forever. Even if he were eventually caught, he would have claimed more victims and extended his already considerable resume.

The most intriguing question still to be decided was that of revenge. There were people in the United States whom he would like to visit. Two women in particular who deserved his vengeance. He would very much like to see them again.

And then he did.

The door to his study swung wide, and they were in the doorway, holding guns, trained on him.

He sat unmoving for a long moment before he raised his hands. He was cornered, unarmed. He had no illusions about fighting back.

“
Willkommen
,” he said with a slow smile. “You have my congratulations. You have tracked the beast to his lair.”

They did not answer. They stepped into the room, separating to cover him from different angles. He admired their efficiency, their stealth. He did not even bother to ask how they had gained entrance to the house, defeating Hoagland’s expensive security system. Sinclair would have handled that. She had a burglar’s skills.

“May I ask what has become of Elise? The news reports are unclear. I am concerned that she may be charged as my accomplice, which would be most unjust.”

“She won’t be charged.” It was Tess who spoke. “She says she didn’t know about the room, and I believe her.”

“That is good. I had not wanted to think of her in prison. She never would have survived such an ordeal.” He lifted his eyebrows in the equivalent of a shrug. “I do not know why I care about her. But I find that I do.”

“Love’s funny that way,” Abby said. She was not smiling. Neither of them was smiling. Their faces were grim, aloof.

“I suppose it is. I honestly would not know.” Faust pushed back his chair and prepared to rise. “You will arrest me now?”

Abby shook her head. “Not this time.”

He looked at her, then at Tess. He saw how it was going to be.

“I see,” he said softly.

Until this moment he had visualized handcuffs, extradition, a trial, a cell. Now he knew that there would be none of that.

He felt cold suddenly. It lasted only a second. Then he mastered himself. He would not quail in fear. He was the Werewolf. He was Peter Faust.

There was one last decision to make. He could die sitting down or on his feet. He chose to stand. His knees did not buckle, nor did his hands tremble as he lowered them to his sides.

“So you
are
a jungle cat,” he told Abby Sinclair. “And you”—his gaze traveled to Tess McCallum—“you are a killer of killers, just as I thought.”

Abby nodded, and Tess said, “That’s right,” her voice low and hard and without apology.

Faust smiled. “I knew I had not misjudged you.”

He shut his eyes. He listened to the beat of his heart. He waited. But not for long.

The two women fired together, the gunshots blending as one, echoing in the dark German night.