Terminal Rage (38 page)

“And a third tranche of twenty-five million dollars to be donated to the City of New York, earmarked for the New York Police Department.

“And finally, twenty-five million dollars to be divided equally among the one hundred most destitute weekend child-care centers across America. These facilities offer vital support for struggling working parents who embody the indomitable spirit of working-class America, refusing to give up.”

Gershwin picked up the last paper in his pile and started to read the message intended for Amelia.

“Begin message.”

Can I see another
’
s woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another
’
s grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrow
’
s share?

Can a father see his child

Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear

An infant groan, an infant fear?

No, no! Never can it be!

Never, Never can it be!

“End of message.”

THIRTY-TWO

Present day—10:00 a.m.
Faulconbridge, New South Wales, Australia

F
our hundred yards away from his final stop, Blackwell switched off his navigation system and turned a sharp right off Redheap Road into Chapman Parade. The rented Toyota Kluger he
’
d picked up from Sydney
’
s Kingsford Smith Airport was handling the dirt road well.

He
’
d just flown in from Los Angeles and had only dozed off a bit on the fourteen-hour flight, but Blackwell had never felt more alive or more awake.

When he approached the entrance of the house he
’
d travelled thousands of miles to get to, he slowed down. This was the final destination of a journey that had started on the small Caribbean island of Anguilla, when Sam Morgan summoned him to Manhattan as the only person he was willing to negotiate with. Which led to the events that had transformed Blackwell
’
s life forever.

Blackwell emerged from the car holding a small plastic bag. He pushed his sunglasses to the crown of his shoulder-length hair to absorb every single detail of what he was looking at.

Now at the peak of the Australian summer, the sun was already scorching down relentlessly, well before midday. The light had an unusual whitish hue typical of this part of the world that took some getting used to.

Blackwell was adequately dressed in a light cotton T-shirt and linen trousers. He wore feather-light slip-on loafers he
’
d picked up from the Crocs store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

This appeared to be a simple home with an adjacent guest house. A rusting tractor parked by the main building suggested the property may have been a working farm at one point. But other than the neat, trimmed lawn, there was no sign now of any viable agricultural activity.

A small animal dashed in front of his eyes and disappeared. It could have been a possum, but it was too fast for Blackwell to tell for sure. A white butterfly with crimson spots landed on his shoulder and inspected him for a while before it fluttered off. As if it too was part of the welcoming committee.

“Hello?” he bellowed out in the open, then waited for some kind of response that never came. There was no gate or fencing around the property, or any passive-aggressive signs threatening would-be trespassers. There were no parked cars either. But Blackwell proceeded with caution anyway.

As he approached the main house, classical music piping from inside drew him in. When he got to the doorstep he recognized the piece as a cello and guitar arrangement of Tchaikovsky
’
s Valse Sentimentale. A deeply melancholic piece, especially with the weeping cello. Blackwell had heard it before with the violin playing the solo, and it hadn
’
t moved him as much back then.

He knocked, rang the bell, and then waited before poking his head inside what appeared to be the living room.

“Anyone home?” His voice was perfectly punctuated to come at the very end of the musical piece. There was no answer, but the music started from the beginning a few seconds later. It was playing on loop from an iPod connected wirelessly to slick Bose speakers on a small table.

He stepped in, gingerly.

A threadbare but comfortable-looking green couch sat on a round monochrome beige rug, facing a large plasma screen on the floor. The space seemed to have been configured for functionality, with only the bare essentials. No welcoming seating for guests or decorative touches hinting at the owner
’
s sense of style, or their appreciation of art or furniture design. Nothing in the least bit to suggest this was someone
’
s home. Just a place where someone lived.

Blackwell wandered into the kitchen, following the smell of fresh coffee. A good-sized breakfast table converted from an antique timber door took up most of the floor space. Unlike the living room, the kitchen felt warmer and more inhabited.

Large windows wrapped around the walls, allowing ample sunlight to flood in. Water and food bowls on the floor indicated a four-legged friend shared the house.

A small white fridge was covered with photographs and post-its. Mostly pictures of Maya and Ryan Morgan from birth until the few weeks before they traveled to Sharm El Sheikh.

The recipes, notes and post-its must have all been plucked from Sam
’
s Toluca Lake home in Los Angeles. A time capsule of the life Sam and his family had lived there.

The schedule for Maya
’
s piano lessons, a reminder for Ryan
’
s next vaccination appointment, and a handmade countdown of the days left until the start of the family
’
s holiday in Sharm El Sheikh. The fifteen days prior to the start of the trip had all been marked with Xs in alternating florescent pink and green markers. And the final day itself had smiles, hearts, exclamation marks and little drawings of boats and fish around it. A painful reminder of how that vacation turned out, Blackwell thought. Why would he have it there, tearing at his heart every day? He thought about it again and realized perhaps that was
exactly
the purpose. A reminder.

On the top part of the fridge, now starting to fade, was an eight-by-ten photo of the whole family. Sam and Angela had their arms around each other, with Ryan and Maya on their laps. All four of them were smiling with infectious happiness.

Something Sam had told him during the Exertify affair now came back to him. Blackwell hadn
’
t really pondered what these words meant when Sam had spoken them back then through the mouth of Seth, “the terrorist.”

What do you think is the first thing that goes through your mind when you hold your dead infant
’
s body in your hands?

With Tchaikovsky
’
s evocative notes tugging hard at his emotional seams, Blackwell understood what those words meant to Sam.

He stuck his hand in the plastic bag he was holding and pulled out a tiny antique Georgian bronze bell and placed it on the kitchen table. He then scribbled a short note on a post-it and stuck it on the bell.

Thank you. Alexander Blackwell.

He was about to walk out of the kitchen when he remembered something else. A printout of the photo of the UPC barcode he had taken when he
’
d seen it underneath a power outlet in Maya
’
s room in Los Angeles. The one clue that had led Blackwell to Sam Morgan
’
s hiding place fifty miles west of Sydney. He placed it next to the bell.

After he
’
d met with Danny Zimmerman and realized it was Sam
who had taken Leviathan, Blackwell had run out of leads and was just about ready to give up on tracking him down. But a few weeks ago, he stumbled across the image of the barcode while clearing out his phone. In a final, desperate attempt, he converted the barcode to a series of numbers and realized they weren
’
t attached to any product, as he had initially assumed.

He labored over them for many weeks and almost considered contacting Zimmerman to pick his code-breaking brain. But the thought of getting in deep with the NSA—good coffee or not—was hardly one he could stomach.

In the end, it was his son Milo who had indirectly put him on the right track. Milo
’
s social science teacher had given the students geographic coordinates. She
’
d asked them to use Google Maps to find the various cities she had assigned to each of them. Milo
’
s coordinates were for the city of Adelaide in South Australia. When he showed it proudly to Blackwell, the similarity in the number sequence to the numbers from the bar code triggered a light bulb in his brain.

The numbers from the bar code were geographic locations to this very house.

Blackwell had first assumed Sam had purchased the house as a surprise for his wife, and the sticker would have been a clue to help her guess what it was. A treasure hunt of sorts. He
’
d done similar things with Melanie in the past.

A part of him couldn
’
t help wondering though if this was all too convenient. It didn
’
t make one bit of sense that Sam would have left the clue on purpose for Blackwell. After all, his message to him was clear.
Stop looking for me
. Or was it really so unthinkable? Ever since he
’
d come into contact with him, Sam Morgan was the sort of man who liked to say one thing, but really mean another.

When Blackwell traced the coordinates of the house to the small town of Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, the records indicated Sam had inherited this property in 2004 from his maternal uncle. But it had been empty since.

After Sam
’
s family had perished, and right before he disappeared, he transferred ownership of this house to a heavily shielded Sydney-based corporate trust. Just as he had done with his Los Angeles home. Probably as part of his plan to erase his identity from any public records.

Blackwell took another look around the house until he began feeling a little uneasy snooping. It was one thing to wander around Sam
’
s abandoned Toluca Lake home. But someone lived here, and it just didn
’
t feel right.

He stepped out and decided to return after breakfast. It had been many hours since they last fed him on the plane.

Before leaving, he wanted to take a quick look at the smaller building.

The door of the guest house was locked and he didn
’
t want to coax it open. He circled around it for anything else interesting to see. A large communication dish was attached to the rooftop. This far out in the wilderness, it had to be for internet connectivity.

All the windows were shuttered except for one at the back, which had venetian blinds left slightly ajar. He cupped his hands on the glass to block out the glare of the sun so he could get a clear view inside.

The space was totally gutted, and it looked as if it had been converted to some sort of warehouse. He counted at least sixty boxes of varying sizes neatly stacked on one end of the rectangular space.

On the other side, an empty workbench spanning the entire length of the wall had been set up with a few office chairs. It had no computers, no monitors, and nothing to indicate what it had once been used for. Just a series of empty cork boards hung on the wall, dotted with hundreds of colorful plastic pins. Whatever had transpired there had now been completed. Or at least suspended.

Back in his car, he blasted the AC on full and punched into the navigation system the address of a nearby brasserie to get some coffee in him. And breakfast.

He circled inside the lot and drove away on Chapman Parade.

In the distance, another vehicle was veering in from Redheap Road with a cloud of red dust hovering above it. A navy blue pickup truck with a barking dog back in the bed.

The truck stopped in its tracks for a short while as if the driver was assessing the situation. The dog on the other hand continued to bark its head off, as if it had drawn its own conclusions about Blackwell
’
s trespassing car and was goading the driver to take necessary action.

Blackwell flashed his headlights and waited, hoping this would convey to the driver he meant no harm. The other truck continued to do nothing. The dog continued to bark like crazy. And Blackwell continued to wait. This went on for a few minutes.

Then, the truck started approaching slowly until the two vehicles were side by side. The dog, a German shepherd, was fully baring its teeth and snarling at Blackwell.

Every cell in Blackwell
’
s body lit up. Every part of him that could pulsate, did. He removed his sunglasses and focused straight in the eyes of Sam Morgan. Every question he had wanted to ask this man was swimming in his mind.

The first thing he wanted to know was why Sam had chosen him.

And how he knew to come for him when he was attacked in Toluca Lake by the Egyptian goons. In fact, why had he saved him?

Was it Sam who had designed Leviathan, as Blackwell was almost certain he did? All that money—the bonds and stocks from Balmoral Westwood, and the billions locked in Leviathan—what had Sam done with it? And who else was part of his crew? Just hired guns who were in it for the payout, or believers like Sam seeking revenge?

Blackwell wanted to know Sam
’
s feelings when he pulled the trigger and took the lives of Nabulsi and Madi. He wanted to know what those men had told him before they died, other than ratting on Demir Salimovic, who had met their same fate. And before he died, had Salimovic put Sam on another hunting trail for the real killers, the masterminds behind the attacks on the resort?

What price does a man pay to avenge his loved ones by shedding even more blood? Does your humanity stay intact? That
’
s what he wanted to know—the extent of the moral metamorphosis required for all-out retribution. The thoughts rushing through a man
’
s mind when he plants a few bullets in the heads of the people who butchered his family.