“Hey,” said the black guy, only now noticing the agents. “Who they? Cops?”
“We’re about to find out.”
A moment later one of them came up to the bar. “Evening. We’re federal agents.” The ID was properly flashed. “I wonder if either of you’ve seen this man around here?”
Czisman looked at the photo of the dead man he’d seen in FBI headquarters. He said, “No.”
The black guy said, “He looks dead. He dead?”
The agent asked, “You haven’t seen anyone who might resemble him?”
“No sir.”
Czisman shook his head.
“There’s somebody else we’re looking for too. White male, thirties or forties. Wearing a dark coat.”
Ah, the Digger, thought Henry Czisman. Odd to hear somebody he’d come to know so well described from such a distant perspective. He said, “That could be a lot of people around here.”
“Yessir. The only identifying characteristic we know about him is that he wears a gold crucifix. And that he’s probably armed. He might have been talking about guns, bragging about them.”
The Digger wouldn’t
ever
do that, Czisman thought. But he didn’t correct them and said merely, “Sorry.”
“Sorry,” echoed the whiskey drinker.
“If you see him could you please call this number?” The agent handed them both cards.
“You bet.”
“You bet.”
When the agents left, Czisman’s drinking buddy said, “What’s that all about?”
“Wonder.”
“Something’s always going down ’round here. Drugs. Bet it’s drugs. Anyway, so I gotta truck with a busted block. Wait. I tell you ’bout my truck?”
“You started to.”
“I’ma tell you ’bout this truck.”
Suddenly Czisman looked at the man beside him carefully and felt that same tug of curiosity that’d driven him to journalism years ago. The desire to know people. Not to exploit them, not to use them, not to expose them. But to understand and explain them.
Who was this man? Where did he live? What were his dreams? What sort of courageous things had he done? Did he have a family? What did he like to eat? Was he a closet musician or painter?
Was it better, was it more just, for him to live out his paltry life? Or was it better for him to die now, quickly, before the pain—before the
sorrow
—sucked him down like an undertow?
But then Czisman caught a glimpse of the Winnebago door opening and several men hurrying outside. That woman—Agent Lukas—stepped out a moment later.
They were running.
Czisman tossed money down on the bar and stood.
“Hey, you don’ wanna hear ’bout my truck?”
Without a word the big man stepped quickly to the door, pushed outside and started after the agents as they jogged through the decimated lots of Gravesend.
By the time
the team met up with Jerry Baker two of his agents had found the safe house.
It turned out to be a shabby duplex two doors from an old building that was being torn down—one of the construction sites they’d found. Clay and brick dust were everywhere.
Baker said, “Showed a couple across the street the unsub’s picture. They’ve seen him three or four times over the past few weeks. Always looked down, walked fast. Never stopped or said anything to anybody.”
Two dozen agents and officers were deployed around the building.
“Which apartment was his?” Lukas asked.
“Bottom one. Seems to be empty. We’ve cleared the top floor.”
“You talk to the owner? Got a name?” Parker asked.
“Management company says the tenant is Gilbert Jones,” an agent called.
Hell . . . The fake name again.
The agent continued: “And the Social Security number was issued to somebody who died five years ago. The unsub signed up for the on-line service—name of Gilbert Jones again—with a credit card in that name but it’s one of those credit-risk cards. You put money in a bank to cover it and it’s only good as long as there’s money there. Bank records show that this is his address. Priors were all fake.”
Baker asked, “Entry now?”
Cage looked at Lukas. “Be my guest.”
Baker conferred with Tobe Geller, who was carefully monitoring the screen on his laptop. Several sensors were trained on the downstairs apartment.
“Cold as a fish,” Tobe reported. “Infrareds aren’t picking up anything and the only sounds I’m registering are air in the radiator and the refrigerator compressor. Ten to one it’s clean but you can screen body heat if you really want to. And some bad guys can be very, very quiet.”
Lukas added, “Remember—the Digger packs his own silencers so he knows what he’s doing.”
Baker nodded, then pulled on his flak jacket and helmet and called five other tactical agents over to him. “Dynamic entry. We’ll cut the lights and move in through the front door and the rear bedroom window simultaneously. You’re green-lighted to neutralize if there’s any threat risk at all. I’m primary through the door. Questions?”
There were none. And the agents moved quickly into position. The only noise they made was the faint jingling of their equipment.
Parker held back, watching Margaret Lukas, in profile, staring intently at the front door. She turned suddenly
and caught him watching her. Returned a cool look.
Hell with her, Parker thought. He was angry at the dressing-down she’d given him about the gun. It’d been completely unnecessary, he thought.
Then the lights went out in the duplex and there was a loud bang as the agents blew in the front door with 12-gauge Shok-Lok rounds. Parker watched the beams from the flashlights, hooked to the ends of their machine guns, illuminate the inside of the apartment.
He expected to hear shouting at any minute: Freeze, get down, federal agents . . . ! But there was only silence. A few minutes later Jerry Baker walked outside, pulling his helmet off. “Clean.”
The lights went back on.
“We’re just checking for antipersonnel devices. Give us a few minutes.”
Finally an agent called out the front door, “Premises secure.”
As Parker ran forward he prayed a secular prayer: Please let us find
something
—some trace evidence, a fingerprint, a note describing the site of the next attack. Or at the very least something that gives us a hint where the unsub lived so we can search public records to find a devil’s teardrop above an
i
or a
j
. . . Let us finish this hard, hard work and get back home to our families.
Cage went in first, followed by Parker and Lukas. The two of them walked side by side. In silence.
The apartment was cold. The lights were glaring. It was a depressing place, painted with pale green enamel. The floor was brown but much of the paint had flaked away. The four rooms were mostly empty. In the living room Parker could see a computer on a stand, a desk, a
musty armchair shedding its stuffing, several tables. But to his dismay he could see no notes, scraps of paper or other documents.
“We got clothes,” an agent called from the bedroom.
“Check the labels,” Lukas ordered.
A moment later: “Are none.”
“Hell,” she spat out.
Parker glanced at the living room window and wondered about the unsub’s dietary habits. Cooling in the half-open window were four or five large jugs of Mott’s apple juice and a battered cast-iron skillet filled with apples and oranges.
Cage pointed to them. “Maybe the bastard was constipated. Hope it was real painful.”
Parker laughed.
Lukas called Tobe Geller and asked him to come check out the computer and any files and e-mail the unsub had saved on the hard drive.
Geller arrived a few minutes later. He sat down at the desk and ran his hand through his curly hair, examining the unit carefully. Then he looked up, around the room. “Place stinks,” he said. “Why can’t we get some upscale perps for a change? . . . What
is
that?”
Parker smelled it too. Something sweet and chemical. Cheap paint on hot radiators, he guessed.
The young agent gripped the computer’s electric cord and wound it around his left hand. He explained, “It might have a format bomb inside—if you don’t log on just right it runs a program and wipes the hard drive. All you can do then is unplug and try to override it later in the lab. Okay, let’s see . . .”
He clicked on the power switch.
The unit buzzed softly. Geller was ready to yank the
cord from the socket but then he smiled. “Past the first hurdle,” he said, dropping the cord. “But now we need the password.”
Lukas muttered, “Won’t it take forever to figure out?”
“No. It’ll take . . .” Geller pulled the housing off the computer, reached inside and took out a small computer chip. Suddenly the screen reported,
Loading Windows 95.
Geller said, “About
that
much time.”
“That’s all you have to do to beat a password?”
“Uh-huh.” Geller opened his attaché case and pulled out a dark blue Zip drive unit. He plugged this into a port on the computer and installed it. “I’m going to download his hard drive onto these.” He tossed a half-dozen Zip disks onto the desk.
Lukas’s cell phone rang. She answered. Listened. Then she said, “Thanks.” She hung up, not pleased. “Pen registers from the phone line here. All he’s called is the connection for the on-line service. Nothing else coming in or going out.”
Damn. The man had been smart, Parker reflected. A puzzle master in his own right.
Three hawks have been killing a farmer’s chickens. . . .
“Found something in the bedroom,” a voice called. An agent wearing latex gloves walked into the living room. He was holding a yellow pad with writing and markings on it. Parker’s heart sped up a few beats when he saw this.
He opened his attaché case and pulled on his own latex gloves. He took the pad and set it on the table next to Geller, bent the desk lamp over it. With his hand glass he studied the first page and noticed immediately that it had been written by the unsub—he’d stared at the extortion note so much that he knew the handwriting as well as his own and the Whos’.
The devil’s teardrop over a lowercase
i
. . .
Parker scanned the sheet. Much of it was doodlings. As a document examiner, Parker Kincaid believed in the psychological connection between our minds and our hands: personality revealed not by how we form letters (that graphoanalysis nonsense that Lukas seemed so fond of) but through the substance of what we write and draw when we’re not really thinking about it. How we take notes, what little pictures we make in the margins when our minds are occupied elsewhere.
Parker had seen thousands of renderings on the documents he’d examined—knives, guns, hanged men, stabbed women, severed genitals, demons, bared teeth, stick figures, airplanes, eyes. But he’d never seen what their unsub had drawn here: mazes.
So he
was
a puzzle master.
Parker tried one or two. Most of them were very complicated. There were other notations on the page but he kept getting distracted by the mazes, his eye drawn to them. He felt the compulsion to solve them. This was Parker’s nature; he couldn’t control it.
He sensed someone nearby. It was Margaret Lukas. She was staring at the pad.
“They’re intricate,” she said.
Parker looked up at her, felt her leg brush against him. The muscles in her thigh were very strong. She’d be a runner, he guessed. Pictured her on Sunday mornings in her workout spandex, sweaty and flushed, walking through the front door after her three miles . . .
He turned back to the maze.
“Must’ve taken him a long time to make it,” she said, nodding at the maze.
“No,” Parker said. “Mazes are hard to solve but they’re
the easiest puzzles to make. You draw the solution path first and then once that’s finished you just keep adding layer and layer of false routes.”
Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer.
. . .
She glanced at him once more then walked away, helped a crime scene tech cut open the mattress, searching for more evidence.
Just like life, right?
Parker’s eyes returned to the yellow pad. He lifted the top sheet and on the next page he found a dense page of notes, hundreds of words in the unsub’s writing. Toward the bottom of the page he saw a column. The first two entries were:
Dupont Circle Metro, top of the escalator, 9
A.M
.
George Mason Theater, box No. 58, 4
P.M
.
My God, he thought, this’s got the
real
targets on it. It’s not a decoy! He looked up and called to Cage, “Over here!”
Just as Lukas stepped into the doorway and shouted, “I smell gas! Gasoline. Where’s it coming from?”
Gas? Parker glanced at Tobe, who was frowning. He realized that, yes,
that
was the smell they’d detected earlier.
“Oh, Jesus.” Parker looked at the bottles of apple juice.
It was a trap—in case the agents got into the safe house.
“Cage! Tobe! Everybody out!” Parker leapt to his feet. “The bottles!”
But Geller glanced at them and said, “It’s okay . . . Look: there’s no detonator. You can—”
And then the stream of bullets exploded through the window, tearing the table into shreds of blond wood, shattering the bottles and spraying rosy gasoline over the walls and floor.
A thousand invisible bullets
, a million.
More bullets than Parker’d ever seen or heard in all his weeks on the range at Quantico.
Glass, wood, splinters of metal shot through the living room.
Parker huddled on the floor, the precious yellow pad still on the desk. He tried to grab it but a cluster of slugs pummeled the floor in front of him and he leapt back against the wall.
Lukas and Cage crawled out the front door and collapsed into the hallway, weapons drawn, looking for a target out the window. Shouting, calls for backup, cries for help. Tobe Geller pushed back from the desk but the chair legs caught on the uneven floor and he tumbled backward. The computer monitor imploded as a dozen slugs struck it. Parker went for the yellow pad again but dropped to his belly as a line of bullets snapped into the walls, heading straight for him. He dodged the volley and lay flat on the floor.