He looked up and saw Cade, standing by the window. He didn’t seem surprised.
“I knew someone would come,” he said.
His voice was still a rich baritone, deep and resonant from his years of theatrical training. Once this was the most famous actor in the nation. And then the most wanted man alive for twelve days in 1865.
But no one looked too hard for a man who was supposed to be dead.
He made no move to escape. Instead, he took another glass from the table.
“Drink, sir?” he asked.
“I don’t drink . . . whiskey,” Cade replied. “You know why I’m here.”
“It has been a long time in coming,” he said, putting the empty glass back on the table. “Which of them sent you?”
“The president sent me.”
That, at least, gave the man a start. “I’m honored to be a topic of discussion in the White House again. What shall I call you?”
“My name is Nathaniel Cade. Which name do you prefer?”
That brought a smile under the old man’s mustache. “John will be fine.”
Cade stepped toward him. “I don’t think we’ll know each other long enough for me to use your first name.”
“No, I imagine not,” he said. He sipped his whiskey again. “I’m ready. As I said, it’s been a long time.”
Ordinarily, Cade would have eviscerated the man by then. He was more brutal in those days, more direct. But he felt an insistent prod of curiosity.
“Why did you begin talking?” Cade said.
“I’m sorry?” The man’s eyes were bleary. The drink was working on him.
“You knew someone would come. You’ve been telling people who you are. Who you really are. Why?”
A long sigh. “Do you believe redemption is possible, Mr. Cade? I don’t mean for breaking the covenant of marriage, or stealing a few coins here and there. I wonder if it’s possible to be forgiven for a truly monstrous sin.”
Cade almost smiled. Not the first time he’d considered that question. “It depends on the sinner, I suppose.”
Sadness filled the man’s eyes. “I don’t know either. It’s been the abiding preoccupation of my days. I suppose I was looking for some punishment. Perhaps that would expiate some of my guilt.”
“You feel guilty?” Now Cade was surprised.
The man nodded and drank. “It has taken me some years to realize how mistaken I was. Everything seems too clear when you’re young. You believe in the absolute rightness of your cause. You believe the end justifies the means. For the greater good. My confederates at the time were all too happy to use me to further their own ends. It was only much later I realized they were in league with our supposed enemies. Each for their own reasons, they wanted an American Messiah. At the time, I was sure we were blazing with the light of truth. Now I realize they were most comfortable in the shadows.”
“Your former allies? You think they’re still around, watching you?”
“Oh, they still exist,” he said. “They change the name of their organizations, their public leaders come and go, but they never die. I knew they would have to silence me once I began confessing. But I had to admit it, even if I was too much of a coward to do so before old age caught up with me.”
“And now you’re ready to pay for your crimes.”
The man gave a short, bitter laugh. “Whether I am or not, you’re here now. I believed the others would find me before any federal man could cross the country, however.”
Cade smiled, showing his fangs. “I’m not your typical federal man.”
Again surprising Cade, the man didn’t react with the usual terror or shock. “I’ve heard of things like you. I suppose it only proves I’m going to Hell, if you’re here to claim me.”
Cade felt something. He couldn’t quite name it. Something in his blood sang in proximity to this man, the same man who fired the bullet that was part of the ritual binding him to the presidency. A bit of the “American Messiah”’s blood was on that bullet, and Cade swore he could feel it now. However small those drops, however little remained inside him, he could feel it.
Perhaps that was what motivated him to ask the next question.
“Do you really feel you did something wrong? Do you repent?”
The old man’s eyes blazed with conviction. “I killed the best man who ever lived. I deserve whatever you have in store for me.”
This was not acting, Cade knew. This was the truth.
He poured the old man another drink.
“You were right, actually,” Cade said. “I wasn’t the first here. Another man entered your room. The whiskey you’ve been drinking has been laced with cyanide.”
The man considered this. “I thought it tasted a little bitter. But when you get to my age, you can’t be too choosy with your spirits.”
“It wouldn’t have killed you. Not before I did,” Cade said. “It certainly would have been less painful.”
“My hard luck, then. Do what you must.”
Cade pushed the glass toward the man’s hand.
“One last drink,” he said. “You have time.”
The man tipped his head in thanks. He drained the glass in a single gulp.
Almost immediately, it fell from his hand. His breathing grew shallow. As Cade had figured, the last glass had been enough for a lethal dose. Within minutes, Cade heard his heart slow, then stop.
He didn’t know why he let the assassin of President Lincoln die quietly, without the pain and fear Cade usually inflicted on his enemies.
Perhaps it was the last bit of that great man’s blood, still flowing in him somewhere.
Perhaps that’s where he found a drop of genuine mercy.
EIGHT
1928—Providence, Rhode Island—A series of “vampire murders” reported. Later, local authorities intercept a bootlegger’s truck that contains the stolen corpse of Benjamin Franklin. Cade sent to investigate. Results inconclusive. Possibly related to the Innsmouth incident.
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODE NAME: NIGHTMARE PET
(EYES ONLY/CLASSIFIED/ABOVE TOP SECRET),
Partial Chronology, Unknown “Events” and Operations
B
usiness in the little coastal town was booming. Piracy had turned what was once a sleepy fishing village into a third-world amusement park: Pirateland. When the pirates came in from the sea, the village doubled or tripled in size, and dollars were dumped in piles amid the bone-grinding poverty. Restaurants on the coastline catered to the pirates and their prisoners as well. They offered menus, daily specials and delivery by boat. Rolls-Royces and Bentleys parked in the mud next to pens of livestock. Modern designer homes overlooked the gulf, paid for with ransoms and stolen goods. Pirated Internet cables were strung through the air, delivering wi-fi to the accountants who tallied the loot on their laptops.
Cade and Graves walked through the carnival smells and polyglot shouts unmolested, but not unnoticed. It was unusual for two white men to be here, but not unheard of. It was possible they were negotiators, or buyers. For some reason, no one wanted to approach Cade to find out.
“This is a waste of time,” Cade said.
“It’s all we have,” Graves replied.
Graves had changed into a tropical-weight outfit while on the plane—linen suit and shirt, khaki tie. He kept his shades on, even though it was now full dark. He looked like colonialism’s ghost on a tour of its old home. The only concessions he made to the setting were the waffle-stomper boots on his feet and the heavy N-frame, 8-shot Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum holstered in plain view on his belt.
They’d arrived at an airstrip—basically a long, flat section of dirt—about ninety miles east of Eyl. Over the intercom, the pilot said landing would be impossible; “a jet-fuel cremation,” was how he put it. Graves stepped into the cockpit, and a moment later, they came in for a landing that felt like going over class IV rapids.
The pilots stayed at the plane, trying to figure out how to turn the Gulfstream for takeoff, as Graves and Cade transferred into a black Range Rover. They left behind a couple of Archies with full-body armor and automatic weapons to stand guard.
By the time they arrived, it was past midnight, but no one was sleeping. As long as the pirates were in port, Eyl was a twenty-four-hour operation.
Still, they’d found nothing. The pirates who’d been infected with the Snakehead virus were already dead, killed by Cade. Their boats were gone, wrecked or scavenged. Their names brought only blank stares from the few people willing to talk.
“A waste of time,” Cade said again.
Graves shrugged. “If you have any other ideas, I’d be happy to—”
Cade had already turned away from him and activated his phone. He called Zach.
“Give me something I can use,” he said.
“AND HELLO to you too, Cade,” Zach replied.
It was past six in the offices, and nothing seemed nearly as fresh as it had this morning. They’d all been up since before dawn, with nothing to show for it.
Bell and her colleagues were frozen with some combination of humiliation, fear and ass-covering. They refused to call Graves without any fresh intel.
They were stuck. They knew it. They’d even sent Hewitt and Reynolds out for pizza. The stink of failure was starting to fill the air.
Bell looked up from her screen. “Is that Cade?”
Candle didn’t stop popping M&Ms into his mouth. “Tell him we say hello.”
“Well?” Cade asked.
“We’ve got exactly dick,” Zach admitted. “Sorry.”
“Look harder,” Cade said.
Zach allowed himself a little sigh of impatience. Zach actually liked talking to Cade on the phone. The nerve-rending effect of his presence was neutered. Even Cade was incapable of reaching through the telephone to tear out your throat long-distance. Sure, his voice still had that creepy, cold flatness, but Zach could handle that. It made him a little bolder, a little more likely to give Cade a direct order.
Of course, Cade always came back. Always. You could send him out against the worst possible nightmares, things that handed out death and destruction like business cards, things that had extinction encoded into their DNA—and Zach
had
—and he’d still come back.
Which meant Zach could act as tough as he liked on the phone, but there would be a price to pay. Eventually.
Still, Zach figured, you have to enjoy yourself when you can.
“Hey, fire me,” he said. “We’ve done our best. I’ve run names of all the pirates through our covert databases, with no contacts to any of the known players. No activity at all in that part of Africa. The Archies looked at their database. No employees match the authorization for the original Somali shipment.”
“That’s what they did, is it?” Cade left that hanging for him.
Zach didn’t pick it up. “Well . . . yeah.”
“And what did
you
see when you looked through their records?”
Son of a bitch, thought Zach. Of course he should have checked their findings. Old habits. He’d actually started to think of them as coworkers, like they were all on the same side. He chipped in for the
pizza
, for Christ’s sake. Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .
“Call you back in five.”
He hung up and moved around the desk to sit at Book’s workstation.
Book, who was lying on a couch across the room, flipping pages of documents, began to rise. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“This is your shipping and freight database, correct?” Zach clicked around, getting a feel for the interface.
“You don’t have clearance—”
“Nice. Very intuitive. Almost like a Mac.” He quickly found the shipment number. Book had left it up on the screen. He was over Zach’s shoulder now.
“I’m not going to tell you again, Barrows.”
“He’s right, Zach,” Bell piped up. “There’s a protocol we have to follow. We’re talking about trade secrets as well as national security—”
Zach talked over her. “You couldn’t find any record of this guy here who authorized the shipment, right?”
“That’s right, genius,” Book said. “No such employee. Fake ID number, fake clearance level, all planted in our records. Otherwise the shipment never would have gone out. But no way to find out who did it, either. We’ve been over this.”
“Right,” Zach said. “A/A employee: Stephens, Justin. A transport engineer, whatever the hell that means.”
“He doesn’t exist,” Book snapped. “We explained this.”
“Yeah?” Zach spun in the chair and faced all three of them. “Well, he sent another shipment twelve hours after the first one.”
Silence. Zach pushed back from the screen to show them what their own computer database had pulled up a few seconds before.