Top Ten (27 page)

“Where is he?”

Romero stepped past Ariel, seeing the folder he’d brought to his boss the day before still out on his desk. Out on his perpetually neat desk. Romero opened it. None of the information inside had been distributed. Nothing but...

“What is it, Tom?”

He picked up the file and showed it to Ariel. “The top contact sheet is missing. The others I put together when it came in are here.”

A spike of dread shot through Ariel. “What did you put the contact sheets together from?”

Romero moved through the file to photocopies of credit card receipts and bank information on those to whom the cards had been issued. “These.”

Ariel grabbed them and looked through them as fast as she could, passing the one she wanted by reflex before going back fast to it. The dread exploded within her. “Christ. He’s on here.”

“Who?” Romero asked, looking.

“Michael Strange,” Ariel said, reading the charge slip from the Super Nine and the bank information. She looked to Romero. “And he just lives up the road.”

“No...” Romero said, voicing the worry for both of them.

“We have to get there now!” Ariel said, dropping all but the information on one Michael Strange as she and Romero bolted out of Jaworski’s empty office.

*   *   *

Lionel and Nita were waiting for the Piper when it landed at Crutch Field. Mills cut the engines and gave another look at Gareth’s gun as his employer went aft out of the plane to take Nita in his arms.

“We got it baby, we got it!” he shouted, picking her up and spinning her around. “We fucking got it.”

Mills came out of the Piper behind him. He might have chanced a radio call right then, but Lionel was looking right at him through the side window and, beyond that, this was where he had envisioned making one of his moves. To do that, though, he would have to leave the Piper and the very dangerous thing that was strapped down in its aft compartment.

“Can you believe it, baby? We’re gonna be fucking rich! Fucking richer than rich!” Gareth kissed her and she kissed him back. “Oh man, we did it!”

Mills stepped from the Piper and walked past Lionel.

“Hey,” Lionel said to him. “Where are you going?”

“To take a piss, Lionel,” Mills said somewhat gruffly. “I just about had it scared out of me on that fucking island.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ask Gareth,” Mills said, and walked as normally as he could toward Nico’s office in the hangar. The bathroom was in back, and to get to it he had to pass the mechanic’s desk, which was what he had planned, because as he did he very quickly and quietly snatched the small black cordless from it.

Thirty

Hale, Hale

The phone rang at Jack Hale’s house just as he walked in the door. He shed his coat and dropped his briefcase and scooted into the den to snatch up the call.

“Hello.”

“Jack, where the fuck have you been? I called the office, I called your car phone...”

Hale’s gaze narrowed down as he loosened his tie. “Who is this?”

“It’s Mills, God dammit, and I don’t have much time.”

“Mills...”

“It’s going down, Jack. It’s going down now.”

Hale sat quickly at the desk in his den and took a pen in hand. “I’m listening. Tell me where you are.”

“I’m in a fucking bathroom right now, and I’ve got about fifty seconds before I’ve got to get out of here, but here doesn’t matter. I’m not going to be here in about three minutes. Hoag’s got his merchandise and he’s having me fly it to his buyer. He told me on the flight from Clarion Key.”

“Where’s his buyer?”

“North Dakota. That’s all I know. I figure he’ll tell me on the way.”

“He’s going with you?”

“He went to the Key with me.”

Hale scribbled some notes. “Are you armed?”

“No, but he sure as hell is. Three bodies on Clarion Key attest to that just fine.” A fast breath hissed over the phone. “Jack, listen, what Gareth bought...it’s not fucking SAMs. It’s nuclear.”

“Nuclear...” The word came as a faint, disbelieving gasp.

“Something nuclear. He had a Geiger with him out there and he checked it. It was hot.”

Hale’s pen was working the notepad fast and furious. “What kind of something? A bomb? Raw material? What?”

“It had a number and some Russian characters. I remember the numbers.”

Hale turned halfway in his chair toward his computer. He hit a key and it woke up from its sleep mode, the screen coming to colorful life.

“Jack...”

“Hang on just a sec, Mills,” Hale said, and logged on to the Bureau computer. He entered his password and navigated as fast as he could to the database covering operations against WMD, or weapons of mass destruction.

“Jack, I’m gonna get my fucking head blown off here...”

“A second. A second.” He was in the database now. “What’s the number?”

Mills gave it to him and Hale entered a search for it. A response came back in seconds. “You picked yourself up a Russian Tactical Destruction Device. A backpack nuke intended to be used by engineering teams to blow high priority targets behind—“ Hale stopped his recitation of what was on the screen and gave Mills the basics. “Three, five, and twenty minute fuses. Default is three.”

“Jack, listen, I don’t
care
what it is. I care about getting it away from Hoag. Now listen. I have a plan.”

Hale turned back to his desk and took pen in hand again, flipping the page on his notepad to a clean sheet.

“I’m going to have to deal with Gareth in-flight. I don’t know how, but I’ll have to. Once I do that, I’m going to put down at a field called Sugarpine. It’s south of Atlanta in Pike County.”

“Sugarpine, got it.”

“It’s a deserted strip, shit for a runway, but I’ve put in there before without cracking up. I can do it again.”

“What about something maintained.”

“I don’t want to fly this thing over any big cities, okay? Sugarpine’s in the sticks.”

“All right. I understand.”

“Have an EOD team there. Someone who knows how to deal with this.”

“Air Force and Army both have people,” Hale assured him.

“Just get them there. And Jack...”

“What?”

“I want you to get in touch with my father. We’re supposed to get together tonight. I don’t want him worrying if this thing hits the news, or...”

Hale understood. “Where is he?”

Mills told him and Jack Hale put it to paper.

“I’ve gotta go, Jack.”

“You want me to wish you good luck?” Jack Hale asked as he was making his last notation. His answer was silence as the connection clicked off.

*   *   *

The Bureau Tactical Teams choppered in from Albany and stormed the house at 1251 West Lemontree in Cole Point, New York, less than twenty minutes from Damascus. They went in fast from multiple points, hoping surprise would give them an advantage.

In the end it was they who were surprised. Several of them came out looking shaken after clearing the property of any threats.

“Back room,” the tactical team leader told Ariel Grace where she had waited across the street. Tom Romero stood at her side with a half dozen other agents from Task Force Ten. “Your boy is one sick fuck.”

Ariel and Tom moved across the street and into the house, leaving the rest of the team to wait until they did a preliminary walk through. They didn’t need evidence trampled at this stage.

The front room was average, small and sparsely decorated, with just a couch and a chair and a television. A fan/light combination hung from the ceiling. The room looked normal. The room looked unused.

Kitchen, on the right, dining room connected. The table in the dining room gleamed. No dust. No water spots. Someone was neat. The kitchen was small. A single plate sat on the counter next to the sink, a fork resting on it. Next to a toaster sat a wood block with slots holding knives. Dozens of knives.

Down a hallway, now, with bathroom on the right. Clean. Sparkling. Across from it a bedroom. Neat. Bed made. No clothes strewn about.

He’s a tidy boy, isn’t he
, Ariel thought as she continued down the hall. A door was at its end. It was fully open. A light was on inside. A red glow filtered out.

Ariel neared with Tom close behind. She had the urge to take her weapon out, but she was safe here. There was no threat here. Was there?

And through the door she stepped, into a room with a table at its center and a chair at the table and a computer on the table and dozens of faces in relief staring out from three of the four walls.

“Oh my God,” Tom Romero said softly as they progressed more fully into the place where madness did live, and breathe, and thrive.

His own gallery
, Ariel thought as she walked to one of the walls, put her hand near to one of the faces bulging out, its surface red and skimmed with something that had peeled away in places. Plaster, she thought. Yes. She backed away.

Not a gallery, she corrected herself. No. This was his trophy room. From a time when he hunted differently than he did now.

“Ariel,” Romero said from across the room. “Look.”

She went to where her colleague stood near a low bookcase beneath a draped and shaded window on the far wall of the room. The only wall devoid of faces.

“What?” she asked, squatting and looking to where he was pointing, finding the answer to her own question on the spine of a tall, thin book. “Same year, same school as Susan Rollins.”

“You were right,” Romero said.

“We were,” Ariel corrected him as she eased the yearbook from its place among atlases and art books and medical tomes. She rested it on her knee and turned its stiff front cover back, slowly turning the pages, reading some of the things Michael Angelo Strange’s classmates had penned for posterity.

Hey there Mickey D

All I can say is YOU’VE GOT BALLS. Truly, isn’t that all anyone can say about you? Isn’t that all you can say about yourself?

Good luck with the dicks...I mean chicks.

Greg

P
eni
S Have you found your yearbook yet???

Another page, and she read:

To the great Michael Angelo!!!

How’s it hangin’? (Ha Ha Ha)

What do you call a guy with no arms, no legs, who hangs on the wall?       Art! (Ha Ha Ha)

Another riddle—what do you call a guy with no ‘you know what’?     Mickey Dickless. Or, just look in the mirror. (HA HA HA)

Judy wants to write something now.

Later, your freakiness.

Walter (I got a BIG OLD ONE) Brandon

Past more of these entries Ariel turned, Romero looking down from above, reading as she did.

“Nice friends,” he commented.

“I doubt they were that to him,” Ariel observed, paging further on until she came to the senior pictures. Three pages into that she stopped. Stopped and let her finger trace to the beaming photo of a young man named Jason LeValle. Let her finger play over the X that had been put upon it. She came slowly up, standing and looking to the walls.

Romero had seen what she had, a young man crossed out. Maybe... “Do you think?”

“I’m sure we’ll find out.”

She looked away from the walls of faces and closed the yearbook, tucking it beneath her arm as her gaze settled on the table at room’s center and the chair in which the madman had most certainly sat. She studied the arrangement. The computer. The printer. The half empty glass of water placed precisely on a coaster so as not to mar the table—or the papers resting very near.

Ariel went there, standing next to where the monster had sat. Standing close to the table. Close to the papers, all face down. She began to turn them over. One by one by one, her eyes flaring with each new sheaf, with each glance at things that had been printed. Articles. Clippings. Pictures.

Pictures that she recognized.

“Oh my God,” she said softly, in the way a quiet scream might sound if there were such a thing.

Romero came up behind her and got his own fill of what she was seeing. “Shit.”

One more word escaped Ariel before she turned away from the table, away from the chair, away from the papers the monster had availed himself of. One solitary word. A name.

“Jack...”

*   *   *

He needed his phone book. The Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal teams were at Bragg, weren’t they? Or were their Air Force counterparts at Andrews? NEST was at Nellis, and somewhere else, right?

Jeez, Jack, get a hold of yourself
, Hale told himself as he stood and turned to get his government directory from the bookcase and stepped right into a shadow with form.

Michaelangelo clamped his hand over Jack Hale’s mouth and took his weapon from his hip holster before the man could arm himself. He squeezed tight on the man’s jaw and drew him close, terrified eyes swimming now, and said, “I thought I might require your assistance for a while.”

*   *   *

She didn’t make it out the door.

That had been her intention. Her driving
need
right then. To get to her car and to a phone and in contact with Jack Hale to warn him. But something short circuited the immediacy of that plan. A can of paint.

Red paint.

She caught sight of it sitting against the wall near the door. The door fully open, concealing that which was behind it. The adrenalin that might have fired her legs out of the room and to a phone ebbed right then, and she stepped  that way. There was a brush in the can. He had been working. Recently. And he had not been tidy. Had not put his brushes away. He had been rushed. Rushed like with Doris May. Rushed like with Deandra Waley. And Aaron Rhodes. She reached the door and gripped its edge and swung it slowly away from the wall and saw Special Agent Bernard Jaworski’s dead face plastered freshly there, a wash of red over agony gaping.

She shook her head and took one step back, bumping lightly into Tom Romero, who was saying something behind her,
Dear Gods
and
Oh no’s
prevalent among his mourning words. For a moment, a very brief moment, she took in the sight of familiar death before her. Took it in and let it stoke the fire that already burned within. The fire of hate for the monster. A fire that now raged indescribably.