‘He thinks that there’s a serpent inside him.’
‘Another loon,’ Rink said. ‘What’s with all these fruitcakes anyway?’
‘I must attract them.’
‘It seems like Imogen has the knack, as well.’
‘She’s lucky to have survived,’ I said.
Imogen was shaken but other than a few scrapes and bumps she was going to be all right. The doctors were still trying to identify the drug used to sedate her, and until they were confident that her system was clear of the residue they wouldn’t sign her out. The feebie, SAC Hubbard, wanted to conduct a thorough debrief with her once she was released from the hospital and he promised that afterwards he would put a guard on her until this was all finished with. Now that he’d heard from Imogen, Walter and Bryce Lang, he’d come to the same conclusion as I had, that the killer had disguised himself as me, dropped my name to Linden Case, because he’d been trying to set me up for his crimes. Hubbard wasn’t so sour, and his raisin eyes held a more genuine twinkle now. Maybe my first opinion of him had been a little misguided: he proved a decent enough sort. Officially, he pulled off the hunt for me, but asked that no one inform the media just yet. Let my enemies think I was still hindered by the law enforcement community and they’d be overconfident and wouldn’t be as difficult to find.
I’d been given five minutes with Imogen and it was nowhere near enough. For most of it she’d cried in my arms. Her ordeal had brought everything flooding back and she cried for her dead sister; to be frank, so did I. Then she’d told me all about her latest nightmare and I toughened up again. The man who’d taken her had intended murdering her in order to punish me, but first he wanted to sate another desire. He was the worst kind of monster imaginable.
When my time was up, she wouldn’t let go of me. I gently extricated myself from her arms. Then I leaned in to kiss her on the forehead, just as she lifted her head to look at me. Our lips brushed. She’d blinked in astonishment, but then had watched me all the way to the door. Something in her gaze made me regret the intimacy, but that was overwhelmed by the sense that it was the right thing to do.
Now we were in Walter’s private jet heading south. There was me, Rink, Bryce and Walter, plus two who were the CIA man’s bodyguards. They sat behind us, iPod wires trailing from their ears.
‘Whoever or whatever he is, he’s just the man doing the dirty work,’ Walter said. ‘Someone is behind him, and it’s important we find out who that is.’
‘I’m still going with Abadia,’ Bryce said.
‘Abadia died.’ Walter was sitting in a plush leather chair, one of six in the Lear’s cabin. The plane was strictly non-smoking but he had a cigar between his teeth. The cigar wasn’t alight. He pulled it out and studied the tip. ‘He was cremated.’
Walter’s words came back to me from when I’d stopped Tubal Cain: we don’t bury the living. My seat was directly opposite his and I could stare into his eyes. He returned my look, and the skin at the corner of his mouth tweaked. He aimed the cigar at me. ‘You were there, Hunter. Nice and close. Did Abadia look dead to you?’
Schilling’s rounds had torn cavities in his chest. Then I thought about Jimena and the small boy and I had to shake loose the image.
‘He was dead, no doubt about it.’
‘So we forget about him and start looking for who’s really responsible,’ Walter said. It was a command, and Bryce dipped his head in acquiescence.
Back in the sheriff’s office, Walter had offered me a deal. The deal also extended to Rink. Come back to work for him. He’d offered immunity from prosecution, sanction to use deadly force and a reward package for a job well done. Neither of us had given him our answer yet, but it looked like our old controller had taken it as a given. I was prepared to go along with that misconception while his resources would help us find and kill those responsible for murdering my team.
‘When we find this lunatic, we’ll make him tell us who’s responsible.’
‘Yeah.’ Rink was as loquacious as usual.
I told Walter about our suspicions and how Harvey was cross-referencing spec-ops who had been on active duty in Colombia and who had also trained at Quantico. ‘I’m hopeful that it will point us in the right direction.’
Walter didn’t question how a retired soldier still had the wherewithal to enter the necessary databases, and I didn’t enlighten him. But maybe in future I should negotiate the same deal for Harvey that Walter had offered us.
‘We should widen the search,’ Walter pointed out. ‘Primarily it has been US and British specialists who have trained the Jungla. But other allies have been involved. I’ll get our analysts on to it.’
The Jungla are a crack team set up by the Colombian government whose express mission is to eradicate the problem of cocaine production in the country. They’re highly trained specialists, on a par with many military special forces, but they’re not military, they’re police. Where DAS are akin to the secret police, the Jungla are the storm troopers.
One of the bodyguards stood up and leaned over to whisper in Walter’s ear. Walter nodded slowly.
As the bodyguard sat down again, Walter said, ‘They obviously have a network inside the country. The man who kidnapped Imogen couldn’t have been working on his own. A boat, a delivery truck and a plane were all necessary to his plans and he needed others to set that up. We have been looking at this angle. We’ve found the plane.’
‘Great,’ I said.
Before I could ask, Walter went on, ‘It’s at a private airstrip outside of Miami. But the pilot isn’t speaking.’
‘Give me a couple minutes with him,’ Rink said.
‘Still won’t speak,’ Walter said. ‘He’s dead. A single round to the back of the head. His body was found jammed into a dumpster.’
‘So the killer’s covering his tracks, eliminating anyone who can identify him?’ It didn’t bode well for Imogen.
Walter read my meaning. ‘I’ll contact Hubbard and have her guard doubled. But I wouldn’t worry.’
Easier said than done, but I knew what he was getting at. The killer had moved on to the next part of his plan.
‘You have people on this already,’ I said. ‘Where has their investigation led?’
‘Initially they were looking at you.’
‘But you knew there was no truth in that.’ I nodded at Bryce, who’d already confirmed that. ‘They must have been looking at others.’
‘We have a team on it in Colombia, another at this end. Up until now they’ve come up empty-handed. We’re working with the FBI on this, so they have people on it as well.’
‘I don’t want any of them getting in our way.’
‘It’s every man for himself, Hunter. The CIA is on board because of the international implications of this one, but it’s the FBI who have jurisdiction because of the federal nature of the crimes.’
‘All these G-men running round but still you’ve come to us.’ Rink’s words more or less echoed my own thoughts.
‘It serves a purpose, Rink.’
‘As usual,’ Rink said.
‘As usual. These people are threatening us all. I’m as valid a target as Hunter or Bryce. It’s in all our interests if we put a stop to them. No trials, no chance of them getting away, no retribution.’
‘Sounds like we don’t have official sanction after all,’ I said.
Walter jammed his cigar between his teeth, speaking round it like one of those gangsters in old black and white movies. ‘You have my sanction. The paperwork can be sorted later.’
Basically what he was saying was that we were going to be his personal assassins. Ordinarily I’d have told him to stick his sanction, except this time I was happy with the arrangement. While the killer was still out there, Imogen and others were still in great danger. It would remain that way until the killer, and whoever was guiding him, was stopped for good.