Reign of Evil

CHAPTER 13

Walker went down the hall into the communications room where he found Preeti crying. She sat at her workstation, four computer screens in front of her and seven thirty-six-inch monitors on the walls, each one showing a different news channel, with the exception of one showing a cricket match. She was slumped in her chair, her head in her hands.

When Walker saw that she was crying, he stopped in the door. “Excuse me,” he said, backing into the hall.

Preeti wiped her eyes with her fists and shook her tears away. “No, it’s okay.” She smiled weakly. “Come in, Walker.”

“I can come back later. Really, I—”

“No. I’m just being silly. What is it?”

“I just got off the line with my boss. He said if there was any link we could make to something that might be of interest to the U.S. then they’d be able to come over and help. Do we have anything like that?”

She grinned, the sudden change to her demeanor remarkable. Then she laughed. “It’s a sad day for us, isn’t it? We used to be so large. Now all we have is Ian and Trev.” At the mention of her husband, her voice cracked.

Walker couldn’t help himself. He went to her, knelt, and put his arms around her. She accepted and leaned into his shoulder, where she sobbed violently for several minutes. Walker rubbed her back and said soft things to her. After a while, she lifted her head and pushed him away.

“Thank you, Walker. I needed a good cry.” She wiped at her eyes. “Bollocks. I bet my makeup is all a mess. My eyes probably look like Rorschach blobs.”

Walker smiled and stood. “They’re fine.”

“That fiancée of yours trained you well, Walker. You know how to say all the right things.” Then she realized what she said and added, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I was trying too— Oh, hell, but I’ve bottled it.”

Walker felt a rush of what could have been flow through him, then shook it off. “You’re worried about Trev is all. No worries. I get it.”

“Desperately. I couldn’t help but think of your situation and how we’re so similar. Then with the loss of Jerry…” She inhaled to keep from crying. “… I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“It’s one thing to be killed crossing the street, or by a lightning bolt, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Like being at the Winter Solstice ceremony at Stonehenge on the exact fucking day when the Red Grove was going to sacrifice everyone there. “That’s random and can’t be helped. It can’t be planned against. Trust me, I’ve been thinking about this non-stop for the last seventy-two hours. But it’s another thing altogether when someone dies while doing something they absolutely believe in. In the case of Jerry, it was the protection of England, his homeland, and his team members. I’ve been there. I’ve been face-to-face with death and ready to give myself up for my team and country. Lucky for me I’ve never had to do it before, but there will probably come a day when it happens.”

Preeti regarded him for a moment. “If this was supposed to cheer me up, it didn’t work.”

“Preeti, if you want me to make some shit up to salve our emotions then I can do that just like any bullshit Hallmark card. I’m laying it on straight. If Trev dies in the service of his country, then it’s something proud, something honorable. It’s what he signed up for.”

“But what if I don’t want him to die?”

“It might never happen, but to be sure… well, then you have to convince him to quit.”

“He’d end up hating me.”

Walker shrugged. “There you have it. It’s what every spouse of a service member has to deal with. What we do is a service. We serve. It’s something that’s in our DNA. In America less than one percent of the population has this desire to serve the other. It’s a sad fact, but there it is.”

“It’s about the same in England.” She wiped at her eyes. “I get what you’re saying. I have to accept that this is part of him, right?”

Walker nodded. “It’s a hard thing. We had a mission to Mexico where Jen became involved to the point where she was in firefights with me. The shoe was on the other foot then and I felt terrified for her. But like me, she was there to serve.”

Preeti was silent for a long time as Walker dove deep into his memories.

When she finally spoke, her voice was full of authority. “You’re upset because she died. You’re trying to say that because she died in such a random way it’s somehow worse. Is it really? I think you’d feel the same way had she died in one of those firefights in Mexico. Don’t add to your troubles, Walker. They’re bad enough as it is.”

He nodded. “You’re right, of course. I’ve always had a tendency to take something bad and make it worse. I guess it’s the optimist in me.” He smiled weakly. “But enough of this emotion.”

She made a mock-serious face. “Right. Enough of that. Time to serve.” She flashed him a mock salute, British-style. “What can I do for you?”

“Did you manage to track the video disturbance?”

Her eyes brightened as she leaned forward and began to punch keys. “Not sure if you know it, but your NSA has nothing on our Home Office. There are almost two million closed-circuit television cameras throughout England at a ratio of about one camera for every eleven citizens. It’s such a massive network; they must be using supercomputers to keep track of everything. At times during the last few hours I felt I was going blind.”

“I doubt they have people monitoring every camera,” Walker said.

“You’re right, although I sometimes imagine a giant building with monitors and people walking back and forth as they follow the people under surveillance, traveling from monitor to monitor to monitor.” She waved a hand. “But that’s just my brain being crazy. To answer your question, yes and no. Let me explain.”

She typed in a few commands and brought up a map of Woking. Not an ordinary map, this one showed nodes, which Walker immediately deduced represented cameras. As she typed, some of the nodes began to turn red, leaving a trail. More than fifty nodes lit up, then stopped.

“It took some time, but I was able to find the disturbance. You were right. It originated somewhere else. In this case, Horsell Common where there are three barrows.”

“Barrows, as in Lord of the Rings barrows?”

She nodded. “The same… well, not the same, but the same thing. Remember, J. R. R. Tolkien was English. The barrows of Horsell Common have been dated to three to four thousand years old. But now it’s basically a public park with thousands of trees and several dozen walking paths.”

“And you traced the disturbance back to there?”

“I did.”

Walker narrowed his eyes as he leaned down to stare at the last node. “Is the Common big enough to hide a Wild Hunt?”

“Given that we don’t know how big the Wild Hunt is I’d have to say yes. But I’m a step ahead of you. I sent in a false complaint of a child being abducted into the woods. Seventeen bobbies were dispatched and searched the woods without finding anything. My guess is if the Wild Hunt was there, they would have found it.”

“They wouldn’t be inside the mounds, would they?”

She stared at the screen. “I couldn’t imagine that.”

“So they just appeared there, attacked the witch’s house, then went back.”

She nodded. “It would appear so.”

Walker was used to dealing with magic on a small scale. A chupacabra or a skin-wearing religious fanatic he could parse, but this was on a much larger scale. He wasn’t sure what to think.

“Have there been any other disturbances like this?”

“I’ve been working on an algorithm to find that out.”

“We can’t just go to the Home Office and ask?”

She was about to answer when she smiled, sat back in her chair, and shook her head. “That would be the obvious answer, wouldn’t it?” She put on a headset and began to make a call, acting like Walker wasn’t even there.

He paused a moment, then said, “Glad I could help.”

She waved a hand but was too deep into her problem set to pay attention to anything else.

Walker left the room thinking about the barrows and the Wild Hunt. There was something the witch had said that he felt was important, but he couldn’t remember exactly what it was.