Spider

86

Jack tightens his grip on Lu and prepares to make his move.

The fingers and palm of his right hand are bleeding intensely from where he cut across them with the kitchen knife as he pretended to fumble for the phone with his back to the camera. Jack knew he had to cut deep for the flow to be fast enough to paint a line of blood across the girl's neck as he faked the motion of cutting her. By cradling Lu in his hands, he was able to smear the blood everywhere and make it look as if she'd been fatally wounded.

Now, on his knees, he knows time is running out every bit as quickly as the blood haemorrhaging from his hand. In one deft movement, he dips his shoulder, falls forward and rolls himself and Ludmila as far underneath the heavy wooden bondage table as he can manage.

They're barely beneath the chrome-legged slab of oak when the explosion rips the room apart.

Jack smothers Ludmila with his big body.

Timber, brick and dust blow everywhere.

Rubble tears into Jack's exposed head and back, belting him like iron baseball bats, smashing his neck, his legs and spine.

He holds Ludmila tight and this time he really does pray.

Spider's computer screen goes grey.

The dust and rubble obliterate his view.

He grabs the laptop and holds it at a different angle, trying to get some kind of picture.

Where are they? I must see their faces!

Spider tingles with the electricity of expectation.

Where are their bodies?

He'd fixed the cameras in the basement in reinforced glass housings designed by film crews to withstand explosions and even train crashes.

He peers closely at the plasma screen.

Slowly, it fills with flames of vivid red and orange.

The fires of hell. May the flames consume King's stinking body.

Spider puts the computer down.

They're dead. King and the girl are dead.

Now I can finish off the policewoman and King's wife.

Spider looks over at Nancy, and then Orsetta. They're both lying down, curled up in near foetal positions.

Lambs to the slaughter.

He turns to pick up his pistol.

But he never makes it.

The first bullet hits him in the face.

His ears are still ringing with the sound of the gunshot when the second and third shots tear holes in his stomach.

Spider falls backwards, his head cracking against the tombstone.

The fourth and fifth bullets splinter his ribcage and rip his heart to pulp.

Only when he is absolutely certain that the man is dead, does Terry McLeod drop the policewoman's Beretta. Howie Baumguard and the ESU team were still holding back when the blast went off.

Howie had figured that BRK was running the show from remote cameras and he didn't dare give a 'strike command' that might endanger the lives of Jack and Lu Zagalsky.

But after the explosion, all bets were off.

The ESU team works, as usual, from a Radio Emergency Patrol truck, but even basic REPs are perfectly equipped for sieges and small building blasts. As Howie rushes towards the scene of the explosion, the small arms troops are at his side, and the rescue unit is already unbolting a variety of tools from the truck, such as fire extinguishers, metal cutters and the kind of inflatable airbags that can be used to lift heavy weights off bodies.

Lead officers with high-powered search beams on their weapons go in first. Behind them come their armed cover and then the Extrication Squad.

At the first sight of flames, the ranks part and the guys with extinguishers lay down a blanket of foam.

Seconds later, when the gas boiler explodes, the heartbeats of the ESU team barely jump. It's something they'd been expecting.

Clouds of foam instantaneously smother the flames. There's no sign of panic. Howie Baumguard steps aside and calmly lets the experts do their work. He's seen the ESU magicians pull people out of mangled metal in multiple car crashes, bomb explosions and building collapses. They're the best. They've worked everywhere from the Oklahoma bombing to the hurricane in New Orleans. If anyone can get Jack and Lu out of this mess alive, it's them.

'Get some portable light in here!' someone shouts.

Through the flashlight, dust and plaster spins in the brick-coated red mist as expert eyes roam over the rubble.

Less than two yards from the door is a pyramid of timber and breeze block.

'More foam!' an officer shouts as a fire flares again near the doorway.

At the top of the basement stairs stands Bernie, the one specialist member of ESU that Howie doesn't want to see deployed.

Bernie is a bloodhound.

And Bernie's expertise is cadaver recovery. Orsetta has taken two bullets in the muscle of her right shoulder and is bleeding badly. The fall knocked her unconscious. Now, as she comes round, she is too disorientated to move. In the movies, hero cops get shot and then simply carry on running as if they've suffered a bee sting. In real life, things are different. Most shootings blow you off your feet and you stay down until paramedics scrape you up and take you away. Orsetta struggles even to sit upright.

'Are you okay?' asks McLeod, both hands still around the pistol, now pointing at the ground.

Orsetta nods. For a moment she is unable even to find her voice.

'He's dead. I think he's dead.' McLeod waves his gun towards the body sprawled against the tomb.

Orsetta forces herself to stand up by sliding her back against the wall.

Finally she manages to talk, her voice croaky but calm. 'I'm a police officer… Please give me the gun.' Rather awkwardly, she pulls her ID card from her back pocket. 'Hand it to me very carefully,' she adds.

McLeod is an expert shot. He's killed deer, rabbits and all manner of birds, but he's never shot a human being before. Now his hands are shaking as badly as if he were mixing a cocktail. He takes hold of the pistol by its barrel and hands it to Orsetta. The policewoman checks it and then levels it at Spider's crumpled body.

She's taking no chances. One twitch from the motherfucking son of a bitch and she'll empty the rest of the magazine into him.

'Further back,' she says to McLeod, 'there is a woman on the ground, please go and help her. I will watch him.'

'Sure, yeah, sure,' says McLeod nervously. He heads around the tomb and immediately recognizes the collapsed body as Nancy King.

Orsetta hears voices and footsteps behind her, coming from the entrance to the catacomb. She realizes that her hearing has been affected by the gunfire. She feels her head start to spin and her sense of balance slip away.

Through the fog she makes out that the voices are speaking Italian. We're safe, she tells herself.

The crackle of a police radio echoes through the catacombs and then beams from several flashlights illuminate the blackness. Someone tells her that everything is going to be all right. A hand reassuringly touches her and fingers gently prise the gun from her grasp. In the glare of a flashlight she sees McLeod start to remove tape from Nancy King's hands.

Then her mind goes slack and she allows herself to collapse. It takes them twenty minutes to find Jack and Lu's bodies in the rubble of the building.

'Over here!' shouts ESU veteran Wayne Harvey. 'They're beneath this fall.' The blast has brought down parts of the ceiling and water is flooding in from ruptured pipes that have been ripped from the walls. The electricity is out and bright beams and helmet lights cross each other as people scramble towards Harvey. A dozen hands claw at the heap of bricks, wood and breeze blocks.

'I see someone!' he shouts, looking down on Lu Zagalsky's bloodied, naked and unconscious body.

The bondage table has taken most of the force of the blast, the slab of heavy oak not cracking and only the legs of the table finally buckling from the weight of the ceiling fall.

Howie Baumguard tears the table away and sees Jack's twisted torso lying protectively across the girl.

'Oxygen and stretchers!' shouts Harvey, taking off a glove to feel for a pulse on Lu's neck. He glances at his watch. 'She's alive, but only just. Get her covered up and outta here, quick as you can.'

'It's okay, buddy, we've got you,' says Howie, kneeling in the wreckage next to Jack, pawing away hunks of concrete as if they were unwanted cushions on his sofa. 'We'll have you out of this shit in no time.'

Jack is barely conscious and still too shocked and dazed to speak.

'Fuck, man! That's bad!' says Howie, suddenly spotting his friend's injured hand. 'Paramedic! We need someone over here, quick, fucking quick!'

'On my way!' replies a calm voice from somewhere off in the darkness. A beam of helmet light flashes in Howie's eyes, blinding him for a second, then the distinctive west coast voice of Pat O'Brien is next to him. 'I see him. Stand back and let me get in there.'

Howie steps aside and stumbles, his ankle twisting on the unseen jags of bricks and blocks.

'He's bleeding like fuckery,' he says, pointing. 'Look at his hand, his right hand.'

O'Brien aims the light down, takes one look and knows instantly what to do. He slips a rucksack off his shoulder, snaps on latex gloves and quickly blots the wound with an antiseptic pad so he can see the 'three S's': the size, shape and severity of the cut.

'Your buddy's right, you've got a main bleed here, my friend,' says O'Brien, turning Jack's hand in his own, wondering how much blood the guy might have lost. Another quick dip in the medi-sac produces a tourniquet, sterile spray and suture kit. The gash is still pumping and is filled with grit and dust. He sluices it with the sterile spray, picks out what fragments he can with his little finger and then dives in with the needle and thread. His ESU training didn't stretch to needlepoint, but if ever the Mother's Circle hold a battlefield category, O'Brien's odds-on favourite to win it.

Jack's eyes are fixed on the girl as they lift her on to a stretcher and attach a drip to her arm. He recalls the nightmare he'd had at the Holiday Inn, when he'd dreamt of saving her and how the room had been full with medics and cops, just like this. He digs deeper into the vaults of his memory and pulls out footage from the other nightmares, images of a black room, an autopsy scene, the water pipes and the blood on the floor. Like the shrink had said, for years his subconscious hadn't rested, it had still been puzzling over the crime scene, processing the psychological profiles, still trying to force him to forget about mundane distractions and return to the case.

'Get me a backboard over here and some lifters!' shouts O'Brien across the room.

'He okay?' asks Howie, hovering a few feet away.

'Should be,' says O'Brien.

'I'm fine,' manages Jack, his voice raw and full of dust.

O'Brien shines his light in Jack's eyes, pulls the lids wide and checks the state of dilation. 'Yeah, you're going to be okay. You've lost a bucket of blood, but then you're a big guy, so you've got some to spare.'

Jack lifts his undamaged hand and motions Howie to lean close to him. 'Look, I know this place is all fucked up, but get them to preserve what they can. Anything. Get Forensics in here as quickly as possible. This is it; this is the place where he cut up some of his victims. I've seen this hell-hole in my nightmares; make sure we get something out of it.' Howie looks around at the wreckage. It's as bad as a Beirut bombsite, but he knows CSU will find something; no offender can ever get rid of everything.

O'Brien pulls Howie to one side as his colleagues arrive and slip the backboard into place and start manoeuvring Jack on to it. 'He needs some shots. Tetanus, the full works,' he says to the lifting team. 'Keep an eye on the bleed, I've only tacked the deeper cuts across the fingers, they'll be able to open them up in the hospital and do a proper clean.'

The lifters nod, heave Jack up to waist height on the creaking backboard and head for the door. Lu Zagalsky's now up top, covered by blankets and an ESU coat, being rushed to a waiting helicopter on the nearby golf course. Paramedics have managed to get an intravenous hydration drip into a vein and the word among the crew is that she's got a good chance of making it, though it's likely to be another twenty-four hours before medics know whether she'll be left with any permanent disabilities such as renal failure.

Jack's fully conscious by the time they get him outside. He squints at the sunlight and slowly sucks in the fresh air. He sees Howie emerging from the blackness and waves a hand again for him to come closer. 'Nancy, Zack, are they…' His voice chokes on him.

Howie finishes the sentence. 'They're okay, they're both absolutely fine.'

Jack swallows and feels the leaden fear sink to the pit of his stomach. 'And BRK?'

'Dead as the dodo. I don't know all the details, but some saintly soul shot him into oblivion.'

'A pity,' says Jack.

'Pity?' queries Howie, frowning.

'Yeah, a big pity. I wanted the pleasure of seeing him rot on Death Row for half a decade. Then I wanted front-row seats and a popcorn combo while I watched the fucker fry.' Orsetta can barely stand unaided, but still manages to kick Spider's bullet-riddled corpse before paramedics shuttle her, Nancy and Zack into a helicopter waiting to airlift them to a hospital in Siena.

Once they're in the air, the medics clamp off Orsetta's shoulder bleed and give Nancy pure oxygen to help her get over the effects of the Lidocaine. Within a few minutes she's clear-headed enough to understand that Jack is alive. The Tuscan countryside rolls surreally beneath the low-flying copter and she spends the whole journey holding Zack tight to her, neither of them speaking. Her brain is still struggling to make sense of everything that has happened, but one thing she is certain of is that the biggest challenge ahead is going to be helping her son to put today's trauma behind him. The copter banks and she feels queasy as they come into land. She is desperate to hear her husband's voice and learn exactly what state he is in. And when she's sure he is okay, absolutely okay, then she's also desperate to remind him that today is Sunday the eighth of July. Their wedding anniversary.

But she knows all the teasing will have to wait. For now, she doesn't even have a phone. It still lies in the blood-soaked darkness of the catacombs next to the dead body of America's most feared serial killer.