The 13 th tribe

[58]

“Bad guys?” Jagger said, waving his hand through the smoke hovering over the table between them. “What does that mean?”

“People who’ve committed crimes and for one reason or another have escaped justice,” Owen said. “For the most part, murderers, rapists, child molesters, but also kidnappers, white collar criminals, men who’ve severely and repeatedly battered their wives or children and just haven’t killed them yet.”

“They’re vigilantes?” Jagger said.

“That puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it?”

Jagger shook his head. “No.”

“But you understand the feeling, wanting to take the law into your own hands? Especially when the system breaks down and bad guys get away.”

“What are you getting at?”

“They’ve killed people who’ve used vehicles to murder innocents. Habitual drunk drivers.”

Jagger reached across the table and grabbed Owen’s wrist. “You’ve investigated me?”

“I did a little research.”

“Why?”

“I’m getting to that,” Owen said. “Right now I just want to know how you feel about vigilantes.”

Jagger released Owen’s wrist, leaned back. “Of course I understand vengeance. Who doesn’t? Yes, I wish that drunk was dead, and there’s a part of me that’s angry with myself for not doing something about it. Maybe if it weren’t for my family, I would.”

“A lot of people think that way,” Owen said. “Something stops them from acting. Their family, going to jail, lack of the knowledge of how to do it or lack of courage, their belief that God will sort it out. Nothing wrong with any of that.” He picked up his mug and seemed to speak into it. “Do you want to kill the woman who shot your son?”

Jagger’s jaw stiffened, his teeth ground together, sounding like ropes pulling tight. He closed his eyes and said, “Yes. But I would settle for her being caught, going to trial, spending the rest of her life in jail.”

“Justice.”

“Yes.” He opened his eyes. “I said I understood vengeance, but I don’t understand what this… this tribe is doing.”

“They’re filling the gap between what victims or the families of victims want to do and what they can do.”

“I get that,” Jagger said. “But who are they targeting? Just random criminals?”

“Sinners,” Owen said. He set down the mug and pushed it away. “They target sinners.”

“ Sinners? In the religious sense?”

Owen smiled. “I don’t know any other sense. A criminal breaks man’s laws. Sinners break divine law. The Tribe doesn’t have much regard for man’s laws, except where they match God’s, and that helps them find targets, because criminals, not sinners, make the news. They’re much more interested in right and wrong as God defines the terms, and then meting out justice to those who escape it. That’s the reason they exist, as far as they’re concerned.”

Jagger had called them vigilantes, but that wasn’t quite it. The religious aspect added something: “Vigilantes for God.”

“So they think.”

“On a divine mission from God.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Owen said, “but you can put it that way.”

“I suppose their dog told them to kill for God?” Jagger grabbed his mug and took a big swig. The brew was lukewarm and even more bitter than before.

“Don’t think about their motivations, just what they’re doing: killing bad guys.”

“Then they should kill themselves, what they did to Tyler. He wasn’t their target. He’s innocent.”

“You said Tyler took the chip?”

“That’s what the woman said.”

“Then he wasn’t innocent, not in their eyes. He got in their way. That made him guilty.”

We were going to leave you alone, Phin had said. But you got in our way-you and the kid-and that gives us permission. Not just that, an obligation.

“That’s twisted logic,” Jagger said. “It makes almost anybody fair game for them.”

Owen nodded, a slow bobbing of his head. “That’s why I’ve been after them for years. Not constantly, they’re much too cunning, too covert. By the time I get to the scene of one of their killings, they’re long gone.”

“That’s how you know so much about them, by going after them when you can, trying to stop them?”

Owen smiled. “I would like nothing more than to call fire down from heaven to destroy them.”

The old man from the counter sauntered over with a carafe. He topped off Jagger’s mug and refilled Owen’s.

“I’m going to be wired,” Owen said, watching the man depart. Without lifting it, he wrapped his hands around the mug and leaned over it, getting closer to Jagger. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve left the Tribe. Most of them, like Creed, came to realize that killing is no way to please God. Sometimes it simply dawned on them. Sometimes what drove them to that realization was the death of an innocent-someone you and I would call an innocent.” He paused, seeming to study Jagger’s face again. “For Creed, it was the Agag.”

“Hiroshima?” Jagger said. “Yeah, I think that would do it.”

“But he didn’t just leave. He was going to try to stop them.”

“Of course. Anyone in their right mind-What?”

Owen was staring at him intently. “Creed can’t do it. Someone else has to.”

“You?” Jagger said. He shook his head. “This is too big, too important. You’ve got to inform someone, I don’t know, authorities.”

“Do you know how difficult it would be to get any law enforcement agency, any government, to believe there’s going to be a major attack somewhere in the world, sometime soon-let alone care or do something about it? Even if it were possible, it would take too long.”

“And you can do better? By yourself? How? You just said they’re always a step ahead of you, gone by the time you get there.”

Owen scooted his chair closer to the table and put his elbows on it. He moved his hands as if shaking a ball, excited. “While Tyler was in surgery, I tapped into the crime databases of INTERPOL, the FBI, the International Crim-”

“You can do that?” Jagger interrupted.

“Calling in more favors,” Owen said. “Now, pinpointing vigilante killings is no easy task. Of course, I first searched for murder victims. Turns out there were about three hundred thousand worldwide in the last six months. Then I ran the list through a bunch of filters: which murder victims had been charged with a crime during the previous year… and got off on a technicality or hung jury… whose crime or release was reported by the local media. Even then, criminals tend to consort with unsavory types, so their deaths could have been infighting or flirting with the wrong woman or anything. So I looked for non-firearm deaths. The Tribe favors blades.”

The door opened, letting in a warm breeze that cleared the smoke away from Jagger and Owen and caused the candle flames to flap like little pennants. Three people in their twenties entered, a woman and two men, all of them laughing. Jagger noticed the sky had brightened to the color of the baby blue paint he’d quickly slathered on Tyler’s walls between his birth and bringing him home. The newcomers commandeered a table in the center of the cafe, and one of the men waved the old man over.

Owen watched the group for a few seconds before turning back to Jagger. “I’ve isolated a few cities, radiating from which are a number of possible vigilante killings, like animal bones near a predator’s lair. One place is particularly interesting.” He wiggled his finger over a spot on the table and started tapping in concentric circles around it. “The killings mostly occurred in outlying towns-only one in the city itself-which is what they would do, kill away from where they live.”

“What city?”

“Paris,” Owen said. “Le Mans, Orleans, Cergy, Beauvais, Reims-vigilante killings in all of them within the last half year. Only two days ago Philippe Gerard, the money manager who drained his clients’ accounts, was found stabbed to death in his home in Versailles. And Paris fits their personal style too. They like big cities, nightlife, culture, enough air traffic that their own frequent trips don’t attract attention.”

“How long would it have taken them to reach St. Cath’s from there?” Jagger said.

“Private jet”-he calculated-“five hours. Add time to get to the airport, then to a helicopter in Sharm el-Sheikh, fly to the monastery-nine, nine and a half hours.”

Jagger nodded. “Creed showed up just after most of the tourists had started up the mountain at closing, about twelve thirty. Someone was watching from the crags. The Tribe attacked about ten thirty.”

“Ten hours, it fits.”

“One thing bothers me about your little plotting of the killings.” Jagger tapped the table the way Owen had done. “You said these guys are globetrotters. They kill all over the world. Why would they kill anywhere near where they live? Why risk it?”

Owen grinned. “They can’t help it. It’s what they do. They may be experts in human behavior, but that doesn’t mean they can completely control their own. They’re Einstein smart, but they don’t necessarily act like it; they’re way beyond that. Their intelligence is a weapon they pull out of a drawer when they need it. Otherwise, they’re just people with their own proclivities and demons, their own habits, compulsions, and hang-ups. One of them’s a firebug, loves torching things. A couple of the killings I plotted around Paris ended in arson fires. Covers their tracks in terms of trace evidence they might have left, but the fires themselves point to them.”

He looked around the room, came back to Jagger, and sighed. “I saw that woman who shot your boy. She was leaving the monastery when I arrived. I recognized her, Nevaeh, unless she’s changed her name recently.”

Nevaeh. What kind of a name is that? Jagger thought about etching it into a live bullet casing.

Owen shook his head. “She’s really something. Gorgeous as all get-out, but mean as they come. She loves her job, and that’s just wrong when your job is killing people. Has a thing for death: graves, tombs, caskets. You can bet wherever they’re holed up in Paris, it has some connection to death. Maybe a former mortuary or a cemetery caretaker’s house.”

“I saw some other tattoos on her,” Jagger said, “besides the fireball thing. Crosses, a skull.”

Owen nodded. “Every one about death-except for the crosses, but I guess you can say that has something to do with death too. She’s got the grim reaper in hooded cloak, holding a scythe; an angel done in all black ink, with huge wings, pulling a man up to heaven by his wrist; lots of skulls, skeletons, things like that.”

Jagger pictured the woman. Something about her-the fluid way she moved, catlike, her exotic beauty-was consistent with his idea of a painted lady: mysterious, rebellious, confident.

“You found all that about her on Google?” he said.

“I tracked the Tribe to L.A. once and spotted her going into a nightclub. She had on this skimpy top thing we used to call underwear, I’m sure just to show off her tattoos. The club was one of those Goth numbers, so she fit right in. The guy at the door wouldn’t let me in, so I went around back to the kitchen and slipped a busboy a hundred bucks. But I couldn’t find her. Found out later a drug dealer who specialized in peddling to middle school kids got knifed in the bathroom that night.”

Jagger felt a faint twinge of admiration for the woman and hated her all the more for it. Even if she hadn’t shot his son, everything about her should have repulsed him. She was a killer who had a strange fascination with death and for all he knew slept in a coffin. Still, he couldn’t help but appreciate her taste in targets. He shook his head, disgusted with himself for acknowledging even the most trivial of qualities in this woman. His body was tired and his mind was numb, that’s all. She had shot Tyler, and if he learned that she had a supernatural ability to instantly rid the world of every murderer, rapist, and pedophile, he’d still want to kill her.

The old men in the back seemed to be staring past the three twenty-somethings at him, as though they knew his thoughts and were waiting for a confession. He turned a shoulder to them and clunked his prosthetic arm on the table.

“… tempted to leave them alone,” Owen was saying, “if the only people they killed were drug dealers and other scum who prey on the innocent. But they’re not. The Agag means blood, a lot of it, and it’ll flow from good men, women, and children. They have to be stopped.” He lifted his mug, set it down again. “And you’re right,” he said. “I can’t do it alone.” He paused until Jagger’s eyes found his.

“Jagger,” he said, “I need you to help me stop them.”