The Black Knight

XXXVIII

Paralysis. Gordon LeMay could not move an inch from where he lay on the back seat of a luxurious SUV driving north out of the city. He got the occasional glimpse through dry eyes of a road sign outside the tinted windows as it passed by, the asphalt humming beneath the wheels outside.

His heart beat felt slow, a dull nausea infecting his guts due to low blood pressure even though he was lying on his back. The motion of the vehicle on the road exacerbated that nausea, which in turn was infected with a fear that he was facing the last moments of his life.

Majestic Twelve had betrayed him, of that much he was sure, but he could not for the life of him fathom why. He had not failed them — had they suspected that he was behind the drone that he had seen filming them? He recalled lying on the thickly carpeted floor of the apartment as the members of MJ-12 looked down at him over their champagne flutes and laughed. Thus, LeMay’s drugging had been premeditated, his betrayal born of some other failure that he could not possibly conceive of.

LeMay was overcome with a regret that threatened to swamp him and squeeze the life from his body long before MJ-12 managed to finish him off. He thought of his wife and their kids, three teenagers just about to venture out into the world, and his grief overwhelmed him as tears trickled down his cheeks. He had struck a deal with the devil — not the fanciful, mythical devil of biblical tales but the true evil among humanity, that of men with no cares but their own wealth and power.

He had been tracked, they had said, somehow, and LeMay could only guess at how the DIA might have managed to follow him so accurately. Wilms had seemed as surprised and shocked as LeMay and the others at the sight of the drone however, and yet that suggested they could not possibly have known in advance of its presence.

The vehicle turned off the road and into the drive of a large country mansion. LeMay knew that they were probably in Larchmont, an exclusive area just a few clicks out of Manhattan and near the Connecticut border. The car slowed and then waited before easing forward into a large garage, LeMay glimpsing an electric door opening above them as they moved inside.

The engine was shut off and the doors of the vehicle opened. LeMay was dragged out by strong hands, his body pliant and loose, heavy and sagging. Unable to do anything except watch through eyes that would not close, and hope that his body retained enough physical control to keep breathing, LeMay was carried through the interior of a house that contained no furniture. He figured in a moment of abstract reverie that the property was one of countless hundreds owned by the cabal as safe houses and places where they could do their work without interference from the outside world.

LeMay was heaved by four men into a large room on the ground floor, and he heard the sound of their boots suddenly grinding on plastic as he was hefted up onto a table and swiftly bound to it using lengths of tough para cord. LeMay struggled to speak, to beg for his life, but all that his throat emitted was a series of odd growls, drool spilling from his lips as he wept openly and silently.

The four men completed their work and moved off in silence, leaving LeMay alone on the bench for a few seconds until he heard the approach of two more men. He looked down past his own chest to where he saw Victor Wilms and another man whom he did not recognize, who was wearing a surgeon’s smock, a cloth mask over his mouth and nose.

LeMay’s stomach turned inside him and he let out another strangled cry of panic as Wilms stood watching him, a faint smile on his face as though he were regarding a scolded child.

‘You failed us Gordon, on so many levels,’ Wilms intoned without passion. ‘Did you really think that we would let somebody like you, somebody with absolutely no financial power, no real influence, no real use in the world into a cabal like Majestic Twelve?’

LeMay struggled to answer but Wilms winced as he looked down at LeMay.

‘My God, you really are a pitiful, disgusting little creature Gordon. Let’s get this over with and leave this sorry episode behind us, shall we?’

LeMay saw Wilms stand back as the surgeon moved forward, and LeMay saw that in his hand was a shiny, long chrome device like a narrow pair of forceps that glinted in the harsh light from the ceiling. LeMay’s breathing accelerated and he struggled to move, but his body barely shifted an inch as the surgeon reached out with one gloved hand and pinned LeMay’s head firmly in place.

LeMay let out a last desperate, pinched scream of desperation as the surgeon pressed the tip of the forceps alongside the septum inside his nose and then the man grimaced as with a hefty shove he rammed the device up into LeMay’s nostril with a crunching sound. White pain seared Lemay’s skull and he heard his own agonized scream soar despite the drugs coursing through his veins as the forceps crunched up through cartilage and plunged deep into the frontal lobes of his brain.

‘There, through there!’

Lopez yanked the wheel of their vehicle as Vaughn pointed down a broad street lined with Colonial style mansions sheltering behind ranks of towering aspen. Behind Lopez a stream of police pursuit vehicles thundered, their lights flashing like a galaxy of bursting red and blue stars as they swerved into line behind her.

‘It’s got to be one of these,’ Vaughn said as he surveyed the lines of houses.

Lopez keyed her microphone as she drove.

‘Search the databases for any unoccupied premises in the area,’ she ordered. ‘If he’s been taken out here it’ll be some kind of safe house.’

Lopez slowed, peering up the long drives and across spacious lawns at the various properties in the upscale neighborhood. As she did so she spotted a house that had no blinds in the windows, trash cans that looked immaculately clean and no sign of decoration or adornment that was the hallmark of an American home.

‘That one,’ she snapped as she accelerated toward it. ‘We’ll try there.’

‘It could be a rental, somebody travelling abroad,’ Vaughn pointed out.

‘Then we’ll find nothing. Either way, we’re taking a look.’

Lopez drove straight up onto the drive and leaped out of the vehicle as Vaughn joined her, his weapon drawn as behind them the six pursuit cars slid into the sidewalk and armed officers leaped out in support.

Lopez, her pistol held double-handed before her and her gaze fixed on the windows of the house, hurried up the lawn and peered inside the large bay window on the front of the house. Even in the gloom of the interior she could see what she was looking for within an instant.

‘He’s here!’ she bellowed. ‘Drop the door!’

A police sergeant called back to her. ‘We’re waiting for the warrant ma’am, it should be here in just a few…’

Lopez dashed to the front door and aimed at the lock, then fired twice, the two bullets smashing into the door handle and shattering it in a spray of wood and metal. The gunshots were shockingly loud in the otherwise quiet, leafy street as she then stepped back and hurled herself shoulder-first into the door.

The door splintered on her first charge, and then she hit it again and it swung open as she lunged inside and aimed into the house.

‘Police, get on the ground!’

No sound but for the hollow tone of her voice in the empty property greeted her, and she dashed forward with Vaughn close behind as she hurried toward the front room where she had seen the table and the plastic on the floor and the blood.

Lopez hurried into the room and dashed to Gordon LeMay’s side. To her horror, his face had been reduced to a bloated, bruised mess of blood and bone that had spilled in thick loops onto the plastic at her feet and across LeMay’s chest.

‘Call an ambulance!’ she yelled at Vaughn as he reached for his cell phone, police officers rushing through the house with weapons drawn.

Lopez saw that LeMay’s eyes were drifting open, bloodshot and greasy with sweat and tears that streamed even now down the sides of his face. She stared down at him, his nasal bridge split in two and blood spilling in thick floods from the cavity torn through his skull between his eyes.

‘Who did this to you?’ she asked. ‘MJ-12?’

LeMay’s jaw worked but no sound came out but a ragged, tortured whisper that Lopez had to leanb close to hear.

‘Wilms… Victor Wilms…. Kill.’

Lopez looked down into LeMay’s eyes. ‘Wilms?’

Although it probably caused him great pain to do so, LeMay nodded once as he gasped again.

‘Wilms, K-I–L, satellite.’

Lopez reached out to stem the flow of blood from LeMay’s face, but as she looked into his eyes once more she realized that the light of life was already fading from them. She saw his chest sink as the last breath left his body and heard the death rattle in his throat as he died.

She turned to Vaughn and shook her head. ‘He’s gone.’

Vaughn turned to the police officers behind him.

‘I want every home in the street canvassed. They all have security systems and it’s likely they’ll have surveillance cameras. Confiscate the footage and then get onto the traffic cameras too. I want to know who did this!’

The police turned and dashed away as Vaughn turned back to Lopez. ‘Did you get anything out of him?’

‘Wilms was here,’ she said, ‘and he said something about a satellite, called K-I–L, that belongs to Wilms.’

‘I’ll get Jarvis onto it,’ Vaughn said as he hurried away.

Lopez looked down one last time at LeMay’s body, and then with one hand she closed his eyes for the last time.