The nameless dead

Thirty-Four

After I spoke to the special agent in charge in Houston, I went back to the SUV and booted up the laptop-fortunately its battery still had some juice. I had realized I couldn’t just let things lie. I remembered that Sara had mentioned her broker, Havi, who had been in contact with Abaddon.

‘What are you doing?’ Mary asked.

‘Trying to find out who was behind the Hitler’s Hitman killings.’ Sara had left a file on the desktop containing her broker Havi’s email address. I considered sending him a message, but I reckoned he’d be too smart to let me get anywhere near him. I could hardly ask who had contracted Abaddon and expect a straight answer. Then I had another thought. I checked that the wireless connection was functioning and sent a message to my friend Roger van Zandt, a computer expert, in London-my memory was as erratic as ever, unable to provide my dead son’s name, but full of less essential data. I asked Rog to find out if a mailing address had been registered for the email account. It was a long shot but, even if Havi had given a bogus address, Rog might be able to follow the routing to the real location.

‘Why are you doing this, Matt?’ Mary asked, when I shut down the computer. ‘Surely the FBI can handle things from here.’

I’d thought about that. In principle, they could, but Rothmann had managed to get his niece close to Peter Sebastian, so I wasn’t convinced. There was also the fact that I was on my own, with nothing else to do with my life. I hadn’t been able to avenge myself on Rothmann and I felt seriously unfulfilled-someone still had to pay for what had happened to Karen and our son.

Mary touched my hand. ‘Matt, you have to let them go.’

I wasn’t impressed that my feelings were so obvious, but she was right. I could still see the ones I’d lost, but their faces were blurred and they no longer came close. Soon the darkness would swallow them up completely. I had no idea how I’d cope then.

I forced myself back to the small town in Texas, which was showing more signs of activity now. I had a decision to make. Either I handed the laptop over with the rest of the gear, or I kept it from the FBI. I looked at my watch. It was nearly 8:30. The advance guard from the Dallas office would be arriving at the camp soon. I decided on a compromise.

A mile before the turnoff, I stopped. I put the computer in the rucksack and stashed it behind a tree at the roadside.

‘I presume I didn’t see that,’ Mary said, with a weak smile.

‘You presume right, if you don’t mind.’

‘Of course I don’t, Matt. After all we’ve been through…’

That was some kind of invitation. I didn’t respond. Mary was a good woman, but I had nothing to give her.

We came over the rise of a low hill and saw a line of stationary vehicles with flashing lights. There was a roadblock in front of them. I stopped and identified myself and Mary. We were told to get out of the vehicle by a uniformed police officer. There was a clutch of plainclothes officers at the junction.

‘Is that yours, sir?’ the officer asked, pointing at the Kalashnikov in the backseat of the Highlander.

‘I borrowed it.’

The next few hours passed in a blur of questions, familiar and unfamiliar faces, and body bags. Colonel Singh, temporary dressings on his legs, seemed to be in pretty good spirits, even though he had lost at least half his men. He eyed Major Al-Haq belligerently when the Pakistani troops passed close by, but both kept their real disapproval for the men from the camp. Not many of them were unscathed, though I saw the bulky man who had taken orders from Apollyon pass by under guard, one arm drenched in blood. He was still wearing the cap, but the badge had been removed-I wondered by whom. I remembered the figure holding the snakes- Hercules, the invincible warrior who had descended to Hades. What was the significance of that?

‘Mr. Wells.’

I looked round. ‘Special Agent Bimsdale.’

He took in the scene. ‘Quite a major incident.’

‘You could say that. You should call the CIA. Someone needs to keep the peace between those Indians and Pakistanis.’

The young man gave me a curious look. ‘I’ve been receiving updates on the plane. I’m satisfied that we can handle everything.’

His tone attracted my attention-suddenly he seemed more authoritative.

‘Where’s your boss?’

‘Back in D.C.’

‘I’d have thought Sebastian would be down here like a shot.’

Bimsdale twitched his lips like a debater who had won a point. ‘Oh, I see.’ He smiled enough to show the edges of his pearly teeth. ‘You don’t know, of course. I’m sorry to tell you that Peter Sebastian was murdered last night.’

‘What?’

‘I’m afraid so. His car was found in the northern suburbs with him inside. He’d been killed with a knife.’

Every alarm in my body had gone off. The timing of the senior FBI man’s death was pretty striking, but that was nothing compared with the way Arthur Bimsdale was reporting it. He sounded like a newsreader trying and failing to emote with earthquake victims in a distant country.

‘What was it?’ I heard myself say. ‘Robbery gone wrong.’

‘That’s what the police are working on, I believe.’ Bimsdale gave me a look that suggested his grief had been short and shallow. ‘A great loss, of course, but life goes on.’

That did it. As far as I was concerned, all bets were off. I would give the FBI whatever would be corroborated by other witnesses, but the rest I would keep to myself. Something was very wrong. I still needed to play ball, though, so I told him about the compound of barns to the east.

When I’d finished, Bimsdale looked confused. ‘I don’t understand how you and the Soul Collector woman ended up here,’ he said, nibbling the end of an old-fashioned wooden pencil.

‘We followed the car containing the assassin Apollyon and Rothmann. Sara-the Soul Collector-had bugged the pickup they were in.’ I thought about Rothmann. He’d been at the rear of the Hades complex with Apollyon and had looked shit scared, but not particularly surprised. Had he been there before? If so, that suggested he and whoever was behind the murders in the northern cities had perhaps been close. Was the person I was after a former collaborator of Rothmann’s? Had he or she been put off by the Nazi’s full-blooded espousal of the Antichurch and decided to get rid of him?

‘Okay,’ Bimsdale said, putting away his pencil and notebook. ‘We need to get you out of here, Matt.’

I was instantly suspicious. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, you’ll be much more comfortable in our Dallas field office.’

That sounded like bullshit, but I wasn’t in a position to do much about it. Then the special agent’s cell rang. He answered, straightened up as if he was on parade, narrowed his eyes in puzzlement and then handed it to me.

‘This is the Director of the FBI,’ said a nasal voice, which I’d heard on the news bulletins more than once. ‘Mr. Wells, I have only just found out about your involvement in this case. I view it as a serious misjudgment by the late Peter Sebastian and would like to meet with you as soon as possible to discuss it. You could fly up to Washington on the Bureau plane that took Special Agent Bimsdale to Texas. Is that acceptable to you?’

I confirmed that it was and handed the phone back to Bimsdale. Washington was a lot closer to New York than the Lone Star State and I wanted to retrieve whatever Sara had stashed in Queens. With luck, the Director would have patted me on the back and sent me on my way by the evening.

I watched as Sebastian’s former assistant ate what looked like several crows before terminating the call. ‘It seems you’re leaving us,’ he said, red spots on his cheeks.

‘Yeah. Can Mary Upson come with me as far as D.C.?’

‘Certainly not. She needs to be formally interviewed.’

It was only as the Bureau car pulled away that I started to wonder exactly what the Director wanted with me.

Was he the fire to the Texan frying pan I’d just survived?

The Reverend Rudi Crane was in the master bedroom of the Hercules Solutions apartment on Central Park West. To his right, the picture window provided a vision of sylvan splendor in the midst of the metropolis, but he paid no attention to that. He drank his hot water and ate his oatmeal, reveling in a rare morning spent in bed. It had been justified by the rigorous activities of the previous night. He had promised the striking stewardess-what was her name again? — a hefty pay increase, and he was seriously considering making her his secretary, even though his wife would smell a regiment of rats if that happened. He would just have to play the affronted husband, appalled that his spouse of thirty-four years could think badly of him. Then they would pray together and everything would be forgotten.

Lord be praised, it was a beautiful day, even though the New York atmosphere was filled with all sorts of hydrocarbons and aerial poisons. That was why he was here-to fly the flag of Hercules at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that began tomorrow. He would be the only CEO and chairman of a private security contractor present and he planned to make the most of that. He had a list of meetings as long as the Ukrainian girl’s leg, including a panel with the prime minister of Upper Congo-he needed to check the atlas about that country’s precise location, though he knew very well that diamonds were its chief export-and the defense minister of Burma, which had a new name that he could never remember. Contracts were in the offing and he meant to close the deals with a brisk shake of his god-fearing hand.

Crane glanced at his gold Rolex. 12:20. He had to get ready for lunch. He was meeting his bankers in a low-profile restaurant near Wall Street. He knew they would have preferred a glitzy Midtown place, but he liked to play the penny-pincher with them and they knew not to cross him on that. There would be the usual veiled objections to his expansion plans in what the financial establishment perceived to be unreliable, if not downright dangerous places. They had acted that way about Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’d proved them enormously wrong. The same would be the case with the new countries he was targeting. The Lord his God was a bountiful god-if only the acolytes of Mammon could appreciate that, their working lives would become much easier.

It was an advantage that the man he would be talking to after the lunch was a business associate. That way, no one would be surprised when he stayed behind. But they wouldn’t be talking finance. No, Xavier Marias might have been a highly talented economic forecaster by day, but it was his out-of-office profile that Rudi Crane valued more. On reflection, it was hardly surprising that a man who had learned how to survive in the shark-infested waters of Wall Street would have become one of the most efficient assassination brokers in the country. The plan to track down his former associate Jack Thomson by framing him and his vile Antichurch for the Hitler’s Hitman killings would not have been possible without Havi’s input, although Crane himself had kept a close eye on the proceedings. Havi had found the assassin and engineered the hits. He had even provided a second assassin to ensure that Thomson didn’t escape. This afternoon, Crane expected Havi to confirm that the Nazi devil worshipper had been liquidated and that his conditioning program was in safe hands. That would be good news to rival the Gospels, indeed.

The confirmation last night that Sir Andrew Frogget had not mentioned the involvement of a Hercules subsidiary in Thomson’s Woodbridge Holdings had been very welcome. In fact, it had led directly to his chastisement of the stewardess. She had accepted the punishment for comporting herself provocatively. Not that he had sex with that woman, oh, no. No bodily fluid of his had entered any orifice of hers, at least for longer than a few seconds-there was a spittoon by the side of the bed, naturally. He had no sin to confess, as he had been thinking of his wife throughout: thinking how horrified and disgusted she would have been if she could have seen them, she the vegetarian, who would never put anything in her mouth that hadn’t been peeled or sliced.

I spent most of the flight to Washington asleep. For a change, I had no dreams-that wasn’t a wholly enjoyable experience, as I didn’t see Karen and our son. Had they finally been swallowed up by the ground beneath? Then I remembered, and my stomach clenched hard. The bodies of my loved ones were in cold storage in the camp in Illinois. Sooner or later, I’d have to decide what to do with them. Not now. I had to find out who was behind the murders and the Hades complex. After that, I’d concentrate on them. The idea that I would have to dispose of their mortal remains terrified me.

Then I had another thought. How had Mary Upson found her way to the Antichurch rite in Texas? Had she evaded the surveillance that Peter Sebastian put in place after her mother disappeared in Maine? She didn’t have the skills to pull that off herself. Had Sebastian let her go to see where she was headed? If so, he had effectively set her up as bait. I wondered what else he might have been capable of. But why would Mary have gone to Texas? Did she know more about the Antichurch than she’d let on, after misleading them?

A trio of men in suits was waiting for me outside the plane after we landed at Reagan National. One of them introduced himself, but I immediately forgot his name. He ran an eye over me and suggested that I might like to change clothes. I was handed a couple of suit bags and ushered to a washroom in the executive lounge. There was a dark blue suit and accoutrements that I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing in one bag. Fortunately, the other contained a pair of casual trousers and a green herring-bone jacket, along with a pair of smart but solid boots and a pale blue shirt. Everything fitted, which showed that someone had done their homework-of course, there was no shortage of information about me in the Bureau’s files. I left the silk tie untouched.

A long car with dark windows took me to the center of the city.

‘The Director will see you as soon as we arrive at the Hoover Building,’ my escort said, glancing at his watch. ‘I have orders to take you to your hotel afterward.’

Rain began to fall as we crossed the Potomac, picking holes in the surface of the gray-green water. I remembered Rothmann’s escape from the boat nearby. Now he was dead, taken out by one of his sidekicks. My urge to kill him had been a waste of time and emotion. Karen and our son were still lost to me. So was Sara. She could be seen as another victim of the Rothmanns’ conditioning, but that didn’t get me off the hook. I still felt sick that it had been my finger on the trigger.

I was whisked up to the top of FBI headquarters in an executive lift and ushered straight into the Director’s spacious office. The tall, distinguished-looking man with white hair whom I had seen on TV rose from behind a huge desk and came to meet me.

‘Mr. Wells,’ he said, with a Southern accent, ‘I am so glad to meet you. Please come and sit down.’ He led me to a three-sided square of leather-covered sofas. ‘Would you like something to drink or eat?’

‘Water’s fine.’

He poured me a glass from the cut-crystal carafe on the central table. ‘Mr. Wells, I-’

‘What really happened to Peter Sebastian?’ I interrupted, determined not to let him run the exchange.

To his credit, he didn’t look either surprised or irritated. ‘Ah, what a tragedy that was,’ he said, his cloudy blue eyes meeting mine. ‘It seems he was the victim of a robbery.’

‘You really believe that?’

Now he did look taken aback. ‘That’s what the police and our people are surmising, Mr. Wells. Do you have evidence to the contrary?’

‘Evidence, no. Suspicion, plenty. He gets killed on the same night as Heinz Rothmann and the assassin Apollyon? It looks to me like somebody’s tidying up.’

The Director nodded. ‘I can see that logic. Do you have any idea who that somebody might be?’

‘That’s your area, isn’t it? Do we know who owned the camp in Texas yet?’

‘Yes, a company called March Violet Partners. It’s based in Liberia.’

‘What a surprise. The partners’ names are presumably straight out of a mystery novel.’

‘So it would appear,’ he said dolefully. ‘We are, of course, interrogating everyone on the scene.’

I thought of the man with the badge that had gone missing from his cap, but I wasn’t going to share that with him. I still didn’t know why he had summoned me.

Either the Director was a mind reader or he wanted to change the subject. ‘Mr. Wells, there are two reasons I invited you to Washington. The first is that I thought you would appreciate seeing one of the survivors of the Antichurch massacre.’

My heart missed a beat. Who could that be?

‘Sergeant Quincy Jerome of the Airborne Division is in Walter Reed hospital.’

Jesus, Quincy.

‘He underwent an emergency operation, but he is out of danger. One of his lungs collapsed.’

I nodded, suddenly doubtful of my ability to speak without breaking down. Only now did I realize how much I’d needed some good news.

‘You will be driven to the hospital in the evening,’ the Director continued. ‘Secondly, I know how much you have been through, Mr. Wells, and I don’t just mean in the past days. Allow me to offer my sincerest commiserations, and those of the entire Bureau, for the deaths of your wife and son.’

I didn’t correct him over Karen’s status. I would have married her if she had survived and would always think of her as my wife.

‘In gratitude for your help in closing the Rothmann case, I would like to invite you to accompany me to New York tomorrow. I have to attend the UN Climate Change Conference, but we will arrange a press conference afterward. The White House has instructed the Justice Department to drop all charges against you regarding the attack on the President at the cathedral here, and I would like the opportunity to clear your name in public.’ He sat back and regarded me with an encouraging smile. ‘As you’ll understand, that will also give me the opportunity to blow the Bureau’s trumpet after the successful end to the operation in Texas.’

I could see he would want to do that, with Rothmann and the others dead. It all seemed very quick, but if that was what the White House wanted, who was I to stand in its way? More to the point, I would be in New York, where I could get hold of Sara’s treasure trove, if that was what it turned out to be.

‘Thank you,’ I said, trying to sound more impressed than I was. I hadn’t trusted Peter Sebastian that much, but I found myself wishing he was still alive.