The Whisperers

He’d spent too long in just about every vehicle the army had to offer, and knew their strengths and shortcomings, but he was eventually brought in to fill a vacant spot on Tobias’s Stryker squad.

There had been a lot of crap tossed at the Stryker, usually by the kind of shitheads who subscribed to gun magazines and wrote letters to them about the ‘warrior class,’ but soldiers liked the Stryker. The seat cushions sucked, the a/c was like the beating of fly wings, and there weren’t enough outlets to run DVD players or iPods for an entire squad, but it was superior to the Humvees, even the up-armored ones. The Stryker offered integral 14.5mm protection from anything the haji could throw at it, with additional cover from RPGs provided by a cage of armor eighteen inches from the main body. It had the M240 at the rear, and a.50 cal that rocked. By comparison, the Humvee was like wrapping yourself in tissue and waving a.22.

And that kind of stuff mattered, because against every rule that he had ever been taught about urban warfare, the army had them marking the same patrol routes at the same times every day, so the haji could set their clocks and, by extension, their IEDs, by them. By this point, it wasn’t a matter of if they were going to be hit on a given day, but when. The upside was that, following a hit, the vehicle was automatically returned to base for repairs, so the squad could rest up for the remainder of the day.

The transfer to the Stryker squad had been Tobias’s doing; Tobias, and the man named Roddam. Tobias had earned his sergeant’s stripes and was squad leader. He wasn’t a jerk, though: he even scored them some beers, and getting busted for drinking was a serious offense. You might pull an Article 15 for a fistfight, or borrowing a vehicle without permission, but alcohol and drugs merited judicial punishment. Tobias’s own neck was on the line over the beer, but he trusted them. By then, though, he had become familiar with the way Tobias operated, and he knew that the beers were a way of softening them up. Tobias had his own unique spin on Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there was an equal or greater reaction expected. They would pay for those beers, one way or another, and Roddam was the one who was going to extract the payment.

Roddam was a spook of some kind. Baghdad was overrun with them, both genuine and charlatans, and Roddam was a little of both. He was private, not CIA, and he didn’t talk much about what he did, like any good spook. He said that he worked for a small outfit called Information Retrieval & Interpretation Services, or IRIS, but Tobias let it slip that it was basically a one-man operation. IRIS’s logo, not unexpectedly, was an eye, with the world as its pupil. Roddam’s cards boasted offices in Concord, New Hampshire, and Pont-Rouge, Canada, but the Pont-Rouge office turned out to be little more than a tax scam with proximity to an airfield, and the Concord office was a telephone and an answering machine.

Roddam was ex-Agency, though: he had contacts, and he had influence. Part of his role in Baghdad was to act as the middleman between the army and the smaller contractors, the ones who didn’t have their own transport networks and were trying to keep their costs down so that they could bank a bigger share of whatever they were overcharging Uncle Sam to begin with. Roddam arranged for the transportation of anything on which the big boys like Halliburton didn’t already have first dibs, from a box of obscure screws to weapons that were required, for whatever reason, to bypass the regular transport channels.

That paid his bills, and more, but it wasn’t his main area of expertise: Roddam, as it turned out, was an expert in interrogation and information analysis, which explained the origins of the name IRIS. There were too many Iraqis in custody for the regular intelligence guys to process, so the little fish were thrown to Roddam. If you got enough little fish, and cross-referenced whatever information could be gleaned from them, it was possible that a bigger picture might be constructed from the individual pieces. Roddam was some kind of genius at analyzing the information coaxed from prisoners, sometimes without them even knowing that they’d revealed anything crucial. Roddam would occasionally deal with prisoners himself, usually in an effort to clarify a point, or in an effort to make a solid connection between two apparently random pieces of information. He wasn’t a thumbscrew and waterboarding kind of guy. He was patient, and soft-spoken, and careful. Everything he learned went into a computer program that he had created, and for which Iraq was to be the testing ground: it collated key phrases, minor operational details, even turns of phrase, and cross-referenced them in the hope of establishing patterns. Army intelligence and the agency would feed him their scraps too so that, over time, Roddam came to know more about the day-to-day operation of the insurgency than just about anyone else on the ground. He was the go-to guy, trusted as a virtual oracle. In return, what Roddam wanted, Roddam got.

He never learned how Roddam and Tobias managed to hook up. He supposed that men like them just inevitably found each other. So, when Tobias brought the beer, Roddam came with him. In fact, it was probably Roddam who had sourced the beer in the first place.

By that time, the squad had taken some hits: Lattner was dead, and Cole. Edwards and Martinez were injured, and had been replaced by Harlan and Kramer, and it looked like Hale, who’d been hit by a sniper, wasn’t going to pull through. He’d taken one in the head, and it would be a mercy if he died. The squad had been marked for force protection duties until it could be restored to full strength: no patrols, just guard shifts in the tower, which meant hour after hour of radio checks with Front Line Yankee, and replies of ‘Lima Charlie – Loud and Clear,’ and maybe ducking occasionally when someone in the darkness decided to lob a mortar, or send in an RPG, or just fire off a couple of rounds to keep you from getting bored.

That night, Tobias – or Roddam – had swung it so that they were relieved of FP, so there were eight of them in Tobias’s CHEW: him, Tobias, Roddam, Kramer, Harlan, Mallak, Patchett, and Bacci. After a couple of beers to soften them up, Tobias began to speak. He told them of Hale, and how the rest of his life was going to be a struggle at best. He spoke of other guys that they knew. He told of how men were struggling to get money under Section 8, welfare, the VA, anything; of how the VA had denied Keys, the assistant gunner that Patchett had replaced, a claim for his leg, informing him that he rated only sixty percent disabled. Keys had gone to the press, and his rating got bumped up, but only to keep him quiet. He’d been lucky, but there were a lot of other injured men out there who weren’t so lucky, or who didn’t have a sympathetic newspaper to take up their cause. Tobias said that Roddam had a proposition for them, and if they went along with it they’d be able to help some of their injured brothers and sisters, and make life more comfortable for themselves once they got back home. He told them to listen up, and they did.

Roddam was fifty, balding, overweight. He always wore short-sleeved shirts and a tie. His glasses had black frames. He looked like a science teacher. Roddam said that he’d come by some information. He told them about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in 2003, and Patchett interrupted and said that he’d been there in the aftermath, and Roddam seemed interested. Later, he would take Patchett aside to talk with him, but for now Roddam simply filed this fact away and continued with his story. He spoke of gold, and statues, and ancient seals. Kramer scoffed some. Joe Radio, the army rumor mill, occasionally threw up tales of Saddam’s hidden treasures, or of gold bars buried in gardens, tales usually originating with shadowy Iraqis who were looking for dollars to grease palms but who would disappear into the night, never to be seen again, if someone were dumb enough to pay them anything. Tobias told Kramer to shut his mouth and listen, and Kramer did.

By the time Roddam had finished speaking, they were convinced, all of them, even Kramer, because Roddam had a quiet, serious way about him. They told him they were in, and Roddam left to arrange the details. They were his creatures now.

He had forgotten what it was like to be drunk. Back home, a six-pack would barely have helped him to get a buzz on but here, cut off from alcohol for months, his mouth always dry, his body always warm, it was as if he had knocked back a week’s worth of production from the Coors brewery. His head hurt the next day, but he was still aware of the promise that they’d made. He was just glad that they were going out in the Stryker and not in some makeweight meat wagon, even as he began to have doubts about what it was they were doing. The night before, with a couple of beers under his belt, and not enough food in his belly, he’d been all gung ho like the others, but now the reality of their situation was impacting upon him. On a regular ‘movement to contact’ mission, the new, kinder name for ‘search and destroy,’ the little FBCB2 screen behind the TC’s hatch would start displaying red triangles once the enemy was located, and that bitch’s voice, both lovely and appalling, would kick in to announce that there was an enemy in the area, but they’d be flying blind and alone on this one.

Tobias treated it like a regular patrol: he patted each of them down to make sure that they all had a CamelBak of water; gloves; pads; a clean, oiled weapon; and fresh batteries in the NODs, the night vision goggles. They’d all carried out their own precombat inspection, and they had the OP order in their heads, but, whatever his flaws, Tobias was a stickler for ensuring that everybody knew his appointed task, and had the proper equipment to carry it out. Roddam watched without speaking, uncomfortable in his Kevlar. He was nervous, and kept looking at his watch. Tobias checked the extra ammo for the.50 cal strapped to the right side of the Stryker. It was hard to get to in a firefight, but there was nowhere else to put it, and better to have it out there than not to have it at all. After the check, they performed their own intimate motions, touching medals, crosses, pictures of their families. Whatever routines had kept them alive in the past, they made sure to maintain. All soldiers were superstitious. It came with the territory.

It was Sunday evening, and the sun was going down, when they rolled out. They all had good food in their bellies, because the best food was always served on Sundays, but they’d skipped the coffee. There was enough adrenaline coursing before a raid. He remembered the sound his boots made on the dust, the grains of sand compacting beneath the sole, the solidity of the ground and the power of his legs, and then the hollow echo from the floor of the Stryker as he stepped to his seat. Such a simple act, the placing of one foot before the other. Gone now. All gone.

The warehouse was in Al-Adhamiya, the old quarter of Baghdad, a Sunni stronghold. They rolled down narrow alleyways custom built for ambushes, kerosene lamps burning in the windows of the houses as they passed, but not a single figure to be seen on the streets. Two blocks from the target, all lights disappeared, and there was only a half moon above them to gild the buildings with silver and differentiate their lineaments from the blackness above and below.

They advanced the last one hundred feet on foot. There were two entrances to the warehouse, which looked more modern than the buildings that surrounded it and was entirely dark inside: one door to the south, at the rear, and the other on the western wall. There were two small windows at ground level, protected by bars, and so thick with dust and grime that it was impossible to see through the glass. The doors were reinforced steel, but they blew the locks with C4 and came in hard and fast. Through the NODs, he saw figures moving, weapons being raised, and even as he fired he thought: something about this is not right. How can we have taken them by surprise? If a fly lands in Al-Adhamiya, someone runs to tell a spider.

One down. Two. He heard a cry of ‘Get some!’ to his left, a voice that he both recognized and did not recognize, a voice transformed by the fury and confusion of combat. A television blared, its screen almost blindingly bright through the goggles, and then the screen exploded and went dark. He heard Tobias shouting ‘Cease fire!’ and it was over. Over almost as soon as it had begun.

They searched the building, and found no other haji. Three were dead, and one was dying. Tobias stood over him while the perimeter was secured, and he thought that he heard words exchanged between them. The squad flipped their goggles as flashlights bounced around the walls, revealing crates and cardboard boxes and odd shapes wrapped in linen. The dying haji’s pupils were dilated, and he was smiling and singing softly to himself.

‘He’s high,’ said Tobias. ‘Artane, probably.’

Artane was an antipsychotic used to treat Parkinson’s disease, but was popular with the younger insurgents. In Baghdad, it was part of the pharmacopia available at places like the Babb al-Sharq, the Eastern Gate. It left the user with a feeling of euphoria and a sense of invulnerability. The haji’s voice rose in prayer, and then there was a single shot as Tobias finished him off. There would be no policing of the dead tonight, no bagging of the bodies to be dropped off at the nearest police station. They would stay where they had fallen.

The dead haji all wore black headbands, the mark of shaheed, of martyrs. He mentioned it to Tobias, but Tobias did not appear interested.

‘So what?’ he said. ‘If they wanted to be martyrs, then they got their wish.’

Tobias didn’t understand. They were waiting for us, he wanted to say, but they barely fought back. If they’d wanted to, they could have taken us in the street, where we were vulnerable, but they didn’t. They let us come to them, and then they let us kill them.

Roddam joined them, speaking on a satellite phone. Minutes later, they heard rumbles and saw lights, and a Buffalo armored vehicle appeared outside. Lord knew how they’d managed to get it down those streets, but somehow they had. It was closely followed by a single Humvee. He didn’t recognize the four men who drove the vehicles. Later, he would learn that they were National Guardsmen, two from Calais, the other two from somewhere in the ass end of the County. More Mainers, more men who owed Tobias a favor. Three never made it home. The fourth was still trying to make his new arms work.

They rolled two pneumatic lifters out of the Buffalo, and started moving the heavier crates out of the warehouse. Tobias formed four of the squad into a line, and they piled the smaller items in the Hummer, and the larger ones into the Buffalo. It took four hours. In all that time, nobody approached the warehouse, and they were allowed to depart Al-Adhamiya unhindered. Along the way, they picked up two teams of snipers. It wasn’t unusual: that was how the system worked. Snipers – Delta, Blackwater, Rangers, SEALS, Marines – would be attached to an infantry unit on a cordon-and-search mission. When the unit left, the snipers would stay and go to ground. Later, a unit would return and pick up the snipers. In this case, he knew that the snipers’ mission had been arranged by Roddam, and only to provide cover for the raid on the warehouse, because their squad had dropped off both teams earlier in the week.

There should have been gunfire, he whispered to himself. They should have been challenged. It made no sense. None of it made any sense.

But it didn’t have to, because they were rich.

Even now, the scale of what Roddam managed to pull off astonished him, but then Roddam was smart: he knew how to exploit the chaos of war, and Iraq was chaos squared. What mattered was what was being brought into the country, not what was being shipped out: half of what they had seized at the warehouse was flown to Canada, sometimes via the US, in otherwise empty planes returning to stock up on more overpriced equipment for the war effort. Larger items were shipped through Jordan, and onward by sea. Where necessary, bribes were paid, but not in the US or Canada. Even without Roddam’s CIA contacts to smooth the way, Iraq was a gold-mine for contractors. Equipment was needed yesterday, at any price, and nobody wanted to be accused of interfering with the war effort by quibbling over paperwork.

Over the months that followed, they all began to drift home, some more intact then others. They handed over their weapons, filled out their medical questionnaires on PalmPilots, none of them ’fessing up to any psychological issues, not then, which made the army happy. They all listened to the same speech from the battalion commander, advising them not to hit their wives and girlfriends when they got home, or words to that effect, and about how the army would welcome them back with open arms, a bunch of flowers, and forty virgins from the southern states should they choose to return.

Or words to that effect.

Then Kuwait, then Frankfurt, passing over Bangor, Maine, on their way to McCord AFB, then back to Bangor again, and home.

All except him, because by then his legs were ruined. He took a different route: a Black Hawk medevac to the CASH in the Green Zone, where he was stabilized before transfer to the trauma center at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Frankfurt, where they performed the amputations. Landstuhl to Ramstein, Ramstein to Andrews AFB on a C-141 Starlifter, men stacked like kindling in the center of the plane, like captives on a slave ship, six inches separating each man from the man above him, the smell of blood and urine sickening, even through the fog of medication, the noise of the aircraft deafening despite the earplugs. Andrews to Walter Reed. The hell of occupational therapy; the attempts to fit prostheses, ultimately abandoned because of the pain they caused him, and he’d had enough of pain.

Then the return to Maine, and the arguments with Tobias. He’d be looked after, Tobias told him; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. But he wasn’t concerned solely about himself. There had been an agreement: the money would be used to help their brothers- and sisters-in-arms, the ones who were injured, the ones who had lost so much. Tobias said that had changed. He wasn’t going to police the consciences of others. They could give what they wanted. They all could. It was complicated. They had to be careful. Jandreau didn’t understand.

And suddenly they started dying. It was Kramer who told him about the box, Kramer who discussed the nightmares he was having, Kramer who led him to delve into the dark corners of Sumerian mythology, but it wasn’t until just after Damien Patchett died that he found out the truth about Roddam. Roddam was dead. He had been found in the IRIS office in Concord one week after Tobias and Bacci returned home, the first of the men involved in the Al-Adhamiya raid to do so. It had passed the rest of them by, if any of them had even cared, because Roddam wasn’t his real name: it was Nailon, Jack Nailon. He’d fallen asleep on the couch in his office with a lit cigar in an ashtray on the couch arm, and with too much whiskey in his system and on his clothes. He had burned to death, they said.

Except that Roddam, or Nailon, or whatever his real name was, didn’t drink. That was what he remembered from the beer night at the base, when he and Roddam had exchanged a couple of words after he had offered Roddam a beer. Roddam was a diabetic and suffered from high blood pressure. He couldn’t drink alcohol and he didn’t smoke. He didn’t know why that hadn’t come up during the investigation into Roddam’s death. Maybe, like everything else about Roddam, his medical history was uncertain, hidden. But then he recalled some of the things that Tobias had begun to say about Roddam before Tobias went home: Roddam was unreliable. Roddam wasn’t one of us. Roddam was causing trouble in Quebec. Roddam wanted a bigger cut. As though he were preparing the way for Roddam’s removal.

He’d brought up Roddam’s death after Damien’s funeral. He’d brought up lots of stuff because he was sad, and he was drunk, and he missed Mel, and he was sure going to miss Damien. If Roddam wasn’t in charge, then who was? Tobias was classic NCO material. He didn’t originate ideas, he just put them into action, and this was a complicated operation.

And Tobias had told him to keep quiet, to mind his own business, because a man in a wheelchair was vulnerable, and cripples had accidents all the time.

After that, he’d started carrying the gun under his chair.

29

The Collector was now only steps behind Herod. He felt himself drawing closer to him, and as he did so his fears increased.

Herod was an unusual case. The Collector might even have viewed him simply as an interesting challenge, like a hunter who finds that the animal he is pursuing has displayed unexpected depths of cunning, had he not become increasingly concerned about the man’s ultimate purpose, and the imminence of its fulfillment. Herod had concealed himself well, and the Collector had only been able to find traces of him: deals, and threats, made; lives ruined, and bodies left unburied; items purchased, or taken from the dead. It was the nature of these artifacts – occult, arcane – that had first drawn the Collector’s attention. Carefully, he had tried to discern a pattern. There seemed to be no distinct historical period to which Herod was attracted, and the items themselves were baffling in their variety and relative value. The Collector had only the peculiar sense that this was the reflection of a consciousness, as though Herod were furnishing a room in preparation for the arrival of an honored guest, so that the visitor might be surrounded by treasures and curios that were familiar or of interest to him; or preparing a museum display which would only come together for the viewer when the main exhibit was finally put in place.

The Collector had come close to confronting Herod on a number of occasions, but the man had always slipped away. It was as though he had been forewarned about the Collector’s approach, and had found ways to avoid him, even if it meant sacrificing an item that he desired, for the Collector had made certain to bait his traps well. The Collector had already decided to dispose of Herod some years before. Herod had killed a child, a young boy, whose father had reneged on a deal, and in the Collector’s mind Herod had damned himself by that action. It was one of Herod’s apparent peculiarities that he seemed to regard himself, and those with whom he dealt, as being bound by some twisted notion of honor, the rules of which appeared to be set by Herod, and Herod alone.

But if the Collector had experienced any doubts about the legitimacy of killing Herod, they had been swept away when he began to learn of Herod’s inquiries into the treasures looted from the Iraq Museum. That had given the Collector his first real inkling of what was being sought. He had heard rumors about the box, but had disregarded them. There were so many such tales, going right back to the original legend of Pandora, yet this one was different, because Herod was interested in it, and Herod did not embark on fruitless searches. Herod had an end in sight, and everything that he did served it.

Herod had been in contact with Rochman in Paris, anxious to establish the source of the seals that he had acquired. Rochman had proved uncooperative, for Herod did not have the funds necessary to engage in a serious bid for the items, even had Herod been interested in purchasing them, which he was not. Herod, in turn, had seemed oddly reluctant to threaten Rochman in order to force the information from him. The Collector had noted that Herod used violence only against the weak, like a playground bully. The House of Rochman was well established, and had influence. If Herod crossed it, he would risk alienating a clique of unscrupulous and wealthy dealers who would, at best, ostracize him, or, as was more likely, move against him. The Collector did not doubt that anyone getting into a conflict with Herod would suffer for it along the way, but a battle with men seeking to protect a billion dollar industry dependent on the secret movement of stolen antiquities could only end with Herod’s annihilation.

So Herod had backed off, biding his time. Now a number of seals had appeared in a town in Maine, for as soon as Rojas began seeking ways to turn gold and jewels into hard cash, rumors had spread. It was not only the dealers, and Herod, who would be drawn by them. The federal government was already taking an interest, for Rochman had begun to talk in an effort to save himself and his business. The seals in his possession had come from Locker 5 in the basement of the Iraq Museum, as had the seals currently available for sale in Maine. Rochman’s seals were a down payment for his advice on valuations, and for his help in sourcing buyers. In time, he would give all that he knew to the investigators, and it would only be a matter of days before they would start to close in on all involved.

The Collector knew of Dr. Al-Daini, and he believed that the Iraqi was ultimately seeking the box, even as he set about recovering the other treasures lost in 2003. The Collector had made inquiries, and had learned that Al-Daini was now on his way to the US. He would fly into Boston, and be taken straight from there to a disused motel in the town of Langdon, Maine.

The men who were transporting the stolen artifacts from the motel had been careless. A pair of small alabaster figures had been found lying in the long grass, and had quickly been identified as part of a hoard discovered at Tell es Sawwan, on the left bank of the Tigris, in 1964, and subsequently looted from the Iraq Museum. The body of a man had also been discovered at the motel, sealed into a room from the inside, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound having first apparently fired at some unknown threat.

The body had been discovered by the detective, Charlie Parker.

There were no coincidences, the Collector knew, not where Parker was concerned. He was part of something that he did not understand; that, in truth, the Collector did not fully understand either. Now, once again, he and Parker were circling the same quarry, like twin moons orbiting a dark, unknown planet.

The Collector made a telephone call to his lawyer. He wanted to know where Parker was. His lawyer, an ancient man who disdained computers and cell phones and most of the significant technical innovations of recent years, made a call in turn to a gentleman who specialized in matters of triangulation, and Parker’s cell phone was traced to a motel near Bucksport.

Bucksport was an hour away.

The Collector began to drive.

30

Herod stood by his car and gazed upon the Rojas warehouse. Lights burned on both floors, and he could see figures moving behind glass on the lower level. There were vehicles parked in the front lot: Rojas Brothers trucks, a couple of cars, and a white SUV.

Herod needed his medication, and in serious doses. The pain had grown worse as the day proceeded, and now he wanted all of this to be over with so that he could rest for a while.

There came a prickling at the base of his neck. At first, he barely noticed it against the shrillness of his agony; it was like trying to pick out a melody from the cacophony of an orchestra tuning its instruments. The wound on his mouth throbbed in the warm night air, and the insects were feeding on him.

I reek of decay, he thought. Were I to lie down and wait for death to take my breath, they would plant their eggs in my flesh before I passed over. There might even be some relief in it. He imagined the maggots emerging from the eggs and feasting on his tumors, consuming the rotting tissue and leaving the rest to regenerate, except that there was no good flesh left, and so they would devour him entirely. He might have embraced such an end, once upon a time, for at least it would have been faster, and more natural, than the manner in which his body was cannibalizing itself. Instead, he had found another outlet for his pain. If this was a visitation from the Divine, a punishment for his sins – for Herod had sinned, and taken joy in his transgressions – then Herod would inflict punishment on others in turn. The Captain had given him the means, had endowed him with a purpose beyond the simple infliction of hurt in revenge for his own torments. The Captain had promised him that the world would mourn because of Herod. Before he was pulled back from the darkness – back, perhaps, from one hell of another’s making to the hell of his body’s own capacities – the Captain had flashed images in his mind: the image of a black angel hidden behind a wall, a presence trapped within it; bodies slowly fading but never dying, each with something of the Captain within itself…

And the box. The Captain had shown him the box. But by then it was already missing, and so the search had commenced.

The tingling continued. He rubbed at his neck, expecting to feel a blood-gorged creature pop beneath his fingers, but there was nothing. An open field lay between Herod and the warehouse. At its closest border was a pool of standing water, cloudy with bugs. Herod drew closer to it, until he could stare at his reflection: his own, and that of another. Behind him stood a tall scarecrow in a black suit, wearing a black top hat with a busted crown on its head. Its face was a sack in which two eyeholes had been crudely cut, and it had no mouth. The scarecrow was unsupported. There was no wooden cross upon which it might rest.

The Captain had returned.

Vernon and Pritchard lay on a slight rise, their position concealed by briars and low-hanging branches. They had a clear line of sight to the houses adjoining the Rojas warehouse. Both were entirely still; even up close, they seemed barely to be breathing. Pritchard’s right eye was close to the night sight of the M40. The rifle was accurate up to a thousand yards, and Pritchard was barely eight hundred yards distant from the targets. Beside him, Vernon tracked doors and windows through an ATN Night Spirit monocular.

Vernon and Pritchard were elite Marine scout snipers, or HOGs in the language of their trade: hunters of gunmen. They were veterans of the sniper battles in Baghdad, a largely hidden conflict that had escalated after the loss of two Marine sniper teams, a total of ten men lost to the hajis. They had played cat and mouse games with the near mythical ‘Juba,’ an anonymous sniper variously believed to be a Chechen, or even a collective name for a cell of snipers, armed with Iraqi-produced Tabuk rifles, a Kalashnikov variant. Juba was disciplined, waiting for soldiers to stand up in, or dismount from, vehicles, looking for the gaps in the body armor, never firing more than one shot before melting away. Vernon and Pritchard differed on whether or not Juba was one man, or many. Pritchard, the better shot of the two, inclined to the former view, based on Juba’s preference for shots in the three-hundred-yard range, and his disinclination to fire more than once, even when baited. Vernon disagreed on the basis that, while the Tabuk was reliable up to about nine hundred yards, it was best at three hundred, so the Juba snipers using Tabuks were limited by their equipment. Vernon had also attributed kills using Dragunovs and an Izhmash.22 to Juba, suggesting multiple snipers, kills that Pritchard preferred to discount. In the end, both men had been targeted by Juba, whether one or many. Like their fellow soldiers, they had become adept at ‘cutting squares’: zig-zagging, ducking, moving back and forth, and bobbing their heads in order to provide a more difficult target to hit. Pritchard called it the ‘Battlefield Boogie,’ Vernon the ‘Jihad Jitterbug.’ What was odd was that neither man could dance to save his life on a regular dance floor, but threatened by an expert killer they had moved like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

Vernon and Pritchard had known the four men from Echo Company who had died in Ramadi in 2004. Three of them had been shot in the head, a fourth virtually torn apart by bullets. In addition, one Marine’s throat had been slit. The attack had happened in broad daylight, within eight hundred yards of the command post. Later they learned that a four-man ‘hit’ team had probably been responsible, and that the Marines had been targeted for some time, but the killings had marked the beginning of Vernon and Pritchard’s disillusionment with the nature of the conflict in Iraq. Only one of the dead men had been a trained sniper. The others had been grunts, and that wasn’t the way the system was supposed to work. No fewer than two trained snipers on any team, that was the golden rule. When the six-man sniper team of the Reserve 3rd Battalion died in Hadithah a year later, and the remaining snipers were forced to operate according to ever more restrictive rules of engagement, Vernon and Pritchard decided that the Marines could go screw themselves, subsequently aided by an explosion that had detached the retina in Vernon’s right eye, leading to permanent vision loss and a ticket home.

But by then they had already met Tobias, and they had been present on the night that the warehouse was raided. They were Team 1, covering the southern approaches. Twizell and Greenham were Team 2, covering the north. Nobody had questioned the purpose of the mission: it was in the nature of sniper units that they planned and executed their own operations, and they had announced their insertion into the area days earlier so that units on patrol could work around them. Only Tobias and Roddam knew exactly where they would be. In the end, they had not been required to fire a single shot on the night of the raid, which had disappointed them.

Pritchard had left the military shortly after Vernon was shipped home, which was how he and Vernon now came to be lying in the undergrowth, ready to kill Mexicans instead of hajis. Both men were quiet, patient, reclusive, as individuals of their calling needed to be. They were without remorse. When asked if he experienced regret at the lives that he took, Pritchard would reply that all he ever felt was the recoil. This was not entirely true: killing gave him a rush that was better than sex, yet he was also a moral and courageous man who believed that his vocation was noble, and he was intelligent enough to recognize the tension implicit in the desire to take lives in a moral fashion while simultaneously experiencing pleasure in the performance of the act.

He and Vernon wore homemade ghillie suits, with holes in the back for ventilation. They had doused themselves with mud and water from a nearby creek and, as it was a moonlit night, their hats bore netting to break up the shape of the human face. They were not using laser range finders. Instead, both men automatically performed all of the necessary calculations in their heads: range, angle to the targets, air density, wind speed and direction, humidity, even adding in the temperature of the propellant in the cartridge, for a cartridge that is twenty degrees warmer than another will strike a target twenty inches higher at a thousand meters. In the past, they had used data books, calculators loaded with ballistics software, and data tables glued to rifle stocks. Now, they knew such details by heart.

The slant angle was slightly downhill. Pritchard figured that he’d be aiming fifteen feet above the target, and to the left, to allow for bullet drop. All was set. The only problem was Twizell and Greenham. They weren’t in position. Pritchard had no idea where they were. Both he and Vernon continued to be troubled by the fact that Tobias had sent the others somewhere in advance, but hadn’t bothered to run it by them first. Vernon had been a staff sergeant, an E-6, the highest ranking of the four snipers, and he and Tobias still butted heads when it came to operational matters. He and Pritchard should have been consulted. Now they were down a team, and that wasn’t good.

The van was parked in a copse some four hundred feet from the back of the Rojas warehouse. The driver’s door was open. Tobias, concealed by a black ski mask and black fatigues, was scanning the warehouse and surrounding buildings through a pair of night vision lenses. He started as a noise came from nearby, and then there was a low whistle and a figure emerged from the bushes before him.

‘Four, plus Rojas,’ said Mallak. ‘Three with MP5s, one with a big-ass pump action. Mossberg Roadblocker, most likely. Two Glock nines in shoulder rigs, one with the shotgun, the other with the MP5 nearest the door. No alcohol that I can see. TV is on, but not too loud. Remains of food on the table.’

Tobias nodded. That was good. Men were more sluggish after food.

‘What about Rojas?’

‘There’s a stairway against the western wall, enclosed, no turns. Ends at a steel door, slightly open. My guess is that it can be sealed at the first sign of trouble. Windows are thickened glass on the first floor, so no reason to think Rojas’s level is any different. There’s no outside stairwell, but there is a weight-activated ladder on the southern exterior wall, accessible from the window above.’

‘Surrounding houses?’

‘Two families at A and B,’ said Mallak, using his fingers to indicate the buildings in question. ‘Two female juveniles, one adult female, two adult males in A; one Glock, belt. Two adult females, one male juvenile, one adult male in B; one Glock, belt. Three males in C; two AK47s, one Glock, shoulder. Vernon and Pritchard have the intel, but we’re still a team down.’

Tobias took one more look at the target through the lenses, then tossed them on the driver’s seat. They could wait for Greenham and Twizell, or proceed. The longer they stayed in position, though, the more likely it was that they would be discovered. He leaned over the seat and looked into the interior of the van. Bacci gazed back at him, his mask rolled up to his forehead in the heat of the van, his face damp with sweat.

‘All right,’ said Tobias, as Mallak slouched against the side of the van, ‘listen up…’

Herod was unarmed. His gun was in the car. He carried only a pair of manila envelopes. The first contained a piece of paper on which a figure was typed. This represented the sum of money that Herod was prepared to transfer to any account nominated by Rojas in return for information on how, and from whom, he had obtained the seals. If Rojas refused to provide such information, then Herod knew where Rojas’s American mistress lived, along with Rojas’s illegitimate five-year-old son. Herod would take them both. If necessary, he would kill the woman first, to indicate his seriousness to Rojas, but he did not believe that such action would be required, especially not after Rojas looked in the second envelope containing photographs of those who had crossed Herod in the past, for Herod had a particular way with women. His understanding of their bodies might even have made him a gifted lover, but Herod was a sexless being. Neither was he cruel. Pain and suffering were, for him, a means to an end, and he gained no particular pleasure from their infliction. Herod was not without empathy, and his own sufferings had made him reluctant to prolong the pain of others. For this reason, he hoped that Rojas would take the money.

He looked again at the Captain’s reflection. He felt no unease. He liked being in the Captain’s presence. He wondered if the Captain would come with him to the Rojas warehouse. He was preparing to find out when, on the surface of the pond, the Captain moved. His fingers were made from twigs, and they rustled slightly as he raised his hand and placed it on the shoulder of Herod’s reflection. Herod himself shivered involuntarily at the pressure, and the chill, of the Captain’s touch, feeling it as surely as he felt the warmth of the night air, and the biting of the insects, but he stayed as he was, and together they kept watch on the building before them.

One side of the first floor of the Rojas warehouse was lined from floor to ceiling with crates of Rojas Brothers Fuego Sagrado hot sauce. If anyone took the trouble to inquire, the importation and distribution of the sauce was the reason for the warehouse’s existence, and one of the means whereby Antonio Rojas made his living. Rojas had lost count of the number of times the trucks transporting the sauce had been searched by local and federal law enforcement, but he didn’t mind. It distracted them from all of the other trucks and cars transporting far more valuable cargo, although, if Rojas were to be honest, he made a very respectable living from the sauce too, even if there were those on the other side of the border who regarded the name, and the packaging, as almost blasphemous. It had a distinctive label, a red fiery cross on a jet black background, and it was marketed as a premium product to gourmet food stores, and the better Mexican restaurants, across New England. The mark-up was nearly as high as on pot or cocaine, and Rojas was careful to declare all income derived from it to the IRS. With the help of a creative accountant, it appeared as though Antonio Rojas was making a reasonable, if not excessive, profit as a purveyor of quality hot sauce.

It was the sound of one of those hot sauce bottles breaking that alerted Rojas. He looked up from the papers on his desk, and his hand drifted to the gun that was never far away. The door to his living quarters was slightly ajar, otherwise the insulation on the floor would have masked all the noises from below: glass shattering, a chair scraping, something heavy yet soft falling to the floor.

Rojas stood and made a lunge for the door, but he was seconds too late. The muzzle of a weapon was thrust through the opening, and there was a burst of muffled gunfire that took him across the thighs, almost cutting his legs from his torso. He collapsed as the door opened fully, but even as he fell he had time to squeeze off two shots that hit the dark-garbed figure in the chest. The Kevlar vest absorbed the impact, rocking the man on his heels. Rojas’s third shot was higher, and a messy splash of blood burst forth from the back of the man’s head, the aftermath of a pebble dropped in a red pool. Rojas barely had time to register it before there was more gunfire, and he felt the hot punches as the shots tore through his back. He lay unmoving, and yet he did not die. His eyes took in the shiny black boots that surrounded him, and registered some of the words that he heard: ‘shoot’; ‘question’; ‘no choice’; and, ‘dead, he’s dead.’ Rojas chuckled wetly.

More footsteps, receding then drawing nearer once again. Black knees by his face. Fingers in his hair, raising his head. The bag of seals, held in gloved hands, the display stand that he had been making for them tossed aside, splintering on the tiled floor. Pink lips moving in the gap of the mask. White teeth, clean and even.

‘Where are the rest of them?’

‘No comprendo.’

A knife appeared. ‘I can still hurt you.’

‘No, you can’t,’ said Rojas, and he smiled as he died, revealing twin rows of ancient gold and precious stones newly embedded in his teeth.

A burst of gunfire was carried from the Rojas warehouse to the hide site, but it was not followed by a second.

‘Shit,’ said Vernon. He’d known that they were unlikely to get in and out of the warehouse entirely without trouble, but he had been hoping for the best. ‘Okay, ready up.’

Slowly, he moved the monocular across the three houses, designated Curly, Larry, and Moe. ‘Moe. Doorway, bearing right,’ he said, picking out the figure of a man carrying an AK47.

‘I see him.’

Breathe. Exhale. Take up trigger slack. Exhale.

Pressure.

Fire.

Vernon watched as the target threw his hands in the air, the final wave, then fell.

‘Hit,’ he said. ‘Curly. Door. Range seven hundred fifty yards. Zero wind. No correction. Come up seven and two.’ This time, the gunman was staying inside, using the frame of the door for cover as he tried to figure out where the shot had come from.

‘Shooter up.’

‘Spotter up. Send it.’

Pritchard fired again. There was a spray of wood chips from the door, and the target ducked back inside.

‘Uh, miss, I think,’ said Vernon. ‘It should keep him pinned, though.’

Momentarily, he shifted his sight to the Rojas warehouse, from which two of their men were emerging, carrying a third between them.

‘Okay, they’re on the move, but they’ve got a casualty. Let’s-’

There was a burst of white flame from the nearest right side window of Curly. ‘Curly. Door.’

Pritchard fired, and Vernon saw the shooter leap into the air as the shot took him in the head, causing his legs to spasm. ‘Hit,’ said Vernon.

There was more firing from Moe. Vernon shifted the monocular just in time to see a second man of the assault team fall to the ground.

‘Ah, hell,’ said Vernon. ‘Second man down.’

Pritchard adjusted himself as quickly as possible and began pumping shots through the window of the house in a ‘spray and pray,’ concerned only with providing cover while the injured were taken to safety, but now there were shouts, and lights were going on in the other houses. Vernon could see the last man on his feet – he thought it might be Tobias – carry one of his fallen team back to the van in a fireman’s lift and lay him as gently as possible on the floor. He then went back for the second man.

‘Let’s go,’ said Pritchard.

They ran to where a pair of Harleys were parked by the side of a rutted track. On the ground behind him, they left a muddied denim jacket taken from a biker in Canada, a drug mule targeted by Vernon and Pritchard and left for dead at Lac-Baker. It was a crude piece of framing, but they didn’t think the Mexicans would be concerned with the niceties of a formal investigation. They would want vengeance, and the jacket, combined with the roar of the departing bikes, might be enough to throw them off the scent for a couple of days.

Tobias got behind the wheel of the van and pulled out. In his side mirrors, the Rojas warehouse was a dark mass against the night sky, the dancing shadows of approaching men visible at either side. He was the only one left alive. Mallak had died at the warehouse, and Bacci had taken a bullet to the base of his neck as they carried Mallak’s body away. It was a mess that could have been avoided if Greenham and Twizell had been there, but he’d made the call, and he’d have to live with it. Maybe if fucking Pritchard had been faster off the mark…

The explosion wasn’t loud, the noise dampened by the thick brick walls of the old building, but the purpose of the thermite device, twenty-five percent aluminum to seventy-five percent iron oxide, was not to blow apart the warehouse itself but to burn everything within, leaving the minimum of evidence. It would also serve to distract his pursuers: with Mallak and Bacci dead, there was no one left to provide covering fire, so it would be a matter of hitting the highway and keeping his foot down all the way. Vernon and Pritchard would take their own route to the rendezvous, but Tobias would have words with them when next they met, if only to preempt the snipers’ inevitable anger.

There was a message on his phone. He listened as he drove, and learned that something had gone wrong in Bangor. Greenham and Twizell had not reported back, and it had to be presumed that the Jandreau situation was unresolved. The GPS tracking device in the detective’s car was no longer responding, and the detective was still alive. It was a mess, but at least he now had the missing seals. He also had, in his pocket, as many of Rojas’s teeth as he could knock from his mouth in the time available. It was time to get rid of what they had, make as much money as they could as quickly as possible, and then disappear.

He did not notice Herod’s car, its lights extinguished, idling on a side road. Moments later, Herod was following the van.

31

It was quiet in the motel room. Mel and Bobby sat together on one bed, she holding him and stroking his face, as though rewarding him for the fact that he had unburdened himself at last of all that he knew. Angel was by the window, watching the lot. I sat on the second bed, and tried to take in all that I had learned. Tobias and his crew were smuggling antiquities, but if Bobby was to be believed, they’d brought something else over with them, something that was never meant to be discovered, and never meant to be opened. It had been part of the bait, like a dose of poison contained in meat. I wanted to believe that Jandreau was wrong, that it was guilt and stress that was leading these men to take their lives and the lives of others, including Brett Harlan’s wife, and Foster Jandreau, for Bobby confirmed that he had approached his cousin about his concerns, and that he believed Foster’s unofficial inquiries had led to his murder. It was just a question of who had pulled the trigger. My money was on Tobias initially, but Bobby was less sure: he had warned his cousin about Joel Tobias, and he couldn’t see Foster agreeing to meet up with him in the darkened lot of a ruined bar with no witnesses. It was then that he told me of his sessions with Carrie Saunders, and of how he had discussed some of his concerns with her.

Carrie Saunders. It wasn’t Tobias alone who connected all of these men to one another, it was Saunders. She had been at Abu Ghraib, as had the mysterious Roddam, or Nailon. She’d been in contact with all of the dead men at one point or another, and had a reason to move between them. Jandreau wouldn’t have agreed to meet a potentially dangerous ex-military man like Tobias in a deserted lot, but he might have agreed to meet a woman. I called Gordon Walsh, and I told him everything that I knew, leaving out only Tobias. Tobias was mine. He said that he’d pick up Saunders himself and see what came of it.

It was Louis, slouched low in the Lexus so that he could watch the approaches to the room, who spotted him. The raggedy figure strolled across the parking lot, a cigarette dangling from his right hand, his left empty. He wore a black coat over a black suit, his shirt wrinkled and open at the neck, the jacket and pants bearing the marks of cheap cloth, ill used. His hair was slicked back from his skull, and too long at the back, hanging in greasy strands over his collar. He seemed simply to have materialized, as though atoms had been pulled from the air, their constituent parts altered as he reconstructed himself in this place. Louis had been watching the mirrors as well as the expanse of motel visible through the windshield. He should have seen him coming, but he had not.

And Louis knew him for who, and for what, he was: this was the Collector. The man might have been dressed in thrift store clothes, his appearance that of one who has been poorly served by life, and has chosen to respond in kind, but it was all a veneer. Louis had met dangerous men before, and some had died at his hand, but the man now walking toward the door to 112 exuded menace the way other people sweated from their pores. Louis could almost smell it off him as he slipped from the car and moved in; that, and something more: a hint of burnt offerings, of blood and charnel houses. Though Louis’s approach was silent, the Collector raised his hands without turning while Louis was still fifteen feet away. The cigarette had burned down as far as the yellowed skin on the Collector’s fingers, but if it hurt him then he did not show it.

‘You can drop that, if it’s bothering you,’ said Louis.

The Collector let the cigarette slip from its fingers. ‘A shame. There was another pull left on it.’

‘They’ll kill you.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘Maybe I’ll kill you first.’

‘And we haven’t even been formally introduced, although I do feel that I know you. You might say that I’ve watched you from afar, you and your partner. I’ve admired your work, especially since you appear to have developed a conscience.’

‘I guess I should be flattered, huh?’

‘No, you should simply be grateful that I haven’t had cause to come after you. You were on the verge of damnation for a time. Now, you are making recompense for your sins. If you continue on that path, you might yet be saved.’

‘Are you saved? If you are, I’m not sure I want to be keeping that kind of company.’

The Collector expelled a breath through his nose, the closest he had come to laughter in an eternity.

‘No, I exist between salvation and damnation. Suspended, if you will: a dangling man.’

‘Kneel,’ said Louis. ‘Put your hands on your head and keep them there.’

The Collector did as he was told. Louis advanced on him quickly, placed the gun to his head, and knocked hard on the door. Up close, the smell of nicotine made his eyes water, but it served to mask the other smells.

‘Me,’ said Louis. ‘I got company. An old friend of yours.’

The door opened, and the Collector looked up at me.

He sat in a chair by the door. Louis had frisked him, but the Collector was unarmed. He examined the ‘No Smoking’ sign by the television, frowning as he knitted his fingers across his stomach. Bobby Jandreau stared at him the way one might stare, upon waking, at a spider suspended above one’s face. Mel had retreated, and was sitting in a corner behind Angel, her eyes fixed on the stranger, waiting for him to pounce.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘I came looking for you. It seems that we are working toward similar ends.’

‘Which would be?’

A thin finger, the nail the color of rust, extended itself and pointed to Jandreau.

‘Let me guess the story so far,’ said the Collector. ‘Soldiers; treasure; a falling out among thieves.’

Jandreau looked as though he might have been about to dispute the use of the word “thieves,” but the Collector turned his mocking gaze in the direction of his finger, and Jandreau remained silent.

‘Except they didn’t know what they were stealing,’ the Collector continued. ‘They were indiscriminate. They took all that they could, without wondering why it had been made so easy for them. But you paid a high price for it, didn’t you, Mr. Jandreau? You’re all paying a high price for your sins.’

Jandreau started. ‘How do you know my name?’

‘Names are my business. There was a box, was there not? A gold box. They left it for you to find. It was probably in a lead receptacle, for they couldn’t be too careful, but they left it where it wouldn’t be ignored. Tell me, Mr. Jandreau. I’m right, am I not?’

Jandreau just nodded.

‘I want the box,’ said the Collector. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘For your collection?’ I said. ‘I thought someone had to die before you got to claim one of their possessions.’

‘Oh, someone will die, if I have my way, and my collection will increase greatly as a consequence, but the box will not be part of it. It does not belong to me. It does not belong to anyone. It is dangerous. Someone is looking for it, a man named Herod, and it is essential that he not be allowed to find it. If he does, he will open it. He has the patience, and the skill. The one with him has the knowledge.’

‘What’s in it?’ asked Angel.

‘Three entities,’ said the Collector simply. ‘Old demons, if you prefer. The box is the latest in a series of attempts to contain them, but its construction was flawed by the vanity of its creator, who forgot that he was forging a prison. Gold is such soft metal. Over the years, gaps appeared. Something of what was contained inside found a way to reach out, to poison the minds of those who came into contact with it. The lead box was an effort to counteract that threat: crude, but effective. Like the dull paint used to cover the gold, it also served to conceal what was inside.’

‘Why didn’t they just dump it in the ocean, or bury it somewhere?’

‘Because the only thing worse than knowing where it might be is not knowing. The box was watched. It had always been watched, the knowledge of it transferred from one generation to the next. In the end, it was hidden away among a jumble of worthless artifacts in a museum basement in Baghdad, and then the war came, and the museum was looted. The box disappeared, along with much else that was of value, but somehow an understanding of its nature, however incomplete, reached those who had seized it. It may even have been that they knew exactly what they had from the moment it appeared, for looting is a relative term. The items stolen from the Iraq Museum were carefully chosen, for the most part. Do you know that seventeen thousand items were stolen from the museum over those April days; that four hundred and fifty of four hundred and fifty-one cases were emptied, but only twenty-eight of those cases were broken? The rest were simply opened, which means that those who stole from them had keys. Astonishing, don’t you think? One of the greatest museum thefts in history, one of the greatest sackings since the time of the Mongols, and it may have been an inside job.

‘But no matter. When Mr. Jandreau and his friends came looking for treasure, the box was passed on to them, perhaps in the hope that they would do exactly what they did: transport it back to this country, the country of the enemy, where it would be opened. Now you know what it is. In return, tell me where to find it.’

His eyes scanned every face in the room, as though the knowledge that he sought might somehow be read in them, before he fixed on mine.

‘Why should we trust you?’ I said. ‘You manipulate truth for your own ends. You’re just a killer, nothing more, a serial slayer slaughtering under some divine flag of convenience.’

A light flared in the Collector’s eyes, like twin flares being ignited in an abyss. ‘No, I am no mere killer: I am an instrument of the Divine. I am God’s murderer. Not all of His work is beautiful…’

He looked disgusted, both at me and, I believed, at some level kept hidden even from his own conscience, at himself.

‘You must set aside your qualms, just as I must set aside mine,’ he said after a moment. ‘If I trouble you, then you disturb me. I dislike being near you. You are part of a plan of which I have no knowledge. You are bound for a reckoning that will be the death of you, and of all who stand alongside you. Your days are numbered, and I do not wish to be close to you when you fall.’

He raised his palms to me, and there was a plea in his voice. ‘So let us do this one thing, for as bad as you may believe me to be, the man named Herod is worse, and he is himself being shadowed by an entity, one that he believes he understands, one that will have promised him a reward for his service. It has many names, but he will know it by only one, the one that it gave him when first it found a way to worm itself into his consciousness.’

‘And what do you call it?’ I asked.

‘I call it nothing but what it is,’ said the Collector. ‘It is the Darkness: evil incarnate. It is the One Who Waits Behind the Glass.’

32

Herod put his hands beneath the faucet and let the flow of water wash the blood away. He watched the patterns that it made, the crimson vortex that swirled against the stainless steel like the arms of a distant nebula spiraling into collapse. A bead of sweat dripped from his nose and was lost. He closed his eyes. His fingers hurt, and his head ached, but at least it was pain of a different kind, the pain of hard labor. Torturing another human being was a wearying business. He looked up at his reflection and saw, in the glass, the man slumped in the chair, his hands bound behind his back. Herod had removed the rag from his mouth so that he could hear what he had to say. He had not bothered to replace it when the man had finished talking. There was no need. He barely had the strength to breathe, and soon even that would be gone.

Behind the slouched man stood another figure, its hands resting lightly on the back of the chair. Once again, the Captain had taken the form of the little girl in the blue dress, her hair long and worn in braids that hung between her breasts. As before, the girl could not have been more than nine or ten, but her breasts were surprisingly well developed; obscenely so, thought Herod. Her face was startlingly pale, but unfinished. Her eyes and mouth were black ovals, blurred at the edges as though a dirty eraser had smeared the marks made by a thick pencil. She stood very still, her head almost on a level with that of the seated man.

The Captain was waiting for Joel Tobias to die.

It would not have been true to say that Herod was an immoral man. Neither was he amoral, for her admitted the distinction between moral and immoral behavior, and was conscious of the necessity for fairness and honesty in all of his dealings. He required it of others, and demanded it of himself. But there existed in Herod an emptiness, like the hollow at the center of certain fruits once the pit has been removed, speeding their decay, and out of that emptiness came the capacity for certain types of behavior. He had taken no pleasure in hurting the man who was now dying on the chair, and as soon as Herod had learned all that he wished to know he had ceased working on the interior of the man’s body, although the damage that had been inflicted was so great that the suffering had continued despite the cessation of violent, invasive actions. Now, as the last of the blood was washed away, Herod felt compelled to bring those sufferings to a close.

‘Mr. Tobias,’ he said, ‘I believe we’ve reached the end.’

He picked up his gun from beside the sink, and prepared to turn away from the glass.

As he was about to do so, the figure of the girl moved. She shifted position so that she was slightly to his right. One filthy hand reached out and stroked Tobias’s face. Tobias opened his eyes at the touch. He looked confused. He could feel fingers on his skin, and yet he could see nothing. The girl leaned closer. From out of the dark orb of her mouth a tongue appeared, long and thick, and lapped at the blood around the dying man’s mouth. Now he tried to turn his head away, but the girl responded to the movement, clinging to his clothing, her legs between his, her body pressing against him. Something in the way that Tobias’s position had changed allowed him to see his own reflection in the smoked glass of an oven door: his reflection, and the nature of the being that was forcing itself upon him. He whimpered in fear.

Herod walked over to the chair, placed the gun against Tobias’s head, and pulled the trigger. The Captain disappeared, and all movement ceased.

Herod took a step away. He was aware of the Captain’s presence somewhere nearby. He felt his rage. He risked a glance at the oven door, but could see nothing.

‘It was not necessary,’ he said to the listening dark. ‘He had suffered enough.’

Enough? Enough for whom? For him, yes, but for the Captain, there could never be sufficient suffering. Herod’s shoulders sank. With no other option, he was compelled to look again at the window.

The Captain was directly behind him, but no longer was he a little girl. Instead, he was a sexless form in a long, gray coat. His face was a blur, a constantly altering series of visages, and in them Herod saw everyone for whom he had ever cared: his mother and his sister, now gone; his grandmother, adored and long buried; friends and lovers, living and dead. Each of them was in agony, their faces contorted in torment and despair. And, finally, Herod’s face appeared among them, and he understood.

This was how it could be. Cross the Captain again, and this was what would come to pass.

The Captain departed, leaving Herod alone with the body. He restored the gun to the holster beneath his shoulder, and took one last look at the dead man. He wondered how long it would be before his friends discovered him, or how many of them might even be left. It hardly mattered. Herod now knew who had the box, but he had to move fast. The Captain had warned him: the Collector was coming.

Herod had heard stories of the Collector long before the man’s pursuit of him had commenced, of the strange, tattered individual who believed himself to be a harvester of souls, and hoarded souvenirs of his victims. From the Captain, he had learned yet more. The Collector would want the box for himself. That was what the Captain said, and Herod believed him. Herod had been careful to hide himself well, operating under a variety of aliases, using shell companies, and lawyers untroubled by scruples, and shadowy transporters who cared little for paperwork and customs documents as long as the money was right. But the uniqueness of some of his purchases, and the inquiries he had made in the course of his searches, however discreet, had inevitably drawn the Collector’s interest to him. Now it was crucial that he remain at one remove from him, for it would take time to figure out the intricacies of the box’s locks. Once the box was opened, there would be nothing that the Collector, or anyone else, could do. The Captain’s triumph would be Herod’s revenge, and he could die at last and claim his reward in the next world.

Herod left the house, walking past the bodies of Pritchard and Vernon where they lay in the yard, and got into his car. There were sirens in the distance, moving closer. As he put the key in the ignition, he heard the sound of banging from the trunk, until it was lost in the roar of the engine.

33

When Karen Emory was a little girl, and had only just begun sleeping in her own room, albeit with the door open and her mother’s bedroom in clear view, a man had broken into their house shortly after midnight. Karen had woken to find the intruder standing in the corner of her bedroom, wreathed in darkness, watching her. He was completely silent – she could not even hear his breathing – yet his presence had pulled her from her rest, a primitive awareness that all was not as it should be, and a threat was near. She had been unable to scream as she looked at him, so terrified was she. Decades later, she could still recall the dryness in her mouth, the asthmatic sound that her breath had made as she tried to summon help, the sense that some great weight was holding her down on the bed, preventing her from moving. They were trapped in a stasis, these two strangers: one unmoving, one incapable of movement.

Suddenly, the man had shifted his weight, as though preparing to leap at her, his gloved hands reaching for her, and the spell was broken. She had screamed then, so loudly that for days after her throat hurt, and the intruder had bolted for the stairs. Her mother came out of her bedroom in time to see a figure open the front door and disappear. After checking on her daughter, she called 911. Cars descended on the neighborhood, and a search began. Eventually, a drifter named Clarence Buttle was picked up as he hid in an alleyway behind a Dumpster. Karen had told the policemen that she didn’t get a good look at the man in her room, and couldn’t recall anything about him. Her mother, too, claimed only to have seen the man’s back in the darkness, and had been too tired and shocked to notice anything that might have distinguished it from any number of other backs that she had seen. The intruder had entered their home through a window, but had left no prints. Buttle protested his innocence loudly, claiming that he had only hidden in the alley because he was frightened of the police and didn’t want to be blamed for something that he hadn’t done. He spoke like a child, and seemed reluctant to meet the eyes of the detectives who questioned him.

They kept him for twenty-four hours. He did not ask to see a lawyer as he had not been charged with the commission of any crime. He gave them his name, and told them that he was originally from Montgomery, Alabama, but had been on the road for almost twelve years. He wasn’t sure about his age, but he thought he might have been thirty-three, ‘like Our Lord, Jesus Christ.’

During the period of his incarceration, a piece of cloth was found on a nail by Karen’s window. It matched perfectly a hole in Clarence Buttle’s coat. He was charged with forcible entry, trespass, and possession of a deadly weapon: a shiv found tucked into the lining of his coat. He was taken to the county jail to await trial, and was still there when his fingerprints produced an AFIS match. A year earlier, a nine-year-old girl named Franny Keaton had been abducted from her parents’ home in Winnetka, Illinois. After a week-long search, her body was found in a storm drain. She had been strangled, but there was no sign of sexual assault, although the girl’s clothing had been removed. The fingerprint that matched Clarence Buttle’s had come from the left eye of the doll found alongside Franny Keaton’s body.

When asked about Winnetka, Clarence Buttle had smiled slyly and said, ‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy…’

As the years went by, Karen Emory would still wake at least once every month, convinced that Clarence Buttle, that bad, bad boy, had come back to take her down to a storm drain and ask her to play with him.

But now other nightmares had taken the place of those concerning Clarence Buttle. She had heard the voices whispering again in their strange tongue, but this time she believed that they were not trying to communicate with her. In fact, she sensed their complete disregard, even contempt, for her. Instead, they were anticipating the arrival of another, one who would respond to their entreaties. They had been waiting a long time, and they were growing impatient. This time, in her dream, she saw Joel entering the basement, stepping into the darkness, and the voices rose in a crescendo of welcome…

But Joel was not here. Before he had departed, he had put a small box on the pillow beside her.

‘I was going to keep them for your birthday,’ he said. ‘Then I thought, why wait?’

It was an apology, she supposed, an apology for striking her, and hurting her. She had opened the box. The earrings were dull gold, but intricately carved, and so delicate that they seemed more like lace than metal. She knew before she touched them that they were old; old, and valuable.

‘Where did you get them?’ she asked, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew that she had reacted wrongly, that her tone was doubtful and not filled with the wonder and gratitude Joel had anticipated. She thought that he might snatch the box away from her, or explode into another fit of rage, but instead he just looked hurt.

‘They’re a gift,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like them.’

‘I do,’ she said, her voice trembling. She reached out and lifted them from the box. They were heavier than she had anticipated. ‘They’re beautiful.’ She smiled, trying to rescue the situation. ‘They’re really beautiful. Thank you.’

He nodded. ‘Well, okay then,’ he said.

He watched as she put them on, but his response as she turned her head to let them catch the sunlight filtering through the drapes was distracted. She had disappointed him. Worse, she felt that, by her actions, she had confirmed a suspicion he had of her. When she was sure that he was gone, she took off the earrings and put them back in the box, then pulled the sheet over her head and prayed for sleep to come. She so wanted to rest, and not to dream. Eventually, she took half an Ambien, and sleep came, and with it the voices.

It was late afternoon when she woke. Her head felt fuzzy, and she was disoriented. She was about to call out for Joel, and as she recalled his absence she wished, even amid their troubles, that she was not alone, and that he was near. He said that he would be gone overnight, perhaps even for two nights. He had promised to let her know. A big deal was about to come good for him, he said, and they could look for a better place. They might even head off somewhere for a while, somewhere pretty and quiet. She told him that she’d like to go away with him, but she was happy too just to stay where they were. She’d be happy anywhere, she said, as long as he was beside her, and as long as he was content. Tobias said that that was one of the reasons why he liked her so much, because she didn’t go asking for expensive things, because she had simple tastes. But that wasn’t what she had meant at all, and it annoyed her that he’d misunderstood her. He had patronized her, and she hated being patronized, just as she hated the stupid secrets he now kept in his basement, and the fact that he wasn’t telling her everything about the trips he took in his truck, and the goods that he delivered.

And then there were the earrings. She rolled over on the bed and opened the box. They were beautiful. Antique, too. No, older even than that. Antiques were like furniture or jewelry from the 1800s, or so she had always thought. These earrings, though, were ancient. She could almost feel their age when she had first touched them.

She got up and ran a bath. The day was as good as gone, and she decided that she wasn’t going to bother getting dressed. She would spend the evening in her robe, watch some TV, and order a pizza. With Joel absent, she rolled a joint from the little stash of pot that she kept hidden in her personal drawer and smoked it in the tub. Joel didn’t approve of drugs, and although he had never tried to forbid her from smoking joints he had made it clear that he didn’t want to know about it if she did. For that reason, she only tended to smoke when he wasn’t around, or when she was with friends.

After the bath and the joint, she felt better than she had in a long time. She looked at the earrings again, and decided to try them on. She piled her hair up on her head, wrapped herself in a clean white sheet, then stood in front of the mirror just to get a sense of how she might have looked in another time. She’d felt kind of silly doing it, but she had to admit that she appeared elegant, the earrings gleaming in the lamp-light, fragments of yellow light falling like dust motes upon her face.

There was no way that Joel could afford a gift like those earrings, she knew, not unless he really was lying even more than she suspected about how much he was earning as a truck driver. The only conclusion to be drawn was that he was involved in something illegal, and the earrings were part of it: an exchange, perhaps, or a purchase with some of the proceeds. It took away some from the beauty of them. Karen had never stolen anything in her life, not even a piece of candy or some cheap cosmetics, the standard targets for the petty thieves among her high school friends when she was growing up. At the diner, she never took more than was permitted her under her food allowance. It was more than generous anyway, and she saw no reason to be greedy, even though there were one or two other waitresses who used the allowance as an excuse to take food home and gorge themselves, their boyfriends, and probably anyone else who happened to be dropping by their place too.

But the earrings were so beautiful. She had never been given anything so lovely, so old, so valuable. Now that they were on, she did not want to take them off. If he could convince her that he had come by them honestly, she would keep them, but equally she would know if he was lying. If he did decide to lie to her about them, their relationship would be under real threat. She had already decided to forgive him for striking her again because she loved him, but it was time for him to be honest with her, and maybe with himself too.

She sat on the bed and turned on the TV. What the hell, she thought, and rolled a second joint. She watched a movie, some dumb comedy she’d seen before but that seemed far funnier now that she was a little high. Another movie followed, an action one this time, but she was starting to drowse. Her eyes closed. She heard herself snoring, and it woke her up. She lay down and rested her head on the pillow. The voices came again, but this time she had the peculiar sensation that this dream, and her nightmares about Clarence Buttle, had become conflated, because in the dream she sensed a presence nearby.

No, not in the dream.

In the house.

Her eyes opened.

‘Joel?’ she called, thinking that he might have come back earlier than expected. ‘Is that you?’

There was no reply, but she sensed that her words had caused a reaction elsewhere in the house: stillness where there had formerly been movement, silence where there had been sound.

She sat up. Her nostrils twitched. There was an unfamiliar smell: musty, but also faintly perfumed, like an old church vestment still suffused with the scent of incense. She found her gown and slipped it on, covering her nakedness, and was about to walk to the bedroom door when she reconsidered. She returned to her own bedside table and opened the drawer. Inside was a Lady Smith 60 in a.38 special. Joel had insisted that she keep a gun in the house, and he had taught her how to shoot out in the woods. She didn’t like the gun, and had largely agreed to have it just to placate him, but now she was glad that, with Joel absent, she was not entirely defenseless.

She waited at the top of the stairs but heard nothing, not at first. Then, slowly, she became aware of it.

The whispering had started again, and this time she was not asleep.

34

Karen stood at the basement door, and listened. She felt like a sleepwalker, for her mind was still fuzzy from the sleeping pill, and the pot, and the aftereffects of napping through the day. Everything was slightly off kilter. When she turned her head, it seemed to take a split second for her eyes to follow the movement, and the consequence was a dizzying blurring of her vision. Now, tentatively, she placed the palm of her hand against the basement door, then knelt until her ear was close to the keyhole. Strangely, it made no difference to the volume of the voices she was hearing, even though she was certain that the whispering originated from behind the door. The voices were at once inside her and beyond her, resulting in an alteration in perception that she visualized in almost mathematical terms: an equilateral triangle, with her at one apex, the source of the voices at another, and the transmitted sound of them at a third. She was overhearing a conversation either carried on with no awareness of her presence or, more correctly, with an awareness of its inconsequentiality. It reminded her of when she was a very young girl, and her father and his friends would gather on a sunny day and sit around the table in the garden, drinking beers, while she sat in the shade of a tree, watching them and picking up on certain words and phrases, but unable to follow or fully understand the substance of their discussions.

Despite her dislike of dark spaces, and her concern at how Joel might react if he found that she had trespassed in his basement – for she knew that was how he would view it if he discovered that she had entered it without him – she wanted to see what was down there. She was aware that he was storing something new there for she had seen him moving the last of the boxes from his truck when she had returned from work the previous day. She experienced a frisson of excitement at the thought of such an incursion, spiced by a degree of apprehension, even fear.

She began to search for the key to the basement. While Joel kept one on a chain with his other keys, she guessed that there had to be a spare nearby. Already she knew her way around all of the shared areas in the house. One of the kitchen drawers contained a jumble of old junk, including stray keys, combination locks, and screws. She went through it all, but could find no key that looked like it would fit the basement lock. After that, she searched in the pockets of Joel’s coats that hung in the hall, but discovered only dust, a couple of coins, and an old receipt for gas.

Finally, aware that she was about to cross a line, she went through Joel’s personal closet. Her fingers probed in suit pockets and shoes, beneath piles of t-shirts and through stacks of socks and underwear. Everything was clean and neatly folded, a hangover from Joel’s time in the military. Halfway through, she began to forget about the key and started enjoying the intimate nature of her search, and what it revealed about the man she loved. She discovered photographs from his time in the military, and letters from a former lover, only a few of which she read, finding herself distressed by the possibility that someone could have thought that she loved Joel as much as she, Karen, did, and irritated by the fact that he had kept these letters. She flipped through them until she found the one that she sought, a simple ‘Dear John’ letter advising Joel that their continued enforced separation because of his military service was too difficult for her to bear, and she wished to end their relationship. The letter was dated March 2007. Karen wondered if the woman, whose name was Faye, had found someone else before she wrote that letter. Some sixth sense told her that she had.

In a steel case on the floor of the closet was a Ruger pistol and a number of bladed weapons, including a bayonet. The sight of the knives made her shiver, the dreadful intimacy of their penetrative capacity, the potential for a brutal connection between victim and killer, separate entities briefly joined by a shard of metal.

Beside the knives lay what looked like a key to the basement door.

She carried it downstairs and placed it in the lock. She twisted the key with her left hand, the little Lady Smith held in her right. The key moved easily, and the door unlocked. She opened it, and was suddenly aware of the silence in the house.

The whispering had stopped.

Before her, the basement stairs stretched down into darkness, only the first three illuminated by the light from the hall. Her fingers found the pull cord that dangled from the ceiling. She yanked it, and the overhead light came on, so that now she could see as far as the bottom of the stairs. Down there was another pull cord that lit the rest of the basement.

She took the steps slowly and carefully. She didn’t want to trip, not here. She wasn’t sure which possibility was worse: that Joel might come in and find her on the floor, her leg broken, or that Joel might not come back, and she would be left there, waiting for the voices to resume their whispering, alone in their presence.

She brushed the thought from her mind. It wasn’t going to help her nerves any. At the second to last step, she stretched up on her toes, holding on tightly to the rail, and tugged the second cord. Nothing happened. She tried again, pulling once, then twice. There was still only darkness before her, and darkness behind and to her left where the basement stretched to most of the width of the house.

Hell, she thought, then remembered that Joel, always practical, kept a flashlight on the shelf immediately beyond the last step in case of just such an eventuality. She had seen it when he had first shown the basement to her, the day she had moved in with him. She trailed her fingers along a steel joist, surprised at how cold the metal felt, then allowed her hand slowly to run horizontally along the shelf, worried about dislodging the flashlight and knocking it to the ground. Eventually, her grip closed upon it. She twisted the head, and a beam shone on the ceiling, catching cobwebs and sending a spider scuttling into a corner. The beam was weak, though. The batteries needed to be replaced, but she would not be down here for long, just for long enough.

She spotted the new additions almost immediately. Joel had stacked the wooden crates and cardboard boxes in the far corner. She padded over to them in her slippered feet, shivering at the cold of the basement. All of the boxes were open and filled with packing material: straw in most cases, foam chips in the rest. She reached into the nearest and felt a small, cylindrical object, protected by bubble wrap. She withdrew it from the box and unwrapped it in the flashlight’s beam. It shone on the two gemstones inlaid into the gold disks at either end, and the unfamiliar signs carved into what she was certain was ivory.

She searched in the box again, and found another of the tubes, and a third. Each was slightly different from the last, but all had gold and gemstones in common. There were more of the cylinders down there, two dozen or more, and at least as many old gold coins in individual plastic sheaths. She rewrapped the cylinders that she had removed, and restored them to their place, then moved on to the next box. This one was heavier. She cleared away some of the straw packing to reveal a beautifully decorated vase. Beside it, in a crate previously used to transport wine, was the gold head of a woman with lapis lazuli for eyes. She ran her fingers across its face, so lifelike, so perfect in appearance. Although she was not someone who generally troubled museums with visits, here, in this musty basement, she began to understand the appeal of such artifacts, the beauty of something that had survived for so long, a link to civilizations now long vanished.

It made her think again of her earrings. Where Joel had got them from, she had no idea, but she knew now that this was the big score about which he had spoken, and in these items lay his hopes for both of their futures. She felt angry at him, yet also strangely relieved. If it had been drugs that she had found, or counterfeit money, or expensive watches and gems stolen from a jewelry store, she would have been disappointed in him. But these objects of beauty were so unusual, so unexpected, that she was forced to reconsider her opinion of him. He didn’t even have pictures hanging on his walls until she came to live with him, yet this was what he stored in his basement? She wanted to laugh. It bubbled up from deep inside her, and she covered her mouth to stop it, and in doing so she was reminded of the sight of Joel seated cross-legged by the basement door, speaking intently to someone on the other side of it, and in that moment she recalled the reason she had come down here. The smile disappeared from her face. She was about to move on to the other crates when a shape on the shelf to her left caught her eye. It was clearly a box, loosely covered in bubble wrap, and it stood incongruously amid paint cans and jars of nails and screws. Yet even disguised as it was, and in such undistinguished surroundings, she was drawn to it. As she touched it, she felt it vibrate against her fingers. It reminded her of a cat purring.

She laid the flashlight on the shelf, and began to undo the wrapping. She had to lift the box to do so, and something inside seemed to shift slightly. Any concern she had that Joel might discover she had been down there was gone: she felt a burning desire to view the box, to open it, understanding the moment she touched it that this was what she was seeking, that this was linked to the voices in her nightmare, to the sensations of confinement and imprisonment, to Joel’s nocturnal conversations. When the bubble wrap stuck she tore at it with her fingers, hearing it pop as she shredded it, until at last the box was fully revealed to her. She stroked it, caressed it, marveling at the detail of its carvings. She lifted it, and was surprised by its weight. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much the gold that went into its construction might be worth alone, regardless of the age of the box itself. With the tip of a finger she examined the intricate series of locks, shaped like spiders, that held the lid fixed to the base. There were no keyholes that she could see, merely clasps that would not move. She grew increasingly frustrated, picking with her fingernails at the metal, all sense of reason and patience gone. Then one of her fingernails broke, and the pain of it brought her back. She dropped the box as though it had suddenly grown hot in her hands. She was overcome by a profound sense of evil, a feeling that she was close to an intelligence that wished her only harm, that resented her touch. She wanted to run, but she was no longer alone in the basement, for there was movement in the corner to her left, directly across from the stairs.

‘Joel?’ she said. Her voice trembled. He would be so angry at her. She could already see the confrontation playing out: his fury at her trespass, hers at his hoarding of stolen artifacts in the basement of their home. They were both in the wrong, but her transgression was minor compared to his, except she knew that he would not see it that way. She did not want him to hit her again. Sense began to return to her: this was a serious criminal enterprise in which Joel was engaged, and that was bad enough. But the box… The box was another matter entirely. The box was foul. She had to get away from it. They both did. If Joel would not come with her, she would leave alone.

If he lets me leave, she thought. If it stops at just hitting when he finds out what I’ve been up to. Her mind went back to the weapons in his closet, and the bayonet in particular. Joel had shown it to her once before when she found him slumped in the corner of the room, his eyes red from weeping for his lost comrade, Brett Harlan. It was an M9 bayonet, just like the one Harlan had used on his wife before cutting his own throat.

Because the box made him do it.

She shuddered at the imaginative leap that she had just made, even as she strained to peer into the darkness before remembering the flashlight. She grasped it and pointed its beam at the corner. Shadows moved: the outline of garden tools and stacked bottles, the frames of the shelves, and one other, a figure that danced away from the light, melting into the blackness beneath the stairs; a deformed shape, distorted by the action of the beam but also, she knew, unnatural in its essence, contorted in its physicality. She could almost smell it: musty and aged with an acrid edge, like old cloth burning.

This was not Joel: this was not even human.

She tried to follow its progress with the flashlight. Her hands were shaking, so she gripped the Maglite with both hands, holding it close to her body. She shone it under the stairs, and the shape danced away again, a shadow without a form to cast it, like smoke rising from an unseen flame. Now there was movement to her right as well. She swung the beam, and briefly a figure was framed against the wall, its body hunched, its arms and legs too long for its torso, the crown of its skull misshapen by outgrowths of bone. It was both real and unreal, the shadow seeming to stretch from the box itself, as though the essence of whatever was contained within it were seeping out like a bad smell.

And the whispering had started again: the voices were speaking about her. They were disturbed, angry. She should not have touched the box. They did not want her desecrating it with her fingers, with her woman’s hands. Filthy. Unclean.

Blood.

She was having her period. It had started that morning.

Blood.

Tainted.

Blood.

They knew. They smelled it on her. She retreated, trying to get to the stairs, aware now of three figures circling her like wolves, moving to stay out of the reach of her light even as they closed upon her. She waved the flashlight like a flaming torch, using it to probe at the darkness, to keep them at bay, her back to the shelves, then the wall, until at last she was facing the basement and her foot was on the first step. Slowly she ascended, not wanting to turn her back. Halfway up, the bulb above her head flickered and went dark, and then her flashlight too gave up the ghost.

They’re doing it. They like the darkness.

Now she turned, stumbling up the final steps, and as she reached the door and slammed it closed she caught a final glimpse of them ascending toward her: shapes without substance, bad dreams conjured from old bones. She turned the key and pulled it from the lock, tripping as she did so and falling painfully on her coccyx. She watched the handle of the door, expecting it to turn like it did in those old horror movies, but it did not. There was only the sound of her breathing, and the beating of her heart, and the rustle of her robe against her skin as she pushed herself along the floor and came to rest against an armchair.

The doorbell rang. The shock of it made her squeal. She saw the figure of a man outlined against it by the night light. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was after three. Where had the hours gone? Rubbing the base of her spine where she had landed so awkwardly, she walked to the door and pulled the drape to one side so that she could see who was there. A man in his sixties stood in profile on the step. He wore a black hat, which he raised politely, revealing a bald cone misted by wisps of gray hair. She opened the door, relieved at the presence of another human being, even a stranger, but she still kept the security chain on.

‘Hello,’ said the man. ‘We’re looking for Karen Emory.’ He still had not turned toward her, so she could see only one side of his face.

‘She’s not here,’ said Karen, the words emerging before she even realized that she had spoken them. ‘I don’t know when she’ll be back. It’s late, so she probably won’t be home until morning.’

She didn’t know why she was lying, and was conscious of the weakness of the falsehoods she was uttering. The man looked unthreatening, but her survival instincts had been shocked into action by what she had seen in the basement, and he was making her skin crawl. She had been wrong to open the door to him, and now it was crucial that she lock it against him as soon as possible. She wanted to scream: she was trapped between this man and the entities in the basement. She willed Joel to return, even as she understood that this was his fault, that the man was here because of him and what was stored in the basement, because why else would such an individual be on their doorstep at three in the morning. Joel would know what to do. She’d take her chances with his anger if he’d only return to help her.

‘We can wait,’ said the man.

‘I’m sorry. That won’t be possible. Anyway, I have company.’ Lies were piling up on lies, and she sounded unconvincing even to her own ears. Then she thought about what the man on the doorstep had just said. We’re looking for Karen Emory. We can wait.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘We don’t think you have company at all. We think you’re alone.’

Now she looked around to see if there was anyone else outside, but there was only this odd, creepy man with his hat in his hand. And she had left the gun in the basement.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Go away, or I’ll call the police.’

Now his head turned, and she saw how ruined he was, how damaged, and she felt that this was as much a spiritual as a physical decay. She tried to close the door, but his foot was already jammed in the gap.

‘Nice earrings,’ said Herod. ‘Old, and too good for one such as you.’

He reached through the gap, his hand a white blur, and ripped out one of the earrings, tearing the lobe. Blood sprayed on her robe and she tried to scream, but his hand was on her throat, his nails digging into her skin. His shoulder struck the door with massive force, and the chain came away from the frame. She fought against him, scratching at him with her fingers, until he slammed her head against the wall.

Once: ‘Don’t…’

Twice: ‘… tell…’

The third time, she hardly felt it at all.

‘… lies!’

35

Karen did not lose consciousness, not entirely, so she was aware of being dragged by her hair across the floor and thrown in a corner. Her ruined earlobe burned with pain, and she felt blood dripping from the wound. She heard the door locking, and saw the drapes being partially drawn on the windows, but she felt nauseated, and she was having trouble with her vision because, when the man walked to the window, she thought that she saw two reflections in the glass. One was the intruder, and the other-

The other was Clarence Buttle. There was something about his gait and posture that had ingrained itself upon her memory, even had the reflected figure not been wearing the shabby dark jacket that Clarence had been wearing that night in her bedroom, with the red-and-black checked shirt beneath it tucked into baggy jeans that looked like they belonged more properly on a fatter person. Clarence’s jeans had been held up with a brown leather belt, its battered silver buckle shaped like a cowboy hat. That was how she remembered him, because that was how he looked in the photographs that were taken of him as his true nature was revealed by the police investigation.

But Clarence Buttle was dead. He had died in prison, taken by stomach cancer that had eaten away at his insides. The reflected Clarence certainly looked like someone who’d been eaten away, except it was his face that had been consumed, because the Clarence that she glimpsed in the glass before the drapes closed had holes where his eyes should have been, and his lips were gone, revealing black gums and the stumps of rotted teeth. But in those final seconds, his lipless mouth had moved, and she heard the words, and smelled the foulness of his insides polluting the room.

‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy,’ said the reflection, both Clarence and Not-Clarence, and Karen, struggling to hold back her bile, knew, deep down in the special hidden place where she kept all that was truly herself, that what she was seeing was the entity that had made Clarence Buttle what he was, the voice that had spoken to him of the pleasures of playing with little girls in old storm drains, the malign visitor that had put Karen Emory’s name into Clarence’s mind.

‘She’ll play with you, Clarence. She likes boys, and she likes dark places. And she won’t scream. She won’t scream no matter what you do to her, because she’s a good, good girl, and a good, good girl needs a bad, bad boy to bring out the best in her…’

The intruder was looking at her in amusement, and she knew that he had seen something of what she had glimpsed, because he was rotting too, inside and out, and she wondered if the entity brought the cancer with it, if that degree of spiritual and mental decay somehow had to find a physical expression. After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul, and other poisons, if absorbed slowly over time, brought changes to the body: nicotine yellowed the skin and blackened the lungs; alcohol damaged the liver and the kidneys, and scoured the face; radiation made your hair fall out; lead, asbestos, heroin, they all affected the body, bringing it closer to its final ruination. Was it not possible that evil in its purest form, the quintessence of it, might do the same? Because the sickness had been in Clarence, just as it was in the man who now held her in his power.

‘What was his name?’ he asked, and she felt compelled to reply.

‘Clarence,’ she said. ‘His name was Clarence.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

She shook her head.

But he wanted to. Oh yes, Clarence had wanted to play, and Clarence played rough when it came to little girls.

Karen drew her knees up beneath her chin, and wrapped her arms around them. Although the reflection was no longer visible, she was afraid of what had created it. It was in here. She could feel it. She could feel it because there was a connection between her and Clarence Buttle. She was the one that escaped him. Worse, she was the one who got him caught, and he would never forgive her for that, never forgive her for leaving him to rot painfully in a prison hospital with nobody to visit him, no one to care about him, when all he’d wanted to do was play.

The intruder approached her, and she shrank from him.

‘My name is Herod,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to hurt you again, not as long as you answer my questions honestly.’

But she was looking past him, her eyes flicking around the room, her nostrils twitching, alert for the approach of Not-Clarence, and his cancerous breath, and his filthy, probing fingers. The old man peered at her curiously.

‘But you’re not frightened of me, are you?’ he said. ‘Because you’ve seen him, and that’s quite the thing, quite the thing. Oh, you can call him Clarence, if you like, but he has lots of names. To me, he’s the Captain.’

He put a hand on her head and stroked her hair, and she trembled at his touch, because whatever had been in Clarence was also in him. ‘Though you don’t have to be scared of the Captain either, not unless you’ve done something wrong, something very, very wrong.’

He shifted his hand from her head to her shoulder and dug his nails in hard, causing her to wince and look him in the face, her eyes drawn to the arrow-shaped decay in his upper lip, and the virulence of its infection.

‘But I suspect that even a little whore like you, all warm breath and hot britches, has no cause to worry, because the Captain has more pressing concerns. You’re inconsequential, girly, and as long as you stay that way then the Captain will mind his distance. And if you don’t, well…’

He cocked his head, as though listening to a voice that only he could hear, then grinned unpleasantly. ‘The Captain says to tell you that there’s a storm drain with your name on it, and a friend there who’s just aching for someone to join him.’ He winked. ‘The Captain says that old Clarence always did like warm, wet places, and the Captain saw him right on that score, because the Captain always keeps his word. Clarence now has a deep, dark, damp hole all to himself where he waits for the girl that got away. But that’s the thing about the Captain’s promises: you have to read the small print before you sign on the dotted line. Clarence didn’t understand that, which is why he’s been alone for so long, but I do. The Captain and I, we’re real close. We speak with one voice, you might say.’

He stood, his grip still tight upon her so that she was forced to her feet.

‘Now I have some bad news for you, but you’re going to take it like a trooper: your boyfriend, Joel Tobias, isn’t going to be the meat in your bun again anytime soon. He and I, we tried to have a talk, but he was a reluctant conversationalist, and I was forced to exert a little pressure on him.’

He placed his left hand upon her cheek, and pinched it gently. His skin was chill to the touch, and she let out a little animal whine.

‘I think you know what I’m talking about. To be honest, it was a blessing for him when the end came.’

Her legs went weak. She would have fallen had Herod not held on to her. She tried to push him away, but he was stronger than her. She began to weep, but suddenly his hand was in her hair again, pulling her head back so far that she heard her neck crack.

‘None of that,’ said Herod. ‘No time to grieve now. I’m a busy man, and time isn’t on my side. We have things to do, and then you can mourn him all you like.’

He led her to the basement door. He reached out his right hand and placed it against the wood.

‘You know what’s down there?’

Karen shook her head. She was still crying, but there was a numbness to her grief, like pain fighting to break through the diminishing effect of an anesthetic.

‘You’re lying again,’ said Herod, ‘but in a way you’re also telling the truth, because I don’t think that you do know what’s down there, not really. But you and I, we’re going to find out together. Where’s the key?’

Slowly, she reached into the pocket of her robe and handed the key to him.

‘I don’t want to go back in the basement,’ she said. She thought that she sounded like a little girl, sobbing and wheedling.

‘Well, missy, I can’t very well leave you up here all alone, can I?’ he replied. He spoke reasonably, even kindly, but this was the same man who had called her a whore earlier; who had left marks in her skin where his fingers had dug into her shoulder; who had torn her earlobe; who had killed Joel and left her alone again. ‘But you don’t need to worry, not when you’ve got me to take care of you.’ He handed the key back to her. ‘Now go ahead and open it. I’ll be right behind you.’

To encourage her further, he showed her his gun, and she did as she was told, her hand trembling only slightly as she inserted the key in the lock. He stepped back as she opened the door, revealing the darkness beyond.

‘Where’s the light?’ he asked.

‘It doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘It broke when I was down there.’ They broke it, she almost added. They wanted me to trip and fall, so that I’d be forced to stay down there with them.

Herod looked around, and saw the flashlight lying on the floor. He bent to retrieve it, and as he did so she kicked him hard on the side of the head, sending him to his knees. She ran for the front door, but she was still fumbling for the latch when he was on her. She cried out, and he covered her mouth with his hand and pulled her backward, then tossed her to the floor. She landed on her back, and before she could raise herself up he was kneeling on her chest. His hand reached into her mouth and grabbed her tongue so hard she thought that he was going to rip it out. She couldn’t speak, but her eyes begged him not to do it.

‘Last warning,’ he said. The wound on his lip had torn and was starting to bleed. ‘I don’t cause pain without reason, and I have no desire to hurt you more than I have already, but if you make me do it, then I will. Cross me again and I’ll feed your tongue to the rats, then leave you to choke on your own blood. Do you understand?’

Karen gave the faintest of nods, fearful of moving her head too much and tearing her tongue. He released his grip, and she tasted him in her mouth, sharp and chemical. She got to her feet, and he turned on the flashlight. ‘Seems to be working fine now,’ he said and gestured for her to go ahead of him.

‘You first,’ he said. ‘Keep your hands away from your body. Don’t touch anything but the stair rail. If you make any sudden moves while we’re down there, it will go hard on you.’

Reluctantly, she moved forward. The beam of the flashlight illuminated the stairs. Herod let her get three steps ahead of him, then followed. When she got halfway down she paused and looked to her left, where the darkness was deepest and the gold box rested on its shelf.

‘Why have you stopped?’ asked Herod.

‘It’s back there,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘The gold box. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it: the gold box?’

‘You’re going to show me exactly where it is.’

‘There are things down there,’ she said. ‘I saw them.’

‘I told you: you’re in no danger. Keep going.’

She continued descending until she reached floor level. Herod joined her, the flashlight searching the corners of the basement. Shadows jumped, but they were caused by the beam, and she might almost have been persuaded that she had imagined the earlier forms were it not for the fact that the whispering had returned. This time, it sounded different: puzzled, perhaps, but expectant.

She led him to where the treasures lay, but he showed no interest in the exposed seals, or the beautiful marble head. He had eyes only for the box. He allowed the light to play upon it for a time, tutting softly at some of the damage that it had incurred, the small dents and scuffs that marred the decoration on its sides, then pointed to a canvas bag that lay on top of some old suitcases stacked beside the shelf.

‘Pick it up and put it in that bag,’ he told her. ‘And be careful.’

She didn’t want to touch it again, but equally she wanted all of this to be over. He would leave when he had the box. If he was a man of his word, he would let her live. Despite her fear of him, she believed that he did not want to kill her. Had he wished to do so, she would be dead already.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s in there?’

‘What did you see when you were down here?’ Herod replied.

‘I saw shapes. They were deformed. Like men except… not men.’

‘No, not men,’ said Herod. ‘Have you heard of Pandora’s box?’

She nodded. ‘It was a box that contained evil, and it was opened and all of that evil escaped into the world.’

‘Very good,’ said Herod, ‘except it was a pot, a pithos, not a box. The term “Pandora’s box” derives from a mistranslation into Latin.’

He was glad that there was someone with him, now that he had that for which he had long been searching. He wanted to explain. He wanted someone else to understand its importance.

‘This,’ he continued, ‘is a true Pandora’s box, a prison of gold. Seven chambers, each with seven locks symbolizing the gates to the netherworld.’ He pointed to the arachnid clasps. ‘The locks are shaped like spiders because it was a spider that protected the prophet Mohammed from assassins by weaving a web in front of the mouth of the cave in which he was hiding with Abu Bakr. The men who constructed the box hoped that the spider might protect them in turn. As for what the box contains, well, let’s call them ancient spirits, almost as old as the Captain himself. Almost.’

‘They’re bad,’ said Karen. She shuddered. ‘I felt it from them.’

‘Oh, that they are,’ said Herod. ‘They’re very bad indeed.’

‘But what are you going to do with it?’

‘I’m going to open it and set them free,’ said Herod, speaking as if to a child.

Karen stared at him. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because that’s what the Captain wants, and what the Captain wants, the Captain gets. Now pick up the box and put it in the bag.’

She shook her head. Herod drew his gun and placed it against her lips.

‘I have what I want,’ he said. ‘I can kill you, or we can both live. It’s your choice.’

Reluctantly, she lifted the box. Once again, she felt it vibrate in her hands. There was a tapping from inside it, as though a rodent were trapped in there, scratching vainly at the lid. It very nearly caused her to drop the box. Herod hissed in vexation, but said nothing. Carefully, she placed it in the canvas bag, then pulled the zipper closed. She tried to hand it to him, but he shook his head.

‘I’ll let you carry it,’ he said. ‘Go on. We’re nearly done.’

She led the way up the stairs, Herod close behind her this time, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder and the gun at her back. When she reached the living room, she stopped.

‘Keep-’ Herod began to say, before he saw what Karen had seen. There were three men in the room, all armed, their guns now pointing at his head.

‘Let her go,’ I said.

36

If Herod was surprised to find us waiting for him, he hid it well. He pulled Karen Emory in closer to him, using her body as a shield, his gun pressed hard against the side of her neck, pointing upward into her brain. Only the right side of his head was visible to us, and even Louis wasn’t going to take that shot. Blood was coursing from the terrible wound on Herod’s upper lip, staining his lips and his chin.

‘Are you okay, Karen?’ I asked.

She tried to nod, but she was so afraid of the gun that the movement was little more than a tremor. Herod’s eyes gleamed. He paid no attention to Angel and Louis. His gaze was fixed on me.

‘I know you,’ said Herod. ‘I saw you at the bar.’

‘You should have introduced yourself. We could have saved a lot of time and energy.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. The Captain wouldn’t have liked it.’

‘Who’s the Captain?’ But I recalled the second figure that I thought I had glimpsed in the car, a wraith with a clown’s face.

‘The Captain is very curious about you, and it takes a lot to pique the Captain’s interest. After all, he’s seen so much that there’s little left to rouse him from his torpor.’

‘He’s screwing with you,’ said Louis.

‘Am I?’ said Herod. He cocked his head, as though listening to a voice that only he could hear. ‘Dominus meus bonus et benignitas est. Ring any bells, Mr. Parker?’

I shifted my grip on the weapon in my hand. I had heard that phrase before. It functioned on a number of levels: as a coded greeting; as a dark joke, a declaration of faith in an entity that was far from benign; and as a naming of sorts. ‘My master is good and kind.’ Good and kind. Goodkind, or Mr. Goodkind. That was what his followers called him, or some of them, but now here was Herod implying that Goodkind and the thing that he called the Captain were one and the same.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’ve no interest in your ghost stories. What’s in the bag?’

‘Another ghost story,’ said Herod. ‘The prison box. I intend to leave with it, and you’re going to let me.’

‘I don’t think so.’ It was Angel who spoke. He was resting almost languidly against the frame of the door. ‘You may not have noticed, but there are three guns pointing at you.’

‘And I have one pointing at Ms. Emory’s head,’ replied Herod.

‘You kill her, and we kill you,’ said Angel. ‘And then you don’t get to play with your box.’

‘You think that you have all the moves worked out, Mr. Parker, you and your friends,’ said Herod. ‘It pains me to disabuse you of that notion. Ms. Emory, reach very slowly into the outside left pocket of my coat, and take out what you find there. Do it gently, now, or you won’t get to discover how this particular story ends.’

Karen fumbled in his pocket, then threw something on the floor between us. It was a woman’s pocketbook.

‘Go ahead,’ said Herod. ‘Take a look inside.’

It had landed close to Louis’s left foot. He kicked it back to me, never taking his eyes from Herod. I opened it. It held cosmetics, some pills and a wallet. The wallet contained Carrie Saunders’s driving license.

‘I buried her,’ said Herod. ‘Oh, not too deep. The box is steel – military in construction, I expect; I found it in her basement – but I didn’t want it to buckle under the weight of the dirt. She has air too, courtesy of a hole and a plastic breathing tube. But it can’t be pleasant, being trapped in the darkness, and who knows what might happen if her tube became blocked? A falling leaf would be enough, or a clod of dirt dislodged by a passing animal. By now, she must be close to panic, and if she does panic, well… Her hands are tied. If she doesn’t keep her lips on that tube, she’ll probably only have fifteen minutes to live, at most. They will be fifteen very long minutes, though.’

‘Why her?’ I said.

‘I think you know why, and if you don’t then you’re not as clever as I thought you were. I’d love to stay here and fill you in on all of the details, but suffice it to say that Mr. Tobias and his friends were very busy earlier killing Mexicans, and when they were done they went to Ms. Saunders’s house to regroup. I learned a lot from Mr. Tobias before he expired: about a Jimmy Jewel and how he died, and someone called Foster Jandreau. It appears that Ms. Saunders could be quite the seductress when she put her mind to it. I guess you could call her the brains of the operation. She killed them all: Roddam, Jewel, Jandreau. Maybe you’ll have the opportunity to question her yourself, if you let me go. The longer you prevaricate, the lower her chances of survival become. Everything is an exchange. Everything is a negotiation. I am an honorable man, and I keep my promises. I promise you the life of Ms. Emory, and the location of Carrie Saunders’s makeshift coffin, in return for the box. We both know that you’re not going to let Ms. Emory die. You’re not the kind of man who could easily live with that knowledge.’

I looked again at the license, and at Karen Emory’s terrified face.

‘How do we know that you’ll keep your part of the bargain?’ I said.

‘Because I always keep my bargains.’

I gave it a couple of seconds before nodding my assent.

‘You’re not serious?’ said Angel. ‘You’re going to take that deal?’

‘What choice do we have?’ I said. ‘Put your guns down. Let him leave.’

Both Angel and Louis hesitated for a moment, then Louis slowly lowered his weapon, and Angel did the same.

‘You have a cell phone?’ asked Herod.

‘Yes.’

‘Give me the number.’

I did so, then said: ‘You want me to write it down for you?’

‘No, thank you. I have an exceptional memory. In ten minutes, I will drop Ms. Emory at a pay phone, and I’ll tell her where Carrie Saunders is buried. I’ll even give Ms. Emory the money to make the call. Then you can ride to her rescue, and our business will be concluded.’

‘If you renege, I’ll hunt you down. You, and your Captain.’

‘Oh, you have my word. I don’t kill unnecessarily. I already have enough stains on my soul to last a lifetime.’

‘And the box?’

‘I’m going to open it.’

‘You think you can control what’s in there?’

‘No, I don’t, but the Captain can. Good-bye, Mr. Parker. Tell your friends to step away. I’d like all three of you in the far corner, please. If I see any of you emerge from the house, or if you try to follow me, our arrangement is off. I will kill Ms. Emory, and Carrie Saunders can take her chances in her own prison box. Do we understand each other?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe that we’re going to meet again,’ said Herod. ‘But you and the Captain, that’s another matter. In time, I’m sure that you and he will have the chance to become more intimately acquainted.’

Angel stepped away from the door, and he, Louis, and I moved into the corner of the room diagonally opposite the front door. Still keeping Karen as a shield, Herod backed out of the house, Karen closing the door behind them at his instruction. I had one last sight of her, and then they were gone. Moments later, there was the sound of a car starting up and driving away.

Louis made a move to the door, but I stopped him.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You trust him?’

‘In this, yes,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t talking about Herod.’

‘Neither was I.’

37

I don’t know if Carrie Saunders panicked. I don’t know if the tube slipped from her mouth and, trapped as she was, she was unable to reach it again. Sometimes, I find myself imagining her final moments, and always I see Herod tossing aside his spade and staring down at the compacted dirt, then gently tugging the breathing tube from the mouth of the woman buried below. He did it because she had breached some unwritten contract with him, but also because it pleased him to do so. For all his talk of honor, and negotiations, and promises, I believed that Herod was a cruel man. He kept his word about releasing Karen Emory, and he told her where Carrie Saunders was buried before he left her, but the autopsy concluded that Carrie Saunders had been dead for hours when she was found.

I do know this: Carrie Saunders killed Jimmy Jewel, and she killed Foster Jandreau. A gun, a Glock.22, was found in her house. The bullets matched those used to kill Jimmy and Jandreau, and her fingerprints were the only ones found on the weapon. As for Roddam, there was no way of knowing for certain if she was responsible for his death, but Herod had told the truth about her involvement in the other killings, so there was no reason to believe that he had been lying about Roddam.

After Saunders’s body was found, there was some speculation that the man responsible for her death might have framed her for the other killings, but it was dismissed when Bobby Jandreau came forward and told of how he had spoken with his cousin Foster about his belief that the death of Damien Patchett, and those of Bernie Kramer and the Harlans, were linked to a smuggling operation being run by Joel Tobias, although he had no formal evidence to offer in support. Foster Jandreau was ambitious, but he hadn’t advanced fast enough for his liking, and had stalled. If he could find evidence of illegal dealings on the part of Joel Tobias, he might have been able to resuscitate a moribund career. But Bobby Jandreau had made the mistake of discussing the matter with Carrie Saunders during one of their therapy sessions, and then she had killed Foster to stop him delving further into the operation and sullied his reputation with drug vials. Whether or not she did so with Joel Tobias’s knowledge and consent I could not say, and those who might have been able to tell me were all dead. I remembered what others had said about Tobias: he was smart, but not that smart. He was not capable of running an operation potentially involving millions of dollars worth of stolen antiquities, but Carrie Saunders was. In Paris, Rochman revealed that his contact for the purchase of the ivories and the seals had been a woman who used the pseudonym ‘Medea’ and that the money had been wired to a bank in Bangor, Maine. Rumors emerged that Saunders and Roddam might have been lovers during their time together at Abu Ghraib, but they were an unlikely couple. War created such odd unions, but it was probable that Roddam and Saunders were using each other, and Saunders had come out on top, because Roddam had died. Saunders and Tobias had gone to the same high school in Bangor, Saunders graduating the year after Tobias. They had known each other for a long time, but if she had been the guiding intelligence behind the operation, she wouldn’t have required the permission of Joel Tobias or anyone else to do whatever she had to in order to ensure its success.

I was there when they broke open the lock on the box, and I saw Carrie Saunders’s face. Whatever she might have done, she did not deserve to die in that way.

Shortly after the discovery of the body, I gave my statement to the police, with two agents from ICE, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in attendance. Behind them hovered a small man with a beard and dark skin, who introduced himself as Dr. Al-Daini, late of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The agents were part of the JIACG, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group, a grab bag of military, FBI, CIA, Treasury, ICE, and anyone else who happened to be passing and had an interest in Iraq, and how terrorists might be financing their operations. They had been drawn to the looting of the Iraq Museum by concerns that the stolen items were being sold on the black market to raise funds for the insurgency. The man who had interrogated me at the Blue Moon was lying, both to me and to himself: people were being hurt by what they were doing, but they were dying on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah and anywhere else in Iraq that American soldiers were being targeted. I told the agents and Dr. Al-Daini everything, with only one detail concealed. I did not tell them of the Collector. Dr. Al-Daini seemed to sway slightly at the news of the loss of the box, but he said nothing.

When we were done, I got in my car and drove south.

38

Herod sat in his study, surrounded by his books and his tools. There were no mirrors, no reflective surfaces. He had even placed his computer in another room so that there was no chance of a face being glimpsed. The Captain was a distraction, his desire to see the box opened so compelling that Herod had been forced to banish him from its presence by covering every reflective surface. He needed peace in which to work; to have done so in the presence of the Captain would have driven him insane. Figuring out the mechanisms of the locks would take time: days, perhaps. They had to be opened in a certain combination, for there were cells within cells. It was a puzzle box, an extraordinary construct: whatever relics had been concealed in the final chamber were bound with wire, and the wire was connected in turn to every lock. Simply to have broken the locks by force would have torn the presumably fragile relics apart, and if someone had gone to such efforts to secure them then it meant that it was important that the relics remain intact.

The box stood on a white cloth. It no longer vibrated, and all of the voices within had ceased their whispering, as though wary of imposing on the concentration of the one who might free them. Herod was not afraid of them. The Captain had told him of what lay in the box, and the nature of the bonds that restricted them. They were beasts, but chained beasts. Once the box was opened, they would be revealed, yet still constrained. They would have to be made to understand that they were the Captain’s creatures.

He was about to prise off the first spider, and reveal the mechanism of the lock, when the house alarm went off, shocking him with its suddenness. Herod did not even pause to assess the situation. He hit the locks on the safe room, sealing himself inside. He then picked up the phone, pressed the red button on the handset, and was immediately connected with the security company responsible for monitoring the alarm. He confirmed a possible intrusion and notified them that he had locked himself in the safe room. He walked to a closet and opened it to reveal a bank of monitor screens, each revealing one aspect of the house, both internal and external, and its grounds. He thought that he now caught the Captain’s reflection on the screens, and felt his intense curiosity as he tried to glimpse the box, but Herod ignored him. There were more pressing issues for now. He could see no evidence of intrusion, and the gates to the property remained closed. It might well have been a false alarm, but Herod was disinclined to take chances with his personal safety or with his collection, especially when such a valuable and rare addition had just been made to it.

After four minutes, an unmarked black van appeared at the gates. A numerical security code, changed weekly as an added safeguard, was entered on the pad by the gatepost, which Herod duly confirmed. The gates opened, and the van entered the property, the gates immediately closing again behind it. Once the van reached the front of the house, its doors opened and four armed men appeared, two of them immediately moving to check the sides and rear of the building, one man training his weapon on the grounds, while the last approached the door and activated the main intercom.

‘Dürer,’ said a voice. Like the numerical code, the word confirming the security team’s identity was also changed weekly.

‘Dürer,’ repeated Herod. He remotely activated the front door lock, opening it and allowing the security guards access to the main house. One of them, the one who had given the code word, immediately entered. The man who had been watching the grounds moved to the door, but remained outside until the main search team had joined him, after confirming that the rest of the house was secure, at which point he too entered the house, leaving them outside. Herod tried to follow their progress from screen to screen as they deactivated the main alarm and checked the log, then proceeded to move through the house. Ten minutes after the search had commenced, the intercom buzzed in Herod’s office.

‘You’re clear, sir. Looks like it was something in zone two: dining room window. There’s no sign of attempted entry, though. Might be a fault. We can send out a technician in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ said Herod. ‘You can leave now.’

He watched the four-man team leave. When they were gone, and the gates had closed behind them, he deactivated the locks on the study door and hid the screens, and the Captain, from sight. Although the room was well ventilated, and he often worked with the door closed, Herod disliked keeping it locked. The thought of imprisonment, or long-term confinement of any kind, terrified him. He thought that was why he had enjoyed inflicting it on the Saunders woman. It was a kind of transference, but also a punishment. He had offered both her and Tobias a deal: their lives for the location of the trove, but they had been greedy, and had commenced a negotiation for which he had neither the time nor the inclination. The second deal was offered to Tobias alone: he could die slowly, or quickly, but he was going to die. Tobias had trouble believing that at first, but Herod had managed to convince him in the end.

As he opened the door of his study, he was still mildly troubled by what might have caused the alarm activation, and was not concentrating fully on the room beyond, so that the Captain’s voice sounded like a siren in his ears as soon as he began to emerge, an incoherent burst of anger and warning and fear. Before he could respond, there was movement in front of him. There were two men, both armed. One of them smelled so strongly of nicotine that his presence in the room seemed immediately to pollute the air. He pushed Herod to the ground and placed a blade against his neck.

Herod stared up at the face of the Collector. Behind him was the detective, Parker. Neither man spoke, but Herod’s head was filled with noise.

It was the sound of the Captain, screaming.

39

I kept Herod under my gun as his eyes moved back and forth between the Collector and me, as though uncertain as to which of us posed the greater threat. Herod’s own gun had been tossed to the floor by the Collector, and now lay out of reach. The Collector, meanwhile, was examining Herod’s shelves, picking up items and examining them admiringly before restoring them to their place.

‘You possess an impressive array of treasures,’ said the Collector. ‘Books, manuscripts, artifacts. I have been following your progress for some time, but even I had not imagined that you were so assiduous, and possessed such exquisite taste.’

‘I am a collector, like you,’ said Herod.

‘No, not like me,’ came the reply. ‘My collection is very different.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘Technology. Your car was fitted with a tracking device while you were in Ms. Emory’s house. I believe it might have been cobbled together by the late Joel Tobias, which is ironic under the circumstances.’

‘You were outside his house all the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘You could have taken me then.’

‘Mr. Parker was anxious to ensure the safety of Ms. Emory, and I wanted to see your collection.’

‘And how did you get in?’

‘Sleight of hand. It’s hard to keep track of so many men moving through one’s house across different screens, especially once the alarm system has been deactivated.’

‘You intercepted the security detail.’

‘Yes. You may sit, but keep your hands on the desk. If they disappear from sight, Mr. Parker will shoot you.’

Herod did as he was instructed, laying the palms of his hands flat on either side of the box.

‘You’re trying to open it,’ said the Collector.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m curious to see what is inside.’

‘Such trouble you’ve gone to, all for the sake of idle curiosity.’

‘Not idle. Never idle.’

‘So this is purely a matter of personal interest?’

Herod considered the question. ‘I think you already know the answer to that.’

The Collector pulled up an armchair and settled himself into it, his hands clasped in his lap, the fingers intertwined and the thumbs crossed, as though he were about to pray.

‘Do you even know who it is that you serve?’ he said.

‘Do you?’

One corner of the Collector’s mouth raised itself in a smile. ‘I settle accounts. I collect debts.’

‘But for whom?’

‘I will not name Him here, in the presence of this… thing.’

His fingers unfolded themselves as he indicated the box. He reached into a pocket and produced a gunmetal cigarette case and a matchbook. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a shame. It seems that I am set to impose still further on your hospitality.’

The Collector put a cigarette between his lips, and struck the match. Soon, a foul-smelling gray smoke curled toward the ceiling. Herod’s face tightened in distaste.

‘I have them specially made,’ said the Collector. ‘I used to smoke generic brands, but I found their ubiquity crass. If I’m going to poison myself, I’d prefer to do so with a modicum of class.’

‘How admirable,’ said Herod. ‘Do you mind if I ask where you plan to put the ash?’

‘Oh, these are slow burning,’ said the Collector. ‘By the time it becomes an issue, you’ll already be dead.’

The atmosphere in the room changed. Some of the oxygen seemed to be sucked from it, and I heard a high-pitched whine in my head.

‘By your hand, or by your friend’s?’ said Herod softly.

‘Neither.’

Herod looked puzzled, but before he could pursue the matter further the Collector spoke again.

‘What name does he go by, the one whom you serve?’

Herod shifted slightly in his chair.

‘I know him as the Captain,’ he replied, ‘but he has many names.’

‘I’m sure. The Captain. The One Who Waits Behind the Glass. Mr. Goodkind. It hardly matters, does it? He is so old that he has no name of his own. They are all the constructs of others.’

The Collector’s right hand moved gently, taking in the room, smoke trailing from his fingers.

‘No mirrors here. No reflective surfaces. One might think you were tiring of his presence. It must be wearying, I admit. All of that anger, all of that need. To work with it in your head would be next to impossible.’ He leaned forward and tapped the box. ‘And now he wants this opened, to add a little more chaos to an already troubled world. Well, no sense in disappointing him, is there?’

The Collector rose. He placed his cigarette carefully on the arm of the chair, then leaned over the desk and began moving his fingers along the locking mechanisms, the tips dexterously exploring the spider legs, the twisted bodies, the gaping mouths. He did not look at the box as he did so. Instead, his eyes never left Herod’s.

‘What are you doing?’ said Herod. ‘These are complex mechanisms. They need to be examined. Their order needs to be established…’

But even as he spoke, a series of clicks and whirrs began to sound inside the box. Still the Collector’s fingers moved, and as they did so the mechanical noises were drowned out by another. It was a whispering that seemed to fill the room, rising in terrible joy, voices clambering over one another like insects in a nest. One lid opened, then another and another. A shadow appeared against one of the bookcases, hunched and horned, and quickly it was joined by two others, a prelude to what was about to be revealed.

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘You can’t do this!’ I moved to my right, so that the Collector could see me, and I shifted the muzzle of the gun from Herod to him. ‘Don’t open that box.’

The Collector lifted his hands in the air, not in a gesture of surrender, but of display, like a magician at the end of a particularly fine conjuring act.

‘Too late,’ he said.

And the final lid sprang open.

For a moment, all was still in the room. The shadows on the wall ceased to move, and what had for so long been without substance assumed concrete form. The Collector remained standing, his hands still raised, a conductor waiting for the baton to be placed between his fingers so that the symphony might begin. Herod stared into the box, and his face was illuminated by a cold white light, like sunlight reflected from snow. His expression changed, altering from fear to wonder at what was revealed to him, but concealed from the Collector, and from me.

And then Herod understood, and he was lost.

The Collector spun away, diving toward me in the same movement, forcing me to the ground, yet I was compelled to look. I saw a black back curved like a bow, its skin distorted and torn by the eruption of sharp spinal bones. I saw a head that was too large for the torso that supported it, the neck lost in folds of flesh, the top of its skull a fantasy of twisted yellow bones like the roots of an ancient tree stripped of bark. I saw yellow eyes glitter. I saw dark nails. I saw sharp teeth. One head became two, then three. Two descended on Herod, but one turned to me-

Then the Collector’s fingers were pressing into the back of my head, forcing my face to the floor.

‘Don’t look,’ he said. ‘Close your eyes. Close your eyes, and pray.’

There was no sound from Herod. That was what struck me most. He was silent as they worked on him, and though I was tempted to look again, I did not, not even when the Collector’s grip upon me eased, and I felt him stand. I heard a series of mechanical clicks, and the Collector said, ‘It is done.’

Only then did I open my eyes.

Herod sat slumped in his chair, his head tilted back, his eyes and mouth open. He was dead, but appeared uninjured except for a thin trickle of blood that ran from his left ear, and the fact that every capillary in his eyes had exploded, turning his corneas red. The box on his desk was closed once more, and I heard the whispering return, now filled with rage like a hive of bees shaken by an outside force.

The Collector picked up his cigarette from the arm of his chair. A long finger of ash hung from the tip, like a building about to fall. He tapped it into Herod’s open mouth, then returned the cigarette to his own mouth and drew lengthily upon it.

‘If you’re going to taunt the dogs, always check the length of the chain,’ he said. He picked up the box and tucked it under his arm.

‘You’re taking it?’ I said.

‘Temporarily. It’s not mine to keep.’

He wandered over to one of the shelves and removed a tiny ivory statue of a female demon. It looked oriental, but I was no expert.

‘A souvenir,’ he said, ‘to add to my collection. Now, I have one more task to accomplish. Let me introduce you to someone…’

We stood in front of the ornate mirror outside Herod’s study. At first, there was only my reflection and that of the Collector, but in time we were joined by a third. Initially, it seemed little more than a blur, dark gray absences where eyes and a mouth should have been, but then it formed itself into recognizable features.

It was the face of Susan, my dead wife, but with holes burnt into her skin where her eyes once were. Then, like a rattle being shaken, the face blurred again, and it was Jennifer, my murdered daughter, but also eyeless, her mouth filled with biting insects. More faces now, enemies from the past, changing faster and faster: the Traveling Man, the one who had torn Susan and Jennifer apart; the killer of women, Caleb Kyle; Pudd, his face wreathed in old spider webs; and Brightwell: the demon Brightwell, the goiter on his neck swollen like a great womb of blood.

For he was in all of them, and they were all of him.

Finally, there was just the figure of a man, one in his early forties, of a little more than average height. There was gray seeping into his dark hair, and his eyes were troubled and sad. Beside him was his twin, and next to him was the Collector. Then the Collector stepped away, the two reflections became one, and I stared back only at myself.

‘What did you feel?’ asked the Collector, and there was an uncertainty to his voice that I had not heard before. ‘What did you feel when you looked upon it?’

‘Rage. And fear. It was afraid.’ The answer came before I had even become aware of the thought. ‘Afraid of you.’

‘No,’ said the Collector, ‘not of me…’

I saw thoughtfulness in his face, but there was something else.

For the first time, I felt the Collector’s own fear of me.