Mystery: Satan's Road - Suspense Thriller Mystery (Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Suspense Crime Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  We met on the sidewalk lined with azaleas. Gideon was tall; his broad shoulders evident under what appeared to be a hand-made cotton shirt. He wore dark green slacks of the same rough fiber and thick leather sandals. I guessed his age at late fifties. I couldn’t remember any age specified on the online accounts.

  "Sheriff," he nodded, his hands still in his pockets. "What brings you here, this beautiful summer morning?" His eyes moved from McNulty to me and then back to McNulty, as if I belonged to an inferior caste that held no importance for him. I looked up and noticed that three more soldiers had appeared by the front door, one carrying a video camera. They looked curious and unafraid. I wondered if our meeting was being broadcast live or would be edited for use later.

  "Gideon, sorry to bother you, but we have to follow up on a report,” said McNulty. “Authorities have a witness that says a woman may be held here against her will."

  Gideon’s eyebrows registered slight surprise. "Have you talked to Judge Lahey?" McNulty seemed to blanch slightly at the comment.

  "Lahey's in ICU. His diabetes is acting up again."

  Gideon frowned slightly. "That's too bad." He turned back and eyed his military and media support up on the porch; men who were suddenly looking more serious.

  "Where did you get a search warrant then?" asked the church leader.

  McNulty tilted his head back. "Went to King William County and got Meridith Molvey to sign off."

  Gideon nodded. "You believe this story, Sheriff? About this old woman?"

  McNulty shook his head and the polite smile disappeared. "Didn't say it was an old woman, Gideon."

  Gideon smiled back at the sheriff. "Had to be old. The young ones never want to leave. This your search party?"

  I grunted. "DC Homicide. Gregory Hyde." I flashed my badge.

  "How's Rosey?" was all Gideon said, but it froze me in mid sentence. Gideon turned back to McNulty, who looked slightly confused.

  "Rosey is short for Rosencrantz. Captain Rosencrantz. He's detective Hyde's superior. We served in Vietnam together."

  "That would make you almost eighty," I said, dismissing his comment as a bad lie.

  "That's about right," answered Gideon, clearly enjoying the conversation.

  "Then you’d know,” I said, “That Rosencrantz retired a decade ago. So now that we have that reunion out of the way – excuse us, but I have a search to carry out." Gideon removed his hands from his pockets and raised them up.

  "Before you start, two things. One. There is no one on this compound being held against their will. But you seem hell-bent on proving otherwise, so let’s just skip to number two.

  Sheriff, Judge Lahey may be on his deathbed, but you and I both know how things are done in this county. You also know his son is one of my most-trusted advisors and supported your re-election two years ago.” He was looking at McNulty. “I say that only because I thought we were friends. Friends don't barge in on each other to mess up a daily work schedule. This county doesn't need a police department led by a loose cannon." Then he turned to me.

  "And Mr. Hyde, Rosy may be retired, but we go back a long way. Why don't you call him right now and ask him if he thinks it would be advisable to carry out this search?"

  I looked at Gideon, puzzling out what he was trying to accomplish. "You want to chat with Rosy, you dial up the old coot. I’ve got a job to do," I said.

  "I already have," he answered back. One of the younger soldiers, acne roaming across his forehead in angry patches, walked up and handed me a cell phone. I looked at McNulty, who seemed unsure of his next move. I was getting the impression that he had totally lost his resolve to carry on. I pressed the speaker to my ear.

  "Greg, is that you?" said a voice at the other end.

  "Rosy? What the hell is going on?"

  "Don't go in there, Greg. I never screwed you around and I won't start now. Don't do it, I'm begging you."

  I turned away from Gideon and lowered my voice. "Rosy. You've gone soft in the head. This is police business."

  "Screw the business. These people will do anything they have to. They'll track down your mother in Phoenix and feed her to desert coyotes. They'll track down your sister . . . believe me, Greg. Don't go there."

  I could feel my face flush. I let the expensive cell phone drop to the sidewalk, lifted my right leg and stamped down on the silver plastic case, all the time my eyes on Gideon. Then I ground the fragments into the concrete walk. The soldier, who handed it to me, stepped back like I had discovered an improvised explosive device and he wanted to be out of range.

  "Gideon,” I said, moving up closer to him, noticing he smelled like homemade soap. “I know you’re used to getting your way. Billionaires usually do. And you believe you have God on your side too. But if you get in my face like that one more time, neither your money or your church will save you from being sorry you were born.”

  Gideon maintained his irritating stony half-smile.

  “Here’s my question though,” I asked. “I’d like to know how you fit that gigantic ego of yours into that ill-fitting shirt every morning. No answer? OK. How about this then – I know about your adolescent J-Day plans. You just don’t know yet that all of the stock markets and financial institutions closed about five minutes ago. A bank holiday courtesy of me and Madame President.” That got his attention. He couldn’t control the corners of his mouth dropping.

  “And she also has about a dozen drones circling only a quarter of a mile from here, armed with good old American Hellfire missiles. God, I wish I had my hands on one of those joysticks.” Even McNulty, who had overheard, was looking shocked. Gideon had taken his hands out of his pocket and looked like he was getting ready to run.

  “Hyde, you are a stupid cop,” said Gideon. “You have no idea what you have gotten into. And dragged good people like McNulty along with you.”

  “We came here in peace, unarmed. Just the two of us. I’m sure your video cameras are capturing that. So what are you going to do to us? In front of all of these people.” I pointed to the women sitting on the picnic tables.

  Before Gideon could answer, we heard a noise and we all turned our heads. Doors banged open behind us. Women were pouring out of the Community centre from all exits, some with frightened looks on their faces, others determined, even angry. They soon filled the turnaround area. I could see this was not easy for them. Several were visibly shaking; arms pulled tight against their bodies.

  A woman in the front, an elder, raised her fist in the air. "Gideon!” she yelled. “Put down your rifles. This is over."

  Gideon stood silently, squinting into the sunlight. He looked back at the men behind him, their rifles at their sides. A few of the younger soldiers looked uncertain, their faces probably searching for mothers and sisters. DNA was always part of the equation.

  Gideon finally turned and addressed the group. "Marjorie, my wife.” He smiled in a practiced way and raised his hands. “You forget. This is the moment we talked about! Dreamed about. And I told you what would happen then. That you would be frightened. That you would need to be strong.” He moved his focus around the group, connecting with as many faces as he could, working to draw them back in.

  “This is the moment you sacrificed for. And in minutes the world will turn for us and everything will change. You, all of you, will own the new world. Now is not the time to lose courage.”

  Marjorie answered him. "Not us, Gideon. We’re not afraid. But what about our children?” She stepped out from the group, the wind whipping her flower print dress around her knees. “We would have sacrificed ourselves for you, all of us, gladly. All you had to do was ask. But why the children? Why would you sacrifice our children?"

  I looked back at Gideon. The children? What were they talking about?

  "We need an answer to that!" yelled another woman.

  A soldier from the farmhouse porch yelled back. "Anna – go back in. We are almost there. Listen to Gideon. He knows best."

  "No! He doesn't know best. Yo
u don't know what we found, Aaron. A huge bomb under our beds. Under the beds of our children.” She choked back tears. “Our leader wants to blow us up. He wants to kill Katie and Jeremy and all the rest." There was a groan of protest from the crowd, their discontent growing.

  Gideon yelled, and people stopped talking. "We were never going to use that bomb. It is just a threat. You need to trust me."

  "A threat to who?" yelled another woman, moving up from the back of the group of women. They parted for her, touched her shoulders and back with their hands. An elder. "Tell everyone here, Gideon, why you would risk all of the women and these innocent children."

  There was a long silence at this point. I realized then that they were looking at him in a way that made it clear they were unaccustomed to outbursts. Gideon was especially angered with their uncertainty; the veins in his neck and forehead bulged and his face grew redder.

  "He wants to sacrifice us," someone yelled. "Is this new world only for men?”

  Another female voice quailed “Not for us or our children?" The women were growing in their diffidence. Gideon turned back to the men behind him.

  "Is this how you control your women? Can't you see they are about to destroy everything . . ."

  At that moment, Gideon paused, his mouth open, his eyes hooded. I’ve seen that look in prisoners before. Our staff psychologist calls it ‘cognitive load’. The human brain can only deal with so balls in the air at a time, and as a result, mental processing slows right down to a crawl. The scale of the lie Gideon was juggling was too much for even his impressive brain. He stalled, struggling to keep track of all the moving pieces.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but he was also just coming to terms with the fact that his biggest secret was now out. That changed everything for him in an instant. And instead of having an army of federal agents surrounding the compound, he had just McNulty and I – armed with nothing more than a search warrant. Not a great media opportunity for the Soldiers of Patmos.

  Shortly after that, all hell broke loose. And considering we were watching the launch of Gideon’s Armageddon, that’s a pretty appropriate description.

  THE SIEGE OF PARKHURST

  Next time you read a news report, remember this – history is bullshit. And the news is just pure entertainment. I’m not exaggerating; I was there.

  There have been hundreds of accounts of the Siege of Parkhurst. A dozen books (two bestsellers), a million web pages, and at least one graphic novel. All manufactured out of the finest smoke and mirrors.

  I feel like asking so-called eyewitnesses, “Where were you when the bullets started flying? Hiding under a hay bale in the north forty?” (That’s a true story.)

  Like every battle, there were deserters who turned into great storytellers. The most inventive stories always seem to work their way to the front of the line, regardless of who is telling them.

  There were very few heroes in attendance. I know, not what the historians like to hear. Kam O’Brien, the retired professor, was one of them. They don’t give out medals for these kinds of clusters, but they should.

  Gideon had a complex master plan, worked out years before, that almost no one in the organization fully understood. He used the same kind of strategy that terrorist groups are known to use: compartmentalization. A fancy word for no one knows more than they need to.

  For example, Tommy McDane, Gideon’s golden boy, was apparently the only disciple who knew anything about the bomb. And none of the other lieutenants were aware of the plan Gideon had for the two tons of ammonium fertilizer packed into the compound’s storage bunkers.

  A handful of Gideon’s commanders were aware of plans for a mobilization on Washington, but many said later, the ones who survived, that they thought they were going to just form a protest march. The two-dozen armored vehicles they planned to include were only there for moral support. I’ve learned that fanatics often lack a sense of irony.

  Another special group, a suicide squad, was also prepared to disburse throughout Washington to key locations.

  And finally, the millions of dollars of financial support Gideon supplied to every major nut job on the planet with an Internet connection, was a secret to everyone, except of course, the FBI. He had single-handedly sold the concept of J-Day to the international hacker/booter community and then funded the purchase of the tools needed by these high-tech renegades so they could pull off a massive cyber attack on the day of his choosing – the Monday he launched Armageddon from Parkhurst.

  Gideon also paid for travel and accommodations so that hundreds of skilled intrusion experts (black hats they were called, referring to the fact that they weren’t on the side of the good guys) could transfer as much of their expertise as possible to interested parties in Poland, Romania, China, North Korea, Syria and Russia. He funded J-Day seminars in all of these countries for the angry and disenfranchised.

  There was much more, but let’s just look at this disaster from the point of view of one very interested bystander, trained in observation, cool in a firefight, and mostly recovered. Yours truly.

  When a young woman in a pale blue dress collapsed in the common area that afternoon, a strange silence came over the assembled community, that seems now to have lasted for several seconds, but on later reflection, may have only existed for a fraction of that.

  If you’ve ever been in a serious car accident, the seconds before impact seem like that – everything feels suspended and drawn out – as if the coming nightmare is so horrifying, your brain can’t face reality and freezes time for as long as possible.

  The young woman, her eyes already closed, seemed to float to the earth, her plain hand-made dress already permanently stained with her own blood.

  My heart broke at that moment. It felt like everything was lost, and there was nothing any of us could do to change history.

  I looked at Gideon. His face had changed from serene to grim. He knew then that other forces, the government he hated being one of them, were showing surprising craftiness. That’s why they had only sent in two men instead of an army. I know of course that was only an accident of fate.

  A minute after Grace fell (we learned her name later); the Virginia Power Company successfully cut power to the compound. A high-pitched whine could be heard from the farmhouse; an alarm Gideon had installed to warn him of a power disruption.

  I could see it on his face. The game had changed. He seemed to smile, which, if you were a resident standing across from him then, was a frightening reaction to the tragedy of the moment.

  Then he made a hand gesture, which caused me to turn and throw McNulty towards the police car. I was convinced that Gideon’s soldiers on the deck were given orders to fire. But they hesitated. I know what they were thinking. Did Gideon mean fire on the women? That couldn’t be his command. So they turned their rifles on us. About a dozen battle-trained veterans with the best firepower money can buy, now had us in their sights.

  McNulty must have sensed what was coming; he grabbed a handful of my new white shirt and pulled me down behind the utility vehicle’s front fender.

  An AM-15 makes a distinctive sound – a kind of angry burp when the bullet leaves the muzzle. But when the bullet plows through sheet metal and glass, it sounds like atoms are being ripped asunder. The roar of automatic fire around us was impossible to describe.

  The Soldiers of Patmos unleashed all of their pent up anger and frustration on McNulty and I, firing hundreds of rounds into his brand new ride, which was our only protection. Glass exploded across the driveway and the SUV sunk down on shredded tires.

  I was kneeling on the gravel with my right hand on the ground, when I caught a ricocheting round that neatly removed my middle and ring finger. The wound instantly bled like a leaky water pipe.

  McNulty was down on one knee behind me – his shiny head covered with crystals of safety glass, but luckily uninjured. He couldn’t see my wounded hand. He just swore repeatedly and yelled that he only had five hundred miles on the Explorer. All
he was worried about was his precious new SUV – which was the problem with what happened next.

  McNulty’s vehicle was armored with steel plate. The .223 shells the militia was using had copper jackets that would often fragment and bounce off steel, angrily headed in every possible direction. That accounted for my hand wound. Another fateful piece of shrapnel sheared off the front of the SUV and spun across the commons, hitting Grace in her upper abdomen. When she screamed and began to fall, the shooting stopped almost immediately.

  When the commons went quiet, to my surprise, I saw Gideon run past the front of the destroyed car, across the turnaround and plow through the phalanx of women, many who were on the ground now with hands over their heads. Others were surrounding Grace. But Gideon didn’t stop to check on her as everyone expected. He just disappeared into a very surprised crowd.

  What the hell was he doing? He was deserting his command. I saw several of the women get up and start to yell at the soldiers on the deck of the farmhouse and in the yard. Some began moving towards us. They were yelling out names and pleading with the men.

  “Don’t shoot.”

  “Put down your guns.”

  “Gideon wants us dead. You have to stop him.”

  Gideon wants us dead? What did that mean? Because the army or the Feds would show up soon and go to war with them? Problem was, I didn’t see any evidence of the Feds. They were politically savvy enough to stay in the background.

  Something else was poking at my subconscious as well. The power alarm. Just as promised, they would whine for about 30 seconds, then go off briefly, then come on again. So the power was essentially out. Was that Gideon’s concern? No video feed to the outside world? But what could I do? If I stood up, these trigger-happy soldiers could take my head off in seconds.

  Then, to my surprise, three young women walked up to McNulty and I, and took our arms in their hands. They stood us up while others crowded around us. Then they walked us out into the open towards the farmhouse.