Return of the Devil's Spawn

by John Moore

  Rogan took a few deep breaths, his face determined. He was fighting for his life. I guess he knew he would lose, but I didn’t blame him for trying. “I didn’t do anything to you, Bob. As a matter of fact, I allowed your father to bring you back from Haiti to raise you as his natural son. You never knew any poverty in your life. You grew up with a silver spoon placed squarely in your mouth, and I was responsible for putting it there. You were content to jet set around the world with your girlfriend, never having to work a day in your life. It was because of me you had it made. Now you want to compare yourself to me. You’ve never accomplished anything in your life. You’re right about one thing though, I did take advantage of the capitalist system. I did what great men have done for centuries. I built things and made money.”

  He wasn’t trying to save himself. He just wanted to gloat, his maniacal ego out of control. Well, they were his last words. I hope he enjoyed them.

  Fire shot from Bob’s eyes as he grabbed Rogan by the throat. “You see, Alexandra, all he cares about is money. He didn’t mention anything about the families he’s destroyed. He thinks they did me some kind of favor by making my father give me money instead of love. He just doesn’t get it. Confess your crimes, Rogan, because this is your last chance.”

  Rogan looked at me, shrugged, and said, “I grew up poor and learned how the system worked. I did what every other corporation does to maximize profits. Sure, some people got hurt while others made money, but that’s just business.”

  Bob pulled a long hatpin from a bag he’d carried in with him. He stood behind Rogan and looked directly at Burak. “You may want to learn something from this,” he said. He took the pin and moved it toward Rogan’s right ear.

  I screamed, “No, Bob, it isn’t right. No matter what he’s done, we need to turn him over to the law. I met his aunt, and she said he was bullied as a child. There was good in him at one time. He killed my mother and Sarah too. Of course I want him to pay. But this isn’t right. You can’t murder him in cold blood. Please, for the love of God, don’t do it.”

  Bob looked at me, his eyes devoid of light.“God has nothing to do with this, Alexandra. What I’m doing today is between me, Rogan, and the devil. He made the deal,he reaped the benefits, and now he must pay the price. He may have had a rough childhood, but he made the choice to commit his crimes, and his choices led him here today.” He looked back at Rogan and said, “See, Bart, she’s as much good in her as you have evil in you. Even though you murdered the people she loved most in this world, she tried to save you.” Then, he slowly pushed the needle through Bart Rogan’s right ear all way through his left, piercing his brain.

  Rogan screamed in pain, and I screamed in shock. Blood trickled down the sides of Rogan’s neck, and a blank expression came over his face. Bob released Rogan’s head, allowing it to fall forward till his chin hit his chest. Then Bob calmly slipped a folded piece of paper into Rogan’s pocket. Barak’s eyes were filled with terror as he squirmed in his chair, making as much noise as he could. There was no point to it. There was nobody left in the building to hear him.

  Bob looked at me and said in a voice devoid of remorse, “Well, that takes care of my unfinished business. Now on to yours.”

  The steady howl of the wind through the Quarter was joined by the pounding of rain accompanied by thunder and lightning. I knew the storm was coming closer, but I didn’t know how bad it was or how close it was. What I did know was Bob might kill the only person who could give me the information I needed. He had a maniacal look in his eye that I was afraid was bloodlust.

  “Bob, please don’t kill Burak,” I said. “I have to know what he used to infect Piper.”

  “That’s not up to me,” Bob said. “That’s up to Mr. Burak.”

  He walked around the table till he stood behind Burak just like he’d done with Rogan. He took the tape from Burak’s mouth and said, “Mr. Rogan chose not to confess his sins. What is your choice, Mr. Burak?” Bob took out another hatpin and waved it in front of Burak.

  Burak stuttered and stammered for a while, so fearful he couldn’t speak, a few Russian curse words leaving his lips. “Get my phone from my pocket. Look at an email I received from Vladimir Popov. It has an attachment with everything you need to know about the bacteria.”

  Bob retrieved Burak’s phone from his pocket and pulled up the email. He showed it to me and it was exactly as Burak described it. I told Bob to forward the email to my phone and Tom’s. He did; then he turned back to Burak.

  “Something else you want to confess?” Bob asked.

  Burak turned paler than he’d been for the last thirty minutes as a lightning strike illuminated his terror-riddenface. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I was ordered by Victor Ivanovich to kill your boyfriend’s brother in Chicago. He owed Victor a great deal of money for gambling debts and couldn’t pay. Victor offered to bargain for his daughter, but he refused. I rigged his car’s computer so I could take control and make him crash. The little girl got away before I could find her. When your boyfriend came to Chicago later he was told by two of our enforcers that if he pushed an investigation into his brother’s death, they’d kill you, the girl, and his parents. I am the one who put the fleas in Piper’s bed. Victor wanted her out of the picture so we could shut down your website without you being able to fix it.”

  Bob looked at my stunned face and asked, “Satisfied?”

  I couldn’t find any words, so I nodded my head yes. When I could speak, I said, “I need to get this information to the doctors. Can you let me go?”

  “Where is your phone?” he asked.

  “It’s in my purse on the floor,” I said.

  Bob took my phone and looked up Sophia’s number. “I’m calling your Colombian friend. Tell her to come and get you.”

  Sophia agreed to brave the storm and come to the condo. Bob disappeared into the raging winds and rain. Sophia moved with remarkable speed, and cut me loose. I made Burak repeat everything he’d told Bob and me. She took him into custody, and I raced back to the hospital. Hurricane Miguela’s winds were pushing my car all over the highway. I suspected they were in excess of one hundred miles per hour. Rain pounded the highway, flash-flooding my path. Still, I pushed on as fast I could. Piper needed me. I wanted to get there before the wind, lightning, and rain disabled the communication lines. Finally, I saw the hospital parking lot and pulled in. The rain had flooded the lot with half a foot of water. I parked and splashed my way into the hospital, struggling against the wind. The gusts tore at my clothes and the rain soaked me to the bone.

  I ran to the ICU and asked for the doctor. When I showed her the email with the details about the bacteria strain she asked me to forward it to her personal cell phone. She quickly got it to the CDC in Atlanta. Within thirty minutes, they responded with the proper course of antibiotics to kill the bacterial infection in Piper’s body.

  The rain and wind intensified, beating against the hospital windows. We all moved to the center of the room to avoid flying glass in the event one broke. I saw debris of every sort imaginable flying past the windows as the building felt like it was swaying with the gusts. I begged them to let me in the room with Piper. The nurses outfitted Tom and me both in full anti-contamination bodysuits and we went to Piper’s side. We stood by her bed, and suddenly the wind stopped. There was absolute calm. I looked at Tom in disbelief.

  “It’s the eye of the hurricane,” he said. “The winds will start again from the opposite direction in a minute.”

  Almost on cue the winds battered the building again, with more intensity than before. The storm unleashed its fury on the city, and I wondered if the levees would hold. If they didn’t we would be trapped in the hospital for days. If the generators ran out of fuel, we could be in big trouble. I prayed—to God, to my mother, to Sarah. And then to Tom’s brother, though I’d never met him. He may not have been the best father, but he’d died for his daughter.

/>   As the storm did its worst, Tom and I remained by Piper’s side. An hour passed before the winds stopped and the rain gradually subsided. I looked outside and saw that the streets weren’t flooded. The levees had held. They’d done their job, and so did the antibiotics.

  Piper opened her eyes and smiled at Tom and me. “You two sure look funny,” she said. I cried happy tears to hear her voice. She was going to be OK. The doctor came into the room and said we could ditch our contamination suits because Piper was not contagious. Oh my God, what a relief.

  We stayed in the room with Piper talking away for at least two hours before the door opened and Detective Demetre Baker pushed a wheelchair with Jess Johnson in it into the room, followed by a Catholic priest.

  Tom looked at me and said, “How do you feel about getting married?”

  I looked at all of them and said, “Hell yes, before anything else happens to stop us.”

  Tom pulled the marriage license and our rings out of his back pocket and gave them to the priest. Jess and Detective Baker were our witnesses, and we got married right then and right there. Piper and I cried as we officially became a family. I was now Mrs. Tom Sanders and proud of it.

  I stood in Piper’s room admiring the wedding ring on my finger, thinking how upset Charlotte would be that she missed the ceremony. We’d have to have a big party for all of our friends to attend when the city recovered from Miguela. The doctor walked into the room, and it gave me a chance to ask her a question that was burning a hole in my brain.

  “Doctor, help me understand something,” I said. “Piper was quarantined, and we were not allowed near her. Then, we were allowed by her bed if we wore contamination suits. Within a couple of hours, we were allowed to take them off with no threat of catching bubonic plague. I don’t understand what changed.”

  The doctor chuckled a little. “You are right to question our methods,” she said. “I didn’t want to alarm you, but we were operating under the belief that she was deliberately infected with a weaponized version of the plague. We weren’t sure what we were dealing with or how to handle it. Once you got us the information, the CDC was able to determine the bacterium was genetically altered to be slightly more dangerous than the normal strains, but it was not weaponized. If it had been, the entire French Quarter would have been quarantined, and maybe the entire city.”

  Holy shit, I thought, are we that vulnerable to a terrorist attack? Sleeping just got a little tougher. I had no idea people actually were evil enough to weaponize something like the plague and spread it. Evil was everywhere in the world, and just like the quote over Jess’s desk, it would triumph if we did nothing.

  My phone rang again, and it was Sophia. “Hi, Sophia, I want you to know Piper is doing better and Tom and I just got married.”

  “That’s great, Alexandra. I was worried about Piper, but she’s a tough little cookie. So sorry I couldn’t be there for your wedding. We’ll have to celebrate later. Right now I need to ask something of you. Can you meet me in the lobby of the hospital?”

  Oh shit, I thought. What now? I agreed and excused myself from the gang in Piper’s room. Tom said he’d try to get in touch with Zach and Maddy and make sure they made it through the storm OK. I walked to meet Sophia, knowing I was headed for trouble.

  Chapter Thirty-One:

  The Night Sky

  Power lines and trees were down around the hospital, but the levees had held back the storm surge, and New Orleans was saved. There would not be another Katrina-style disaster. As I walked, I thought about Rogan’s death. Bob Broussard was right about Rogan. He’d killed many people in his life pursuing money and power, but he didn’t invent capitalism. What Rogan didn’t understand was that capitalism wasn’t the problem. It was the abuse of the system that caused all of the carnage. There will always be those who lie, cheat, and steal their way to money and power, but they all end up the same: dead and alone before God. They did the devil’s work in this life, and they’ll join his legion in the next.

  Sophia called out to me in the parking lot beckoning me to her car. She said, “Get in and I’ll tell you what I need you to do on the way.”

  As she drove out of the parking lot, she picked up her phone and called Don. They agreed on a meeting place, and we scurried to an abandoned warehouse near the Quarter. She turned to me and said, “Alexandra, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it weren’t absolutely necessary.” She paused and tried to conjure the right words to say to me. “I need you to meet with Victor Ivanovich.”

  She waited for my reaction, looking straight at the road ahead and not at me. I took a deep breath before I spoke. “Sophia, we have been through a great deal together. I know you would never do anything to hurt me, but before I agree, I want to know why me and exactly what you hope to gain from the meeting.”

  “We don’t have enough evidence against Victor to make an arrest,” she said. “He is rich and can afford an all-star legal team. Also, he is leaving the United States on his way to China tomorrow. Once he’s gone, we won’t have another chance to stop him from selling what his hacking team has stolen to terrorists. We’ve got to get him now.”

  “OK,” I said. “But what has that got to do with me?”

  “After you left the condo today, I took Burak to the warehouse to be interrogated by Don and Will. Burak made a deal to cooperate with us in exchange for not being sent to a secret prison in Ukraine. Victor doesn’t know about Rogan yet. Burak is going to set up a meeting between you and Victor on the premise that you and Piper have agreed to come to work for him.”

  “Why do you think Victor would believe him?”

  “Burak and Victor have been together for more than ten years. He’s going to tell Victor you almost lost Piper fighting Victor and you have lost your business, so you are desperate to make a deal. You are the only person who has ever beaten Victor, and he can’t stand that. He’s such an egomaniac he’ll want to hear you say he’s won, and he’ll want to gloat.”

  I hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Sophia, is this really a matter of national security or just government bullshit?”

  She laughed loudly. “I know what you mean, because most of the time it’s bullshit. Not this time, Alexandra. Victor is Russian and has no loyalty to America. He’s selling his skills and what he’s stolen to the highest bidder. Those bidders will be terrorists. This is real.”

  “OK, I’ll do it,” I said. As we parked at the warehouse, I said, “After Bob Broussard killed Rogan he slipped a folded piece of paper in Rogan’s pocket. Did you read it?”

  She said, “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you about it, so I never said this, OK?”

  I nodded.

  “It was a nursery rhyme, and I know it well. It goes like this:

  “Three blind mice, three blind mice,

  See how they run, see how they run,

  They all ran after the farmer’s wife,

  Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

  Did you ever see such a thing in your life,

  As three blind mice?”

  “Bob Broussard must have lied to me,” I said. “He has to be the serial killer plaguing the streets of New Orleans over the last few weeks. No one knew about the nursery rhymes being placed in the victims’ pockets except the police and the killer. I wonder why that particular nursery rhyme.”

  “Don’t you know the history of the three blind mice nursery rhyme?” Sophia asked. “We learned about it in European history class in Colombia. It is based on the ruthless reign of Queen Mary I of England, also known as ‘Bloody Mary.’ The queen was a Catholic, and the three blind mice of the poem refer to three Protestant noblemen who were accused of plotting against her. She had them burned at the stake.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Rogan and Bob’s mother represented two of the three blind mice. I’ll bet Garrett Morris is the third.”

  We walked into t
he warehouse to meet Don and Will. They were casually talking to Burak. I wanted to punch him in the nose for what he’d done to Piper, but this wasn’t the time or place. He was still shaking from his encounter with Bob. He’d agreed to set Victor up because his choices were to cooperate or go to jail in a foreign country as a terrorist. He knew if Victor found out he’d cooperated with the authorities he and his entire family in Russia would be killed. The NSA had agreed to fake his death so Victor would have no reason to kill his family. Victor had agreed to meet me on a barge on the Mississippi River after dark.

  “Will I be wearing a wire?” I asked.

  “No,” Don said. “Leave that to us. You just need to get Victor talking about his plans. You have to make him believe you are going to work for him.”

  I had to wait till dark before I went to meet Victor. Time crept by at an agonizingly slow pace. I had never chewed my fingernails before, but I did that evening. Remaining calm wasn’t an option. What would happen to me if Victor didn’t believe my story? What if I couldn’t deliver it convincingly? I couldn’t imagine ever joining Victor, no matter what happened, so how could I sell that?

  He’s not you, I told myself. He doesn’t understand goodness. All he sees is weakness and strength.

  I was still terrified. I tried to control my thoughts, but they got the better of me. Would he push me in the Mississippi River or shoot me first? Why was I doing this stupid, stupid thing? Then it occurred me that I had no choice. Victor was responsible for giving Piper the plague and putting Susan in jail, and he would never leave me alone. He had to be stopped, no matter what the risk. Even if it killed me, I had to try. My heart rate slowed and my breathing returned to normal. The Lois Lane section of my brain took control. I was on a mission to put that demon in jail where he belonged.