by JC Ryan
“I think they were trying to compensate for the oxygen depletion. Remember, they were giants. When the oxygen levels started going down, less oxygen in the air meant they’d begin dying off from hypoxia. It must have taken centuries for their stature to adjust to it. Meanwhile, they had to keep themselves alive somehow.”
“Makes sense. Are you going over to the lab this morning?” Dylan asked.
“I have to. I can’t let Mackenzie and her team chase down the wrong path if this will help them sooner.”
“Okay. Before you go, can I have a couple more eggs and another piece of toast?”
She knew he worked hard and trained hard, but how he kept his fighting-trim physique when he ate like he did, she’d give good money to know. It seemed he consumed five thousand calories per day, and never gained a pound. As she turned the burner on under the skillet again, she wondered if she could interest Mackenzie in a new study when she’d perfected the respirocytes.
8
IT HAD BEEN more than a month, and Ahab’s quest was still unrewarded. As his frustration grew, so did his bloodlust. Knowing he was on the edge of decompensating, he made what he felt was the only rational decision. He took the yacht to the mainland and arranged to have it cleaned and stored for a few days while he went home to London.
Once home, his mask – the persona he showed to other people – felt a bit more secure. He spent the night in his own bed after unlocking the safe where he kept his souvenirs. Those were innocuous bits of keepsakes – a hair ribbon from his first kill, a shoelace from another. Though he was an equal-opportunity killer, taking adults when the urge struck, and it was an easy capture, all his souvenirs were from the children. He thought it would be best to grab a child this time. The thirst was quenched longer with a kid, for some reason. He wasn’t introspective enough to have determined why. He’d just noticed it was so.
Ahab understood how the police investigated disappearances. They looked first to family and friends. A husband or wife for an adult; the parents, other relatives, or friends of the family for a child. So long as he was careful about witnesses and didn’t hunt in his own backyard, so to speak, he would never fall under suspicion. For that reason, he never considered taking one of his colleagues at the university or one of their family members, not even one of their kids. Too close to home.
His most fertile hunting grounds were slums in South London, where the working poor were forced to leave children unattended or attended by older siblings that were still too young to have the responsibility. He kept to a strict schedule, though not a systematic one, so as not to create a pattern that authorities might discern. It had been more than eighteen months since he’d taken the last kid from a converted warehouse where the local council authorities provided emergency housing for the homeless on a night by night basis.
The setup was perfect. Temporary residents didn’t know each other well and were too busy looking out for their own interests to look out for each other’s. He’d allow himself one pass through the area, no more. Even in such an environment, he’d be noticed if he cruised it more than once. Any kid he could lure would do. Ahab had his preferences, but he never allowed them to dictate his victims. That was a way to be caught, to let the authorities know there was a serial predator working. Randomness was key to his continued freedom.
Before he went hunting, however, he checked in at the Uni. The atmosphere of the campus in summer had a different vibe from the other seasons. The students were a different demographic, often foreign, taking advantage of the short courses offered in summer. Inevitably, he found a few of his fellow academics proctoring an exam or poking about in the library. He made sure to let them know he’d be returning to Crete the next day, though he planned to stay several more. It was a precaution designed to give him a sort of alibi, though he didn’t expect to need one.
Later that day, he drove to Hull, where he kept a cottage on the outskirts. It was here he meant to bring his next victim when he was done. The marshes at Sutton Park already held the remains of several previous victims, and he wanted to get a feel for the level of activity in the park before settling on it as the resting place of the next. To his dismay, he learned a festival had attracted crowds. It was the first disappointment he’d encounter on this trip, though not the last. On the four-hour drive back to London in the night, he searched his memory for a resting place closer to London, where his Middle Eastern looks wouldn’t be remarkable.
He slammed his hand onto the steering wheel. It was the ethnic population of Hull that had brought him there in the first place. Now it seemed he may need to find another city, if the park was no longer a suitable hiding place for his kills.
Back in London and after sleeping late on the following day, he used an incognito window on his laptop to search for another suitable hiding place. The fruitless trip to Hull had set him back on what he’d intended as a three-day turnaround. He couldn’t take a victim today without having a plan for disposal. Scouting for a suitable area would take the rest of the day. Of concern in his endeavor would be spotting the CCTV cameras ubiquitous in London, both for the snatch and for the disposal. His earlier expeditions had mapped many of them in his preferred hunting grounds, but there was always the possibility that others had been added. On the other hand, the constant need for maintenance usually meant that those in the poorest slums might easily be out of order, even though there was where the most crime took place.
Ahab considered acquiring a uniform in the style of the maintenance crews and making sure several in his intended area were on the fritz, but decided it would take too long. He’d simply rely on speed and disinterest, like he usually did. The lack of planning for the kidnapping cut both ways. Though he couldn’t control every aspect of it, the random aspect was one of the best precautions he could have taken. There’d be no trail of surveillance to be caught on camera. He wasn’t in the social sphere of the victim. And of course, he’d be using a stolen car for the snatch, and another for the disposal.
Since he couldn’t use the Hull location for disposal, he went back to another idea he’d used in the past. It tickled his fancy to choose archaeological sites for the bodies. If he chose a charnel house or ossuary, the bones wouldn’t be remarkable once the body had decomposed sufficiently. Some of the sites had been long abandoned, and discovery wasn’t likely before the flesh had melted away.
This time, he chose a different site, though. It amused him to select the Roman Fort, a remnant of the Londinium archaeological site. Though the approach would be tricky, the requisite marshes nearby would be a good place. The smell wouldn’t be enough to remark on before he was well out of the country. With his plans set, he went hunting that very night after all.
A WEEK AFTER Ahab had secreted the body in the marshes near the old, round, stone structure, a teenaged visitor from America remarked on the odor while on a tour of the site. Adults on the tour seemed embarrassed, but one agreed, the stench was remarkably bad. More so than usual. Museum employees were dispatched to search for the source and traced it to near the remains of the fort gate.
Expecting the corpse of a large feral animal, perhaps a badger or otter, the employees were horrified to see a flash of color like no animal had ever displayed. They immediately called the local constabulary. Hours later, police dredged the decomposing remains of a child from among the reeds, and the city’s media went ballistic. How could a child so young have gone missing, and no one knew in this internet-connected era? Who was this child? Why weren’t there parents demanding to know the child’s identity?
Reporters descended on police headquarters, and eventually discovered that an eight-year-old girl had been reported missing from a South London homeless shelter. The investigation stalled when no one came forward with information, and the CCTV camera closest to the shelter had been discovered to be inoperative. A minor bombing in the center of London had been the biggest story that week. The loss of a homeless child hadn’t even blipped the radar.
As outrage
grew, the police revealed dozens of unsolved disappearances and fielded questions about serial killers. In one interview, a spokesperson admitted that it could be possible, but the police didn’t have the resources to investigate every crime where there was no evidence to be found. That was when the Mayor of London demanded MI5 get involved.
MI5, the equivalent of America’s FBI, had plenty to do already. The sudden dumping of several dozen unsolved disappearances of children over the past ten years wasn’t their priority. Nevertheless, they couldn’t create the impression that they were not doing anything about it, and a team of data analysts was assigned to work on it immediately to forestall the more outspoken members of the press claiming that the poor were of no importance to police. The team quickly established a database of every bit of information the police did have.
Less than a week after the body of Ahab’s latest victim was found, patterns he hadn’t anticipated emerged in the data. Fortunately for Ahab, he hadn’t been the first to stash a body in the waters surrounding the Roman Fort. MI5 had caused the site to be dredged, and two more turned up. After that, the press began to call the crimes the Archaeology Murders. Though the two older bodies weren’t related, the fact they were adult bodies widened the data net, and soon a full investigation was gaining traction.
The last thing MI5 wanted was a panic over a serial killer or more scrutiny of their operations. Someone suggested that these bodies could be the work of one of those chaps – the Nabateans – who’d been in the news the previous year. One of the investigators had back-door knowledge of the Nabatean case through an old friend in MI6 and had seen the faint trace of something familiar on the clavicles of two of the Roman Fort victims.
The ‘something’ was a crow’s feet symbol like the one on the leader’s documents, which had been seized when authorities raided her Paris townhouse. Her decrees had been made electronically, of course, but Graziella Nabati, head of the Council that had come very near to taking over world financial institutions, had exhibited a bit of narcissism by also printing them, in calligraphy on vellum, and then sealing them with wax and a signet ring before filing them in her secret archives. The marks on the victims looked the same to him. The suggestion was enough to get the head of MI5 to request the help of MI6.
MI6, the American equivalent of the CIA, was not pleased. They were in the spy business, not murder, and almost never operated on home soil. But the fact that the idea that the Nabateans could be involved, preposterous as it might have been, came from a senior official at MI5, MI6 had no choice – they had to comply. It wasn’t every day they got to meddle in domestic affairs. Perhaps it was an opening they should see as an advantage, their Chief told them.
By then, however, several weeks had passed. Ahab was back at his careful grid search off the coast of Crete and paid no attention to the news from London.
IN LONDON, A task force was formed to survey every archeological site and urban body of water in southeastern England. The agencies involved got much more than they bargained for. Over a hundred bodies in various stages of decomposition turned up, over twenty in archeological sites. Despite police assurances that it couldn’t possibly be the work of one killer, England’s notorious gossip rags whipped up the citizenry into a frenzy of demands for answers.
It didn’t take long for news articles to appear listing Britain’s worst serial killers, mentioning names such as Harold Shipman. Although convicted of fifteen murders, official reports later stated he had killed between 215 and 260 people between 1975 and 1998. Dennis Nilsen, former Army cook, and Civil servant apparently killed up to 15 people, Peter Sutcliffe who became known as the "Yorkshire Ripper" murdered at least 13 women, mainly prostitutes, over a period of five years. And of course, such a list would not be complete if it didn’t mention Jack the Ripper. The most famous serial killer of all, ‘Jack’, who was never identified and brought to justice, terrorized the people of London between 1888 and 1891 and killed at least 11.
The work eventually settled into a painstaking analysis of the data to understand whether any of the bodies were the work of a serial killer, but focus on the bodies in the archaeological sites made analysts lean toward these being just that. MI6 wanted an archaeologist involved but stipulated it couldn’t be anyone from the UK. All of those, they insisted, were suspects.
MI5 agreed. They put their heads together and decided on who they wanted, then called upon the Prime Minister to call in a favor. The PM would rather have dealt with ex-President Samuel Houston Grant, but Grant had finished his statutory two terms, and a new President was in the saddle, as Grant would have said. After a few pleasantries, he got down to business.
“I assume you were fully briefed on the recent threat our countries and indeed the world faced. I’m talking about what happened early last year, the Nabatean affair,” he prompted.
“I’m aware of it, yes. What about it?”
“We have a situation here that may or may not be related, and I have had a request from our investigating agencies to borrow one of your top people. A man by the name of Carter Devereux. Do you know him?”
“Yes, of course. He discovered…”
“Yes, yes, the Library of the Giants and all that. This is something a bit different.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it seems we need an archaeologist, and none of ours will do. It’s a bother, frankly. But if he isn’t otherwise engaged, my people are asking for him specifically.”
“Do you know why him?”
“That I don’t. Need-to-know, of course. D’you want me to find out?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. I’ll have him sent to you right away. Is there anything else America can do for you, Mr. Prime Minister?”
The PM indulged in a little internal pique at the suggestion that the President was the entirety of America, but he answered mildly. “Not at this time, Mr. President, thank you.”
“It’s done,” he reported to his security advisors. “He said he’d have Devereux ‘sent to us’ right away. As if he were a package, mind you.”
The others laughed with him.
LESS THAN AN hour later, Carter fielded a call from Irene O’Connell. He thought she was kidding when she told him what she wanted.
“I’m not a detective,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve been specially requested by MI6. They said it could have something to do with the Nabateans, so you have to go.”
“I thought we’d put those guys to rest once and for all,” Carter grumbled.
“Apparently not. Get there.”
Though he protested that murder investigations weren’t in his background, Irene informed him they were now. Favors had been called in, and that’s all she would say.
Carter knew it would be fruitless to argue any further. Instead, he called Mackenzie. “Mackie, they want me in London. Do you want to come?”
“I’d love to, darling, but I can’t right now. Liu has turned up something really exciting, and we’re retooling. How long will you be there?”
“Until we solve it? I don’t know, really. No one seems to know why me. The visit would be educational for the kids, though. Please consider it. And what do you mean by retooling?”
“I’ll leave that for another time. You have a plane to catch, don’t you? I think I can get the boss to give me a week off once we’ve dealt with this retooling issue,” she wisecracked.
“Ask her pretty please and tell her I’ll have a special thank you in mind if she does.”
“Carter, behave.” Her voice betrayed the smile on her face, though. He could hear it through the phone all the way from the Mediterranean.
“My plane’s being called,” he joked. Carter’s plane was his own Dassault Falcon 7X, and he was the pilot as she knew very well. But she’d started the banter.
Flying the big jet with no passengers was an indulgence, but he could afford it, and it was much more convenient than commercial, which was why he’d bought it. “I’ll call again
when I’m settled in the hotel. I’ll get a suite.”
“Carter…”
“Got to go! Bye.”
He considered he’d won a small victory by cutting off her protest that she might not make it to London. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to share some of the sights of the city with the kids. Liam especially would enjoy them. Beth might be too young, but she was in a dinosaur-loving phase, and she’d be sure to enjoy the Crystal Palace, if nothing else.
A representative from MI6 met him at Heathrow and insisted on driving him to a hotel where they’d arranged for him to stay. One look at the old structure told him he’d be changing hotels when Mackie arrived, but for now he graciously accepted the accommodations.
“I probably don’t have the appropriate wardrobe with me,” he explained to his escort. “Can you direct me to somewhere I can rectify that?”
“Not to worry. You have a briefing in twenty minutes, and afterward I’ll be pleased to go shopping with you.”
“But…”
“We all understand you’ve been in the field, so to speak,” the man interrupted. “Your, ah, attire will be perfectly acceptable under the circumstances.”
Carter looked down at his Levi’s, T-shirt, and Sperry’s Topsiders and sighed. He was pretty sure they were not acceptable at a high-level meeting, but he had nothing else to change into. He hadn’t expected to be called to London when he’d packed for the Alboran site. Twenty minutes. They must be desperate.
HALF AN HOUR later, Carter learned that the investigation had so far stalled out as to suspects. The remains of the three victims from the London Fort had been dated many years apart. As the briefing progressed, he realized he was further out of his element than he’d even known. But at least he now knew why him. One of the skeletons did indeed display a symbol associated with the Nabateans, and he was the world’s foremost expert on the criminals who’d been among the last survivors of the ancient group.