The King

by Steven James

  No, he did not think of himself as a deity or as some type of alluring or servile spirit. However, since the day he’d emerged, he had thought of himself as the one who had the duty to determine who would live and who would enter eternity.

  Tomorrow evening Keith and Vanessa would be arriving from India. They didn’t yet know that he was in the States, but they would find out. He had a meeting planned with them before the drugs entered the country’s secure supply chain.

  Well, the supply chain that was supposed to be secure.

  So now, DC.

  The Washington Monument rising regally into the night.

  Here was the center of democracy in the world, the beacon of freedom, the convergence of all that he had fought against while he was still working for the GRU. The Cold War was long over, but Russia’s network of spies, and his homeland’s interest in the politics and policies of Washington, had remained the same.

  However, over this last year his heart had turned against Mother Russia. Her concerns were no longer his. In fact, these days he had no master directing his life. None, that is, except his past, which, in a way, dictated everything, shaped who he was and how he had become the determiner of life and death.

  His past, his choices, had transformed him.

  The day last May when his wife, Tatiana, died.

  No, not died. Was murdered.

  Before he’d ever identified himself as Valkyrie, he’d been known by his given name, Alexei Chekov, and had been in the business of cleaning up messes no one else wanted to dirty their hands with. Sometimes that involved taking the life of another person, a job he had never enjoyed, but one that he did, out of duty to his homeland, when called upon to act.

  And he did his job well.

  But then something happened that changed things forever.

  Last May he’d argued with Tatiana, told her words he would always regret, words that would always ring like a terrible death knell through his mind, the sharp, most painful lie of all: telling her that he did not love her and never wanted to see her again.

  Then, later that same day, he found her body, with a single bullet hole in her forehead staring at him like a dark, unblinking third eye.

  She’d only just been killed and the blood wasn’t done seeping from the back of her head across the sheets of the bed.

  He’d searched for her murderer, vowing to punish him.

  But he never had the chance, because she hadn’t been killed by another assassin, as he’d first thought.

  He had blocked out the truth. It took him a long time to come to terms with what had actually happened, but last winter an FBI agent named Patrick Bowers had confronted him and made him realize the truth: that day when Alexei was with Tatiana, in a moment of terrible loss of self-control, he had done the unthinkable—he had killed the woman he loved.

  Bowers had apprehended him, but, under the supervision of a law enforcement officer who was not nearly as astute as Bowers, Valkyrie had escaped. Still, Bowers was the one who’d deduced what Alexei had done to Tatiana, and nothing had been the same since.

  A palpable, sweeping darkness had crept into his heart, a new personality that relished pain, that sought to make others suffer, that took him to places he never would have allowed himself to go before the metamorphosis in his soul took place.

  And now, finally, he would avenge Tatiana’s death.

  It had to do with the drug shipment, yes, but it went a lot deeper than that.

  The suicides would only be the beginning.

  Ultimately, it had to do with striking back at Mother Russia for training, honing, creating the man who had killed his wife.

  The Valkyrie.

  The harbinger, the courier of death.

  He returned to his suite, drew the shades shut, and used his encrypted, untraceable cell to reach his contact from the Chechen Republic to tell him the drugs were ready to be shipped to the States.

  39

  Tuesday, April 9 9:34 a.m. 12 hours until the drowning

  For reasons she didn’t tell me, Lien-hua asked me not to come by until after the doctors had put the cast on her leg at eleven, so after dropping Tessa off at school and making sure the public safety officer had her schedule for the day, I’d gone to my office in the classroom building at Quantico and set to work.

  With notes from Agent Hammet’s recently posted interviews with the people who were friends and family with Basque’s previous victims in the DC area, and my own investigation into their travel patterns, I was able to refine the representations of their cognitive maps.

  I compared the background checks that the team had done yesterday with what I already knew, adding the location where Basque had purchased the lock and taking a more careful look at Lien-hua’s awareness space.

  I’d hoped the location from which Basque had stolen the car might shed some light on what we were looking at, but it didn’t do much, other than give me one more location to add to the geoprofile.

  After updating the online case files with what I had, I turned to the other front burner.

  Corey Wellington’s suicide.

  Obviously, I couldn’t visit the scene myself today, so I called the Atlanta Police Department and convinced them to send an officer there to be my eyes. Thankfully, they sent the man who’d been the first one to arrive yesterday when Corey’s body was discovered.

  While I waited for him to get there, I ran through what we knew.

  Corey hadn’t shown up for work on Thursday or Friday and didn’t call in sick. When he didn’t answer texts over the weekend or come to the office yesterday, one of his friends went to his house, found it locked, and went around back. He saw Corey’s body through the living room window.

  Margaret’s brother hadn’t left a suicide note, hadn’t texted or e-mailed anyone telling them what he was going to do.

  He hadn’t updated his will or, as far as we could tell, set his affairs in order. There was no sign of forced entry.

  Now, when the officer, a somewhat impatient man in his early twenties named Dustin Wilhoit, arrived at the scene, we started a video chat. I asked him about something that hadn’t appeared in the police report: if there were any pills found near the body.

  “No, sir. We checked.”

  Based on what Margaret had told me, Corey was taking depression medicine and I wanted to know what it was. “Corey was taking prescription meds. Look through the rest of the house. The bathroom medicine cabinet, the kitchen cupboards maybe, find the pills.”

  While he searched, I contacted Angela Knight, who was at home when I reached her. I asked her to do some checking through Corey’s credit card records to see what pharmacy he used. “I’m not at work,” she objected.

  “You can remotely log into Lacey, can’t you? It should only take a few minutes.”

  It took three.

  Putting through a call to the pharmacy, I learned that Corey took Calydrole, which was prescribed to people who’d attempted or contemplated suicide. Then I phoned the waste management company to find out when they picked up the garbage and recyclables, just in case my gut instincts, which I don’t put much faith in, happened to be right.

  Wilhoit returned my call and told me that he hadn’t found anything.

  “No prescription meds in the whole house?”

  “No, sir.” He sounded ready to be done with this.

  “I want you to check the garbage cans for me.”

  A pause. “Sir?”

  “Look for any empty bottles or blister packs.”

  “Really, are you sure that’s necessary?”

  “I’m not sure what’s necessary, apart from being thorough. Take a look for me.”

  He didn’t agree right away. “Alright.”

  It took him a few minutes, but then he got back to me. “There’s an empty foil packet in the trash can in his bathr
oom.”

  “Is the name of the drug imprinted on it?”

  “Yeah. Calydrole.” He told me the lot number printed on the back of the packet.

  “How many pills did it contain?”

  “Fourteen.”

  So, likely two weeks’ worth, or perhaps one, depending on how many Corey took each day.

  A thought began to form in my mind.

  “In the crime scene reports, the photo of the bathroom shows the medicine cabinet door open. Was it open when you arrived?”

  “It must have been.”

  “Don’t tell me it must have been. Tell me if it was.”

  A pause. “It was.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I closed it myself. Look, what does it matter if it was open or closed?”

  “Everything matters. Get it dusted for prints.”

  “This was a suicide, Agent Bowers.”

  “Then there shouldn’t be any anomalous prints there to slow things down when you run them through the system.”

  He didn’t try to hide his sigh. “Alright. Sir. We’ll dust for prints.”

  I ended the call, contacted the pharmacy again, and the pharmacist told me that Corey was prescribed four hundred milligrams per day of the drug. “The ones in the packets he bought were two-hundred-milligram pills.”

  “Did you just say packets?”

  “Yeah, he bought a month’s worth when he came in here on . . .” He paused and I pictured him pulling up the records. “It looks like March twenty-seventh. Right at five o’clock. Got here just before we closed.”

  “At what time of day do people take Calydrole?”

  “In the morning.”

  I did the math in my head. “Thanks.”

  One more call, this one to PTPharmaceuticals, the makers of Calydrole, to have them run the lot number on the back of the blister pack. They told me they’d call me back.

  Margaret had been concerned about the meds, so I thought at this point I should probably fill her in. Rather than go through the Bureau’s switchboard I tried her cell.

  She jumped right in. “What do we know?”

  “The drugs Corey was taking for depression are used to reduce or quell suicidal thoughts, but they weren’t there.”

  “What do you mean, they weren’t there?”

  “There was an empty packet that held a week’s worth of meds, but no prescription pills were in the house. And, by all indications, the medicine cabinet was open when the police arrived.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s hard to say, exactly. The garbage is picked up every Friday and he hadn’t taken his out yet. I contacted his pharmacy and they told me he’d purchased enough for the next month on Wednesday, March twenty-seventh.”

  She thought that through. “So if he took one the next day after he bought them and had the last one on the day before he died, then he took a week’s worth.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he bought a month’s worth.”

  “Yes.”

  “And so, where are the rest of the pills?”

  “That is the question.”

  A moment passed. “You mentioned that the medicine cabinet was open. What are you thinking? That someone removed them from his house?”

  “We’ll have to do some checking—his car, at work, maybe at any gyms he had memberships at to see if he kept any meds there. But yes: who removed them from the house. I’m having the pharmaceutical firm verify the lot number. I want to see if there were any other reported suicides from people taking this medication, specifically this lot number of it.”

  “You said reported suicides.”

  “Yes. Because if someone did remove the rest of the pills from Corey’s house before the police arrived—”

  “His death might not have been a suicide. And there might be other victims out there just like him.”

  “For now, that’s the line of inquiry I want to pursue. Yes.”

  “Hypothesize, evaluate, test, and revise.”

  She knew me pretty well after all.

  “Exactly.”

  I checked the time and saw that Lien-hua should have her cast on by now, so after ending the call with Margaret I left to meet her, fill her in and let her know we were ready to have her do a little profiling on the case of Corey Wellington’s death.

  ++

  Keith stared out the window of the Boeing 757 at the ocean far below him.

  Vanessa sat beside him with the law brief from one of her clients laid open on the tray table in front of her. However, rather than review the papers, she was taking a break and was coolly observing the flight attendants as they served the people ahead of them, studying them one at a time as if they were specimens and not fellow human beings.

  Keith still hadn’t seen her sleep at all on this trip.

  She was a woman who seemed to want nothing more than to please their employer, Valkyrie. The longer she worked for him, the more it seemed to become her obsession.

  Not a woman Keith wanted to get on the bad side of.

  He had not enjoyed this trip to India, and he was glad to be on his way back to America. At last it was all coming together. And by the weekend this assignment would be over.

  The shipment should be arriving in just under forty-eight hours, but in the meantime he and Vanessa had a few people to visit to make sure the drugs would enter the supply chain and be shipped to the pharmacies.

  Their plane would be landing tonight at Logan International Airport in Boston at 9:39 p.m. local time. Then they could get a hotel room, lie low, and, at least in Keith’s case, catch up on some sleep.

  He imagined that Vanessa might rest for an hour at the most before being ready to go out and do Valkyrie’s bidding again.

  And although Keith said nothing to her, he hoped that whatever that might be, this time it would not involve the pruning shears he had in his checked luggage.

  40

  12:34 p.m. 9 hours until the drowning

  Because of the electronic trail it might leave, Valkyrie avoided online trading and instead made all his financial transactions through a certain very reliable broker in Dubai.

  It was after office hours there, but that wouldn’t make any difference to the woman who managed his investments. She was a discreet lady from whom he had kept his identity hidden and whom he had paid well not to ask any questions that either of them would end up finding awkward. A recent law in Dubai allowed for the nondisclosure of the client’s name in some financial transactions, and Valkyrie had taken advantage of the somewhat expedient legislation.

  When she picked up, he greeted her, then said, “I would like to buy some put options in PTPharmaceuticals.”

  A pause as she typed, no doubt checking the company’s recent performance. “I’m not sure this is the time for that, they’ve been performing well lately.”

  “Regardless, I’m not confident that they’ll trend in this direction for long.”

  A put option is the right but not the obligation to sell the underlying share at a fixed price. An option, whether that’s a put option or a call option, is essentially a bet, and he was betting that the stock value of the company was going to drop. Locking in a price now that was below the current market value, one that he could then sell the options at when the stock dropped below that price, he would be able to sell at a profit. In this case, a substantial profit.

  It was the same strategy Al Qaeda had used to raise millions for their cause on 9/11.

  And he would use it to raise money for his cause as well.

  “How much?” his broker asked him. “How many options?”

  “One million struck at a hundred.”

  A beat of silence. “One million. I’m not sure that’s possible.”

  “It is. I looked into it.”

&nbs
p; “What price are you suggesting?”

  “Half of what it’s trading at. And I want a three-month expiry.”

  “Half?”

  “Yes.”

  “As your broker, I have to say I would suggest you rethink this investment.”

  “Of course, and that is one of the things I respect about you. In this case, my mind is made up.”

  “So you’re certain about this?”

  “I am.”

  “And you know what this will cost you on this premium if the stock price remains the same, or continues to rise?”

  “Yes.”

  When he exercised the option at expiry, he planned to cash settle rather than physically settle. It would be harder to track, since, in essence, no one would be buying or selling the shares, and the transaction would be completed without his actually owning the underlying shares. He was confident he wouldn’t have to let the option expire worthless. Confident enough to bet millions on it.

  “Alright, then. I’ll send you an e-mail confirming the specifics.”

  “Thank you.”

  They ended the call and Valkyrie set down the phone.

  Some people confused short selling with buying put options, but they were entirely different kinds of transactions, and in this case, put options were definitely the more prudent choice.

  After everything went through, after the counterfeit Calydrole was shipped and the suicides began, he would make known who had already taken the medication. That would help even more with the investment he’d just made and with the expected returns, which he estimated to be upward of sixty million dollars.

  Money he was going to put to good use.

  He received a message from Alhazur Daudov, his Chechen contact, that he would be arriving in DC on Friday night.

  That was unexpected, but undoubtedly Alhazur was interested in the progress of the shipment, and it did make sense that he would want to meet with Valkyrie.

  Alhazur never traveled alone, so Valkyrie knew that he would be accompanied by at least one or two of his soldiers. Freedom fighters. Suicide bombers dedicated wholeheartedly to the cause.