by Steven James
A fire alarm went off or maybe it was the phone ringing or maybe it was an alarm clock somewhere. My sleeping mind couldn’t tell and didn’t care. Part of me fought the idea of waking up like it was the thought of dying. Stay alive. Stay alive. Sleep is the only way to stay alive. Don’t wake up. Never wake up. The sound came again. Persistent. It wouldn’t give up. I groaned and rolled over. It wouldn’t stop. Pick up Tessa. You have to pick up Tessa.
I managed to pry my eyes open.
3:45 p.m.
The room was quiet.
Slowly, space and time began to make sense again. I was in a hotel room with lime-green walls and a creaky bed. Jolene was dead and so was Christie. They weren’t coming back. Wouldn’t ever be waking up. Not ever. I hadn’t set the alarm. There hadn’t been a fire. A house had exploded right next to me earlier today. My shoulder really, really hurt.
I noticed a blinking glow beside me. Ralph’s cell phone. That was what had been ringing.
Only the cell phone ringing.
I had two voicemails.
The first was from an unknown number: “Yes, um, Dr. Bowers, they told me you’d be at this number. Special Agent Eric Stanton here-the, um, Tessa’s escort, that is, chaperone. We were diverted to Chicago because of the blizzards up here in the Midwest-you probably heard about ’em on the news. Anyway, they’re not letting any planes in or out. Everything’s shut down. We won’t be able to fly out until tomorrow at the earliest. I’ll call you later when I know more. We’ll be in a safe house here in Chicago tonight.” He gave a few details about where they would be staying and what number to reach him at, and then he finished by assuring me that Tessa was fine but that she didn’t really want to leave a message right now.
Well, that was no surprise.
Actually, I was relieved I didn’t have to drive to Charlotte tonight. It gave my shoulder a chance to recover. I listened to the second message on my way down the hall to get some ice for my shoulder. It was from Terry Wilson, my NSA friend.
I returned his call right away. “Hey, Terry, it’s Pat. Sorry I missed your call.”
“Is this line secure?”
“Yeah. It’s Ralph’s phone,” I said. “Encrypted to level 5-C.”
“I’m only 4-D.” He sounded a little disgruntled.
I filled the bucket with ice. “What do you have for me, buddy?”
“Pat, listen. Sebastian Taylor was a spy.”
“What?” I topped off the bucket and turned toward my room.
“Probably CIA. Maybe NSA. It’s a little tough to decipher all that. Back in the seventies, most low-ranking overseas diplomats were agents of some type. Remember, those were Cold War days. The threat of communism was everywhere. The thing is, he was stationed in South America in November of 1978.”
Back in my room I sat on the bed with my back against the wall and tied off the bag of ice.
“And?”
“Ever hear of Jonestown?”
“Jonestown? You don’t mean the Kool-Aid drinkers?”
“Yeah. Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, you remember all that?” “Vaguely.” I slipped the ice in place and leaned back. It stung, but in a good way.
“Well, listen, Pat. I did some checking, and I stumbled across some CIA communiques from the Jonestown compound. One came at 3:29 a.m. the night of the tragedy. According to the files, though, no CIA operatives arrived on-site until two days later. So who sent the communique? I also found references to a tape, Q875, in connection with Taylor’s name. Someone had tried hard to hide the link, though. Pat, listen, this thing is a powder keg. Lots of international black ops went on in those days. I’m not sure how deep you want to go poking around here.”
“As deep as I have to go to find our killer. Somehow Taylor is connected to this series of murders. One of the girls called him, apparently tried to warn him-oh!”
“What?”
“Transcripts of her calls. I was supposed to read them this morning. I forgot all about that until just now. It’s been… how can I say… an ‘interesting’ day.”
“Listen. The governor is a powerful man, Pat. The Democrats have the presidency pretty much locked up for 2008; I mean, we’re only a couple weeks out from the election, and I know you’ve seen the polls. Some people say Taylor is already being groomed to be the Republican frontrunner for 2012.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be careful. How about I call you tomorrow morning. I’ve got a few things to check on. Until then, see what else you can dig up. OK?”
“Pat, I don’t think I should-”
“Terry, we found the torso of a girl in the trunk of a car today. Someone sawed her in half, and somehow the governor is involved. Get me whatever you can.”
He sighed. “All right then, I will. Talk to you tomorrow.”
I clicked the phone shut, and pulled out my notebook. I needed to clear my mind and sort through what we knew so far. Even if it took me all night, I had to start getting my mind wrapped around this case.
47
The foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Northern New Mexico
3:55 p.m., Eastern Standard Time
“We’re scheduled to arrive in Tennessee at 5:00 p.m. tomorrow,” Kincaid told the video screen. He saw Theodore nod at him from the living room of the house on Larchmont Street in Asheville, North Carolina. “We’ll drive in from there.” He didn’t want to arouse suspicion by flying into an airport in the same state as the luncheon.
“I’ll meet you at the airport with the van,” said Theodore. “Everything is set.”
“And have there been any more problems?”
“No, Father.”
“I need to tell you something.” There was a stiff reprimand in his voice. “The second girl wasn’t dead when you left her.”
Theodore shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry, Father.”
“I sent you the case files, even found a copy of the right kind of chess set, told you how to tie the ribbon, gave you all the details about the crimes. All you needed to do was make the scenes look like those of the other girls.”
“I’m sorry, Father. I did my best-”
“We’ll discuss it further when I arrive.”
A slight hesitation this time. “Yes, Father.”
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid ended the video chat and walked through his library to the main entrance hall.
Over the years the ranch had shifted from an artists’ colony in the sixties, to a guest ranch that catered to movie stars in the seventies and eighties, to the home of Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Olivia Brine in the early nineties-and even served a two-year stint as the weekend getaway for software designer and billionaire Rex Withering, the man Kincaid had purchased it from a decade ago. But as diverse as all of the owners had been, they’d had one thing in common: all sought a place of solitude and inspiration here at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Spanish for “blood of Christ.”
Kincaid found it ironic that he and his family lived in the shadows of mountains named for the blood of a savior.
He’d originally acquired the four thousand acres of land to use as a corporate retreat for PTPharmaceuticals, but after selling his drug company four years ago for $650 million, he’d made the ranch his home and turned it into the living quarters for his family.
He stepped outside and drank in the desert scents of juniper and pinion. The sandy ground crunched underfoot as he headed toward the building on the edge of the corral. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. At this altitude, October was a brisk and frosty month beneath the lonely, windswept skies of New Mexico.
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid had chosen this part of New Mexico because out here in the Enchanted Circle, the government let you do your own thing. Yes, officially, the Enchanted Circle got its name from an eighty-four-mile stretch of road that encircled Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in the state. But all the locals knew that the region really got its name for another reason. Even though the area had originally been sett
led by Catholic missionaries, over the years it had become the home of a blend of various flavors of spirituality combining Native American beliefs with whatever parts of eastern mysticism were in vogue at the moment. Crystals. Reincarnation. Wiccan rituals. Whatever.
None of that mattered to Kincaid. He didn’t believe any of it. He was just glad the region provided a place where his family could disappear for a few years while the plans were put into place.
In addition, for some reason, cattle in this region were often found mutilated in the fields. Some people said it was just the locals doing it to give the tourists something to talk about. Others said it was from extraterrestrial encounters. For Kincaid it was simply a matter of added convenience since he and his family needed to perform certain tests on the livestock. The rumors made it easier for them to dispose of the leftover carcasses.
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid walked over to the specially constructed building on the edge of the meadow. It was there that the test room had been set up. It was there that Rebekah and Caleb were dying of tularemia.
Even though at times the ranch and outbuildings had been the home of more than eighty people, Kincaid’s group had never numbered more than fifty or so.
Currently, counting Rebekah and Caleb, along with the thirteen children, there were twenty-eight family members.
Bethanie and Alexis would have made it thirty.
It was family. His family.
And since they were family, they would do anything for each other.
Rebekah and Caleb were sitting together on the sofa in their quarantined room. And, just as Dr. Andrei Peterov had promised, there’d been no visible signs of the bacterial infection until about twelve hours ago. “They’ll be contagious almost immediately,” Dr. Peterov had explained in his nearly impeccable English. “Though they might feel a little nauseous, the true effects of the infection won’t be evident until after the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. By then, of course, it’ll be too late to reverse the effects-even if the doctors were somehow able to correctly identify the agent.”
After the Cold War it hadn’t been tough to find Russian scientists who still sympathized with communism, who still believed in the cause. Many had been devastated in the months following November 18, 1978, when they saw what the capitalistic Americans had driven a small colony of communists to do. Nearly a thousand comrades were dead, and the world remembered them not as believers dedicated to a cause, to each other, to compassion-but only as lunatic members of a killer cult.
That was the fault of the media.
And that’s why the media leaders of the world would be the first to pay.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, most of the Russian scientists doing research in biological and chemical weapons fled to the Middle East or North Korea. However, a handful had defected to the United States. Kincaid discovered it wasn’t all that difficult to find just the right scientist. Not for someone with money. You’d be amazed what $28 million in cash could buy.
And Dr. Peterov had proven more than worthy of his salary.
Kincaid’s pharmaceutical labs had provided the ideal place to perfect the process-all in the name of research and development. Of course, after selling the company he’d brought that research with him to his private labs here in New Mexico.
But for everything to work out as planned, he needed just the right agent. Bacterial or viral, it didn’t matter to him. Just something contagious, airborne if possible. Silent for a few days; deadly from the start. And Dr. Peterov had delivered the perfect little bug.
Rebekah and Caleb were holding each other now, struggling for breath. Reading the sacred scripts aloud, bowing in rhythm to the words.
It was Dr. Peterov’s idea to use the gram negative bacillus called Francisella tularensis. He’d pioneered ways of weaponizing it in Russia before the end of the Cold War. “It’s versatile, able to be spread either through ingestion or as an aerosol, fatal about 35 percent of the time, and very tough to identify symptomatically,” he’d told Kincaid. By splicing in some genes from Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, he and his team had created something nearly impossible to diagnose. Very exotic. And very deadly.
“What about a cure?” Kincaid had asked him.
“There is no known vaccine for CCHF, and the vaccine for tularemia, the disease caused by Francisella tularensis, isn’t available to nonmilitary personnel. Of course we developed a way to treat it in case we were exposed, but without our research the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will never find a cure in time.”
It’d taken six years to find a way to make the bacteria contagious human to human and to make it virulent enough to raise the death toll up to 85 percent-a satisfactory percentage to Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid. After all, when you know you’ll most likely die, it’s a thousand times more terrifying than if you know for certain that you will-in which case you might find peace; or if you discover the odds are actually in your favor — in which case you can survive relatively well on denial.
No, the most terrible thing of all is to face life without the possibility of either peace or denial.
With no place to run or hide.
Distribution seemed to be the primary problem. At first he’d thought about using inhalers to spread it-after all, his drug company produced some of the most popular asthma medicine currently prescribed, but his goal wasn’t to indiscriminately infect children, so he gave that idea up almost immediately. No, he needed a more focused distribution system. He’d considered replacing fire extinguishers with an aerosol version of the bacterium and then starting a fire in the Stratford Hotel, but that seemed too elaborate. Besides, the place was built out of solid rock.
Finally, he’d landed on a simple plan. Nearly infallible. Completely unstoppable.
Kincaid looked at Rebekah and Caleb.
The effects of the genetically altered CCHF tularemia were quite evident by now: the trembling limbs, skin ulcers, swollen lymph nodes, orifice bleeding. It was actually rather disturbing to watch.
But, the couple didn’t look disturbed or frightened. After all, they’d volunteered for this job. To go ahead of the rest.
A test had been necessary, after all, and this was the easiest way to control it, here at the ranch.
They were holding hands, eyes closed, perhaps in prayer to their Father, Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid. As they mouthed their petitions, Caleb’s eyelids started hemorrhaging, seeping blood.
Kincaid spent all afternoon consumed with thoughts of the jungle, watching them die. The babies. The syringes, and of course, Jessie Rembrandt and the whirlpool and the hunting knife twisting slowly to the bottom of the bloody water.
And then, at last, his thoughts turned to Sebastian Taylor, the governor of North Carolina, the one responsible for it all.
48
The further I moved into this case, the more complex and intriguing it became.
After talking with Terry, I spent about forty-five minutes at the desk in my hotel room, jotting down notes, drawing lines to connect ideas, and crossing out entire pages of my notebook as I eliminated different theories.
I hardly noticed how numb my shoulder had become from the ice. Finally, all I had left was a dripping bag of water that I discarded in the trash.
First, we had a serial killer murdering women and leaving their bodies in geographically significant locations. He wanted them found. He was making a statement to us, carefully tying all his crimes together. Besides being an expert marksman, he could tie sutures, electronically scramble the origins of his emails, and might have grown up along the southern coast. Based on the way the ropes were knotted around the women’s necks, it appeared to me that he was left-handed. He had knowledge of local climbing and caving areas and knew to leave a clean crime scene and blow up a house.
Quite a resume.
I tried to avoid thinking it was Grolin, but everything kept pointing in his direction.
Second, we didn’t know it for sure yet, but the evidence seemed to indicate that somewhe
re along the line, another killer had started copying him.
But how did the copycat find out about the correct kind of chess pieces, the wound patterns, the yellow ribbons? The two killers could be working together, of course. Either that or:
(A) The copycat knew the Illusionist.
(B) He’d seen the case files.
Since there was no way for me to know whether or not the killers knew each other, I could only look into option B.
But was that even possible? Only our investigation team had access to the case files. Was it actually possible that the killer was a member of the team?
And what about victimology for the copycat? How was he choosing his victims?
So far it appeared that the copycat killer had murdered Bethanie and Alexis, and maybe others we didn’t know about. So the real question was, what did Bethanie and Alexis have in common?
I pulled up their case files on my computer and began comparing notes, timelines, relationships. They were both from the East, but from different cities-Bethanie from Athens, Georgia, and Alexis from Roanoke, Virginia. Both had attended college out West for a few months.
Both were killed within days of returning home.
I don’t believe in coincidences, so I made a note to follow up on the school they attended. Maybe the killer had something to do with the college.
And then there was Governor Taylor. How did he fit into everything?
I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose.
Well, since I wasn’t going to Charlotte tonight, maybe I could look into some of these questions and then spend some time reworking the geo profile based on the theory that there were two killers instead of one.
OK. Good. A plan. But first, before anything else, I needed a shower. After hiking up a mountain, dropping into a cave, running to the trailhead wearing a backpack, and having a house blow up next to me, a shower sounded like a really good idea.
After stepping out of the shower and toweling off, I pulled some clothes out of my suitcase and noticed a sheet of paper flutter to the floor.