by Andrew Mayne
A bomb this big would leave a crater the size of a block. They’d all be gone. How many people? Fifty? A hundred?
My mind races with all of the disturbed possibilities. I try to keep my pulse down so my chest doesn’t start heaving and set off the sensors. If he sees me here, I’m not sure I’ll make it to the rollup door before he can press a button.
To some, the lives we’ve seen lost so far don’t seem as consequential in the devil’s arithmetic. I have a new reason to remain motionless: It’s not just my life, it’s everyone around me.
On the other side of the fence, Danielle, Shannon, and all the agents and police who are waiting for me would be taken out in the blast.
One twitch, one sneeze and the sensors go off.
My heart starts to race again. I concentrate on slowing it down. My left hand is still in my pocket on my phone. I left it there in case I need to turn it on to make a call.
Do I tell them to pull back and clear the area? I think I can make the call without moving more than my thumb. But what about sound?
With a metal roof and thin walls, I’d think audio surveillance would be pointless. Or is it? Wiring the place with microphones is fairly easy. Should I put anything past him?
I decide to wait.
The sunlight coming through the vents begins to fade. I don’t dare check my watch. I just stare into the darkness and keep my mind as clear as I can. In some ways it’s easier than I would have thought.
I’ve always been a solitary person. Since I let work fill my life there hasn’t been much room for anyone else. First magic, then law enforcement. I don’t know if I regret that or not. It’s just the way I am.
Every few minutes I wrestle with taking the risk of turning on my phone or not. I could at least give them some notice to get clear. But what about the people next door? They wouldn’t make it.
In the distance I can hear the wail of police sirens growing closer. Damn, not here!
They may have gotten a full search warrant by now. That’s not going to help if this place is wired to explode. If the Warlock sees police cars barreling through the front gate, it’s all over. Done.
The sirens get louder, then pass by. They’re heading somewhere else. I breathe a sigh of relief. A shallow breath.
There’s another noise now. It’s the distant low rumble of a helicopter. It’s getting closer. The roof rattles as the helicopter passes over the top of the building.
I can hear the engine roaring through the vents. I try to visualize where it’s going from the maps. The helicopter is a block or two away now. It’s probably assisting the chase cars.
There’s a high-pitched whine coming from that direction. Something has malfunctioned. The blades make a sloshing noise and the helicopter’s engine screams louder.
The engine cuts out and all I can hear is the whoosh of the blades as the helicopter auto-gyrates to the ground. There’s a metallic thud and a loud crackle, then an explosion like a transformer blowing.
Oh God.
Right near us too.
What are the chances?
The red lights on the cameras go out. The refrigerator stops humming.
The power is off.
51
I TRY NOT TO PANIC. I don’t understand what is going on. I sit there and wait. I focus on my shallow breaths and not moving. The cameras could come back on at any moment.
Footsteps run across the gravel outside. A metal blade is cutting into something. The middle rollup door slides up and three men dressed in bomb armor run inside. Unsure of what’s happening, I remain perfectly still.
One of the men runs over, throws a bomb vest over me and fastens on a helmet.
“This way, Jessica!” he commands.
I let him pull me to my feet.
All three of them rush me out of the building and into an armored personnel carrier sitting in front of the warehouse. They slam the door shut and the driver takes off out of the junkyard, swerving around the wrecks of planes and cars.
Two of the men stare at monitors keeping a careful watch on the building. We pass through the entrance and another bomb tech shuts the gate then hops onto the running board of the carrier.
We head down to the end of the block and take a side street. In the distance I can see police cars and fire trucks. There’s a cloud of black smoke in the sky.
Our driver pulls us into the open doors of a recycling plant and they slam shut after us. Finally, one of my rescuers speaks into his radio. “We got her.”
I step out of the vehicle into a command center they’d set up in the last few hours. Danielle comes running up and gives me a hug.
“Thank God! Thank God!”
“The bomb?” I ask.
“We know. We checked the swabs Shannon collected and realized what we’d left you sitting on.”
I point to the armored carrier. “He knows we were there now.”
Danielle shakes her head. “No. He doesn’t. We staged an accident.”
“The helicopter?”
“The sheriff’s department pilot is a former Navy SEAL pilot. He offered to do a controlled crash.”
“Oh my God!” My hand flies to my mouth.
“He’s fine. Bruised, but fine. We had to have an excuse to clear the area, so we staged a high-speed chase. It was live on the news along with the crash next to a chemical supply company. We’ve cleared everyone for a half mile. We cut the power and Ailes took over the Warlock’s system.”
It was all an elaborate scheme to evacuate the area without the Warlock realizing what we were doing. Did it work? There hasn’t been an explosion yet, if that’s any indication.
“We’re going to send in techs to take out the bomb,” continues Danielle. “We should have done that the first time. If we’d paid more attention to the thermal imaging we would have noticed something was out of place.”
“That’s my fault,” says Shannon. He’d been standing over a table looking at a map. “I should have known he would try something like that.”
I shake my head. “It’s not your fault. We’re just beginning to understand how the man thinks. If you hadn’t gotten those swabs of the explosives, I’d still be sitting back there next to the bomb.”
A bomb tech walks over to Shannon. “We’re ready to go try to dismantle the thing.”
“He’s devious. Don’t take anything for granted,” I reply, the scent of explosive fuel still fresh in my mind.
“Trust me. We’re going to take things real slow, Agent.”
I take my phone out and turn it on to call Ailes.
“Thank God you’re okay. We never should have let you go,” he says. His voice is apologetic.
“Stop that. Someone had to go. Thankfully I have smart people to work with.”
“Hopefully. We ended up making a virtual version of his entire network and overrunning the routers he was sending traffic through. The satellite was the tricky part, but Jennifer managed that. I won’t get into the details.”
“I’m not sure I’d understand,” I admit.
“The short of it is that his software patches were a few months old. He got a little busy and forgot to update them.”
“It’s good to know he’s just as forgetful as the rest of us. Did anyone have a chance to go over Danielle’s footage?”
“We’ve been making a map of the floor plan. Besides Times Square, we think we can make out some outlines where he traced the observation deck on the Empire State Building.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I reply.
“We’ve been looking at 3-D models of that junkyard of his trying to figure out exactly what he’s got piled out there. We found a stack of aluminum piping cut to the same size as the rails of the observation deck and some screen. He may have actually built a model of the deck and placed projection screens to simulate the walls of the lobby and the outside view.”
“To fake footage?”
“Not quite good enough. More for a practice run. A really intense practice run. T
he same for Times Square. He probably projected images of buildings and traffic lights to make sure everything would work just right. It’s insane. Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“Yeah. Remind me sometime to tell you about my rehearsals in my grandfather’s basement.”
“Well, the one bright ray of light in all this is that we’re pretty sure some of that IP traffic from the warehouse was being routed to Texas.”
“So everything is still a go?”
“It looks that way. Unless we think revealing his Michigan hideout will deter him, we’re still on the hunt there.”
I turn to Danielle. “How quick can we get to the airport?”
52
I LOCK THE DOOR of my motel room and check my wig in the mirror. It’s dirty blond and much shorter than my own hair. With a pair of librarian glasses, I was able to fool Agent Knoll in the Quantico command center. As I was the most recognizable person on the task force, he didn’t want to send me to south Texas.
Agreeing to use a disguise, plus the fact that the Warlock practically told us where he was going to strike next, convinced him to let me at least come as close as our field command post six miles away. I’m in a motel that’s across the road from a Texas Highway Patrol station. This seemed to be the place we’d be least likely to run into him.
I’ve been having second thoughts on our ability to catch him here. The Santa Lucia clue had a capital C. It was intentional.
He might want us to know where he’s planning his next deception. Or this is just one giant red herring. A fake-out. We’ve got another team outside Boulder, Colorado, the fifth point on the pentagram, and a third team on standby at Quantico, ready to jet anywhere in the United States in five hours.
So far the group in Michigan hasn’t found anything more about what he has planned next. In the warehouse they found an empty freezer inside the hidden passage and several tons of explosives, enough to have taken out the entire industrial area, but no future plans.
The bomb squad opted to dismantle the bomb but leave the warehouse looking as if we’d never been there. To the best of our knowledge, the Warlock still hasn’t figured it out. Ailes turned his computers back over to him when power was restored to the area, and has been monitoring the signal traffic while a surveillance team keeps watch.
My bet is that he doesn’t go back there. The staged police helicopter crash was a close call, but not so close that he pulled the trigger.
I sit down at the table and look over a map with highlighted points of interest around our Texas town. The town church has the unique honor of having been struck by lightning twice, burning down both times. A schoolhouse was wiped away in a tornado twenty years ago, killing three students and a teacher. Since then, the kids have been getting bused to a school near Brownsville.
Part of me suspects that what makes the town special isn’t anything about it, other than the name and it was one of the possible locations on the pentagram. The real reason he singled it out is because it fits a larger pattern of escalation.
The first murder happened in a cemetery, hours before we cracked the code and got there. The second one took place in a more public place in Fort Lauderdale, yet nobody was watching when he dragged the plane onto the sandbar. The third murder was the most overt one of all, before thousands of people. Video of the New York City illusion is playing on the television in my room. To my frustration, it alternates with a clip of me repeating Katya’s disappearance on top of the Empire State Building. The security camera techs recorded the whole trick and made an edited tape that makes it look a lot smoother than it actually was. At Chisholm’s suggestion, this was given to the media as proof that the FBI is on top of things and not deceived by the Warlock’s stunts.
The problem is that, even with the edits, my impromptu vanish looks different. People who want to believe in the Warlock, and there are many of them on television, aren’t convinced by the demonstration. It’s the debunker’s dilemma. If you don’t replicate the exact effect, then they have reason to believe.
I shut the TV off when clips of me onstage with a white tiger start playing. Part of me knows I should call my father and grandfather and tell them not to talk to the media, but I’m really not sure I want that stress right now.
Earlier at the gas station, I’d picked up a tabloid that was floating the theory that the Warlock didn’t actually murder any of his victims. It suggests that he simply found them and arranged for a spectacular memorial. It’s full of holes and insulting to the families. But some people want him to be an antihero who really isn’t hurting anyone.
It reminds me of Hitler worship. The Web is full of idiots trying to spin his evil. It’s bad enough when serial killers get groupies who know they did it and glorify them regardless; it’s worse when less crazy people delude themselves into justifying something they want to believe in. Entire books have been written trying to claim the concentration camps never happened, all so a handful of people who still adhere to National Socialism can point to their most famous icon as a little misguided and not a genocidal monster who has come to represent pure evil.
I stare at the map in front of me as if it will reveal its secrets and the next deception will leap forth. It’s not working. Next to me is a stack of old magic books I brought to thumb through, hoping they will jar my mind.
From time to time my mind drifts to Colorado. I pull up a state map on the computer and search satellite images of the location, as if a clue will pop out at me.
Knoll and Ailes are under the impression that I might be able to see through everything and give them a heads-up to what the deception might be here. I don’t know how. I just got lucky before. The only thing I believe is that this illusion is going to be bigger than the others, and he wants us as witnesses.
Magic is a funny thing. David Copperfield flew twenty feet in the air on a television special and people barely remembered it. Five years later, David Blaine floated six inches off the ground on a magic special that looked like reality television and the world went nuts. The Blaine trick looked real. Copperfield’s looked like an illusion. Blaine never repeated the trick, while you can go see Copperfield float, just as he did on television, every night in Las Vegas.
I flip through the pages of a magic book and stop at a photo of a Chinese magician pulling umbrellas from a box. A few pages later a man and his wife are producing light bulbs by the dozen. Each prop is a theme.
If the Warlock’s crimes are a magic act, I should be able to figure out the theme. The Chloe murder was him raising the dead, bringing someone back from death. The airplane was pulling something out of the past. The angel was him sending someone down from heaven. The best guess is that he’s trying to open up different realms that embody the classical elements, water, air, wind, earth and fire, or just symbolic clues to that effect.
What other realms are there?
Chisholm’s group suggests that the Warlock might try to open up the gates of hell. Our minds are so wide-open on this, we actually had a team of researchers try to track down the remaining parts of Hitler’s corpse, and the graves of anyone else we would expect to find in “hell.”
Hell. Hell and fire. Fire is one of the remaining elements. It sounds like it might fit. I keep asking how.
My big fear is that he might send us on so many wild-goose chases, we’ll end up spread too thin. The gates of hell bring up the notion of not just fire, but also brimstone. Brimstone was an ancient word for sulfur. Of course it would turn out that Texas is one of the world’s biggest suppliers. We’ve got teams checking sulfur-processing facilities for anything unusual there.
Our minds have been bouncing around from one possibility to the next. I’m going insane with permutations. I have to hold myself back from relaying to Knoll every idea that strikes me.
I come back to the idea of hell and fire. I used to perform an illusion called the Cremation. Two muscular assistants would seal me inside a metal coffin that was then set on fire. I was supposed to escape b
efore I burned to death. The twist was the coffin would fall open and reveal a skeleton. After the audience reacted in horror, I’d appear in the back row of the auditorium. I never liked it conceptually. I argued with my father and grandfather about the logic of the effect. Whose skeleton was it supposed to be if I was alive? It was a logical leap nobody cared about except me.
There are at least a half dozen other illusions involving fire. They split into two themes: endurance and resurrection. Walking on hot coals, surviving in an oven, putting a hot poker on your tongue all imply an invulnerability to fire.
Resurrection illusions, like the Cremation, involve a kind of rebirth. Someone gets consumed by the flames, only to reappear unharmed. A phoenix effect of sorts. There are hundreds of versions of these ideas.
For what it’s worth, I’ve already e-mailed Knoll and Ailes my thoughts on these specific concepts. I still don’t know if they fit the Warlock’s MO. He could burn down a church full of people and have them or their twins appear elsewhere and it’d still look like a trick compared with the spectacles he’s already accomplished.
He’s thinking so much bigger than we are and he wants us to know this. We’re here in Texas at his invitation: Come watch me kill.
I look out my window at the storm clouds gathering overhead and try to imagine, if anything were possible, what would he do?
What would I do?
My phone rings. It’s Knoll.
“We found the girl. And she’s alive.”
53
ROSA MARTINEZ and her mother are very confused by what’s going on. Knoll had Agent Johnson and a female agent named Keener go to the mother’s house disguised as a couple and explain the situation to avoid arousing suspicion. They took her to pick up Rosa from her high school, presumably to help tend to her ailing grandmother. The goal was to get the two of them away from the house as quickly as possible in the event the Warlock already has them under surveillance.
In the adjoining motel room, Knoll is trying to tell them what he can. Mrs. Martinez isn’t taking the news lightly that her daughter may be the next target for the serial killer she’s seen all over television. They had to take her phone away to keep her from calling a friend and ruining our cover.