Level 26

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  But after a few seconds the power resumed, and a new, pixilated, black-and-white image appeared on all of the monitors.

  To view this “live” film, log into LEVEL26.com and enter the code: run4fun

  chapter 93

  The images were nothing less than surveillance footage from the heart of hell itself.

  Latex hands lowering a baby into an open metal crate. The baby is cold. Crying. Reaching out for her mother…

  The image twitches.

  The mother is freed from her wrist binds and taunted with a razor. Over her chest. Her legs. Her toes. Cruelly, mercilessly, like a butcher tormenting a chicken he’s about to chop. The mother lies frozen in fear, but it is no use. The butcher is determined.

  The image twitches.

  The mother is freed from her ankle binds, knees the monster in the face and scrambles off the hospital gurney, blind, limping, scrambling, spitting, screaming…

  The image twitches.

  The mother screams at the camera, screams at all of us, and we see the butcher pursuing her, razor in hand, bobbing and weaving and chasing, through the butcher’s nightmare dungeon and down a long hall until the butcher finally overcomes the mother….

  The image twitches.

  The butcher holds the razor in the air now. He, it seems, is determined to strip the skin from this sacrificial chicken….

  The image twitches, as if it can’t bear to watch what it’s been forced to record.

  And now the butcher has the baby in his blood-soaked hands, holding it up like an offering to some ancient and forgotten god….

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Everyone in the Special Circs War Room turned to face Secretary of Defense Norman Wycoff. The man’s shirt was untucked and he had dark bags under his eyes. Little hairs stuck up from the top of his head, making him resemble a duckling who’d just kicked its way out of the shell.

  The op heading up the computer search spoke up first. “We think he’s in Anaheim.”

  Riggins had been dreading this. He’d hoped that Wycoff would do what all figureheads should do—stay the fuck away and let them do their jobs. Wycoff loved snapping off commands, but he never stuck around and plunged his hands into the meat of it. The fact that he was here confirmed that Dark was right: This was so totally fucking personal.

  And a serious abuse of power.

  “Think?” Wycoff asked. “You got something real, or is he just jerking us off, like that Yucca Street address?”

  The operative brought Wycoff up to speed quickly, making sure to note that the Matterhorn breakthrough had, in fact, sir, been his idea. Constance muttered something to Riggins about needing the ladies’ room and started to edge her way out of the War Room.

  Wycoff saw her. “Agent Brielle. A word.”

  Constance exhaled, then walked back over to the secretary of defense. He leaned in so close, he’d be able to tilt his head and bite off her earring, if he wanted to.

  “I told you I wanted the latest intel the nanosecond you received it,” Wycoff said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Our jobs,” Constance said. “We literally just pieced this together seconds ago. Do you want this monster caught or not?”

  Wycoff looked her over for a moment. Her hair, her lips, then her tits. He was drunk. She could smell the scotch radiating from his pores. Wycoff’s eyes flittered around in their sockets, unable to focus on any one thing for very long.

  “We got it!” an op shouted.

  Oh, shit, Constance thought. Could she pull it off?

  “Bring it here,” Wycoff said. He was already pulling his BlackBerry from his pants pocket.

  “Just let me confirm,” Constance said, and made her way over to the op. She made him write it down quickly on a piece of paper—so there could be no error, she told him. Then she took the slip of paper to another desk, wrote something else on the note, then brought it over to Wycoff.

  “Come on, already,” he said. “You can file all the paperwork you want when this little motherfucker is dead and buried.”

  “Here,” she said, handing him a slip of paper. “We just wanted to lock it down. You don’t want to bring the wrath of God down on John Doe and his two-point-five kids living in the shadow of Disneyland, do you, Mr. Secretary?”

  “Disneyland?” he asked, then looked down at the slip of paper, which read:

  1531 Playa Del Rey

  Anaheim

  Wycoff stormed off without so much as a hidey-ho or a fuck you, cell phone pressed to his ear. He read the address over the phone. “You got that? Send the fucking cavalry. Execute all targets. Yes, fucking now. If it has a heartbeat, it dies…”

  The op who’d found the address stood up, confused. “Wait—Agent Brielle, I think the secretary has the wrong—”

  Riggins glided over to run interference. He put his hand on the op’s shoulder and guided him back down to his rolling desk chair. “Agent Brielle knows what she’s doing,” he said. “Now, get back on the machine and get me any kind of surveillance you can on the address you found.”

  A few moments later Constance walked into the ladies’ room, chose the stall on the end, lifted her skirt and pulled down her panties, then sat down. For a moment she caught herself staring blankly at the gray metal stall door, a little confused about how her career had brought her to this point.

  Then she snapped out of it, pressed a key, speed-dialing Dark.

  “What’ve you got?” he said.

  “Did you see that little window in the corner of the screen?”

  “No,” Dark admitted. “What was it?”

  “The best lead we’ve ever had on this case. We were able to triangulate and somehow got an address. But here’s the problem: Wycoff’s goon squad is moving in.”

  “I need more time.”

  “And you’ve got it,” she continued. “I gave Wycoff the wrong address. The real one is 1531 San Martin Drive in Anaheim. You’ve got about fifteen minutes of me jerking them around before they figure it out. Go.”

  “Thank you, Constance. If I haven’t—”

  “Just go.”

  Dark hammered the accelerator of his stolen car, blasting south on the 405, headed for Disneyland.

  chapter 94

  1531 San Martin Drive, Anaheim, California

  The house looked like it had dropped out of the wrong decade and accidentally landed here, in this decade, in the middle of this sunbaked suburban sprawl. Unlike the ranch houses around it, 1531 San Martin Drive was a grand folk Victorian, with brackets under the eaves and a trellised porch ringing the front. The home appeared to have been built before people realized what homes in Southern California should actually look like, its style imported from turn-of-the-century New England.

  Inside, every piece of the décor was white. Floors, walls, ceilings—even the windows were smoked white. Dark, clad completely in black, crawled along the white carpet, pistol with a laser-sighting rig strapped to his right side and a small bag of gear strapped to his left. Dark thought of a line from Raymond Chandler—he stood out like a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake.

  Clearly, Sqweegel had a thing for light and dark. So be it. All Dark needed was for that little red dot to land on a vital piece of his twitchy body—his forehead, maybe. Then one squeeze and it would be over.

  There was a white wooden door with a smudge of blood near the knob. Only a RIGHT THIS WAY sign would have been more obvious.

  Sqweegel, clearly, was waiting for him.

  White marble steps led down. Dark followed a set of bloodied footprints—messy and smeared. They were headed in both directions, as if someone had marched up to the doorway, changed his or her mind, then headed back down.

  Were those Sibby’s footprints?

  Dark paused at the doorway. The light was scant down here. He quietly fished out a mirror attached to a thin metal rod—a sniper’s snake mirror—to look around the corner.

  Sibby was in the reflection, tied to a hospital gurney
, covered in blood. There were so many wounds and gashes, it was hard to tell where they began and ended.

  Do not think of your foster family. Do not think of what the monster did to them. Sibby’s alive; that’s all that matters. No matter what he’s done, she can heal. We can all heal together.

  All you have to do is slay the monster, take your family, and go home.

  Dark dropped the mirror, not giving a shit about stealth anymore. There were no rules now. No more games. He drew his gun and rounded the corner to see Sqweegel.

  Holding the baby up in front of his chest.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to miss this,” he said. “Are you ready to fulfill your destiny?”

  chapter 95

  Dark aimed his gun at Sqweegel’s forehead. It was dim in here, but not so dim that he couldn’t see his white, wormlike writhing body. While Dark had stood out upstairs, Sqweegel’s white costume made him practically glow down here. All of his joints pumped like pistons, as if tuned to some song playing only in his head.

  The baby glowed, too.

  “Put the baby down or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, Steeeeeve? Kill me? You wouldn’t dare shoot. A stray bullet might hit my precious little baby.”

  “That’s not your child,” Dark hissed.

  “Why don’t you shoot us and find out? Give us both blood tests. Watch the truth wriggle its way to the surface. The truth always comes out. Always. You know that now. God is always watching us.”

  Dark struggled to find a shot. The red tracer dot bounced erratically around Sqweegel’s body. He was itching to shoot.

  But the moment the tracer sight found a clear shot, Sqweegel would inch back and move the baby into a different position—using it as a human shield. This basement was too dark. The margin of error too high.

  The baby was crying now, too. It didn’t like being bounced around, lifted up and down. It was cold and smelled like death down here. What was going through its tiny mind?

  Jesus, there he was, thinking of the baby as an “it.” Dark didn’t even know the gender—he and Sibby had decided to wait to find out. Most fathers were treated to the news two seconds after the birth. Their baby had come into the world inside the basement dungeon of a madman. Its first sounds the tortured cries of its mother, along with the lies of a sick little freak.

  And now the bright red laser sight from a gun held by its father.

  Welcome to the world, little one. It’s a stranger place than you ever could have imagined.

  “Having trouble?” Sqweegel taunted. “Would a little light help?”

  His elbow tapped a hospital-style metal plate, and instantly the dungeon was bathed in fluorescent light. And a hundred monitors, mounted in the walls, flickered to life.

  Illuminating Sqweegel’s secret place—the one he’d successfully hidden for three decades.

  The one he’d spent his entire adult life burrowing and constructing.

  For years Special Circs assumed that Sqweegel had some kind of home base, a lair where he could bring his victims with relative ease. They speculated that it had to be well equipped with a variety of gear and, most important, soundproofing.

  Now that Dark was finally seeing it, his mind boggled at the horror.

  chapter 96

  The place seemed to have been constructed with two types of building materials: video monitors and human corpses.

  Squint and if you were lucky you might see only the video monitors, each linked to a hidden camera in a different location: Air Force Two. Quantico—the Special Circs War Room. Dark’s Malibu home. Sibby’s empty hospital room. And dozens of random interiors—homes, apartments, offices—all offering a visual portal into a space Sqweegel had already defiled. Clearly, he liked to keep tabs on things once he’d visited.

  Sqweegel liked to bring back souvenirs, too.

  And that’s what filled the spaces between the monitors—the remains of human bodies. Skulls, bones, joints, veins, pink muscles, cloudy eyeballs, spongy gray brains, all preserved through plastination. They served as the mortar holding the monitors and computer gear in place, Sqweegel’s final mockery of the human form.

  “You’re the first to see my life’s work, Steeeeeeve,” he said. “Go ahead. Look around. Explore. You might recognize the fragments of a tiny skull somewhere in there. Maybe some of your own DNA will tug at your blood. I’d be interested to know. It took a lot of searching through medical waste to find the right one, and I wouldn’t want to be wrong.”

  “You’ve killed…”

  “Far more than anyone’s ever imagined,” Sqweegel said. “I only leave the occasional body to send a message. But nobody seems to understand my work…except you. You were close, you know, when you were talking to Constance. I liked how you put it—Saint Peter, right? Not perfect, but close.”

  “You’ve been watching everything.”

  “What, with this? No, no, no. This is just the compound eye of a common fly compared to the almighty vision of the Father. No, Dark, I was just watching you and those in your orbit. I’ve had your life on tape for years. I’ve seen your every move. Heard every conversation. Watched every second of every hour of every day. There is nothing I don’t know about you, or her, or Riggins, or Constance, or our traitorous Secretary Wycoff.”

  Dark moved closer to Sqweegel. “You’re not God.”

  “No,” Sqweegel admitted. “But He sent me. Don’t you realize that by now?”

  “You’re fucking delusional.”

  “No, I’m merely telling a parable. Cast aside your mortal shell and listen with your soul,” Sqweegel said. “I know at least part of you can hear me. You wouldn’t have come this far if you hadn’t. And we wouldn’t have met up again in Rome.”

  Met up again? Dark thought. No. Rome was the first time. He’s trying to confuse me. Keep it simple. Flip open the monster’s skull. Follow the wires running around his diseased brain. Pull the wires. Pull them all out and strangle him with them.

  “You’re trying to show us sinners the errors of our ways,” Dark said.

  “No, I’m not interested in punishing the sin,” Sqweegel replied. “Instead I serve as a beacon of God and all of His heavenly virtues.”

  Something clicked in Dark’s mind. Seven. Not the sins. Everyone knew about the sins. But who considered their opposite—the seven heavenly virtues?

  “Surely you remember them,” Sqweegel said. “After all, your fake family enrolled you in that so-called Catholic school. Come on. Recite them with me. Prudence…”

  Dark’s mind spun through the past in the present. The definition of the virtue, matched against the recent carnage. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t not think it.

  Prudence was all about showing proper judgment. If Sqweegel held himself up as an example of prudence, then he’d taught that lesson in New York City.

  “The 9/11 widows,” Dark said softly.

  “Ah, see—I knew you were listening! How about justice?”

  The guilty will be punished. And the punishment will fit the crime.

  “The kids buying beer.”

  “Faith?”

  “The priests. Punishing six for the actions of others who lost their faith and hurt children.”

  “Hope.”

  “You didn’t kill the wives, just the horses. You expected them to do better. You had hope in them.”

  “Fantastic, Dark! Now the virtues from this evening, starting with charity.”

  “You helped Sibby give birth.”

  “Restraint?”

  “You let our baby live.”

  “And finally…courage.”

  “You and I. Right here in this basement. The ability to face our worst fears. Is that it? Are we here to face each other, you son of a bitch? Are you afraid of me?”

  Now he held the baby close, and Sqweegel began to make a strange hissing sound as he contorted his body—as if he held an orange somewhere in his rib cage and he was trying to squeeze the juice out of it. Black bile began to
seep out from between his teeth. It dripped on the infant’s masked head.

  “I’ve waited for this moment for so long,” he whispered. “You have no idea.”

  chapter 97

  Above Sqweegel’s head, on a series of video monitors, Dark saw a flurry of running bodies in uniform. He recognized them. Wycoff’s Dark Arts team, swarming out of their vans, rifles in hand. Moving in for the kill. Only now there were more than two. Easily a half dozen, from what he could tell.

  And they were here in much less than fifteen minutes.

  “Face your fear, my brother,” Sqweegel said.

  “Don’t!”

  But he did. Sqweegel used both hands to toss the infant in a high arc over Dark’s head.

  No no no no NO…

  Dark dropped his gun, spun, and made two giant strides across the floor, hands out. The baby was moving too high, too fast, too far away—

  Behind him he heard a quick shuffling and a metallic clicking noise, but forget that; focus on the baby—

  Which was plunging now, way too fast, toward the cement.

  Dark lunged out with both hands, blindly, without any thought to how he might land—because how he might land didn’t matter. Saving the baby did. Sibby’s baby. His baby—

  His fingers brushed the back of the baby’s soft head, and they both slammed into the ground.

  Somehow, his hands protected the child’s fragile head from the fall.

  Dark’s lungs struggled to recover. The breath had been pounded out of his body when he hit the ground. But that didn’t matter, either. Breathing wasn’t important. He would breathe later. The important thing was taking Sibby and the baby out of here now.

  He scooped her up and climbed to his feet. Newborn in one hand, he picked up his gun with the other. Where was he? Where was that slippery son of a bitc—