Penance

by Dan O'Shea

  CHAPTER 24 – RESTON, VIRGINIA

  In the generic conference room at the back of InterGov’s suite, Weaver was trying to be patient while Tom Paravola, InterGov’s technology director and research guru, ran down what he had thus far unearthed. Ferguson, Weaver’s top ops guy, was at the table along with Chen and Nancy Snyder, chief witch doctor from the PsyOps group.

  “We’ve hacked into all the major credit card issuers, and we have a program sorting through all cards issued based on applications received since Fisher’s family was killed,” Paravola droned. “We’re sorting them by the demographic parameters Fisher could likely use. White, male, age range forty to sixty-five just to be safe. That’s still way too many cards. OK, we also have in place programming that cross-references these cards with existing credit histories. Here’s how that works. We assign algorithms to–”

  Weaver waved a hand. “Tom, could you skip the tech wizard shit? We don’t care, and we don’t understand. Skip to the bottom line, OK?”

  Paravola looked disappointed. “OK, but this is some pretty elegant stuff we’ve done, and it’s got some great potential applications–”

  “Paravola, you’re starting to piss me off. I’m sure it’s great shit. That’s why we pay you what we do. It’s also why you’re here and not doing time for that child porn rap we got your ass out of. Now give me some fucking data.”

  Paravola blanched and took a swallow of water. “OK. We’ve got about 51,100 new cards that make sense. Of the ones that have been used, most have heavily localized usage patterns away from the north-south line we’re focusing on, and many have been used at dates and times that coincide with Fisher’s known activities, but in locations far removed from those actions.”

  “You mean while he was blowing people’s hearts out through their spinal columns,” said Weaver.

  “Yes, then. That still leaves better than 20,000 cards. Most of those haven’t been used at all, so those don’t help. OK, that leaves 735 cards that have been used on or near Fisher’s line at least once on dates that fit our profile. Of that set, 541 have other charging patterns that eliminate them from consideration, and 107 others have charging patterns that put them within five percent of being eliminated by our current probability matrix. Of the remaining 83 cards, one interesting pattern has emerged.

  “A Paul Reynolds, forty-seven, used a Discover card in and around Door County, the first shooting scene, for two days before and on the day of the shooting. That card was not used before nor has it been used since. Charges include a hotel room, meals, and some clothing.

  “A Joseph Huss, fifty, used a MasterCard in the northern suburbs of Chicago, again for three days, two before the Marslovak shooting and the day of the shooting. Room, board, and gas. Again, not used before or since.

  “And, the pièce de résistance, a Bill Wilson, forty-six, has used a MasterCard for the last three days, first to check into a Motel 6 in Kankakee, Illinois, and to eat at a Denny’s, then to buy some shoes at a local sporting goods store, and, just this morning, to buy breakfast at a diner in Onar–”

  Paravola stopped talking to duck the water glass Weaver had thrown at his head. The glass shattered against the white board behind Paravola.

  “You dumb fuck.” Weaver was standing now, leaning toward Paravola, his hands on the table. “You waste our time with your goddamn algorithms and charge-pattern run-downs when you have something close to real-time intel? When did you develop this?”

  Paravola was shaking. “Just in the last hour. The last charge was only made a few hours ago.”

  “What’s that town again?”

  “Onarga.”

  “Fergie?”

  Ferguson already had a map up on his laptop. “On our line, boss. Maybe an hour or so south out of Kankakee.”

  “You ready to roll?”

  “Got my team,” Ferguson said. “Me, Lawrence, Capelli, and Richter. Gave Chen my load-out list yesterday.”

  “Everything is at the hangar, sir,” Chen said.

  “Four guys enough?” Weaver asked.

  “Best we can do, unless you want to call Langley, get some extra bodies,” Ferguson said. “Figured you’d want to keep this in house.”

  “You figured right. Fergie, get out to Andrews. Beep your team. I want you wheels up ASAP. Get set up in Effingham. You already made arrangements there, Chen?”

  “Yes, sir. Ferguson has the details.”

  “Good deal. Chen, I don’t know what we can do in the way of local stringers in central Illinois, but if we have some or can get some, get them out. Hotels, gas stations, you know the drill. Get somebody into Kankakee, see if we can get a make and model on whatever Fisher’s driving.”

  “Yes, sir. Can I contact any other agencies?”

  “No. We need to contain this, people. Fisher is our guy. He’s our problem. It’s a post-9/11 world. Already a lot less handwringing on the Hill when our more legitimate friends need to color outside the lines a little. This is not the time to be calling Langley or the feebs looking for help. This sort of outside-the-box shit is why we exist. If we can’t clean this up, what good are we. Anything else?”

  Dr Snyder, who had spent the meeting doodling on a legal pad, looked up.

  “Actually, Colonel, if you have a moment, you and I should chat.”

  “Your office,” said Weaver. “Rest of you get moving.”

  The higher-ups at InterGov were left to their own devices when it came to decorating their offices. Most emulated Weaver’s spartan army-surplus look. But Dr Snyder’s office was damn near opulent.

  Two walls were covered by bookcases. The cases were full, and Weaver had no doubt Synder’d read all that shit. An exquisite hand-tied rug from northern Afghanistan covered most of the floor. The pattern was dense and intricate, with red the predominant color. It had been darker red the first time Weaver had seen it because Ferguson had picked up a body the lab needed to look at and had used the rug for packaging on the flight from Islamabad to DC. Thing was, Fergie’d had to put a couple 9mm slugs through the body in order to convince it to lie still, so the body had a couple of leaks. They were going to toss the rug, but Snyder had asked if she could have it. She got some restoration friend of hers at the Smithsonian to clean it up. Still had some stains, but you had to know where to look.

  Weaver sat down in one of the wine-colored leather wingback chairs that flanked a butler’s table with brass accents. Snyder was futzing around in the back.

  “Would you care for a cup of tea, Colonel?” she asked.

  “Doc, every time I come down here, you ask if I want a cup of tea. Every time you ask, I tell you no.”

  “I’m going to have some tea, Colonel. Propriety demands the inquiry, even given your predictable response.” Dr Snyder settled into the other chair, setting a small white china cup and saucer on the table.

  “So you unscramble Fisher’s eggs for me, doc?”

  Snyder smiled. “Alas, like the lamented Humpty Dumpty, Mr Fisher’s eggs cannot be put back together again. I do believe, however, I can offer some insight into what might be on his menu.”

  “Gimme,” said Weaver.

  “First, Mr Fisher, like most of the gentlemen in your operations department, evidences numerous psycho- or sociopathic tendencies – lack of empathy, lack of guilt, considerable cunning.”

  “For Christ’s sake, we have you test for those qualities when we recruit. Look, Doc, I understand if you’re running the local Walmart those qualities might put you off a candidate. But they’re all big pluses for me.”

  “True. Mr Fisher is an interesting case, however. He did consent to examination after his family was murdered. I had expected him to be enraged and focused on revenge. Psychopaths generally hold grudges and do not bear insults of any kind lightly. Fisher was curiously unaroused. In response to questions in this area, he indicated that his family was in paradise. They had all been to the Catholic sacrament of confession that morning, so Fisher was convinced they had died in a state of gra
ce and were thus ensured immediate entrance into heaven. I understand that his father was devout as well?”

  “Zeke? Yeah. I did a job in Kenya with Zeke, back during the Mau-Mau shit. Son of a bitch got me out of the rack at dawn one Sunday so we could drive through the bush for better than an hour so he could make mass at some cholera-trap mission.”

  “So a paternal bond, our Mr Fisher sharing his father’s spiritual and vocational faiths. As to the issue of this geographic line that so interests you and Mr Ferguson, that smacks of ritual. Now, mental illness is a maddeningly esoteric affair, so such rituals are often very difficult to decipher. However, if Mr Fisher has become a serial killer, although I suppose one could argue that he has been one for years after a fashion, but if he has become a serial killer operating on an agenda other than the one which you control, then there is almost certainly a ritual involved. In his case, I would guess that this ritual will have religious, specifically Catholic, underpinnings.”

  “You gonna give me any more guidance on that, or am I just supposed to operate on the assumption that he’s become some kind of religious whack job?”

  “We are well into the area of supposition, Colonel. But not, I don’t think, wholly unfounded supposition. Let me ask you, how many people has Fisher killed?”

  Weaver gave a shrug. “Couldn’t say for sure. Specific targets on missions I assigned? Better than a hundred. Collateral deaths in those missions? Maybe another hundred. There was Vietnam before that.”

  “And how would you characterize the men Fisher killed?”

  “Scumbags, mostly. Terrorists, drug dealers, third-world thugs. Why?”

  “Colonel, Fisher is not, I don’t believe, what you would characterize as a primary psychopath – not utterly remorseless, certainly not incapable of forming real attachments. His attachments to his family were authentic and quite strong. I believe he is a secondary psychopath. Ordinarily, the only hope for anything like a cure for a psychopath is an epiphany of some kind. Some event that so undermines their egocentric worldview that they ameliorate or even repolarize their behavior of their own volition. I believe that watching his family die was such an event for Mr Fisher. Unfortunately, the shock of this event was such that it did not redirect Mr Fisher into more normal channels. Instead, it has redirected him into another pathology entirely. As I said, one psychopathic characteristic that Mr Fisher evidenced was a lack of remorse. He was capable of killing in cold blood without allowing his conscience to interfere with his ability to continue to do so. When his family was killed in front of him, when he had his epiphany, the cumulative guilt attendant to all those previous killings must have been extraordinary, compounded by the guilt of not being able to save his own family. He was able to exonerate himself of the latter guilt by taking refuge in his religion – by assuring himself that his family was in paradise. If he had found no mechanism to relieve the guilt of failing to prevent – and, really, since the act was almost certainly targeted at him, of likely causing – the death of his family, the death of the only persons with whom he had an authentic attachment, I don’t believe he would have been able to function. Therefore, he has not only found refuge in his religion, he has become imprisoned by it. However, Catholicism compounds the guilt attached to his prior bad acts. The men he killed, by the standards of Fisher’s religion, were almost universally evil. Thus, he not only killed them, by killing them when they were not in a state of grace, he damned them. God, in his church’s teaching, desires that all souls find their way to him. Fisher had, thusly, subverted God’s will.”

  Weaver leaned back in the chair. He’d learned long ago that you couldn’t rush Snyder. She’d get to her point when she got to it. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he threw a glass at her, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t wet her drawers like Paravola.

  “This is all real interesting, doc, but where’s it get us?”

  “Colonel, don’t you see? The two people he’s killed so far were both killed immediately after being absolved of their sins by a Catholic priest. Fisher purposely killed them while they were in a state of grace. He sent them to heaven.”

  “Christ, doc. You telling me he’s trying to balance the books?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Then he’s got a couple hundred people to go.”

  Dr Snyder tilted her head a little, looking amused. “That, dear Colonel, is your problem. There’s one more thing, Colonel. I happened to take a peek at that map Mr Ferguson accessed. Your assumption is that the killings will be roughly equidistant from one another along this north/south axis?”

  “It’s a stretch, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  “If you look just south of Effingham, you’ll see a town called Moriah.” Snyder paused expectantly.

  “And?”

  “Think of your Old Testament, Colonel. When God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his only son, he tells Abraham to take him to a place called Moriah and to make the sacrifice on a height that God will point out. I think the symbolism will be compelling to our Mr Fisher.”

  “God stops Abraham before he offs the kid.”

  “Yes,” said Snyder. “Abraham sacrifices a ram in the child’s stead.”

  “Not much chance of that happening this time.”

  Snyder just raised her eyebrows and took another sip of her tea. Weaver got up and headed back up the hall.

  An hour later, Weaver stood in a closed hangar at Andrews Air Force base watching Ferguson oversee the former Air America guys as they loaded his team’s gear into a Gulfstream IV.

  “What are you bringing, Fergie?”

  “Got the Remington 700s for me and Lawrence. Scoped 16s with the extended mags for Capelli and Richter, let them handle any hose jobs. Suppressed H&Ks in case we need to take things inside. Everybody’s got their personal weapons. Also, I’m bringing a couple of the Barretts.”

  The Barretts were .50 caliber weapons with ten-round magazines and an effective range of almost a mile. They could shoot through walls, through cars. They could throw armor piercing slugs, incendiary rounds, you name it.

  “Jesus, Fergie,” Weaver said. “The fucking Barretts?”

  “A lot of open country down that way, boss. Might catch him in a vehicle. Frankly, I want to have the bastard out-gunned. Gets to a shooting match, I’ll feel a lot better if we’re out of his range. Anyway, better to have it and not need it–”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Than need it and not have it. OK, Fergie, it’s your show. Just try to keep us off Nightline.” Weaver clapped Ferguson on the back. “Hey, Chen around?”

  Ferguson nodded up at the Gulfstream. “Already on board.”

  Chen was sitting in the back of the cabin looking at her laptop.

  “Playing solitaire, Chen?”

  “I had Paravola link me into his tracking program. I’m running a few alternative searches. Will you be joining us?”

  Weaver walked down the aisle and sat in the seat facing Chen.

  “Yeah. Got some good shit out of Snyder. You heard about Villanueva?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not your fault, Chen. I told you to send the spic. My call. Anything heating up there?”

  “The detective on the case has identified the spot where Fisher took the shot, and another investigator is asking military and law enforcement contacts for names of snipers. We have to assume Villanueva had the electronics on him when he was killed, but I haven’t seen anything regarding those in their system yet.”

  “What’s this detective’s name?”

  “John Lynch.”

  “He any good?”

  “He has an excellent clearance rate on his cases,” Chen said. “This is also the second time he has been involved in a gun battle. When he was a rookie, he killed two men and was wounded when he and his partner were ambushed in a housing project.”

  “So this Lynch guy could be a problem.”

  “It is possible, sir.”

  “You think on that then, Chen. Let me know if it look
s like we’ve got to make his life interesting.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pull up your map for a second,” Weaver said. Chen pressed a few keys and turned the laptop so both she and Weaver could see the screen. “Snyder thinks Fisher will head to a town called Moriah. Some biblical bullshit.”

  “It’s here,” said Chen, moving the cursor.

  “Gimme some detail.”

  Chen zoomed in on the town.

  “Jesus,” said Weaver, “Welcome to Mayberry. They got a Catholic church?”

  Chen switched out of the map program and into a local directory. “Holy Angels. Hill Street.”

  “When they do confessions there?”

  “The next scheduled time is 3pm tomorrow.”

  “Go back to the map, show me the church. Switch to topo,” said Weaver.

  Chen pressed another key, bringing up a topographical map of the area. Weaver took one look at the dense concentration of curved contour lines and let out a low whistle.

  “Fergie’s gonna love this,” he said.

  Richter popped into the cabin, followed by Ferguson, Lawrence, and Capelli. Weaver got up. He went to clap Chen on the shoulder, habit, just what he did with the troops. But he stopped. Every time he touched her, he felt like he’d just put his hand in a snake pit and gotten away with it.

  CHAPTER 25 – CHICAGO

  While Lynch slept, Johnson went out and bought food. She could hear Lynch in the shower when she got back. He came out from the bedroom in a pair of khakis and a white T-shirt just as she set breakfast on the table. Eggs, sausage, bagels, grapefruit, coffee.

  “Thought you’d gone in to work,” said Lynch.

  “I’ll have to, after we eat. How are you feeling?”