Randall quietly said, “Pip?”
No response.
Randall reached out and touched Pip’s shoe.
Still no response.
Randall sighed and sat back. Over the past few months, he and Pip had become friends. Their conversations, however, had turned to Luco’s servile treatment of Pip, who had been Luco’s “friend” for three decades. Randall had encouraged Pip—as recently as that very morning over the phone—to come out from Luco’s shadow. It was clear Pip was struggling with painful memories and difficult decisions.
“Pip?” Luco called from outside.
Pip swung around, avoiding Randall’s gaze. “Yes?”
“What was that, a nine?”
“A Llama—9mm, yes.”
“Gimme a box.”
Pip pulled a box from a cubby under the armrest and handed it to him. Luco tossed it down the embankment. When it hit the ground, bullets scattered everywhere. He pointed at the small treasure he was leaving, nodded at the boys, and climbed back into the limo.
He scowled at Randall’s cigarette and said, “Father, please.”
Randall pulled deeply on the smoke and then tossed it out the door, into the dirt.
Luco shut the door. To his driver he said, “Let’s move it, Tullio.” He showed Pip a big grin. “Graduation day for the rock throwers!”
Pip nodded ambivalently. As they rode away, Randall craned to look out the dark glass. The first of the boys was just breaking cover and running toward Luco’s gift. The others followed, then the limo arced away between two hills, and the boys disappeared from view.
Luco crossed a leg and began wiping the dust off his shoe with a handkerchief, smiling smugly.
“One of those boys is going to shoot you dead,” Randall said.
The smile faded. Luco’s eyes caught Randall’s, and the old man chuckled dryly.
“No, Luco, that is not a prophecy. Only sarcasm.”
“Your jokes aren’t funny.”
“Nor are yours,” he said. “You are destined for bigger things. Why piddle with juvenile pranks?” His tone was fatherly.
Luco shrugged. “Amusement.” He turned to Pip. “Maybe we should take the Mevo Modi’in road home.” He grinned. “I hear Route 1 just got more dangerous.”
He snapped the handkerchief at his clean shoe, then switched legs and started wiping its mate. After a few breaths, he said, “So, Father, how long can you stay this time?”
“I fly out this evening.”
Concern flashed across Luco’s face. “What about . . . ?”
“I’ll return for the Gathering, never fear.” Father Randall took a swig of wine. He closed his eyes and put his head back. It was going to be a long week.
11
Two years ago, Brady would have skipped the 6:40 flight out of Dulles to Colorado Springs and taken the next one. The FBI required him to wear his pistol whenever on duty, which included Bureau-related travel. The Federal Aviation Administration understood the need for certain law enforcement officers (LEOs in cop-talk) to carry weapons on board and accommodated that need—provided the LEO completed an FAA class on the subject and adhered to strict guidelines. One of the guidelines prohibited “boarding an aircraft armed within eight hours of consuming alcohol.” Best Brady could figure, he’d stopped drinking—the term passed out never occurred to him—around midnight. Despite feeling sober and alert, technically he violated a federal law when he boarded at 6:25 a.m. Technically.
He envied Alicia’s expediency. She never let something as trivial as the law hinder her pursuit of a felon. If the irony of that ever bothered her, she kept it to herself. Certainly, she wouldn’t kill without provocation or steal for her own gain. Stomping on the civil rights of a perp was, however, less problematic. So was conveniently forgetting protocol, the accumulation of which Alicia thought of as weights on her ankles in the race for justice—and of which Brady thought of as a wall that delineated cop from crook.
He had never made a show of following proper procedure or pointed out when others didn’t; he’d done his puritanical best silently, believing that acts of virtue were done for oneself or for God, not for others.
Brady had always been the kind of person who paid separately at hotels for in-room movies, though they were always as innocuous as, say, The Lord of the Rings or Remember the Titans, so they wouldn’t be charged to his Bureau MasterCard. He wondered now why he’d been so fastidious. Since Karen’s death, he’d found himself increasingly willing to initiate or overlook lapses in protocol. While he had never believed good behavior should earn him special consideration in the blessings department, he had thought it should count for something when it came time for the Big Guy to pick who got needlessly slaughtered by a drunk driver and whose life would be ripped apart by the event.
The realization that bad things happen to good people did not give him a feeling of being a kindred spirit to fellow sanctimonious saps as much as it got him thinking the opposite was equally true: good things happen to bad people. Not that white lies and small vices made people bad, but he had become aware of how many of his colleagues—mostly hardworking, decent agents with excellent reputations for closing cases—did let the government pick up the tab for their hotel movies and room service, and did stretch truths to secure search warrants, and did apply intimidation tactics to uncooperative witnesses. Essentially, they breached all sorts of ethical, legal, and moral principles, to varying degrees. Some claimed that in the current climate of “criminal rights,” it was the only way to get bad people, truly bad people, off the streets.
And nailing bad guys was something he yearned to do now, even more than before. Aside from time with Zach, helping put bad guys away was the only balm he’d found to soothe his anguished soul. If he had come to view his life as a vandalized, dilapidated house with ripped-apart furnishings and graffitied walls, locking up a perp felt like repairing a smashed figurine and placing it back on a shelf. And if bending a rule or two—or more important, developing an attitude that breaking rules in the name of expediency or tough-mindedness—got the job done, then that was for him.
The passenger on his right, a broad-shouldered business type, attacked the morning’s Wall Street Journal with aggressive eyes and furiously page-turning hands, as though fully expecting to find personal libels hidden among the text and tables. To facilitate his search, Mr. Business annexed the airspace in front of Brady’s face, snapping the paper wide to scan its columns. Brady nudged the hand away. The man mumbled an apology and then a few minutes later snapped the hand back with the turn of a page.
A wisp of an elderly woman occupied the seat to his left. She apparently understood air travel to be a grand opportunity to socialize—if socializing meant telling a complete stranger every imaginable detail of her life. Whatever good his metabolism and four Tylenols were doing to alleviate the symptoms of his foolish minibinge last night, this woman effectively counteracted them.
“Ma’am?” Brady said finally, after the plane had leveled off at thirty-five thousand feet.
Her history droned on unabated.
“Ma’am?” More firmly.
She paused, seeming surprised to find a live person looking at her.
“I’m sorry, but I really have to do some work.” He bent to retrieve a three-ring binder and a legal pad from the soft-sided documents case stashed under the seat in front of him.
Her monologue clicked on again, picking up mid-sentence, precisely where Brady had stopped her. He sighed and decided she wouldn’t notice he had moved on to his own affairs, or care if she did notice.
He lowered the drop-down tray in front of him and centered the pad of paper on it. The binder went on top of the paper; he wasn’t ready to open it yet. Instead, he sat with his fingers resting lightly on the front cover.
Through the bottom opening of the binder, he could see three yellow dividers. They separated the documents into four sections, one for each of the presumed Pelletier killings, not including last night’s. Th
e locals for each case had faxed the paperwork and some of the crime scene photos to the Bureau only yesterday, after some cajoling by John Gilbreath, head of the laboratory and training divisions. Brady had made copies for the trip to Colorado.
Among the reports, interview transcriptions, and crime scene sketches were photocopied death shots—snapshots of the victims in graphic, bloody detail. As part of their training, LEOs, from county sheriff deputies to FBI agents, view dozens if not hundreds of death shots. The exposure is calculated not only to sharpen their investigative skills, to teach them, for instance, how to read the truth in blood splatters and to recognize suicides that aren’t suicides, but also to desensitize them to the extreme horror of violent physical trauma. Vomiting officers can wreak havoc on crime scenes, and investigators can hardly reconstruct the events of a death from bodily wreckage when the sight of it makes them nauseated and light-headed. The extent of violence people inflict on others and themselves cannot be exaggerated: faces sheared off by shotgun blasts, leaving hanging gristle and gore-filled sinuses, eye sockets, and throats; eviscerated bodies that are nothing more than hollowed-out husks; dismembered victims bagged and buried.
In light of other mutilations he’d seen, decapitation didn’t seem so hideous. Still, the thought of it made his stomach roll. There was something about its finality that rattled his mind. Throughout history, people have survived horrendous assaults. They’ve recovered from gunshots to every conceivable body part. They’ve lived through amputations and brutal slashes. Stabbings, impalements, electric shocks, chokings, flayings, poisonings, beatings, burns, bites, falls.
But never decapitation. It left no hope, no chance for survival. Which was probably the reason this killer chose it. Beheading was a more gruesome version of popping two slugs into the skull, the coup de grâce favored by mobsters and despots.
It was Brady’s job to bear witness to these crimes, to study their aftermath, and to construct an image of the person who could commit such atrocities. On his best days, he felt like a gallant knight blazing a trail through hell so that others would not have to. When he was down, and the murders were particularly repugnant, he was a voyeur in an alternate world where everything was the opposite of what it should be. Birth, vibrancy, hope, life, love, beauty—he dwelt in the exact converse of these. Most days, his view of his job fell somewhere between.
With a sigh, Brady lifted the binder. It came to him that it was lighter than it ought to be, that somehow it should bear the weight of the lost lives it represented. Drawing it close to his chest, making sure its contents were hidden from the woman (the newspaper was wall enough on the other side), he cracked it open.
12
Under Jerusalem
Luco Scaramuzzi took a deep breath and tried not to visualize the people on the opposite side of the massive conference table as a big pile of corpses. As much as he’d like to facilitate that vision, he needed them. He needed their money, their power. For now.
Bare bulbs over their chairs in the dark room made their faces appear disembodied, hovering above the table’s edge like Halloween masks hung from fishing line. It was an altogether eerie sight, which perfectly complemented both the locale and the business at hand.
They occupied an octagonal chamber sixty feet below the streets of the Christian Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. The room was part of an underground complex that had been appropriated and modified by various occupying governments for three millennia. For the last few hundred years, it had remained sealed off and forgotten by the surface world. Then, twenty-three years ago, workers broke through a wall in the basement of the Latin Seminary and Patriarchate, revealing an ancient water tunnel. This tunnel sloped down into a vast labyrinth of tunnels, catacombs, caverns, and rooms. Situated just inside the Old City wall between Jaffa Gate and New Gate, the discovery was well away from the famous Hasmonean Tunnels, Tsidkiyahu Cave, and Jerusalem’s other known subterranean structures. No one suspected its existence, and the quick thinking of a man who was at the time the rector of the school ensured its secrecy. He made some calls, collected a handsome finder’s fee, and granted to what he thought of as an organizzazione oscura—a shadowy organization—exclusive access to the entrance. The workers were paid off (though one tale had them all murdered). New workmen installed an iron door at the threshold and constructed a separate basement entrance and walls that gave an element of privacy to those who entered and left the regions below.
Like Luco. And the twelve men and women he faced across the table.
Around them, columns dimly caught slivers of light along their fluted lengths; they stood at regular intervals along the perimeter and marked out the room’s dimensions. Eighty feet across, it resembled the ancient tomb of a king more than the barracks it had once been. The surface of its stone walls had crumbled, forming a concave ramp of sediment between floor and wall. The columns supported capitals and entablature whose ornate carvings of vines and faces had worn into bumps and grooves more closely approximating scar tissue. Stone beams arched up to meet at the apex of a high domed ceiling, now invisible in the gloom.
The bulbs had been strung from pillar to opposing pillar. They cast a faint illumination on the flawlessly constructed cherrywood table, which seemed as incongruous with its surroundings as a Krugerrand in the hand of a junkie.
Luco was seated in one of twenty matching chairs widely spaced around the table. The eight men and four women seated opposite him constituted the governing body of an organization euphemistically called the Watchers. Its actual name was ancient and heavy on the tongue; few said it, or even knew it, in this age. Most of these directors had followed their fathers or mothers into their current positions, both here and in the wider world. A few had been recruited to combat attrition through barrenness, disloyalty, political or financial misfortune, or premature death leaving children too young to assume the mantle of responsibility. Every director was wealthy and powerful—equals among the world’s elite.
Having experienced lifelong privilege and preordained responsibilities, their distinct personalities had been shaped primarily by pedigree and nationality rather than by the average person’s complex blending of desires hard-won and desires never to be. When any passion can be easily and immediately satiated, the experiences that stir even the most exhilarating emotions in humankind—love, accomplishment, adventure—soon take their place among common things. Consequently, the emotion that defined each of them was boredom.
Until Luco had entered their lives. He was everything they had dreamed about and hoped for, and like nothing they had ever seen. When he thought about his effect on them, a phrase came to mind, a bit of teenage ego-centricity—I rock their world! Corny, yes, but perfect for Luco in regard to these aristocrats whose worlds had not been rocked since the shock of leaving the birth canal.
A man seated directly across from Luco was conferring quietly with his colleagues. This was Koji Arakawa, heir to a real estate fortune, superintendent of this committee’s muscular financial arm, and de facto leader of the Watchers. Even in the chamber’s unflattering light, his regal good looks were undeniable, and Luco knew him to be quick-witted and intelligent. It was easy to imagine him receiving subjects and issuing proclamations at his company’s Tokyo headquarters, an Asian Solomon with the world at his feet. If Luco could admire any of these people—these scavengers who waited to pick the bones he left on his plate, who pretended to guide him, guard him, grow him, but who kept their talons in what was rightfully his—if any engendered his admiration, it would be Arakawa. Always stoic, he displayed a steely resolve the others could only mimic.
Luco lifted a bottle of Daggio springwater to his lips and drained half of it. When he returned it to the table, Arakawa was looking at him. He possessed a voice as noble as his appearance.
“Luco,” he said kindly, “we are unsure of what it is you want.”
“Everything,” Luco said.
“What do you mean, ‘everything’?” asked Niklas Hüber in a sharp
Teutonic accent. On everything, he slapped the table, as if smashing a bug. He was a German telecommunications magnate and Luco’s fiercest detractor. He had fat, black caterpillars for eyebrows, an explosion of silver hair, and the grim face of an Edvard Munch painting.
Luco kept a passive demeanor as he studied the stern countenance of his adversary.
If looks could kill . . .
The others, too, were waiting for a response. All except his countryman Donato Benini. Good ol’ Donato. Luco’s most ardent supporter, almost a fan. His ever-present grin had dimmed with embarrassment, perhaps shame, over Hüber’s ill manner.
Donato sat at one point of the crescent of people on the other side of the table, Niklas at the other point. Through what Luco was sure was an unconscious polarization process, the Watchers had adjusted their seating positions over time, so that moving right from Donato, watcher by watcher, trust in Luco and enthusiasm for his plans gradually waned, culminating with Hüber’s utter contempt.
It was Luco’s goal to stabilize in his favor this spectrum of opinions, to turn the others’ doubt into Donato’s fawning conviction.
“Everything,” he said again and shrugged. “The bank accounts, real estate holdings, securities; access to the politicians, media barons, investors; control of the technicians, clerics, assassins . . . everything.”
“You are mad!” shot Hüber, squashing another bug with his palm.
The lot of them began clamoring in shock and indignation, some at Luco’s words, some at Hüber’s.
Arakawa alone held his tongue. He met Luco’s gaze, and a smile creased his lips. Luco found the man’s expression impossible to decipher. It could be saying, “How did we end up in the company of such fools?” Or just as possibly, “You’re in trouble now.”
After a moment, he quieted the others. To Luco, he said, “You do realize we have a plan for you, a timetable?”
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