The Soul Collectors dm-4

by Chris Mooney

  She thought about Charlie Rizzo's odd-looking black medieval tunic. 'What's the name of this group?'

  'It doesn't have a specific name. But this group believed that symbol represents one who is basically a slave to an Archon.'

  'Is Gnosticism an actual religion or is it a cult?'

  'An actual religion,' Ross said. 'It was essentially wiped out by the end of the fifth century. What we know about it comes from the Gnostic library discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the forties, and then, in 1970, the discovery of the Gospel of Judas in El Minya. It's a Gnostic gospel written by Jesus's Gnostic followers, and the pieces that have been recovered claim to be a documented conversation between Judas Iscariot and Jesus. Judas is believed to be the only disciple who was taught the one, true Gospel, by Jesus.

  'Now, according to the canonical Gospels of the New Testament — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — we know that Judas betrayed Jesus. The Gospel of Judas claims that Judas was acting on the orders of Jesus, which, taken from the Gnostic point of view, makes sense. Jesus wanted to be released from his spiritual prison, and Judas acted as the catalyst. So you have — '

  'Sorry to interrupt,' Darby said. 'I appreciate the history lesson, Professor, but I need something along the lines of evidence. Something that can lead back to this group or cult or whatever they are.'

  'I understand. The short answer is no, I don't have anything to give you other than historical background on Gnosticism. But I can tell you more about this symbol you found. I know you can't get into specifics of the case, but let me ask you this: the person who bore this symbol, did he murder someone?'

  'As far as I can tell, no. The man was a husband and father.'

  Tell her, Daddy, Charlie Rizzo had said. Tell her what you did.

  She wrote on her pad: Mark Rizzo alias?

  'Historically speaking,' Ross said, 'Archons crave power and destruction. They're not sent here to do God's work but rather to fulfil their own needs and desires. Archons want the world to bend to their will. They achieve that through inflicting both physical and psychological pain and suffering. Through the destruction of one's soul. Forgive the cliche, but think of them as monsters masquerading as human beings.'

  Darby finished writing and looked up, reminded of Jack Casey. Then she saw, a few blocks away, the medical examiner's office.

  'I have to go, Professor Ross. Can I call you back?'

  'You can, but there's no need. That's about all the information I have at the moment, anyway. I can send you my notes if you'd like.'

  'That would be great.' She gave him her private email address. 'I appreciate your taking the time to do this.'

  'If I can be of any further assistance, don't hesitate to contact me. You have my numbers? I left them on the voicemail message.'

  'I have them. And I may take you up on your offer. In fact, I may have an associate of mine call you. Keep your cell phone handy.'

  Darby hung up as the SUV came to a sudden stop in front of two Secret Service agents, one black, the other white, both tall and young and looking like they could bench press a car.

  'They'll take you in and bring you back out when you're done,' Keats said.

  The black guy opened her door and his partner reached inside and gripped her arm. She left the pad on the backseat, not wanting to carry it with her, and with the two men flanking her jogged to the building's front doors.

  Dr Ellis wasn't happy about being summoned back to work at such an hour. He stormed across the lobby and without a hello or nod swiped his laminated ID across the keycard reader to let her in, the agents sticking close.

  Walking through the halls, she called Sergey.

  'You got a pen?' she asked when he picked up.

  'Always do.' He sounded exhausted. 'What's up?'

  She gave him Ross's name and cell number. 'He's a professor at Harvard's Divinity School. I just got off the phone with him. He has information on that symbol I found tattooed on Mark Rizzo's lip. I want you to bring him in on this.'

  'I already have someone at Langley. Cryptography's working on it right now.'

  'Then have them coordinate with Ross. This is the guy's area of expertise. Trust me, we need him.'

  'Okay, fine. Where are you?'

  'At the ME's office. I'll explain everything when I get there.'

  Darby hung up and ducked into the locker room. She dressed quickly.

  The black agent followed her inside the autopsy suite. His partner stood guard outside with his back to the door, watching the hall.

  Until you find the people who belong to this group or cult, a voice whispered in the back of her head, this is how you're going to spend the rest of your life.

  Ellis wheeled out John Smith's body, the cadaverous skin covered with frost.

  Darby turned to the agent and said, 'Hit those lights, would you?'

  The exit wound had destroyed most of John Smith's face. Using alcohol swabs, Darby cleaned the blood away from what was left of the man's lips and examined the tissue. She didn't find any trace of the symbol.

  She decided to examine the rest of the body.

  The symbol had been tattooed on his chest, just above his dead heart.

  65

  Darby saw the big, familiar sign welcoming her to Boston's Logan Airport. A moment later Keats accessed a private gate leading to a brightly lit stretch of tarmac holding a small fleet of private planes — a couple of jumbo jets used to shuttle around rocks stars but mostly smaller, sleeker models.

  The Lincoln Navigator came to a stop and she saw a new pair of Secret Service agents dressed in heavy winter coats standing guard at the bottom of a set of portable metal steps leading up to the main door of the biggest plane here — a Boeing 747, she guessed, given its size and shape. There were no markings or printed words on the side of the plane, nothing to indicate what kind of aircraft it was.

  Keats asked her to stay in the car for a moment. He got out and jogged over to the other two agents to have a private conversation.

  What had happened back at the hotel was painfully fresh in her mind but she had managed to tuck it away by keeping busy. Focused. Now, waiting alone in the warm silence of the car, the wind roaring outside, wanting to blow everything clean, her thoughts flashed to Coop and she wondered if he was waiting for her to return or if he had said screw it and left to catch a flight back to London. She pictured him inside the airport talking to Amanda what's-her-name, making plans for when he returned in between exchanges of 'I miss you' and 'I love you'.

  Keats came back and opened her door, and when she stepped out the wind slapped her face, which thrust Coop into the back of her mind (but not too far back; she could still see his face, and his anger, and hear him say: 'I was the one who waited for you.'). Keats didn't hand her off to the agents. He took the metal staircase and she followed, the railing cold beneath her hand and the wind whistling past her ears.

  She stepped inside a semi-dark cabin. Two men dressed in white were fast asleep in the first rows of seats, paramedic kits resting on the floor near their soft-soled white shoes. The remaining four rows of leather seats were empty, and another Secret Service agent stood in front of a closed door that, on an ordinary plane, would separate the first-class passengers from the commercial herd.

  But this plane wasn't ordinary. The door, made of heavy steel, had a magnetic lock that required a code.

  Keats punched in the code, and, as he held open the door for her, he said, 'Sergey's on the lower deck. Go straight down and you'll see a set of stairs to your left. Take them all the way down. I'll join you in a bit.'

  Darby thanked him and stepped into a luxury cabin worthy of the president's private plane, Air Force One. The first section, with beige carpeting and soft lighting coming from several lamps, had comfortable leather chairs and seats. They were empty, as was the leather chair bolted to the floor behind a nicely sized executive mahogany desk. Thick pale curtains covered part of the plane's windows. The others had blinds, all drawn, and on one she saw a p
residential seal.

  Maybe this was Air Force One. Not the current one the president used but possibly a retired model that had been appropriated by the Bureau. Made sense. She remembered Sergey saying the plane stored lab equipment and a place this size could certainly accommodate a full-sized forensic lab.

  The next part of the plane appeared to be a conference room. More empty leather sofas and chairs; more empty desks, only these were much smaller than the one in the previous room. A flat-screen TV hung on one wall, tuned to CNN. Anderson Cooper's lips were moving but no sound came from the speakers.

  Making her way to the back, the warm air smelling of coffee and stale food, she wondered if Casey, Sergey and the others slept here. Probably, as the plane clearly served as the base of operations. The place was packed with high-tech equipment, secured phones and computers, video-conferencing monitors.

  Darby passed what she guessed had to be the 'presidential bathroom' — gold fixtures and a roomy shower. She turned on the light and stepped inside to examine her face in the mirror, saw blotches of mascara. She ran the hot water and scrubbed her face with soap and several paper towels.

  A high-pitched scream came from somewhere deep in the plane.

  66

  Darby straightened, water dripping down her face as she listened to a young woman crying and pleading for help.

  Darby grabbed the hanging towel and quickly dried her face. A final check in the mirror and then she moved out, heading down the aisle on her far left.

  The young voice screamed a single word:

  'Daddy.'

  Jack Casey sat in the gloom, his back to her and his attention focused on a flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall across from his chair. The film playing on the screen had been recorded by a video camera equipped with night vision; his daughter, Sarah, was bathed in a green ambient glow of light. She wore the same clothes as those in the photographs — jeans and a white tee smeared with her blood — and she stood shaking and crying behind some sort of prison cube made of Lucite or Plexiglas.

  She wasn't in danger of suffocating — several holes had been drilled through the walls for air — but she was in danger of being bitten by the dozens of eight-legged creatures crawling above her.

  The spiders moved and scattered across a separate rectangular cube mounted against the ceiling. The people who had captured her had installed a sliding bottom, one operated by a lever situated outside the young girl's clear cell. A scarred, grimy hand clutched the lever. With a flick of the wrist, the ceiling — well out of the girl's reach — would disappear and drop the venomous spiders down on her.

  Darby's mind filled with images of Mark Rizzo's body. Saw the necrotic bite on the man's forearm caused by a Brown Recluse. She saw at least one on the screen, and another one that Perkins had identified as a Tunnel Web. Their bite is extremely painful, Dr Perkins had said. Their venom carries atraxotoxin, which disrupts neurotransmitters. The victim experiences muscle twitching, severe nausea and vomiting.

  Sarah Casey pounded on the clear plastic, screaming at her father. Her right little finger was gone, severed above the knuckle. There's going to be no way to attach it, Darby thought, approaching the empty chair next to the profiler. Too much time had passed, for one, and, given the blackened stump on the swollen right hand, she suspected, with a nauseating intensity, that the wound had been crudely cauterized with something like a blowtorch to stem the bleeding. If it had, the nerves had already been damaged.

  Casey had a highball glass on his lap. He wasn't drunk — not yet, his eyes were too clear when he looked up and focused on her — but he was well on his way. He had put a serious dent in the bottle of whiskey sitting on the table to his left. The bottle was more than half empty.

  Casey picked up the remote and paused the video. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. She felt like telling the man how deeply sorry she felt about what was going on. No, he wouldn't want that. Stick to business.

  'Did Sergey tell you about the tattoo I found on Mark Rizzo's lip?'

  He nodded.

  'I found another one tonight,' she said. 'On the chest of the former cop who worked on the Charlie Rizzo investigation.'

  'The cop from Nahant who got shot?'

  She nodded. 'John Smith.'

  'Interesting.'

  Clearly — understandably — Casey's attention was on the video. On his daughter. She decided not to fill him in yet on her conversation with the Harvard professor.

  Darby took the empty chair. 'Sergey told me this video was on the USB drive.'

  'Yep.'

  'Anything else?'

  'Just this. The USB drive is downstairs. The computer whiz kids are scraping through it right now, seeing if they can find some digital fingerprints or something. Another group is analysing the video frame by frame, trying different light sources to see if anything jumps out.'

  He polished off the rest of his drink, the melting ice cubes rattling in the glass. He reached for the bottle, and Darby glanced at the image frozen on the screen: Sarah Casey pounding on the clear plastic, lips stretched back in a howl of pain and terror.

  'How much time does she have?' he asked, pouring himself another drink.

  'That's a question you're much better suited to answer, isn't it? You know these people — '

  'I meant her finger. How much time until a surgeon can reattach it?'

  'I'm not a surgeon.'

  'But you knew enough to send my daughter's finger over to Mass General.'

  'Six, maybe eight hours.'

  'And if, by some miracle, my daughter was found right now?'

  She didn't see a point in sparing the man the truth. 'I think the time has passed.'

  'Why's that?'

  'The wound's already been cauterized. The nerves need to be healthy in order to reattach the finger.'

  Casey nodded, kept nodding, his face not registering any emotion.

  'Dr Izzo told me the same thing,' he said after a moment. 'He called me an hour ago, said the window of opportunity is now officially shut.'

  She told herself to keep her voice gentle, and she did.

  'If you already know this, why did you ask me?'

  'To see if you'd bullshit me,' he said.

  'So this was, what, a test?'

  Casey didn't answer. He swirled the booze around, the ice cubes tinkling against the glass, and looked around the cabin. 'This plane's an old Air Force One, one of two that's been refitted to combat the war on terror. State-of-the-art technology on board. Had to fight the Bureau to let us use it. These people we're after, they fall under the domestic terrorism label, don't you think?'

  She nodded, sensing he had a point to make. She crossed her legs and waited.

  'I look at all this technology and see the one thing it can't do: understand or figure out a person's motive,' he said. 'I'm not just talking about serial killers or this group who have my daughter and wife right now. I could be referring to anyone. Like the housewife who wakes up one day after thirty years of marriage and just decides to pack up and leave her husband and kids. You can never know what truly goes on in somebody's mind. You learn that pretty fast when you work in the Monster Factory. That's what they called Behavioral Sciences in the early days.'

  Casey took a long sip. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She watched his face in the dim green glow of light coming from the TV screen.

  'Before I went to work there, I was a cop in Michigan. This one case, this guy calls 911 and says he murdered his family. My partner and I get the call, and when we get there the front door is cracked open and the second I step in I see the blood covering the walls and the floor. We go inside with our guns raised and find this guy sitting at his dining-room table eating dinner and reading the newspaper. He greeted us — thanked us for coming, and then tells us his family is in the basement.

  'He killed them one by one, starting with his wife in the morning. Picks up the youngest from nursery school, brings him inside and shoots him in the back o
f the head. Guy makes himself lunch and waits for the next one, the ten-year-old. He gets shot the moment he walks in the door, doesn't even get a chance to take off his jacket. The thirteen-year-old has soccer, so the father goes and picks him up after practice, brings him home and shoots his son just as he's going up the stairs. Guy didn't tell us this. I found out after the fact, after we studied the splatter patterns and drag marks on the carpet.

  'I went into the basement myself. They're all sitting there, the wife and her kids, they're sitting on a couch watching a Disney movie in the VCR. Bambi. Guy said it was the family's favourite movie. He went down every hour and a half to rewind the movie and play it again.'

  'He tell you why he killed his family?'

  'Nope. Guy died on death row without telling a soul.'

  She sensed he had more to say, and waited.

  A nearby plane took off, its engines vibrating through the cabin and her seat.

  Casey said, 'The first guy I caught, Tommy Barber? He broke into houses, bound, raped and tortured women and their families. Recorded everything too. Guy had quite the little home-movie collection. Tommy's a quadriplegic now, serving a life sentence in Angola. I shot him in the spine.'

  No sympathy in his tone, just matter-of-fact, as if he were narrating some instructional video.

  'Charlie Slavick,' he said, looking up at her, his gaze level and cool, 'put boys inside dog crates and tortured them. I beat him to death with a hammer.'

  'And Hamilton?'

  'He's alive.'

  'I know,' she said. 'Did you plant evidence?'

  'I did.'

  'And then what?'

  'Then I went to work on how to kill him. And the only thing I regret is that I couldn't do it.'

  'Maybe you'll have a second chance when he's released,' she said.

  Casey regarded her for a moment, wondering if she was being serious or glib.

  'I'm assuming Sergey told you I talked with your wife,' Darby said.

  'He did. If we don't find my wife and daughter, I'm going to go ahead with the press conference.'