The Soul Collectors dm-4

by Chris Mooney

  She crept to the edge of the door and opened it slightly, looking down the winding staircase. In the bright sunlight saw a man dressed head to toe in black peering through the target site of an HK sub-machine gun. His partner was standing right behind him, SWAT in bright white letters on his back.

  How had they found — the GPS transmitter in her arm. Sergey or the feds monitoring the signal had found it and sent people here.

  She had to scrape the words from her dry throat.

  'Don't shoot,' she said, her voice a whispery rasp. She came out of the doorway with her hands raised. 'Don't shoot.'

  The one in the back turned to her, then dropped his gun and said, 'Jesus.'

  84

  The SWAT officers draped her arms across their shoulders and carried her out of the lighthouse. The wind slapped her face and blew her hair, and the bright sun pierced her eyes as she looked up the weathered cliff and caught sight of a Coast Guard helicopter.

  'It's hidden in the woods,' Darby croaked. 'A hatch. Jack Casey and his daughter. Underground. Need to help them.'

  They didn't answer and she realized they couldn't hear her.

  She tried again when they brought her inside the helicopter.

  'Jack Casey and his daughter.'

  They guided her on to a stretcher.

  'Below us,' Darby croaked. Christ, how her throat ached. It felt raw and dry and nearly swollen shut. 'Go to the woods and find the hatch, hurry, not much time.'

  Darby felt a cool alcohol swab brush against the back of her hand. She turned and saw a Coast Guard officer, a woman, hovering by her side. Darby looked over the woman's shoulder, at the two SWAT officers who had turned away. They had heard her, she was pretty sure. She could see them running towards the woods, the trees shaking in the breeze on a beautiful autumn day.

  Darby moaned when the IV needle slipped into her hand.

  'Sorry,' the woman said. 'It's your skin. You're dehydrated. We need to get fluids into your system.'

  Darby needed to be sure they had heard her. She beckoned the woman closer and told her about the hatch, Casey and his daughter, everything.

  The woman straightened, looking confused and frightened. 'I'll tell them.'

  'Where am I?'

  'Black Rock Island. It's off the coast of Maine.'

  'Stay.'

  'I will. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere — '

  'No. Stay here. On the island. I need to go back there. I need to see.'

  'There's nothing out there, hon. Nobody comes out this way.'

  'Don't take me away' was the last thing Darby said before she drifted off. Coop came as the sun started to set.

  Darby saw him standing near the edge of the woods. She sat up on the stretcher, the IV line still in her arm, and lost sight of him for a moment. Her head was spinning but not as badly as before and she leaned back against the cabin wall.

  The aft door slid open and Coop popped his head into the copter, his face washed in the sunset's deep gold and purple hues.

  Not Coop but a federal agent with a similar face and haircut.

  'Special Agent Martynovich wanted me to tell you he's here.'

  'The hatch?' Her throat was still raw but most of her voice had come back.

  'They found it. He's about to go down, and he said he'll talk to you once — What are you doing?'

  'Coming with you.' Darby slid the IV needle out of her arm. She found a bandage and covered the wound.

  'Miss McCormick, you're not exactly dressed for the weather,' he said, looking at her hospital scrubs and bare feet stained with dirt. They had cleaned her up and dressed her while she had slept. 'It's getting pretty raw out.'

  'Grab that.' She pointed to one of the bulky orange Coast Guard jackets hanging on the wall.

  'What about shoes?'

  'I'll manage,' she said. 'Come on, let's get going before it gets dark.' She found Sergey pacing in front of the hatch.

  'I don't know anything yet,' he said. 'We discovered the hatches about an hour ago and — '

  'Hatches? There're more than one?'

  'Two. One here, and one in the southern part of the woods. Before I sent anyone down, I wanted the air tested. I'm glad I did. It tested positive for sarin gas.'

  Darby thought about Casey and his daughter, the people she'd seen chained to the walls, and felt a sick and hollow pit in her stomach.

  'I was told what's down there is an ossuary created back in the early eighteen hundreds,' he said. 'When the cemeteries on the mainland flooded, they brought the bones here to this island and created this space to honour the dead. There's some old church up there, what's left of it. The locked cells and some of the other things we found, they're probably new. The locals say nobody comes out to this rock.'

  'Jack and his daughter are down there. I saw them.'

  Sergey nodded, kept nodding. 'I couldn't send anyone down until we had the proper masks and clothing. I'm waiting for mine to arrive, and then I'm going down.'

  'You didn't have that stuff on your plane?'

  Sergey kicked a tuft of grass with the tip of his shoe. 'The plane's been grounded. My boss and the pencil pushers he works for have decided to conduct an internal audit of this investigation. When we found your signal, I had to make other travel arrangements.'

  'Why did they shut down the investigation?'

  'Because I've lost too many people — Jack and his daughter, and now Keats. The Secret Service agent has vanished, along with his wife and son, Luke.'

  'Keats didn't disappear.' Darby told Sergey what had happened with Keats in the back of the ambulance.

  Sergey looked at the hatch and said, 'Did they bring Keats here with you and Jack?'

  'I don't know. I didn't see him. Just Jack and his daughter. In the great hall.'

  'The what?'

  'The great hall. That's what Sarah Casey called it. I know where it is.'

  'There's no need for you to go down there, I'm sure they'll — '

  'The place is a maze of tunnels. I'm going down. Don't argue.'

  'Then you're going to need to be properly dressed,' he said, and barked a request for another suit and gas mask into his radio.

  85

  Halfway through the tunnels, Darby got dizzy. Not from whatever was in the air; she wore a gas mask, as did everyone who was down here. The dizziness came from dehydration. Her body hadn't bounced back yet and she had ignored it, pushing herself too fast; her body was now pushing back. Sergey had to hold her arm the rest of the way.

  They walked into what Sarah Casey had called the great hall and found it packed with bodies. A hundred, maybe more, it was impossible to tell. Dead from sarin gas.

  Casey was no longer tied to the wheel. The device that had held his daughter lay on the floor, spotted with blood.

  Sergey glanced around the room packed with bodies. 'I can't… This is…'

  Darby moved to her right and searched through the bodies for Jack and Sarah Casey.

  She didn't find them.

  She was thinking of the smiling faces of those missing children in the photographs when she turned around and saw Sergey studying the metal device Sarah Casey had been forced to wear around her neck: the rusted O-ring with four metal rods leading to a horizontal one with two half-moon rings.

  'I didn't find Jack or his daughter,' she said. 'You?'

  'No, nothing here.' Sergey's voice was muffled behind the gas mask. 'This thing is called the Scavenger's Daughter. I first saw it, along with some other torture devices, when I toured the Tower of London. Henry VIII used it: prisoners would be forced to kneel with their chins on their knees, and then they'd be locked into the device, which crushed them into a foetal position.'

  Darby looked away, her eyes wet. They settled on the steps leading up to the throne where the masked Archon had sat, watching the spectacle.

  'Lot of pain,' Sergey said. 'Cracked ribs and collapsed lungs, and if enough time passed, the capillaries would burst and blood would start pouring from every orifice
of the body. I pity the poor son of a bitch who had to endure this.'

  She turned back to him as he leaned the device against the Catherine Wheel, its thick wooden spokes splattered with blood — Jack Casey's blood.

  'Jack,' she started to say, and her throat closed up.

  Sergey gave her his full attention and she told him about what had happened in this room, everything she had heard and seen.

  A tall man dressed in a biohazard suit stepped inside the room and waved to Sergey. She went with him, and they followed the man down through the dirt-floored tunnels lined with bones and skulls.

  The man stopped halfway down one tunnel and then fell to his knees and faced a grille. No, not a grille — the iron bars of a cell. She saw an ancient padlock flecked with rust.

  The man shone the beam of his flashlight on whatever was inside and she also fell to her knees and looked, saw the tiny cell holding a tangle of broken limbs and dirty skin covered with fresh abrasions and welts from whippings — Neal Keats, the Secret Service agent, curled into a foetal position and hugging his dead son fiercely against his chest.

  Epilogue

  86

  Darby woke to sunlight and the squawk of seagulls.

  She sat up in the bed and checked her watch. It was early, just past six. She pulled the covers off and padded across the room in her bare feet to the rear window overlooking the ocean. The binoculars sat on the bureau. She picked them up and examined the shore.

  After her hospital stay, three short days that felt like a lifetime, she helped Sergey and a federal team consisting of fifty people, most of them forensics, search every corridor, tunnel and room. When Jack and Sarah Casey's bodies didn't turn up, she braced herself for the fact that they would bob to the surface of the ocean at some point. The currents from Black Rock Island hit the beach near her rental home in Ogunquit, so she checked the shoreline every morning, at noon and then in the early evening before it got dark and she had to lock herself inside the house.

  No bodies this morning, but she could see only part of the beach from her house. She'd have to walk the rest of it to be sure. She put down the binoculars, went back to the bed, grabbed the Glock from underneath the pillow and took the nine with her to the shower. She had already put out the next day's clothes, laying them on top of the toilet tank.

  After she locked the door, she wedged the chair underneath the knob. Dressed in heavy winter clothes, her hair blown dry and tucked underneath a Red Sox baseball cap, she checked the upstairs rooms first, Glock in hand.

  Finding nothing out of the ordinary — all the closet doors were open, the windows locked tight — she headed downstairs and started with the front door. Locked, alarm still on. Living room, spare bedroom and bath clean. All the windows locked. She wound her way into the kitchen, found everything neat and tidy, just as she had left it. She relaxed a little but kept the gun in her hand as she started to make coffee.

  She found the picture when she went to put in a new coffee filter.

  It was a recent one, showing Sarah Casey huddled in a corner and clutching her knees tightly against her chest. Fresh cuts and bruises on her shins. Her head had been shaved.

  Darby tripped on the way back upstairs to retrieve a pair of latex gloves and an evidence bag. The restaurants in Ogunquit's downtown area catered to the lunch crowd, so most of them were closed. Darby hit the gas stations and found a payphone next to an air pump at a Mobil Station, its windows sprayed with fake snow and decorated with Christmas garlands.

  Sergey was back in Washington. She called his cell, woke him up and told him about the picture.

  'Bring it to our Boston office,' he said after she finished. 'Give it to Tina.'

  Tina was the name of the federal agent who handled Sergey's mail. Darby had met the woman only once, when she drove to Boston at the beginning of the month to deliver the letter and stack of pages she'd written for Coop. Tina had forwarded the package to Sergey, who had delivered it to Coop's London address. When it came to Coop, she didn't want to take any chances.

  She hadn't talked to him since he'd left but knew he was safe. Sergey had placed people on him, and she had called him every three days, like clockwork, to get a status report.

  Coop had no way of getting in contact with her, and she hadn't called him. She thought about him, wondering what he was doing right now, if he still thought of her.

  Sergey was speaking.

  'What's that?'

  'I said I'll send some forensic people to your house,' he said. 'What are you going to do now?'

  'I'm already on my way to Boston.'

  'I meant after that.'

  'Pack and move.'

  'Where?'

  'I don't know yet.'

  'You want me to bring you into federal — '

  'No,' she said. 'No, I don't want that.'

  'You still checking the beach every morning for bodies?'

  Darby didn't answer. A car had peeled into the station and her hand reached inside her jacket.

  The car, an old blue Volkswagen Beetle, parked at one of the pumps. She watched three college-aged guys stagger out, their faces pinched with hangovers.

  'You there?' he asked.

  'I'm here. How do you know about the beach?'

  'I have people watching you too.'

  Her jaw clenched. 'Since when?'

  'Since you decided to embark on this plan or whatever it is you've got locked in your head. I know about your beach walks, how you watch it every morning from your window. I know about the boats you chartered during the first month to see if any bodies bobbed to the surface.'

  'We should check the tunnels again.'

  'We've checked them a dozen times. Each time we brought you along, remember?'

  'But we haven't really explored every inch of the island. There could be — '

  'Jack and his daughter aren't there.'

  'Then they moved them someplace else. You have any leads?'

  'Darby, you need help.'

  'I'll be fine on my own.' But the words died on her mouth. One of these people had broken into her house, bypassed the alarm code and left Sarah Casey's picture in her coffee-maker. They had been watching her and found her. Maybe they were watching her right now.

  'I'm talking about your head,' he said. 'You're exhibiting classic signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.'

  'What's the status of that EMT? Have you found him yet?'

  Sergey didn't answer, and she spoke into the silence.

  'I gave you his description. He spoke to Keats, remember? I told you — '

  'His name is Peter Grange,' Sergey said. 'He's thirty-six years old and single.'

  'When did you find out?'

  'A while ago.'

  'When were you going to tell me?'

  Sergey didn't answer.

  'Do you have him in custody?' she asked.

  'No. He disappeared. We know he's not one of the bodies we found in the ossuary.'

  'So let me help with the investigation. I can — '

  'The Bureau has enough people working on it.' He sounded so incredibly tired. 'The guy's gone. We're never going to find him.'

  She squeezed the receiver, wanting to take it and smash it across Sergey's head. Knock out that loser thinking and help him get his priorities straight.

  'Darby, you're going to have to deal with this.'

  'I'd deal with it much better if you'd let me into the investigation.'

  'There is no investigation. Not any more.'

  She felt a cold space in her stomach. 'Since when?'

  'Since about a week or so ago. The suits upstairs, they decided to pull the plug on it for the time being. Those bodies we found, most of them were identified and — '

  'I know. It's all over the news.' She had followed it in the papers and on TV. The FBI was getting heat about not having found this cult sooner, with the media resurrecting the ghost of Waco and drawing comparisons with that botched operation.

  She also knew that Sergey's son was
not among the dead.

  'We put in a lot of manpower, a lot of time and even more money,' he said. 'The suits and bean-counters looked at the bottom line and decided that finding and identifying those bodies, bringing them home to their families — that was a victory. They put all the information about this group into the open. Forwarded all our information to police departments while the press is hot and it's fresh in everyone's minds. This group is on everyone's radar screen now.'

  'And Casey and his daughter? Are they still on your radar?'

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

  'I consider Jack a friend,' he said. 'Keep that in mind when you hear what I'm about to say.'

  She heard a hitch in his voice. He cleared his throat and said, 'Have you considered the fact that both he and his daughter are dead?'

  'They're alive.'

  'You don't know — '

  'Last week you told me Taylor Casey received a phone call from her daughter.'

  'Yes. Yes, I did say that. But we don't know for sure that her daughter was on the other end of the line. Taylor Casey received a phone call that lasted twenty-two seconds. And you remember I said I couldn't trace it.'

  'You said it was Sarah. Taylor told you her daughter called crying, asking her mother when she's coming to get her.'

  'Darby, the woman was lobotomized. She has permanent and severe brain damage. She doesn't know what day it is. She thinks Jack is coming in any minute to pick her up.'

  'I want to talk to her.'

  'No. She's being moved to another private facility — the same place we're taking Darren Waters. They'll both be well taken care of. You need to stop this obsessive thinking.'

  'Sarah Casey is twelve years old.'

  'And my son was five when they took him.'

  Darby propped an arm up on top of the payphone and looked out at the cars whisking by on the highway, the sun warm on her face.

  'My son isn't coming back,' Sergey said. 'I've come to grips with that. I won't lie to you, it's not an easy process. For a while there I was a member of the living dead. But I've got past that now, and yes, there are still days when I wake up and wish I could go back and do things differently. But I can't. Sad fact of life but there it is. That day is gone, and my son's gone. You've got to start letting this go.'