by Lis Wiehl
“You said he had three older brothers,” Dani said. “You didn’t mention that one was his identical twin. Marko.”
“I didn’t know that,” Stanley said.
She believed him, but she held her ground, insisting on a more complete reckoning.
The older man paused to think, then reached into his coat pocket and laid a photograph on the table.
“Is that your drone?” he asked.
Tommy picked up the photograph and examined it. It was a picture of his Orison 6, taken from above in midflight.
“How’d you get this picture?” he asked.
“You’re not the only one who has drones,” he said. “Ours fly higher than yours.”
“You’ve been watching us?”
Ed didn’t answer.
“What else?” Dani said. “Have you tapped our phones? Hacked into our computers? What else is there?”
“I could give you the simple answer and say yes,” he said. “But I think you’re right. We need to put our cards on the table. Awhile ago you asked me if I’d heard the name Peter Guryakin. You met him at a reception at St. Adrian’s. At the art opening.”
“You said he was a dangerous man,” Tommy said.
“Let me tell you how dangerous. Peter Mohammad Guryakin,” Stanley said. “Russian father, mother from Kazakhstan. Raised in an Islamic household. Never particularly devout, but when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1980, they got suspicious of anybody bowing toward Mecca. Guryakin earned his credentials helping to weaponize smallpox. They still have twenty thousand tons of the stuff in storage. He was working on nerve agents, genetic disruptors, really terrible things. And then he must have gotten wind that he was going to be purged. Picked up and left his apartment with the food still warm on the table. He’d already sent his son away to boarding school.”
“To St. Adrian’s,” Tommy said. “Andrei Guryakin.”
“He works for Linz Pharmazeutika now too,” Dani said, thinking of Quinn. “Following in his father’s footsteps.”
Stanley nodded. Dani couldn’t tell if it was because they’d told him something he already knew or simply something that didn’t surprise him.
“When Peter Guryakin left the Soviets, he took his research with him,” Stanley continued. “His expertise. The Soviets took his wife and three-year-old daughter into custody as leverage to get him to come back. They died. Guryakin swore vengeance against … well, against everyone. Sent his old boss a text that we intercepted: ‘I am dajjal.’”
Tommy started in his seat. “How do you spell that?”
“D-a-j-j-a-l. Arabic for devil. Why?”
“That’s it. That’s what she meant,” Tommy said.
“Slow down,” Stanley said. “What who meant? What are you—”
“It’s the last clue,” Tommy said. “Abbie Gardener—we thought she was crazy. I thought she was crazy. I was interviewing her, and she said, ‘Anyone for a little dodge ball? Dodge one, dodge all.’ Or that’s what I thought she said, d-o-d-g-e. Apparently she was using a different spelling.”
“What was the context?”
“It was a warning,” Tommy said.
Stanley reached into his coat pocket and laid four more photographs on the table.
“These are the people who ‘posed’ for the pictures your drone took,” he said. “These are our pictures, not yours. Our cameras are higher resolution.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t think the names would mean anything to you,” he said. “They might not have meant anything to us ten years ago. But now we have computers and algorithms and Boolean search engines, and more data on more individuals than, frankly, anyone suspects. We look for patterns and intersections. Key words. Phone calls made at the exact same time on the exact same day, or calls made to each other in a recognizable pattern. Sequences of communication. Chatter in the ether. Every call. Every e-mail.”
“In this country?” Tommy asked.
“On this planet,” Stanley said. “That’s how powerful our programs are.”
“And what conclusions have you reached?”
“If we thought we were dealing with terrorists, we’d suspect an attack is coming,” Ed Stanley said. “On Christmas Eve. The computer says it’s statistically likely. Highly improbable that it won’t. Red alert. Somewhere in the northeastern United States. Probably New York. But we agree with you. We don’t think we’re dealing with terrorists. Not in the traditional sense. They’re not Al Qaeda or Taliban or Muslim Brotherhood or Occupiers or Wikileakers, or anything we can identify. They all went to St. Adrian’s, but that’s all we know. The question I have is—what do you know?”
Dani glanced at Tommy, who nodded. “We’re going to tell you a story,” she said.
“Halfway through, you’re going to think we’re nuts,” Tommy said.
“But if you listen to the whole thing, you won’t,” Dani said.
“And then an hour later you’ll think we’re crazy again, but an hour after that, you’ll change your mind,” Tommy said.
Dani started talking. She began with the murder of Julie Leonard and the dream she and Tommy shared. She told him about the arrival of Reese Stratton-Mallins, and how George Gardener and Julian Villanegre were murdered. Ed Stanley listened and, Dani suspected, committed to memory every word they were saying.
When they’d finished, multiple cups of coffee and tea later, the government man pushed his plate away and dabbed his lips with his napkin before setting it on the table. He studied them both.
“As Sherlock Holmes says, ‘When you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ The funny thing is, our computers—our incredible thinking machines, capable of making a trillion computations per second, computers the general public is not yet even remotely aware of, very nearly approaching true sentience—have come to the same conclusion you have. It’s like a science fiction story, where man invents a computer that, through sheer mathematical logic, proves the existence of God. Or in this case, of Satan.”
He folded the napkin and smoothed it down on the table.
“Now that you’ve taken me into your confidence, I’ll take you into mine,” the older man said, speaking low so as not to be overheard. “There’s a group of us in the intelligence community—CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, in this country and abroad—men and women of faith, who wouldn’t have a problem with what you’ve just said. A discrete subset within a discreet subset, if you will. But we have to be careful. Part of what the devil does is discredit those of us who know he exists and is at work in the world. We could go public with what we think, and what the computers are indicating, but if the press ran with this and started writing stories that a group of fanatical Christians—and let’s not kid ourselves, that’s what they’d call us—if they said we were seeing satanic conspiracies in recent events, I think you can imagine what would happen. I take it you can’t share the names of your Curatoriat?”
“It’s best that we don’t,” Dani said.
“I obviously have resources I can bring to bear,” Stanley said. “Both hardware and HUMINT.”
“Humint?” Tommy asked.
“Human intelligence. Boots on the ground stuff. My sense is that it would be best to keep our people separated, but liaison with each other. Full disclosure, with that understanding.”
“Agreed,” Tommy said.
“These men,” he said, gesturing to the photographs on the table, “are on threat lists in their own countries, and others. But from what you’re saying … it’s the St. Adrian’s boys, the Selected, that pose the real danger, correct?”
“That’s our sense,” Dani said.
“We need the names,” Stanley said. “Once we have them, I can put people into the field, pretty much anywhere, within thirty minutes.”
“We’re going to have another session today with Reese in the sensory deprivation tank,” Dani said, and then fell silent as Gail, the owner of the diner, cam
e over.
“How you doing here? Think this rain’ll stop?” she asked.
“Always has,” Stanley replied. “To quote Calvin Coolidge.”
“Well, if it doesn’t,” she said, “it’s not the end of the world.”
No one knew quite what to say to that.
They walked Stanley to his car. He took a moment to admire the green, the gazebo, the lights on the town tree, the bright storefronts with windows decorated with Christmas artwork created by the local children. He admired the steepled church at the far end of the commons, opposite the library.
“I used to love the sound of church bells on Sunday morning,” Stanley said.
“So did I,” Tommy said. “Unfortunately, ours are broken. They haven’t rung in years.”
Hopefully, Dani thought, that wasn’t some kind of omen.
27.
December 23
9:50 a.m. EST / 3:50 p.m. CET
“You’re such a good actress,” Laurent said to her as the sleek black Italian Agura helicopter soared above the outskirts of Paris. “Tell me—is there ever a time when you choose to use your acting skills when there isn’t a camera pointed at you?”
You mean like now? Cass wanted to say. She wondered if she’d done something to give herself away. She’d hoped she could see this as just another acting role, but unlike all the other acting roles she’d played, this one would have dire consequences if she failed. Laurent was right—there’d been times in her life when she’d pretended to be happy, or in love, but if she’d been able to fool other people, she’d never been able to fool herself. She’d been surrounded for a long time by people who were famous or wealthy, but during the time she’d spent in East Salem with Tommy and Dani and the others, she realized she much preferred being surrounded by people who were genuine and honest and weren’t playing games or trying to attach themselves to her for hidden reasons and agendas that had nothing to do with her.
She liked Laurent, but she had reasons to distrust her judgment. She didn’t think she’d done anything to let on that she was joining Bauer on his yacht to collect information, but still, Laurent worked for Bauer, so she had to be careful.
“I try not to,” she said. “But sometimes you have to. Like when you’re on the red carpet and you have the flu but you have to smile and look glamorous. Have you been on Herr Bauer’s yacht before?”
“This is my first time,” Laurent said. “I hear it’s quite special.”
“So I’ve read,” Cassandra said. “My mother was a cook on boats. I sort of grew up on them. There was an old man, I think he was from either Jamaica or Barbados, sort of a fishing guide, I guess. Whenever I’d admire somebody’s boat, he’d say to me, ‘Enjoy the ride, chile’, but doan’ fall in love wit’ it—soonah or latah, everah boat ever made ends up at de bottom of de ocean. Everah mansion falls down.’”
“Your accent is very good,” Laurent said.
“Thank you,” she said, though an alarm went off in her head. Laurent had introduced himself as a native Frenchman, and he’d gone on to add that he’d never been to the United States. His English was heavily accented but passable. As a nonnative English speaker, how would he know that her Caribbean patois was authentic-sounding?
The pilot interrupted to ask Cassandra if she wanted to do any sightseeing along the way, or if she simply wished to proceed directly to the Freiheit, where Udo Bauer was waiting. She opted for the latter.
The helicopter flew south from Paris, over Lyon and the Burgundy region of France, skirting the western edge of the French Alps and landing in Marseilles to refuel. Cassandra took a short walk from the helicopter, hoping to use her phone to call Tommy with an update, but Laurent came with her, explaining that Herr Bauer had asked him to keep an eye on her wherever she went to make sure she was safe from harm. She sent Tommy a text instead: ON MY WAY TO BOAT. WISH ME BON VOYAGE. :)
They flew east to Toulon and hugged the coastline as far as St. Tropez and Cannes before turning south over the Mediterranean. Laurent pointed out the islands of Corsica and Sardinia to the east, out the port window, and in the far distance, barely visible, the island of Minorca on the starboard side, where the sun was already lowering toward the horizon. An hour after leaving the coast, the helicopter banked and descended toward the ocean and the Freiheit itself—a sleek white sliver the length of an ocean liner. The landing pad on the fantail was natural grass; Cassandra wondered why until she exited the aircraft and saw a set of golf clubs and a bucket of golf balls off to the side. It doubled as a driving range, she realized.
“Cassandra!”
Udo Bauer was waiting for her, dressed casually in white pants and a white V-neck sweater, his skin tanned and toned. He greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and then bade his staff—a dozen young men dressed in white shirts, shorts, shoes, and knee socks—to take Cassandra’s bags to her stateroom. He introduced his first mate and personal assistant, a swarthy young man named Vito, and told her if there was anything she wanted, Vito would get it for her.
Something about Vito made her skin crawl. Intuition, perhaps, but she trusted her intuition. “Look for the guy whispering in his ear,” Tommy had advised her. “The number two guy. He’s going to be the one who’s most dangerous. That’s how they work, behind the scenes.”
“Would you like a tour of my ship, Miss Morton?” Bauer asked.
“Only if you call me Cassie,” she said. “And I would absolutely love a tour, Mr. Bauer.”
“Only if you call me Udo,” he insisted.
Cassandra had seen every kind of ship there was to see in her childhood, moving from island to island, rental to rental, always in transition, nothing ever settled or final. She’d told Tommy, when he’d asked her if she wanted to go out on his Boston Whaler to do some fishing, that she’d made a vow to never set foot on a boat again, because she was done with things that floated or drifted without anchors. Even so, she was impressed by the Freiheit. It went beyond the materials used, the Carrera marble from Tuscany, the Brazilian rosewood, the handcrafted New Zealand deerskin upholstered furnishings, the Persian rugs, the salon the size of a hotel lobby, where, Bauer informed her, he occasionally held parties or business gatherings. The whole was more than the sum of the parts, for some reason—though the parts were impressive indeed.
There was a tennis court below decks, and a garage where he kept a black Bentley, a red Ferrari, a camouflaged military-grade fully armored Humvee (“for the times when my presence is required in war zones”), and a pre-WWII restored Citroën that had belonged to his grandfather. The ship towed behind it a twenty-five-foot wooden speedboat as a tender, as well as an inflatable Zodiac and a pair of Jet Skis that Bauer suggested they try out in the morning, if she was feeling up to it.
“I need the tender because the only two ports capable of hosting a ship of this size are Monaco and Antibes,” he said.
The galley, staffed by a team that included a chef Bauer had hired away from a four-star restaurant in Paris, featured three walk-in freezers where they stored fresh supplies taken on whenever they docked (“Though if we needed to, we could stay at sea for a year and be quite comfortable”) and enough gas burners to cook for a party of a hundred.
“You will see your stateroom in a minute, but let me show you my pride and joy first,” he said, leading her down a set of stairs to a movie theater. “By the way, I have been watching all your films so that I might know your work better.”
“I don’t mind subtitles, but voice-overs freak me out,” she replied. “You have no idea how odd it is to watch yourself when the words coming out of your mouth have been dubbed into a foreign language. I hope that’s not what you wanted to show me.”
“No, no—I have something much better.” He moved to a control panel, pressed a sequence of buttons, and the movie screen disappeared into the ceiling while the lights came on behind it, revealing a huge aquarium, inside of which swam a great white shark, easily fifteen feet long and four feet across.
Cassandra
gasped audibly.
“Isn’t he remarkable?” Bauer said. “I call him Prachtvoller. German for ‘magnificent’.”
“I thought great white sharks were impossible to keep in captivity.”
“Quite so,” Bauer said. “But he is not captive. He is free to come and go as he pleases—the bottom of the tank is open to the sea. He comes here because we feed him. It was actually quite easy to train him. We move his food a little closer, a little closer, until finally he comes inside my ship. Sharks are opportunistic feeders, but if he finds a reliable food source, he stays with it. He’s been following the Freiheit for almost a year now. We thought for a while we’d lost him, but he came back.”
“Very Thunderball,” Cassandra said. “Did you know I was almost a Bond girl? My agent thought it would ‘sultry up my brand,’ but the producers thought it was too much of a leap. Does he do any tricks?”
“None whatsoever,” Bauer said. “He’s the king of the sea. He makes all the other fish do tricks.”
Like you, she thought. Like your friends from St. Adrian’s.
“You must be tired from your flight,” Bauer said. “Would you like some time before dinner to refresh yourself? A nap, or perhaps a swim? I have a heated pool on the top deck.”
“I think a nap,” she said. “I’m still a bit jet-lagged.”
“Of course,” he said. “I will have the ship turned so that your balcony faces the west. I’ve made a few phone calls and arranged for a particularly fine sunset tonight.”
She stared at him, not sure what he meant.
“A joke,” he explained.
On deck, she was distressed to see the helicopter taking off. By the end of the helicopter ride, she’d come to see Laurent as an ally, someone she might be able to turn to in a pinch. Bauer explained that the helicopter would return tomorrow. Still, she felt uneasy. She felt … trapped.
In her stateroom, which was larger than any hotel suite she’d ever stayed in (and she’d stayed in some of the best hotels in the world), she took out her GPhone and tapped the screen, only to read that there was no signal. That, she’d expected. But when she tried to use the satellite link, her screen told her the uplink was blocked. That, she had not.