McKinsey walked easily and loosely, without a trace of military bearing, blending perfectly into the foot traffic on the streets. At the same time, his well-honed radar—an ability to sense anything out of place on the field of battle or in enemy territory—combined with his keen sight to vet each person he glimpsed, even if it was only for a second. He quartered his immediate environment with military precision while appearing to window shop. It was important, he knew, to check the interior of shops, cafés, and restaurants, because contrary to how movies and television shot these things, foot chases were more often slow and plodding, more a question of thinking like your prey than being faster with foot and gun.
He paused in front of a café, thinking he’d spotted Willowicz, but a waitress moved out of the way and he saw that he was mistaken. Nevertheless, he entered the shop, checking the L-shaped space in nooks and crannies not visible from the street. Then he went into the men’s room, checked all the stalls, before finding his way back out onto the street. He was now a number of blocks from Twilight, having moved in an expanding spiral from the locus of the nightclub. He went into a public garage and looked around.
Clear.
* * *
NAOMI’S TREK west soon took her past several boutiques and a medium-sized restaurant, which she entered, ignoring the manager, picking her way around the tables and banquettes, searching for any sign of O’Banion and Willowicz. She checked the kitchen, where workers looked at her curiously, sullenly, then she backtracked to the men’s room. She was neither shy nor squeamish. Taking out her ID, she held it in front of her as she kicked open the door and strode in. One man, at a urinal, jerked around, wetting his polished brogues. A younger man, at the sink, looked her up and down in the mirror and gave her a wolf whistle. She grinned at him, then turned her attention to the stalls.
Naomi had come to the Secret Service because her older brother had expected such a career path for her. She adored him; he had brought her up after their parents had died in a plane crash over the Himalayas. She had been six, a vulnerable age. She had missed her parents terribly, particularly her mother. Her brother hadn’t been able to do anything about that. Instead, he had instilled in her a sense of self-worth and of purpose before he had shipped off to Afghanistan. Eight months later, he had been returned home in a body bag.
She had chosen the Secret Service, partly because she could not bear to leave D.C., which was her hometown. An orphan had to feel close to something from her past, and, for her, the District was it. Still, she missed her brother, who was still her best friend. She was closed and she knew it; after her brother had moved to New York, she had isolated herself. She had some acquaintances, a couple of drinking buddies, both male and female, and an employee of DoD whom she counted on from time to time for a booty call. That was it. Except for Jack McClure, for whom she had been carrying a torch ever since they had first met when he was in ATF and still married to that bitch, Sharon. Now that he was officially on his own, though, she found that she lacked the skills, or tools, to let him know how she felt. The fact was, she was as terrified as she was attracted—a cul-de-sac from which she had yet to extricate herself.
Finding neither of the false detectives inhabiting the dank stalls, she retraced her steps to the kitchen, passing through it, and out the back door into a grim alley lined with garbage cans. A Dumpster hulked not far away and, because she was nothing if not thorough, she lifted up the green top and peered in. Using a metal rod she found in the alley, she held her nose and stirred the garbage, jamming the rod into several spots. Garbage and more garbage. She dropped the rod, closed the top, and visually checked either end of the alley.
Choosing one end at random, she moved off.
* * *
WALKING UP the garage’s ramp, McKinsey thought about the Horn of Africa. That dungheap was never far from his thoughts. Fallujah had been blindingly bright with danger, and any number of his buddies had perished there, most in terrible ways he’d rather forget, but in Fallujah he knew the enemy, even when it was a hurt teenager packed with explosives. He could smell death in the air, and he knew how to deal with it.
The Horn of Africa was an entirely different story—a morass of terror and betrayal. Death lurked not only in every shadow and around every corner, but in the brilliance of sunlight, an extended hand, a warm smile, a whisper of friendship and support. Nothing was as it appeared to be. It was all dark theater, complete with masks, trapdoors, and unknown ringmasters out to skin you alive and string you up for the vermin to feed on. In all his travels around the world, McKinsey had never felt the sting of such implacable, bitter hatred as he had in the Horn of Africa. He liked it there; it was like living on Mars.
Soon enough he reached the topmost level, and walking to the gray late-model Ford, he pulled the passenger’s side door open and got in.
“What the fuck?” Willowicz said. “This McClure bastard is going to screw everything up.”
SEVEN
JACK EXPERIENCED Emma’s laugh as another breath of cool air on his cheek. He no longer bothered to wonder whether he was losing his mind, whether the ghostly visitations or whispered voice were real or figments of his guilt-ridden brain. The truth was she knew things he didn’t, things he couldn’t know.
—Emma, where are you?
“Who knows? I’m in twilight, neither light nor darkness.”
—Shades of gray.
“Not even that. Everything is just gray … unchanging gray.”
—I’m so—
“Don’t say it, Dad. Don’t say you’re sorry. We’re both in a different place now.”
—I wish that were so.
“There is peace here, total and absolute, but it’s just out of my reach.”
—I don’t understand.
“I don’t either. But it’s why I’m here, in this place, close to you, unable to reach you. I feel like Sisyphus.”
—Cursed to eternally roll the stone up the hill, only to lose control of it, seeing it roll down to the bottom and trudging back to try again.
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m not learning.”
Jack was surprised.
—Learning. In what way?
“I can see things now—see them clearly, in a way that was impossible to do when I was alive.”
—Your perspective has changed.
That odd breath of a laugh. “There is no perspective here, Dad, just as there is no time. Everything just is. You’re so involved in criminality it became an obsession of mine. I studied every text I could find on human criminality, but it wasn’t until now—to put it in life’s terms—”
—Terms I’ll understand.
“If you like. Anyway, I can see now that the criminal personality—Dad, you’ll really like this—is formed from two sides of a coin, both terribly dark. On one side, criminality is born of misdirected resentment, a logic, if you want to call it that, of self-destruction. Remember how you and I were drawn to the paintings of Paul Gauguin? At one point, his beautiful, mysterious work was the only thing we could agree on. You know why, Dad? Because of his philosophy. He wrote, ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’ An Impressionist painter wrote that! Can you believe it?
“Anyway, the other side stems from being totally self-absorbed, like the Roman Emperor Nero. What the hell, the little prick inherited virtually limitless power before he had a chance to grow up. To him, no one outside of himself was real—what happened to them didn’t matter in the slightest, so murder, rape, torture, and mayhem were beneath his notice.”
Good God, Jack thought. This can’t be happening. And yet, he couldn’t help himself …
—Where is she, Emma?
“Where’s who?”
—You know. Annika. Where is she?
“You swore you never wanted to see her again.”
—That was almost a year ago. A lifetime.
“Even if I did know, Dad, I couldn’t tell you. I’m not your guide through this darkness.”
Di
d she know? Jack wondered. And then realized he had said it out loud.
“Jack?”
He almost cracked his neck, turning around so fast. Naomi and McKinsey had reentered Twilight.
“We lost them,” she said.
McKinsey, looking around, said, “Does who know?” He couldn’t keep a smirk off his face. “Who were you talking to?”
Ignoring his comment, Jack told them about the fractured left eye socket that linked the murders here with Billy Warren’s.
“That exonerates Alli,” Naomi said with clear relief.
McKinsey shook his head. “Or it could signal that she’s not in it alone.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Naomi said. “You don’t know her.”
“In my experience,” he told her, “nobody knows anyone. Not really.”
Jack wanted to move in a more fruitful direction. “Look what I found.” He showed them the badge. “The manager was clutching it in his fist, as if he wanted to protect it from O’Banion and Willowicz.” As they examined it in turn, he said, “Either of you make any sense of the writing?”
As they were shaking their heads sirens sounded, rapidly approaching.
Naomi took the badge, fingering it as if the writing were in braille. “I think I know someone who can help us.”
“I bet my wife knows plenty of linguists,” McKinsey said. “She’s a professor at Georgetown.”
“The person I’m thinking of isn’t a linguist.” Naomi was turning the badge over and over, as if trying to coax a sense memory from it. “I think I’ve seen something like this before.” She glanced up at Jack with a penetrating look. “If I’m right, we’re headed into a very dark place.”
* * *
ALLI SLEPT because of exhaustion, but also to escape the horror of the present, the gruesome image of Billy bound to the tree, blue-white as the moon, and just as distant.
Curled in her uncle’s wing chair, she was dreaming about the last snow of winter. It drifted down upon the vast, terrifying expanse of Moscow’s Red Square like glittering confetti. Lights that illuminated the onion domes of Saint Basil’s seemed to enlarge each flake to a monstrous size. Alli breathed in the frozen, knifing wind as she ran through the clusters of tourists, Red Army soldiers, and cassocked Russian Orthodox priests—robins, hawks, and ravens picking over the ground for sustenance.
She ran in frantic circles, as if lost, rudderless, without any thought save to find Annika. A strange form of hysteria gripped her, as if she were dying, and only Annika could save her. She pushed past people, who whirled like the snowflakes, their eyebrows and lashes powdered white, their eyes staring past her as if she didn’t exist, or was already dead. Her dread increased exponentially, tightening her chest, making her heart pound as if she were running a long and terrible race.
And, against all odds, she saw Annika, light hair and deep mineral eyes, outlined against the stark, massive edifice of the Kremlin. She was staring at Alli, but made no move toward her as Alli struggled against the tide of people that tried to pull her away toward the dark, shadowed fringes of Red Square where certain death lurked like a staircase at night. Still, she kept struggling forward, only to find that she was in a different section of Red Square altogether, seeing Annika from a different angle, now closer, now farther away. Grimly, she pressed on, determined.
Then, all at once, breathless and on the verge of tears, she stood before Annika, who was dressed in an ankle-length coat embedded with the bones of what might be small animals. Alli wanted nothing more than for Annika to take her in her arms and rock her like a child.
But Annika said, “Why have you come all this way to see me? Life is a doomed enterprise.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Talk is a hopeless activity, like looking at a blank page.”
“Please don’t say that!”
“Would you rather I lie to you?”
“You lied to Jack.”
“But not to you, never to you.”
“You lied to him, don’t you see it’s the same thing.”
“I lied to protect him, I lied because I loved him.”
“Do you love him still?”
Annika looked at her pitilessly. “How can I help you?”
“Please answer me.”
“Why? Would you understand? What do you know of love, how it can shape a heart, how it can twist it, shatter it. Have you experienced irretrievable loss?”
“Yes, yes! We both have. We’re the same, you and I—”
“No, Alli. I am darkness, I am death.” She stepped away into the spiraling snow, and called back, her voice echoing off the walls of the monolithic Kremlin and Saint Basil’s, “Don’t come after me.…”
Alli awoke with an unpleasant start. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt. She looked around, disoriented, surprised to find herself still in her uncle’s study. Her vision was blurry. When she put her hand up to her face her fingers came away wet with tears. She had been crying in her sleep.
She leapt off the chair as if she had received an electric shock, and turned when she heard the door open. Rudy, the guard who looked like an ex-professional wrestler, came into the study. He closed the door behind him and picked his way across the polished wooden floorboards toward her. He had an odd, almost delicate way of walking that was entirely silent, as if he were barefoot. She watched him, fascinated, as he put his right foot in the precise location his left foot had just vacated.
It was only when he was very close, and about to swing it, that she saw the iron poker in his hand.
EIGHT
DIME-STORE SLIM had one hand. Seemingly, he was proud of it, or rather the stump, which had ingenious metal pincers affixed to it, as if he was in the process of turning into a crab-man or the creature from Predator.
He certainly had a personality to match, Jack thought, as Naomi Wilde introduced him and McKinsey. Dime-Store Slim was very tall, very narrow, and very dark-skinned. He had kinky hair, which he wore in a 70s-style Afro, like an outrageous hat on a runway model. On him, though, it looked ominous rather than incongruous or theatrical, as if that pitch-black cloud of unknowing could reach out and swallow you alive.
Dime-Store Slim liked to shake hands with his pincers, which he proffered in an unavoidable gesture. In fact, he thought it was hilarious to witness other people’s consternation and embarrassment. In contradiction to his slight frame, he exuded a powerful menace that was impossible to ignore or to deflect. You simply had to deal with it, Jack realized, long before McKinsey did. He was amused to see how uncomfortable Slim made the Secret Service agent.
“Why’d you think I’d know what this is?” asked Slim, slouched on a chair with his long legs up on a crate of Mallomars, fingering the badge Jack had handed him. They had found him in the rear of his Smoke Shop in a section of Northeast Washington so burned out it seemed an irredeemable slum. Slim seemed to like it that way. Even if this ant hill was grubby, he was king of it. Plus, the area was among the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. That, too, was quite all right with him. The more dangerous the better. Piratically, he wore a large .45 semiautomatic stuck in the waistband of his jeans.
McKinsey’s expression darkened as soon as he noticed the handgun. “D’you have a permit for that weapon, son?”
Slim was off the chair in a flash, his Doc Martens banging loudly against the floor. “Who you calling ‘son,’ fool?”
Compounding his error, McKinsey flashed his ID. “The United States government, that’s who.”
Slim had the .45 out, the muzzle stuck in McKinsey’s face, before the agent knew what was happening. “Ain’t no United States government in this part of the world, motherfucker.”
“Easy.” Naomi held up her hands placatingly. “Let’s all stand down.”
“Tell him that,” McKinsey said in a voice that was thin and strained to the point of breaking.
“She ain’t gonna tell me, nuthin, motherfucker.” Slim cocked his head toward Naomi. “Why you bring these fo
ols into my house, anyways?”
“We all need someone to laugh at,” Jack said, before she could answer.
There ensued a kind of stunned silence, during which McKinsey’s face turned red and Naomi’s mouth formed a tiny O. Then Slim started to laugh. He laughed so hard he could no longer keep up the pretense of being pissed off. He stepped back, slid the .45 back into his jeans, and returned to his beat-up old lounge chair.
“Fuck!” His forefinger jabbed out at Jack. “I know whys you brought this motherfucker, um-hum.”
He nodded, and then brought out a pack of rolling paper and a plastic bag of pot, deliberately, to Jack’s way of thinking, antagonizing McKinsey further. The agent stiffened and Jack saw Naomi’s hand grip his arm.
“Why don’t you go back outside and make sure we aren’t disturbed,” she said in a soft voice.
After hesitating enough to regain a modicum of self-respect, McKinsey said, “Fuck this shit,” and, shaking her off, stalked out of the shop with a gunshot bang of the front door.
“Nice fucking sonuvabitch,” Jack said, which returned Slim to a state of helpless laughter.
At length, he wiped his eyes, rolled his joint, lit up, and offered to share. They both declined.
“Straight’n’narrows, the two of you.” But it wasn’t said unkindly.
“The badge,” Jack prompted.
“The what?”
Jack pointed to the small metal object he was holding.
“Oh, you mean this? What the fuck, do I look like Sherlock-motherfucking-Holmes?” He lifted his head and hollered, “Grasi! Get your ass over here!”
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