Bestiary

by Robert Masello

  “I haven’t seen another car for the last fifteen minutes.”

  “Yeah, but up here, almost any car you do see is a security patrol.”

  Greer nodded, as Sadowski completed the curve, then took them back up around a wide bend—Greer had the feeling that they were basically making a big circle around the top of the hill crest—before entering a long, dimly lighted, dead-end street. Greer hadn’t even seen another driveway gate, on either side, for a while—just ivy-covered walls, with impenetrably thick and high hedges rising right behind them. So all of this was one property? And all of it al-Kalli’s?

  “Okay, that’s his gatehouse up ahead,” Sadowski said. “A guy named Reggie’s usually on duty.”

  Greer straightened his cap and collar. “You’re doing the talking.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get us in,” Sadowski said. “After that, it’s up to you.”

  Sadowski flashed his headlights as they approached the lighted gatehouse. It looked like the kind of stone cabin you’d see when you were entering some national park. A black guy holding a magazine in one hand stepped out as Sadowski pulled to a stop and lowered his window.

  “What’s up, dude?” Sadowski said in a friendly tone.

  What happened to the coming race war? Greer wondered.

  “Not much,” Reggie said, resting his hand on the door of the car. He looked into the car. “Who’s this?”

  “This, my man, is our sensor expert.”

  Greer lowered his head, nodded, but said nothing.

  “Your what? Your sensei, like in Karate Kid?”

  Sadowski faked a laugh. “No, this is the guy that checks out all the motion sensors around the house and grounds.”

  “Whatever you say,” Reggie replied.

  “Anybody home tonight?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll get this done as fast as we can.”

  Reggie stepped back and batted a lever with the end of the rolled-up magazine. The gates swung back smoothly.

  Sadowski raised his window again as he steered the patrol car up the long, winding drive. Greer didn’t particularly like the sound of that—everybody home. He always hoped to hear that his targets were away on business or off on vacation. But he would work around it.

  But he still couldn’t see any sign of a house. What he did see, standing by the side of the drive and staring silently at the car, was a pair of peacocks. When one of them, suddenly caught in the headlights, cried out, the sound took him right back to Iraq. To those eerie cries, at dusk, when he’d first ventured into al-Kalli’s palace grounds.

  “Yeah, those fuckin’ birds are all over the place,” Sadowski said. “I don’t know how anybody gets any sleep up here.”

  Greer wasn’t going to worry about it. “Is there a house somewhere, or are we just out for a ride?”

  Sadowski snorted. “Yeah, it’s coming.” And then, under his breath, for no particular reason, “Fucking A-rabs.”

  The car passed a lighted fountain, with lots of carved figures and water jetting up on all sides. Greer started to feel like he was in an amusement park—but he wasn’t amused. Maybe it was that damned peacock cry, maybe it was just the fact that it was al-Kalli’s place, but he was already getting a bad vibe about the whole mission. He’d had enough bad nights, nights when he bolted up in bed sweating, thinking about endless colonnades, slanting desert sun . . . and empty cages with bent bars. Just a couple of weeks earlier, he’d actually screamed in his sleep, so loudly his mother had poked her head in the door and asked if he was all right.

  At first, he hadn’t been able to answer her; his mouth was that dry. And he hadn’t been able to shake that image . . . of a black fog, but stronger, and more substantial, rolling toward him, starting to envelop him. He’d been struggling to get free, to get out, before whatever was in that fog—and he knew there was something in it, something terrible—discovered him. He could hear its breathing, a low rumble, and he could smell it—the smell of putrid fur and dung and blood.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he’d finally said to her, wiping his damp palms on the sheet. “I’m okay.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I said I’m okay.”

  “Well, you don’t need to snap at me,” she’d said, before jerking the door closed.

  He’d swallowed a couple of Xanax and spent the rest of the night in a stupor in front of the TV.

  The wheels of the car had moved off the smooth concrete now and onto a rougher, cobblestoned surface. The car made another turn, and suddenly the house loomed into view. Greer had to lean forward in the seat to see all the way to the top of its spires and gables, silvered in the moonlight.

  “They call it the Castle,” Sadowski said.

  “No shit.”

  To Greer, the place looked like a cliff of stone and timber, with here and there a shaft of yellow light creeping out of a curtained window.

  Sadowski stopped the car short of the house and turned to Greer. “Okay, the pool and tennis court and all of that are back behind the house. Off to the left, that’s where the stables and some kind of barn are. That back gate, the one where I’ll pick you up again, is just past that; you can’t miss it, just follow the service drive.”

  Greer didn’t move, and Sadowski waited. “Captain?” he said, maybe because they were back in reconnaissance mode.

  “Yeah,” Greer replied, still taking in the sprawling house. “I got it.”

  “How long you want?”

  “Give me an hour, but stay on your cell in case I need you sooner.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Greer hated that military crap.

  He got out of the car, making sure to close the door quietly; no point in emphasizing that you were there. The night air was warm, and a light breeze was blowing. He waved Sadowski off, and the patrol car backed up slowly, then made a slow turn back down the drive. Because the car would exit on the other side of the guardhouse, they were counting on Reggie not to notice that there was now only one occupant. If he did, Sadowski was going to tell him that Greer was working on a broken motion detector and he’d come back for him later.

  Once the car was gone, Greer surveyed the house, which had a wide flight of stone steps leading up to a massive wooden door, and big, several-storied wings extending out on either side; dense ivy covered much of the walls. All the way on the left there was a garage with about six bays in it, and a weather vane on top shaped like, what else, a peacock.

  What was it with this guy?

  Greer approached slowly, but taking care not to look furtive. He straightened his cap, removed the flashlight he’d looped on his belt, and sauntered up the front steps, as if on a routine patrol. He tried the door handle—locked, big surprise—and glanced up at the surveillance camera neatly tucked above a stone gargoyle. This one, a grinning demon with a monkey’s snout, reminded him of gargoyles he’d once seen, when he was a kid, on an old church in downtown L.A. The last time he’d gone by the site, the church was gone and a parking garage was standing in its place.

  But where, Greer wondered, did these cameras feed to? Was there some underground command center, with round-the-clock attendants, or did it just feed to Reggie in the guardhouse? Sadowski told him he’d checked the Silver Bear files, and there was nothing to indicate anything more than the usual camera setup. But Greer had been burned by Sadowski before, and knew enough not to rely on his information.

  Keeping to the shadows, but at the same time doing nothing to appear suspect, Greer walked the length of the house, then moved into the porte cochere, where a golf cart, with a little fringed roof, was parked next to a top-of-the-line black Mercedes limo. Greer glanced inside the car, and he could see that this model was fully tricked out, with better body armor than his army Humvees had ever had. Al-Kalli knew how to travel . . . and he knew how to live.

  Greer tried the side door to the house and it, too, was locked; Greer could even tell, just from rattling the knob, that there was a thrown dead bolt, w
ith a metal reinforcement plate behind it. Brass lamps that cast a yellow glow were affixed to the exterior walls, and Greer followed them around to the back.

  The estate really opened up back here, with a wide portico giving on to long rows of trees in full bloom, and beyond that a pool, and one of those little garden houses that reminded Greer of the open bandstands where old guys in straw hats would play Sousa on the Fourth of July. A wooden easel was set up next to a table with brushes and stuff all over it.

  Turning back to the house, Greer saw a few lights on inside, some on the upper stories and some on the ground level; staying just out of range, he walked across the flagstones to peer into the first-floor windows; they were the casement kind, with lots of little diamond-shaped panes. Inside, he could see the back of a kid’s head, with curly black hair; he was bent over what had to be a PlayStation or an Xbox or one of those things. Greer could even make out, on the giant plasma TV screen, some kind of battle scene, with guys in camouflage blowing away guys who looked like Taliban. He had to laugh—his life was a video game now.

  Suddenly, the kid looked up, and the action on the screen stopped; the kid was talking to somebody just out of Greer’s sight. Then the screen went dead, and the kid pushed himself up off the sofa. It wasn’t hard to figure out what this was all about. Greer glanced at his watch—it was almost midnight, on a school night. Greer moved back a bit, and to one side, and now he could see who the kid was talking to—a man with a bald head, in a black turtleneck, and a scowl on his face.

  And Greer knew instantly that he was seeing, for the first time, Mohammed al-Kalli himself.

  He had Googled him and surfed the Web, but for a guy with his money and power, al-Kalli kept a very low profile. The only photos Greer had been able to find showed a young man in a riding outfit in England, a couple of grainy shots taken at Arab summits, and one where al-Kalli was holding up a hand to hide his face as he stepped out of a limo in Paris. But this, now, was definitely the guy—Greer would have known it just from the way he held himself, like that emperor named Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven.

  The kid shuffled out of the room, and al-Kalli followed right behind. The lights went out. And then another light went on, upstairs. The kid in his bedroom? Greer waited, for another light. Or a sound. But all the windows were closed, and there was little chance of hearing anything emanating from inside the house.

  But then there was a noise from the area where the car and the golf cart had been parked. The sound of a bolt being thrown, a door opening, low voices. Greer quickly retreated into the shadows of the trees.

  Al-Kalli was standing outside, holding a riding crop. The door stood open, and a moment later, Greer saw why—a muscular man in a dark blue tracksuit hauled a guy who looked half-dead outside. He dragged him over to the golf cart—the guy looked way past fighting back—shoved him into the seat, then squashed himself in, too. Al-Kalli took the driver’s seat.

  Jakob, Greer thought—that was the muscleman’s name. And he was the guy Greer had given the box to in Iraq!

  A second later, the golf cart jolted to a start, and Greer cursed to himself. This was way too interesting to miss, but how was he going to keep up?

  The cart rumbled across the flagstones, then onto the lawn. Greer knew his leg would kill him tomorrow, but right now, all he could think of was keeping them in his sight. He hobbled along through the trees. The cart slowed down, as the lawn dipped, then picked up speed on the other side. Greer smelled horses, and sure enough, a stable showed up on his right. He could hear a horse neigh, softly. But that wasn’t where the golf cart was going. It glided past the stables and toward that back service entrance Sadowski had showed him.

  Greer had to stop, to catch his breath and rest his leg. The cart disappeared into the trees. But what the fuck—it was a golf cart. If they were going far, or beyond the walls of the estate, they’d have gotten into the car.

  He set off again. The grass was thick and lush under his feet; the rest of L.A. might be suffering from a drought, but al-Kalli was keeping his own lawn nicely irrigated. A narrow stream ran through the grounds, and though he hated to be so exposed, Greer crossed it over a little wooden bridge. Way up ahead, he could see, rising above the trees, the top of what looked to him like one of the massive ammo sheds in Iraq. He remembered Sadowski saying something about a riding ring; that must be it.

  Rather than head right for it, Greer moved deeper into the trees and approached the ring at an oblique angle.

  And he’d been right.

  Because at one end, where there were two big doors, the kind you’d see on a barn, the golf cart was stopped. Al-Kalli was still at the wheel, but the prisoner was scrambling across the ground, aimlessly, while Jakob plodded after him, clearly not worried that the guy would get away. In fact, the prisoner stumbled and fell, and Jakob reached down, grabbed him by the collar of the jumpsuit they had him in—one of those orange jobs you see convicts wear—and hauled him back to the cart like a sack of laundry.

  Whatever was going on here, it didn’t look good for the guy in the jumpsuit.

  Al-Kalli turned and said something to the bodyguard. Greer couldn’t make out the words, but the tone told him it was an order. Al-Kalli reached up to the visor of the golf cart, where there must have been a remote; the doors to the ring—the biggest damn thing Greer had ever seen on a piece of private property—slowly swung open. Greer moved closer.

  They were going to go in . . . but should he try to follow? Or would that be the biggest mistake of his life?

  There was the sound of blowers—huge fans blowing out cool air from the interior—as the gates spread wide.

  Greer moved closer.

  The golf cart lurched forward, with Jakob firmly clutching the prisoner.

  The gates held steady as the cart entered. Greer could see a vast open space in the center, with mountains of crates and equipment stacked along the near side and, more interestingly, what looked like barred enclosures along the far wall.

  Even bigger, and more high-tech enclosures, than he’d seen in the palace outside Mosul.

  And that’s when he made his mind up. He had to know. Keeping low to the ground, as if avoiding sniper fire, he scurried into the building, the massive fans nearly blowing his cap off, and then cut to the side where some crates would afford a hiding place. The ponderous doors swung shut with a thud behind him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BETH DlDN’T KNOW what woke her, or how she knew she was alone in the bed. But when she opened her eyes, moonlight was streaming in through the window, and Carter’s side of the bed was nothing but a twisted sheet and crumpled pillow.

  She slipped on her blue robe, and padded across the hall to Joey’s room. She had barely crossed the threshold when she suddenly stepped on something soft, heard a yelp, and she jumped back, startled.

  Champ was sitting up, watching her.

  “Oh my gosh,” she said, letting out a breath. “I didn’t see you there.”

  The dog waited, his ears up, tongue out. She could see the glistening scar on the top of his head from his fight with the coyotes; the vet had said it would heal in a few months. But ever since that night, Champ had appointed himself the unofficial companion and protector of little Joey, keeping tabs on him during the day, sleeping by his crib all night. Robin, the nanny, said he was like a sheepdog, tending to his flock.

  “We’re going to have to get you a doggie bed, aren’t we?” Beth said. Right now, he just slept on the carpeted floor. “And maybe put it farther out of the doorway.”

  Champ appeared to have no opinion, but watched silently as Beth went around him to look into the crib. Joey’s eyes were open.

  “Oh, did I wake you, pumpkin?” she said, leaning down. Although she had nothing to compare him to, Beth thought that he must be the most sensitive baby in all the world; he always seemed perfectly well rested, but he never seemed to sleep. Anytime you so much as approached him, he was wide awake. She’d even mentioned it to the pediatrician, w
ho’d said he couldn’t see any problem or adverse effects.

  “If anything,” he’d said, “he seems ahead of the curve—growing fast, thriving. I’d put him in the top one percentile on almost any measure.”

  Beth checked his diaper—no problem there—and kissed him on his forehead. His eyes, crystal clear and pale blue, remained fixed on her, and she had the odd sense, as she often did, that he was about to say something to her. That he could say something to her, if he wanted to, but that he just hadn’t decided to do so yet. She knew it wasn’t really true, but even as she drew back, she felt it.

  “Someday,” she whispered, “you’re going to tell me what that’s all about. Okay?”

  He wiggled his feet in reply.

  As she left, she could hear Champ turning around and around in a tight circle as he settled back down at the foot of the crib.

  Downstairs, the house was dark. Had Carter actually gone out somewhere, at this hour? And after what had happened with the coyotes the last time? She glanced at the digital clock on the microwave; it was almost one in the morning. Going to the kitchen window, she looked out into the tiny yard, and she could see him sitting there in a lawn chair, facing out over the canyon. He had a beer in one hand.

  Opening the double doors to the yard, she said, “Drinking alone again?”

  He turned his head toward her. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  She gathered her robe around her, walked barefoot across the short, mostly brown grass, and sat down in the chair next to him. “Was it the arm?”

  After the attack in the tar pit, Carter had been taken to USC University Hospital, where they’d sewed up his forearm with a half dozen stitches. Now he had a narrow white bandage running down his forearm.

  “No, that’s okay.” He was wearing a California Science Center T-shirt and a pair of Jams.

  Beth sat back on the plastic strips of her chair, its aluminum frame creaking. The moon was full, etching the trees and brush below in a cold silver light.

  She knew what it was; she knew Carter well enough by now to know what he would be thinking after such a terrible day.