Deadline

by Craig McLay

  Just as soon as he was as far from here as he could get.

  -57-

  Janice’s apartment was the ground floor of an illegally subdivided townhouse unit, eight blocks from the school.

  The building was owned by a numbered company in Singapore, the CEO of which was an electronics wholesaler who had paid contractors under the table to turn the existing 22 units into 44 units of low-cost student housing. Property maintenance duties were contracted out to a local company owned by a city counsellor. Most of their profit margin was dependent on their tenants having little or no idea of what their rights were relative to rent increases, leaky faucets or functioning electrical. Janice had taken it because she had needed to find a place in a hurry and her father knew the owner. She had been lucky in that the only problems she had encountered were a faulty smoke detector (she had to yank the battery out every time she cooked anything or it went off and didn’t stop) and a bathroom sink that emitted a swamp gas smell in the afternoons and evenings. She had left messages about both problems with ITC Maintenance Solutions, but so far, nobody had showed up to even look at them. At least she didn’t live in 14A, where a ceiling fan had spontaneously detached in mid-rotation and almost decapitated a cat.

  Colin circled the parking lot once to make sure there weren’t any cruisers waiting to grab him as soon as he stepped out of the car. All of the vehicles in the lot appeared to be empty. They could be waiting inside to grab him, of course. He had tried calling Janice several times on the way over and gotten no answer. There was nothing else for it, though. He would just have to take his chances.

  The entrance to Janice’s unit was at the back of the building, which faced a creek and, beyond that, the delivery entrance for a doughnut shop and gas station. The people who lived in the upper units entered through the front doors, which was more convenient in terms of parking lot access, but also more exposed to the noise generated by the adjoining highway overpass.

  Colin pulled up his collar as he jogged around to the back of the building. He had never been the subject of a manhunt before. He was convinced that everyone who looked in his direction was a cop in disguise, from crossing guards to the old bearded guy out walking his German shepherd along the creek side. The K-9 units used those, didn’t they? It was nerve-shredding. He hadn’t been able to listen to the news station he usually played in the car, but the only music he had was an old CD copy of Planet Suite by Holst. As much as he liked it, Mars, the Bringer of War wasn’t exactly what the doctor ordered to calm the hypertense.

  Janice’s unit was in the middle of the centre block of buildings. He deliberately avoided looking in any of the other windows as he passed. The last thing he needed was to see his own face looking back at him from somebody else’s TV.

  He reached the middle of the building and noticed that Janice’s door was ajar. What the hell did that mean? Maybe he wasn’t being paranoid. Maybe they really were in there waiting for him. But wouldn’t they have closed the door? Leaving the door partway open was kind of a stupid giveaway.

  He stopped and took a moment to think. Janice had complained that there were a lot of maintenance issues with her building. Maybe the door just didn’t close properly. Maybe she had been in a hurry and hadn’t closed it properly. Maybe the wind had blown it open.

  Or maybe something was seriously wrong.

  Colin crept forward and tried to peek in through the crack in the door. The lights appeared to be out inside and he couldn’t really see very much beyond the closet. He couldn’t hear anyone moving around in there. If the cops were waiting to jump on him, they could have done it as soon as he got out of his car. The building was at the end of a cul de sac and there wasn’t really anywhere to run.

  “Janice?” he said, tentatively pushing the door open.

  He stepped into the hall. He could hear the dull beat of dance music coming through the wall from one of the units next door, but otherwise everything was quiet. Janice’s boots were still tucked under the bench. He looked inside the half-open closet and saw her jacket still hanging up. If she had gone anywhere, it had been without either of those things, which didn’t seem likely on a day like today. Her car was still in the lot, too, so she hadn’t driven anywhere. The possibility that she had gone next door to borrow a cup of sugar was pretty remote. Her neighbours on one side were a group of six loud and slightly obnoxious nursing students (the likely source of the dance music) and on the other a family of nine that had recently emigrated from Pakistan and spoke little or no English.

  Colin walked past the kitchen, where he noticed a half-empty coffee cup sitting on the counter next to the entryway. There was a small spray pattern of coffee droplets on the counter next to the cup. It looked like somebody had put the cup down there in a hurry on their way to answering the door. The droplets were sticky and the cup was still lukewarm. Whoever had been drinking the stuff had been doing it within the last 20 or so minutes.

  Colin felt the vague sense of unease in his gut growing larger by the minute. He put down the cup and went back into the hall.

  “Janice?”

  Maybe she was in the bathroom or something. Or maybe she’d just gotten tired after all the research and decided to grab a quick nap.

  Or maybe she just won a million dollars after the ghost of Ed McMahon showed up at the front door.

  All of them were equally likely.

  Colin stepped into the living room and froze. Spray-painted in red on the wall above Janice’s desk was a cross surrounded by a circle of thorns. The design was ragged and clumsy, but there was no mistaking it for anything else.

  “Shit,” Colin gasped. He felt all his muscles tense and his mind temporarily eject itself. What had so far been the most awful day of his life had just gotten inestimably worse.

  No, he thought. I need to think.

  He grabbed the backpack off his shoulder and rushed to Janice’s desk. He opened the backpack and pulled out his laptop, opening it up and turning it on. He fished around the back of Janice’s laptop and pulled out her ethernet cable, plugging it into the back of his own computer. He drummed his fingers anxiously while he waited for it to boot up. The dance music next door stopped. He jumped to his feet and ran to the window. There were still no signs of an army of cop cars racing in to barricade the parking lot.

  He sat back down at the desk and opened a browser window to access his email. Janice’s internet speed was painfully slow. It must have taken her forever to download those massive graphics files she had found in the overseas archives.

  There it was. A message from an anonymous, numbered gmail account with a file attachment. The attachment was a large database file. Colin clicked on the file and it started to download. Colin watched it tick slowly through the percentage complete. It felt like he was trying to bring the Atlantic Ocean through a straw.

  Colin jumped out of his chair and paced the room. Aside from the image on the wall, nothing appeared to be out of place. There wasn’t any blood or sign of a struggle. It occurred to him that he hadn’t checked the bedroom or the basement.

  The bedroom was at the back of the unit. Colin pushed the door open, but it was empty. Clothes, file folders and other items were strewn all over the place. Like many introverted and overly analytical people, Janice was something of a mess when it came to her personal space. He looked quickly under the bed, but all that was there was a hair clip, a black running shoe and a dinner plate she appeared to have pushed under there and forgotten about.

  Colin was trying to decide whether or not he actually wanted to go into the basement when he heard his computer beep to indicate that the download had finished. He raced back to the desk and opened the file. It was an Access database file that had been sorted by last name. It also included fields for address, age, conditions, PO (which Colin guessed was parole officer) and a dozen other pieces of data, the meaning of which was not immediately apparent.

  In every case, the conditions field was populated with the same value: FSC5001-SCCPD. />
  There were 34,381 names in the database.

  “Jesus,” Colin gasped. “The fucker must have enrolled every ex-con in the country.”

  Colin clicked on the last name field and did a search on “Crowley”. The search returned zero results.

  “Didn’t think it would be that easy,” he muttered.

  He started to page through them a screen at a time. He was looking for anything that struck even a vague chord in the back of his mind. He was on screen twelve when one of the names made him pause.

  CLAIRVAUX CONRAD

  Colin stopped. He knew he had seen that name somewhere in the last five days. He flipped to the folder containing his investigative notes. It only took him a few seconds to find it. Conrad Clairvaux had been one of the names on the account that had funded the purchase of Crowley’s church in Newansett. All attempts to track any such person down had gone nowhere. Janice, however, had advised him that Bernard de Clairvaux and Conrad III of Germany had been key figures in the second crusade.

  Colin ran a search on the other name. “Augustine Levant” was in the database as well. Both Conrad and Augustine were listed at the same address. Colin felt a surge of excitement. The address was outside of town, but not by much. It couldn’t be more than 20 minutes away. He punched the address into his phone’s GPS and threw his laptop back in his backpack.

  He made one quick phone call and then ran out the door. It was a long shot, but the way he saw it, he didn’t have any choice. The person who answered the phone was even more surprised to get the call than he was to make it in the first place.

  -58-

  Janice opened her eyes in total darkness.

  There was a hood over her head. It smelled musty and had a rough, thickly woven texture that rubbed against her cheeks. It took her a moment to remember what had happened before it all came back in a flash. The knock at the door. Crowley standing on her step as innocuously as a delivery man. The sudden, blinding pain in her neck. Now this.

  They had her. She was going to die.

  She could feel herself starting to panic and forced herself to stay calm. If she hyperventilated in this hood, she would probably pass out. She needed to stay awake if she was going to have any kind of chance at all.

  Her hands were tied tightly behind her back. So tightly, in fact, that they had gone completely numb. She tried pulling her arms and felt nylon rope bite into her wrists. A similar rope was wound around her ankles, but not so snugly that she couldn’t feel some circulation through her feet.

  Okay. So escape wasn’t really going to be an option. She needed to figure out where she was.

  The floor was cold and smooth. It felt like poured concrete as opposed to stone. The air was cool. She guessed she was probably in a basement. Her mind flashed back to the one she and Colin had visited—the one with the well under the altar—and she felt herself start sliding back into panic again.

  Get a grip, she thought. Just stay calm and try to think.

  She heard footsteps on the stone floor. They echoed so much off the stone walls that it was impossible for her to tell how many people were coming. It sounded like an army. Her heart was pounding so hard that she felt like she was just going to explode. As the footsteps got closer, she gritted her teeth and tried to control her breathing.

  The footsteps stopped. She felt a hand take hold of the top of the hood and pull it off over her head. She closed her eyes against the light. Maybe if she didn’t look at them, they would leave her alone.

  “Open your eyes, sister,” said a soft voice. Whoever was speaking was almost right in front of her face. She could feel warm breath on her cheek. Whoever it was, his breath smelled terrible. Janice kept her eyes closed. Despite all her efforts to stay calm, she was totally paralyzed with fear.

  “There, there,” said the voice. She felt a hand touch her cheek and instinctively recoiled, opening her eyes as she did. Kneeling down in front of her was the same face she had seen on her doorstep. And in the old newspaper article. And in some of her nightmares.

  “You’re Crowley,” she said.

  He smiled, revealing a mouth full of blackened and rotting teeth. Janice winced. That explained the bad breath. She wondered if the Knights of the Holy Thorn didn’t believe in some of the more modern advances in dentistry. It was also probably pretty hard to get good medical care when you’d been on the run from the law for over a decade.

  “You know a little about us,” he said. “From your computer and papers, I can see that you have been studying us for some time.”

  Keep him talking, Janice thought. That’s all there is.

  “So you’re the last remnants of the Knights of the Holy Thorn,” she said.

  Crowley stood up and gestured to the group standing behind him. There were five that Janice could see. They were all dressed as he was, in black cloaks with a red cross on the chest. They appeared to range in age from about 15 to 25. Janice recognized one of them, but couldn’t figure out where she had seen him before.

  “Last remnants?” said Crowley, laughing. “Oh no. There are more of us out there than you know. I have spent the last 12 years searching for my family…and they for me. We have been charged since birth with a sacred task. It is one we have performed since the dawn of history and will continue to perform once all of this has passed away.”

  “What do you mean there are more of you?” Janice asked. “Where? How many?”

  Crowley smiled again. She really wished that he wouldn’t do that.

  “We are on every continent and in each country,” he said. “Our numbers are legion and grow every day. That is how I was able to so easily evade what passes for what you would call the authorities for all of these years. Your…law enforcement. Of course, it is no such thing. The laws of God are not so easily bent or broken.”

  “Is that what you believe you’re doing?” Janice asked. “You’re out there doling out God’s justice?”

  “We bring those who have strayed back on to the path of light,” he said. “You would have borne false witness against us. You would have given the world a perverted and diseased description of our mission. That is why we could no longer allow you to continue.”

  “It’s not just me,” Janice said. “I’m not alone.”

  “Oh yes,” Crowley said. “You speak of your…partner in your investigations. The one with whom you have laid down like a common whore.”

  How in the world did they know so much? Janice wondered. “That’s right. He knows everything that I do. It’s only a matter of time before they find their way to you.”

  “A matter of time, yes,” Crowley said. “But not for me. Soon he will be either dead or in the hands of the police and we will be long gone from here. I have found my youngest daughter, you see. She is living with a family not far from here. It is time she was reunited with her birthright.”

  If Janice remembered correctly, Crowley’s youngest was barely three at the time her father had gone on the run. That would make her 15 now. She wondered if the child had any memory of what had happened. Hopefully she didn’t.

  “And what if she doesn’t want to come?” Janice asked.

  Crowley waved his hands to indicate that this was of no concern. “It is not her decision to make any more than it is mine. This is the will of God.”

  Janice swallowed. She could sense that she was running out of time here. “Isn’t it supposed to be a sin to claim to know the mind of God?”

  Crowley’s expression darkened. “Sin,” he said, “is something about which I know more than any man alive. It is my sacred duty to purge sin to make souls worthy to stand in the presence of God. It is time that you learned something about the true nature of sin. It stains both the body and mind. Only through great trial and suffering might we wipe that stain away.”

  He walked over and knelt back down next to her, grabbing her chin forcefully with his hand. She tried to shake loose, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “Today is the most glorious day of your life,”
he said. “Today you shall be purged of your sins. You will be pure. Today, you will see God in all his glory.”

  Janice tried to think of something to say, but nothing was coming to mind. Crowley waved to the other cloaked figures. “Bring her to the altar!”

  The largest figure at the front, the one Janice was sure she recognized, took a step forward and then stopped suddenly at the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked. A familiar voice came out of the darkness.

  “Stay right there, asshole. Any of you fucking nutbars move and I’ll send you on an express train to Jesus myself.”

  -59-

  Colin stepped forward holding the Glock. He hoped the relative darkness would keep everyone else from noticing how badly his hands were shaking.

  From the outside, the place had looked like an abandoned farmhouse. All of the doors and windows were boarded up. Colin had circled the place twice before he found the wooden storm doors that led down into the basement. They were painted a charcoal brown and blended in so easily with the surrounding ground that he actually stepped on them before he saw them.

  The doors led to a narrow stone stairway that led him deep under the house. He followed the sound of voices through the darkness. The place smelled like an abattoir.

  Crowley stood up as Colin entered the room. He looked older than Colin had pictured, but that in no way detracted from his intimidating presence. The guy was tall. It was hard to tell just how big he was under the cloak, but he had a rangy look in his eyes that immediately set Colin even more on edge. The guy had the air of a hunted animal—the kind that’s learned to survive by becoming a better predator than its enemies.