“We called the police,” the stage manager continued. “Under the circumstances, they said there’s nothing they can do unless he’s gone for twenty-four hours. And then a family member has to—”
“All right, all right,” Kiernan said. “Tell the cast I’ll be going on for him script-in-hand—no, tell them all to meet me backstage left. I’ll break the news to them myself. Also, notify everybody on headset that I’ll be making a curtain speech before the show begins. When I’m clear, just call everything else as you normally do.”
The stage manager just stood there, frightened.
“Don’t worry,” Kiernan said, winking. “We’ll get through it.”
The stage manager nodded and was off.
Kiernan took another deep breath and asked the costumer if he could have a moment alone. She left, and the director sat down at the dressing table, thumbing absently through the script given to him by Cindy Smith. She’d already written down all of Cox’s blocking in the scenes with Lady Macbeth, and Kiernan figured he could remember the rest of it from his own promptbook, which was too thick, too heavy to carry around onstage.
He studied his face in the mirror—felt his breathing level off and his heart slow down. And when the announcement from the stage manager came over the intercom, the director calmly walked out of Bradley Cox’s dressing room and stood in the wings before his cast like a general.
Chapter 72
Cindy held Edmund Lambert’s hand as Kiernan laid out the battle plan for the matinee. With the absence of Cox, she’d grown nervous, but at the same time was beyond excited at being so close to Edmund—especially since he’d been waiting for her outside her dressing room when she arrived at the theater. They’d spoken to one another only briefly, but kissed long enough for her to know that everything was all right again.
“Now you need to focus,” he’d said, pulling away. “But I’ll be watching.”
It was going to be the best show yet, Cindy thought, and felt beyond ecstatic when she played over in her mind how Edmund had looked at her.
But now when he looked at her he seemed agitated. And he kept glancing at his BlackBerry as Kiernan gave them a pep talk about focus and teamwork.
“I thought he would have canceled the show,” Edmund said as Kiernan made his curtain speech. “Or at least the photo call.”
He actually seemed disappointed, Cindy thought.
“Not George Kiernan,” she said. “The show must go on. Just don’t get jealous in that part where Macbeth tries to kiss me, okay? Even though it’s George Kiernan, I’ll still try my hardest to resist.”
Edmund smiled thinly. Cindy kissed him and then ran to places for the opening scene—a silly scene, Cindy had always thought, in which the director had the Witches arrange all the characters like pieces on a chessboard. Edmund thought it was a silly scene, too, she learned at the cast party—just one of the many things they had in common. “A scene like that takes Macbeth’s fate out of his hands,” he’d said. “If only he’d read the messages correctly things wouldn’t have turned out so badly for him.”
For some reason talking like that with Edmund had turned her on.
His speech finished, Kiernan stepped back into the wings and took his place with the rest of the cast—directly opposite Cindy on the other side of the stage. He gave her a thumbs-up and she replied in kind. The audience was still murmuring as the music started and the lights dimmed, and Cindy felt as if the air were charged with electricity, as if she would explode from excitement at any moment. Yeah, she thought, in a sick way she was thrilled all this was happening.
“This is fucked up about Bradley,” whispered the actor playing Macduff.
“Yeah,” replied Jonathan, winner of the Perils of Inbreeding Award. “Maybe Vlad got him.”
“Or maybe Lambert finally finished the job.”
The two boys snickered, and Cindy told them to shut the hell up.
Yeah, even though it was Bradley Cox they were dissing, a comment like that was beyond uncalled for.
Chapter 73
Markham landed in Raleigh about twenty minutes early. As the plane taxied down the runway, he turned on his cell phone to find the text message from Andy Schaap already waiting for him.
Checking on names, the message read. Might be out of range 4 a while, but let me know when u land. Will call u when I get back to the RA l8r.
“Enough with this nonsense,” Markham said, and promptly dialed his partner’s number.
It rang only twice and then went straight into voice mail.
“I’m back,” Markham said. “Got your article about the lion’s head. Good work, and I’ll follow up at the taxidermy shop myself first thing tomorrow. There are some other things I want to discuss with you. Don’t know if you read the latest updates, but the set list from Rodriguez’s CD was uploaded into Sentinel last night. I think there might be a connection with one of the songs in particular—“Dark in the Day” by that eighties band High Risk. Only going with my gut, but I ’d like to bounce a couple of things off you. Let’s plan on dinner at the Dubliner around seven. Call me back ASAP.”
He hung up feeling on edge, but by the time he reached his TrailBlazer he was furious. It didn’t make sense, Markham thought, this frustration with his NCAVC coordinator. Perhaps he might feel better after a stop at the Resident Agency to see what Andy Schaap was up to.
Still, something was off. Something was wrong.
Markham could feel it.
Chapter 74
KISS’s “Detroit Rock City” kicked in just as the General turned off the Mustang’s ignition, and for a moment he thought he’d tripped an alarm or something. He glanced down at the BlackBerry—the name Sam Markham in bright white letters on the screen—and waited patiently for the song to stop. And when it did, the General gazed across the parking lot to the apartment building where the famous Quantico profiler was staying.
The General had reconned the Resident Agency earlier that morning; had to circle the outside lot only once to realize it was too risky to grab out Markham there. His apartment would be much better. The General had found the address on Schaap’s computer, but after he left the theater he decided to first drive back to the farmhouse to check on the progress there. Satisfied, the General switched his pickup for Bradley Cox’s Mustang and arrived at the apartment building forty-five minutes later. The General hoped Markham had gotten the e-mail he’d sent from Schaap’s BlackBerry; hoped he’d stop first at the taxidermy shop or perhaps the Resident Agency before coming home. That was important, for the General’s plan would only work if Markham got home after dark.
Of course, as with the tattoo parlor, the FBI would find nothing at the taxidermy shop. The General was always careful not to leave any fingerprints, but the idea of sending Markham on a wild-goose chase excited him. He was tempted to send him another article or a text message, but knew he could play his little game only for so long before the FBI agent caught on. Indeed, the General suspected the game might already be over when he heard the voice mail notification on the BlackBerry. After all, Markham would grow suspicious when he didn’t hear from his partner in person.
He needed to be careful. There was no room for mistakes, and time was running short. The General had seen it all in the doorway.
Andrew J. Schaap had proved invaluable. The Prince was no longer angry with the General. He couldn’t come right out and say so (as the General suspected, such communication took up too much of the doorway’s power), but the General could tell from the Prince’s visions that he had forgiven him. Of course, Edmund Lambert’s mother was nowhere to be seen, but the Prince did show him Ereshkigal. She was most certainly part of the equation now. But exactly how she fit in, the General still wasn’t sure—he could only see himself running with her across the smoking battlefields. However, in the part of his brain that he could still keep hidden from the Prince, the General felt confident that he would be able to save his mother in the end. He didn’t know where she was—there was sti
ll so much about Hell that he didn’t understand—but knew that Ereshkigal would help him. Plus, the fact that the Prince would actually expect him and Ereshkigal to be together filled him with hope. Perhaps they could conspire behind his back. Perhaps she knew where the Prince had taken his mother. Perhaps, if the General promised to restore her to her throne she could—
He was getting ahead of himself again. That kind of thinking needed to go on the back burner for now. The equation must take precedence, and there was still time to balance it. The Prince had shown him this in his visions. And if everything went according to plan, as of tomorrow more than half of the nine would be complete. After that, and once Ereshki-gal had joined with him—the General would eventually be told what to do next.
After all, eventually had always been part of the equation.
First things first, the General said to himself, and he fished out a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment. Even though George Kiernan had messed things up for him by not canceling the show, he needed to take care of business here in Raleigh first.
He’d already telephoned Doug Jennings—told him his aunt had been in a car accident and that he wouldn’t be able to make the photo call. Then he left Cindy a voice mail saying would call her once he got his aunt home from the hospital. He had only a short window before Markham would come looking for his partner along with his friends, so it was critical that he be alone for what the Prince had in store for him.
Besides, despite the scene he had laid out in Cox’s apartment, the General knew it was only a matter of time before the police began questioning people. They would question everyone and would eventually get to Edmund Lambert. In that respect, the variable of eventually would not bode well for the equation.
True, even the Prince had no idea how long it would take before the police, and then the FBI, would start trying to connect Cox’s disappearance to Vlad the Impaler. But this Sam Markham character knew the murders had nothing to do with Vlad the Impaler; and judging from the FBI’s military profile for the killer, any interaction with the authorities was too risky for the former 187th Infantry Screaming Eagle. And that’s what had the General worried.
“But the seal-tailed lion left the FBI a present back in Greenville,” the General said, raising the binoculars to his eyes. “If they find it before I get to Markham, I’ll have to consult the Prince again. Either way, we’ll know exactly when the FBI figures out Andrew J. Schaap is missing.”
The General fingered the focus knob and trained the binoculars on Sam Markham’s front door. And in an instant he felt his worry drain away; for although there was still so much about the Prince’s plan that had yet to be revealed to him, one thing was certain:
Sam Markham was now part of the equation, too.
Chapter 75
Markham arrived at the Resident Agency to find Andy Schaap’s office empty. He flicked on the light and sat at his desk—stared grimly at the scattered papers before him and picked up a stack with a yellow Post-it note on top.
First batch just came in, the note read. Markham stuck the Post-it to Schaap’s computer screen. It was a fax from the Marines—a list of Iraq War veterans from units that fit Dr. Underhill’s insignia profile, and who had undergone psychiatric counseling before, during, and after tours of duty beginning in April of 2003 through June of 2004.
Markham looked at the time and date stamp.
“Yesterday afternoon,” he muttered.
He found two more faxes: another from the Marines and one from the Army. Both were stamped from earlier that morning and had been tucked underneath the first fax.
Markham ruffled absently through the other lists of servicemen that Schaap had strewn across his desk—faxes and printouts and PDFs from all the branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. There were some other lists, too, and Markham quickly deduced that Schaap’s computer program had begun priori- tizing the names according to various criteria. On one of the lists, Markham discovered, Schaap had narrowed down the names further by inputting birthdays that fell under the astrological sign of Leo.
Still, there were a lot of names—hundreds of them.
“Oh, it’s you,” said a voice, and Markham looked up, startled.
It was Big Joe the Sox Fan Connelly. He stood in the doorway.
“Sorry, Sam,” he said. “I thought you were Schaap. Another batch of those medical records just came in. Air Force is being a bit of a bitch, though.”
He handed Markham the fax.
“You know where Schaap is?” Markham asked.
“I haven’t seen him since before noon yesterday. Said we’d start checking the lists against each other when you got back.”
“You know if he checked out the taxidermy shop?”
“Taxidermy shop?”
“Schaap sent me an article this morning about the theft of a lion head over in Durham. Happened in November of last year. He didn’t tell you about it?”
“I haven’t seen him today. Something you want my team to look into?”
“No, no, I plan on heading out there tomorrow.”
“Tech will have the Google Earth setup ready for us tomorrow morning,” Big Joe said. “Schaap’s already begun narrowing down his lists by probability of location. Wants to divvy up some addresses and have our boots on the ground by noon.”
Markham nodded.
“I’m gonna jet now if you don’t need anything. Kid’s got a soccer game.”
Markham gave him a thumbs-up, and Joe left. He sat there for a moment staring at the yellow Post-it on Schaap’s screen. He returned the note to its proper place, then went into his office and turned on his computer—signed into Sentinel and saw that Schaap had not updated anything since Friday.
Markham sat back in his chair and closed his eyes—hundreds of names, unreadable, but scrolling upward, white on black like credits at the end of a movie.
“What are you up to, Andy Schaap?” he whispered.
Chapter 76
Bradley Cox felt as if his head were about to spin off his neck—the deafening pump of the Clone Six song over and over again, the flash of the strobe light threatening to drive him insane.
He was naked and strapped to a dentist’s chair in the man’s cellar—the cold, the writing all over his body, the newspaper articles taped to the wall. And his nose still hurt from where the man rammed him with the rag. However, along with his feelings of encroaching madness, Bradley Cox’s senses were sharp. And, despite the swelling, his nose still worked fine; could smell the chemicals and taste the bitterness in the back of his throat. He could also smell Pine-Sol and something else—something faint, but foul and rotting underneath it all. He found that focusing on the smells helped him keep it together. He would need to have his wits about him when the motherfucker in the ski mask returned.
“How could you think? How could you think?
Tell me how could you think, I ’d let you get away?”
Despite the ski mask and the bloody tattoo on his chest, Bradley Cox knew who’d come for him—knew it as soon as he woke up and the son of a bitch asked: “Will you know him when he comes for you?”
Cox had recognized that slow Southern drawl at once—but somehow, amid his growing terror, he was able to heed the advice of a voice inside his head. Stay calm, Bradley, it whispered. As long as he thinks you can’t identify him to the police you still have a chance.
Cox had pleaded to be let go—repeated over and over that he had no idea what the man in the ski mask was talking about—but the dude had kept asking:
“Will you know him when he comes for you?”
“Yes,” Cox had said finally, exhausted. “Whoever you want me to know I’ll know, okay? Just let me go!”
“And do you accept your mission?”
“What the fuck are you—”
“Do you accept your mission?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”
“The nine to three,” the man had said, pointing to the large numbers on eithe
r side of the chamber’s doorway. “The three to one. Do you see them?”
“Yes,” Cox had whimpered, “but I—”
“You are the nine, I am the three. You are the three and I am the one. Your destiny is written all around you, in the stars. The equation is in everything and always was. It is why you must accept. Do you understand?”
“I’m not accepting shit, you sick motherfucker!”
The man in the ski mask had deflated for a moment, seemed to sigh, and quickly left.
A minute later he returned with the razor blade.
Bradley Cox gritted his teeth as the searing pain in his chest reminded him what the man in the ski mask had done. The man in the ski mask—a.k.a Edmund Lambert, a.k.a Vlad the Impaler. The fucking symbols he’d written all over his body, just like the ones on the Internet—it had to be him!
However, through all his hours of screaming—even through his ordeal with the razor blade—Bradley Cox had not let on that he knew the identity of his captor. A childhood spent watching countless episodes of America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries with his father had taught him that.
As long as Lambert doesn’t know I’m on to him, he kept repeating to himself, I still have a chance.
But Cox hadn’t seen Edmund Lambert for hours, and sensed that he was gone now not just from the cellar, but from the house above it, too. About twenty versions of the song ago, he heard an alarm go off briefly upstairs. Shortly afterwards, he saw a figure standing in the darkened hallway. He wasn’t exactly sure when the figure disappeared, but in the transition between the eighties version and the Clone Six cover he heard the alarm again and a door slamming. Everything upstairs had been quiet in the transitions since then. And thank God there were no more sounds of hammering and power tools coming from the other room; no more flashes of yellow light and little breezes coming from the darkened hallway, either.
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