Hangman

by Daniel Cole

  “Very well . . . Eduardo!” Green called. A man stepped out into the gauntlet of his peers. He pulled at his fresh bandages uncomfortably. “You and Sasha are friends?”

  “Yes, Ale— Sorry. I mean Dr. Green.”

  “I think she could use you right now.”

  “Thank you,” Sasha whispered as Eduardo approached them, putting his arm around her.

  Green squeezed her hand affectionately, then let go.

  They had made it halfway back down the room before he addressed them again:

  “Eduardo,” Green called, stopping them where the entire audience could see. “I’m afraid Sasha has decided that she isn’t one of us . . . Kill her.”

  Stunned, Eduardo turned back to say something, but Green was already walking away, disinterested, his sentence passed. He turned to face Sasha, unsure what to do.

  “Eddie?” she gasped, watching the look on her friend’s face change. She couldn’t even see the exit now through the wall of onlookers. “Ed!”

  His eyes filled with tears, and then he struck her with a disorientating fist to the face.

  Grasping out as she fell, his bandages tore away in her hands.

  All she could focus on, as he kneeled down over her, was the word etched into his chest. And in her final moments, that brought her some solace, because it wasn’t her friend driving her skull into the room’s hard floor . . . He was already gone.

  Chapter 24

  Thursday, 17 December 2015

  3:36 P.M.

  The glass walls muffled the shouts from outside as Lennox and Chase marched across the entrance hall of Montefiore Medical Center. Someone, almost certainly the comatose man’s reluctant doctor, had informed the media of the situation developing inside and they had turned out in force. Behind the cameras, picket boards bobbed in and out of sight: campaigners protesting against the FBI’s decision to prematurely wake a man with a life-threatening brain injury.

  “Christ! These people’s memories are short,” muttered Lennox as they followed signs toward the intensive-care unit.

  Chase had not heard. He was keeping pace with his superior while deflecting phone calls on her behalf. He made an irritating creaking sound with every step as his various pieces of body armor rubbed against one another:

  “Yes, I understand that, sir . . . Yes, sir . . . And as I said before, she’s not currently available.”

  A middle-aged man in a long brown coat seemed overly interested in them as he approached from the other direction. Lennox was about to alert Chase when the man pulled a camera and audio recorder out from his pockets:

  “Agent Lennox, do you believe the FBI is above the law?” he asked accusingly as Chase shoved him up against the wall. Lennox continued down the corridor without pausing. “Judge, jury, and executioner—is that how it works now?”

  As Chase restrained the struggling man, he continued to shout after her:

  “The family have not given their consent!”

  Lennox maintained her confident demeanor as she passed between the two police officers on the door and entered the ICU. Inside, the atmosphere was even more tense. A defibrillator sat ominously on a cart in the corner. Three nurses fussed over wires and tubes while the doctor prepared a syringe. Not one of them acknowledged her as she regarded the man in the bed.

  He was as scrawny as a schoolboy, despite being in his twenties. Severe burns covered most of his right-hand side. Even the four-letter lie cut into his chest had spilled over onto his flank: a Puppet masquerading as Bait, a killer masquerading as a victim. A sturdy neck brace held his head in place, while a thin, bloody tube protruded from the tiny hole that had been drilled through his skull.

  “I just want to reiterate how strongly I advise against this,” said the doctor, without taking his eyes off the syringe in his hands. “I am one hundred percent against performing this procedure.”

  “Noted,” said Lennox as Chase entered the room. She was glad to have at least one person on her side.

  “The risks involved in inducing consciousness with a brain injury like this are immense, exacerbated exponentially when considering his previous mental health history.”

  “Noted!” repeated Lennox more forcefully. “Shall we?”

  The doctor shook his head and stood over his patient. He plugged the first of the syringes into a port, an access point into the closed system of intravenous tubes and medications flowing into the bedridden man. Very, very slowly, he depressed the plunger, clouding the clear fluid already inside.

  “Crash cart ready,” the doctor instructed the room. “We need to keep intracranial pressure as low as possible. Constant monitoring of pulse and blood pressure. Here we go.”

  Lennox watched the motionless body, refusing to show even a glimpse of her inner turmoil. Whatever happened, her career at the Bureau was more than likely over. She had created a nationwide PR incident, ignored direct orders from above, and lied to the doctors to procure their compliance. She just hoped that it would prove to be worth the sacrifice, that this sole surviving enemy might just give them something that they had been missing the entire time.

  The man gasped. His eyes sprang open and he attempted to sit up, the tubes and wires keeping him alive pulling him back down.

  “OK. OK. Andre? Andre, I need you to stay calm for me,” the doctor said soothingly, resting a hand on his shoulder.

  “Blood pressure’s 152 over 93,” one of the nurses called out.

  “I’m Dr. Lawson, and you are in Montefiore Medical Center.”

  The man looked around the room. His eyes grew wide with fear as he regarded horrors that nobody else could see.

  “Heart rate ninety-two and still climbing. BP’s too high,” said the nurse anxiously.

  “Don’t die. Don’t die,” Lennox whispered to herself as the man started thrashing around.

  Dr. Lawson reached for a second syringe and twisted it into another port. Within seconds his patient stopped fighting and became drowsy to the point of sleep.

  “BP’s dropping.”

  “Andre, I’ve got someone here who needs to ask you a few questions. Would that be all right?” asked the doctor, sealing the deal with a kind smile.

  The man nodded groggily. Dr. Lawson stepped aside to allow Lennox through.

  “Hello, Andre.” Lennox smiled, setting the tone for the friendliest interrogation in history.

  “Try to keep it simple. Short, direct questions,” warned the doctor as he moved back to monitor his patient’s vital signs.

  “Understood.” She turned back to the man in the bed. “Andre, do you recognize this person?”

  She held up a photograph of Alexei Green, looking every bit the wannabe rock star with his beautifully kept chin-length hair. Andre struggled to focus on the picture. Eventually, he nodded.

  “Have you ever met him?”

  On the edge of sleep, Andre nodded again: “We . . . all . . . must,” he slurred.

  “When? Where was this?” asked Lennox.

  Andre shook his head as if he couldn’t remember. In the background, the steady beeps were building momentum. Lennox looked back at Dr. Lawson, who made a gesture that she interpreted as “move on.” Reluctantly, she obeyed. She stared down at the letters sliced into the man’s chest, “Bait,” cut halfway through his emaciated body:

  “Who did this to your chest?” she asked.

  “’Nother.”

  “Another? Another what? Another . . . Puppet?” She almost whispered the last word.

  Andre nodded. He huffed and panted as he struggled to form his words:

  “All of us . . . to-gether.”

  “What do you mean, ‘together’?”

  He did not respond.

  “When you were at the church?” she asked.

  Andre shook his head.

  “You were all together somewhere before the church?”

  He nodded.

  “And this man was there?” She held up the photograph of Green once more.

  “Yes.�
��

  Lennox turned to the doctor excitedly:

  “How old would you say these scars are?” she asked.

  He got up and examined the wounds, causing Andre to flinch when he prodded a tender section just below the armpit.

  “Rough guess, based on scabbing, inflammation, and infection: two, maybe three weeks.”

  “That coincides with Green’s last visit to the US,” confirmed Chase from the back of the room.

  Lennox turned back to the patient:

  “Did you know the church was going to blow up?”

  Andre nodded shamefully.

  “Did you know about the other bombs?”

  He stared up at her blankly.

  “OK,” said Lennox, taking her answer from his expression. “Andre, I need to know how that meeting was arranged. How did you know where to go?”

  Lennox was holding her breath. If they could just work out how these people were communicating with one another, they could intercept the messages before anybody else had to die. She watched the exhausted man struggling to remember. He brought his hand up to his ear.

  “Over the phone?” she asked skeptically. Her team had thoroughly scrutinized the previous killers’ phone records, messages, apps, and data.

  Andre shook his head in frustration. He raised a hand to the electronic display above his bed.

  “A computer?”

  He tapped his ear.

  “Your phone screen?” asked Lennox. “Some sort of messages on your phone?”

  Andre nodded.

  Confused, Lennox turned to Chase. He acknowledged the unspoken order to share this important information immediately and left the room. Lennox could tell she wasn’t going to get much more out of the man but would question him until the doctor stopped her:

  “Did these messages say anything else? Were there any instructions for after the church?”

  Andre started whimpering.

  “Andre?”

  “Heart rate increasing again,” called the nurse.

  “What did they say, Andre?”

  “Blood pressure’s rising!”

  “That’s it. I’m sedating him,” snapped Dr. Lawson, stepping forward.

  “Wait!” yelled Lennox. “What did they tell you to do?”

  He was whispering something under his breath, searching the room again for his invisible tormentors. Lennox leaned in closer to hear what he was saying.

  “. . . one . . . every . . . ill . . . ryone . . . ill everyone . . . Kill everyone . . .”

  Lennox felt her firearm slide out of its holster: “Gun!” she shouted.

  She grabbed the weapon in the man’s hands as a round fired into the wall. The monitoring equipment was flashing and beeping frantically as the struggle continued. Dr. Lawson and the nurses were all crawling across the floor. Another shot shattered the light overhead, showering the bed in broken glass. Chase rushed back into the room and threw himself on top of the bedbound gunman, a second pair of hands easily overpowering the weakened man.

  “Knock him out!” Chase ordered the doctor, who scrambled to his feet and reached for one of the syringes.

  As they kept the gun pointed safely at the exterior wall, consciousness drained from his patient bit by bit until the weapon dropped out of his limp hand.

  Lennox holstered the gun and smiled at her colleague in relief:

  “Last twenty seconds aside, I think that went pretty well!”

  Baxter turned off the obnoxious breakfast radio show and watched the entrance to Hammersmith Station, the hail exploding into icy patterns as it struck her windscreen.

  After a few minutes, Rouche emerged from the station with his phone pressed to his ear as usual. He waved in the direction of Baxter’s black Audi and then hovered in the doorway while he finished his call.

  “Are you kidding me?” Baxter muttered to herself.

  She honked her horn angrily and revved the engine until Rouche jogged through the downpour to climb into the passenger seat. Empty Tesco sandwich boxes and half-drunk bottles of Lucozade crunched under his feet.

  “Morning. Thanks for this,” he said as she pulled onto Fulham Palace Road.

  Baxter didn’t reply, switching the radio back on, only to find the show more annoying than ever. She soon turned it off again and resigned herself to making conversation:

  “How’s coma-bastard doing?”

  The entire team had been made aware of the FBI’s progress overnight.

  “Still alive,” said Rouche.

  “That’s good . . . I guess. Should mean we can hold on to Lennox for a bit longer.”

  Rouche looked at her in surprise.

  “What? She’s the first manager I’ve ever met who actually did something I would do,” said Baxter defensively. She decided to change the subject: “So, they forgot to check the killers’ text messages, then?”

  The rain outside was intensifying.

  “I believe it’s a little more complicated than that,” replied Rouche.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They’re going to try decrypting the . . . fragmented . . . errrm . . . data store . . . the Internet,” explained Rouche, explaining nothing. “Anyone searched Green’s place again since?”

  “Where do you think we’re going?” said Baxter.

  They continued along the high street. Rouche stared out at the illuminated shops longingly:

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I skipped breakfast.”

  “Sucks to be you.” Baxter huffed and pulled over.

  “You’re the best. Want anything?” asked Rouche, already climbing out into the rain.

  “No.”

  He slammed the door behind him and dodged the traffic to enter the bakery across the road, his mobile phone lying forgotten on the passenger seat. Baxter looked down at it for a moment and then focused her attention back on the bakery; however, her gaze slowly returned to the passenger seat. She rapped her fingers anxiously against the steering wheel.

  “Screw it!”

  She snatched the phone off the leather. The screen was locked—she swiped her finger across it—but not password-protected. She clicked on an icon and started scrolling through the call log.

  “Who the hell are you calling all the time?”

  A list of outgoing calls flashed up, the same number reappearing time and time again: a London area code, almost every hour throughout the previous afternoon and evening.

  A moment’s indecision.

  She glanced back at the bakery, heart racing, pressed the “call” button, and held the phone up to her ear.

  It started to ring.

  “Come on. Come on. Come on.”

  Someone answered: “Hello, my lov—”

  The car door opened.

  Baxter hung up and tossed the phone back onto the passenger seat as Rouche sat down. He was soaked through, his graying hair darker, making him look younger. He shifted his weight and pulled the phone out from under him before dropping it into his lap.

  “I got you a breakfast bap,” he said, offering it to Baxter. “Just in case.”

  It did smell delicious. She snatched it off him and quickly pulled into a gap in the traffic.

  As Rouche unwrapped his bacon-and-egg roll, he noticed that his phone was glowing against his trousers. His eyes flicked across to Baxter, who was focusing intently on the flooded road. He watched her carefully for a few moments and then swiped his finger across the screen to lock it once more.

  Chapter 25

  Friday, 18 December 2015

  8:41 A.M.

  “Would you just calm down for a moment!” hissed Edmunds as he rushed out of the Fraud office and loitered in the corridor with his phone pressed to his ear. He had managed to steal an impressive three hours of sleep, more than Tia tended to average, but the recent run of sleepless nights had his weary body demanding payback.

  When his boss suddenly stepped out of the lift a little farther along the corridor, Edmunds backed into the d
isabled toilet and lowered his voice to a whisper:

  “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

  “For lying to me time and time again ever since I joined this case?” whispered Baxter.

  She was standing in the massive master bedroom of Alexei Green’s rented penthouse apartment in Knightsbridge. The floor was littered with expensive clothes, while the wardrobe and drawers stood empty. The mattress had been eviscerated, spilling springs and stuffing across the rug beside the window, which looked out over the Harrods building to the southeast. The television had been removed from the wall, its rear panel separated from the screen.

  The search team had done a thorough job.

  Baxter could hear Rouche rooting through the mess in another room.

  “Think about it—I literally watched them find something in front of me at the 33rd Precinct and he denied it. The toxicology report that Curtis . . .” She paused. “I found it screwed up in his jacket pocket, and now he’s lying about where he was last night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why would he be phoning home every hour through the night if he was already there?”

  “Maybe you should have asked his wife when you spoke to her,” suggested Edmunds unhelpfully.

  “I didn’t have time,” hissed Baxter. “So considering this, the whole weird situation with his family, and the fact that he doesn’t even seem to know how old his daughter is—one minute she’s sixteen, the next she’s six—I just think . . . something’s not right.”

  “When you put it like that . . .” said Edmunds. He paused. “But being a crappy father isn’t illegal. What does his personal life have to do with our case?”

  “I don’t know! Everything . . . Nothing.”

  She went quiet when Rouche emerged from the second bedroom and entered the hallway. He yawned widely and stretched his arms, revealing his pasty abdomen. He waved cheerfully and then moved into the kitchen.

  “I’ve got to get in there,” Baxter whispered.

  “Where?” asked Edmunds. “You mean his house?”

  “Tonight. I’ve already offered to drop him home. I’ll ask to use the bathroom or something. If that fails, I’ll just have to force my way in.”

  “You can’t!”