Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  What the hell was I doing? I had the chance to hand this to Jackson. He had an army of specialists to deal with this shit. There was a phone on Cooper’s desk. I could call Jackson, then sit tight with my gun aimed at the door until the troops arrived.

  As fast as it hit me, all doubt vanished. Wolf had to be terminated. Now.

  Rage had always served me as the perfect replacement for fear. I breathed deeply, then stepped back through Cooper’s door, and slipped farther into the depths of the BSU.

  I heard voices originating somewhere near the end of the hall.

  it’s almost time, they say—

  they say and walk away …

  Wolf had someone with him.

  leaving me with the night

  and the sea …

  It was a woman’s voice.

  and no handle on my soul—

  Darla Michaels.

  I had violated every law and ethical constraint I could think of so that, at the end, there would be no one between Wolf and me. Once again, I felt as if the bastard had read my mind.

  “DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO WRITE WITH?” I asked Darla Michaels.

  “What? Oh, sure.”

  She dropped her purse on the table and walked along the row of cubicles, glancing in at each one. I removed her .32 from the leather bag and placed it in my pocket. I had done my work well; she trusted me.

  When she reached the last workstation, Michaels turned and started back. “Why do I need something to write with?”

  “I’m going to give you the rest of your story.”

  She sat at the table and folded her hands. “Roger, why don’t we just wait for Landry. He shouldn’t be long.”

  “My name isn’t Roger.”

  Darla looked up at me. As she stared at my eyes, her face clouded with confusion. Then her expression cleared and she dove for her purse.

  “I have your weapon,” I said.

  She continued to dig through the leather bag, emitting a low-pitched whine. Her performance was undignified and annoying. Finally, she collapsed across the bag, her head resting against her arms.

  After several moments she looked up at me and said, “John Wolf.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to kill me.”

  Her voice shook. Her green eyes were wide, and darted in wild sweeps of the room.

  “No. You have to carry my words to the world. Your readers depend on you for their vicarious thrills. I need you, and you need me. I want the story done right. You want your Pulitzer. We have only a few hours, so let’s get started. Sit in that chair.”

  Her face was a mess. “Landry’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked, falling back into the chair I had indicated.

  “We’re all going to die.”

  Silence. Too shocked to think.

  “How will you die?” she asked, rallying, a hint of challenge in her voice.

  “I was in Greenwich Village one time,” I said as I peeled a length of duct tape from a roll and cut it with my knife. “I was still a student then. You probably should write this down.”

  She was slow to move, but did manage to find a pen and steno pad. “You’re playing a game. Then you’re going to kill me.”

  “I give you my word.”

  “What good is that?”

  “It’s all you have to believe in right now. There’s no one else here. If I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”

  “What’s the tape for?”

  “To fix your ankles to the chair legs. As long as you behave, that will be the only restraint I use.”

  “What did you do to Landry? He should’ve been hereby now.”

  “Nothing. Darla, do you want to die?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then listen, and write,” I said, pointing at her pad. “How many reporters get an opportunity like this? Your father would have jumped at the chance to sit and talk with me.”

  “You knew my father?”

  I taped her legs to the chair.

  “He knew my work.”

  “Oh, Jesus. You’ve been killing that long?”

  “Longer.”

  “I can’t…”

  “Greenwich Village,” I said again as I removed my jacket, reached inside its lining, and retrieved the soft cloth that contained my tools, wires, timer, batteries, and wafer-thin, cream-colored sheets of plastic explosive.

  “What’s that?”

  “I visited the White Horse Tavern,” I said as I folded open the cloth. “That’s the place where Dylan Thomas did most of his drinking when he was in New York. Then, I walked toward Washington Square. I saw a sign for a palm reader.”

  Darla’s hands were trembling. “I can’t concentrate. What is all that?”

  “Remember your brass frog? The one that sits next to the wooden starfish on top of your bookcase.”

  Her head snapped up. “I said it was on a shelf. I didn’t say anything about the starfish. You’ve been in my fucking apartment.”

  “Oliver—the artist—was an acquaintance of mine.”

  Again, she seemed confused. “You put it there? When? How… ?”

  She was like a child searching the heavens for Orion, finding a star here, a star there, but never the constellation in its entirety.

  “The palm reader,” I interrupted, pointing again at her hands. “You don’t need to concentrate, Darla. Just write.”

  Once more, she looked down at the pad. “I still want to know what you’re doing.”

  “For two dollars the future could be mine,” I continued. “It was already mine, but I walked up the narrow flight of stairs anyway, sat at a small, round table, and waited.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t like it when people interrupt me.”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  “An old woman came in,” I said as I began stripping half-inch bare ends on my wires. “She asked for the money, and told me to hold out my right hand. She gazed down at it, then folded up my fingers and pushed my hand away. She shook her head and said, You know too much.’ The she returned my two dollars, got up, and walked back through the curtains the way she had come.”

  “If you know so much, you can answer the question.”

  “What question?”

  “How will you die?”

  “By violence.”

  There was a curious expression on her face. “What about me? How will I die?”

  This young woman would travel to my Web site on the Internet. I was mildly impressed. I had made a good choice for the person I wanted to see me, to know and to record my accomplishments for others to finally appreciate.

  “Let’s finish with me first,” I said. “Then maybe I’ll tell you the story of the rest of your life.”

  I fixed the sealed battery case in its seat on the timer’s back, then threaded wires through the clips that would brace them, and attached the bare copper ends to the appropriate poles.

  Michaels watched. “What’s the tan stuff?”

  “Cyclonite.”

  She looked up from my hands. Her eyes widened. “You’re going to blow up this place.”

  I smiled. “They’ve never been very nice to me.”

  I COULD HEAR WOLF’S VOICE—THE DEEP, THROATY bass, and the tone, the inflections of a man who is absolutely sure of himself—the same voice I had heard a year ago in Vermont, and countless times in my mind.

  I moved into the corridor on my right, my back against the wall, inching toward the lighted room thirty feet away, and remaining in the shadows.

  My old friends daughter said, “You can’t do that. You’ll never get away with it. If you thought you had cops after you before …”

  “You just don’t get it,” Wolf said. “I’m the killer. You’re the reporter. You write down all of this, and then you make a story out of it. I build the bombs and blow up whatever I want. Police are inept. They’ll hint at nonexistent progress while waiting for the public outcry to subside. Case closed.”

  “
What if your hand slips?”

  “It won’t.”

  It was no longer the simple matter of surprising Wolf and executing him. I was within twenty feet of the lighted doorway, listening as Darla Michaels confronted John Wolf—pushed the killer, challenged him— and Wolf grew increasingly restive as he assembled his bomb.

  Michaels was not applying school-of-journalism technique. What I heard was the person she was. Her demeanor could be enough to get her killed.

  “You can’t let me go. You have to kill me.”

  “You and I will leave here together. Ill drop you at your office.”

  “Why would you risk coming here? Why blow up this place?”

  Darla, please don’t push him.

  “In a few hours, Lucas Frank and his daughter, Agent Jackson, your friend Landry if he doesn’t respond to your message, Agent Walker, some of the other BSU experts—all of them plan to gather in the conference room and debate my existence. I am flattered to be the focus of so much attention and speculation, but these cretins will not complete their meeting. Within minutes of our departure, Ms. Michaels, this place will cease to exist.”

  “Why a bomb? Jesus. I can’t think. Which of those people is the target?”

  “The target is everyone,” Wolf said. “Lucas Frank thought he had killed me. He made a mistake. My message to the FBI is simple. They can’t create their categories of homicidal behavior fast enough to keep up with the killers. You should write that. After the Versace murder in Florida last summer, agents bickered about whether their suspect was a serial killer, a spree killer, or a hybrid. They had no idea where he was, but they knew who he was, and they were going to pigeonhole him. What fucking difference did it make? The caretaker for a houseboat stumbled onto him.”

  “What about Lucas Frank?” Michaels asked. “What’s your message to him? Just that he made a mistake?”

  “He’s received a lifetime of messages from me,” Wolf snapped. “He paid no attention. You are getting ahead of the orderly development of things, and you’re wasting time. I am the news. I make the news. I decide what’s news. What you do is write it down. Report the news. That’s all. I will not caution you again.”

  I was close enough so that I could see Wolf’s shadow fall across a table. Darla Michaels sat at the table. I needed Wolf to move from where he was pontificating, or I had to get close enough to the doorway so that I had a decent angle for a shot.

  “I can’t interview you? I can’t ask any questions?” Michaels asked.

  Wolf sighed.

  Jesus, Darla, hack off.

  “One question. Ask. Don’t waste time.”

  “Most of your victims were women. Was there ever a woman you cared about?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Her name was Annie. I met her in Cambridge at a warehouse fire.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “Many years later.”

  “Why did you kill her?”

  Again, Wolf sighed, but he was granting Darla Michaels considerable latitude. She was his Boswell— his biographer. “She talked about her father often, but seldom with affection. He was a hard man, a wealthy breeder of world-class horses, and a drunk.”

  I knew what was coming. The story of Annie’s father was an entry in Wolf’s computer journal.

  “One night when Annie was home for a weekend,” Wolf continued, “something was bothering the horses. Her father went out to the stable. The horses were frightened, nervous, jittery. He didn’t know why. Then he saw what he thought was a large dog—really just the shadow of the animal—moving away from the barn. It disappeared into the darkness, and eventually the horses settled down.”

  His account was verbatim. John Wolf could not exist without rehearsal. He was fact and he was fiction. I wondered if he knew which was which. The problem had always been that he was so fucking believable, so seductively real.

  “When the same thing happened the next night,” Wolf continued, “her father took their German shepherd with him. The dog was afraid, too. This was a trained attack dog, but he put his tail down and backed away toward the house. Annie’s father got a better look at the animal, though. It was like a dog, but bigger than any dog he had ever seen. It wasn’t afraid. It was almost casual as it drifted into the shadows. It had no fear, which intimidated her father. On the third night, he took his deer rifle with him. When he saw the profile of the animal moving away from the barn, he fired. Annie said that the animal went down. The game warden came and looked at it. He said it was a wolf, the first one on the south side of the mountains in fifty years.”

  The room was silent.

  “Because she told you that story, you killed her?”

  There was a sharp edge to Wolf’s voice.

  “I told her that it had to be a mixed breed. She was adamant. Her father couldn’t be wrong about something like that. ‘Pure wolf,’ she said. No pure wolf would be that stupid. I told her that. Whatever it was, that animal just walked out there for her father to shoot him. One shot. It would never happen. A scavenger like a coyote, maybe, but not the purest predator of them all. Not a wolf. Not one shot.”

  “You identify with the animal?”

  “He lives inside me. Always.”

  The elevator doors whooshed and clicked behind me in the corridor, followed by the sound of footsteps approaching fast.

  I saw Wolf’s arm reach across the table and grab Darla Michaels by the shirt. He skirted the table, a long knife in his hand, and started to move into position behind the young woman.

  I raised my nine-millimeter and aimed at the space where I expected to see the side of his head.

  As he brought the knife up against her throat, he came into view for the first time. He turned his head to look toward the doorway, his eyes glazed gray and empty. He was inches from Darla Michaels’s face.

  I had one chance, one shot to stop him.

  “Freeze,” Rexford Landry called from behind me.

  The FBI agent could see me, but he could not see Wolf and Michaels.

  Wolf held his grip on the reporter’s shirt. I moved my head only slightly, but in that split second Wolf disappeared into the maze of cubicles.

  “Place your weapon on the floor,” Landry said. “Do it now.”

  Darla Michaels continued to sit at the table, staring straight ahead, slowly shaking her head.

  “Landry, John Wolf is in this room,” I shouted.

  I heard the snap as Landry engaged the action on his gun. “Put it down, Dr. Frank.”

  Michaels slipped from her chair onto the floor and began to crawl toward me. The chair, taped to her ankles, slid along behind her, then wedged against the aluminum table, threatening to tip it.

  “Okay, Landry,” I said. “You want him? You go after him.”

  Landry approached slowly, directly behind me, still unable to see beyond the doorway, and unconcerned as he moved into the light that spilled from the room.

  That was when I first saw the bomb. With each of Darla Michaels’s attempts to move forward, the chair banged the folding table, and the explosive device slipped toward the edge. I had no idea how stable cyclonite was—whether the impact of a two-and-a-half-foot fall would set it off.

  “Darla, don’t crawl,” I said.

  Wolf was quick. The BSU’s tunnels echoed with the large caliber handgun’s explosion as the slug ripped into Landry’s shoulder and spun him around. The agent bounced off the wall and went down, his weapon skidding back along the floor.

  “Oh, God,” Michaels said, again sliding forward, and again nudging the bomb toward the edge of the table.

  I dove forward into the room, landing beside her.

  “Stay put,” I said to Michaels. “Stay flat on the floor and don’t move.”

  “He set the timer,” she said, her voice shaking. “He did it real fast. He snapped a red wire into place, then clicked something.”

  “Darla, I need you to stay as motionless as possible.”

  She nodded. “Jus
t hurry up.”

  I crawled forward into the first cubicle, where I pulled myself to a crouching position and looked back at the table. The bomb had slid to the far side and rested at an angle, extending two inches out over the floor. I couldn’t see the timer.

  From my glimpse of Wolf, and the smoke from his gun when he shot Landry, I knew that he was near the back of the room on the right side. I figured there were thirty feet between Wolf and me, and I was between him and the exit.

  I glanced around, searching for inspiration.

  If I moved down one line of cubicles, Wolf could move up on the opposite side. If I dove up over the partition that separated the two rows, I would make an excellent target. If Wolf missed, me, all he had to do was disappear through the row that I had vacated.

  Then, just as my calf muscles started to cramp, I saw it—a can of solvent and thinner for rubber cement. The cubicle’s occupant was the person responsible for mounting crime-scene photographs. The agent’s desk was also decorated with a dried wildflower arrangement in a narrow-necked glass bottle. A smock hanging from a hook was my final ingredient.

  I yanked the weeds from the neck of the bottle, and emptied the solvent into it.

  “I plan to have a glass of red wine when I leave here,” Wolf’s disembodied voice said. “What about you? Oh. I forgot. It’s late. You’re an old man. Probably right to bed, huh? You hadn’t thought about it, had you? You were trying to figure out how to finish me off, so you gave no consideration to what you might do after that. There isn’t much time, you know.”

  Wolf was moving. He had a forty-foot area that was his. As long as he remained there, I couldn’t see him.

  “Doesn’t this piss you off?” he asked. “You already killed me once. Now you have to do it again. Well, it was your own stupidity. You thought to the end as you defined the end. That’s never good enough. A killer must look beyond the end. Shit. I gave you every possible advantage. This episode proves what I’ve known from the beginning. No mere theorist will ever be as good as a man who plies the trade.”

  Using my pocketknife, I cut the smock into several foot-long strips, wound them tight, and pushed them through the neck of the bottle until only four inches remained exposed.