by Jon McGoran
Ressler nodded and told her the plan.
“They want to send you into the Dead Ring?” she said. “That’s insane. You’ll be killed.”
He bristled a little, as if it was an affront to his masculinity. “I can take care of myself.”
“There’s one survivor,” she said. “Out of who knows how many psychotic killers? Besides, how would you even get inside?”
“We’re still working on that. But I wouldn’t have to compete, not really. I would just have to activate a transmitter of some sort, and stay alive. Five minutes later, the tac team will come in and shut everything down. Greg Nichols is piloting the chopper, so you know it’ll be smooth as silk.”
Nichols was one of the best. A tactical pilot they had worked with many times. “I can’t believe Cooper would go along with this,” she said.
Ressler smiled reassuringly, and a little patronizingly. “That just proves it’s not such a crazy idea.”
He went back to his own room to reach out to local law enforcement and the FBI’s El Paso office, and see if he could come up with a list of local crime figures capable of hosting something like this.
Meanwhile Keen dug into Marianne LeCroix. There wasn’t much out there. Age thirty-four. Born in Denver to Lucianne and Pierre LeCroix. He was an importer of French antiques with a weakness for gambling. She was a real estate agent with a weakness for Frenchmen, as well as alcohol, and driving while under the influence of it.
As a teenager, Marianne LeCroix was a brilliant student, a brown belt in judo, and a bit of a handful. Arrested once as a juvenile for dislocating the elbow of a member of the football team who tried to assault her. She was suspected in a string of big-ticket burglaries, but never charged in any of them because of lack of evidence.
She won a full scholarship to Princeton and dropped out midway through the first semester, traveled to France three weeks later and vanished.
Five years later, a French police report included a mention of a mysterious cat burglar known as Le Chat. There was a smattering of similar mentions over the next five years. She was also mentioned as a suspect in a pair of unsolved homicides. Both victims were criminals with histories of sexual violence, and both were killed expertly by someone using only their bare hands. But there were no photos, no fingerprints, no arrest warrants. Nothing but suspicion and speculation.
Corbeaux’s file was thick with arrests, convictions, appeals on technicalities, and a steady rise through the ranks, such that it had been a long time since he’d gotten his hands dirty. He had people for that. Lots of people.
If they were all after LeCroix, that would indeed be incentive for the old “one last job and retire” plan. But from what she understood about LeCroix, she couldn’t see the Dead Ring as that last job. LeCroix seemed smart, sly, sophisticated. Capable of violence, maybe, but not prone to it.
Ressler knocked on the door and she let him in.
“Find anything?” she asked.
He rolled his shoulders. “Not really. Plenty of organized crime around here, lots of back and forth with the Mexican cartels. But the psychos seem to all be in the lower echelons. The guys with the resources or the juice to pull off something like this, they all seem like garden variety criminal businessmen. Lots of bodies in their wake, but they all seem to be just business.”
“Depending on who’s watching and betting, this could be a big business.” She told him what she’d found and they sat there for a moment, quiet. They didn’t know when the next round was going to take place, but they knew the clock was ticking toward it. And they didn’t seem to be getting any closer to figuring out where or what or when it was going to be.
Then Keen’s phone buzzed. She picked it up and said, “Hey, Aram.”
“Agent Keen, we got two hits not far from you,” Aram said.
She cupped the phone and turned to Ressler. “Let’s go.”
He dashed back into his room and she started packing up as Aram continued.
“Marianne LeCroix was picked up on a traffic camera in Odessa three hours ago, and an hour ago at a convenience store in a little town called Balmorhea. She bought bottled water and some granola bars, then appeared to head across the street on foot, to a place called the Yellow Rose Hotel. She’s forty minutes west of where you are right now.”
Chapter 17
The Yellow Rose Hotel was part rustic and part run down. The sign and the posts holding up the overhang were made to look like rough-hewn logs. Everything else was more legitimately rough-hewn, in a charmless, utilitarian kind of way: the dusty concrete slab out front, the ratty mat outside the door, the chipped cinderblock walls. It was hard to tell what was intentional and what had been baked in by the hot desert sun.
The whole area seemed oddly quiet for the middle of the afternoon, like it was siesta time. The hotel was low, one story, and C-shaped, wrapped around a parking lot incongruously full of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, like there was a convention in town or something.
Ressler parked at the convenience store across the street, and they got out, exchanging a look as they crossed the road toward the hotel. Ressler cocked an eyebrow. He sensed it, too. Something strange.
Keen spotted a video camera mounted on top of the utility pole at the end of the block. Aram hadn’t mentioned that one in his search for LeCroix.
The guy at the desk was young and nervous. “I’m sorry. We’re fully booked,” he said as soon as they walked in. He sounded surprised to be saying it.
Ressler badged him and said, “We’re looking for someone.”
The kid blanched, but seemed somehow less surprised.
Keen showed him the photo of LeCroix. “Have you seen this woman?”
The kid looked around, then gulped and nodded. “Room nineteen,” he said quietly, pointing to the hallway that led off to the right.
“What’s going on here?” Ressler asked. The place was oddly quiet considering how packed the parking lot was.
The kid shook his head, convincingly mystified. “We’re just full up. First time it’s happened, as far as I know.”
As they headed down the hallway, guns out but held low, Keen noticed a security camera mounted high on the wall, pointed away from them and down at the floor. She tapped Ressler’s arm and pointed it out.
They stopped outside room nineteen, and Keen heard a faint, machine sound, like a DVD player ejecting a disk. Looking back down the hallway, she saw the video camera slowly rising up, then panning away from them, aiming down the hallway they had just come from.
As Ressler raised his fist to pound on the door, the camera started to swing back toward them. Before he could bring his knuckles down against the door, the air suddenly split with the piercing scream of a fire alarm. Emergency lights flashed on and off. Almost immediately, every door in the hallway swung open and a lone occupant charged out through each, like the gates opening at a horse race. They didn’t look like they’d been unexpectedly roused from whatever they were doing, more like they’d been waiting for a signal, chomping at the bit.
The hallway was plunged into bedlam, packed with biker types, buzz-cut special ops, face-tattooed mercenaries, and a handful of women in each category, all of them seemingly battle-hardened and dangerous—clawing, hitting, and kicking each other. They all moved with great determination, but all in different directions. Some entered other rooms, some disappeared down the hallway, a couple set their legs wide and stood there, lashing out at the others, seemingly at random.
It was so bizarre, so unexpected, that Keen and Ressler were both taken aback, stunned just long enough that when the door in front of them opened, they were distracted and unprepared.
LeCroix darted out, turning her shoulders and slipping between them without slowing a step.
“Wait!” Keen called out.
“Freeze! FBI!” Ressler thundered.
But their words were swallowed up in the madness around them, and so was LeCroix, a flash of dark hair disappearing into the mayhem, lithely weaving h
er way through the crowd.
They went after her.
Keen almost matched LeCroix’s maneuvers, and her pace. Ressler lagged behind, throwing bodies left and right as he tried to clear a path.
As LeCroix approached the corner, a young man with a blond beard came toward her. His eyes were round and open, lacking the hardness of all the others. The two paused as they passed, just for an instant, looking at each other before continuing on their way.
Then LeCroix turned the corner, and by the time Keen did too, LeCroix had vanished. Keen made her way almost to the end of the hallway, but there was no sign of her.
Ressler caught up with her. “Where’d she go?” he shouted, above the din.
Keen shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Then, back toward the bend in the hallway, a door opened and LeCroix stepped out, clutching something in her hand.
Keen shouted, “There she is!” and she and Ressler started fighting their way back toward her. A massive figure rose up in front of Ressler, shirtless under a leather vest, arms and eyes bulging with steroids and rage. He swung an arm at Ressler’s head. Ressler ducked, pivoted, and brought the butt of his gun down behind the giant’s ear, dropping him on the spot.
LeCroix stood under the camera on the wall, looking straight into it. Her hair covered half her face and as she reached up to move it away, a giant of a man with wild hair and a bushy beard rounded the corner behind her, wielding a fire extinguisher over his head. His arms were spattered with blood.
He swung the fire extinguisher like a club. It obliterated the camera on the wall on its way to crushing the skull of a skinhead with a swastika on his neck. Without pause, he brought it back the other way, and on the backswing it slammed into LeCroix’s ribs with a force that smashed her against the opposite wall. Her head left a bloody mark where it hit the wall, and a smear of blood where she slid to the floor.
Without pause, the fire extinguisher swung the other way, crushing the skull of a ferret-faced biker wearing denim and gang patches.
Ressler screamed “Freeze!” and raised his gun at the man, but he was already gone, pushing his way back through the mass of people and disappearing into one of the rooms.
Keen and Ressler made their way toward LeCroix. The crowd in the hallway was starting to thin, the threadbare carpet littered with bodies—the injured, the unconscious, and the dead.
LeCroix was barely conscious, bleeding profusely from her ear and her mouth. But as they tended to her, she struggled to sit up, her eyes uneven but open wide.
“Where’s David?” she said, looking around at the almost empty hallway. “We have to get out of here. Quickly!”
“You’re hurt,” Ressler said.
“Now!” she snapped, her voice a ragged bark.
“Why?” Keen asked. “What’s going on?”
LeCroix turned frantic, trying to get up under her own power, but unable to. “There’s no time. We have to get out, now!”
Keen met Ressler’s eyes. Both wondered what the hell was going on, but spurred on by LeCroix’s frantic voice, they each put an arm under one of her shoulders and hustled her out the fire exit.
“David,” she groaned as they moved her. She did her best to keep up, her legs pumping even though she was unable to walk.
The parking lot was half empty now, and they cut across it, toward their car parked at the convenience store. In every direction, cars receded into the distance.
An old guy in a white apron was standing outside the convenience store, looking at them and past them, probably wondering what the hell was going on.
Keen opened the back door to the car, and they gently positioned LeCroix on the back seat.
She seemed to be fading from consciousness, but she shot upright at the sound of a massive explosion, looking out the back window as one end of the hotel erupted into a massive fireball, sending debris high into the sky.
LeCroix screamed, “David!” her voice serrated with anguish. “No!” she cried, trailing off into a low sob that was drowned out by two more explosions, in rapid succession, that swallowed up the rest of the hotel.
Keen and Ressler were stunned for an instant by the spectacle, but before the debris started raining down on them, they were inside the car, and speeding away.
The old man watched slack-jawed until a chunk of concrete hit the sidewalk next to him, peppering him with chips of concrete and chasing him inside.
Chapter 18
The second heat started less pyrotechnically than the first, but the anticipation of it produced the same familiar rush. The staff were unaffected as always— monitoring the transmission equipment that was in the hotel or standing at the ready in case of any unexpected interruptions—maybe because they’d seen it enough, or maybe because they were professionals.
Neither was true of the Cowboy. He did an anxious little dance throughout, hopping from one foot to the other, twisting and turning along with the violence playing out on the screens. He wasn’t mimicking the thrusts and punches and jabs of those attacking. His involuntary movements betrayed his identification with the victims—squirming under an onslaught, twisting out of the way. Trying not to get hurt.
A pair of noncombatants had entered the view right before things got underway, a young couple apparently looking for their room. Odd, because the Cowboy was supposed to have booked all the rooms, but whatever, a little more collateral damage was always welcome. And in an instant, they were gone, swallowed up by the mayhem as soon as the alarm sounded and the festivities began.
It was a magnificent riot of confusion and violence. Eyes filled with terror, walls spattered with blood, muscle-bound madmen standing in the middle of it all wreaking havoc on everyone around them. There were always those go-getters who liked to jump the gun and take out the competition. They rarely made it to the final round, but they added so much in the meantime.
In the middle of it all a beautiful young woman with dark hair looked straight into one of the cameras, like she was auditioning for a movie. An instant later she suffered a crushing blow to the ribs from a monstrous hulk swinging a fire extinguisher.
The Cowboy gasped at the sight and wrapped a hand around his midsection, as if in sympathy.
Sympathy.
The Ringleader let out a snort at the thought. The Cowboy turned to look at him, but quickly turned back toward the carnage on the screen, pausing for a moment as if he couldn’t decide which sight was more disturbing.
Then he turned decisively to the screen once more.
Chapter 19
“Is she alive?” Red asked as soon as he pushed through the hospital’s heavy swinging doors. Dembe emerged behind him, stepping through before the doors could swing shut.
“We don’t know,” Ressler told him. It had been half an hour since the ER staff had rushed LeCroix through an identical pair of doors at the other end of the hallway.
“She lost consciousness on the way here,” Keen said. “We haven’t heard anything yet.”
As she said it, the doors behind them swung open and a doctor came out. She was young, her hair pulled back in a bun that had probably started the day tight, but was now springing leaks in a dozen different places. Her scrubs were spattered with blood.
Red took a sharp breath.
“I’m Doctor Prasad—”
“How is she?” Red asked, cutting her off.
Prasad looked at him, taken aback, and turned to Keen, her eyes questioning as to whether she could speak freely in front of Red.
Keen nodded as Ressler came up beside her.
Dembe took up position beside the swinging doors.
Prasad cleared her throat. “We don’t know, exactly. This is not blood,” she said, extending her arms. She raised a hand, holding two plastic pouches, seemingly covered in blood. “She had on these fake blood packets. They… went off… as we were removing her clothes.”
Keen and Ressler both looked at Red, but he shook his head.
“Her condition is stable f
or now,” Prasad continued. “She’s in and out of consciousness, but the prognosis isn’t good. She is concussed and her brain is showing signs of some swelling. She has several cracked ribs. We’re running tests to see if there is any internal bleeding. The next twelve hours will be key.”
“We need to see her now,” Red said, stepping closer, looming over the doctor.
Prasad frowned at Red. “She’s weak. You mustn’t get her excited or upset. You mustn’t tire her out. You can speak to her briefly. And no more than two of you.”
Red was the only one who knew LeCroix. A familiar presence would help reassure her, hopefully convince her to talk, and possibly give context to whatever was said.
The doctor looked at Red dubiously, then led them through the swinging doors and down the hall. The door to LeCroix’s room was flanked by a pair of state police.
Keen badged them as the doctor explained she was allowing them to talk to LeCroix, just for a few minutes. They gave Red a hard stare, but didn’t stop him.
Le Croix’s head was swaddled in bandages and the swelling and bruising from her head had spread to her face.
Her eyes opened as they walked in and she turned her head slightly to look over at them. She squinted, as if trying to get her eyes to focus, then almost sat up. “Reddington?” she said, bewildered.
Red smiled. “Hello, Marianne,” he said softly.
“What are you doing here?” she said, easing back down onto the bed, clearly exhausted. “What am I doing here? I need to get out of here.”
Red took a chair from against the wall and set it next to the bed.
“What were you doing there, Marianne?”
She looked at him, appraisingly, then over his shoulder at Keen. “Who’s she?”
Keen held up her badge. “Agent Keen. FBI.”
LeCroix made a faint snorting sound. “Then I want a lawyer.”
Red shook his head. “This isn’t about you, Marianne. They’re not after you, and there’s no time for lawyers. This is about the Dead Ring.”
Her eyes opened wider at that. They looked clearer.