by David Beers
The Titan
The Luke Titan Chronicles
David Beers
Contents
Mailing List Invitation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Letters from a Killer
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Letters from a Killer
Letters from a Troubled Soul
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
The Titan
Epilogue
Letters from a Killer
On Purpose and Other Things
Also by David Beers
Mailing List Invitation
Chapter 1
Please, see him clearly, as I do.
He steps out of the shower, water dripping from his body as well as from the faucet behind him. Fog hangs around his face, filling up much of the bathroom. He stands still for a second, not moving forward, but looking down at his feet. They are clean, free of scars. His eyes move up his legs, seeing more smooth skin. He looks at his hips and groin, everything appearing as his body should.
The door to the bathroom is open and the fog lifting. The man moves forward, going to the mirror. He takes a small towel from the rack on the wall and wipes away the moisture, seeing himself clearly.
A long scar cuts across his torso, ending at the bottom of his ribs. It’s dulled some, but still stands out like a craggy mountain ridge. Scar tissue, though less deep, decorates the rest of his chest. Small strips of skin that had been torn away by a leather whip, now rough tissue. There is a circular hole, large, on the lower left side of his stomach, where a red flower once bloomed.
The man stares at it all.
He looks at his shoulders and sees where the whip curved up his back, ripping off flesh there as well.
His eyes move up to his face, which had once looked young and full of hope, but now holds another circular scar sitting directly on his cheek, covering a hole that rightfully should have killed him.
The man stands looking at himself, at a body that had been born beautiful, and now was the product of some sadistic artist. One who decorated with pain and torture, his paintbrush a weapon.
The man swallows and finds his own eyes in the mirror.
This is his body, the only one he has, the only one he will ever have. Broken, scarred, but not beaten. Not yet.
He turns from the mirror and walks into the hotel room.
Christian Windsor exited the bathroom and moved to the bed where his clothes were laid out before him: a crisp, white, button-down shirt, and freshly pressed pants. The suit’s jacket hung from the bathroom door.
“Thank you,” he said, not looking to the person on the other side of the room.
“You’re welcome,” the woman said.
Veronica, Christian thought. It’s Veronica, not some strange woman.
Which was true, and yet wasn’t. He didn’t have time to consider that now, though.
He quickly threw on his boxers, an undershirt, and then grabbed the button-down from the bed, covering the scars he’d just stared at, hiding many of them from the world—though the one on his face couldn’t be hidden.
Christian turned to the mirror and continued dressing, his fingers dancing up the shirt’s buttons.
“Are they here?” Veronica asked.
Christian glanced in the mirror and saw the other behind him, lying on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. His eyes were bleeding, dripping large red drops down the side of his face and onto the bed. Christian knew he would have to sleep in that blood later tonight.
“One is. The other isn’t,” he said. He hadn’t seen the mouth in a day or so. He wouldn’t delude himself by thinking that the mouth was gone. He knew of only one way to make these two disappear for good anymore, but that couldn’t be accomplished at the moment.
Christian tolerated the other. There was a certain sad truth to him, though Christian hated to admit it. The other was his negative, something Luke’s presence had created—yet the other was now in a similar place to Christian. Perhaps even worse. The other wanted nothing anymore except to be freed, which was another way of saying to die.
The mouth … that was a monstrosity Christian couldn’t stand, but like with the other, there was no ridding himself of it. A thing created of black shadows, making a Cheshire cat grin with huge, jagged teeth.
Christian was just glad it wasn’t here right now. He didn’t know where it was, but it’d be back.
“Do you think they’ll interfere with the hearing?” Veronica asked. She sat across the room at a small table, a cup of coffee in front of her. She was staring out the hotel window and had been since 5:00 this morning.
“You can tell her I won’t interfere with anything. I’m not even sure I’m going,” the other said.
“I don’t know,” Christian told Veronica, ignoring the other’s comment. None of them could be trusted, because none of them actually existed. They were all creations of Christian’s own mind … which essentially meant his mind couldn’t be trusted.
“That could be bad, if they try interrupting,” Veronica said.
Christian was quiet. Much of his life was now spent in silence. He sometimes spoke to Veronica, but offered none of his own thoughts. Like his own mind, hers couldn’t be trusted either.
Christian put his pants on, tightened a belt around his waist. He donned his shoes, then walked back to the mirror.
“Your tie is on the bed,” Veronica said.
He had seen it, but would he wear it? He remembered back to the first day he was offered a job with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He’d been riding the train to the Director’s office, worrying constantly about his tie’s knot. He had thought he messed it up and knew there’d be no time to fix it before he sat down.
Now, he looked at the unbuttoned top of his shirt and knew he wouldn’t be wearing a tie today.
“You should wear one,” the other said. “They’re not going to be friendly.”
“Fuck them,” Christian replied.
Senator Robert Alexander took his seat at the lengthy dais. He was the last senator to arrive, though still five minutes early. He wanted to be the last coming in, because he planned on being the most aggressive. He wanted everyone sitting in the closed meeting to understand that he was in charge, and that they would go at his pace.
Which would be fast.
He opened his notebook in front of him, keeping his eyes down as he did—he didn’t want people in here to think he was more concerned with them than getting his own things in order. He pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and laid it across the notebook.
Finally Senator Robert Alexander looked up. “Thank you all for coming today.”
The room was packed, easily as busy as any hearing Robert had ever participated in previously. He now presided over this special committee created for one task—the Committee for Responsible Justice Enforcement. Robert didn’t like the name much, but that didn’t matter; the public knew what it really stood for.
He was in charge of getting to the bottom of the royally fucked chase for Luke Titan. Robert didn’t give two hoots or a single holler for what happened
to Titan. No one had seen or heard from him in a year, and Robert secretly thought the man would stay out of sight for the rest of his life. He’d barely made it out alive, from what the senator understood; and if the man was as smart as everyone said, he’d quit while he was ahead.
What mattered to Senator Robert Alexander were the three people in front of him.
Three desks were spaced evenly before the dais. On the far left was the Attorney General, Wendy Welcs. In the center was the man of the hour (besides Robert, of course), the former FBI Director, Alan Waverly. And on the far right was the scarred up freak, who Robert had heard, lost his mind during his last round with Titan. Oh, yeah, he was also a former FBI employee. The first two desks—Welcs’s and Waverly’s—had a lawyer sitting at it, and two or three more behind them. The freak sat alone, the desk looking much too large for him.
You’re not going to have much of a career in politics, son, if you don’t understand the power of looking good, Robert thought.
Behind the three desks were the press corps … and apparently anyone else who could squeeze in.
“Thank you for coming today. We’re here to understand what happened with the Luke Titan investigation. I’d like to remind everyone whom is being questioned by this committee that you are free to invoke your fifth amendment. I have a few remarks, and then we can get started.
“This committee has been convened due to an alleged dereliction of duty, a breach of the public trust placed in our law enforcement officers, and what I personally believe to be of a criminal nature. It is alleged that the former FBI Director, Alan Waverly, hired a contract killer to eliminate Luke Titan, when he and his organization failed to arrest the fugitive. It’s further alleged that much of the Titan investigation was performed under a veil of secrecy, culminating in an upstanding agent’s murder. This committee’s singular purpose is to get to the bottom of what happened so that we may place safeguards against something like this happening again.”
Robert paused, and looked over at the other senators. “My colleague from Arizona, would you like to begin?”
“Thank you, Senator Franklin,” Tabby Heinz said. Robert personally couldn’t stand the bitch, but he knew she was going to rip into Waverly right off, so having her start was A-okay. “Director Waverly, I think what concerns me most, is that we need to know the truth here. Did you indeed contract with a killer?”
Waverly looked at the senator asking him the question, still unsure of how he would respond to the question. He knew what his lawyers wanted him to say. He was to plead the fifth to basically anything asked of him.
He’d been summoned before Congress and here he was, mandated to answer their questions. A criminal investigation had already commenced, this hearing was just for spectacle. Something that the Great Senator Robert Franklin could put on his highlight reel when he went back home to pander for votes.
Waverly wanted to glance over at Christian, but he kept his eyes forward.
This was a spectacle, but Waverly still had to look out for himself. Whatever was said here would definitely be used in the criminal investigation.
“On advice from my counsel, I respectfully assert my fifth amendment right,” Waverly said.
“I thought you might do that,” the congresswoman said. “I imagine you might do that a lot during these few hours, but, I still have some more questions. Could you outline for the committee here what happened when Special Agent Christian Windsor went missing a year ago? Could you please pay specific attention to your actions after his whereabouts became unknown?”
Waverly’s lawyer leaned in and whispered to him. “Same. Same all the way through.”
“On advice from my counsel, I respectfully assert my fifth amendment right.” You fucking bitch. What I did after ‘Special Agent Christian Windsor’ went missing was nothing. I went back to my house and I poured a three finger glass of bourbon, and then when I finished it, I poured another. I kept that going until I ended up sleeping on the floor, tears staining my face. After? I woke up, I went to Welcs and told her I was done. Then I called my lawyer because I knew the jig was up.
“Attorney General Welcs, maybe you can help enlighten the committee some on what happened?”
Welcs was the only one in the room that wasn’t hated. The press sitting behind Waverly had been excoriating him for the past six months—it had taken that long for the leaks to reach reporters: the reason Waverly resigned had a lot more to it than his inability to catch Titan. Since they’d found out, though, there had been a never ending stream of news blasting across every television and paper in the country.
“While the timeline cannot be precisely determined, due to Director Waverly’s actions, what I believe occurred was the day after Special Agent Windsor disappeared, the Director came and offered me his resignation, which I accepted,” Welcs said.
She was doing the smart move, the only one she had really: helping direct the bus as it drove over Waverly’s body.
“And did he tell you that Agent Windsor was missing?” the congresswoman asked.
“No. There was no mention of that at all.”
“And what did he tell you about Luke Titan?”
“He said that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts,” Welcs answered.
“Do you believe he was telling the truth?”
“At the time, yes, I did. Now, I don’t know.”
The congresswoman kept going, intent on destroying any character Waverly might still possess. “I’m asking you to speculate here, and I know that’s not something lawyers prefer to do, but it will help us all understand a bit better what was happening at the time. Do you know why Director Waverly didn’t mention any of this?”
“Well, Congresswoman, I don’t like to speculate. However, speaking honestly, I can’t say why he wouldn’t have told us. Special Agent Windsor was only missing for 24 hours at that point. We could have perhaps kept him from being wounded and saved Agent Thomas Phillips’s life.”
“Thank you, Attorney General. I see my time is running low, so I yield the floor back to my colleague from New York.”
Waverly watched as the Robert Franklin leaned in to the microphone. All of this was going as he thought it would. Waverly would keep his mouth shut, because to open it would surely lead to harsher penalties when the special investigation on him finished. He couldn’t explain the truth to these people, though, not if he had a million years and a million mouths. That’s why he wanted to look at Christian, because he was the only one in this room who had any understanding of what actually happened.
What would I say to him? he wondered.
That I’m sorry. That I didn’t report anything because I didn’t think there was any reason to. You hadn’t done anything, nothing—no struggle. You just went with that killer and I thought that’s what you wanted. In fact, I still think it. I think the only reason you’re here is because Luke won’t let you die. So maybe I’m not sorry, because maybe I was right. You wanted to die and I was letting you finally do it.
The two of them had had virtually no contact since Christian made it back to society. Waverly’s lawyers forbade it. Christian was certainly involved in the investigation, though Waverly didn’t know if he’d been subpoenaed before the grand jury or not.
His lawyer had asked Waverly what Christian would say. The case’s entire crux depended on whether Waverly hired the killer. There were four people that knew—Luke, Waverly, Veronica, and Christian. So what Christian said mattered greatly.
And he wasn’t a liar. Scarred and changed, yes, but Waverly wasn’t expecting him to say anything untrue. Waverly had lawyered up and was taking the fifth … but he knew all the lawyers in the world couldn’t stop the truth from coming out. Not if Christian wanted to tell it.
“I’d like to direct my question at the former Special Agent,” Franklin said. “Mr. Windsor, there was a transmitter injected into your calf, correct? One which could have allowed the authorities to trace your location. What happened to it? When the lobby
of your apartment called up to say a visitor was on their way, why didn’t you call for backup then? We’ve checked your records, no outgoing call was ever placed.”
The mouth had arrived and it sat right behind Senator Franklin. It was grinning with its teeth ajar, looking like it might take a large bite out of the man’s head.
Christian tried to keep his eyes from venturing to it. He looked at the Senator instead.
There were any number of lies he could say. Luke, or the animal—whose actual name turned out to be Martin Cianado—had removed it once he was captured. He could say that he’d been unconscious most of the time. He could also do as Waverly was and hide behind the fifth amendment.
Luke’s voice fluttered through Christian’s head, the last words either had spoken to each other.
Your shackles are gone. There is no FBI to hold you back. There are no rules that matter any longer, and if you doubt that, look behind me. You are free to come get me, Christian. You are free to do whatever you want. I’ve granted you that.
Behind Luke, of course, had been Tommy lying dead on the couch.
“I didn’t want any backup, Senator,” Christian said.
Whispers rushed from behind him, the press finally having heard something they weren’t expecting.
Christian didn’t move, only kept his eyes on Franklin.
“Your actions ensured your partner of many years died. Why, Mr. Windsor, did you not follow the guidelines that were set up by you? This was your plan, the one to lure Luke Titan to you, am I correct?”