Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  Westfield listened to the old priest’s feet clomping down the wooden stairs. When he was gone, Westfield sat at one of the computers and turned it on.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  No single ship had been present in every port on the day of each killing. But ships belonging to one company, Lothian Lines, Ltd., had been in Galveston on the day Allison was murdered, in Naples on the day the twins were slaughtered, and in New Orleans over the two-day course of Robin Knappe’s dismemberment and consumption. Those ships were the M/V Tantallon and the M/V Dunnottar. Other Lothian Lines ships had been in ports the day before or the day after killings on the rim of the Atlantic. There were no Lothian Lines ships anywhere near killings that took place in the Pacific. But here, Julissa found ships either belonging to, or time-chartered into, the fleet of Cathay Steamship & Freight Co., Ltd.

  Chris was sitting across from her at the coffee table. He had been doing research on his laptop and taking pages of notes on a pad of hotel stationery for the last three hours. Their empty room service trays were on the floor and they were both on their third cups of coffee. It was two thirty in the morning.

  “It’s better than you think,” Chris said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Lothian Lines is an old steamship company, registered in the U.K. in 1840. Privately held. They restructured twenty years ago so Lothian’s a wholly owned subsidiary of a holding company called Lothian Holdings, Ltd.”

  “Okay. I don’t get—”

  “Hang on, there’s more. Cathay Steamship is also a wholly owned subsidiary of Lothian Holdings, even though it’s a privately held corporation registered in Hong Kong.”

  “So they’re under common control,” Julissa said.

  “Exactly. Lothian Holdings is just an umbrella that covers hundreds of other companies. Maybe thousands, I haven’t gone through all the records yet. And there’s one other thing.”

  Julissa had been taking a sip of her coffee, but she set the cup down.

  “It looks like Lothian is investing in a lot more than just shipping lines.” He paused and flipped back through his notes.

  “Like what?” she asked, feeling she might know the answer.

  “Lately they’ve been getting into biotech.”

  “Intelligene?”

  Chris nodded.

  “It’s a publicly traded U.S. company, so it wasn’t made into a Lothian subsidiary. They didn’t have to. Three privately held corporations, registered in Delaware or Nevada, bought seventeen percent, twenty percent, and fourteen percent of Intelligene’s stock right after its IPO.”

  “And all three were tied back to Lothian Holdings?”

  Julissa’s computer began to make a quiet chiming sound, which she ignored. She was focusing on Chris.

  “That’s right. With their fifty-one percent interest, Lothian didn’t need to make it a subsidiary; it already controlled the board, which is all it would need if its goal was to keep tabs on Chevalier’s research. Trails like this used to be hard to follow until ten years ago. Now most of these records are online.”

  “Where’s the headquarters of Lothian Holdings?”

  The look on Chris’s face faded a bit.

  “I don’t know. It’s a privately held company, so it doesn’t have to list very much about itself. It doesn’t have customers, so it has no interface with the public. But all companies have to name a registered agent so you know who to serve when you file a lawsuit. Lothian Holdings, Lothian Lines, and about a hundred other LLCs and corporations have the same registered agent. A guy named Howard Stark III, Esq.”

  “Our killer’s got a mob lawyer.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “A law firm in Edinburgh, Scotland,” Chris said. “I don’t know where the holding company is, but the shipping line’s been in Edinburgh since 1840.”

  Julissa rubbed her temples with her fingertips and looked at the coffee table.

  “1840?” she asked. “Really?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Chris said. “Chevalier said the creature might not age. I guess he was right.”

  Julissa finally noticed her computer was still chiming at her. She looked at the screen, and what she saw was every bit as surprising as the idea they would be going to Scotland to kill a centuries-old monster.

  It was a message from Skype.

  Someone with the screen name Captain_Westfield wanted to talk to her.

  “Oh my god,” Julissa said. “Oh my god, Chris! Come over here!”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Father Silva had been alone in the confessional booth for an hour, using a pair of votive candles to read a book in French about Saint Damien. The booth smelled of polished wood and candle wax. He liked to read in the shadowed, holy hush of the old church. He did it often during his confessional hours, because in a village this small, and in these times of waning interest in his Church, he spent most of these hours alone. Now he heard the main door to the church open. The flames of his candles bent towards the confessional door, then sputtered out and smoked in the darkness. Footsteps worked their way across the church to the opposite side of the confessional booth. Father Silva marked the page in his book and sat back.

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” said the man, in American-accented English. “It’s been thirty-three years since my last confession.”

  “Thirty-three years is a long time,” Father Silva said. “Did the computer work?”

  “It did, thanks. I reached my friends.”

  “You want to confess?”

  “Yes.”

  The man was silent a long time. Father Silva could hear the wind blowing past the leaves of the apple trees that grew outside the church steps. He waited for the man to start speaking.

  “There’s a lot. If another person comes while I’m talking, I’ll stop. Is that okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “In 1978, at the Sasesbo naval base in Japan, my wife Tara was killed and eaten. It happened while I was away. I hadn’t seen her in two months and I never saw her again. She died in agony. And in fear. Alone with a creature who tortured and raped her, and drew out her death for over a day. I thought the killer was just an ordinary guy. A monster, but a man. Now I know it isn’t a man at all. I also know how to find it.”

  The man spoke to Father Silva, in his slow and careful whisper, for two hours. Now and then he encountered men or women who assumed because he was a priest, and a believer in God, and a vocal witness of miracles, he would be easy prey for superstition, or stretched truths, or even outright lies. That people would try to take advantage of his faith—the trait it was his duty to nurture in everyone he encountered—didn’t particularly disturb him. It was just a fact of human nature, and facts were things to be dealt with as they came. But as this man’s story came, he didn’t sense a lie: the man believed every word he spoke. And though the man had been a physical mess when Father Silva first laid eyes on him, it was clear he wasn’t out of his wits.

  When Aaron Westfield finished his story, the two of them sat in silence on opposite sides of the booth. Again there was only the sound of the wind.

  “What do you want me to do?” Father Silva said.

  “My friends will come in four days. That’s how long it’ll take Julissa to get a new passport for me. Is there an airport on this island?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually, I don’t even know the name of this island. I’ll need to tell them where to come.”

  “Flores. The farthest west of the Azores. On the day they come, I’ll borrow a pickup and drive you to the airport to meet their plane.”

  “May I stay in the school until then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need help with anything? In the school, or in the church?”

  “There’s a fishing boat with an engine that won’t run. Two mechanics looked, and neither had any luck. Maybe you could help the man who owns it? He hasn’t been able to fish for several days.”

&nbs
p; Westfield agreed to try.

  That was how Father Silva came to be walking down the waterfront in the waning afternoon of the day he met Aaron Westfield, carrying a cot and a sleeping bag to the old school. He thought about Westfield’s story. He supposed he could use the computer and check to see if parts of the story were true. It would be easy to see if Westfield had been in the Navy, if his wife had been murdered, and if a girl had been killed in the American state of Texas recently.

  But he had seen enough already that he didn’t need more. After the confession, and after Westfield had sat in the front pew of the church to pray and to say the Our Fathers and Hail Marys which Father Silva had imposed upon him, he had taken Westfield back around to his house and had helped him change the dressings on his wounds. These were no ordinary wounds, and they told him much. They were bite marks, but not from any man. In the few places where the creature had bit into Westfield without tearing away an entire mouthful of flesh, he could see the imprint of its teeth. Though its mouth was no larger than a man’s, its teeth must have been set apart from each other like those of a predatory animal, each a sharp needle. Afterwards, when he was out of Westfield’s sight, Father Silva bit his own wrist, hard enough to leave an elliptical imprint of his teeth. He’d looked at this bite mark and thought about what he’d seen all over Westfield’s torso. Whereas his own teeth left individual marks like the blade of a dull chisel, the thing’s teeth had punctured Westfield’s skin with hundreds of perfectly round holes. While rubbing in new antibiotic ointment, he had counted the wounds in one of the clearer bites. The creature had fifty-two teeth on each jaw. The smell of infection coming from the wounds told him the rest of what he needed to know.

  Father Silva opened the door to the schoolhouse, brought Westfield’s bedding up the stairs, and made a place for his guest next to the computers. He looked out the window to the harbor. Westfield was out there, wearing his dirty mechanic’s jumpsuit again, sitting on the red-painted gunwale of the broken fishing boat. He was using a wire brush and a borrowed sewing needle to clean the engine’s fuel injectors in a porcelain bowl of petrol. He had spread tools and parts across the deck. He had a kerosene lantern tied to the boom over the open engine compartment, though it was not yet dark. He must have planned to work into the night. Father Silva raised his hand to acknowledge Westfield, who raised his own hand in return.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The young woman woke naked and in pain in the darkness, and screamed herself hoarse. Then she went on screaming until she passed out again from the agony of wounds she couldn’t see and the terror of not knowing how she’d gotten them. Or where she’d been dumped, or what was happening. The last thing she heard as she fell down a hole inside her own mind was the echo of her raw cries reverberating through the deep and endless hallways of the cavern where she was trapped.

  The second time she woke, she curled herself into a ball on the stone floor, her arms wrapped tightly around her naked legs, her spine bent so her chin was over the top of her knees. She shivered and stared at a darkness so deep she became unsure whether her eyes were open or closed. Then her other senses fell one after another. Her skin was no longer freezing, no tug of gravity pulled her against the broken stones. Where once there had been the distant drip of water echoing from the far reaches of this dungeon, now there was only a spreading silence. She was floating through ink.

  In that blackness, she began to remember things.

  Days ago she’d been in Brighton. She’d walked from the 11:47 London train to the Grand Hotel to meet a man named Kent who’d spoken to her on the telephone twice that morning. He had information about her latest MI6 piece in The Guardian, but of course he couldn’t give it over the phone. She wouldn’t have let him if he’d tried, but there’d been no need to stop him. He knew how to handle himself. It was clear he’d been an operator of some kind. He asked her to meet him and she agreed. He called a second time from a different phone and told her to go to the Lincoln Lounge on York Way, to ask for Mitch when she got there. The lounge was close to her office; she’d been there in five minutes. The barkeep, Mitch, slid her a business card. It was blank on one side and on the other, printed in neat lettering, it said,

  GRAND HOTEL, BRIGHTON. ROOM 803.

  AS SOON AS YOU CAN.

  She’d never met Kent, but he’d left her a computer disk in a dead drop last year. That disk turned into a major story. As a rule, if she left her desk before lunchtime on a Friday to see a man willing to talk about torture programs, and black ops, and Diego Garcia, she didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Not even her editor. Secrets deserved secrecy.

  People like Kent knew it was her rule and relied on it.

  Besides, the Grand Hotel was a lovely spot, one of the old Victorians, the kind where rich men stayed and the tabloid paparazzi slinked around with their cameras across the street. If his information was useless, she’d still be in Brighton for the weekend. It was warm, and there hadn’t been much fog at the seaside, so it wouldn’t be a total loss.

  She made it by noon and he’d opened the door at her second knock. He’d been handsome in a pleasant, English way.

  “Rachel?”

  “Hope I’m not late.”

  “Not at all. Come on in and get set up, your laptop or whatever. You look just like your picture on the byline. Stunning, I should say. Such beautiful hair.”

  He’d almost reached out to touch her hair where it fell over her shoulder, and then he’d stopped himself. He smiled and looked down; it was kind of sweet. Then she’d made the mistake of walking past him, into the room. Because she’d been blushing, she left her back to him while she unzipped her shoulder bag to get her notebook. She remembered the blow on the back of her neck, his fist coming down on her vertebrae like a sledgehammer. He’d probably wanted that to take care of her, but it hadn’t been enough. Instead of falling to the floor in a heap, she’d pivoted and leapt for the door. So he’d tackled her, and forced her to the ground, using his weight to pin her while he got his hands around her throat and squeezed.

  Now, floating in the deathlike darkness, she remembered clawing and biting at his face. But it hadn’t done any good. If anything, he’d enjoyed it. He’d choked her until she’d gone limp, and he’d choked her well past that until she’d been a second or two from death. After that, she didn’t remember much. Just a few images. It was like walking in and out of a snuff film and seeing only the worst parts. In this scene, the girl is staring at her hands and ankles as the man binds them with duct tape, the sight slowly receding as her pummeled eyes swell shut. The next shot is a long ride in the foot well of an unseen vehicle, the girl’s head banging against the dash. She cries out; a man laughs. Hours into the drive, she struggles to the surface for just a moment, forcing one eye open against its bloody bruise. The man looks down at her as he drives.

  “You’re perfect,” he says. “You’ll do just fine.”

  It’s hard for the girl to talk. Her throat has been crushed somehow; even whispering is a struggle.

  “My editor. Knows. Where I went.”

  “No,” he says. “She doesn’t. I checked your email, your phone. You told her you were going to Cambridge. To meet a source on the hacking probe. So you’re on your own here.”

  He reaches down to cup her breast and she blacks out as she screams.

  Then they were in a dark and cold city and he’d put a hood over her head before taking her out of the van. He used a saw-bladed knife to cut her ankles free, digging into the skin while he was at it. She could see her feet, the mossy cobble stones across which he was dragging her. A door opened. The same door boomed shut. Now the darkness was total and he was guiding her down steps. They descended forever, his hand crushing her arm above her elbow, the point of the knife between her shoulder blades.

  “You think I’m taking you down here to do things to you,” he’d said. “Rape you, kill you. Stuff like that. But you’re wrong. I’m just bringing you. Whatever happens next is between you and h
im.”

  He cut her clothes off, and cut her wrists loose, and whipped the hood from her head. She stood frozen in the utter darkness, listening for anything.

  When his fist fell on her neck the second time, it had worked exactly as he intended: she fell to the stone floor like a dead thing.

  She floated in the darkness for hours, for days. She didn’t know. At one point she came to earth again, skin upon stones, and she found her way to her hands and knees. She crawled across the cavern floor, tentatively, then faster. Ten feet, a hundred feet. A quarter mile. Her hands found a round stone the size of a melon and she held it and turned it in her fingers, her thumbs finding deep openings. It was too light to be a stone. She found the teeth, the hinged jaw, and knew what she held. She threw the skull away and listened to it bounce hollowly along the floor, rolling and banging down a slope for minutes as it went deeper into the ground. She lay on her side and went back into a protective ball, shutting her eyes against the darkness.

  Everything dropped away. She was drifting, unbound.

  But there was something above her. A pair of unblinking yellow eyes watched her from on high, like a spider in its web. They began to circle. As they moved, she could hear the click and scrape of claws on stone.

  She began to scream again.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The chartered Learjet 45 landed on the main runway at Edinburgh International Airport at nine p.m. on the twenty-second day of July, 2010. Edinburgh lay so far north the sun wouldn’t set for another hour. In the gloaming shadows of the rainclouds, the fields around the airport were a cool, deep green. On their approach, the North Sea had been gray and choppy. The jet taxied to its hangar and then Chris unbuckled his seat belt, got his bags, and stretched in the aisle. His back and neck were still sore from the car accident.