Apocalypse

by Dean Crawford

  Ethan’s senses reconnected themselves as the colossal G-force eased, and he saw the coast of Virginia passing by beneath rippled blankets of cloud as Rawlings rolled the F-15 right-side up. The sky above was almost black, the sleek fighter flirting with the edge of space.

  ‘How fast are we going?’ he enquired, as a vague sense of nausea poisoned his innards.

  The reply came back as casually as though Emma Rawlings were driving a car.

  ‘Just over Mach 2, faster than a rifle bullet. We’ll have you in Florida in an hour. I’m opening a three-way data-link channel with your boss, stand-by.’

  Ethan heard a hiss and a squawk across the airwaves, and then Jarvis’s voice crackled in his ear as one of the screens in the cockpit showed the old man’s face as he spoke from the cavernous interior of a transport aircraft. A second screen showed most of Lopez’s face obscured by her oxygen mask and helmet, only her exotic almond eyes visible.

  ‘Ethan, Nicola, pay attention. If the situation in Miami is not resolved within twelve hours, then we feel certain that the answers we seek at the Defense Intelligence Agency will be lost forever.’

  Ethan frowned beneath his oxygen mask.

  ‘Why the time limit?’ he asked Jarvis.

  ‘I told you that Charles Purcell was involved in research into the nature of time at NASA,’ Jarvis explained. ‘It would appear that after leaving the space agency he continued his work. When he contacted the police at the scene of his family’s murder, Charles Purcell accurately predicted future events as they unfolded.’

  Lopez’s voice crackled over the radio.

  ‘No way! I’ve read about things like that. You can’t see into the future, it’s impossible. Physics won’t allow it. You’re saying you pulled us off eighteen thousand dollars of bond money for pure fantasy?’

  ‘That may be so,’ Jarvis responded. ‘But fact is fact and this guy got it right several times during a single conversation. He also claimed that he wasn’t responsible for the murder of his family, and would himself be murdered sometime today.’

  ‘He knows that this will happen?’ Ethan asked in surprise.

  ‘Apparently so,’ Jarvis replied. ‘He even stated that his killer does not yet know he will commit the act.’

  ‘Which is why we’re being rushed down there,’ Ethan said. ‘To try to stop it before it happens.’

  ‘Correct,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Whatever this guy’s been up to, he’s either an exceedingly clever psychopath or exceedingly desperate to prove his innocence. The FBI has written the case off as nothing more than the ramblings of a madman, sheer coincidence. I only saw the paperwork myself four hours ago, and managed to get control of the case.’

  ‘It sounds like Purcell’s smart enough to fool people into thinking he’s seen the future,’ Lopez suggested. ‘If he’s lost his mind he could be presenting like a classic psychopath – severe narcissism combined with a god complex.’

  ‘Where do we start?’ Ethan asked Jarvis.

  ‘Captain Kyle Sears of the Miami-Dade Police will meet you at Homestead Joint Air Reserve Base. He’ll be your liaison. I’ll meet you when we arrive. For now, you’d best be on your way.’

  A thought crossed Ethan’s mind.

  ‘How do you know that we’ve only got twelve hours left to solve this case?’

  Jarvis’s voice sounded ominous over the radio as he replied.

  ‘You’ll have to see that to believe it. Jarvis out.’

  9

  HOMESTEAD JOINT AIR RESERVE BASE, MIAMI, FLORIDA

  June 28, 09:18

  Warner sat in the front seat of a Crown Victoria Interceptor as it sped away from the airbase at Homestead toward Miami, lights blazing and sirens wailing as it joined the freeway and accelerated past lanes of traffic lumbering north. He felt mildly disorientated after the fearsome speed and maneuverability of the F-15, as though he’d awoken in a different time zone.

  ‘We’ll be in Hallandale shortly.’

  Captain Kyle Sears, his eyes concealed behind a pair of Aviators, looked in his rear-view mirror at Lopez sitting in the rear seat. Ethan guessed from the weary creases lining Sears’ face that he was a career officer, probably in his late forties, highly experienced and most likely allergic to bullshit. That he’d experienced first-hand somebody predicting the future probably hadn’t gone down too well.

  ‘You guys got here in a real hurry,’ Sears observed.

  ‘Priority case,’ Lopez said.

  ‘That so?’ Sears replied. ‘Well, we sure could use the help, because I don’t have a damned clue what the hell’s going on down here.’

  Ethan concealed a smile as he replied.

  ‘Tell us what you know.’

  ‘We walk into a crime scene, two victims shot in the head. I get a call from the husband and father of the victims, Charles Purcell, who then predicts what’s happening around me, doesn’t miss a damned thing. I figure maybe he has cameras set up or something, but the area is clean. He predicted an automobile accident, the ambulance turning up, when my partner would trace the call, everything. Turns out that Purcell was calling from an apartment in Hallandale several miles away, no chance he could have observed what he saw as it happened.’

  Lopez frowned, her long dark hair rippling in the breeze funneling through the Interceptor’s open window.

  ‘I take it he took off before you got there,’ she said.

  Sears nodded as he took the next exit off the freeway.

  ‘His prints were all over the apartment; he’d made no attempt to conceal his presence, but he was long gone. We checked local cameras for his movements but the guy had cut the cables before calling us. That’s what’s so weird. He claimed that he didn’t kill his family, but this whole thing must have been set up in advance, else how could he have predicted the phonecall, the accident, everything?’

  Ethan watched palm trees flashing past against the blue sky outside. Most all people associated palms with vacations, but he’d only ever seen them against the war-scarred deserts of Iraq or in the sweltering alleys of Colombia. He and Joanna had rarely had any downtime, travelling from one warzone to another in pursuit of the next big story. He briefly regretted that they had not taken the chance to spend time together doing something else.

  Now, here he was again beneath a burning sun and swaying palms, yet in the middle of an investigation.

  ‘Anything else odd that you noticed?’ he asked Sears, shaking off his reverie.

  ‘You mean apart from this guy predicting the future? Well, he asked us to pick up the ammunition used in the homicides and analyze them for traces of something called Rubidium-82.’ Sears leaned forward, grabbed a sheet of paper from the dash and handed it to Ethan. ‘We sent the rounds to the labs and sure enough, the compound turns up. Some kind of mildly radioactive dye used by scientists and medical teams. Again, how could he have not committed the murders and yet know that the bullets were dipped in that dye? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  Ethan looked down at the sheet of paper. Rubidium-82 was a form of rubidium chloride that contained a radioactive isotope and was used in a technique called PET perfusion imaging. Easily absorbed by heart muscle cells, its presence helped identify regions of poor blood flow in heart muscle. A graph recorded its radioactive signature on each of the two bullet casings found at the scene of the murders. While Ethan had heard of some killers going to extraordinary lengths to tease officers in their pursuit, leaving hints and clues behind as to their identity, he could see no sense in leaving traces of such a material on the bullets and then blatantly informing the police of its presence. Surely doing so only risked confirming Purcell’s guilt, or at least some kind of involvement in the crime?

  ‘What about the apartment?’ Lopez asked. ‘Anything there that could help us?’

  Sears chuckled. ‘Oh yeah. You’re going to have to see it to believe it.’

  ‘People keep saying things like that,’ Ethan replied uneasily.

  ‘You’re sure that you’ve ne
ver met this guy Charles Purcell, right?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ Ethan replied. ‘The DIA checked him out and we’ve got no apparent history. Only time I ever visited Miami was on a family holiday when I was ten years old.’

  Sears nodded but said no more, guiding the Interceptor between lanes of traffic that parted before his blazing sirens and lights. A few minutes later and they pulled in alongside a cheap-looking motel, the kind with tired, flickering neon lights over thin and unkempt lawns.

  ‘Not the usual haunt of a NASA scientist,’ Lopez said as she got out of the car.

  One of the first-floor apartments was sealed off with ribbons of crime-scene tape that fluttered listlessly, and two uniforms guarded the entrance.

  ‘Crime scene and forensics been through yet?’ Ethan asked Sears as they walked across the half-empty lot toward the apartment.

  ‘Yeah, like I said, they found his prints everywhere but no evidence of a weapon or other residues from the homicide. If Purcell hadn’t called us we’d probably never have known he stayed here.’

  Sears waved his badge at the uniforms and they opened the apartment door for him. He gestured for Ethan to take the lead, and Ethan stepped through the doorway.

  The apartment was tiny, a narrow hall leading to a functional kitchen at one end that backed on to a shower stall and latrine. To the left and right of the hall were doorways to the lounge and bedroom.

  ‘It’s the lounge you’ll want to see,’ Sears directed him.

  Ethan turned right and walked in to see a tired-looking but clean room adorned with a coffee table and couch, a wall-mounted television and a tall mirror on the wall at the rear. As he walked in and turned to survey the room, he froze in place and stared at the back wall.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Sears asked.

  Across the wall was scrawled a message, written with a thick black marker.

  PLEASE HURRY ETHAN WARNER!

  TIME IS RUNNING OUT!!!

  20:48, June 28

  10

  ‘Jesus.’

  Lopez stared at the message as she joined them in the room.

  ‘Charles Purcell told me to come here immediately,’ Sears explained to Ethan as they stood looking at the message. ‘He told me that I must contact you. He kept insisting that time was of the essence and that if I didn’t do what he was asking, the killers of his family would never be brought to justice.’

  Ethan found himself still transfixed by the scrawled message on the wall.

  ‘Today is June 28,’ he said.

  ‘Yup,’ Sears confirmed. ‘Whatever that time means, it’s referring to something that hasn’t happened yet. Given what Charles Purcell has managed to do so far, my guess is that he’s completely lost his mind and that this is all some kind of goddamn freak show that he’s arranged, all based around him. Most killers are severely narcissistic and display exactly this kind of behavior.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Lopez nodded, ‘this is the start of his game and it’s all about him. He’s the star, we’re the audience, and he’ll continue to crave more and more attention right up to the moment he’s captured or gets himself killed.’

  Ethan looked at Sears.

  ‘Except for the fact that he did accurately predict the future, right?’

  ‘He did,’ Sears conceded. ‘That part, I got no explanation for.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘The opposite wall,’ Sears said, and gestured behind them. ‘We haven’t got a clue what the hell it means.’

  Ethan turned and strode across to the window, pulling aside threadbare net curtains to reveal another message written on the wall just above the window pane in small, precise strokes.

  ‘Looks like some kind of equation written backwards,’ Lopez said as she moved alongside Ethan and peered at the strange symbols. ‘Same person wrote both messages?’

  ‘Purcell was a physicist,’ Ethan suggested. ‘He’d have spent much of his life using math. It fits his history, if nothing else.’

  ‘You actually know what it means?’ Sears asked.

  ‘Not in the slightest,’ Ethan admitted. ‘And how did he know I would come here at all?’

  Sears smiled but it was tinged with anxiety.

  ‘I got a letter this morning, sent by UPS, from Charles Purcell. It had a picture of you, taken off a website from your old high school in Illinois. It helped us track you down, and that’s how your man at the Defense Intelligence Agency got involved. We called the FBI when we realized that we were getting out of our depth. They wrote us off, but the DIA picked up the case.’

  Sears slipped a print from his pocket and showed it to Ethan. The image showed a young man in his late teens, his light-brown hair still scruffy despite having been combed for the shot, his gray eyes clear and sharp. Ethan’s jaw looked slightly leaner than it did now, and the creases etched into his skin by years of physical and mental hardship were missing, but there was no mistaking the defiant set of his shoulders and the crooked grin on his face.

  ‘You were actually almost cute once,’ Lopez said, with a smirk. ‘The hell happened?’

  ‘Life,’ Ethan replied. ‘This code must mean something. Why did he write a huge message for me on that wall, but then conceal a tiny one over here?’

  ‘Either the guy’s crazy or he’s just trying to buy himself time to get away,’ Lopez replied. ‘By the time we’re finished decoding this, even if that’s possible, Purcell could be clean out of the state.’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘He could have been clean out of the state without doing any of this. He’s leaving us messages, leaving us a trail.’

  ‘Why leave anything?’ Lopez asked. ‘And why us? Why you? You’ve never met this guy. Surely if he’d wanted private detectives on his case he’d have contacted someone in Florida instead, somebody nearby?’

  Ethan nodded in agreement but could find nothing to say that could explain Charles Purcell’s bizarre actions.

  ‘My guess,’ Sears said, ‘is that he’s suffered some kind of mental breakdown and all of this is the result of his illness. Until I’m convinced otherwise, I’m putting out an APB for this guy as a wanted murderer. We need him off the streets and in custody because we can’t risk the chance that he won’t hit some other family just like he’s iced his own. Believe me, once these freaks really lose the plot, anyone and anything is fair game.’

  Sears headed out of the lounge to leave the apartment. As Ethan turned to follow, his gaze settled on the mirror hanging on the wall opposite the window. He focused on the reflection of the room around them and then a smile curled from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Maybe Charles Purcell knows exactly what he’s doing.’

  11

  LOIZA, PUERTO RICO

  June 28, 09:24

  ‘Do we know what happened to our aircraft.’

  Joaquin Abell kept his voice down, not wanting his children to hear the news that Sandra had related to him.

  ‘We chartered a Grumman Mallard from Bimini Wings to bring home our staff from their work on the coral-conservation project in the Florida Straits. It went down late yesterday afternoon. No mayday call from the pilots, radar contact was lost by Miami at seven twenty. Search and Rescue haven’t found a thing.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ Joaquin stared at her.

  ‘I was waiting for confirmation from the coastguard before I broke the news,’ Sandra said. ‘I didn’t want to bring this to you until I was sure.’

  Joaquin massaged his temples, his eyes closed. ‘How many people were aboard?’

  ‘Nineteen, including the two pilots.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Joaquin whispered, ‘the poor families. Get in touch with all of them, I’ll want to speak to them in person and reassure them that we’ll stand by them. IRIS is a family, Sandra, and I want them to know that they’re members too.’ Sandra nodded and jotted down notes as Joaquin spoke. ‘Then contact the families’ litigation teams and let them know that appropriate com
pensation will be provided, regardless of whether IRIS is considered legally responsible for the loss of life, understood?’

  Sandra finished scribbling and looked up at him, a flourish of admiration on her features.

  ‘Absolutely, sir. I’ll get on it right away. At least it seems there may be a survivor from the conservation project, that’s something that we can take away from this tragedy.’

  Joaquin’s eyes fixed on hers. ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles Purcell, one of our lead scientists. His name was absent from the aircraft’s departure roster at South Bimini. He can’t have been aboard.’

  ‘Excellent news, Sandra. See if you can find Charles and let me know the moment that you do.’

  Joaquin watched as Sandra dashed away, and then walked across to his wife. Katherine was now accompanied by a short, pale-looking man with baleful eyes that peered out from behind thin glasses. Dennis Aubrey was a lifelong friend of Katherine, a physicist who had attended the University of Florida as she had. Just as she had grown to become a powerful lawyer, so Aubrey had grown alongside her from a shy, plump little boy into a physics genius, sought after by some of the most prestigious laboratories and universities in the continental United States. Joaquin had recently hired Aubrey, always preferring to appoint family friends to his organization rather than cast his net and take on potentially unreliable employees. People tended to work better for their friends than for anonymous corporations, and despite its size he had worked hard to make IRIS a family and not just an employer.

  ‘Mr. Abell,’ Aubrey said in greeting. ‘Katherine tells me that the news broadcast went well.’

  Joaquin nodded with a brief but weary smile. ‘Let’s hope it garners support in Congress and the funding we’ll need out here.’