The Nameless Dead

by Paul Johnston

  Karen was looking dispirited. ‘They’re never going to let us out of this place.’

  I took her hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’m doing my best to drive them crazy. Soon they’ll be paying us to leave.’

  She let out a sob. ‘I never…I never imagined our son would be born in a secure facility, attended by army doctors.’

  I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter where he’s born.’ I kissed her cheek. ‘All that matters is that you both come through all right and that he’s healthy.’ I nudged her gently. ‘Besides, you’ll have a room of your own with hot and cold running midwives.’

  Karen looked away. ‘We tried to kill the President, Matt,’ she said, her voice pitched low to elude the listening devices. ‘Even if they give us a trial, we aren’t going to be let off and sent home.’

  She had a point. Although people from the British Embassy had visited a few times, we hadn’t been allowed to see lawyers. When I complained, I was told we could either stay where we were or join the general population in separate federal prisons. I certainly wasn’t going to allow our son to be born in a prison infirmary without me present, so I shut up. The fact was, we were better off being deprogrammed in the camp. Peter Sebastian, the FBI homicide chief with responsibility for us, said the Justice Department had no desire to drag us through the courts, citing not only my assistance with the authorities, but the political desire not to have a sensational trial that would overshadow the President’s entire domestic agenda. But they had to be sure we no longer posed a danger, and that stage hadn’t yet been reached. As usual, the British government had been completely craven and had caved in to American pressure, even though Karen was a high-ranking and decorated police officer. So much for the special relationship between the two countries.

  Karen’s eyes were wet. ‘It isn’t fair. He deserves better.’

  I felt my son kick against the palm of my hand. ‘Of course he does,’ I said softly. ‘Especially since his names are going to be Mick and Keith.’

  That earned me an elbow in the gut.

  ‘I told you, Matt,’ Karen said, a smile playing on her lips. ‘No wrinkled Rolling Stones’ names. It’s Algernon or nothing.’

  I laughed and brought my mouth close to her bulge. ‘Hey, Nothing!’ I called. ‘Stop kicking your mum!’

  Her elbow made contact again before I could get away.

  Later on, I went to the FBI’s version of Frankenstein’s laboratory. It smelled as bad as usual: of dubious chemical compounds, half-finished plates of food from the canteen, and apprehension, though I may have been responsible for the last.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Wells.’

  I nodded to the elderly scientist. Dr. Rivers wasn’t a bad type, but he was over-keen on formality. Despite the fact that I’d told him weeks ago to use my first name, he stuck to my surname. Maybe he thought that would reinforce my comprehension of what I really was—a British crime novelist who had got involved with more killers than was good for his health, rather than the mindless pawn of Nazi conspirators.

  ‘Today we will try some new triggers that the computer has thrown up, if you don’t mind.’ Rivers led me to the secure room. It had armored glass windows on all sides and the only furniture was a chair bolted to the middle of the floor. At least they weren’t chaining me to a bed anymore—that had got very tedious. Now I was free to walk around in the room.

  I sat and watched as electrodes were attached to my head and body. The wires ran to a transmitter that was hooked onto the pocket of my orange jumpsuit. Then the glass door closed behind the doctor and his technician, bolts shooting into their sockets with a loud thunk. My legs twitched as tedium gripped me. Things only got interesting when we came across a trigger, but that hadn’t happened for a couple of weeks. I was still on edge—the experience was weirder than smoking camel dung.

  ‘Ready, Mr. Wells?’ Dr. Rivers’s voice came through a speaker above the door. He had taken up his usual position behind a bank of screens.

  I raised a hand.

  ‘Matthew Wells, session number twenty-seven, December fifth, 1612 hours,’ the scientist said for the recording. He paused, and then started reading out the list of words slowly.

  ‘Faden.’ He paused again, waiting to see if I meta-morphosed into a psycho killer. Nothing.

  ‘Eggenfelden.’ Ditto.

  ‘Kinski.’ Zilch.

  And so the list went on. I sometimes tried to guess what the unfamiliar words meant, but I’d never studied German so I remained generally clueless. It was often hard even to discern which ones were proper names.

  ‘Alexanderplatz.’

  That was easier. I had the impression there had been some important Nazi offices in the Berlin square of that name. Since I remained in control of myself, the Rothmanns obviously hadn’t deemed it worthy of use.

  My mind began to drift. Rivers didn’t protest when that happened; in fact, he’d told me at the start of the process that it was probably better if I didn’t concentrate on what was said. So I let my thoughts wander. Inevitably I found myself thinking about Karen. She was right. We might well be kept in the camp indefinitely; it might become our personal Guantanamo Bay, Illinois-style—we’d only been told which state we were in after a week had elapsed. There had been no sign of the therapy ending. For prisoners, we were comfortable enough. We had a fairly decent apartment and wholesome food provided but were under constant surveillance, with cameras and microphones in every room. The tracking cuff had only recently been taken off Karen’s swollen ankle. Given her condition, she was hardly going to make a dash for freedom—not that the high, razor-wired fences could be scaled, even by someone as fit and long-legged as Quincy Jerome.

  There was only one thing to be said for our enforced stay. It meant that the woman who had sworn to kill me couldn’t get to us. Sara Robbins, my former lover, had turned out to be the sister of a ruthless serial executioner who called himself the White Devil. He tried to frame me for his crimes, and, after his death, Sara took up the baton, murdering one of my closest friends and nearly doing in my ex-wife Caro and our daughter Lucy. Sara had made herself into an even more lethal executioner than her brother and it wasn’t long after the attempt on the President’s life that she’d sent me a message—helpfully passed on by the Feds, who were monitoring my email—saying that she was looking forward to catching up with me.

  ‘Bismarck,’ said Rivers.

  ‘Too obvious,’ I said, shaking my head.

  The doctor raised his hands, a look of irritation on his thin face. ‘Please don’t interrupt, Mr. Wells,’ he said, with a cough. ‘Or make smart comments. Krankenhaus.’

  I was tempted to recommend that he get his throat looked at in a krankenhaus. The word had come up in a pub quiz years ago and I had guessed it meant ‘lunatic asylum’ rather than ‘hospital.’ That really would have been too suggestive, considering the Rothmann’s father had worked at the Auschwitz krankenhaus. I was so busy damping down a sudden flare of anger about what the Nazi bastards had done to millions of innocent people, let alone Karen and me, that the next word took me by complete surprise.

  ‘Fontane.’

  Immediately I felt the hairs rise all over my body.

  The conscious part of me seemed to disconnect and rise upward like a spirit. I watched from above as my corporeal self leapt to its feet and started roaring incomprehensibly. Running to the door, trying to break out, I felt no pain as my shoulder repeatedly crashed into the glass.

  Somewhere in the distance a voice was speaking, telling me to breathe deeply and calm myself, reminding me to use the calming techniques I had been taught. With concentration, they had some effect. Eventually I returned to my body, which stopped raging and stepped back from the door. I found myself confused and gasping for breath. I kept hearing words I couldn’t understand, words barked out in a harsh voice, and I looked around desperately for a way out. I knew the idea behind these triggers was to provoke different reactions. Some drove subjects to acts of
extreme violence at specific targets, others to covert intelligence gathering, or communication with superiors via phone numbers or email addresses previously inaccessible to their memory. This had been one of the violent reactions, but I didn’t have any target in mind. I also knew what would happen next. When Dr. Rivers was satisfied that my condition had stabilized, there would be a puff of gas from a pipe in the ceiling and I would be rendered unconscious.

  Before the darkness took me, I found myself wondering who or what ‘Fontane’ was.

  Two

  Peter Sebastian, Director of the FBI’s violent crime unit, was not a happy man. In the last week his hitherto stellar career (apart from the jolt at Washington National Cathedral) was beginning to turn to excrement.

  First, there had been the murder in Manhattan: civil rights lawyer Laurie Simpson found decapitated in her apartment, her innards piled on a dresser above which a large red swastika had been sprayed. Her head had been carefully positioned upside down in the toilet bowl. Examination of the wounds suggested that a large, but by no means unusual, knife, probably manufactured for the hunting market, had been used, while the paint was a very common brand. The CSIs had discovered minimal signs of a forced entry—the killer had picked two complex but fairly standard locks, but there were no foot-or fingerprints and no significant fibers or other traces. NYPD detectives were following up on Ms. Simpson’s professional activities—the legal practice in Harlem had been vandalized by far-right extremists more than once, and she had written some strongly worded antifascist pamphlets when she was younger. The fact that her dead black lover’s face had been at the center of the swastika seemed to point indisputably to racist motivations.

  Now Sebastian was standing outside a lakeside house in Michigan, listening to the harsh cries of birds that he could neither see nor identify and looking at the darkening surface of water that would take a man’s life in minutes. He shivered in the late afternoon gloom, hoping against his professional experience that the dead man was not the second in a series. He had heard enough on the phone from the local sheriff to suggest that the same killer could be responsible, but he wasn’t going to draw any conclusions till he had scoped the scene. The CSIs had finished earlier, but the supervisor was on hand to give a report. On Sebastian’s specific request, the body had been left in situ. December on the shores of Lake Huron meant that decay would be slow and the gas boiler in the house had not been turned on.

  ‘Sir?’ Sebastian’s assistant, Special Agent Arthur Bimsdale, a twenty-eight-year-old so fresh-faced he could still have been at junior high school, handed him pairs of overshoes and latex gloves, as well as a white protective suit.

  When they were ready, the detective in charge, a heavily-built man by the name of John Jamieson who smelled strongly of sweat, took them inside the house. It was in a state of disrepair, the paint flaking and the wood distressed.

  ‘No sign of forced entry,’ the big man said, looking round. ‘There were no tire tracks in the driveway apart from the vic’s truck. And no recent footprints around the house except the vic’s.’

  ‘So we have a ghost.’ The smile on Arthur Bimsdale’s lips froze when he caught Sebastian’s eye. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  In the living room they were joined by the senior CSI, a blonde woman with a heavily lined face.

  ‘Traces?’ Sebastian asked.

  ‘We’re analyzing,’ she replied. ‘Nothing that stands up and begs for attention.’

  ‘Prints?’

  ‘Comparisons are underway. Most of what we’ve got so far belongs to the victim.’ She shook her head. ‘A killer this organized would have been wearing gloves.’

  Sebastian turned to the detective and noticed that a single hair nearly an inch long curled from the policeman’s left ear. ‘Witnesses?’

  Jamieson shook his head. ‘As you can see, there aren’t many houses in the vicinity, and it’s quiet up here during the week.’

  Peter Sebastian looked around the room. It was furnished by what must have been original pieces dating from the fifties, many of them in poor condition. The floral wallpaper was faded and the curtains frayed. There were piles of CDs, books and newspapers around the floor. The juxtaposition of old and recent objects struck the FBI man.

  ‘The place used to belong to the vic’s aunt,’ Detective Jamieson continued. ‘She died early last year and he took it over. Guess he didn’t have time to do any refurbishments.’

  ‘Has the dead man been positively identified?’

  ‘Well, not officially. Seeing as the body’s still here and…how we found it. But the sheriff knew him.’ The detective bit his lip. ‘So did I. Met him once at a charity disco.’

  Sebastian’s nostrils flared. ‘That’s another reason to show respect by using the man’s name.’

  Points of red appeared on Jamieson’s cheeks. ‘You’re right.’ He looked down. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the body is definitely Sterling Anson’s.’

  The FBI man nodded. He had never liked the way law enforcement professionals deprived the dead of their personal identity by calling them ‘vics.’ It was a professional issue. If you kept in mind that people were unique individuals, you were more likely to nail their killers.

  ‘I understand Mr. Anson was quite a celebrity in these parts,’ he said, softening his tone.

  The detective nodded. ‘Everyone in Detroit knew of him. Most people thought he was a great guy, but he did have his enemies. Someone tried to burn down the radio station when his show was on air a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Those fucking Nazis,’ the CSI put in. ‘After that, they called in the next time he was broadcasting live and said they’d get him sooner or later.’

  Sebastian turned to Jamieson, who nodded. ‘It was a public phone and no witnesses came forward. We never caught them.’

  ‘And you don’t have any idea of their identities?’

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘After all this time.’ The senior FBI man let several seconds pass to register his disapproval.

  ‘The thing is,’ Jamieson said, ‘he used to talk about the threats he got on air rather than reporting them to us. If he was telling the truth, there must have been dozens of them.’

  ‘All right, Detective, let’s see what you’ve got.’

  They moved into the hall and toward the stairs. According to the briefing Bimsdale had prepared on the Bureau plane from Washington, Sterling Anson was a Howard Stern look-alike whose nightly talk show knocked lumps off anyone who demonstrated racist tendencies. He never hesitated to name names, and several companies had fired staff displaying prejudice. Businesses run by bigots had been harassed out of business. Anson was an obvious target for retaliation, even though he had never suffered personal physical attack. Until now.

  ‘I didn’t see any alarm system,’ Bimsdale said.

  Jamieson shook his head as he led them to the second floor. ‘Seems he was too fearless for his own good.’

  On the landing, where the metallic smell of blood was pervasive, the CSI stepped forward. ‘This isn’t pretty,’ she said, her hand on the first door to the right.

  Peter Sebastian leaned forward and took in the badge on her chest. ‘Don’t worry, Martine. We’ve seen it all before.’ When the CSI looked at Bimsdale, who swallowed nervously, he amended his statement. ‘Well, I have,’ said his boss.

  He followed the woman inside and immediately regretted his bravado. It was true that he had witnessed the worst that the country’s murderers could provide, but the scene by Lake Huron was a real eye-opener.

  ‘We think the killer may have been let into the house by the vic…by Mr. Anson,’ the detective said.

  Peter Sebastian’s eyes were fixed on what remained of the talk show host. ‘Why’s that?’ Bending down, he lifted the cover of a plastic container on the rug below the suspended body. Two blood-drenched eyes stared up at him.

  ‘Like I said,’ Jamieson said, after a long pause, ‘there’s no sign of a break-in.’

  ‘But t
hat’s not all,’ the CSI said, pointing to the curved piece of rolled steel from which Anson was hanging head-down. ‘There are traces of blood on the hook in the beam.’

  Sebastian looked around at the congealing slick on the floor. There were spatters on the walls, too. ‘So his throat was cut before the hook was attached up there? You think that suggests the killer didn’t gain prior entry?’

  The detective nodded. ‘The medical examiner said that Anson took a blow to the back of the head that would have knocked him out.’

  The senior FBI man looked up at him. ‘Is it likely that a man with a history of threats would have opened the door to a stranger?’

  Jamieson frowned. ‘If it was a stranger. We’re checking with his family and friends. His wife, who’s Chinese-American, said he was careful at their place in the city—they’ve got two small kids—but up here he was less concerned.’

  Sebastian and Arthur Bimsdale got as close as they could to the hanging man, the younger agent visibly shaken. Sterling Anson, a Caucasian in his early forties, was naked, the ends of his long brown hair dipped in his blood. The wound across his throat was wide and clean-edged. Apart from the removal of his eyes, his chest and abdomen had been mutilated. He had been cut from groin to sternum, with another incision running across the belly button.

  ‘It’s inverted,’ Sebastian murmured, glancing at his assistant. ‘If he was standing the right way up, the cross would be upside down.’

  Jamieson was immediately alert. ‘You seen something like this before?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ the FBI man replied, turning to the CSI. ‘Has anything been drawn or written in the house? Anything in red?’