3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  “What makes you think this organization is involved?” Jack, the bile of anger feeding the heat of his shame, asked. “The most likely suspects are Al-Qaeda or a homegrown derivative.”

  Garner shook his head. “First off, the terrorist chatter’s been elevated for about ten days now, but you know that ebbs and flows, and a lot of it is just trying to play with our minds. There’s nothing there for us. Second, there have been no unusual movements in the suspected cells we have under surveillance.”

  “What about the cells you know nothing about?” Jack said.

  Nina looked at Garner, who nodded.

  “Show him,” he assented.

  Nina fanned out a handful of forensic photos of two men, naked from the waist up, with fatal wounds on their backs.

  Jack studied the visuals with a relief only he could fully comprehend. “Who are they?”

  “The Secret Service personnel assigned to guard Alli Carson,” Garner said while Nina’s lips were still opening.

  Jack felt an unpleasant prickling at the back of his neck. The news just got worse and worse. The photos showed the respective bodies in situ.

  “The killers are professionals,” Garner said with an unforgivable degree of condescension. “They know how to kill quickly, cleanly, and efficiently.” He pointed. “They took their wallets, keys, pads, cell phones. Just to rub our noses in it, I guess, because we’ve locked down everything belonging to or attached to these two individuals, so there’s nothing the perps can do with the personal items. And see here.”

  Beside each body, partially wedged beneath their left sides, were what appeared to be playing cards.

  He peered more closely. “What are those?”

  Garner dropped two clear plastic evidence bags onto the photos. Each one contained a playing card. Drawn in the center of each card was a circle with a familiar three-pronged symbol: a stylized peace sign. “During the war in Nam, U.S. soldiers used to leave an ace of spades on the bodies of their victims. These E-Two sonsabitches are doing the same thing, leaving their logo on their victims.”

  Reaching down to his feet, he pulled a document out of a briefcase, read it out loud. “Faith-based initiatives and policies are spreading from America to Europe, where faith-based reasoning is taking root in the burgeoning Islamic populations of France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, et cetera. All too soon, Muslims will be running for office in these countries, and faith-based initiatives will begin there….” There followed a list of statistics showing the alarming rise of Muslims into Europe, as well as increasing militance of certain sections.

  “Here.” Garner handed over the manifesto. “Read the rest yourself.”

  Jack, who was inordinately attuned to such undertones, wondered whether Garner suspected—or, worse, knew. Chief Bennett had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Jack’s secret under wraps, but with the Homeland Security geeks, one never knew. They were as zealous as a Sunni imam, and if they didn’t like you—and clearly Garner didn’t like Jack—and if they felt threatened by you—and clearly Garner felt threatened as hell—they would move heaven and earth to find the skeleton in your closet, even if it was an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum.

  Jack stared down at the impassioned tract, which was signed “The Second Enlightenment.” It contained a stylized peace sign identical to those on the playing cards found on the Secret Service detail.

  “It’s official now,” Garner said. “E-Two are terrorists of the first rank. They won’t hesitate to kill again—I can guarantee you that because E-Two’s manifesto calls for a drastic change in the current president’s faith-based policies before he leaves office. We believe that it is seeking to discredit him in front of the entire world, to sabotage his legacy, to force him to admit that his policies are wrong.” He took the document back from Jack. “It’s clear from the evidence that E-Two has abducted Alli Carson. I want all our energies concentrated on this organization.”

  “Sounds like a leap of faith, rather than a leap of logic,” Jack said.

  Garner squared around, bringing to bear every asset that had allowed him to climb the jungle gym of federal politics. “Do I look like I care what it sounds like to you, McClure? Goddamnit, you’re in my army now. The President of the United States has tasked me with getting Alli Carson back, alive and as quickly as is humanly possible. I’m telling you how. Either you’re with us or get out of our way.”

  “I’d like to see some hard evidence—”

  “The E-Two cards on the bodies of our fallen soldiers aren’t enough for you?” Garner rose and, with him, Nina.

  The atmosphere had deteriorated from unpleasant to toxic. Jack went to the window, stood staring out at the neat manicured lawns.

  He gathered himself. “I need to see where it happened.”

  “Of course.” Nina nodded. “I’ll take you.”

  “I know the way.”

  Garner’s knife-edge smile just barely revealed the tips of white, even teeth. “Of course you do. Nevertheless,I’ll accompany you.”

  6

  Light, melancholy as a ghost, tiptoed into the room through a pair of mullioned windows. It was northern light, dismal, vagrant, at this time of year almost spectral. Hugh Garner had peeled back the yellow-and-black tape that marked the boundary of the crime scene like an admonishing finger, but as he was about to step across the threshold, Jack blocked his way.

  Jack snapped on latex gloves. “How many people have been through here?”

  “I don’t know.” Garner shrugged. “Maybe a dozen.”

  Jack shook his head. “It looks like a shit disco in here. You sure took your time getting me over here.”

  “Everything in this ‘shit disco’ was tagged, photoed, and bagged without your expertise. You read the reports,” Garner said with peculiar emphasis.

  “That I did.” Jack knew by now that the only thing keeping Garner from kicking his ass off the grounds was the president-elect. Even the president couldn’t say no to Edward Carson without looking like something you picked up on the sole of your shoe.

  “If you find anything—which I seriously doubt—it’ll be analyzed by our SID division at Quantico,” Garner said. “Not only is it the best forensic facility in the country, but the security is absolutely airtight.”

  “Is that where you sent the two bodies?”

  “The autopsies were done by our people, but the bodies are housed locally.” Garner took out a PDA, scrolled through it. “At the offices of an ME by the name of—” He seemed about to read off the name but, struck by a sudden idea, turned the face of the PDA so Jack could read it.

  “Egon Schiltz,” Jack said, his brain vainly trying to decode the scrawly squiggles on the PDA screen. Mercifully, his guess was more than a shot in the dark. Schiltz was medical examiner for the Northern District of Virginia. Despite sharp political differences, they had a friendship that went back twenty years.

  Returning his attention to the present, Jack entered the room, carefully placing one foot in front of the other until he stood in the center. It was perhaps twenty by twenty, he estimated, not small by dorm standards. But then, Langley Fields wasn’t a standard college. You got what you paid for, in all areas.

  The floor was plush wall-to-wall carpet. Beds, dressers, chairs, lamps, desks, closets, sets of shelves—there were two of almost everything. Alli’s laptop, its hard drive ransacked by IT forensics, sat on her desk. The shelf above her bed was a clutter of books, notes, pins, pennants, first-place trophies she’d won for horseback riding and tennis. She was an athletic girl and intensely competitive. He took several steps closer, saw the bronze medal for a karate competition, and couldn’t help feeling proud of her. Owing to her diminutive size and with Schiltz’s daughter in his mind, he’d convinced her to take it up in the first place. His eyes passed over the spines of the books—there were textbooks, of course, as well as novels. Jack had been taught to locate a spot outside himself on which to fix his rabbity mind. The point was fixed. Like a spinning d
ancer trained to concentrate on a single point in the distance in order not to lose his balance or grow dizzy, it was essential that Jack concentrate on the point and stay there to tame the chaos in his mind. Otherwise, trying to make sense of letters and numbers was as futile as herding cats. He couldn’t always locate it. The more extreme the tension he was under, the less chance he had of finding the point, let alone holding on to it.

  He located his center point, six inches above and behind his head, and the whirling hurricane inside his head dissipated, his disorientation melted away, and he was able to read the book spines with minimum difficulty: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Natsuo Kirino’s Out, Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind.

  Garner shifted from one foot to another. “After Emma’s death, Alli Carson refused to have anyone else move in with her.”

  On what had been Emma’s side of the room, nothing remained of her presence but a small stack of CDs. Everything had been taken by either him or Sharon, as if they were the contents of a house they were never going to share again. Seeing the CDs kindled a flame of memory: Tori Amos, Jay-Z, Morrissey, Siobhan Donaghy, Interpol. Jack had to laugh at that one. The day she moved in, he had given her an iPod—not a Nano, but one with a whopping big eighty-gigabyte drive. And as soon as she was able to rip tracks into MP3s, there went the CDs. Jack picked up the Tori Amos CD, and the first song his eye fell on was “Strange Little Girl.” His heart, thumping and crashing like a drum set, threatened to blow a hole in his chest. His hand trembled when he put the CD back on the small stack. He didn’t want them; he didn’t want to move them either. Her iPod was living at home, untouched. He’d palmed it from inside the wrecked car without anyone seeing, the only thing miraculously undamaged. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d promised himself he’d listen to the music on it, but so far he’d failed to work up the courage.

  “So difficult,” Garner continued, “I can only hope you can do your job with a clear head, McClure.”

  Jack was immune to the taunts. He’d been derided by eighteen-year-old professionals drawing on depths of sadism Garner got to only in dreams. He stood very still now, transferring his gaze from the specific, allowing it to sweep the room instead. He had what in the trade was called soft eyes. It was a phrase difficult to translate precisely but, more or less, soft eyes meant that he had the ability to see an area, a neighborhood, a house, a room as it was, not as it was expected to be. If you went into a crime scene with preconceptions—with hard eyes—chances were you’d miss what you needed to see in order to make the case. Sometimes not. Sometimes, of course, there was no case to be made, no matter how soft your eyes were. But that was a matter out of Jack’s hands, so he never gave it a thought.

  Jack walked straight down the center of the room, peered out and down through the windows. They were on the third floor, it was a straight drop down to a blue-gray gravel drive, no trees around, no hedges to break a fall, no wisteria trunk to climb up or down. He turned around, stared straight ahead.

  Garner pulled ruminatively on the lobe of his ear. “So far, what? See anything we missed, hotshot?”

  Soft eyes be damned. While Jack’s dyslexia robbed him of his ability to see verbally, he received something valuable in return. His multisensory mode of seeing the world tapped into the deepest intuition, an area closed off to most human beings. This same strange quirk of the brain caused Einstein to fail at schoolwork yet become one of the greatest mathematical minds of his century. It was also what allowed Leonardo da Vinci to conceive of airplanes and submarines three hundred years before they were invented. These great leaps of intuition were possible because the geniuses who conceived of them were dyslexic; they weren’t tied down to the plodding logic of the verbal mind. The verbal mind thinks at a speed of approximately 150 words a minute. Jack’s mind worked at a thousand times that rate. No wonder certain things disoriented him, while he could see through the surfaces of others. Take the crime scene, for instance.

  Alli had slept here last night until just after three; then something happened. Had she been surprised, driven out of sleep by a callused hand clamped over her mouth, a cord biting into her wrists? Or had she heard a strange sound, had she been awake when the door opened and the predatory shadow fell on her? Did she have any time before being overpowered, before she was gagged, bound, and spirited out across the black lawn under the black sky? Alli was a smart girl, Jack knew. Even better for her, she was clever. Maybe Emma had been secretly envious of her roommate’s ingenuity. The thought saddened him, but wasn’t everyone envious of someone, wasn’t everyone unhappy with who they were? His parents certainly were, his brother was, up until the moment the bomb took him apart on a preindustrial Iraqi highway, somewhere in the back of beyond. After the explosion and the fire, there wasn’t enough left to make a proper ID, so he remained where he died, staring endlessly into the hellish yellow sky that seemed to burn day and night.

  These disparate thoughts might have confused a normal mind, but not Jack’s. He saw the room in a way that neither Garner nor any of the forensic experts could. To him what he was processing was a series of still frames, three-dimensional images that interlinked into a whole from which his heightened intuition made rapid-fire choices.

  “There was only one perp,” he said.

  “Really?” Garner didn’t bother to stifle a laugh. “One man to infiltrate the campus, soundlessly murder two trained Secret Service agents, abduct a twenty-year-old girl, manhandle her back across the campus, and vanish into thin air? You’re out of your mind, McClure.”

  “Nevertheless,” Jack said slowly and deliberately, “that’s precisely what happened.”

  Garner could not keep the skepticism off his face. “Okay, assuming for a moment that there’s even a remote possibility you’re right, how would you know just from looking at the room when a dozen of the best forensic scientists in the country have been over this with a fine-tooth comb without being able to come to that conclusion?”

  “First of all, the forensic photos of the Secret Service men showed that they were both killed by a single wound,” Jack said, “and that wound was identical on both of them. The chances of two men doing that simultaneously are so remote as to be virtually impossible. Second, unless you’re mounting an assault on a drug lord’s compound, you’re not about to use a squad of people. This is a small campus, but it’s guarded by security personnel as well as CCTV cameras. One man—especially someone familiar with the campus security—could get through much more easily than several.”

  Garner shook his head. “I asked you for evidence, and this is what you come up with?”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Enough, McClure. I know you’re desperately trying to justify your presence here, but this bullshit just won’t cut it. What you’re describing is Spider-Man, not a flesh-and-blood perp.” Garner, folding his arms across his chest, assumed a superior attitude. “I graduated second in my class at Yale. Where did you go to school, McClure, West Armpit College?”

  Jack said nothing. He was on his hands and knees, mini-flashlight on, looking under Alli’s bed—

  “I’ve been Homeland Security since the beginning, McClure. Since nine-fucking-eleven.”

  —not at the carpet, which he saw had been vacuumed by the forensics personnel, but at the underside of the box spring, where there was a small indentation. No, on closer inspection, he saw that it was a hole, no larger than the diameter of a forefinger, in the black-and-white-striped ticking.

  “What is it exactly you ATF people do again? Handcuff moonshiners? Prosecute cigarette smugglers?”

  Jack kept his tone level. “You ever dismantle a bomb made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil set in the basement of a high school, or defuse a half pound of C-four in a drug smuggler’s lab while the trapped coke-cutter is trying to set it off?”

  Garner’s cell phone buzzed and he put it to one ear.

  “You ever run down a psycho whose
lonely pleasure is trapping girls and beating the piss out of them?” Jack continued.

  “At least I can read without contorting my brain into a pretzel.” Garner turned on his heel, walked out of the room, talking urgently to whoever was on the other end of the line.

  Jack felt the heat flame up from his core, move to his cheeks, his extremities, until his hands began to tremble. So Garner knew. Somehow he’d burrowed back into Jack’s past to discover the truth. He wanted to lash out, bury his fist in Garner’s smug face. It was times like this when his disability made him feel small, helpless. He was a freak; he’d always be a freak. He was trapped inside this fucked-up brain of his with no chance of escape. Ever.

  Something glimmered briefly as he shone the tiny beam of the mini-flash into the hole. Reaching in, he felt around, extracting a small metal vial with a screw top. Opening it, he saw that it was half-filled with a white powder. Tasting a tiny bit on his fingertip, he confirmed his suspicion. Cocaine.

  7

  Nina Miller lit a clove cigarette, stared at the burning tip for a moment, and gave a small laugh. “Reminds me of my college days. I never lost my taste.” She inhaled as slowly, as deeply as if she were drawing in weed, then let the smoke out of her lungs in a soft hiss. Behind her, the sun was going down over the low hills. A dog was barking, but the sound was high-pitched, from an adjoining property, not one of the K-9 sniffers.

  She was standing outside of the west dorm, where Alli’s room was, leaning against the whitewashed brick, her slim left hip slightly canted. Her right elbow was perched on the top of her left wrist, the left arm hugging her waist. The slow light placed her in the elongated shadow of the roofline.

  “Find anything of interest?” she inquired.

  “Possibly,” Jack said.

  “I saw Garner storming out. You got to him, didn’t you?” Jack told her about his single-perp theory.