3 Great Thrillers

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

  “Secrets like who Emma met under the oak trees outside Langley Fields?”

  There was a silence for a moment as Alli squirmed in her seat. Inside her mind, a pitched battle was in progress between what she wanted to say and what she felt compelled to hold back. “Okay, I lied to you about that, but it was only to protect Emma, the part of her life she’d entrusted to me.”

  “So you know who she met?”

  Alli bit her lip. As a cloud skims across the moon, a shadow came over her, her eyes lost their focus, her gaze seeming fixed on a distant shore. Her stomach was tied in knots; she could feel the cold sweat breaking out under her arms, at the small of her back. She couldn’t backtrack now, and yet she knew she mustn’t tell Jack Kray’s name. If she kept to what Emma had told her, she thought she’d be all right. Talking about her friend, feeling closer to her was just about the only thing that calmed her. So she continued the process already begun by Kray himself of cleaving her thoughts in two: talking about the acceptable, pushing down the forbidden.

  “Emma said his name was Ronnie Kray.”

  Until this moment Jack had thought the phrase “made his blood run cold” was merely a literary one. Now he experienced it literally. Emma had met with a serial killer, the man who had abducted Alli. Did Alli know that? He judged that now, as she was just beginning to open up, was not the time to tell her.

  “But she suspected from the get-go Ronnie Kray might not be his real name,” Alli said.

  Every strangely wired synapse in Jack’s brain was singing now. “Why would she question that?”

  “Emma had done a lot of reading on the pathology of being an Outsider. In fact, she’d practically memorized a book called The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. That’s where she got the term, that’s how she knew she was one. She also read another book of Wilson’s called A Criminal History of Mankind, I think. Anyway, she’d heard that name Ronnie Kray and looked it up. He was one of a pair of murderous twins in the East End of London. Their pathology fascinated her, and I think that was one of the reasons she even listened to this guy in the first place.”

  “They shared E-Two’s point of view.”

  She nodded.

  Jack felt the tug of his daughter. This important history had happened while he was obliviously going about his job. His daughter’s life had slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. “Didn’t she understand the potential for danger?”

  “Of course she did,” Alli said. “That was the lure, that was why she wouldn’t back off. Then she began to suspect that Ronnie Kray was keeping secrets, so she set out to discover what they were.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Jack said, because he truly couldn’t.

  “Why not?” Alli said. “It sounds just like what you’d do.”

  There was no point mentioning that he was an adult with years of training. “I knew she didn’t follow Kray blindly.”

  “Emma never did anything blindly.”

  “Not even drugs?”

  “Especially not drugs. For Emma, taking them was a kind of, I don’t know, social experiment.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “She wondered whether being stoned would allow her to approach another level of being an Outsider. To touch—I don’t know—the infinite.”

  “And did it?”

  “Uh-uh. It disappointed her. She was so sure there was something just out of reach, but so far out there, it was beyond our comprehension.”

  “I’ve had the exact same feeling,” Jack said.

  Alli nodded. “So have I.”

  He had a thought. “So did she really want to join E-Two or did she want to find out more about Ronnie Kray?”

  Alli shrugged. “Emma’s motives were never simple. One thing I do know: She was far too smart simply to follow the pied piper. Her bullshit alarm was totally scary.”

  Jack thought of the times she’d busted him on his screaming matches with Sharon, how he’d let her words go in one ear and out the other. Why had he done that? Why had he devalued her opinion? Or was the truth of what she was saying too difficult to face?

  “There’s something else,” Alli said. “I got the feeling that because she knew how dangerous her being with Kray was, she kept a journal.”

  This interested Jack immensely. “I searched everything after her accident,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything.”

  Alli’s fear returned full force. “Maybe I’m wrong. It’s only a hunch. I mean she never said anything to me directly.”

  Still, it was something to ponder, Jack thought. Maybe he’d overlooked something.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” he said, getting out of the car. When she’d joined him, he took her down the alleyway and around behind the buildings on Kansas Avenue. They had to be careful as they approached the rear of the FASR building, as it was lit up like an airport runway, crisscrossed by federal agents in flak jackets, riot helmets, and assault rifles loaded with rubber bullets.

  Jack moved them back into the shadows of the hulking warehouses on their right, crouched down, making their way past the activity. As they moved farther down, the light continued to fade until they were once again engulfed in deepest shadow. At the back of the building that used to house the Hi-Line, they crept along until they reached what looked like a windowless wall. Jack moved his fingertips along the wall until he found the join he was looking for, the outline of the door Gus’s detective clients used to come and go without being seen.

  Slipping a credit card out of his wallet, he slid it into the join on the left side. A moment later, though Alli heard no sound at all, he gripped the join with the tips of his fingers and the door opened outward.

  They slipped in together and Jack immediately closed the door behind them. They were in almost complete darkness. Ahead of them was a thin line of warm light coming through the crack between an inner door and the floor.

  Stepping up to the door, Jack turned the knob and, opening it, crossed the threshold. Chris Armitage whirled around, grabbing for a length of pipe.

  Jack said, “Down, boy. You could get yourself killed that way.”

  Armitage had the look and posture of a hunted animal. “How the hell did you find us?”

  As he said this, Jack looked behind him at Peter Link, asleep on the sofa. “Let’s just say that I know these buildings were the haunts of bootleggers in the thirties, complete with escape routes to outwit the police.”

  Armitage’s mouth twitched sardonically. “Seems nothing much has changed since then.” He sighed, put aside the pipe. “I suppose they enlisted you to take us in.”

  “I had to dodge a Secret Service detail to get in here unnoticed,” Jack said. Then he turned and beckoned.

  Armitage’s eyes opened wide. “Good God.”

  “Chris Armitage, this is Alli Carson, the soon-to-be First Daughter. Alli, Chris is the co-head of the First American Secular Revivalists.

  “What’s left of it,” Armitage said. “Hey, Alli.” Then, to Jack: “Why on earth did you bring her here?”

  Jack smiled. “I thought you and she ought to meet.”

  “My organization has just been smeared by the President of the United States with the help of the Russian president.” Armitage let go a bitter laugh. “This is hardly the time for a get-together.”

  “I don’t see that you have anything better to do,” Jack said.

  Armitage nodded. “I can’t argue there.” He lifted an arm. “Sorry I don’t have much in the way of conveniences to offer you.” He pointed at a half fridge. “There’re Cokes in there, a couple of cartons of juice. And frozen food.”

  Jack and Alli shook their heads as they sat on facing chairs. Armitage perched on the edge of the sofa.

  “How’s Link?” Jack asked.

  “Out like a light, as you can see.” Armitage ran a hand through his hair. “He’ll be okay. Thanks for asking. Thanks for everything.”

  Jack waved away his words. “I’d like to ask you about a former member of FASR. A man you k
now as Ronnie Kray.”

  “Oh, him.” Armitage rubbed his chin. “Interesting guy, actually. Very smart, very intense. And he’d done his homework—he knew all the ins and outs of every argument we’re propounding. He was so well versed, in fact, that Peter and I wanted him to make some personal appearances with us, you know, to get the word out.”

  Armitage opened the half refrigerator. After offering them a drink, he took out a can of Coke, popped the top. “Above all, Kray had a quality about him—he was quite charismatic. That was another reason we wanted him to take a more active role. But he turned us down.” He gulped down some soda. “He told us he could only spare us a couple of days a week. Plus, he said he was strictly a behind-the-scenes type of guy.”

  “Did you believe him?” Jack said.

  “Interesting question. In a funny way, I did. He had trouble interacting with the other FASR members. He lacked—what?—for want of a better phrase, social graces.”

  “In what way?”

  Armitage rolled the soda can between his palms. “He had no tolerance for people who didn’t do things his way—and at the speed of light. He pissed off more than his share of coworkers because he didn’t seem to have an inhibitor switch. Whatever was on his mind, no matter how harsh, he’d just say it. I recall one time, I brought him into the office to talk to him about the effect he was having on the people he had to interact with. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll get their act together.’”

  “I’d like to fill out my mental picture of him,” Jack said. “Would you mind describing him to me?”

  “Not at all.” Armitage thought a moment. “To begin with, he was a good-looking guy, but in an interesting way. Dark, smoldering—and charismatic, as I said. He was tall and slim. He was in good shape. He looked like he was in his late forties, but I got the feeling he was older than that, certainly in his mid-fifties.”

  Jack’s mind was engaged on two levels. While he was using Armitage’s description to build a mental picture of Kray, he was watching Alli for signs of anxiety or nervousness. After all, the man Armitage was describing had abducted her and held her captive for a week. But she seemed oddly detached, as if her mind was far away.

  Armitage swallowed the last of the Coke, set the can aside. “I think he was actually popular with the women. The men felt they had to defend themselves against him.”

  “Did you know,” Jack said, “that Ronnie Kray also goes by the name of Charles Whitman?”

  “What? No. Of course not.” Armitage looked and sounded genuinely shocked.

  “Do you vet people—do background checks?”

  “Sure. We don’t want anyone with a record to be on our rolls. But frankly, it’s rudimentary at best; we’re all chronically overworked.”

  Jack nodded in sympathy. “I imagine he was counting on that. I doubt those two names are the end of Kray’s deception.” He turned to Alli. “What d’you think?”

  “Alli,” Armitage said, “you know this man?”

  Panic gripped her with such force that for a moment she could scarcely catch her breath. “A friend of mine did,” she squeaked. “Jack’s daughter, Emma.”

  “I wonder,” Jack said in a perfectly neutral voice, “whether you don’t know him, as well.”

  Alli’s panic escalated to an almost intolerable pitch. It was all she could do not to jump up and run out of the room. “Me?” He knows, she thought. He knows Kray took me. “I never met him.”

  “Haven’t you recently been with someone who fits Chris’s description of Ronnie Kray?”

  Alli said nothing, but Jack observed a certain tension take hold of her like an invisible hand.

  Jack shrugged. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.” He turned his attention to Armitage, who had been following that byplay with a certain confused interest. “We’d best decide what to do with you and Peter. You two can’t stay holed up here forever.”

  Alli was thrust back into the midst of her mental battlefield. On one side was Ronnie Kray, terrifying in his omniscience; on the other was Jack, her savior, who understood her in the same way Emma had. And thinking of Emma, she felt her friend’s great strength and courage flow into her. Would Emma lie to Jack? Alli knew she wouldn’t, so how could she herself do it?

  “I was,” she said faintly.

  “Have you thought about how to get yourself out of this prison?” Jack said to Armitage.

  Alli’s guts were churning. “That was the man who took me from Langley Fields,” she persisted.

  Jack turned to her. “You don’t say?”

  Alli’s expression was stricken. “I … I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you sooner.”

  “I’m curious why you didn’t.” Jack knew it was crucial to keep any admonition out of his voice. He could see the terror shimmering in the faint sweat on her face.

  Alli put her head down. “I was keeping Emma’s secret. I thought if I said one thing, it would lead to the rest.”

  “But then you told me about Emma wanting to join E-Two. You could’ve told me about Ronnie Kray any time after that.”

  Alli wedged her hands beneath her thighs, her arms as straight as boards. “He said if I told anyone about him, he’d come after me and kill me.”

  “How would he know?”

  Alli was crying again; she simply couldn’t stop. “I don’t know, but he knew everything about me, right down to what I did with a boyfriend, my doctors, what hospital I was born in.”

  Jack wanted to take her in his arms, but he intuited this was the wrong time, the wrong place. He’d read that victims of abduction or rape often react negatively to being touched, even when that’s what they really want.

  Alli panted as if she’d just finished a hundred-meter sprint. Emma, she thought wildly, please help me be strong. Then, with a start, she realized that she had Jack. In many of the important ways, Jack and Emma were alike, which was why she trusted him as much as she did, why she could talk to him on some level about her very private dread. “He’s in my dreams. He’s always there.”

  Jack felt his stomach contract. “What does he say? What does he want?”

  She sobbed. “I can’t remember.” A tremor went through her like an earthquake. “Whatever he wanted, you got to me first—you saved me.”

  He could see how terrified Alli was of this man. How could she not be? He had held her entire life in his hands. Suddenly, he had a vivid mental image of the photos taken of her with a telephoto lens that had hung in the Marmoset’s house, especially the one of her and Emma walking across the Langley Fields campus.

  How, he asked himself, had Ronnie Kray—or whoever the hell he was—come to have all that info? Some of it, like the hospitals and doctors, was a matter of public record, but other things, like intimate details of her personal relationships, certainly weren’t. If this guy was a spook, Jack could see it. But a civilian? He’d have to be psychic.

  In the back of Jack’s mind, his oddly aligned synapses had been playing with the 3-D puzzle he was assembling in his head. Now the puzzle turned in a different direction, and he saw the shape of a missing piece.

  “Alli,” he said with his heart pounding in his chest, “do you recognize the name Ian Brady?”

  “Sure.” She nodded. “He and his partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for what were known as the Moors murders. They went on a two-year killing spree from, I think, sixty-three to sixty-five.”

  Ka-thunk! Jack could hear the missing piece fall into place. Proof that the man who abducted Alli, who killed her Secret Service detail, was the same man who, twenty-five years ago, had murdered the two unnamed men at McMillan Reservoir and, shortly thereafter, the Marmoset and Gus.

  Jack had gone after the wrong man; Cyril Tolkan had been responsible for many crimes, but murdering Gus wasn’t one of them. So how clever was Kray/Whitman/Brady to have used a hand-honed paletta to kill, knowing full well that it would lead investigators to the wrong man?

  Come to think of it, didn’t this serial killer use the same MO no
w, twenty-five years later? He’d left clues to lead investigators to FASR and E-2 and away from himself. Everyone had taken the bait—except Jack, whose mind was already hard at work fitting pieces of the puzzle together. At first, it simply hadn’t felt right, and then, little by little, as more pieces of the puzzle appeared for him to manipulate like a Rubik’s Cube, he had started to gain an inkling of his quarry.

  Now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt: This man was his personal nemesis. Kray had played him for a fool once; Jack would track him down this time, or die trying.

  At that moment, his cell phone buzzed. He’d set it on vibrate before they’d left the house. He was getting a text message, just three letters: WRU. It was from Nina, but what the hell? Jack never texted, had no idea of shortcuts.

  He showed the phone’s screen to Alli. “What does this mean?”

  “‘Where are you?’” Alli looked at him. “She needs to see you.”

  Jack thought a minute. Having slipped the Secret Service detail, it wouldn’t do to show up at a meet with Nina with Alli in tow, and he certainly wasn’t going to drop her off at the house, SS detail or no SS detail. They’d blown their coverage once; he couldn’t afford to take the chance they’d do it again.

  What location could he give Nina that wouldn’t seem suspicious? He was about to ask Alli to text Nina back, but then reconsidered. It was odd for Nina to be texting him, rather than phoning. Given the specter of the Dark Car, Jack wasn’t in any frame of mind to take a chance. He logged on to the Web, called up Google Maps. He already had several saved. Choosing the one he wanted, he sent it to Nina. It wouldn’t show up as anything useful to potential eavesdroppers.

  “Okay, we gotta go.” He and Alli rose. “For the time being, sit tight. You have enough food for a week?”

  “I think so, yeah.” Armitage crouched down, opened the half fridge. “Plus, when the Coke and juice run out, we’ve got plenty of water.” He glanced up. “But that’s really all academic, isn’t it? The minute the people who run this place return in the morning, we’ll be screwed.”

  “No, you won’t. I know them.” Jack still owned the building; because he charged his tenants way under the going rate, they’d do anything for him. “Trust me, they won’t bother you.” Jack shook Armitage’s hand. “I’ll get you out of this, Chris.”