The Darkness Gathers: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  He blamed Thomas Harris and all those other writers, with their larger-than-life villains. How was a real serial killer supposed to live up to that image of the brilliant, sophisticated Dr. Lecter? It just wasn’t realistic, and he resented it. Nothing was ever as cool in real life as it was in books and the movies, not even serial homicide.

  On the other hand, it was interesting how in Hannibal, it was only when Clarice Starling had lost everything that Lecter was able to have what he had wanted from her all along. That was the only thing that kept Jed in check, even though he’d wanted to strangle R. Alexander Harriman, Esq., or whoever he was today, with his bare hands. A few thousand dollars, some new clothes, and a Land Rover were supposed to turn him into some kind of puppet taking orders from a mystery mogul. Didn’t these guys get it? He was a homicidal maniac … not some thug, some killer for hire. He had impulses that even he couldn’t control. What hubris to think that they could control him. But he was proud of himself because he had kept his cool. He was smart enough to know that someone powerful enough to get him out of the hospital was powerful enough to put him back. In the meantime, Jed’s benefactor was allowing him to travel in style … while doing exactly what he would have done anyway—rip the flesh off of Lydia Strong’s life, take it right down to the bone, so she’d be nothing but a shell of herself, broken and empty.

  Both cars were in the driveway, a black Lincoln Continental and a sporty red BMW, but the lights were low and Jed hadn’t seen any activity in the house. It would be hours before he made his move. He reached over to the floor on the passenger side and picked up the bag of Krispy Kreme doughnuts he’d bought on Twenty-third Street before leaving Manhattan on his way up to Sleepy Hollow.

  chapter thirty-three

  With the fire crackling in the hearth, the dark varnished floor, antique furniture, plush Turkish area rugs scattered throughout the room, it would have been a pleasant and cozy place if they hadn’t had to worry about whether or not they were going to be killed. Lydia and Jeffrey sat stiffly but unbound on an overstuffed red velvet sofa. Once they were inside, they were treated like guests, except for the armed men in black ski masks and body armor blocking any potential exit from the posh sitting room. Lydia could see Jeffrey scanning the room and counting men, assessing their options. His face was stony, but she could feel the tension coming off him in waves.

  A sophisticated older woman with salt-and-pepper hair styled in a neat bob entered the room on quick, quiet feet. She was dressed in a simple black long-sleeved sheath and was carrying a tray with a teapot and cups, cream and sugar, and a plate of cookies. She didn’t look at them at all as she placed the tray on a table before them and then moved quickly from the room.

  “How civilized,” commented Lydia, wisecracking to manage the fear rising in her belly.

  “There’s no reason not to be civilized,” said Sasa, entering and sitting opposite them. He threw one leg over the arm of the overstuffed chair and touched his fingertips together. “In Albania, there are strict laws of hospitality.”

  “But there’s nothing on the books about selling young women into sexual slavery?” she said, shifting forward on the couch.

  Sasa smiled and shrugged. “There are not a lot of ways to make a living in Albania,” he said simply, not a trace of shame on his coldly handsome face. She noticed how at ease he was, how sure of himself. And it made her wonder about what it might be like to operate without a moral code, whether somewhere deep inside he knew what a monster he was.

  “Why have you brought us here?” asked Lydia.

  He laughed. “I did not bring you here. You followed me here. I have been trying to shake you off for days, but you are like something sticky on my shoe.”

  “You know what I mean. Why did you bring us here instead of just shooting us out on the road?”

  “It wasn’t my decision to make. If it were up to me, you would have been dead a long time ago,” he answered, anger seeping into his voice and darkening his eyes. As he slid forward in the chair, Lydia shrank back involuntarily.

  She had expected him to seem more ghoulish, but now that she was seeing him up close for the first time, he was handsome and well dressed, soft-spoken. It made him all the more horrifying. She imagined that the young women he’d led to the slaughter were charmed by him, seduced by him. That they had looked into his blue eyes and naïvely saw someone they could trust, someone who could make them into models and actresses. It wasn’t fair that nature so often played such games. Monsters should be recognizable, but they seldom were.

  “So educate me, Sasa,” she said, his name feeling dirty on her tongue. “What’s going on?”

  He looked at her sullenly and got up from his chair as the doors opened. Lydia saw Jeffrey do a double take as Jenna Quinn entered the room—followed by Jacob Hanley. Jacob nodded to the men standing guard at the entrance. When they took off their masks, Lydia recognized Special Agents Bentley and Negron.

  “Jesus,” said Jeffrey, standing up, “what the fuck is going on?”

  “You couldn’t have just stayed in New York, right?” said Bentley with a grim smile.

  “Shut up, Bentley,” snapped Jacob, and the agent’s face darkened. He complied but continued to glare at Lydia and Jeffrey.

  Jeffrey sank back down onto the couch, staring at Jacob, trying to get his mind around his sudden appearance in this place. Lydia was at a rare loss for words. She regarded Jenna and Jacob with wonder as her mind raced through all the possibilities. Jenna, looking smaller than Lydia remembered her, walked over toward the window and Jacob came to stand in front of them. He wore a pair of loose black pants and a beige cable-knit sweater. She could just make out the outline of the butt of his gun under the sweater. He stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on dark brown suede shoes. His expression was some combination of triumph and condescension. As the pieces started to fall together in Lydia’s mind, things made more sense than they had in days.

  “She’s here, isn’t she?” asked Lydia finally.

  “Yes, she is,” replied Jacob, sighing. He leaned against the fireplace mantel and regarded Lydia with something that looked annoyingly like benevolent pity.

  “And she has been all along?” asked Lydia with a shake of her head, never taking her eyes from Jacob. She was amazed that this person they thought they knew so well was a complete stranger to her, with an agenda that they had never suspected.

  “Yes,” he said. “Understand that it had to be this way, Lydia.”

  She knitted her brows together and rubbed her hands absentmindedly on her thighs as she tried to understand, the pieces slowly coming together. But for all the things that were starting to make sense, there was one thing she couldn’t understand. “Why?” she said after a moment.

  “Because Tatiana’s safety was the only condition acceptable to the person who could help us to bring down Nathan Quinn.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?” asked Lydia.

  “The FBI,” said Jeffrey, looking at Bentley and Negron, then back to Jacob. “Are you working for the FBI, Jacob?” Lydia heard something like hope in Jeffrey’s voice, as if he was still searching for something redeeming in the man who used to be his friend.

  “More or less,” said Jacob with a shrug. “Let’s just say that the FBI’s interests happened to collude with the interests of another organization that could no longer condone Nathan Quinn’s activities.”

  “The Council,” said Lydia.

  Another shrug from Jacob and a kind of half nod confirmed Lydia’s guess.

  “And Jenna Quinn was the only person who could help you?” she asked.

  Jenna stood at the window. She couldn’t have been more than five four, but there was a hardness to her bearing now that Lydia hadn’t seen before. She had her arms folded across her chest and she leaned against the sill. The morning light was gray and dull; it was bad for Jenna, making her look older and washed-out, tired. She hardly looked like she could be the lynchpin in this operation, but it wa
s all starting to make sense now.

  “Well, Jenna Quinn and Sasa Fitore,” answered Jacob.

  “So the FBI got into bed with the Albanian mob in order to arrest Nathan Quinn?” asked Jeffrey. “They must have wanted him pretty bad.”

  “He’s a very bad man. And he needs to be stopped,” said Bentley with a passion that surprised Lydia. “By any means necessary.”

  “So how did the FBI get Jenna Quinn and Sasa Fitore to cooperate?” Lydia asked.

  “I married Radovan when I was a child, only fifteen,” Jenna said, so softly that Lydia wasn’t sure she had heard her right. “It was an arranged marriage, like so many marriages here. Our families were both very powerful in the organized-crime syndicate that existed even when the Communists were in control. I was too young to know any of this then, but he taught me everything … over the years. And as I grew older, he treated me as much like a partner as a wife, very unusual for an Albanian man.”

  She moved away from the window and began pacing in front of the fireplace, her arms folded across her belly, her eyes on the floor.

  “When the Communist regime fell, Radovan became even more powerful—the most powerful man in Albania. Even the new government was in his pocket, its officials made rich by their expensive ‘ignorance’ of Radovan’s businesses. He had interests in the trade of guns, heroin, women—everything went through him. But then with all the money coming in from the West, he began to realize that there were even bigger opportunities awaiting us. He started his company, American Equities, supposedly to export tobacco, but, in reality, it was women he was exporting.

  “He sought American investors. Nathan Quinn was one of those men. The government wanted their share, of course, so they insisted that the company be open to Albanian investors, as well. Then they encouraged Albanians to invest their meager life savings. Of course, the whole country was in a feeding frenzy; everyone thought they would be rich like Americans, but that money went directly into the hands of the corrupt government. It was all a sham—in a matter of a year, all the money was gone, stolen by government officials; people lost everything. The country, as you know, descended into chaos.

  “Radovan was murdered. I was a pariah in this country. Many people would have liked to see me dead, as well. I had no choice but to accept Nathan Quinn’s proposal and take Tatiana to America. I had always dreamed that she would be educated there.”

  Jenna spoke of the murder of her husband and the destruction of her entire country in a quiet monotone, betraying neither emotion nor regret.

  “I was grieving and afraid when I first moved to the United States,” Jenna went on. Lydia detected the same note of drama that she remembered from Miami. “Sasa, who was Radovan’s closest associate, took over the exporting business. But seeing a bigger opportunity, he came to the United States to start American Beauty, the film company. Nathan financed much of the operation, and his business associates became American Beauty’s biggest clients. Nathan offered a liaison to a world Sasa never would have been able to enter otherwise.”

  “So you knew that Sasa Fitore and his men were tricking or abducting young Albanian woman and using them in snuff films? And that Nathan Quinn was profiting from it and providing the clientele?” interjected Lydia, her voice thick with judgment.

  “What could I do? I was powerless to stop it,” Jenna said, not trying to hide her shame. She took a moment to compose herself and then she continued. “Until now.”

  Lydia remembered Tatiana’s taped indictment of her mother and thought how right she had been.

  “Then I finally noticed how Nathan looked at my own daughter. I realized then how truly evil Nathan was, and I became very afraid for her, for us. I knew I had to find a way out. I just wasn’t sure how. He is so powerful, I never could have gotten away from him on my own.” She turned a pleading gaze on Lydia and Jeffrey, as if begging them with her eyes to understand the predicament in which she had found herself.

  Lydia wondered if Jenna considered Nathan to be more or less evil than her first husband, who, by her own admission, was an arms and drug dealer and a pimp, the man responsible for the fall of Albania, or her current lover, who was a producer of snuff films.

  “Nathan Quinn was a star in the Council, once,” said Jacob. “Through his brilliant investments and international connections, he made a lot of money for a lot of people.”

  “Let me guess,” Jeffrey said. “There came a time when Nathan Quinn’s interests no longer meshed with the interests of the organization. But because of the people he had on the end of his strings, he was untouchable. Some people were making a lot of money … but some people weren’t. And the decision was made to bring Quinn down. But it turned out to be harder than they thought.”

  “He has a lot of important people by the balls,” said Jacob.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jeffrey.

  “Because they are clients of American Beauty,” said Lydia. “Jesus Christ.” Flashing on the images of the DVD, she felt sick. She’d imagined the men she saw to be criminals, maybe mob bosses; she’d never imagined them to be senators and businessmen. She could hardly judge Sasa, who’d grown up surrounded by crime, poverty, and desperation, when these men of privilege were just as morally bankrupt.

  “That’s right,” said Jacob. “Men you wouldn’t believe … raping and murdering young women for sexual gratification. They were a secret society within the secret society, sexual deviants with ravenous appetites. Quinn was untouchable by law; even the other members of the Council couldn’t get near him.”

  “So it became like a war?” asked Lydia.

  “A quiet war. A war they were losing until we realized that the FBI had already begun an investigation into Nathan Quinn and Sasa Fitore. Through their intelligence within the ranks of the Albanian mob, we learned that all of Nathan Quinn’s illegal operations—including American Beauty—were in Jenna’s name.”

  “So you threatened to charge her with crimes and send her to prison?”

  “We threatened to extradite her to Albania so that she could face the charges pending against her here,” said Jacob with a grim smile. “A far more frightening option.”

  “But she’s here now.”

  “Those charges have been dropped,” he said, sitting down in the chair where Sasa had been earlier.

  Jenna hadn’t moved from the mantel, where she stood staring into the flames, holding her hands to the heat. She seemed not to be listening to their conversation, lost in her own thoughts. She had her back to Lydia, who could see that her shoulders were slumped, and Lydia wondered if the shame she seemed to feel was real. She hoped so. Her eyes drifted to Sasa, who stood sullen and silent in the corner, watching Jenna, an ugly look in his eye.

  “How convenient,” said Lydia. “And how did you get this piece of shit involved?” she asked, nodding at Sasa. She saw Sasa’s face flush and his right hand clench into a fist, and she was glad.

  “Through the same FBI investigation. They’d been watching Sasa for over a year, gathering evidence against him on a number of illegal operations. Marianna was a key player in that end of things, even though she never trusted us any more than she trusted her uncle. But addicts are always easy to control. Thanks to her and to Agents Bentley and Negron, we have enough on Mr. Fitore to keep him in prison for most of the next century. It behooves him to cooperate with us.”

  At this, Sasa let out a little laugh, which Jacob seemed to ignore. Lydia turned to look at him. His face had grown angrier, and his body language brought to mind a pit bull on a chain. Sasa had the arrogance of a man with something to prove, an ego that when challenged would defend itself at all costs. He is a very dangerous man to be relying on, thought Lydia. And she hoped the leash they had him on was strong enough to hold him.

  “And what’s Jenna providing for you on Quinn?” asked Jeffrey.

  “She’s providing us with information, security codes, account numbers, habits, names of associates, things that Sasa doesn’t have access to. We’
re gathering evidence against him.”

  “Gathering evidence? You threw the DVD you had with his voice on it out the window of the car the other night,” said Lydia, remembering that night clearly and wondering how she hadn’t realized his motives then.

  “Oh,” said Jacob with an indulgent laugh, “we’ll never get him on that. Too many people, too high up, are involved for that ever to come out. Snuff doesn’t even exist, according to the FBI.”

  “What, then?” she said, trying to quell her rising frustration and anger, as well her sense of helplessness.

  “We’ll get him on tax evasion … something like that,” said Jacob with a world-weary sigh.

  “And he’ll go to federal prison,” said Jeffrey. “Where, having lost everything, he’ll sadly ‘commit suicide.’ ”

  Jacob gave a cryptic smile and crossed his legs. “Well, it would be quite a blow to poor Mr. Quinn.”

  “They don’t want to expose him, or bring him to justice,” Jeffrey said, turning to Lydia with a sad smile. She could see her own emotions mirrored in his face. “Because to do so would be to expose the Council and their dirty little secret. They just want to get rid of him.”

  “Getting rid of him is the only justice we can hope for here, Jeff.”

  “But what about the rest of them, like those two men on the tape?” asked Lydia. “Who are the rest of these men?”

  “I could tell you,” said Jacob, smiling, “but then I’d have to kill you.” He laughed heartily then and said, “I’ve always wanted a legitimate reason to say that.”

  Jeffrey just glared at him.

  “We have another copy of that tape,” said Lydia pointlessly, hating him so intensely, she could taste bile in her throat. She hated him more than she hated Sasa, because at least Sasa knew what he was. Jacob still considered himself one of the good guys. “We could find out who those two men were.”