by Jeff Pearce
Mary Ash didn’t bother to shift from her tranquil spot on the grass. She looked up at Tim and Crystal and said with the faintest note of self-conscious humility, “It’s a work in progress. I’m using what I can remember.”
A video was placed on YouTube claiming responsibility for Dieter Wildman’s kidnapping. Wildman, roped to a chair, looked very frail but defiant. His left eye was swollen and livid with a yellowish red bruise, but apart from the doctor’s slightly elevated breathing, the consensus was that the victim was all right, all things considered. Now if they could just reach him in time…
Unlike other terrorist groups, the ones who had taken Wildman didn’t force him to read out their demands, and they didn’t even bother to wear ski masks or scarves. One of them with curly brown hair that badly needed cutting and a craggy weathered face—a man who looked like he’d spent his life planning in basements—addressed the camera.
“Last year, there were more than a hundred and fifty thousand abortions across the United Kingdom,” insisted the man on the screen, his seething outrage carrying a discernible Northern Irish lilt. “Abortions performed by Nazis like this old bastard here.”
“I’m the Nazi?” asked Wildman, his voice weak.
“Shut the fuck up!” roared the man.
But still Wildman softly demanded, “I’m the Nazi?” And his exhaling breath held a croaking laugh, bitter and pitying for the unrecognized, forlorn irony.
Tim remembered reading in a background note how Wildman had survived Auschwitz. Christ, imagine coming through that horror only to endure the ignorant screaming and barbarities of these troglodytes.
“Um, not that it matters,” said Crystal, “but the figure he cited is wrong. And ridiculous. The group he claims to be speaking for here is notorious for inventing their figures. They also like to pad them with ‘suspected abortions.’ They throw in estimates based on pharmaceutical sales of the morning after pill.”
“Terrific.”
Crystal tapped the screen. “This is Desmond Leary, former IRA. terrorist turned bank robber—then mercenary after peace finally broke out. Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Pakistan… Mr. Big Conscience for Babies doesn’t mind if the ones already born in Africa wind up child soldiers. He’s muscle, not brains.”
“How do you know?” asked Tim. He clicked the little slash mark across the icon for the video’s sound. Leary’s rant was irritating noise, not providing them with anything useful.
“You have a reputation for insight,” said Crystal. “You tell me.”
Tim paused to consider. Then: “He’s showing his face. This is a guy who rationalized for years that he was slaughtering and bombing for a cause, and he didn’t want to be a spokesman in all that time. He’d have the strategic and tactical common sense to hide his identity. But I doubt even mercenaries like him earn enough to pay off Somali pirates. Someone knew exactly which of his buttons to push—the whole angle that unborn children are the perfect innocents. No gray lines, no compromises… He’s been primed for a long time to work for a cause that’s personal to him, and someone took advantage of that.”
“You’d make a fair counter terrorism analyst.”
“Only fair? I did work in the American foreign service.”
Crystal smiled fleetingly at his witticism then reached for a file. “The cash behind Leary comes from this American televangelist, Parker Scott Thompson.”
She held up a publicity still of Thompson looking towards Heaven with a smug grin of personal knowledge, then a surveillance photo of the forty-eight-year-old preacher in a polo shirt and beach shorts.
“Mr. Thompson is a cliché,” she went on. “Argentine authorities have known for a while he’s had an affair with one of their top actresses in Buenos Aires. We’re guessing he forgot to mention to Leary that he arranged an abortion for her at a clinic in Holland. Whether he’s funding this out of demented guilt or he likes having the power, we don’t care. He was stupid enough to fly back to Argentina as Wildman was kidnapped, and the Argentines don’t mind at all having him extradited to us.”
“And your people don’t mind him becoming your problem?” asked Tim.
Crystal laughed. “He’s small beer as far we’re concerned. He has no ministries in the UK. His show isn’t carried on any of our networks. The second he screams ‘atheist persecution,’ we’ll leak the story about the actress—photos and all. Leary’s the bigger threat. He’ll have whole Facebook pages of supporters in Northern Ireland, and for years, he’s had a network of safe houses he can rely on.”
“But something tells me you have an idea where he is.”
“There’s that famous insight.” Crystal shut off her laptop. “You think Miller has ever been to Derry?”
Derry. The Troubles had once been bad here. According to the files, Desmond Leary learned to hate the British and became radicalized as a thirteen-year-old boy. That was after he got caught in the shooting gallery of the Bogside Massacre known as Bloody Sunday. But as the Nineties started, the violence died down, and by then Leary had long moved on to plant bombs in London. Derry survived the Troubles and him.
There were—and it seemed there would always be—shoppers at the world’s oldest department store of Austins, and there were even more tourists these days coming to see the old walls on the river’s west bank and St Columb’s Cathedral. In Maydown, far from the city’s landmarks, there was an empty factory warehouse a couple of miles up from the old DuPont manufacturing plant. No one had paid much attention to it since it was quietly bought up two years ago.
The British were sure the merchant marine ship was sneaking into the estuary leading into the River Foyle and ultimately into the port of Lisahally, where the Karma Booth would have to be moved by truck. Eighteen counter terrorism officers back in London had pored over the prison and arrest records of Leary’s associates, along with their financials. And they had turned up the warehouse in Maydown bought by one of them. It was a warehouse that, according to satellite images, had a couple of security cameras for its perimeter and yet absolutely no business at all going in and out of it during the day.
The SAS team drove only so far up to the building, and then their vehicles stopped. Tim, Crystal and Miller were to wait, and it was made clear that God bloody help them if they didn’t. “You don’t contradict these guys,” Crystal warned. “They go in like Batman, and you never see them coming.”
Still, mostly thanks to Crystal’s position and influence, they were allowed to follow a hundred yards behind with an escort once the SAS team had disposed of Leary’s point guards with sharpshooters. Miller, deciding discretion was the better part of valor, followed two hundred yards behind.
Tim hadn’t worn a Kevlar vest since one of his assignments in Asia. It was heavy and hot around his torso, and when he tapped it with his knuckles, it felt like he wore a hockey pad. Crystal handled hers more gracefully, but still she looked half-swallowed by the gray vest.
Her hand urged him to stay back. They shouldn’t follow too close behind the team. So they watched the SAS squad burst into the warehouse with their rifles raised and their flashlights sweeping the green walls, and then they heard shouts and a thunderclap of staccato gunfire, loud and long and ugly.
“Hands on your head, down on the floor! Down on the floor right—”
More gunfire, and now between the eruptions, Tim and Crystal heard another sound. A metallic ringing and a hum, getting louder.
“What is that?” she asked.
Tim knew. He tugged on her arm, and when she resisted, he sprinted ahead. “Shit! That’s the Booth! They’re using it now!”
“Tim, wait!” she yelled. “They haven’t cleared—Tim!”
But he kept running. She was still calling his name, warning him, and then she was at his side, and her eyes widened with shock as she came face to face with the Karma Booth for the first time. Tim was already familiar with what would happen next. There was nothing he could do. Dieter Wildman was in the first chamber as
it filled with dazzling flares of color and light, but his expression remained inexplicably calm. Tim understood. The doctor’s face was set in a firm resolve to preserve his dignity.
“Oh, God,” whispered Tim.
Decades ago, Dieter Wildman might have been forced into a claustrophobic space like this one to be exterminated, and so now he had decided on his posture of farewell. He had lived with a rehearsed knowledge of his potential end for decades. Now that death was coming, he knew how to act. There would be no screams. There would be no yells or even an outraged final look. He would simply be going…
Tim waited for the inevitable.
The officers in helmets and protective gear had two surviving terrorists on the floor, one wounded and being handcuffed, while the other was still fighting with his nose in the dirt of the cement floor. Tim recognized Leary from the video sent out on the Internet.
“You’ll see in a minute we did the right thing!” Leary was shouting. “We’re bloody heroes, and you should—”
“Shut up!” barked the officer with his knee in Leary’s back, light flickering and bouncing off his helmet.
Miller stood timidly outside the doorway, the only civilian to heed Crystal’s warning to hang back and let the assault team do their work. Now she hurried over to him, desperate and close to panic, grabbing his lapel.
“Can you shut it down? Can you do something?”
“No, no, it’s hopeless—”
“Miller!”
“It’s too late, Crystal! They started the process, Weintraub and I have no idea how to reverse it!”
They were helpless, impotent in the blinding spray of colored molecules from the first chamber. Tim felt more than saw Crystal stepping over to him, looking to him for answers, for a solution. But he had none. Leary, still struggling on the dusty floor, was able to crane his neck to see the fruits of his labor. His face broke into a delighted grin, sure that he was about to be vindicated. Then his expression went blank as did everyone else’s.
Because the process wasn’t going as planned.
Dieter Wildman was still whole. The light of the Karma Booth refused to carve into his body and transform him. The doctor, resigned a moment ago to his fate, now betrayed a look of confused bewilderment. He knew instinctively that whatever was supposed to be happening hadn’t.
And Desmond Leary, still fighting the knee wedged in his back and resisting the handcuffs about to be slapped on, bellowed with rage over being cheated. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
He rolled and wrestled out of the officer’s grasp, kicking a heel into the man’s head and scrambling to his feet, breaking into a sprint. It was blind, mad dog insanity—running up to the first chamber of the Booth and yanking the door open. Leary was actually getting inside to choke Dieter Wildman as if this would prompt the kaleidoscopic, dazzling bursts to do his will and execute his hostage. Crystal ran forward. One of the SAS men ran forward.
Then Leary screamed. The doctor’s eyes were wide with horror. He was less than an inch away, his wrinkled, liver-spotted hands trembling in a panicked gesture to comfort, to help the man, no longer his tormentor but a human being now attacked by the light. Light reflected and bounced around the chamber, taking Desmond Leary but not Dieter Wildman. The door still open, Crystal and the SAS man shouted for the doctor to come out, get out of there, and they were pulling the doctor to safety—
Leary was gone.
The second chamber began to hum. And now light—flashing, pulsing, signaling an arrival. Everyone waited.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Crystal gasped as the necrotic, sickening odor from Leary’s execution assaulted her nostrils and provoked a reflexive gagging. Tim had to cover his own nose and mouth at the smell. The team officers, fiercely disciplined, stifled their reactions, but he caught their sharp intakes of breath as they stood in awe of the flashing chamber.
Tim noticed another smell, one that was different from what he remembered of Mary Ash’s resurrection.
Wildman, still very much alive, stood next to them, and Crystal panted for breath and asked, “Are you all right, sir?”
“Yes. Yes, I think so… What happened to him?”
She couldn’t answer, looking again to Tim, but he didn’t know. She nodded to the SAS man, who merely hustled the doctor away, following procedure. It didn’t matter if Wildman said he was all right. He needed to be rushed to their medic and checked out. Tim and Crystal barely noticed them leaving, their eyes still fixed on the second chamber, waiting for the motes and whorls to coalesce.
The Booth had taken Leary, but if it took Leary, then who was coming…?
The odor. It was faintly reminiscent of childbirth. Tim had witnessed deliveries in Third World villages. He could instantly recall that smell, even though he had never had any children of his own. Then it took on a sickening sweetness, like the flesh of burn victims. The shadow emerging now behind the tinted glass of the second chamber was adult in height…
No one stepped forward to open the door panel of the second Booth. The arrival itself pushed the door, banging it open with the limp claw twitches of dinosaur limbs, of a visceral fetal anger.
Then it shuffled wetly out of the chamber, and there was a pat, pat, pat… It left a puddle of fluid, a disgusting brown pool, as if meconium flowed in a river from a pediatrics ward. One of the officers let go of his rifle and vomited. Crystal, next to Tim, let out a short, sharp cry of horror at the thing that now walked into their world.
Tim stared, and a distant part of him recognized he was numb, stupidly staring, but he could do nothing else. Oh, my God was the thought that kept playing over and over in his mind.
It was Leary. Desmond Leary reborn in the second chamber as a grotesque parody of a resurrected victim. But no, it was more horrible than that. In his fanatical career, Leary must have passed around his share of inflammatory pamphlets, with the kind of disgusting propaganda images that could be seen on placards protesting outside abortion clinics. And the Booth had reshaped him in the image of his hate.
He was still Leary, but now he was more it than man. And several its at once.
Here was Leary, with more than one pair of eyes, but so many pairs that were clouded with milky white cataracts, and what wheezed and drooled very much like a mouth on the misshapen head sucked in the air and made an angry hiss. There were atrophied limbs. There were curves and rounded growths of elephantiasis and greenish, scaly flesh of leprosy. There were twisted parodies of bone that were beyond spina bifida. And inside an orifice was what appeared to be a second, more regular face, revolting because it could still be recognized as Desmond Leary’s face.
Its beaded eyes and thin lips were twisted in an expression of pure malevolence. Eyes like abandoned shining pearls on a hellish landscape, with multiple mouths that belonged more on insects or reptiles. It was not a single creature; more of a community that was never intended to grow, forced together and now feeling the rage of a mob, a mob of things that weren’t supposed to be here, in existence. Desmond Leary had hated so much and for so long, even while he screamed high and shrill over “life.”
So the Booth gave him life. All his twisted, warped conceptions of it.
Tim staggered, his head suddenly on fire. It was a rush of migraine-like agony that stripped him of his rational senses, and he looked towards Crystal with a primitive need for her to help. But she was already holding her head in equal pain. They all were. Miller dropped to the floor on his hands and knees, yelling out.
It was not the same as what Emily Derosier had done to them in Paris. This was not a probing but a silent scream inside their skulls. The Leary creature was demanding, pleading to die.
One of the officers found the strength to save them, firing his rifle. There was a jackhammer roar as bullets sank into the soft, bloated pink mass with its leering mouths and limping gait. The Leary-thing squealed and whimpered as it died, and worst of all, it laughed. The deformed thing actually laughed. As if its existence were a great joke, and it
was happy that it won a reprieve.
Crystal burst into tears and cried out, “I’ve got to get out of here! Get me out of here!”
“Okay, okay,” said Tim, shaken as well. “We’ll get out of here—”
“I need to get out of here now! Right now! Jesus, please!”
They ran back to the car, Crystal wracked with sobs in the passenger seat. Tim didn’t say a thing. He left her alone, deciding it was best to give her a few minutes. His own hands were shaking, and he had to stand a moment in the quiet Irish countryside in the crisp night air to center himself. Then he went to find the SAS team’s vehicle, where its medical officer was peeling the Velcro of a blood pressure cuff off Dieter Wildman’s right arm.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” answered Wildman, looking tired. And haunted. “I’m fine, really.”
“They’ll get you home,” said Tim. “I’m very sorry this happened to you. Your government will likely suggest you don’t talk about this, in case it gives other psychopaths any ideas.”
“I would expect them to say that, yes. But… Mr. Cale, is it? I’m sure you know that madness never lacks for creativity.”
“True. But I prefer we don’t give madness any more inspiration.”
He nodded a goodbye, and it occurred to him he should check on Miller. The young scientist was perched on the hood of one of the army vehicles, his laptop open, but he wasn’t typing. His hands were steepled over his mouth, his eyes blinking, struggling to focus, blinking again.
“Hey,” called Tim. “You all right?”
“Um, sure, yeah—of course.” His body shuddered with a nervous release of energy. “No. No, I’m not. Are you?”
“No.”
“That was… It was… I’ve got to write Weintraub. I’ve got to report what happened.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
Tim couldn’t think of what to say.
“I’m going to go with the doctor. Hitch a ride back in the medical truck. I’ll see you guys in the morning, okay?”