The Leviathan Effect

by James Lilliefors

  “Excuse me!”

  Blaine turned. Saw a dark blur emerging out of the rain. A bearded man in a black plastic slicker. “Do you have the time?”

  She froze, sensing right away that something was wrong. The man kept moving. Did not stop the way someone would have who actually wanted to know the time.

  Then she saw his right arm lift, incongruously, as if he were reaching for something above him, and in the next instant she felt his fist smashing the side of her face. Blaine stumbled backward, falling into the wall, her bag slamming to the pavement, beer bottles shattering.

  The man’s arms went around her torso and he stumbled with her down to the concrete. His knee rammed her thigh, his right hand slapping at her face. She heard the shift points of his SUV engine idling in the rain behind them, a whine and drone of the windshield wipers, and felt herself about to pass out.

  Blaine reached inside her jacket, grasping for a button on her cell phone. But the man noticed and violently jerked her arm out.

  “No.”

  In the next instant, Blaine scooted back and kicked her knee into the man’s groin, then scampered on hands and knees out into the parking lot, trying to gain her footing.

  But the man was with her. She felt his full weight landing on top of her, her chest slamming the pavement. Felt his knee on her back, knocking the wind out of her. Holding her. And then he dragged her back to the stairwell, out of the rain, and turned her over. He punched the side of her head as she struggled beneath him. Then his right hand covered her nose and mouth and she felt herself beginning to smother.

  THE ASSASSIN SAW Blaine reach into her jacket and he yanked her arm out, with the intention of breaking it. But his gloves slipped on the wet nylon of her jacket sleeve and then she caught him by surprise, ramming her knee just above his groin.

  He recoiled for an instant, during which she got a good look at him, and managed to scramble away. Desperately, like a crab, crawling into the rain.

  She didn’t make it. The assassin lunged at her and pinned her to the pavement. Pulled her back under cover by the elevators.

  “Okay?” he said. He lay her out again and sat on top.

  Blaine watched him, breathing heavily, her eyes stunned. His hands traced a pattern on her face, as if he were a blind man reading Braille. We’re in a pretty good spot here, he thought, half-hidden behind the stairwell. I’m going to mold you now. He moved his fingers delicately over her face and neck. He actually liked her; that was the sad part of this. In another life, they might have even been friends. But not now. That chance had been lost. He listened to the rain and the shifting of his engine and the drone of the wipers, straining to hear any other sounds. No. No one would be out on a night like this. He leaned down so his face was touching hers. “You want to try anything else?” he whispered, lightly licking her auricle, rubbing his beard against her cheek. She didn’t respond. He sat up, watched her. Her face was mottled, eyes closed, her dark blond hair wet against her skin. She was breathing heavily. When she still wouldn’t speak, the man slapped his open right hand hard across Blaine’s face, and he saw her eyes open slowly. And then he studied the way her skin changed, seeming to fill with blood. He liked that. He imagined what she’d be like at the farmhouse, afterward.

  He sat very still on top of her, feeling her heavy breathing underneath him. It wasn’t unpleasant. “Okay?” he whispered, still catching his own breath. A thin stream of blood trickled from one of her nostrils; the flesh around her right eye was already beginning to darken. He gazed back at the parking lot, seeing the escape route she had imagined for an instant. He smiled, but knew that he needed to move quickly now, even though he felt protected here—out of the rain, out of view from the road. He reached inside his left coat pocket and extracted a rag that he had soaked with isoflurane and held it over her face. Felt her breathing quicken under his hand, then slow. Watched her eyes open once and close. Then the assassin replaced the rag in his pocket and unzipped her jacket. He removed his right glove and rubbed his hand over her chest several times, massaging the soft skin of her breasts. “Okay?” he whispered.

  Blaine said nothing. Eventually, he found what she had been reaching for. It wasn’t mace or a gun. It was just a cell phone.

  The man stood, pulling on his glove, surveying the parking lot. Nothing. He extracted the hinged cuffs from a rear pocket of his jeans, and knelt on the concrete. Drew the backs of her wrists together and double-locked the cuffs behind her. Then he lifted her under the arms and dragged her across the pavement to the back seat of his SUV. Yanked her inside; she was heavier than he had thought, but it was not unpleasant lifting her, bending her legs inside the vehicle, one and then the other; rubbing the insides of her thighs. He was out in plain sight again, though. Something he said he’d never do.

  The assassin opened the driver’s door and slid in behind the wheel. He shifted to reverse, then drive. He pulled onto the highway, went half a block and turned into the lot of a darkened office building. Parked around the side, in a deep patch of shadow. He reached into the back and went through her pockets and purse. Found a wallet with twenty-seven dollars in paper money, several credit cards, and a picture pouch with three photos of a young man—her son, no doubt—car keys, a motel room key. He had to improvise now. To finish it.

  Room 217.

  The assassin cut the engine and got out. He jogged back, splashing through the rain, coming at the motel parking lot from the rear, through a thatch of woods. Past the stairwell. As he reached the lot, he checked the Smith & Wesson .38 in his shoulder holster. Her shopping bag, he saw, was still lying by the stairs. He picked it up and pushed it through the slot in the trash can.

  Then he walked up the stairs to the second floor, one step at a time, glancing out at the rain slanting across the empty highway, the blurred lights of apartment houses in the distance.

  A lamplight glowed behind the curtain of 217. There was a thin crack for him to look through. Nothing.

  He removed the safety catch on his gun and gripped it in his right hand. This would be delicate, yes.

  He touched the knob, then inserted the key. When the latch turned, he kicked the door with his right foot, entering in a combat stance, ready to fire a succession of rounds into Charles Mallory. His second target.

  But there was no one in the room.

  Nothing.

  He pushed the door closed behind him and stood straighter, though still ready, his heart thumping.

  With his weapon extended in both hands, the assassin cleared the other spaces in the enclosure—a double closet; a bathroom. Nothing. All clear. The room was empty.

  He kept the gun raised as he pulled the motel door open again, leaving it unlocked, alert for any sound or motion. But there was nothing. Site cleared. All he heard now was the rain. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He jogged back through the alley to the SUV, slipped inside behind the steering wheel, and drove back onto the pike, his prisoner of war lying motionless across the back seat.

  FORTY-FIVE

  CHARLES MALLORY TRIED TO call Blaine, and again his call went to voice mail. He shouldn’t have allowed her to leave. He felt a rage tear through him, afraid he’d let her down. Afraid that someone had followed her. Was she really off the grid of the government’s surveillance? He didn’t know. But he did know this: it had been his idea for her to come here, and she had been safe when they’d been together; but the game had changed as soon as she left alone.

  Restless, Mallory stepped outside onto the ledge. He breathed the cold mist from the rain, looking past the red glow of the Pike Motel sign. Saw his breath become vapor as he exhaled. Beyond the awning, wind blew gusts of rain horizontally into the bare trees.

  He counted the cars in the lot. Seven. Lights burned in the motel office, he noticed, but there was no one behind the check-in counter. Mallory saw a television screen through the office window in a corner of the room, and the familiar swirling color-enhanced bands of Alexander. Everyone’s attention was riveted on
the same thing. It took a disaster to do that.

  Mallory looked up at the distant office buildings beyond the trees, dark silhouettes against the sky, and the dim glow of moonlight through the sheets of rain. He gazed down at the parking lot again and saw the incongruity. His heart began to race.

  No.

  He went back inside the room and grabbed his Beretta. Came out and looked again. The thing sat there in the corner of the lot without explanation, parked in the rain. A taunt. Something that shouldn’t have been there: Blaine’s Ford Focus, occupying the last space. But Blaine hadn’t returned. She wasn’t here. Was she?

  He hurried to the stairwell and down to the second floor. Could she be in her room? Wouldn’t she have called? He glanced at the bottom of the stairwell and saw something by the elevators that stopped him—a pool of orange liquid and broken glass. The liquid trailed across the pavement under the concrete awning, ending at a metal trash bin. Mallory hurried down. He tilted the cover of the trash can and looked. Saw a plastic bag, broken beer bottles, smashed orange juice container. Bottle of aspirin. Hers. “No!”

  He ran back up the stairs to Room 217. There was light through the curtains. He squinted in and knocked, holding out his gun. Tried the door. It was unlocked. Mallory pushed it open and, gun drawn, stepped inside. Listened.

  The room was vacant.

  But then he noticed the wet shoeprints on the carpet. Someone had been inside, probably just minutes earlier. He stepped out and surveyed the lot. The walkway was too wet for clear indentations of shoeprints.

  So where had he taken her?

  He ran back to the third floor room and pressed a button on one of his cell phones. Chaplin answered after the third ring.

  “Hello.”

  “I have an emergency,” he said. “Do you still have tracking on Catherine Blaine?”

  He heard opera music blaring in the background. Rigoletto, perhaps.

  “Why, yes.”

  “Good.” Chaplin turned down the music. “We need to follow her. Right away. Both of us. She’s been abducted. Come on out. Be in touch with me.”

  After a pause, Chaplin said, “What should I bring?”

  Mallory imagined where they would be going. He heard the soprano in the background hitting a high note, then Chaplin shutting the music off. “Bring night vision goggles and two telephone headsets, if you have them.” He added, “And bring a gun.”

  Mallory clicked off, his heart racing. Think like the enemy was the mantra of intelligence field agents; but this was an enemy he didn’t know. Not really.

  There was also a GPS application on her phone, he knew. Walking down to his car, Mallory called up the zoomable vector-based map on his own phone and moments later found her—her location pulsing like a heartbeat, appearing to be moving back toward the Beltway. Only a couple of miles from the motel.

  He got in his car and pulled out onto the pike. Floored the accelerator.

  Several minutes later, he glanced down at the phone and saw that the locator had stopped blinking. The GPS was no longer transmitting. Whoever had her must have turned it off.

  He kept driving toward the Beltway, though, trying to think like his enemy now. He was chasing a man who had done this before, and who had gotten away with it. Seven or eight times. Probably more. Someone who had a system. He’d be driving now toward a sequestered location, Mallory guessed, out of sight of accidental onlookers. A place where he could hide a car, perhaps. Or several cars. And maybe bury a body. Where he took Dr. Keri Westlake. A large plot of land. Rolling country out in the suburbs. A farm, maybe. That was part of his system. And it was a system. The MOs had all seemed different, but that was by design. To seem different. To mask their similarities. He understood that now.

  But where? Which direction? How much time would he wait? Or had the abductor already done what he was going to do?

  Minutes later, speeding along the two-lane highway toward the Beltway, Mallory glanced down at his phone and saw that the GPS app on Blaine’s cell had been activated again. Had she managed to turn it on? Or was this a trap?

  ONE FLOOR BELOW the Oval Office, four men sat in high-backed black leather chairs around a long wooden conference table in the Situation Room: the President, Vice President Bill Stanton, Intelligence Director Harold DeVries, and Dr. James Wu, the President’s chief science adviser. At the President’s directive, Dr. Wu had taken the lead on the White House’s hurricane response. They were waiting for the first briefing from Mr. Zorn and the Weathervane Group. Starbucks coffee cups were in front of each of them, along with printed copies of the projections provided hours earlier by Mr. Zorn.

  By eight the next morning, the storm was supposed to have begun breaking apart, according to those projections. Turning east into open sea. At this point, Alexander should have already slowed significantly, to less than 100 mph, according to Zorn’s projections.

  But Dr. Wu gave them the latest readings from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, and no such weakening had been detected. There had been a slight narrowing of the wind field and some slowing of the strongest winds over the past four hours, but it was much less substantial than predicted. The center of the system remained highly organized and Alexander was now a Category 3, with winds topping 127 mph. The National Weather Service had just issued a forecast that some coastal communities would be rendered “uninhabitable” after Alexander came through. FEMA had sent its Incident Management Assistance Teams to staging areas up and down the East Coast, deploying millions of liters of water and millions of meals, along with cots and blankets, and coordinating emergency plans with state and local officials. The National Guard and the Red Cross were also mobilizing, preparing for the aftermath.

  “No signs yet of diminishing,” Dr. Wu told the others, in summary, trying to sound unemotional. But inside, he felt sick. This was the worst storm system he had ever seen; the devastation would be unprecedented. “We’re getting a lot of severe thunderstorm activity still in the Carolinas up into Virginia and Maryland. And some reports of violent and continuous cloud-to-cloud lightning storms.”

  “Let’s just wait until we’ve heard what they have to say,” the President said. A silence fell over the room. They all stared numbly at the four-foot monitor that conveyed the real-time storm coordinates and the monitor beside it showing a high-resolution satellite image of Alexander swirling toward the East Coast, its cloud cover and wind field stretching nearly from New England to Florida.

  At 9 P.M., the digital speaker made a short chirping sound, indicating an incoming call. “Go ahead,” the President said.

  “This is Dr. Romfo, sir. Good evening.”

  Dr. Wu pictured the tall, husky, dark-haired scientist.

  “Yes.”

  The President held eye contact with Wu. Waiting.

  “Mr. Zorn and the rest of our team are here,” she said, her voice thick and, it seemed, a little nervous.

  “All right.”

  “This is our first update. I am pleased to report that the four mitigation operations are now fully active. The maximum sustained wind speed of the system has diminished from 135 miles per hour to 107. The wind field has also decreased significantly. We are seeing particularly strong results from the LRT process, which has, most significantly, begun to disrupt the storm’s eye wall. This will produce results that won’t be evident until the morning, however.”

  Dr. Romfo then recited a litany of readings from the past four hours, conveying variations and declines in wind speed, a steady decrease in the storm’s vacuum dome, drops in barometric pressure, and increases in central pressure and wind shear. Her voice occasionally seemed to shift register.

  When she finished, several minutes later, it was the Vice President who spoke first. “Uh, okay. And, so, let me just ask, then, if I may, in plain English: When will we see this thing actually break apart?”

  “Sir?”

  “When will this thing knock back down to a Category Two or One? Are we still on target to see that in the
morning?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Dr. Romfo answered. But her voice sounded tentative. “Of course, I’m not able to make precise projections of that nature. But, yes, there should be continued weakening through the morning hours. Our projections, as you know, show it breaking up by late morning or afternoon and turning to sea. But there are still a number of variables at play with a system of this size. And those projections, as we have indicated, are nonlinear.”

  “A couple of questions,” said Harold DeVries.

  There was no reply. “This is simply an update,” Dr. Romfo said. “Your next report will be at eight A.M.”

  “Yes,” the President said.

  Moments later, the line went to a dial tone.

  The men in the room exchanged looks.

  “Anyone having buyer’s remorse here?” the Vice President finally said. No one smiled.

  “Jim, do you see this thing tracking in any way with their projections?” the President asked.

  Dr. Wu frowned, as if he hadn’t considered that issue before. He didn’t speak for a long time. “Honestly? No. Not really, sir,” he said, eyeing the President earnestly. “It’s—there has been some wind shear, which is having an effect on the outer bands. And the wind speeds have diminished. But the latest sustained wind-speed reading we have is 127.”

  “Not 107?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So, what’s happening?” the Vice President said. “Are they fudging?”

  “We can’t say that. It may be they’re basing these readings on data that we simply don’t have,” said Dr. Wu, playing the diplomat. “They obviously have their own satellite-based technologies and their own measurements.”