False Prophet: The gripping breakthrough thriller (A Saul Marshall Thriller 1)

by Richard Davis

  I’d remained calm when I’d discovered Samuel strapped into a bomb, and when I’d spoken to Drexler over the phone. I’d remained calm when he’d taken Vannevar, and when people had died in Mineral. But in that moment, as I watched these people clawing at their throats, suffocating slowly, I was tipped over the edge and a thirst for revenge, mad and animalistic, took over. I understood that Drexler, for now, was out of reach. But I reckoned I knew where Lofkin was. And so I decided Lofkin was going to pay.

  In the next instant, I was tearing back towards The Essex House. By the time I burst into the lobby and approached the reception desk, I could already hear the first few sirens starting up outside. The man behind the counter, clearly oblivious to what was happening, sneered at my appearance. He opened his mouth to speak, but I got in first.

  ‘FBI,’ I barked, presenting my ID. ‘I’m looking for two Caucasian men, one with distinctive red hair. What’ve you seen?’

  Ignoring my ID, he gave me a look that spoke caution and contempt. He thought I was a nutcase from off the street.

  ‘Well, sir, if you wish for us to disclose such information, you’ll need a warrant. Otherwise—’

  I reached over the counter, grabbed the guy by his throat, and lifted him off his feet. His pupils dilated with fear.

  ‘Listen very carefully,’ I hissed. ‘There’s been a terrorist attack outside your hotel. People are dying. So I haven’t got time to fuck around. Now, I’ll ask you only once – what room are they in?’

  No sooner had he choked out a number than I was hurtling up the hotel stairs. 502, he’d said, and I wasn’t surprised. 502 was the suite I’d stayed in all those years ago. And as I climbed, two steps at a time, I pictured the interior of this room in my mind’s eye. But I didn’t use this knowledge to devise a subtle approach to the situation. I was out of patience. All I was interested in was getting inside and blowing Lofkin’s brains from his head. And so, when I arrived on the fifth floor and outside 502, I didn’t hesitate: I extracted the SIG, chambered a round, and with one vicious kick cast the door aside.

  By all rights, it should’ve been the last thing I ever did.

  Chapter 25

  Thursday, February 28, 2013.

  It was just sitting there, a few yards before me: a simple bomb, made of Semtex. It looked so harmless, so innocent. Yet it was crystal clear that this device, connected as it was to the door, had been meant to go off as I’d come in; that it’d been meant to kill me. And, courtesy of my HRT bomb disposal training, I could see exactly what’d spared my life: a small fault in the fuse’s circuitry. Otherwise, the bomb was sophisticated – a very capable effort.

  By killing me at The Essex House, Drexler had intended to achieve a symbolic victory. But I’d been spared by the tiniest of errors.

  I was, however, too busy berating myself to feel any kind of relief. I’d allowed my temper to get the better of me, and the result had very nearly been fatal. If one thing was clear, it was that I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake twice, because next time, I might not be so lucky.

  As suddenly as my rage had come, I summoned my composure, and took myself firmly in hand. Then I took a closer look at the device. Fortunately, as I’d first supposed, the bomb presented no threat: it needed modification before anything would set it off. However, I didn’t let down my guard, because it occurred to me I may not be alone. It was possible, given what’d happened in Mineral, that there were cultists somewhere in the suite who’d been intending to bring a suicide mission to its conclusion. But while I was willing to consider this eventuality for the sake of caution, it seemed more likely that if anyone was in this suite, it’d be Samuel. After all, Drexler had only taken Samuel to goad me. So it was possible that he’d want to get rid of us both at the same time. Though, if this was the case, then I had to hope Samuel had been gagged and restrained. It was just as possible the cultists had taken the easier option, and simply put a bullet in his brain.

  Looking around the suite I could see that, although there’d been some superficial refurbishment since the 1990s, the layout had remained unchanged. There was a living room (in which I was standing), a bedroom, and a bathroom. So, closing the door to the suite, I quickly rounded the living room, checking any spaces where a body, living or dead, might be concealed. Then I did the same for the bedroom. In both the coast was clear. But then I entered the bathroom and what I found there turned my world completely upside down.

  I found a body alright, but it wasn’t Samuel’s. It was Lofkin’s. It was floating, naked, in a body of water that – with the help of sealant applied to the drain and doors – had been trapped in the shower unit. Both his hands and legs had been tightly bound. And immediately I understood. He’d been placed, while in a state of sleep deprivation, in this body of water which, due to its height, had required Lofkin to stand on tiptoes to breathe. The bindings, of course, had stopped him getting free. Then, when he’d finally reached a point of exhaustion in which the urge to sleep had been overpowering, he’d been forced to let himself drown.

  Lofkin had been targeted by The Order and, just like The Order’s initial victims two days earlier, he’d been placed in a situation in which he’d been forced to self-inflict harm. Of this, I was sure. But what was wildly unclear was why they’d chosen to target one of their own. Of course, there were a number of possibilities – perhaps he’d wronged the cult, perhaps he’d known too much, perhaps Drexler simply ordered it on a whim – but it was impossible to be sure. And the questions didn’t stop there. Who, precisely, had done this? And, more importantly, where the hell did this leave Samuel?

  But I didn’t have time to ponder all this. I needed to get moving. And already, I’d formulated a plan. If I could modify the bomb to go off after I’d escaped, I could convince Drexler that his plan had, in fact, succeeded and in doing so, I could put myself in a perfect position to plot a sneak offensive. But first I knew I ought to search the place, since whoever had been here had assumed the suite was going up in flames, so the chances they’d negligently left something behind were higher than they might otherwise have been.

  Starting in the bathroom, I began rifling through everything that could conceivably contain a clue – the cabinets, the toilet, Lofkin’s discarded clothes – before moving onto the living room. However, it wasn’t until I got to the bedroom that I found something: a small rucksack, tucked beneath the comforter. Immediately, I emptied its contents on the bed. And although at first my heart sank at the sight of empty potato-chip packets, flattened juice boxes, and apple cores, in among this rubbish I also spotted a crumpled piece of writing-paper. But when I read what was on this page, written undoubtedly in Samuel’s hand, two things happened. First, my world was turned the right side up again. And second, it was smashed into a thousand pieces.

  02/28/2013 – Third Day of Euphrates

  5:30 a.m. Depart for NY.

  11 a.m. Check in Essex House, Room 502. Lofkin’s salvation.

  11:15 a.m. Depart for NJ, after preparing father’s salvation.

  1 p.m. Collect kerosene, restraints. 407, Bloomfield Avenue, Montclair.

  1:15 p.m. Spender’s salvation. 141 Highland Avenue, Montclair.

  1:25 p.m. Depart for home.

  Resh, for The Zahir.

  All at once, I understood.

  Samuel was no hostage. Samuel was Resh – a member of Drexler’s cult. And suddenly everything made sense. The note Olivia had received had indeed been written by Samuel, but it had been a trap. Drexler had planned all along for me to go to Durham, to follow Samuel and Lofkin to Mineral, then finally to die in New York. And while Samuel had worn the bomb-vest to make it appear to me that he was the hostage, in actual fact Dean Lofkin had been the real hostage the whole time, and had only pretended to be Samuel’s captor because of Samuel’s bomb-vest. Because Samuel was threatening to detonate it and kill them both if Lofkin didn’t play ball. And as I absorbed this, I realized that both Samuel and Drexler had known there was a good chance I’d storm
the house in Mineral, but hadn’t warned the other cultists. That is to say, they’d allowed their own loyalists to be blindsided to facilitate their plot. But then my son had done worse than that. He’d then killed his hostage in the most chilling of fashions and attempted to kill his father.

  I understood this intellectually. Yet emotionally, my brain short-circuited. I couldn’t process it. Everything was broken.

  But then, for the simple reason that it had to, my training kicked in. Samuel’s itinerary suggested he was plotting another attack in Montclair, New Jersey, at 1:15, and the bedside clock was already showing 12:37. I needed to haul-ass. So I headed back to the living room and got to work modifying the bomb. First, I removed a quantity of Semtex – enough to ensure the bomb would take out nothing beyond the suite, but not so much that Drexler would realize there’d been tampering. Next, I fixed the fault in the fuse’s circuitry. Finally, I added a rudimentary countdown, a mechanism which created a lag of approximately sixty seconds between when the device was activated, and when it actually went off.

  Then, with the device sufficiently modified, I pocketed the excess Semtex and started the countdown. The next instant, I was in the corridor, which I was relieved to find deserted, and sprinting towards the staff staircase. However, despite taking the stairs at a tremendous pace, I was still within the building – approaching the fire-exit leading to the service road behind the hotel – when the bomb went off, the blast shaking the place like an earthquake. But the shock didn’t slow me and a moment later I was bursting through the fire-door with an overwhelming sense of relief.

  But then I spotted the man with the gun.

  ‘Police,’ he shouted. He was standing seven feet off, wearing the blue uniform of an NYPD officer, and aiming at my head. ‘On your knees. Hands behind your head. Don’t think I won’t shoot.’

  I had a split second to decide on a course of action. I could see by his steady hand and serious gaze that this guy meant business. And though I recalled that during the Aaron Woolf incident impostors dressed in NYPD uniforms had coerced Woolf’s neighbors from their apartments, I knew this couldn’t be a set-up. As far as The Order was concerned, I was dead.

  I decided to cooperate.

  I got to my knees, and put my hands behind my head, saying as I did so, ‘I’m with the FBI. My identification is in my inside, left jacket pocket.’

  He nodded curtly. ‘If you are who you say you are, then you’ll understand my need for caution. A bomb goes off at The Essex House, then I find you running out of the building ten seconds later. And you don’t exactly look like a Fed.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said calmly.

  If I was in this guy’s shoes, I would’ve had the same reservations. So I cut him some slack, and kept still as he came close, extracted the ID from my pocket, then finally moved back beyond my range. After a few long seconds of examination, he was satisfied.

  ‘I believe you,’ he said, throwing me my ID and holstering his gun. Then, once I was back on my feet, he added:

  ‘So what the hell’s happening here?’

  There was no way I had time to get into that now. I needed to get to Montclair, pronto. But then it occurred to me that this chance encounter could in fact be a blessing. Because in my current situation – stranded in a city undoubtedly on lockdown – a ride from an NYPD officer was exactly what I needed.

  ‘You got a car?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘On 58th.’

  If I wanted his cooperation, I had to let him in a little.

  ‘What I’m about to tell you is classified,’ I said. ‘And I’m only telling you because the situation is desperate. Lives are on the line.’

  He nodded again. I continued:

  ‘Everything that’s happened in Manhattan this past half hour is linked to the attacks of the past three days. That bomb you just saw, however, was intended specifically to kill me. As far as the people who made it know, it has. They’re now plotting an assassination in Montclair, New Jersey, within the next forty minutes. The situation’s complex but the crux of it is, I have to be the one to stop it. But as things stand, I’ve no means of getting there—’

  ‘Let’s roll,’ he interjected, before leading the way to 58th Street at a sprint.

  *

  For years I’d hunted Jihadists, suicide bombers, and terrorists in general without a second thought. To my mind they’d been nothing more than murderers; the scum of the earth. But now my son had joined these ranks, suddenly all my certainties were out the window. Suddenly all the terrorists I’d ever hunted, including the cultists I’d dispatched only that morning, weren’t just terrorists. They were somebody’s children. And I didn’t want my child hunted down in the same way. I wanted him regained and rehabilitated – saved from himself.

  Yet not only had this revelation forced me to see terrorists as human – it’d also forced me to see my son as capable of the very worst monstrosities…

  But though this was a big shock to my system – a tremendous and disorientating blow – I’d suddenly gained two significant advantages in my fight against Drexler. Firstly, he now thought I was dead. And secondly, I’d gained genuine information regarding The Order’s plans, namely, the information contained within Samuel’s itinerary. And it was because of this information that I knew Samuel was on his way to assassinate somebody called Spender, since it was clear “salvation” was a euphemism for murder.

  But on the face of it, there was a problem, because there was no way I was going to get to Montclair by 1:15 when Spender’s salvation was set to begin. This seemed to suggest that if I wanted to save Spender, I’d have to call ahead and warn Spender or The New Jersey Police Department and thus reveal to Drexler I’d survived the assassination attempt, found the itinerary, and passed on the information. However, in actual fact, it seemed to me the situation was more complex. I reckoned, based on the itinerary’s reference to kerosene and restraints, that this attack, like almost every other Order attack so far, would be a drawn out affair; that what I was probably dealing with was a house set on fire, and the target left for dead within. And if this was the case – and I felt certain it was – then there was a distinct chance that when I arrived in Montclair, there’d still be time to save Spender.

  However, there was also the issue of Samuel himself. The itinerary said he was planning to leave Montclair by 1:25. So if I arrived before then, there was a chance we’d come face-to-face. And if this happened, I’d have no choice but to try and safely neutralize him – not least because if he got away, he’d tell Drexler I was still alive. But although one part of me wanted to encounter Samuel, a much larger part told me that it was something I wanted to avoid. That attempting to neutralize my hostile son while an assassination attempt involving extremely flammable materials was underway was asking for disaster. Better, I thought, he should be gone by the time I arrived so I could concentrate on rescuing Spender. Because really, if I could save Spender while keeping Drexler none the wiser that either of us were still alive, then I was in as good a position as I could reasonably hope to be.

  And then it occurred to me that Spender may in fact be an extremely useful person to get hold of. As far as I knew, the only other people who’d faced incineration these past few days were the cultists in Mineral. So perhaps incineration was a means of death reserved for cultists. But Spender’s death wasn’t going to be willing, so perhaps he was a cult defector – somebody who knew too much.

  Spender could be an invaluable lead.

  I looked to the policeman sitting to my left, expertly guiding the car through traffic, and then to the dashboard clock which was already reading 12:55. I knew I had to emphasize the need for haste: Montclair, under normal circumstances, was at least thirty minutes from Manhattan and there were only twenty till Samuel’s attack began. But just as I was about to broach this subject, the box of donuts on the dashboard caught my eye and suddenly, all I could think about was the hunger in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Mind if I help myself
to those?’ I said, nodding at the donuts.

  ‘Go crazy.’

  Within twenty seconds, I’d gotten through the three remaining donuts. The policeman gave a low whistle.

  ‘Boy, you’ve really been through the trenches.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘Look,’ he said abruptly. ‘I know this might be confidential, but why does it have to be you? Why can’t we call the NJSP and have them deal with this?’

  I’d expected this question. And, really, I was happy about where he was steering the conversation. It was ground we needed to cover.

  ‘If we call ahead, the people who put the bomb in The Essex House will infer I’m not dead. And from a tactical standpoint, it’s very important these bastards think I’m dead.’

  ‘So you plan to save this person without giving away the fact you’re alive?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  He crumpled his brow. ‘I take it you’ve some idea about how this assassin intends to carry out his attack?’

  ‘I reckon the assassin will get to work at quarter past one, and will leave the scene no more than ten minutes later. I’ve reason to believe, however, that his method of execution won’t be instantaneous, and thus I should have a window of opportunity to save the target –though I’m not sure how long this window will last, or whether it’ll extend past the assassin’s departure. And it’s entirely possible there will be no window at all…’

  The guy glanced at the clock and tensed his jaw. This was the effect I’d sought: to have him sweating about the time as much as I was. He then said: