“No, I guess it doesn’t, but it’s true anyway,” said Hugo.
“What about the Deacon? If John likes setting fires, is the Deacon the one who likes putting them out? Are they some kind of opposite? Like the Sith and the Jedi or something corny like that?”
Hugo shook his head. “Frankly, kiddo, I don’t have the slightest fucking clue who or what the Deacon is. And, believe me, I’ve looked. What little I’ve found confuses me, because it’s all contradictions. What I do know is that he’s not what he seems and that John is scared of him. That scares me. That scares the living shit out of me.”
He let her go and stepped back. Santoro was close enough to have heard all of this, but his face was unreadable. Hugo squatted down and placed a hand on the stock of his shotgun but didn’t pick it up.
“I have something in the works that’s going to put me in the crosshairs of the Deacon and his group. It’ll play out in a couple of years. If I win, the Deacon and the DMS will be ashes and I’ll be the richest son of a bitch who ever lived. If I don’t play it right, then best case scenario is I spend the rest of a short life in Gitmo playing water sports with the interrogation team.”
Zephyr shivered. “That’s not going to happen, is it?”
“Not if I’m smart and careful,” said Hugo. “And that’s how we got into this. I told you that you have to be careful of the Deacon and his people. You do. Their organization is still pretty new, still growing and finding its footing, but I know the Deacon. Not as good as John knows him, but well enough. There isn’t anyone else out there who has a hope of stopping what’s coming.” He glanced at her. “Your plan’s going to take longer, and it might even be bigger than mine. Fuck, kid, you might actually have the vision and the guts to change the world for the better. Time will tell. But the Deacon won’t hand the world to you, and he won’t step aside.”
“Why don’t you just kill him?”
Hugo smiled. “I’ve taken some swings over the years. So far, though, he’s ducked and counterpunched pretty fucking well, even though he doesn’t know it’s me he’s fighting. And I’ve put a few other things in motion that might hit him from his blindside.”
“Maybe,” said Zephyr, picking up her gun and reloading it, “you should stop trying to kill him and try something else instead.”
“Like what?” asked Hugo, clearly intrigued.
“Like hurting him.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
HOME OF JACK LEDGER
NEAR ROBINWOOD, MARYLAND
MONDAY, MAY 1, 5:13 PM
They knew we were coming, so there was no need to sneak up on the place.
From the air, from twenty miles out, everything looked normal, but with every mile and every moment we could tell that normal had left town. There was a wrecked car. There were big burned patches on the porch, the grass, the front of the house. There were bodies. There was blood. There was so much damn blood, as if a landscape painter had gone mad and bled onto the canvas of the day.
Sean had the door open and was leaning too far out, taking it all in, letting his fear and his need do bad things to him. Rudy held on to him, and Ghost whined continually. I told the pilot to set the helo down in the big side yard that the family used for softball games and touch football and Frisbee. The swirling vortex of mechanical wind picked up pieces of debris and flung them into the trees. Paper plates, empty soda cans, a kid’s Orioles baseball cap.
“I don’t see them,” yelled Sean. “Where are they? God, where are they?” Asking a question none of us could answer.
Before the bird even touched down, Sean jerked the door the rest of the way open and jumped out, tearing his gun from its holster, yelling out his wife’s name. Calling for his kids and Uncle Jack. Calling for his dog, Barkley. Calling for anyone. No one called back. We all scrambled out behind him. Per instructions, the pilot dusted off and vanished high and away in the late-afternoon sky.
Rudy ran toward the bodies. I sent Ghost on a hunt and he raced off, making a big circle, sniffing for hostiles and looking for family. I caught up with Sean as he approached the house, and then I stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Sean, listen to me,” I told him, “you need to keep your shit together. I can’t be watching you and doing my job at the same time. We do this right so we can find them. You hear me?”
He stared through me for a moment, but then his wild eyes cleared a little and he nodded. “Okay, Joe … okay.”
We did it all the right way.
We went up on the porch and flanked the door. He provided cover while I pushed the door open and ducked down and back. No shots. No movement. I went in low and cut left, and he followed a second later, gun up and out as he came in and went right. The living room was a shambles. Chairs and end tables overturned, the big mirror cracked, a vase of flowers smashed, muddy footprints everywhere. Boot prints, I noted. I pointed to them and held up four fingers. He understood. Four men had entered this house wearing combat boots. U.S. military issue, but that didn’t mean anything. Anyone could buy that stuff. What mattered was that this had all been done with precision and aggression.
We moved through the downstairs. Living room, dining room, den, pantry, kitchen, mud room. Nothing. Lots of damage. A little too much. It didn’t look like battle damage but instead had a flavor of meanness, of spite.
There are two sets of stairs in my uncle’s house, one in the living room and one going up from the kitchen. I took the front steps and Sean went up the back ones. We both knew where to step to keep the boards from creaking. There was less damage upstairs, but there was some. The bedrooms were empty. So was the attic.
“They’re not here,” said Sean in a tight whisper.
“Keep it steady,” I warned. “We knew they wouldn’t be here. Let’s finish the sweep.”
As soon as we cleared the house, we hurried downstairs and went outside again. There was a terrazzo patio around the door, and I saw three bloody footprints. Dog prints. Barkley? Or had the bad guys brought their own dog? Ghost sat beside them. He hadn’t barked and he didn’t look agitated, which meant that whatever had happened here was over. If anyone had been hiding in order to ambush us, Ghost would have warned me. He knows several different barking patterns to tell me different things. He’s smart, and we’ve spent hundreds of hours doing drills.
The Pool Boys lay where they had fallen, their bodies torn and bloody. Rudy was on his knees between them and waved us over. “They’re still alive. God only knows how, but they’re alive. Sean, is there a first-aid kit in the house? Yes? Get it. Hurry!”
Sean hesitated for a second, then spun and raced back to the house. I looked at the two agents sprawled on the grass. Alive? The Pool Boys didn’t look it. Both of them looked like ground meat. Neither looked like the men I knew. Their faces and bodies had been slashed to ribbons.
“Talk to me,” I said to Rudy. “Is this the rabies stuff? Did they go nuts and do this to each other?”
“No. This is something different,” said Rudy. He worked fast to apply makeshift dressings of cloth torn from his own shirt. “Each of them has multiple lacerations, and some are very deep. Joe, put pressure there—no, there. Good. Even if we can stabilize them, they’ve lost so much blood. It’s shock that we have to prevent now.”
“What did this?” I asked.
“Knives, I think. Or something with a longer blade. Machetes, perhaps. Or a scythe. I don’t really know. I’ve never seen wounds quite like these.” He pointed to a number of lacerations on the hands and arms of both men, and to similar cuts on their shoulders, upper chests, and faces. “These hand injuries look like defensive wounds, but against what? The same weapon was used on both of them, and the patterns are almost identical.”
Sean raced back with a big farmer’s first-aid kit in a sturdy blue-and-white plastic box. He opened it and Rudy dug out bandages and antiseptic and clamps. He told us where to apply pressure, what to hold, what to do, how to help. I know first aid and so does Sean, but it’
s different when a real doctor is calling the shots.
“If we don’t get them into surgery in the next hour, we’re going to lose Tommy and maybe Alvin, too,” Rudy said.
“Can’t bring the chopper back,” I said.
“What about an ambulance? Can we at least call 911?”
“No,” cried Sean. “We can’t. They’ll think we’re trying something.”
“Saving these men and saving your family are both of equal importance, Sean. Whoever did this left them alive. They left them for us to find. They expect us to try and save them. If they didn’t want that to happen, they would have killed them or given us implicit instructions to let them die. They did neither. Which means we’re allowed to save them.”
Sean tried to reply, couldn’t find the right words.
I tapped my earbud and said, “Cowboy to Ronin.”
Sam’s voice was right there. “Go for Ronin.”
I explained the situation on the ground, and I heard him yelling at someone to get the machinery working. Then Sam asked, “Status on your family?”
As if in answer, I heard a phone begin ringing. It wasn’t mine, and we had to wait for the next ring to zero in on its location. In Alvin’s pants pocket. As soon as I pulled it out, I knew that it wasn’t his phone. It was a burner. Even though I knew there was almost no chance of useful fingerprints, I still handled it carefully.
“Yes…?” I said cautiously.
“By now you’ll know that your associates have not been killed,” said a man’s voice. “You may infer that their lives were spared as a gesture of goodwill.”
He spoke in English, but he had a thick accent. French. Metropolitan. Not Canadian. A Parisian accent. Provincial accents are different. Not young, not old. Forty, maybe? Forty-five?
“Where’s my family?” I asked.
A pause. “This is not Detective Sean Ledger, is it? No. Captain Joseph Ledger, then, non?”
“Yeah. And, for the record, fuck you. Where’s my family?”
“They are safe,” said the Frenchman, “and they will remain so as long as you follow my instructions.”
“I’m listening.”
“Ah, that is incorrect, Captain. It is I who am listening. I’m waiting for you to tell me that the complete case files and all related materials are in your possession.”
“They’re on the way,” I said. “I wasn’t in the right place to bring them myself.”
“If a strike team is accompanying the materials, Captain, this day will end badly for you.”
“Listen, asshole, I got the instructions and we’re following them. You made a lot of threats that I’m taking very seriously. My family matters more to me than catching you. Are we clear on that?”
“Completely.”
“But, since you apparently enjoy threats, listen to this one, and you can believe it as completely as I believed yours. I want my uncle, my sister-in-law, and my niece and nephew back safe and sound. I don’t want them hurt. I want them safe. You’re going to do that because that’s your part of the bargain. I’m going to give you everything you asked for. Everything. We’re cleaning out the closets on this thing, and you get to walk away.”
“Very well. And the threat…?”
“It should have been implied, but let me spell it out. If my family is harmed in any way, I’ll come after you and I will find you. If you know who I am, then you probably know something about who I work for. We are willing to accept your terms and let you walk off. We’re willing to close this file, but only if you return my family unharmed. If you don’t—no, actually, if you even think about breaking your word and double-crossing me—then know that I will find you and I will tear your world apart. Read up on me if you’re not sure what that will mean. Try and guess how much I’ll let you skate if you mess this up. Consider what lengths I’ll go to. Ask around. Ask the people who have fucked with me and my crew in the past. Oh, wait, you can’t. They’re all dead.”
He chuckled. A warm sound, like someone amused by a witty joke told by an old friend. It was supposed to unnerve me, defuse the bomb I was lobbing at him.
“Then I suppose we must both behave ourselves, Captain Ledger, non?”
I said. “Crois, ce que je te dirai.”
Believe what I’m telling you.
To which he responded, “Ensuite il est essentiel que nous nous faisons confiance.”
“Yeah. Well, in my experience trust is earned,” I replied.
“And so it is,” said the Frenchman. “Now, here are a few addendums to my terms. You may not remove your wounded friends until the materials have arrived. You can send them away in whatever vehicle delivers the case files and bodies.”
“You really don’t want them to die, pal,” I said.
“They are soldiers.”
“And this is a war? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It is an evolution, Captain,” he said. “For something new to emerge, something old must surely die.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Of course not. I will make another call in half an hour. Listen for the ring. It won’t be on this phone. If the materials are at your location, answer that call. If not, expect a follow-up call every fifteen minutes. Wait for the call that comes in after your materials arrive. At that point, you will be given additional instructions. If we are both satisfied with the arrangements of exchange, a final call will be made on a phone that will be at a location I will share at that point. You will go to that location, locate the last phone, and receive instructions on where to find your family.”
“How do I know they’re still alive?”
“You don’t,” he said, and repeated my comment about trust being earned, but he said it in French. “La confiance se mérite, mon ami.”
The line went dead.
Sean and Rudy stared at me. All they had heard was my end of the conversation. I told them everything, and it hurt them every bit as bad as it hurt me.
INTERLUDE EIGHTEEN
THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN
MCCULLOUGH CASTLE, CROWN ISLAND
ST. LAWRENCE RIVER, ONTARIO, CANADA
WHEN ZEPHYR WAS TWENTY-TWO
“What if they catch me?” asked Zephyr.
Hugo Vox pursed his lips as he dropped ice cubes into a chunky tumbler, poured two fingers of Heaven Hill over it, sipped the bourbon, and then turned away from the wet bar. He paused and repeated the process, handing the second glass to Zephyr. She sniffed and winced, took a sip, winced again, and then threw back the whiskey. She gasped, coughed, and staggered in Hugo’s wake as he walked out onto the big stone balcony.
“That was a waste of good bourbon,” he said.
“It tastes like socks.”
“It’s better than that shit scotch your dad used to drink.”
“It was thirty-five years old. He said it’s top of the line.”
“Have you tried it?” asked Hugo.
“Well … sure. Once. On New Year’s Eve.”
“And…?”
“It’s even worse. It tastes like ass.”
“That I’ll agree with,” said Hugo. “But trust me, bourbon is better. Besides, you hammered it back. You’re supposed to sip it, savor it.”
“Dad always said that ice ruins the taste of whiskey,” said Zephyr.
“Your father was a fucking psychopath. Not sure his opinions were all that valid.”
Zephyr grunted, acknowledging the point. They stood for a moment watching boats on the river, their sails reflected in the mirror-bright water.
“To answer your question,” said Hugo, “if you get caught, then you didn’t think it through. You didn’t plan. If you get caught, it’s probably because you deserve it.”
“I don’t understand.”
He turned and leaned a meaty hip against the stone rail. “You know that I made an assload of cash when the towers fell, right?”
She nodded.
“Do you know how?” he asked.
“Sure. Y
ou had brokers ready to buy when everyone panicked and the market prices fell. John said that the plan worked because you knew that the towers were going to be hit, and when they would be hit. He said your genius is timing.”
Hugo sipped his drink. “Timing is a funny word. I doubt that John explained what it really means. The big-picture view is that we funded Al Qaeda and we set the timetable. We had brokers in place to make the right purchases when the towers fell and the sheep started running. We knew they would because sheep always run. There’s always a flight to safety in the market. That part you know. But there’s the SEC, the FBI, the IRS, and a bunch of other alphabet groups whose whole job is to look for people gaming the system. If it were only a matter of us doing what you said, it would show. It would look exactly like what it was, and I’d be in jail or on death row, depending on how much of it they figured out. With me so far?”
She nodded.
“So why ain’t I in jail? How come all those federal agencies haven’t kicked down my door, frozen my assets, and thrown me in jail? Take a moment and answer when you have something smart to tell me.”
She thought about it. Hugo finished his drink, took both glasses inside, and came back out with fresh drinks.
“You bribed the agents?” she ventured.
“Bribed or coerced,” he said, nodding. “Blackmailed some, extorted some. Sure. But we only did a little of that during and after. We only had to do that with guys who were new to those agencies. Which should give you a hint of the rest of it.”
“You … bribed some of them before? Like, long before?”
“Closer,” he said, beaming with approval. “But you have to go much, much bigger. Look at it this way—we stood to make tens of billions from the shifts in the market after 9/11. We did, in fact, make that and more. We netted a lot more than we expected, and we expected a lot. So, knowing that this was probably going to work pretty well, we could take some risks with the money we had to invest to set everything up. And we eliminated some of the guesswork by controlling the timetable. Had we done more damage to the Pentagon or hit the White House, we might have doubled it. A dead president would have kept the market in flux for a long time. But that’s life, that’s a variable. We got the biggest fish, which was hitting the financial centers. The next components are vision and nerve. The vision part is being able to look forward to this as something we should do eventually but not something we should do right away. Good planning takes time. Staying safe takes time. So we took time. We started this project years ago. And I do mean years. Some of this was started before you were born. Some of it was started before we even picked the specific targets. We started by using that other quality—nerve. How did that work? It worked by hiring and training an enormous staff of qualified people, and then carefully and comprehensively seeding them into the system. Want to guess where we seeded them?”