“So when the reports started coming in, you sent Brady and me?”
He lowered his gaze—ashamed? “As soon as I could justify it.” His voice had lost a measure of strength, of self-righteousness. “I took Ramsland’s request to be an order to put agents on the case.”
“And with the Crime Scene Digitizer’s ability to help local law enforcement, and its need for further field tests, you were able to get us out there sooner than you could otherwise.”
He nodded. “Before we could establish official jurisdiction.”
“Then you let Ramsland know?”
“Yes.”
“How did you make contact?”
“A phone number.” He rushed to respond to her next, unasked question: “But it’s disconnected now. I tried calling today after I heard about New York. I have no way of contacting him again.”
“You told him we went out to offer assistance?”
“I told him you and Brady were on the case. I didn’t think he cared about semantics.”
“And that was the last time you spoke to him?”
Silence. He looked at his wife.
“John, what did you do?”
He pulled in a deep breath, let it out.
“He called again, asked where you were staying in Colorado. I’d already pulled you off the case, because the evidence of interstate serial murder allowed the Bureau to step in with a real team. I thought . . . I thought . . .”
“You thought that’s what Ramsland wanted, more bodies on the case.” She watched him readjust himself on the bed. Squirming, she thought. “But he wanted us, Brady and me.”
“I let him know you were following a lead in New York. He wanted to know what you were doing, where you were staying. He said ‘they,’ so I knew he meant Brady as well.”
“And you gave him Brady’s home address.” She felt nauseated.
He lowered his head, then looked her in the eyes. “I sent him your personnel records.”
A bolt of light, startlingly bright, cut through the sheers of the window on Gilbreath’s side of the bed. Alicia’s mind had just registered this intrusion when she saw Gilbreath leaping toward her, hands grasping for the gun, face skewed into a mask of white-hot fury. Instinctively, she pulled the gun away, then swung it around in a blurring arc, clubbing him in the temple. He crumpled before her. She vaulted over him and hit the wall beside the window as the light panned away.
A quick look, then another.
Cops. Gilbreath had found a way to trigger a silent alarm. Or she had not been as smart at defeating the alarm as she had thought. Either way, she was in big trouble.
55
There was something funny about the police cruiser in front of Gilbreath’s house . . .
Cautiously, she peered through the curtains again, this time long enough to assess the situation.
A private security car. Parked at the curb. One man standing behind the hood, watching as another operated a spotlight mounted on the passenger-side door. The beam hit the second bedroom window, again filling the room with the stark intensity of an autopsy table.
Had Gilbreath known? Had all the talk been nothing more than a stall tactic?
Last year, rising incidents of false alarms prompted the Alexandria Police Department to institute a policy of billing property owners for calling them unnecessarily. As a result, security companies stopped reporting every suspicious event; now only “positive triggers,” such as breaches in door and window monitors and the activation of panic buttons, warranted 911 calls. Alicia was certain she hadn’t tripped a positive trigger. Gilbreath must have had the home’s security system programmed to send a coded signal periodically—every twenty to thirty minutes, most likely—to the monitoring company, reporting its continued functionality. Disabling the phones, as she did to gain entrance, must have prevented the last signal from going out.
She caught movement in her peripheral vision.
Gilbreath—moving in fast.
Her gun hand was quicker: his face came dead-center on the pistol’s silenced barrel. He jolted to a halt, cross-eyed on the weapon.
“God help me,” Alicia hissed between clenched teeth, “I’ll do it! Now back away. Back away! On the floor! Down!”
He dropped to his knees. She planted a foot against his upper chest and shoved him onto his back. He landed with an “Oomph!” and froze like that, only his eyes tracking her movements.
From the shadows of the chair she retrieved her canvas bag of breaking-and-entering tools, all purchased at a local hardware store. She moved toward the door, then suddenly stopped. She swung around and stepped on Gilbreath’s neck, hard.
“Are these guys at OCP so spooky that you would deliver me in a body bag to them?”
Through clenched teeth, he hissed: “Yes!”
“The Bureau’s out of it? We can’t come in?”
His face was turning the color of an eggplant.
“Not if OCP wants you dead.”
“How do we know it’s OCP and not someone else with ties to it?”
He didn’t answer. His eyelids were beginning to droop. She eased up on the pressure her foot was exerting to his neck. His eyes came back.
“You don’t,” he said. “Look, the OCP doesn’t act alone. It watches. It exchanges information. If it wants you dead, you can bet someone else is behind the initiative.”
She glared at him in disgust. Then she spun out of the room, pulling the door shut. She attached a travel gadget that locked the door in place.
From his side, Gilbreath yelled, “This is bigger than you or me, Wagner! These guys deal in otherworldly phenomena! Something’s happening! Something’s coming! Alicia? ”
A crash inside.
She smiled at the thought of his finding the gun he kept in the bedroom closet and the one between the mattresses without bullets. Later, he’d have to fish both ammo clips out of his downstairs toilet bowl.
Another crash. She suspected he had yanked the nightstand drawer all the way out. Going for the cell phone. Oops, no battery.
He bellowed unintelligibly, and she wished she had time to savor his fury.
As she descended the stairs, staying close to the wall to prevent creaks, the pounding at the front door started. She slipped into the kitchen seconds before a flashlight beam cut through the narrow foyer window to illuminate the staircase. She heard the upstairs door rattle, then fall silent. She was betting on Gilbreath’s reluctance to sic these rent-a-cops on her. Besides the humiliation of being bested, the incident would draw too much attention from the press. Best handled internally. How he conveyed that from his locked bedroom was his problem.
Gilbreath’s house was spacious and contained a separate breakfast room adjacent to the kitchen. At the round table, she plucked the “silencer” from the gun. Fashioned from a toilet-paper tube and covered with black electrician’s tape, it weighed next to nothing. A fat-barreled fountain pen jutting from one end held it firmly to the gun and provided the sobering sound of grating metal when “screwed” into the barrel. A perforated black cap from a juice bottle made up the business end. The thing would no more silence a pistol shot than would holding her finger over the barrel. But it had scared the tar out of Gilbreath, so it had accomplished its intended purpose. Several times, she had feared that he would recognize it as a fraud, and batting him with the gun had nearly sent it flying. Now she wanted to leave it for him so he’d know how she duped him. A small concession for what he’d put her through. She set it on the table and slipped out the back door.
Alicia was halfway to the fence when a pounding flood of rain dropped from the sky. She squinted behind her to see a light coming around the side of the house, igniting the silvery pellets of water in its path. She scaled the six-foot cedar fence at the rear of the property and dropped over.
56
Brady’s wife had always been appreciative of God’s custodial wonders, and through her, he had come to marvel at them as well. But on this night he did not like the ra
in at all. It drummed against the SUV’s roof with deafening fury, like the pounding feet of a million tiny soldiers marching into battle. Almost immediately, his head began pounding too. He reached into his breast pocket, found two painkillers he’d stashed there earlier, and swallowed them dry.
Parked on a dark residential street in the affluent section of Alexandria, the car straddled the property line of two backyards. If either homeowner noticed it, each would assume it belonged to a guest of the other. Or so he hoped. Several other vehicles dotted the curbside, the nearest only a few feet behind the car. John Gilbreath’s big colonial was four blocks east. He wanted to be closer, but Alicia had insisted that distance was the key to getting in and out unnoticed.
He glanced nervously at the glove compartment, where earlier he had shoved over $16,000. Back at the hotel, after convincing him they had to find out what John Gilbreath knew—and do it with surprise and stealth—she had asked him how much cash he could get his hands on.
“We need to fund our own investigation,” she’d said.
“A couple grand?” he’d asked.
“We may need to buy a different car, not new, but dependable.”
“Five?”
“Worse comes to worst, we’ll need fake IDs. I know where to go, but good ones are expensive. We’ll have to keep moving, chasing down leads, staying in motels. We won’t be able to use credit cards after today. Too easy to trace.”
“How much?”
“I can put in eight,” she’d said, her eyebrow arcing up inquisitively.
After some thought, he had agreed to match her contribution. On one hand, it seemed like an awful lot of money; on the other hand, how much was survival worth?
He shifted in the driver’s seat and glared at the water streaming over the windshield, obliterating everything beyond. He would switch on the windshield wipers but didn’t want their movement to catch someone’s eye. If he moved his head around, he could catch fleeting glimpses of the wet world outside: leaves and branches (dark chaos upon dark symmetry), a parked car (appearing to shiver instead of merely shimmer), a tall wooden fence (shaking off beads of water in violent tremors as a shadowy figure bounded over it from the other side).
Before he could grasp the image, a palm slapped against the passenger window, Alicia’s face swimming into view behind it. Brady hit the electric door lock button, and Alicia clambered in, breathless and drenched. Bending low, she shook her head vigorously in the foot well. Brady thought he saw her look at her hand in profile. It reminded him of his high school and college days, when kids would do that to see if they’d consumed enough alcohol to give them the shakes. Then she snapped into a proper sitting position, pushing her heavy hair back from her face. Incredibly, she was smiling.
“Well!” she said.
Still stunned and relieved by her sudden appearance, Brady managed to ask, “How’d it go?”
Her smile wavered before she caught it and held it together. He suspected she was forcing light into one seriously dark place. Whatever had happened had really shaken her up.
A visible wave of exhaustion washed over her, slumping her shoulders, softening her face. “Gilbreath’s the one. The man is very weak and very bad. And as we suspected, we’re on our own.”
Brady was about to prompt her for more, thinking about the gentlest approach, when he sensed movement outside the car. A street lamp a block away cast a ghostly aura in the blackness, and he thought someone had passed under it.
“Did you see something?” he asked.
“No, what?”
She peered out the windshield as he cranked the car to life, flipping on the headlamps and wipers. Raindrops raced through the beams, but nothing else moved. Illuminated now were trees, bushes, fences, other vehicles, a freestanding garage up ahead on the right: all superb hiding places.
“I’m not going to say it was nothing,” he said, hitting the button that locked the doors. They looked at each other. “When people do that, it always turns out to be something.” He half-expected her to contradict his pop culture wisdom with some professional axiom—“To the hunted, everything appears to be a hunter,” or the like. When she didn’t, he put the car in gear and made a U-turn, bouncing over the curb on the other side of the road. After a mile of pavement had stretched away, he said, “Where to?”
She showed him her teeth. “How do you feel about Rome?”
He glanced at her. “As in Italy?”
“You do have your passport, don’t you?” Bureau agents were required to carry them when they traveled, even domestically; but Brady had started this odyssey from home.
“In the glove compartment,” he said. “But do you think we can use them? What’d Gilbreath say about an APB?”
“Nothing’s been issued yet. He may get around to putting one out on us, but not until he’s covered his tracks, and certainly not before his wife recovers from the midazolam. He’s not going to want to explain what I was doing in his house.”
“So we get out of the country before anyone knows we’re gone.”
She thought for a moment. “Just to play it safe, let’s use a smaller international airport, one well away from here and one without an FRS.” For several years, Facial Recognition Systems had been making their way into larger airports; they made spotting fugitives as easy as scanning a photo and letting the security cameras watch for a match.
“Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a couple of hours away,” he suggested.
She checked her watch. “Probably can’t get a flight till morning anyway. Let’s do it.” She slapped the dash. “Get this steed moving. We’ve got places to go and people to see.”
“Italian places, Italian people,” he agreed, trying to match her high spirits. He realized it was sugarcoating to help them swallow a frightening and bitter pill, one that might prove lethal.
“Viva Italia!” she chimed.
PART III
ITALY AND ISRAEL
Evil that disguises itself as good is far
more insidious, far more dangerous,
than the vilest evil we can see.
—Cardinal Roberto Ambrosi
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive.
—Sir Walter Scott
57
Brady stood at their flight’s baggage carousel in Leonardo da Vinci Airport, gazing at the hanging strips of vinyl that covered the opening through which their luggage would soon come. Alicia had insisted on bringing her laptop and the CSD: not only did they contain her Pelletier notes and video walk-throughs, but “You never know what will come in handy,” she said. She had decided that a few CSD pieces—like the heavy printer and floor-analyzing boots—were unnecessary; they’d left them, along with her pistol, in the back of the Highlander at the airport. They had each purchased a change of clothes and had combined their personal belongings into a single rolling suitcase. And any second now, it and the CSD bag would glide though those vinyl strips to meet them.
Alicia nudged him. She said, “Looks like you’re zoning out. You all right?”
He pursed his lips. “Just tired.”
That was a lie. Rather, he was filled with doubt about their actions and concern for his son. If he could have been certain that traveling to Italy to confront Father Randall would bring them closer to stopping the attacks on him and Alicia, he would have possessed a stronger sense of purpose. If they had concrete evidence to analyze and discuss, he would have felt better, less adrift. As it was, by the time they reached the Harrisburg airport, they had brainstormed over the scant evidence they had and exhausted alternative action plans.
They’d considered taking their case to a Bureau field office; Brady liked New York because of its size and reputation for snubbing procedures and orders emanating from headquarters. Alicia had reminded him that their evidence against Gilbreath was circumstantial, and if his story was true, nobody would or could stand up to OCP.
What about the Pelletier killer? Brady had asked.
Was there any sense in tracking him down? They had few clues and fewer resources. Brady figured there were ways to draw him out, using themselves as bait. But without backup, a positive outcome to an encounter with him was anything but certain. Even if they could capture him, so what? Would he know more than Malik? You never knew until you asked; that was the nature of investigations. More than anything, they amounted to a process of elimination and an accumulation of seemingly insignificant facts. If capturing or killing him could have guaranteed an end to the killings and assaults, of course Brady would have insisted on trying. But certainly the Viking, as they both now thought of him, was only a marionette. The puppeteer would simply send in another puppet, maybe bigger and badder than this one, though Brady could not imagine such a thing.
They had gone round and round, fielding any idea that popped into their heads, no matter how ridiculous. In the end, they had agreed that tracking down Father Randall was the best course of action. Both Father McAfee and Malik had pointed to him. They knew where to find him—at least as of yesterday, if Alicia’s call to the Vatican had yielded accurate information. They’d know soon enough if they’d chosen the right tree to bark up or not.
An amber light over the carousel flashed, an alarm sounded, and the conveyor belt started moving. A few seconds later, bags came riding in.
AT CUSTOMS, the CSD helmet in its oversized bowling ball bag caused a measure of commotion. Several immigration officers led them to a back room, and Brady figured their adventure was over before it had started. But then Alicia proved that her ability to surprise him had not run dry. With all the flair of a flamboyant Hollywood-type, she explained that she was a documentary filmmaker and the strange device was a cutting-edge camera—which, Brady thought, is not far from the truth. She even donned the helmet and gave them a demonstration. That sufficiently impressed the officials, who slapped them on their backs, asked if they knew Francis Ford Coppola, and released them from customs.