Comes a Horseman

  The boy turned his body without taking his gaze off Brady and walked to another aisle.

  Brady found the tape and took a roll. He almost snatched up a flashlight and then realized he would not need it, not this time. On the way out, he dropped a handful of bills and coins on the counter.

  He was in the seminary’s front parking lot thirty seconds later. It was nearly deserted at this hour. He killed the engine in a slot not far from the drive leading to the labyrinth entrance. No light guided travelers down the ramp; it was dark and almost invisible. Watching for pedestrian traffic, thinking he’d rush through the first basement door after someone opened it and coerce his way through the second, he sat in the car and stripped off his shirt. He pulled out a length of duct tape without tearing it off and wrapped it tightly around his torso, where his ribs felt bruised and broken. He wound it around again and again, until he was encased from navel to mid-sternum in a stiff cast of vinyl. He climbed out of the car and bent and twisted until he’d formed enough grooves in the tape to give him some flexibility.

  He opened the trunk with the key and in the glow of a small light saw his hope: the bag containing Alicia’s CSD. He tugged it out, opened it on the asphalt. In the bowl of the inverted helmet, he found a metal box the size of a modem. This was the computerized brain of the CSD, he knew. It would mount like a belt buckle at his waist. Another box was the device’s hard drive, for recording crime scene walk-throughs. He could not care less about chronicling the next hour, but he did not know if the CSD required information stored on the hard drive to function properly, so he hooked it up. He pulled out the helmet and discovered an assortment of attachments stored in the case around and under it. After some experimentation, he found a spot on the helmet for everything. He turned the now-heavy contraption in his hands and nodded; it coincided with his memory of it on Alicia.

  His heart leaped when he could not squeeze into the CSD’s gloves and armbands, which contained buttons that controlled the helmet’s lighting and heads-up display. Finally, he wriggled into them, ripping only one seam. He hoped the vest, which acted as wiring harness and accessory mount, and the helmet were not as customized to Alicia’s smaller form as the gloves and armbands were. He slipped them on with no problem.

  Reassured, he pulled off the helmet. He returned the CSD bag to the trunk. He leaned through the Peugeot’s front door and retrieved the Kimber and the duct tape. He taped the grip of the gun, played out a foot of tape, and wrapped the end around his right wrist. He squeezed the strip of tape between his wrist and the gun into a tight cord. He held out his arm, watching the gun dangle. With a snap of his wrist, the pistol was in his hand. He would be able to operate the CSD controls without fumbling with his weapon.

  Donning the suit reminded him of every place the German had punished him, even through the dulling effect of the analgesic. He stood erect and drew a deep breath. His lungs were tight under his taped torso, but the sharp pain from his battered ribs was no longer a distraction.

  Leaving the car keys under a floor mat, he shut the door and the trunk lid, picked up the helmet, and trudged down the drive. In the eight or nine minutes it had taken him to tape himself and suit up, no one had approached Scaramuzzi’s lair. He wondered if the place closed down at night, or if the organization it housed limited its errand running to daylight hours to reduce the chance of detection.

  At the metal door, he hoisted the helmet and lowered it over his head. He seated it into the O-ring that rested on pads over his shoulders. Blackness. No displays, no lights indicating the status of the device. He remembered that the faceplate was opaque; the suit had to be powered up to activate the pixels that allowed the wearer to either see through the faceplate or view other images, depending on the CSD’s settings. He didn’t understand the technology, but Alicia had tried to explain it to him once. He recalled her saying the vest contained two battery cells, located above each kidney. Alicia had said that each charge was good for five hours of heavy use. She had charged them after the Ft. Collins walk-through—he remembered working around the charging unit as he made piles of crime scene photos and reports in Alicia’s hotel room. But he had no power and no CSD.

  Don’t give me this! he thought, instantly on the brink of panic.

  He wiggled the helmet, shifted it around. He felt it slide easily in the groove of the O-ring. He rotated it, felt resistance, pushed harder. There was a click as it snapped into place. Light flickered in his eyes, and he was looking out through the helmet’s faceplate. Instead of darkness, however, he could see the metal door and the stone bricks around it and the keypad box as well as he had in daylight. He recognized the day-for-night quality from the laptop display of Alicia’s walk-throughs. Spending as much time as he had with those walk-throughs, he knew the high-tech gadgetry he now controlled—a DNA MEM microchip for rudimentary microanalysis of biological material left at a crime scene, infrared for thermal imaging, infrared and deep-ultraviolet laser to see . . .

  His mind jumped from the academic to the practical. He flipped open the keypad box beside the door. Same design as the keypad on the inner door: rubber, lighted from behind, laid out like a telephone’s numeric pad. He glanced at his left forearm and positioned the fingers of his right hand over the CSD’s controls. He focused on the keypad once more. His index finger touched a button on the suit. A white-hot light blasted against the keypad and wall and bounced back into his face; the concave screen in front of his eyes dimmed to compensate. Instinctively, he snapped his head around to survey the upward slope of the drive. Bright as day, but he knew it wasn’t optically adjusted to allow him to see in the darkness: he had activated the helmet’s intense halogens. Anyone within sight would think a bonfire was blazing beside the seminary. He pressed down with his index finger again. The lights dimmed away; the screen reverted back to day-for-night mode.

  He waited without moving for a full thirty seconds.

  Then he saw the flashing blue lights, flittering on the trees, against the wall of the seminary, growing brighter by the second.

  78

  Father Randall sat at a small table among the street vendors and their carts. Even at this late hour, the vendors displayed their wares, hoping to catch the tourists whose body clocks had not caught up with local time. All around him hung colorful scarves, quilts, and rugs. He particularly enjoyed watching the flicker of the lighted cloth stars that more closely resembled Chinese lanterns than novelties from the Via Dolorosa. Gentle violin chords drifted from the open doorway behind him. His friend Nissim Ben-David’s daughter playing, becoming quite adept. He sipped from a china cup of milky almond tea—his favorite treat in all the world. It always calmed him, and this evening, he needed calming. In the past few days, Luco had become a loose canon, ordering Pip’s murder and now, he understood, actually kidnapping one of the Americans who’d come to investigate crimes in their country.

  He set down the cup and glanced at his watch. He could spare only a few more minutes in this tranquil environment. The Gathering would start soon—with a pseudo-mass officiated by Luco himself. Randall felt a headache coming on just from thinking about that atrocity. Beforehand, he wanted to catch Luco to discover his intentions for the Americans. He hoped they weren’t as nasty as he suspected. He let his lids fall down over his eyes. The music felt like a breeze on his cheek.

  He withdrew his cigarette case from the inside pocket of his coat and popped it open. He was selecting a cigarette when he glanced around at the faintly flapping scarves and flickering stars. What he saw caused him to drop the case. It hit the edge of the saucer, making the cup tip and pour hot tea onto his lap. He bolted up, knocking his chair over.

  He lowered his eyes to his lap and the disrupted tea setting for the briefest of seconds, but when he looked up again, Pip was gone. It had been Pip, Randall was positive. He had looked awful, his head heavily bandaged, his eyes sunken, his skin alabaster.

  Randall hurried around the table and shuffled as fast as his aging legs could move
him. Thirty feet—that’s how near he had been, his face peering between lengths of hanging material. He reached the spot and saw that it was where an alleyway met the market street.

  “Pip!” he called, though he saw no one who could be his friend. He raised his voice further: “Find me, Pip!”

  His shoulders slumped. He looked back as his table. Ben-David’s wife, Dalia, was righting the chair. His daughter stood in the doorway, violin and bow quiet in her hands. She watched him with concern. He waved, tried to smile. He started back, reaching for his wallet to pay for the tea and anything he had broken.

  HER HEAD no longer ached, but her mouth still felt as if it had been lined with aluminum, and the water was long gone. Alicia sat on the cot, her head down in her hands, feeling the gloom of her surroundings pressing down on her. Her mind wanted to explore, to prod and grope at new information, and she let it. It was better than driving herself crazy looking for a way out of the cell. There wasn’t one. The walls were solid—she had pushed and rapped on every stone, scraped her fingernail along every joint. The bars were firmly imbedded into the floor and ceiling, each a mere handbreadth apart. The door lock did not rattle or budge or so much as tease her with the slightest play. Oddly, she could reach the touch pad that unlocked the door, but she could not see it, and she had found that three incorrect entries caused it to beep shrilly for two full minutes before settling into silence again. She’d set it off three times, resulting in no visits from guards or jailers. The complete lack of attention to her was worse than vigilant scrutiny: it implied confidence in the cell’s ability to hold her or the labyrinth’s power to confuse—if a labyrinth did, in fact. exist between here and the exit; she had no reason to believe anything Scaramuzzi said.

  One thing he had mentioned outright puzzled her: that Brady was to meet with someone named Pip to get a file Scaramuzzi wanted. He had intimated that this person had already contacted her and Brady. Was she missing something? When was this supposed to have happened? She sifted her memory for attempted contacts—pleading looks from strangers, cryptic messages on napkins, ringing phones left unanswered. Nothing came to mind. She had been joined to Brady’s hip since they’d met up in the Marriott’s room 4914.

  No, she was certain nobody had attempted to contact them.

  What kind of game was Scaramuzzi playing?

  He was insane, no doubt about that. But in a sly-scary charming-Hitler way. Crazy like a fox, was the saying. But that wasn’t right either. This guy really thought he was Antichrist . . .

  A thought hit her, and she did not like it one bit: What if he is Antichrist? What if Ambrosi has it wrong?

  She could not remember his explaining why he believed Scaramuzzi was either faking it or insane. When he had scoffed at Scaramuzzi’s professed identification, she had assumed he was correct, not because he was a scholar on the subject but because of course Antichrist wasn’t walking around on earth today, knocking off naysayers and scheming to rule the world. That was the stuff of bad movies. But if learned people, religious leaders, and even governments believed Antichrist would eventually appear, why not now?

  Maybe they were approaching this the wrong way. What if . . .

  She sensed eyes on her. She turned her head and nearly screamed.

  A wolf stood inches from the bars, staring at her with yellowish-green eyes. It lowered its snout slightly, so its glare crossed a crinkled brow to reach her. A low rumble emanated from its husky chest. Its top lip quivered, a black sheath over white blades.

  Alicia realized this was one of the wolf-dog hybrids that had attacked Brady and Zach and had assisted the Pelletier killer; if not this very one, then one like it. It was a war dog, trained to kill. She stood, took a step back.

  The animal’s rumbling grew louder.

  Movement in her periphery drew her eyes. From the black corridor on the right another wolf-dog emerged. It stopped halfway out of the shadows. Another dog stepped around it, levering measured steps toward the first dog, never taking its eyes from Alicia’s. Claws clicked against the stone floor.

  The dog at the corridor stepped into the light, nudged forward by a larger presence: a man. He floated at the terminator between dark and light, like a man just under the surface of a murky pond. He had a heavy beard and what appeared to be animal pelts draped over his shoulders. Knitted shirt, dark pants, high boots.

  The Viking. The Pelletier killer.

  His eyes gleamed among the shadows. He shifted and came farther out of the corridor. A wooden handle protruded up from over his shoulder. Alicia was shaken by the conviction that this was the weapon he had used to behead Cynthia Loeb and the others. She imagined his reaching back, seizing the handle, and swinging it up and around, severing a head in one smooth motion.

  As if sensing her thoughts, the way his dogs must certainly know her fear, he stepped forward, raising his hand to grip the ax handle.

  79

  Brady backed into the corner at the bottom of the drive. The police cruiser slowed as it approached the seminary. Its flashing blue lights played on the wall and bushes above him. He remembered hearing somewhere that Jerusalem police left their strobes on at all times; he had, in fact, seen a few on his way in from the airport. He hoped the lawmen in the car had caught only a glimpse of the CSD’s halogen moment and had come to investigate without knowing precisely where they should look.

  That seemed the case when a bright searchlight flipped on from the road, panned past the head of the sloping drive, and as suddenly returned the darkness to the night.

  The cruiser pulled away, pulling its blue lights with it.

  Brady let out a breath he had not been aware of holding.

  Back to the keypad.

  Ready to reverse his action in case it again did something attention-drawing, he pushed the CSD control under his middle finger. His view turned red. He could detect faint specks and smears on and around the keypad. Under his little finger was a pinwheel, like the volume control on a clock radio. He gave it a tweak. The specks and smears disappeared. He turned the pinwheel in the opposite direction. They became splotches of glowing neon, too many of them to decipher any meaning. He spun the wheel back and forth but could not bring out only the markings that told the story he was searching for.

  Frustrated, he pushed another control with his ring finger. The screen’s hue changed to orange—and revealed to him the keypad buttons that had received the most recent attention. Three buttons . . . maybe as many as five. He rolled the pinwheel and two possibilities faded away, leaving three buttons, each superimposed by a bright orange glow, absent from the other nine. Two. Seven. Eight. When he’d slipped through this door earlier, the man who had opened it had caused the keypad to beep three times—a three-digit code. Three digits, three buttons: three to the power of three. Twenty-seven possible combinations. But that was if the same number could be used more than once, which would leave another number unused. The glowing buttons said the code required all three, reducing the possible key combinations to . . . He wasn’t sure, six or nine. He could handle that.

  He punched in two-seven-eight. Nothing. He tried the door anyway. Still locked.

  Two-eight-seven.

  Seven-two-eight.

  Seven-eight-two. The locking mechanism on the door buzzed, and its bolt clunked as it shifted position.

  He pulled it opened and discovered what he had hoped the CSD could provide: footprints, glowing bright orange on the floor. So many shoes had trod here, they formed a solid line two feet wide, as though a huge snail had passed instead of hundreds of humans. The outside edges of the line broke apart into individual prints, showing where people had veered off the straightest path to the keypad behind the breaker panel and the rusty inner door. He crossed the threshold and pulled the door closed. He caught himself stepping over the footprints, as though they were both tangible and distasteful. He saw his own footprints from his first visit circling behind the furnace and boiler. Larger prints marked where the Viking, Olaf, had followed, loo
king for him. But there were two sets of the larger prints heading to and from the equipment. Around them, and all over the basement floor he noticed now, were irregular dots the size of small fists. He felt his blood chill as he realized what they were: paw prints. Olaf had brought his dogs back to reexamine the area. Did that mean they had found the German? Had he awakened and informed his comrades of Brady’s presence? Or was it that Olaf was meticulous or so keen with his senses that he knew someone had been here?

  Doesn’t matter, Brady thought. He was going in. He would find Alicia, despite an army of Vikings, wolf-dogs, German prizefighters, Satanists, antichrists, or whatever else lurked in the tunnels beyond that rusty door.

  As he moved his vision around, dizziness brushed over him like a breeze. He took a step back and reached for the wall. It was nearer than he thought, and he cracked his knuckles against the stone. Maneuvering solely by the orange electronic graphics was disorienting. He had read that young recruits with copious experience playing video games performed more efficiently in the field. He understood part of the reason now. As electronics become an increasingly important element of field craft, those who had learned to understand three-dimensional landscapes from the two-dimensional and limited-field-of-view graphics of computer monitors would have a distinct advantage.

  He took a step toward the inner door, felt no more vertigo, and moved faster. At the second keypad, he found the correct code on his sixth attempt. The snail had squirmed down the metal catwalk and, he could see now, turned left into the tunnels. What must have been blood on the floor below, where he and the German had brawled, seemed to shimmer like orange phosphorus among a chaotic jumble of footprints, handprints, and paw prints.

  Brady snapped up on his right wrist and seized the pistol. He eased down the catwalk, left hand on the rail, not trusting himself to navigate a slanted, vibrating platform wearing the CSD. At the bottom, he took a deep breath.