“Glad I could help, ma’am,” Teodoro said, sliding out of the booth and scooping up the meal check at the same time. “I’ll get this. You can get the next one.”
Underwood snorted. “Thank you, but I’m hoping there won’t be a reason for another clandestine meeting.”
Teodoro chuckled. “Me too, ma’am. Me too.”
Teodoro was stepping outside the door when he heard the clatter of dishes against carpet and a panicked cry from the chubby waitress clearing dishes from the last booth on the right.
“Someone call 911!”
Teodoro slipped out the door and strode across the parking lot to his shining cranberry Prius. He didn’t need to look to know that the stroke had left SOD Celeste Underwood facedown on her emptied plate, maple syrup gluing her dark cheek to the stoneware.
Climbing into the Prius, Teodoro belted himself in behind the steering wheel. Through the café’s main window, he watched frantic activity taking place beside the booth he’d just left. He started the car’s engine.
He’d liked Underwood, despite her prickly manner, had enjoyed working with her for the last decade, and he regretted what he’d been forced to do. But in the grand scheme of things, her life meant little. After all these centuries, he finally had an opportunity to take from the Fallen the thing they most wanted—just as they’d once done to him.
Soon the Princes of Gehenna would have no choice but to slay their precious, long-awaited creawdwr as madness reshaped him into the Great Destroyer.
Pulling from the parking lot onto the highway, he aimed the Prius for the Shadow Branch’s underground facilities. He had a gift for Violet—a new box of crayons.
20
HARD NEWS
NEW ORLEANS
CAFÉ DU MONDE
March 28
TAKING A SIP OF his café au lait, Field Agent Richard Purcell folded back the front page of the Times-Picayune and scanned the headlines. A smile stretched his lips when he spotted a paragraph on page 4 detailing the blazing conflagration that had destroyed the home of local rock musician Dante Prejean the night before. One life was lost—that of Simone Martinique.
Purcell remembered how the scene had looked when he’d arrived about an hour after the fire had been doused and the fire trucks had finally left.
The plantation house has burned down to its foundation. A couple of fire-blackened walls poke up into the night like fingers scorched to the bone. Several huge old oaks look like torched skeletons—leaves gone, gnarled and twisted branches crisped black. Smoke hangs in the air, a lung-coating reek of incinerated wood, molten metal, and irretrievable loss. The wet street gleams in the moonlight.
The newspaper stated that witnesses had mentioned hearing shattering glass and explosions, suggestive of Molotov cocktails. The survivors denied hearing anything.
Of course the bloodsuckers denied hearing anything, Purcell mused. They would take care of the problem on their own, leaving blood and ruin in their wake.
And Prejean—the little fucking psycho codenamed S—would bathe in the shit, a knowing smile curving his lips, his pale, pale face incandescent with a devastating beauty.
A beauty Purcell’s heart had hardened against years before. S’s sexy spell wouldn’t work on him. Never had.
The chug-chug-chug of powerful ship engines echoed from the Mississippi, and the cool morning air smelled of river water and mud and sweet pastries as Purcell sat back in his chair, eating his beignet with its liberal dusting of powdered sugar, and watched the pigeons hopping around the café’s covered terrace, heads cocked to one side as if they hoped to force crumbs to the pavement with a hungry pigeon’s version of the Force. Pigeon Jedi mind tricks.
Breaking off a couple of pieces from the beignet, he tossed them in front of the optimistic pigeons. Well, look at that. It worked.
Chuckling, he polished off his beignet and brushed sugar from his hands. He scooted back his chair, scraping it across the pavement and causing a few pigeons to hop away madly. Just as he stood, his cell phone vibrated in his trouser pocket. He pulled it free and looked at the caller ID. Unknown. Frowning, he answered the call.
“Purcell. And who is this?”
“It’s Díon, Purcell. Are you sitting down? I have some hard news.”
The fact that a field interrogator was calling him with hard news instead of SOD Underwood shuffled unpleasant possibilities through Purcell’s mind with all the faster-than-the-eye speed of a deck of cards in the hands of a Vegas blackjack dealer. But the ace of spades in that deck was the most likely possibility: Underwood’s little plot had been discovered and she was in deep, deep trouble.
And, maybe, just maybe, so was he. The beignet in his belly turned to stone. He planted his butt back in his chair.
“I’m sitting,” he said roughly.
“SOD Underwood died of a stroke this morning.”
Purcell stared at the splay-toed pigeon prints in the powdered sugar scattered on the pavement. His pulse pounded in his temples. That card hadn’t even been tucked into his deck of possibilities. Underwood, dead?
“A stroke?” he repeated like an idiot, not sure of what to say.
“Yeah,” Díon sighed. “A massive one. The attending doc said she went quick, if that’s any consolation.”
“Fuck.” Purcell trailed a hand through his hair. Now what? Should he continue with the mission, for Underwood’s sake? See her daughter-in-law into her well-deserved grave?
But even as those thoughts were zipping through Purcell’s mind, Díon said, in a low, European-flavored voice, “Underwood told me about the gift for her daughter-in-law that you were going to deliver for her.”
Fear curled a cold hand around Purcell’s guts. He went still. “She did, did she?”
A low, rueful laugh. “I didn’t pluck it from her mind. Christ, Purcell. Why would I even be looking?”
Good question. A damned fine question, and one Purcell was going to examine in minute detail and in every kind of light later. Once he’d figured out what Díon wanted.
“That I don’t know,” he admitted. “So how come you’re breaking the news?”
“So we could discuss mutual concerns.”
“Those being … ?”
“Terminating Prejean and fulfilling Underwood’s last request.”
Laughter from tourists strolling along Decatur street headed for the French Market carried like music on the still air. “Keep talking,” Purcell said.
A grin stretched across Purcell’s lips and excitement crackled like crazed lightning through his veins as he listened to Díon’s urbane voice lay out his plan for S and his traitorous FBI squeeze, Heather Wallace.
21
TRUE BLUE AMERICAN
OUTSIDE DAMASCUS, OR
THE WELLS/LYONS COMPOUND
March 28
TIM SHAUNN WAS LYING on his belly in the dirt and scrub beneath rain-dripping pines atop a small rise near what remained of the Wells place. He adjusted the gas mask strapped on over his head, making sure it was snug as a bug in a effing rug.
He had zero desire to die from a stray whiff of the toxic fumes the federal government talking heads claimed was wafting from the mysterious sinkhole that had opened up and swallowed an entire house. Not to mention the poor, doomed souls living inside it—an FBI agent and his family, so the Oregonian said.
And, not only that, the so-called toxic fumes had stolen the lives of several of the nearest neighbors in the sparsely populated hillside community.
A handful of agents wearing tan windbreakers with red letters on the back reading TASK FORCE—and, effing interesting that no particular agency was named, not the FBI or HSA or CDC, just a generic, all-encompassing TASK FORCE—strolled the grounds alongside techs in yellow jumpsuits. A small guest cottage with broken-out windows seemed to be functioning as a command post.
Tim noted that no one was wearing a gas mask or any other kind of air filtration device. Not even the techs standing at the lip of what looked like an enormous
mist-blanketed pit, various gadgets and instruments in their gloved hands.
Toxic fumes, my ass.
Tim snorted, and the tinny sound bounced off the mask’s confines and into his ears. Okay, then. No more noise while wearing this effing thing. But the thought of pulling the gas mask off and putting the harmlessness of the air to the test left him cold.
Better safe than too effing dead to be sorry.
Maybe the toxic fumes had been controlled or had ended. Maybe. But on Tim’s fave late-night radio talk show, Mike and Jill Carr Digging for the Truth!, he’d heard a darker, more chilling theory.
The government was killing witnesses to whatever had happened at the Wells/Lyons compound. Too many people near the site had suddenly gone on vacation—without bothering to tell anyone. Or had inexplicably moved, leaving a forwarding address to some faraway vacant lot.
The feds rolled their eyes and explained that some people had been contaminated by the fumes and had been shuttled to a secure location to be scrubbed clean, monitored, then released.
Like quail in front of a pump action shotgun.
Tim’s gut tied itself into hard knots. He finger-wiped rain from the gas mask’s goggles as he reminded himself why he was here risking life and liberty. Mike and Jill Carr’s slogan circled through his mind like a torch held aloft by an Olympic runner: Keep Digging for the Truth!
Americans had the right to know what was going on in their very own country and on their own Grade A USA soil, had the right to know what dirty-assed deeds their duly elected government officials were busy committing and why.
Plus … maybe, just maybe, Mike Carr would ask Tim to the studio and have him recount his gritty, dangerous adventure live over the airwaves to a rapt audience. Jill Carr would then declare Tim a hero and a true-blue American and plant a pink-lipped kiss of gratitude on his manly, whisker-stubbled cheek.
A dreamy sigh escaped Tim’s lips, and he caught a pungent whiff of onion and green peppers from his breakfast burrito. His stomach rumbled, wishing for another.
Later, he promised it. First a little sleuthing, a bit of James Bonding, maybe a few photos, a smooth and unseen getaway, then a tasty and well-deserved lunch. Taco Bell was the shit.
Pulling his binoculars from his olive-green knapsack, Tim raised them to his eyes. They smacked against his goggles with a dull thok. His cheeks heated even though no one had witnessed his decidedly not double-oh moment. Sweat prickling against his scalp—damned mask was effing hot!—Tim carefully rested the binoculars against the goggles and peered at the scene below. Or tried to.
He discovered he couldn’t see anything due to the bad combo of binoculars and goggles. He’d have to get closer to ground zero in order to get a better look—oh joy.
Swallowing back his fear, he stuffed the useless binoculars into the knapsack, then pulled out his Fujifilm digital camera and, with a deep breath that he quickly regretted, started belly-crawling across the rain-dampened ground.
Pale mist snaked like dragon’s breath among the wet trunks of the pines, oaks, and fir trees growing thick throughout the property. Rain misted Tim’s goggles. Exertion and rising body temperature fogged them.
Now I can’t see. Effing great.
Tim paused in his exhausting ass-and-elbows crawl to wipe the lenses of his goggles and discovered the fog was on the inside.
Jesus Christ! Does James Bond or Jason Bourne deal with shit like this? No. They do not.
Sweat trickled down Tim’s face. His breath was coming in onion-scented pants. His heart drummed a fast-paced march against his ribs. The feds weren’t wearing gas masks. The air might be perfectly fine. Or … they’ve had a special shot that renders them immune to the effects of the toxic fumes.
If the toxic fumes ever existed in the first place.
With his goggles fogged, Tim felt like he was trapped, his head screwed into one of those magician’s boxes. He couldn’t breathe. Fingers fumbling with the straps, Tim ripped the gas mask off his face and shoved it to the top of his sweat-soaked head.
He sucked in a deep lungful of cool, moist air thick with the smells of pine and moss and wet bark. And nearly sobbed in relief when nothing happened—but what if it’s cumulative? Effing shut up!—except the quiet intake of fresh air. He drew in another deep breath as he attempted to calm his racing heart.
Wow. Claustrophobia. Who knew?
Tim wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his army camouflage shirt. As soon as his heart rate dropped into a relaxed saunter, he’d resume his crawl. But his heart never had the chance.
The sound of a round being chambered skyrocketed his heart into high orbit. Tim’s vision grayed and he felt his mouth working like a water-free goldfish’s.
“Throw your weapons away, then put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers,” a masculine voice ordered.
Feeling faint, Tim rose to his knees and hurled his camera into the wet undergrowth. It thudded against a pine trunk. He put his trembling hands behind his head and folded his fingers together.
“That was a camera, asswipe. Toss your goddamned weapons.”
“I don’t have any,” Tim stammered through a mouth gone dry. “I’m a reporter.” Why the effing hell did you say that? His brain screamed at him. Reporters are the first to die! What was wrong with birdwatcher or nature hiker or just effing LOST?!
“That gas mask tells me that you already knew this area was off limits due to health risks,” the man said with disgust. “Typical fucking reporter.”
See? You just got us killed. Asshole.
“Up on your feet, jerkoff. Let’s go. I’m sure the AIC would love to hear your reason for being here. She needs a good laugh.”
Tim blinked. Not sure he’d heard right, but not wanting to say anything that might correct his understanding of the man’s words—no summary execution, he rose shakily to his feet.
“Can I put my hands down?” Tim asked meekly.
“No, douchebag, you can’t.”
Tim barely heard the pine needles crunching underneath the man’s shoes as he approached. His thundering heart damned near drowned out all sound—but not his thoughts.
So what happens when they find out you’re not a reporter? That you lied?
But Tim didn’t have an answer for his brain’s angry accusation. You work on the problem, he suggested.
Tim held still as the man, an agent in a tan windbreaker, dark brown cords, and hiking boots, holstered his gun, then patted him down with quick, assured slides of his hands. He grunted in satisfaction when his search turned up nothing.
“No guns, but I guess a camera could be considered a weapon in a reporter’s hands,” the agent said. His blue eyes were hard as diamonds. “And give me that.”
The strap snapped against Tim’s ear as the agent yanked the gas mask from the top of his head. Ear stinging, eyes watering, brain no longer screeching, Tim kept silent.
The agent pulled his gun free of its holster again and motioned down the hill. “This way, dickwad.”
Heart pounding out the 1812 Overture inside his chest, Tim had no choice but to accompany the gun-toting agent down through the rain-beaded grass and underbrush to the gravel driveway leading to the damaged guest cottage tucked beneath the oaks and pines, and the pit or cave yawning in the earth in front of it.
Tim thought he heard an echoing rush of water, as though a river pulsed through the pit’s dark heart. The smells of cold water and wet rock and ozone laced the air.
Jumpsuited techs and other agents refused to look at Tim, keeping their gazes fixed ahead of them as though he was a ghost. Cold dread lumped up in his belly.
Dead man walking.
He had the sickening feeling that he was going to find out firsthand, up close and oh-so-effing personal, exactly what happened to the other people who’d stumbled across this quarantined scene.
Tim’s knees jellied and he stumbled, his combat boots slipping in the gravel. A strong hand latched around his shoulder. Kept h
im upright.
“Keep moving,” the agent said, his voice low. “You’re the one who wanted to be here so bad.”
Square back your shoulders. James Bond your way out of this. Charm him with snappy banter, then strangle him with a bootlace.
Yeah, that’s real helpful, brain. Thanks.
But Tim decided to give the snappy banter a go since he had absolutely zip to lose. “True, but when I booked this vacation, I specifically asked for a hollow volcano hideaway, a few laser-beam toting squirrels, and absolutely no gun-toting government operatives,” he said, his mouth so dry his words clicked.
The agent regarded him with narrowed eyes. “You trying to be funny, asswipe?”
Tim swallowed hard. “Sorta.”
“Christ.” But a smile ticked up one corner of the agent’s mouth for a millisecond. At least Tim was pretty sure he’d smiled. At some point. During his life. Maybe.
Releasing Tim’s shoulder, the agent grumbled, “Move it, comedian. “
Comedian, that’s a good sign, Tim’s brain babbled, grasping at straws as it skittered off a cliff into gibbering insanity. A step up from asswipe or douchebag or dickwad, don’tcha think?
Tim ignored it.
The roar of water intensified as the agent led him across the remains of a ruined lawn that looked as though giant fingers had raked through the grass, and to the pit/cave. Or close to it, anyway.
Crouched at the pit’s edge was a woman wearing a wind-breaker and trim khaki slacks, her wheat-blonde hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. She seemed to be peering down into the darkness below.
The agent halted a few feet away from her. Tim came to a reluctant stop as well. Despite the air’s cool touch against his skin, sweat trickled down his forehead and into his eyes. His shoulders ached. He wished he could unlace his fingers and lower his arms.
“Hey, Kaplan,” the agent said. “Look at what I found crawling through the underbrush on his belly like a worm grubbing through the goddamned dirt.”