Comes a Horseman (13 page)

The Watchers nodded or mumbled their greetings, but Randall had already turned away to rummage through his papers.

To Luco, the old man seemed as ancient as the papyrus he was endlessly poring over. His skin even resembled the stuff: heavily creased, dry and delicate, stained by time. His lips had narrowed and faded to flesh-tone, rendering his mouth invisible when closed. His nose was too large, his cheeks too hollow, his hair too gone—but the fire in his eyes instantly blinded observers to those imperfections. They were Russian blue and saw everything. They'd been seeing everything, in fact, for a long, long time. Wisdom ran deep in those eyes, as did intrigue and humor and compassion. Something about them made you appreciate the attention, as if they were capable of conferring some great knowledge upon whoever fell within their purview.

Even Luco, impervious to masculine allure despite exuding it so effortlessly himself, found turning from Randall's gaze a painful experience. Mostly, though, he envied its enchantment. His own charm was an amalgam of expressions, wit, and aura. Randall's eyes could captivate, and so manipulate, all by themselves. Luco thought,
The old coot must have been a sexual dynamo in his day, priest or not.

A bulb above him illuminated Randall's gleaming head, making what little silver hair he had appear even more diaphanous, as though his scalp were smoldering. His clothes—charcoal shirtsleeves, black pants—floated about him, a size too big. The material hung over his bony shoulders like drapery. From the sleeves jutted the thinnest of speckled arms, hairless, but host to magnificently interesting hands. Gaunt, with yellowed nails and brown nicotine stains, they were big hands with long fingers—piano fingers, Luco's aunt would have called them—and they fluttered like doves when he spoke, dancing to the cadence of his words. But Randall wasn't talking, so the hands stayed down, shuffling papers.

He said, “Ahhhh”—drawing it out the way one would after a splash of cold water on a blistering day—and pulled a sheaf of papers from the box.

Luco caught a glimpse of the minuscule handwriting covering the pages from edge to edge. He wondered how Randall hoped to find a note again once it was relegated to the thousands of identical lines he scribbled every day.

Randall fanned the notes out on the table. His head moved back and forth as he read. Suddenly, he laughed robustly. With a look, he invited the Watchers, then Luco to join in his merriment. Their reticence did not diminish the joy in his eyes or his openmouthed smile.

What an odd duck,
Luco thought. Passionate and excitable, yet deliberate and reserved. Not so odd, really. Focused. Fervent about things that mattered to him, apathetic about everything else. Luco understood that; he was like that himself. Only
his
passions encompassed a world of pleasures; Randall's were limited to a few choice studies—each of which served Luco quite nicely.

Now that was an understatement. He could only imagine where he'd be without Randall's work. Back in Rome, likely. At
Centro di Psicoterapia Cognitiva
, the loony bin, playing Old Maid with God and Napoleon.

“Now!” Randall proclaimed. “Gregory the Great's
Moralia
. . .”

Luco put a hand on his arm. “One sec, Father.” To the other twelve, he said, “Your own scholars have already reviewed this prophecy.”

“John Stapleton knows about this?” asked Niklas Hüber, skeptical.

“Oh, yes,” answered Father Randall. “I have . . .” He stuck his hand into the box, and this time it immediately returned, clutching several single sheets. “I have his statement right here, concurring with my conclusions. And one from Dr. Noyce. And Professor Inglehook.” He dropped each letter on the table as he announced its writer.

“We should like copies, if you please.” This from Tirunih Wodajo, a tall Ethiopian seated beside Hüber.

Randall patted the side of the box. “I have bound copies of my report, supporting documents, and these concurrences.”

Several Watchers nodded appreciatively.

See, not so odd at all.
Luco felt like hugging the old man. He always came through.

“Now!” Randall proclaimed once more. And starting with an incidental notation made in the margin of a manuscript by Gregory the Great in the year AD 598, he began a detailed accounting of the steps through ancient writings that ultimately brought him to this latest discovery. Pantomiming the retrieving, opening, and scrutiny of great codices, the unrolling of precious scrolls, the sneaking of glimpses at forbidden manuscripts, he described this arduous journey—with side comments about bibliotics and methods of exegesis.

Listening to Randall's impassioned recitation was excruciating. Randall always did it this way, as though a conclusion could not be appreciated without first comprehending the processes that derived it.

At last he fell silent. His eyes darted from one floating face to another, expecting a word of praise or a question or at least a startled expression. When nothing responsive materialized, Koji Arakawa spoke up.

“I'm sorry, Father Randall,” he said. “I'm afraid you've spoken over our heads. Could you tell us again, in layman's terms, what the prophecy is?”

Randall lowered his head and closed his eyes. Finally, he leaned back, drew in a deep breath, and said, “As a young boy, the Son of Perdition will murder, rather I should say,
will have murdered
”—he looked at Luco;
a great touch
, Luco thought—“his mother.”

That got the response he'd been looking for. Gasps and questions and calls for order. Many of the stares coming across the table fell not on Randall but on Luco. They all knew his history. A dark incident from his boyhood, long buried until the thorough background investigation they had initiated disinterred it, had now become . . . something else, something extraordinary.

Luco could not help but smile. He had them.

15

W
ith a sharp sound still ringing in her ears, Alicia Wagner woke. Her eyes snapped open, and her face came off the mattress. She was lying on her stomach in the bed she had crawled into at six that morning. The digital clock on the bedside table told her it was 10:27. Four and a half hours of sleep, if you could call the restlessness she had just experienced sleep. A sheet, moist with perspiration, entwined her torso like a boa constrictor. Her skin was clammy. The pillows and heavy hotel covers had fled the arena of her nightmares sometime during the morning. She turned her stiff neck toward the window. Light was stealing through the edges of closed curtains.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

She nearly flipped off the bed. Someone was knocking at the door. Probably had been knocking for some time.

“What?” she tried to say, but her throat was too parched to make more than a raspy noise. She grabbed a quarter-filled glass of water off the table, swallowed painfully, and called out: “What is it!”

Loud mumbling answered her.

“Oh, for heaven's sake.” She rolled off the bed, got a foot tangled in the clothes strewn on the floor, and stumbled for the door.

The peephole framed the distorted face of Brady Moore. He had not landed by the time she had finished at the crime scene, loaded up her equipment, and headed for a hotel, so she had left a message on his cell phone, letting him know her hotel and room number. He was looking down the corridor one way, then the other. He squinted at the peephole, wiggled his tie, checked his watch.

“Hold on a sec,” she said.

The woman staring out at her from the bathroom mirror was not her, no way. That woman had Alicia's blond hair, but Alicia wore it shoulder-length, styled back away from her face. This other's hair was sticking out in spiky clumps, with one side perfectly flat and rising above her head a good four inches, the other side attacking her face with fingerlike protrusions. Her eyes were big and green, like Alicia's—and not too bloodshot, she noticed. The bluish coloration under them, however, was a fashion Alicia never fancied. Too Goth.

“Ohhh,” she moaned and began running her fingers through her hair. She had never been very concerned with appearances, but this was ridiculous. After fifteen frustrating seconds, she realized a brush was right before her on the counter. She reached for it, then stopped. “Oh, forget it.” She supposed putting on something other than the panties she'd slept in was the minimum required of her. She yanked the fluffy white hotel robe off the back of the bathroom door, cinched the belt tight around her waist, and pulled open the door.

He looked perfect. Even needing a shave and with a trace of red in his eyes, he could have played an FBI agent in the movies. She instantly regretted not taking more time to spruce up.

He gave her a halfhearted smile. She'd learned that was about the best he was capable of. Except around his son. The boy was the only thing she'd seen in the year they'd worked together that got Brady's happy meter above “okay.”

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said flatly. He made no attempt to enter the room.

“What took you so long?” She pulled the robe tighter, making her muscles taut as she did, stretching.

“First flight out was 6:40. How 'bout I meet you in the café downstairs, grab some breakfast?”

She shook her head and looked over her shoulder into the room. The CSD cases were on the floor at the foot of the bed. “I'll order room service. I want to review the CSD data from last night.”

“How'd it go?”

Thinking about it—the technology, not the victim—made her smile. She felt the last vestiges of grogginess fall away. “Good . . . great, really.” She shrugged. “Lead Dee's a crotchety coot, didn't like the Bureau stepping in, didn't like my gender, and didn't like me thinking I was going to tell him how to process his crime scene.”

“So did you?” Brady asked. He stuck his hands in his pockets, looking casual and comfortable standing in the hotel corridor.

“Oh yeah. You should have seen him. After going through the scene with him and a tech, I showed him the POA. He was just about stammering with excitement.” She laughed. “I spread the floor plan out on the hood of his car and started explaining the symbols—suspicious latents, blood spatter, a couple heel scuffs, what I'm pretty sure was dog hair—and this guy was like ‘Ooooh, ahhhh.'”

Brady smiled appreciatively, and she was reminded of the disparity between his relative dapperness and her own dishevelment.

“Look, I gotta make myself presentable. Come back in half an hour.”

He took in her robe, her hair. “I think you're going to need more time than that.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I'm down the hall, in 422.” He cocked his head in the direction he meant. “Give me a ring when you're ready.”

She shut the door and pressed her back against it. Brady was a handsome man. Not movie-star handsome, but he could hold his own in a room full of former high school studs and the neighborhood hunks, whom housewives clucked about while stitching patches into a quilt or burning cookies for a school bake sale or whatever it was housewives did when they gathered. She wasn't sure if his stoicism added to or detracted from his charm. He could be either mysteriously brooding or depressingly sulky. His usually successful efforts at humor—which Alicia interpreted as his way of either deflecting scrutiny or keeping others from being sucked into his void of depression—made his melancholy appear more like a personality trait than an emotional problem.

There was also something utterly romantic about his sadness. His wife had died, what, a year and a half ago? And still, Alicia got the sense that if it weren't for the sake of his son, Brady would plunge into that eternal darkness after her. In a heartbeat. He must have really loved her. Alicia knew couples who had claimed to have found their life mate but who insisted that if one died the other should try to find love again; each wanted only for the other to be happy. Alicia suspected it was all garbage. In reality, everyone wanted to be irreplaceable. Distill that desire to its core, and you'd behold a subconscious emotional death wish for your spouse; if you died, you wanted your lover's heart to break so completely, nothing could ever grow there again. After all, how deep were all the professions of undying love if they could be shifted to another? What we all yearned for, Alicia decided, was a love so deep it could never reach the surface again.

Unpleasant. Downright selfish. But true. And extremely romantic.

Ironic too. Because someone who could love that deeply was very attractive to someone who desired to be loved that deeply.

Alicia shook her head. What was she thinking? Romance with Brady? She pursed her lips. Okay, she'd thought about it before, once or twice. Female colleagues at the Bureau had described the old Brady to her. They'd used phrases like “full of life” and “spark in his step.” That was a cool Brady. Could he be like that again? If he could, would it negate the very romanticism Alicia found so appealing?

Maybe she was different. Could she draw him up from the depths without the very act proving he wasn't so far down to begin with? Then down he would go again, this time weighted with love for
her
.

Aaaahhhhh!
her mind screamed.
I must really be tired.
Brady was Brady. Her partner. Good looking but awfully moody. Nice guy but too selfish to understand how much of a bummer he could be.
Besides, I'm not in the market. I'm not! Work is my lover, my spouse. That's the way it has to be for now . . .

Her hand rose and felt the hair exploding from her head. She laughed out loud, short and humorless. Even if she thought of Brady only as the partner he was, she didn't want him holding in his head an image of her as a disheveled cow. Well, that wasn't true. She knew that if Brady was just some other guy, she wouldn't care less what image of her he possessed. Just get the job done.

She pushed away from the door.
Get your head on straight, Alicia,
she thought
. You got work to do, girl. No time for daydreams, especially about . . . about
that. She padded into the bathroom, thinking she'd keep the shower cold today. Very cold.