Comes a Horseman (19 page)

“You mind?” she asked, sincerely, not as a challenge.

He shook his head. She lit up and cracked her window. Instantly the smoke whipped away like a soul who'd found a way out of hell.

“Why don't you give me one?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “You don't smoke.”

“I'm trying to start.”

She kept the pack in her hand. “It's a nasty habit.”

“Nastier the better.”

She laughed. “Since when?”

Since I realized nasty things fare no worse and sometimes better than healthy, good things,
he thought.
Since I decided it doesn't matter.

He shrugged.

She handed over the pack. “You worry me sometimes, Brady. You really do.”

As they approached Denver, traffic slowed and she had no choice but to fall in line.

“We need to get gas pretty soon. Ft. Collins is another hour after we get out of this mess,” she said, firing up another cigarette.

One had been enough for Brady. He went back to the CSD walk-through. He would play a bit, stop, replay, move ahead. In this way, he had advanced to the baubles in Cynthia Loeb's bedroom when Alicia spoke again.

“You remember Muniz?” she asked.

A tight smile pushed at the corners of Brady's mouth. He nodded. “The hero,” he said. Special agent Rudolph Muniz had been part of an investigative team that had earned a white feather—Bureau-speak for solving a particularly important case. Feathers were especially heady when victory rose out of hopelessness. The case Muniz and his partner, Jack Barrymore, were working looked particularly bleak: the disappearance of an eleven-year-old girl. She'd been missing two weeks already when the locals called in the FBI.

Brady and Alicia had heard the details about two months ago, the day following the bust. They were waiting for the Evidence Response Team's debriefing to begin when Bull Jordans—a former LSU linebacker and New Orleans beat cop, with all the charm and sensitivity you'd expect from someone with that background—regaled them with the Bureau's latest and greatest bust.

“They're making the rounds, right?” Bull said to the dozen faces turned his way. “Reinterviewing everyone. It's grunt work, 'cause they figure the kid's a graveyard steak by now anyway. But they go to the crib of the kid's piano teacher.”

Brady winced at the word “crib” coming out of the mouth of a forty-year-old white guy. “Graveyard steak” was more in line with Bull's personality.

“What's this guy going to give 'em, they're thinking,” Bull continued. “Thirties, married, no sheet. Normal guy, by all accounts. So they ring the bell, and a minute later the curtains over the front window move. Next thing, the garage door's rolling up and a car's in there revving and revving. Muniz and Barrymore run for the garage. Piano Man's at the wheel of a '68 Charger. Big engine, fast car.” Bull flashes an appreciative grin. “As soon as he sees 'em, he pops the clutch and burns rubber outta there.

“Muniz and Barrymore are yelling,
‘Stop! FBI! Stop!'
They got their gats out, but they don't wanna shoot in case this is their guy and he has the kid stashed somewhere. So Muniz drops his piece and—get this—he jumps on the hood. I mean, this thing is screaming out of the driveway and Muniz is holding on for dear life, sliding this way and that. Barrymore is, like, awestruck. He just stands there watching. Says the Charger ripped down the street like some street-racing movie played in fast-forward. Ya know those kick-butt movie cops; when they do that, they got these determined expressions.”

Everyone nods.

“Not Muniz. He's got this look like he just woke up on this speeding vehicle and hasn't got a clue how he got there. His face is like this—” Bull perfectly mimics the expression of someone who sees a train rushing toward him. “Muniz is screaming. Not ‘Stop the car!' But ‘Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!' All the way down the blasted street.”

Roars of laughter.

“Barrymore, that idiot, starts chasing after it, yelling, ‘Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!' Finally, he gets his wits and runs back to their steed. He gets close enough to see the Charger go round a corner and Muniz fly off. I mean, he
flies
—like forty feet. Rolling and tumbling another fifty feet before landing in some old lady's hedges. Piano Man loses control and pegs a tree. When Barrymore gets to him, he's blabbering, ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' ‘Where's the little girl?' Barrymore says.” Bull shook his head and looked around as if to say,
Some guys have all the luck.
“Piano Man says, ‘In my basement! Oh, I'm so sorry! I'm sorry!' Muniz is limping over, holding his arm, but obviously he'll live, so Barrymore drives back to the house and there she is, in the basement, good as new. Kaching!”

Over the next few days, more details trickled in. Turns out the little girl wasn't as good as new, but she would recover. Physically, anyway.

“Jumping on the hood of that car,” Alicia said now, jarring Brady out of the memory.

He nodded.

“Everyone made fun of him. ‘Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!'” She showed Brady the face Bull had made. “Thing is . . .” She hesitated. “I want to do that.”

She looked at him, apparently expecting surprise or humor or something else less than encouraging. When he nodded again, his face impassive, she put her eyes back on the road and continued. “I want to jump on the hood of a speeding car or run across some field with people firing at me or leap from a helicopter onto a semitruck.” She glanced at him again. “You know?”

“All in the name of rescuing a civilian or stopping an archcriminal from causing greater harm.”

“Yeah. Not for fun.” She paused. “But I think it would be fun too.”

Brady cleared his throat. “Jung called that a ‘hero complex.'”

“Oh, great. I have a complex.”

“We all do. Most of us have several. But
complex
is just a word. It's a convenient way to categorize inclinations in thought and behavior.”

“So is a hero complex good or bad?” She suddenly swerved onto a passing exit ramp, apparently having spotted a gas station she liked.

Brady grabbed a handgrip on the door. Alicia approached a red light, braking hard.

When the car stopped, Brady said, “Could be positive or negative. It's good if it gives you initiative and makes you adventurous. It's bad if it leads to foolhardiness and bravado.” He watched her think about this. “You might have something altogether different,” he added.

“What do you mean?”

“Could be your desire to perform heroic acts stems from your passion for the job. You love being a special agent, and you want to experience it in every possible way. And, sure, you want to save people in the process. That's one of the reasons you joined the Bureau, right?”

Alicia didn't respond. A horn honked. She saw the light was green and accelerated. Finally, she said, “I think I got into law enforcement because I wanted to kick butt.”

Brady smiled. “If the butts belong to bad guys, you're a hero. Congratulations.”

“You don't feel the same?”

It was his turn to think. More than anything else, he was a desk jockey. He studied case descriptions and crime photographs and tried to turn them into a profile of the perp. Alicia liked the down-and-dirty stuff. She spent her off-hours on the shooting range; his idea of training was a few hours with
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. While he had been working on his doctoral dissertation, she'd been in the trenches, learning hero moves.

He said, “Not to that degree, no.”

“I bet Muniz pats himself on the back every day for jumping on that hood, despite the razzing he got for it.”

“Broke his arm too.”

“Oh, pish,” she said. “I broke my arm when I was fourteen. Didn't even cry.”

“Were you beating up the neighborhood bully?”

Alicia punched the gas to get through a yellow light. It turned red before they reached the intersection. They zoomed through, then braked hard to pull into a Diamond Shamrock. “I was on my bicycle and hit a mailbox,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Now
that
I believe.”

24

T
he Middle Eastern sun bathed the city in orange fire that flared off the windows and metallic surfaces of Tel Aviv's modern skyline. A moist breeze coming off the Mediterranean made the air feel warmer than the 68 degrees reported by the large digital thermometer outside Bank Hapoalim's Romanesque headquarters on Rothchild Boulevard. Day-trippers lingered on Gordon Beach, savoring a final plunge into the surf or one last sandy-toed stroll before heading inland to their homes. The office workers who had gone home to shower and change would soon reemerge to fill the many nightclubs on Hayarkon Street. Tel Avivians often surprised visiting Westerners with their cosmopolitan lifestyle and insatiable passion for merriment. They believed the day was for hard work, the night for cutting loose and taking it easy.

Except for Luco Scaramuzzi.

Ensconced in his private workout room in the Italian Embassy, he pushed at the limits of his strength and endurance. Rivulets of sweat tracked the sharp contours of his muscles like winter runoff—slicking over straining biceps, quadriceps, pectorals. They poured off his face and ran, glistening, through the fine black hair that swirled over his chest and stomach, soaking the waistband of his cotton gym shorts. Each heft of the fifty-pound dumbbells in his fists brought forth more sweat and tight-lipped groans of exertion. Shifting his gaze from a glass wall and the city beyond to a mirror-fronted column, his lids fluttered over stinging eyes. But he liked what he saw, the way his body responded to his daily workouts. He was sitting on a padded bench, the soles of his Pradas flat against the floor, his back straight, and still he saw no folds at his stomach, no fat edging over his shorts. His body tapered nicely from shoulders to waist. He pushed the iron over his head, watching what bulged, what quivered. He was after muscle mass and tone more than strength, so the weights were relatively light and he did lots of reps.

He realized he had lost count and decided to keep raising and lowering the weights until the current track blaring through the iPod earbuds ended. It was “Murder (in Four Parts)” from the movie
Road to Perdition
—brooding and atmospheric, the sound he preferred for furious workouts. This evening his mind was troubled, so he had attacked the equipment with more intensity than usual—first with leg presses, then shoulder rolls, wrist curls, bench presses, a circuit of Nautilus stations, and now the dumbbells. His aching muscles were threatening to shut down. Each push up and draw down became exponentially harder—he lowered the weights with excruciating slowness, the way his trainer had taught him. His eyes squeezed shut. The weights were not merely quivering now, they were wobbling. But he got them up. His arms were on a glass-through-the-veins journey downward when he felt the air pressure in the room suddenly relax: someone had opened the door. With a savage grunt, he pushed the weights up, holding them steady, brought them down, then up again.

See?
he told himself.
Mind over matter. There's always more power where you think there's none. You just have to look for it, conjure it.

He opened his eyes, this time ignoring the sting of sweat. Pippino Farago came into view, looking nervous and intimidated, as if he expected Luco to ask him to bench some free weights. But Luco knew his old friend had other reasons to be anxious.

The dumbbells came down . . . slow, steady. Luco closed his eyes again. Up went the weights . . . then down . . . The song had reached its deafening crescendo, and Luco thought,
Up . . . one . . . more . . . time.
The track stopped. Luco lowered his arms and let them hang with the weights below the bench seat. Perspiration streamed over his skin as he caught his breath. Finally, he lowered one dumbbell to the floor, then the other. The next song in his custom playlist had started—“Elk Hunt” from
The Last of the Mohicans
. It was such a stirring orchestration, he was tempted to let it play to the end. Business was at hand, however, so he reached to the iPod clipped to his waistband and turned it off. He pulled the ear-buds out and draped the cords over his shoulders.

“Arjan said you wanted to see me.” Pip shifted his weight to his shorter leg.

“Have a seat.” He indicated a workout bench across from his own. He leaned sideways to snag a towel off a hook affixed to the mirrored column and began wiping his face.

“Get everything taken care of in Jerusalem?” Luco asked. After Luco's meeting with the Watchers, Pip had not returned to Tel Aviv with him, saying he had errands to run. He'd arrived hours later with one of the security guards.

Pip seemed to take a sudden interest in Luco's sneakers and mumbled some response.

Dabbing the towel over his arms, Luco said, “How do I look?”

“Uhh . . .”

“Michelangelo arms, don't you think?”

Pip nodded. “You've always been fit.”

“Better now than ever.” He ran the towel across his chest and dropped it in his lap. He leaned over, planting his forearms on his thighs. Pinning Pip with his eyes, he said, “We have a problem.”

Pip winced and recovered quickly. “What's that?”

“I'm aware of your meeting today. With Hüber. Did you think I would not find out?”

Again, the smaller man diverted his eyes. They darted back to Luco, then fled away once more. A smile, too, quivered into place, then vanished.

Luco knew Pip could not bear the weight of direct confrontation, especially when it was Luco applying the pressure. When Arjan had reported the call Pip received from Hüber, he had shrugged it off. No way would Pip meet with a Watcher behind his back. Then the meeting took place, and Luco considered waiting to see how it all played out. Would Pip's better judgment force him to confess his misstep, or would he surprise Luco by pursuing motives Luco could not fathom? What could Hüber promise that Luco had not already given? Then he realized he could not risk Pip's betrayal, not now, not with the power plays he had set in motion at the Watchers meeting and in the United States. Better to meet Pip's rebellion head-on, find out what was going on, and stop it quickly.