Comes a Horseman (26 page)

“Olaf . . . you there . . . ?”

He shook his head. He had been trained since boyhood to be a warrior. Weaponry, stealth, survival, target acquisition, escape. Why had they not prepared him better to leave his home?

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Arjan sends word. You have a new assignment.”

With that, Arjan returned Olaf 's stunning blow. His assignment had been to kill every person on the list of fifty, quickly and without interruption. Arjan had stressed the task's importance to the rise of a new order—or a restored order, in Olaf 's opinion.

“I don't understand,” he said. He leaned past the aluminum cases to retrieve the sheet of names and biographical data.

“Priority one reassignment,” came Ottar's matter-of-fact words.

Olaf unfolded the list. Only six names crossed off.

“Was it . . .
me
?” He did not want to broach the subject of failure, but he had to know. “Ottar, was it something I did?”

“No, no, no. Arjan said, tell Olaf, ‘Good job. Wonderful. Everything went as planned.'”

As planned? His confusion grew. He had been given fifty names. Forty-four yet remained.

“What about the others? The other names on my list?”

“Forget them. That's what Arjan said: ‘Forget them.'”

Olaf touched the letters of Trevor Wilson's name as though touching the boy himself. He thought,
You have been pardoned, Master Trevor. Live well.

When Ottar said, “I didn't catch that,” he realized he had spoken out loud.

“Nothing. What is the new assignment?”

“I'll send it through.”

“Do it, Ottar. I'll sign off now.”

“Wait, Olaf. Arjan said to tell you that these next two targets are on the move. If they leave from their location, which is near you, we will notify you and arrange for transportation.”

“I understand.” Transportation meant a private jet. Sixteen days before, a Gulfstream had deposited him in Utah. How else was he to travel, the way he looked and with he dogs?

“Gods be with you, Olaf.”

He peeled off the headset to save his ears from the screeching damnation of data transference. Two color photographs, positioned side by side, began materializing on the laptop's wide screen. Horizontal lines of pixels zipped from left to right, then from the top down. On the left, a woman. Feline features. Upturned nose, green almond-shaped eyes. Attractive, if you liked them that way. Olaf preferred women with more meat on their bones. More
oomph
. The man on the right had dark hair, brooding eyes, green or hazel.

He leaned back in the chair. The photographs had finished rendering. Now, information about each person filled the space underneath. The fourth line, under their names and physical descriptions, caused his eyebrows to rise. This was where their occupation was entered—the same occupation for each—and Olaf nodded in appreciation.

It read:
Special agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

PART II

VIRGINIA
AND
NEW YORK

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more
susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

—Desiderius Erasmus

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me.

—Emily Dickinson

36

I
f it weren't for Mrs. Pringle, Brady would sneak into his house like a shadow.

Since Zach was three or four, whenever Brady came home from a trip, a game of hide-and-seek would start even before his Florsheims hit the front porch. He'd tell Zach when he was scheduled to touch down at Ronald Reagan National, and that was it. He didn't know if Zach started hiding right at that time, if he calculated his ETA from the airport, or if he watched for him from a window. (He had once asked Karen, who lowered her eyes coyly and said, “I ain't telling.”) But whenever Brady arrived home, Zach was hiding. And the kid was good. He'd slip his little body into the tightest nook or cranny and wouldn't make a sound until Brady either spotted him or gave up, which he usually did after forty-five minutes of serious seeking.

The prize for not being found was dinner out at the restaurant of Zach's choice. When the game started, that had meant McDonald's. Lately, it was Olive Garden. If Brady found Zach, they would go for a round of putt-putt golf, which Brady enjoyed more than Zach did. Brady didn't get to do much putt-putting anymore.

Three years ago Brady went to Los Angeles to consult on a case. When he returned, he searched from the attic rafters to the basement drains. Prodded by Karen, he searched for two hours. Finally, he gave up.

Karen led him to the basement, where she slid away a false wall to reveal a small hidden room—and Zach. Their close friend Kurt Oakley had wanted to build a hideaway and playroom for Zach for a long time—he had made one for his three boys and they loved it. When he had heard about the game, he insisted on building the room while Brady was away.

Brady protested that he didn't spend enough time in the basement to know its precise layout. Besides, the wall was perfectly camouflaged, with a rowboat wall hanging and empty boxes of laundry soap and bottles of cleaner attached to the sliding wall, low to the ground. The effect was brilliant in its ordinariness. Finally, Brady had admitted defeat and taken everyone—including Kurt, his wife, Kari, and the boys—out to Red Lobster, a very special treat indeed.

Zach used the hideaway frequently to play, spend quiet time, and hide from uninformed friends, but he never hid from Brady there again. Still, Brady always scoped it out, because he knew the day he stopped checking was the day Zach would be there.

The first time Mrs. Pringle was at the house when Brady showed up for the hunt (this was six months after Karen's death), she had spotted him—to her fading eyes, a mere shadow—creeping up the stairs. She had screamed to wake the neighborhood and clutched her chest. He had thought that was the end of her—if not her life, then certainly her babysitting for him. She had recovered remarkably well, however, and made him promise to inform her of his arrival in the future.

So now, after using his key to unlock the front door and after removing his shoes in the hardwood foyer, he found Mrs. Pringle watching
Entertainment Tonight
in the den and cleared his throat for her. She started slightly, gave him a maternal look, and nodded.

A half hour later, Mrs. Pringle was ready to go home, and he had not found Zach.

“Ollie ollie in come free!” he called from the foyer. After a minute: “Zach! Mrs. Pringle wants to go home. Ollie ollie in come free!”

He looked helplessly at Mrs. Pringle, who gave him
that
look and nodded to something behind him.

He turned and there was Zach in the hall leading to the kitchen, the sweetest smile on his face.

“Where were you this time?” Brady asked.

“I ain't telling.” Sounding just like his mother.

Brady held open his arms, and Zach ran into them. “I think I'll try the macaroni and cheese this evening,” Zach informed him.

“Olive Garden?”

“Of course.”

AFTER DROPPING off Mrs. Pringle, but before descending upon Zach's idea of culinary perfection, father and son went to visit wife and mother. Karen's grave site at Mt. Olivet was one of those quaint hilltop plots every person thinks he or she'll occupy one day; the more likely scenario for most people is that their bodies will spend eternity in a flat space the size of a football field, plot number C-10 in a matrix of a thousand graves. Karen had a modest life insurance policy. Most of it went to purchase two adjoining plots in an undeveloped section of the cemetery, under a hundred-year-old oak that the management company agreed in writing to maintain and never remove. Brady had written a check for $60,000, nearly twice the cost of other grave sites.

Each time they visited, Brady considered the money well spent. Away from the milling mourners, from the assembly-line death holes down in the older and current “communities”—as the manager called the various areas of his necropolis, as if he were building neighborhoods of growing families; perhaps philosophically, he was. Away from all that, Zach could spend time with his mother. He could talk and sing and weep and lie still on her grave. On a typical visit, he would do all these. When Brady visited alone, he did too.

Tonight, Zach sat before the headstone, a dusty rose–colored marble with a large heart protruding from one side of the rectangle that spanned the width of two plots. The heart was on the left side, Karen's side. On the right, under which Brady would eventually rest, was an exaggerated Roman vase with a hole in its top for flowers. Brady thought Karen would have liked it.

Zach sat there, running an open hand over the words:

BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER, DAUGHTER AND SISTER.
KAREN ANNE MOORE

The dates of Karen's birth and death came next. Both Brady and Zach avoided reading them. There was something too blunt, too final about that brief stretch of time; the dates made them too aware of their being carried forward in the river of time, while their loved one stayed behind, growing smaller in the distance, no matter how hard they strained to keep her in sight. Below the dates was Karen's favorite Bible verse:

REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS. I WILL SAY IT AGAIN:
REJOICE!
— PHILIPPIANS 4:4

“That seems like an odd choice for a headstone,” he had said when she told him once what she would want as an epitaph.

“No, it's not! The Lord is good, and when I finally meet Him, you can bet I'll be rejoicing. I hope you will be too.”

“When I go or when you go?”

“Both, but I was thinking when I go.”

“Fat chance I'll rejoice, unless I go first.”

“Look how much God wants us to rejoice. It's repeated. ‘I will say it again.'”

“Can we talk about something else?”

Giving the headstone engraver those words to etch forever on her marker was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Back then, as now, there was little rejoicing.

From his position ten paces back, he could hear Zach quietly talking, telling his mom about his studies and the cool book he was reading and the kid who was picking on him at soccer practice, whom he had stood up to. Brady knew Karen would be hugging him right now, running her fingers through his hair, telling him, “How interesting!” and “I'm so proud of you!” And who knew? Maybe that was what she was doing at this very moment.

He put his hands on his hips and touched the cell phone clipped to his belt. He'd forgotten about it. He unclipped it and punched buttons until he'd set the ringer mode to vibrate. Nothing spoiled quiet moments worse than a ringing cell phone.

He gave the boy a few more minutes alone, then sat beside him. Zach touched his index finger to the
B
in BELOVED. Brady put his finger on top of his son's. Together, they traced the words all the way through Philippians 4:4. As usual, they skipped over the dates.

37

F
ollowing directions she had downloaded from a map Web site, Alicia drove her rented Dodge Stratus from LaGuardia to a litter-strewn parking lot next to St. Anthony of Egypt on Thirty-fifth Avenue. Her limited experience with both New York City and houses of God had led her to expect a massive, ornate structure of chiseled statuary, rose windows, and heavy wooden doors resembling the rear flank of a Spanish galleon. But this was no St. Patrick's Cathedral. St. Anthony's was puny by comparison, a stone building of traditional church shape: steps leading up to double doors only slightly larger than a residence's, a spired roof with a bell tower. Set into each side wall was a row of narrow stained-glass windows.

Forty feet to the west of the church sat a two-story brick building with dingy windows and no apparent means of ingress. Between this building and the church, set back from the street, was a high wall, whose stones mimicked the church construction but appeared much newer. Dead grass filled the space between sidewalk and wall. Flagstones cut an arching path from the base of the church steps to a wood-and-iron gate set in the center of the wall. Alicia went through the gate into another world.

The courtyard she stepped into could have been the set of a vampire movie, the kind Hammer Films made in the seventies with overcast skies, creepy forests, and creatures howling in the distance. Denuded willow branches hung over the area like a trap ready to spring. In here, twilight became night, the air cooler by several degrees. Three metal chairs huddled around a table, an inch of grime and leaves covering them all. Alicia rubbed her arms. The brick building she'd seen from the street plus two others made up three sides of the court. Set into the side of the building to the left of the courtyard entrance, directly behind the church, was a door and a carved wooden plaque:

RECTORY
FR. DUNCAN MCAFEE

She mounted the concrete slab in front of the door and pushed a lighted doorbell button. A chime sounded deep inside. Moments later, a porch light came on. A wicket door, set in the larger door at face height, opened. Alicia could see nothing behind it, just darkness.