Deliver Us From Evil (28 page)

R
EGGIE LOOKED AROUND
the small footprint of her dingy flat in London. There was a lumpy four-poster bed, an old chest that had belonged to her
mother, a square of frayed carpet, a table with two straight-backed chairs, a hot plate, a small under-the-counter fridge,
a four-foot-high shelf crammed with books, and two dirty windows that looked out on the back of another grimy building. Her
single potted plant was quite dead because a freak heat wave that had hit London while she was gone had baked her room, which
sat defenseless without the benefit of central air-conditioning. The toilet and shower were down the hall. The folks in her
building were early risers and if she wanted to bathe with even moderately hot water she had to get there by 6 a.m.

I’m twenty-eight and still live like I’m at university.

She’d showered in cold water since she’d arrived home late, and then changed into the only clean clothes she had left in her
closet. She bagged up her dirty laundry with the intent of washing it later in the facilities downstairs. Since she’d been
gone awhile, her fridge held nothing edible. She ate breakfast at a café down the street, taking her time over eggs, coffee,
and a buttery croissant. She’d charged her phone and sent a text to Whit. She’d received an immediate reply. All their people
had gotten out safely. One had even gone to the villa and retrieved her personal things and brought them back to England.
In his message Whit wanted to know where Shaw was. He wrote, “Make sure he can’t find Harrowsfield.” She emailed him back
and told him that Shaw was no longer with her and that she would make sure she wasn’t followed.

Walking down the street Reggie stretched her arms and worked the kinks out of her legs. The boat ride had been horrible, pitching
and swaying nonstop. Shaw had taken the ordeal easily in stride. He’d never once become sick. He just sat at a table, reading
a book and even eating, and would hand her towels and a bucket when she needed it, which was frequently.

When she would glance up at him for sympathy she didn’t receive any. Then she felt guilty for even seeking it. It was an unforgiving
business and one had to tough it out. He certainly had. She, on the other hand, had come up a little short with her sea legs.
At least she was safely back in England, as was her entire team. While it was true they had missed Kuchin, things could be
far worse.

She rode the Tube to Knightsbridge. She was heading out to Harrowsfield later to brief the others but had something to do
first. She had a sixty-millimeter-size safe-deposit box housed at a company that specialized in storing people’s valuables.
It had all the latest technological security devices—biometric scanners, access cards, and each box wired directly to the
closest police station while closed-circuit cameras monitored the vault. This level of security cost nearly a hundred pounds
a year and was worth every penny to her.

She entered the building and successfully passed through the various layers of security. Alone in the vault room, she accessed
her box and slid out the contents. Making sure her back was between the camera overhead and the items she was looking at,
Reggie sat down at the table and began to read through things she knew by heart.

This was her ritual. After every mission she came and did this. All other times she had been successful. This was her first
miss, her first loss, her first ass-kicking. But still here she was. It was important.

The newspaper articles were old and yellowed. Over time the paper would fully disintegrate, but the information contained
in the pages would never be erased from her mind. Some days she wished that it would disappear.

Robert O’Donnell, age thirty-six. The photo of the man was a faded black-and-white, but Reggie had no trouble recognizing
him. He was her father, after all. He’d died on her seventh birthday. The headline from the
Daily Mail
had covered all the basic points and added in its typical dash of hyperbole:

London’s Most Notorious Serial Killer Since Jack the Ripper Dead!

It was not exactly what a little girl wanted to read about her dad on her birthday.

Twenty-four victims, all female and all in their teens and twenties, had died at her father’s sadistic hands. At least those
were the ones that were known. People had even compared him to the American serial killer Ted Bundy, who’d been executed around
that time. A charming, good-looking man who’d lured young women to their deaths. Except Bundy had not been married with children.
He’d been a loner. Reggie’s father had a good job, a loving wife, and a boy and a girl. And yet somehow over the years he’d
managed to slaughter at least two dozen human beings with such ferocity and depravity that veteran constables who’d discovered
some of the bodies had spent time afterwards in therapy to help them through the horrors they’d witnessed.

Even now, once the truth had been established past all doubt, she still couldn’t quite bring herself to accept that the man
who had helped create her was the same man in these horrible stories. She looked at another newspaper, one written on the
fourth anniversary of her father’s death. It had a full-page picture of him in his last days. In the face Reggie could see
a man possessed by something not human at all. But she also saw something else that terrified her even more.

My eyes. My nose. My mouth. My chin.

Physically she was far more her father than her mother. Physically.

The end of her father’s violent life had been crushing because it also marked the end of the other two lives she cared most
about. Her mother’s. And her beloved older brother’s.

It was her brother who had been the hero. At age twelve and having figured out what his father had done, Lionel O’Donnell
had gone to the police. At first they had not believed the ramblings of a child. They were swamped with leads, most of them
false, and under enormous pressure to catch the worst serial killer any of them could remember.

It was only afterwards that they realized he was right. By then it was too late. Her entire family had perished on a single
day. Her enraged father had discovered his son’s betrayal and killed them. He would’ve killed Reggie too if the police hadn’t
arrived when they did. She still had nightmares about it. She supposed she would always have nightmares.

Reggie turned to another article and started trembling as soon as she saw the photo and caption underneath. The girl’s hair
was done in pigtails. The eyes were vacant. The small mouth was set in a thin, unemotional line. No joy, no sadness, no feelings
at all. More than twenty years later Reggie struggled to remember what it felt like to be photographed that day. Where she
was, what she’d been thinking.

Her gaze drifted to the caption underneath:
Only surviving family member Jane Regina O’Donnell, age seven.

The next weeks, months, even years were a frantic whirl of events. Her mother’s family took her in. They left the country.
New lives were set up. Nothing was ever said about the past—not her mother, her brother, and certainly not the monster of
a father. And yet Reggie, armed with her mother’s maiden name instead of her father’s, had eventually come back to the city
where he’d committed his atrocities. Her identity had been buried deep. She was no longer seven and vacant. She was Reggie
Campion, a grown woman on a mission rebuilding a life from the catastrophic ruins of her past.

And yet she now wondered, and not for the first time, whether Professor Miles Mallory knew who she really was. And if that
was why he’d approached her. He had never given any indication that he did know her true history, but he was also the sort
of man who wouldn’t have let on if he did.

There were other items in the box, yet she decided to look at only two more. One was a photo of her mother, a petite blonde
woman whom Reggie remembered as innocent if not overly intelligent or curious, and yet someone who loved her children unconditionally.
The second item was a photo of her brother, Lionel, who had gone to the police and ended the monster’s reign in London, though
it had cost him his life. Even at age twelve, he was tall, like his father, who had been six-four and well over two hundred
pounds. Lionel took after their mother, not in stature, but in looks. The hair was light, the eyes a dim blue, the mouth usually
curled into a smile. But not in this picture. This was a photo of her brother lying dead in his coffin. Reggie didn’t know
where it had come from, only that she’d discovered it years ago and now found herself unable to part with it. It was sick,
macabre, she realized that. But it was also a reminder of her brother’s ultimate sacrifice to save all of them from evil.

She put the items back in the box, locked it up, and slid it back into the wall vault receptacle. Reggie returned to her flat,
packed a bag, climbed in her little car, and drove to Harrowsfield.

On the way there she thought of nothing else other than how to get one more chance at Fedir Kuchin. Well, that was not entirely
true. Another tall man with dark hair kept uncomfortably intruding on those thoughts too.

Where was Shaw now?

A
LMOST
as soon as Reggie passed the town of Leavesden and started making her way along the winding roads to the estate, the sun
disappeared behind darkening clouds. At least the meteorological conditions matched her mood. She passed the entry gates,
parked her car, took a long breath, and walked inside.

She’d phoned ahead with her expected time of arrival and they were waiting for her in the library. The professor, Whit, Liza,
and Dominic. As she passed down the hall she saw Niles Jansen, the colleague that Shaw had steamrolled back at the cottage
in Provence. She tossed him back his cell phone that Shaw had taken.

“How is it?” she asked, indicating the large bruise on his face.

“Like a bloody tank hit me,” said Jansen.

“Actually, I think it did.”

She drew a calming breath and opened the door to the library. Taking a seat on one side of the long table with all the rest
aligned on the other, she painstakingly went through everything she recalled from her time in Gordes and then briefed them
on the days spent with Shaw.

“And you learned nothing more about him than that?” asked Mallory, who did not bother to hide his incredulity.

“It’s hard to be a competent interrogator when you’re vomiting your brains out,” she answered. “And he’s not the sort to volunteer
much information. He’s obviously an experienced hand. Other than that, it’s all speculation.”

“But his organization is obviously official whilst ours is not,” pointed out Mallory.

“Meaning that we could all be charged with attempted murder for all the good we’ve done,” said Whit. “Hell, Kuchin could
sue us for what we did and probably win. Maybe we should all retain solicitors.”

“This isn’t funny, Whit,” snapped Liza. “Our entire operation could be jeopardized.”

“Shaw doesn’t know where we are,” said Reggie. “It wasn’t like I was going to bring him here.”

“See, I told you that,” noted Whit. He looked at Reggie. “And Dom here reminded all of us that you’d earned the right to be
trusted.”

Reggie gave Dominic a grateful look before turning back to Mallory. “But that’s not a real solution. With their resources,
they may be able to track us down. They certainly know what the three of us look like.”

“I suggest that all of you stay at Harrowsfield until further notice,” said Mallory.

Both Whit and Dominic slowly nodded in agreement.

But Reggie said, “I’ve got some things to take care of, but then I’ll be back here to stay.”

Mallory nodded. “Good, that’s settled. Now let’s move on to more important issues, namely Fedir Kuchin and his unfortunate
survival.”

“We’ll go after him again, like we talked about yesterday,” said Whit.

“I actually agree, after much deliberation, with your Mr. Shaw,” said Mallory, surprisingly.

Reggie, having not been privy to this conversation, said, “Agree with him in what way?”

Whit spoke up. “He’s talking about your buddy’s assessment that Kuchin will be coming after us. So instead of going after
him we have to guard our own flanks.”

“We talked about that too, right before we parted company,” said Reggie.

Mallory rose, walked over to the empty fireplace, and knocked out the dregs from a new pipe into the hearth. “I’m sure you
did. Indeed, it seems that this other organization might be more aptly suited to take Mr. Kuchin down than we are.”

Whit burst out, “But they’re not going to do it. I told you that. They were pulling out. Apparently they don’t care that he’s
selling girls as whores. Once he dropped the nuke angle it was all copacetic as far as those blokes were concerned.”

“That was before they knew who he was.” He looked at Reggie. “You told him, correct? That Waller was Fedir Kuchin?”

“Yes. But he didn’t know who that was.”

Mallory took a few moments to puff his pipe to life. “No matter. He will look into it now, and then there you are. When he
knows the real Butcher of Kiev is out there, chances are very good that either they’ll go after him or they’ll notify another
appropriate agency to do so.”

“So we just fob off on them the job we set out to do?” said Reggie. “Why should they have to deal with him?”

Mallory eyed her with interest. “Are you really thinking why should this
Shaw
fellow have to deal with him?”

Reggie’s face reddened. “That is not what I said, Professor.”

“And there’s no guarantee they will go after him,” protested Whit. “They might have other things on their agenda.”

Mallory turned to him. “There are no guarantees about anything we do, Whit. And I believe this is the best we can do. At least
currently.”

“Well, I disagree.”

“I don’t mind disagreement so long as you do not turn it into unilateral action.”

“Well, what if Kuchin ends up walking free?”

“There are many men like him out there. I will not jeopardize catching all of them in order to take one down.”

Whit snapped, “But we’ve already shown him the shit from his past. Now all we need to do is kill the bastard. A rifle shot
from long distance. Poison in his morning coffee. Stick the prick in the street with an umbrella tipped with poison, like
they did that Bulgarian fellow.”

Mallory shook his head. “But since the authorities presumably will know who he is, they will investigate his death and past
and publicize their results to the world—that he is indeed the Butcher of Kiev. And all others will be warned.”

“All others?” scoffed Whit. “You think these assholes send out newsletters to each other? Look out, fellow scum, the good
guys are gunning for you? I’ve never bought that rationale before, Prof, and I sure as hell don’t buy it now. You’re saying
we as good as let him go free forever.”

“No, I said we can let others handle it for now.”

Reggie spoke up. “I think I side with Whit on this, but the problem is that Kuchin will dig in so deep now we’ll never be
able to find him. He probably has safe houses all over the world.”

“Since we have limited resources, that makes all the more reason to move on to someone else. But for now, I think all of you
should relax and regroup. Dominic needs to heal physically.” Mallory looked at Reggie and then at Whit. “And you need to do
so in other ways.”

“My head is on as straight as ever,” muttered Whit.

“I wasn’t necessarily talking about you,” replied Mallory.

“So me then?” exclaimed Reggie. She looked darkly at the man.

“Just everyone please take a rest,” said Mallory a trifle wearily.

“Even if the Ukrainian psychopath has us in his gunsights?” asked Whit.

“Yes, even then,” said the professor sharply. Mallory then rose and left the room.

“He’s under a lot of pressure,” said Liza defensively.

“We’re all under a lot of pressure, Liza,” rejoined Reggie.

“The operation in Provence cost a lot of money,” Liza continued. “And funds are getting harder and harder to come by. Miles
spends a great deal of his time finding benefactors.”

Whit scowled at her. “Great, fine. I’ll cut my salary. Oh, that’s right, I don’t really get paid a bleeding quid to risk life
and limb, now do I?”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Whit,” she said.

“I don’t think any of us mean anything we’re saying right now,” said Dominic.

Whit rose. “Speak for yourself, Dom. I meant it all.”

Before anyone could say anything he’d slammed the library door behind him.