Kingdom of the Seven (10 page)

Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven

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But, in fact, she couldn’t be sure the men in suits were actually from the FBI. And why weren’t authorities from the San Diego Sheriff’s Department represented at Jardine-Marra in any form?

Perhaps because they had never been summoned. Perhaps the whole show had been put on for her benefit.

A soft knock rattled against the door behind her, and she jumped.

“Karen?” Alexander MacFarlane’s voice called. “Is everything all right?”

Why don’t you tell me?
she wanted to shoot back, but instead said softly, “Yes.”

Her decision was already made by then, her children the only concern.

“I told you they were fine,” MacFarlane reassured when
she stepped out of the room and closed the door carefully behind her.

“Thank God.”

“They’re safe here. So are you.”

“I know.”

She waited until after 3:00 A.M. to make her move. The bedroom Alex had given her overlooked the sloping cliffs and the ocean beyond, a stretch of Black’s Beach visible in the day. The floodlights were still burning when she arose, the guards continuing to methodically patrol the grounds. Either the illusion of security was being maintained for her benefit, or MacFarlane’s intentions were genuine. The thought crossed her mind that the guards might also be there to make sure she didn’t leave. If that was the case, the next few minutes might go very badly indeed.

Fortunately, MacFarlane had not stationed guards inside the house, which would give her the run of the interior for as long as she needed it. Karen crept into the hallway and padded toward the boys’ room. The door opened soundlessly and she moved to Taylor’s side of the bed. She stirred him from sleep with a hand cupped over his mouth. His eyes regarded her sleepily, then gratefully.

“Mom.” The word muffled, sound absorbed by her palm.

“Shhhhhhhhhh,” she counseled. “We’ve got to leave.”

His eyes looked at her questioningly.

“I’m not sure we’re safe here. We may be, we probably are, but I can’t be sure.”

Where they would be safe, where they would be going from here, was a problem she had not yet confronted. First things first.

Taylor slipped into his sneakers while Karen roused Brandon, who fought determinedly against coming awake. She had to nearly drag him into the corridor and then support him as they started down it.

“This way,” she whispered, leading them toward the stairway.

She knew where Alex MacFarlane kept the keys to his three cars: a Rolls Corniche, a rare Porsche, and a Cadillac. The garage in which they were stored was attached to the house, accessible through a small hall off the kitchen. In that same kitchen, Karen found the keys in a drawer and grabbed the ones attached to a chain bearing the Cadillac logo. Still in silence, using only the light the outdoor floods gave them, she led the boys into the garage and eased the door closed behind her.

The most difficult part remained ahead. The grounds were still swimming with security men. They wouldn’t be expecting what was about to occur, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be able to respond to it rapidly. Her sons stowed safely in the Caddy’s backseat with instructions to keep down out of sight, Karen stuck the keys into the ignition and turned.

The Cadillac purred to life.

Karen reached up and touched the button on the visor that activated the automatic garage door opener. Instantly it began to churn upward. A light snapped on above and she cursed herself for not removing the bulb prior to entering the car. The soft whir of the garage door’s machinery might escape the patrolling guards’ attention, but the light would be noticed with a turn of the next head.

Karen eased the Caddy into reverse. The big car slid onto the dark macadam of the circular drive and nearly collided with a pair of the cars double-parked along it before Karen found the brake. She kept the Caddy’s lights off as she started toward the main entrance. She didn’t screech away, keeping her pace normal, hoping to make those on the grounds think the exit was expected, planned for.

The one at the front gate didn’t bite. Karen saw the gun holstered on his hip as he came toward the car in a trot. There was no choice. She floored the accelerator and the Caddy shot forward with a burst of dirt and debris kicked behind it. The man lurched away at the same time she jerked the wheel to avoid him. The car jumped onto the
grass and sideswiped an ornamental boulder set at the entrance as it swept through. She righted it quickly and tore off, barreling down the street.

“Awright, Mom!” congratulated Taylor, elated by their screeching getaway.

As had been the case earlier the same evening, Karen’s eyes flirted nervously with the rearview mirror. As before, though, no unfriendly sights appeared. No sights at all, for that matter.

Lights on now, she drove into the night. Gone from the place that might or might not have been her prison, Karen turned her focus on possible destinations. The local police were out, those of the state variety made up by the California Highway Patrol a good possibility. Yet she had no idea where the nearest substation could be found, never mind what would happen once she got there. Again her decision might have been different if not for her sons. Wherever she drove, it had to promise sure safety and real refuge for Taylor and Brandon, perhaps for an indefinite period.

Only one place fit that bill, and Karen pushed the Caddy further into the night toward it.

CHAPTER 8

“That’s it, sir,” a voice said from the dark of the small theater when the tape reached its conclusion.

“And they are all here now, Major?”

“Still being settled in when I last checked, sir. It’s a rather complicated process, given the situation.”

“But we are equipped to handle it, I trust.”

“We are now, sir.”

“And what of the state trooper?”

“He never should have gotten away, of course. It was a fluke, sir.”

“A rather ominous fluke.”

“Not according to present reports. He was picked up in the desert several hours ago in a near catatonic state. I doubt very much he’ll be talking to anyone anytime soon, sir.”

“We will have to make sure that is long enough, won’t we, Major?”

The man in the rear grasped the back of the crushed red velour seat before him. Every detail of the small theater
had an ornate look and feel to it, as if an old-fashioned movie house had simply been shrunk down and placed here. Rich wood paneling with hand-carved pilasters and moldings covered the walls. The ceiling was painted in neo-Pompeian style, with arabesques and ropes of flowers intertwined with gods and goddesses.

“And what of the site itself?” he resumed.

“All reports indicate it’s clean, sir. Not even the slightest trace. The tests carried out were remarkably thorough. I don’t think we have anything to fear on that account.”

“We have that much to be thankful for, I suppose. What about security, containment?”

“We’re monitoring the area closely, sir, but so long as we are able to move the replacements into the town before the highway patrol happens to return, I think we’ll be all right.”

“And how long do you expect that will take, Major?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, sir, at the latest.”

“Very good. Keep me informed.” He seemed finished until something else occurred to him. “Of course, the other events of the day do now allow us to eliminate a problem that has been vexing us for some time. You know of what I speak, Major?”

“I have issued the appropriate orders, sir.”

“By my specifications, I trust.”

“Of course, sir. To the letter.”

“I want her to have a chance to atone. I owe her that much.” The figure rose in the back of the dark theater, silhouetted by the dim ceiling lights. “Very well, then …”

“Sir?”

“Ah yes, Major, there was something else.” He sat down again, reluctantly.

“Something else rather pressing, I’m afraid, sir.”

On signal, the lights in the small, plush theater were snapped all the way off once more. On the eight-bytwelve-foot screen encompassing the center of the front wall, a picture came to life portraying a narrow slice of Lexington Avenue in New York City. A number of pedestrians
were stepping past a tight throng gathered before a fruit stand set up in front of the abandoned Alexander’s department store.

“We confiscated this tape from a bystander who happened to be filming at the time of the attack.”

“An attack that was most poorly executed, leaving the material we sought to acquire potentially in dangerous hands.”

“Erase potentially.”

“Major?”

“I believe we have located the material, sir. I’m going to fast-forward here to the spot in question.”

“Please,” returned the voice from the very back row, sounding disturbed.

The action on the screen returned to normal speed. A woman and three children were smiling and waving at the video camera. Their lips moved, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Suddenly a figure crossed in front of the lens, obscuring the family. At the front of the theater, the major froze the tape briefly on the befuddled looks of the family members. Then he rewound it and ran it again in slow motion, freezing the frame when the intruding figure was centered on the screen, visible from only the waist up. Even through the blur, it was clear he was broad and had a beard that looked more the result of a week gone without shaving than careful grooming.

“Sir, this man meets the description of one of the surviving gunmen from inside Bloomingdale’s who eliminated our people. We have now been able to obtain a positive identification based on a computer enhancement of this frame.” The major paused. “The man’s name is Blaine McCracken.”

The figure in the theater’s rear rose to better his view, but the screen denied it, refusing to let him gain a clear glimpse through the blur. “Is that supposed to mean something to me, Major?”

“Indeed it is, sir,” said the man in the theater’s front, and then he began to explain.

PART TWO

THE KEY SOCIETY

NEW YORK CITY:
TUESDAY; 9:00 A.M.

CHAPTER 9

Sal Belamo arranged the meeting for McCracken from his bedside. The effects of the bullet wound suffered the previous afternoon had left him stiff and uncomfortable after a restless night. He grimaced and dry-swallowed a pair of Percodans in the bedroom of the Grand Hyatt suite.

“You ask me, a guy could get to like this shit too much, he gets the chance.”

“What’d your man say about the bodies?” McCracken asked him.

“Nothing. Won’t talk on the phone, even after I tell him that’s the way it’s gotta be. He says in person or I can go fuck myself.”

“You tell him I was coming?”

Belamo smirked, eyes starting to grow glassy as the Percodans took hold. “I told him to look for a guy ’bout as pretty as me only ten years younger.”

McCracken walked the short distance from the Hyatt to the Broadway Deli on Forty-second, where Sergeant Ed Reese would be waiting for him. Blaine didn’t need
Belamo’s description to spot the cop; a fat man in a cheap khaki overcoat was sitting with his counter stool hal-cocked toward the door when he stepped into the deli. He gave McCracken a disinterested glance and went back to a jelly doughnut which leaked all the way to his lips. Took a big slurp of coffee next and left what didn’t reach his mouth pooling in the saucer. Reese had hair that was slicked down in the front and stood upright in the back. His eyes looked tired and drained, but confident.

McCracken was a yard away when Reese threw him another cursory glance and then started talking.

“Old Sal got himself shot, did he?”

“He did.”

“It’s happened before.”

Reese shifted his bulk enough on the stool to make it wobble.

“Got hit myself in Korea,” he explained, and slapped the upper part of his left leg. “Took it right in the hip. Part of the slug’s still in there. Bastard doctors couldn’t get it all.”

“You know Sal from Korea?”

Reese shook his head demonstratively. “Hell, no. He was into a whole different game and a lot better at it than I was. You?”

“Nam.”

“So I figured. Anyway, I got to know Little Sal after, while he was boxing. Bet on both Carlos Monzon fights.”

“Must have lost your shirt.”

“Nah! I took the odds and went with Monzon. What the hell, I figure. Guy’s never lost, it’s not gonna be Little Sal puts him on the mat.” Reese stuffed the rest of his doughnut into his mouth, chewed rapidly, and swallowed before he checked his watch. “You don’t mind, I want to be out of here fifteen minutes ago.”

“You ID those two shooters we iced?”

“Nope, and we’re not going to neither.” Reese stopped and looked around to see if anyone was watching before he took another doughnut from inside the glass container.

“’Cause the bodies are gone. Somebody lifted them right out of the ME’s office. Knocked the guard out and that was that.” He reached a hand into his sport jacket and it emerged holding a folded, coffee-stained envelope. “Preliminary report on the two stiffs is in here. Best I can do. Hey, they got something in common.”

“Other than having been stolen?”

“Try this out: Both of them were missing the lobes on their left ears.”

Blaine thought about that briefly. “What about the body found back on Lexington near Fifty-ninth Street?” referring to the man who had uttered a dying message to Johnny Wareagle, after switching briefcases with El-Salarabi.

“Had both his lobes still intact, that’s what you’re asking.”

“At least you didn’t lose his body too.”

Reese frowned. “Yeah, well, that guy lost most of his guts to somebody who knows how to use a killing knife.” Reese reached into his pocket and came out with a notebook. “On account of we didn’t lose the body, we did a little better with this one. Got a make on him off the fingerprints. Stiff’s name is Benjamin Ratansky. Age fifty-three from Aldrich, Illinois. Funny thing is, according to the make we ran on him, he ain’t dead at all. Computer insists he’s serving out a ten-year sentence for computer fraud at the Taylorville Correctional Center in Taylorville, Illinois.”

Johnny Wareagle was walking the streets of New York. He had no precise destination in mind, no specific route to follow. Anyone watching him might be reminded of how a hunting dog circles the woods in search of the right scent.

His sighting of Earvin Early the previous afternoon had brought him face-to-face with failure, a condition he was not used to and disliked intensely. His Sioux heritage counseled that the entire universe was composed of a single
interconnected and interdependent chain. Some men’s actions are explicitly tied to those of others, and the responsibilities must be shared. In Wareagle’s mind, this meant that his failure to kill Early twenty years before cast him with a measure of the blame for all those the madmen had subsequently killed. And there had been many—of that, Johnny was sure. He could see it in Early’s yellow eyes even from the distance he’d caught his glimpse of him yesterday.

The morning air grew warmer. The city turned alive.

“Hey, giant. Hey, big giant.”

Johnny stopped and gazed downward at the origin of the voice. The speaker was a one-legged vagrant sitting on the pavement with his single leg crossed beneath him. The cool slate supported his shoulders and helped keep his torso from toppling. From around his neck dangled a handwritten sign that read DISABLED VIETNAM VETERAN. He thrust toward Johnny a Styrofoam cup that still smelled of coffee.

His sunken eyes lost their hopelessness for a moment as Wareagle met his gaze.

“You was there, too. I can tell it for sure, you was there, too!”

Wareagle stared intently at the derelict, and the sight taught him much about Earvin Early. Early, after all, had looked almost the same way yesterday. Johnny knew it was not a disguise. The material, anything physical and thus transitory, bore no meaning for the mad giant. Early lived in his mind, and in his mind anything could happen. The experiment he had subjected himself to while in jail had done something to that mind, turned a man into a monster. But it had been Wareagle’s misjudgment that had set the monster free in the north woods of California twenty years ago.

In the thick forest that night, Earvin Early had survived a tumble over a steep ravine with two arrows stuck in him and had lived to begin a new existence. More than anything else, that new existence concerned Wareagle. Indeed,
this hunt wasn’t so much about Early as what he was now a part of—what Johnny had
let
him become a part of:

Judgment Day
…

Early had killed the man who held its secrets, killed the man to
protect
those secrets. Find him and the next stage of the chain would follow.

Judgment Day had to be stopped.

And Earvin Early was going to help Johnny do it.

Sal Belamo returned the receiver to its cradle and looked disparagingly at Blaine from the chair in the suite’s bedroom. “And you thought a contact of mine coulda been this far off … .”

“Ratansky?”

“According to Illinois prison records, he’s in the Taylorville Correctional Center, all right. Cellblock D, cell twenty-seven. Transferred there from the medium security facility up in Sheridan.”

“Except he’s lying on a slab in the New York City medical examiner’s office. Funny how a dead man can still be serving time in prison.”

“Beats me, boss.”

“I guess I’ll have to go ask him in person.”

“You sure you wanna do this, Indian?”

Wareagle looked up from the small shoulder bag he was packing on the couch in the suite’s living room section. “It is not a question of want, Blainey. It is a question of must.”

“Because you missed this Earvin Early the first time around.”

“And because he is a part of what we are facing now.”

“Early falls off that ridge, survives somehow, and makes his way out. Trail’s cold, Indian. Twenty years cold.”

“The scent will still be there, Blainey.”

“Just stay in touch, Indian.”

“Sorry about your uncle, miss,” Sergeant Bob Hume said compassionately. He looked up from the paperwork on his desk to meet the stare of the young woman seated across from him. Her blue eyes were cold and hard. Hume had seen lots of different looks on the faces of those who only minutes before had positively IDed the remains of loved ones. No two were the same, but Hume had seen few to match this particular gaze. In any case, his job was only to fill in the spaces on the report beneath him with the proper information to allow her to claim possession of the body.

“You were Mr. Ratansky’s niece, then,” Hume said, getting to that line on the requisite form.

“Yes,” Rachel replied. Playing the part of someone older came easy for her; a smartly styled suit, some heavy makeup, and hot-iron tousling of her hair created the effect. She had considered acting more grief-stricken, but rejected that role for fear it would offset her subtle disguise.

“We can release the body once the autopsy report is complete,” the policeman continued.

“Were there any … personal effects?” Rachel raised.

“A few,” Hume told her, noting the small list clipped to the back of the case report. “We can turn them over to you as soon as we’re done here.”

“I’d like a copy of that file,” she requested, eyeing the folder.

Hume fingered it, as if to question if that was what she was talking about. “There’s really nothing—”

“For my own benefit.”

“It’s against procedure.”

Her face softened, just a little. “My father’s a police officer, too. He asked me to—”

“I understand. I’ll make you a copy.”

Hume started to rise to do just that when the young woman’s voice stopped him.

“Sergeant, I was wondering about something else. My uncle always carried a brown leather briefcase with him. He moved around a lot and had gotten in the habit of
never letting his most personal papers get too far away from him. I was wondering if something meeting its description might have been found near the scene.”

Hume again scanned the personal property sheet. “Not according to this list. But I’ll be happy to check for you, miss.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, if you’ll just sign here, I’ll go make you a copy of this report … .”

Jacob was waiting for her in the small asphalt park just down the street from the precinct. He noticed her small handbag bulged slightly with new contents.

“Nothing in his personal effects can help us,” Rachel started, taking the seat next to him on the bench.

Jacob’s gaze moved from the bag to her eyes. “Are you certain? Ratansky was very clever. He could have—”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

She extracted a set of crumpled pages from her handbag. “When the sergeant went to make a copy of the report, I grabbed this off his desk.” She handed it to her twin. “It’s the complete police report on the events that followed Ratansky’s murder.”

“What events?”

“Read it.”

Jacob scanned the pages quickly, stopping when he came to the notation of the missing earlobes on the corpses that had disappeared. “They were
killed
?”

“Keep going.”

Jacob read on through the sketchy details of a shootout that had taken place inside Bloomingdale’s between the two unidentified corpses and at least three additional men. One of these had been identified as a Syrian national with suspected terrorist ties. He, too, was dead. All that the report offered of the other two were general descriptions compiled from terrified witnesses at the scene.

“This makes no sense,” Jacob said when he was finished. “Who
are
these men? What brought them into battle
with the soldiers?” His eyes widened hopefully. “Allies of Ratansky, perhaps. Help we’re not even aware of!”

“Even so, that doesn’t mean he passed the material on to them. And if he did, the fact that they have yet to make contact indicates they are pursuing a different agenda.”

“One that intersects with our own, apparently.”

“And unknowingly from their perspective.”

“Leaving us with nothing more than their descriptions.”

“A bearded man and a giant Indian,” said Rachel, highlighting the most repeated phrases used by the witnesses trying to describe the mystery men.

“Not much to go on,” Jacob conceded, his youth showing in his disappointment.

“But all we have for now.”