The Prophet (Ryan Archer #2) (12 page)

Security was state of the art, and every square inch was monitored by an impressive computerized security grid. The head of security was a man named Victor Klosko. He had once been an officer in the Russian army and no one had ever seen him smile. He wore a suit, day and night, and his hair was shaved two inches above his ears. There were gold flecks in his black eyes that appeared to shimmer when he was angry, and he was angry most hours of the day. His accent was as thick as his walrus mustache.

Klosko was in his office watching Tatum Cloud on a video monitor when he saw the garage door open and watched the black Mercedes driven by Markovich and Walvoord pull inside and park. These were the two men Klosko had assigned to watch Ryan Archer, the former FBI agent who’d been hired by Jimmy Cloud to locate his daughter. Thus far, Klosko was far from pleased by the performance of his underlings.

The basement garage was made of stone mined from a quarry in Brazil. No expense had been spared. A small fleet of identical black German sedans were parked in a neat line like a row of battle ready Russian soldiers. The slab floor was polished to a mirror shine. The Mercedes driven by Markovich limped in and parked in its designated spot. Both doors opened simultaneously, as if choreographed. Walvoord pushed the passenger door shut and ran the flat of one hand down the front of his suit coat, pressing out any wrinkles. His hair had a crisp part on the left side. He was the darker of the two, but they appeared to have been genetically engineered in the same laboratory, which was not far from the truth. Both men were near physical perfection. Markovich and Walvoord walked shoulder to shoulder through the arched hallway of brick to the offices beneath the otherworldly glow of fluorescent lighting. Both men wore dark glasses, even down here far away from the intrusion of any hint of daylight.

They were nervous about reporting to Klosko in person. Rightly so. The head of security for the Church of the Narrow Gate was an unforgiving man. He was cold and blunt, and his wrath was to be avoided at all costs. But these were men without emotion, born and bred to be soldiers, willing to accept punishment for their shortcomings. Most of the basement offices had glass walls. Not Klosko’s. His walls were stone, and his door remained closed and locked. His secretary, an efficient, sober looking thirty-year-old former PhD candidate in psychology, glanced up from her computer screen as the two men appeared and glared at her expectantly. The secretary picked up her phone and pressed a button on the console. Her eyes remained on them as she notified Klosko of his visitors. Then she set the phone back on its console and gave the men a crisp nod. They walked past her without expression. Klosko unlocked the door by a remote signal from a button at his desk.

Klosko’s desk was glass with steel legs. He was surrounded by an array of monitoring equipment. Classical music—a string quartet—was playing softly in the background. It was a symphony in a minor key by a Russian composer. It was his favorite symphony, and he listened to it on an endless loop throughout the day in his office. The eerie highs and lows kept him centered on his life’s work.

Markovich and Walvoord stood in front of his desk and removed their sunglasses because their boss wanted to see their eyes. Klosko pushed away from his desk and stood. He was a huge man. Tall, broad shoulders, thick arms, and a thick neck. His hair was the color of straw growing in the heat of a brutal Russian summer, shorn down to a bristly length and parted at the precise center of his scalp. His eyebrows were thick and unruly. Each morning he shaved his face, but by noon a shadow was already visible along the contours of his jawline.
 

Klosko turned his back to them, staring up at a wide display monitor mounted to the wall behind his desk. Random images delivered by multiple cameras positioned throughout the church grounds flashed onto the display, constantly changing. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, fingers fat and pink. He let the men sweat for several long minutes. The Russian quartet played on, the bows and strings delivering a somber message conjuring imagery of starvation, despair, interminable winters, and bleak death. The limestone walls provided perfect acoustics.

“I’m waiting,” Klosko said at last, his voice rising from his chest as if from a barrel of aged vodka.

“We have followed the man called Archer as instructed,” Markovich reported.
 

“And?”

“He is elusive,” Markovich said.

“And dangerous,” Walvoord added.

“He is skilled, yes,” Markovich said.

“You have had the advantage from the beginning,” Klosko said. “He should have had no way of knowing you were following him, or that you were watching. You had the advantage of GPS tracking, and yet he still detected you. Please tell me how this could have happened.”

“Perhaps we underestimated him,” Markovich said.
 

“I provided both of you with a full dossier of Archer’s background. His training. You should have known exactly what to expect from him. Please explain your failure to contain him.”

“He is still contained, sir,” Walvoord countered.

Klosko turned to face them. His hands remained clasped behind his back. The beefy flesh of his face beneath his eyes glowed pink. The gold flecks of his irises swirled and danced. There was no disguising his rage. But his rage burned calmly from within. His words remained measured and were delivered with the timing and precision of a chess master.
 

“Contained? Is that what you choose to call it? Do you think me a fool?”

“Of course not, sir!”

Klosko’s enormous nose flushed with color as he glowered at them.
 

“What is the damage to your car?”

“Minimal,” Markovich insisted.

“Ah, we will see about that soon enough. You are lucky to be alive.”

“It was nothing, sir.”

“How could Archer have known you were following him?”

“There is no way he could have known.”

Klosko’s eyes clouded.
 

Markovich corrected, “I don’t know, sir.”

Klosko walked out from behind his desk and paced along the perimeter of his office, hands behind his back, chin jutting out, kicking the toes of his blocky leather shoes with the dramatic flair of a drill sergeant.

“This American ex-everything has made both of you look like amateurs.”

“I—”
 

“Don’t speak!” Klosko snapped, cutting Markovich off. His Russian accent was most apparent when his temper flared. His subordinates sat in silence.

“This is unacceptable,” he said. “Unacceptable! Do you realize to what degree you have disappointed Silas? This is our work, our mission, to protect the interests of Silas and the church. And when we fall short, we put the interests of the church in jeopardy. This is no small thing! Do you understand? Am I making myself clear?”

He was standing directly behind them now, near enough that they could feel the heat radiating of his face.

“We will redeem ourselves,” Markovich said, cautious with his tone.
 

“Hmph,” Klosko grunted.
 

“We will make you proud again,” Markovich assured him. “We will not fail.”

“For unto whomever much is given, of him shall be much required,” Klosko said. “We have been given great responsibility. Never take that for granted.”

“Of course, you are right, sir,” Walvoord said.

In one corner of the office was a glass aquarium with a bed of cedar shavings and grass in the bottom. A deadly viper was coiled in one corner, its head hovering low to the shavings, eyes alert as Klosko approached. Klosko raked through his mustache with his fingers, staring down through the lid of the aquarium enclosure. In a separate cage on a shelf beneath the aquarium was the viper’s food. Klosko opened a hatch on the top of the cage and reached in, lifting out a white mouse by its hind leg. Then he lifted the aquarium lid and dropped the mouse into the shavings on the opposite end from the snake.

“Come,” Klosko said to his men. “Observe as our deadly comrade enjoys his dinner.”

Markovich and Walvoord stood from their seats and walked to him, watching through the glass as the viper began to slowly uncoil and advance stealthily across the field of shavings and bark. The gold flecks danced in Klosko’s eyes, not from rage but with delight.
 

“Eat, Petros, eat,” he said. His men enjoyed the mealtime ritual as much he.
 

The small white mouse explored his new environment for a few moments before sensing impending danger. Then it raised its nose, sniffing the air, and turning to claw at the glass wall, desperate for a way out.

“Ah, tiny friend, there is no escape for you,” Klosko said, as if truly empathizing with the rodent. “You were born for only this, to fulfill the need of this moment. You were born to satisfy Petros, born to be his prey. And here you are!”

The snake slithered through a patch of grass, head rising, preparing to strike. Klosko watched without blinking, eyes cold but filled with anticipation. An instant later, the viper struck, seizing the rodent in its jaws and coiling around it.

Klosko leaned in close, nose nearly brushing the glass, savoring the moment. The mouse twitched once, twice … then the struggle ended.

“Very well done, Petros,” Klosko said, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. “Victory is yours!”

His men stood silently at his side, expressionless, watching the snake squeeze the life from its meal. They had enjoyed the show but didn’t derive the same level of demented satisfaction.

“Go now,” Klosko told them. “Go and kill Ryan Archer.”

EIGHTEEN

There was a leather sofa in Tom Webb’s office at Webb & Associates. Archer was lying down on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. One arm was hooked behind his head, one foot flat on the floor. He clutched a tennis ball in one hand, bouncing it against the wall and catching it. The word
Penn
was stamped on the ball, black ink on yellow fuzz. Webb was talking on his cell phone, pacing around the space behind his desk, pausing at least once a minute to face out through the windows toward the skyline of Los Angeles.
 

Archer wasn’t an office kind of guy, but he liked being in Webb’s office. He found a certain comfort there. It wasn’t about the office; he just took comfort being in the presence of his friend. He trusted Webb implicitly. That was why he accepted as much work from Webb’s firm as he did. It wasn’t the work or the money that drew him, though there was a definite tactile satisfaction to be had from both, he simply had a hard time saying no to his buddy. Archer held loyalties to few people, but Webb was one of them.

Webb was dressed in a blue button-up shirt and slacks. His hair had gone prematurely gray years ago, and he wore rimless glasses with rectangular lenses. He was tanned and fit due to thrice weekly workouts. He was completely neurotic and OCD, and his office and daily schedule were plenty of evidence to support this. His office door was open and he could see Rosemary seated at her desk. She had arrived that morning in no mood to deal with her boss. Must be boyfriend problems, he figured. Or mother problems. Or maybe Aunt Flow had arrived unannounced. But sometimes it didn’t take anything specific to make the claws come out. She was out there staying busy, and that’s all he cared about.

Archer snapped his wrist and released the tennis ball. It hit the wall eight feet away, and he snatched the return volley like a frog picking a fly out of thin air. He repeated this performance over and over, until finally Webb spun on his heels and gave him a look that said
WTF
.
 

Webb dropped the cell onto his desk and leaned against the window. He gestured at the photos fanned across his desk. He had shown them to Archer upon his arrival.
 

“Jimmy Cloud has confirmed it. He believes the girl in the photos is Tatum,” Webb said.

Archer rocketed the ball toward the wall again, and snagged it like a first baseman on opening day. He offered no reaction. In fact, he seldom reacted. Good news or bad. Webb often wondered about his hearing, and would repeat questions or statements multiple times unnecessarily.
 

“The pics from the box,” Webb expounded, “I was convinced it was a prank, but Jimmy says it’s Tatum.”

Archer palmed the ball and spun up into a sitting position.

“Forget the pics,” he said.

“What about Jimmy?”

“Forget Jimmy.”

Webb’s eyebrows went up. “Okay.”

“You talked to Jerry Ving?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the Salt Lake phone number.”

Archer pitched the tennis ball to his friend. Webb put it away in a desk drawer.

“You were right about that,” Webb said. “It traced back to the same warehouse outside Salt Lake as the Mercedes tags. But we still don’t know anything about that place.”

“The girl they found dead in the park had five grand stashed under her mattress and had made a call to that Salt Lake number the day Tatum went missing.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve introduced myself to the two goons driving that car,” Archer said. “They didn’t strike me as particularly chatty. And they also didn’t strike me as the stereotypical kidnap for random kind of guys. This wasn’t an operation run out of somebody’s garage in the Valley. This wasn’t some random psycho who’s going take a handful of smut pics and drop them in the mail. They know who I am. They’ve followed me. And they want to make sure I don’t get in the way of whatever they have planned, because they know I work for you, and you work for the girl’s father. They are organized, well funded, and worst of all, very patient. So do yourself a favor and stop looking at those glossies.”

“What about Jimmy?”

“At this point, Jimmy is delirious. Take him out on Ventura any night of the week and he’ll identify every fifteen-year-old girl in a hoodie as Tatum. He’s desperate to find her, so his judgment isn’t reliable right now.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

“Don’t burn the calories.”

Archer stood. Walked to Webb’s desk.

“What’s the name of the dummy corp in Salt Lake linked to the car and the cell number?”