The Tenth Circle (8 page)

Mobile, Alabama

The members of the crowd fighting for a fix on him in their sights surged forward, toppling a laggard segment of elderly attendees and causing a mass pileup of bodies that looked like a chain collision on the interstate. McCracken had just veered left when an older woman hit the ground hard not far from him, crying out in pain and panic.

He never hesitated, swooped in and scooped her off the drenched ground that had gone soggy under the canopy of the wooded area of the park. With no other alternative, he carried the woman forward through what now felt like hail in search of a place to gently lay her down where she might be swiftly found and tended to. The hailstones pelted him and he heard the distinctive rattle and clacking of their impact against trees, brush, and ground. McCracken felt hail pellets crunch underfoot, some almost as big as golf balls spit from the sky. He tightened his grasp of the old woman, canting his body to shield her from the torrents as best he could. Remarkably enough, that had the unintended effect of providing him the ideal cover, for who would expect a potential target or fleeing assassin to delay his escape to rescue a fallen senior citizen?

Soaked to the bone himself, McCracken kept his head down and his grasp of the woman’s moaning form tight as he neared the street where a phalanx of additional highway patrol cars were tearing onto the scene. Certain the arriving officers had no clear sense of what was happening or whom they were actually after, McCracken moved straight up to the line of cars and laid the woman down on the soft grass near a pair of patrolmen yanking on their flak jackets.

“This woman needs help!” he called.

“Not our problem,” one smirked casually, listening to his walkie-talkie clack off a description of the suspect as a big man with a beard.

The officers’ stares froze on him, their hands starting for their holstered pistols, when McCracken pounced. An elbow to the face shattered the nose of one and a heavy palm-heel blow under the second man’s chin sent him slamming backward into his squad car and then slumping down it.

The next instant found Blaine lurching behind the wheel and tearing off down the road, past a fresh armada of arriving vehicles. He watched them spinning around wildly in his rearview mirror to give chase, others joining in as McCracken clamped down harder on the accelerator.

His eyes were still cheating looking toward the mirror when a roadblock formed by two squad cars parked nose to nose appeared directly before him across the road.

Mobile, Alabama

“What the hell happened down there?” Hank Folsom demanded­, once McCracken finally managed to reach him.

“I see you’ve heard.”

“Heard? It’s on every network. Please tell me that wasn’t you who crashed through a police barricade. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking giving you the Go on this?”

“That you were fortunate I volunteered for the job. Now you should be thinking that I had nothing to do with what happened, because I didn’t.”

“You’re supposed to be a professional.”

“Are you listening to what I’m saying? I was set up. They knew I was coming.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Wake up and smell the way the world works, Hank. Someone’s always watching you and somebody else is always watching the watcher. Somebody got wind you were sending me down here and that somebody’s the one who set me up.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, let me put it this way: There’s a leak smack dab in the Homeland office you’re talking to me from right now that could only have originated on your end. Means this probably isn’t a secure line,” McCracken added, from beneath an empty, covered bus stop being hammered with hailstones atop its glass roof in downtown Mobile. “So get to one and call me back in twenty minutes at this number.”

“They’ve got your picture somehow, identified you as a suspected covert government operative,” Folsom told him, upon calling McCracken back nearly thirty minutes later instead.

“You believe me now about the setup, Hank?” McCracken asked from beneath another bus stop overhang. The rain was still pounding the streets, but the wind had abated and thunderclaps sounded only distantly.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“For being a fool or an idiot?”

“Take your pick.”

“We need to meet, Hank. We need to sort this out.”

“Just name the time and place, McCracken.”

“Something else. Get in touch with whoever Homeland has inside Rule’s entourage.”

Silence filled the other end of the line, making McCracken figured he’d been cut off.

“Hank?” he prodded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. You told me Rule’s been on Homeland’s radar for a while. You know stuff about him you couldn’t get out of news reports or religious pamphlets. That means Homeland must have had someone on the inside feeding you information.”

A deep sigh filled the line. “You make me feel like a fool
and
an idiot, McCracken.”

“You’re neither, Hank, just an amateur. In over your head, and now you’ve dragged me along for the ride, and I was dumb enough to follow.”

“I just thought—”

“Forget what you thought. Too much thinking gets you into trouble. Just have your man meet me at the Greyhound bus station on Government Boulevard. Tell him to come prepared to tell me everything he knows about the Reverend Rule, so I can figure out why a two-bit preacher has the kind of security a million bucks wouldn’t buy.”

“That means my man in Rule’s organization will have to risk exposure.”

“Execution’s the alternative. He’s on borrowed time already. Take your pick, Hank.”

“Better you come in from the proverbial cold, McCracken. I’m sorry about this boy in Missouri, but you’re not being objective, not thinking straight. I didn’t even think the personal existed for you.”

“Neither did I, but the fact is Rule’s only a part of what’s going on, and if you want to stop more bodies from plunging off bridges, you’ll do what I tell you.”

Mobile, Alabama

McCracken was watching the bus station from a nearby local version of Starbucks an hour out from the time of his planned rendezvous. The plan was for Homeland Security’s unnamed plant in Rule’s camp to wear an Alabama Crimson Tide football hat so Blaine would recognize him. Since he’d started watching the station, though, no man wearing any such hat had passed through the doors.

McCracken entered the bus station at the designated hour anyway and searched the waiting crowd for the man in question. Spotted him wearing a baseball cap that read
Roll Tide!
, seated alone in a bank of four chairs divided by a built-in, table-like platform for resting coffee cups or magazines. A small tote bag, nice touch for the further cover it provided, rested on the floor at his feet. McCracken moved toward the man and took the seat next to him.

Younger than Blaine had expected, of an age to still be able to wear his hair long enough to push out from beneath the
ROLL Tide!
cap’s confines. Thirty years old maybe, with a tan bred of spending lots of time at outdoor rallies, services, or whatever you wanted to call gatherings like the one held earlier in Crawford Park.

McCracken kept his eyes fixed forward, sleeve held in a way to disguise the fact he was speaking. “I’ve got your ticket right here. We’ll talk on the bus. Ninety-minute ride to—”

He stopped when he realized the man was utterly unresponsive, hadn’t even looked or glanced his way.

Blaine jostled him slightly at the shoulder. “Hey …”

The younger man slumped sideways,
ROLL TIDE!
cap falling off to reveal a thick patch of matted blood on the right side of his head soaking through his hair, evidence of a small caliber bullet.

McCracken stood up as casually as he could manage, pretending to stretch while paying the slumped figure no heed. Prepared to just walk off, leery of the same killer laying in wait for him, aware the young man must have come here to meet someone.

He started to back away, stopped when he glimpsed what looked like a magazine that had fallen to the floor when he’d ruffled the man’s shoulder. McCracken stooped and retrieved it innocently enough, noticing immediately it was open to a page featuring a crossword puzzle with only a few of the boxes filled, incorrectly by all measure since a sequence of numbers and letters moved across the page.

4271FH121

And running down the page, coming up short of filling all the required boxes for that entry, was a single word:

CROATOAN
.

Mobile, Alabama

McCracken held his ground, fighting against the urge to simply bolt the area. The murdered man’s killers were almost surely­ still on site. They’d be mixed among the crowds both inside the terminal and waiting to board buses in the departure area outside.

His eyes swept one way, then the other, then back again.

Nothing.

Damn!

Whoever they were had melted away, taken up positions concealed from his vantage point, perhaps with him zeroed in their crosshairs.

Come out, come out, wherever you are… .

Easier said than done. They wouldn’t show themselves, so Blaine needed to make them. Strip the advantage from them and turn it to him.

Also easier said than done. These men were well-trained professionals; anyone brazen enough to murder a man in full view of dozens of witnesses had to be. But they wouldn’t know who he was in all probability, and right now that was the best thing he had going for him.

McCracken tried to gauge their thinking, starting with the fact that they’d let the Homeland plant get this far to see if he was meeting with someone. So long as Blaine didn’t act rashly, they couldn’t be sure he was that man, at least not sure enough to risk exposure by starting a gunfight that would undoubtedly claim plenty of bystanders in its path here and now.

Which gave him time.

“Atlanta bus boarding now. The two o’clock bus for Atlanta is boarding now
.
”

The booming voice’s announcement was met with a large exodus from the terminal area, forty or so people rising to clutch their suitcases or loop their carry-ons and laptops over their shoulder. McCracken rose with them, grasping the dead man’s tote bag for cover. He pretended to glance at his phone for the time, when in fact he was using it as a mirror to check behind him, see if there was any activity of note coming his way.

Nothing he could detect. So far.

McCracken joined the flow of bodies exiting the terminal. He felt for any disturbance in the mass, a sudden buckling or jostling indicative of men forcing their way forward. Nothing there either and, outside, McCracken found himself waiting in line before the Atlanta-bound bus while the driver collected tickets just short of the open door. With no intention of actually boarding the bus, Blaine would have to make a move soon. The terminal lot was cluttered with buses squeezed against one another with barely enough room for anyone to pass between them. Dozens lined up all the way to the road where a big John Deere front loader was hoisting the refuse of ongoing reconstruction into a dump truck.

Just before his turn came in line, McCracken veered away from the bus and sliced behind it, entering the tight confines separating it from the next. The buses were parked two, and in some places three, deep all the way to a fence that paralleled the street just short of the sidewalk. Blaine hit the ground and rolled under one bus and then another, a plan forming in his mind even as he caught the first signs of pursuit in the form of heavy footsteps and the soft garble of voices.

“I lost him, Red. You got anything?”

“Sorry, Blue. Nothing on my flank.”

“This is Green, boys. Man just disappeared into the pavement. Fucking shapeshifter.”

“He’s moving for the street, using the buses,” said Red. “We need to take him before he gets there.”

“This is White. I’m on it.”

“White, circle round and enter the maze halfway down. Brown, you read me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“You circle into the maze from street side and work your way back toward us.”

“Roger that, Red.”

“Blue and Green, you know the drill. Now let’s go bag this son of a bitch and find a wall to mount the trophy.”

McCracken heard bits and pieces of the chatter, enough to discern presence though not plan. Five men, he guessed, maybe six. Talking like operatives who knew their way around a bus terminal, but not necessarily a battlefield. He needed to bait them, make them look where he wanted them to instead of where he intended to be.

“This is Blue, Red, I’m middle in. I just saw someone roll under a bus.”

“Roger that, Red,” from Green. “I’m middle out. He just rolled under the next bus in line here. I’m closing.”

“This is White. I’m dead center. No glimpse of the bitch yet.”

“He’s going for the street for sure,” said Red. “Close in on center of the maze grid, eyes peeled downward, weapons hot. Brown, you hold your position. I’m coming in.”

As soon as he found a clear aisle, McCracken rose and hoisted himself atop a bus just past the center of the stacked-together assemblage of steel. Hardly a difficult feat, but one that proved taxing to his body, which needed a bit of coaxing to respond to what had once been simple tasks not given a moment’s thought, nonetheless. Intense gym workouts, hours stretching out, could make it all doable at his age, but they couldn’t make it easy.

Fortunately, the close spacing of the buses left leaping from one roof to the next just that simple, the biggest challenge being to land lightly without alerting any of the patrolling gunmen of his presence. Especially with their eyes aimed low, figuring he was still rolling his way under one chassis through to the next.

The fence was coming fast and, beyond it, the next phase of his plan.

“Anybody, got anything?” Brown said from the fence line. “Got nothing here, no sign whatso—”

“Brown, this is Red Leader. Say again.”

Nothing.

“Repeat, say again.”

Still nothing.

“Anybody have eyes on Brown?”

“Negative,” from White.

“Nada,” from Blue.

“That’s a negative,” from Green.

“Move for the street, people. Repeat, move for the street.”

The men heard a screech, followed by a clanging and the sound of a rippling crash.

“What the hell was that?” Red demanded. “Anybody got eyes on anything?”

“Holy shit,” one of the men said.

McCracken crashed through the fence, the big John Deere front loader he’d commandeered from the construction site obliterating the chain link without even slowing. The driver had been surprised to see him approaching the cab, even more surprised when Blaine climbed up, tossed him to the shredded concrete below, and replaced him behind the controls.

He wasn’t sure what he was about to try would work, not sure he’d be able to gather enough speed to build the momentum he needed. In fretting over that, though, he’d forgotten about how powerful this particular John Deere 644K hybrid wheel loader was. Twenty tons of unstoppable power under his control.

McCracken got the shovel up and leveled just before he hit the last bus parked in the endless line of them stacked all the way to the terminal building. He felt the shovel teeth shred the bus’s thin side steel, his intention to tip this bus into the one next to it, and so on, to create a domino effect that would trap his pursuers amid the jammed together mash of steel.

Instead, though, the massive power of the John Deere slammed the last bus in line into the one immediately next to it. He felt both start to move, crunching together, and McCracken responded by giving the loader more gas and working its gears to continue the process it had started on its own. Bus glass shattered and flew everywhere. The squeal and grind of metal tearing sent a flutter through his eardrums, as the buses folded up tight like an accordion instead of dominos.

“This is Red Leader! Everyone, get your asses out of there. Report! I want statuses!”

“Green here.”

“Blue here.”

“White reporting!” a different voice chimed in, bus tires exploding around him. “Tight squeeze, but I’m almost out. Jesus Christ, who the fuck is this g—”

A gasp followed, a thump, then nothing.