Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (103 page)

“Anyway, the other side stems from being totally self-absorbed, like the Roman Emperor Nero. What the hell, the little prick inherited virtually limitless power before he had a chance to grow up. To him, no one outside of himself was real—what happened to them didn’t matter in the slightest, so murder, rape, torture, and mayhem were beneath his notice.”

Good God,
Jack thought.
This can’t be happening.
And yet, he couldn’t help himself …

—Where is she, Emma?

“Where’s who?”

—You know. Annika. Where is she?

“You swore you never wanted to see her again.”

—That was almost a year ago. A lifetime.

“Even if I did know, Dad, I couldn’t tell you. I’m not your guide through this darkness.”

Did she know?
Jack wondered. And then realized he had said it out loud.

“Jack?”

He almost cracked his neck, turning around so fast. Naomi and McKinsey had reentered Twilight.

“We lost them,” she said.

McKinsey, looking around, said, “Does who know?” He couldn’t keep a smirk off his face. “Who were you talking to?”

Ignoring his comment, Jack told them about the fractured left eye socket that linked the murders here with Billy Warren’s.

“That exonerates Alli,” Naomi said with clear relief.

McKinsey shook his head. “Or it could signal that she’s not in it alone.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Naomi said. “You don’t know her.”

“In my experience,” he told her, “nobody knows anyone. Not really.”

Jack wanted to move in a more fruitful direction. “Look what I found.” He showed them the badge. “The manager was clutching it in his fist, as if he wanted to protect it from O’Banion and Willowicz.” As they examined it in turn, he said, “Either of you make any sense of the writing?”

As they were shaking their heads sirens sounded, rapidly approaching.

Naomi took the badge, fingering it as if the writing were in braille. “I think I know someone who can help us.”

“I bet my wife knows plenty of linguists,” McKinsey said. “She’s a professor at Georgetown.”

“The person I’m thinking of isn’t a linguist.” Naomi was turning the badge over and over, as if trying to coax a sense memory from it. “I think I’ve seen something like this before.” She glanced up at Jack with a penetrating look. “If I’m right, we’re headed into a very dark place.”

*   *   *

Alli slept because of exhaustion, but also to escape the horror of the present, the gruesome image of Billy bound to the tree, blue-white as the moon, and just as distant.

Curled in her uncle’s wing chair, she was dreaming about the last snow of winter. It drifted down upon the vast, terrifying expanse of Moscow’s Red Square like glittering confetti. Lights that illuminated the onion domes of Saint Basil’s seemed to enlarge each flake to a monstrous size. Alli breathed in the frozen, knifing wind as she ran through the clusters of tourists, Red Army soldiers, and cassocked Russian Orthodox priests—robins, hawks, and ravens picking over the ground for sustenance.

She ran in frantic circles, as if lost, rudderless, without any thought save to find Annika. A strange form of hysteria gripped her, as if she were dying, and only Annika could save her. She pushed past people, who whirled like the snowflakes, their eyebrows and lashes powdered white, their eyes staring past her as if she didn’t exist, or was already dead. Her dread increased exponentially, tightening her chest, making her heart pound as if she were running a long and terrible race.

And, against all odds, she saw Annika, light hair and deep mineral eyes, outlined against the stark, massive edifice of the Kremlin. She was staring at Alli, but made no move toward her as Alli struggled against the tide of people that tried to pull her away toward the dark, shadowed fringes of Red Square where certain death lurked like a staircase at night. Still, she kept struggling forward, only to find that she was in a different section of Red Square altogether, seeing Annika from a different angle, now closer, now farther away. Grimly, she pressed on, determined.

Then, all at once, breathless and on the verge of tears, she stood before Annika, who was dressed in an ankle-length coat embedded with the bones of what might be small animals. Alli wanted nothing more than for Annika to take her in her arms and rock her like a child.

But Annika said, “Why have you come all this way to see me? Life is a doomed enterprise.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Talk is a hopeless activity, like looking at a blank page.”

“Please don’t say that!”

“Would you rather I lie to you?”

“You lied to Jack.”

“But not to you, never to you.”

“You lied to him, don’t you see it’s the same thing.”

“I lied to protect him, I lied because I loved him.”

“Do you love him still?”

Annika looked at her pitilessly. “How can I help you?”

“Please answer me.”

“Why? Would you understand? What do you know of love, how it can shape a heart, how it can twist it, shatter it. Have you experienced irretrievable loss?”

“Yes, yes! We both have. We’re the same, you and I—”

“No, Alli. I am darkness, I am death.” She stepped away into the spiraling snow, and called back, her voice echoing off the walls of the monolithic Kremlin and Saint Basil’s, “Don’t come after me.…”

Alli awoke with an unpleasant start. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt. She looked around, disoriented, surprised to find herself still in her uncle’s study. Her vision was blurry. When she put her hand up to her face her fingers came away wet with tears. She had been crying in her sleep.

She leapt off the chair as if she had received an electric shock, and turned when she heard the door open. Rudy, the guard who looked like an ex-professional wrestler, came into the study. He closed the door behind him and picked his way across the polished wooden floorboards toward her. He had an odd, almost delicate way of walking that was entirely silent, as if he were barefoot. She watched him, fascinated, as he put his right foot in the precise location his left foot had just vacated.

It was only when he was very close, and about to swing it, that she saw the iron poker in his hand.

8

Dime-Store Slim had one hand. Seemingly, he was proud of it, or rather the stump, which had ingenious metal pincers affixed to it, as if he was in the process of turning into a crab-man or the creature from
Predator.

He certainly had a personality to match, Jack thought, as Naomi Wilde introduced him and McKinsey. Dime-Store Slim was very tall, very narrow, and very dark-skinned. He had kinky hair, which he wore in a 70s-style Afro, like an outrageous hat on a runway model. On him, though, it looked ominous rather than incongruous or theatrical, as if that pitch-black cloud of unknowing could reach out and swallow you alive.

Dime-Store Slim liked to shake hands with his pincers, which he proffered in an unavoidable gesture. In fact, he thought it was hilarious to witness other people’s consternation and embarrassment. In contradiction to his slight frame, he exuded a powerful menace that was impossible to ignore or to deflect. You simply had to deal with it, Jack realized, long before McKinsey did. He was amused to see how uncomfortable Slim made the Secret Service agent.

“Why’d you think I’d know what this is?” asked Slim, slouched on a chair with his long legs up on a crate of Mallomars, fingering the badge Jack had handed him. They had found him in the rear of his Smoke Shop in a section of Northeast Washington so burned out it seemed an irredeemable slum. Slim seemed to like it that way. Even if this ant hill was grubby, he was king of it. Plus, the area was among the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. That, too, was quite all right with him. The more dangerous the better. Piratically, he wore a large .45 semiautomatic stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

McKinsey’s expression darkened as soon as he noticed the handgun. “D’you have a permit for that weapon, son?”

Slim was off the chair in a flash, his Doc Martens banging loudly against the floor. “Who you calling ‘son,’ fool?”

Compounding his error, McKinsey flashed his ID. “The United States government, that’s who.”

Slim had the .45 out, the muzzle stuck in McKinsey’s face, before the agent knew what was happening. “Ain’t no United States government in
this
part of the world, motherfucker.”

“Easy.” Naomi held up her hands placatingly. “Let’s all stand down.”

“Tell
him
that,” McKinsey said in a voice that was thin and strained to the point of breaking.

“She ain’t gonna tell me, nuthin, motherfucker.” Slim cocked his head toward Naomi. “Why you bring these fools into my house, anyways?”

“We all need someone to laugh at,” Jack said, before she could answer.

There ensued a kind of stunned silence, during which McKinsey’s face turned red and Naomi’s mouth formed a tiny O. Then Slim started to laugh. He laughed so hard he could no longer keep up the pretense of being pissed off. He stepped back, slid the .45 back into his jeans, and returned to his beat-up old lounge chair.

“Fuck!” His forefinger jabbed out at Jack. “I know whys you brought
this
motherfucker, um-hum.”

He nodded, and then brought out a pack of rolling paper and a plastic bag of pot, deliberately, to Jack’s way of thinking, antagonizing McKinsey further. The agent stiffened and Jack saw Naomi’s hand grip his arm.

“Why don’t you go back outside and make sure we aren’t disturbed,” she said in a soft voice.

After hesitating enough to regain a modicum of self-respect, McKinsey said, “Fuck this shit,” and, shaking her off, stalked out of the shop with a gunshot bang of the front door.

“Nice fucking sonuvabitch,” Jack said, which returned Slim to a state of helpless laughter.

At length, he wiped his eyes, rolled his joint, lit up, and offered to share. They both declined.

“Straight’n’narrows, the two of you.” But it wasn’t said unkindly.

“The badge,” Jack prompted.

“The what?”

Jack pointed to the small metal object he was holding.

“Oh, you mean this? What the fuck, do I look like Sherlock-motherfucking-Holmes?” He lifted his head and hollered, “Grasi! Get your ass over here!”

A moment later, a dark-headed kid, who could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, sauntered into the back room. His starkly corded body marked him as a gym rat. So far as Jack could see, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He wasn’t muscle-bound like a lot of gym rats; rather, he’d sculpted his body to become a lean, mean, fighting machine. The normally laughable description that reminded Jack of a scene in the comedy
Stripes
was never more apt.

“We call him Grasi,” Slim said, “because he’s got some fuckin’ unpronounceable foreign name, don’t you, Grasi?”

Grasi grinned. He wore black jeans, custom high-tops, and an anachronistic leather vest over a white T-shirt that showed plenty of his chest. He had a ton of bling around his neck, and tattoos, most of them amateurish-looking. “Can’t buy a fucking vowel to save my life.”

Slim tossed him the octagonal badge. “You got a name for this?”

Grasi deftly caught it with his fingertips and held it up in front of his face. In almost the same motion, he tossed it back to Slim. His eyes slid sideways. “Never seen anything like it before.”

Slim sighed. “And there you have it, sports fans.” He shrugged as he handed the badge back to Jack, and said to Naomi, “I always try to be of service, but…” Again his shoulders lifted and fell.

“Thanks, anyway,” Naomi said. “It was worth a shot.”

Grasi turned to go.

“Hold on a minute,” Jack said. “Can you show me where the bathroom is?”

Grasi nodded disinterestedly, and Jack followed him out into the shop proper.

*   *   *

Peter McKinsey stood with shoulders hunched, hands thrust deep into pockets containing any number of concealed folding weapons whose honed steel both energized and soothed him. He was oblivious to the light rain or the passing vehicles. With chin jutting and lips pursed, he was sunk deep inside his thoughts.

He had met Willowicz six months into his tour of duty in the Horn of Africa. Willowicz’s name was different then, but the man was the same. McKinsey and Willowicz felt an immediate kinship, possibly because they held the same worldview. Their intense and uncompromising gung-ho attitude was nothing more than a facade beneath which existed a rich layer of nihilism. The interesting thing was that neither was conscious of this Nietzschean tendency; they would have vociferously denied it, even if confronted with the truth.

They were fearless, which meant that they were reckless in everything they did, skating along the edge of the black ice of death without ever succumbing to its embrace. They killed, maimed, tortured, and slaughtered the intractable enemy with the righteous zeal of Crusaders or priests of the Spanish Inquisition. They liked to invoke God’s name while they laughed, splashing in blood and gore, grinding guts and organs to the consistency of motor oil. Spurred on by the seemingly limitless enmity they encountered every minute of every day and night, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to their enemy to make him give up secrets out of the agony they inflicted, never thinking for a moment that these secrets might be concocted in order to end the pain. But no matter how many of the enemy they destroyed, the full measure of the satisfaction they craved never materialized. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how much pain they inflicted, they could never engender in their prey the terror they longed to see. These people were different, inhabiting an entirely different plane of existence than the Americans.

“They’re not human,” they would tell each other, over the stink of their high-minded work or, later, during bouts of heavy drinking. “If they can’t feel terror, they can’t feel any emotion. They’re for sure not human.” If it wasn’t satisfaction, it was impossible, during those sessions, to know what emotions McKinsey and Willowicz felt.