Bloodletting (42 page)

Readying his Beretta and flashlight, he opened the gate silently and crept inside. Walls formed of great stone cubes. Modern cables and lighting overhead. Floor thick with the dust of construction. He walked sideways with his back to the wall, directing the light deeper into the darkness, until the tunnel opened into a much larger room. Support columns had recently been placed in the corners and there might have been a small hole in the stone roof that served as a vent. There were sawhorses and stacks of wood in the middle of the room, metal pipes and tank-fueled arc welders. A rusted barrel was overflowing with odd-sized wooden waste and the remnants of far too many lunches for it to have been dumped anytime recently. There were rows of hard hats and dirty overalls against the wall.

Carver weaved through the mess of construction until he reached the far side of the room, from which three tunnels branched. The one to the left had collapsed, and not too long ago by the looks of it. The tunnel to the right housed a portable latrine. His choice made, he continued deeper. The air was heavy, laden with dust. With the complete lack of circulation, he wondered if he was breathing the same air as the long dead Maya. The walls were covered in hieroglyphics, large cats and stick men, permanently retired gods. There were even small holes bored into the stone where someone once might have run high-voltage cables.

At the terminus of the corridor, tunnels branched to either side. He turned left, a decision apparently in his blood, and found a small doorway into a state of ruin. Broken chunks of stone filled the entryway. The room beyond was in the same condition, almost as though someone had ripped out whatever may once have been in the room, and had gone out of their way to nearly destroy it in the process. Or maybe this was just the natural condition following centuries of decomposition. Had he not known better, that might have been what he thought.

He turned around and headed back down the tunnel, past the corridor to the outside world, and into the room beyond.

This one was the same as the last. Stone crumbling away from the walls, the ceiling threatening to meet the floor at any second. Finger tight on the trigger, he swept the barrel from one side of the chamber to the other, the beam sparkling with dust. There was no movement. No sound. He pressed deeper into the room, peeling apart the darkness with the lone light, directing it farther to the right--

The light flashed back at him.

He was too late.

Carver walked toward the point where the beam had reflected.

A mirror from the inside of a medicine cabinet had been leaned against the wall on the rubble. The glass was a spider web of fissures, causing his face to appear as it might in the moment of impact with a windshield. Small amounts of blood lined the cracks.

Carver stared into the mirror, but his brother stared back.

Just like him, only broken.

Epilogue

No one thinks of how much blood it costs.

-- Dante Alighieri

I

Denver, Colorado

Six Months Later

Moonlight diffused through the drawn blinds and sparkled from the glass shards on the carpet. The curtains billowed inward ever so slightly at the behest of a gentle breeze. The room smelled of leather and furniture polish, beneath which was a trace of the sweet scent of cognac. There was the clatter of a key hitting the lock on the front door. The men sitting in the darkness straightened in the high-backed suede chairs at the sound.

Light from the streetlamp flooded across the tiled foyer floor as the door opened inward. It was momentarily eclipsed by a silhouetted form. The door closed and there was the
click
-
click
-
click
of their prey toggling the light switch in vain. With a muffled curse, the man strode into the living room, set his briefcase on the floor, and tried the switch on the freestanding lamp, again to no avail. The man froze, realizing too late the reality of the situation. He made a move for the sidearm under his jacket--

"Don't even think about it," one of the men said from across the room. He turned on a flashlight and shined it directly into the startled man's eyes, which reflected twin golden rings before the man shielded them with his hands.

"I'm a federal officer," the man said. He again tried to reach beneath his jacket--

Pfoot.

The lamp next to the man shattered.

"Jesus," the man gasped. "What the hell do you want?"

The man with the flashlight rose from the chair. It appeared to take significant effort. The other man stood as well, his movements fluid, almost serpentine.

"You did a remarkable job of covering your tracks," the man with the gun said. He took a step forward and the dim light revealed his scarred forehead. "It took us much longer than I thought it would to track down the leak in the Bureau."

"I don't know what--"

Pfoot
.

The man cried out and grabbed his shoulder. Hawthorne directed the beam into the man's face. It shined from the liberal application of pomade in his slick hair, from the monster's eyes behind his brown irises. He wanted to memorize the expression of pain, the look on the man's face when he realized he wasn't ever going to leave this room again.

"I should have recognized it immediately in your reaction when I first walked into your office. That was my mistake," Hawthorne said. "One I won't make again."

He walked toward Moorehead, who retreated into the foyer. There was the soft sound of blood dripping onto the tile.

"You see, I was looking for a payoff, some sort of money trail," Hawthorne said. "I never thought of looking for one of our own."

Moorehead made a guttural sound that could have been a laugh and eased closer to the front door.

"We were so focused on Dreck that we failed to consider Windham. At first, anyway. I don't believe Windham had any knowledge of what Dreck and Heidlmann were plotting, any more than his wife knew about the illegitimate child his mistress had given birth to five years prior to his death. But Dreck knew, didn't he? Before Windham died, his partner helped him set up a discreet trust to be paid out of
his
portion of the company's profits. Once we found that, it didn't take long to piece the rest together. The problem was that there was no failsafe in place to force Dreck to continue paying Windham's share of the profits. Your mother was worried that Dreck would end up exposing her or cutting her off after Windham died. So she cut a deal. She let your good old Uncle Avram inject you with the virus in one of its experimental stages, didn't she?"

"Look to the future, Hawthorne," Moorehead said, cautiously reaching for the door. "The world is evolving and the human race is on the verge of extinction. Soon there will be a new dominant species and we--"

Pfoot
.

Moorehead howled and fell to his knees. He cradled his hand to his chest. Blood poured from the hole in his palm down his suit jacket.

"There is no
we
," Hawthorne said. He turned and gave Locke a single nod.

A toothy smile spread across Locke's bearded face.

"Four little girls were tortured and killed in the most horrible manner, Special Agent Moorehead, and you did nothing to stop it. They were beaten. Starved. Bled to death. Butchered," Hawthorne said, turning away from Moorehead. "Do you have any idea how they must have felt?"

Hawthorne sat at the kitchen table and waited for the screaming to begin.

"You will."

II

Chesapeake Bay

Maryland

The fifty-two foot Gillman Fiberglass Sportfisherman floated in the bay, just far enough out toward the Atlantic that Baltimore appeared as a faint line on the western horizon, the blood red sun setting over it like an atomic mushroom cloud. Jack was around back behind the cabin, reeling in his line for the last time, the cooler four thirty-plus-inch Rockfish and two perch heavier for his efforts. He still needed help landing them, but Carver never made him ask. It was just what sons did for their fathers, he supposed.

Carver sat on the bow, bare legs stretched under the rail, his toes inches above the frigid water. The salty spray tickled the soles of his feet. Ellie sat beside him, her hand in his, only the sound of the waves between them. Her grant had expired and thus so had her work in the Nazca Desert, which left her free to explore her other options, the most appealing of which was the opportunity to study the Anasazi burial rituals in the Four Corners region in southwestern Colorado. Or maybe that option appealed most to Carver, who not-so-secretly wished she would decide to stay closer to him. He had made the trip to Peru twice in the last half-year, and hadn't found it remotely pleasant either time. Of course, now that he had found Ellie again, he'd happily visit her wherever in the world she might go. He was pretty sure she felt the same. They hadn't put a name to what they had, but they were both comfortable with it nonetheless.

These most recent three days together had been wonderful. Unfortunately, tomorrow Carver would board a flight back to the real world, where bad men killed children and all kinds of monsters prowled the streets in search of blood and worse.

But today none of that mattered. The world would still be waiting for him when he returned.

The smell of fish preceded Jack up onto the bow, and by no small coincidence, reminded Ellie that the wine had reached her bladder. She kissed Carver on the lips and he nearly blurted out those most dreaded and wonderful words. Each time he came closer and closer to losing that battle. He wondered why he even tried to fight it. After everything they had lived through, he understood there was no guarantee the sun would continue to rise.

"Was it something I said?" Jack said. He smirked and sat down next to Carver. After spending the last three months nearly exclusively on this boat, his tan made Carver look pasty by comparison.

"More like something you sat in."

"Ah, it's the smell of freedom, my boy. There's nothing in the entire universe like it."

"You definitely reek of freedom then. I'm pretty sure that's why all the seagulls are circling the boat."

Jack put his arm around Carver's shoulder, a gesture with which he was becoming increasingly comfortable. Carver nodded to himself, and stared blankly out over the sparkling waves, imbued by the color of the sunset, an endless ocean of blood.

"Something troubling you, son?" Jack asked. The tone in his voice suggested he knew what was coming and was ready to get it over with.

"That picture you sent me. Of this boat."

Jack waited patiently for Carver to formulate the words.

"How did you know Avram Dreck? He was right here beside you in the photo."

"He was an advisor to the President's Council on Bioterrorism. Even pioneered a vaccine for the bird flu, if you can believe that. I didn't suspect him of anything at the time. Why would I? He seemed genuinely concerned with safeguarding America from bioengineered threats. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, I probably should have kept a closer eye on him instead of the other way around, but between us, I actually kind of liked the guy."

Carver was silent for a moment before speaking.

"That must have made it harder to kill him."

Jack sighed and leaned back. He braced his arms behind him on the deck.

"You sure took your sweet time getting to that."

"I had everything else squared away, but Dreck's death still bothered me. There wasn't enough time for, you know...
him
to have done it. Not with having taken Ellie and Locke back to that dungeon, and with what he did to Kajika."

"I heard all of his money went to the reservation, that they're using it to fund schools and renovate the entire community."

"His father would have been proud," Carver said, "but you're changing the subject."

"Can't blame a guy for trying."

"And Heidlmann would never have killed Dreck. He would have been cut off from all of his research and potential distribution channels, not to mention the fact that he would have nowhere to live. So that brought me to you, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what you had to gain. We could have collared him and made him stand trail."

"You knew none of this would ever see the light of day, let alone reach trial. Dreck was a bad man who won't be missed by many."

"So it was revenge."

"Are you going to arrest me...son?"

Carver shook his head. He had been planning this conversation for months, but he had never considered the option of taking Jack in. Jack was right. The world was a safer place without Dreck, and truth be told, deep down he understood why Jack had done it. A man should only have to bear so much pain.

"I'd let you, you know," Jack said.

"I know," Carver said.

The sea began to grow choppier as the sun vanished, leaving only an orange stain on the clouds. There was the clatter of a door opening inside the cabin.

"How's your mother?" Jack asked.

"She's doing fine."

"Never had the heart to tell her, did you?"

"What would that have accomplished? She gave her life to be my mother. Who am I to take that away from her?"

Jack smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.

Carver looked back through the window into the cabin. He only had a moment before Ellie returned.

"Any sign of
him
?"

"No," Jack said, his voice suddenly serious. "You heard?"

"That the blood from the mirror tested positive for the snakehead retrovirus? Yeah. He intentionally infected himself. That was the whole point of the message he left for me. The rest of the virus has been destroyed, what do you think he intends to do with it?"