Before Cain Strikes (22 page)

“This is an M107 .50 sniper rifle. Do you recognize it, Grover? It’s the same make and model your hero Henry Booth used to murder over fifty men, women and children.”

With expert precision, the young woman assembled the rifle, each piece locking with a soft, strong click.

“At 4:44 p.m., all nine of these agents will be in a conference room on the second floor of the Resident Agency for a briefing. That’s when you’re going to take your perch and fire off every one of these blanks at that window. They’ll take care of the rest.”

Then Grover understood.

“The Great Hunt.”

Tom turned to the young woman. “Didn’t I tell you he was a smart boy?”

She nodded, and handed the weapon to Grover.

“Go ahead,” said Tom.

“I…”

“You what? Don’t know if you can do this? Well, I’ll tell you, Grover, here’s the thing—you are going to do
this. You’re going to do this for three reasons. One, it’ll be a service to your country. Two, it’ll be a service to helping us catch a lot of really bad people. Three, you don’t have a choice. See, the moment you started writing about all this, posting those amusing notes on those message boards, you became part of the story. This is how your part ends.”

“Are people going to think I actually…killed these…?”

“Absolutely,” Tom replied. “We’re going to make sure everybody knows. We have to, for this to be believable. ‘Galileo Writer Snaps, Copycats His Subject, Nine Dead.’ Everyone in the country is going to know what you did. That’s how we’re going to get Cain. That’s how you’re going to help us get Cain. And then the truth will be revealed and you can go home to your Florida bungalow with a cleared reputation. Who knows? It may even help sell copies of your book. Now sit back and relax. Would you like a cup of coffee? Agent Ramirez here is going to show you how this rifle works.”

E
sme wasn’t there for Grover’s latest interview. She’d overslept.

Or rather, she hadn’t slept—and when she finally was able to close her eyes and approach some weak imitation of slumber, it was almost 7:00 a.m. And so she hadn’t heard the alarm, hadn’t even needed to slap the snooze button. She just slept and slept and then, around 10:00 a.m., her eyes finally crusted open. The alarm had long since tossed its hands in the air and shut up, so for a moment, she thought she’d actually awoken early. She could take her time, enjoy a long, hot shower, maybe stop for a casual bite to eat on the way to the city…

And then her bleary vision cleared and she beheld the actual time and all thoughts of taking it slow went bye-bye. With a vociferous “Shit!” and an equally adamant “Fuck!” she bolted into the shower, nearly slipping on the bath mat and breaking her neck.

Wonderful. It was going to be one of those days.

One benefit of all her rushing about was that it helped to distract her mind off the fact that, less than twelve hours ago, she was essentially disowned by her husband and daughter. She had told them she wasn’t going
to cut and run. Rafe got angry, which made Sophie cry, and so Esme kissed her little girl goodbye, promised to visit tomorrow, walked to her own car and drove back to the house that Rafe melodramatically no longer called a home (despite all the warm years they’d spent under its ceiling). How he could let six months counterbalance all those years was beyond her comprehension.

Also beyond her comprehension: how she was going to explain her tardiness to Tom. But one thing at a time. First get dressed. She chose a sensible sweater-pants combination and matched them with a pair of soon-to-be-dead shoes (because the leaden sidewalks of New York City sapped the life out of even the most comfortable footwear). She grabbed a muffin from the fridge and almost made it out the door before bursting into tears.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She needed music. She needed pop music. She needed the Spice Girls.

She started up her Prius, checked her sob-smeared makeup in the rearview and on her iPod she dialed up
Spice,
the premiere album by the British purveyors of froth and “girl power.” Too bad there wasn’t a Doomed Spice. At that moment, she would have been Esme’s soul mate.

Halfway to New York, she followed up the Spice Girls with pretty much the same group, the all-female quartet All Saints, and their self-titled debut album. Once she’d reached the George Washington Bridge, it was time for yet another album. Pop music evaporated so quickly. She cycled to the trio Sugababes and welcomed the next wave of studio-enhanced harmonies to buffer her from the twisting-down-the-drain realities of her life.

As she spotted the Federal Building, looming like the emotionless twenty-first-century skyscraper it was,
part of her wanted to just keep driving, follow the traffic through the Holland Tunnel, and take the Jersey Turn-pike down to Atlantic City. She had never been to Atlantic City. She heard the boardwalk was nice. It was at least valuable in Monopoly. Maybe if she resettled to Atlantic City, her life could become as simple as a board game. She’d get a job as a croupier, dealing out luck to eager tourists. At night she’d walk the old wooden planks by the Atlantic Ocean and— No, the Atlantic Ocean would just remind her of the lighthouse, and Rafe, and Sophie.
Go west, young woman.
Santa Fe or San Diego. Guam. Hong Kong. Dubai. Christ, had it been only ten days ago that she’d, tongue firmly in cheek, suggested during their session with Dr. Rosen that they move to Iceland?

Ten days. Six months. Seven years. Not to mention the 2,037 active members belonging to Cain42’s website. She was drowning in a pool of mathematics.

She arrived on the FBI’s high-altitude floor in time to run smack-dab into Grover Kirk, who was on his way out. He backed away, covering his left ear with a protective hand.

“You get away from me, you kung fu bitch!”

Esme looked to Tom, who was trailing behind the dickhead like a tall shadow. What was Grover doing here?

“Let’s go, Grover,” said Tom. “Remember, 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. The case will be on the roof exactly where I told you.”

Grover nodded, glared at Esme and shuffled past her to the elevators.

“What’s going on?” she asked Tom.

Tom motioned for her to follow him, and she did. He led her back to the conference room, still ornamented with all of those ghastly photographs. Almost three-
quarters of them, though, now had victims identified, the locations highlighted and the murderers’ user names labeled. Although it was, as she’d told Mineola, reactive rather than proactive, it remained a tremendous achievement. These poor men and women were close to receiving the justice for the lives that had been so brutally stolen.

Tom closed the door, giving them some privacy. It was a visual echo of her brief heart-to-heart with Karl Ziegler, and it left her feeling even more unsettled.

“What’s going on?” she repeated.

Tom told her. It didn’t take very long. She stood there, silently processing the information, nodding now and then, and out of respect to this man, whom she loved like a father, she waited until he was finished before she opened her mouth.

“Are you fucking nuts?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re giving that man a
rifle?
”

“This can’t be done without him. You knew that yesterday.”

But Esme couldn’t shake the image of Grover, who had invaded Sophie’s life at the museum, who had slimed into bed with her, holding a sniper rifle. It roused bile to gurgle up her esophagus. “There has to be a better way than this.”

“This needs to be done this weekend. We had to have a plan in place and you—”

“This is bullshit,” she replied, and began to pace.

“It’s a good plan.”

“It’s lunacy.”

Tom shrugged. “You can’t be objective.”

“Next you’re going to tell me I should go home.”

“Maybe you should.”

Esme wheeled to face him, her face burning with a week’s worth of fury. She wanted to take a swing at the man. Maybe she should go home? No matter what they had been through, he had never treated her as if she were expendable—until now. Maybe she should go home? And where, pray tell, was that, Tom, huh? Where was home? She wanted to punch him and kick him and take him down but she couldn’t see him through her tears and she couldn’t raise her arms because what little strength was left in her sleep-deprived, joy-deprived, love-deprived body seemed to vanish away and she was left with nothing. And that was the word that summed her up, that was her destination of all these weeks and months and years—
nothing, nothing, nothing.

Sometime after, she realized Tom was hugging her to his chest and her tears were staining wet shadows across the shoulder of his chamois shirt. She heard sobbing and wondered what poor woman could be making those sounds, so reminiscent of…what? P. J. Hammond, after he’d murdered his son. That’s where she’d last heard these sounds, and here they were again, in of all places this emotionless twenty-first-century skyscraper. How odd.

And now she was sitting in a chair, with a glass of water in front of her. When had that happened? Had she asked for some water? She was thirsty, actually, and sipped from the glass. Her hands were trembling. She watched them vibrate in the air. She thought about the fish in the moonlight. She thought about Sophie.

But she looked around the room, and Sophie wasn’t there. Only Tom. Always Tom.

“Esmeralda,” he said, “talk to me.”

And she did.

A bruised and battered cloud formation hovered overhead, and left a dreary pall over Long Island. But that didn’t change the fact that it was still Saturday, and so the playground at McCoy Park in Oyster Bay, Long Island, was bustling with the noise of hyperactive children sliding down the slides, swinging on the swings and Tarzan-ing across the jungle gyms. On the outskirts of the playground sat their vigilant parents and/or nannies. The Weather Channel meteorologists had predicted a cold rain by 4:00 p.m., and many of the adults were keeping one eye on their raucous offspring and the other on the time. It was now 4:06 p.m. Once the promised storm arrived, they’d be provided with the perfect excuse to go home, but for now, it was wait and watch and wait.

Esme wasn’t with the other adults. Esme was with her daughter, and they were bouncing up and down on the seesaw.

Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

“Is this like a catapult, Mommy? If you push harder enough, maybe you can send me up in the air!”

“Okay…” replied Esme, a twinkle in her eyes. “Let me try…”

Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

The sky, Sophie’s longed-for destination, groaned with growing darkness.

The rumbling above reminded Sophie of the ugly noises her stomach had made Thursday night, after they’d returned from the Italian restaurant. “It sounds like God needs Pepto!” She giggled.

Esme just smiled back at her daughter and replied, “Maybe.”

“Mommy?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“Are you and Daddy getting divorced?” When she posed the question, there was no change in Sophie’s facial expression. She’d asked it with exactly the same tone and curiosity she’d had about the fish. “Because I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Who said anything about divorce, Sophie?”

“Grandpa Les.”

Of course.

“Well, sweetie, sometimes Grandpa Les doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Sometimes he smells like old socks.”

“And sometimes he smells like old socks,” agreed Esme.

Another echo of thunder. The battered bruises up above were darkening ever further, as if color itself knew better than to stay outside today. The storm would be soon, and mighty.

“Sophie, I think it’s time to go.”

Esme expected a protest—they hadn’t been out here very long—but her little girl just shrugged her shoulders okay and hopped off the seesaw once her feet touched the ground. They walked back to the Prius, parked alongside all the other cars. Other parents were escorting their children off the playground now, too. Esme offered a friendly wave to a few of the mothers she recognized. Only one waved back.

How lovely to be made a pariah for protecting your neighborhood.

They drove back to the lighthouse. Esme allowed her daughter to pick the music and, predictably, Sophie chose the Beatles. This was her little girl, after all. Sophie was especially fond of Paul McCartney’s music hall contribution to
Abbey Road
: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Mother and daughter sang along with the bouncy chorus as they
traveled north. The rain erupted in a cloudburst, providing wet percussive backbeats that echoed the “bang bang” of Maxwell’s silver hammer in three-eight time.

Nolan Worth met them in the parking lot of the lighthouse, with an umbrella and a grin. Esme and Sophie scrunched underneath the vinyl octagon and, on the count of three, they all rushed, mud splashing at their feet, toward the warm, dry interior of the lighthouse. Rafe’s car was gone. Tonight, he and Lester were elsewhere. That was the agreement. She didn’t care where they were and hadn’t even bothered to ask. If she needed to get ahold of her husband, she had his cell phone number. She didn’t plan on getting ahold of her husband. This was her day with her daughter.

Not too far away, in an unmarked sedan outside the nondescript FBI substation in Melville, New York, Tom was also thinking about Esme’s day with her daughter, among many other things. Esme’s breakdown had hit him hard. Even though so much of it seemed to stem from the dissolution of her marriage, Tom couldn’t help but shoulder some of the guilt himself. Here was his prodigal daughter, his beloved disciple and friend, of whom he was so proud, for whom he cared so much, and circumstances—which he had played a part in creating—had reduced her from a glacier, implacable and fearless, to an icicle being heated into nothingness. He longed for nothing more than to help her out and build her back up, but he couldn’t. Her problems went beyond the scope of his prodigious abilities to solve. She wasn’t a case to be concluded or a criminal to be profiled. She was his Esmeralda, and she was alone, and no amount of “It’ll be okay” or “I’m here for you” counterbalanced the hot truth of that fact.

Meanwhile, there was the operation. Tom was supposed to be concentrating on the task at hand. Dozens of operatives were waiting for his go-ahead to abort the mission. The rain wasn’t letting up, and this was a weather-dependent operation. Grover could still fire off all of his blanks, but what were the odds that an untrained marksman like himself would notch one kill, let alone nine, in this wind and with this rain? Galileo couldn’t have even accomplished that feat. Credibility was vital here. So why wasn’t Tom signaling the abort?

None of them could have known what was on the veteran special agent’s mind, not even Grover Kirk, up there on the roof, no less wet than if he were underwater. For one, Grover was too busy trying to keep the soaked sniper rifle from sliding out of his hands.

As for the nine targeted agents in the conference room on the second floor, they were impatiently debating whether or not to contact Tom themselves. The operation called for radio silence (unless Tom were to breach it), but proceeding in this weather was ridiculous. Why wasn’t he signaling the abort? They all recognized the important theatrical value that they played here, but they all also knew when enough was enough. It was time to call it a day. It was time to return home, cuddle up with a hot cup of coffee and watch some college football with their kids.

The operation was scheduled for 4:44 p.m. It was now 4:41 p.m.

From his vantage point at street level, Tom could see the tip of Grover’s rifle and he could see the sheer surface of the conference room bay window. An hour ago he could have seen through the window and into the conference room itself, but the dark weather made that
prohibitive. Could Grover even see his targets? Tom sighed. He was aware of how precarious the whole operation had become. But he was also aware of how absolutely essential it was that this operation succeed. This was their best opportunity to end Cain42 and his World Wide Web of violence. Perhaps they should have had a second operation on the back burner in case this one went FUBAR, but Tom had never been a fan of fallbacks. People with fallbacks tended not to commit as fully to their primary objective. People with fallbacks had a safety net.