Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (30 page)

He gave her a little squeeze but she didn’t respond. Then another squeeze. Then, a shake. Nothing!

Alarmed, he sat up and turned on the light. She was on her side and didn’t wake up to the harsh glare of the overhead fixture. He rolled her over onto her back. She was breathing shallowly. Her cheeks were red. Cherry red.

That’s when he noticed his own brain was operating slowly, not a drunkenness, a sluggishness, like gears that were clogged with gritty sludge. With all his might he yelled, “Gas!” and forced himself off the bed to open both windows wide.

He threw himself over the side of his son’s crib and picked him up. He was limp, his skin like shiny red plastic. “Joseph!” he screamed. “Mary!”

He began to give Philly mouth-to-mouth while he ran down the stairs. In the front hall he grabbed a phone, threw open the front door then put the infant on the rough welcome mat. He fell to his knees. In between chest-expanding breaths into his son’s little nose and mouth, he called 911.

Then, he made a desperate decision. He left the baby on the mat and ran back inside for Nancy, screaming for her at the top of his lungs, like a man who was trying to wake the dead.

WILL HEARD HIS NAME. The voice was coming from far away. Or was it close but whispered? Either way, it caused him to snap from a disturbingly light sleep to the reality of the moment: a hospital room streaming with daylight.

At the instant of wakening he was uncertain whether he was patient or visitor, in the bed or beside it, having his hand held or holding someone’s.

Then, with a blink, it came back.

He was holding Nancy’s hand, and she was staring up into his bloodshot eyes and pitifully squeezing his thick fingers. “Will?”

“Hey.” He wanted to cry.

He could see the confusion on her face. The flashing, beeping ICU machinery didn’t make sense to her.

“You’re in the hospital,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.”

“What happened?” She was hoarse. The intubation tube had been removed only a few hours earlier.

“Carbon monoxide.”

She looked wild. “Where’s Philly?”

He squeezed her hand tightly. “He’s okay. He came out of it fast. He’s a little fighter. He’s in the pediatric wing. I’ve been shuttling back and forth.”

Then, “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

He squeezed her hand again, and said, “I’m sorry, honey. They didn’t wake up.”

The chief of police and the fire marshal personally peppered Will with questions all day, cornering him in the hospital corridors, pulling him out of Nancy’s room, ambushing him in the coffee shop. An electrical wire to the furnace blower motor had been disconnected, causing a deadly buildup of carbon monoxide. The safety cutoff switch had also been disabled. Compounding it all, the Lipinskis didn’t have CO
₂
detectors. This was a deliberate act, no doubt, and Will could tell from their initial questioning that he was a “person of interest” until the discovery of a broken bulkhead lock led them to believe he was more likely a victim than suspect.

The fact that he was ex-FBI and Nancy was active-duty didn’t escape them, and by midafternoon, the Manhattan office of the FBI had pretty much elbowed the locals out of the way and taken control of the investigation. Will’s former colleagues circled him warily, waiting for the right moment to grill him.

They tagged him making one of his shuttles between his wife and his son. He was only mildly surprised to see Sue Sanchez approaching, her high heels hammering the floor. After all she was Nancy’s supervisor. On the other hand, he was repulsed to see John Mueller with her.

Will and Sanchez always had a relationship based on mutual distrust and animus. Years earlier, he had been her supervisor. By self-admission, Will was a piss-poor boss, and Sue was always sure she could do a better job than he. She got the chance when he was busted down a grade for having an “inappropriate relationship” with another supervisor’s admin.

On a Friday she reported to him, on a Monday the roles were reversed. Their new chain of command was nightmarish. He responded to her by being asinine and passive-aggressive. If it hadn’t been for his need to stick it out for a couple of years to get his full pension, he would have metaphorically and perhaps literally kicked her officious Latina ass.

Sanchez was his superior during the Doomsday case, and she’d been the stooge dispatched to remove him when he got too close to Shackleton. A chain of puppet masters had used her as a tool, and she still resented not knowing why she’d been ordered to terminate him, why the Doomsday case had entered a deep freeze without resolution, and why Will had been given an absurdly attractive early-retirement package.

As fractured as Will’s relationship was with Sue, it was worse with John Mueller. Mueller was priggish, by the book, an agent more concerned with process than results. He was a ladder-climber, anxious to get out of the field as early in his career as possible and rise in the bureaucracy. He resented Will’s cavalier, insubordinate attitude and his moral transgressions, the drinking, the womanizing. And he was horrified that Nancy Lipinski, a young special agent with the potential to be a Mueller clone, had been turned to the dark side by Piper and had even married the scoundrel!

For Will’s part, Mueller was a poster child for everything wrong with the FBI. Will had worked cases to put bad guys away. Mueller worked them to accelerate his career. He was a political creature, and Will had no time for politics.

Mueller was the original lead special agent on the Doomsday case, and had it not been for his sudden incapacitating illness, Will would never have been assigned to the case. He would have never worked with Nancy. He would have never hooked up with her. The Doomsday case might have been solved. An entire chain of events would have been avoided if Mueller hadn’t had a little clot that shot into his brain.

Mueller had fully recovered and was now one of Sanchez’s pet poodles. When the call came in that Nancy and her family had been deliberately targeted, her first move was to get Mueller to drive her to White Plains.

In an empty visitors’ lounge, Sanchez asked Will how he was and offered condolences. Mueller waited for the brief, human exchange to conclude, then jumped in hard with an unpleasant edge.

“The police report says you were away from the house for an hour and a half.”

“You read the report perfectly, John.”

“Drinking at a bar.”

“In my experience, bars are pretty good places to find a drink.”

“You couldn’t find a drink at the house?”

“My father-in-law was a great guy, but he only drank wine. I felt like a scotch.”

“Pretty convenient time to be out and about, wouldn’t you say?”

Will walked two paces, grabbed him by the lapels of his suit jacket, and pushed the smaller man against the wall with a thud. He was tempted to hold him with one hand and smash his face with a closed fist. When Mueller started to thrust his arms upward to break the hold, Sanchez shouted at both of them to stand down.

Will let go and backed off, his chest heaving, his pupils pinpointed in anger. Mueller smoothed his jacket and smugly shot Will a grin that seemed to say, this is so not over between us.

“Will, what do you think happened last night?” Sanchez asked evenly.

“Someone made a forced entry when we were at dinner. They rigged the furnace. If I hadn’t gone out, three people would be in a coma right now.”

“In a coma?” Mueller asked. “Why not dead?”

Will ignored him as if he weren’t there.

“Who do you think was targeted? You? Nancy? Her parents?”

“Her parents were innocent bystanders.”

“Okay,” Sanchez said patiently, “you or Nancy?”

“Me.”

“Who’s responsible? What’s the motive?”

Will was talking to Sanchez. “You’re not going to want to hear this Sue, but this is still the Doomsday case.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying, Will?”

“The case never ended.”

“Are you telling me this is the Doomsday killer back at it?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying the case never ended.”

“This is nonsense, it’s bull!” Mueller protested. “What’s your basis?”

“Sue,” Will said, “you know the case wound up screwy. You know I was deep-sixed. You know I was retired out of the Bureau. You know you weren’t supposed to ask any questions. Right?”

“Right,” she agreed softly.

“There’s stuff going on so many pay grades above your head it would make you spin like a top. The things I know are covered by a federal confidentiality agreement that would take a presidential order to waive. Let me just tell you that there are people out there who want certain things from me and are prepared to kill to get them. Your hands are tied. There’s nothing you can do to help me.”

“We’re the FBI, Will!” she exclaimed.

“The people after me play on the same side of the field as the FBI. That’s all I can say.”

Mueller snorted. “This is the most conveniently self-serving crap I’ve ever heard. You’re telling us we can’t investigate you or this case because of some high-level clandestine bullshit. Come on!”

Will answered, “I’m going to see my son. You guys do whatever the hell you want. Good luck to you.”

The nurses left Will alone by Phillip’s intensive-care crib. The breathing tube was out, and Philly’s color was returning to normal. He was sleeping, his little hand grasping for something in a dream.

Will was steaming like a pressure cooker. He forced himself to focus. There was no time for fatigue. There was no room for sorrow. And there was no chance he’d be hobbled by fear. He concentrated all his energy on the one emotion that he knew would be a reliable ally: anger.

He understood that Malcolm Frazier and his minions were out there, probably close by. The watchers had an edge—they had dates of death, but that was as far as their prescience extended. They knew they’d be able to kill his in-laws. They hoped they’d be able to send him and his family into comas. But they failed. He had the upper hand now. He didn’t need the police or the FBI. He needed his own strength. He felt the Glock in his waistband, its barrel painfully digging into his thigh. He channeled the pain against a mental image of Frazier.

I’m coming for you, he thought. I’m coming.

At JFK, DeCorso opened the back door of Frazier’s car and slid in beside his boss. Neither of them spoke. Frazier’s truculent chin said it all—he was not pleased. His phone was hot from constant usage.

The diplomatic immunity card that DeCorso played had wreaked transatlantic havoc. The State Department didn’t have a clue who DeCorso was or why the Department of Defense was insisting they honor his claim. SIS brass furiously tried to shake information about DeCorso out of their CIA counterparts. The political football kept getting punted higher up the chains of command until the US Secretary of State was reluctantly corralled into personally interceding with the UK Foreign Secretary.

DeCorso got his get-out-of-jail-free card. The British government reluctantly acquiesced and turned DeCorso over to a detail from the US embassy. He was sped to Stansted Airport to board a private Gulfstream V belonging to the Secretary of the US Navy, and the arson and murder investigation was functionally closed.

Finally, DeCorso broke down and offered an apology.

“How’d you get made?” Frazier growled.

“Somebody called in my rental’s license plate.”

“Should’ve swapped it out.”

“You’ve got my resignation.”

“No one resigns on me. When I decide to fire you, I’ll let you know.”

“Did you get Piper?”

“We tried last night. Carbon monoxide at the Lipinski house. We rigged it while they were at a restaurant.”

“Yesterday was their DODs, right?”

“Yeah. We were causative. Piper left the house, came back, and raised the alarm. His wife and son are going to recover. We never had a chance to retrieve whatever he found in the UK. For all we know, he could’ve passed the material to Spence by now.”

“Where’s Spence?”

“Don’t know. Probably on the way back to Vegas. We’re looking for him.”

DeCorso sucked in air through his teeth. “Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Piper’s at the White Plains Hospital. The place is crawling with FBI. We’re watching it, and when he leaves, we’ll pick him up.”

“You sure you don’t want to shitcan me?”

Frazier knew something his man didn’t. DeCorso would be dead day after tomorrow. There was no sense in taking on a mountain of termination paperwork. “There’s no need for that.”

DeCorso thanked him and was quiet the rest of the ride to White Plains.

It was late afternoon when Nancy awoke again. She was out of ICU, in a private room. Will wasn’t at her bedside, and she got panicky. She rang her call button, and the nurse told her he was probably at the PICU with the baby. In a few minutes, he was back, swinging the door open.

Nancy was holding Kleenex, dabbing at her eyes.

“Where are they? Mom and Pop.”

“They’re at Ballard-Durand.”

She nodded. Their prechosen funeral home. Joseph was a planner.

“It’s all set for tomorrow, if you can go through with it. We can also push it a day.”

“No, I’ll be ready. I need a dress.”

She looked so sad. Those wet, oval eyes. “Laura’s got it covered. She and Greg went shopping.”

“How’s Philly?”

“They’re moving him out to the ward. He’s great. He’s eating up a storm.”

“When can I see him?”

“Sometime tonight, I’m sure.”

The next question surprised him. “How are you doing?” Did she really care?

“I’m holding it together,” he said grimly.

“I’ve been thinking about us,” she said.

He waited for it, held his breath. She wanted him out of her life. He never should have blackened her door in the first place. She and Phillip would be better off without him. He was in a bar drinking while his family was getting gassed. He had already cheated on her once. Who could say he wasn’t capable of doing it again?

“Mom and Pop loved each other.” She choked on the words, her lower lip quivering involuntarily. “They went to sleep together like they’d done every night for forty-three years. They died peacefully in their bed. They never got frail. They never got sick. It was their time. It was always going to be their time. I want that to happen to me when it’s my time. I want to go to sleep one night in your arms and never wake up.”