Comes a Horseman (42 page)

Heart pounding, he spun and flicked on the bedside lamp, blinding himself for a mere second. And in that moment, a voice, strong and female, filled the room.

“She'll be fine.”

He jumped, and a sharp noise escaped him—not a word, not quite a scream; something in between. His eyes darted around the room, settling on a pair of legs clad in beige slacks and protruding from the shadows in the corner. Someone was sitting in the overstuffed chair. Intended for late-night reading, the lamp was too weak to reveal the intruder's body and face.

Haltingly, he rotated his head away, then shifted his eyes to see his wife sprawled on her back under the bed linen, head cradled deep in her favorite down pillow. Her mouth hung open impossibly wide, and a thin line of drool glistened on her cheek. His nostrils flared, catching an odor . . .

“Midazolam hydrochloride,” the voice said. “Kind of like chloroform, but a lot less dangerous. At least that's what the on-line PDR says.”

“What is this? Who are you?” He reached for the nightstand drawer but stopped when a pistol emerged from the shadows. “What do you want?”

Alicia Wagner leaned into the light, watching him carefully. Of the three emotions that flashed over his face, the middle one was most telling. First, surprise: a natural reaction regardless of who she had turned out to be. Then fear: that mechanism of defense initiated when encountering someone who has a reason to harm you . . . such as someone you've betrayed. And last, indignation: the ruse.

“Alicia! How dare you!” His flesh was turning red from the neck up.

“I've come to ask you that.”

“How did you get past the alarm system?”

“Oh, please.” She put the gun in her lap.

His jaw found a posture of fiery anger, but he could not get control of his eyes. They darted to the gun, to her face, to the open bedroom door.

“What happened in New York?” he asked, a superior tone to his voice.

“Not what you expected to happen, I imagine.”

“We got a call from NYPD. They wanted to know why your prints are all over a room from which two people fell to their deaths. Your prints and Brady's, for crying out loud! They found his service pistol too. He was supposed to be home in Virginia.”

“Dead in Virginia, you mean.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What's NYPD doing? What's the Bureau doing? Have APBs been issued?”

“For you and Brady? No! We don't air our dirty laundry to locals, not until we find out what's going on. We covered for you up there, said you and Brady were undercover on something we couldn't discuss. That'll buy us a few days at best.” He reached for the nightstand drawer. “Now let's get downtown and sort this—”

“Stop, John! I mean it!”

He snapped his hand back as though from a hot surface. “You can't do this, Alicia!”

“Who's after us, John?”

“I don't know what—”

“You would not believe the
thing
that paid me a visit at my hotel last night.” She held up her arm to show him the bloody gauze. “He tried to kill me. You were the only one who knew where I was.”

Gilbreath shook his head like a dog shaking water off its pelt. “That's New York; that's the way it is. Someone . . . a
mugger
must have followed you—”

“At the very same time, an assassin attacked Brady Moore at his house. Almost got his son too.”

“What?” He looked genuinely stunned. “Is anybody . . . ?”

“They're alive. Sorry to break the news.”

“I'm
glad
they're alive; of course I am!” His head jerked a millimeter as if grasping an idea. He softened his face. “Look, we need to jump on this right away. If someone's out there hunting down agents—”

“Shut up.”

He froze.

“The attacks have something to do with the Pelletier killings.”

Gilbreath's entire body spasmed—almost imperceptibly but enough to convey his surprise. His eyes locked on hers. He opened his mouth just to close it again.

“Tell me,” she said.

He shook his head, breaking the gaze. “Nothing . . . no. I don't know anything.”

“John . . .” A disappointed tone.

“Think what you want.”

Her face hardened. She reached into the darkness beside her. Her hand returned with a cylindrical object about five inches long. Gilbreath watched intently as she raised the barrel of her semiautomatic pistol to it and began screwing it on.

“A silencer!” he barked. “You're an idiot, Alicia, threatening me with that!”

She understood. There was something about a silencer that instantly raised the stakes. It said “I mean business” more than anything else she'd done so far; more than breaking into his home, more than anesthetizing his wife, more than waving a pistol at him. As frightened as he may have been at finding her in his bedroom with a gun, he had never really believed she would harm him. This device changed that. It spoke of cold deliberation, of deadly intent, of wanting to kill and get away with it. That was precisely the reason she had brought it, and despite his angry words, she knew by the fear in his eyes it would work.

“Tell me,” she said again, pointing the enlarged pistol at him.

He appeared transfixed on the silencer, hypnotized by it.

“Tell me, John, or you'll have to explain to your wife why she'll spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.” Slowly she panned the pistol's aim toward the unconscious woman.

John Gilbreath's mouth unhinged. His eyes moved from the silencer to his wife's legs and back to the silencer, as if calculating the trajectory of the bullet. For a moment she feared that he still would not talk, then he said, “I got a call two weeks ago about the murders.”

“Two weeks ago? We didn't know about them two weeks ago.”

“Somebody did,” he said. He snapped his gaze toward the window as if he'd heard something. He slid the tip of his tongue over his lips but did nothing about the perspiration that had broken out on his forehead.

Alicia's breath caught in her throat, lumping there like a stubborn pill. “Either there's another Pelletier murder we don't know about—”

She stopped. Gilbreath was shaking his head no.

“Someone knew about the killings before they started?”
Her mind raced through the implications. “Did the killer call you?”

“No, it was someone I know.” He turned his head away. “In the government.”

“What are you saying? Who called?”

“Jeff Ramsland. That's what he goes by, anyway. When I met him a couple of years ago, he said he was with Justice. Every now and then he'd appear at a high-level meeting. He'd never say a word, just listen and then leave. I got the impression he was an oversight officer, something like that. When he called, he wanted to meet. Haupt Fountains. You know them?”

She nodded. Geysers of waters shooting out of blocks of granite that were supposedly the oldest rock in the United States, three and a half million years old.

“Do you know why there?” he asked.

It took her a few seconds. “The water,” she said. “The sound makes electronic eavesdropping virtually impossible.”

“First thing he does is hand me a letter. Bureau letterhead. From the office of the director. Signed by the man himself; I've seen his signature a thousand times. Two sentences: ‘Give this man what he wants. No questions.' As soon as I read it, Ramsland takes the letter back, puts it in his pocket. Then he tells me who he's with. At that point, he didn't have to. I had my orders. He did it to make sure I obeyed—to stress his authority and maybe give me a scare.” Gilbreath smiled thinly. “It worked.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“The Office of Contingency Planning.” He gauged her astonishment and said, “I see you've heard of it.”

“Who in federal law enforcement hasn't? I started hearing the rumors a few weeks after I joined the academy. Some kind of government watchdog, waiting for flying saucers, alien contact, viable evidence of ESP . . .
The X-Files
was reportedly based on the rumors.”

“But
The X-Files
got it wrong. The OCP is not some rogue FBI agent or two, stubbornly begging their superiors for funding and permission to investigate strange phenomena from a basement cubbyhole. It's the most powerful agency in the federal government. To remain secret, it has to be. It's small, so it uses the resources of other agencies. And to do that, its demands have to trump any objections those other agencies have. If it wants to appropriate a spy satellite to check out some djinni activity in the Sahara, it does it. If it needs a special forces unit to invade the home of some Oxford professor who claims to have found the staff of Moses, it picks up the phone and gets it. With impunity and without scrutiny. The CIA can't say no, NSA can't say no . . . I hear even the president can't say no. If it wants to close down an investigation, it can. If it wants to see a file, you send it over.”

“Over where?”

“No one knows. Everything's electronic these days.”

“You've had dealings with it before?”

“Not directly. I've been told to send files to anonymous e-mail accounts and to change direction on a case a time or two—at OCP's behest, was my understanding.”

“Sounds ripe for abuse.”

“An acceptable risk, considering its work.”

“
Work?
UFOs . . . Bigfoot . . . ?”

“Extrasensory perception—everybody knows about the government's interest in that. But even ESP is insignificant next to
other things
that might be out there. The world's strongest nations have long believed in the power of religious artifacts.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
wasn't so far off the mark. No one cares if the artifacts' power comes from God or if they were found by men in ancient times to have natural power and used to propagate some religious belief. The power is what's important, not where it comes from. The OCP has funded expeditions looking for the ark of the covenant, the staff of Moses, the true cross of Christ. It watches for the Antichrist, the so-called beast—”

“Whoa, whoa,” she said, stopping him. “The Antichrist?” She thought about the religious iconography in the Pelletier victims' houses, Malik's satanism, the mysterious symbol branded on the victims and on Malik's back, the rumors about the reason an entire Norse colony vanished.

“Sure, why not? If he makes an appearance, he's going to be mighty powerful. Don't you think the world's only superpower would want in on that? Or at least get a heads-up to defend itself ?”

“But . . .” She felt as though she'd followed the white rabbit down a hole. “How could a government agency
watch
for the Antichrist?”

“It watches for signs, prophecies fulfilled. The OCP reportedly has affinity relationships with all kinds of like-minded individuals and organizations. I've heard one of its operatives meets regularly with theologians. Spends a lot of time at the Vatican. Where better to get intel on religious stuff ?”

Alicia felt dizzy. Nothing Gilbreath had said was proof of anything, but somehow she knew she'd seen the shadow of the beast they were pursuing. It sometimes happened like that. A sliver of circumstantial evidence that, when added to all the other circumstantial evidence, made a cohesive whole that felt as solid, as
right
as a murder weapon with finger prints and video footage of the crime.

The Vatican. Again.

She blinked and saw Gilbreath eyeing the pistol. She had let it slump in her hand. She snapped it to attention.

“So what did Ramsland want from you? No questions asked?”

“To know when we got on the Pelletier case—beheadings in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.”

“Pelletier hasn't struck in New Mexico.”

Gilbreath raised one knowing eyebrow. “At the time, he hadn't struck
anywhere
. I asked Ramsland, ‘What beheadings?' He said, ‘You'll find out.'”

“So when the reports started coming in, you sent Brady and me?”

He lowered his gaze—ashamed? “As soon as I could justify it.” His voice had lost a measure of strength, of self-righteousness. “I took Ramsland's request to be an order to put agents on the case.”

“And with the Crime Scene Digitizer's ability to help local law enforcement, and its need for further field tests, you were able to get us out there sooner than you could otherwise.”

He nodded. “Before we could establish official jurisdiction.”

“Then you let Ramsland know?”

“Yes.”

“How did you make contact?”

“A phone number.” He rushed to respond to her next, unasked question: “But it's disconnected now. I tried calling today after I heard about New York. I have no way of contacting him again.”

“You told him we went out to offer assistance?”

“I told him you and Brady were on the case. I didn't think he cared about semantics.”

“And that was the last time you spoke to him?”

Silence. He looked at his wife.

“John, what did you do?”

He pulled in a deep breath, let it out.

“He called again, asked where you were staying in Colorado. I'd already pulled you off the case, because the evidence of interstate serial murder allowed the Bureau to step in with a real team. I thought . . . I thought . . .”

“You thought that's what Ramsland wanted, more bodies on the case.” She watched him readjust himself on the bed.
Squirming,
she thought. “But he wanted us, Brady and me.”

“I let him know you were following a lead in New York. He wanted to know what you were doing, where you were staying. He said ‘they,' so I knew he meant Brady as well.”

“And you gave him Brady's home address.” She felt nauseated.

He lowered his head, then looked her in the eyes. “I sent him your personnel records.”