The Collective (55 page)

“Easy for you to say,” Chang said, holding a hand against her wound.

Cait started moving. Monteforte looked up, frowning at her.

“Caitlin, get down!” Lynch shouted.

She dropped to her knees just as half a dozen bullets struck the far wall of the office. Cait rolled and came up, gun aimed at the broken windows, but she saw no one.

“They’re starting to get control of things down below,” Lynch told her, “but the kill order went out. Once those snipers figure out it’s really over, they’ll beat feet, but for now, stay away from the windows.”

Monteforte still had her gun on Shelby. “What about him? This son of a bitch is responsible for everything. Who gets him? FBI? ICD? I know you’re not going to put him in my custody.”

Shelby said nothing, but he gave a soft grunt that might have been a laugh and shook his head almost imperceptibly.

The two federal agents kept their focus on the entrance to the executive suite, just in case some fanatical Black Pine operative decided to make a last-ditch attempt to carry out
their orders. But Agent Hart glanced quickly over at Shelby with a look of disgust.

“I’m going to let my boss make that call,” he said, “but he’s done. Finished. Now the real fallout starts.”

“And it wasn’t just him,” Cait said. “The others he named … who knows how many more of these fucking
Herods
there are. We’ve got to take them all down, make sure their quest is really over.”

She pointed her gun at Shelby, on her knees amidst the shattered glass. “As for you, Leonard, you get to face the world as a baby-killer.”

Glass crunched underfoot. “No,” Lynch said. “He knows the secrets of too many powerful people.”

“What, you think he’ll get off?” Monteforte asked, horrified. “After what we just exposed to the whole damn world?”

“He won’t go free,” Lynch said. “But they might make him vanish, just to be sure their secrets go with him. They might cut a deal.”

Cait turned to stare at him. “Come on, Lynch. You seriously think he can get away with this?”

Lynch shook his head. “No.”

He emptied his gun into Shelby’s chest. The second bullet probably killed him, but Lynch kept firing, the man’s body jumping with each impact, then listing to one side in a spill of blood when the shooting was done.

“What the fuck was that?” Agent Hart snapped.

He and Chang aimed their weapons at Lynch, both looking wary, afraid of what he might do next. They swayed with the lingering effects of the gas, unsteady on their feet. Their guns wavered in their hands and Cait wondered if they would be able to hit their target, or if she and Monteforte would end up getting shot instead.

“Drop your weapon!” Chang said, her tone steadier than her aim.

Lynch turned to Cait, searching her eyes. It seemed like he wanted to apologize, but couldn’t decide what for.

“I’m happy you and Leyla will be all right,” the old man said. He squinted a little, deepening the crow’s-feet around
his eyes. “But stay vigilant. No matter how many of Shelby’s friends they might arrest, remember that the other side, the jihadists, are still out there.”

Cait nodded. “I’ll remember.”

Lynch smiled and turned his back on the people in the room.

“Goddammit, Lynch, keep still and drop your weapon!” Agent Hart shouted.

Lynch stepped in front of the shattered windows and pointed his gun down at the crowd of police and federal agents below. Monteforte shouted at him to get back, Chang yelled for him to put his gun down, but Cait could see the determination and a strange sort of contentment in his eyes. And though a deep sorrow filled her, she did not try to argue with Lynch’s choice.

The snipers made him dance. Four bullets, each one hitting home. He jerked back from the broken windows and spun around, arms outflung, then he sprawled on the floor. He had managed to hold on to his gun, perhaps by instinct, but as life flowed from him, Lynch released his grip on the weapon and used his fingers to push it away—a refutation of the violence into which he had been born and upon which he had been weaned.

Lynch twitched once, then his eyes glazed and he went still.

A child of war had at last found peace.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” Agent Hart said. “What the hell was he thinking?”

Agent Chang leaned against him, weakened by blood loss. They both stared at Lynch’s corpse in confusion. Monteforte stepped over Shelby’s corpse and retrieved her badge, then sank into the dead man’s chair, her eyes round and glazed with shock.

Cait sat alone on the floor, surrounded by the dead. Her family had been torn apart, and her brother was dead. But she knew that her baby was alive and well and waiting for her back in the Bronx. Her arms ached to hold Leyla again, and soon they would.

After what the world had seen today, via cell phone and
Internet and probably television by now as well, the lunatics and murderers who believed in War’s Children wouldn’t dare come after her.

The thought made her smile vanish and her heart grow cold.

Of course they will
. Unless they were all caught, someone would come for Leyla again. But next time, Cait would be ready. And in the meantime, she wouldn’t allow her daughter to grow up the way Matthew Lynch had, knowing nothing but survival and death. They would learn and laugh and play together.

They would live.

Finnerty’s had been established in 1956 by a legendary Washington, D.C., police sergeant who had been shot three times, stabbed twice, and electrocuted once in the line of duty before riding a desk for the last few years of his career. Shortly after he opened the pub in the fall of that year, he’d had a heart attack while having sex with the wife of his former precinct captain. It was this last more than his reputation as being unkillable that made him a hero to legions of D.C. police officers. Bert Finnerty had died in his sleep in 1980, at the age of seventy-four, but his legend lived on.

Voss sat at a booth in the back, where the wall was papered with vintage photos of local girls who had posed for the annual Finnerty’s Heart Attack Calendar, which raised money for the widows and children of D.C. police officers killed on the job. Her shoulder still hurt, but Josh had teased her mercilessly. Less than a year earlier, he had been shot in almost the same place and she had mocked him for not moving a little faster. Now he tormented her for catching the bullet. Her doctor had called her lucky, said the damage had been minimal, but she still felt like pieces of her were tugging themselves apart anytime she shifted position.

She knew she was already healing, and quickly, but she promised herself she would dodge better next time.

Several televisions were bolted to the wall behind the bar. Two of them had sports running in silence, but the nearest one showed CNN. An image of the Black Pine building flashed by, and then the anchor appeared with a photo of Dwight Hollenbach behind her. The words
King Herod?
were superimposed beneath the picture. With Shelby dead, the media needed a villain to be the face of the conspiracy, and Hollenbach fit the bill nicely. General Barnes from
SOCOM—Lieutenant Arsenault’s boss—was an older man, balding and jowly, and looked too much like someone’s kindly grandfather. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Graham of Florida, had taken his own life only hours after the standoff in Hoboken had come to an end. Dozens of participants in what was now being called the “Herod Conspiracy” had been uncovered, but Hollenbach was being painted as the man behind the curtain.

Voss knew it was bullshit, and she suspected the media knew it was bullshit, too. If anyone had been pulling the strings, it was either Shelby or someone they hadn’t gotten to yet. But the American public needed a villain as much as they needed a hero.

Nobody would dare pitch Matthew Lynch as the good guy; his final act had been to aim a weapon at police officers and federal agents, provoking FBI snipers into killing him. The investigating agencies were still trying to figure out if any of those shooters were the same guys who had fired at Cait through the broken windows of Shelby’s office, or who had shot Voss in Hartford. But, for the moment, Lynch’s death was considered a righteous shooting.

Detective Monteforte had become a media darling. She had been suspended from duty with the Medford Police Department pending the conclusion of an investigation into her participation in the events at Black Pine, but Voss felt confident that she would be cleared and fully reinstated. Homeland Security’s official report would reveal that the plan executed by Cait McCandless and Detective Monteforte had been conducted in cooperation with the ICD and FBI agents working to expose the Herod Conspiracy. The media dissected the hell out of the irony involved in Black Pine taking part in acts that could be construed as domestic terrorism.

Monteforte had already hired an agent, who was shopping a book about the case, though she had agreed to let the ICD vet the manuscript before she delivered it to her publisher. With the money she would get for the book, it didn’t really matter if she got her job back. But Voss knew Monteforte didn’t really care about the money. Writing about what happened was the detective’s way of dealing with the death of
her partner and the shock of what happened in Leonard Shelby’s office. All the media interviews were a kind of therapy, as well as a way to continue to report the version of the story they had all concocted.

What the media wanted most, of course, was Cait McCandless. That was the real story—the soldier mother who had done whatever it took to keep her baby safe—but Cait was nowhere to be found. And that was the way it would stay.

Voss slid her empty beer glass around on the scarred wooden table and glanced back at the TV above the bar. CNN was showing the video of Cait beating the shit out of that football player in Boston for the millionth time. That video would be the bane of the young woman’s life. It had gone viral online even before the rest of this had happened. A lot of people would recognize Cait McCandless’s face, and that was a dangerous thing—both for her and for her daughter.

Josh stepped back from the bar with a glass of beer in each hand. Careful not to spill, he navigated his way through tables and chairs occupied mostly by cops. Voss noticed a couple of guys give Josh a dirty look. He was in street clothes—jeans and brown shoes and a decent shirt—but they had a sixth sense in Finnerty’s and had sussed him out as a Fed. The local police were not warm and welcoming to federal agents of any stripe who came among them when they were off duty.

“Ice cold,” Josh said as he set down the two frosty beer glasses and slid into the booth across from her.

Voss thanked him and smiled, lifting her glass. Josh did the same and they toasted, clinking glasses quietly.

“To Cait McCandless,” Voss said.

“To luck,” Josh replied.

They drank. The beer went down smooth and cold enough that Voss took a long second gulp before setting the glass back on the table and studying Josh’s face.

He frowned. “What?”

She had a lot on her mind, but some of it she didn’t want to talk with him about.

“Do you believe it?” she asked.

Josh frowned. After a second he raised his glass and took another sip of beer. “You mean the whole War’s Children thing?”

Voss cocked her head, arching an eyebrow. The whole point in coming to Finnerty’s was so they could relax over a beer and talk about things in a place where they could be sure no other federal agents would overhear them.

Josh took a long drink, and when he put the glass down it was halfway drained.

“I ran across all sorts of things when I was digging around in this case, a lot of small, pretty much forgotten bits of history—”

“Footnotes,” Voss said.

“Exactly. Footnotes,” Josh agreed. “I found enough of that stuff—about kings and governments ordering the killing of children, officially or in secret, or sprees of unexplained child killings—that it’s hard to ignore. But learning something like this can change the way you look at the world. This is the lens I’m looking at that research through. So maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there. But I keep thinking about that
Rolling Stone
article.”

Voss nodded. “Me, too.” She took a sip of beer and glanced away. “The guy who wrote that article is dead. But the editor—the guy who commissioned it, and who was the only other person to know the name of the source—he’s still alive. I put Turcotte on it. Took a while, but we found him.”

Josh stared at her. “You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not,” Voss said.

“What was his name?” Josh asked.

Voss arched an eyebrow. “Matthew Lynch.”

For several long seconds, Josh just stared at her. Then he laughed.

“Still, that doesn’t make it true, does it? I mean, we’ve pretty much established that Lynch was a lunatic.”

“He was right about the Herods, though. On both sides of this conflict,” Voss reminded him. “Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s
all
true—the mystical stuff—but he sure as hell believed it.”

“People believe all sorts of crazy shit,” Josh said, glancing around to make sure no one was paying them any special attention. “Whole groups of nutjobs believe the Holocaust never happened, or that the moon landing was a hoax. I don’t
know what to believe anymore, but does it really matter if any of it is true? From our perspective, the only thing that matters is that there are a lot of dangerous people out there who believe it enough to kill for it, and we have to stop them.”