The Devil's Elixir (48 page)

Corliss had clearly heard me drive in and pull up to the house, but he hadn’t made any effort to get up and see who it was. I suspected he knew it was me, just as I suspected he’d been expecting me to show up at some point.

He didn’t even look over as I stepped out to join him.

It had just fit too perfectly. Alex happens to be the reincarnation of McKinnon. Munro happens to get wind of that somehow. He then decides to use that to bait Navarro out of hiding—the one thing he knew Navarro couldn’t possibly resist going after.

Like I said, it was a coincidence too far, and although my horizons had broadened about the so-called nonphysical world in the last few days, that was one coincidence I wasn’t prepared to believe. Not when it fit that perfectly.

I’m not into perfect fits.

Life doesn’t work that way.

And if it wasn’t a rare alignment of stars, if it wasn’t serendipity spreading its wings and giving Jesse Munro the gift of a lifetime, then it had to be something else. Something more human. Which then got me wondering about how much Munro could pull off by himself. And that got me wondering about Corliss.

Whoever did this had to know Navarro was obsessed with reincarnation. He also had to know what McKinnon’s drug was all about. And he needed to be, in my eyes anyway, insanely desperate to get Navarro.

Which brought me back to Corliss and to something Munro had said, out in Merida, by the chopper.
You think I went through all this bullshit just so some cranky old man could get his revenge?

His words had been rattling inside me ever since he said them.

I thought I knew what they’d done. What I didn’t know was, how long had it been going on?

That, and the how, was what I was here for.

There was no point in getting into any pleasantries.

“Did you know Munro was running his own game?” I asked him.

That got his attention.

He turned to face me, and he looked even more tired than I remembered. The lines across his forehead were like furrows, and he had dark pouches under eyes that already looked like they’d had all life drained out of them.

“He wasn’t going to bring him back to you, you know,” I added. “He was going to sell him on to the cartel for fifteen million dollars. And you know what the worst part is? You probably never would have known. He’d have come up with some story about Navarro being killed out there, and you’d be sitting here thinking you pulled off your plan perfectly.”

He shrugged, impassive. “I doubt they would have kept him alive too long,” he replied.

If I still had a smidgen of doubt about Corliss’s involvement, his reaction killed it there and then. “True, but that’s not what this was about, was it? This was about revenge. You, getting your revenge. And I can’t imagine it would have been anywhere near as satisfying for you not to have him right there in front of you and be able to stare into his eyes when you did whatever you were planning to do with him.”

He didn’t reply. He just kept his tenebrous gaze on me while he breathed out slowly through a half-open mouth.

“It would have all worked out, too. If Michelle hadn’t fought them off at the house. That was the plan, right? He’d grab them. And Alex would lead you right back to him.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out Alex’s Omnitrix wristband and chucked it onto the side table by his side.

I’d had it checked.

It’s where the tracker was.

“You knew Navarro believed in reincarnation,” I told him. “You had the journal. You knew Eusebio’s story. And you knew Navarro didn’t just believe in it. He was obsessed with it, and he was obsessed with getting McKinnon’s formula back. So you decided to use that to flush him out. And what better way to flush him out than to have him think McKinnon had been reincarnated.”

I saw a reaction flicker in his eyes.

“Then you decided to load the dice,” I continued. “You decided it couldn’t be just any kid. You wanted to be sure he’d believe it, you wanted him so motivated that he’d definitely come after this kid. And who better for the job than the son of the guy who shot McKinnon? Which you knew, because Munro knew that Michelle was pregnant with my son.”

The reaction calmed, and I saw that he was already wondering about the consequences.

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked

“I should. And maybe I will. I mean, you got Michelle killed. And Villaverde. And Fugate. And Michelle’s boyfriend. And all the rest of them.” I couldn’t control my temper and my tone blew. “And you put my son at risk. You screwed with his mind and you dangled him out as bait for one of the biggest psychos on this planet.”

“None of this should have happened,” Corliss said. “The plan wasn’t for anyone to get hurt. But then . . . the best laid plans, right?”

“That’s horseshit,” I replied. “You were dealing with Navarro here. What did you think would happen?”

Corliss sucked in a deep breath through thin, tight lips, and his eyes narrowed defiantly. “You, of all people, should understand why I did this. You know what happened. What he did to my family.” He paused, as if looking to see if any of his words were striking home.

For a second, I put myself in his shoes, and I wondered about that. I wondered about what I would have done had I seen my daughter butchered in front of my eyes and had my wife end her life because of it. But I also felt like strangling him for what he did.

“And he was going to keep looking,” he added. “He was going to keep looking until he found that drug. Where would we be then, huh? How many parents would be standing there saying, ‘Why didn’t you do everything you could to stop him?’ ”

I’d wrestled with the same arguments after shooting McKinnon, so his words weren’t falling on deaf ears. But I still had a few burning questions for him.

“How’d you do it?” I asked, thinking about Alex and trying to keep the rage out of my voice. “How’d you get Alex to say the things he did, to do those drawings . . . how’s you get him to be so convincing that he’d fool someone like Stephenson?”

Corliss looked away, and for a moment, I thought I saw some regret there, some pain, something human that told me maybe this hadn’t been as cold and heartless for him as I thought.

“We brought in a spook. A guy who’d been in on MK-ULTRA back in the day.” He was referring to the CIA’s now widely known mind-control experiments, back in the sixties.

The sick bastards had brainwashed my four-year-old boy.

“Name?”

“Corrigan,” he said grudgingly. “Reed Corrigan.”

It wasn’t a name I was ever going to forget. Corrigan would be hearing from me. Real soon.

“How’d he do it?”

Corliss looked away, wearily. “We drugged Michelle’s water. She went to bed every night and for a week or so, she didn’t have a clue about what was really going on in Alex’s bedroom.”

I was really having a hard time stopping myself from reaching down his throat and ripping his heart out.

“He fed him key bits of information about McKinnon’s life. About his background, his travels, his work. He showed him photographs. He also showed him the video from the night you killed him. From the cameras on your helmets.” He winced as he said it, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of monster would show a four-year-old something like that. “But we had to be very careful,” he added, as if sensing my anger about that last reveal and wanting to move on. “We had to seed only the information that would be sure to mean something to Navarro, but wouldn’t alert Michelle as to who Alex was really talking about. And you played a part in that, even though it wasn’t intentional. You didn’t tell her what really happened that night.”

I’d been wondering about that, and it was another dagger through my heart. It was my turn to want to move on. “So Alex couldn’t know the name McKinnon?”

“No. That would have told Michelle who he was claiming to be. But he could talk about McKinnon’s past, about his life and his family and big moments in his career. He could talk about Mexico. About the journal. About Eusebio de Salvatierra. And about the tribe.”

“And Stephenson was part of the plan all along?”

“He’s the expert. The world authority. And he’s right here in California. If he gave it his stamp of approval, Navarro would believe it. We just made sure the local shrink Michelle first took Alex to see pointed her in his direction.”

“How?”

He shrugged again. “Homeland security and the threat of being branded an enemy combatant go a long way these days. No one wants to end up in an orange jumpsuit.”

I nodded. “But how’d you know Navarro would hear about it?”

“I knew what he was after. I’d read the full transcript of Eusebio’s journal. The one I asked the analyst to keep to himself. Navarro . . . he wasn’t just obsessed with reincarnation. He was beyond obsessed. It’s all he lived for. You didn’t see him that night at my house. You didn’t see the look in his eyes. I knew he had to be following Stephenson’s work. And Alex would have been a big story for Stephenson. A kid, here in the United States, reliving a past life that was so recent. He’d be talking about it with his peers, writing about it. And the odds were that sooner or later, Navarro would hear about it and come after him. We just had to make sure we had enough trackers in place to find him.”

He had said
trackers
with an
s
. “So there were more of them?”

“A few. One in each of his sneakers. Some of his toys. His favorite stuffed animal.” He waved it off with disinterest. “They’re small and they’re a dime a dozen.”

“And all along, all this time, you knew Navarro was still alive?”

“Come on.” He sneered. “I didn’t buy that car bomb horseshit for a minute. Then when he started grabbing these scientists . . . they were all working on psychoactives. One of the guys he took over in Santa Barbara was synthesizing
iboga
to turn it into a pill for heroin addicts. They fit too closely to what I knew he was after.”

I felt a fresh surge of anger. “You could have asked Stephenson to just create a fake report. Or made him do it using your charms.”

His mouth bent downward at its edges, and he shook his head. “No. There was a high risk that Navarro would have had him grabbed by some hired guns, like he did with the others. Some bikers or what not. And Stephenson would have broken under questioning in a heartbeat. It was pointless to even try that. No, Stephenson also had to believe in our story.” He paused, then his expression softened. “How is he, anyway? Alex?”

I didn’t think I owed him an answer, but I still said, “He’ll be fine. Now that we know what you did to him, we can start to undo it.”

He just nodded vacantly. “Good.”

He didn’t say he was sorry. I guess he wasn’t.

“So what happens now? Is this where you pull out your gun as I’m ‘resisting arrest’?”

My expression soured, and I just shrugged. “No. I’m just going to go back.” I paused, then added, “And write my report about what happened.”

He looked at me, like he was sussing out what I meant. I guess my face said all I had to say.

I turned to go, and he called out after me. “For what it’s worth . . . it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t an easy call. But I couldn’t see any other way.”

It wasn’t worth much to me.

I walked out of his front door, and as I opened the door to my car, I heard the bullet.

I didn’t go in to check.

I just strapped on my seat belt, swung out of his gates, and set off to spend the rest of the day with Tess and my son while trying not to think too hard about what Navarro had said about the past lives of his that he’d researched nor about what I would do with the stainless steel vial I’d taken off Munro’s dead body.

 

RAYMOND KHOURY is the author of four consecutive
New York Times
bestsellers: his debut,
The Last Templar
;
The Sanctuary
;
The Sign
; and
The Templar Salvation
. His books have been translated into more than forty languages. To find out more about his work, visit his website at
www.raymondkhoury.com
, or join him on his official Facebook fan page.

ALSO B RAYMOND KHOURY