The Impaler (25 page)

He kept running until he was safely inside the barn—closed the doors behind him, tore off his shirt, and fell to his knees before the mirror in the horse stall, the temple doors of Kutha rising and falling with his breaths.

He was terrified, but that was all right for now. The Prince had not awakened—would not be able to hear him in here even if he
was
awake. No, this doorway, the last of them all, was not yet open.

Ereshkigal,
he heard his mother say in his head.
Ereshki-gal will help us.

That had been unexpected—perhaps even more unexpected than hearing from his mother. He knew the latter
would have to happen eventually, especially if she ever sensed him near the doorway or perhaps saw him with the Prince.

But Ereshkigal? The Prince’s beloved?

Of course, Edmund knew the story of how the Prince had raped her and taken her throne by force. And when he thought about it, the fact that Ereshkigal might want to help them made perfect sense. Perhaps that was why the Prince did not want to talk about Cindy Smith. Perhaps the Prince was keeping something from him after all.

Then again, Edmund thought, the General had been keeping something from the Prince, too—a promise he’d made long before he was anointed, but a promise nonetheless of which the Prince would surely disapprove.

But could this be a trap? Could the Prince be testing the General’s loyalty?

“The General is
still
loyal,” Edmund said out loud. “His loyalty is split is all; and there is no reason why this can’t be part of his reward.”

But the Prince demands ultimate devotion. You know that. There is to be no one but the Prince. He has shown you that in his visions, in the sacrifices at Kutha—

“The General made his promise before he was anointed,” Edmund said. “That is surely one of the reasons why the Prince chose him. For his loyalty.”

The voice in his head was silent, and all at once Edmund Lambert was the General again. He watched himself in the mirror until the temple doors became still. Cindy Smith? But how could she be Ereshkigal? How could she be both in this world and that world at the same time?

The General envisioned the young actress as Lady Macbeth; saw her in her spirit costume rising from beneath the stage to take her husband into Hell. The General kept replaying this scene over and over again in his mind. Could the answer have been right there in front of him all along? Was it
written in the stars that he, the General, should have been the one to design and build the doorway through which he would join with Ereshkigal in the Underworld?

Something deep behind the temple doors on his chest told him yes. A parallel with his day-life, part of the equation, everything connected—but he would need to think on it. There was still much about the doorway that he had yet to understand—so much so that, oftentimes when the Prince revealed things to him in his visions, the General didn’t know what to make of them. Even
after
consulting with the Prince.

Of course, there would be no consulting the Prince about all this. And even though the Prince spoke to the General inside his head, he could not read the General’s thoughts unless the General wanted him to.

No, when it came to this part of the equation, the General was on his own.

But that was all right. He’d figured out how to balance other parts of the equation on his own. And so he would figure out how to balance this part on his own, too.

Eventually,
a voice answered in his head.

The General smiled. He understood the concept of eventually. It had been that way from the beginning, all those years ago when he promised his mother he would save her. It had taken him almost two decades of eventually to balance that part of the equation.

But then again, the General thought, what’s a couple of decades compared to eternity?

Alan Gates hung up from a call with his Interpol liaison feeling frustrated and helpless. He hated having to deal with anyone at the United Nations—hated having to deal with anyone outside the FBI
period
. True, things had gotten better since 9/11; clearer channels and more cooperation all around. Nonetheless, even with this new wrinkle surrounding the ob-jets d’art seized in Rome, he knew things were going to come to a screeching halt again in Jordan. Yes, now that the United States was involved, those bastards would take great pride in sabotaging Interpol’s investigation.

The suspect in question was a Dutchman named Bertjan van Weerdt, a black-market antiquities dealer whose specialty was European art seized by the Nazis during World War II, and against whom Interpol had been building a case for almost a year. Why or how van Weerdt had gotten mixed up in one of the many smuggling rings to come out of Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion was still a bit of a mystery. He’d already been turned over to the authorities in The Hague, and even though Interpol had him by the balls, van
Weerdt wouldn’t give up the name of his contact in Jordan—said he knew the man only as Abdul and could provide no further information. Gates had a feeling van Weerdt was telling the truth. He knew the type—no loyalty, anything to save his own skin—and could already see the trail ending at the Jordan consulate with or without the Dutchman’s help.

Of course, Gates would fly one of his men to The Hague to run van Weerdt through the obligatory round of questions. But that was going to take time, and time was something they didn’t have.

The implications of his protégé’s theory were staggering. Never mind the killer’s time line; never mind his connection to the constellation Leo, the god Nergal, and his obsession with the mark of the lion. No, given the date on which Inter-pol nabbed van Weerdt in Rome, what bothered Alan Gates the most was that, if in fact the Impaler
had
drawn on the stolen Babylonian seal for inspiration, there were really only two possible scenarios in which he could’ve come into contact with it. Either he was involved in the smuggling ring himself, or he’d seen the seal somewhere else—perhaps at an archaeological dig in Iraq or a private collection that eventually got mixed up with the stolen items from the Baghdad Museum. The latter left open too many variables. And so, until anything told them differently, the FBI would have to begin from the premise that the Impaler had seen the ancient seal somewhere between its theoretical departure from Iraq and its appearance in Rome.

Of course, Special Agent Schaap—in conjunction with both the Raleigh PD and ICE—would check out the anomalies with immigration and customs, as well as any leads involving violent offenders of Middle Eastern descent in and around the Raleigh area. But it was what Markham said at the end of the teleconference that made Alan Gates’s stomach turn.

“One last thing,” Markham said. “Back in 2003, three U.S. soldiers from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division were brought up on allegations of attempting to smuggle out of the country priceless artifacts that Iraqi antiquities officials said were looted from the Bagdad Musuem. The names of the soldiers were never released and the charges later dismissed. And even though incidents of smuggling by U.S. military personnel are extremely rare, it at least proves that a serviceman could not only have come into contact with the ancient Babylonian seal, but also that he could’ve been connected to the smuggling operation in Jordan.”

“You’re saying you think there’s a possibility that the Im-paler might be a veteran of the Iraq War?” Mr. Spock asked.

“Perhaps,” said Markham. “There’s the planet Mars con-nection—the god of war, the ultimate soldier crossing paths with the lion figure in the sky. Our profile for the killer thus far indicates that our boy is a highly disciplined individual. He goes to a lot of trouble to make sure he doesn’t leave any DNA at the crime scenes. If the Impaler was in the military, they’d have a sample of his DNA and a record of his prints if he’d been on special assignment. Never mind that he’d have to possess quite a bit of physical strength to pull off his little shenanigans.

“Then there’s the fact that the kind of gun used to kill Rodriguez and Guerrera was a nine-millimeter, the rounds from which show marking consistent with the Beretta M9. Ballistics can’t be one hundred percent sure, of course, but the M9 has been standard issue for the U.S. military since 1990. Given Raleigh’s relative proximity to both Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, it’s another connection to Iraq that I think can’t be ignored at this point.”

“I’ll take care of getting the clearance on all that,” Gates said.

“Thank you, Alan. For the rest of us, in addition to getting
on Interpol and ICE, I suggest we put together a team to cover Bragg and Lejeune and begin working from there—fast-track the necessary paperwork to requisition medical records and look for servicemen in the Raleigh area who have a history of mental illness. It’s a long shot, but if you’ve got a better place to begin, I’m all ears.”

Then came the silence—all of their minds spinning, Alan Gates knew, with variations on the same theme. The fact that the Impaler might be in the military had blindsided them more than anything Markham had said that day. And for Alan Gates, it was a prospect that both saddened and terrified him: sad because he felt an unspoken kinship with the killer; terrified because he also identified with him.

He’d seen it all firsthand. Sometimes he still saw it. In the middle of the night, the dream fading, the warm wet blood on his face and hands chilling into the sweat of his nightmare. Thankfully, gone were the nights when he woke up screaming, or when Debbie had to sleep in the guest room because his tossing and turning and talking in his sleep scared her close to death. But still, the dream always returned.

Curiously, however, he never remembered the dream itself; only pieced it together afterward when he figured it had to be about the worst day of them all—the day his best friend Ronnie Blake stepped on a land mine; the day First Lieutenant Alan Gates watched him die in his arms even as he wiped from his eyes the blood and shit from Blake’s blown-out bowels.

Those were the kinds of days that made a man snap, made him come back “a tick away” as they used to say. Gates had been close, could have snapped with the best of them were it not for his faith in God. Yeah, the Old Man Upstairs had bailed him out of that one just as he had bailed him out of Nam without a scratch.

But then there were the guys who snapped in a different way. The guys who came back “normal.” The guys who never dreamed, never cried, held a steady job and golfed and banged their wives and colored Easter eggs with their kids. That is, until one day …

One day
.

The doctors and the smart men with the degrees had names for that day—theories and fancy terminology that he learned at Georgetown and had to indulge over his many years with Behavioral Analysis. But in the end Alan Gates didn’t care why a man snapped; didn’t preoccupy himself with the minutia as to why one kid could grow up to be a healthy member of society after being raped repeatedly by his uncle, while another felt the need to kill little old ladies because his grandmother got him the wrong color bicycle for Christmas.

No, when it came right down to it, Alan Gates was good at what he did because he not only understood what it meant to be a tick away from his own
one day
, but also because he was able to wrap his mind around the kind of snap that made the one day into a string of days. Sure, he could think like the killers he hunted, but he was also able to see and feel the waves of the water in which they swam. It was the latter that separated the men from the boys. The tick of the clock that took him further, but at the same time kept him sane. It was that way for Markham, Gates knew. His tick was Elmer Stokes.

After all, thinking like a killer was one thing, but feeling like him was another.

The superposition principle.

Markham,
Gates said to himself as he looked at the clock over his office door:
1 p.m. Already on his way. So much to do, so little time. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

Gates thought about his platoon in Vietnam, and in his
head he ran through the names and faces of those who’d made it and those who hadn’t—of those he knew were still living, and those he knew had since died.

And then Alan Gates did something he’d never done before.

He got down on his knees and said a prayer for a killer.

Cindy Smith was beyond thrilled that she had waited in front of her computer just that little bit longer before heading off to the gym.

Direct and to the point
, she said to herself, reading.
But at the same time mysterious. Just like the handsome soldier himself.

Cindy smiled and read the e-mail again:

“I guess it’s meant to be, after all,” Cindy said out loud for the twentieth time. “But
what
is meant to be? Going to the party? Or going to the party with me?”

Cindy sighed and chastised herself for not playing it cool even in private. She shut down her computer and slipped her script into her book bag.

“I’ll be home late, Mom,” she called on her way out the door. “Don’t forget the cast party is tonight.”

“Be careful,” her mother replied from the kitchen. “And no drinking and driving.”

“I know,” Cindy said. They exchanged
I love yous
, and then she was gone.

“I guess it’s meant to be,” Cindy said to herself as she started up her car. “Yeeess,
Meester Lem-behrt.
Now I have you right vehre I vahnt you.”

As Markham walked across the tarmac, he felt a wave of panic pass through his stomach when he imagined how thin the FBI’s resources would be stretched in the days to come. There was the European and Middle Eastern can of worms now, not to mention the coordination of all the military records. He’d already followed up on the name Lyons itself but came up empty. He wasn’t surprised. That would’ve been too easy.