The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (27 page)

“What else can you tell me about this island?”

“Nothing!”

“Who did you speak to from the government? Answer me!”

“No one, not directly. Just contacts, liaisons, like I said. It was one of them who mentioned the island. I don’t even know if he was telling the truth.”

“Then I’ll have to find out, won’t I?”

“You don’t know what you’re doing, I tell you.”

“And you don’t know what you’ve done, you stupid son of a bitch!”

“I’m a government employee. I had no choice.”

“The government had nothing to do with this and never did.”

Vogelhut regarded Kimberlain quizzically. “No, that can’t be. Everything checked out.”

“Sure. Officials in the right places were probably bought off, enough of them to make this whole charade possible and keep it thriving.”

“
What
charade?”

“You’re not listening, Doctor. You didn’t before and you’re not now. You simply followed orders, just like the wardens of all the prisons convicted killers were sentenced to spend their lives in.”

“
Others?
”

“Hundreds. Whoever’s behind this found their subjects in plenty of areas beyond The Locks.”

Vogelhut’s eyes swam fitfully. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m the only one who’s telling the truth. Don’t you see? It all fits. Leeds never could have escaped without considerable help from the inside, and now I understand how it was set in place.”

“Leeds? What does he have to do with this?”

“Everything, Doctor. He wants to create a world where only those who meet his particular standards can exist. He wants to turn things inside out, bequeath society to the same kind of person he got himself placed in here to bust out.”

“Placed here?”

“All part of the plan. He wanted, needed, to empty MAX-SEC, because whatever he’s plotting is going to happen soon, and those eighty-three inmates must have some role to play.”

Vogelhut straightened tentatively. “This is madness!”

“Your specialty, doctor.”

“I’m telling you the people I dealt with had all the right credentials. We had phone conversations. I called their offices!”

“You called the numbers they gave you. Before I leave I’ll give you some new ones. None of the people on the other end will have ever heard of them or their operation.”

Vogelhut’s face sagged, his features seeming to melt. “I released all these madmen to their custody. I covered the truth up.”

“You were guilty of being stupid, and my guess is you were played by experts. At least one person who’d been on the inside of the game, maybe more.”

The inmates of the lost ward were clustered before the entry door now, those closest pounding their fists raw against it. For a brief instant Kimberlain saw the world within the ward as a microcosm of what Leeds endeavored to make. A world where there would be no door to bar the lost and no cells to confine them. Leeds would be back for these and all the others like them. They were his legion. He would set them free.

“Lock them in tight, Doctor,” he told Vogelhut. “Lock them in tight.”

Kimberlain tried to reach Lauren Talley from The Locks, but she was in transit between the hospital where Tiny Tim had struck and Quantico. It would be another hour before she would be accessible, and, no, Kimberlain didn’t want to talk to anyone else in her place. Instead he used the empty time to call Captain Seven.

“So what happens next?” the captain asked after the Ferryman had briefed him on what he had learned from Vogelhut.

“My young friend Talley helps put a search party together to find this island. Any ideas?”

“Well, boss, you probably remember that techno plan our old D.C. buddies asked me to draw up to protect the East Coast from submarines. Along the way they sent me the most accurate maps possible of the whole fucking seaboard from north to south. Give me ten minutes to find some possibilities on them and five to tell you what I came up with while you were paying the doctor a house call… .”

“You pausing for effect?”

“What I got here’s too much for even Hawaiian lava bed to mellow. You were right about the mutilating being a key, boss. One per site, sure as sunrise.”

“Not confirmed in Dixon Springs yet.”

“Far as I’m concerned it is. Old couple named Snead, right on the master list you gave me.”

“Snead?”

“They were parents, boss. The ones in Daisy were a brother and his family. The nurse in the hospital was an ex-wife. Relatives all, closest living from what I can tell.”

“Whose relatives?” Kimberlain asked in confusion.

“The original Caretakers, Ferryman. That’s who our boy is going after.”

Chapter 27

KIMBERLAIN’S HEAD WAS STILL
spinning when he finally got Talley on the phone.

“This time it’s you who sounds shaken,” she said, before he had even begun to relate everything he had learned.

“With good reason. I think I know where Leeds and the others are.” He swallowed hard. “I can also tell you how we can go about catching Tiny Tim.”

“Should I be heading for my superior’s office yet?”

“You should hear it all first. Better sit down, Lauren. This may take a while… .”

Actually, it took only ten minutes for the Ferryman to summarize everything. Each minute to him was one more that brought Andrew Harrison Leeds’s ninth dominion closer to fruition. But it could be stopped now. Find the island where Renaissance was headquartered and they would find Leeds.

“What do we do?” Talley asked in the end.

“You go to your superiors, Lauren, and you get them to authorize a major recon mission. Probably have to call in the army, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Captain Seven will narrow down our field of choices, and we send the cavalry in.”

“You’ll have to come down here for a full debriefing.”

“Send the Lear to Buffalo. I can be there in two hours.”

“What about Tiny Tim, Jared?”

“I’m going to have Captain Seven fax you the complete files on all The Caretakers. Track down the closest living relatives of the eight others and you’ll know where to look.”

“Nine others including you.”

“I’ve got no relatives. That means he’s probably saving me for last.”

Kimberlain ran it through his mind over and over on the way to Buffalo and while he was waiting on the tarmac for the bureau’s Learjet to arrive. Who could have held a grudge against The Caretakers of the magnitude to justify what Tiny Tim was doing? One of The Caretakers, yes. God knew Kimberlain and the others had left plenty of enemies in their wake. But
all of them
? It made no sense. There was only one time the entire dozen had actually worked together, and that, well …

The island of San Luis Garcia …

It had been the one time all The Caretakers had been summoned as a unit, the one time Kimberlain had actually laid eyes on the others who were considered to be on the same level he was. The interests of the nation years before had required the assassination of the island of San Luis Garcia’s despot ruler and the installation of a puppet government in his place. To the dismay of all, the puppet leader, an American general, elected to start pulling his own strings. General Travis Seckle, it seemed, had his own ideas of what was best for the island and they were in direct conflict with those of the United States. Worse, he threatened to reveal the embarrassing truth about the assassination if he were deposed.

The Caretakers had parachuted down to the island just after midnight and made their way to the hilltop palace. Seckle had done a decent enough job of positioning his troops to guard against such a maneuver, but there was only so much he could do in a short period of time. And against a small, precision group with the skill level of The Caretakers, the entire complement of San Luis Garcia armed forces might have proven insufficient.

Their advances along the palace’s outer perimeter had gone smoothly and quickly, but there was no disguising their presence once they reached the courtyard. A bloody battle ensued that eventually spilled into the palace itself, where Seckle had been killed. Kimberlain had been charged with holding the perimeter at that point and never actually entered the palace. Two Caretakers who did had been wounded, and one would never be able to fill missions again. But the cost was worth it. If the truth about San Luis Garcia and Travis Seckle had ever gotten out, the cost for both the U.S. government and The Caretakers would have been incredibly high.

But Seckle was dead, everything connected to him was dead. Something else, then.

The Lear arrived two hours after Kimberlain got to Buffalo Airport, and Kimberlain walked onto the tarmac to meet it. He was halfway to the jet when the door opened and the stairway was extended down. Seconds later a well-dressed man descended.

“Kimberlain?” he called over the jet’s still-roaring engine. The Ferryman nodded.

“Let’s go.”

Kimberlain climbed on board and found a second agent waiting to greet him.

“I’m Special Agent Greeley and this is Special Agent Hawks.” The two men flashed their IDs. Hawks went back to the task of closing the door. “We’ve got com link with Washington and Quantico. No reason to waste the trip. We’ll get started on the way, if you don’t mind.”

Kimberlain sat down and fastened his seatbelt. This Lear was a technological marvel even Captain Seven would be proud of. There were three television screens, two fax machines, four telephones, and a pair of computers that were obviously attached to modems.

“We can start with where Leeds can be found,” the Ferryman began, as the jet streaked into its takeoff.

Captain Seven had narrowed the field to remarkably few prospects, one of which stood out above the rest: an island called Devil’s Claw located forty miles out to sea due east from the border of North and South Carolina. Isolated and undeveloped, it was technically not part of either state but at various points had been possessed by both. Its topography and jagged, rock-strewn shoreline made it uninhabitable, and with a hundred more desirable islands within close reach of the shore, no one paid any attention to it anymore.

The name Devil’s Claw referred to the island’s general form. It was a massive range of hills with a single flat plane five hundred acres large sitting square in the middle. Five tall hills dominated the area enclosing the plane, as the captain described it, each coming to a narrow peak that might have been a talon. From above, the single plain looked like a palm of an upturned claw.

“That can wait,” the agent named Greeley was saying, after twisting in the seat ahead to face Kimberlain, “until the director is on line.”

The Lear was banking upward through puffy white clouds as thin as the jet’s exhaust plume in—

Something scratched at Kimberlain’s spine. They hadn’t refueled the jet at the airport before taking off again. No way the Lear could have enough fuel to manage the return flight to Washington… .

The agent named Hawks was leaning forward in his seat, working one of the television’s controls.

“I have the director now,” he said, and a staticky picture appeared on the screen. Then it sharpened in the same instant Kimberlain’s seatbelt retracted and dug into his stomach. His hand was halfway to his gun when he realized the belt had trapped it against his body. He was struggling to extract it when another pair of men lunged from concealed positions in the rear of the jet and steadied machine guns upon him.

“Welcome,” said the image of Andrew Harrison Leeds that now filled the screen before the Ferryman. “It’s so nice to have you aboard.”

The Seventh Dominion
Devil’s Claw

Thursday, August 20; 11:00
P.M
.

Chapter 28

FROM VERMONT, HEDDA
and Chalmers drove west toward a secluded estate overlooking the Hudson River in Highland, New York. Two of the other Caretakers were already present when they arrived, and the rest trickled in over the course of the next six hours, as a cool summer night replaced the day. They had flown into the country from safe houses where Chalmers had stashed them in cities all over the world. One after another rental cars slid into an old barn on the outskirts of the property and the drivers made their way to the main house.

Finn, Ishmael, Kurtz, Marner, Iago …

They were a group like none other Hedda had ever encountered. At first glance utterly different in appearance, they were alike in the way they carried themselves and in their eyes, hollow and blank, impossible to read. They were her eyes, predator’s eyes she had looked at in the mirror, but never really seen until now.

This was what she was… .

But she had been someone else before. Chalmers had steadfastly refused to tell her anything more about her true self, and Hedda realized it was pointless to press him. He was holding the truth hostage; she would get it only if she played her role on Devil’s Claw.

When all The Caretakers were accounted for, the group adjourned to the living room of the large house, which had been emptied of furniture except for a large table. On it rested a detailed mock-up of the island. Clay formed the five hilltops that rose over the single flat plain. Miniature wooden buildings represented a small town complete with roads and traffic lights. A dangerously short airstrip lay on the edge of the plain beyond the buildings.

The Caretakers gathered around the table. Hedda wondered if any of them knew more of the truth than she did, but guessed they didn’t. After all, only she and Deerslayer had been involved directly with Chalmers’s operation. To the rest this might have appeared just another mission.

“You were all on … this island … once,” Chalmers told the assembled group. “You became … who you are … on this island… . I know none … of you remember … it. It’s been … two years since … I was there… . But it must … be destroyed … if all of us … are to survive.” He turned her way. “Hedda?”

“The hills,” she proposed, without missing a beat. “We wire them with explosives to cause an avalanche. Entomb the buildings and the people.”

The Caretaker named Finn ran his fingers over the model town, stopping at the airstrip. Hedda noticed they were long and slender, like a piano player’s.