The Prophet (32 page)

Vasques had taken Marcus’s advice and called in the cavalry, but she hadn’t wanted to involve the Bureau. Luckily, her partner Troy LaPaglia had friends in the Cook County Sheriff’s office and was able to get their tactical unit out to help make the arrests. For obvious reasons, she hadn’t wanted to involve the local police department.

Now she sat inside the same surveillance van that she had four days earlier when she had busted the human-trafficking ring in Elk Grove Village. The block vinyl letters reading MASCONI PLUMBING AND HEATING still clung to its exterior. It was still cramped and uncomfortable, and it still smelled of stale coffee and greasy takeout food. She was certain that Belacourt hadn’t seen it; even if he had, the detective didn’t have Marcus’s memory.

Troy had set up a small electric heater that hummed on the desk beside him near the surveillance monitors. For some reason, he was always cold. Vasques was sweating and ready to throw the little heater out the window.

The parking lot of the Jackson’s Grove mall was packed. Christmas was only a few days away and everyone was scrambling to cross the final names from their lists. The sight of all the cars and people heading toward the mall to purchase gifts for loved ones evoked both sadness and anger in Vasques. She would not be giving any gifts or receiving any that Christmas. Her brother’s gift had been the little dog, and she hadn’t bought him anything. Childhood memories of Christmas morning with her father only fueled her anger at Belacourt.

She reached up inside her Level III-A body armor and scratched at her chest. It would stop a .44 magnum round traveling at fourteen hundred feet per second, but it was also bulky and added to her discomfort in the stuffy interior of the van. She popped in a third piece of Juicy Fruit gum. At her side, Troy said, “I just bought a new pack of Marlboros if you want one.”

“Thanks, Satan, but I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look like one of those junkies on that TV show where the person’s family confronts them about their addiction.”

Vasques shook her head, but she did it with a smile. “Shut up and watch the monitors.”

They had a spotter posted on each of the entrances to the mall and five officers waiting in unmarked SUVs ready to converge on Belacourt and Jansen once they both arrived. Belacourt had probably chosen the mall as a meeting place because he wanted to blend in with the crowds, but it also made it easier for their team to intermingle. She had called Stan, and he would notify them as soon as Belacourt’s signal approached the shopping center. Belacourt had told Jansen on the phone that he’d be driving a green Honda Civic and would park along the back edge of the parking lot’s far corner.

In her mind, Vasques ran through everything one more time. The team would converge with overwhelming force, blitzkrieg-style. With luck, that would ensure that they’d meet no resistance. The very back corner of the lot had only a sporadic dotting of cars, so they should be a safe distance from any civilians. And she had parked the van close enough to where she could rush up to Belacourt’s car with the tactical team and be the one to make the arrest.

They were ready. Now all they had to do was wait.

When Andrew returned, he dropped two white extra-strength Tylenol tablets into Marcus’s outstretched palm and said, “Where’s the Director?”

“I don’t care,” Marcus said as he looked down at the tablets in his palm. “You only brought me two pills.”

“They’re extra-strength. You’re not supposed to take more than two at a time.”

“You’re not supposed to shoot people or drive over the speed limit, either. But that’s never stopped me.”

“How many do you usually take?”

“I don’t know. Four or five.”

“That’ll destroy your liver.”

He popped the pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry. “If I live that long, I’ll consider myself lucky. You think they have a coffee pot in that big command center?”

“Don’t get any ideas. If you want coffee, you can get it your damn self.”

Marcus chuckled. “You’re getting cranky. Is it that time of the month already?”

“Hilarious. If you had coffee right now, I’d dump it all over you.”

“Might feel pretty good in this weather.”

Andrew’s gaze traveled over the onlookers and police, and he said, “Does anything about this whole situation bother you?”

“Something doesn’t fit. That’s for sure.”

“The Anarchist is so meticulous and likes to assess every situation and be prepared. So why wouldn’t he be prepared for this? He had to have a plan in case the cops ever caught up with him.”

Looking back up at the building, Marcus wondered what he would do if he were in a similar situation. He considered the facts, analyzed what he knew. The secretary had called in with instructions. They were barricaded in an interior office. Schofield had pulled the fire alarm. People were everywhere. They were right next to a strip mall, and it was the holiday shopping season. The police didn’t know for sure if Schofield was even armed. They hadn’t seen him. No one had seen him. No one had even talked to him.

Marcus’s eyes went wide. He looked at Andrew and could tell from the look on his partner’s face that he had followed the same line of thinking. “We need to go.”

Andrew said, “Schofield’s not in there.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact.

“This is all just a distraction to cover his escape.”

“He couldn’t have taken his car. He must have walked out the back or through the underground garage and just blended with the crowd. But where would he go now?”

Marcus’s head felt like a volcano about ready to erupt. He raised his hands and pressed hard against both sides of his skull. “I have no idea.”

Erik Jansen had hated being a Marine. He didn’t mind the actual training, but he had hated just about everything else. He hated the culture. Six-second showers for seventy-five recruits that had been sweating and crawling through salt marshes all day produced some odors that he could still feel clinging to the inside of his nostrils. He had once been punished for being late because he was only fifteen minutes early. The drill instructors treated him like a slave and nitpicked every move that he made. They yelled at him for asking too many questions. They yelled at him for not taking the initiative if he didn’t ask questions and awaited instructions. He hadn’t seen the point in any of it. He had been glad when they kicked him to the curb for knocking out the teeth of one of the drill instructors.

But he had acquired some valuable skills during his brief time in the Marine Corps. He had already been a good fighter, but they had honed his abilities. They had taught him about weapons. They had taught him how to kill, up close and from a distance.

He thought back on those lessons as he sat four hundred yards away from the back corner of the Jackson’s Grove Mall. A wide swath of undeveloped land bordered the mall’s lot and beyond that was a road lined on one side by small suburban homes and apartments. He had parked his maroon Dodge Caravan along that road in front of a little yellow ranch-style prefab. The mini-van didn’t seem out of place in any environment and had plenty of interior room. That was exactly why he had chosen it.

Inside the back of the van, he laid out his Remington 700 M24 sniper rifle between the second row of bucket seats. A Leupold Mk 4 LR/T M3 10×40mm scope sat atop the weapon. The rifle was loaded with M118LR 7.62 175-grain ammunition and had an effective range of about eight hundred and seventy-five yards. He would only have to shoot half that distance today.

He had it all planned out.

When Belacourt pulled up to the back of the mall, Jansen would slide open the side door of the van, sight in on the coward, and unleash a round traveling at 2,580 feet per second. The front glass of the car shouldn’t be an issue, although he would have preferred to have another shooter there to pop the glass before he delivered the kill shot. But either way, he’d fire a second round to make sure that Belacourt was dead.

Then he’d turn the gun on anyone else nearby and kill a few more of the slaves, just for good measure.

After staging his distraction, Schofield had slipped into a set of blue and white coveralls worn by SSA mechanics and system-installation technicians, placed a long blond wig over his hair, and covered the wig with a blue SSA baseball cap. It was the same outfit that he had stolen from the company to use when he’d installed his cameras. He kept it behind a ceiling tile in the men’s second-floor bathroom just in case he was ever confronted at work and needed to make a hasty escape. He liked to plan ahead.

As he exited with the other technicians, he was afraid that someone would notice him. Mortimer, the garage manager, had glanced in his direction once as they hurried up the ramp as a group, and Schofield’s hand had slipped around his pistol. But no one paid him any attention in the confusion of the fire evacuation.

After that, he had walked down the road a few blocks to the office of a local cab company. He paid a driver to take him just across the Illinois-Indiana border to the Lansing Municipal Airport. Several years earlier, he had paid $850 cash to a private seller for a beat-up 1988 Volkswagen Jetta GLI with 105,000 miles on its odometer. Then he had parked it in a long-term lot at the airport, ten minutes from his office. He had changed lots every month and practiced his escape route many times, hoping that he would never have to use it.

But he had been forced to do so, and now he sat behind the wheel of the Jetta, heading home. He knew that it was a risk to return to his house, and he didn’t need to retrieve anything from the property. He had everything that he needed in the trunk of the Jetta, and his family had already gone. But he had unfinished business to take care of, and he finally had the strength to do something that he should have done a long time ago.

The police would be watching the house, but he hoped that it would only be one or two officers. That was manageable. Anything more, and he would keep driving.

He took Route 30 back to Jackson’s Grove and then made two circles of his block without actually turning down the street in order to check for surveillance and police. He noticed two cars that he didn’t recognize. One was a Kia Rio and unlikely to be used as an unmarked police vehicle. But the other was a black and white Jackson’s Grove squad car sitting across the street from his house. It looked like there was only one officer inside. That would be protocol, since most small police precincts didn’t have the manpower to have two officers per patrol car. Schofield guessed that they weren’t actually looking for him, but just trying to locate his family.

Parking one street over, he cut through the backyards of two of his neighbors and came up beside a big house that looked a lot like his own only with cream-colored brick and no landscaping. The cop sat at the curb about fifty feet away. He could see the back of the officer’s head. It looked like he was typing on the computer mounted over the center console of the cruiser, probably filling out one of the many reports that dominated police work.

He was a sitting duck.

Schofield considered his next moves carefully, choreographed them in his mind. He would approach from well beyond the field of view for the side mirrors. He would raise his P22 Walther silenced pistol at the last possible moment, keeping it behind his back until then. The glass could be a problem. A .22LR wasn’t a powerful round and could be easily deflected. The officer would be wearing a bulletproof vest. It needed to be a head shot and even a slight obstruction could cause his first shot to miss. He could try to break the glass with the butt of the pistol, but what if it didn’t shatter completely? Ultimately, he decided that it would be best to unload the entire clip at the man, just to be sure.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped away from the house and followed his plan to the letter. When he was within a foot of the window, he raised the gun and fired ten rounds into the vehicle. He couldn’t risk the officer surviving even long enough to key the mic of his radio.

The cop didn’t stand a chance. The rounds struck him in the head, and he simply shook from the impacts and fell forward.

But he bounced off his computer, and his left shoulder landed squarely on the cruiser’s horn. The vehicle blared out an obnoxious and ear-piercing squeal.

Schofield swore and rushed forward to push the dead man away from the steering wheel, but the damage was done. Breathing hard, Schofield looked all around for any sign that a neighbor had heard the noise, but he saw no one, no movement in any windows.

He shoved the dead man over onto his side to make him less visible and then set off to take care of his unfinished business. This cop wasn’t the last person that he planned to kill that day.

But unlike the officer, his next victim wouldn’t die quickly and quietly. He would be burned alive. He would suffer terribly before death took him.

Schofield had come to realize that his son’s experiments on the animal he had found in the shoebox and the dark drawings he had stumbled upon in the drawer weren’t actually because Benjamin had no soul. The boy was being influenced by an outside source, and Schofield knew exactly who that was. And now the old man next door would learn that he should never have interfered with Schofield’s family.

Two things happened within a moment of each other that added to Maggie’s unease. The first was a text message from Marcus that read
Schofield is in the wind, watch your back.
The second was a car horn sounding out on the street. The prolonged nature of the noise seemed strange. If it had been someone pulling out of a driveway and nearly backing into another car or something similar, the horn’s blare should have been quick and angry. She hadn’t heard screeching tires or a collision. Still, it wasn’t strange enough to warrant investigation.

The basement was large and open, half finished, half given over to storage. Shelves containing plastic totes of all sizes labeled with masking tape and marker filled the storage space. There was also a gun safe in one corner, but she lacked the skills to open it. There was no sign of the kidnapped women.

Once upstairs, Maggie crept into the foyer to see if the cop was still outside. Looking through the shades, she saw his car but not him. Maybe he was walking the perimeter. In which case, she was stuck inside the house. She couldn’t let the cop see her leaving the house, federal agent or not.

She moved to the back of the house and peered out a window, but there was no sign of the officer in the backyard or near the garage. Then she moved into the kitchen and looked out through a window to the north side of the house. Her eyes scanned the neighbors’ homes, since the officer might have decided to start asking questions.

And then she saw him. Walking into the neighbor’s house was a man wearing navy-blue and white coveralls. Stan had sent them all an image of Harrison Schofield that he had retrieved from the company’s website, and although the guy in the coveralls was only visible in profile, she could have sworn that it was the same man. But why would Schofield return here? And why would the cop not have stopped him?

Unless the officer was already dead.

Maggie took her Glock 19 from the holster at her hip and ran toward the back door.