The General stepped into the farmhouse, set the alarm, and checked his watch. If the second act had started on time, he thought, Macbeth was about to get his head cut off. The General thought this fitting, as he himself was about to consult the Prince’s head in the Throne Room.
All part of the equation. Everything connected.
The General was happy to finally be home. True, the young man named Edmund had only stayed to watch the trap open for Duncan’s descent into Hell, but still it had seemed like a long time. Jennings had stopped by to see how things were going and told Edmund to go home; said he was a good worker and gave him a key to the tool closet—“for the summer theater season,” he added.
This sat well with Edmund Lambert, even though he would soon have no more need for the tool closet. In fact, he would be
And the Prince’s army would return with him; would be waiting by the doorway, ready to serve and pave the way for what was to come.
But someone would be waiting for the General, too. And once he was able to pass through the doorway, they would be together again. In this world or that? Well, the General wasn’t sure.
The General smiled and went upstairs, undressed in the bathroom, and stepped into the shower. And as he scrubbed off the remains of his day-life, his mind soon wandered to the young woman named Cindy Smith.
He turned up the water as hot as it would go and stood there watching as it reddened the flesh beneath the large tattoo on his chest and stomach. And when the doorway became numb with the pain, he closed his eyes and imagined Cindy Smith in her spirit costume, rising up from the trap and stepping through his flesh from the depths of Hell. He opened his eyes and gazed down at the doorway, half expecting to see her there with him in the shower, and saw instead that he had grown erect.
He would need to consult the Prince about all this; would need to look for her in his visions, in the flashes of images and sounds. He hoped he would find her there, and began to wonder if the she wasn’t part of the equation, too.
Chapter 33
Alan Gates had been dreaming about pigs when the telephone startled him awake. The clunky old ringer was set on high, but his wife kept on snoring. She was used to it; had always been a heavy sleeper, but had been conditioned over the course of their thirty-five-year marriage to snore through her husband’s occasional late-night interruptions.
It was all part of being married to “the life,” just one of the many sacrifices that Debbie Gates had made for her husband over the years. And in all that time, he never once took her for granted; still thanked God every night for his blessings even as he thought it was only a matter time before the Old Man Upstairs pulled the rug out from under his feet—just as He’d done to so many others in his line of work.
A deeply religious man, Alan Gates had indeed been blessed over the last forty years. Had come out unscathed from two tours in Vietnam and quickly made his way up through the ranks of the FBI in the seventies and early eighties. He could’ve long ago been promoted to director if he’d gunned for it; could have retired by now, too. But the unit chief slot at Quantico was where his heart was; and when he thought about it, he considered himself as much a part of the Behavioral Analysis Unit as the glass and steel and brick in which it was housed.
However, the fact that his wife had learned over the years to sleep through his late-night telephone calls always made him feel uneasy—even more so now that the kids were moved out and married. Heaven forbid if he was away on a case and needed to get in touch with her. Heaven forbid if there was ever an emergency. And if the Old Man were to decide that it was finally time to pull that rug out, Gates was sure He’d do it while he was away and Debbie was asleep—a fire or some other tragedy in which, if only she’d woken up, she could’ve been saved.
Something like that would be most in line with the Old Man’s MO, for over the years Gates had come to the conclusion that not only did God have a sick sense of humor but also that He judged a man’s character by how well he could take a joke.
Gates fumbled for the receiver and squinted at his bedside clock.
“Yes?”
“Alan? It’s Sam.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sorry to bother you so late, but I’m here with Andy Schaap at the RA in Raleigh. We’ve found something. Something we need to get moving on right away.”
“Give it to me.”
Gates listened carefully as his number-one agent explained his theory. And when Markham was finished, Gates hung up and lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. His wife had slept through the entire conversation—had already started snoring full force again by the time he donned his bathrobe and closed the bedroom door gently behind him.
He would make his telephone calls downstairs in his study, but would first make a pot of coffee to clear his head. The necessary arrangements wouldn’t take much time. He could be back in bed in less than half an hour if he wanted. But Alan Gates decided it would be better if he remained in his study. After all, there was no way he was going to fall back to sleep now.
Not after what Sam Markham had just told him.
Chapter 34
Cindy Smith hated that she enjoyed getting bigger applause than Bradley Cox—actually despised that diva side of her personality—but at the same time wasn’t about to lie to herself and pretend it didn’t matter. It did.
But when she looked toward the wings and saw that Edmund Lambert was nowhere to be found, Cindy felt her heart deflate. She was sure he would’ve been there watching, applauding, smiling—especially after what had passed between them just before intermission.
“Thank you for the flower,” he said, catching her in the stairwell on the way back down to her dressing room.
“Thank you for looking out for me,” Cindy replied.
Then, a long silence in which she saw the corner of Edmund’s mouth turn up, his eyes narrowing as if he was studying her. Cindy felt her cheeks go hot, felt as if an elec- tric generator had been turned on in the stairwell—the low hum of a charged circuit suddenly connecting them at their chests. He wanted to kiss her. She just knew it. And oh God how badly she wanted to kiss him back!
“You’re very special,” he said finally, his steel-blue eyes locked with hers in that way that made her retinas tingle. “I never realized just how special until tonight.”
Then he smiled and was out the stage door.
Cindy felt as if she were on fire; made her way back to her dressing room and changed into her next costume with the hum of the electric generator never leaving her. It powered her all through the second act. And even before she took her bow, she knew her performance had been a triumph.
But now, as the lights dimmed and the cast left the stage to resounding applause, Cindy’s victory felt curiously hollow. She was on autopilot, it seemed, and caught herself paying only half attention to George Kiernan as she searched for Edmund among the crowd outside her dressing room. He never showed. And when Amy Pratt asked her to join the rest of the cast downtown for a beer and some cheese fries, Cindy politely declined and drove
