Chapter 91
Markham was sure he’d lost consciousness; was vaguely aware of a loud explosion in front of his face—but then the pain, in a burst of bloodred stars, shot across his nose and sent him flying backwards. Something happened next—blurry movement and a loud buzzing as the sky threatened to iris into black—and then the taste of blood in his throat brought him back, started him coughing.
He rolled onto his stomach, shook the cobwebs from his skull, and spat into the grass. The buzzing in his ears was replaced by ringing, and something whispered of a blink forward in time—how long a blink, he wasn’t sure. One part of his brain told him his nose was broken, while another part registered his gun lying a few feet away. Instinctively he crawled toward it, his hand reaching for the warm barrel when suddenly, underneath the ringing, he thought he heard the footsteps crunching in the grass.
Markham turned and saw the Impaler staggering out into the field beyond the old oak tree. He grabbed his gun and rose on all fours. A wave of pain at the bridge of his nose sent him reeling, but he found his feet and stumbled toward the tree—took cover and peered around it to discover the Im-paler had slowed. He could see him clearly now in the open field—naked, about thirty yards away, his muscular flesh a milky gray in the moonlight. He was unarmed.
Markham whirled from around the tree, his empty gun trained on the man’s back. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” he shouted, but the Impaler seemed to ignore him—staggered a few more steps and then sank to his knees.
Markham lowered his gun and watched in fascination as the man in the field began clawing upwards at the open air. He struggled to stand; and when he did, he lifted his left foot and dropped it quickly. He repeated the motion with his right and then his left again, stepping in place over and over as if he were trying to climb an invisible staircase. Then all at once he stopped, stood motionless, and fell face-first into the grass.
Markham rushed to his side and turned him over, pulling back immediately when he saw the blood gushing from the hole under the young man’s right eye. He was handsome, Markham thought, suddenly detached; younger than he expected, too—but his breathing was shallow, and his lips moved as if trying to speak.
“It’s over,” Markham whispered. But it was clear the Im-paler didn’t hear him, didn’t see him either; for the young man seemed to gaze past him and up toward the sky.
“Come back,” he managed to say at last. “Come back.”
Epilogue
“Would you like some?” Gates asked, raising the pot of coffee.
“No, thank you,” Markham said. “I don’t touch it anymore.” He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the large bulletin board: dozens of photocopies of newspaper articles taken from the Impaler’s cellar.
Gates nodded and replaced the pot on the burner. “Meant to tell you yesterday that the nose looks good,” he said. “But I have to admit I liked it better before the swelling went down. Gave you a sort of street cred.”
Markham smiled thinly, and Gates sat down—slipped out one of Claude Lambert’s notebooks from the pile on his desk and leaned back in his chair.
“Lambert,” he said, opening the notebook. “Family history in North Carolina goes back to the late nineteenth century. Before that, the line hailed from Louisiana. Looks like they were run out of New Orleans in the decade following the Civil War. We found records of an absinthe house established on Bourbon Street around the same time. Seems to be a connection there, some kind of falling-out between business partners, but we’ll never know for sure. The notebooks speak of an absinthe recipe in the Lambert family dating back generations. The old man was simply building on tradition.”
Markham fingered a newspaper article.
“Claude Lambert was an interpreter in World War II. Did you know that?” Markham nodded. “He was stationed in France for some time after the Allies took Normandy. Guess he kept up the tradition of speaking French, too. We interviewed his son in prison. Said his father only spoke French when he was down in the cellar cooking up his experiments. Claims he never really understood what was going on down there. Odd part of it is I believe him.”
Markham said nothing, only scanned the bulletin board.
Gates closed the notebook and set it back on the pile. The business with Schaap, the names from the cemetery—Markham couldn’t understand how he missed it. True, Gates thought, given the size of the cemetery, without the military connection it would’ve been like shooting blind from the white pages—thousands upon thousands of names, over one hundred Lamberts listed in the city of Raleigh alone. Add on how the gravestone marked Lyons had confused them—no, Schaap stumbling onto the Impaler was literally a one-in-a-thousand shot. They would’ve found him eventually, but Schaap shouldn’t have gone it alone. That was reckless, unacceptable, and stupid. But still, Gates knew his supervisory special agent felt somewhat responsible.
“How’s the girl doing?” Markham asked.
“I talked to her mother today,” Gates said. “Says she’s doing better but still wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. That’ll soon pass, I expect. Or at least it’ll become more manageable.”
“Part of the equation.”
“What’s that?”
“General equals E plus Nergal,” Markham said absently, tracing his finger over an article. “The equation the Impaler spoke of on the phone—the nine and the three—all this must be a part of it, too. Gene Ralston equals Stone Nergal.”
“The obituary, you mean? The one we found on the cellar wall?”
“Yes. Looks like Ralston committed suicide just after Lambert returned from Iraq. Lambert wrote out these anagrams on the obituary and in one of the notebooks. You can tell by the way he crossed out his letters in the notebook that he was trying to solve a problem. Looks like he found part of the solution in Gene Ralston’s name. Stone Nergal. Christ, what are the chances of that? Even a sane person would have a hard time denying some sort of cosmic connection.”
“What about the word ‘general’ itself? You think that was in play before or after he made the connection to Nergal?”
“Not sure. His excessive narcissism, his military aspirations, perhaps paralleling his delusions of being a second in command to the Prince. E plus Nergal equals General. His real identity, part of the equation.”
“Other parts are here,” Gates said, patting the pile of notebooks. “Claude Lambert’s formulas, the experiments with his own children, the hybrid absinthe production, and the drug supplies from Ralston. The abuse had been going on for years, but seems to have stopped once Edmund reached puberty. And from what we can gather from Claude Lambert’s notes, Edmund never had any idea. At least not while his grandfather was alive.”
“Not consciously, no, but I suspect he knew something was there. Like the death of his mother. A problem, an equation that needed to be solved. The word ‘general’ and the first seven letters of Gene Ralston’s name—a connection of which his subconscious might have been aware.”
“The old man made his notes in coded French. Even with the help of French Intelligence it took us a while to figure it all out. Hard to believe that Edmund Lambert could’ve deciphered anything in here. His grandfather was quite frank about what he let his buddy Ralston do. Basically pimped out his own children and grandchildren all in the name of science. Some paranoid, insane scheme about a mind-control drug that he and Ralston would sell to the government.”
Markham was silent.
“However,” Gates continued, opening a file on his desk, “Claude Lambert seems to have been far from insane. A textbook sociopath, yes, but there’s something almost Nazi-esque in his writings—the meticulous documentation and his twisted rationale for the continued abuse he let Ralston inflict upon his family. He even talks about the suicide of his daughter as if it were simply a failed experiment.” Gates flipped through his file and read,
