'Clear tactical frequencies,' Garzarelli ordered. 'No chatter. You men are good to go.'
This was it-ass-pucker time. In a few minutes Amanda Pierce and her contact would be either in custody or dead. Tennant didn’t care which way it worked out, so long as the suitcase was recovered and none of the good guys got hurt.
The risk was that Pierce and her friend might have time for a defiant, suicidal gesture. The gas masks were intended to provide for that contingency. But this kind of warfare was still new to him. Hell, it was pretty goddamn new to everybody. It was a brave new fucking world.
Tennant followed the squad down the carpeted hallway to the door marked 1625. The scout produced a boxy piece of electronic equipment and pressed it against the outer wall of the room. The unit was a RadarVision scope, which used ultra-wide-band radar to see through concrete, wood, or plaster.
Tennant saw a luminous blob dancing on the LCD panel.
'We have movement,' the element leader whispered into a throat microphone on a breakaway strap. His LASH radio headset transmitted the words clearly to Tennant’s earpiece. 'Minimal but rhythmic, consistent with deep respiration.' The rise and fall of the abdomen was detectable by the radar pulse. 'Movement located near northeast corner, in approximate position of bed.' They had studied the room’s layout before suiting up.
There was no other movement, Tennant observed. Either the two suspects were sleeping so close together that the radar could not distinguish two separate respiration signatures, or one of the pair had left-possibly taking the suitcase.
But one, at least, was still there.
The scout put aside the radar scope. The element leader took out the passcard for the room’s electronic lock and inserted it in the slot. Above the lock, the red LED turned green as the latch released. Silently he eased the door an inch ajar.
The two assaulters took up their positions flanking the leader, who served as point man. Their HK MP-5 9mm submachine guns were held at port arms. Night-vision goggles were perched on their foreheads, ready to be snapped down over their eyes if needed. Gas masks hid their noses and mouths.
The element leader ticked off a silent count on his fingers.
On three, they went in.
Where there had been silence, there was a sudden eruption of noise as the door was thrown wide, the SET squad rushing in to cover both sides of the doorway, the leader shouting, 'Police, you’re under arrest!' More shouts from squad members checking the bathroom, closet, and balcony-'Clear!' 'Clear!' 'Clear!'
Tennant watched from outside the doorway. When his chest started to hurt, he realized he’d forgotten to breathe.
Then the leader reported, 'Team leader to base, premises are secure. There is one, repeat one, occupant of this room, a female, and she is one-eight-seven.'
One-eight-seven was the section of the California Penal Code that covered homicide.
Amanda Pierce was dead.
'You say one-eight-seven?' Garzarelli asked over the radio, seeking confirmation.
'Affirmative, sir. She’s about as one-eight-seven as it gets.'
Her contact had killed her. Tennant could think of a dozen reasons. She had been followed from Oregon and had inadvertently endangered them both. The killing might be her penalty for that mistake. Or maybe it was an insurance policy, a way to ensure that she never talked.
Tennant didn’t care about the reason. What mattered to him was that Donald Stevenson, whoever he had been, had killed Pierce and left the room.
Which meant he must have taken the suitcase.
Slowly, Tennant stepped through the doorway into the room and looked toward the bed, where the breathing had come from.
Amanda Pierce was on the bed, but she wasn’t breathing.
His gaze tracked to the nightstand, where a room-service menu flapped in the breeze of an air-conditioning vent. A rhythmic flutter, which the scope had read as respiration.
He looked around the rest of the room and saw the suitcase. It lay on a desk chair, its contents scattered. He experienced a wild moment of hope, which died when he looked over the miscellany of items.
There was no metal canister. It was gone.
The team leader’s voice, loud in his earpiece, took him by surprise. 'Looks like her partner offed her,' he said.
Tennant realized the SET officer was addressing him. He nodded and turned toward the body again.
Amanda Pierce’s eyes stared at him, wide and somehow angry, even in death. She had been duct-taped to the headboard, her throat cut.
Duct-taped…
Throat cut…
Tennant kept up with the major investigations handled by the bureau. He remembered the maniac in Denver who had recently resurfaced in LA.
'It wasn’t her partner,' Tennant said slowly.
The element leader glanced at him. 'Sir?'
He didn’t answer. He stood staring at the bed, thinking of the missing canister and the case code-named RAVENKIL.
Things had been bad before. But they had just gotten a whole lot worse.
17
Mobius.
His name, his mantra, coiling through his mind, a snake swallowing itself in a perpetual act of self-devouring, of unappeasable appetite.
It was a name that signified many things, but above all the loop of time coiling to intersect itself, merging past and future in an endless present, the great now extending forever.
He had killed before and he would kill again, but always it was the same act, the same victim, the same moment in time.
Always he saw there, the gun in her hand, the song playing like background music, the theme song of his life.
She spoke to him, and then there was the gunshot blast, the heat and pain, and the water closing over him like the petals of a flower as he sank into a humming brightness.
He tried to call to her for help, but the water got in the way, the water that flooded his mouth and filled his eyes like tears, and around him slow tendrils of blood unwound in the water, making clouds of red…
And then-and then He was out of the water, he was strong, reanimated, and he was holding her down, taping her wrists to the headboard of the motel bed. A knife was in his hand, and she couldn’t hurt him. He was the one who would do the hurting now, and the bitch couldn’t stop him. The bitch could only writhe and struggle and die.
That was how it had been tonight, in the MiraMist Hotel. That was how it was, every time, always.
Mobius had left the MiraMist at 2:45, taking the stairs to the lobby, exiting via a rear door without being seen by the hotel staff. His car was parked a short distance away. He had driven east on Wilshire Boulevard, into the Westwood district.
At 3:15 A.M. he parked on an elm-shaded side street outside the Life Sciences Center on a university campus. He put on his gloves and took the canister with him when he got out of his car.
The campus was deserted at this hour. The Life Sciences building was situated along one side of a picturesque quadrangle. He was considering the best way to break in when he noticed a light in the basement windows.
Someone was at work in a lab.
This was very convenient. Although he had intended to perform the procedure himself, he knew he would be
