True Evil

'How did you find out what it stood for?'

'Google, believe it or not. It was the picture in his office that did it, though. I'd never have known what to look for otherwise. But Tarver lied to me about what the acronym stood for. He tried to make it sound noble.'

'I'll get on it. The SAC is still stalling on the search warrant for Tarver's house. Maybe this will tip the scales.'

'Even Webb Tyler can't ignore this. Call me when you get the warrant.'

Kaiser hung up.

The Explorer was only twenty yards from the old bakery.

'Where do you want to go?' asked Will.

'Those casement windows in front.'

'They're blacked out.'

'Not all of them. Look to the right. A few have been replaced with clear panes.'

Will swung the wheel, and the Explorer came to rest opposite one of the windows with clear glass.

'Get out and keep your hand on your pistol,' said Alex.

'You think they'd try something?'

'No doubt in my mind. This is a deeply fucked-up individual we're dealing with.'

She got out and walked up to the windows. Each pane was about eight inches square, but the clear ones were too high for her to look through.

'Can you give me a step up?'

Will walked over, shoved his pistol into his pants, then bent at the waist and interlocked his fingers. Alex stepped into the resulting cradle, feeling as she had as a little girl when Grace used to boost her up to the lowest branch of the popcorn tree in their backyard. The memory pierced her heart, but she caught hold of the brick sill and pulled herself up to the clear windowpane.

'What do you see?' Will grunted.

'Nothing yet.'

The pane was caked with gunk. She spat on the glass and wiped a circle with her sleeve, then pressed her eye to the glass. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a wall of cages. Dozens of them. And inside each one, a sleeping dog. Small dogs, maybe beagles.

'You see anything yet?' Will asked. 'My back ain't what it used to be.'

'Dogs. A bunch of dogs asleep in cages.'

'That's what they breed here.'

'I know but…there's something odd about it.'

'What?'

'They're asleep.'

'So?' Will was wheezing now.

'Well, they can't all be asleep, can they?'

'Haven't you ever heard, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie'?'

Alex almost laughed, but something stopped her. 'There must be a hundred of them. A hundred and fifty maybe. They can't all be asleep.'

'Maybe they drug them.'

As Alex peered into the darkened room, the sound of a distant engine reached her, its tone rising steadily. Even before she saw the red van racing down the fenced perimeter, the spark of instinct that had guided her through so many successful hostage negotiations roared to flame.

'Run!' she shouted, leaping backward out of Will's hands.

'What is it?' he gasped, trying to straighten his back and grab his gun at the same time.

'RUN!' Alex grabbed his arm and started dragging him away from the building.

'What about my truck?' Will yelled.

'Leave it!'

They were thirty feet from the building when a scorching wall of air slapped them to the ground like the hand of God. Alex skidded across the cement, the skin tearing away from her elbows. She screamed for Will, but she heard only a roaring silence.

It took most of a minute to get her breath back. Then she slowly rolled over and sat up.

Will was on his knees a few yards away, trying in vain to pull a large splinter of glass out of his back. Behind him, a vast column of black smoke climbed into the sky. All the windows in the front wall were gone. Behind the smoke, Alex saw a blue-white flame that looked more like the glow of a Bunsen burner than a roaring blaze. The heat emanating from the building was almost unbearable. As she struggled to her feet, an inhuman shriek of terror echoed across the empty parking lot. Then a dark simian shape burst from the building, running on all fours, trailing smoke and fire. Alex staggered three steps toward Will, told him to leave the splinter where it was, then fell on her face.

CHAPTER 47

Andrew Rusk had taken two Valium, a Lorcet, and a beta-blocker, yet his heart was still pounding. His head was worse. As he stared into his wife's vacuous eyes, he felt as though someone had taken hold of his spinal cord where it entered the base of his brain and was trying to yank it out.

'But I don't understand,' Lisa said for the eighth time in as many minutes.

'Those men outside,' Rusk said, pointing to the dark patio windows of the house. 'They're FBI agents.'

'How do you know that? Maybe they're IRS or something.'

'I know because I know.'

'But I mean Cuba?' Lisa whined.

'Shhh,' Rusk hissed, squeezing her upper arm. 'You have to whisper.'

She jerked the arm away. 'This is the first time you've ever mentioned Cuba to me. Why? Don't you trust me?'

Rusk squelched a desire to scream, Of course I don't trust you, you silly bitch!

Pouting like a child, Lisa retreated to the sofa and tucked her legs beneath her, yoga style. She was wearing biking shorts and a tank top that revealed the usual fleshscape of spectacular cleavage.

'Cuba?' she said again. 'It's not even American yet, is it?'

He gaped at her. 'American?'

'I mean, you know, capitalist or whatever.'

Lisa's primary virtue was physical beauty combined with a ravenous libido. Rusk still had difficulty with the idea that someone of middling intelligence could experience truly intense passion, but he'd finally accepted it, based on empirical evidence. Maybe it was a vanity of intellectuals to believe that dumb people couldn't enjoy sex to the degree that smart people did. But maybe they did. Maybe they enjoyed it more. Still, Rusk doubted it. At bottom, he figured Lisa was some kind of prodigy, an idiot savant of sexual technique. And that was fine for the bedroom and minor social intercourse. But when it came to actual thought, not to mention decision making, it made things difficult.

He knelt before the couch and took Lisa's hand. He had to be patient. He had to convince her. Because there were no more options. They had to get out of the country, and fast. Thora Shepard was lying under a painter's drop cloth in the back of his Cayenne. If one of the FBI agents outside bent the law and broke into the locked garage, it was all over.

Rusk had tried to shut out his memories of the afternoon, but he couldn't do it. After the first euphoric moments of triumph, he had looked down at Thora's shattered skull with horror-but he hadn't frozen. Extreme sports had taught him one indelible lesson: hesitation killed. Knowing that Ponytail would return any moment, he'd rolled Thora into the drop cloth, then carried her featherweight body through the metal studs to a distant office in the construction area. There he'd found a gift from God: a sixty-five-gallon trash can on wheels, with the brand