‘I ain’t that lucky, man.’
‘Are you in the bar?’
‘Check.’
‘Don’t get drunk, Mr. Quincy.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Don’t talk to any strange women. I’m serious.’
‘Check.’
‘How are you going to pay?’
‘Check.’
I hung up. Quincy was a good man and I was glad to have him watching my back. But even he could only do so much against Heinz Rothmann and his band of brainwashed Nazi devil-worshippers.
Abaddon had decided that steering clear of Portland was a good idea. She drove north for ten miles, then got off the Maine Turnpike and found a quiet side road to hole up. She drank a bottle of water and ate an eggsalad sandwich that she’d bought earlier. That made her feel slightly better, but she wasn’t looking forward to what she was going to have to do next. She booted up her laptop, checked the wireless connection was functioning, and then accessed the secure site. It was monitored on an ongoing basis.
666-request subject location update, she typed, hoping for a simple answer. As the seconds turned into minutes, she realized she was going to get more than that.
Commander-what happened? r u compromised?
Abaddon groaned. It was the big boss himself and, as usual, he wanted to know everything. She answered as briefly as she could, stressing the role of the woman with long black hair in the parking lot, and waited to be dismissed from the operation since she couldn’t guarantee that she hadn’t been spotted. Long minutes passed. She concentrated on keeping her breathing steady. Failure was not something she had experienced often.
Commander-proceed-subject en route houston tx-assume id watson georgina-meet aircraft lewiston me 1800-ditch rental, came the reply.
Abaddon clenched her fists in triumph. She was still on the case. The truth was, she’d have found a way to stay on it even if she’d been fired. She logged off and packed away the laptop. Then she got out of the Grand Cherokee and opened the bag on the backseat. She had worn gloves ever since she had picked up the SUV, so prints were not a problem. She took out the outfit that she would wear as Georgina Watson, an unironed denim shirt and patched Levi’s, and took off the wig. Instead of short brown curls, Georgina, a tree-hugger, favored blond dreadlocks. She undid the buttons of her blouse and reached for its replacement.
‘You know, this is private land.’
Abaddon froze, then moved her eyes up to the mirror. It showed a large man in a checkered shirt and jeans close to the rear of the vehicle. He was carrying what looked like a tire iron. Her own weapons were out of reach.
‘I said, this is private land, lady.’
She left the blouse unbuttoned and turned to face him. There was a sharp intake of breath as his eyes fixed on her red brassiere and its contents.
‘You…you see,’ he mumbled, ‘we…we get a lot of people stopping here to do the drugs they got in the city. They make a mess, scare the kids…’
The woman looked around. She hadn’t noticed any buildings in the immediate vicinity. The sound of traffic on the turnpike was audible in the distance, above the cackle of starlings.
‘But I don’t do drugs,’ she said, taking a step toward him.
The man raised the tire iron to chest height. ‘They…they attacked me more than once.’
She smiled. ‘Come on now, do I look like I’m going to do much attacking?’ She glanced down at her front.
He laughed uneasily. ‘No, ma’am, that you don’t.’
Abaddon took another couple of steps forward. ‘See anything you like?’
The guy was in his forties and he looked like he hadn’t ever seen a woman in a state of undress before, save maybe in the movies. Lights-off-sex with the wife would be the rule. His eyes widened as she flicked off one of her straps and tugged down the cup.
Then she crushed his windpipe with the back of her hand. He died with a wet smile on his lips.
Twenty
I woke before six the next morning, in a cold sweat despite the warmth of the hotel room. They had come to me again, the ones I had lost, dressed in white like the sheets that had covered them in the morgue. My son’s face wasn’t blue anymore, but corpse-gray like his mother’s. She had her hand stretched out to me again, her face twisted in pain and longing. And then she turned and started to walk down a rough track between trees. I knew immediately that it was the path everyone eventually had to take, the way to the land of the countless, nameless dead.
I took a shower and pulled open the drapes. It was still dark outside, the static lights of the terminal and the moving ones on aircraft shimmering through the heavy drizzle that pattered against the pane. Our plan had me leaving the hotel at eight, so that I would be in Tyler County before ten. That left plenty of time before dark to find the Antichurch’s facility on the road between Warren and Fred. Quincy would keep a mile or so behind me, using the locating device to track me. He was to use his own discretion about coming to my aid if anything suspicious happened. The Bureau’s Houston field office was involved, but its operatives had been told to keep their distance.
After I’d dressed, I checked the weapons in the bag I’d picked up. There was a combat knife in its sheath and a Glock 19 semiautomatic with two clips. I ejected a shell and examined it. As far as I could tell, it was the real thing. Although I didn’t fully trust Peter Sebastian, I couldn’t see why he would let me go into Rothmann’s den firing blanks.
I logged on to the operation’s secure site and read a report that Major Hexton had filed late last night. The body of a thirty-nine-year-old male had been found near the turnpike about ten miles north of Portland. His throat had been crushed. A few yards from the body was a black Jeep Grand Cherokee. The number plate squared with one logged earlier in the day by a witness in the diner across the road from police headquarters, who had come forward last night. The assumption was that the driver, a woman, had made her way to the turnpike and hitched either north or south. A call was out for anyone who had seen or picked her up, but a lot of the traffic was interstate so drivers either might not have heard it or ignored it.
So what the hell was going on? Could this second woman have been on my tail as well? Why had she killed the man? Had he seen something he shouldn’t have? That didn’t feel right. Who was the woman? The last thing I needed was someone who could kill with a single blow after me. In addition to Sara, that is.
I checked out and had the Mercedes brought to the front of the hotel. I looked around surreptitiously, but there were no women apart from hotel staff in the vicinity. No sign of Quincy, either. All was as it should be.
For speed, I took I-10 to Beaumont and then headed north toward the Big Thicket. At first I thought I was back in Cajun country in Louisiana. I’d gone on a wild trip there with some other crime writers after a conference in New Orleans-we ate gumbo, drank beer, sweated buckets and made enough noise to scare off any man-eating creatures.
The forest grew thicker the farther north I got, and there was no shortage of lumber trucks-in that respect, the area was like Maine, but with more humidity and a lot more insect life. I could believe that runaway slaves and draft dodgers had made use of the Big Thicket in the old days. It struck me that the difficulty of tracking people down in the swampy terrain might have attracted Rothmann, too. Then again, there were signs of the oil industry encroaching, which would have reduced his privacy.
I made it to Warren and stopped for a cup of coffee. There was a pamphlet about the area in the diner. Apparently there were eight different vegetation zones in the Big Thicket preserve, ranging from palmetto hardwood flatlands to stream flood plains, whatever those were. They harbored over eighty species of tree and sixty kinds of shrubs. Since I’d lived in cities on the other side of the ocean all my life, a lot of the fauna was unknown to me:
