His tone attracted my attention-suddenly he seemed more authoritative.
‘Where’s your boss?’
‘Back in D.C.’
‘I’d have thought Sebastian would be down here like a shot.’
Bimsdale twitched his lips like a debater who had won a point. ‘Oh, I see.’ He smiled enough to show the edges of his pearly teeth. ‘You don’t know, of course. I’m sorry to tell you that Peter Sebastian was murdered last night.’
‘What?’
‘I’m afraid so. His car was found in the northern suburbs with him inside. He’d been killed with a knife.’
Every alarm in my body had gone off. The timing of the senior FBI man’s death was pretty striking, but that was nothing compared with the way Arthur Bimsdale was reporting it. He sounded like a newsreader trying and failing to emote with earthquake victims in a distant country.
‘What was it?’ I heard myself say. ‘Robbery gone wrong.’
‘That’s what the police are working on, I believe.’ Bimsdale gave me a look that suggested his grief had been short and shallow. ‘A great loss, of course, but life goes on.’
That did it. As far as I was concerned, all bets were off. I would give the FBI whatever would be corroborated by other witnesses, but the rest I would keep to myself. Something was very wrong. I still needed to play ball, though, so I told him about the compound of barns to the east.
When I’d finished, Bimsdale looked confused. ‘I don’t understand how you and the Soul Collector woman ended up here,’ he said, nibbling the end of an old-fashioned wooden pencil.
‘We followed the car containing the assassin Apollyon and Rothmann. Sara-the Soul Collector-had bugged the pickup they were in.’ I thought about Rothmann. He’d been at the rear of the Hades complex with Apollyon and had looked shit scared, but not particularly surprised. Had he been there before? If so, that suggested he and whoever was behind the murders in the northern cities had perhaps been close. Was the person I was after a former collaborator of Rothmann’s? Had he or she been put off by the Nazi’s full-blooded espousal of the Antichurch and decided to get rid of him?
‘Okay,’ Bimsdale said, putting away his pencil and notebook. ‘We need to get you out of here, Matt.’
I was instantly suspicious. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, you’ll be much more comfortable in our Dallas field office.’
That sounded like bullshit, but I wasn’t in a position to do much about it. Then the special agent’s cell rang. He answered, straightened up as if he was on parade, narrowed his eyes in puzzlement and then handed it to me.
‘This is the Director of the FBI,’ said a nasal voice, which I’d heard on the news bulletins more than once. ‘Mr. Wells, I have only just found out about your involvement in this case. I view it as a serious misjudgment by the late Peter Sebastian and would like to meet with you as soon as possible to discuss it. You could fly up to Washington on the Bureau plane that took Special Agent Bimsdale to Texas. Is that acceptable to you?’
I confirmed that it was and handed the phone back to Bimsdale. Washington was a lot closer to New York than the Lone Star State and I wanted to retrieve whatever Sara had stashed in Queens. With luck, the Director would have patted me on the back and sent me on my way by the evening.
I watched as Sebastian’s former assistant ate what looked like several crows before terminating the call. ‘It seems you’re leaving us,’ he said, red spots on his cheeks.
‘Yeah. Can Mary Upson come with me as far as D.C.?’
‘Certainly not. She needs to be formally interviewed.’
It was only as the Bureau car pulled away that I started to wonder exactly what the Director wanted with me.
Was he the fire to the Texan frying pan I’d just survived?
The Reverend Rudi Crane was in the master bedroom of the Hercules Solutions apartment on Central Park West. To his right, the picture window provided a vision of sylvan splendor in the midst of the metropolis, but he paid no attention to that. He drank his hot water and ate his oatmeal, reveling in a rare morning spent in bed. It had been justified by the rigorous activities of the previous night. He had promised the striking stewardess-what was her name again? — a hefty pay increase, and he was seriously considering making her his secretary, even though his wife would smell a regiment of rats if that happened. He would just have to play the affronted husband, appalled that his spouse of thirty-four years could think badly of him. Then they would pray together and everything would be forgotten.
Lord be praised, it was a beautiful day, even though the New York atmosphere was filled with all sorts of hydrocarbons and aerial poisons. That was why he was here-to fly the flag of Hercules at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that began tomorrow. He would be the only CEO and chairman of a private security contractor present and he planned to make the most of that. He had a list of meetings as long as the Ukrainian girl’s leg, including a panel with the prime minister of Upper Congo-he needed to check the atlas about that country’s precise location, though he knew very well that diamonds were its chief export-and the defense minister of Burma, which had a new name that he could never remember. Contracts were in the offing and he meant to close the deals with a brisk shake of his god-fearing hand.
Crane glanced at his gold Rolex. 12:20. He had to get ready for lunch. He was meeting his bankers in a low- profile restaurant near Wall Street. He knew they would have preferred a glitzy Midtown place, but he liked to play the penny-pincher with them and they knew not to cross him on that. There would be the usual veiled objections to his expansion plans in what the financial establishment perceived to be unreliable, if not downright dangerous places. They had acted that way about Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’d proved them enormously wrong. The same would be the case with the new countries he was targeting. The Lord his God was a bountiful god-if only the acolytes of Mammon could appreciate that, their working lives would become much easier.
It was an advantage that the man he would be talking to after the lunch was a business associate. That way, no one would be surprised when he stayed behind. But they wouldn’t be talking finance. No, Xavier Marias might have been a highly talented economic forecaster by day, but it was his out-of-office profile that Rudi Crane valued more. On reflection, it was hardly surprising that a man who had learned how to survive in the shark-infested waters of Wall Street would have become one of the most efficient assassination brokers in the country. The plan to track down his former associate Jack Thomson by framing him and his vile Antichurch for the Hitler’s Hitman killings would not have been possible without Havi’s input, although Crane himself had kept a close eye on the proceedings. Havi had found the assassin and engineered the hits. He had even provided a second assassin to ensure that Thomson didn’t escape. This afternoon, Crane expected Havi to confirm that the Nazi devil worshipper had been liquidated and that his conditioning program was in safe hands. That would be good news to rival the Gospels, indeed.
The confirmation last night that Sir Andrew Frogget had not mentioned the involvement of a Hercules subsidiary in Thomson’s Woodbridge Holdings had been very welcome. In fact, it had led directly to his chastisement of the stewardess. She had accepted the punishment for comporting herself provocatively. Not that he had sex with that woman, oh, no. No bodily fluid of his had entered any orifice of hers, at least for longer than a few seconds-there was a spittoon by the side of the bed, naturally. He had no sin to confess, as he had been thinking of his wife throughout: thinking how horrified and disgusted she would have been if she could have seen them, she the vegetarian, who would never put anything in her mouth that hadn’t been peeled or sliced.
I spent most of the flight to Washington asleep. For a change, I had no dreams-that wasn’t a wholly enjoyable experience, as I didn’t see Karen and our son. Had they finally been swallowed up by the ground beneath? Then I remembered, and my stomach clenched hard. The bodies of my loved ones were in cold storage in the camp in Illinois. Sooner or later, I’d have to decide what to do with them. Not now. I had to find out who was behind the murders and the Hades complex. After that, I’d concentrate on them. The idea that I would have to dispose of their mortal remains terrified me.
Then I had another thought. How had Mary Upson found her way to the Antichurch rite in Texas? Had she evaded the surveillance that Peter Sebastian put in place after her mother disappeared in Maine? She didn’t have the skills to pull that off herself. Had Sebastian let her go to see where she was headed? If so, he had effectively set her up as bait. I wondered what else he might have been capable of. But why would Mary have gone to Texas? Did she know more about the Antichurch than she’d let on, after misleading them?
A trio of men in suits was waiting for me outside the plane after we landed at Reagan National. One of them
