Comes a Horseman (61 page)

He withdrew his cigarette case from the inside pocket of his coat and popped it open. He was selecting a cigarette when he glanced around at the faintly flapping scarves and flickering stars. What he saw caused him to drop the case. It hit the edge of the saucer, making the cup tip and pour hot tea onto his lap. He bolted up, knocking his chair over.

He lowered his eyes to his lap and the disrupted tea setting for the briefest of seconds, but when he looked up again, Pip was gone. It had been Pip, Randall was positive. He had looked awful, his head heavily bandaged, his eyes sunken, his skin alabaster.

Randall hurried around the table and shuffled as fast as his aging legs could move him. Thirty feet—that's how near he had been, his face peering between lengths of hanging material. He reached the spot and saw that it was where an alleyway met the market street.

“Pip!” he called, though he saw no one who could be his friend. He raised his voice further: “Find me, Pip!”

His shoulders slumped. He looked back as his table. Ben-David's wife, Dalia, was righting the chair. His daughter stood in the doorway, violin and bow quiet in her hands. She watched him with concern. He waved, tried to smile. He started back, reaching for his wallet to pay for the tea and anything he had broken.

HER HEAD no longer ached, but her mouth still felt as if it had been lined with aluminum, and the water was long gone. Alicia sat on the cot, her head down in her hands, feeling the gloom of her surroundings pressing down on her. Her mind wanted to explore, to prod and grope at new information, and she let it. It was better than driving herself crazy looking for a way out of the cell. There wasn't one. The walls were solid—she had pushed and rapped on every stone, scraped her fingernail along every joint. The bars were firmly imbedded into the floor and ceiling, each a mere handbreadth apart. The door lock did not rattle or budge or so much as tease her with the slightest play. Oddly, she could reach the touch pad that unlocked the door, but she could not see it, and she had found that three incorrect entries caused it to beep shrilly for two full minutes before settling into silence again. She'd set it off three times, resulting in no visits from guards or jailers. The complete lack of attention to her was worse than vigilant scrutiny: it implied confidence in the cell's ability to hold her or the labyrinth's power to confuse—if a labyrinth did, in fact. exist between here and the exit; she had no reason to believe anything Scaramuzzi said.

One thing he had mentioned outright puzzled her: that Brady was to meet with someone named Pip to get a file Scaramuzzi wanted. He had intimated that this person had already contacted her and Brady. Was she missing something? When was this supposed to have happened? She sifted her memory for attempted contacts—pleading looks from strangers, cryptic messages on napkins, ringing phones left unanswered. Nothing came to mind. She had been joined to Brady's hip since they'd met up in the Marriott's room 4914.

No, she was certain nobody had attempted to contact them.

What kind of game was Scaramuzzi playing?

He was insane, no doubt about that. But in a sly-scary charming-Hitler way. Crazy like a fox, was the saying. But that wasn't right either. This guy
really
thought he was Antichrist . . .

A thought hit her, and she did not like it one bit:
What if he
is
Antichrist? What if Ambrosi has it wrong?

She could not remember his explaining
why
he believed Scaramuzzi was either faking it or insane. When he had scoffed at Scaramuzzi's professed identification, she had assumed he was correct, not because he was a scholar on the subject but because of course Antichrist wasn't walking around on earth today, knocking off naysayers and scheming to rule the world. That was the stuff of bad movies. But if learned people, religious leaders, and even governments believed Antichrist would eventually appear, why not now?

Maybe they were approaching this the wrong way. What if . . .

She sensed eyes on her. She turned her head and nearly screamed.

A wolf stood inches from the bars, staring at her with yellowish-green eyes. It lowered its snout slightly, so its glare crossed a crinkled brow to reach her. A low rumble emanated from its husky chest. Its top lip quivered, a black sheath over white blades.

Alicia realized this was one of the wolf-dog hybrids that had attacked Brady and Zach and had assisted the Pelletier killer; if not this very one, then one like it. It was a war dog, trained to kill. She stood, took a step back.

The animal's rumbling grew louder.

Movement in her periphery drew her eyes. From the black corridor on the right another wolf-dog emerged. It stopped halfway out of the shadows. Another dog stepped around it, levering measured steps toward the first dog, never taking its eyes from Alicia's. Claws clicked against the stone floor.

The dog at the corridor stepped into the light, nudged forward by a larger presence: a man. He floated at the terminator between dark and light, like a man just under the surface of a murky pond. He had a heavy beard and what appeared to be animal pelts draped over his shoulders. Knitted shirt, dark pants, high boots.

The Viking. The Pelletier killer.

His eyes gleamed among the shadows. He shifted and came farther out of the corridor. A wooden handle protruded up from over his shoulder. Alicia was shaken by the conviction that this was the weapon he had used to behead Cynthia Loeb and the others. She imagined his reaching back, seizing the handle, and swinging it up and around, severing a head in one smooth motion.

As if sensing her thoughts, the way his dogs must certainly know her fear, he stepped forward, raising his hand to grip the ax handle.

79

B
rady backed into the corner at the bottom of the drive. The police cruiser slowed as it approached the seminary. Its flashing blue lights played on the wall and bushes above him. He remembered hearing somewhere that Jerusalem police left their strobes on at all times; he had, in fact, seen a few on his way in from the airport. He hoped the lawmen in the car had caught only a glimpse of the CSD's halogen moment and had come to investigate without knowing precisely where they should look.

That seemed the case when a bright searchlight flipped on from the road, panned past the head of the sloping drive, and as suddenly returned the darkness to the night.

The cruiser pulled away, pulling its blue lights with it.

Brady let out a breath he had not been aware of holding.

Back to the keypad.

Ready to reverse his action in case it again did something attention-drawing, he pushed the CSD control under his middle finger. His view turned red. He could detect faint specks and smears on and around the keypad. Under his little finger was a pinwheel, like the volume control on a clock radio. He gave it a tweak. The specks and smears disappeared. He turned the pinwheel in the opposite direction. They became splotches of glowing neon, too many of them to decipher any meaning. He spun the wheel back and forth but could not bring out only the markings that told the story he was searching for.

Frustrated, he pushed another control with his ring finger. The screen's hue changed to orange—and revealed to him the keypad buttons that had received the most recent attention. Three buttons . . . maybe as many as five. He rolled the pinwheel and two possibilities faded away, leaving three buttons, each superimposed by a bright orange glow, absent from the other nine. Two. Seven. Eight. When he'd slipped through this door earlier, the man who had opened it had caused the keypad to beep three times—a three-digit code. Three digits, three buttons: three to the power of three. Twenty-seven possible combinations. But that was if the same number could be used more than once, which would leave another number unused. The glowing buttons said the code required all three, reducing the possible key combinations to . . . He wasn't sure, six or nine. He could handle that.

He punched in two-seven-eight. Nothing. He tried the door anyway. Still locked.

Two-eight-seven.

Seven-two-eight.

Seven-eight-two. The locking mechanism on the door buzzed, and its bolt clunked as it shifted position.

He pulled it opened and discovered what he had hoped the CSD could provide: footprints, glowing bright orange on the floor. So many shoes had trod here, they formed a solid line two feet wide, as though a huge snail had passed instead of hundreds of humans. The outside edges of the line broke apart into individual prints, showing where people had veered off the straightest path to the keypad behind the breaker panel and the rusty inner door. He crossed the threshold and pulled the door closed. He caught himself stepping over the footprints, as though they were both tangible and distasteful. He saw his own footprints from his first visit circling behind the furnace and boiler. Larger prints marked where the Viking, Olaf, had followed, looking for him. But there were two sets of the larger prints heading to and from the equipment. Around them, and all over the basement floor he noticed now, were irregular dots the size of small fists. He felt his blood chill as he realized what they were: paw prints. Olaf had brought his dogs back to reexamine the area. Did that mean they had found the German? Had he awakened and informed his comrades of Brady's presence? Or was it that Olaf was meticulous or so keen with his senses that he knew someone had been here?

Doesn't matter,
Brady thought. He was going in. He would find Alicia, despite an army of Vikings, wolf-dogs, German prizefighters, Satanists, antichrists, or whatever else lurked in the tunnels beyond that rusty door.

As he moved his vision around, dizziness brushed over him like a breeze. He took a step back and reached for the wall. It was nearer than he thought, and he cracked his knuckles against the stone. Maneuvering solely by the orange electronic graphics was disorienting. He had read that young recruits with copious experience playing video games performed more efficiently in the field. He understood part of the reason now. As electronics become an increasingly important element of field craft, those who had learned to understand three-dimensional landscapes from the two-dimensional and limited-field-of-view graphics of computer monitors would have a distinct advantage.

He took a step toward the inner door, felt no more vertigo, and moved faster. At the second keypad, he found the correct code on his sixth attempt. The snail had squirmed down the metal catwalk and, he could see now, turned left into the tunnels. What must have been blood on the floor below, where he and the German had brawled, seemed to shimmer like orange phosphorus among a chaotic jumble of footprints, handprints, and paw prints.

Brady snapped up on his right wrist and seized the pistol. He eased down the catwalk, left hand on the rail, not trusting himself to navigate a slanted, vibrating platform wearing the CSD. At the bottom, he took a deep breath.

This is better than the first time,
he told himself, because he had to and because it was true. He wasn't going in blind. He had a guide, lots of guides—the footprints of everyone who had entered the labyrinth in the last day or so and went directly to the occupied area. He peered into the tunnel, first the way he had gone before, then the direction everyone else had headed. The CSD display revealed greater lengths of tunnel than he could see before. Tall shadows marked the branching passages that had loomed so suddenly and mysteriously on his first foray.

He examined the controls on his forearm and used his pinky to push a button etched with an icon of an audio speaker. A menu appeared, superimposed over his faceplate view:

TRANSCRIPTION PLAYBACK VOLUME—INTERNAL SPEAKERS

TRANSCRIPTION PLAYBACK VOLUME—EXTERNAL SPEAKERS

EXTERIOR SPEAKER—VOLUME

EXTERIOR MICROPHONE—VOLUME

EXTERIOR MICROPHONE—SQUELCH

He tickled a nub the size of a pencil eraser on the control panel, and a cursor appeared, scrolling in response to his finger's movement. He selected EXTERIOR MICROPHONE—VOLUME. A slide control appeared. He increased the volume, only to have a high-pitched hum pierce his ears. He returned the volume to its previous low level. He played with the squelch control but soon realized it did nothing. He edged the volume up slightly, until he could hear himself stomp his foot. The humming was barely noticeable, but the CSD's audio problems presented a problem. A person with any level of stealth at all would have no trouble sneaking up on him. He played with various menus and discovered a way to display the image captured by the rear-facing camera in a small square low on the heads-up display. Not perfect, but it did compensate a little for having poor hearing.

He trudged on.

Scuff marks and an occasional handprint in glowing orange marred the walls. A vague sense of frustration hovered at the edge of his consciousness. Then he realized it was in response to the ease of finding his way through the tunnels this time versus the utter confusion and helplessness that had plagued him a few hours before. He had to remind himself that the snail track on the floor was invisible to the unaided eye. Perhaps he should have thought to use the CSD before, but how could he have fathomed the complexity of the maze he would encounter? And he had never used the CSD—he had only analyzed the walk-throughs it produced—so it was not a resource he readily considered.