Authors: Duane Swierczynski,Anthony E. Zuiker

Dark Revelations (11 page)

BOOK: Dark Revelations

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The truth was—and here was the horrible truth he could never, ever reveal to anyone, especially Steve Dark:

Riggins half-expected Steve Dark to completely snap at any given moment.

When it happened, Dark would not be to blame. Not entirely. Not when that kind of thing is in your blood.

In the aftermath of the Sqweegel case five years ago, Dark had completely destroyed the body of his nemesis, chopping it to pieces before personally pushing it into a crematorium. Hours later, though, Dark realized his mistake. That they should have kept some of Sqweegel’s DNA for future reference, to match against unsolved crimes. And then Dark remembered the one place where he still could find a DNA sample. Riggins had volunteered for the job.

Hours later, Riggins was picking up the dead cold hand of Sibby Dark and gently ran a stick under one fingernail like he was wiping a tear away from the corner of a baby’s eye. He thought about how hard Sibby Dark had clung to life, gouging away at her tormentor, ripping through his latex suit and tearing at his flesh.

Riggins ran the sample personally, and waited for the results in the empty trace lab. When they came back with a CODIS hit, Riggins wasn’t surprised. Sqweegel hadn’t just sprung up from the bowels of hell to terrorize mankind. Even monsters had relatives.

But Riggins had no idea that one of those relatives would be
Steve Dark himself.

According to the results, the two were brothers.

So for the past five years, Riggins had swallowed the truth and kept it in a lock box inside himself, and he drank a little more booze to keep it shut. He couldn’t let it slip, he couldn’t let on.

But he kept a careful eye on Dark, watching for any signs of psychosis or instability. Not that these things always ran in families, but it certainly explained a lot about Dark’s inclinations. He was the world’s best manhunter because he was a very short distance away from being a Level 26 killer himself.

The very thought terrorized Riggins beyond belief.

That someday, he’d have to hunt down his own surrogate son . . .

“Riggins, are you still here on earth with us?”

Constance smiled at him, but it was for show. Riggins could tell she’d been thinking about Dark, too.

What he wanted more than anything was to gather Dark and Constance together and work this one last case, this one last time. But you couldn’t always get what you want, and living in the past was the surest way to give up your future.

“Yeah. I’m here.”

Riggins raised his hand, summoned the waiter, and asked him to bring over another Black Maple Hill, double, neat.

Told Constance, “I’m not going anywhere.”

But she was, and Riggins knew it.

chapter 16

DARK

Paris, France

W
hen Dark woke up he was lying on a settee in the middle of a very large room. The world seemed like it had tilted to the left. Graysmith was next to him on the settee. She put a hand on Dark’s shoulder as if waking him from a gentle nap, not the injection of a knockout drug.

“Steve, meet Damien Blair, the head of Global Alliance.”

Blair, standing in front of them, had about ten years on Dark, as well as graying hair at his temples. Handsome features. Bright eyes. Blair didn’t extend his hand. He stood there, fixing an icy stare on Dark.

“How did you know my name?” he asked.

Dark took a mental snapshot of his surroundings. Ornate columns, painted over dozens of times with a pale primer. A high, vaulted ceiling in badly need of some of that primer. To his left, a stage. All at once he realized why the world felt like it was tilted on its side. They were in an old movie palace, only with the seats removed, leaving the floor pitched at an angle toward the stage.

“You live here alone, or with a roommate?” Dark asked.

“Just borrowing this for our meeting. Which will be brief, because the situation is rapidly evolving, and I don’t have much time to hold your hand.” Blair looked at Graysmith. “Let me ask you again—how did you know my name?”

“The old-fashioned way,” Dark said. “I looked for it.”

Blair smiled—or what passed for smiling. The man’s face seemed genetically incapable of expressing true mirth.

“You’re the first candidate to uncover my name, which is very impressive.”

“So was that another tryout? If I guess your weight and height, will you let me join your little super club?”

This time Blair didn’t even pretend to smile. Instead he turned to face Graysmith and asked her, “Does he know about Dubai yet?”

Graysmith shook her head. “No. I kept the plane in media blackout mode, as you requested.”

“Good,” Blair said.

Dark stood up. Blood rushed away from his brain and he had to fight the vertigo. “Now will you tell me who you are, and what you do?”

Blair said, “Your beloved Special Circs was known as the most elite serial killer–hunting unit in the country. Dealing with the worst of the worst. Right?”

Dark nodded.

Blair said, “Imagine a similar unit, only global in scale. Populated by manhunters of your caliber, and in some cases, even more seasoned. And whose prey is much more fearsome than your garden-variety serial killer.”

Dark didn’t think Blair realized how fearsome serial killers could be—such as the worst killer Dark had ever faced. A being that didn’t even qualify as a human being. A living monster with pure hate running so hot it burned the blood in his veins, reducing it to tar. They called him Sqweegel. He had taken away the only woman Dark had ever truly loved. It had taken a special friend to guide him out of the fun house of horrors that was his mind.

You create your own fate,
Dark had told Riggins just a few months ago.
As long as you do that, there’s hope.
And he’d come to believe that.

If Blair had spent just thirty seconds inside a room with Sqweegel, he wouldn’t be dismissing him as “garden variety.”

Still, Dark said nothing. He was here on Blair’s dime; let him make his pitch.

“You’ve spent your career chasing what you call Level 26 killers,” Blair continued. “But there are worse things out there—worse than even Special Circs realize. I created Global Alliance, with the support of major governments around the world, to neutralize these burgeoning threats.”

Dark stared at him. Was this meant to impress him? The monsters
I
chase are bigger and badder than the monsters
you
chase.

“Funny,” Dark said, “that I’ve never heard of you, or these
worse things
you talk about.”

“Because thus far, we’ve stopped them first,” Blair said, deadpan look on his face. “Mr. Dark, I could show you some interesting case files—and you should peruse them at some point, should you choose to continue. I think you’d find them intellectually fascinating. But as I mentioned, there’s not much time for back and forth, so let me explain what we do.”

The way Blair explained it, Global Alliance was an all-star team of international agents, bringing together people with the top skill sets in the world: forensics, combat, interrogation, technology, mind ops, and so on. There was no home base; each Global Alliance agent lived in his or her own country, yet came together as needed. Blair was no cop himself; he explained that he was merely a facilitator, with the funding to be able to move anything, to anywhere, no questions asked.

“Why bother with me?” Dark asked. “You seem like you’ve pretty much got the planet by the balls.”

Graysmith sighed audibly. “Told you I needed a little more time.”

Blair smiled. “No, he’s doing just fine.”

Then he turned his attention back to Dark.

“Before being invited to join the ranks of GA, each agent is carefully monitored and tested on various cases. We noticed you when you apprehended and dispatched the killer known as Sqweegel. We carefully observed how you handled the Tarot Card Killer. Ordinarily, we would have invited you in a more controlled, leisurely way. Wooed you, even. But now that Labyrinth has appeared, there’s no time. We need your expertise, and we need it now.”

“Again, why me?”

“The members of Global Alliance are highly skilled—the best at what they do. But I’ve never encountered someone who can truly climb into the mind of a killer like you can. And if we’re going to catch Labyrinth, I need you on my team.”

“Why does Labyrinth demand the attention of Global Alliance?” Dark asked.

Blair’s eyes narrowed. He ran his tongue around his mouth, as if he’d bitten into something unpleasant and wanted to scrape it off his tongue immediately.

“Labyrinth is the
reason
I created Global Alliance.”

“He only emerged last week.”

“True,” Blair said, “but I’ve been aware of his existence for quite some time. Think about that software you’ve grown so fond of—the program that collates disparate materials from the fat spurting stream of electronic information? That was my design. Genius is nothing more than the ability to put together two disparate pieces of information to create something new. An insight, a song, a revolution—it doesn’t matter. My software is a crude approximation of the potential of human genius.”

“You seem really proud.”

“You’ve used it,” Blair said. “In fact, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve come to rely on it. Anyway, as you know, the program seeks patterns and attempts to make sense of them. Well, I’ve been sensing rumblings for the past decade—just like meteorologists sense a superstorm is forming. Indications that someone like Labyrinth would appear. All the signs were there. So I spent my time assembling a team to deal with that threat once he emerged.”

“So far he’s killed a couple of people and uploaded some creepy shit onto YouTube.”

Blair said, “You just think he’s another serial killer, don’t you? You don’t see the larger battle being waged?”

Dark asked, “What happened in Dubai?”

chapter 17

DARK

G
raysmith quickly briefed Dark on the riddle, the fish tank, and the gold watch. Everything the Dubai Police had gathered was silently uploaded to her own tablet, and on the flight she had digested and analyzed each piece of evidence as it appeared.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this on the plane?” Dark asked.

Blair answered for her. “Frankly, if you had turned us down, we wouldn’t want you getting in our way.”

“You people are just bursting with trust, aren’t you.”

Dark knew that the parallels between this new package and the original Labyrinth case in the United States were unmistakable. You had the riddle hand-printed on company letterhead. You had the strange objects that didn’t seem to fit any obvious pattern. What did a gold watch given to an oil executive have to do with the fish? Was it some kind of crude joke?

More important: Who was the intended victim?

Any oil executive working in 1948 would be either elderly or dead. Even if the executive was eighteen years of age at the time he was given the watch, he would be eighty years old by now. Was this “Labyrinth” threatening to kill a man who did not have much time left to live?

Because if this case followed the same pattern as the U.S. homicides, then when the timepiece stopped, a new murder victim would be revealed to the world.

“So, what do you make of it?” Blair asked. “Do you know the answer to the riddle?”