Deliver Us From Evil (29 page)

R
EGGIE DECIDED
against seeking refuge in the underground shooting range. This was principally because she didn’t think her still queasy
stomach could take the pungent smells created by the weapon’s discharge in close quarters. Yet she didn’t want to remain inside
the distinctly chilly atmosphere at Harrowsfield, so she settled on wandering the grounds. That of course led her to the graveyard
and then to the gravesite of Laura R. Campion. She’d visited her mother’s and brother’s graves only once, years ago, and her
father’s never. And yet here she was, for the hundredth time standing in front of what was almost certainly a stranger’s final
resting place.

Are you going mad, Reg? Is this what it feels like?… Is this what happened to my… dad?

She had long ago convinced herself that her father had become insane, because that was the only way to explain what he’d done.
But at a certain level she knew that might not be true. And it terrified her.

She said out loud, “Do you just go mad? Or are you simply born evil? Or do you simply slaughter because history gives you
the chance?”

“Yes to all three,” said a voice.

Reggie nearly toppled over as she spun around, her mind recognizing the voice but also at the same instant wondering how it
could possibly be.

Shaw stood at the edge of the yew hedge that nearly surrounded the cemetery.

“How?” she began, before Shaw put a finger to his lips as he came forward.

He stood beside her. “Good to see you again too.”

“How the hell did you get here?”

“The phone I gave back to you? GPS.”

“That’s impossible. We disable all GPS chips in our phones when we’re on mission to prevent just this sort of thing.”

“I know. That’s why I had to put one in it on the boat ride over.”

Reggie groaned and put a hand to her forehead. “I can’t believe I was that incredibly stupid.”

“You’re not stupid, you’re really good. But I’m pretty good at what I do too.”

Reggie looked around nervously. “If they find you here?”

“What? They’ll kill me?”

“We don’t do that,” she said sternly.

“Oh really?” He reached in his jacket pocket and slipped out the syringe he’d taken from Niles Jansen at the cottage where
he had been held captive. He held it up.

Reggie looked from the syringe to Shaw. “What are you doing with that?”

“They were going to kill me with it, Reggie.”

“That’s impossible. We never told anyone—”

“The guy I knocked out said the order came from someone else.” He looked in the direction of the mansion. “Maybe somebody
in the big house I passed?”

“Shaw, that is just not possible.”

“So do you guys just carry this stuff around with you?”

“That poison was intended for Kuchin. But we already had a syringe with us.”

“So why a second one?”

“In case something happened to the first, I imagine,” she said lamely.

“Or in case someone got in the way. Like me.”

“This is absurd. He actually said that somebody ordered him to kill you?”

“I’m not really in the habit of making stuff like that up. I mean, what would be the point?”

Reggie slowly moved away from him and slumped down on a weathered stone bench on the edge of the small cemetery. Shaw joined
her there, drawing up his collar against the chilly air and cloudy skies that had come back to England with a vengeance as
if to make up for the rare heat and sunshine.

“The plan was to let you go once we’d finished with Kuchin.”

“Plans change if the right person wants them to. Who here has that kind of clout?”

Reggie involuntarily glanced toward the mansion.

“So I was right. They’re in there. You got a name?”

“Why? Are you going to go in there and arrest him?”

“So it’s a he? Trouble is, I don’t actually have any authority to arrest anyone.”

“Then what? Kill him? You go after him you’ll have a lot of other people you’ll have to kill too.”

“Including you?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

“Well, then I find my options limited.” He handed her the syringe. “Just make sure whoever you stick with that really needs
killing. No second chances there.”

Reggie held the capped needle in her open palm while gazing up at Shaw. “Why did you come here?”

“Wanted to see for myself the competition, I guess. Nice digs. My office is either at forty thousand feet or right at ground
level with lots of excitement going on all around me.”

“Is that all?”

“Oh, there was something else. I wanted to make sure you weren’t still puking your guts out. See, I feel a little responsible
for that. And I guess I wasn’t as sympathetic to you as I should have been while we were bouncing across the water.”

This drew a meager smile from Reggie. “Well, truthfully, I’m still a bit wobbly, but my bearings are slowly returning.” She
paused while carefully pocketing the syringe. “Does your boss know that you’re here?”

“We’re not always in sync.”

She glanced once more in the direction of the old mansion. “Actually, I can relate to that. How long will you be in England?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’ll agree to have dinner with me tonight. If yes, I’ll be here at least another day. If not, I’m out of here
right now.”

Reggie glanced down.

“Problem getting away?” said Shaw.

“Actually we’ve all been given a spot of time off. But if anyone sees you. Whit or—”

“No one’s going to see me. I’ll go back out the way I came in. I kind of make a living sneaking around. But to be on the safe
side let’s meet in London around eight tonight.” He gave her the name of a side street off Trafalgar Square. “We can pick
a place to go after that.”

“Can I let you know?”

“Yeah, right now, or I’m flying out tonight. And I doubt I’ll be back, Reggie.”

“You don’t give a girl much time to make up her mind.”

“No, I really don’t.”

“All right. But what are we going to talk about at dinner?”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find something of mutual interest. And if we’re lucky, it might even be entertaining too.” He looked over
her shoulder at the sunken ground of the cemetery. “And it might cheer you up a bit. Looks like you need it.”

“I guess it seems weird to you, my staring at graves.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I do it too.”

F
EDIR
K
UCHIN
had nothing, and because he had nothing the man was growing increasingly frustrated. In ninety-degree angles he paced the
three-thousand-square-foot cabin perched near an ocean whose water temperature never got much above fifty degrees even in
August. Kuchin’s mood was tied directly to his underling’s failure. Alan Rice had purchased access to a dozen databases and
yet there had not been one hit on any of the digital images made from his drawings or the photo. Every other avenue of investigation
he’d pursued had ended with a similar lack of progress. Kuchin’s large hands clenched and then loosened as his nimble mind
galloped along trying to envision some way to move forward.

Finally, Kuchin drew on a parka and walked outside. He had taken with him a rifle and scope and some cartridges. It was summer
but one wouldn’t know it by the weather. It wasn’t cold enough to snow, but as he looked around, the terrain reminded him
starkly of his birthplace in the Ukraine. Perhaps that’s why he’d built a home here with nothing else around for miles. He
had two guards with him who stayed in another building five hundred meters from his house. Yet there wasn’t much danger out
here. Other than the threat of being gored or trampled by a moose or a caribou, Kuchin felt fairly secure.

He trudged over ground that brought back memories of a little boy trailing his burly father as he went off to work. Work was
fishing on a commercial trawler in the Sea of Azov. Forty thousand square kilometers in area, the Azov’s deepest point was
surprisingly less than fifteen meters. It was in fact the shallowest sea in the world. Because of that its waters were turned
over quickly. This did not keep it fresh, however. When Kuchin was a child the pollutants from factories and oil and gas exploration
were already pouring into the sea’s meager depths.

By the 1970s dead and mutated fish by the thousands were piling up on the shores, clearly victims of man-made toxins and radioactive
poisons. To swim in the waters today would be suicidal. Yet all the children in Kuchin’s village had spent their summers in
waters whose temperatures would soar toward thirty degrees Celsius in July. In winter the sea would be frozen solid for months
and the children would take their homemade skates and have races until their mothers would call out to them from shore to
come eat their dinners. Kuchin could even remember lying facedown on the ice and licking it with his seven-year-old tongue.

Now Kuchin had heard that the Azov was in danger of becoming a dead sea and that commercial fishing should be banned for twenty
years. This was not as draconian as it sounded. For forty years fishing yields had been reduced to nearly zero simply because
all the sea life was dead. And yet he could recall vividly his father cleaning the fish he’d caught for their personal table
with his big gutting knife, efficiently slicing up perch, sturgeon, and mackerel that his mother would then fry up in her
big iron skillet with secret spices and ingredients that Frenchwomen seemed to naturally possess.

South of here was the Strait of Belle Isle, across from which was the region of Newfoundland. Kuchin had hiked there often
and watched the cargo ships pass through the narrow channel. Indeed, some of his human cargo passed through these same waters.
Before he reached adulthood Kuchin’s life had been inextricably tied to water, polluted water as it turned out. He realized
it was probably a miracle he was not dead from some horrible cancer rising from the shallow depths of the Azov. Yet there
could be tumors right now growing in his body, wrapping silently but lethally around essential organs, crushing blood vessels
or invading his brain.

However, despite the environmental dangers of his childhood, growing up there had provided him with an ambition to succeed
that had been inexhaustible. Everything he’d ever set out to do he’d achieved, which made this present situation unacceptable.

He made the trek to the Belle Strait and stared out at seawater that represented the most direct route to Europe for ships
coming from either the St. Lawrence Seaway or Great Lakes ports. Yet fogs, gales, and ice-choked seas for ten months of the
year made navigation here some of the most treacherous in the world. The strait could hold wondrous sights too, however. These
included humpback whales doing spectacular flips and wandering icebergs calved from glaciers in Greenland and bundled south
by the Labrador Current before starting to come apart, with massive crashes, into the warmer waters off the coast. And
Belle Isle
, after which the strait was named, meant “Beautiful Island.” It sat at the eastern tip of the waterway and was roughly halfway
between Labrador and Newfoundland, which together formed the Canadian province of the same name.

Beauty in the midst of nothing, thought Kuchin. He believed, however briefly, that he’d found beauty in Provence. A woman
who intrigued him, bewitched him, even; one whom he thought he might like to possibly entertain for longer than one night
without a bloody mess to clean up afterward. And yet the beauty had almost killed him. It was a sense of betrayal—even though
realistically the woman owed him no measure of loyalty—that fueled Kuchin’s smoldering rage.

He walked up to the top of a small knoll, the strait behind him and the land in front of him flat for as far as the eye could
see. Newfoundland was known as “the Rock.” Its eastern region used to be part of northern Africa. The last glaciation had
scraped almost all the soil off the southeastern coast, leaving it with more rock than anything else, hence the nickname.
Labrador, the easternmost section of the Canadian Shield, had roughly three times the landmass of Newfoundland but with approximately
five percent of its population. Its climate was technically classified as polar tundra, and polar bears indeed prowled the
coastal areas and caribou outnumbered people by over twenty to one. Here, Kuchin had his pick of massive mountains to hike,
isolated bays in which to fish, barren tundra to ski across, and breathtaking and brutal fjords cut into bedrock by glacier
saws to view. The slopes were often sheer and the current in the water deceptively fast.

Kuchin drew a bead with his rifle, sighting through a scope manufactured by Zeiss, the same outfit that had supplied the Third
Reich. It had everything an experienced shooter would expect in a high-end sighting device, including O-ring seals and nitrogen
fill for fogproofing, all in a lightweight package with enhanced field of vision.

When hunting large game it was generally agreed that a minimum of a thousand foot-pounds of force from the round was necessary.
For the biggest game like moose that requirement ratcheted up to roughly fifteen hundred foot-pounds at about five hundred
yards. He was using pointed boat-tailed 140-grain rounds that would drop just about anything on four hooves and certainly
anyone on two feet.

Kuchin had had this rifle custom built. It was lightweight for ease of carrying and maneuverability and he had fought his
ego and opted for somewhat less power because that translated to less recoil, which resulted invariably in greater accuracy.
He had splurged on a premium barrel because that played a major factor in the only thing that mattered: whether you hit your
intended target or not.

The small coyote was wandering along about two hundred yards away from him, its agile gait carrying the animal along rapidly
over the flat terrain. It was early for the beast to be searching for food, thought Kuchin, but here one never knew. Kill
when you can was probably a good motto for such a desolate place. It was probably a female, Kuchin noted as he examined through
the glass the small chest and frame of the animal.

He lay prone on the ground, carrying the weight of the weapon on his elbows. He steadied himself, fixing his grip around the
stock and underbelly of the gun, but relaxing his muscles. This was the magic recipe of the successful sniper and long-range
hunter, firm but loose, heartbeat and breaths mellow, unhurried but with any possible vibration removed. The butt of the weapon
hard to his bicep, his index finger dropped to the trigger guard and from there to the slender bit of curved metal. With one
pull the immediately heated round would burst from the elongated barrel, lands and grooves branded into its metal hide from
the force of the rapid expulsion. The quarter-gram metal missile would cover the distance between man and beast roughly six
times faster than if it had been perched in a seat on a commercial jet aircraft.

And yet with the coyote dead in his sights Kuchin did not pull the trigger. He lowered the weapon. The beast, unaware of how
close it had come to annihilation at the hands of a far more dangerous predator, scampered along until it was nearly out of
sight. Kuchin trudged the solitary miles back to his cabin. He had never enjoyed killing wildlife. Fishing held little interest
for him either despite having been his father’s trade.

It was only living things that looked like him that had ever motivated Fedir Kuchin to pull the trigger, light the match to
the gas-filled pits, kick out the stool from under the noosed victim, or plunge the knife into someone’s chest. It was just
who and what he was.

He returned to his cabin, slid the parka on a hook by the door, locked his rifle back up in his gun safe, and returned to
his desk. There was a blinking light on his phone. The message on the recording dispelled all the bad thoughts Kuchin had
been harboring for most of the day.

It was Alan Rice.

“We found him.”