Shadow Unit 15 (12 page)

This, too, is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: '"It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.'"

—Aristotle, Poetics

In the end—or was it the beginning—it had been the reliably bizarre luck and the information-mining abilities of one Solomon Todd that gave them their break, or so he told himself at the time.

After everything started to go bad, after he really understood what they were up against, he was moved to consider if he had been played. Led. If some fraction of the horrors that followed were on his head.

But at the beginning, it seemed like a break.

J. Edgar Hoover Federal Building, Washington, D.C., July 1, 2014

"Beale must have been ready for a long time," Todd said.

Daniel Brady set a cup of coffee by Todd's left hand. Hafidha Gates sprawled across the couch on the other side of the bullpen, a tablet resting on her chest face-down in a strictly decorative capacity.

Renee's couch
, Todd thought, with a tiny stab of guilt. If only they'd figured it out sooner—

It was what it was. And they were doing everything they could.

It was dark outside the windows. City-dark, not real-dark. Not Oolitic, Indiana dark. But what was, this side of the middle of the north Atlantic?

Todd tried not to look at the clock in the lower corner of his monitor. He definitely wasn't registering that the hour was a single digit, and that digit wasn't a
one
.

"Yeah," Brady said. "He's vanished like a tapeworm up a stray dog's ass. You don't do that without a plan. Cash. Identities."

"He's been
baiting us
," Hafidha said, with a lip curl that might have been a snarl. "Since day one. Since fucking two thousand and seven. He's been enjoying the game, seeing how far he could stretch his luck. How much he could get away with it."

"Not just his luck," Todd said wearily. "
The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular
. Edward Gibbons. Maybe he decided it was really unlikely we'd figure it out."

"That'd be a fucking subtle manifestation." Brady sipped his coffee, kicked the toe of one shiny loafer. His pants cuff broke just so; Todd wondered when Gray had started buying Brady's clothes. He wondered if Mehitabel was still awake. She wouldn't mind if he showed up on her doorstep, looking for a shoulder to sleep on.

"That'd be a fucking lot of grande mocha frappuccinos," Hafidha agreed. "But there's cop skills, too. They also play into it." She tapped the back of her tablet meaningfully. "All right, Solomon, share your wisdom. Where the hell do we look next?"

"At the beginning." They were all tired. Too tired. "Victimology and profile. If we understand where Beale came from, we'll know where he's going." He stood. "Tomorrow. When everybody's here. Go home."

"Sol—"

"
Home
," he said, and they both sighed and lurched to their feet, exactly as if he still had the standing to give anybody an order.

*

Esteban Santiago Miguel Domingo Reyes Fomosa y Ibarra stood in the doorway of his daughter's room and watched her sleep. It was just as poignant as all the Lifetime movies made it out to be, and he felt mildly embarrassed for experiencing the emotion in such stereotypical terms. The part of his brain that was always running check sums and analyses, meanwhile, chose that moment to be archly amused about both emotions.

You're a piece of work, Stephen Reyes.

His phone beeped in his pocket. He stepped hastily into the hall, one hand pressing it into his leg to muffle any more sounds.

It was from Sol.
10 A.M. Preliminary profile and victimology.

It didn't say of whom.

It didn't have to.

*

Nikki Lau knew that wiping her palms on the fabric of her carefully- pressed trousers was a sign of weakness. She rummaged her aching brain for signs of strength and confidence, because her assembled team was watching her.

They were arranged around the briefing closet table doing a bang-up job of showing positive attitudes, but she knew the difference between show and the real thing. Rupert Beale.
Rupert Beale
, for God's sake, had blindsided them so thoroughly that
betrayal
wasn't even the right word.

She filled her lungs with stale, shared air. "We had to start with the assumption that any information about Beale we got directly from him could be tainted. As it turned out, there was hardly anything he concealed or lied about."

Esther Falkner nodded. "Which suggests he believes there's nothing in it we can use against him."

"He could be right," Brady offered, from the wall he held up with his broad shoulders.

"Normal humans are pretty bad at threat assessment." Arthur Tan tapped gently with the eraser end of his pencil on the file in front of him. "Gammas probably are, too, unless they're special that way. Beale's not hiding anything except his present location, which says he doesn't think anyone's smart enough to use what he's given away."

"I hate people like that," Hafidha said. She gazed bright-eyed at the photo of Beale on the screen behind Lau and coiled a corkscrew of her hair around her index finger. "Really. Fire of a thousand suns."

Flirty
and
predator
, Lau thought, and had to swallow before she could go on. "So, Rupert Beale, born in 1965 in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago. At the age of eight he was hospitalized for pneumonia, and remained in Cook County General for six weeks."

"Pretty serious case," Todd murmured. "Even in 1972 hospitals weren't big on extended stays."

"That may have been when his first exposure to the anomaly occurred." Lau thumbed the remote in her palm. Beale's book-jacket photo was replaced with a yellowish snapshot of a square-faced, red-haired man and a densely- freckled boy. The man was beaming, a baseball in one hand, the boy's shoulder in the other. The boy glared into the camera.

"Charles John Dacovitz, a hospital orderly, shot his wife and son on the pediatric floor of County General, then killed himself. We haven't been able to determine if Beale had direct contact with Dacovitz, but he was almost certainly on that floor at the time of the shootings." Lau recited the facts with as much cool distance as she could.

"Is that one of the stories we got from Beale himself?" Tan asked.

Chaz, who'd been silent, attentive, and surprisingly un-twitchy thus far, curled his lip a little. "Oh, yeah. There's a television interview. He says, quote, 'That may have set me on the path to becoming who I am.'"

Tan turned to Chaz, distressed. "That was on purpose, wasn't it? The way he put it."

"He's having a great time," Hafidha agreed.

"When Beale was released from the hospital," Lau continued, because if she didn't she might not get another chance, "the doctors prescribed fresher air than he was likely to get in the city. His parents sent him to live with his uncle and aunt, Gene and Linda Krupe, who had a farm near Plainfield, Illinois, outside Chicago." She thumbed the remote again to bring up a newspaper photo from the 1960s of a school ice-cream social fund-raiser.

The location was the yard of a big, rambling farmhouse, built on a prosperous farm where the owners could afford the latest 1890s architectural touches: gables, dormers, an arched sleeping porch, turned railings and gingerbread, decorative shingles. The house was painted a sensible and thrifty white in the photo, like the big dairy barn and outbuildings showing behind it, and stood at the top of a long, gentle slope of green lawn shaded by mature maples.

"The Krupe cousins were grown up and moved out," Brady said, picking up for her. "Son in the Army, daughter married and moved to Indiana. Rupert was effectively the only child of a middle-aged farming couple until high school."

"He didn't go back to live with his parents?" Reyes asked.

"Ten months after he got out of the hospital, his mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Maybe the family thought it would be easier on him to stay on the farm and miss the fun."

Hafidha rocked back in her chair, and Brady caught it before it whacked him in the hip. "Please tell me Mister I'm-So-Clever had a miserable young adulthood."

Brady grinned down at her. As far as Lau could tell, it was the unconsidered smile, the one that didn't come with reservations about gamma-hood. "Sorry, Miss Thing. Good student, lettered in varsity wrestling and the swim team, popular with the ladies. His aunt and uncle seemed to think he was God's gift to the universe. After that, four years at Illinois State University majoring in criminology. Joined the Chicago police force—"

"You skipped one," said Chaz.

"Wait, I've got this." Hafidha stared into nearby unoccupied space. "And may I say the irony of combining Rupert Beale and a city named Normal is not lost on me."

"Old, old joke," Todd said, but he was smiling.

Hafs stuck her tongue out at him, then went on. "ISU campus police report. Frat-boy hazing incident in which one guy jumped from a roof and two more were supposed to catch him, and really, don't ask me how anyone could have thought that was going to work out well. One of the catchers was our boy Rupert. As any sane person would expect, there were injuries all 'round. Beale got a busted collarbone. The catchee got a concussion."

Brady glowered from Chaz to Hafidha. "So why's there no report with the
real
police?"

Chaz tipped his head back to meet Brady's frown. "Because schools used to cover up fraternity hazing abuses and get away with it."

"Jesus in a leisure suit."

"No argument there."

Lau took the temperature of the room again. Falkner, Reyes, and Todd seemed surprisingly calm and contained, given they'd had the most contact with Beale. No, that wasn't true: Chaz had met with him often at Idlewood in the context of the survivors' group. And Chaz, though he might not be twitchy, wasn't anything like calm. In his stillness Lau thought she could read something deep and cold and...formidable.
Hafidha and Daphne,
Lau realized.
That's why.

Hafs and Danny were nearly symmetrical in their anger. They both tended to rise to a challenge with a lot of "Oh, yeah? Sez who?" anyway, and they were focusing a concentrated pissed-offedness on Rupert Beale.

For Tan, still New Kid, Beale was a gamma. Not
just
a gamma, because that was never true. But Beale was their quarry, their perp, not someone he'd shared bits of his life with. His presence reminded everyone else that this was their job.

Lau clicked the remote again to bring up the next photo: a scene of so much ruin it was hard to identify its component parts. Shattered concrete, twisted rebar, the back end of a gray SUV, and a police car logo scarred and folded on a crumpled door panel.

Into the stunned silence that followed, Todd said, "One person walked away from that: Rupert Beale. Well, dragged away. His left hip joint was effectively powdered.

"He and his partner were answering a suspicious vehicle call when the vehicle in question, an SUV with two men in it who'd just beaten and robbed a rival gang member, went out of control and punched through the third-floor apron of a parking structure. It landed on Beale's and his partner's squad."

"Improbable," Chaz breathed, with what sounded like respect.

"The accident ended Beale's career on the force. It may also have been the trigger for his conversion, and the basis of his mythology. He had a stake, as he saw it, in knowing when the unlikely would become likely, or could be
made
to be likely. He could see the potential Rube Goldberg machinery of causality. All he had to do was step in and adjust a ramp here, a spring there, to make the events happen."

"Speculation," Reyes said, his voice rusty. "But based on sound observation."

Todd beamed at him. "Thank you, Professor."

"So we have three locations where Beale experienced significant trauma," Falkner said, her level gaze on Lau. "Cook County Hospital, the ISU campus, and the parking structure. Do any of them look like a place Beale might go to ground?"

Chaz opened the file folder in front of him and spidered his brown fingers over the pile of paper inside. Like the laptop lying closed in front of Hafidha, the file was a polite fiction; everything in it was in his head. "The parking structure, no. The whole block was bulldozed and rebuilt two years ago, and the street turned into a pedestrian mall. It would take a lot of abstraction to identify it with the original accident."

"Even if you're crazier than a barrel of shithouse rats with the lid nailed down?" asked Brady.

Chaz blinked in appreciation, and Lau filed the Bradyism away for use elsewhere. "The hospital's trickier. So much has changed that it's not the same buildings, or even the same institution, really. But Beale's identification with it isn't necessarily institutional." He looked up from his files. "Though Dacovitz was a hospital employee, and one of his stressors was probably hospital management. I'd say the hospital's about fifty-fifty."

"And the campus?" Falkner asked.

"There's the similarity with the accident that triggered his conversion. Struck by falling object. The life-changing component doesn't seem to be there, but it's hard to tell without any real investigation at the time."

"No public statements from him about it?'

Brady shook his head. "Which is either significant or not."

"Victimology?" Falkner prompted.

Tan set his pencil down. "Victim, know thyself. Because in addition to anomalous criminals, which fits the pattern of a vigilante killer, Beale targets law enforcement. Or rather, specifically, us. Like the vigilante, he sees himself as doing our job. Unlike the vigilante, he's actively interfering with the WTF. He's saying, 'I'm better than you,' but if he believes that, why bother to hold us back?"

"We're his experiment." It was Reyes's voice, so they all knew where to look. But Lau couldn't remember hearing Reyes say anything in quite that way before.

"But he's not in the sciences," she said.

"He sees himself as a researcher. It's in his books, in his relationship with the ACTF, his involvement with the survivor group. He'll change one thing and see what happens. Because the more you know, the more you understand of what's probable and why."