Shattered (26 page)

A trace of that dark matter remained inside Maura as well. It emerged gradually over the subsequent days and nights, as the Grove family—ensconced in a new government-issue split-level home outside Alexandria—licked its psychic wounds. At first, Grove figured the odd behavior was merely post-traumatic stress popping and crackling in her subconscious like radio signal interference. But the more he noticed the subtle little signs and indicators, the more he realized that the thing which had leached out of Splet that night in his dying moments—reflecting off Maura's eyes like tiny mandalas—had infected Maura as well.

The first signs manifested themselves as faint tremors in her hands. Grove noticed them while drying the dishes one night. Maura was washing and could barely hold on to the china. On another night the shaking got so bad that Maura nearly dropped Aaron. She blamed it on nerves. But Grove noticed other little signs cropping up. Maura would wander off into the wooded nature preserve adjacent to their new backyard, muttering to herself, which was completely out of character. She would doodle nervously while watching TV.

One afternoon Grove came home to find her dozing on the couch, Aaron in a playpen next to her, Maura's beloved
New York Times
crossword puzzle splayed open on a TV tray, riddled with strange strings of Latin in the margins.
Latin?
Grove had studied the dead language in undergraduate school, but had forgotten most of it. Still, the words had some kind of strange resonance in the back of his mind. At dinner that night, he innocently asked Maura if she had ever studied Latin and she confessed that she hadn't. Grove dropped the subject then, and never commented on it again, unsure of Maura's emotional state, not wanting to alarm her. But he
did
slip the newspaper in his briefcase the next morning.

Grove knew a cryptologist at Langley named Clorefene, and asked the guy to come over to Quantico for an informal cup of coffee one afternoon. Clorefene was an officious little balding man with a heart of gold, a genius-level IQ, and a severe stutter. He took one look at the words that Maura had absently doodled and grinned. “Ch-ch-ch-church Latin they call it, sh-she a g-good Catholic?”

Grove laughed. “Not exactly.”

“M-most of these w-words are nonsensical…but th-this h-hhh-here.” The little man pointed to the phrase
Te cognitum qui natura.
“This m-means ‘You know who I am.'”

After a long, long silence, Grove frowned. “‘You know who I am?'”

Clorefene shrugged, rubbed his bald head, and pointed to another string scrawled across the edge of the newsprint—the same words repeated over and over:
Inimicus…hostis.
“Only other thing I c-c-can m-make out is this. It m-mmm-means ‘enemy' or ‘n-nemesis.'”

Grove thanked the man and gave him a Cuban cigar and told him to say hello to his wife, Tracy. The rest of that afternoon Grove spent pacing his office, ruminating on Maura's behavior. Had she heard Splet say these words? Were they spontaneously occurring to her?

It all finally reached a sort of critical mass a few days later.

In the middle of the night, Grove was awakened by the sound of Maura's voice. At first Grove thought his wife was talking to him, so he rolled over and mumbled groggily, “What was that, honey?”

Maura had her eyes closed, her pale face contorted, her neck arched. She hissed something through clenched teeth. Grove realized his wife was talking in her sleep, and what she was saying was in Latin. Grove's chest tightened as he fumbled for a pen or a pencil in the bedside junk drawer. He found a Sharpie and a stray index card. He hurriedly scribbled a single word, the only thing he could clearly discern:

FATUM

All at once several things happened that sent a trickle of dread down the center of Grove's solar plexus, and clenched his heart with icy fingers. Not only did he realize the word was somehow meant for
him
—for his ears only—but he also saw that his wife's face had subtly changed its orientation without Grove even being aware of it.

She was looking at him now.

“
Fatoooooommmmm
,” she growled. Her eyes were open and yet unseeing, her pupils enormous and as black as onyx. The corners of her mouth rose with contempt.

Grove reached for her. At his touch, Maura sat up with a jerk.

She let out a little gasp as though he had just splashed cold water on her face. She looked around the room, blinking, stricken.

It took a moment for Grove to realize Maura had awakened. She looked at him. Her eyes were normal, albeit watery with confusion. “What is it?”

“You were dreaming,” Grove finally told her, opting to proceed very carefully. He discreetly slid the index card under the blanket and put an arm around her. She was damp and feverish.

“Jesus.” She lay back against her pillow, holding his hand.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. “God, that was a doozy.” She swallowed. “I dreamt I was being strangled.”

“It's over now.”

“Yeah.” She touched his face. “When you touched me, it was like magic. The dream went away. Just like that. Don't stop holding me, okay?”

He didn't.

Within minutes she was fast asleep.

Grove held her the rest of the night, thinking about what had just happened, pondering the words. He didn't know it then, but whatever was inside Maura that night had either fled or had gone dormant, leaving behind a battered yet relatively unharmed spirit. But Grove could not stop wondering about that single word she had snarled at him in her sleep:
Fatum
. It nagged at him the rest of that night and throughout the next day until he finally broke down and looked up its meaning. At first it made absolutely no sense at all, but in time it would ultimately lead him to discover truths not only about himself…but also about the dark questions that had tormented him throughout his career.

Fatum
is the Latin word for fallen.

Lee's Neck State Park is about forty miles south of Alexandria, along the lower Potomac. Clinging to the banks of that broad, gunmetal waterway, the thick forest of white pine and cypress, still as dark and primeval as it was in the Bronze Age, snakes toward Fredericksburg without break or clearing.

In 1864, on a warm spring day, General Grant smoked thousands of ragged, dying Confederates out of these woods, slaughtering them on the narrow strip of sandy scrub that lines the riverbank. The blood turned the river red, and the severed limbs of soldiers were piled head high. “It was a scene of horror that beggered description,” one surgeon recalled. “God forbid that I should ever see such again.”

Nearly a century and a half later, the blood has long washed away, the tribulations of Ulysses S. Grant's campaign long ago relegated to the musty pages of history books. But the forest and the adjacent strip of crabgrass remain unchanged, a reminder of the cruel permanence of nature. Today, park trails, scenic markers, and picnic tables dot this historic pathway.

Another Ulysses—
this
one a black man—sat at one of these tables on a mild September afternoon, nursing a thermos of spice tea, the travails of the Civil War far from his mind.

The sun had dipped behind the trees, and now the air was cool and smelled of fish and wood smoke. A month and half had passed since the events surrounding the Mississippi Ripper. The scars—both external and internal—were healing. Grove was back in therapy, and Maura was doing better every day. Their marriage was shaky but holding on. The future lay before them, a little murky, but navigable. Grove raised the collar of his fleece jacket and said, “What's on your mind, Tom?”

The Section Chief sat on the opposite side of the picnic table, his suit still on, his tie loosened. He had come from work. Had asked to meet Grove here. Had sounded strange on the phone. “Truth is, I don't even know where to begin,” he said and shot a worried glance at Maura.

She was perched on the edge of the table behind Grove, her child bouncing on her hip. Aaron was gnawing on a little rubber teething ring, drooling all over his Buster Brown overalls, looking astonishingly chipper after nearly perishing at the hands of a psychopath in Indiana. Maura, on the other hand, displayed a stooped, morose sort of weariness in her denim jacket that was apparent only to close friends and loved ones. The light in her eyes had gone, and her sleep came harder now. “What's the matter, Tom?”

“Nothing, I just, I don't know whether this is—” Geisel tripped over his words, glancing from Maura to Grove.

“Whatever it is, Tom,” Grove assured him, “whatever you want to tell me, Maura's part of it.”

“Okay, fair enough.”

Maura gazed out across the river at the Maryland shoreline in the gray distance. The barges, the rickrack of docks and weather-beaten piers like rusted tongues jutting out. “This isn't going to turn my stomach, is it?”

“No…no, it's nothing like that.” Geisel paused. Licked his lips. Measured his words. “It's…”

Grove sighed. “Spit it out, boss.”

After a long pause, the section chief said, “How long have we known each other, Uly?”

“I don't know, since before Christ left Chicago. Why?”

“I haven't been exactly truthful with you over the years.”

Now Grove looked at Maura.

She was looking at Geisel. Waiting. Her expression was unreadable to Grove. She just looked tired. She had been taking an antidepressant and a sleep aid to get her through the rough spots. “You know, maybe Tom's right,” she said. “Maybe I should a take a walk and let you two boys talk shop.”

Grove turned and put a hand on her knee. “Maura—”

“It's okay, really. I want to show Aaron that Civil War cannon. See if he fits inside it.”

Geisel let out a nervous laugh.

“Start 'em young,” Grove said with sheepish smile.

“C'mon, junior,” Maura said and hefted the chewing child away from the table.

Grove watched them walking away for a long moment. Then he turned to Geisel, his smile fading. “Okay. You got my attention.”

Geisel took a deep breath as though preparing to jump out of a plane. “We met a long time ago, you and I, long before I recruited you out of the CID.”

Grove frowned. “You mean at the academy?”

Another awkward pause here. Geisel shook his head, looked out at the water. “I was thirty-three years old, just got bumped up to deputy section chief in the RICO unit.”

“RICO? I never knew—”

“You were born in a small village in Kenya—Rishiki, I think was the name—and your mother emigrated to America when you were two. She settled in Chicago, a little walk-up on Lawrence Avenue in Uptown. She did some housecleaning to support the two of you, she worked for the city commissioner one summer, used to buy you beef jerky with her tips. You went to George Washington Grade School, Senn High School. Had a pretty good arm, too, played some ball. You hit a grand-slam home run one spring for the Senn Tigers, got them into the state finals. Got good grades, too, good enough to get you into the University of Michigan.”

Grove shrugged. “What, are you getting ready for the Friars Roast?”

“You're probably thinking I got all this from your file, took a peek at your CV?”

Grove looked at him. “I don't know
what
I'm thinking right now.”

A pause. “When I was thirty-three and just some upstart in RICO, you were ten years old.”

“Okay. And?”

Geisel rubbed his face. “One day, there's a knock on my door. And I swear, to this day, I don't know who let them in, who set up the meeting, why they came to me.”

“You lost me, Boss.”

Geisel looked at him. “What I'm trying to say is, some people came to me and told me about you.”

“Say what?”

“It happened, Ulysses. Thirty-some years ago, a group of elderly gentlemen came to Quantico. They came to me, and they told me about this kid who would grow up to be…well…
you.”

“What?”

Geisel nodded, looking at the water. “They told me this child was chosen. That's the word they used, Uly. I'll never forget that part.
Chosen
.”

Grove felt light-headed all of a sudden. The sun felt hot on his neck. “Chosen for what?”

“To be a manhunter. What else? I know it sounds ludicrous, but let me finish. These old geezers, I mean, they scared the hell out of my secretary. Out in the lobby, sitting there waiting like a bunch of owls. All they wanted to tell me was to keep an eye on you, and one day you'd join me, you'd be the greatest manhunter ever.”

Grove shook his head. “You got to be kidding me, you didn't run a check on these guys?”

Geisel smiled at that. “Oh, I ran plenty of checks on these guys. They were just old men. One of them was a preacher, one was in a nursing home, no criminal jackets, nothing out of the ordinary. The only common thread was, they were all from somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else?”

“Haiti, the Sudan, Eastern Europe, one of the old coots was from Israel. Most of them had been in the States for years but, you know, no red flags, nothing weird. They were all very religious, all from someplace else, and they were all interested in you.”

Grove glanced over his shoulder at Maura a hundred yards away near the tree line, blowing dandelion fluff at Aaron, laughing. She hadn't laughed in weeks. He turned back to Geisel. “Why are you telling me this?”

Now it was obvious Geisel had reached the most difficult part. “I don't know,” he said, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “I figured you had a right to know. I never saw these old coots ever again, and of course by now they're all long gone. I thought it was a put-on at first. But I guess curiosity got the best of me.”

“Meaning what?”

Geisel smiled at him. “Meaning I started keeping tabs on this wonderboy from the Windy City.”

“I don't know how to—”

“You don't have to say anything. I just wanted you to know. Turns out they were right. I knew it almost before you graduated from Senn. All your scores were off the charts, the physical profile, mental aptitude. Even when you were in the military police.”

Grove's stomach clenched. “You made sure I got into the military police, didn't you? Behind the scenes. You pulled some strings and got me in.”

Geisel gave a shrug. “I made a couple of phone calls. No big deal. That's not the point.”

Grove stared at the river. “And I thought it was affirmative action at work.”

“I don't want to stir things up here, Ulysses. I don't even know why I told you this. I guess it was partly because of what you told me on the plane to Indianapolis, the stuff about the energy, the dark energy. This thing that keeps turning up in serial perps down through the ages.”

Grove was vexed He pushed himself away from the table, rose, and started pacing. “I need some time to think about this.” He paced some more. “Who
were
these guys, Tom? These guys that came to you.”

“I don't know. We may never know. Just guys. The rundowns gave us nothing.”

More pacing. “I'm gonna need to think about this.”

“I understand. But let me ask you something.”

Grove paused, looked at him. “Go ahead.”

“This energy you've been fighting, this so-called enemy, whatever it is, you think it was in Splet?”

Grove told him that he did.

“Is it gone now? Dormant? Or what?”

Grove thought long and hard about how to answer that.

He turned and gazed once again at his wife and child. Maura was spinning the little boy in rays of sunshine filtering down through the cypress boughs. Aaron was giggling—Grove's favorite noise in the world—and the sound seemed to carry up into the cornflower sky.

Better yet, the sight of mother and child in that good Southern light, held within the field of Grove's one good eye, was as crystalline and sharp as a beautiful cameo carved on the back of his brain. The sight of them gave him strength and hope for the future, shelter from the inevitable storm lurking beyond the horizon.

And the mysteries yet to be solved.

He never answered Geisel's question.

It was time to go home.