The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story (3 page)

The young man looked up at Cade, his face contorted with pain and rage. “You broke my fucking hand,” he screeched. “That’s torture!”

Cade reached out, viper-quick, and grabbed the man by the wrist. Then he bent it at an angle that was too sharp.

Cade spoke quietly, directly into the man’s face. “This is not torture,” he said.

The man started to squall again, but Cade increased the pressure on the man’s arm. The bones under the skin began to make noises a lot like the last kernels of popcorn in a microwave.

“Torture is watching your skin bubble and slough off after it’s been touched by the flames,” Cade said. “Torture is struggling to breathe and choking on smoke. Torture is the fear you feel as you run for your life, not knowing if you will ever see your children again.”

The man’s forearm was bent almost in half now. Tears streamed from his eyes, his face a mask of fear.

Cade dropped him.

“This is not torture,” Cade said again. “But I can start any time.”

The young man looked up. He was panting and sweating, but he was tougher than Zach thought. He’d managed to stay conscious. And his pain was nothing compared to the hatred in his eyes.

Hatred, and something else.

“I knew you jackbooted thugs would come. Well, we’re ready for you. You’re already too late.”

Zach noticed the air in the room had suddenly grown heavy and still. He was sweating. It was very, very warm.

The stink of sulfur was overpowering now.

The young man’s eyes locked with Zach’s. They glowed.

“You’re both going to burn,” the man hissed.

Something gathered in the room with them. Something coiled inside the man. That was the only way Zach could describe it. A keening rose from somewhere in him, a song that was ragged and painful and somehow too big for his body.

The walls began to smoke.

Fire erupted from the man’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

And then, abruptly, it went out, as Cade crushed his throat.

His lifeless body hit the carpet. Smoke poured from his skull. But the heat was gone. The sound was gone.

Zach finally found his voice again. “Took you long enough.”

“I’d hoped we could question him.”

“You let him point a gun at me.” Zach tried not to make that sound like he was whining. Gave himself maybe a B-minus for the effort.

“We are dealing with men who apparently know how to explode into flame. I wanted to secure any evidence before it went up in smoke.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Apart from a few domestic items, the rest of the house is empty.”

“Well, at least it was worth risking my life.”

“I was never more than a few dozen feet away,” Cade said. Zach had to admit, that was no distance at all to someone with Cade’s speed. He was almost mollified, but Cade kept talking. “And honestly, I was hoping you would annoy him enough to keep him busy. Perhaps we could learn something that way.”

“That was your plan?”

“You do seem to bring it out in people.”

“Jesus, Cade — ”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

“ — It didn’t even work! We’ve got nothing. All he said was something about some guy Marcus...”

“Marcus?”

“Well. Yeah.”

“More than we had before.”

Zach really hated it when Cade was right. He considered a few replies, tho
ught better of them, then pulled out his phone and called Ramos. Maybe she could make something out of the Heat Miser here.



They loaded the corpse into the trunk of the car and took it back to the morgue themselves. There was no sense in involving the locals now. That would only mean more loose ends to snip later.

Ramos was so interested in the body she barely even took the time to eyeball Cade. She prodded the burned-out skull with a steel probe, listening to the crunch. “And he did this to himself?” she asked, fascination creeping into her tone.

Zach nodded. “He would have gone up in smoke and taken us with him in another moment.”

“So cool,” Ramos said, and began stripping the body for autopsy without another word.

Zach looked away. He started working on his earlier data searches on his spy phone.

Cade, meanwhile, looked a bit unsteady on his feet. Zach checked the time. Sunrise outside. The morgue was cool and dark, but Cade had been awake for a long time.

“When did you last get any coffin-time?”

“I’m fine,” Cade said.

Ramos didn’t look up from the body on the slab, but she pointed at the wall, lined with refrigerated cabinets for corpses. “Most of those are empty,” she said.

“I’m fine,” Cade said again.

“Get in,” Zach said. “We’re not going anywhere for a few hours, at least.”

Cade didn’t argue, at least. He walked to the wall, opened one of the doors, pulled out the long steel drawer, and inserted himself neatly in with the other dead bodies. He even managed to slam the door behind him without sounding too much like a sulky teenager.

“So who was he?” Ramos asked as she began to make the Y-shaped incision in the corpse’s chest.

“Guy named Julius Knapp.”

“Julius?”

“Right? Who does that to a kid? Probably drove him straight to terrorism. I’ve already run him through our databases. He’s been off the grid for a couple weeks. No recent credit card payments, no rent, last known address was a house near the college he graduated from last year. I’ve got a few hits on him from FBI surveillance. He was an Occupier. But nothing serious. He used to do puppet shows.”

That got Ramos to look up from the chest cavity. “He did what?”

“Puppet shows. Giant puppets. Of world leaders, politicians. He would do little shows at demonstrations, making fun of them. Here’s a video.
Undercover cop in the crowd shot it.”

Zach’s screen lit up with Julius, and three other people, waving large, papier-mâché dolls on sticks around, as they yelled largely incomprehensible dialogue and slogans at each other. Then the wind picked up, and tore Julius’ puppet out of his hands. It fell on another protester, and they began arguing. End of the clip.

Ramos looked back down at Julius’ body. “That seems a long way from turning yourself into a bomb.”

“Anything inside him so far?”

“Not much,” she said. “But I’ve barely gotten started.”

Zach frowned. “I was hoping for an internal gas tank. Something obvious. Even a real bomb. Anything beats the alternative.”

“I’ll figure it out. There’s got to be some kind of rational explanation. I mean, you don’t really think this was magic, do you?”

Zach didn’t like to sound like Griff, his immediate predecessor in this job. But sometimes it was hard to avoid. “I’ve seen stranger things.”

“What do you think he was doing here?”

“Hell if I know,” Zach said. He felt better about cursing when Cade was asleep and inside a steel box. “So let’s try to find out.”

They worked steadily, not talking much more after that. Zach gleaned what he could from his databases, and then turned to the laptop they’d taken from the house.

It was password-protected and encrypted. Fortunately, like most amateurs, Julius Wilkes had downloaded all his spy software from the Internet. The encryption program he used was readily available from a number of public sites, and it had been cracked in half by the NSA’s super-computers a year earlier. That’s why the intelligence agencies left it out there. In fact, Zach had learned that about a quarter of the programs out there were created by the government and released into the wild. People locked up their secrets without realizing someone else already had the keys.

He plugged his phone in with a USB cord, and bypassed all of the laptop’s security.

There was not a lot that was useful, not at first glance. He did find Julius’ Facebook page, which had not been updated since August. The most recent pic was of Julius with a group of five other guys, all about the same age. One of them was tagged MARCUS WILKES.

He called Ramos over. She looked at the image on the screen.

“Just your best guess, but does this guy match the general dimensions of our first crispy critter?”

She peered at the pic for a moment. “I can do better than that. Simulation’s ready.”

She took out her own phone and zapped a picture over to his. It was the computer mock-up of the face on the burned man.

It was bald and hairless, while the kid in the photo was bearded, but it was close enough to match. Definitely the same guy.

Not good, Zach thought. There were six of them. Standard number for a cell. All of them mildly political, easily radicalized — you could put them in a term paper. If Julius and Marcus were working together, if they knew this secret, the odds were good that the other four were in on it, too.

He copy-pasted their names: JOSH GREGORY, COOPER REED, TYSON NOVAK, ADAM THOMPSON. And then put his computer to work again, searching for them all, any traces they’d left, any phone calls, any emails, anything at all.

Ramos put a gloved finger near the screen. “Where are they? Looks like a desert.”

Zach read the caption, then snorted.

“What’s funny?”

“You’re going to love this. They’re at Burning Man.”

Ramos said, “That can’t be a coincidence.”

Zach’s phone suddenly buzzed. Direct call. Oval Office.

Shit. He answered. “Sir.”

“CNN,” President Curtis said, then hung up.

There was a flatscreen on a desk nearby. Zach turned it on and found the right channel.

The sun streamed down on the scene. A mall outside Springfield. People running and crying.       The crawl along the bottom of the screen with a body count. Smoke pouring from windows that had been blown out of an atrium.

Another one. This time in broad daylight.

“Oh, no,” Ramos said. Her voice sounded very small.

Zach got up and headed for the car, already dialing the pilot of the Gulfstream.

“Do you want me to get Cade?” Ramos asked.

“Tell him a
t sunset. He’ll find me. And keep working on those bodies.”

No point in waking Cade right now. They were already too late.



There was even less left behind this time. The burned man was mostly ash, a pile of cremated flesh and bone in the middle of th
e bombed-out food court. Maybe he burned hotter in a big, open space. Maybe he was better at the trick than either of the other two.

Maybe Ramos could figure that out. Zach was just trying to keep from throwing up.

The scene in the theater had been sterile compared to the mall. Fewer people had been close to him — small favors — but the panic had been worse. There were tables overturned, fast-food wrappers and spilled drinks everywhere. Blood on the tiles where people were knocked to the ground and trampled. The scent of burned flesh mingled with grease from deep fryers that no one had thought to turn off.

In all, seven more dead, maybe thirty more injured. Zach had walked past the ambulances where the medics were working on people. He saw the body bags.

Two of them were much too large for the tiny bodies inside.

Zach had operated on autopilot, reflexes kicking in and taking over. He confiscated the security video before it ended up on YouTube. It showed a young man — it looked like Cooper Reed, but he couldn’t be sure — standing in the food court. And then a bright flash, and everything inside a circle around him was burning. People stood in shock, and then their mouths opened in silent screams.

There was no sound on the video. Small favors.

Zach shut the whole area down and called in the cleaners, the crew of people that worked for him and Cade picking up the wreckage of things that were not supposed to exist. The head cleaner, Smitty, wasn’t available, but he sent a team. Zach had them contain the scene and collect the evidence.

Then there wasn’t much else he could do. He sat and watched them work. They were vacuuming up the ashes and bagging the bits that got clogged.

“Seabrook’s people will love this,” one said to the other. “I bet he’ll have a campaign ad about it before the end of the week.”

“Oh, hey. Too soon.”

“Not for him. So what are we going to call this one?”

“Gas main explosion?”

“We use that all the time.”

“Well, it happens.”

Zach felt sick, and not from the barbecue stink in the air. The cleaners kept talking.

“How about an electrical fire?”

“That’s about as original as a gas main.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know we were grading on creativity.”

“Hey, who says you can’t have fun at work?”

They both laughed at that. It was the laughter that did it.

“Will you both just
shut the fuck up
,” Zach said through gritted teeth.