The Jury Master (42 page)

Madsen’s second call came as Sloane rushed down the front porch steps of Tom Molia’s house, exactly two minutes after the first. The general provided directions to a public gas station, where a man emerged from the shadows, casually opened the passenger door, and searched the inside of the car, confirming that Sloane was alone and had the package. The fact that the man did not simply take the package indicated what Sloane had already figured out: It had become personal. Sloane had likely embarrassed the general. He wanted to handle the matter personally. He wanted the challenge of bringing matters to an end, and he didn’t want to share his victory with anyone else. Sloane had sensed Madsen’s character during their abrupt meeting in the Oval Office. A short pit bull of a man, Madsen exuded a wall of omnipotent arrogance that had prevented Sloane from getting behind the pinpoint eyes of hollow darkness but had not prevented Sloane from knowing exactly the type of man Madsen was. Men like Parker Madsen did not consider failure a possibility. Their egos were of such immensity, it was inconceivable that the outcome of any engagement would be anything but what they expected. Their arrogance put them in positions of power, but more often than not it also led to their demise. Sloane had met similar men in the military, and the nation had received a very public display of that arrogance in the White House. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton came immediately to mind.

Beyond that, Sloane felt something else: fear. There was something about the impending confrontation with Parker Madsen that made his legs go weak and his stomach churn. It had nothing to do with the thought of dying. It was something beyond that, something that told him Madsen was the predator that had stalked him, and that this would be the confrontation from which he had been running, and which he could no longer avoid. He and Madsen were like two lines running toward each other from a great distance, with their intersection at this very spot, the spot where Joe Branick had spent the final moments of his life.

After the initial checkpoint, Sloane was given a series of directions, likely designed to ensure that he was not being tailed, that ultimately ended on the flattop. That was twenty minutes ago. Madsen was now content to make him wait, to gain some psychological advantage while he observed Sloane from somewhere in the dark.

“Your training has served you well.”

Sloane had not heard a sound before the staccato voice disrupted the beauty of nature. He turned, panning the darkness left, right, and back to dead center. He saw no one. Then, slowly, his eyes made out the imprecise outline against the darkened tree trunks and shrubbery. Parker Madsen appeared from the underbrush like a Bengal tiger emerging from thick jungle. He stood at the edge of the clearing, perhaps fifteen feet away, dressed in jungle camouflage fatigues that seemed to float a foot off the ground, presumably where they had been tucked into black infantry-style boots. His face was a streaked mixture of light and dark greasepaint.

The bulb in Sloane’s mind flashed, followed by the percussive blast. He heard the heavy boots stampeding into the room, felt the vibrations running through his body. He fought to stay in the present; Tina’s survival depended on his staying in the present.

“You were a marine, were you not?”

Sloane opened his eyes. He had avoided falling into the black hole, but unlike in the past, this time he felt a compelling urgency to go there. “Why do you ask questions you already know the answers to, General?” He was counting on Madsen knowing much more than the branch of the military in which he had served. “I didn’t come here to discuss my past. Where is she?”

Madsen stepped forward, stopping at a point perhaps ten feet from Sloane. With the dark of night, it was not possible for Madsen to see much of anything, but the general seemed unconcerned whether Sloane was carrying a weapon—part of whatever mind game Madsen was intent on playing, like a gunfighter on the dusty streets of an Old West town, daring the other to make the first move. “You enlisted at seventeen without parental consent, yet did not lie about your age.”

“I got caught up in the commercials. You know: ‘the few, the proud’? Let’s cut the bullshit, General. Where is she? We had a deal.”

“You managed to talk your way past the marine recruiter. By the time your age was determined you had already obtained the highest score that year on the Marine Corps aptitude test, not surprising given your IQ. Your commanding officers elevated you to platoon leader, First Marine Division, Second Battalion, Echo Company. You earned citations for marksmanship, saw action in Grenada, received the Silver Star for gallantry, and took a Cuban bullet in the shoulder for reasons far more puzzling to me.”

Sloane knew that the reason he had given for taking off his flak jacket would intrigue a military man like Madsen, as would the reason postulated by the military psychiatrist they had required him to see. “I was young and stupid,” he said, still struggling to stay in the present. His mind and body felt as if someone had tied a weighted rope around him and dropped it down a hole. It tugged at him, urging him to descend to that place where he had found Joe Branick and Charles Jenkins, and the woman he now knew had been his mother. Unlike in the past, however, it was an urging fraught not with peril but with the instinct for self-preservation.

“You’re being modest, Mr. Sloane. But I am always curious when a soldier disregards his military training, and particularly so in this instance. You took off your flak jacket during a hostile engagement. Why would you do that?”

“I suspect you already know that answer as well, General.” Sloane braced his legs, feeling as though, if he did not, he would be dragged backward across the ground and into the depths. He could not go. He needed to get Tina. He could not let her die.

“I am aware of what you told the military doctor who examined you, as well as the conclusions he drew from it—the act being indicative of someone with suicidal tendencies. It certainly fits the profile: a man without family in search of a place, and frustrated because he has not been able to find it. Was that not how he put it?”

“You’d know better than I, General.”

“And yet you have evaded some of the finest-trained soldiers this country has ever produced. I know; I trained them.” Madsen sounded almost impressed. “Why would a man seemingly without a burning desire to live do that? What are you fighting so hard for, soldier?”

“I’m not a soldier, General, and I have no desire to be one again. I didn’t come here to engage in a philosophical exchange about the idiosyncrasies of men.”

“Then answer a more basic question: How is it that you knew Joe Branick? I will admit that I have found no possible connection between the two of you that would justify his sending you a package about which you could have no knowledge.”

“You should have asked him that question yourself before you had him killed.”

“Oh, I did, but he was equally recalcitrant.” Madsen sighed. “No matter. I assume we will get to the root of that problem imminently. You have the package?”

“Where is she?”

“If I am satisfied with its contents—”

“No. I’ll show you the package when you show me Tina. Then we discuss the details of an exchange. I don’t trust you any more than you trust me.”

Madsen smiled. “A hardened negotiator. Fair enough.”

Madsen stepped back, the darkness swallowing him. He emerged with one arm extended, his hand gripping Tina by the shoulder. Her mouth was taped shut, her hands bound in front, hair disheveled. Though it was difficult to see in the dark, she appeared to have sustained cuts and bruises on her face. At the sight of her, Sloane’s legs came out from under him and he dropped, no longer able to fight gravity or the heavy weight pulling him into the depths. He landed at the bottom of the hole and found himself beneath the bed, wedged against the wall, unable to move. His mother sat on the floor, and now it pained him even more to see her battered, bruised, and violated. The man stood over her, shouting the words Sloane had, until that moment, refused to hear.

“¿Dónde está el niño? ¿Dónde está el niño?”
(Where is the boy?)

They had come for him. Outside they were killing—killing everyone . . . because of him.

The words rang in his ears and struck a chord deep within him, a place as dark and desolate as the hole into which he had fallen. From beneath the bed he looked up at the face, a streaked reflection of light and dark—nondescript features concealed beneath the dark of night and the smear of greasepaint. The eyes, however, could not be concealed: white, shimmering pearls rimmed by red fires of hell, and in the center a black abyss of nothingness—the eyes of a predator intent on killing, and feeling no remorse for its act. Sloane saw them in his dreams, in the Oval Office, standing before him now. Unmistakable. Unforgettable.

Parker Madsen’s eyes.

He would kill Tina.

He sprang to the surface, the need to be there breaking whatever barrier had confined him to the past or trapped him in the present, free to go between both worlds now, able to remember without pain, able to see. It had been Madsen.

“
You
killed her.”

The eyes narrowed.

“You came that night. You came into the mountains, to the village. It was you and your men. You killed them. You killed them all.”

Madsen studied him in silence.

“You beat and raped her. You slit her throat. I saw you do it that morning. I saw the darkness come. It was you.”

“How could . . . ?” Madsen stopped, his voice a whisper of disbelief and devoid of bravado. He tilted his head and craned forward, as if intrigued but leery of what he might see. At that moment Parker Madsen’s past and present collided, just as Sloane’s had, and his mind solved his burning questions: why Sloane had no living relatives, why he seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, why Joe Branick would send him a package about events in which he could have had no involvement.

Because he
had
been involved.

Because he had been there.

Madsen laughed, but it was nervous, hesitant, and devoid of humor. “You’re the boy,” he said. “He saved you. Joe Branick saved you.”

“Joe Branick may have taken me out of that village, but he didn’t save me from what I saw that morning. I watched you do it. I watched you beat and rape her. I watched you hold her by her hair and slit her throat. I watched you kill my mother.”

He remembered it now vividly, clearly, as if a tarp had been lifted. He remembered lying beneath the bed in the stillness of early morning, the light of day breaking into the room and bringing with it the horror. He told himself it was not real, that it was just a dream, that when he opened his eyes it would all be gone. He remembered hearing the men come into the room and felt the terror that surged through him all over again. He remembered holding his breath, trying not to make a sound, until he could no longer do so, and it escaped in a whimpered cry. He remembered the rush of air, the pressure against his chest suddenly relieved, and the blanket that had concealed him being pulled away. Charles Jenkins and Joe Branick stood over him in stunned silence.

The handgun materialized in Madsen’s hand like a rabbit from a magician’s sleeve—the trained soldier returning to the task at hand, setting aside the unexpected turn of events. “The package, Mr. Sloane.”

Sloane unzipped the jacket he had taken from Tom Molia’s closet, bulky and too large for his frame, and removed the file he’d stuffed inside. “Let her go.”

Tina stood shaking her head, mumbling through the tape, eyes wide with fear.

“Throw it on the ground.”

Sloane tossed the file on the ground.

“Who says you never get second chances in life?” Madsen said.

Then the smile disappeared, and he pulled the trigger.

82

I
T WAS THE
cry of utter despair and anguish, of hope lost, and futures shattered. It exploded from Tina with such force that the tape tore from her cheek and flapped like a Band-Aid that had lost its grip.

“No!”

Her cry united with the explosion of the gun, a shimmering echo of violence that permeated the peace like a blast inside a metal drum, clattering and horrific. She watched as Sloane fell backward. Her legs collapsed as if broken from a fall from a great height, and she dropped to the ground, lifeless and languid, sobbing hysterically, unable and unwilling to move.

Then she felt Madsen’s hand grip her by the hair, and the pain at her scalp as he yanked her to her knees, pulling the combat knife from the sheath on his belt.

S
LOANE LAY ON
the ground, a throbbing pain radiating from his chest—a center-mass shot that left a gripping knot of agony pulsing through him. Thunder rang in his ears. Blood overpowered his taste buds. A burning fire consumed his being, leaving his limbs without life. He felt the cool dampness of dew and the sharp sting of the pebbles and rocks against the back of his head. Darkness unlike any he had ever experienced enveloped him. Had it not been for the ringing in his ears and the taste of bile in his mouth, he would have concluded that Madsen’s shot had blown away his head.

His eyes fluttered open and closed, fighting the desire to drift away. He turned his head, watching. The woman lay on the ground, sobbing hysterically, her body convulsing in agony and torment. Her executioner reached down and grabbed her by a tuft of hair, pulling her to a sitting position as he unsheathed the blade from his belt.

“Your dreams may not be dreams. They may be real.”

Tina.

Not a dream.

Real.

Madsen.

A
T THAT MOMENT
any remnant of the carefully crafted image of the politician disappeared, and the person within, the man who, during a military career of over thirty years, had become a hardened killer, escaped from whatever prison Madsen had locked him in. He burst free in a sardonic mask of evil and perverse enjoyment that came with the rush of absolute and unadulterated power. This was why General Parker Madsen had never left the fields of battle. This was why he never left the men he trained and led. This was why he never left Talon Force. It had nothing to do with loyalty to his soldiers or to duty and honor. It was a selfish, perverted fulfillment of his own desires. There was nothing that equaled the rush of war, the thrill of killing, having the power within one’s hands to give and take life. It was omnipotent, the closest thing he could imagine to being almighty. It was intoxicating. His addiction. His weakness.