The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (2 page)

“How much do you know?” she asked him now, turning away from those dagger-sharp eyes to stare at the counter. Those eyes belied the full, almost soft look of the rest of his face. Dark brown wavy hair long enough to cover the top folds of his ears framed that face. It surprised Talley that he didn’t wear it shorter.

“I know there’s not an eye in this diner that hasn’t been locked on you since you walked in. I know you’ve made a lot of truckers’ mornings. You should have warned me.”

A waitress came and the two of them leaned back to allow the woman to set Talley’s breakfast on the table before her. Scrambled eggs and three strips of bacon battled each other for space. The toast came on a separate plate. The waitress refilled Kimberlain’s coffee cup.

“Bring me a cheese danish, too, will you?” Talley asked her.

The waitress seemed surprised as she jotted it down on her pad. Kimberlain smiled.

“They keep Special K behind the counter for the few women who come in here,” he said by way of explanation.

Talley slid the first forkful of eggs into her mouth. “I eat when I’m nervous.”

“Do I make you nervous?”

“The fact that you might say no does.”

Lauren Talley shook the hair from her face. Though a year past thirty, she could have still passed for a college student. That fact had proved a hindrance as much as a help at Quantico. People didn’t take her seriously. Many still thought she was a secretary, unable to picture her hard at it on the trail of some vicious serial killer preying on America’s heartland. She had thought about cutting her hair, adding glasses maybe, anything to make her look older and more serious. But she had dismissed it as a bad idea. None of these cosmetic changes would help her discover what role she was expected to play. She was making it up as she went along.

“How much do you know?” she repeated.

“What’s been in the papers, on the news. Small towns. Two of them.”

“He killed the entire population of both. Six days apart: 108 in the first, 115 in the second. The second was two nights ago. I’ve got the files in the car. They don’t say anything more substantial because we haven’t got a single lead.”

“Not exactly. There’s the thing about one of his feet not being whole.”

Lauren Talley nodded. “We could tell from his boot imprint that his left foot was malformed. We’re still trying to figure out if it was congenital or caused by an accident. Press got ahold of it.”

“And thus his nickname …”

“Tiny Tim,” Lauren Talley said. “I told my superiors I could get you to help. I don’t plan on leaving here empty-handed.”

“In that case you could take your cheese danish to go.”

“He’s going to do it again, you know.”

“Unless you catch him.”

“We won’t be able to. He’s too good for us.”

“Maybe too good for me.”

“The others weren’t. Not Leeds. Not … Peet.” Talley gave up on her eggs and leaned forward. “I want to try something out on you. Peet escaped from The Locks three years ago and was reported drowned. What if he made it to shore? What if he lived?”

“To be reborn as Tiny Tim?”

“It’s possible.”

“Not unless the victims all had their heads torn off their shoulders.”

“What I mean is—”

“Listen, Ms. Talley. Peet killed individuals: seventeen in seventeen different states. He killed them up close and personal. Tiny Tim is a wholesale slaughterer.”

“You sound like you’re defending Peet.”

“Just clarifying things. And I’m done hunting monsters, Ms. Talley. I leave it to the professionals now. I’ve got better things to do.”

“Your file was rather specific on that count. A number of incidents I believe you call ‘paybacks.’”

“
Alleged
incidents. Otherwise, I’d imagine someone else at Quantico would be investigating me.”

“You have powerful friends, Mr. Kimberlain.”

“Well earned over the years I assure you, Ms. Talley.”

Kimberlain fidgeted, drained the rest of his coffee, and slapped his cup back into its saucer. Talley knew she was losing him.

“Just let me tell you about the towns. Hear what I’ve got to say while I finish my breakfast.”

“Go ahead.”

“Daisy, Georgia was his most recent stop. Population 115. Dixon Springs, Montana, population 108, was his first.”

“What’d they have in common besides size?”

“Isolation and nothing else. Dixon Springs is a seasonal ski resort. Not many stick it out for the summer. Daisy has lots of small farms.”

“Population makeup?”

“Daisy was almost all black. Dixon Springs was a hundred percent white.”

“Survivors?”

“A few kids out camping in the woods. Infants.”

Kimberlain’s eyebrows fluttered. “He let the infants live?”

“Only the ones he didn’t find.”

Kimberlain cleared his throat. “Weapons?”

“Pretty much what the papers said. Bare hands, knife, silenced pistol and machine gun, poison gas in Dixon Springs but not Daisy.”

“Indicating …”

“Military background almost surely. Also availability. He uses stuff he can get his hands on. That should narrow the field down considerably.”

“Except you’ve run your checks on men with military backgrounds, looking for one with a deformed foot perhaps as a result of service, and those checks haven’t yielded anything.”

“The injury could have come postservice.”

“You could send a memo to every hospital in the country. Ask them to check their records.”

“We have. We are.”

The cheese danish came, and Talley lifted it to her mouth but didn’t bite. “You were in the army, weren’t you?”

“What does my file say?”

“It doesn’t, not specifically anyway.”

“And your point is …”

“That some people with military backgrounds don’t have files.”

“Like me, for instance.”

“I thought you might have a few ideas on possibles.”

“Drawn from my nonexistent years of military service, you mean.”

“Yes,” Talley said. “Exactly.”

“I didn’t serve with Peet, Ms. Talley.”

“Anyone else come to mind?”

“I worked alone. Always.”

“Like Tiny Tim. He doesn’t leave any prints, blood, saliva, not even any sweat, Mr. Kimberlain. We’ve got no physical evidence, besides size fifteen boots, to pin on anyone even if we do get lucky.”

“Running into a guy this size won’t exactly qualify you as lucky.”

Talley hesitated and leaned back. The rest of her eggs had gotten cold and she seemed to have lost interest in her danish.

“Like you running into Peet in Kansas.”

“That’s wasn’t lucky, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

“You quit after that.”

“I stopped hunting the sick sons of bitches who fester in America’s underbelly. I didn’t quit.”

“You got Leeds.”

“Somebody had to.”

“Somebody has to get Tiny Tim.”

Kimberlain’s blue eyes caught fire. “It’s not going to be me. You’re wasting your time.”

“I brought the files. They’re in the car. I was hoping you could look them over, tell us what we’re doing wrong.”

“Not praying enough maybe. Might be the only thing that stops Tiny Tim.”

“If the two towns have nothing in common, how did he choose them?”

“They have something in common, Ms. Talley. There’s always something. The trick is finding it and figuring out the pattern so you can break into it.”

“That’s how you caught Leeds. And Peet. I think it’s him we’re after. I think he’s Tiny Tim.”

“Peet’s dead.”

“No body was ever found.”

“The search didn’t extend to Newfoundland. That’s where the body probably ended up.”

“There are tens of thousands of other towns that fit Tiny Tim’s pattern. We can’t watch them all, and no matter what steps they take, they won’t be able to stop Tiny Tim.”

“So you’ll have to stop him.”

Talley stopped her danish halfway to her mouth again. “Tell me how.”

“Try licking the icing off first,” Kimberlain said, as he stood up and slid out of the booth.

“You haven’t finished your coffee.”

“Caffeine spoils my day.”

“I think we can ruin it anyway. Take a look at this memo that crossed my desk yesterday,” Talley said, pulling a neatly folded set of pages from her handbag and handing it up to him. “We’re not planning to release it to the press.”

Kimberlain unfolded the memo. His eyes turned to stone as the first line jumped out at him:

The escape of eighty-four prisoners, including Andrew Harrison Leeds, from the maximum security wing of Graylock’s Sanitarium is being termed …

“When?” he asked.

“Night before last.”

Kimberlain read a little more and then looked down at Lauren Talley. “Tiny Tim’s the least of your worries now.”

“And what about your worries? Leeds was yours.”

“All I did was catch him.”

“That makes him yours. Now that he’s out you’ll have to catch him again.”

Kimberlain didn’t bother denying it. “I’ll need access to The Locks.”

“For a price.”

“Tiny Tim?”

Lauren Talley nodded. Kimberlain retook his seat.

“Your eggs are getting cold, Ms. Talley. Finish them so we can talk.”

Chapter 3

THE MACHINE GUN ACCEPTED
the weight of the ammo belt grudgingly, the extra bulk of it nearly tipping the pedestal over. Hedda steadied the assembly and eased it closer to the missing window. She gazed down across the street at the former holy residence in the Moslem quarter of Beirut near the Hippodrome, just five blocks from the location of the U.S. marine barracks that had been destroyed by a terrorist bombing in 1982. Her binoculars dangled from her neck, but she did not lift them; her mind worked better when she absorbed the scene this way.

None of the Palestinian guards on duty inside and beyond the fence gave this apartment building a single glance. By all accounts it had been bombed out twice in the civil war, and even the city’s many homeless were smart enough to avoid it. Still, the terrorists should have been less lax in their duty. She supposed overconfidence was to blame. They had not lost a single western hostage to the kind of operation she was about to execute.

But this was the first time they had dealt with The Caretakers.

Hedda had learned from her control, Librarian, that the son of a high ranking American in Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil conglomerate had been kidnapped by a Palestinian group calling for the complete withdrawal of American capitalist influence from the region. No ransom demands for the boy or opportunity for negotiation. He was just a symbol, kept alive only to furnish videotapes and perhaps a severed ear or finger if things took a turn for the worse. The boy’s father had managed to reach the proper parties and proved both willing and able to meet the nonnegotiable fee. The rest had fallen into place swiftly.

Hedda did not know how The Caretakers had uncovered the boy’s whereabouts, nor did she care. Her job was to get him out and reach the rendezvous point. Her job alone. Caretakers never worked in groups and only occasionally in pairs. Twice she had been coupled with Deerslayer; in their last teaming, he had lost an eye. Only fast intervention by Hedda had saved his life, and she had heard that he became even more deadly after donning the black eye patch.

Hedda checked her watch. She had seen the boy escorted outside to play in the sun the last two days at precisely the same time. His captors had tried to get him to kick around a soccer ball, but he resisted, moping and avoiding them.

The boy had still been dressed in his school uniform, the white shirt grimy and one of the legs of his gray flannel pants torn through at the knee. Hedda had raised the binoculars then and focused on the boy while he sat alone on a bench within the once well-sculptured courtyard of the holy residence. Tear stains ran down both his cheeks. His upper lip was swollen and showed traces of a scab. His long hair hung wild and uncombed.

Hedda pulled a snapshot of the boy from her pocket. Crinkled now and poorly focused to begin with, it pictured him smiling in the same school uniform.

Christopher Hanley, age twelve …

Hedda’s mind returned to the scene in the courtyard from the previous two days. The terrorist pair trying to interest him in a game of soccer, the ball kicked the boy’s way and left there. That scene was about to be repeated, and this time she would make use of it.

Hedda pulled what looked like a transistor radio from her duffel bag and began the task of affixing it to the machine gun.

Fifteen minutes later she was hidden among the remains of three burned-out cars on a side street bordering the compound. She checked her watch.

4:20.

According to routine, the boy would be emerging with his captors in the next twenty minutes. It was time to move.

There were only two perimeter guards on the outside of the six-foot-high stone wall to complement those within the courtyard. All of them wore standard PLO khaki uniforms and baggy Arab headpieces that draped down over their shoulders as well. She had viewed their motions closely enough to see the yawns and disinterest. Eliminating one to allow access would not be a problem; the only issue was timing.

Hedda tucked the headpiece over her head and readied herself to move. The duffel bag she had brought with her contained a uniform that matched those of the Palestinian guards. She was big for a woman at just over five-foot-ten, so a glaring discrepancy in size would not be a problem in the plan she was about to enact.

4:30.

The holy residence stood as a virtual oasis in the midst of a desert of destruction. This part of Beirut was mostly abandoned, except for a few homeless and beggars who came to these dead streets to avoid the shooting war. Hedda had decided while observing the residence from the apartment building to launch her strike from the holy residence’s right flank. The guard who stood between her and entry had a beard, so her final action before leaving the apartment building had been to affix a false beard to her face.

Hedda slid as close to him as she dared and crouched behind an ancient stack of garbage cans rank with flies and maggots. A Palestinian spotter watched over the street from the circular dome that topped out the holy residence, but the sun was in his eyes from the west now, which accounted for her choice of the right flank.