Comes a Horseman Read online

  Am I going to make it? Really, am I going to get out of here alive?

  As he cruised slowly toward the exit—blocked by a wooden arm painted red and white and by metal teeth protruding from the pavement—he saw the guard glance up at him, then back at something lower than the window, most likely a book.

  Keep reading, he thought—no, he willed it, with all his concentration. That’s not the walkie-talkie you hear. Not an order to stop the perspiring man in the red Fiat.

  The guard didn’t look up again until Pip brought the car to a stop directly in front of him. The Fiat’s grille wasn’t four feet from the barrier arm and spikes. From the shack’s window, the guard grinned down at Pip.

  “Mr. Farago,” he said. But he didn’t punch whatever buttons were required to raise the barrier arm and lower the teeth. He just looked at Pip.

  Was this it? Had Luco already called the guard? Instead of issuing the simple order, “Kill him,” had he said, “Keep him from leaving. I’ll be right down”? No reason to handle Pip’s murder discreetly.

  Luco had instructed Arjan to recruit all his bodyguards and the building’s security guards from Palermo. They all knew Luco and Pip from the old days. Remove the two months of training they received at the Paladin Academy of Advanced Executive Protection in Munich—an elite facility Luco had charmed the Italian Foreign Service into springing for—and these men were mere thugs, mafioso with manners. They were loyal and trained to kill—could the Antichrist have better buddies?

  Pip looked over his shoulder, through the back window. He half-expected to see Luco standing there, washed red in the brake lights, shotgun pointed at Pip’s head. But there was no one. To the guard, he said, “Well?”

  “Your pass card?” he said, sounding as though he wanted to add, Idiot!

  Which is what Pip felt like. He was so used to already having his ID in hand when leaving, he’d completely forgotten it.

  He fished his ID out of his jacket pocket and handed it to the guard, who swiped it through a card reader inside the shack and handed it back. The barrier arm began swinging up. Pip assumed the metal teeth were also retracting. He felt his heart slow a bit and inch down out of his throat.

  But why would Luco let him go? Pip had seen the look in his eyes when it dawned on him that Pip could do him true harm. He had seen the fury, the mad hate. He’d seen it before, and it had always meant destruction to the person at whom it was leveled. Why not this time? Had Pip misread the situation? Misread Luco?

  Movement at the corner of his vision made him turn. The guard had raised a finger to his ear. A skin-colored cord snaked from it and disappeared under his collar. Pip stepped on the accelerator. The engine revved; the car went nowhere. He had dropped the manual shifter into neutral when he’d gone for his pass card. His eyes caught sight of the guard’s handgun rising from below the window and turning toward him. He shoved the shifter forward with his palm and popped the clutch.

  The gun roared in his ear. A searing pain flared around his skull. A tremendous force knocked his head to the right; his body followed. A spray of blood hit the windshield and streaked over the dash and center console as he went down.

  The car leaped forward. Pip kept his foot on the gas.

  The gun roared again, shattering the window behind the driver’s door. Glass rained down like diamonds on Pip and bounded off every surface. The majority of his brain frantically screamed at his body to do something, anything—lash out, hit, kick, pull, tug, run, flip, duck, leap, scrunch down, flail out, jump back . . .

  However, some small area of cognizance was casually processing the events around him. It told him that he should have heard the tinkling of all that glass flying and bouncing around him. It told him he could not hear it because the first gunshot had made him temporarily deaf in his left ear and largely deaf in his right. It told him that the bump the car had just bounded over was the lowered metal teeth. And when the front end dropped down, then suddenly leveled, it had gone past the sidewalk. Pip cranked the steering wheel sharply. Metal crunched, then screeched as the car pushed itself along the side of another vehicle.

  The back window shattered. A bullet hole appeared like magic in the windshield.

  He adjusted the wheel and the metal-on-metal scraping ended with a clang! The car sprang forward as though shot from a catapult, only to crash to a dead stop. Centrifugal force wrenched him against the stick shift, slamming his head into the glove box. The pain was so excruciating, consciousness flirted with leaving him. He held on to it, he had to. He pushed himself up, knowing he was groaning but hearing nothing but a sustained deep tone. The Fiat had plowed into a BMW parked at the curb. He shoved the shifter into reverse and looked back.

  The guard was out of his shack, standing on the parking garage exit ramp. Behind him, the barrier arm was lowering again. The guard held his pistol with two hands, pointing it at Pip through the shattered back window. Pip dropped down. He heard nothing, felt nothing, but when he popped up again a moment later, another hole had appeared in the windshield in front of him. Tires squealing, he backed away fast from the BMW, adjusted the wheel just so . . . and slammed into the guard. The man shot off the rear bumper, blasted through the barrier arm, and slammed into the guard shack. His body dropped limply to the ground.

  Deep in the shadows of the garage, muzzle flashes ignited like paparazzi cameras. Sparks sprang up from the trunk lid as a bullet nicked its surface. Two . . . three guards appeared out of the gloom, sprinting toward the Fiat.

  Pip found first gear and shot down the street, fishtailing, then straightening. Another bullet tore through the windshield, taking with it a chunk of glass the size of a loaf of bread. Pip ducked, but the movement lowered his head only millimeters; he was already driving hunched over. His face was almost touching the wheel. He realized he could see only out of his right eye. He imagined his left eye punctured and hanging out on his cheek like a dead jellyfish on a beach. If indeed his eye lay like that, he couldn’t do anything about it. His left arm rested limply in his lap, refusing to budge when his mind sent it orders.

  Three blocks and he turned, bounding up onto the sidewalk to navigate past cars waiting for the light. Pedestrians scattered.

  His pursuers would be in vehicles by now, not far behind. He tried to gauge how much of a lead he had, but his thought processes seemed as mangled as his car. He knew the guards would have had to retreat back into the garage for their Hummers, which were large vehicles and less maneuverable on these tight, crowded streets. A minute, maybe two, he guessed.

  Again he swerved onto the sidewalk and slammed on the brakes inches before a startled family. When they scrambled into a shop, he surged on, then veered onto the street again. The blast of a horn widened his eye. The grille of an SUV rushed at him. He was in the wrong lane. Jerking the wheel, the Fiat crumpled the front quarter panel of some other vehicle, whose horn sounded like an infant’s wail. Everything was dim, gray. Getting dimmer, grayer. He had to push on. They were close, close.

  When consciousness finally shook free and fled, Pip sagged right, cranking the wheel that way. Against the hardness of Jerusalem’s iron lampposts, the Fiat was no match.

  26

  Daniel Fears’s home was a brick trilevel. From the front porch, you could spit and hit one of the neighboring houses. A uniformed officer met them on the porch, cut the yellow crime scene tape on the door, and let them in. Since the Ft. Collins crime lab had already dusted, scraped, taken photographs, removed the body—in other words, done all the damage they could do, Brady thought—recording a CSD walk-through would be only for practice and the Bureau’s reference.

  Alicia decided to don the suit on a little patch of linoleum inside the front door to avoid drawing a crowd.

  “Need help?” Brady asked.

  “No thanks. One of those things you gotta do alone.”

  “I’m going to wander.”

  “Have fun.”

  Brady wrote the date, location, and vic’s name at the top of a
legal pad and began walking the perimeter of the living room. Formal furniture. No clutter. Obviously not used much. He made a few notes. A half-flight of stairs rose from the living room to a hallway with five doors. The first on the right opened into a bathroom. Brady examined the contents of the medicine cabinet and the cupboard under the sink. He noted a pewter cross hanging on a nail.

  The next door on the right was the master bedroom. He looked in the dresser drawers and the bed stand.

  He examined another bathroom and two bedrooms, one decorated for a little girl.

  Alicia was coming up the stairs as he was heading down. He didn’t speak, just slipped past her quickly. He didn’t like seeing himself on the walk-throughs.

  “Check out the painting in the den,” she said through the CSD’s tinny speaker.

  It was over a plaid sofa, which bore the bloodstains of Mr. Fears’s untidy end. Brady recognized the print immediately. He’d taken a college course in European art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and this artist was one of its stars. Hieronymus Bosch. This was a lithograph of the Haywain triptych, which depicted paradise, earth, and this one, from the right wing—hell. Dark and depressing, it showed the ruins of burning buildings and animalistic demons impaling, skinning, and groping naked humans. Why anyone would display it so prominently in his home was a puzzle to Brady. But it did create a common denominator between Fears and Loeb.

  On one wall of the den was a brick fireplace, flanked by bookshelves. He was still studying the spines when Alicia came up behind him. She was wearing the CSD, but she had turned off its lasers, lights, and doohickeys.

  She said, “You want to point out important things I may have missed?”

  “These books,” he said, his head craned down to his shoulder to read the titles.

  “Got ’em.”

  “Wall hangings, photographs, knickknacks.”

  “That’s the same speech you gave me in Palmer Lake.”

  “Nothing’s changed.”

  “Then I got everything. Find any linkages?”

  “Maybe. Get out of that thing and we’ll talk.”

  “You’re as bad as the locals.”

  Five minutes later, she returned sans the Robocop outfit.

  She said, “Did you notice that the painting is similar to the images Cynthia Loeb had painted on her trash cans?”

  “Hell.”

  “In all its fiery horror. And this guy has some crosses here and there. Nothing like Loeb’s bedroom, but do people tend to have a lot of religious symbols around the house? Is this normal?”

  “Karen kept a few. A cross-stitched Bible verse—‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ A few crosses. A painting of Jesus praying. One of George Washington praying at Valley Forge.”

  “So what stands out?”

  “The images of hell. By definition, they’re religious, but it’s not the sort of thing religious people dwell on.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. We have three other vics to check out, and we’re nowhere near them, so we’ll have to rely on the photos and reports.”

  “What are we waiting for? Let’s get back to the hotel.”

  27

  Luco Scaramuzzi’s security force came upon the wreckage from two directions. Their Hummers roared up to the crumpled, smoking Fiat and stopped within a foot of each rear corner. With the lamppost pushing into its engine compartment, there was no way the thing could pull a surprise maneuver and get away. The Hummer doors flew open, and men hopped out.

  From one of the Hummers emerged Arjan Vos. He was a man of average stature, five feet ten and thin. But the cords of muscles under his skin bulged and flexed like cables. He appeared densely packed, ready to spring. Even in his face, muscles rippled, carving angular features both hawkish and leonine. Unlike the blue uniform of his underlings, he wore the tan fatigues of a desert soldier. A tan beret covered the top of his bald head; where berets made weak men seem weaker, they made strong ones like Arjan more menacing, as though the beret were a cap on a bottle of destruction.

  Arjan surveyed the area. Only curious stares. No police sirens yet, but that would change soon. In the few seconds he’d spent assessing the surroundings, his men had encircled the Fiat. Arms ending with pistols radiated inward from the circle of men. Arjan drew a Desert Eagle .357 magnum from its holster and strode up to the Fiat’s closed driver’s door.

  The car was empty. Lots of blood, no body.

  His head snapped up. The onlookers gaped with innocent expressions. Windows and doorways were impenetrably dark in the gloom of early evening. Squinting at the ground, Arjan saw no blood trails, no drops, no sign whatsoever of Pip’s escape. He raised his voice to address the crowd.

  “Who has seen the man from this car? He is hurt. We are here to help.”

  A boy of about six watched stone-faced from a nearby curb.

  Even he knows we are not here to help, Arjan thought. Still, by making the claim, anyone who ratted out the wounded man could pretend to have believed in the soldiers’ benevolence.

  “Boy?” Arjan addressed the child. “Where has this man gone?”

  The child didn’t say a word. A woman came from the shadows of an arched alleyway, grabbed the boy by the shoulders, and hustled him away.

  In the fashion of the finest town crier, Arjan turned in a slow circle as he called, “Italy offers a reward for this man. He is dangerous. He will hurt you. Take your reward and free yourself of his burden.”

  One old man turned and shuffled away. A young woman did the same. Soon the crowd had dispersed, uninterested in Arjan’s offers. They knew who he was. They had heard stories of—or had had firsthand experience with—the strong-arm tactics employed by the Italian Embassy to keep the streets around its compound free of enemies and riffraff. He wanted to seize a few of them, take them back to his chambers, and discover what they knew of Pippino Farago. He considered conducting a quick house-by-house, store-by-store search, but that would be severely overstepping his authority, and the Jerusalem police would arrive soon. The telltale warble of their sirens had just now reached his ears. He could enlist their assistance in finding Pip, but once he was found, Jerusalem might hold him while jurisdiction was sorted out, and who knew what tales he would tell? Better to handle this in-house.

  “Let’s roll,” he barked to his men. Pistols found their holsters, doors slammed.

  When the first Jerusalem police car arrived, no evidence remained of anyone’s particular interest in this traffic mishap. The only curiosity was the disappearance of the car’s driver.

  28

  Cañon City, Colorado

  Over the jump!” Trevor Wilson yelled to his buddy Josiah, pedaling behind him. Even ten feet ahead, Trevor could hear his friend huffing for breath. He didn’t feel superior because he was fitter, and he didn’t give Josiah a hard time for being fat. He only wished his friend could keep up better so he didn’t have to wait for him when they were hiking the rough terrain out past the new construction. Worse was not going on certain adventures at all—like crossing Temple Canyon River into the BLM lands beyond—because Josiah would have died trying.

  Where the curb yielded to a driveway, Trevor swerved off the street onto the sidewalk and aimed his bike at a plywood skateboard jump some teenagers had set up. He heard Josiah’s bike rattle as it jolted onto the sidewalk behind him. He’s doing too good a job keeping up, Trevor thought. If Trevor wiped out on the jump, Josiah would plow into him for sure. He pumped his legs harder, wanting to hit the ramp fast and as far ahead of Josiah as possible. Crashing would be bad enough—Mom had warned him about not ruining another Boy Scout uniform—but Josiah and his bike landing on top of him was a nightmare he didn’t want to think about.

  Ten feet to the ramp. Five. Trevor held his breath and pulled up on the handlebars just as the front tire made contact. A hollow rumble, then silence—he was flying. He looked straight down to see the concrete a good four feet below his sneaker
s. He hoped the older kids who’d built the ramp were watching from somewhere. Catching air like this might score him some points. Then he remembered his helmet and prayed the teens were nowhere near. Helmets were definitely uncool. Shifting his gaze to the point of impact, he braced himself and tried to keep the front wheel from wobbling. He hit and experienced a moment of panic as his bike wanted to bounce and tumble out from under him, but he held on and kept it under control. Immediately he veered into a yard and slid sideways to a stop.

  He looked back in time to see Josiah take the ramp hard, not lifting on the handlebars to help the bike over. He was leaning forward instead of back as he took flight. And he should have been moving faster. The front wheel plummeted down against the sidewalk, suddenly becoming much slower than the rear of the bike, which careened upward, sending Josiah over the handlebars. The boy’s death grip kept him from sailing ahead of his bicycle. Instead, for a few amazing seconds, fat Josiah Millard performed a handstand on the handlebars, as graceful and balanced as a circus bear. Then he came down—fortunately onto the seat and not in the other direction. But the acrobatics and the force of their conclusion proved too much for Josiah and his bike: the two shook violently and went their separate ways. Josiah landed on the sidewalk, skidded, rolled, tumbled, and came up standing, just to repeat the skid-roll-tumble once more before halting in a heap.

  Trevor leaped from his bike.

  “Dude! That was awesome!”

  Josiah moaned.

  “Are you all right?” Trevor leaned over, appraising his friend’s face. His eyes were open; that was a good sign. A square of skin was scraped off one cheek. He was holding his elbow.

  “Lemme see,” Trevor said.

  Josiah’s hand came away bloody. A gouged-out hole the size of a pebble oozed goopy crimson.

  Trevor scrutinized the wound from several angles and declared, “You’ll be fine.”