Comes a Horseman Read online

  The man snapped and growled at the hand it could neither see nor reach.

  “What in the name of—,” Brady started.

  Alicia touched his arm and urged him closer to the thing in the chair. “This is the man who attacked me. He won’t tell us his name; I call him Hyena.”

  Hyena opened his mouth to growl or hiss, but before he could utter a sound, Apollo seized a handful of hair and yanked his head back sharply. He leaned low and said, “Do you want me to tape your mouth again?”

  Hyena’s eyes flicked left, right, left, as if trying to comprehend the source of the voice. Then he spasmed, and Brady realized he was shaking his head no.

  “Then shut up.” Apollo released him and gently patted the top of his head: Good boy.

  Brady turned away. On one side of the expansive room were two double beds. A nightstand stood between them, cluttered with a clock radio and a smattering of Alicia’s things. Above it was a wall-mounted lamp with two lights, each on its own articulated arm. One of these lights was on, barely radiating through its small shade. Evidently it was designed for reading in bed. Between the second bed and the wall farthest from the door, a floor lamp beside the desk glowed brightly. The other side of the room, behind Apollo, contained a compact sitting arrangement: love seat, chair, coffee table. Shadows reigned in his half of the room. On the love seat, Brady could see several open Halliburton cases, the expensive, brushed-aluminum kind. Scattered about were wires and bandages and various medical instruments. He wondered if it was Apollo’s preference to work in the dark.

  The entire wall opposite the door was glass, from just above a room-length climate control unit to the ceiling. Heavy drapes were bunched in the corners like columns. A billion lights twinkled and flashed far below. The way the lights radiated out and eventually dissipated in the distance made Brady think of a phosphorous atomic bomb; and here he was hovering over ground zero.

  He faced Alicia and saw that what he had mistaken for a washcloth on Alicia’s forearm was a thick padding of gauze taped there. Blood oozed through. She was touching it gingerly. She noticed his scrutiny and pulled back a section near her wrist. Her skin had been ripped in two long furrows about three inches apart. The gashes disappeared beneath the gauze, which extended nearly to her elbow. The edges of skin were red and inflamed. Between the crusty lines, deep bruising marbled the flesh. Black stitches closed the wound at half-inch intervals. Brady could not imagine the cause of such a hideous wound.

  Alicia pushed the gauze back into place. Nodding toward Hyena, she said, “He tried to garrote me. Caught my arm instead.”

  It hit him how awful it would be to lose her, not because she was a fellow agent or his partner, but because she was . . . Alicia. He didn’t know what other word to use. Beneath her gruffness, her unapologetic ambition, her elastic ethics—maybe because of these things, he didn’t know—she was a better human being than 90 percent of the people he’d ever met or even heard about. She was irreplaceable.

  He touched his fingers to her throat, as if to make sure it had suffered no damage. The gesture was unexpectedly sensual. A single butterfly flitted in his stomach. If he raised his eyes to hers, he knew it would validate the touch as more than a caring comrade’s inspection. This feeling for her was so unanticipated, he was not sure he wanted to take it any further. He saw something and bent around to look. Toward the back of her neck was a scabbed-over string-thin line, no more than an inch long. The garrote had reached her neck; it had been that close.

  He spun around and smashed his fist into Hyena’s jaw.

  “Whoa, whoa, man,” Apollo said, holding up his hand.

  Brady rubbed his knuckles and stared into Hyena’s emotionless eyes. He fought the urge to punch him again. Hyena flexed his jaw back and forth but made no other indication that the blow bothered him. Brady felt Alicia’s hand press against his back. He shifted his gaze to Apollo’s impassive expression, then down to see what the black man was doing. Three intravenous bags hung from a stainless-steel stand. From the bottom of two of the bags, tubes ran to needles that had been inserted into the crook of Hyena’s arm. As he watched, Apollo followed the tube from the third bag to its terminating needle. He leaned around and deftly plunged it into a vein in Hyena’s other arm.

  Hyena squinted at the needle and appeared to smile.

  Brady looked at Alicia, at Apollo, back to Alicia. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Apollo’s a medical doctor,” Alicia said. “Used to work exclusively for the government as an interrogation specialist.”

  Brady said, “Interro—”

  She cut him off. “He went freelance, what, three years ago?”

  Apollo nodded and looked up at Brady. He said, “I am assisting you because of what this fellow did to my Alicia.”

  It was the kind of line that usually came with a grin. Not this time. Apollo delivered it stone-faced (if that could be said of someone with jowls as fleshy as Apollo’s). His diction was perfect, as though he had studied English as a second language and had worked hard to get it right.

  “Wait a minute,” Brady said. He looked squarely at Alicia and pointed at Apollo. “How do you know this guy?”

  Alicia sat on the bed directly in front of Hyena. “We met a few years ago when the Bureau was tracking down terrorist leads in New York. This was right after 9/11. I was field-testing new surveillance gadgets, but with the pressure the Bureau was under at the time to make some big arrests, my involvement became more operative.”

  He remembered the panicky atmosphere at Quantico, where he was part of a team attempting to develop a profile of the typical terrorist. It was an impossible task. Still, no one let up. He and other members of the team interviewed convicted terrorists at maximum security prisons. A few unmarried volunteers took off for Afghanistan to interview the terrorist hunters there. In addition, they cataloged everything there was to know about every suspected or convicted anarchist for the past five decades: from gender to favorite color . . . no aspect of their lives was left unexamined. Patterns, always looking for patterns. In every division, agents and administrative employees burned with high-octane energy for months. A lot of protocol went out the window, replaced by a singular mandate: to get results in the form of arrests.

  Alicia continued. “Everyone believed more terrorist strikes were imminent. We needed intelligence—immediate and actionable intelligence.”

  He nodded.

  “Nowadays, interrogators threaten and negotiate to get the information they need, even if the life of a kidnapped child hangs in the balance. Most times, perps realize anything they say puts them closer to a jail cell, so they clam up. Investigators are left with no choice but to hit the streets, praying for that one clue that will break the case. You know all this.”

  “So tell me something I don’t.”

  She smiled, then absently touched her wounded arm and winced. “Before World War II, we—the U.S. government, law enforcement, whoever—were more open-minded about doing what it took to get information from suspects, especially when lives were at stake. Physical torture wasn’t uncommon. Most police agencies kept red pepper on hand to rub into suspects’ eyes during interrogations. Pliers, blowtorches—”

  Brady held up his hand to stop her. He looked nervously at Apollo, who was now fiddling with a thick rope of what Brady recognized as wires for either an ECG for monitoring heart stress or an EEG for monitoring brain waves. “You’re not thinking of—”

  “Brady, let me finish. After the Nazis showed the world how grotesquely far torture could go, most governments backed away from using it. There were already laws against it on the books, but after the war they passed the word through cloak-and-dagger agencies: ‘We mean it this time—no torture.’ No big deal, really, because a new method for extracting information had been gaining favor anyway.”

  Brady saw what the man who didn’t look like any “medical doctor” he knew was now doing and understood. “Truth serum,” he said.

  Apollo l
aughed but did not turn away from the syringe he had pushed into one of the IV bags. Inside the clear plastic bag, red liquid dripped from the syringe into clear fluid—probably saline solution, Brady guessed. The bag’s contents turned darker and darker pink with each drop.

  “You can call it that,” Alicia said. “In reality, there’s no such thing. It’s not serum, never has been. And the term makes it sound easy: give a shot, get the truth. It’s much more complicated than that.”

  Watching Apollo, he had figured out that much.

  “The trick,” Apollo said, continuing his preparations, “is to break down inhibitions, primarily the inhibition of divulging secrets. The best way to do that is to bring the subject right to the line between consciousness and unconsciousness. We call it the twilight zone. It’s like being groggy and drunk. Defenses are down, mind and body relax.”

  He peeled off the backing of an electrode, realized he was not ready to position it on Hyena, and held it out for Brady to hold. He grabbed the collar of Hyena’s T-shirt with both hands and ripped it down the center. Hyena snapped at him. The skin beneath was hairless and nearly translucent, revealing a network of blue veins.

  “What’s this now?” Apollo said. He held open one of the flaps of the T-shirt. Above the left nipple was a brown inverted pentangle, the five-pointed star often associated with the occult. It was the size of a fist.

  Alicia rose from the bed, squinting at the mark. “Is that a tattoo?”

  Apollo ran a finger over it. “This was burned into the skin. It’s a brand.”

  “Take his shirt off,” Brady said, excited. “All of it.”

  Apollo ripped away the arms, then tugged the material off the emaciated body. Alicia pulled the floor lamp closer, pointing it like a wizard’s staff. Shadows leaped up on the walls behind Hyena and Apollo and danced to the rhythm of Alicia’s unsteady hand.

  Hyena’s torso was covered in symbols: a crescent moon and star, a swastika, the double lightning bolts used by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany, the Star of David in a circle, a cross with a fishhook on the bottom—Brady thought this was an upside-down question mark with a crossbar. It had something to do with the questioning of God’s deity. Satanism and occultism were popular topics among criminal psychology students.

  “Not here,” Alicia whispered.

  “What’s not?” Apollo asked.

  “Are there any more?” Brady asked.

  “Here.” Apollo pointed at Hyena’s back.

  The light didn’t reach that far. Alicia yanked the cord out of its socket. The room dimmed to a murky glow from the underpowered lamp between the beds.

  Brady was leaning in close. He said, “I think . . .”

  She found a new outlet and plugged in the lamp. Light washed over Hyena’s back.

  There, burnt into the skin over his left shoulder blade, was a sun with curving flames and filled with vertical lines: the same symbol burned into the foreheads and palms of every Pelletier victim. This one was many times larger.

  There were other symbols on Hyena’s back. On the right shoulder blade was the letter A in a circle. Brady recognized it as Anarchy. It symbolized a saying in Latin that translated to “Do what thou wilt”—the law of Satanists. Lower on the spine were a Udjat, or “Eye of Satan,” and three sixes marching in a circle, their upper stems pointing inward.

  Brady’s eyes couldn’t stray from the sun for more than a few seconds.

  “Brady?” Alicia said.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “What’s it?” Apollo asked.

  “That sun,” Alicia answered. “Very uncommon. Not cataloged in any of our databases.”

  “But you’ve seen it before?”

  Alicia nodded. “On some dead bodies.”

  Hyena suddenly threw his head back, then forward with so much force the chair rocked. He was grunting and jerking back and forth, left and right, putting everything he had into breaking his bonds. The chair legs pounded against the carpeted floor, thumping like an erratic heartbeat.

  Brady stepped back, then stepped forward again—he had to do something before the man broke free, shattered the chair, or caused enough noise to draw attention. Before he could decide on an angle of attack, Apollo turned a thumbscrew under one of the IV bags. Clobbering him over the head could not have rendered him unconscious any faster. He was a tsunami of fury one second and nothing the next.

  “Fast acting,” Apollo said with a smile, the first Brady had seen.

  48

  Alicia once thought Apollo had assumed the moniker because of The Iliad’s portrayal of the son of Zeus as a healer, as the creator and reliever of plagues. One of her colleagues had disagreed. “It’s because the mythological Apollo was all-seeing, all-knowing,” he’d said. “And with that tool kit of chemicals of his, believe me, this Apollo can see everything people don’t want him to.”

  When she asked him, Apollo simply grinned, the folds of his face pushing out like a bulldog’s with a mouthful of kibbles, and said it was because the Greek god was so pretty.

  She watched him now, his bulldog face tight with concentration as he readied his equipment.

  Hyena was out cold. His head hung limply, chin to chest. A gossamer thread of saliva trailed from his lip to his thigh. His white skin, branded with symbols of hate, stretched over discernible ribs.

  Apollo clipped a wire to one of nine electrode patches he’d stuck to various parts of the Satanist’s torso. He was reaching for another wire when Hyena groaned and bobbed his head. For the hundredth time in ten minutes, Apollo sent him back into the immunity of sleep with a quick turn of the knob on an IV bag. Apparently, the drug wore off nearly as quickly as it worked.

  Alicia had already photographed the symbols with a digital camera. Brady had moved the lamp back to its original position, which illuminated Hyena from the front. Now he stood a few feet from her, his hands crossed over his chest, glaring at the unconscious attacker. Brady’s reaction to her attack had surprised and delighted her. She wondered if he would have gotten so worked up if Hyena had attacked a male partner. Certainly, he would not have touched a male partner the way he had touched her throat. His fingers had been charged with electricity.

  He turned toward her and she looked away, instinctively masking the movement by smoothing her eyebrow.

  He stepped closer. “This room, is it in your name?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “The other one is, 522. Not this one. I think this entire floor is unoccupied.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  The current generation of electronic door locks were notoriously difficult to pick.

  She nodded toward Hyena. “Same way he got into my room.” She walked around the first bed, reached under a blazer, and withdrew a small object. She came back and handed it to him. It was an electronic gadget the size of a pack of cigarettes. A thin plastic card protruded from the top.

  Brady flipped a small button, and a liquid crystal readout lit up.

  “Takes about five seconds,” she informed him.

  He cocked his head skeptically at the attacker. “He had this?”

  “Looks like a homeless junkie, doesn’t he?”

  Brady turned the device over in his hands. No markings of any kind, and it was free of dirt, smudges, foreign matter. “Someone supplied it to him.”

  “Someone’s giving him orders.”

  “There,” Apollo said, standing. “Ready when you are.”

  Brady clicked off the device and tossed it onto the bed.

  “What’s going to happen here?” he asked.

  “I’ll let this creature rise into consciousness, but just barely,” Apollo explained. “I’ll hold him in the twilight zone with this.” He pointed to the IV he’d been using to keep Hyena under. “Barbiturates. My own recipe.” His eyes flashed. “Sodium amobarbital, pentothal sodium, and seconal. Small doses, smaller than the ones I’ve given him so far. In the twilight zone, the mind can’t think fast enough to fabricate a lie. She doesn�
�t even realize that lying is what she should do.”

  “She?”

  Apollo looked surprised. “The mind.” He moved his open hand in an arc several inches over Hyena’s head. “It is beautiful, simple and complicated, spiteful and forgiving, truthful and deceitful. Female, definitely.” The folds of his jowls rose into a broad grin.

  He continued: “Holding someone in that state of near-unconsciousness is tricky. Too much sedative and they go under. Too little and they are aware enough to avoid the truth. And everyone is different. Some require lots of truth juice, others only a little. Some respond quickly, others not at all. Some get happy, others sad.” He thought for a moment. “Or agitated, as though the subconscious knows the conscious is saying things she shouldn’t.”

  Brady indicated the other IV bags. “Barbiturates in one. What are these other two?”

  Apollo touched one. “Scopolamine, mostly. The original ‘truth serum.’ I’ve found a squirt of this helps if my recipe doesn’t take the subject all the way. A psychotropic drug. It can cause hallucinations and extreme panic. That’s why it was abandoned. I’ve added other hallucinogens, very fast-acting ones, like the barbiturates. Confusion helps break down defenses.”

  He touched the third bag.

  “Stimulants. Benzedrine and Methadrine. The barbiturates relax the mind’s inhibitions. The stimulants get her talking. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.” He used his hand to mimic a talking mouth. “No good having a mind willing to spill the beans if she is too groggy to talk.”

  Simultaneous narcotics and stimulants. Alicia wondered how many of Apollo’s subjects suffered coronaries or strokes. She hoped the EKG machine helped Apollo prevent such incidents.

  Hyena began to groan again.

  “Ready?” Apollo asked.

  Brady looked at her, concern etching his face like age lines.

  She nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  49

  The EKG was on a coffee table near Apollo. He flicked a switch, and the machine’s pens began recording Hyena’s heart rhythms. The sound was like fingernails moving back and forth on a desktop. Apollo crouched behind the attacker’s chair, his head barely visible.