Comes a Horseman Read online

  “Not necessarily. If the Excubitor is still their benefactor, maybe all we have to do is find it.”

  “An organization, probably older than seven hundred years?” Brady said. “No problem.” He paused. “Excubitor . . . did you search the Net for that too?”

  “I did. No hits, except for Lanius excubitor. It’s a bird. Oh, and I found out excubitor is a Latin word.”

  “For . . . ?”

  “Watchmen or watchers.”

  Brady nodded absently and strolled into the bathroom, still trying to get his mind around all she had laid on him.

  WHEN HE came out, Alicia was cursing at her computer.

  “Uhhh!” she said loudly and slammed her laptop shut.

  “What?” Brady asked.

  “We’ve been locked out of the system, out of the National Crime Information Center.”

  “What? Try my password—”

  “I already did.” She waved off his baffled expression. “I’ve had your password since the day we started working together.”

  “Of course. Who would’ve . . . ?” He sat on the edge of his bed. “They’ve connected us to Malik’s and Apollo’s deaths already.”

  She shook her head no. “Last night, after you’d been attacked, I asked you a question.”

  “Who knew where to find me.”

  She nodded. “The same person who knew I went to New York to pursue the Father McAfee lead.”

  “Gilbreath,” Brady said.

  John Gilbreath, head of the Bureau’s laboratory and training divisions. The Evidence Response Team Unit was part of the laboratory, while profiling inexplicably fell under the banner of “training.” Since the experimental team of which Brady and Alicia were a part was composed of personnel from both divisions, Gilbreath was their immediate supervisor.

  She nodded. Her jaw was tight.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. He tried to envision their boss as betrayer, as murderer. The man was a go-getter with political aspirations, but did that mean he’d do anything to achieve his goals—assuming their deaths would somehow boost his career? Even with his education in psychology, Brady couldn’t imagine how a person so seemingly together could hide this level of malice.

  “Why him?” he asked. “I mean, anyone could have hacked into the Bureau’s system and gotten my address. No computer is impenetrable.”

  “The person who knew where to find us had to know two things. First, he had to know where to find you at that precise time yesterday. So he not only had to have your home address, but he also had to know you were home from the investigation. Second, he knew I wasn’t home. In fact, he knew I wasn’t even in Colorado. But in New York, of all places. Finding one of us . . . okay, a hacker could do that. But both of us at the same time and with me in a new location? No, that’s a combination lock that only one person has the right numbers to.”

  She saw that he wasn’t convinced. She rose from the chair and began to pace.

  “All right, Brady. For whatever reason, somebody wants to kill us. He needs to know where to go and when to go there, right? And just for argument’s sake, this person is not Gilbreath. What does he do?”

  “He taps our phones.”

  “Okay. You probably called Zach to let him know you were coming home, right?”

  He nodded.

  “When I called Gilbreath last night to ask him to let me pursue the McAfee lead, I was on the hotel phone. Did this UNSUB tap that too?”

  “Maybe Gilbreath’s line was tapped.”

  “At his home, to find us? That’s a long shot.”

  “What about someone else in the Bureau?”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding appreciatively. “I can count on one hand the colleagues who probably know my address. You?”

  “’Bout the same.”

  “So it’s someone with enough clout to get into the personnel files. Now, when Gilbreath gave me permission to go, he said it was off the record for one day, just to see what I could uncover. He didn’t want to step on any toes, so he didn’t even tell the investigation’s team leader what I was up to. You know how tight-lipped the Bureau is, even within itself. Who would he tell? The deputy director? That’s who he answers to.”

  She almost had him. Almost.

  “And remember, Brady, I didn’t know I was coming to New York until after midnight on the day we were attacked. That’s moving pretty fast.”

  Nudging him a little closer to her way of thinking.

  “Let’s say it’s somebody totally outside the Bureau,” she said, on a roll now. “The same person controlling the killer. To piece everything together—where and when to find us—he’d have to have access to the Bureau files and credit card processing databases and probably tap a dozen phones or so.”

  She stopped pacing.

  “Or . . . ,” she said, “he could be John Gilbreath and have all the information at his fingertips.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Look, he’s the place to start. If it’s not him, no harm, no foul.”

  “Okay,” Brady agreed. “So what do we do?”

  “We have to go see him.”

  “He leaves early on Fridays,” Brady said. “If we leave now, we’ll just make it.”

  “No,” she said, a devious expression touching her eyes and her lips. “I have something else in mind.”

  54

  John Gilbreath awoke suddenly at 12:37. Jaundiced light from a nearby street lamp filtered through sheers on the windows that flanked the bed. Jet shadows clung like putty to the edges of the room. Something had woken him, but what? His wife, Candice, inhaled loudly beside him. It sounded nasal, almost a snore. Not at all like the demure respiration he’d come to find so soothing on restless nights.

  “Hon?” His gravelly whisper grated against the house’s tomblike silence.

  Another loud breath, this time the mother of all snores.

  He shifted onto his left hip, propping himself up with an arm. His other hand fished forward, and he found Candice under their light quilt and cotton sheets. He could just make out the shape of her face in the dark. He shook her gently.

  “Candice?”

  Another shake, another snore.

  Heart pounding, he spun and flicked on the bedside lamp, blinding himself for a mere second. And in that moment, a voice, strong and female, filled the room.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  He jumped, and a sharp noise escaped him—not a word, not quite a scream; something in between. His eyes darted around the room, settling on a pair of legs clad in beige slacks and protruding from the shadows in the corner. Someone was sitting in the overstuffed chair. Intended for late-night reading, the lamp was too weak to reveal the intruder’s body and face.

  Haltingly, he rotated his head away, then shifted his eyes to see his wife sprawled on her back under the bed linen, head cradled deep in her favorite down pillow. Her mouth hung open impossibly wide, and a thin line of drool glistened on her cheek. His nostrils flared, catching an odor . . .

  “Midazolam hydrochloride,” the voice said. “Kind of like chloroform, but a lot less dangerous. At least that’s what the on-line PDR says.”

  “What is this? Who are you?” He reached for the nightstand drawer but stopped when a pistol emerged from the shadows. “What do you want?”

  Alicia Wagner leaned into the light, watching him carefully. Of the three emotions that flashed over his face, the middle one was most telling. First, surprise: a natural reaction regardless of who she had turned out to be. Then fear: that mechanism of defense initiated when encountering someone who has a reason to harm you . . . such as someone you’ve betrayed. And last, indignation: the ruse.

  “Alicia! How dare you!” His flesh was turning red from the neck up.

  “I’ve come to ask you that.”

  “How did you get past the alarm system?”

  “Oh, please.” She put the gun in her lap.

  His jaw found a posture of fiery anger, but he could not get control of his
eyes. They darted to the gun, to her face, to the open bedroom door.

  “What happened in New York?” he asked, a superior tone to his voice.

  “Not what you expected to happen, I imagine.”

  “We got a call from NYPD. They wanted to know why your prints are all over a room from which two people fell to their deaths. Your prints and Brady’s, for crying out loud! They found his service pistol too. He was supposed to be home in Virginia.”

  “Dead in Virginia, you mean.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What’s NYPD doing? What’s the Bureau doing? Have APBs been issued?”

  “For you and Brady? No! We don’t air our dirty laundry to locals, not until we find out what’s going on. We covered for you up there, said you and Brady were undercover on something we couldn’t discuss. That’ll buy us a few days at best.” He reached for the nightstand drawer. “Now let’s get downtown and sort this—”

  “Stop, John! I mean it!”

  He snapped his hand back as though from a hot surface. “You can’t do this, Alicia!”

  “Who’s after us, John?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “You would not believe the thing that paid me a visit at my hotel last night.” She held up her arm to show him the bloody gauze. “He tried to kill me. You were the only one who knew where I was.”

  Gilbreath shook his head like a dog shaking water off its pelt. “That’s New York; that’s the way it is. Someone . . . a mugger must have followed you—”

  “At the very same time, an assassin attacked Brady Moore at his house. Almost got his son too.”

  “What?” He looked genuinely stunned. “Is anybody . . . ?”

  “They’re alive. Sorry to break the news.”

  “I’m glad they’re alive; of course I am!” His head jerked a millimeter as if grasping an idea. He softened his face. “Look, we need to jump on this right away. If someone’s out there hunting down agents—”

  “Shut up.”

  He froze.

  “The attacks have something to do with the Pelletier killings.”

  Gilbreath’s entire body spasmed—almost imperceptibly but enough to convey his surprise. His eyes locked on hers. He opened his mouth just to close it again.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He shook his head, breaking the gaze. “Nothing . . . no. I don’t know anything.”

  “John . . .” A disappointed tone.

  “Think what you want.”

  Her face hardened. She reached into the darkness beside her. Her hand returned with a cylindrical object about five inches long. Gilbreath watched intently as she raised the barrel of her semiautomatic pistol to it and began screwing it on.

  “A silencer!” he barked. “You’re an idiot, Alicia, threatening me with that!”

  She understood. There was something about a silencer that instantly raised the stakes. It said “I mean business” more than anything else she’d done so far; more than breaking into his home, more than anesthetizing his wife, more than waving a pistol at him. As frightened as he may have been at finding her in his bedroom with a gun, he had never really believed she would harm him. This device changed that. It spoke of cold deliberation, of deadly intent, of wanting to kill and get away with it. That was precisely the reason she had brought it, and despite his angry words, she knew by the fear in his eyes it would work.

  “Tell me,” she said again, pointing the enlarged pistol at him.

  He appeared transfixed on the silencer, hypnotized by it.

  “Tell me, John, or you’ll have to explain to your wife why she’ll spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.” Slowly she panned the pistol’s aim toward the unconscious woman.

  John Gilbreath’s mouth unhinged. His eyes moved from the silencer to his wife’s legs and back to the silencer, as if calculating the trajectory of the bullet. For a moment she feared that he still would not talk, then he said, “I got a call two weeks ago about the murders.”

  “Two weeks ago? We didn’t know about them two weeks ago.”

  “Somebody did,” he said. He snapped his gaze toward the window as if he’d heard something. He slid the tip of his tongue over his lips but did nothing about the perspiration that had broken out on his forehead.

  Alicia’s breath caught in her throat, lumping there like a stubborn pill. “Either there’s another Pelletier murder we don’t know about—”

  She stopped. Gilbreath was shaking his head no.

  “Someone knew about the killings before they started?” Her mind raced through the implications. “Did the killer call you?”

  “No, it was someone I know.” He turned his head away. “In the government.”

  “What are you saying? Who called?”

  “Jeff Ramsland. That’s what he goes by, anyway. When I met him a couple of years ago, he said he was with Justice. Every now and then he’d appear at a high-level meeting. He’d never say a word, just listen and then leave. I got the impression he was an oversight officer, something like that. When he called, he wanted to meet. Haupt Fountains. You know them?”

  She nodded. Geysers of waters shooting out of blocks of granite that were supposedly the oldest rock in the United States, three and a half million years old.

  “Do you know why there?” he asked.

  It took her a few seconds. “The water,” she said. “The sound makes electronic eavesdropping virtually impossible.”

  “First thing he does is hand me a letter. Bureau letterhead. From the office of the director. Signed by the man himself; I’ve seen his signature a thousand times. Two sentences: ‘Give this man what he wants. No questions.’ As soon as I read it, Ramsland takes the letter back, puts it in his pocket. Then he tells me who he’s with. At that point, he didn’t have to. I had my orders. He did it to make sure I obeyed—to stress his authority and maybe give me a scare.” Gilbreath smiled thinly. “It worked.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “The Office of Contingency Planning.” He gauged her astonishment and said, “I see you’ve heard of it.”

  “Who in federal law enforcement hasn’t? I started hearing the rumors a few weeks after I joined the academy. Some kind of government watchdog, waiting for flying saucers, alien contact, viable evidence of ESP . . . The X-Files was reportedly based on the rumors.”

  “But The X-Files got it wrong. The OCP is not some rogue FBI agent or two, stubbornly begging their superiors for funding and permission to investigate strange phenomena from a basement cubbyhole. It’s the most powerful agency in the federal government. To remain secret, it has to be. It’s small, so it uses the resources of other agencies. And to do that, its demands have to trump any objections those other agencies have. If it wants to appropriate a spy satellite to check out some djinni activity in the Sahara, it does it. If it needs a special forces unit to invade the home of some Oxford professor who claims to have found the staff of Moses, it picks up the phone and gets it. With impunity and without scrutiny. The CIA can’t say no, NSA can’t say no . . . I hear even the president can’t say no. If it wants to close down an investigation, it can. If it wants to see a file, you send it over.”

  “Over where?”

  “No one knows. Everything’s electronic these days.”

  “You’ve had dealings with it before?”

  “Not directly. I’ve been told to send files to anonymous e-mail accounts and to change direction on a case a time or two—at OCP’s behest, was my understanding.”

  “Sounds ripe for abuse.”

  “An acceptable risk, considering its work.”

  “Work? UFOs . . . Bigfoot . . . ?”

  “Extrasensory perception—everybody knows about the government’s interest in that. But even ESP is insignificant next to other things that might be out there. The world’s strongest nations have long believed in the power of religious artifacts. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t so far off the mark. No one cares if the artifacts’ power comes
from God or if they were found by men in ancient times to have natural power and used to propagate some religious belief. The power is what’s important, not where it comes from. The OCP has funded expeditions looking for the ark of the covenant, the staff of Moses, the true cross of Christ. It watches for the Antichrist, the so-called beast—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” she said, stopping him. “The Antichrist?” She thought about the religious iconography in the Pelletier victims’ houses, Malik’s satanism, the mysterious symbol branded on the victims and on Malik’s back, the rumors about the reason an entire Norse colony vanished.

  “Sure, why not? If he makes an appearance, he’s going to be mighty powerful. Don’t you think the world’s only superpower would want in on that? Or at least get a heads-up to defend itself ?”

  “But . . .” She felt as though she’d followed the white rabbit down a hole. “How could a government agency watch for the Antichrist?”

  “It watches for signs, prophecies fulfilled. The OCP reportedly has affinity relationships with all kinds of like-minded individuals and organizations. I’ve heard one of its operatives meets regularly with theologians. Spends a lot of time at the Vatican. Where better to get intel on religious stuff ?”

  Alicia felt dizzy. Nothing Gilbreath had said was proof of anything, but somehow she knew she’d seen the shadow of the beast they were pursuing. It sometimes happened like that. A sliver of circumstantial evidence that, when added to all the other circumstantial evidence, made a cohesive whole that felt as solid, as right as a murder weapon with finger prints and video footage of the crime.

  The Vatican. Again.

  She blinked and saw Gilbreath eyeing the pistol. She had let it slump in her hand. She snapped it to attention.

  “So what did Ramsland want from you? No questions asked?”

  “To know when we got on the Pelletier case—beheadings in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.”

  “Pelletier hasn’t struck in New Mexico.”

  Gilbreath raised one knowing eyebrow. “At the time, he hadn’t struck anywhere. I asked Ramsland, ‘What beheadings?’ He said, ‘You’ll find out.’”