We carried the paper to the dresser and carefully unfolded it. It was a quarter of a piece of ordinary computer paper folded several times and then rolled into a cylinder. There were several lines handwritten on it in blue ballpoint:
My Sweet Laura and Precious Zoë,
I know that what I have done is unforgivable.
I have damned my immortal soul for all eternity,
but at least what I have done here in our home
will save you both from greater horrors.
It was the only way to save you both from them.
They areeverywhere.
I could not let them do those things to you.
Not even if I am to burn in hell.
God accept and protect you both.
My greatest regret is that I will not be able
to join you in paradise.
I will try to make it right if I can, but I know they are watching.
I don’t ask for or expect forgiveness.
They are not kings. They are monsters.
I am only the monster they made me.
It was unsigned. The paper was stained with bloody fingerprints and the distinctive pucker marks of dried water. Tears, without a doubt.
There was a reference to the Kings, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. Was Plympton not part of the Kings?
I am only the monster they made me.
Was that an admission that he had become corrupted by the Kings? Or had they somehow coerced him into this?
They are not kings. They are monsters.
No shit.
I looked at Owlstone and saw confusion and compassion warring on her young face. As one we straightened and turned to look at the bodies on the bed.
“What the hell are we into here, Captain?”
They are everywhere. He had underlined “everywhere” half a dozen times.
“It’s Joe,” I said, “and in my considered opinion as a professional investigator, it beats the hell out of me.”
Though … that was not entirely true. An idea was beginning to form in one of the darker side corridors in my broken head.
I am only the monster they made me.
My phone rang. It was Church.
“Sit rep?” he demanded.
I told him and started to explain, but he cut me off.
“We have what we need from that site. Leave the rest to the locals. I’m three minutes away. Be downstairs.”
“I think I’m on to something here, I don’t want to bug out now.”
“Would you rather hear about it from the Emergency Broadcast System?”
Shit.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Interlude Thirteen
T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State
Three and a Half Months Before the London Event
The range master at Terror Town was slim, swarthy, bearded, and had a beaky nose and dark eyes. The name embroidered on his chest was Muhammad. A few sorry souls had made jokes around him with words like “towel head,” “camel jockey,” and “sand nigger.” They misunderstood his stance on racial epithets, because they thought that if he was working this range then Muhammad could not be either a devout Muslim or a true Arab. Of those sorry souls, the ones who were able to walk away from the range under their own steam were encouraged to pack their bags and go find a clue. The rest received the very best of emergency care in the T-Town infirmary.
Circe O’Tree had been there for one of those encounters. The whole thing was over in a second and a man much bigger than Muhammad lay in a fetal position, hands clutching his groin, faced screwed into a purple knot of silent agony. The sight had bothered Circe for weeks. But she could not find any fault with the range master. He never once started a fight; his view, however, was that even small hate crimes should be “appropriately addressed.”
Although she worked around violence all day and though she had logged hundreds of hours on the combat ranges and in the self-defense classes, Circe had never before been a witness to actual violence. Even so, threads of violence were sown through her life. Her mother and sister had died violently, her father was in one of the more ferocious departments of government service, and all of her friends were either current or former military or scientists like her, who studied war and conflict.
The relationship between Chief Petty Officer Abdul Muhammad and Dr. Circe O’Tree was complicated, its parameters unspoken. He cut her no slack, but he always gave her a little extra advice and encouragement. He also let her train in the late evenings after the teams had called it a night. Though most of the men at T-Town respected—or perhaps dreaded—Muhammad, they frequently forgot themselves when Circe was on-deck. She was a very beautiful woman with a figure that drew the eyes of normally focused shooters away from their targets. Range scores plummeted when she was on-deck.
And she found the whole thing exceptionally tiresome. She couldn’t change her genetics, and dressing down in shapeless clothes was an admission of defeat. After ignoring the testosterone-infused nonsense for months, she began coming later and later to the range. Now it was full dark and the sky above glittered with 10 billion diamonds. The August breeze off of Mount Baker was cool and soothing after hours spent with her computer.
“Your mind is not in the game, Doc,” Muhammad growled after she finished her last grouped shots.
Circe cleared and benched the gun. There was no one else on the range, but the proper etiquette had become ingrained. You earned a sharp rebuke only once from Muhammad, and you never forgot it. On her second day at T-Town Circe had stepped past the firing line before all of the other shooters had declared their weapons benched. Muhammad read her the riot act in front of everyone and he was thorough about it. Then he made her stay an extra hour and practice the rules of handgun safety, shouting out each step no matter who was firing. The lesson sank in.
She pulled off her ear defenders. “Lot on my mind tonight, Chief.”
“You haven’t scored this low since your first month.”
She looked downrange as the target moved toward her on a pulley. She had fired all fifteen rounds from a Glock 22. She was not a brilliant shooter, but she was a competent and consistent one, usually putting eleven rounds out of each magazine into the kill zone of a suspended target fifteen yards away. At twenty-five yards she lost a bit of her accuracy if firing fast, but in a slow fire drill she was a very good shot.
Muhammad folded his arms and leaned against the wall of the shooting stall.
“Why do you practice with a handgun?”
She almost sighed. This was one of the Chief ’s ritual questions.
“To save my life and the lives of those in my charge.”
“How do you accomplish this?”
“By hitting what I aim at with focus, speed, and commitment.”