He nodded.
I said, “We know that the Kings’ point man, the Spaniard, was here in Scotland as late as this morning. If I had to guess, he oversaw the Hospital thing by turning dials on Plympton and maybe some others at the Hospital and then he came here to get this in motion. This took time, so he must have made multiple trips to London and here. We might get lucky with airline records and whatever boat service brings people out here.”
“Yes. I’ve got Bug on that already. What else?”
“We know that he works on a pattern.”
“Tell me.”
“He picks people who not only have families but who are absolutely devoted to them. People willing to kill others to prevent harm from coming to their own. I know I’d kill to protect my brother, his wife, and their kid, but I wouldn’t blow up a hospital to do it. No, that’s got to be a specific kind of person. Snow seems to be the exception, so we can’t discount the possibility that she was more ‘agent’ than ‘victim.’ The question is how the Kings are identifying people who are vulnerable to this kind of coercion.”
“Employee records can be hacked,” Church suggested. “We do it all the time.”
“Sure, but would that kind of thing be inside an employee’s records? I mean, imagine asking that question on a performance review: ‘Would you release a virus capable of creating a global pandemic to keep your kids safe?’ Pretty sure we would have gotten wind of that.”
He nodded.
“So, maybe these guys are accessing psych records. We need to look for commonalities there, see if they’ve used the same therapist, or therapists in the same network. There has to be a link to how they’re getting this kind of info.”
“I asked Dr. Sanchez to coordinate with Bug on the proper search arguments. What else?”
“They like backup plans. They had three people here. Grey, Scofield, and Snow. Probably the same thing at the Hospital. Unfortunately, that screws the math even more when it comes to employee psych profiles. Three people of that kind in the same place. I might be able to buy that at the London, but not in a place like FIRE. Too small. That’s weird unless somehow they were seeded here. We need to look at transfer records, too.”
“Hugo Vox can help with that. He’s the top security screener in the country, and he owns a number of employment agencies for this kind of work. He may be able to determine how the Kings are working the employee profiles.”
“Good. Set it up. One more thing we know.”
Church cocked an expectant eyebrow.
“We know they plan well in advance, which means we are way behind the curve here. God knows how many other events like these are cocked and locked.”
“Yes.”
We walked in silence for another minute. “What’s my next step?” I asked. “I’d like to head back to London and—”
“No. Childe tells me that word’s gotten around that you killed two London cops and put another in intensive care. A formal statement has been issued by the commissioner that these three were part of the terrorist cell responsible for the bombing, but—”
“But some cops aren’t going to buy that. Shit.”
“I don’t think there’s anything more you can do here, Captain. You’ve done very good work. You’re booked on a flight to the States.”
“Area 51?”
“No. You’ll land in Philadelphia and meet up with Dr. Sanchez. He called me while you were in the lab. I think we can say with certainty that Nicodemus is involved.”
Church told me what had happened during Rudy’s visit to Graterford. It didn’t make me want to dance and sing.
“This guy is pretending to be—what? A prophet?”
“Unknown, though from the description Dr. Sanchez gave, Nicodemus is either pretending to be demonically possessed or suffering from an unusual form of multiple personality disorder. So far Nicodemus’s references are distortions of biblical references. Old and New Testament, as well as the Apocrypha.”
“Lots of psychos read the Bible, especially in prison. He could be pulling stuff out of his ass to jerk our chains.”
“And he mentioned the Goddess.”
“Which ties to the Spaniard,” I said, and he nodded.
“And Nicodemus mentioned the ‘Elders,’ but there wasn’t enough context to infer a meaning. Most likely it’s a reference to theProtocols of the Elders of Zion. There were Internet references to that via some posts by the Goddess.”
I asked what that was and Church explained about the early-twentieth-century propaganda.
“World’s full of nuts. How’s that tie into this stuff?”
“Unknown. Could be part of a plan to foment religious violence, or it could be simple misdirection. We still need to understand where these clues are supposed to take us.” Church paused. “And there were a few other things he said.”
He told me the rest, about what Nicodemus had said as he was being led out.
“He actually said that?” I demanded. “Nicodemus referred to a friend of Rudy’s who had ‘lost the grace of the Goddess’? ‘One who walks with ghosts’?”
“Yes,” drawled Church. “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Dr. Sanchez was badly shaken by those comments. However, the remark that I find most significant is the one about the river of blood that was supposed to sweep you away. It ties into what Scofield said, but it was clearly directed at you.”
“Yeah. That’s a real ass-biter.”
“What do you think of it?”
I cut a look at Church. “If you are asking if I think this Nicodemus character is getting messages from the spirit world, then no, I don’t. I wasn’t swept away by a river of blood. We stopped this from happening. To me it says that he knew that I was going to be here and something about me personally. Grace’s death, the name of my dog. Shit that could be found out. But he didn’t know that things were going to spin our way on this.”
Church smiled. It was a rare thing for him to do and it wasn’t at all a friendly or happy smile. The Angel of Death might smile like that. “Nicodemus said that to Dr. Sanchez before I even picked you up at the Plympton crime scene. How would anyone know that I was going to assign this mission to you?”
The wind howled past me for a long time. Ghost whimpered slightly, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from the cold or his canine senses had caught the specters on the wind that we humans could not see.
We started walking again.
“I also received a call from our informant,” he said.
“Deep Throat? What did he say?”
Church told me. “On the surface the conversation appears to flow normally, but I’m sure there was a code in there. A clue. One line stands out: ‘They want to break the bones of their enemies and suck out the marrow.’ I told him that it didn’t seem helpful and he insisted that it was. So we need to add the words ‘break,’ ‘bones,’ and ‘marrow’ to our key words and see what happens.”
I nodded. “We’ll sort it out. We still have a lot of resources we can throw at this. No matter what it takes, we’ll find them.”
He half-turned and studied me. “What makes you think so?”
“We have to,” I said. I was aware of how that sounded.
Church let a little time pass before he replied.
“I don’t want to preach cynicism, Captain,” Church said, “but if you stay in this game for any considerable length of time you may experience an enlightenment that is akin to what the national consciousness of America went through between the end of World War Two and the end of the Vietnam War.”
“What, a loss of innocence? I just shot someone, Boss, so I think—”