Tessa let her gaze drift to the sky. The clouds had gathered and were swallowing the light of the setting sun as day unfurled into night.
And then the sun disappeared.
And darkness began to crawl across Washington, DC.
I was a couple minutes from Headquarters when I heard from Ralph that someone had left an anonymous tip that Valkyrie was in DC and would be at a distribution warehouse near the Potomac at eight thirty.
“Track the firms that ship there,” I said. “See if PTPharmaceuticals uses—”
“Already did. It’s confirmed. They sent a semi full of meds down here from Boston this morning. Tens of thousands of Calydrole pills.”
Man, everything was coming together across town and I was going to be stuck in the lower level of Headquarters meeting with Basque.
“I’ll turn around,” I told Ralph. “I’ll come over there.”
“It’s not our party. HRT is lead on this.” The Hostage Rescue Team was the tactical unit of the Bureau’s Critical Incident Response Group. They trained year-round with the military’s most elite divisions and, despite all the interagency rivalries, were pretty much recognized as being on par with Delta Force and the SEALs.
The HRT’s specialty? Rapid deployment, close-quarters combat, and eliminating two-legged threats without civilian casualties. They were called in on any terrorist activity in the States and were eminently more qualified than Ralph, me, or anyone else in the region to face Valkyrie and whoever he might be meeting with tonight.
“They’re bringing in the Blue Whale,” Ralph told me. The Blue Whale was the Bureau’s most advanced, and largest, mobile communication command post. It was the size of a semi. “We’ll be three blocks away. You need to meet with Basque, find out about any other victims. Do your job, let the HRT guys handle this.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I’m done here.”
Good timing to end the call, because I lost reception as I passed through security and entered the parking garage.
I found an open space, parked, and stepped onto the elevator to the detention cells deep beneath the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Keith and Vanessa left Ravel’s Steakhouse and walked to the car.
He had done it.
He’d made the call. Now he just needed to make sure that somehow he wasn’t there at the warehouse when the FBI surrounded it to capture Valkyrie.
But how he was going slip away from Vanessa was still unclear to him.
She positioned herself in the driver’s seat and said to him, “I have something I haven’t been completely honest with you about.”
“What’s that?”
“We won’t be meeting Valkyrie at the warehouse.”
“We won’t?”
She was rooting through her purse. “Plans have changed.”
“Where are we meeting him?”
But rather than answer, she drew her hand out of her purse, and only when it was too late did Keith realize what she was holding. She was incredibly quick, and before he could pull away she’d jammed the hypodermic needle into the side of his neck and depressed the plunger.
He gasped and attempted to reach up to get the needle out, but whatever she’d given him was potent, because his arm already felt lead-heavy and his hand never made it to his neck.
“And one other thing,” she said. “The cell phone I was letting you use wasn’t quite secure. There’s one phone that connects to it: I’m able to listen in on your calls.”
She removed the needle in her own good time and set it on the dashboard.
Keith felt himself slumping in the seat. “What… are you doing? What did you give me?”
“Just something to help you sleep. Until we get there.” She drew a pair of handcuffs out of her purse, and he was helpless to resist when she slipped one cuff over his wrist and snapped the other shut around the door handle.
“This isn’t…” He was having a hard time organizing his thoughts. “You’re making a—”
“You called the FBI, Corporal.”
Dark dread swept over him. “No, I—”
“Yes,” Vanessa said softly. “And now I’m going to take you to the man you tried to turn in to them.”
He tried desperately to move his free arm to go for her throat, but it was useless.
She turned his chin so he was looking directly at her. “I’ve enjoyed working with you, Keith. I’m sorry it has to end like this.”
And the last thing he saw before darkness shrouded him was Vanessa pulling the pair of pruning shears out of his jacket pocket and placing them in her purse.
Valkyrie listened as Vanessa told him on the phone what Keith had done.
Well, it looked like a trip over to the distribution warehouse wasn’t going to appear on tonight’s agenda after all.
He gave her instructions on how to get to the marina. “From where you are it should be twenty to twenty-five minutes. I’m pleased with how you’ve been monitoring his calls.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see you at eight thirty.”
Alhazur eyed Valkyrie suspiciously, and when he hung up, he asked him, “Is there a problem?”
“Not at all. Two people will be joining us at half past the hour. One of them will be remaining for the rest of the evening.”
Alhazur’s gaze drifted toward his dead associate, lying on the deck. “One of them.”
“Yes.” Valkyrie said to the remaining suicide bomber, “You can remove your vest now. I’d like you to place it in the backseat of the SUV you and Alhazur drove over here.”
“For insurance?” the man ventured.
“Let it never be said that you’re not a quick study.”
As the man left to obey his instructions, Valkyrie found his thoughts drifting from the suicide vests to the discussion with Alhazur about the proposed attacks in Moscow, to the situation with Keith and Vanessa, to Richard Basque.
If Basque really did make it out of FBI Headquarters tonight, he would be heading over to the distribution warehouse expecting to meet there at ten, but now that Keith had made the call, the Feds would undoubtedly be there at eight thirty, and if they waited long enough they might just find Basque instead of the terrorist they were hoping for.
Valkyrie assured himself that Vanessa had left his cell number with Basque. If the famed serial killer did escape, Valkyrie trusted that he would be prudent enough to call before heading to the place where they had been scheduled to meet.
If not, his freedom was going to be short-lived indeed.
75
Still thinking about the team moving in on Valkyrie, I entered the interrogation room and found Richard Basque seated at the steel table, wrists and ankles shackled.
He calmly assessed me. I calmly assessed him. He had a line of dark stitches across his cheek reaching down across his jaw from the knife wound.
“How’s your mouth, Richard?”
He peeled back his lips to show me the uneven ridges of splintered and missing teeth. It made him look even more like the cannibal that he was.
It brought to mind my conversation with Tessa about werewolves and vampires and how monsters today look like the rest of us and not what they really are. But maybe in Basque’s case, now, tonight, he did look like exactly what he was.
“How do you turn someone into a monster?” Tessa had asked me, then answered the question herself: “Let him be himself without restraint.”
That was Richard Basque.
The form of a man but the soul of a beast.