Dantes' Inferno (37 page)

Of course, she entered.

Inside was a war room where the battle had been fought and not necessarily won. It was square, with low ceilings, and an air temperature that literally ran a few degrees colder than the rest of the house.

Her attention was drawn to a large flat screen, where film images moved abstractly in gray, then in color, then black-and-white, and back to gray; brutal explosions of ever-changing targets: embassies, churches, buses, apartments, pubs, schools, factories.

The eerie scenes of destruction had been caught on amateur video, surveillance satellite, security cameras, and they ran now on an endless grainy loop.

She felt his presence: Sweetheart. He was seated lotus style, still as a statue, on a tatami.

For an instant Sylvia thought he was sleeping. But he blinked—and his eyes moved, the whites gleaming in the shadows, tracking her movements.

She didn't switch on the overhead lights, choosing instead to find her way by the low, lemony moonlight that spilled through two high windows.

She seated herself in front of a cold computer monitor, swiveling the chair to face him. When he didn't speak, she turned back toward the desk.

Files—both hard copies and discs—were stacked neatly. She scanned the labels:
Zaire, 1975; Paris, 1983; Kenya, 1990; Nairobi, 1987; London, 1988, 1981; Munich 1999
.

She opened the first manila folder. Names lined a single page:
Ben Black, Benjamin J. Bland, John Blake, Jean Bonai, J. Bonay
—they went on and on, filling two columns.

Aliases of an international terrorist. Aliases of a dead man.

Two words echoed in her mind:
Dead boy
.

A chill ran across her skin like a breeze over water.

“What happened to the investigation?” she asked.

“Ben Black died,” Sweetheart said, his voice barely audible.

In this room, just as in others, the walls were lined with the maps, the patterns of Sweetheart's MOSAIK—the gestalt of deciphering information from isolated data, of connecting the dots, of discovering the topography of the bigger picture.

In this case for the purpose of constructing a profile of Ben Black, a man who for decades had disappeared like mist, alternately reported dead, imprisoned, tortured, or working under the shade of Qaddafi's and bin Laden's wing.

Sylvia didn't look at Sweetheart but let her voice fill the space. “If the war is over, why not shut the war room down?”

“Because he was better than me, better than MOSAIK. His forensic signature was almost untraceable . . . he never used the same method twice.” Sweetheart sighed. “We didn't stop him.”

“What did?”

“Luck.”

Sylvia closed her eyes; cold leather pressed against her back; in her monkey mind, restless thoughts chased their tails. Ben Black's death had been an anticlimax for Sweetheart—after all those years of pursuit, they had killed him by chance.

Wasn't it Molly Redding who had talked of her uncle's demons?

And then, soon after Black was gone, Sweetheart had transferred his obsession to John Dantes. The linking event? Jason Redding's death; the child had been a random target, a victim of chance and coincidence.

At least that's what everybody wanted to believe.

“All the terrorists you've pursued,” Sylvia whispered.
“What do they mean to you, Sweetheart? Where's the synergy? Is it their twisted ideology? Their nihilism? What do you want them to prove? Or is it just that you look at them and see yourself?”

She caught the rhythm of her own breath, and for an instant that sound was the only thing holding her to earth. She pictured Sweetheart standing outside M's workshop, a feather in his hand:
This is the home of a
makuuchi—
a master
.

The words escaped her lips. “You don't believe Ben Black is dead.”

“We had intelligence confirmation.” Sweetheart stared back at her, his eyes shining dangerously—and then they went flat and closed, as if the man no longer inhabited his body.

“The final circle of hell is reserved for traitors,” he murmured, rocking slightly. His breathing was labored and harsh. “Judas Iscariot, Cassius, Brutus . . . the traitors. Dantes had the intelligence, the charisma, the
gift;
he had the chance to help the world. Instead he chose destruction. I won't let you take away Dantes' sins. Now, get out.”

Sylvia stumbled from the house, pushing open French doors, fearing she might break the glass. Outside, she forced herself back to the present. Talking. Walking. Slowly coming down. In truth, she didn't think she could stand to be enclosed inside that house a minute longer.

The walled garden was filled with the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. Moonlight polished the sculpture of the
Fallen Angel
so its bronze glowed with a milky patina, and the decidedly human seraph calmly surveyed the softening dark.

Faint sounds of traffic drifted up the canyon from Sunset
Boulevard. And then, a distant coyote sent a primal message echoing off the urban mountains behind the house on Selma. Her skin raised goose bumps. For a moment, she tasted New Mexico and its crisp arid spaces.

In the high desert around her home outside Santa Fe, the coyotes went crazy on chosen nights. During a kill, there was a terrible wildness to their cries; she thought it must resemble the manic laughter of African hyenas. Always, the day after these orgiastic deaths, Sylvia would discover on her walks the matted feathers from a blue jay, or the barely bloodied puffs of a rabbit's fur. All that remained of the natural and fatal dance between efficient predator and available prey.

Under the spell of midnight she let the stillness of that remembered desert fill her cells, expand her lungs, lure her thoughts to a higher plane where the air was thin and rarefied.

Now, inside her, she discovered an ache created by absence; she was homesick for damn molecules. For that intangible mixture of tropospheric gases at seven thousand feet. She craved comfort. She was homesick, but she couldn't go home.

Behind longing lay something deeper and much more frightening: the sense that she, Molly Redding, Sweetheart, even M had all been drawn into a vortex—
Dantes' Inferno
.

She squeezed her eyes tight, shivering in warm air.

The demons stirred, raising their grotesque heads, sniffing the air for a scent.

Move. Don't let them take possession
.

She heard whispering voices: an
abuelita
who talked to
brujos
, a magical child with uncanny vision, an inmate who flew with the night creatures.

A walk on crazy ground . . 
.

It took her too long to restore any sense of safety. She found herself pacing, jumping at the slightest sounds of night. Everything was wrong. She was going over the edge. She was missing something. Something very dangerous.

She heard the rustling of branches and she looked up. To see the sky—to look for the stars that weren't there.
An empty celestial ocean . . 
.

She took one ragged breath. In New Mexico the stars were so bold and bright a person could safely navigate the deepest, darkest night. Arcturus, Antares, and the Corona Borealis in June; Cassiopeia and Perseus and Polaris in December. Standing out like hot jewels against ebony skin.

Here, in this hellish city, there was nothing to show the way . . . not if you were lost. God help you if you were lost.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, urban anarchists went on bombing sprees in Paris and New York, claiming hundreds of victims. At a time when the new sciences of psychology and psychiatry were exploding with theories—by James, Wundt, Titchener, Kraeplin, Breuer, Freud, Watson—bombers, free of the stigma of psychopathology and reveling in the heroics of revolution, were exploding their infernal devices.

Leo Carreras, M.D., Ph.D., and Sylvia Strange, Ph.D.,

Terrorism in the 21st Century

*  *  *

3:33
A.M
.
John Dantes woke from a nightmare, and he lashed out, his hands forming fists.

“Take it easy, man,” a voice said. “It's tomorrow. You're shipping out.”

Dantes shivered, gazing up at Officer Jones—but seeing the ghost of the boy.

“Looks like you're doing better with that arm,” Officer Jones said slowly.

Jason Redding had visited again in the dream. Dark holes where his eyes should be. Such sadness in his heart. There were no secrets between child and man.

You're killing yourself with hate
, the boy had whispered.

Dantes tried to answer but he couldn't breathe. Disgust lodged in his chest, blocked his throat, until he couldn't suck any air to his lungs.

Dying, he thought.
I'm dying
, he said in the dream.
Dying because I failed them . . . first Bella, then Laura, then Simon, then you
. He gazed at the boy, imploringly.

“C'mon, man, are you okay?” Officer Jones asked.

“No,” Dantes whispered.

Coal eyes glowing, Jones stared down at the inmate, who made no attempt to respond.

Dantes remembered a passage from somewhere in the chaos of his feverish brain:

“
There are times I believe I'm going mad, not psychotic, not schizophrenic, but mad in some banal way. I have no use for the pseudosciences of the mind; when I touch my madness, I know psychology has failed to explain the darkness of the human spirit, those quiet corners of despair that never see the light of day. That's when I turn to the city, civilization, a maze of streets always leading me somewhere, even when I'm lost, even when I'm blinded by the loss of faith
.”

He stared up at the white peeling plaster on the ceiling.
No sky, no heaven, no peace. He tried to save what he loves most, but his actions have led to coward's hell.

“Dantes, man, didn't you hear me? You're shipping out. Time to move you to the transfer station. Last stop before Colorado.”

It was as if those words finally woke him from the darkness.

He sat up, shaking off the sleep, the dream.

“I hear you,” he said, his voice hoarse but audible.

“You can't take much,” Officer Jones said, kindly. “But you don't got much anyway. You want to take your books?”

Dantes mustered a smile. “Yes, thank you, Officer Jones. I would like to take my books. You ever been to Colorado?”

“Never have. Heard it's nice, though. Lots of trees and all those mountains.”

With no help, Dantes stands. He straightens his clothes, he runs his hands through his hair. He needs a shave. And a bath. He stinks of hospital and sweat.

He wonders if the Feds are satisfied now that he has given them M's cave. He can picture the abandoned warehouse just across the water from Terminal Island. No accident it had been visible from his prison cell; M leaves little to chance.

Mackie's back in town
.

“I could use a good meal,” he said to Jones. “What day did you say it is?”

“Saturday, by a couple hours.”

As the officer gathered together the few possessions in the hospital room, Dantes closed his eyes. He waited to see if he could feel the presence; they've always had that connection; over the years, the miles, they've never lost that.

“I know you're coming,” he whispered.

Officer Jones looked up from his work. “You talking to me, Dantes?”

“Yes, Jones,” Dantes said, eyes still shut.

“What you say? I couldn't hear you, man.”

“I said, ‘This time, I'm ready to meet you halfway.'”

There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

Raymond Chandler,
Playback

3:43
A.M
.
M has come to worship darkness.