The Whisperers

More footsteps, receding then drawing nearer once again. Black knees by his face. Fingers in his hair, raising his head. The bag of seals, held in gloved hands, the display stand that he had been making for them tossed aside, splintering on the tiled floor. Pink lips moving in the gap of the mask. White teeth, clean and even.

‘Where are the rest of them?’

‘No comprendo.’

A knife appeared. ‘I can still hurt you.’

‘No, you can’t,’ said Rojas, and he smiled as he died, revealing twin rows of ancient gold and precious stones newly embedded in his teeth.

A burst of gunfire was carried from the Rojas warehouse to the hide site, but it was not followed by a second.

‘Shit,’ said Vernon. He’d known that they were unlikely to get in and out of the warehouse entirely without trouble, but he had been hoping for the best. ‘Okay, ready up.’

Slowly, he moved the monocular across the three houses, designated Curly, Larry, and Moe. ‘Moe. Doorway, bearing right,’ he said, picking out the figure of a man carrying an AK47.

‘I see him.’

Breathe. Exhale. Take up trigger slack. Exhale.

Pressure.

Fire.

Vernon watched as the target threw his hands in the air, the final wave, then fell.

‘Hit,’ he said. ‘Curly. Door. Range seven hundred fifty yards. Zero wind. No correction. Come up seven and two.’ This time, the gunman was staying inside, using the frame of the door for cover as he tried to figure out where the shot had come from.

‘Shooter up.’

‘Spotter up. Send it.’

Pritchard fired again. There was a spray of wood chips from the door, and the target ducked back inside.

‘Uh, miss, I think,’ said Vernon. ‘It should keep him pi

Momentarily, he shifted his sight to the Rojas warehouse, from which two of their men were emerging, carrying a third between them.

‘Okay, they’re on the move, but they’ve got a casualty. Let’s-’

There was a burst of white flame from the nearest right side window of Curly. ‘Curly. Door.’

Pritchard fired, and Vernon saw the shooter leap into the air as the shot took him in the head, causing his legs to spasm. ‘Hit,’ said Vernon.

There was more firing from Moe. Vernon shifted the monocular just in time to see a second man of the assault team fall to the ground.

‘Ah, hell,’ said Vernon. ‘Second man down.’

Pritchard adjusted himself as quickly as possible and began pumping shots through the window of the house in a ‘spray and pray,’ concerned only with providing cover while the injured were taken to safety, but now there were shouts, and lights were going on in the other houses. Vernon could see the last man on his feet – he thought it might be Tobias – carry one of his fallen team back to the van in a fireman’s lift and lay him as gently as possible on the floor. He then went back for the second man.

‘Let’s go,’ said Pritchard.

They ran to where a pair of Harleys were parked by the side of a rutted track. On the ground behind him, they left a muddied denim jacket taken from a biker in Canada, a drug mule targeted by Vernon and Pritchard and left for dead at Lac-Baker. It was a crude piece of framing, but they didn’t think the Mexicans would be concerned with the niceties of a formal investigation. They would want vengeance, and the jacket, combined with the roar of the departing bikes, might be enough to throw them off the scent for a couple of days.

Tobias got behind the wheel of the van and pulled out. In his side mirrors, the Rojas warehouse was a dark mass against the night sky, the dancing shadows of approaching men visible at either side. He was the only one left alive. Mallak had died at the warehouse, and Bacci had taken a bullet to the base of his neck as they carried Mallak’s body away. It was a mess that could have been avoided if Greenham and Twizell had been there, but he’d made the call, and he’d have to live with it. Maybe if fucking Pritchard had been faster off the mark…

The explosion wasn’t loud, the noise dampened by the thick brick walls of the old building, but the purpose of the thermite device, twenty-five percent aluminum to seventy-five percent iron oxide, was not to blow apart the warehouse itself but to burn everything within, leaving the minimum of evidence. It would also serve to distract his pursuers: with Mallak and Bacci dead, there was no one left to provide covering fire, so it would be a matter of hitting the highway and keeping his foot down all the way. Vernon and Pritchard would take their own route to the rendezvous, but Tobias would have words with them when next they met, if only to preempt the snipers’ inevitable anger.

There was a message on his phone. He listened as he drove, and learned that something had gone wrong in Bangor. Greenham and Twizell had not reported back, and it had to be presumed that the Jandreau situation was unresolved. The GPS tracking device in the detective’s car was no longer responding, and the detective was still alive. It was a mess, but at least he now had the missing seals. He also had, in his pocket, as many of Rojas’s teeth as he could knock from his mouth in the time available. It was time to get rid of what they had, make as much money as they could as quickly as possible, and then disappear.

He did not notice Herod’s car, its lights extinguished, idling on a side road. Moments later, Herod was following the van.

31

It was quiet in the motel room. Mel and Bobby sat together on one bed, she holding him and stroking his face, as though rewarding him for the fact that he had unburdened himself at last of all that he knew. Angel was by the window, watching the lot. I sat on the second bed, and tried to take in all that I had learned. Tobias and his crew were smuggling antiquities, but if Bobby was to be believed, they’d brought something else over with them, something that was never meant to be discovered, and never meant to be opened. It had been part of the bait, like a dose of poison contained in meat. I wanted to believe that Jandreau was wrong, that it was guilt and stress that was leading these men to take their lives and the lives of others, including Brett Harlan’s wife, and Foster Jandreau, for Bobby confirmed that he had approached his cousin about his concerns, and that he believed Foster’s unofficial inquiries had led to his murder. It was just a question of who had pulled the trigger. My money was on Tobias initially, but Bobby was less sure: he had warned his cousin about Joel Tobias, and he couldn’t see Foster agreeing to meet up with him in the darkened lot of a ruined bar with no witnesses. It was then that he told me of his sessions with Carrie Saunders, and of how he had discussed some of his concerns with her.

Carrie Saunders. It wasn’t Tobias alone who co

It was Louis, slouched low in the Lexus so that he could watch the approaches to the room, who spotted him. The raggedy figure strolled across the parking lot, a cigarette dangling from his right hand, his left empty. He wore a black coat over a black suit, his shirt wrinkled and open at the neck, the jacket and pants bearing the marks of cheap cloth, ill used. His hair was slicked back from his skull, and too long at the back, hanging in greasy strands over his collar. He seemed simply to have materialized, as though atoms had been pulled from the air, their constituent parts altered as he reconstructed himself in this place. Louis had been watching the mirrors as well as the expanse of motel visible through the windshield. He should have seen him coming, but he had not.