London Bridges: A Novel (3 page)

We got a possible break soon after I arrived. A couple of rock climbers had spotted a man using a video camera to film the explosion. He looked suspicious, and one of the climbers had photographed the man with his digital camera. The climbers also had shots of the town's evacuation.

Two of our agents were interviewing the climbers, and I also wanted to talk to them as soon as the agents had finished. Unfortunately, the local police had gotten to the camera first and were holding it until their chief arrived at the scene. He was late, because he'd been away on a hunting trip.

When the chief finally got there, in an old black Dodge Polaris, I was all over him. I started talking before he had even climbed out of his car.

“Chief, your men are holding important evidence. We need to see it,” I said, not raising my voice at the sixtyish, potbellied man but making sure he got the point. “This is a federal investigation now. I'm here representing both the FBI and Homeland Security. We've lost valuable time because of your men.”

To his credit, the police chief himself was exasperated. He began yelling at his officers. “Bring the evidence over here, you morons. What the hell are you two trying to pull? What were you thinking? Do you think? Bring the evidence.”

His men came running, and the taller of the two, who I later learned was the chief's son-in-law, handed over the camera. It was a Canon PowerShot and I knew how to get at the pictures.

So what do we have here? The first shots were well-composed nature photos. No people in any of them. Close-ups and wide-angle shots.

Then came pictures of the actual evacuation. Unbelievable.

Then I finally got my first look at the man who had filmed the explosion.

His back was to the camera. At first he was standing, but in the next few shots he was down on one knee. Probably to get a better angle.

I don't know what had prompted the rock climber to take the initial few shots, but his instincts were pretty good. The mystery man was videotaping the deserted town—then suddenly it went up in flames that rose several hundred feet high. It seemed pretty clear that he had known about the attack before it happened.

The next photograph showed the man turning in the direction of the climbers. He actually began to walk toward them, or so it appeared on film. I wondered if he'd spotted one of them taking his picture. He seemed to be looking their way.

That was when I saw his face, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. I recognized him. And why not? I'd been chasing him for years. He was wanted for more than a dozen murders here and in Europe. He was a vicious psychopath, one of the worst of his kind still on the loose anywhere in the world.

His name was Geoffrey Shafer, but I knew him better as the Weasel.

What was he doing here?

There were a couple more crystal-clear shots as the hateful Weasel got closer to the photographer.

Just the sight of him sent my brain reeling, and I felt a little sick. My mouth was dry, and I kept licking my lips. What is Shafer doing here? What connection does he have to the bomb that leveled this small town? It was crazy, felt like a dream, completely unreal.

I'd first come across Colonel Geoffrey Shafer in Washington three years ago. He'd murdered more than a dozen people there, though we could never prove it. He would pose as a cabdriver, usually in Southeast, where I lived. The prey was easy to grab, and he knew D.C. police investigations weren't as thorough when the victims were poor and black. Shafer also had a day job—he was an army colonel working inside the British embassy. On the face of it, he couldn't have been more respectable. And yet he was a horrible murderer, one of the worst pattern killers I'd ever come across.

A local agent named Fred Wade joined me near the helicopter I'd come in on. I was still studying the climber's photos. Wade told me he wanted to know what was going on, and I couldn't blame him. So did I.

“The man who videotaped the explosion is named Geoffrey Shafer,” I told Wade. “I know him. He committed several murders in D.C. when I was a homicide detective there. The last we heard of him, he'd fled to London. He murdered his wife in front of their children in a London market. Then he disappeared. Well, I guess he's back. I have no idea why, but it makes my head hurt just to think about it.”

I took out my cell phone and put in a call to Washington. As I described what I'd discovered, I was reviewing the last few photographs taken of Colonel Shafer. In one of the photos he was climbing into a red Ford Bronco.

The next was a rear shot of the Bronco as it rode away. Jesus. The license plate was visible.

And that was the strangest thing of all so far: the Weasel had made a mistake.

The Weasel I'd known didn't make them.

So maybe it wasn't a mistake after all.

Maybe it was part of a plan.

The Wolf was still in Los Angeles, but reports were coming in from the Nevada desert on a regular basis. Police arriving near Sunrise Valley . . . then helicopters . . . the U.S. Army . . . finally the FBI.

His old friend Alex Cross was out there now, too. Good for Alex Cross. What a good soldier.

Nobody understanding a goddamn thing, of course.

No coherent theory about what had happened in the desert.

How could there be?

It was chaos, and that was the beauty of it. Nothing scared people more than what they didn't understand.

Case in point, a local L.A. hot shit named Fedya Abramtsov and his wife, Liza. Fedya wanted to be a big Mafiya gangster, but also lead the life of a movie-star type in Beverly Hills. This was Fedya and Liza's house that he was staying in now, but really, the Wolf thought of it as his house; after all, their money was his money. Without him, they were nothing but small-time punks with big ambitions.

Fedya and Liza hadn't even known he was at their house. The couple had been at their place in Aspen and finally got back to L.A. at just past ten that evening.

Imagine their surprise.

A powerful-looking man sitting by himself in the living room. Just sitting there. So peaceful. Rhythmically squeezing a rubber ball in his right hand.

They had never seen him before.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded Liza. “What are you doing here?”

The Wolf spread his arms. “I am the one who gave you all of this wonderful stuff. And what do you give me in return? Disrespect like this? I am the Wolf.”

Fedya had heard enough already. He knew that if the Wolf was there, letting himself be seen, then he and Liza were as good as dead. Best to run and hope to God the Wolf is here alone, unlikely as that may be.

He took a single step, and the Wolf raised a handgun from out of the seat cushion. He was good with a gun. He shot Fedya Abramtsov once in the back, once in the back of his neck.

“He's very dead,” he calmly said to Liza, which he knew to be a nickname of hers. “I prefer Yelizaveta,” he said. “Not so common, so Americanized. Come and sit. Come. Please.”

The Wolf patted his lap. “Come. I don't like to repeat myself.”

The girl was a pretty one—smart, too—and apparently ruthless as a snake. She walked across the room and sat in the Wolf's lap. She did as she was told, anyway. Good girl.

“I like you, Yelizaveta. But what choice do I have—you've disobeyed me. You and Fedya stole my money. Don't argue. I know it's true.” He looked into her beautiful brown eyes. “Do you know zamochit?” he asked. “The breaking of bones?”

Apparently Yelizaveta did, because she screamed at the top of her lungs.

“This is good,” said the Wolf as he grabbed the woman's slender left wrist. “Everything is going so well today.”

He started with Yelizaveta's little finger, just the pinkie.

Had a war started? If it had, who was the enemy?

It was pitch-black, and it was freezing cold in the desert. Scary and disorienting, to put it mildly. No moon out. Was that part of the plan? What was supposed to happen next? Where? To whom? Why?

I tried to collect my thoughts and make a rough plan to take us through the next few hours in at least a semiorganized manner. Difficult to do, maybe impossible. We were looking for a small convoy of army trucks and jeeps that seemed to have disappeared, to have been gobbled up by the desert. But also a Ford Bronco with the Nevada license tags 322JBP and a sunset design.

And we were looking for Geoffrey Shafer. Why would the Weasel be here?

While we waited for something to break, maybe a message or a warning, I walked around what had been Sunrise Valley. Where the bomb had actually detonated, buildings and vehicles hadn't just been flattened, they'd been practically vaporized. Little bits of death and destruction, sparks and ash, were still floating in the air. The night sky was masked by a dark and oily cloud of smoke, and I was struck by the unsettling idea that only man could create something like this, and only man would want to.

As I wandered through the mounds of debris, I also talked to agents and techs involved in the investigation and I began to make a few crime-scene notes of my own:

Bits and pieces of the mobile-home camp are scattered everywhere.

Witnesses describe canisters dropped from a prop plane.

One falling can seemed about to strike a trailer home, then exploded in midair above the town.

At first, the explosion was like a “white, undulating jellyfish cloud,” then the cloud ignited.

High winds from the heat of the fire, convection whirls, apparently blew at gale force for several minutes.

So far we had discovered only one body in the rubble. Everyone was wondering the same thing: why only one? Why spare the others? Why blow up this trailer-park town at all?

It just didn't make sense. Nothing did so far. But especially Shafer's presence.

One of the local FBI agents, Ginny Moriarity, called out my name and I turned. She waved excitedly for me to come over. Now what?

I jogged back to where Agent Moriarity was standing with a couple of local cops. They all seemed exercized about something.

“We found the Bronco,” she told me. “No army trucks, but we located the Bronco in Wells.”

“What's in Wells?” I asked Moriarity.

“An airport.”

“Let's go!”

I was back in the FBI helicopter and headed to Wells in a hurry, hoping to catch up with the Weasel. It seemed like a long shot, but we didn't have anything else. Agents Wade and Moriarity traveled with me. They didn't want to miss this—whatever was waiting in Wells.

As we pulled up and away from what remained of Sunrise Valley, I was aware of the high desert; the former town was at an elevation over 4,000 feet.

Then I tuned out the surroundings and started thinking about Shafer, trying once again to figure what could possibly tie him to this mess, this disaster, this murder scene. Three years before, Shafer had kidnapped Christine Johnson. It had happened during a family vacation in Bermuda; at the time, Christine and I were engaged to be married. Neither of us knew it, but she was pregnant with Alex when Shafer abducted her. We were never the same after her rescue. John Sampson, my best friend, and I found her in Jamaica. Christine was emotionally scarred, and, of course, I couldn't blame her. Then she moved out to Seattle, where she lived with Alex. And I blamed Shafer for the custody struggle.

Who was he working with? One thing was obvious, and probably useful to the investigation: the firebombing at Sunrise Valley had involved a lot of people. So far we didn't know who the men and women posing as U.S. Army were, but we did know that they weren't real army national guardsmen. Sources at the Pentagon had helped confirm that much. Then there was the matter of the bomb that had leveled the town. Who made it? Probably somebody with military experience. Shafer had been a colonel in the British army, but he'd also served as a mercenary.

Lots of interesting connections, but nothing very clear yet.

The helicopter pilot turned to me. “We should be in visual contact with Wells as soon as we clear these mountains up ahead. We'll see lights, anyway. But so will they. I don't think we can sneak up on anybody out here in the desert.”

I nodded to him. “Just try to land as close as you can to the airport. We'll coordinate with the state troopers. We might draw fire,” I added.

“Understood,” the pilot said.

I started to discuss our options with Wade and Moriarity. Should we try to land at the airport itself, or nearby in the desert? Had either of them fired their weapons before, or been fired on? I found out that they hadn't. Neither of them. Terrific.

The pilot turned to us again. “Here we go. Airport should be coming up on our right. There.”

Suddenly I could see a small airfield with a two-story building and what looked like two airstrips. I spotted cars, maybe half a dozen, but I didn't see a red Bronco yet.

Then I saw a small private plane taxiing and getting ready for takeoff.

Shafer? It didn't seem likely to me, but neither did anything else so far.

“I thought we shut down Wells?” I called to the pilot.

“So did I. Maybe this is our boy. If it is, he's gone. That's a Learjet 55 and it moves pretty damn good.”

From that moment on, there was very little we could do but watch. The Learjet shot down one of the runways, then it was airborne, winging away from us and making it look ridiculously easy. I could imagine Geoffrey Shafer on board, looking back at the FBI helicopter, maybe giving us the finger. Or was he giving me the finger? Could he know that I was there?

A few minutes later we were on the ground at Wells. Almost immediately I got the jolting news that the Learjet was off radar.

“What do you mean 'off radar'?” I asked the two techies inside the tiny Wells control room.

The older of the two answered. “What I mean is that the jet seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. It's like it was never here.”