Reign of Evil - 03 (10 page)

Walker smiled and stood. “They’re fine.”

“That fiancée of yours trained you well, Walker. You know how to say all the right things.” Then she realized what she said and added, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I was trying too— Oh, hell, but I’ve bottled it.”

Walker felt a rush of
what could have been
flow through him, then shook it off. “You’re worried about Trev is all. No worries. I get it.”

“Desperately. I couldn’t help but think of your situation and how we’re so similar. Then with the loss of Jerry…” She inhaled to keep from crying. “… I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“It’s one thing to be killed crossing the street, or by a lightning bolt, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Like being at the Winter Solstice ceremony at Stonehenge on the exact fucking day when the Red Grove was going to sacrifice everyone there.
“That’s random and can’t be helped. It can’t be planned against. Trust me, I’ve been thinking about this non-stop for the last seventy-two hours. But it’s another thing altogether when someone dies while doing something they absolutely believe in. In the case of Jerry, it was the protection of England, his homeland, and his team members. I’ve been there. I’ve been face-to-face with death and ready to give myself up for my team and country. Lucky for me I’ve never had to do it before, but there will probably come a day when it happens.”

Preeti regarded him for a moment. “If this was supposed to cheer me up, it didn’t work.”

“Preeti, if you want me to make some shit up to salve our emotions then I can do that just like any bullshit Hallmark card. I’m laying it on straight. If Trev dies in the service of his country, then it’s something proud, something honorable. It’s what he signed up for.”

“But what if I don’t want him to die?”

“It might never happen, but to be sure … well, then you have to convince him to quit.”

“He’d end up hating me.”

Walker shrugged. “There you have it. It’s what every spouse of a service member has to deal with. What we do is a service. We serve. It’s something that’s in our DNA. In America less than one percent of the population has this desire to serve the other. It’s a sad fact, but there it is.”

“It’s about the same in England.” She wiped at her eyes. “I get what you’re saying. I have to accept that this is part of him, right?”

Walker nodded. “It’s a hard thing. We had a mission to Mexico where Jen became involved to the point where she was in firefights with me. The shoe was on the other foot then and I felt terrified for her. But like me, she was there to serve.”

Preeti was silent for a long time as Walker dove deep into his memories.

When she finally spoke, her voice was full of authority. “You’re upset because she died. You’re trying to say that because she died in such a random way it’s somehow worse. Is it really? I think you’d feel the same way had she died in one of those firefights in Mexico. Don’t add to your troubles, Walker. They’re bad enough as it is.”

He nodded. “You’re right, of course. I’ve always had a tendency to take something bad and make it worse. I guess it’s the optimist in me.” He smiled weakly. “But enough of this emotion.”

She made a mock-serious face. “Right. Enough of that. Time to serve.” She flashed him a mock salute, British-style. “What can I do for you?”

“Did you manage to track the video disturbance?”

Her eyes brightened as she leaned forward and began to punch keys. “Not sure if you know it, but your NSA has nothing on our Home Office. There are almost two million closed-circuit television cameras throughout England at a ratio of about one camera for every eleven citizens. It’s such a massive network; they must be using supercomputers to keep track of everything. At times during the last few hours I felt I was going blind.”

“I doubt they have people monitoring every camera,” Walker said.

“You’re right, although I sometimes imagine a giant building with monitors and people walking back and forth as they follow the people under surveillance, traveling from monitor to monitor to monitor.” She waved a hand. “But that’s just my brain being crazy. To answer your question, yes and no. Let me explain.”

She typed in a few commands and brought up a map of Woking. Not an ordinary map, this one showed nodes, which Walker immediately deduced represented cameras. As she typed, some of the nodes began to turn red, leaving a trail. More than fifty nodes lit up, then stopped.

“It took some time, but I was able to find the disturbance. You were right. It originated somewhere else. In this case, Horsell Common where there are three barrows.”

“Barrows, as in
Lord of the Rings
barrows?”

She nodded. “The same … well, not the same, but the same thing. Remember, J. R. R. Tolkien was English. The barrows of Horsell Common have been dated to three to four thousand years old. But now it’s basically a public park with thousands of trees and several dozen walking paths.”

“And you traced the disturbance back to there?”

“I did.”

Walker narrowed his eyes as he leaned down to stare at the last node. “Is the Common big enough to hide a Wild Hunt?”

“Given that we don’t know how big the Wild Hunt is I’d have to say yes. But I’m a step ahead of you. I sent in a false complaint of a child being abducted into the woods. Seventeen bobbies were dispatched and searched the woods without finding anything. My guess is if the Wild Hunt was there, they would have found it.”

“They wouldn’t be inside the mounds, would they?”

She stared at the screen. “I couldn’t imagine that.”

“So they just appeared there, attacked the witch’s house, then went back.”

She nodded. “It would appear so.”

Walker was used to dealing with magic on a small scale. A chupacabra or a skin-wearing religious fanatic he could parse, but this was on a much larger scale. He wasn’t sure what to think.

“Have there been any other disturbances like this?”

“I’ve been working on an algorithm to find that out.”

“We can’t just go to the Home Office and ask?”

She was about to answer when she smiled, sat back in her chair, and shook her head. “That would be the obvious answer, wouldn’t it?” She put on a headset and began to make a call, acting like Walker wasn’t even there.

He paused a moment, then said, “Glad I could help.”

She waved a hand but was too deep into her problem set to pay attention to anything else.

Walker left the room thinking about the barrows and the Wild Hunt. There was something the witch had said that he felt was important, but he couldn’t remember exactly what it was.

CHAPTER 14

TWIN PEAKS, CALIFORNIA. AFTERNOON.

Director David Lynch made the place famous, but there was really nothing to the town of Twin Peaks other than several hundred homes and a quickie mart. The TV series by the same name started out with a mysterious naked body wrapped in plastic found on the side of the road. Nothing like that really ever happened in this sleepy out-of-the-way hamlet overlooking the Rim of the World Highway and downtown Los Angeles. Which is why many old Hollywood movie stars settled in the greater Lake Arrowhead area. A normal day out near the lake or in one of the nearby towns such as Twin Peaks or Crestline could find a person passing Will Smith or Heather Locklear or Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe. One of the unspoken rules, however, was not to approach them and to give them their space. Although there were tourists who didn’t know this, the locals treated it as dogma.

So when SEAL Team 666 landed, loaded into the NCIS-provided SUV, and headed toward Lake Arrowhead it wasn’t any surprise when they found themselves at a stoplight next to a Mercedes convertible with a woman behind the wheel who resembled a star from a famous 1970s TV show.

Yank drove. Holmes sat in the passenger seat. Behind him sat Laws. Behind Yank sat YaYa. They all wore jeans and T-shirts and light jackets to cover their shoulder rigs, which carried Sig Sauer P229s.

Yank thumbed toward the Mercedes. “Isn’t that that actress from
The Love Boat
? What’s her name, Jane?”

All four SEALs turned to stare at the older woman in the car next to them. Although she couldn’t see them through the heavily tinted windows, she turned and looked at the SUV that towered over her car, giving them all a clear look.

“That’s Julie,” Laws, the man with the eidetic memory, said. “And it’s
Love Boat
minus the ‘
The
.’”

“Julie, right,” Yank said, smiling wistfully. “She was the cruise director. Never knew she got so old.”

“It’s called the passage of time,” YaYa said from the backseat. “It’s been more than thirty years since that show was on television. Which begs the question, what’s a Compton kid like you watching an all-white show like that?” He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. The bartender was black. What was his name?”

“Isaac Washington played by actor Ted Lange,” Laws said flatly.

Yank spoke into the rearview mirror. “You’re always so cliché, Yaya. Why is it a black guy like me only watches black people on television? Do you only watch ragheads?”

“That would mean I’d spend my days watching nothing but Al Jazeera. We’re seriously underrepresented on television unless it’s some terrorist blowing themselves up. What do they expect me to do, clap and shout,
Hooray, another one for the seventy-two overworked virgins!
?”

A car honked from behind.

Yank looked up and saw that Julie in the Mercedes was already three car lengths ahead.

“We can go anytime,” Holmes said.

“Yessir.” Yank cursed inwardly. YaYa was always getting him in trouble. He put the SUV in gear. They drove a mile farther before he added, “Anyway, my adopted father watched it as reruns. He made me sit in the living room and do my homework when he watched it. I couldn’t help but watch it. It was either that or math.”

They drove in silence for several minutes, during which Yank thought fondly of the man who’d adopted him and given him a new life after his mother had perished in a house fire. He wished the man was still around so he could see how his work in progress
,
as he sometimes called Yank, turned out. Being a Navy man, he’d have been very proud his adopted son had become a SEAL.

“Let’s review,” Holmes said. “YaYa, give us the rundown.”

YaYa glanced into the mirror nervously, catching Yank’s attention. Whereas before the mission to Mexico YaYa had been the most outgoing member of the team, the loss of his left arm to the elbow and the installation of the new DARPA mechanical replacement had made him feel less than who he’d been, culminating in a loss of confidence. Yank had told him that he should see it as an addition, rather than a subtraction, but it was hard to dissuade the lithe young Jordanian-American from what he’d already come to believe. Still, both Holmes and Laws had been forcing him to brief and debrief recently in an effort to get his confidence back to the Navy SEAL norm of 1,000 percent.

“So the murder of Jen has been tied to an organization called the Red Grove. It’s a 50…”

“501.3c tax-exempt religious organization,” Laws supplied.

“Right. What he said. A payoff check was traced to this organization, whose chair is Hubert Van Dyke, a former television actor who had bit parts in pretty much every show that came out in the fifties and sixties.”

Holmes nodded. “What do we know about him now?”

“Now, according to
Who’s Who,
he is a philanthropist and an environmentalist. His net worth is believed to be around thirty million dollars. He’s a member of virtually every conservancy group and also every Wiccan religious group. Interestingly enough, he’s on the board of trustees for Loyola Marymount University, which is a Catholic college.” YaYa paused and stared at Holmes.

“Continue.”

“He also sits on the board of the Bohemian Grove, which we’ve been asked not to even think about. He’s also on the board of A Celestial Worry LLC, which is a young adult organization which promotes
thoughtfulness on the control of Earth by corporate religions
. Its list of religions to watch includes Scientology, Judaism, and Catholicism.”

“Which makes his affiliation with Loyola Marymount curious,” Laws said. “What’s that tell us?”

YaYa narrowed his eyes. “I—uh—am not sure.”

Laws looked to the driver. “Yank?”

“That he might care more about money and connections than about his own philosophy.”

Laws smiled. “Exactly. It’s difficult to make someone cooperate who believes strongly in an ideal. Greed, on the other hand, is something we can work with.”

Yank made several turns, then pulled into a cul-de-sac. Two-story houses stood back from the road between towering trees. The grass on the ground was brown, not only from the constant shade but also because of the layers of pine needles that shoaled here and there. The temperature was fifteen degrees cooler in the mountain than it was in the valley. The air was also noticeably cleaner.

“Laws, you ready?”

He put on a pair of glasses that made him look like a fit Berkeley professor, if Berkeley professors wore their hair high and tight and had trained-killer eyes. “Ready.”

Yank watched as the second in command left the vehicle and headed down one of the longer driveways. The plan was to determine if Van Dyke was actually there. If they’d been in any other country in the world, they could have used the full intelligence powers of the U.S. government, but Americans, especially in their own country, were provided a privacy barrier that they weren’t allowed to cross. Nor should they. Although it would have been easier, Commander Holmes said it best.
We can’t trample the rights and freedom we’re sworn to protect
.

“YaYa … move,” Holmes commanded.

The SEAL pulled a Dodger cap low over his eyes, grabbed the bag from the seat beside him, and exited, closing his door softly behind him. He jogged into the woods, then began to angle toward the house. He’d set up in the wood line to monitor Laws’s engagement with the persons on the premises.

Holmes toggled on a tablet to magnify the view and waited.