The Devil's Dream: Waking Up (10 page)

They don't win because you stop, Matthew,
Rally said.
They're winning right now. What do you think those cops that killed Hilman would say right now, looking at all this? These bodies and your bloodied self? They'd say that they did the world a favor by killing our son because he would have turned out to be the same. They've already won at this whole thing; they're dead and still winning. Running up the score now. And you don't even realize it because you're playing a completely different game. One that no one else is playing and no one else cares about. Wake up, Matthew. Look around. You've lost and if you somehow are able to cast this world into darkness, then it just means you'll die in darkness too, still a loser.

No. She wasn't right. The cops that killed Hilman couldn't say a goddamn word because the dead couldn't talk—and that meant Rally's words didn't matter either.

"You're dead!"
He shouted.

And you're going to be soon, too. How many more people do you want to rape before that happens? Did you not get your fill with five?

Matthew closed his eyes and blocked out everything around him. She was wrong. He couldn’t lose, not this close to the end. Things were...unraveling a bit, but he was still within walking distance of the finish line. They didn't determine the rules of this game and neither did Rally. Only Matthew did.

He hadn't been raised an egomaniac. His parents did the best they could with a child whose gifts were beyond anything the world had ever seen. He had never thought his wishes should reign over the world; he had simply gone through life putting in work where he saw it necessary and for the most part that work helped those around him. As soon as he had his own wishes though, his own wants that didn't coincide with what the rest of them wanted, everyone turned on him. A monster. A devil. And now, here he was, fresh off a five round raping, naked, bloodied, and in a foreign body all because they refused to let him have the piece of the world he wanted. Sheeb and Morgant and the young man hanging from the wooden beams all wanted him to stop, wanted him to falter, wanted his dream to fade.

"No," he said again.

"
Y
ou two
..." Gyle shook his head, looking down at his desk. "I don't even know if I have words to describe what I'm feeling."

His voice was low, his hands folded over one another. Art stood behind a chair and Jake sat. Art leaned on the back of his chair, his tie unbuttoned and his shirt wrinkled. Werzen had been missing for twenty-four hours; he delivered the news to Gyle yesterday, but not in person.

"It was a gamble," Jake said.

"You're goddamn right it was," Gyle responded, looking up from the desk. "You got anything to tell me I don't know? If you don't, then shut up, please. I don't need to hear anything else from you."

Art watched Jake hold the man's gaze. Art, somehow despite the circumstances—or perhaps because of them, thought about what might have happened if this was a different case with a different criminal. He thought that holding a man like Gyle's gaze, especially in this current context, would probably cost a man his career. In any other case, Jake could hand over his FBI badge—and, if Gyle really wanted to fuck him, Jake might not even rise to Sheriff back in Katy, Texas. Now though, none of that mattered. Now, Jake held the gaze because he knew the man on the other side of the table had nothing on him. What could Gyle do? Fire Jake? Not hardly. Everyone in this room, whether or not Gyle wanted to admit it, knew that the ideas sprang from Jake. He didn't know the operations of the FBI, probably couldn't shoot for shit, and couldn't compete with some of the FBI's analysts—but the idea generation, the creativity, that was all Jake. So no, Gyle wouldn't fire Jake, and more, if they were all dead in a month, whether or not one had a job seemed irrelevant.

Gyle looked to Art. "Do you have anything on Werzen? Anything?"

Art raised his right hand to his face and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "No. All the devices we put on him were discarded in the house. Brand stripped the guy naked and brought him out the back door."

"Neither of you thought that was a possibility? You didn't think that maybe he'd consider you mic'd the kid up?" Gyle asked.

"He's never done that before. All the rest of Brand's victims were fully clothed. I mean, the mics were woven into his clothing, not taped to his chest," Jake said, interrupting the conversation Gyle tried to start with Art.

Art imagined that if a glacier could speak, it would sound like Jake right now, each breath an icy temperature.

"So the answer's no?" Gyle asked, not even looking at Jake. "You two didn't think about it."

"No," Art said. He sighed and stopped leaning on the chair. "There's a lot we're not thinking about because there's a lot going on, Gyle. I'm not going to sit here and say we're doing our best or some other bullshit, but I don't know what else to do."

"You can
not
lose a twenty-four year old agent! You can
not
have Brand steal away every single decent idea we have!" Gyle shoved the folder containing all of Werzen's history off the desk, the front of it opening and the papers scattering across the floor in front of Art. "You find him, Art. You find that kid and you bring him back unharmed. When you call his mother today, you guarantee her that you're bringing him back unharmed. Guarantee it, you understand?"

Art nodded, knowing he couldn't do it.

"If we make it out of this, Art, you're done here. You know that, right? This is your last case."

Had Art known that? Standing here, looking at his boss, he couldn't say if he'd even thought about it. This place was his life, the FBI. He joined when he was twenty-five and he was nearing sixty now. He had put his thirty years in, but never really considered leaving. What would he do if he did? Golf? Watch day-time television? Put a bullet in his mouth like other cops did when they retired? But now, he apparently didn't need to think about it. Now the man on the other side of this desk was telling him that the FBI no longer needed his services, or wouldn't, as soon as this case ended. Art felt like some large, dusty tome that had lain open in his mind for a long, long time had just been thrown shut. The book he'd been reading, the book of his life, was no longer available to him. The man in front of him just closed it, and in its place was...nothing. Just complete stunned silence.

"Anything else?" Art asked.

"No. Go find him."

* * *

"
Y
ou
...you want me to hang around?" Jake asked. He stood in Art's office doorway. Art sat behind his desk, his computer not turned on, no papers in front of him. Jake thought he looked like a mother bear that just lost her cubs. He didn't know what to say or how to respond to what Gyle just said.

"No. I'll be okay. What time is it?" Art didn't glance at his watch, didn't look up from his desk.

Jake checked his phone. "Eight-thirty." It could have been eight in the morning or four in the afternoon and Jake wouldn't have been surprised by either. His mind was functioning, barely, but he felt his body beginning to give out. He didn't even want to count the hours since he last slept.

"Go to your hotel room. Come back at one pm," Art said, still not looking up.

Jake watched him for a second longer and then left the office.

He couldn't say he disagreed with Gyle's decision, more, he thought that he should be included in any firings that happened. Neither Art nor he deserved these positions, not if results mattered at all. How many times had they fucked up? How many dead people now rested on their shoulders? How many more were to come if they continued on at this current pace? Maybe Gyle should have fired them both right then, sent them home to spend the last few months of life with their families. Jake wouldn't blame him. Not a bit.

He rode the elevator down to the lobby and then zombie-walked his way to his hotel room. He opened the door and stood looking at the room in front of him. The door closed with an audible click, but Jake didn't move.

What had he done? Not Art. Art took
Jake's
idea and helped put it into motion. Without Jake, Henry Werzen would still be in California living with his brother and helping his mother grocery shop every week. Art had no part in the idea, had no say in it really. What could he have done? Told Jake no? Not likely, because the idea was
good
. It worked, even if only briefly. Brand showed up; Brand believed at least for a second that he had another son. They had gone wrong somewhere, though. Where?

Art told him a few weeks ago—which now felt like eons—not to underestimate Brand.
Do you think heads of nations are calling the President daily because they're worried about some Ted Bundy style serial killer? They're calling because everyone in this world, apparently besides you, sees the big picture. That we are dealing with a criminal unlike anything the world has seen.

Jake was out classed, that's all. The plan rivaled Moore's use of Rally, and in the end, Brand got the best of both of them. And now a person was in danger because of it. Maybe the danger was over, even. Maybe Werzen was dead. Now the mother had a dead husband and a dead son and at least fifty percent of her loss rested with Jake and his inability to realize he couldn't compete. How many more lives would Jake hoist up on his shoulders? How long would he stand here and keep trying to capture a man that couldn't be captured, killing innocents the whole while?

He dropped his computer bag on the floor and walked to the bed. He didn't lie down, but stood like he had in the doorway. After a few minutes he pulled his phone from his pocket.

"Hey," his dad answered.

"Hey," Jake said back, tears already in his eyes.

"Jesus. You haven't sounded like this since we had to put Charlie down. What's going on? Give me a second here."

Jake listened as his father's voice shifted away from the phone. "Honey, I'm going to step outside. It's Jake. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Tell him I love him," he heard his mom say.

"Alright, can you hear me?"

"Yeah," Jake answered.

"So why are you about to cry?"

He couldn't hide it from his dad, and what made it worse was that he had never seen his father cry. He didn't know if it was the military or his dad's natural inclination, but sadness was one emotion that didn't boil to the surface for him. And it didn't for Jake either, not usually. He couldn't hold it back this time, though, couldn't shove his tears away, and they finally fell onto his cheeks.

"We lost this kid. He was twenty-four years old and we tried to trick Brand, and now the kid is gone. We lost him, dad." He blurted it all into the phone as the tears came harder, causing him to gasp for breaths every few words.

"Say it again. You lost someone, how?"

"We wanted this guy to act like he was Brand's son, to try to make Brand calm down, or stop. And Brand found him, the guy who was supposed to be his son, but he didn't believe it. He took him, a twenty-four year old kid with a mother and a brother. It's my fault, dad."

Pete Deschaine said nothing and Jake sat, nearly collapsed, onto the bed. "What do I do?"

"I don't have any pep talk speeches for you, Jake. There aren't any to give. Death is a part of this thing. It always is in war and most of the time the wars America fights are thought up in rooms that serve food on silver platters and then the orders are given to the kids who eat McDonald's every night. This time we didn't start this war, someone else did, and they brought it to us. You were drafted, and now here you are in the heat of it, and there are no words that will make it better. War is an awful, awful thing, Jake."

"Did you ever cry?" Jake asked. He wasn't sure why it was an important question, but it was.

"Yeah, I did. Of course."

"When?" Jake wiped the tears from the left side of his face.

"Oh, I don't know, Jake."

But his dad was lying. They never talked about the war, never much about the past before Jake's mother. It was an unspoken rule strictly followed by all involved, and now as Jake asked his first question about those years, his father simply lied.

"Why are you lying?"

Jake listened to silence for a few seconds. "Probably for the same reason that you're going to lie to your kids if they ever ask you about this. It's not something you'll want to think about. It's not something you'll want to bring up ever again."

And then Jake was silent, waiting on his father to continue. He needed to know this. He needed to know what had made his father cry and what his father did to go on. Because he
did
go on; he lived a whole life after it.

Pete let out a long sigh. "I caught the flu. Bad. Diarrhea, vomiting, fever, the whole nine yards. Anything I put in my body was coming out within twenty minutes and I became so dehydrated, they hooked me up to IVs. My unit was put out on patrol and I couldn't go with them. The next morning, only one came back and he didn't have any legs. They hadn't been surgically amputated the night before; they'd been completely shot off. The gun had simply removed them. He nearly died from blood loss and trauma, and I'm pretty sure Chad developed a pretty nasty heroin habit after. I cried then. I lay on my cot and I cried until my face hurt. A week later the flu was gone but that guilt didn’t leave. I don't think it ever left, not even now. I lay in my bed shitting myself like a newborn while all of my friends, all of the friends that I had sworn to protect, were ambushed and murdered. You’re supposed to die out there with your friends, you don't die seventy years later in a bed, which is what I realized would end up happening to me. Ryan Fulseme. Alan Trend. James Vetran. There are more names, a lot of them, and none of them grew much older than the kid you just lost. And here I am, in my fifties, and all because I came down with the flu. It wasn't fair then and it's not fair now."

"What did you do?"

"What I was told. I got up out of the bed and joined another unit and went and killed more people. That's what you do in war." His father paused. "What are they wanting you to do?"

"Anything at all. Anything to stop this guy. They say they want the kid back but the kid's gone. Everyone knows that. They just want this to end and they're looking at us to do it."

"Jake, this is going to sound flippant, but don't put too much pressure on yourself. The whole world could be looking for Brand if they really wanted to. If every person in the United States cared as much as they think they do, all three hundred million of them would be in the North-East walking hand in hand across the land until they came across him. No one's up there doing that, right?"

"No."

"No, they're not. Your mother and I are down here sipping Mojitos and I don't know what the rest of the world is doing, but I do know you're alone up there, at least relatively. Pick up your gun and go kill some people. That's about all you can do in war."