The Soul Collectors (37 page)

‘This is my friend,’ Roy said, and she felt his finger dig into her arm. ‘Her name is Darby.’

‘Hello, Darren.’

Jagged scars the colour of jelly and smaller, neat ones left from a scalpel were slashed across a face of missing eyebrows. Goitres, the result of his Graves’ disease, covered his neck and half of his left cheek. His nose had been broken she didn’t know how many times and what was left was a pulpy, crooked mess. He tried to smile but the lips twitched. No teeth, just like the thing with the egg-white skin she had tied to the tree.

He snatched the envelope from her hand and then retreated to the corner, making some sort of nasal but gleeful sound as he went to work tearing off the paper like it was a Christmas present.

The pictures spilled across his lap. He picked up one, turned it over and looked, then tossed it aside and went after another one. Darby watched him do it six or so times before his head darted up, his hand waving a sheet at Roy.

‘It’s a picture,’ Roy said.

Waters performed some sort of sign language, then picked up one of the photographs and held it close to his face.

‘Then you need to turn on a light,’ Roy said.

Waters kept shaking his head.

Darby felt Roy release his grip. He reached into his trousers pocket, came back with a small flashlight, placed it on the floor and sat next to Waters in the corner.

‘Darren, would you like to use this?’ Roy asked, tapping the floor where the flashlight lay.

Waters tilted his head to the side. He made some signs again and his gnarled fingers scooped it up.

‘You’re welcome,’ Roy said. ‘Can my friend Darby sit with you?’

‘
Aye-ah.
’

She sat next to Roy. Waters turned on the flashlight and she felt her stomach slide south – not from fear of seeing his ghoulish face with its scars and lumps but more so out of anger and piercing sadness. This group had abducted Waters at four, tortured and beaten him over decades and turned him into this ghost of a human being.

Why in the name of God did they do this to you?

‘Darren,’ she said.

He looked up from the picture.

‘Do you know Mark Rizzo?’

No reaction.

‘Can you tell me anything about this?’ She pointed to the picture in his hand, the one showing the archway formed from human skulls.

No reaction.

‘Do you know this place?’

Water picked up a blue crayon and began colouring one of the skulls.

‘Too many words,’ Roy said to her. ‘Darren knows only basic language.’

‘Darren,’ she said kindly.

He looked up, tilted his head to the side.

‘This,’ she said, tapping the picture. ‘Where?’

She pointed down. ‘Below the ground?’

He didn’t understand.

‘Darren, can I use a crayon and paper?’

He didn’t understand and looked at Roy, who used sign language. Darren nodded and handed her a piece of paper and his box of crayons.

She drew a quick, crude picture of an outdoors scene dotted with trees and flowers. Below it, she drew a tunnel; inside it, a floor and the archway.

She put the drawing on the floor. Pointed to the picture of the archway he was colouring and then pointed to the one she had drawn.

Waters brought his hands together, kissed his palms and then made waving motions with his hands, like rising flames of fire.

A voice came over the speaker: ‘Darby McCormick, report to Situation Room 102.’

Darren Waters pressed his hands over his deformed ears.

After she stepped outside with Roy, she said, ‘That sign language at the end, what was he trying to describe? Hell?’

Roy shook his head.

‘Heaven,’ he said.

74

Her face flushed, Darby opened the door to the situation room and found three men dressed in SWAT gear picking up weapons from the table.

Casey wasn’t here, but Sergey was, leaning back in a leather chair with his legs crossed. He had loosened his tie and was eating peanuts from a bag, reading a stack of papers.

‘What took you so long?’ he asked, a half-grin cocked on his face.

‘I had to ask someone for directions.’ She nodded to the papers on his lap. ‘That Ross’s stuff?’

He nodded. ‘Religious theory on Gnosticism, stuff about these Archons. They like to bend people to their wills and wage war. Creates unity.’ He shook his head. ‘Load of useless mystical propaganda created centuries ago.’

‘And this group, for whatever reason, has bought into it.’

‘Sure looks that way. And none of it is going to do us any good.’

He tossed the stack on the table, ate another peanut. ‘I’ve got guys checking on customs logs to see who’s tried to import any of the spiders Perkins put on his list. No hits so far, but we’ve only just started.’

‘I didn’t know you carried SWAT on board.’

‘Former Hostage Rescue guys, on loan to us. Your stuff is in the back. They could use an extra body, and with your training I figured you wanted in.’

‘What about transport?’

‘You’re going to love this.’ He crumbled his bag into a ball and threw it into the trashcan bolted against the wall. ‘It’s a Huey, a Bell UH-1H, one of the new ones with a four-blade rotor system and dual GE engines. Powerful but quiet. And it’s got just about every piece of equipment we need to stage a military coup or mount a search and rescue.’

‘How did you score that?’

‘Pure luck.’

‘What about ground support?’

‘SWAT, local police and ambulances,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Blackstone from the Connecticut field office is overseeing everything. Good guy, he knows what he’s doing. He’s going to go in quiet when he gets close to the transmission corridor. He’s going to have to wait for us to scout out the terrain first.’

‘We know anything about the terrain?’

‘Woods. Lots and lots of woods. We’re going to fly in and scope it out using FLIR thermal imaging. Never seen it in action before.’

‘It’s good, unless you’re going into an area with fog or poor visibility, like tree cover.’

‘FLIR won’t pick that up?’

‘Depends,’ she said. ‘It’ll probably pick up warm spots as opposed to hot spots – the thermal image of the target won’t be entirely clear.’

He broke out in soft laughter.

‘What?’

‘You are one goddamn remarkable woman, you know that?’ He raised his hands, still laughing. ‘I mean, Christ, how many women look the way you do and can kick the ass of every guy in this room and also know the specs on FLIR?’

She smiled back, and it eased some of the tension. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’ He stood and pointed across the table to a guy with a shaved head and a square jaw. Marine, she thought. The only thing he was missing was a cigar jammed into his mouth.

‘That’s Knowles,’ Sergey said. ‘He’s heading up the operation, and he’ll brief you.’

‘You said “we” a moment ago. Are you coming along?’

Sergey nodded. ‘Jack too. He’s already dressed.’

‘Does Casey have SWAT training?’

‘He has training.’

‘That’s not the same thing, Sergey, and you know it.’

‘Of course I know it. Jack knows it too. But he wants to be on the ground if you find his wife and daughter.’

‘You think that’s wise, given what’s on the video?’

Sergey knew what she meant. She saw it in his eyes.

‘Jack’s not stupid, Darby. He knows the score. If the bodies of his wife and daughter are in those woods, he wants to be the one to bring them home. And that’s the least I can do, given what the man’s put on the line for the Bureau.’

Darby nodded. ‘Any news on their signals?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ He shook his head, sighing. ‘Sandwiches and stuff are on the table in the corner. Dig in now. You could be in for a long night.’

The FBI helicopter was perfect. Two sliding aft doors had enough room to allow two to three people to rappel from either door. The cabin, specially lengthened, had an internal rescue hoist and passenger seats that, if detached, could accommodate the six stretchers stored in the back.

Right now there was plenty of space to spread out. Darby took a rear seat, the pleasant roar of the engine throbbing through her limbs. The men filed inside, along with Casey. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to see whatever might be on his face, didn’t want that in her head right now.

Sergey had climbed in next to the pilot. The team leader, Knowles, slid both aft doors shut, then pounded twice on the wall behind the pilot.

The copter lifted off the ground. ETA was thirty minutes. Nobody spoke.

Having already checked and prepared her weapons, Darby closed her eyes and meditated, wanting her mind clear for whatever was waiting for them in the darkness.

75

Knowles’s gruff voice barked across her headset: ‘Mount up, people.’

Darby stood, crouching forward, and grabbed an O-ring on the ceiling for balance.

‘Our FLIR picked up a collection of warm spots,’ Knowles said. ‘These images aren’t clear because of our current distance from the site and because of the tree cover. We don’t want to risk flying in for a closer look and alerting anyone who may be down there waiting for our arrival. These warm spots aren’t moving.’

Nobody said it but everyone was thinking the same thing: bodies.
Buried
bodies. A possible mass grave site.

‘Bravo One, McCormick and Farrell,’ Knowles said. ‘We’re dropping you south of the target. Proceed ahead a thousand metres to what appears to be a clearing. Bravo Two, Clark and Reggie, we’ll drop you north of the location. All of you are to treat this as though you’re stepping into a potential hot zone. In other words, be aware of traps. Take nothing for granted. We’ll be monitoring the area and radioing updates. Make sure you all do the same. Questions?’

There were none.

Knowles gripped the side door handle. Darby reached down and grabbed the thick rope with her gloved hands.

The aft door slid open. Cold wind rushed inside the cabin and the engine roared against her ears as she moved to the opened doorway, which looked out on a black sky peppered with bright stars. She affixed the rope to her harness, threw the dangling end out of the copter and stepped outside, on to the railing. Got her boots planted firmly and, gripping the rope, leaned backwards into the air, waiting for her partner, Farrell.

She gave her zip-line a final check. Looked good. She flipped the night-vision goggles down across her eyes and in the bright ambient green glow of light saw that Farrell had got himself into position. A bend of the knees and she pushed herself off the railing, falling through the awful dark, her stomach jumping with anticipation and worry.

She kept her grip steady as she whisked past leaves and tree branches. She saw the rushing ground, slowed her descent and hit it softly. She released the rope, and as it climbed back up and into the air she noticed she could barely hear the copter above the wind whistling through the trees and shaking the branches.

Her partner hit the ground a moment later, a little more roughly. He stumbled and she had to help him release his zip-line.

Standing behind a tree, she scanned the surrounding area, saw nothing but trees and leafy ground. They searched the flat and bumpy areas ahead, and then the trees and ground and boulders for any moving shapes.

She hand-signalled to Farrell and he nodded and stepped out from behind a tree. Up came his HK submachine gun with a silencer and flash suppressor. They fell into step with each other, their backs nearly touching, and moved forward in a two-by-two formation, checking the ground before each step, the dark forest lit up by their night-vision goggles, the wind camouflaging the sounds of twigs and branches snapped by their boots.

It was slow work. Several minutes later she heard Clark from Bravo Two whisper over her headset: ‘Command, this is Bravo Two. We’ve discovered a path east of the clearing. Permission to investigate.’

‘Permission granted,’ Knowles replied. ‘Proceed, Bravo Two.’

Ten more minutes and up ahead she spotted the clearing she had been instructed to reach.

Definitely man-made. Someone had removed the trees and stumps in a space roughly the size of a basketball court, the ground covered with snapped branches, some looking as if they had been stabbed into the ground and –

Darby took another few steps before hand-signalling to Farrell to stop. She pointed ahead to the clearing and Farrell looked down the length of her arm and she heard him mumble, ‘Jesus.’

She called it in: ‘Command, this is Bravo One. I have a partial visual on the clearing. I’m seeing at least three hands sticking out of the ground. They don’t seem to be moving, but I won’t know until I get a closer look.’

A short pause, and then Knowles replied: ‘Acknowledged. We don’t have a visual so walk us through it. Proceed with caution. I repeat, proceed with caution.’

You don’t have to tell me twice
, she thought. The whole scene smacked of a Grand Guignol performance, only she wasn’t dealing with theatre of the macabre. These hands belonged to real people, not actors. These people weren’t pretending to be dead, they
were
dead.

Jack Casey’s wife and daughter flashed through her mind and Darby wondered with a sickening dread if one or both had been buried somewhere up ahead. She advanced slowly, a single word worming its way through her thoughts:
trap
.

These people worked too hard to remain hidden in the shadows – and had done so successfully – so why would they bury their victims with their hands sticking out of the ground for us to find?

Two tight, bright beams emerged at the opposite end of the clearing – the path Bravo Two had mentioned. She could see Clark and Reggie sweeping the beams of their tactical lights across the ground.

Clark’s voice spoke over her headset: ‘Command, we’ve come across a hatch of some sort. It’s covered in … a camouflage blanket you could call it. It’s made of these fake leaves, like the kind my wife buys at craft stores. I don’t know how else to describe it.’

Darby reached the edge of clearing and saw a sea of hands sticking out from underneath the dirt – there were dozens of them hanging in the air, lifeless.