Cassiel had looked at buildings, places to eat, stores and businesses that interested him for one reason or another, and in particular, women on the street. A good percentage of his recent memories now residing in her head seemed to be of women’s asses. His vision had been like a heat-seeking missile for ass. Those women were of course long gone, leaving blanks along the route they needed to follow. Those memories explained some of the perverted things he had liked to do to the women he murdered.
She often wished she didn’t have to live as the curator of the terrible visions and memories from killers’ minds. Being in their heads, seeing the things they did, and how much they liked doing them, made her sick and angry. When she killed one of those savages, like when she had killed Cassiel, she at last had the chance to unleash vengeance on them.
She was the wrath of God.
Angela bent forward between the front bucket seats, over the center console, and squeezed herself through to get up front with Jack, her legs finally making it up and over with the rest of her.
Once they had taken the exit and were on Interstate 495 going east, Angela got serious about looking out the windows, scanning from side to side, trying to overlay the scenery with memories, looking for matches for everything she saw, hoping that would help lead them to the place where Rafael had the second bomb. She knew some of the things—besides women—that seemed to have drawn Cassiel’s attention, so she looked for those things. If she saw a shopping center, or an ethnic food store, or a smoke shop, she tried to fit a memory to it.
Hard as she tried, nothing seemed to match.
She didn’t say anything to Jack, but inside she was beginning to feel panicky that her plan was not working. Everything depended on her being able to follow the bread crumbs of his memories to lead them to the nest of terrorists. So far, she wasn’t finding any bread crumbs other than that one sign.
Scanning everything she could out the windows while running memories through her mind didn’t seem to be working. She began to seriously worry that maybe it would never work. She worried that if they couldn’t find the building with the bomb, then Jack might have to call the shadowy intel people he knew.
But how could they ever find it, especially in time? There were only a few hours left before Rafael would detonate the bomb. Even if by some miracle those government forces did manage to find the building, Rafael was prepared for every eventuality. She knew there was no chance they would be able to stop the bomb from going off. They would be the cause of it going off.
If Angela’s plan didn’t work, Washington had only a few hours of existence left, and then the world would change forever. None of the people going about their lives there had any idea they were about to die.
She kept coming back to the same problem. Finding it and stopping it were two different things. Everything she had told Jack about the terrorists’ plans was true. They had contingencies for any kind of attack to stop them.
Being eager to die removed the self-preservation factor. Being eager to die added a level of certainty for success.
Rafael knew they couldn’t win a gun battle or survive a heavy assault, but he didn’t need to win because he didn’t plan to survive, so they didn’t make any plans for it. Their endgame was to detonate the bomb, not win a gunfight with a SWAT team. The bomb was ready to go. If anything happened to interrupt or threaten their schedule they were prepared to simply set it off ahead of time. Either way worked for them.
“There,” Angela said when she saw a store that struck a chord with the memories. “Turn right just before that store on the corner. The one with Uncle Sam posters in the window.”
Jack turned down the street without comment or objection.
Angela sat back, relieved that she had at last recognized something significant. It was proof that she was on the right track.
She let herself sink into a kind of trance as she scanned everything as they drove along. As she watched, the buildings grew gradually more run-down. As she let herself become immersed in Cassiel’s memories, letting them run nonstop through her mind, fragments of images were beginning to make her feel that they were going the right way. She saw a Laundromat she recognized from Cassiel’s memory, and a corner market with hand-painted advertisements for a sale on hamburger. Both the Laundromat and the market were busy.
Cassiel had memories of fat-assed women in stretch pants carrying black plastic bags full of laundry into the Laundromat. Angela had to smile at her own memory of carrying pieces of Cassiel in black plastic bags back to the hell hole.
“Up there, on the right a block ahead, there’s an old abandoned theater. See it? Turn left just past it.”
The vertical theater sign was coming detached at the top, so that it leaned out, attached only by a bottom bracket. Because it was leaning out, it had caught Cassiel’s attention.
As they drove past it, Angela saw plywood nailed up across the doors and windows of the building to keep people out. Cassiel had looked at the graffiti on that building. The meaning of it all had puzzled him. He had considered how universal graffiti was, how the ghettos in all the countries he’d been to had the same multicolored mess of graffiti.
They turned onto a street lined with older cars and pickups parked along a curb. Homes occupied long buildings, each home painted a different color to make it look like they were individual row houses. Each house had steps and a small porch. Some people sat on the steps, others sat on the porches on rusty benches or overstuffed chairs with padding hanging out of torn seams. Little kids ran up and down the steps, and in and out of the houses.
“Here, take a right at this street, go down one block, then hook a left.”
They drove past empty lots with chain-link fences that had strained newspapers, pizza boxes, burger wrappers, and all kinds of other debris out of the gusty breezes the way a colander strained pasta out of water.
“Go a little slower, please,” she said to Jack from inside her trance of a killer’s memories.
The farther they went, making turns where she instructed, the more unsavory the areas became.
“Are you sure they went on such a random route?” Jack asked.
“It’s not random. They studied the city. They’ve been sending advance people in for years to scout the whole city for locations and routes that would be least likely to encounter scrutiny and searches. They took thousands of photos. They knew that if they drove close to the Capitol Building or the White House there would be a lot of security. They wanted to use poor areas because they would fit in with people in those places. Their cargo van was old and has primer spots so that it wouldn’t raise eyebrows on any of these streets. In wealthier areas they were more likely to look out of place or suspicious.”
“It’s frightening the way they thought everything through.”
“From what Cassiel learned, Rafael, his advisors, and his team have had years—decades—to make sure they eliminated variables, dangers, or problems. They bought an abandoned building eleven years ago. They occasionally ran a small distribution business out of it to look legit and so they could be sure it was kept up just enough. They’ve planned for every contingency.”
“Except for you,” he said.
Angela smiled to herself as she gazed out the windows at a crumbling landscape. In ways, it reminded her of the buildings her grandfather had built. Some of these buildings were painted, but under the layers of peeling, faded paint they were brick. Some of them were long abandoned, now only forlorn shells. Walls here and there had collapsed, leaving piles of rubble, mostly bricks, scattered out onto empty lots beside them. Shopping carts lay capsized among the rubble like ships that had run aground on shoals.
The memories were fitting the scenery more closely the farther they moved into the deteriorated areas.
“These are the kind of dangerous shithole places Cassiel liked to haunt in third-world countries,” she told Jack. “Lots of crime so that the things he did would stand out less, or not at all. He felt comfortable in places like this, so his memories are more vivid along here. He viewed this area through the eyes of a predator. This is a hunting ground.”