29
The Collector was now only steps behind Herod. He felt himself drawing closer to him, and as he did so his fears increased.
Herod was an unusual case. The Collector might even have viewed him simply as an interesting challenge, like a hunter who finds that the animal he is pursuing has displayed unexpected depths of cunning, had he not become increasingly concerned about the man’s ultimate purpose, and the imminence of its fulfillment. Herod had concealed himself well, and the Collector had only been able to find traces of him: deals, and threats, made; lives ruined, and bodies left unburied; items purchased, or taken from the dead. It was the nature of these artifacts – occult, arcane – that had first drawn the Collector’s attention. Carefully, he had tried to discern a pattern. There seemed to be no distinct historical period to which Herod was attracted, and the items themselves were baffling in their variety and relative value. The Collector had only the peculiar sense that this was the reflection of a consciousness, as though Herod were furnishing a room in preparation for the arrival of an honored guest, so that the visitor might be surrounded by treasures and curios that were familiar or of interest to him; or preparing a museum display which would only come together for the viewer when the main exhibit was finally put in place.
The Collector had come close to confronting Herod on a number of occasions, but the man had always slipped away. It was as though he had been forewarned about the Collector’s approach, and had found ways to avoid him, even if it meant sacrificing an item that he desired, for the Collector had made certain to bait his traps well. The Collector had already decided to dispose of Herod some years before. Herod had killed a child, a young boy, whose father had reneged on a deal, and in the Collector’s mind Herod had damned himself by that action. It was one of Herod’s apparent peculiarities that he seemed to regard himself, and those with whom he dealt, as being bound by some twisted notion of honor, the rules of which appeared to be set by Herod, and Herod alone.
But if the Collector had experienced any doubts about the legitimacy of killing Herod, they had been swept away when he began to learn of Herod’s inquiries into the treasures looted from the Iraq Museum. That had given the Collector his first real inkling of what was being sought. He had heard rumors about the box, but had disregarded them. There were so many such tales, going right back to the original legend of Pandora, yet this one was different, because Herod was interested in it, and Herod did not embark on fruitless searches. Herod had an end in sight, and everything that he did served it.
Herod had been in contact with Rochman in Paris, anxious to establish the source of the seals that he had acquired. Rochman had proved uncooperative, for Herod did not have the funds necessary to engage in a serious bid for the items, even had Herod been interested in purchasing them, which he was not. Herod, in turn, had seemed oddly reluctant to threaten Rochman in order to force the information from him. The Collector had noted that Herod used violence only against the weak, like a playground bully. The House of Rochman was well established, and had influence. If Herod crossed it, he would risk alienating a clique of unscrupulous and wealthy dealers who would, at best, ostracize him, or, as was more likely, move against him. The Collector did not doubt that anyone getting into a conflict with Herod would suffer for it along the way, but a battle with men seeking to protect a billion dollar industry dependent on the secret movement of stolen antiquities could only end with Herod’s annihilation.
So Herod had backed off, biding his time. Now a number of seals had appeared in a town in Maine, for as soon as Rojas began seeking ways to turn gold and jewels into hard cash, rumors had spread. It was not only the dealers, and Herod, who would be drawn by them. The federal government was already taking an interest, for Rochman had begun to talk in an effort to save himself and his business. The seals in his possession had come from Locker 5 in the basement of the Iraq Museum, as had the seals currently available for sale in Maine. Rochman’s seals were a down payment for his advice on valuations, and for his help in sourcing buyers. In time, he would give all that he knew to the investigators, and it would only be a matter of days before they would start to close in on all involved.
The Collector knew of Dr. Al-Daini, and he believed that the Iraqi was ultimately seeking the box, even as he set about recovering the other treasures lost in 2003. The Collector had made inquiries, and had learned that Al-Daini was now on his way to the US. He would fly into Boston, and be taken straight from there to a disused motel in the town of Langdon, Maine.
The men who were transporting the stolen artifacts from the motel had been careless. A pair of small alabaster figures had been found lying in the long grass, and had quickly been identified as part of a hoard discovered at Tell es Sawwan, on the left bank of the Tigris, in 1964, and subsequently looted from the Iraq Museum. The body of a man had also been discovered at the motel, sealed into a room from the inside, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound having first apparently fired at some unknown threat.
The body had been discovered by the detective, Charlie Parker.
There were no coincidences, the Collector knew, not where Parker was concerned. He was part of something that he did not understand; that, in truth, the Collector did not fully understand either. Now, once again, he and Parker were circling the same quarry, like twin moons orbiting a dark, unknown planet.
The Collector made a telephone call to his lawyer. He wanted to know where Parker was. His lawyer, an ancient man who disdained computers and cell phones and most of the significant technical innovations of recent years, made a call in turn to a gentleman who specialized in matters of triangulation, and Parker’s cell phone was traced to a motel near Bucksport.
Bucksport was an hour away.
The Collector began to drive.
30
Herod stood by his car and gazed upon the Rojas warehouse. Lights burned on both floors, and he could see figures moving behind glass on the lower level. There were vehicles parked in the front lot: Rojas Brothers trucks, a couple of cars, and a white SUV.
Herod needed his medication, and in serious doses. The pain had grown worse as the day proceeded, and now he wanted all of this to be over with so that he could rest for a while.
There came a prickling at the base of his neck. At first, he barely noticed it against the shrillness of his agony; it was like trying to pick out a melody from the cacophony of an orchestra tuning its instruments. The wound on his mouth throbbed in the warm night air, and the insects were feeding on him.
I reek of decay, he thought. Were I to lie down and wait for death to take my breath, they would plant their eggs in my flesh before I passed over. There might even be some relief in it. He imagined the maggots emerging from the eggs and feasting on his tumors, consuming the rotting tissue and leaving the rest to regenerate, except that there was no good flesh left, and so they would devour him entirely. He might have embraced such an end, once upon a time, for at least it would have been faster, and more natural, than the manner in which his body was cannibalizing itself. Instead, he had found another outlet for his pain. If this was a visitation from the Divine, a punishment for his sins – for Herod had sinned, and taken joy in his transgressions – then Herod would inflict punishment on others in turn. The Captain had given him the means, had endowed him with a purpose beyond the simple infliction of hurt in revenge for his own torments. The Captain had promised him that the world would mourn because of Herod. Before he was pulled back from the darkness – back, perhaps, from one hell of another’s making to the hell of his body’s own capacities – the Captain had flashed images in his mind: the image of a black angel hidden behind a wall, a presence trapped within it; bodies slowly fading but never dying, each with something of the Captain within itself . . .
And the box. The Captain had shown him the box. But by then it was already missing, and so the search had commenced.
The tingling continued. He rubbed at his neck, expecting to feel a blood-gorged creature pop beneath his fingers, but there was nothing. An open field lay between Herod and the warehouse. At its closest border was a pool of standing water, cloudy with bugs. Herod drew closer to it, until he could stare at his reflection: his own, and that of another. Behind him stood a tall scarecrow in a black suit, wearing a black top hat with a busted crown on its head. Its face was a sack in which two eyeholes had been crudely cut, and it had no mouth. The scarecrow was unsupported. There was no wooden cross upon which it might rest.
The Captain had returned.
Vernon and Pritchard lay on a slight rise, their position concealed by briars and low-hanging branches. They had a clear line of sight to the houses adjoining the Rojas warehouse. Both were entirely still; even up close, they seemed barely to be breathing. Pritchard’s right eye was close to the night sight of the M40. The rifle was accurate up to a thousand yards, and Pritchard was barely eight hundred yards distant from the targets. Beside him, Vernon tracked doors and windows through an ATN Night Spirit monocular.
Vernon and Pritchard were elite Marine scout snipers, or HOGs in the language of their trade: hunters of gunmen. They were veterans of the sniper battles in Baghdad, a largely hidden conflict that had escalated after the loss of two Marine sniper teams, a total of ten men lost to the hajis. They had played cat and mouse games with the near mythical ‘Juba,’ an anonymous sniper variously believed to be a Chechen, or even a collective name for a cell of snipers, armed with Iraqi-produced Tabuk rifles, a Kalashnikov variant. Juba was disciplined, waiting for soldiers to stand up in, or dismount from, vehicles, looking for the gaps in the body armor, never firing more than one shot before melting away. Vernon and Pritchard differed on whether or not Juba was one man, or many. Pritchard, the better shot of the two, inclined to the former view, based on Juba’s preference for shots in the three-hundred-yard range, and his disinclination to fire more than once, even when baited. Vernon disagreed on the basis that, while the Tabuk was reliable up to about nine hundred yards, it was best at three hundred, so the Juba snipers using Tabuks were limited by their equipment. Vernon had also attributed kills using Dragunovs and an Izhmash .22 to Juba, suggesting multiple snipers, kills that Pritchard preferred to discount. In the end, both men had been targeted by Juba, whether one or many. Like their fellow soldiers, they had become adept at ‘cutting squares’: zig-zagging, ducking, moving back and forth, and bobbing their heads in order to provide a more difficult target to hit. Pritchard called it the ‘Battlefield Boogie,’ Vernon the ‘Jihad Jitterbug.’ What was odd was that neither man could dance to save his life on a regular dance floor, but threatened by an expert killer they had moved like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
Vernon and Pritchard had known the four men from Echo Company who had died in Ramadi in 2004. Three of them had been shot in the head, a fourth virtually torn apart by bullets. In addition, one Marine’s throat had been slit. The attack had happened in broad daylight, within eight hundred yards of the command post. Later they learned that a four-man ‘hit’ team had probably been responsible, and that the Marines had been targeted for some time, but the killings had marked the beginning of Vernon and Pritchard’s disillusionment with the nature of the conflict in Iraq. Only one of the dead men had been a trained sniper. The others had been grunts, and that wasn’t the way the system was supposed to work. No fewer than two trained snipers on any team, that was the golden rule. When the six-man sniper team of the Reserve 3rd Battalion died in Hadithah a year later, and the remaining snipers were forced to operate according to ever more restrictive rules of engagement, Vernon and Pritchard decided that the Marines could go screw themselves, subsequently aided by an explosion that had detached the retina in Vernon’s right eye, leading to permanent vision loss and a ticket home.
But by then they had already met Tobias, and they had been present on the night that the warehouse was raided. They were Team 1, covering the southern approaches. Twizell and Greenham were Team 2, covering the north. Nobody had questioned the purpose of the mission: it was in the nature of sniper units that they planned and executed their own operations, and they had announced their insertion into the area days earlier so that units on patrol could work around them. Only Tobias and Roddam knew exactly where they would be. In the end, they had not been required to fire a single shot on the night of the raid, which had disappointed them.
Pritchard had left the military shortly after Vernon was shipped home, which was how he and Vernon now came to be lying in the undergrowth, ready to kill Mexicans instead of hajis. Both men were quiet, patient, reclusive, as individuals of their calling needed to be. They were without remorse. When asked if he experienced regret at the lives that he took, Pritchard would reply that all he ever felt was the recoil. This was not entirely true: killing gave him a rush that was better than sex, yet he was also a moral and courageous man who believed that his vocation was noble, and he was intelligent enough to recognize the tension implicit in the desire to take lives in a moral fashion while simultaneously experiencing pleasure in the performance of the act.