Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

‘You better stay where you are, bitch.’

‘Please,’ Taylor said, her hands up in a surrender gesture. ‘Shutting the door on her will make her panic even more.’

Lucien nodded in a carefree way. ‘Yes, I know.’

Anger radiated from Taylor. ‘You sonofabitch.’

‘Let her go, Lucien,’ Hunter said. ‘Let Madeleine go. You don’t need her anymore. You don’t need to take her life. She means nothing to you. Take me and let her go. Let Courtney take Madeleine out of here, and take me.’

‘You dumb fuck,’ Ghost said. His gun was still aimed at Taylor. ‘Reality check, big guy — we already have you, and the whore inside the room, and the pretty FBI bitch with the pretty toes here.’ He blew Taylor a kiss while rubbing his groin. ‘Soon you’ll be all mine, bitch. And I’ll make you scream. You can bet on that.’

Taylor’s self-control completely escaped her.

‘Fuck you, you tiny pencil-dick ugly fuck.’

Maybe it was Taylor’s words, or maybe Ghost had just had enough of this game, but the overload switch in his head flicked.

‘No,’ he said, with so much anger it almost drooled out of his mouth. ‘Fuck you, you stupid whore.’ He squeezed the trigger on his gun.

FBI Academy — Quantico, Virginia.

Forty-five minutes earlier.

It didn’t take the FBI long to get in contact with Joshua Foster, the air traffic controller at Berlin’s municipal airport. The call was immediately transferred to Director Kennedy in the Operations Room.

‘Mr Foster,’ Kennedy said, switching the call to speakerphone. ‘My name is Adrian Kennedy. I’m the director of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I believe that you were in contact with one of our agents. His name is Robert Hunter. You handed him the keys to your Jeep.’

‘Ummm, that’s correct.’ Understandably, there was a nervous edge to Joshua Foster’s voice.

‘OK, Mr Foster, please listen carefully,’ Kennedy said. ‘This is very important. I understand your car was brand new.’

‘Yeah, well, I got it about two months ago.’

‘That’s great. Now did the car come equipped with a location transponder, a GPS locator, in case of theft?’

‘Actually, yes, it did.’

Kennedy’s face lit up.

‘But I don’t have the transponder tracking code with me,’ Foster said, anticipating Kennedy’s next question. ‘It’s back at my house.’

‘We don’t need it.’ The agent at the radar station took over. ‘All we need is the car’s license plate and I can find the transponder tracking code from here.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Foster gave them his Jeep’s license plate number.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Foster,’ Kennedy said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

‘Could I ask. .?’ Foster tried saying, but Kennedy had already disconnected the call.

‘How long will it take you to find this tracking code,’ he asked.

‘Not long at all,’ the agent replied, already typing something into his computer.

As Kennedy waited, his cellphone rang inside his jacket pocket again. It was Special Agent Moyer, the agent in charge of the expedition sent to Lake Saltonstall in New Haven. They were looking for Karen Simpson’s remains, together with those of four other victims.

‘Director,’ the agent said, his voice firm but a little subdued, as if to show respect. ‘Sir, the information is one hundred percent legit. So far, we’ve dug out the remains of exactly five bodies.’ There was an awkward pause. ‘Would you like us to carry on digging? The area here is pretty vast, and if this was the perpetrator’s preferred burial ground, who knows how many more we might find.’

‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ Kennedy replied. ‘You won’t find any more bodies.’ He had no doubt Lucien had told the truth. ‘Just prep the ones you found for transportation. We’ll need them here in Quantico ASAP.’

‘Understood, sir.’

‘Good work, Agent Moyer,’ Kennedy said before hanging up.

‘Got the transponder tracking code,’ the agent at the radar station announced, as he entered a few more commands into his computer.

Everyone’s eyes were glued to his screen.

‘Tracking now.’

The seconds felt like minutes. Finally, the map on the agent’s screen repositioned itself to show the location of a bright, pulsating dot.

‘We’ve got the Jeep’s location,’ the agent said excitedly. A short pause. ‘And it doesn’t look like they’re moving anymore.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ Kennedy said, frowning at the screen. ‘But where the hell are they exactly?’

‘Right in the middle of absolutely nowhere, by the looks of it,’ Doctor Lambert commented.

According to the map, the Jeep was parked at the end of a nameless dirt path deep inside a dense forestland several miles from Berlin’s municipal airport.

‘We need a satellite image of the area instead of a map,’ Kennedy said.

‘Give me a second,’ the agent replied and immediately started typing again.

Two seconds later, the map on his screen was swapped for a satellite image of the area.

Everyone frowned at the screen for a moment.

‘What is this?’ Kennedy asked, pointing at what looked like a construction site not that far away from where the Jeep was parked.

The agent zoomed in on it and readjusted the resolution. ‘It looks like an old abandoned house, or building of some sort,’ he answered. ‘Or at least what’s left of it.’

‘That’s it,’ Kennedy said, ‘that’s where they are. That’s where Lucien was keeping his victim.’ He reached for his cellphone and called agent Brody inside Bird Two. They needed to land and get to that house — NOW.

Hunter saw it before it actually happened.

He saw something explode inside Ghost’s cold eyes, as if he’d been injected with an overdose of pure anger and evil, and right then he knew Ghost had passed the point of no return. But even though he saw it, this time Hunter wasn’t able to move fast enough. He wasn’t able to get between Taylor and Ghost. Ghost’s trigger-squeezing reaction took only a split second.

As the hammer hit the firing pin in Ghost’s gun, it was like it’d activated a real-life slow-motion switch for Hunter. He practically saw the bullet leave the gun barrel, travel through the air and whizz past the right side of his face, missing it by just a fraction. In a reflex reaction, he began turning toward Taylor, but he didn’t have to. From that distance, even a novice wouldn’t have missed, and he could see in Ghost’s eyes that he was no first timer. A millisecond after the shot, he felt the warmth of splattered blood and brain matter hit the back of his neck and side of his face, as Taylor’s head exploded with the impact of the fragmenting bullet.

The air inside the room was immediately filled with the smell of cordite.

Hunter still managed to turn fast enough to see Taylor’s body be propelled backward and slam against the dappled gunmetal door, before falling to the ground. The wall behind her was immediately colored in crimson red with speckles of flesh, gray matter and blonde hair. The bullet had hit her almost perfectly right between the eyes. Due to Ghost’s diminutive height and his position in relation to Taylor, the bullet traveled in a slight upward and left-to-right angle. The damage was mind-boggling. Most of the right upper part of her head and cranium was missing, blown off by the devastating effect of the Civil Defense bullet — a special type of round designed to mushroom (like turning inside-out) and fragment on impact, sending tiny pieces in all directions.