Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

Darby thought about Casey and his daughter, the people she'd seen chained to the walls, and felt a sick and hollow pit in her stomach.

'I was told what's down there is an ossuary created back in the early eighteen hundreds,' he said. 'When the cemeteries on the mainland flooded, they brought the bones here to this island and created this space to honour the dead. There's some old church up there, what's left of it. The locked cells and some of the other things we found, they're probably new. The locals say nobody comes out to this rock.'

'Jack and his daughter are down there. I saw them.'

Sergey nodded, kept nodding. 'I couldn't send anyone down until we had the proper masks and clothing. I'm waiting for mine to arrive, and then I'm going down.'

'You didn't have that stuff on your plane?'

Sergey kicked a tuft of grass with the tip of his shoe. 'The plane's been grounded. My boss and the pencil pushers he works for have decided to conduct an internal audit of this investigation. When we found your signal, I had to make other travel arrangements.'

'Why did they shut down the investigation?'

'Because I've lost too many people — Jack and his daughter, and now Keats. The Secret Service agent has vanished, along with his wife and son, Luke.'

'Keats didn't disappear.' Darby told Sergey what had happened with Keats in the back of the ambulance.

Sergey looked at the hatch and said, 'Did they bring Keats here with you and Jack?'

'I don't know. I didn't see him. Just Jack and his daughter. In the great hall.'

'The what?'

'The great hall. That's what Sarah Casey called it. I know where it is.'

'There's no need for you to go down there, I'm sure they'll — '

'The place is a maze of tunnels. I'm going down. Don't argue.'

'Then you're going to need to be properly dressed,' he said, and barked a request for another suit and gas mask into his radio.

Halfway through the tunnels, Darby got dizzy. Not from whatever was in the air; she wore a gas mask, as did everyone who was down here. The dizziness came from dehydration. Her body hadn't bounced back yet and she had ignored it, pushing herself too fast; her body was now pushing back. Sergey had to hold her arm the rest of the way.

They walked into what Sarah Casey had called the great hall and found it packed with bodies. A hundred, maybe more, it was impossible to tell. Dead from sarin gas.

Casey was no longer tied to the wheel. The device that had held his daughter lay on the floor, spotted with blood.

Sergey glanced around the room packed with bodies. 'I can't… This is…'

Darby moved to her right and searched through the bodies for Jack and Sarah Casey.

She didn't find them.

She was thinking of the smiling faces of those missing children in the photographs when she turned around and saw Sergey studying the metal device Sarah Casey had been forced to wear around her neck: the rusted O-ring with four metal rods leading to a horizontal one with two half-moon rings.

'I didn't find Jack or his daughter,' she said. 'You?'

'No, nothing here.' Sergey's voice was muffled behind the gas mask. 'This thing is called the Scavenger's Daughter. I first saw it, along with some other torture devices, when I toured the Tower of London. Henry VIII used it: prisoners would be forced to kneel with their chins on their knees, and then they'd be locked into the device, which crushed them into a foetal position.'

Darby looked away, her eyes wet. They settled on the steps leading up to the throne where the masked Archon had sat, watching the spectacle.

'Lot of pain,' Sergey said. 'Cracked ribs and collapsed lungs, and if enough time passed, the capillaries would burst and blood would start pouring from every orifice of the body. I pity the poor son of a bitch who had to endure this.'

She turned back to him as he leaned the device against the Catherine Wheel, its thick wooden spokes splattered with blood — Jack Casey's blood.

'Jack,' she started to say, and her throat closed up.

Sergey gave her his full attention and she told him about what had happened in this room, everything she had heard and seen.

A tall man dressed in a biohazard suit stepped inside the room and waved to Sergey. She went with him, and they followed the man down through the dirt-floored tunnels lined with bones and skulls.

The man stopped halfway down one tunnel and then fell to his knees and faced a grille. No, not a grille — the iron bars of a cell. She saw an ancient padlock flecked with rust.

The man shone the beam of his flashlight on whatever was inside and she also fell to her knees and looked, saw the tiny cell holding a tangle of broken limbs and dirty skin covered with fresh abrasions and welts from whippings — Neal Keats, the Secret Service agent, curled into a foetal position and hugging his dead son fiercely against his chest.

Darby woke to sunlight and the squawk of seagulls.

She sat up in the bed and checked her watch. It was early, just past six. She pulled the covers off and padded across the room in her bare feet to the rear window overlooking the ocean. The binoculars sat on the bureau. She picked them up and examined the shore.

After her hospital stay, three short days that felt like a lifetime, she helped Sergey and a federal team consisting of fifty people, most of them forensics, search every corridor, tunnel and room. When Jack and Sarah Casey's bodies didn't turn up, she braced herself for the fact that they would bob to the surface of the ocean at some point. The currents from Black Rock Island hit the beach near her rental home in Ogunquit, so she checked the shoreline every morning, at noon and then in the early evening before it got dark and she had to lock herself inside the house.

No bodies this morning, but she could see only part of the beach from her house. She'd have to walk the rest of it to be sure. She put down the binoculars, went back to the bed, grabbed the Glock from underneath the pillow and took the nine with her to the shower. She had already put out the next day's clothes, laying them on top of the toilet tank.

After she locked the door, she wedged the chair underneath the knob. Dressed in heavy winter clothes, her hair blown dry and tucked underneath a Red Sox baseball cap, she checked the upstairs rooms first, Glock in hand.

Finding nothing out of the ordinary — all the closet doors were open, the windows locked tight — she headed downstairs and started with the front door. Locked, alarm still on. Living room, spare bedroom and bath clean. All the windows locked. She wound her way into the kitchen, found everything neat and tidy, just as she had left it. She relaxed a little but kept the gun in her hand as she started to make coffee.

She found the picture when she went to put in a new coffee filter.

It was a recent one, showing Sarah Casey huddled in a corner and clutching her knees tightly against her chest. Fresh cuts and bruises on her shins. Her head had been shaved.

Darby tripped on the way back upstairs to retrieve a pair of latex gloves and an evidence bag. The restaurants in Ogunquit's downtown area catered to the lunch crowd, so most of them were closed. Darby hit the gas stations and found a payphone next to an air pump at a Mobil Station, its windows sprayed with fake snow and decorated with Christmas garlands.

Sergey was back in Washington. She called his cell, woke him up and told him about the picture.

'Bring it to our Boston office,' he said after she finished. 'Give it to Tina.'

Tina was the name of the federal agent who handled Sergey's mail. Darby had met the woman only once, when she drove to Boston at the beginning of the month to deliver the letter and stack of pages she'd written for Coop. Tina had forwarded the package to Sergey, who had delivered it to Coop's London address. When it came to Coop, she didn't want to take any chances.