William Krueger - The Devil's bed

When he reached the truck, the old man asked, “It’s done?”

Nocturne nodded.

The old man drove out of the alley, down the street between the closed shops, past the dark houses, out where the farmland began. He pulled into a lane between fields of harvested corn and turned off the engine. He drew a pocket watch from his overalls and checked the time.

Nocturne sat as silent as his grandfather, looking toward town. He wasn’t worried. He knew the device he’d built would work. He’d done just as his grandfather asked. It was now only a matter of waiting, and that was something he was very good at.

After a few minutes, Nocturne felt the old man stiffen. “It should have gone off by now.” His grandfather’s fierce eyes settled on him with a look that froze the boy’s heart.

“Your watch,” Nocturne offered timidly. “I think it’s fast.”

At that moment, the sound of a muffled explosion rolled across the open field. The old man’s head jerked around, and he watched as an orange glow slowly bloomed in the dark among the buildings and the trees of the town. Without a word, without a sign that he was pleased with the boy’s accomplishment, he started the truck and drove home.

Nocturne’s mother waited at the back door. He could see that she’d been crying, but she didn’t speak as he entered with his grandfather. The old man hung his coat on a peg near the door. He looked at the boy.

“Tomorrow, we’ll move you to a room upstairs.”

“I like the basement,” Nocturne said.

The old man shrugged and started from the kitchen. He turned back before he left and said to his daughter, “Don’t lock the basement door no more.”

For an hour, Nightmare watched the monitor and listened as Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon sat with her communications director, Nicole Greene, in the office of the main house and discussed the commitments that had to be rescheduled due to her extended stay at Wildwood. She outlined correspondences to be written on her behalf, giving the other woman specific instructions regarding content and tone. She spent an hour on the telephone-briefly with her husband, then for a longer time with her daughter, then with the White House chief of staff, with a reporter for theLos Angeles Times, with her lawyer, and finally with the president of Harvard University, who was obviously a good friend. Except for her daughter, to whom she spoke gently and lovingly, she communicated in a manner that conveyed power. Nightmare liked that. Bringing down powerful people had always made his work more satisfying. Before he himself had been betrayed and left for dead, he’d been assigned to kill for many reasons, and sometimes for no reason that he could see. He never wondered about a sanction he carried out against someone in a powerful position. Power was itself reason enough to draw a sanction. It was when he was told to kill someone who was no one that he wondered. Why end a life that was no life at all?

In South Africa once, he’d tracked a man for a month to learn the patterns and rhythms of his life. He did it to make a clean kill. In his surveillance, he found a lowly government clerk with a wife and three children, a man who liked bow ties, who drank Indonesian black tea under a kapok tree at lunch while he read the LondonTimes, who visited his mistress every Wednesday afternoon, and who, in his position, wielded only the power of a rubber stamp. He also discovered that the wife was herself a mistress to an important political figure. He killed the clerk with poison, a few milligrams of aconitine in his black tea, and he was out of the country on an afternoon plane. The killing didn’t bother him. By then, there’d been so many. It was the why of it, to remove a small man from the path of a greater man’s desire, that ate at him. Murder as a political favor, granted as easily as an invitation to an embassy ball.

On the monitor, he watched the First Lady head upstairs. He switched to the camera he’d put in her room two weeks earlier, on a bookshelf, inside a hollowed-out copy ofLittle Men. He watched her undress, prepare to take a bath, and stand for a moment in front of the mirror on her vanity. She turned and studied her profile, drew in her stomach, lifted her breasts, shook her head in a disappointed way, and relaxed. She stepped toward the bathroom and out of range of the camera lens.

Nightmare sat back patiently. He was used to watching and waiting. However, he knew that on this kill, waiting could be a problem. The First Lady wouldn’t stay at Wildwood indefinitely. And there was Thorsen. The man was a complication, one Nightmare would have to consider carefully. He would probably have to neutralize Thorsen. But later. Now he had to focus on his purpose, which was to sanction the lying abomination called Tom Jorgenson and his daughter Kate, whom Nightmare had once called his friend. It had been his intention to kill them both together at the hospital with the C-4 explosive. Because the security guard had caught him, the plan was ruined. At first, he’d been angry with himself. Weakness, he’d chided. After further reflection, he decided he’d unconsciously sabotaged his own strategy because he wanted the man and his daughter dead in a different way. Most of his life, he’d killed for reasons tied to politics, to economics, to the expediencies of closet diplomacy. This was different; this was personal. He wanted to confront the man and the daughter face-to-face before they died. Not to gloat, as he had at Jorgenson’s bedside. That was a mistake. No, he wanted to be sure they went to their deaths with a full understanding of their guilt. This would probably mean killing them separately, and probably Thorsen somewhere along the way.

A knock on the van door startled him.

“Open up. Police.”

Nightmare quickly turned off the monitor, shoved his Beretta into his belt at the small of his back, and opened the back doors of the van. Outside, it was twilight. The sheriff’s deputy stood looking at Nightmare, his thumbs hooked over the leather of his gun belt. Behind him, at the side of the highway, stretched a line of parked vehicles, mostly media vans and cars.

“ID.” The deputy held out his hand.

Nightmare gave the deputy his wallet.

“MCC,” the deputy said. “Never heard of that one.”

“Metro Cable Communications,” Nightmare replied. “Usually we stick with city council and school board meetings, but this is too big to pass up.”

“Parking here all night?”

“Unless the First Lady leaves.”

“You know the rule. You let her motorcade pass, then you can follow at a reasonable distance.”

“I know.”

“All right, Mr.”-he double-checked the ID-“Solomon. Good evening.”

The deputy moved to the next vehicle in line, a white van that carried the call letters KSTP on the side. Like Nightmare’s van, it had a small satellite dish mounted on top and a short broadcasting antenna.

Nightmare glanced across the road at the entrance to Wildwood. A Washington County Sheriff’s Department cruiser was parked behind the stone arch, controlling access. Nightmare smiled at the futility of the effort.

The fax came through a little before 9:00P.M. Deputy Williams from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department had moved quickly on Bo’s request. Luther Gallagher had no criminal record. He was employed as an attendant at the Minnesota State Security Hospital in St. Peter, and the photograph on his hospital ID card was included. Bo only had to glance at the photo to see that it wasn’t Max Ableman. Gallagher had a large square face and a bald head that reminded Bo of a professional wrestler. The presence of Gallagher’s pickup truck at the motor court probably had nothing to do with Ableman.