Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

He alone had survived. That proved his reality, but also his solitude. From now on, he would have to shoulder the terrible burden of the Secret all by himself. The mystics of the Cabala had taught that as long as there was one enlightened man left alive, God would spare the world for his sake. It was an awesome responsibility to hold the destiny of all Creation in your hands, but he had no choice.

There would be no more mistakes, no more false disciples. From now on, he would trust nobody but himself. He would live quietly and alone, invisible to every eye but God’s. But first he had a debt to pay, a sacrificial offering to mark his acceptance of the great task which had been entrusted to him. He had pledged his faith in blood, and now that pledge must be renewed. Only thus could he be cleansed, and all the errors and confusion of the past erased.

He opened the black bag and lifted out the handcuffs and the roll of tape he’d bought in Everett, then the Cobray automatic pistol. He wouldn’t use that, though. Sometime in the next few days he’d swing by the gun shop next door and pick up a.22 revolver and some Stinger ammunition. A couple of boxes should be enough. Whatever else might have gone wrong, there was nothing wrong with the method itself. It was tried and tested, and he would stick to it.

He weighed the Cobray in his hand, thinking over his next move. It would be best to let things settle down for a couple of days before doing anything. This was a perfect place to hole up. All they wanted was money, and he had plenty of that. It hadn’t always been that way. Back in the early days, each initiation had to be funded by the novice going off and taking some lousy job for a couple of months. But that had all changed with Rick’s arrival. His was the only case where the victims had been selected personally instead of in the regular way. But Los made the rules, and he could break them. As he’d said at the time, the test of faith was even greater when the individuals concerned were your own father and mother.

There had been a stunned silence when the news was announced. You could see them all wondering if they’d have been able to do it themselves. It had been hard enough for some of them to agree never to see their parents again, never mind having to hold a gun to their heads and expose their sham existence for what it was, a mess of meat and bone and tissue. But Rick had wanted to do it. He hated them both, especially his mother, who had never lifted a finger to stop the abuse he had suffered as a child. He figured his father didn’t know any better, but she should have stepped in and done something. Well, she hadn’t, and now he would.

Whatever Rick’s feelings were, the financial rewards for the group had been substantial. The sale of the family house, plus the life insurance and various investments, had netted almost a quarter of a million dollars. The other son, Matt, would have got a share of that, but Rick had scores to settle with him too. A telephone call had been enough to send Matt, who had a plumbing business, out in response to a nonexistent emergency around about the time the cops arrived at the parents’ luxurious suburban house, alerted by a neighbor who had seen flames. They found the father and mother dead, their chests blasted away by a shotgun. The weapon was not recovered. The fire had been caused by a pan of oil which the mother had apparently been heating on the stove when she was attacked. There was no sign of forced entry, and neither the sophisticated alarm system nor the family’s German shepherd dog had responded to the intruder.

Since Rick was supposedly in Mexico-he’d crossed the border a week before, then paid a coyote to smuggle him back with a group of illegal immigrants-it was only a matter of time before the police began to suspect the other brother. No one was surprised when Matt was found in his truck up in the mountains, his head blown away by a blast from the shotgun he was holding, and which had also been used to kill his parents. Rick had set up the meeting, stressing the need for secrecy, on the pretext of working out a fake alibi if Matt was arrested.

As a result, the estate had come to Rick, and through him to the rest of them. The money had been deposited in a bank in Bellingham and was accessible via the Accel and Interlink systems at any one of millions of cash machines all over the country. He could afford to wait weeks, even months, until it was perfectly clear that the police suspected nothing.

The thought made him reach into the bag again. He took out a pair of pants and jacket in a dark, heavy material. They needed to be cleaned and pressed, but it might well be a nice touch to wear them when the time came. But first he had to find out where the house was and figure out the bus schedules. It might take days to get there, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t care how long or uncomfortable the journey was, just as long as he arrived safely.

And he would! He knew it, suddenly, with a surge of confidence and courage that made him want to leap in the air and holler exultantly. He would arrive and the others would depart, revealed for the shams they were. And the survival of the Secret would be ensured forever, sealed in their blood.

It was a Sunday morning, ten days after I was released. I had gone to run some errands at the local stores and now I was walking home, relishing the warm sunshine and the cool breeze and the stunning views of snow-capped mountains above the wooded ridges and valleys of the North Seattle skyline.

We had been in the house a week, and were still settling in. It had been made a condition of my release that I should remain in the state, available to the San Juan County investigators. At the same time, both Andrea and I wanted to get away-and to get David away-from the islands themselves which, beautiful as they were, held such horrific memories for us. When my lawyer mentioned a house in Seattle that was available for a few months at a reasonable rent, we jumped at the idea.

When I was finally given my conditional freedom, I had no expectations about anything or anyone from my former life. All that had been wiped clean. After being charged with crimes I had experienced only as a victim, nothing seemed impossible, or even unlikely. Normality had become a meaningless concept. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that David had vanished again, and that everyone was conspiring to convince me that he had died back in Minnesota months before. As for Andrea, I no longer had any firm belief that she had ever existed in the first place. She was just one among many phantom figures I seemed to have encountered in the course of my hallucinatory experiences on the island.

So I was even more amazed than pleased to find her waiting for me when I emerged from my cell. Thanks to a benign sexism on the part of Sheriff Griffiths, Andrea had never been regarded as a suspect, and once he had taken a full statement from her she had been free to go. But she had stayed. That made all the difference. We both had to make plans, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make them together. After what we had just lived through, any arrangement was bound to seem provisional. Why not take the path of least resistance, rent this house that my lawyer had found and see how things turned out?

It had been Andrea’s testimony which had finally convinced the sheriff of my innocence. We had each been questioned separately and in great detail about the events of that fatal day, and our answers matched to a degree which ultimately made it impossible to believe that we were making it all up. One of the two survivors from the hall was Ellie, and she had been able to corroborate my story about the events leading up to the final horror. Finally, the police had talked to David. His story, told with the idiosyncratic clarity of a child’s vision, corresponded fully to Andrea’s and mine. That clinched it.