Michael Prescott - Next Victim

At Universal City, she had thought of the evacuated subway train as the essence of Mobius’s world, but this was his true world, this hell of rubble and poison mist, deep underground, sealed off from light and air.

He must be somewhere in this room. He couldn’t afford to leave the exit unguarded. But the clouds of VX and pulverized debris stirred up by the air-conditioning limited her visibility. He could be hidden behind one of the long semicircular arrays of workstations or concealed behind a pile of overturned chairs. He could be two steps away from her, veiled by smoke and fog.

"Whatever it was she’d gotten hold of," Andrus said, "I wanted it. I waited until she was en route to LA-and then I called her."

" You called her?"

"Why not? I was able to learn her cell phone number without raising any suspicions. That’s an advantage of being on the fast track to a senior post. People are eager to do you favors. I knew that her phone was encrypted, and that if I contacted her on the road, there was little chance of Tennant listening in."

It was difficult to scope out the room. She could barely turn her head inside the bubble helmet, and the rippling plastic of the face mask warped her vision with shifting lines of distortion.

"And you told her…?" Tess prompted.

"That I was the person she would meet in LA. That our meeting place had been changed. That she should wait in the MiraMist, at the hotel bar."

"You got her to go right to you."

"Clever of me, don’t you think?" Andrus sounded obscenely pleased with himself.

No, she was wrong to think of him as Andrus. For Andrus, she might have some human feeling.

He was Mobius. He was the killer who’d taken Paul from her.

"Oh," he added, "and I warned her that she was under surveillance. The evasive action she took the next day, the way she lost Tennant’s team-it was all thanks to my timely heads-up. I couldn’t have Tennant interrupt our little tete-a-tete, after all."

"Suppose she hadn’t lost her pursuit."

"Then I would have aborted the mission. But she came through for me. I picked her up, I fucked her-she enjoyed it, I think-and then, well, you saw what I did then."

"Yes. I saw."

The flickering video wall threw varicolored stroboscopic light over half the room. One of the fluorescent panels overhead had been knocked out; another sizzled at half its normal brightness. The room felt like what it was-a cellar-dark and vaporous and claustrophobic.

Tess shuffled forward, sliding on her rubber boots, trying to avoid broken glass from computer monitors. A tear in her suit would allow the nerve agent to quickly seep inside and mingle with her air supply.

"By the way," he said, "I was still in the hotel room, sitting on the bed with the late Amanda Pierce, when you reached me on my cell phone to tell me about my latest postcard. I was playing with dead Amanda’s hair as I talked to you."

Her stomach clenched, but she knew he was only trying to get to her, and she wouldn’t let him. "What was the deal with those postcards, anyhow?"

"Just my nutty sense of humor, Tess. I’m a party animal at heart."

"You went to a lot of trouble to get my attention."

"Maybe you remind me of my mother."

"Do I?"

He laughed, the sound harsh and raucous over her headset. "No. Nothing’s that simple. I don’t have a mother complex. You know what I think of all that psychological mumbo jumbo."

"You always said you had no faith in profiling. You trusted your gut instinct."

"Exactly. And you thought I had no instincts. See how wrong you were? I know more about the dark side of human nature than you could ever imagine."

"You know more about insanity, that’s for sure."

She advanced farther into the room. The smoke was thicker here. She was moving through billows of grayish haze, lost inside a darkening cloud.

"Wrong again," he said. "I’m the sanest person you’ll ever meet. I’ve always known exactly what I wanted and how to get it."

"Is that why you joined the bureau? To get an insider’s perspective on law enforcement, learn what you were up against?"

"You have such a quick, bright mind, Tess. I admire that in a victim. Originally I’d planned a career in the sciences. That’s where the name Mobius came from, by the way. The Mobius strip, an endless loop, coiling back on itself-the perfect symbol of my life."

"You’re a poet, Gerry."

"Every killer is a poet, because every murder is a work of art. Another aphorism of mine. Anyway, I changed my plans and decided to follow in the footsteps of my adoptive father. You know, I’m sure, that dear old Dad was one of J. Edgar’s top G-men."

"Did you hate him?"

"Hoover? Never met the man."

"Your father, I mean. Did you hate your father?"

"I hate everyone," he answered without emotion.

"But him, especially? Because he was in law enforcement? And law enforcement killed your mother, nearly killed you?"

"Once again I stand in awe of your perspicacity."

She moved between the two rows of workstations, not far from the video wall. The exit wasn’t far away, but she knew she couldn’t reach it without encountering Mobius first.

"So you established yourself in the bureau, and then when you started killing in Denver, you could supervise the investigation. You had everything you wanted. And then you stopped. You were inactive for two years."

"Learned I was going to be transferred out of Denver. Needed to put my alter ego on ice. I couldn’t have Mobius following me around-it might look suspicious."

"Must’ve been hell for you, holding yourself back like that."

"I have remarkable self-discipline. Besides, I was biding my time, waiting to move on to bigger things. When the Amanda Pierce case crossed my desk, I knew I’d found it. I reactivated Mobius for the occasion."

Spears of light from the video wall stabbed at her through the fog. Bits of torn paper floated around her like confetti, glittering in a spectrum of colors.

"You could’ve used a new MO," she said.

"I wanted to be Mobius."

"Why?"

"For you, Tess. To bring you to LA. You were an item of unfinished business for me."

Another twist of her stomach. "You killed Angie Callahan just to bring me here?"

"As I’ve been telling you, it was all part of the script."

Angie Callahan, a woman she’d never known, had died for her. A sacrifice on an altar. Mobius’s gift in her name.

Paul had died in her place. Now Angie Callahan had died to summon her to LA. She wasn’t responsible for either death-or was she?

The fog was deeper now, or maybe it was the fog in her mind…

Her eyes blurred, and she nearly stumbled over a broken swivel chair in her path.

"How about Hayde?" she asked, struggling for composure. "Was he in your script, too?"

"Actually, no. I did a little improvising where he was concerned. He was so ideal for my purposes, I just couldn’t resist. When Larkin told me that Hayde had worked on the Metro system, I knew he was the perfect fall guy. I could release part of the VX in the subway, and Hayde would be the obvious suspect. He would divert any possible suspicion from me."

She almost moved on, then took a closer look at the upturned chair. It must have been where Andrus had draped his jacket, dead center in the blast. The bomb had blown it apart-casters scattered, seat cushion shredded. The backrest had been separated from the chair, leaving only a vertical bar attached to the seat.

The bar was held in place by a single loosened bolt. Wielded as a blunt instrument, it would make a serviceable weapon at medium range. She had already taken one precaution, but she needed every possible edge.

Closing her gloves around the metal bar, she pried at it. Her face mask began steaming up again.