Michael Prescott: Next Victim

"When did you kill Hayde?" she asked. "Before or after you picked up Pierce?"

"Before. I lingered outside the Federal Building, followed Hayde and Michaelson when the interrogation was concluded. Michaelson drove Hayde back to his car on Melrose, and then Hayde drove home. I killed him as he was unlocking the gate to his condominium building. It was late. There was no one around. I have to say I took no pleasure in the act. It was just business."

"I doubt Hayde thought of it that way."

"Tess, haven’t you learned not to trouble yourself about what other people think? At any rate, I put his body in my car, and later I transferred it to the chem lab."

"To substitute for Scott Maple. What did you do with him?"

"So many questions. It’s your inquisitive nature that makes you such a world-class investigator. Really, you surprised me at Dodge’s house. I didn’t think you would survive the trap I’d laid in your motel room-and I certainly didn’t expect you to anticipate my next move."

"Or see you driving Hayde’s car," she said. She had almost succeeded in wrenching the metal bar free. "Which you parked at the Metro station, so the police would find it there."

"And therefore link the attack to Hayde that much more quickly. I assumed no one would look for the car until after the subway had been gassed. You out-thought me, I’m afraid. As a result, the train was evacuated before the bomb could explode. I ought to be peeved at you for that. You didn’t let me have any fun tonight."

"You got off at the Universal City station, didn’t you?"

"Of course. There was no trouble. The cops who boarded the train were looking for Hayde, not me. Still, I didn’t dare exit the station. As the AD of the bureau’s LA office, I’m known to quite a few of our boys in blue. One of them might have recognized me. So I slipped into the shadows until you and the other law enforcement types arrived."

"You never hid in the tunnels."

"No, but I did plant one of Hayde’s cuff links when we were searching. Michaelson found it on the way back. Another diversion-I wanted Tennant and his men sidelined."

With a final twist of her shoulders, she separated the bar from its mounting. The effort exhausted her. She straightened up, unsteady in the clumsy suit.

"You know, Gerry, just because your life started out badly, you didn’t have to hurt other people."

"Thank you for that moral from today’s After School Special. But you’re mistaken. I had to do exactly what I did. Not that I’m complaining. How many people in this soft and aimless society of ours can honestly say they have a purpose in life?"

"Well, you failed in your purpose. Your big scheme is a bust. You’ve got nothing to show for it."

"On the contrary, I have one thing to show for it." She heard the volume of his breathing ratcheted up another notch as his voice rose in a snarl. "I have you."

She caught a flash of orange on the edge of her field of vision, and she turned-slowly, so slowly in the bulky suit-turned as Mobius lunged at her from his hiding place behind an upended workstation.

She swung the bar at him, hoping to split open his face mask, but the swing missed, and then he was on her, his inflated suit colliding with hers, the two of them staggering backward in drunken slow motion.

She raised the bar again. He ripped it out of her hands and jabbed it at her chest. The blow felt distant, transmitted to her body by vibrations as the suit shivered all over like the skin of a pudding.

He drew back for another blow. She pushed over a desk between them, blocking his advance.

"I did make one rather serious error," he said. "Paul Voorhees. I was going after you, of course. I knew you lived in that house. But you and Paul were so discreet about your office romance, I had no idea he was spending his nights there. When I saw a bureau car in the driveway, I assumed it was yours. As the kids say today-my bad."

"As the kids also say-fuck you."

The video wall was behind her, a waterfall of streaming images. There was no place for her to go. She couldn’t outrun him-couldn’t run at all in the suit.

"I’ll tell you a secret, Tess. You think Paul was unconscious the whole time. But he wasn’t. He came to, at the end. He watched me cut his throat."

He stepped over the obstacle of the desk, his movements cautious, like an astronaut in old footage of a moon mission.

"Paul tried to call your name. And do you know what I told him?"

He produced a simpering little laugh like the giggly falsetto in his theme song.

"I told him I’d already taken care of you."

His face was dimly visible behind the bubble helmet’s visor. Steam and sweat had coated the clear plastic and seemed to be coating the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses, as well.

"I told him you were already dead."

But through the mist of his face mask, she could see him well enough to read his expression.

He was smiling.

"You should have seen the tears in his eyes, Tess. You should have seen Paul cry…"

She made a noise, probably a scream, or maybe the scream was only in her mind, and she flung herself at him, even while a detached, observing part of herself knew that this was precisely what he wanted her to do.

She landed a gloved fist on his helmet, creasing the visor, and then the metal bar caught her in the side of her head and knocked her down. She fell on her back, her upper body propped against the wall below the Niagara of soundless video. She couldn’t rise, not with the thick legs and arms of the suit inhibiting her movement, trapping her like an upturned tortoise trapped by its shell.

"Women really are emotional creatures," Mobius said. "Your buttons are so easily pushed."

She drew up her legs as far as possible, reached along her side with her right hand.

"I only wish"-he straddled her, leaning down, the shaft of steel huge in his hands-"I had my knife. That’s the way I wanted to end this."

Tess looked up at him as her right hand closed into a fist.

"You want your knife?"

She slid it free-the knife inside her boot, the knife she’d wrenched out of the office wall and concealed on her person for use at close range.

"Then take it," she said, and with one long vertical sweep she slit open the left side of his hazmat suit from hip to armpit.

The suit deflated instantly. A moment later his face mask was smeared with a new layer of droplets.

Not sweat, this time.

VX.

Mobius felt the suit collapse around him, saw the mist swirling before his visor-inside the helmet, sharing his air, entering his respiratory system and the pores of his skin and the corners of his eyes.

And he was dead.

He knew it.

A dead man.

But this was nothing new. He had died when he was eight years old, and although the first-aid squad and the doctors claimed to have brought him back to life, he knew better.

There had been no life for him since then. There had been only patient planning nursed by truculent hatred, a secret campaign against the living, a nocturnal war fought on many fronts, with murdered women as the markers of territory seized.

But not life. He’d always known that-and hadn’t cared.

But he did care now. Not about dying. About losing.

He squinted past the fog of his face mask and saw the knife in Tess’s gloved hand, his own knife, and he saw how to salvage victory, even at the end.

It was a knife sharpened on women’s throats.

Now let it cut one more.

He dropped the metal bar, twisted sideways, and grabbed her hand, clamping his gloved fingers on hers.

"You don’t win," he said.

He pushed her arm slowly backward, toward the seam joining her helmet to her suit.

One cut, one gouge or slice, and whether he opened her neck or not, she would be dead just the same. Dead from the same toxins that were speeding into his bloodstream with every pump of his heart.