John Connolly - The Reapers

There were eight men, including Angel and Louis, gathered on this particular evening in what was unofficially known as “The Presidential Room,” a reference to a famous night when a holder of the highest office in the land had used the room to satisfy a number of his needs, of which eating was only one.

The men ate at a circular table, dining on red meat-venison and fillet steak-and drinking Dark Horse shiraz from South Africa. When the table was cleared, and coffee and digestifs had been served to those who required them, Louis locked the door and spread his maps and graphs before them. He went over the plan once, without interruption. The six guests listened intently, while Angel watched their faces carefully for any flickers, any reactions that might indicate that others shared his own doubts. He saw nothing. Even when they began asking questions, they were purely on matters of detail. The reasons for what was about to take place did not concern them. Neither did the risks, not unduly. They were being well paid for their time and expertise, and they trusted Louis. They were men used to fighting and they understood that their compensation was generous precisely because of the dangers involved.

At least three-the Englishman, Blake; Marsh, from Alabama; and the mongrel Lynott, a man who had more accents than the average continent-were veterans of any number of foreign conflicts, their allegiances determined by mood, money, and morality, and generally in that order. The two Harrys-Hara and Harada-were Japanese, or said they were, although they possessed passports from four or five Asian countries. They looked like the kind of tourists one saw at the Grand Canyon, mugging cheerfully for the camera and making peace signs for the folks back home. They were both small and dark, and Harada wore black-framed glasses that he always pushed up on the bridge of his nose with his middle finger before speaking, a tic that had led Angel to wonder if it wasn’t simply a subtle way of giving the world the bird whenever he opened his mouth. He and Hara looked so innocuous that Angel found them deeply unsettling. He had heard of some of the things they had done. He hadn’t been sure whether to believe the stories or not until the two Harrys passed on a film to him that they claimed had made them laugh harder than anything they had seen before, tears already rolling down their cheeks as they exchanged favorite plot points in their native tongue. Angel had blocked out the name of the film for the sake of his own sanity, although he had a memory of acupuncture needles being inserted between a guy’s eyelid and eyeball and then being “pinged” gently with a fingertip. What was particularly disturbing was that the movie had been the Harrys’ Christmas present to him. Angel wasn’t a guy to go around branding people as abnormal without good reason, but he figured the Harrys should have been strangled at birth. They were their mothers’ little joke at the world’s expense.

The sixth member of the team was Weis, a tall Swiss who had once served in the pope’s guard. He and Lynott seemed to have some minor beef going, if the look that passed between them when they had realized they were to dine together was anything to go by. It was just one more reason for Angel to feel uneasy. Those kinds of tensions, especially in a small team, tended to spread out and make everyone edgy. Still, they all knew one another, even if only by reputation, and Weis and Blake were soon deep in conversation about mutual acquaintances, both living and dead, while Lynott appeared to have found a point of shared interest with the Harrys, which confirmed Angel’s suspicions about all three of them.

By the end of the evening, the teams had been decided: Weis and Blake would secure the northern bridge, Lynott and Marsh the southern. The Harrys would work the road between the two bridges, traveling back and forth at regular intervals. If required, they could move to support either of the bridge teams, or take it upon themselves to hold a bridge if one of those teams had to cross the river to support Angel and Louis in their escape.

It was decided that they would leave the next day, staggering their departures, staying in preassigned motels within easy reach of their target. Shortly before dawn, when each team was in position, Angel and Louis would cross the Roubaud to kill Arthur Leehagen, his son Michael, and anyone else who got in the way of this stated aim.

When their six guests had departed, and the check had been settled, Angel and Louis separated. Angel returned to their apartment, while Louis went downtown to a loft in TriBeCa. There he shared a final glass of wine with a couple named Abigail and Philip Endall. The Endalls looked like any normal, well-to-do couple in their late thirties, although normal was not a word that applied to their chosen line of work. As they sat around the dining table, Louis went through a variation of his original plan with them. The Endalls were the jokers in Louis’s pack. He had no intention of tackling Leehagen with only Angel by his side. Before any of the other teams were even in place, the Endalls would be on Leehagen’s land, waiting.

That night, Angel lay awake in the darkness. Louis sensed his sleeplessness.

“What is it?” asked Louis.

“You didn’t tell them about the fifth team.”

“They didn’t need to know. Nobody needs to know every detail except us.”

Angel didn’t reply. Louis moved beside him, and the bedside light went on.

“What is it with you?” said Louis. “You been like a lost dog these last two days.”

Angel turned to look at him. “This isn’t right,” he said. “I’ll go along with it, but it isn’t right.”

“Taking Leehagen?”

“No, the way you’re going about it. Pieces aren’t fitting the way that they should.”

“You talking about Weis and Lynott? They’ll be fine. We keep them away from each other, that’s all.”

“Not just them. It’s this small team, and the holes in Hoyle’s story.”

“What holes?”

“I can’t put my finger on them. It just doesn’t ring true, not all of it.”

“Gabriel confirmed what Hoyle told us.”

“What, that there was a beef between him and Leehagen? Big deal. You think that’s enough of a reason to kill someone’s daughter and feed her to hogs, to pay the best part of a million dollars in bounty on the heads of two men? No, I don’t like it. It seemed like even Gabriel was holding something back. You said so yourself after you spoke to him. Then there’s Bliss…”

“We don’t know that he’s out there.”

“I smell him all over Billy Boy.”

“You’re turning into an old woman. Next you’ll be talking about getting a cat, and clipping coupons.”

“I’m telling you: something is off.”

“You that worried, then stay here.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then get some sleep. I don’t need you any edgier than you already are for this.”

Louis turned out the light, leaving Angel in darkness. He did not sleep, but Louis did. It was a gift that he had: nothing ever got in the way of his rest. He did not dream that night, or he could not remember if he did, but he woke up just before dawn, Angel at last sleeping beside him, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of burning.

Their names were Alderman Rector and Atlas Griggs. Alderman was out of Oneida, Tennessee, a town where, as a child, he had witnessed police and civilians hunt down a Negro hobo who had stepped off a freight train at the wrong station. The man was pursued through the woods as he fled for his life until, after an hour had gone by, his bullet-riddled body was dragged through the dirt and left by the station house for all to see. His mother had named him Alderman out of spite for the white people who were determined that such a title would never be available to him in reality, and she stressed to the boy the importance of always being neatly dressed and of never giving a man, white or black, an excuse to disrespect him. That was why, when Griggs tracked him down at the cockfight, Alderman was dressed in a canary-yellow suit, a cream shirt, and a blood-orange tie, with two-tone cream and brown shoes on his feet and, screwed down so hard upon his head that it left a permanent ring in his hair, a yellow hat with a red feather in the band. Only when you got up close could you see the stains on the suit, the fraying on the collar of the shirt, the ripples in the tie where the elastic in the fabric had begun to give, and the bubbles of hardened glue holding his shoe leather together. Alderman owned only two suits, a yellow and a brown, and they were both items of dead men’s clothing, bought from the widows before the coffin lid had been screwed down on their previous owners, but, as he often pointed out to Griggs, that was two suits more than a whole lot of other men owned, whatever the color of their skin.