Текст книги "An Evil Mind"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

The floor was simple polished concrete. A plethora of metal and PVC pipes of different diameters crisscrossed the ceiling in all directions, disappearing through the walls. A couple of medium-sized square cardboard and wooden boxes were piled up one on top of the other in one corner of the room. They looked to be supplies.

Hunter’s eyes began searching the room.

How many victims has Lucien tortured and killed locked away in this hellhole, he thought.

‘Madeleine is through that door,’ Lucien said. ‘I suggest you hurry.’

‘Which key?’ Taylor asked, holding the keychain up to Lucien once again.

‘Second to last key on your right.’

Taylor holstered her weapon and moved purposefully toward the gunmetal door. Lucien and Hunter followed and the formation inverted: Hunter took the rear, three steps behind Lucien.

Taylor slotted the key into the door lock and twisted it left. With two loud clicks, the lock chamber rotated 360 degrees once, then twice.

Taylor’s heart picked up speed inside her chest as she turned the handle and began pushing the door open.

Police instincts, hyper-sensitivity, training and experience, psychic ability, whatever it is that one has in these situations, Hunter and Taylor both sensed it at the same moment – a new life, a new presence, as if unlocking the door had given the cue for their cop’s intuition to kick in.

Once again, an identical thought crossed both of their minds: Maybe we’re not too late. There’s still hope.

But that hope vanished fast, because that new life, that presence they’d sensed, wasn’t past the door ahead of them. It was behind them.

Ninety-Six

Click.

They felt the new presence, but before Hunter or Taylor had a chance turn around, they heard the sound of a bullet being chambered into a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

‘If any of you two fuckheads move, I’ll blow your fucking heads off. Is that clear?’ The voice that came from the opposite end of the room was sharp, firm and young. ‘Now get your goddamn hands up above your heads.’

Hunter tried to identify the specific direction where the voice was coming from. He was positive that the bullet chambering sound, together with the first few spoken words, had come from the general direction where the piled-up boxes were – probably the perpetrator’s hiding place, but there was barely enough space behind them for a midget to hide. His next sentence, though, had come from a different direction all together, which meant he was moving, but the reverberation inside the room coupled with the incessant light-bulb hiss made pinpointing the perpetrator’s exact location an almost impossible task.

Hunter was pretty sure that he could spin around and squeeze out a shot before the perpetrator realized what was happening, but that would only work if he knew exactly where to place the shot. Guessing wouldn’t cut it – if he missed, he’d be a dead man. He decided not to risk it.

‘Did you all fucking hear me or what?’ the young voice said again, but this time with a much more disturbed edge to it. ‘Hands above your heads.’

Hunter and Taylor finally lifted their hands.

Lucien turned and smiled triumphantly at Hunter as he moved past him.

‘I did good, didn’t I?’ the young voice asked. ‘I followed the instructions just like you taught me.’

‘You did great.’ Hunter and Taylor heard Lucien reassure whoever else had joined them in that room. ‘OK,’ Lucien said, now addressing them, ‘this is when I have to ask you both to put your guns on the floor, and without turning around, kick them back toward me, one at a time. Robert, you go first. Nice and easy. And let me add that my friend here has a very itchy trigger finger. And he never misses.’

A few hesitant seconds.

‘The fuck you waiting for, big guy?’ the young voice said. ‘Let’s go. Put your gun on the floor and kick it back before

I put a hole in the back of your head.’

Hunter cursed himself, because the little voice inside his head had been telling him that things didn’t feel quite right since they’d got to the derelict house. But in his hurry to try to save Madeleine Reed, he’d disregarded his instincts and proceeded inside the fallout shelter without properly checking the control room.

‘Do it, Robert,’ Lucien said. ‘He really will blow your brains all over these walls.’

‘Fucking right, I will. You think this is a game, big guy?’

The voice had moved closer. Hunter was almost certain that he was just a little to his right. But Hunter was now holding his weapon high above his head, while the kid behind him had his directly aimed at Hunter’s skull. The advantage had swung the other way. Hunter had no way out.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘Nice and slowly,’ Lucien commanded. ‘Squat down, place your gun on the floor, then get back to a standing position again before kicking it back toward me.’

Hunter did as he was told.

‘Your turn, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien said.

Taylor didn’t move.

‘Bitch, did you hear what he said?’ the young voice asked with overwhelming anger.

Lucien lifted his hands, signaling his accomplice to give him a minute.

‘I’m well aware of many of the FBI’s protocol field rules, Agent Taylor,’ he said, keeping his voice steady and unthreatening. ‘I’m also aware that some of those rules are not supposed to have any exceptions whatsoever. High on that list is the rule that mandates that an FBI agent shall never surrender his or her weapon to a suspect or perpetrator during a hostage situation.’

Taylor clenched her teeth in frustration.

‘Make no mistake here, Agent Taylor, this isn’t your typical hostage situation. This is a life or death situation . . . for you and Robert, that is. If you don’t slide your weapon over to me, you will die. It’s not a threat. It’s a certainty. You need to make a judgment call, and you need to do it sharpish.’

‘Fuck this explaining bullshit, Lucien,’ the young voice blurted out. ‘Let’s just kill these two fucks and get it over with.’

The new ring to the kid’s voice told Hunter that he was right on the edge; going over it wouldn’t take much.

‘Your call, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien said. ‘You’ve got five seconds, four . . .’

Hunter’s gaze was fixed on Taylor’s tense body. ‘Don’t be a fool, Courtney,’ he said under his breath.

‘Three, two . . .’

Hunter got ready to move.

‘OK,’ Taylor said.

Hunter breathed out.

Taylor proceeded to slowly place her weapon on the ground before using her foot to slide it across the floor toward Lucien.

Hunter and Taylor heard the sound of metal chains scrapping the floor for an instant.

Lucien had picked up Taylor’s gun.

‘Nah ah,’ the young voice said as Taylor began to turn. ‘No one told you to turn around, bitch. Keep your eyes on the Goddamn door in front of you, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

Taylor paused.

‘He really means it, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien said.

‘Does this bitch think I’m kidding?’

Even without looking, Hunter and Taylor could sense that the newcomer’s aim had moved to the back of her head. All he needed was a reason.

Taylor didn’t give him one. She finally complied, and her eyes returned to the door.

‘Now I’m going to have to ask you both to kneel down, and put your hands behind your heads,’ Lucien said, while at the same time, unseen to Hunter and Taylor, signaling his accomplice. ‘Do it now.’

Once more, Hunter and Taylor had no way out. They had to do as they were told.

‘So what now?’ Taylor asked. ‘You’re just going to shoot us in the back?’

‘Not my style, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien replied.

Clunk.

They heard the sharp sound of metal cutting through metal. A few seconds later they heard it again, this time followed by that of a chain running through a loop before falling to the ground.

‘I was just being cautious while I got rid of these chains. Oh, now this is much better.’

The next sound Hunter and Taylor heard was a loud thud, as a heavy metal object was thrown across the room to the other side and collided with the wall.

‘Now please, stand up and turn around,’ Lucien commanded.

They did.

Standing next to Lucien, holding a Heckler & Koch USP9 semi-automatic handgun, was a wiry and small man, a little like a professional horse-racing jockey in build, who looked to be only about twenty-five years old. He wore a crooked smile that seemed to bend in the same direction that he hunched his shoulder, giving him a skewed and somewhat menacing look. His head was completely shaven, and his blue eyes glowed with an intensity that was unsettling. He had a large, badly healed scar that ran from the left side of his chin, all the way to the back of his right ear, crossing his right cheek. Even from a distance, Hunter could tell that the scar had been made either by a blunt knife, or a thick piece of glass. Across the room he also saw the heavy-duty, 48" bolt cutter that Lucien had used to free himself.

‘Remember when I told you that it wouldn’t be hard for me to find an apprentice if I wanted to?’ Lucien said with a lopsided grin. ‘Well, I did want to, and just as I’d said, it wasn’t hard at all. So let me introduce you to Ghost.’ He gestured toward the shaved-headed man to his right. ‘I call him Ghost because he moves like one, so light and silent you won’t ever hear him coming. And due to his size and amazing flexibility, he’s able to hide in places you can’t even imagine.’ Lucien allowed his gaze to move to the cardboard boxes. ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but he was actually inside one of those.’

One of Ghost’s front teeth was chipped. Every few seconds he nervously ran his tongue across its jagged edge, giving him a very edgy look, as if he was about to lose control.

‘I like her,’ Ghost said, his gaze falling over Taylor as if she were naked. ‘And she’s got pretty toes. I reeeeally like that. Let’s just kill the big guy and take her with us. We can have some fun with her.’

Taylor didn’t shy away from Ghost’s eyes, the anger in her stare colliding with the desire in his.

‘Did you arrange everything the way we’d planned?’

Ghost nodded. His attention was still on Taylor.

‘I don’t want you to think that I’ve been lying to you all this time,’ he said, ‘because I haven’t. Why don’t you open that door, Agent Taylor?’ He indicated the gunmetal door. ‘And see what lies behind it.’

Taylor held Lucien’s stare for a while longer before turning around and pushing the door open. On the ceiling of the corridor beyond it, two very weak fluorescent tube lights flicked and hissed as if they were about to blow. Their light seemed to travel down the hallway in slow motion, and as it reached the end of it Taylor’s heart almost stopped beating.

Ninety-Seven

Hunter had also turned to see what lay beyond the door.

The corridor was long and narrow. The walls were made of solid concrete, just like the shelter’s control room. There were several doors on both sides of the hallway and one directly at the end of it. All of them in the same dappled gunmetal color as the one Taylor had just opened. They were all shut, with the exception of the one at the far end.

The light that propagated from the fluorescent tubes wasn’t strong enough to properly reach the last room, so all they got was a sort of hazy silhouette, but even so, Hunter and Taylor had no problem identifying the shape of a naked woman’s body. She was sitting on a chair. Her head was slumped forward awkwardly. Her hands looked to be tied behind her back, and she didn’t seem to be moving.

Taylor felt a nauseating shiver start right at the pit of her stomach.

‘Ghost,’ Lucien said, ‘the lights.’ He nodded at the control desk.

Still with his attention locked on Hunter and Taylor, Ghost took a couple of steps to his right and flicked a switch on the old-fashioned control console.

Inside the room at the far end of the corridor, another weak light bulb struggled to come to life for a few seconds before finally engaging. It bathed the room in a pale yellowish glow, and right then every muscle in Hunter’s body tensed.

Madeleine Reed wasn’t dead. On the contrary, she was pretty much alive, but compared to the picture they’d seen of her inside Director Kennedy’s office just hours before, she wasn’t even a shadow of the woman she used to be. Her weight had drastically plummeted. Her smooth skin looked like it had aged forty years in just a few months, and it now clung to her bones as if she were a terminal cancer patient. The dark circles under her eyes were so intense they looked like surgical bruises. The eyes themselves seemed to have sunk into her skull just a little, but enough to give her a cadaver’s appearance. Her lips were dry and chipped, and her body looked weak and extremely fragile.

As the light inside the room came on, Madeleine blinked desperately several times, her sad and confused eyes struggling with the brightness after who knows how many hours of darkness. Focus took a while, but when it finally came, her drained brain had to battle to understand the images in front of her. She slowly lifted her head, and the look on her face went from puzzled, to hopeful, and then to pleading, before at last settling on desperate. Her lips moved, but if any words did come out, their sound wasn’t strong enough to reach anyone at the other end of the hallway.

With the room now under its own light, Hunter and Taylor could finally see the entire picture.

Madeleine was indeed naked, her hands were surely tied to each other behind the chair’s backrest. Her feet were tied to the chair’s legs.

As her eyes at last registered people at the other end of the corridor, she started shaking. Her breathing came in little gasps, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room.

‘Madeleine,’ Hunter said, reading the first signs of acute panic on her. He knew she’d been conditioned. She’d been tortured and scared for so long that her immediate psychological response to seeing anyone down in that hellhole was to flood her body with terrifying fear. Right now, to her, everyone was a threat, because everyone she’d ever met down there had tortured her.

‘Listen to me, honey.’ Hunter’s voice was as calm and as warm as he could make it sound. ‘My name is Robert Hunter, and I’m with the FBI. We’re here to help you. Stay calm and we’ll get you out of here, OK?’

Hunter felt so useless saying those words. He wanted to go to Madeleine, free her hands and feet, get her out of that fallout shelter, and reassure her that she was safe, that the nightmare was now over, that no one would hurt her anymore. But he couldn’t do any of that. All he could do was throw empty words traveling down that corridor, and hope that was enough to keep Madeleine from losing control.

Madeleine’s lips moved again; again, the sound of her words weren’t strong enough to reach anyone’s ears in the control room. But Hunter had no problem reading her lips.

‘Please help me . . .’

Hunter quickly peeked at Ghost. He was standing by the control console, his weapon firmly in his grip, his stare burning a hole in the back of Taylor’s head. Lucien was standing just a step to his left, but his attention seemed to be everywhere – nothing would escape him. If Hunter tried anything, he’d be dead.

Lucien nodded at Ghost, who flicked a different switch on the control console. The door to the room Madeleine was in slammed shut, no doubt sending even more fear snowballing into every molecule in her body.

Reflexively, Taylor turned to face Lucien and Ghost. ‘No. Please, no.’

The suddenness of her movement caught Ghost by surprise, almost tipping him over the edge, his arm tensing even further and his finger half-squeezing the trigger on his gun.

‘You better stay where you are, bitch.’

‘Please,’ Taylor said, her hands up in a surrender gesture. ‘Shutting the door on her will make her panic even more.’

Lucien nodded in a carefree way. ‘Yes, I know.’

Anger radiated from Taylor. ‘You sonofabitch.’

‘Let her go, Lucien,’ Hunter said. ‘Let Madeleine go. You don’t need her anymore. You don’t need to take her life. She means nothing to you. Take me and let her go. Let Courtney take Madeleine out of here, and take me.’

‘You dumb fuck,’ Ghost said. His gun was still aimed at Taylor. ‘Reality check, big guy – we already have you, and the whore inside the room, and the pretty FBI bitch with the pretty toes here.’ He blew Taylor a kiss while rubbing his groin. ‘Soon you’ll be all mine, bitch. And I’ll make you scream. You can bet on that.’

Taylor’s self-control completely escaped her.

‘Fuck you, you tiny pencil-dick ugly fuck.’

Maybe it was Taylor’s words, or maybe Ghost had just had enough of this game, but the overload switch in his head flicked.

‘No,’ he said, with so much anger it almost drooled out of his mouth. ‘Fuck you, you stupid whore.’ He squeezed the trigger on his gun.

Ninety-Eight

FBI Academy – Quantico, Virginia.

Forty-five minutes earlier.

It didn’t take the FBI long to get in contact with Joshua Foster, the air traffic controller at Berlin’s municipal airport. The call was immediately transferred to Director Kennedy in the Operations Room.

‘Mr Foster,’ Kennedy said, switching the call to speakerphone. ‘My name is Adrian Kennedy. I’m the director of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I believe that you were in contact with one of our agents. His name is Robert Hunter. You handed him the keys to your Jeep.’

‘Ummm, that’s correct.’ Understandably, there was a nervous edge to Joshua Foster’s voice.

‘OK, Mr Foster, please listen carefully,’ Kennedy said. ‘This is very important. I understand your car was brand new.’

‘Yeah, well, I got it about two months ago.’

‘That’s great. Now did the car come equipped with a location transponder, a GPS locator, in case of theft?’

‘Actually, yes, it did.’

Kennedy’s face lit up.

‘But I don’t have the transponder tracking code with me,’ Foster said, anticipating Kennedy’s next question. ‘It’s back at my house.’

‘We don’t need it.’ The agent at the radar station took over. ‘All we need is the car’s license plate and I can find the transponder tracking code from here.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Foster gave them his Jeep’s license plate number.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Foster,’ Kennedy said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

‘Could I ask . . . ?’ Foster tried saying, but Kennedy had already disconnected the call.

‘How long will it take you to find this tracking code,’ he asked.

‘Not long at all,’ the agent replied, already typing something into his computer.

As Kennedy waited, his cellphone rang inside his jacket pocket again. It was Special Agent Moyer, the agent in charge of the expedition sent to Lake Saltonstall in New Haven. They were looking for Karen Simpson’s remains, together with those of four other victims.

‘Director,’ the agent said, his voice firm but a little subdued, as if to show respect. ‘Sir, the information is one hundred percent legit. So far, we’ve dug out the remains of exactly five bodies.’ There was an awkward pause. ‘Would you like us to carry on digging? The area here is pretty vast, and if this was the perpetrator’s preferred burial ground, who knows how many more we might find.’

‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ Kennedy replied. ‘You won’t find any more bodies.’ He had no doubt Lucien had told the truth. ‘Just prep the ones you found for transportation. We’ll need them here in Quantico ASAP.’

‘Understood, sir.’

‘Good work, Agent Moyer,’ Kennedy said before hanging up.

‘Got the transponder tracking code,’ the agent at the radar station announced, as he entered a few more commands into his computer.

Everyone’s eyes were glued to his screen.

‘Tracking now.’

The seconds felt like minutes. Finally, the map on the agent’s screen repositioned itself to show the location of a bright, pulsating dot.

‘We’ve got the Jeep’s location,’ the agent said excitedly. A short pause. ‘And it doesn’t look like they’re moving anymore.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ Kennedy said, frowning at the screen. ‘But where the hell are they exactly?’

‘Right in the middle of absolutely nowhere, by the looks of it,’ Doctor Lambert commented.

According to the map, the Jeep was parked at the end of a nameless dirt path deep inside a dense forestland several miles from Berlin’s municipal airport.

‘We need a satellite image of the area instead of a map,’ Kennedy said.

‘Give me a second,’ the agent replied and immediately started typing again.

Two seconds later, the map on his screen was swapped for a satellite image of the area.

Everyone frowned at the screen for a moment.

‘What is this?’ Kennedy asked, pointing at what looked like a construction site not that far away from where the Jeep was parked.

The agent zoomed in on it and readjusted the resolution. ‘It looks like an old abandoned house, or building of some sort,’ he answered. ‘Or at least what’s left of it.’

‘That’s it,’ Kennedy said, ‘that’s where they are. That’s where Lucien was keeping his victim.’ He reached for his cellphone and called agent Brody inside Bird Two. They needed to land and get to that house – NOW.

Ninety-Nine

Hunter saw it before it actually happened.

He saw something explode inside Ghost’s cold eyes, as if he’d been injected with an overdose of pure anger and evil, and right then he knew Ghost had passed the point of no return. But even though he saw it, this time Hunter wasn’t able to move fast enough. He wasn’t able to get between Taylor and Ghost. Ghost’s trigger-squeezing reaction took only a split second.

As the hammer hit the firing pin in Ghost’s gun, it was like it’d activated a real-life slow-motion switch for Hunter. He practically saw the bullet leave the gun barrel, travel through the air and whizz past the right side of his face, missing it by just a fraction. In a reflex reaction, he began turning toward Taylor, but he didn’t have to. From that distance, even a novice wouldn’t have missed, and he could see in Ghost’s eyes that he was no first timer. A millisecond after the shot, he felt the warmth of splattered blood and brain matter hit the back of his neck and side of his face, as Taylor’s head exploded with the impact of the fragmenting bullet.

The air inside the room was immediately filled with the smell of cordite.

Hunter still managed to turn fast enough to see Taylor’s body be propelled backward and slam against the dappled gunmetal door, before falling to the ground. The wall behind her was immediately colored in crimson red with speckles of flesh, gray matter and blonde hair. The bullet had hit her almost perfectly right between the eyes. Due to Ghost’s diminutive height and his position in relation to Taylor, the bullet traveled in a slight upward and left-to-right angle. The damage was mind-boggling. Most of the right upper part of her head and cranium was missing, blown off by the devastating effect of the Civil Defense bullet – a special type of round designed to mushroom (like turning inside-out) and fragment on impact, sending tiny pieces in all directions.

Taylor never had a chance.

Hunter quickly turned back to face Ghost, whose aim had now moved to Hunter’s face.

‘Make a move, tough guy, c’mon, make a move, and I’ll blow your brains all over her rotting corpse.’

Hunter felt every fiber in his body go rigid with anger, and he had to use all his willpower not to lunge at Ghost. Instead he just stood there, his breathing labored, his hands shaking, but not from fear.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ Ghost said. ‘Not so tough after all, are you?’

‘WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?’ Lucien shouted. He looked even more surprised than Hunter was. ‘Why the fuck did you shoot her, Ghost?’

Ghost kept his weapon trailed on Hunter. ‘Because the bitch was getting on my nerves,’ he replied in a serious but unconcerned voice. ‘You know I hate when anyone talks about me that way.’

Lucien took a step back, running a hand across his forehead.

‘The foulmouthed bitch got what she deserved.’ Ghost shrugged, as if all he’d done was throw a dart at a dartboard. ‘What does it matter anyway? They were both going to die, weren’t they? They’ve seen our faces, Lucien. You and I know that they would never walk out of here alive. And all this chit-chat bullshit was pissing me off, so I just sped things up for her.’ He nodded at Hunter. ‘And you know what? I’m just gonna do the same for him.’

Ghost’s face burned with sadistic desire, and Hunter saw the same determination of moments ago flood Ghost’s eyes.

There was no time for a reaction.

Another squeeze of the trigger.

Just like before, the bullet found its target with amazing accuracy.

One Hundred

Sky above the city of Milan, New Hampshire.

Forty minutes earlier.

Inside Bird Two, Agent Brody and his team were starting to lose hope.

Their plane had been circling the outer perimeter of Berlin’s municipal airport for several minutes now. The pilot had already told Brody that he’d need a plan of action soon. The plane had enough fuel for another thirty to thirty-five minutes of flight time, but if they weren’t landing in Berlin, they would need to land somewhere else and refuel before flying back to Quantico. That meant turning the plane around and flying to a different airport.

The nearest airport to Berlin was Gorham municipal airport – about five to ten minutes due south depending on the wind. As a precaution measure, the pilot always allowed an extra ten minutes of flight time in case of landing traffic or some other unforeseen circumstance. That left them with a maximum of another ten, maybe fifteen minutes’ circling time. After that, the pilot was turning the plane around and heading toward Gorham.

Brody had his cellphone on the table in front of him. He was staring at its dark screen as if hypnotized. When he finally checked his watch, another seven minutes had passed. Three more minutes and this operation was over. He had to call Kennedy.

As he reached for his phone, it rang.

One Hundred and One

This wasn’t the first time Hunter had stared down the barrel of a gun. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a life or death situation either, but Ghost was too far away for Hunter to be able to get to him in time, and he was too close for Hunter to be able to dive away from the bullet.

This time there was no way out.

In that split second before Ghost squeezed the trigger, all Hunter could think of was how sorry he was for not being able to protect Taylor, and for not fulfilling the promise he’d made Jessica all those years ago while he held his fiancée’s mutilated body in his arms.

Despite what he was facing, Hunter didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t even blink. He would not give Ghost the satisfaction. His gaze stayed on Ghost’s face. And that was how he was able to see his head explode.

It was a perfect shot. The bullet hit Ghost on his left temple. Its hollow-point cavity was immediately filled with fluids and tissue, forcing it to mushroom as it began traveling past the cranium wall and across Ghost’s brain, savagely ripping apart everything in its path.

The mushroom effect of a hollow-point reduces the bullet’s velocity considerably, and in most cases there will be no exit wound. The bullet will generally lodge itself within its target. But again, at such close range, the power of a .45-caliber round was more than enough to propel the bullet all the way across Ghost’s shaved head.

When it occurs, the exit wound of a .45 mushroomed Civil Defense bullet is impressive. In Ghost’s case, it was the size of a grapefruit. Half of the right side of his face, from his ear to the top of his head, exploded out as if an alien being had hatched out of a large egg. Bone, blood, brain matter and skin splattered against the wall and the control console to his right, covering everything in a sticky, gooey red mess.

The terribly loud sound of the fired shot made Hunter jerk, but he still kept his eyes open. He saw the anger, the determination and the evil dissipate from Ghost’s eyes, before his whole body was basically lifted from the ground by the force of the shot’s impact. It slammed against the control console and flopped to the ground like an empty flour sack. A pool of blood quickly began to form around his head.

His gun also hit the console, but it slid away to the other side of the room, ending somewhere behind the cardboard boxes.

Hunter’s heart was racing like a Drag car. Adrenaline had flooded every vein in his body, making him shake. His gaze finally moved to Lucien. He could still see a thin plume of smoke traveling in the air from Lucien’s shot, but again, before Hunter could react, Lucien had already aimed Taylor’s gun at him.

‘Stay right where you are, Robert. I really don’t want to, but if need be, I’ll put a bullet right through your heart. And you know I mean it.’

Hunter stared at him, unable to hide his surprise for what he’d just done.

‘I’ve never liked him anyway,’ Lucien explained in his usual matter-of-fact manner. ‘He was just a dumb, sadistic kid with no purpose, who was traumatized when young, and because of that he loved torturing and killing people just for the fun of it.’

Coming from Lucien, Hunter found the comment very rich.

‘And he just outlived his usefulness,’ Lucien moved on, not even a pinch of remorse or pity in his tone. ‘Like all the previous ones. They all do eventually, so I just find myself a new little helper.’

Hunter’s focus was on Lucien’s gun.

‘Believe me if you like, but I had no intention of killing Agent Taylor, unless I absolutely had to, but unfortunately she touched on a very delicate subject when it came to Ghost. You see, he came from a very dysfunctional family. Both of his parents abused him physically and psychologically in ways that are hard for even me to imagine. They forced him to walk around the house naked all the time, and they made constant fun of him, especially of his manhood, calling him a series of derogative names. Would you like to guess one of them?’

Hunter breathed in. ‘Pencil-dick.’

Lucien nodded once. ‘That’s the one. Unfortunately, the same name Agent Taylor threw at him.’

For a deeply traumatized and disturbed person, a single word, a sound, a color, an image, a smell . . . a multitude of simple things can easily reopen a terribly painful wound. Usually the person’s reaction is highly unpredictable, but in the case of a violent person, violence is almost always present within the reaction. In the case of a psychopath like Ghost, that violent reaction is usually fatal.