CHAPTER ONE #3
Cirillo inclined his head again. “You will note that I requested your presence rather than allowing him to hold court with my people. The last thing I need is a young officer going home with a head full of Old Testament.”
They reached a glassed-in office area labelled ADMINISTRATION.
Cirillo handed her a clipboard. The top page was a form stating that she accepted the risks inherent in speaking to a high-risk inmate and would not sue the state in the event of injury, trauma or death.
The legalese was dense, black paragraphs marching down the page like a tiny, earnest army.
It was the sort of form that made lawyers sleep well.
She signed in the blank without reading the rest. It was a little late in her career to start pretending that plausible deniability kept you safe.
Cirillo watched her pen move, then said quietly, “Our time window is forty minutes. There will be an officer in the room with you at all times. You sit on this side of the glass. He sits on that side, hands cuffed, ankles shackled. Any attempt to circumvent those arrangements and the visit ends immediately. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Cirillo studied her for a moment, eyes assessing but not unkind.
“And Agent Valentine — if I may. Whatever he says in there, remember that his primary objective is not truth. It’s domination.
Of the narrative, of the emotional field.
He will lie, if it serves the story he wants you to tell yourself. ”
She met his gaze. “I know.”
“I believe you do,” he said. “Good luck.”
The maximum-security visiting room was buried so deep in the building that Kate lost track of the turns they took to reach it.
Two more sally ports with the distinctive double-door dance, a short climb up a concrete stairwell that smelled faintly of bleach and old sweat, then a descent in a narrow corridor where the air seemed thicker.
Finally, a door that required both a passcard and a fingerprint.
Day stood aside and let Rivera handle the security, as if to underline that once they crossed this threshold, everyone was playing by the institution’s rules, not his personal authority.
Inside, the room was smaller than she’d expected.
A row of thick glass partitions divided it into booths, each with a metal stool on either side and a black plastic phone bolted to the wall.
Everything was bolted to something. The glass was the kind they used in banks — clear enough to see every pore, strong enough to survive a speeding truck.
The fluorescent lights hummed above, washing everything in a pale, flattening glow. The air carried a faint smell of dust and something lemon-scented that didn’t quite succeed in masking the human undernote.
Cameras watched from the corners, tiny lenses embedded in protective domes.
Another officer — BAILEY, according to his tag — leaned against the back wall, red-headed and quite young, huge, gym-pumped arms just about folded, his eyes bored and sharp at once.
He looked like someone who’d been told to regard everything as a potential threat, but had never needed telling.
“Cox is already seated,” Bailey said, unnecessarily. “You ready?”
She nodded, suddenly aware of the dryness in her throat, the way her pulse had picked up somewhere between her collarbones. Her palms had gone damp. She flexed her fingers once, twice.
Through the glass, she could see him.
He wore a pale grey jumpsuit, not orange.
The color washed him out further, made his skin look almost translucent under the fluorescent lights.
His formerly long hair had been clipped short, the iron-grey patches more obvious now, tufts sitting stubbornly against his skull as if resenting the imposed neatness.
There had been weight loss too; his jaw was sharper, the bones of his hands more prominent where they rested on the table. Chains ringed his wrists and ankles, fastened to a bolt in the floor so that any movement would be slow, constrained, emphasized by sound.
He looked, Kate thought, like a priest after a long illness. Or a man who had spent the last three months being stripped deliberately of everything that made him feel like himself and had chosen to make even that process part of his narrative.
When he saw her, he smiled.
Not broadly. Not like a man greeting an old friend. The smile was small and intimate, with a lift of the eyebrows, as if they shared a joke nobody else in the room could hear.
She ignored the way her stomach clenched and sat opposite him, the metal stool cool under her thighs. She lifted the phone from its cradle. After a moment, he mirrored the gesture, chains chiming gently.
“Agent Valentine,” he said. The line made his voice faintly metallic, as if he were calling from underwater. “You came.”
“You asked,” she said.
“I prayed,” he corrected her gently. “But yes. I asked. It’s good to see you.”
“You look well,” she said. It was only partly a lie. For someone who’d been through a stabbing and a self-induced case of sepsis, followed by a manhunt, a rooftop arrest and a supermax transfer, he looked better than many. That was unsettling in itself.
“You always did prefer the truth, even when you’re being polite,” he said. “I appreciate that about you.”
“Let’s save the compliments,” she said. “You said you had information about an imminent divine action. You’ve got forty minutes.”
“Ah.” He inclined his head. “Straight to business.”
“You don’t have a lot else to recommend you.”
He laughed, soft and almost fond. “You wound me. And yet you came. Isn’t that interesting?”
“What’s interesting,” she said, “is that you had your shot. Multiple shots. Now you’re here, chained up like a dog. So if there’s another threat out there, you’re not the one I’m worried about.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Annoyance, perhaps, or respect. With Cox it was always hard to tell whether you’d scored a point or fed him a line.
"You are right," he said. "In a sense. My own active work is concluded for now. I am bound. Quite literally." He rattled his shackles lightly, metal against metal. "But the work itself — the sacred work of rebuke and correct — does not depend on my hands alone. But, Kate, it never did."
“You’re talking about your followers.”
He tilted his head. “Such an ugly word. Followers. As if they were sheep, blind and stupid. No. I am speaking of those who have heard and understood. Those who have seen what I have seen, Kate: the rot at the heart of our so-called civilisation. The abandonment of duty. The casual desecration of a covenant that once meant something.”
“Spare me the sermon. And I prefer Agent Valentine.”
He smiled again. “You came to church. You knew there would be preaching.”
She tightened her grip on the phone. The plastic bit into her fingers. “You told the warden there was an imminent action. Something planned. I assume you weren’t referring to any of your old cases, since we both know you’ve been locked down too hard to orchestrate much of anything.”
He considered that, then nodded slowly. “Imminent is perhaps the wrong word. Imminent, to you, implies schedules and logistics. To me, it means only that the storm has reached the horizon.” His eyes sharpened. “But yes. There is another.”
Another. The word slid under her ribs like a thin blade.
“A copycat?” she asked. “Someone who reached out to you? Wrote to you? Visited you? This had to be before the transfer, right? Or was it while you were on the run?”
“A new actor,” he said thoughtfully, without answering the question. “That is what I would call them. An instrument in the orchestra, picking up a theme.”
“Name,” she said. “Location. What do you have, exactly?”
He looked past her for a moment, as if admiring the geometry of the glass, the way it split the room into before and after.
“You know, for a long time I doubted anyone would follow in my footsteps. Oh, there have always been those who shouted on message boards, who emailed me in prison about how they ‘got it.’ But shouting is cheap. Commitment is dear. I thought perhaps the age of obedience had passed. And then, recently, I was given to understand that I was wrong.”
“By whom?” she demanded.
He looked back at her. His eyes were clear and bright; prison had not dulled that fever. “Providence.”
The hair on the back of her neck prickled. “Who wrote to you?”
He spread his hands as far as the chains allowed. “When I was able to receive communications… Many persons. Always. The lonely, the devoted, the disturbed. The ones who see in my work a permission slip for their own anger. Most I ignore. A very, very few, I listen to.”
“And this one?”
He smiled again, but there was less warmth in it now. More calculation, like a cat deciding how much to toy with a trapped mouse.
She forced her voice to stay neutral. “Stop playing games,” she said. “Can you give me a name? An address? Anything that could help me protect people?”
“Protect.” He rolled the word on his tongue like a tasting wine. “Always so noble. What protection is there from the fire of the Lord of wrath?”
“Name,” she repeated.
He was quiet for a long moment. Through the glass, she could see the pulse beating thinly at the side of his throat. He looked older, suddenly. Tired. But the tiredness seemed almost… chosen, a garment donned for effect.
“At this stage,” he said, “names are irrelevant. What matters is the work. They spoke of honor. Of parents. Of the first duty we learn and the first we discard when it becomes inconvenient. They spoke as one who has watched that betrayal up close and has become ready to answer it.”
Honor. Parents. The commandment came to her at once, as it had for years.
Honor thy father and thy mother. The fifth.
She felt her jaw tighten. “You think someone’s about to start killing under that banner. The fifth commandment. They’re working their way through the list.”
“What a dull, prosaic way to describe mankind’s contract with the Almighty,” Cox observed sharply.