CHAPTER NINE
Jakes sat with his elbows propped on the chipped laminate of the kitchen table, the blinds drawn tight against the fading daylight.
The cheap aluminium slats rattled faintly whenever a truck passed three floors below, a thin percussion against the silence he needed.
The monitor glowed in the dark like an altar.
Floor plans first. He had memorised them already, of course, but memorising was not the same as inhabiting. He needed the walls to become the inside of his skull. Every corridor, every emergency exit, every blind corner had to live there as naturally as the layout of his own bones.
Channel Grace—William Harper’s garish kingdom of television evangelism—spread across four floors of a renovated warehouse on the edge of the city’s arts district.
Jakes traced the schematic with the back of a fingernail.
Reception at ground level, all white marble and camera-friendly uplighting.
Two studios above it, the larger wrapped in black acoustic drapes, a glittering stage built for the thunder of fake miracles.
Offices and editing suites on the top floor, each labelled in a neat architect’s font.
He closed his eyes and pictured the path he would take: service entrance at the loading dock, the left-hand stairwell that smelled of disinfectant and old coffee, press the buzzer for Deliveries. He’d checked and checked again: this was the place, the only place that the Door Dash guys used.
He clicked the next file. Grainy footage, no sound: a narrow corridor filmed through the deliberate blink of a hidden camera.
Someone – not Cox, obviously, but someone else working for him, had gone in there with a pinhole camera.
The images rolled: production assistants carrying stacks of cue cards, a make-up girl glancing into her phone, a security guard with a soft belly and a badge that sat too loosely on his shirt.
Jakes watched them without interest. He didn’t need this detail. None of these people would be there when he struck. Only one.
He slowed the feed, stopped it altogether, rewound to the moment Harper himself strode into the studio. This one. Expensive black suit, the sheen of stage powder dulling his jowls. A man who had learned to draw light toward himself and then sell it back to the faithful in monthly instalments.
Jakes’s breathing was slow, steady.
The studio called up other corridors in his memory, corridors he had not walked in years. Not this tidy, not this safe.
Basra.
He never said it aloud if he could help it. The name carried its own dust and heat.
He saw again the stone-coloured alleys where the sun poured down like molten brass.
The war was supposed to be a thing to survive, a trial to be endured.
People looked at him with a careful sympathy whenever he admitted he remembered it.
They imagined he carried scars that made him fragile.
They could not grasp the truth: that he had loved it.
He had loved the clarity of danger, the clean, single line that ran through every day. You woke, you breathed, you hunted, or you were hunted. That was the algorithm of life, as pure as any equation. Today, kill or be killed.
There had been a sniper then, a shadow perched high in the broken husk of a television station.
A building that still reeked of old electrics and burned film.
The sniper was the city’s own private god of death.
Women who ventured to the cracked concrete basin to draw water crumpled mid-stride.
Cats toppled from rooftops in sudden silent bursts of red.
A Kurdish grandfather who stood tall despite the bent spine of his years took one neat hole through his forehead while reaching for his prayer beads.
The sniper spared nothing. Toddlers, animals, the frail and the proud—his bullets found them all.
The Marines called this sniper the Lord of Death. Jakes, twenty-four and lean with purpose, took the hunt as a private vow.
He remembered the weight of the rifle against his palm as he crossed the courtyard littered with broken satellite dishes. The air smelled of oil and singed plastic. Flight after flight of narrow stairs twisted upward into darkness.
Bodies lay where they had fallen. A woman sprawled beside an upturned pail, water leaking away to mud. Two boys barely old enough to shave. He stepped over them with the cold precision of a man counting rungs on a ladder.
Halfway up, he found a junkie slumped against the wall, eyes open but pupils swimming in a haze of chemicals.
The man did not move or speak. Jakes left him to whatever dream held him captive.
The guy was a junkie. A junkie in Basra.
It took balls to be that fucked-up. So Jakes left him to it. A kind of a tribute.
Near the top, a family of cats blinked at him from the shell of a broadcast office. A mother and three scrawny kittens, ribs like the struts of tiny umbrellas. He unwrapped a corner of his rations and laid it on the floor. The mother sniffed once before tearing into the meat.
The sound that reached him then was so gentle it took a moment to recognise. A thread of music—violin and piano—drifting through the broken walls. Classical, precise, unbearably calm.
The Lord of Death was listening to Mozart.
Jakes crept forward, heart slowed to a metronome’s tick. The final flight of stairs opened onto the broadcast roof. There, behind a half-collapsed section of concrete, the sniper crouched, headphones clamped to his skull, the long barrel of his rifle resting like an extension of his own bones.
The man was beautiful. That was the first thing Jakes thought. The desert light etched the fine bones of his face, the dark hair drawn back and damp with sweat. In that instant, the war narrowed to the single line of the man’s pulse.
Jakes came up behind him, a silent shape in the ruin. He pressed the barrel of his own weapon into the hollow at the base of the man’s skull.
The sniper turned his head. Their eyes met, only inches apart.
Jakes pulled the trigger.
The body shuddered once, then lay still.
Silence returned—except for the music, still playing, absurdly delicate.
Jakes stared. He had given the man the most intimate death possible, face to face, the last thing the sniper saw the eyes of the one who ended him.
And yet, when the breath had gone and the blood had cooled, a different urge rose in him like a tide. He took the sniper’s own rifle and smashed it down upon that perfect face, those oxbow lips—once, twice, again—until the features were a ruin of bone and blood.
He could never explain why.
It was not rage. It was not fear. He had felt something like it before, years earlier, when a girl at school had been so breathtakingly pretty that the sight of her filled him with a power he could neither name nor resist. Beauty, for him, had always demanded its own destruction.
On summer mornings, in the same spirit, he’d tear down spiders’ webs garlanded with dew. They were calling out for it.
People who asked about his memories of the war expected sorrow, trauma, the polite vocabulary of damage. He had learned to let them think that. They offered sympathy like coins dropped in a beggar’s cup, and he took it with a nod. They would never understand.
He had loved the war.
The simplicity of it. The certainty.
And Cox knew that. Had understood. Remembered him doling out a ladle of soup in that shelter, tall with that big old silver prophet-beard. Oklahoma City. Cranktown. Jakes the only one in that whole, shuffling line of them with teeth.
“Miss it, doncha, soldier?”
“What?”
“The war.”
“Whatchu say, old man?”
But Cox just ducked his head. Carried on ladling out the soup like he hadn’t spoken. That was how they first met.
A truck’s horn blared far below, yanking him back to the present.
The studio footage still rolled on the monitor, Harper’s figure now framed by the glittering arch of Studio B. Jakes flexed his fingers, the muscles in his forearms tightening as the memory drained away.
Time to work.
He laid out the tools on the table with the slow precision of a craftsman.
First the vial of baclofen—liquid relaxant, pharmaceutical purity. He measured the dose with a practised hand. Eight milligrams would do it, based on the preacher’s bulk and the lazy weight of his step. Eighteen seconds, perhaps twenty, before muscle turned to water.
Next the scalpel: carbon steel, balanced to a hair, the scent of the whale oil still pungent and sharp. He held it up to the light, tested the edge with the soft pad of his thumb.
Then the six-inch nail, cold and black, sharpened at one end to a fine wicked point. It would carry the inscription when the work was done.
A length of nylon cord. A syringe. Two sterile swabs.
He worked without hurry, the way he had in Basra when a single slip of sound could bring death from an unseen barrel.
Outside, the Greek woman downstairs began her evening ritual, thumping her broom handle against her ceiling—his floor—in some private symphony of complaint. Three sharp thuds, a pause, then three more.
Jakes allowed himself the flicker of a smile.
The world remained full of noises: broomsticks, truck horns, the cheap static hiss of the city. But inside this room there was only the quiet weight of purpose.
He slid each item into its place in the black canvas pack, the motion fluid and unthinking. Drugs, scalpel, nail.
Order was everything.
Order was holy.
And soon, William Harper would learn what it meant.