Chapter 20
Some number of days later, Mr. Francis opened the door of Donna’s room and let himself in, pushing a trolley ahead of him.
He was alone. Donna could not remember receiving a lone visitor in months, not in all the time since she had torn off Joe
Valentine’s—check that, Norman Barclay’s—ear.
“I already had dinner,” she said. “Is that dessert?”
“Yes,” he said, and she saw there was a bottle of Scotch on the trolley, and two glasses.
“When did you start delivering refreshments?” she asked.
“When most of our nursing staff contrived to get themselves dead,” he said. “Hope you didn’t want ice in that Scotch. The
machine is broken and the maintenance team is long gone.”
“I haven’t had a Scotch in months. I’m not about to spoil it with a bunch of ice.”
“Good girl,” he said.
“Don’t ever say that ever again. I’m not your good girl.”
“Noted.”
He poured an inch, looked at her, poured another half inch. She took the glass between her mittens, put her nose over it,
and inhaled. It smelled like Christmas, like The Briars.
“So you’re shorthanded all around?” she asked.
“In every department except security,” he said. “We’re up to a half company of soldiers now, and more coming in every day.
Thermopylae is pulling resources from all over—Yugoslavia, East Timor, Chechnya. Anywhere there’s a squalid little fight going
on over oil or emeralds. The best way to keep your black site detention center off the books is to outsource it to the professionals.”
“Don’t leave war crimes to the amateurs,” Donna said.
Francis saluted her with his glass.
“Thermopylae,” Donna said, trying the word out to see how it felt in her mouth.
Francis nodded. “Thermopylae Security Worldwide. Second only to Blackwater among private military contractors.”
“Private military contractors? That’s a nice euphemism for mercenaries. And you work with them,” Donna said, curling her upper
lip.
“They still would’ve taken you,” Francis said, “even if the people I represent weren’t involved. Better to have them on a
leash.”
“And that’s who you are? The man holding the leash?”
“No, Donna,” Francis said. “I am the leash.”
She tasted her Scotch. It was a smoky lick of flame.
She exhaled softly and met his gaze and said, “You can get me drunk, but I still won’t tell you where to find Allison.”
“I wasn’t planning to ask. You can’t tell me what you don’t know.”
“Here’s what I do know. In nine days, my pet iguana is going to murder a whole slew of you, but it’s not my fault. I didn’t paint a target
on your backs.”
Francis gave her a considering look. “But somehow King Sorrow knew forty-three members of the team by name anyway. Their real
names. How do you think that happened?”
“Allie has her resources.”
“What a crock of shit,” he said, without any hostility at all. “The only contacts Allison Shiner has are the people who work
at her local liquor store.”
“Her daddy was a congressman. He’s got friends all over the federal government, in the military, with Central Intelligence.”
Francis nodded his big, ugly, English mastiff head.
“That’s certainly what Valentine thinks .
. . that Allison was able to work her daddy for confidential intel somehow.
I don’t see it myself. We know she called him once, forty-eight hours after Park Slope.
Told the old man she and Donovan were checking into a clinic to sober up.
That they’d be out of touch and not to worry about them.
We were listening to the old man’s phone calls, of course.
We’ve had men on him ever since Allison slipped away.
She hasn’t called him since, hasn’t approached him .
. . she’s just gone. Don’t you think it’s interesting that she made up a story to explain a long-term disappearance?
That she didn’t try and tell him the truth?
‘Daddy, some men tried to stick a needle in me and take me away. I think they got Donovan. Please help.’”
“She was just doing what she always does,” Donna said. “Giving them a story they can live with, because the truth would scare
them too much.”
“A truth, like if she told them she’d rather be fucking girls?”
“Not just any girls,” Donna said, exhaling Scotch fumes. “Classy girls.”
“Imagine that. Marrying a guy to make your parents happy when you don’t even like dick?” He tasted his Scotch, paused to enjoy
it. “Naw, it wasn’t Allison. One of the others told King Sorrow who to kill.”
“What others?” Donna asked. A tingle of alarm shot down her nerve endings, right into the tips of her fingers, a prickling
electrical charge.
“Your other friends, the ones who helped you bring King Sorrow through from the Long Dark. Arthur Oakes, for one. What are
the odds you all would’ve gone to school with the world’s foremost expert on dragons in medieval literature and he doesn’t
know about King Sorrow? Problem is, he’s a UK citizen and it would be hard to extradite him, even if we did know where he
is. Which we don’t. Allison must’ve called him right after she called you. He told Oxford University he was going to Indonesia
to study the dragon in traditional temple architecture, but he never left the UK. We’ve got CCTV footage of him with a backpack,
walking across the parking lot of a Tesco in a Welsh village called Penmaenpool—no idea if I’m pronouncing that right—wearing
a backpack so big it’s hard to believe he could lift it. He walked into the woods there, left his car behind, and no one has
seen him since. There’s a lot of woods out there. A lot of mountain.”
“He doesn’t know anything about—about King Sorrow,” she said, but her uncharacteristic stammer gave her away. Mr. Francis laughed.
“We don’t got to talk about Arthur,” Francis said. “Or any of the others who are in on it with you. It’s almost nine and I’m
drinking Scotch with a good-looking woman. We don’t got to talk shop, do we?”
“So what do we talk about?”
“How about Cady Lewis?”
She felt like he had put ice in her drink after all and a lump of it was caught in her windpipe, behind her breastbone. She
had thought of Norman Barclay as the torturer and Mr. Francis as a possible ally. But they were both torturers, of course,
both in the business of forcing her to talk about things she didn’t want to talk about. It was the good cop, bad cop game,
and she had let herself be taken in by it. In her vanity, she wanted to believe Francis had a little bit of a yen for her.
But she was the only one having fantasies.
“You already know about Cady. I bet you read a whole file on her.”
“I don’t know what you know. Only what I read in newspaper clippings.”
“She was a friend of mine who got into a van with strangers and they fucked her and killed her. She was eight. What else is
there to tell?”
“You were there when it happened, weren’t you? You watched her get into the van. You think about it much?”
“No, never crosses my mind at all.”
He made a little sound, halfway to a laugh, and had another taste of his whiskey.
“You ever think, what if you got in the van with her? Or instead of her?”
“If it was me instead of her no one would’ve died. I would’ve bit a son of a bitch in the pecker.”
“No. You would’ve got your head bashed in like her. You would’ve been raped and killed just the same.”
She held the whiskey glass between her mittened hands and calculated whether she could smash him in the head with it. He smiled, as if he could see her working through the thought. “They wouldn’t have got away with it. I would’ve screamed so loud.”
“Maybe they didn’t get away with it,” he said. He rolled his glass back and forth between his big hands. It nettled her that
she couldn’t see his angle, couldn’t figure out what he wanted out of this conversation.
“What do you mean?”
“Guys like that, they don’t do it once, and their issues never stop at grabbing little girls. For all you know, one of them
is doing life in East Texas right now for strangling his girlfriend in a domestic incident. And his partner got knifed in
the kidneys during a thirty-day stint in the county jail for exposing himself to a child. He’s on dialysis now. He’s never
going to be off it.”
“Is that true?” she asked, her breath roughening with emotion.
“Dunno,” he said, and the tension went out of her. “I just made all that up on the spot. Point is, it’s over.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know how many other kids they hurt. For all you know they’re still at it.”
“I doubt it.” His certainty pissed her off. He had no right to dismiss Cady that way. “The piece of shit that killed her,
something will have caught up to him, or if it hasn’t yet, it will. A cop will make a routine traffic stop and find his child
porn. He’ll meet someone worse than him and get a shovel in the brains. Or he died with a needle in his arm. These guys, they
don’t die peacefully at eighty with their loved ones around them.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better? Because you’re about as comforting as a rash.”
“I guess if no one’s caught up to them yet,” Francis said, “King Sorrow might, one of these days. If you could only learn
their names. And in the meantime, there are so many other men like them. So many other Cadys.”
“Thanks for the amateur psychoanalysis. Only one quick session to sort out all my personal issues and completely solve me
as a person. How much do you charge?”
“That’s how you make peace with it. You get the bad guys no one else can. You’re the one driving the murder van now.”
That touched her off, was more than she could allow. “The fuck I am. King Sorrow is waste disposal. All he’s done the last
ten years is incinerate trash. Don’t twist this. Don’t try and make me out to be anything like the people who killed Cady.”
“What about Tokyo? An apartment building full of members of Aum Shinrikyo burned to the ground. That was one of yours. They
were a bad bunch, no argument about that. Only thing, one of the worshippers was in the building with her nine-month-old.”
She felt her thighs beginning to tremble. “We didn’t know there’d be kids there, and anyway, that wasn’t my pick, that was
C—”
She caught herself before she could say his name . . . but even before she did she saw Francis put a finger across his lips
and casually saw it back and forth. If she didn’t know better, he was telling her to shhh. It confused her, why he would try to shut her up just when she was about to give up a name. His eyes had darkened ever so
slightly.
“All I was saying,” Francis said, “is that you were after one of them in particular, probably Haruto Sagawa, the mastermind.
It’s too bad you didn’t have more help, a support team. He could’ve been lured out of the building on Easter. Maybe so many
people didn’t need to die.” He finished his own whiskey and exhaled heavily. “The thing about cults like Aum Shinrikyo—or
the Scripture of the Kingdom Church in Iowa—is that people join their shelters, their compounds, expecting to die. They go there to wait on the end of the world. I wouldn’t feel too bad about giving it to them. At least they didn’t
die disappointed.” He looked around the room, considered the cameras mounted on the ceiling. “This place is also a bit like
a cult compound now. The people here wanted to learn about King Sorrow, and soon they will.”
“You too, buddy,” she said.
He got up. “I was content with what I already knew about him. Once a year, King Sorrow comes out of the Long Dark to destroy bad people and bad places. And in less than two weeks, he’s going to do it again.
Same as always. Same as ever. He’s going to wipe out a private corporation that runs torture sites and the world is going to be a better place for it. I’ll leave you with the bottle?”
He didn’t wait for her answer, just rapped his knuckles on the door and slipped out when the guard on the other side unlocked
it.