CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gabriel Kane had been watching the news broadcast with the sound low.
The Georgia station's late segment filled the dim room, its blue-gray light the only illumination in the space.
The anchor was reading the items that crawled along the bottom of the screen without particular emphasis, the way local news tended to read items that were caught between significant and flavor-of the-week.
An arrest had been made in connection with three deaths in Savannah, a former SCAD lecturer named Russell Cord.
There had been federal agents involved, and the investigation was ongoing.
The crawler at the bottom of the screen added nothing the anchor had not already said.
Then the segment ended and the broadcast moved to the weather.
A cute blonde woman with a pleasant face stood in front of a map and discussed a high-pressure system moving up from the Gulf, and Kane reached for the remote and turned the monitor off.
The room held his reflection in the darkened screen for a moment, the image dim and slightly distorted by the curve of the monitor's surface.
He looked at it without any feeling. He was fifty-three years old and he looked it in certain lights and not in others.
This dim reflection in a dead monitor was one of the lights that showed it.
The burn scar on the left side of his neck was just barely visible, a texture of skin that ran from just below his jaw down to where his collar covered it.
It was the legacy of a laboratory accident that had happened more years ago than he cared to recall.
He had stopped thinking of as a disfigurement sometime in his thirties when he understood that disfigurement was a designation that required a consensus he had never agreed to participate in.
He touched it with two fingers, pressing lightly against the scar tissue in the way he had done for nearly thirty years. It was akin to the strange comfort and impulse that made a person check a lock they had already checked. It was there. Everything else could be verified from there.
He thought about Russell Cord.
Cord had been one of his more genuinely gifted disciples.
He had found him several years ago and had developed him over time.
Most of the people Kane worked with required construction from a foundation up, the slow and patient work of identifying a susceptible architecture and building the belief system into it piece by piece over months or years of careful contact.
Cord had needed almost none of that. The chromatic depletion framework, and the years of notation and observation had all been present before Kane ever sat across from him at a color science symposium in Atlanta and asked him what he thought was the most undervalued problem in contemporary environmental science.
Cord had answered for forty-five minutes without pausing. Kane had seen the man’s passion there and knew he would be perfect.
What he had needed from Kane was not the belief.
The belief was already there, had been there longer than Cord fully understood.
It had been built in the isolated and self-reinforcing way that genuine obsessions come about—when the person holding them was intelligent enough to work with it without letting it utterly consume them.
What Cord had needed was permission, and the technical capability to act on what he already believed.
The chromium work had been elegant. He wanted to be precise about that, because precision was the standard he held himself to and he didn’t see any reason to lower it when assessing his own investments.
The delivery mechanisms Cord had developed, the relabeled solvent in the painter's studio, the treated soaking solution in the florist's supply chain, the compound worked into the gardening gloves…
each one had been a method calibrated to the specific routine of that specific victim.
It had required a patience that even Kane envied.
Telling Cord to watch Sterling had been straightforward enough. He knew it would be risky, but really…Sterling was starting to become a nuisance. Him and his partner. But what Cord had apparently done with that instruction was something else entirely.
Kane had pieced it together from the news crawler.
An altercation at a hotel. Sterling hospitalized, Cord in custody.
Kane had asked for surveillance and Cord had decided, on his own initiative, to do something more permanent.
He could not know for certain that was how it had gone, but it was the only version that made sense given what he was looking at on the news.
He was not angry about it…not really. Cord had believed he was serving the work, and that belief had been genuine.
And hell, if he had killed Sterling, it would have been a blessing.
But the decision had been Cord's alone, unsanctioned, and it had cost Kane a disciplined and capable operator.
That was the part worth noting. Cord had been one of the more naturally gifted people Kane had developed, the chromatic framework already fully formed when they met, the chemistry aptitude genuine, the patience unusual in someone that consumed by a belief.
Those qualities were not common, and they were not replaceable on a short timeline.
Losing Cord to an unsanctioned decision made in a hotel corridor was a waste, and Kane allowed himself to register it as such before setting it aside.
The disappointment about Cord was real but small.
He had never expected every disciple to complete every task.
That was not how the work functioned. Eleven cities, eleven elements, eleven different people activated toward eleven different ends — some of them completed their work and some had not.
The point was never any single outcome. The point was the accumulation, the proof, repeated in city after city, that the systems people trusted to protect them were open at every seam.
Sterling and his partner and the FBI itself had closed eleven of those demonstrations. Kane respected that without being particularly troubled by it. He wasn’t even too upset about being thrown in prison. It shows that those he was up against were almost as strong and as determined as he was.
He stood and crossed to the window. Outside, the California skyline spread out below him, the grid of the city running all the way to where the lights met the black edge of the Pacific.
He had been here a month now, heading this way as soon as he had escaped from prison.
It was beautiful and quiet and based on what he knew, the FBI was for some reason certain he was in Kentucky based on the few irresponsible reports he’d seen on the news and red online.
It was almost too perfect.
He supposed he’d stay here until things came to an end…until his great work was nearly finished. He had not yet decided if he would carry out the last project or not. He wouldn’t have to if he didn’t want to because his pool of disciples was large indeed.
But Sterling had interrupted eleven of those disciples. He was good at his work and getting better, and he had a partner who made him sharper, and a task force that had learned from every case they'd worked together. Kane did not pretend otherwise.
What interested him more than Sterling's capability was Sterling's pattern.
The man approached each case the same way, building inward from the physical evidence toward the belief system underneath it, and he was getting faster at that process with every iteration.
In Austin he had identified the ideological framework within twenty-four hours.
In Savannah it had been faster than that.
At some point the speed would become a genuine problem, and Kane preferred to account for genuine problems before they materialized rather than after.
There was also the question of what Sterling now understood about Kane's willingness to move against investigators directly.
Cord's improvisation had been a mistake in execution, but it had produced one unintended result: Sterling now knew that Kane considered him a specific target.
That knowledge would change how Sterling operated.
It would make him more careful in some ways and more aggressive in others, and Kane wanted to know which impulse would win before he made any further decisions about Miles Sterling.
He touched the scar on his neck, two fingers, brief.
He thought about Sterling in a Savannah hospital, recalibrating. Perhaps he was updating his own picture of what Kane was willing to do. That was the part that had become genuinely interesting — the fact that Sterling was now actively revising his assumptions, the same way Kane was revising his.
Eleven cases in, they were finally paying each other the appropriate amount of attention. And before long, he supposed they’d meet again.
In fact, he hoped so.