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“I don’t see another way. I can’t trust him, and I need to know what it is he’s hiding from me.”

  “I don’t want you doing this alone,” said Edmunds.

  “So you admit there’s something suspicious about all this?”

  “No. But . . . just . . . I’ll meet you there, all right? Let me know what time.”

  “Fine.”

  Baxter hung up the phone.

  “Pretty girl,” said Rouche, standing in the doorway, making Baxter jump guiltily.

  He was holding up a canvas print of Alexei Green and a beautiful woman. They looked happier than any couple she had ever seen, effortlessly upstaging the incredible scenery behind them, which was shamelessly pulling out all the stops, the sun setting over a tranquil fjord.

  “We need to identify her,” said Baxter as she barged past him. “I’m done in here anyway.”

  “This is a waste of time,” said Rouche, placing the canvas back onto the pile of mess in the spare room as he followed her down the corridor. “The Met have already been through every inch of this place.”

  “’Cause I didn’t know that.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Whatever,” Baxter replied as she stepped into the beautifully appointed kitchen. The granite work surface sparkled under the spotlights, the gray city stretching out into the distance beyond the balcony that choked the building’s upper levels. “Know what else isn’t here? A single reason why Alexei Green would want to blow up half of New York. Why risk it all when he had so much to—” She stopped when she noticed him staring at her. “What?” She started to feel uncomfortable when he failed to look away. “What, Rouche?”

  “Top floor, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  He rushed toward her. Baxter instinctively clenched her fist, but then relaxed when he stepped around her and pulled open the balcony door. A cold wind snaked through the spacious apartment, animating the discarded paperwork and photographs. She followed him out into the rain.

  “Bump me,” said Rouche.

  “I beg your pardon?” Baxter had a dangerous edge to her voice.

  “Bump me up,” said Rouche. “Onto the roof.”

  “Oh!” Baxter sighed in relief. “Yeah . . . No.”

  Undeterred, Rouche climbed up onto the wet railings.

  “Jesus, Rouche!”

  He reached up and grabbed the edge of the flat roof before unsuccessfully attempting to pull himself up. Avoiding his floundering legs, Baxter gave him an undignified shove in the right direction until he finally scrambled up and disappeared out of sight.

  Her phone went off:

  “Baxter,” she answered. “Uh-huh . . . Yep . . . Fine.” She ended the call. “Rouche!” she shouted up, the freezing rain stinging her face.

  His head popped over the ledge.

  “Anything up there?” she asked.

  “Roof,” he answered, a little embarrassed.

  “Tech team’s got something for us.” She politely pretended not to notice when he split the crotch of his trousers clambering back down. “Shall we?”

  “OK. So this is pretty exciting,” said Techie Steve, bustling around the various wires that linked laptops to flashing boxes to other flashing boxes to mobile phones. “I’ve taken a second pass at our Mall killer’s phone.”

  “Which wouldn’t have been necessary if someone had done their job properly in the first place,” said Baxter accusingly.

  “Well, let’s not start pointing fingers.” Steve smiled awkwardly, as Baxter was literally pointing at him. “Anyway, I found something. That”—he gestured to the expensive new phone on the table—“is Patrick Peter Fergus’s.”

  He typed something on his laptop.

  There was a cheery ping.

  “I think you’ve got a text,” he prompted Baxter excitedly.

  Rolling her eyes, she picked up the mobile phone and clicked on the familiar messaging icon:

  “‘Hi, boss. Winky face,’” she read aloud.

  “Wait for it,” Steve told her, barely able to contain himself as he counted down the seconds on his watch. “OK. Why don’t you read it to me again?”

  Baxter groaned. Losing patience, she glanced back down at the screen to find that the short message had vanished. Confused, she clicked back to the list of previous texts from Fergus’s assorted contacts:

  “It’s gone!”

  “Self-deleting one-read-only messages,” Steve told her proudly. “Or ‘suicide texts,’ as I’ve just coined them. That phone has been installed with a clone messaging app. It looks like the standard one. It even acts like the standard one 99.9 percent of the time. That is, until it receives a text from a particular set of numbers, in which case that happens and the content becomes unrecoverable.”

  Baxter turned to Rouche, who looked to be struggling to keep up with the conversation:

  “What do you think?” she asked him, while Steve fiddled with his equipment, a huge grin on his face.

  “I think . . . this guy might actually wet himself if we ask him to send another one,” he whispered, making Baxter snigger.

  “Just so I’m up to speed,” said Rouche, looking over the equipment, “we’re now saying that Patrick Peter Fergus was a sixty-one-year-old tech genius Santa Claus?”

  “Definitely not,” Steve told him. “This is some proper clever stuff. This was done at manufacturing level.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m working with the Americans on that right now as they have far more recovered devices to work with than I do.”

  “You said we had something to work with now,” Baxter reminded him.

  “We do.” He smiled. “The server at S-S Mobile’s headquarters in California, where all of these suicide texts originated from, each and every one sent out by a different number. We might not be able to recover the data from the devices but there will be a record of them at source. The FBI should be sharing the files with us within the hour.”

  Baxter looked almost happy, or at least a little less miserable than usual.

  Steve typed another short message and hit the “return” key with satisfaction.

  The phone pinged in Baxter’s hand:

  You’re welcome ;-)

  The printer in the main office continued to swallow page after page, churning out hour after hour of work for Baxter and her team to wade through.

  The capital’s underbelly had excelled itself during an abnormally busy night, limiting the resources available to sort through the mountain of messages the FBI had retrieved from the S-S Mobile server. Baxter had been able to assemble a team of only six, most drafted in on their day off.

  She removed the lid from her highlighter:

  They don’t understand you, Aiden, not like we do. Know that you are not alone.

  “What is this shit?” she whispered, placing the page onto a separate pile.

  After four hours, the general consensus was that these bizarre snippets of pontification, provocation, and instruction wouldn’t have been enough to coerce even the most susceptible of minds alone. Rather, these insidious communications waking them in the night only to vanish without a trace had served to contaminate their thoughts between sessions—those hours of privacy devoted to molding the vulnerable into weapons.

  “What is this shit?” Rouche didn’t whisper from the next desk over. He looked up at the board, where details of three gatherings, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been extracted from the messages. Having all already taken place, the relevant CCTV footage had been requested.

  “It’s like he’s probing their paranoia, their sense of worthlessness,” said Baxter, highlighting another message, more than aware that she sounded just like Edmunds with his university psychobabble she always found so irritating. “He’s promising them greatness and purpose, things they’re never going to achieve alone.”

  Rouche waited for her to gather her thoughts.

  “It is a cult,” she told him. “Not in the traditional sense, but it’s still a shared mass hy
steria fulfilling the wishes of a single person.”

  “Our Azazel,” said Rouche. “Dr. Alexei Green.”

  “Chief!” a detective shouted from across the room, a sheet of paper in her hand as she waved it excitedly above her head. “I think I’ve got something . . .”

  Baxter rushed over to her, Rouche close behind. She snatched the sheet out of the woman’s hand and read through the short message:

  Sycamore Hotel, 20 December, 11 a.m.

  Jules Teller welcomes you one final time.

  “Well?” asked Rouche.

  Baxter smiled, handing him the supposedly unrecoverable message.

  “Jules Teller?” he asked, the name sounding familiar.

  “That was the name their last gathering was booked under,” Baxter clarified. “This is it. This is Green. And now we know exactly where he’s going to be.”

  “What’s that?” asked Rouche, looking back at the rear seats as Baxter drove him home through the rush-hour traffic.

  “Homework.”

  “Can I help?” asked Rouche, reaching for the box.

  “No! I got it.”

  “There must be hours of it to get through!”

  “I said, I got it.”

  Rouche gave up and stared out at the half-arsed seasonal displays in the shop windows. A tatty motorized Santa Claus waved at him with what little remained of his right arm. Depressed, he turned back to Baxter:

  “We’ve got two days.”

  “Huh?”

  “According to the messages, we’ve got two days,” he elaborated, “until Green’s gathering. How do you want to play it? Check out the venue in the morning?”

  “I’m not sure there’s much point in planning tomorrow,” said Baxter.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Baxter shrugged, but after a few moments, she continued:

  “No one’s putting a foot inside that place before Sunday.”

  Rouche was still watching her carefully, the throwaway comment playing on his mind.

  “For the first time, we’re one step ahead,” said Baxter. “Green has no idea we’ve found the messages. This is our one shot. We can’t risk spooking him.”

  “Left here!” Rouche reminded her.

  Baxter swung the wheel and hit the curb as the car skidded onto the leafy street. She recognized Edmunds’s dilapidated Volvo as they passed it and pulled up outside Rouche’s similarly dilapidated house.

  “Ta for the lift. I can make my own way in in the morning if it’s easier?”

  “It is.”

  “OK, then.” Rouche smiled.

  He stepped out, waved awkwardly, and then ascended the perilous driveway.

  In the rearview mirror, Baxter watched Edmunds get out of his car. She waited until Rouche had disappeared inside before climbing out into the chilly night.

  She nodded to her friend, took a deep breath, and then made her way up toward the weathered front door.

  Chapter 26

  Friday, 18 December 2015

  6:21 P.M.

  Overgrown ivy framed the doorway, the leaves trembling in time to the first frozen raindrops of the night.

  Baxter had almost knocked twice, but her hand had been stayed by the realization that by doing so, she was instigating the bitter end of her partnership with Rouche.

  Between the warped wood and the frame, a solitary slit of orange light cut through the darkness to settle over the shoulder of her jacket. She glanced at Edmunds, who had taken up position on the opposite side of the road, and smiled uncertainly before turning back to the house.

  “OK,” she whispered, knocking sharply against the wood.

  When there was no reply, she knocked again more loudly.

  Eventually, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching across the floorboards. A lock clunked and then the door opened a few cautious inches. Baxter watched the metal chain pull taut as Rouche peered out from between the gap:

  “Baxter?”

  “Hey,” she said through an embarrassed smile. “Sorry to do this, but I think the traffic’s gonna be shit trying to get back into Wimbledon and I’m absolutely bursting for a wee.”

  Rouche did not respond immediately, his face disappearing momentarily from view, revealing the tattered wallpaper behind and the dust particles crashing into one another in their haste to escape the dying house.

  An eyeball returned to address her:

  “It’s not . . . it’s not really a great time.”

  Baxter took a small step forward, still smiling, as if her colleague’s cagey behavior were perfectly normal:

  “I’ll be in and out. I swear. Two minutes, tops.”

  “Ellie . . . She’s caught something at school and really isn’t feeling too good at all and—”

  “You do remember the lift I just gave you across London, right?” interrupted Baxter, taking another small step toward the opening.

  “Yes, of course I do,” replied Rouche quickly, clearly aware of how incredibly rude he was being. “Do you know what? There’s actually a Tesco just down the road. They’ve definitely got toilets in there.”

  “A Tesco?” asked Baxter, unamused, edging forward.

  “Yeah.”

  Rouche clocked the drastic change in her, noticed the way that her eyes were searching what little space he could not block with his body.

  They stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Guess I’ll just head there, then,” she said, watching him.

  “OK. I’m really sorry.”

  “No harm done,” she told him. “I’ll be off, then.”

  “Good nigh—”

  Baxter lurched forward. The chain tore from the wood with the force of the impact as she shoved the door back violently into Rouche.

  “Baxter!” he shouted, scrambling to push back against her. “Stop it!”

  She wedged a foot between the door and the frame, and jolted when her eyes fell on the huge bloodstain dried deep into the sanded wooden floorboards.

  “Let me in, Rouche!” she yelled as he crushed her boot in the narrowing gap.

  He was stronger than her.

  “Just leave me alone! Please!” called Rouche desperately as, with one final effort, he threw his full weight against the door, slamming it shut. “Just leave, Baxter. I’m begging you!” his muffled voice pleaded from inside.

  “Shit!” she shouted when she heard the lock click again. “What happens next, Rouche, is on you!”

  She kicked the blocked entrance with her injured foot before limping back down the driveway. Edmunds met her halfway up and offered her his hand, knowing full well that she would refuse it.

  “Blood on the floor,” she announced.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” asked Edmunds, already making the call to the control room. It was answered immediately. “Baxter?” he hissed while cupping his hand over the speaker. “Are you sure? You can’t be wrong about this.”

  She considered for a fleeting moment: “I’m not wrong. Get a team down here.”

  The door surrendered without a fight, separating from its hinges in a shower of splintered wood and scattering screws. The first members of the Armed Response Unit rushed inside, accompanied by a chorus of barked orders, to secure the man sitting quietly on the bare hallway floor.

  Rouche remained still, his head lowered.

  “Are you armed?” the team leader yelled, unnecessarily, down at him, watching the CIA agent’s empty hands cautiously.

  Rouche shook his head:

  “Dismantled. Kitchen table,” he mumbled.

  Keeping his weapon trained on the subdued man, the team leader sent another officer to go and check the kitchen while his colleagues moved through the tumbledown property.

  Baxter and Edmunds followed the last armed officer inside, pausing on the threshold to estimate the pints of blood required to soak such a large area of floor. The broken door rocked underfoot as they crossed it and took their first breath of the stale, dusty air. A sing
le, yellowed lightbulb swung from the ceiling, illuminating sections of the peeling wallpaper, which looked at least forty years old.

  Baxter immediately felt right at home because it was the sort of place where she had spent the majority of her working life: the rotten truth hidden behind closed doors, the darkness that the veil of normality had been concealing; it was a crime scene.

  She turned to Edmunds:

  “I wasn’t wrong,” she told him, attempting to sound smug but unable to hide the confusing mix of relief and sadness that she was feeling.

  They passed an open door to their right, where damp patches climbed the walls of the empty room. Rainwater had stained sections of the floor. Baxter moved on, stepping over Rouche in the hallway and trying to ignore the look of betrayal that he shot her.

  From the foot of the wide staircase, the house looked even more derelict than it had from the entrance. Deep cracks ran up the exposed plaster. Several of the stairs were rotten through, with crude spray-painted crosses warning where to avoid placing one’s weight. On the ground floor, the scene in the kitchen looked like the aftermath of a bomb blast, resurrecting images of New York that Baxter prayed to one day forget.

  “You head up. I’ll stay down,” she told Edmunds.

  She stole another glance at Rouche, who was sat on the floor between them. It was clear that he had given up, sitting with his face in his hands, the back of his white shirt ruined by the filth of his own home.

  As Edmunds risked his life playing stair roulette, Baxter entered the rubble-strewn kitchen. The dividing wall to the neighboring room lay in pieces across the floor. The few remaining cupboards showcased a depressing array of canned foods and packets of instant unpleasantness. Exposed live wires protruded from behind broken tiles, offering a merciful way out to anyone unfortunate enough to be faced with the prospect of a Rouche household dinnertime.

  “Bloody animals,” one of the armed officers muttered under his breath. “Who lives like this?”

  Baxter ignored the man and walked over to the patio doors to look out over the dark garden. She could just about make out a colorful and cared-for Wendy house, something for the ruined family home to aspire to. Long grass obscured its walls, threatening to swallow it up entirely.

  Upstairs, Edmunds could hear the team searching the rooms either side of him. Entire sections of the ceiling lay fragmented and trodden into the ancient carpet, and he could hear water dripping somewhere above him. Had it been earlier, he was confident that he would have been able to see daylight shining in through the roof.