The First Prophet Read online

  And maybe you’ll get dead. But she didn’t say it, of course. Instead, she said, “Where will we go?”

  “I have a feeling that once we get moving, you’ll know which way to go,” he said with more confidence than she thought he had any right to feel.

  North. I think we have to go north. But I don’t know how far. Or why we have to…

  But all she said was, “And until I know that—assuming I do?”

  “Away from Richmond is the first priority, I think. Unless you disagree, our first stop will be a place near Arlington.”

  “Why Arlington?” Heading north. And I didn’t even have to tell him we’re supposed to. Fate again.

  “Because a friend owns a cabin near there. A place to rest our weary heads and plan the next stage of the trip.”

  “Plan?”

  “We’ll come up with something, Sarah.”

  “You just want an adventure. A road trip. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  She was silent for several minutes, then said abruptly, “I should have gone to the bank. I don’t have any money.” It had just occurred to her that this was likely to be an expensive trip.

  Tucker responded promptly. “I stopped by my bank this afternoon and got some cash. Enough, I think. We’ll need to avoid plastic, avoid using ATMs because of the cameras, cell phones because they can be pinged—which is why I left mine at the shop and asked you not to bring yours—or anything else that might give them a way to track us as we move. Cash is the way to go.”

  “I can’t let you—”

  “Sarah, it’s not a problem.”

  “Yes, it is. I can’t let you pay my way.”

  “Look, if it really bothers you, we’ll settle up later. Until then, don’t worry about it.”

  She was silenced, but not happy. It went against the grain for her to depend on anyone else, particularly financially. She hadn’t even allowed David to bring in an occasional bag of groceries, and he’d practically lived at her place. Something Margo had scolded her for.

  “He eats like a goat, Sarah! Why the hell shouldn’t he kick in some for groceries? He’s got you cooking for him practically every night!”

  Sarah frowned, a little startled to realize that the memory had roused resentment rather than pain. He had usually suggested they eat at her house. And he hadn’t been able to cook, so she always had. Sometimes he’d helped her clean up afterward, but many times he’d had to “eat and run” because of business calls he needed to make from his own apartment. Or something like that.

  Now that she thought about it, he had bought dinner once or twice a week—when they ended up having sex.

  Jesus, he was paying for it!

  “Sarah?”

  “Hmm?” Dinner out—sex. A little quid pro for his quo. Wonderful. Why didn’t I see it before?

  “Don’t be upset about the money.”

  She wrenched her mind back to the present and drew a breath. “Okay. But I expect you to keep track. This is my little adventure more than yours, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you pay for it.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “As long as we understand that.”

  “We do.”

  They fell silent again. Sarah shifted a bit. Mercedes or not, the backseat wasn’t a terribly comfortable bed. Then again, she was probably too edgy to sleep. Like last night. If this kept up, she’d really be a bundle of raw nerve endings. “What time is it?”

  “After one.”

  It felt like dawn at least, to Sarah. She was so tired.

  “Why don’t you try to sleep?” he suggested.

  “If you watch all night, you’ll be exhausted.”

  “I can lose a night or two without it bothering me too much. Probably comes from a habit of all-night writing marathons. Try to sleep, Sarah.”

  She didn’t think there was a chance in hell of her actually sleeping, but she once again closed eyes that kept drifting open, and this time she did her best to stop thinking. Following directions from a relaxation tape she’d listened to, she concentrated on letting all her muscles go limp and imagined lying peacefully on a beach listening to soothing ocean waves.

  That was the last thing she remembered.

  “Sarah.”

  She came awake instantly, her scratchy eyes and heavy head telling her she hadn’t slept more than an hour or two, if that. “Hmm?”

  “Look.”

  She sat up carefully, fighting her hands free of the covers so she could rub her eyes. It took her a moment to focus, and to look where Tucker was looking, but as soon as she did, she saw them.

  “Oh God,” she whispered.

  The two cars, lights extinguished, were coming down the street toward the shop from the opposite direction. In an eerie quiet that didn’t even seem to contain the faint sounds of engines, the cars pulled into parking places at the shop. Doors opened—no interior lights betrayed them either—and men got out of the cars.

  Sarah numbly counted eight men, four from each car. “So many,” she whispered.

  Tucker nodded, silently watching.

  The men slipped toward the building, some going around to the sides and back. They all seemed to be wearing black, or at least dark colors, and Sarah strained to see whether the tall watcher was among them.

  “Do you see him?” she asked Tucker, still whispering.

  “No.”

  “Neither do—Oh. That isn’t…that can’t be…”

  “But it is,” Tucker responded grimly.

  One of the men had paused for a moment at the end of the walkway, and the light from a nearby streetlamp shone full on his face. Then he was moving with two others toward the stairs that led to the apartment.

  “I don’t understand,” Sarah said. “Why would he be here? Why would he be doing this?”

  “I don’t think we want to stick around and ask right now.” Tucker released the emergency brake, and since the car was out of gear and only the brake held it stationary on the slight incline where he had deliberately parked, it immediately began to roll forward silently.

  They were well down the street when Tucker finally started the engine, but even then Sarah couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder. Already, the shop was lost to sight, and no screaming engines followed them as Tucker turned a corner and headed for the highway. But what Sarah had seen was branded in her mind.

  How could she trust anyone when even cops came sneaking in the middle of the night to kill her?

  “Son of a bitch.” Sergeant Lewis stood at the foot of the stairs and watched his breath mist with the curse. He was vaguely aware of one of the men coolly disabling the shop’s security system and going inside, but he didn’t bother to follow.

  They wouldn’t be there. They were long gone.

  And he was anxious to get out of here. If one of the neighbors happened to wake up and look out a window, he’d have to answer some very uncomfortable questions in the morning.

  His cell phone rang just then, and he swiftly drew it out of an inner pocket and answered before it could ring again. “Yeah?” Of course, he knew who it would be. Who else would it be at four o’clock in the fucking morning?

  “Well?”

  “We missed them.”

  “I know that.”

  Lewis looked around at darkness and shadows and felt his heart thud a bit faster. You bastard—where are you?

  “What I want to know,” the cool voice continued, “is how you intend to find them now that you’ve lost them.”

  Lewis gritted his teeth and spoke between them. “I’m sure you have a suggestion.”

  “I have several. You won’t like any of them.”

  So what else is new.

  “Meet me in one hour. The usual place.”

  Lewis opened his mouth to object, but the line went dead. Slowly, he closed the phone and returned it to his pocket. He had a hollow feeling about the coming meeting.

  A very hollow feeling.

 
SIX

  “Very clever, our Mr. Mackenzie.” Brodie lowered the infrared binoculars and glanced aside to meet Cait’s gaze. “He kept Gallagher out of harm’s way and still managed to take a look at the presumed enemy.”

  Cait sniffed and then rubbed her nose. It was cold on the roof of the building across from the antiques shop, and they had been up here for hours. Her nose was beginning to run. “He was too close, if you ask me. If he knew they were coming, why not just take her and run?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know they were coming, just thought they might. Or maybe she knew and he wasn’t sure.”

  “Even so, they could have been seen sneaking back to the car. We saw them.”

  “Umm. But the others didn’t, did they.” Brodie frowned. “Odd, that. They’re usually Johnny-on-the-spot whenever something like this goes down. Wonder who fell asleep at the switch.”

  “Maybe that cop. Jeez, how many does that make?”

  “Too many. At the local and state levels so far. And impossible to guess who’ll show their face next. Be a lot easier on us if they’d just wear a sign. But at least we have one more name to add to the list.”

  Cait rested her chin on her hand as she peered across the street and watched silent men getting silently into weirdly silent cars. “Think he’s a major player?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before, but this was our first case in Richmond, so that doesn’t mean much. I’d give a lot to know who called him just now. He didn’t look very happy about it.”

  “You think he removed the evidence I couldn’t find from the shop yesterday, don’t you?”

  “I’d bet money on it. Nobody’d expect a cop—probably the first at the scene—to pocket a piece of evidence. At least, nobody but a suspicious bastard like me.”

  “Think he did the same thing at Sarah Gallagher’s house? The fire marshal suspected arson, but so far he can’t find any proof.”

  Brodie nodded, lifting the binoculars to gaze once more across the street. “Makes sense. They do tend to clean up after themselves whenever possible—and suspicious fires make for uncomfortably public headlines.”

  “Okay, so what do we do now? Stick with the cop or go after Mackenzie and Gallagher?”

  He hesitated only an instant before lowering the binoculars and easing back away from the edge. “I’d love to go after the cop, but we’ll leave that to someone else. We have to get our hands on Sarah Gallagher. And it’ll be a lot harder now. You can bet they saw Lewis just as clearly as we did, and you can bet it scared the hell out of both of them. We’re taught to trust cops, to depend on them for safety. Hell of a thing when we find out that’s a luxury we can no longer afford.”

  “Amen,” Cait agreed soberly.

  Neither made a sound as they crossed the roof and took an exterior stairway down to the ground. Their car was parked nearby, and neither spoke again until they were in it and moving.

  “We don’t know where they’re going. Do we?” Cait asked as Brodie drove toward the highway.

  “No. Get on the cell. Call it in.”

  Immediately, Cait drew a specially modified cell phone from a bag on the floorboard and punched in a familiar number.

  Sarah watched the sun come up from the front seat of Tucker’s Mercedes and wondered idly why it looked no different from the last sunrise she had seen, only a few weeks before. It should look different, she thought. The whole world had changed since then. It had gotten darker. And grimmer. And as terrifying as any nightmare.

  She could still feel them. Out there somewhere. Somewhere near. Looming over her like the shadow of something vast and far-reaching. It was like feeling breath on the back of her neck, the cold, fetid breath of an ancient predator.

  Where are you? Who are you?

  But she was afraid to look too hard, to reach into that place inside herself where the voices—at least one of the voices—might have the answers. She was afraid to willingly open that door.

  Afraid of the answers she might get. Afraid they would see her before she could see them.

  “We’re about two hours away from the cabin,” Tucker said finally. “We’ll stop for groceries when we get closer; there’s never anything in Pat’s refrigerator but beer, and we might be there a few days.” His voice was matter-of-fact but didn’t quite hide the fact that Lewis’s presence in that hit squad had shaken him almost as much as it had her.

  “Does this friend of yours know you’re—we’re—coming?”

  “He doesn’t live in the cabin, just spends summers there. I called him from my bank, and he said I was welcome to spend a few days there. Polishing the latest novel. Most people assume that requires peace and quiet.”

  Sarah was suddenly uneasy, her instincts jangling. “Will he tell anyone you’re there?” After seeing a police officer coming stealthily by night to get her, paranoia was stronger in her than it had ever been before. Except that it wasn’t paranoia, of course.

  “No, he won’t breathe a word. Don’t worry, Sarah.”

  “Right.”

  He glanced over at her. “I’m sorry. That sounds facile, doesn’t it?”

  “A bit.”

  “It wasn’t meant to. I’m not kidding myself, and I won’t kid you. What we saw last night makes this a whole new ball game. It means we can’t trust the cops.”

  “Any of them? They can’t all be…be in on this? Can they?”

  Tucker shook his head. “I can’t imagine some mysterious conspiracy that large. But how can we possibly know who to trust? Unless you find some special insight along the way, I think we’d better not take chances. You trusted Lewis, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Until…”

  “Right. Until he showed up outside your apartment in the dead of night, intending to kill you. That is what you believe?”

  Sarah hesitated, then nodded. “I know they came for me. I don’t know if they were going to kill me, but I know they wanted to…hurt me.”

  Tucker sent her another glance. “But you still don’t know why Lewis—why anyone—would want to hurt you?”

  “No. But…it isn’t just him. He wasn’t the man who was watching me. And…” She hesitated, then said slowly, “When I had the vision about them coming for me, I heard a voice—a man’s voice, but not Lewis’s—saying, ‘Even if you run, we will find you. We will always find you.’”

  Tucker looked at her sharply. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Those men coming to the apartment were the immediate threat. That’s all I thought about until we got away.”

  “But you heard a voice saying they’d find you?”

  “Yes. And a low hum of…murmuring and whispering. Tucker…I think there are a lot of them. Like an army. I didn’t see them, but I heard them. Soft murmuring voices all around me. And they weren’t friendly voices.”

  Tucker was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “My name is Legion: for we are many.”

  “That’s from the Bible.”

  He nodded. “As I recall, it refers to the devil and his minions.”

  “Evil.” Sarah shivered. “I…feel that about them, in a way. Darkness, shadows. Threatening, always threatening. And all around me. Reaching out for me. They want me, and I don’t know why.”

  “But you do know that your life was perfectly normal until you were mugged—and woke up psychic.”

  She tried to think, to force her fears to the back of her consciousness. “Yes. So it has to have something to do with that.”

  “Somehow,” he mused, “being psychic, having visions, makes you valuable to someone. Or a threat to someone. Why? Did you—have you made a prediction that hasn’t yet come true? I mean, one involving someone else?”

  “No. The only threat I saw was aimed at me.”

  “That serial killer out in California; you predicted something about him, didn’t you?”

  “Just that he’d strike again. Which he has. But he’s still out there killing. And he’s just one man.”

  “You d
on’t feel a threat from him?”

  “To myself? No. He doesn’t even know I exist.”

  Tucker glanced at her. “Okay, tell me this. Are we heading in the right direction?”

  “We aren’t heading in the wrong one,” she said slowly.

  He let out a faint sound of humor. “Well, that’s something.”

  “I’m sorry.” She felt a bit stiff, very conscious of the things she had not been able to bring herself to tell him. Like those other voices. But he didn’t need to know about them. Not really.

  “You’re doing fine. Tell me this. Do you know why we need to head in the right direction? Are we looking for something? Someone? Or is the point simply to get away from Richmond and the threat back there?”

  “I…don’t know.” Then, suddenly, she did know, and blurted, “Someone. I think there’s someone we have to find. Someone we have to look for.”

  “Who?”

  The moment of clarity was gone as abruptly as it had come, and Sarah slumped in the seat. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “All right, Sarah. Don’t force it. You’re exhausted anyway; it’s a miracle you were able to come up with anything at all. Look, I think we could both use some coffee and a couple of breakfast biscuits. I’ll get off at the next exit and find a place.”

  She looked down at her hands and rubbed them together because they felt so cold.

  “Sarah?”

  “I’m okay. But I could use some coffee.” She didn’t want him to know how fragile she felt right now. How unutterably tired. How frightened.

  This is my fate. My destiny. All this has to happen.

  “You’ll be safe at the cabin, Sarah. You’ll be able to rest.”

  “At least for a while?”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “At least for a while.”

  Staring through the windshield now, she said idly, “They will find us, you know. They’re very, very good at that. They’ve been good at that for a long time. A long time.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.” It was like catching a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye, Sarah realized. There was knowledge there, off to the side, just out of sight. Waiting for her to pay attention. She could see it if she looked.