Part 50 (2/2)

'It's no coincidence. He used us. Like bloodhounds. Turned us loose on his own trail. Had us hunt him. And now he's backtracking.'

'He?'

'Who do you think?'

'But what does it accomplish? Even if you were right, he merely erases our footnotes, not our conclusions.'

'He erases his own image.'

'Then he defaces himself. What does that change?' But even as he spoke, de l'Orme felt wrong. Were those distant sirens or alarms tripping in his own head?

'It destroys our memory,' said Parsifal. 'It wipes clean his presence.'

'But we know him now. At least we know everything the evidence has already shown. Our memory is fixed.'

'We're the last testimony,' said Parsifal. 'After us, it's back to tabula rasa.'

De l'Orme was missing pieces of the puzzle. A week behind closed doors, and it was as if the world had changed orbit. Or Parsifal had.

De l'Orme tried to arrange the information. 'You're suggesting we've led our foe on a tour of his own clues. That it's an inside job. That Satan is one of us. That he - or she? - is now revisiting our evidence and spoiling it. Again, why? What does he accomplish by destroying all the past images of himself? If our theory of a reincarnated line of hadal kings is true, then he'll reappear next time with a different face.'

'But with all his same subconscious patterns,' said Parsifal. 'Remember? We talked about that. You can't change your fundamental nature. It's like a fingerprint. He can try to alter his behavior, but five thousand years of human evidence has made him identifiable. If not to us, then to the next Beowulf gang, or the next. No evidence, no discovery. He becomes the invisible man. Whatever the h.e.l.l he is.'

'Let him rampage,' de l'Orme said. He was speaking as much to Parsifal's agitation as about their hadal prey. 'By the time he finishes his vandalism, we'll know him better than he knows himself. We're close.'

He listened to Parsifal's hard breathing on the other end. The astronaut muttered inaudibly. De l'Orme could hear wind las.h.i.+ng the telephone booth. Close by, a sixteen-wheel truck blatted down through lower gears. He pictured Parsifal at some forlorn pit stop along an interstate.

'Go home,' de l'Orme counseled.

'Whose side are you on? That's what I really called about. Whose side are you on?'

'Whose side am I on?'

'That's what this whole thing is about, isn't it?' Parsifal's voice trailed off. The wind invaded. He sounded like a man losing mind and body to the storm.

'Your wife has to be wondering where you are.'

'And have her end up like Mustafah? We've said goodbye. She'll never see me again. It's for her own good.'

There was a b.u.mp, and then scratching at de l'Orme's window. He drew back into his presumption of darkness, put his spine against the corduroy sofa. He listened. Claws raked at the gla.s.s. And there, he tracked it, the beat of wings. A bird. Or an angel. Lost among the skysc.r.a.pers.

'What about Mustafah?'

'You have to know.'

'I don't.'

'He was found last Friday, in Istanbul. What was left of him was floating in the underground reservoir at Yerebatan Sarayi. You really don't know? He was killed the same day a bomb was found in the Hagia Sofia. We're part of the evidence, don't you see?'

With great, concentrated precision, de l'Orme laid his gla.s.ses on the side table. He felt dizzy. He wanted to resist, to challenge Parsifal, to make him retract this terrible news.

'There's only one person who can be doing this,' said Parsifal. 'You know it as well as I do.'

There was a minute of relative silence, neither man speaking. The phone filled with blizzard gales and the beep-beep of snowplows setting off to battle the drifted highways. Then Parsifal spoke again. 'I know how close you two were.' His lucidity, his compa.s.sion, cemented the revelation.

'Yes,' de l'Orme said.

It was the worst falseness he could imagine. The man's obsession had guided them. And now he had disinherited them, body and spirit. No, that was wrong, for they'd never been included in his inheritance to begin with. From the start, he had merely exploited them. They had been like livestock to him, to be ridden to death.

'You must get away from him,' said Parsifal.

But de l'Orme's thoughts were on the traitor. He tried to configure the thousands of deceptions that had been perpetrated on them. A king's audacity! Almost in admiration, he whispered the name.

'Louder,' said Parsifal. 'I can't hear you over the wind.'

'Thomas,' de l'Orme said again. What magnificent courage! What ruthless deception! It was dizzying, the depths of his plotting. What had he been after then? Who was he really? And why commission a posse to hunt himself down?

'Then you've heard,' shouted Parsifal. His blizzard was getting worse.

'They've found him?'

'Yes.'

De l'Orme was astounded. 'But that means we've won.'

'Have you lost your mind?' said Parsifal.

'Have you lost yours? Why are you running? They've caught him. Now we can interview him directly. We must go to him immediately. Give me the details, man.'

'Caught him? Thomas?'

De l'Orme heard Parsifal's confusion, and he felt equally dumbfounded. Even after so many months spent treating the hadal as a common man, Satan's mortality did not come naturally. How could one catch Satan? Yet here it was. They had accomplished the impossible. They had transcended myth.

'Where is he? What have they done with him?'

'Thomas, you mean?'

'Yes, Thomas.'

'But Thomas is dead.'

'Thomas?'

'I thought you said you knew.'

'No,' groaned de l'Orme.

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