“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Hawkins leaned back in her chair. “Remember when I thanked you, for keeping what happened last night between us?”
“Yes…”
“I changed my mind. Everyone needs to hear about it, especially Collins.”
“I am not sure I am following you.”
“It isn’t complicated. As far as I can see, the only way to win Parabellum’s game is not to play at all. Over the years, I’ve read every psych profile that has ever been generated on this guy, but you’re more experienced with that sort of thing, so give me your opinion: what do you think Parabellum would do if he thought an opponent was too weak to face him, if they fell apart during the first round?”
“A guy like Parabellum?” Ryan considered it for a moment. He’d seen the psych profiles too, hell they’d studied them in the academy, and the consensus was clear, “he kills to prove his superiority. He makes sure that he challenges only the best of the best, to demonstrate just how good he really is. A weak target he would consider below him, unworthy of his time. In fact, if he could get out of the challenge without losing face, he would probably just move on to someone else, rather than degrade himself by facing an inferior opponent.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” Hawkins nodded briskly. “It looks like last night’s little misadventure wasn’t totally a waste after all.” Hawkins rubbed her hands together, she seemed genuinely pleased. “Which brings us back to what I was saying before, everyone needs to know about my little meltdown.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I’m dead serious,” she replied calmly. “Look, essentially, we need to convince everyone that I’ve had a nervous breakdown. That won’t be so hard to believe, if anyone saw my performance last night, and I am sure Parabellum did. He would have been watching. I just need him to think that, as a result, I never got his message, and I have no idea that anything is amiss with the case. If I believe this case is closed and I don’t know that he challenged me, then hopefully he will decide I’m not worth his time, and the game will be called off.”
“Well, the message was hidden well enough that it wouldn’t be that surprising if you missed it.”
“That’s what I’m banking on. If he thinks I’m so shaken up by his first kills that I’m not even fit to go back to work, and he thinks that no one will ever know he challenged me in the first place, I’m hoping that he’ll drop me as a target.”
“That might actually work,” Ryan concluded slowly. “But even if he lets you go, and there are no guarantees of that, he’ll just move on to someone else. You must know that.”
“I know,” Hawkins bit her lip, clearly uncomfortable with that part of the plan. “But hopefully that will take some time. He’ll need to plan another staged crime, get a new target, have them solve the crime and then challenge them.”
“That’s true. A lot of planning must go into that.”
“Exactly. And while he’s planning, he won’t be killing people. And I will have time to hunt him down, without him watching my every move, sabotaging my evidence and killing everyone who crosses my path.”
“So, you think it serves a dual purpose, it delays any more murders while he looks for a new target, and it lets you get in under his radar,” Ryan considered the plan, it actually made sense, as ludicrous as it was. “But it means that you’ll have to leave the NIA, you won’t be able to do any official investigating if you really want to sell him on this.”
“I know. But it’s better than the alternative. If Parabellum is an agent, and I’m now sure he is, then the agency itself is compromised, anyway. The only way to do this and succeed is to go off the books, completely.”
“Look, Hawkins,” Ryan massaged his temples; he was starting to get a brutal headache. “Everything you’re saying makes sense, on face, but what you’re suggesting… You’ll lose your job, for certain. And this will probably involve committing a variety of illegal acts, you could end up in prison, and that’s if you’re lucky.”
“You have a better idea, Stone? If I go back there and play this by the book, odds are I’m dead, along with anyone else he wants to take with me,” she sighed deeply. “It’s like you said before, there’ll be no problem as long as I’m right. If I fail, I’m probably dead anyways. If I succeed and I stop him, the details on how I did it will hopefully come out in the wash, and even if I do get fired, at least I get to live. Besides, if I get Parabellum, the job doesn’t really matter, anyway,” she offered a little half-smile.
“You’re crazy, you know that? I mean you do realize that 2 of the 3 options you just gave me ended with you on a slab in the morgue, right?” Stone shook his head.
“That part wasn’t my choice. I’m just trying to improve my odds,” she shrugged. “If I let Parabellum make the decisions, set the rules, then I’m on the slab in almost 100% of the scenarios.”
“If we go back to the agency, they can protect you,” Ryan was still not keen on her plan. What she was suggesting was that she go rogue, start her own personal undercover operation. It was insane and dangerous, and he couldn’t let her do it, not if there were other options.
“Still not convinced, huh?” Hawkins sounded a little peeved at his resistance. “You think that the Agency can protect anyone from him?”
She rose from her chair and walked over to the corner of the room, shifting a stack of boxes around, she retrieved one from near the bottom of a pile. Then she began to leave the room, Ryan followed her back into the kitchen.
“Need evidence that the agency can’t protect their people from Parabellum?” she asked. “More evidence that Parabellum knows his game better than we do?”
Hawkins slammed the box down on the kitchen table. Opening the lid, she extracted 4 thick folders and slapped them down on the table. She flipped open the first file to an old NIA ID photo of a dark-haired, handsome young man.
“Jeremy Wallace,” she pointed to the photo. “He was the first target, 26 years ago. Parabellum killed 2 of his colleagues, his partner, his wife and his 4-year-old daughter. Wallace vanished 3 days after the last murder. When his body was found, the coroner determined that his legs had been crushed with a sledgehammer, likely to keep him from trying to escape. He’d been tied up and then beaten repeatedly in torture sessions that lasted for days. When Parabellum was through torturing him, he slit his throat and then he crucified him on a tree in front of the NIA headquarters.”
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Hawkins reached down and slid the ID photo to the side; beneath it was a crime scene photo. It showed the man’s body, beaten to the point of being unrecognizable, the handsome face a bloody pulp, the body staked to a tree overlooking the street.
“Fuck,” Ryan hissed between his teeth. He could think of nothing else to say.
But Hawkins didn’t stop there; she flipped open the next file, revealing a photo of a blond, clean cut, middle-aged man.
“Target #2, Shawn Walker. 19 years ago. This time Parabellum killed 6 agents, as well as Walker’s partner and his pregnant wife, who was, I might add, in an NIA safe house at the time. Walker himself was again horribly beaten. When Parabellum was done with him, he was sliced in half at the waist. Parabellum left the two halves of his body sitting next each other, on a bus bench on a busy commuter line. It was a line that many agents use to get to work. The woman who found him was so distraught that she suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up confined to an institution for months afterwards.”
She flipped to the crime scene photo again. Ryan had been an agent a long time, and he had seen plenty of gruesome murders, but nothing quite so bad as this. It looked like some sort of sick modern art project, sitting there on the bench, blood dripping through the slats and splattered on the ground. He felt nauseous, but Hawkins didn’t blink twice, it was clear she had seen this photo many times, which brought an important question to mind,
“Why do you have these case files, Hawkins?” he asked. “Why are they in your home? These cases occurred long before you came to work at the NIA.”
“Is that really important right now? You know I have been interested in this case, I wanted to see it solved, that’s all,” she replied impatiently, already flipping open the next file to another smiling face that represented another horribly murdered agent.
“Target #3. The only female agent, so far. 13 years ago. 7 agents were killed this time, as well as her partner and her 75-year-old father. She was burned repeatedly with a butane torch. She had second and third degree burns over her entire body. Her execution was also particularly ugly and brutal; she was given a fatal dose of strychnine. Strychnine poisoning is, in case you have never studied it, one of the most painful types of poisoning death. It causes the victim to go into intense, continuous convulsions,” Hawkins paused, for the first time she seemed to be having trouble getting through this, something about this death bothered her more than the others. “The spasms cause the victim’s back to arch and their mouth to contort into a macabre grin known as risus sardonicus. Eventually, the victim dies of suffocation, but the whole process can last for 2-3 hours, all of which the victim spends in constant, excruciating pain. Her body was left in the lobby of a local police station, her face covered with a shawl. No one saw who left her there and they weren’t on any of the security footage.”
This time, Hawkins flinched when she flipped to the photo, and Ryan had to admit he wasn’t surprised. Death by strychnine was singularly horrible to look at and after an instant, he had to flip the file closed himself.
“Target #4, Adrian Peirce. 7 years ago. 5 agents were murdered, along with Peirce’s brother, while he was under police protection. Peirce’s eyes were cut out while he was still alive and every bone in both of his hands was broken, likely with a hammer. His throat was cut, and the tongue was pulled out through the wound. They found the body out in front of the safe house where they had been keeping his family. His 10-year-old son found him when he looked out his bedroom window in the morning.”
The photo revealed this method of execution to be just as shocking as it sounded. Ryan needed to look away again. He had heard all these stories, of course, he knew of all the cases, but only in abstract, academic terms. The real horror of their deaths was sickening. And he knew that all the other agents that were killed in each of these incidents had also suffered cruel and unnecessary deaths. He was grateful that Hawkins had not felt the need to detail each of those right now.
“These were all talented agents. Each one was fully supported by the agency, and all but the first went into this knowing exactly who they were dealing with. The agency could not protect them, or their families. They played his game, by his rules, and they lost; every last one of them. They lost everything. He’s got plenty of practice by this point, and plenty he needs to answer for,” she met Ryan’s eyes, holding his gaze. “I need this to end with me, I need to prevent any more of these deaths. Do you understand? I’ve waited almost half my life for a chance at him, I’ll risk anything if it means I can put Parabellum where he belongs.”
Ryan could see the brutal truth right there in front of him. Hawkins was right, something different needed to be done this time, or the body count would just keep rising. He wouldn’t blame her for just wanting to prevent her own horrifying torture and execution. But he knew that that wasn’t what it was about for her. She wasn’t simply trying to get out of being Parabellum’s next target, because she was still planning on going after him, on opening herself up to his retribution if he discovered her, before she discovered him. And she would have no protection, she would be all alone. This was about preventing as many unnecessary deaths as she could and stopping a sadistic killer for good. But there was also something else, something personal. The fact that she had all of these files in her apartment told him that this meant more to her then she was letting on. Then it hit him. Almost half her life.
“Why didn’t you read the name of the 3rd target?” he asked.
“What?” she looked up sharply.
Ryan reached over and flipped open that file again. There on the page, under the ID photo, was her name: Grace Hawkins. His breath hissed sharply between his teeth. As he looked back over at Hawkins, he could even see the resemblance.
“She was my mother,” Hawkins answered his unspoken question. “That’s why I recognized the necklace in the photo Parabellum left. It was hers. She died when I was 15 years old. So, I know better than anyone what this son-of-a-bitch is capable of. And if I can, I’ll stop him, so no one else has to lose someone, the way I did.”
So that was what she meant before, Ryan reflected, when she said she wondered ‘if he appreciates the irony’. A mother and a daughter, 13 years apart. What were the odds?
“I’m so sorry, Hawkins,” Ryan didn’t really know what else to say.
“Don’t be sorry. Help me put an end this, once and for all.”
“Are you sure you are thinking about this clearly, Hawkins? I mean after everything that’s happened…”
“As I said before, if you have a better plan, I’m all ears. I know that if I let myself get emotional about this and fuck it up, that wouldn’t be the way to honour my mother, or anyone else who has died by his hands. I am sure that this is the best way, the best chance we have. I’ve thought about this for a long time.”
Ryan watched her face as she spoke. She was calm; her eyes were clear and focused. It seemed impossible, but he actually believed that she was being perfectly logical. Her arguments were certainly persuasive and frankly, he really didn’t have any better ideas. He didn’t like it, but finally he relented,
“Ok. I’m in.”
Hawkins hesitated for a moment.
“There is one more thing you need to consider before you agree to this. I am going to need your help, and it’s going to be dangerous.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he replied. “Look, you aren’t the only one who is trying to better their odds of survival here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hey, you just read through the list of victims,” Ryan replied. “Out of all of the agents Parabellum has targeted in the past, how many of their partners survived?”
Hawkins bit her lip,
“None.”
“Exactly. It’s part of his signature. He isolates his victims. Therefore, he needs to eliminate the people that are closest to them. From the beginning, this challenge was as much my death sentence as it was yours. Whatever we do from now on, we’re in it together.”
“Well, I guess that’s settled, then.”
Ryan nodded,
“What do you need me to do?”