Chapter 6: The Gray Man
Griseo Grayson looked like every bureaucrat ever. He probably cultivated the image deliberately. We had been introduced during my field expedition to London, where I had first encountered the Soul Stone—an antediluvian weapon that could level cities.
I tried not to dwell much on their destructive origins when I considered I had a piece of the Soul Stone on my finger and another piece on my hip.
Grayson had provided my Vatican-assigned partner, Father Michael Pearson, with enough information to know that we were on our own. He also pointed us to a very bad guy named Imam Abu Hamza Kozbar. Imam Kozbar had allied himself with the forces of darkness in London in the form of two atheist British nobles—Lord Fowler and Lady Toynbee. The Lord and Lady wanted to nuke London so they could wipe out everyone and become royalty, and stop the spread of Anglicans switching over to Catholicism. The Soul Stone had ended up consuming them.
Imam Abu Hamza Kozbar, on the other hand, had been wiped out by three angels I had summoned to my aid. I hadn’t intended to do that, but they showed up anyway. Who knew?
I rose from the desk. I’d barely sat down, and I was already fielding phone calls left and right. “I’ll take the call in the main office. Put it on speaker so everyone can listen.”
I walked into the main office, and everyone had angled their chairs to listen in. I hoped Grayson wasn’t too picky about who heard the call. But then again, the office was filled only with people I trusted unto death.
Once I was settled on top of an FBI desk, I nodded at Jeremy. He hit the speaker button. I said, “Hey, Grayson, what do you have for me?”
“Ah, no pleasantries,” Grayson answered. “Good to know that you’re one for getting down to business. Apparently, you hit upon a set of fingerprints at a crime scene?”
I rolled my eyes. “We found a hand. We haven’t found the donor. So, after a fashion. Given the nature of the hand, we assume he’s deceased.”
“Oh! Well then, we can knock him off of our list.” Grayson muttered something, and papers shuffled on the other end. “Funny enough, this goes back to Imam Abu Kozbar. I presume you remember him?”
I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at the mention of his name. “Yes, I do. What about him?”
“Your fingerprint... your hand, really ... comes back to a terrorist that we’ve been looking for since Imam Kozbar disappeared some fifteen years ago,” Grayson told me.
I winced. I hadn’t realize it had been that long since Kozbar had died. “Okay, what about him?”
“You may not have your ear to the terrorist underground like we do, but there has been a rise among terrorists who use the Kozbar name, or serve under the banner of Kozbar.”
I frowned. I knew that much. During a visit to Texas, I had found a collection of terrorists who had responded to Kozbar’s name. Luckily, I easily sealed them inside a sixteen-wheel truck. I didn’t realize the Jihadi movement had kept growing.
“In the fifteen years since he disappeared in London,” Grayson continued, “he’s been like an Osama bin Laden symbol, the one that never really coalesced after Osama died. The followers are more fanatical than ISIS. If you can remember that far back, ISIS were much too radical even for al-Qaeda.”
I nodded slowly, thinking back to a terrorist training camp in Texas, just outside of Dallas. I had joined the Texas Rangers for their raid on the camp. The inhabitants were Jihadi in ectoplasm-powered armor. The battle was a mess. But in their log books were two names I knew. One was Rene Ormeno, an MS-13 shot-caller. The other one was Khalil Kozbar, brother to the late, unlamented Imam.
“What about the brother?” I asked. “Is he involved?”
“Probably,” Grayson stated. “The brother, Khalil Kozbar, is 45. There was a seven-year period where he mirrored the movement of Arturo Bergolio.”
I groaned internally. Jeremy slapped his forehead. Lena slammed her head against the headrest of her computer chair. They both sat down at their computers and started typing. They had Khalil Kozbar’s records up on their screens in a matter of seconds.
The brother of a supernatural terrorist following another supernatural terrorist? Hardly a coincidence.
I felt confident when I muttered, “Great, he’s a student of the dark side.” I sighed, then decided to move on. “But Bergolio died over nine years ago. What’s Khalil been doing since then?”
“Working at Golden Chalice Studios and Hexagon Inc.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach, and everything inside me went with it. My chest felt empty, a void and a vacuum. Both of those had been companies run by Lucifer and his Illuminati pals. Both of those companies were destroyed. One had been taken apart over the course of years of prosecutions, fancy legal footwork, audits, and arresting almost everyone in the company. Hexagon had been leveled when I had asked God Himself for an orbital strike.
And yet Khalil Kozbar had not only slipped through our net, he hadn’t even been on our radar.
“Right,” I said, my voice dead. “So he’s our problem.”
Grayson sighed. “Afraid so, old chap.”
I nodded slowly, mechanically, more to myself than anything else. I needed control, and I needed it now. Hail Mary...
“Listen, Grayson,” I said, “thanks for the heads up. If anything else pings on your radar with the Kozbar crowd, let us know, would you?”
“Will do, old boy. Be safe.”
Grayson hung up.
Then my professional decorum slipped.
“HOW COME WE HAVEN'T FOUND THIS FUCKER BEFORE?” I roared at no one in particular. “Where the hell has he been hiding?”
Jeremy, nonplussed, eyes locked on his computer, calmly said, “He hasn’t been hiding. But he hasn’t been on a watch list. He hasn’t officially done anything.”
I glared at Jeremy like he had said the dumbest thing in human history.
Lena sighed and decided to distract me. “We know that’s impossible with who Khalil has been working with, and where, but right now? No one has been tracking him. Which is why we only know his last job was three years ago for only one reason—he’s very small and far down in the files. The only reason we can find him at all is the files were all digitized and we can search them with keystrokes.”
I nodded slowly. “Right.” I let out a slow breath. I was using all of my control to deal with my frustration. “Jeremy, Lena, keep digging into Khalil. I’m thinking a digital rectal exam. Good, hard and fast. Alex!” I called over the railing.
“Yo!” he called easily, like I was asking where he was.
“Call Texas and get Ranger Lermon. See if he’s heard from ‘the other Kozbar’ that went through the training camp where we met. We need to know where the hell he’s gone. Have Lermon put out some feelers. What are the odds, but why not?”
The front door of the office opened. Sinead walked in. Her coat was over one arm.
I didn’t even give her a chance to say hello, “Sinead. Anything new on the hand? Anything on it? In it?”
Sinead nodded as she came up the stairs. “Funny you should mention that. Does it help any that it was covered in genetic material that ignited in UV light?”
I blinked. “What’s the condition of the hand?”
She nodded. Sinead threw her coat on top of Freeman’s, on the desk. “A little burned, but we still have it.”
I frowned. At least we still had it. “Genetic material? What sort?”
Sinead shrugged. “Slime, basically.”
My mouth bunched up, my brows furrowed, and my eyes focused on the railing, using it as a focus point while I considered the problem. Ultraviolet light was a key part of sunlight. The explosion happened in the dark—at least after sundown and before night fell. Sunlight ignites something on the hand? What reacted to sunlight? Vampires, obviously. But vampires up that early? No. Necrophages? That was more likely.
I nodded, mostly to myself. Sinead looked at me like I was on another planet. She waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello?”
“I need to check on something.”
Since everyone else was busy, I needed to check the “something” myself. Sinead, not used to being ignored, followed me into my office. She stood off to the side as she watched me log in.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I stared at the computer screen as I answered, “I’m looking for bodies. Preferably bodies that washed up near the water. There are several things that don’t react well to sunlight. One of these things prefers to hang out in water. Necrophages, for one.”
Sinead shrugged, unaffected by the casual talk of monsters. “Given the name, don’t they only eat the dead?”
I smiled ruefully as I thought back to my encounter with necrophages in the bowels of a tunnel in Italy. They sure hadn’t been shy about coming for me. “Some are more ambitious than others. And not as patient.” I scrolled through, focusing only on the location of the dead. After five minutes and fifteen pages of text, I stabbed the computer screen with my finger. “There! Brooklyn Bridge Park! Ten bodies in the last five weeks. Cause of death, possible shark attack.”
Sinead leaned over and shouldered me aside. “Let me see that.”
She opened up a new browser window in Brave and went to the Medical Examiner’s office website. She entered her login information and looked up the cases I had pointed out.
The bodies were eaten, but not bitten in half. Some missed limbs, but none had been ripped apart like the more dramatic shark attacks. The teeth that did it were clearly not human. They were triangular and razor sharp. “Whatever ate these people, it was more than one of them. You can clearly see that some of these bite marks are missing teeth—different teeth.”
“Well, I can’t imagine that they have a dental plan.”
Sinead lightly elbowed me in the shoulder without looking. She smiled slightly. “Hush you. Now, none of these people were attacked while free floating in the water. They were held still and eaten.” She pointed at the photos. “See the crush marks in the bone? Something held on while they dug in.” She looked at me. “How did you know it was this place? These bodies?”
“Aside from not having a major series of shark attacks in New York since 1916? Not much”
Sinead glanced at me like she was surprised I had ever heard of it. “I didn’t know you were an expert in local history.”
I smiled as I typed. “I heard it was the inspiration for Jaws.”
I called up a map of Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier Six, then traced my finger from the park to the major street that led into it.
It was Atlantic Avenue.
In New York, Atlantic Avenue was a street that ran the entire length of Brooklyn, ten miles. Atlantic even spilled over into Queens, running fairly close to my neighborhood.
But if you say “Atlantic Avenue” to many New Yorkers, the first, last, and only reaction will be: Islam. No, that’s not racism, it’s demographics. Starting at the western end of Atlantic Avenue, there were at least five mosques within rock throwing distance of the water. It stayed like that for a good chunk of Western Brooklyn, even spilling out into Queens. And even a general map overview of Atlantic Avenue online will show at least seventeen major Muslim centers.
I don’t even want to hear about “racial profiling.” If Khalil Kozbar was involved (and I had little doubt about it—my life didn’t have coincidences), it only made sense that he would be on Atlantic Avenue. He would be there to hide, just another Muslim in a crowd of them. That crowd meant Brooklyn—not necessarily even Atlantic Avenue, but the necrophage activity and the location pointed to one specific part of Brooklyn. If I were hunting an IRA bomber, you can be damn sure I would have started in Breezy Point, Whitestone, or Rockaway.
I didn’t have to explain any of this to Sinead. She said, “Good thing we didn’t have to look for bodies found on land. We might never have found them.”
I nodded to myself. One of the things that most people don’t talk about is that an average of sixty thousand people just disappeared every year. No, that wasn’t an exaggeration. They disappeared every year. Nearly five thousand in Texas, Florida, and California alone. New York State didn’t even top Arizona’s disappeared persons. It had been like this for years. Decades.
However, in New York, we had something that no one else did: hundreds of miles of subway system. Yes, hundreds. That’s not even counting the unused or abandoned subway tunnels.
It was a great place to hide bodies.
Sinead was right. If there were necrophages living in the tunnels instead of the water, we’d never know. But at the moment, we had no evidence that pointed anywhere else. The hand was covered in slime, maybe from a necrophage. The hand belonged to one of Khalil Kozbar’s minions. There seemed to be only one site of necrophage activity. It was an algebra equation with a variable, but we could only guess at the variable.
I glanced at the time. It was ten o’clock. The phone calls had each eaten up a lot of time. But we needed to know where in Brooklyn we were going to hit. We had an area, but that still covered a lot of territory. And I don’t even mean Atlantic Avenue.
The area of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, encompassed Brooklyn Bridge Park. Sunset Park was less a neighborhood and more of an industrial area. The further away you got from the water, the more residential the area became. The entire area was more Asian (majority Cantonese), Hispanic (varied), and Indian (don’t ask). It was Brooklyn’s first Chinatown. (If you ever need to go to “Chinatown in New York City,” natives will ask you which one you want. We have nine.)
Thankfully, the demographics would make it harder to hide. I was always willing to be wrong; but if the necrophage activity was any indication, our target had to be around Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 6—they couldn’t be too far south, otherwise there would have gone too deep into the Columbia Street Waterfront District. People who worked the area who would have seen something out of place. They could be too far away from the water, or they would stand out.
If I were in the shoes of whatever terrorists these were, I would have wanted to keep all of my people together for mutual defense and have them in a place where we didn’t have to go out much. On top of that, I would want to attract no attention, either staying or going.
Following all of that logic, we would be looking somewhere on the northern docks of the Waterfront or inward, either on Atlantic Avenue or north of it. While I knew that Jihadis didn’t have any problem with human shields, experimenting with the supernatural could be unpredictable. They would want someplace they could operate in peace, while having the available manpower to suppress anything that got out of control, and I don’t mean a fire.
I stood and waved Sinead ahead of me. I didn’t want to have to dance around her. We stepped out into the main office. Alex was already off the phone, while Lena and Jeremy were still at their computers.
“Lena, Jerry,” I said, “could either one of you check out who owns piers out in the Columbia Street Waterfront District? Say, the piers nearest Brooklyn Bridge Park?”
Jeremy nodded. “Sure, Dad. One minute.” One minute later... “We have a Nur Trading company. A Guag Import Firm ... are you kidding me?” Jeremy glanced at me. “Both of these companies are basically named ‘Light.’ Nur is Arabic. Guag is Chinese.”
The sinking feeling in my guts returned. It was worse than Abu Kozbar’s brother. It was worse than anything else I had ever tangled with. It was the force behind Luminary Productions, who called himself Lou Luciano and later Raito Mazuko. The body was that of a lich, an undead necromancer that was already absurdly powerful. But worst of all, that lich had been possessed by a greater evil.
Lucifer, “the lightbringer” angel himself.
I didn’t even have to explain myself to the rest of the room when I simply said, “He’s back.”
Jeremy nodded. “And he’s not particularly subtle about it, either. Lucifer does like his ‘light bringer’ puns.”
I frowned. The last time Lucifer and I had exchanged words had been at Mariel’s wake. He said he would make it his mission in life to make me suffer. I had thought he’d be content with the constant infestations and nightmares that plagued my sleep.
“But why two companies?” I asked. “Why two languages?”
Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “Lim Tong. He’s here. I will bet anything that he’s watching the terrorists.”
Lena cocked her head around her screen to look at Jeremy. “But you just beat him up this past weekend in London. Why would he be here?”
London? I thought.
Jeremy told Lena, “He left his men to watch these terrorists, followed us himself to London. Wouldn’t be difficult.”
I sighed. “That’s nice. Now we just need enough evidence for a warrant.”
Jeremy smiled. “Seriously, Dad, why do we need one? It’s not like we arrest that many people. It’s hard throwing demons in jail.”
I arched a brow. “Really? Even if we hit the place with D’s people, we’d need to file for a warrant just to make sure we don’t get hit with friendly fire.” I sighed. “Find evidence, file a warrant, and the cops who deal with ‘normal’ crimes won’t mistake us for criminals starting a firefight in the middle of the waterfront.”
From the front desk, Alex leaned back and said, “I just got off with Lermon. I’ll be happy to talk to Carlton about a warrant.”
Jeremy sighed. “I know some counterintelligence guys, we’ll see what they can dig up.”
Lena focused her attention on me. “You should go home, Hussar. Tell Grace we should be picking up the kids within the hour.”
I frowned. I didn’t like taking a nap during an investigation, especially during the first two days. But I couldn’t argue. There wasn’t anything more I could do from the office. There were no forensics to follow up with that we hadn’t already covered. Witness statements were few and far between, but they amounted to nothing. Several front-door cameras had been facing the block when it exploded, but the pictures all turned to static just before the explosion kicked off.
Given how much supernatural energy was released, we should be happy the EMP didn’t take out the entire city.
I relented and headed for the door.
When I got home that night, little Mariel, Michael, and Grace were already asleep. I changed for bed and slipped under the covers.
Before I turned off the lights, I took off the chain from around my neck. On it were two items. One was a Miraculous Medal for the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The other was my wedding ring.
I kissed the wedding ring, then slid the chain away in the nightstand drawer. Before I closed it, I said, “Goodnight, love.”
I went to sleep, and prayed that I would dream of Mariel, instead of the horrors that usually awaited me in the dark behind my eyelids.
My prayers would not be answered.