Caller unknown, p.40
Caller Unknown, page 40
He told them about the names in the little red book. They said they would look into them, but the information led to no arrests. The book and the pages recovered from the Lot had burned at Brantwood.
Ed realized the lack of progress was part of the bargain. The Feds knew there were dirty agents in their organization. They would clear the problem up discreetly. The less probing, the better for Ed and for them. It was a cover-up. There were retirements, but no arrests.
A house in Mt. Lebanon was raided in the New Year. The agents found it long abandoned and stripped, without a scrap of incriminating evidence. There was one oddity: the agents found an upstairs window had been smashed. In the garden below, they discovered stained-glass fragments. When pieced together, part of an image emerged. A human monster with snakes spurting from its skull head, hands, and feet. One of their number, classically educated, pronounced it to be Typhon.
The ill-named Merriweather’s foundered. The Feds hadn’t even needed Ed’s testimony to sink that ship. Its assets had been seized; its principals had either disappeared or been incarcerated in federal prisons, indicted for a series of felonies, but not murder.
In the end, Ed was exonerated of any wrongdoing in the events of December ’89. The state’s attorney’s office gave him a quiet introduction to a Boston law firm, Berenson and McCatter, that handled a large amount of government tax work. Given the amount of mutual back-scratching between the state’s attorney and Berenson and McCatter, the latter were happy to allow Ed to continue his career as an associate with them.
The authorities then washed their hands of him. He wondered if collectively they had achieved some sort of closure. If so, it was a closure not available to him.
No one was ever arrested for Sarah Constance’s murder.
The forensics people explained that the body he was going to bury was, necessarily, only a token. A tiny, ashy fragment of bone. The coffin he helped carry into Our Lady of Perpetual Help weighed nothing. There had been no family: he had never had one; she had lost all hers. There were only professional mourners and agents on the lookout for any criminals tempted to witness the last act of the saga. Ed guessed they particularly hoped that Mrs. Frome might show. If so, they were disappointed.
There was no funeral for Jim Dove. His remains were never found. He had become part of the woods, as he had foreseen back in Chesuncook, that last evening of peace before the killing began.
Ed had taken Max out of the Madison pound and given him a home.
Alice Mae and the other children awaited the next wave of terror against America in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico.
In the fall two years later, near Chesuncook, a hunter followed a wounded buck through a thick stand of trees, lost the blood trail of his quarry and was making his way back down a game trail toward the lake lodge when he saw something strange: the remains of a blue parka hanging above him in a lattice of tree branches. He got closer and saw that the parka contained a yellow rib cage. The hunter’s boot crunched and he looked down on a human skull. There were other yellowed human bones lying in the leaf mold.
The medical examiner was flown out. He discovered a four-inch arrowhead lodged under the lowest of the ribs of the skeleton. The degeneration of the corpse being absolute, he could not tell whether the arrowhead had caused death or, as the many shattered bones suggested, a fall from a great height had done it. He was about to appeal for information about the dead man when the FBI intervened. He was told that the corpse without doubt belonged to a DEA operative gone missing two years before. It now appeared he had been murdered and dumped from a helicopter in the backwoods by the drug cartel. There was to be no publicity: the dead agent’s operation was still ongoing.
The remains of David Krige were buried in a corner of Potter’s Field in Blue Plains, Washington D.C., close to the last resting place of six Nazi saboteurs executed in the Second World War.
EPILOGUE
ENDGAME
December 1999
The people at Berenson and McCatter were true to their word. The leaving party was over in a half-hour. The speech was brief, the toast made. Then came the incident with the gift and, after that, all was a blur. He believed he had thanked them quickly before hurrying back to his office.
Now he was alone. Beyond the large plate-glass windows was the night: Boston in December. The end of the millennium. In two weeks the harbor would be lit up like it had never been before. A sprinkling of snow fell, dusting the sidewalks, fretting the black sky and the bright windows of the financial district. Christmas lights twinkled in the streets.
He looked for a long time toward North End. Gail McReedy had died over there because he had walked into that Marriott bar. One of his too many regrets. Jim and Sarah had followed. Dead because of him. He stared at his reflection. A reflex made him touch his brow. His forehead was ridged and red from the burns from the gas station explosion, his hands too. The scar from the graze on his shoulder pulled in the cold weather.
He had spent the day packing up. All that was left was to take the box of possessions and be gone. Ten years in a box. Terminus. The taxi waited outside. Berenson and McCatter had given him a good life: now it was over. The house was sold, its contents auctioned. Max had died the year before. He was going to get in his car and disappear.
He had had ten years of waiting, knowing it was not over. Many of those in the little red book were still free. Mrs. Frome and Vermeulen had simply disappeared, Fitzgerald had retired without an indictment or the slightest smudge on his name.
The state’s attorney had found him this job, sure, but in the end he’d found it as bogus as the one at Merriweather’s.
He was the last Apostle. Ed had no idea how it was he had survived. Some dark angel had preserved him—for what? Future acts unknown. He was, despite the years of counseling, a ticking time bomb waiting for a trigger. The world did not believe that Manchurian candidates existed in real life. How wrong they were. In 1973, as Watergate blew up and the intelligence services fell under suspicion, the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, had ordered all papers relating to MKUltra destroyed. For want of any evidence to the contrary, the official line was that the secret services had never created any robot agents. Yet every year it seemed there were more incidents: actions not by foreign powers or Arab jihadists but by citizens. Ted Kaczynski’s reign of terror had ended in April 1996, but there were, it seemed, many others out there.
Ed was in no doubt that no one ever left Typhon: however far you ran, those serpent tentacles would one day catch and seize you. He had tried to live life as others lived it, but, short of holding down this job, had only fleetingly succeeded. There had been casualties along the way. A marriage to a fellow attorney had foundered. Thankfully, there had been no children. Friendships died on the vine, killed by his distant demeanor. He marched to a different drum from other people.
One of his imperatives was his promise to Shannon. His vacations were spent searching for Alice Mae: combing official records for New Mexico, driving the dusty roads, asking questions in lonely towns and trailer parks out in the desert where strangers weren’t welcome. There were no clues. She, like all of the lost children, had vanished into thin air.
Maybe he would go to New Mexico now and live like a hermit in a ring of rocks in the desert, on an old iron bed with rusty springs, waiting for the rain to come or Alice Mae to appear.
Every time he read about a child abducted by a parent after killing their partner he wondered: was a new story, just like his, starting? Vessels and Vials and Angels, all over again… His flesh and blood had given him up into captivity. A mother or father he had never known, would perhaps never have wanted to know.
No one, even to this day, knew his true age. But by the measure of his invented age, he was far too young to retire. There had been many physicians, counselors, and a good many therapeutic drugs since ’90. None of the interventions had worked for long. The medics, young and old, naive or cynical, all knew: it was the whole life that needed curing, not an isolated day, week, month, or even year. His childhood had been stolen. Afterward, there had been too many dead people: gone in bullets, explosions, dropped from a helicopter, or, simply, disappeared as if they had never been.
The office was all packed up, not a knick-knack remaining on the desk: the steel balance, the model of the sailing dinghy, the Empire State snow globe, framed pictures, awards, diplomas with their waxed seals—all now in the box. There was one other memento: an old, yellowing white wristband with “1979 N Welcome Week” printed on it. No one had ever thought to ask him about it. He slipped it onto his wrist.
He’d made partner a couple of years after the incidents in Maine. Partner at just over thirty. Practically unheard of. Berenson and McCatter had been a new firm going places fast, with many government contracts. He had gone with them. It had surprised Ed, and maybe the partners at Berenson and McCatter, to learn that, after his past and being foisted upon them by the state’s attorney’s office, he was not so bad a tax attorney after all.
Rivals muttered at his fortune or, worse, the undue influence his past had brought. He was a man who knew too many secrets, and those who know secrets end up two ways: privileged, or dead.
The cabin he had built on Tranquility over the burned-out wreck of the old one had never held any attraction for him. He had done it remembering better times, but better times were gone. No one had bought Jim Dove’s old bait store and it was boarded up, another relic of Tranquility’s past, like the steamer pier next to it and the ruins of the old hotel at the end of the lake.
On the couple of occasions he had gone up to the new place, it was difficult to forget the man in the black Tyvek suit who had been cremated in the inferno of the old one.
He dreamed of his enemy’s fire-blackened ghost. In his dreams it sat at the new breakfast counter in singed clothes with a peeling face, pupil-less eyes cooked like egg whites and a lipless smile, and stared wistfully at Ed’s mug of coffee. The ghost would say: “You know, Ed, I’ll never see my family again. Never see anyone again. And it’s all down to you.” Then Ed would wake up in a cold sweat, his heart racing.
The last time he had gone to the cabin it had been only one night before the sightless ghost drove him back to Boston again.
You can run, but you can’t run forever. His life had been running, even when he had sat still at this desk. Nowhere was safe. One day the words would be spoken again. The Beast and One. Even if he lived to be 100, they would come. They would come as they had come before, when he was not watching. “Ye know not the hour.” Mrs. Frome had taught him that. That, above all other things.
A snow flurry slapped against the black glass and slithered down the picture window, obscuring the reflection of his face.
Yes, it was December: killing weather.
One item remained on the desk. The gift. Earlier it had been wrapped in silver paper and presented to him by the managing partner. He hadn’t really thought what token the office might have deemed worthy for him. A pen, perhaps.
But when he had unwrapped it there was a blue and white box with the legend “NOKIA 3210” in blocky letters, a picture of the cell phone and the slogan: “We call this human technology.” There had been a ripple of laughter from his colleagues when they saw Ed’s face. It had been said many times that Ed Constance was the only attorney in Boston without a cell phone. Over the years there had been a few frantic searches for him during emergencies when he couldn’t be contacted.
There was an ironic note with the gift: “Hey, Ed, we guessed you might have time to learn how to use one of these now. Enjoy! Maria McCatter.”
After the laughter there had been applause. Perhaps the applause set off his tinnitus. The eardrums perforated by the Claymore and Semtex had never healed. But maybe this distant ringing was caused not by those injuries, but by something else: it was the phone. No one at Berenson and McCatter knew what had happened at Lenox Avenue.
Or did they? Had Typhon been here with him these ten years?
The ringing grew loud, deafening. Suddenly his vision closed to a pinprick. Gone was the boardroom. Instead he was back at Lenox in the white light and cold of the air-conditioning. There, as actual as the night he had seen them, were the muddy backplate and the severed finger and the pool of blood.
After he had thanked them, Maria asked him if he was OK, and he had answered that he just needed some air and, taking up the box, had felt his way out of the room and back to his office. He’d laid the box on his desk. For a minute he breathed deeply, fighting to restore his vision.
The panic attack had finally passed. Some of his colleagues had stuck their heads through the door to check on him and wish him good luck. Now they were all gone.
It was 9.09 p.m. The central heating pipes began to knock, signaling that the system had been turned off. Standard office practice—keeping the energy bills down. It would slowly start feeling cold as the night air began pressing through the plate-glass windows.
So why tonight, looking over to the Marriott where Gail McReedy had died, did it feel like the temperature had suddenly dropped some twenty degrees? The thermostat still read 73, but the cold played on his spine. Beyond the hotel, further out there in the dark of the winter’s night, in the woods, were all the bones: Carl, Jim, David, Fallows… Sarah…
He shivered. He had to shake this thing off. He was alone, the way he wanted it. Nothing could touch him here. He turned and picked up the gift. He’d give it to the first street person he saw outside. No doubt it would bring them a few dollars at a second-hand electronics shop.
The box suddenly vibrated and his hands jerked and he dropped it back onto the desk.
The lid flew off.
The phone was revealed.
The screen was lit up.
And there were the words: “CALLER UNKNOWN.”
His vision closed in again. All he could see was the phone, nothing else.
He took a deep breath. This prank, if that was what it was, had to stop now. He was not one for practical jokes. Whichever colleague was calling him was going to get a piece of his mind.
He lifted the thing out of the box, pressed the green button and lifted the phone to his ear.
There was a hiss of static, then a voice said, “Hello, Ed.” There was a brief pause. “I guess you never expected to hear from me again.”
It was Sarah.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any editor of forty years’ standing, of which I am one, knows you don’t write alone, and you certainly don’t get published alone. So, there are a legion of people to thank, but most particularly: Dave Morris, writing friend and inspiration for more years than I can remember; Mark Booth, a visionary publisher and author; Anne Perry, a treasured colleague, now destined for bestsellerdom; the rock who is my agent, Jim Gill; Wayne Brookes, my editor and publishing’s greatest empath; and finally, the dedicatee of this book, my wife, Caroline—a true and constant mainstay.
© Mark Rusher
Oliver Johnson was born in Paris and pursued a career in academia before going into bookselling and then publishing. He has been a commissioning editor for many years, working principally at Penguin Random House and now Hachette and has edited many bestselling and prize-winning authors. He is the author of various gamebook and roleplaying series and a fantasy trilogy. He splits his time between London and a small hamlet in the Sussex countryside with his wife and two cats.
A POINT BLANK BOOK
First published in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and Australia
by Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2026
This ebook edition published 2026
Copyright © Oliver Johnson, 2026
The moral right of Oliver Johnson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978-1-83643-022-3
eISBN 978-1-83643-023-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Oliver Johnson, Caller Unknown
