Page 34 of Wrong Door

“No, it was a good idea. I was sure it would work.” Miles could see them from where he stood, their body language the controlled, neutral posture of two people managing a result they had been prepared for but had hoped not to arrive at.

When he, too, admitted to himself that this had bene nothing more than an enormous waste of time, Miles began breaking down the display. It was methodical work and it gave him something to do with his hands while he thought through the failure of it all. He worked from the front filters back, collapsing the panel frames and stacking them against the railing, coiling the power lines and returning the UV lamps to the transit cases the Atlanta vendor had left behind. He worked without assistance because no one had offered any, and he had not asked.

Cord had not come. Or Cord had come and had been more careful than Miles had accounted for. Maybe he had come and had assessed the crowd. Maybe he’d spotted the surveillance from whatever distance his caution had kept him at. Miles didn’t know which of those was true and it honestly didn’t matter, because both pissed him off.

He had banked on Cord’s obsession overriding caution, on a man's deepest fixation proving stronger than whatever discipline had kept him invisible for weeks. But Cord was apparently smarter than this. Or more disciplined, or both. Miles and the team had built the trap around what they thought would appeal to Cord and had underestimated his restraint.

He thought about Hayes, and then of the mayor's office, which had committed resources to this on his recommendation. He didn’t even want to think about what the conversation with Hayes would look like later tonight when he and Vic called to debrief. He did his best to shove the thought away as he finished packing the transit cases. That was a problem for later.

He stacked the last case and stood up and looked at the empty riverfront, at the water beyond the railing black in the dark. He picked up two of the transit cases and carried them toward the parking structure. He was going to head back to the hotel, take a shower, and then call Hayes for the debrief. After that, he was going to sleep, or attempt to, and in the morning, he was going to look at the problem from whatever angle was available after this one had failed. Because somewhere, somehow, there had to be an answer.

Still, as he moved closer to the parking garage, the thought that had been sitting at the edge of everything all evening finally moved to the center: maybe when he and Vic got back to DC, he should ask Hayes to take him off the task force. This was not a dramatic or melodramatic thought. It arrived without self-pity, which made it harder to dismiss. Eleven cases and he still could not get ahead of the killing, still could not find a way to stop these disciples before they reached their targets.

Maybe that meant the problem required a different kind of mind than his. Maybe the honest thing, the useful thing, was to say so out loud to Hayes and let someone better suited take the seat he had been occupying while he retreated back to his lab.

He had been telling himself for nearly a year now that he was the right person for this work. And all he had to show for it was a dead fiancée and a string of victims he’d been unable to save.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Russell Cord had known within twenty minutes of the first news segment.

It was the phrasing that did it. One of the idiot newscasters had actually come out and called it “a rare moment of chromatic spectacle.” And that was not the language of a guerrilla art collective or a spontaneous community event. It was precise language…specific language, the language of someone who had read enough about chromatic theory to know which words would land.

The timing was the second thing. The speed with which an unannounced event had acquired radio coverage and a local news segment made no sense. It all had the seamless quality of a promotional campaign that was pretending not to be one.

All the same, he had been able to watch it. It was clear that someone had built the display with a working knowledge of chromium's optical properties. And that person had also likely known the right wording and phrasing that might draw someone like Cord out. That was not a coincidence and it was not art. It had the stink of a specialized technician or a forensic scientist who had been given the task of luring him out.

And he was certain it had likely been Miles Sterling.

He had done his reading on Miles Sterling. He had started three weeks ago, when the instructions from the Elementalist had come through and the name was included in the briefing material as context. Sterling had been the primary investigative agent on all of the previous Elementalist cases. He had been the one who had identified the pattern, the one who had built the behavioral framework that had eventually led to Kane’s arrest. He had read Sterling's published work, the academic papers he had contributed to through the BAU, the conference presentations that had been summarized in trade publications.

Sterling was smart. He knew a great deal about the elements and seemed driven…determined. And if he had indeed been the creative force behind the display on the riverfront tonight, good for him. It had been elegant; Cord would give him that. The choice of compounds was genuinely smart.

Kane had known Sterling would be here because Kane had known how quickly the FBI would recognize this as one of their so-called Elementalist cases. And Kane had been tight about that…just like he’d been right about so many other things.

He had been on the roof of the apartment building on River Street for three hours, seated on the low parapet wall at the building's south edge with his sketchbook open across his knees. The building gave him a clear sight line down to the riverfront two blocks below. The installation had been visible from this height as a configuration of light that was, even at this distance and this angle, extraordinary. He had been able to see the violet secondary emission from the roof. He had not expected that. It appeared at the interface between the second and third filter layers, a violet so saturated it was visible from two blocks at elevation, and he had been looking at it when he should have been sketching and had eventually stopped pretending to do anything other than look at it.

He was still angry about the violet. Not at Sterling, but at the circumstance. That frequency of violet, at that saturation, produced at that scale and in that specific relationship to the amber light coming off the water behind it, was something he had been trying to achieve in paint for three years. And he had seen it tonight, built by a federal agent as a trap.

He had sketched the color relationships from the roof. He had done it carefully, the way he did everything—the proportions of the filter cascade were now annotated in the margins with his best estimates of the pigment equivalents. He had three pages of it by the time the UV lamps went dark and the crowd began to clear.

He’d watched the crowd from the roof as it dispersed, five hundred people or more moving back along the walk in small groups. It had taken him a while, but he’d picked Sterling out of the crowd when the plainclothes detail became visible in the dispersal. They’d been clever, but not clever enough. He had been able to pick them out due to their identifiable by their positioning and their attention and the way they moved through the thinning crowd rather than with it. Sterling was at the installation, working alone, breaking down the equipment. Cord watched him for a few minutes. He moved methodically, no wasted motion, the physical intelligence of someone who had built the thing himself and knew how it came apart.

Cord closed the sketchbook.

He had new instructions. They had come through the usual channel earlier, brief and clear. The instructions were always brief and clear. That was one of the things he most admired about the network. The Elementalist didn’t waste words. Every communication from Kane's network carried the specific authority of something that had been considered carefully before being committed to language, the weight of a mind that operated with a precision Cord recognized and respected in a way he had not respected many things.

The instructions had been to watch Sterling.

Not to approach. Not to interfere with the work Cord had planned. He was simply to watch, to document what Sterling was doing and how he was doing it, and then to report back.

Kane was still building his picture of Miles Sterling. Cord understood this without needing it explained. The Elementalist had been watching Sterling for almost a year now, through the cases, through his trip to prison, through the escape and the period since. He was assembling something methodically and without rushing, and he’d asked Cord to serve as his eyes.

He had seen Sterling twice from the roof during the event, and he had been specific in his documentation. He’d noted the positions Sterling took and the intervals at which he moved through the crowd, the systematic quality of how he worked a space. He had also noted the partner, Stone, working the southern section in a mirroring pattern, the two of them covering the crowd in overlapping passes that left very little unexamined.

It was a good operation. He could say that without any conflict. The display was smart and the surveillance deployment was smart and the promotional framing had been smart. If Cord had been the person Sterling believed him to be—a man whose obsession operated faster than his caution—it might have worked. But Cord had learned patience from the best available teacher, and patience was the discipline that separated the work from his love of color.

He came down from the roof through the building's interior stairwell and out onto the street at 10:05. The riverfront was clearing, the last of the crowd moving up the side streets toward the parking areas. He walked south along River Street at an ordinary pace, the sketchbook under his arm, and he turned at the corner where the street came level with the riverfront walk. From there, he could just barely make out Sterling fifty yards ahead, carrying transit cases toward the parking structure.