Elizabeth entered the BRIC where Nick and Jane were staying with Eric Weber, her steps and eyes wide. "We have a name!" she announced.
Jane and Nick looked at her in surprise.
The chief saw something that had startled her daughter and got up from her chair. "Well, out with it, Liz," she said as the detective stood rooted.
The detective blinked a few times and licked her lips. "Cameron Wilkinson. Oscar Wilkinson's son."
Jane's eyes grew wide, and she opened her mouth several times, but no words passed her lips.
Nick knew the name Oscar Wilkinson all too well himself and immediately sat down at one of the computers, he was the first to move.
Jane closed her eyes briefly and swallowed hard to pull herself back together. "Chief prosecutor Oscar Wilkinson, perhaps?"
Elizabeth pressed her lips together and nodded in agreement. "Lucas Cope and Mom's former boss ... And Cope's perverted accomplice, who covered up all of Cope's crimes, and in return got innocent children delivered to him by Cope so that he could ... The one who almost got Kate to --"
Nick stopped typing on the keyboard and looked at his sister-in-law over his shoulder.
Jane closed her eyes and ran both of her hands through her hair. "Oh my God," she muttered.
Elizabeth blinked a few times and looked at Nick. "Make it quick, Nick," she urged. Some voice in her head told her that someone might warn the killer. "We don't have very much time."
xxx
The BPD was swarming like an anthill. Armored RRT officers ran across the corridors. Emergency vehicles pulled up in front of the main entrance.
Weapons, ammunition, and tear gas grenades were shouldered or strapped to the battle dress.
"We must get to that former industrial building!" barked Jane again. "With everything we've got!"
Even Bell, usually bureaucracy personified, had given the nod to the large-scale operation surprisingly quickly. Jane had called a short briefing to clarify procedures during the operation.
"This guy is dangerous, very dangerous," the chief of detectives had said. "We're assuming he's armed to the teeth, and is probably a walking extermination machine. That's why we're going to position snipers on the opposite rooftops who can give us cover fire if necessary."
Bell, who had been at the scene of Al Zaid's murder himself and had seen what Cameron Wilkinson was capable of, hadn't been able to help but agree.
Seaport District, Elizabeth thought, as she now sat in the unmarked car driven by Nick, who was heading in that direction with screeching tires and a bulletproof vest on their bodies.
Seaport District ...
Nomen est omen.
Sometimes fate did have a sick sense of humor.
This was where her younger sister was lured via cell phone messages by an older boy named Adam to meet up with her at night, back when she and Katherine were kids. As it would later turn out, the messages came from Dionysus, Lucas Cope. A colleague and friend of her mother, Maura.
Cope had planned that evening to kidnap Katherine and place her in Oscar Wilkinson's care so that Maura would stop investigating the Dionysus case further, even destroy Maura by Katherine's disappearance, at best even drive her to suicide, because Oscar Wilkinson wasn't a good man.
Oscar Wilkinson was the exact opposite of a good man.
He had a penchant for young children, and Lucas Cope had gotten wind of this and had made a deal with Wilkinson that he would cover up Cope's crimes and get 'fresh meat' from Cope in return. A win-win for both until Maura got too close to their plot. And for that, she had to pay.
Nick looked at his sister-in-law, sitting in the passenger seat with a very deep frown, staring out the passenger window, biting her thumbnail. "You okay?"
Elizabeth blinked a few times as she returned from her train of thought to the here and now and looked at him. "Huh?"
He looked back at the road and frowned. "You okay, Liz?"
She opened her mouth and immediately closed it again before looking out the window again, not knowing how to answer the question; after all, many dark memories were crashing down on her at that moment.
How back when she was a kid, she was driving in the same direction in an unmarked car in the middle of the night just because she had been too busy with herself to keep an eye on her sister, who had a crush on a boy at her school who had been a few grades above Katherine and was dying to meet up with this boy named Adam.
The memory of the night she didn't know if she would ever see her little sister alive again. And if she didn't, then she, Elizabeth, would have been to blame.
That was precisely how she felt at that moment. It would be her fault if they didn't get to that abandoned warehouse fast enough.
She would be to blame if Cameron Wilkinson again got away with his actions.
xxx
The man, who went by the name Cameron, heard the sounds of a helicopter reaching his ear from outside.
His instincts, which had ensured his survival for decades, told him what was about to happen. Why this helicopter was coming, and inside was not the men from the air rescue. He heard the sounds of the transporters from outside.
He knew who was sitting inside.
He knew what these men were doing.
Because they were like him.
They were peons of death on the hunt.
Hunting to slay enemies and drink their blood.
In Norse mythology, Odin, ruler of Asgard and supreme of all the Germanic gods, invited the fallen warriors to Valhalla, where they drank every night, feasted, fought, died, and rose again the next day. The straw dead, on the other hand, who had died in bed, came to Hel, where a black dragon sucked the clotted blood from their veins.
Cameron thought that there was no better death than death in battle for a man.
He approached the front door to await the intruders, the one Glock in each hand. It was a good idea to use such weapons to shoot the RRT officers, who usually used them themselves and who wanted to keep him from his mission. The short heavy bullets used in these weapons meant that they could only shoot accurately at a distance of about a few yards. But that was enough. This was a matter of hand-to-hand combat. First with firearms, then with knives. And in the end, with fists if necessary.
It was rare for a man to shoot two of these weapons simultaneously because they had a recoil that made it difficult to fire them one-handed. Normally. But Cameron was not an ordinary man.
And before that, he would throw two hand grenades as soon as he heard the sounds at the door. They would rip the heavy door off its hinges, and the pressure would blow the RRT's first unit to hell.
Also, how could anyone expect anyone to set off hand grenades in this building?
Not an ordinary man, anyway. But then, he wasn't an ordinary man.
He was the Angel of Death.
The god of war.
He was the Draftsman.
And even if he should die - he would take many of them with him. The dead were his army. And he was the victor. No matter if in life or in death.
Because living meant dying.
And to die meant to live.
He thought peace dwells not with the coward but with the sword.
He placed the grenades next to him on the box, loaded both Glocks, and waited.
The sounds came closer.
xxx
The helicopter approached the roof of the disused warehouse with its rotors roaring. Elite troops in black clothing shimmied out of the helicopter on rope ladders as the wind tugged the rotors on the coveralls the task forces wore under their bulletproof vests. Marc and Philip formed the vanguard. Elizabeth watched the two below from the unmarked car. She knew and appreciated the men. Together with them, she had already taken down the Werewolf and stormed the underground bastion of the Nameless One.
Still, she prayed; they were both careful. If the killer was still on the scene, it was possible that he had barricaded himself in and was waiting for them with his weapons drawn.
Elizabeth looked down at herself. At the bulletproof vest, she was wearing. Looked through the windshield. Nick, wearing a bulletproof vest over his torso in the driver's seat. They wouldn't go in first, and they would apprehend Cameron Wilkinson as soon as the RRT had rendered him harmless.
Jane sat in the back seat. She also wore a bulletproof vest, but she would go in last. She still had her left hand on her Glock, ready to draw it if necessary.
Two armored cars pulled up next to the unmarked vehicle where Elizabeth, Jane, and Nick were sitting. In front of the warehouse was a large black SUV. Was this the car they had been looking for all along? The description could be fitting. But if the vehicle was registered through the military, it didn't show up at any DMV. Three men from the RRT checked the car, and there appeared to be no one in it.
Then ten RRT officers stormed down the lot, assault rifles at the ready, heads tucked in as if they were walking through a tunnel. All were armed to the teeth because they knew who they were dealing with.
With a blunt bang, the heavy door flew off its hinges, while above windows clanked, Marc, Philip, and the troop, both leading, entered the building through the roof.
For some time, nothing happened.
Silence.
But it was a terrible, lingering silence that didn't end.
What was going on in the warehouse? Why was there no signal? No gunshots? No sounds? Just this haunting silence? As if a neutron bomb had detonated ...
Terrible thoughts ran through Elizabeth's head. Thoughts that were too horrible to be true but that her paranoid brain inevitably allowed to arise.
Had Cameron Wilkinson killed the men and women? With gas grenades? Mustard gas? Sarin? Tabun? Elizabeth believed anything of this brutal psycho. Or had he drugged the men and women, then cut up his paralyzed victims at leisure, as he had done with Al Zaid? But indeed, there were far too many! Or would he use poison gas and kill himself in the process? That didn't correspond to his modus operandi at all ...
Still: Why was there nothing to be heard from inside? No signal from the radios?
Elizabeth closed her eyes for a moment. Still no sounds of fighting, no screams, nothing. What was going on in there? In a horrible vision, she saw herself walking down the warehouse hallways. Saw the men and women of the RRT lying on the floor covered in blood, and the weapons their held in their dead hands curled into claws. Weapons that had done them no good.
Elizabeth's radio crackled.
And then silence.
The silence of death.
A silence broken only by the ripple of blood from torn arteries soaking uniforms and bulletproof vests. The final pumping motions of a pounding heartbeat until there was no more blood to carry, so that heart finally died last. The soft, sickening sound of a corpse's head slumping to the side, or the scraping as a dead body, until just now half leaning against the wall, slowly slid to the floor.
Elizabeth felt the tension, like a drilling headache, like a migraine attack of fear that threatened to explode her skull, as if a hollow-point bullet from the killer would also hit her in the head. The same killer who had just executed the entire RRT.
At that moment, Elizabeth heard the crackle in her radio again.
Then Marc's voice. "He doesn't seem to be here."
Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief so heavy it sounded like a grunt. She was immensely glad to hear Marc's voice.
Still, she thought she had misheard.
He doesn't seem to be here ...
"Excuse me?" she asked into her radio. "He's not here?"
He's not here?
How could that be? After all, his car, the big heavy SUV, was parked in front of the warehouse.
Could that be the reason for the silence?
Was Cameron Wilkinson waiting in his car after all? Or was he waiting for them somewhere in the warehouse? Had they searched everything? Looked in every booth? Was there perhaps a hiding place in the floor under the floorboards where this madman had been waiting while he listened to the heavy footsteps of the men and women of the RRT above him? Elizabeth recalled a case where a necrophiliac killer had kept his victims under the hardwood floors of his apartment until the neighbors called the exterminator because of the maggot infestation in the stairwell.
When Elizabeth and Nick finally stormed the apartment, they found the killer under the floorboards amidst four badly decomposed, foul-smelling corpses. That's why this perpetrator had been nicknamed The Maggot. But this wasn't only due to his perverse preference for decaying corpses but also his pale skin color and thick, bulky stature.
The radio crackled again, snapping the detective out of her less-than-tranquil thoughts.
"We can't find him anywhere!" Marc sounded almost offended. "We've checked every room individually, looked under every box. It's not like this is the first time we've done this!"
Elizabeth was barely listening to him. Her thoughts circled only one question.
What had happened here?
Had Cameron Wilkinson been warned?
But by who?
She opened the passenger door and got out of the car, glancing at Nick. "We're going in," she said, then she repeated those words into the radio. "We're going in now!"
She needed to know what was going on in that warehouse. Nothing was worse than not knowing, especially in a case like this.
"Okay," Marc said after a brief pause. "But stay away from the windows, maybe the guy is somewhere out in the bushes shooting from there."
Elizabeth nodded as her partner got out as well. "Let's do it."
They entered the building.
Elizabeth was first.
Through the long corridor.
Past the doors on either side.
She took in the warehouse. White walls. Dark parquet flooring. Nothing was lying around anywhere; everything was neat. Everything at right angles to each other.
She entered a former break room with a clean gas stove and shiny silver pots. Next to it was a large knife block.
There was a cot in a room that must have been used as a dormitory. As one would expect in the military.
A side room. No, not just a side room because the room was full of weapons. Automatic weapons. Small arms. Hand grenades. Stun grenades. Combat gear. Helmets. Gloves. Ammunition. Combat knives. Even a samurai sword. The guy had to have nerves of steel. If there was ever a fire here, and the flames caught the ammo and grenades, even Connecticut would hear the explosion. But this guy didn't give a shit.
Elizabeth cautiously walked on. There was a table by a window in the back room, and on it were two books.
One was a large book bound in leather. On it were the words Book of Victory .
Marc and Philip appeared in the room. Both held their assault rifles at the ready.
Elizabeth heard the voices of the two men as if from one mouth. "He's really gone."
She took a deep breath and picked up the large-format book in her gloved hand with furrowed brows. It was bound in dark leather, with pages where she didn't know if it was paper, parchment, or human skin. Written in some places with a reddish-brown ink that might as well have been blood.
The book.
Maybe he had forgotten it because he had left so quickly. Or perhaps he had deliberately left it like a suicide note in a deadly game of hide-and-seek that investigators would never win.
Book of Victory was the title of this eerie book.
Elizabeth flipped out the heavy book, its leather cover opening with a soft crunch. She saw images that came from another world. Of dead bodies in different places somewhere in the world, people who had been killed at some point by Cameron Wilkinson.
The book was divided into chapters. One part of the book was called Los Angeles. There Elizabeth discovered the pictures of the victims Wilkinson had killed there, whose murders Brooks had investigated. A picture of Vincent Calitri and a picture of the heart that Wilkinson had placed on the dining room table as a macabre greeting to Vincent's father, the Chief of Police Los Angeles.
Enjoy it d(e)ad.
Then came the part called New York and the other victims who had been killed there by Wilkinson. One last picture was a newspaper clipping with Nathan and Katherine where they had announced their engagement.
Elizabeth made a face and gritted her teeth, letting her gloved fingers roam unknowingly over the newspaper clipping. After all, it wasn't Wilkinson who had murdered Nathan but Kenneth Baldwin.
Or had they been wrong about that, too? Had Wilkinson waylaid and overpowered Nathan during the chase?
Then came other pictured. Captioned Congo, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Pictures of bodies with eyes wide open and chests sliced open. Ribs severed, hearts cut out. Photos of a predator unleashed on the world, killing without mercy, without remorse, without fear.
And then came Boston.
The last five pages of the book were blank.
Off to new shores, it said, again in that strange, reddish-brown ink.
And underneath:
It's not over 'til it's over.
xxx
It's not over 'til it's over, Elizabeth thought on the way back to BPD as she sat in the car, and the streets and squares outside passed her by.
It's not over 'til it's over.
The chant Wilkinson had used to say goodbye when he last killed in Los Angeles. Brooks had shown her the pictures in New York, the heart on the plate, and the saying on the wall.
She thought he was again on the loose, and looked out at the streets, at the passersby, one threat poorer, for the Draftsman was gone.
But he hadn't disappeared, and he just wasn't here. But would he return?
Who had warned him? Could anyone have warned him at all?
Elizabeth thought of the call with Lance Williams that Lance had abruptly cut short. As if someone would have been on to them.
Back at the BPD, in the bullpen, the detective was met by Ted Williams. His face looked so contrite and sad that Elizabeth feared he had a death in the immediate family. But that wasn't the case, it was something else. It was the answer to Elizabeth's question as she drove back to BPD from the warehouse.
Williams was holding an email in her hand. "This is from Lance." He looked out the window for a moment as if he didn't know how to continue. "He wrote me this email about why he couldn't help himself."
Elizabeth looked at the man for a long moment and drew her eyebrows together. Slowly it dawned on her, "And why is that?"
Williams pressed his lips together and shook his head. "There was no other way, and his supervisor got wind of the data sharing with us, which is strictly forbidden. You see, there's a particular reason that Cameron Wilkinson's DNA isn't in any FBI database."
Elizabeth's eyes grew wide, and she furrowed her brows. "Are you saying the CIA doesn't want Cameron Wilkinson --" She faltered.
"That's right. The CIA doesn't want him to go to jail, even if he does kill a few civilians now and then. But since he keeps picking off some underworld bigwig because it flatters his ego, from the Agency's point of view, it often hits the right ones anyway. Overall, the man is too valuable to them."
Elizabeth blinked a few times. "Too valuable?"
"Too valuable to the common cause. The war on terror." William pressed his lips together and dropped his expression. "This man is a perfect weapon. Deployable anywhere. And completely fearless. Even in the Unknown Warfare units, it's rare to find guys like him."
But Elizabeth still needed answers. "As soon as the information was with your nephew's superior, the order went out to get Cameron Wilkinson out of Boston?"
Williams nodded slowly. "They made Lance choose: either he gives up the info, or he loses his job. That makes his job more important to him than the BPD's investigative success."
Elizabeth pressed her lips together and nodded slowly as she understood the case's full scope. "So he's gone then? Cameron Wilkinson? For good?"
"Yes, he's gone. The CIA couldn't let Cameron keep killing in the United States because they would have to explain eventually, at the latest, when he might have been caught after all. But they couldn't allow one of their top people to go to prison and become useless to them. That's why they brought him in. He's an asset, far too valuable to let him languish in prison."
Elizabeth thought briefly about what Cameron Wilkinson might have done in prison. He probably would have become one of those inmates that even the worst types, who liked to ask new, young inmates to pick up the soap in the shower, would give an extensive berth.
She was still shaking her head. "And what about Brooks?"
"Brooks is all messed up. He was this close to finally catching this killer he's been chasing all these years in Los Angeles and New York and then lost track. But whom he had never been able to get out of his head since." Williams took a resigned breath. "It's all for nothing, Liz. Because Uncle Sam doesn't want Wilkinson get caught at all."
Elizabeth looked at her wristwatch. "We're not going to catch him anymore?"
Williams also looked at his wristwatch. Then he shook his head. "He'll already be on his way to a military airport. From there, it's straight to some crisis site in this world." He looked out the window again. "Even an urgent appeal would take too long to change anything. And even if it did, the CIA would make sure that no one thwarts their plans." He took a step toward the detective. "I'm sorry. You and Kate are outstanding investigators and have an outstanding team with Detective Simms. You all don't deserve this. I really am sorry, Liz."
I really am sorry, it echoed in Elizabeth's head, and she nodded through clenched teeth while realizing that it had all been for nothing. All that work for nothing.
So many people had died just because one man wanted to let off steam. So many people suffered from their deaths, even if they were primarily people who had committed terrible crimes, still they had families who loved them and would never get an answer as to why their loved one had to give up their life.
There were also people among Wilkinson's victims who didn't deserve to lay down their lives. Victims like Vincent Calitri and Cody Wilkins, and who knows how many more innocent people, only because Cameron Wilkinson couldn't resist his desire to kill, because he had never learned to do so, but was encouraged by the CIA to act out this very desire. Even if only in crisis areas.
How many innocent people were killed by the Draftsman in Somalia, Congo, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else, just because he enjoyed it?
That question would never be answered. Not even if Wilkinson was killed in one of his deployments. Then, very likely, his record would disappear forever, just like himself.
Not granting the relatives of truly innocent victims the closure they had deserved all these years.
She furrowed her brows as suddenly a good memory of herself and Nathan, long tucked away in a box, flashed in her mind. She wondered if he was also among one of Wilkinson's victims but could never make the connection as everything pointed to a man named Kenneth Baldwin.
She also questioned whether Kenneth Baldwin had been the perfect sacrificial lamb for the CIA to throw off Cameron Wilkinson's trail. And then she wondered how many police officers Cameron Wilkinson had had on his conscience but had been able to cover his tracks so well that someone else had been dragged to righteousness for it.
Elizabeth's expression darkened at these thoughts, and she took a step toward the agent, teeth clenched, shoving her index finger into his chest. "You and your nephew can take your 'I'm sorry's and shove it up your asses," she hissed dangerously. She continued to suppress her frustration further as all the other detectives' work, including Nick's, came to a halt. She took a long look at the agent and made a pained face. A clear indicator that she felt betrayed. "We trusted you, Williams," she said in a normal voice. "We were your friends!" Her voice swelled. "shit, we were allies. We brought you on board, not the other way around!"
Nick stood up from his desk chair as the full attention of Homicide was on Elizabeth and Williams and raised a hand reassuringly. "Hey," he said quietly, trying to defuse the situation, "Elizabeth --"
Elizabeth expertly ignored her brother-in-law and looked at Williams with a fiery gaze. "You should go to the fourth floor and explain to Kate why we can never drag the man who is actually for the death of the man she had loved responsible. Let's see how she reacts to that." She paused and took another step toward Williams, baring her teeth. "She was your fucking student. Shit ... She was your friend who always looked up to you." She clenched her fists and took another step toward the man. "Shit, I'd love to shove your 'I'm sorry' into your --"
"Detective Rizzoli," a voice said a little louder, and Elizabeth looked over Williams' shoulder and paused in her movement. Maggie stood at the entrance to the bullpen, looking at her wife with wide eyes for a long moment. "Can I have a word with you in my office?"
Elizabeth looked at the agent and growled softly before stomping past him and following Maggie to the elevator. As soon as the door closed, she vented her anger and slammed her clenched fist full force into the elevator wall in such a way that her fist left a dent.
Maggie took a deep breath and looked unimpressed at the upper display, which continued to count the floors on their way down. "You can thank me another time," she whispered.
Elizabeth made a pained face and shook her hand wordlessly.