“It proves he’s paying attention. It proves he’s still here. He hasn’t left the country. He hasn’t slipped back into his hole in the ground. It proves we can reach him. We just have to figure out how to reach him in a way that provokes a reaction we can work with.”
Esti’s eyes narrowed, her expression shifting from disbelief to speculation. “You mean, like, use the media—maybe that asshole Bork—to offer Panikos some kind of deal to reveal who hired him?”
“Bork could play a role, but not to offer that kind of deal. I think our little Peter Pan operates on a different wavelength.”
“What wavelength?”
“Well … just look at what we know about him.”
Esti shrugged. “We know he’s a professional killer.”
Gurney nodded. “What else?”
“He’s an expensive one, specializing in difficult contracts.”
“Impossible jobs that no one else will take—that’s the way Donny Angel put it. What else?”
“A psychopath, yes?”
Hardwick chimed in. “The psychopath from hell. With bad dreams. The way I see it, this wee fucker is one highly motivated murder machine—angry, crazy, bloodthirsty, and not about to change his ways any time soon. How about you, Sherlock? You got any other insights for us?”
Gurney swallowed the last mouthful of his lukewarm coffee. “I’ve just been trying to put all this together to see what it adds up to. His absolute insistence on doing everything his own way, his high intelligence combined with a total lack of empathy, his pathological rage, his killing skills, his appetite for mass murder—all that combined would seem to make little Peter the ultimate control freak from hell. Then there’s the final explosive element—the loose end, the secret, whatever it is that he’s desperate to conceal and afraid we may discover. Oh, and one more thing Angelidis told me—I almost forgot to mention it—little Peter likes to sing while he’s shooting people. Put all that together and it looks like a recipe for an interesting endgame.”
“Or a fucking world-class disaster,” said Hardwick.
“I guess that would be the downside.”
Chapter 50. Jabbing the Madman
“Is there an upside?” Hope and apprehension were vying with each other in Esti’s expression. Apprehension was winning.
“I think so.” Gurney’s tone was matter of fact. “My sense of Panikos is that his ultimate motivation is hatred, probably directed at every human being on earth. But his tactics, his planning—those aspects are steady and well thought out. His success in his profession depends on maintaining a delicate balance between his hot appetite for killing and his cold planning process. It’s evident in the behavior we’re seeing, and Donny Angel told me as much. On the outside Panikos is a reliable businessman who accepts difficult assignments with equanimity. And inside there’s a fierce little monster whose main pleasure—maybe only pleasure—is murder.”
Hardwick let out his harsh bark of a laugh. “The wee Peter could be quite the eye-opening experience for an ‘inner child’ therapist.”
Gurney uttered a small laugh, despite himself.
Esti turned to him. “So he’s part planner, part psycho. The motive is crazy, but the method is rational. Let’s say you’re right. Where does it take us?”
“Since that delicate balance between madness and logic seems to work well for him, we need to upset it.”
“How?”
“By attacking its most accessible weak point.”
“Which is?”
“The secret he’s trying to protect. That’s our way in. Our way into his thinking. And our way into understanding Carl’s murder, and who ordered it.”
“Be nice if we knew what the precious fucking secret was,” interjected Hardwick.
Gurney shrugged. “All we have to do is make him think we know, or that we’re about to find out. It’s a game we need to play—inside his head.”
“And the point of this game?” asked Esti.
“To disrupt the careful calculation he relies on for his success and survival. We need to hammer a wedge between the core lunatic and his rational support system.”
“You’re losing me.”
“We apply pressure in a way that threatens his sense of control. If control is his most intense obsession, it’s also his greatest weakness. Take away a control freak’s feeling of control, and the result is panic-driven decisions.”
“You hear what the man is saying?” interjected Hardwick. “He plans to poke a mass murderer in the eye with a sharp stick to see what might happen.”
It was a way of putting it that seemed to resonate with Esti’s growing anxiety. She turned to Gurney. “Suppose what happens after we apply this ‘pressure’ is that Panikos kills another six or seven people. What then? We apply more pressure? And if he slaughters another dozen victims at random? What then?”
“I’m not saying there’s no risk. But the alternative is to let him fade back into the shadows. Right now we’ve pulled him up close to the surface. Almost within reach. I want to keep him there, stir up his fear, make him do something stupid. As for his potential slaughter of innocent people, we can take the random factor out of his decision. We’ll feed him a specific target and use it to trap him.”
“Target?” Esti’s chocolate-brown eyes widened.
“We have to get him focused where we want him. It’s not enough to just ratchet up the threat level and push him over the edge. We have to be able to contain the response we provoke—keep it aimed in a manageable direction, within a manageable time frame.”
She looked unconvinced.
Gurney went on. “We set him up, generate the reaction we want, then reel him in—at a time and place of our choosing.”
“You say it so easily. But it’s very risky, no?”
“Yes—but not as risky as the alternative. Jack described Peter Pan as a murder machine. I agree. That’s what he does. Always has. Ever since he was a child. Always will, if he gets his way. He’s like a fatal disease that no one has figured out how to stop. I don’t see any risk-free options. We either let the murder machine keep running, keep converting people into corpses, or we do what we can to jam it up.”
“Or,” Esti offered hesitantly, “we could turn over everything we have to BCI right now and let them deal with it. They’ve got the resources. We don’t. And those resources could—”
“Fuck BCI!” growled Hardwick.
Esti emitted a small sigh and turned to Gurney. “Dave? What do you say?”
Gurney said nothing. His mind had been ambushed by too vivid a memory. A sickening thump. A red BMW speeding away from the scene … down a long city street … turning a corner with squealing tires … disappearing … forever. Except in his memory. The victim of the hit-and-run lying twisted in the gutter. The little four-year-old boy. His own Danny. And the pigeon Danny had followed, unthinking, into the street—the pigeon rising on a flurry of wings, alarmed but untouched, flying away.
Why hadn’t he commandeered a car right there on the street?
Why hadn’t he pursued the killer, right then and there, to the gates of hell?
Sometimes the memory triggered tears. Sometimes just an aching in his throat. And sometimes a terrible anger.
The anger was what he felt now.
“Dave?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think it might be time to hand the case over to BCI?”
“Hand it over? And stop doing what we’re doing?”
She nodded. “It’s really within their—”
He cut her off. “No. Not yet.”
“What do you mean, not yet?”