now that they had the information they needed.
Leroy Hisscus, Bradley Knacker, and John Verbotski had come to the mall at 10:30 p.m., four hours before the boys of Tragedy were supposed to show up, two hours before they actually showed up. Leroy, Brad, and John had embedded themselves in nearby abandoned stores, so cleverly concealed that the cursory search for hostiles undertaken by Gatz and Sergetov detected no trace of them. Gatz and Sergetov had weapons, but their guns were holstered. When Hisscus, Knacker, and Verbotski materialized like spirits at a séance, their pistols were drawn and Ludlow was safely out of their lines of fire. Even if Gatz and Sergetov were wearing Kevlar vests, they were doomed, as three extended magazines containing forty-eight rounds were emptied in less than a minute, with a number of head shots that would have won all the biggest stuffed animals at a duck-shooting game booth in a carnival.
All the pistols were fitted with sound suppressors, which never totally silenced a weapon. This much gunfire might have been heard beyond the walls of the mall, even on a night of explosive wind, although probably not as far away as the one-story elementary school across the street from the construction-fence gate by which Ludlow had entered the property.
A third Tragedian, Cory Holmes, was stationed on the roof of that school, watching the gate, to be sure Ludlow came alone and that no one followed him. By now, Holmes was probably dead from a bullet to the back of the head, because an associate of Hisscus, Knacker, and Verbotski had secreted himself on that roof before Holmes got there.
If the muffled gunfire didn’t still echo through the desolate shopping mall, it still rang in Ludlow’s ears as he approached Bradley Knacker and his partners. Brad wore an earpiece walkie-talkie, one finger pressed to it to tighten the fit, listening intently. He said “Ten-four” to the man on the elementary-school roof. To Ludlow, he said, “Sherlock has gone over the Reichenbach Falls for real this time,” by which he meant that Cory Holmes was dead and would not later be resurrected as Arthur Conan Doyle had resurrected his detective after killing him to the dismay of his readers.
Ludlow wondered when it was that men in this line of work had concluded that part of their job was to get off a half-baked quip in the midst of action. Blame the movies.
The other three agents of Tragedy, asleep in their Stockton homes, had been or were now being likewise dispatched. No bodies would remain to be found either here or there. Six men would just disappear. The website and all records of its operation, if any, would cease to exist by dawn.
If Frank Gatz and Boris Sergetov had been aware that the seed money with which they had launched Tragedy some years earlier had not come from mob sources, as they thought, but from Dorian Purcell, by a most indirect route, they might have marveled at the irony of their fate. Or perhaps at least Gatz might have had the capacity to marvel. Sergetov not so much.
Hisscus, Knacker, Verbotski, and five associates had formed their Dark Web operation two years ago, with seed money they thought had been arranged through certain international arms dealers that did business with mercenaries worldwide. In fact, Dorian was the murder-for-hire equivalent of a Broadway angel, backing their Dark Web play, which had a fifty-two-character address of letters and numbers, and which they called Atropos & Company, after the most ominous of the Three Fates in classical mythology. Atropos was the goddess who cut the thread of life. The name had been provided by John Verbotski, who was perhaps overeducated for his profession.
Behind many great fortunes there was no crime, only hard work and intelligence and obsession, but Balzac was not entirely wrong. Fourteen-year-old boys, well rewarded for extortion, would always learn from that experience the efficacy and profitability of well-considered crime.
The man who had killed Holmes on the schoolhouse roof would deal with that corpse and then assist Leroy Hisscus in the cleanup here at the mall. John Verbotski and Bradley Knacker would set out shortly for the Bookman house on the outskirts of Pinehaven, which lay less than two hours away.
Being of more delicate sensibilities than the agents of Atropos, Haskell Ludlow moved farther away from the perforated, leaking corpses of Gatz and Sergetov, which smelled of blood and feces and urine and stomach gas.
“Mr. Gordius,” Verbotski said, moving