Chapter Text
October 1988, Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania
“Morning, Sheriff. Morning, Bobby,” the plump, brunette waitress called from behind the counter. She didn’t have to check the clock hanging on the wall to her right to know it would be just past 6:00 a.m. Every day, without fail, Sheriff Walton and his deputy, Bobby Dale, came into Nora’s Truck Stop Diner for breakfast before heading out to the office to start their shift.
“Morning, Beth,” Bobby replied, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the coat rack by the door.
The crisp October air was damp this morning, causing the fog rolling off the mountains to be a bit thicker than usual.
“Morning, Beth,” Sheriff Walton followed, taking off his hat and pausing a moment to look around the diner. This early in the morning there was never much traffic, and only three out of the fifteen tables were taken.
A man and a woman in their mid-twenties were sitting at the table nearest to the door, having a pancake breakfast. The sheriff figured that the beat-up, older model Pontiac parked outside belonged to them.
The next table along was occupied by a large, sweaty, shaved-headed man who must’ve weighed at least 350 pounds. The amount of food sitting on the table in front of him was enough to choke a horse.
The last table in the corner was taken by a tall, gray-haired man, with a bushy horseshoe mustache and a crooked nose. His forearms were covered in faded tattoos. He’d already finished his breakfast and was now sitting back on his chair, toying with a pack of cigarettes while looking out the window at the fog like he was dreading going out there.
There was no doubt in Sheriff Walton’s mind that the two semi-trucks outside belonged to those two.
The sheriff and his deputy sat down at their usual table in front of the big plate glass window and Beth immediately walked over and filled their cups from a fresh pot of steaming coffee. “The usual for you boys?”
The sheriff nodded while blowing on the coffee before taking a sip and sighing in appreciation. No two ways about it, Nora’s Truck Stop Diner had the best coffee in these parts.
“Just as well,” Beth said, walking away. “If you boys ever changed your order, the shock might give me a heart attack,” she sassed, drawing chuckles from the two.
The sheriff continued to gaze out the window as he sipped his coffee. Sunrise was around 6:20 this time of year, and it was just starting to lighten up outside. The sun would help burn off that fog. “Well would you look at that,” he said, looking awed.
“What?” Bobby said, looking up from the newspaper he had spread out in front of him and following the sheriff’s gaze.
The sheriff pointed his chin at the window just as a fancy car drove past, most likely heading for one of the pumps at the gas station next to the restaurant.
“What kind of car is that?” Bobby asked.
“If I’m not mistaken, that there is a 1987 Bentley Continental. That car costs more than you or I make in a year. Take a good look because you’ll probably never set eyes on one of those again. Not around these parts.”
“Good looking car,” Bobby said, sounding only mildly impressed before going back to the sports pages.
The sheriff just shook his head at his deputy’s lack of automotive appreciation.
As the car drove out of sight, the sheriff wondered what a fancy car like that was doing around here. The car had Maryland plates, so the driver probably realized he was running low on gas and just got off the highway at the nearest exit to fill up the tank.
He looked up expectantly when he saw Beth heading their way with two plates loaded with eggs, bacon, hash browns and buttered toast, but his expression turned to confusion when he saw her freeze, her eyes going wide as she looked past him out the window.
“What the hell?” the sheriff breathed out, following her gaze and setting the cup down with a clatter while standing up quickly.
“What?” Bobby Dale said, looking up from the paper and following the sheriff’s gaze out into the gloom where he saw a pair of pick-up truck headlights coming straight at them. The car seemed completely out of control.
“Holy shit!” Bobby said, jumping up from his seat and scrambling backward.
The sheriff quickly looked around the diner. Everyone had turned to face the window but seemed to be frozen in place. The vehicle was coming toward them like a guided missile, and it was showing no signs of diverting or slowing down. They had maybe five seconds before impact.
“EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!” Sheriff Walton yelled, waving frantically, spurring them into action.
Their breakfast plates shattered as Beth dropped them and ran for cover, and everybody else in the restaurant was already scrambling to their feet to get out of the way. At that speed, the pick-up truck would crash through the front of the diner and probably not stop until it reached the kitchen at the back, destroying everything in its path and killing anyone in its way.
The diner was in chaos everyone scrambled to get out of the way before impact.
CRUUUUNCH-BOOM!
The deafening crashing noise sounded like an explosion, making the ground shake under everyone’s feet.
Sheriff Walton was the first to look up from the floor, where he had dived in an effort to get out of the way. It took him a few seconds to realize that somehow the car hadn’t crashed through the building.
Frowning, he scrambled to his feet. “Everyone all right?”
Mumbled confirmation was returned from all corners of the room.
The sheriff and his deputy immediately rushed outside, everyone else following just a heartbeat behind.
Out of sheer luck, the pick-up truck had hit a deep pothole on the ground just a few yards from the front of the diner and had drastically veered left, missing the restaurant by just a couple of feet. As it detoured, it had clipped the back of the Bentley sitting in front of a gas pump before smashing head-first into the side of the adjoining gas station building, destroying the side that housed the shelves of snack foods, coolers full of soda and beer, and racks of magazines and other various sundries. Thankfully it hadn’t hit the side where the clerk stood in front of the cash register looking out the window with a stunned expression.
There was a well-groomed man standing in the gas station doorway looking between the crashed pickup and the Bentley, and the sheriff knew right away that this was the owner of that car by the way he was dressed. Folks around these parts did not dress like that. He was wearing a long wool coat, leather gloves, and had one of them fancy little cashmere scarves around his neck. The sheriff thought he looked remarkably calm considering half the gas station had been destroyed right next to him and that expensive car of his now had significant damage to one side of the rear end.
“Holy shit,” Sheriff Walton breathed out, looking closer at the pick-up truck, which was a mangled wreck. He couldn’t imagine anyone in the truck survived that, but he had to check.
Stepping over the debris, the sheriff was the first to get to the truck. The driver was its only occupant – a gray-haired man who looked to be somewhere in his late fifties, but it was hard to be sure. Sheriff Walton wasn’t able to recognize him, but he was certain he’d never seen that particular vehicle around these parts before. It was an old and rusty, early1960s model Chevy pickup, no airbags, and though the driver had been wearing his seatbelt, the impact had been way too violent. The front of the truck, together with its engine, had caved backward and into the driver’s cabin. The dashboard and steering wheel had crushed the driver’s chest against his seat. His face was covered in blood, torn apart by shards of glass from the windshield. One had sliced through the man’s throat.
“Goddammit,” Sheriff Walton said through clenched teeth, standing by the driver’s door. He didn’t have to feel for a pulse to know that the man hadn’t survived.
“Oh, my God!” he heard Beth exclaim a few feet behind him in a trembling voice. He immediately turned to face her, lifting his hands in a ‘stop’ motion.
“Beth, do not come any closer,” he commanded in a firm voice. “You don’t want to see this. Go back inside and stay there.” His stare moved to the rest of the diner patrons who were moving toward the truck fast. “That goes for all of you. Go back into the diner. That’s an order. There’s nothing you can do. This whole area is out of bounds now, y’all hear?”
Everybody stopped moving, but no one turned back.
The sheriff’s eyes searched for his deputy and found Bobby standing all the way at the back by the rear of the Bentley. The look on his face was a mixture of shock and fear.
“Bobby,” Sheriff Walton called. “Call for an ambulance and the fire brigade now.”
Bobby didn’t move.
“Bobby, snap out of it, goddammit! Did you hear what I said? I need you to get on the radio and call for an ambulance and the fire brigade right now!”
Bobby stood still. He looked pale, like he was about to be sick. Only then did the sheriff realize that Bobby wasn’t even looking at him or at the mangled pick-up truck. His eyes were locked onto the rear end of the Bentley. Before crashing into the gas station, the truck had clipped the left side of the Bentley’s rear-end hard enough to release its trunk door.
All of a sudden Bobby broke out of his trance and reached for his gun.
“Don’t move,” he yelled out, the gun shaking in his hand at he aimed it at the well-dressed man who had just started moving toward the car. “Sheriff,” he called in an unsteady voice. “You need to come have a look at this.”
Five days later…
FBI National Training Academy, Quantico, Virginia.
For the past ten minutes Special Agent-in-Charge Jack Crawford, head of Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI, had been standing inside the holding cells control room in the basement of one of the many buildings that made up the nerve center of the FBI Academy. Despite the many CCTV monitors mounted on the east wall, all of his attention was set on a single and very specific one.
“Has he moved at all in the past hour?” Crawford asked the room operator, who was sitting at the large control console that faced the wall where all the monitors were mounted.
The operator shook his head. “No, sir, and he won’t move until lights out. Like I told you before, this guy is like a machine. I have never seen anything like it. Since they brought him in four nights ago, he hasn’t broken his routine. He sleeps on his back, facing the ceiling, hands locked together and resting on his stomach – like a cadaver in a coffin. Once he closes his eyes, he doesn’t move – no twitching, no turning, no restlessness, no scratching, no snoring, no waking up in the middle of the night to go pee, no nothing. He sleeps like a man with absolutely no worries in life, sleeping on the most comfortable bed money can buy. And I can tell you this –” he pointed at the screen – “that bed ain’t it. That is one goddamn uncomfortable piece of wood with a paper-thin mattress on top.”
Jack nodded his head thoughtfully but said nothing.
The operator continued.
“That guy’s internal clock is tuned to Swiss precision. I shit you not. You can set your watch by it.”
“What do you mean?” Crawford asked.
The operator let out a nasal chuckle. “Every morning, at exactly 5:45 a.m., he opens his eyes. No alarm, no noise, no lights on, no call from us, and no agent bursting into his cell to wake him up. He just does it by himself. 5:45, on the dot – bing – he’s awake.”
Jack knew that the prisoner had been stripped of all personal possessions. He had no watch or any other kind of timekeeper with him.
“As he opens his eyes,” the operator continued, “he stares at the ceiling for exactly ninety-five seconds. Not a second more, not a second less. You can watch the recording from the past three days and time it if you like.”
No reaction from Jack.
“After ninety-five seconds,” the operator said, “he gets out of bed, does his business at the latrine, and then hits the floor and starts doing push-ups, followed by sit-ups – ten reps of each in each set. If he isn’t interrupted, he’ll do fifty sets with the minimum of rest in between sets – no grunting, no puffing, and no face-pulling either, just pure determination. Breakfast is brought to him sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. If he hasn’t yet finished his sets, he’ll carry on until he’s done, only then will he sit down and calmly eat his food. And he eats all of it without complaining, no matter what tasteless crap we’re serving that day, and he eats it slow using perfect table manners even though he’s just given a set of crappy plastic utensils.
“When he’s brought back to his cell after interrogation, whatever time that might be, he goes back to a second battery of his exercise routine – another fifty sets of pushups and sit-ups. If you’ve lost count, that’s one thousand of each every day. When he’s done, if he isn’t taken away for further interrogation, he does exactly what you can see on the screen right now – he sits on the end of his bed, back straight, stares at the blank wall in front of him, and I guess he meditates, or prays, or whatever. But he never closes his eyes. And let me tell you, it’s fucking creepy the way he just stares at that wall,” the operator said, looking a bit unnerved.
“For how long?” Jack asked.
“Depends,” the operator shrugged. “He’s allowed one visit to the shower every day, but prisoners’ shower times change from day to day. If we come get him while he’s wall-staring, he’ll simply snap out of his trance, step off the bed, get shackled and go to the shower – no moaning, no resisting, no fighting. When he comes back, he goes straight back to the bed-sitting, wall-staring thing again. If he isn’t interrupted at all, he’ll carry on staring at that wall until lights out at 9:30.”
Jack nodded.
“But yesterday,” the operator added. “Just out of curiosity, they kept the lights on for an extra five minutes.”
“Let me guess,” Jack said. “It made no difference. At exactly 9:30, he lay down, went back to his ‘body in a coffin’ position, and went to sleep, lights off or not.”
“You got it,” the operator agreed. “It’s creepy. Mentally this guy is a freaking fortress. Has he talked at all during any of the interrogation sessions?” the operator asked, hoping he wasn’t overstepping his bounds.
Jack considered the question for a long moment.
“The reason I ask is because I know the drill. If a special prisoner like this one hasn’t talked after three days of interrogation, then the VIP treatment starts, and we all know how tough that gets.”
Jack crossed his arms and sighed. “Newman and Taylor should be taking him to the interrogation room any minute now. They’re going to take one more crack at this guy before we take things to the next level.”
The prisoner, whose driver’s license identified him as Roman Fell, sat at the interrogation table wearing a white jumpsuit with his hands chained to the bolt on the table and his feet chained to a bolt on the floor. He calmly watched as the two agents, who had been attempting to interrogate him for the past three days, were gearing up to throw more questions at him.
The attractive blonde woman, who called herself Agent Taylor, was soft spoken, charming and polite, while the older man with the crooked nose who called himself Agent Newman was much more aggressive and short-tempered. Typical good-cop-bad-cop team play. But their frustration due to his continued silence was starting to show. And while it was entertaining to watch, it was also starting to get boring.
His arrest had been unexpected, but during his three days of silence he had had plenty of time to think and decide what he was going to do next. He now had a plan in place and it was time to shake things up.
He watched with amusement as Agent Newman paced, occasionally glaring over at him, no doubt thinking it was unnerving him while he rehearsed in his mind the threats he was about to launch at him. He waited until Agent Newman stopped pacing, and just as the man opened his mouth to start his onslaught, the prisoner cut him off and said in a calm, cultured voice, “I will only speak to William Graham,” catching the two agents totally off guard and stunning them into silence.
The prisoner couldn’t help but think that it had been worth the three days of silence listening to these two prattle on with their insistent questions just to see the expressions on both their faces.
“Who the hell is William Graham?” Agent Newman finally asked when he overcame his shock, exchanging a confused look with Agent Taylor, who shrugged, before looking back at the prisoner, who only smiled at him and refused to say another word.
In the control room, where he had been watching the interrogation on the monitor, Jack Crawford was also looking stunned, but it was for a different reason, because he actually knew who William Graham was.