Page 183 of Lethal Obsession

Young men who all dress exactly like Tyler fucking Thorne.

“The Cartographer Club,” I read. “What is this, some kind of elite college secret society?”

“Exactly that,” Mak says. “Only the Cartographer Club isn’t associated with one particular college—it has maintained branches in elite universities across America for nearly a century. Its list of former members include senators, generals, and judges, not to mention several presidents. Now look at this.”

He expands a photograph from the old platform. Three faces stare austerely into the camera as if they’re Victorian explorers about to climb into a hot air balloon and navigate the earth.

“This was taken over twenty years ago.” Mak points to the first face. “Silas Thorne. Founder of Meridian—and during his college years, president of the Yale chapter of the Cartographer Club. The man next to him is Reid Calloway.” He points to the second face. “Founder of Sentinel Operations and Cartographer Club president at West Point. And finally”—he points to the third face—“Calder Vane, CEO of the Zenith Advisory. President of the Georgetown chapter. Now.” He enlarges the photograph to focus on the round pins the men are wearing in their silk cravats. “Look at the logo engraved on them.”

“Holy shit.” I stare at the pins. They’re all engraved with two letter C’s, facing each other so that they form an oval-shaped globe, intersected by the directional needles of a compass. I bring up the logo on the John Owens card and put it beside the photo. The two logos are almost identical, except that the Owens logo has multiple lines in addition to the central compass arrows on that of the Cartographer Club.

“If I had to guess,” Mak says, “I’d bet the additional lines represent other companies run by Cartographer Club members.”

“No wonder we couldn’t find a fucking company name.” I shake my head slowly. “We were looking for the wrong thing altogether.”

I think of Lars and me, chasing that logo down one rabbit hole after another, and feel suddenly swamped by a wave of exhaustion and defeat.

It should be us sitting here, I think dully. Bouncing off each other like pinballs, until we uncover the mystery.

The thought that we might never do that again is too bleak to even contemplate.

Going to the fridge, I pull out a bottle of vodka and pour us both a hefty shot. For once, Mak doesn’t make a crack about the lack of elegant presentation. I pull the laptop toward me, staring at the smug, self-satisfied faces in the old photo.

Thorne. Calloway. Vane.

The kind of names found on a country club membership list or beneath portraits on a wall.

Not the kind of names you see in tabloid articles.

Which is where I’ve seen them before.

“Hang on.” I pull up an old news report from the time around Carter Thorne’s death. “Here.” I point to the second paragraph. “Carter Thorne’s friends who were interviewed after his disappearance. I barely noticed the names at the time.” I shake my head. “Thorne, Calloway, and Vane. The first one is Carter’s younger brother, Tyler. The other two are Reid Calloway’s son and Calder Vane’s son. This Cartographer Club is some serious generational shit, by the look of it.”

“Going by the Compass Initiative logo, I’d say that’s a solid assumption,” Mak says. “Although you’d never know. The Cartographers are one of those skull-and-crossbones type societies that are dismissed as some kind of conspiracy theory.”

Lars laughing at me: “Diagrams and tin foil hats . . .”

I swallow hard.

“That old social media page is the only evidence of the club I could find,” he goes on, “and even that I only came across by chance, years ago on the dark web when I began researching possible links between Meridian, Sentinel, and Zenith. The Cartographer’s Club is strictly underground, always has been. That page was an anomaly, and it disappeared almost as soon as it was begun. Other than this photograph, I’ve never been able to find any connection between Thorne, Calloway, and Vane, or any evidence of their three entities working together—until their sudden coordination to bring you down, something that made no sense to me. Until now.”

He clicks to bring Carter Thorne’s face back onto the screen. “This was the missing link. I knew—or rather, I suspected—who was behind this. I just couldn’t work out why. I couldn’t see the body in the swamp,” he says quietly. “But I fucking knew it had to be there.” He meets my eyes. “You didn’t just kill Silas Thorne’s eldest son, Alexei. You stirred up a media storm of publicity that directly threatened a highly secretive network of power. One that effectively controls the American government.”

“So why did they bother with a swamp creature like me?” I stare at the screen, too drained to make sense of any of it. “Why go to all the trouble of putting Hunter into power and recruiting the Novikovs? Why did this John Owens prick give me the whole spiel about how America was about to change, and try to recruit me to be a part of it, if all Silas Thorne wanted was revenge? With those kinds of resources, these Cartographer Club boys could have had me hung, drawn, and quartered, and nobody would ever have known, let alone cared.”

Mak gives a humorless laugh. “Because when they worked out who you were, they realized that killing you would have been a waste of a good resource.” He takes a large mouthful of martini. “Not to mention far too simple a revenge for a man like Silas Thorne.”

He glances at me. “I told you how the Zenith Advisory chooses and controls political candidates?”

I nod.

“Well, Marty Hunter Jr. is exactly the kind of patsy they choose. Corrupt, connected to organized crime, and thus totally malleable. Zenith doesn’t choose squeaky-clean candidates. The problem with honorable candidates is that they tend to be motivated by more than self-interest, and that is no use to the men who control these corporations. They prefer to take an utterly corrupt figure, then publicly redeem him by putting all his crimes out in public—and pinning them on a third party. A villain, if you will, the supposed power behind the throne.”

Mak’s eyes settle on me with something almost like sympathy. “When Thorne worked out who had killed his son, he realized that you could be not just any villain—but the perfect villain.”

The Biscayne Butcher. My stomach churns. The Swamp Surgeon.

He’s right. I’m not just any garden-variety villain—I’m the fucking best in the business.