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colour photograph. ‘This was taken at the safe house, when we first discovered Caldwell had killed the two guards. On the kitchen wall of all places. Written in one of the guard’s blood’, McCrane shook his head. ‘Poor bastard’, he added.

                Animi. When the time is right, I will come for you all.

                ‘So how do we know that Caldwell is The Chemist?’ Brittles asked the question on everybody’s lips. Burr nodded, he’d been expecting that question.
                ‘I received an e-mail yesterday, from an internet café in Vancouver of all places. It goes without saying we have had the CCTV checked and no sign of Caldwell. And the email account is the café’s generic outbox account. Absolutely nothing to help us there’.
                ‘This email’, Conway wanted to know. ‘What did it say?’
                ‘Very simply’, Burr informed, ‘it said Animi, The Chemist says the time is now ’.
                There was a pause of around twenty seconds or so as they digested the news; the members of the Animi were visibly shaken.
                McCrane thought it was time to summarise. ‘Caldwell has had seven years to think of God knows what whilst incarcerated in SQ, six months of freedom to put a plan into place, and now seems to want to play some kind of sick game, which includes us. All I know is this; we’ve got some fucking psychopath running round LA playing this deranged game, which, my good men, like it or not, we now seem to be a part of. Caldwell obviously has bad intentions in mind as far as we are concerned. If the police don’t catch Caldwell, well then our next meeting could very well have a somewhat depleted attendance. If Caldwell’s caught, well we are quite high-profile individuals if I do say so myself; I would not doubt that the bastard would trade us in, in a heartbeat, as part of some kind of deal if it were on the table. Finding Caldwell before Caldwell finds us is our only option’.
                The Senator, and likewise his fellow Animi, bar Burr and McCrane, could not believe this. Six fucking months! And to top that off, now they all find they are on The Chemist’s shitlist. Sensing a growing animosity, concern and general panic around the room, McCrane did what he could to ease the tension. ‘Gentlemen, simply put, now we have a problem, we will deal with it’, he said with his customary authority, as he began passing round copies of the file he had compiled with all the information they had on Caldwell to the rest of the room.
    As ‘Plan B’ was drawn up over the course of the next couple of hours, Conway couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t going to have a happy ending.

 
    9

    Before I could re-open the envelope we’d just picked up from the Kavannagh, my cell rang. Flipping it open to my ear, I hoped this was good news. ‘Patton’, I answered, passing the envelope to Charlie, though I was desperate to see its contents. I could see two of the black and whites, having evacuated The Kavannagh, questioning and fingerprinting the two employees. Although we needed their fingerprints to eliminate them from the envelope, I suspected they would be of no further use; clearly they were pawns in the game The Chemist had devised for us. Their fingerprints would probably be all over the envelope, but even if they hadn’t handled it at all, I knew that The Chemist wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave any other fingerprints for us.
                ‘Patton, its Dave Ferguson’, the voice was excitable. ‘We’ve had a breakthrough, well to be more specific, Bradshaw has come through for us. He brought in his own software, which I’m ashamed to say puts ours ….’
                ‘Get to it man’, I interrupted. ‘We don’t have the time’.
                ‘Yeah, OK’, Fergs sounded a little more in control. ‘Well we