23. Jarvis: Once Is Happenstance, Twice Coincidence…

Lieutenant Jarvis slammed the door violently behind him as he entered his office, hard enough to make its window rattle. He flung the laboriously-prepared reports and analyses into the wastebasket with disgust.

The goddamned idiots on the Board just wouldn’t listen. He’d saved their sorry asses thirty-five years ago and had salvaged the Project for them, and now they were going to fuck up the whole thing! They wouldn’t even recall the Phase II Operatives, which he considered the very least they should be doing.

And none of them were at all sympathetic to him when he asked them to let him order the kill. They still wanted Riddick alive.

“He’s a lost cause,” Jarvis had argued. “We should just terminate him and move on to the next phase—”

“Richard Riddick tested higher in every category than any of the other successes,” Baldwin had replied with that irritating calm. “Stronger, faster, smarter—”

“Crueler!” he’d been unable to keep from shouting. “Crazier! Have any of you even looked at the pictures of what he did to Miss Kowalczyk? And she was the closest thing to a friend he ever had!”

“It is irrelevant to the Project.”

“No it is not! That kind of instability indicates massive flaws! He’s as bad as the Phase I subjects; in fact, he’s much worse!” Jarvis remembered the Phase I subjects well. He’d been the one who orchestrated their termination, after all.

“Our decision is final in this matteer, Lieutenant. The contract will continue in its current form: Capture Only.” Baldwin’s voice had gone steely.

What a fuckup, he thought tiredly now, sagging into his chair. His eyes came to rest, as they frequently had for the last week, on Jack Kowalczyk’s picture. Her grave, sad green eyes seemed to bore into his. The icon of his conscience, that’s what she’d become.

Why had Riddick killed her? How could he possibly have missed the fact that the girl loved him?

Stop thinking about it, he instructed himself. Jack Kowalczyk is dead. You can’t bring her back, but you can make Riddick pay for what he did to her.

He glanced over at the wall of his office where twelve pictures were hanging, each one with a ceremonially-folded Tribunal flag in a display box beneath it. And he’ll pay for what he did to you, too, he vowed.

Those boys had been the very best and brightest. They’d almost been the equals of the Project’s Phase II Operatives; they might one day have worked in tandem with them. He’d had such great, shining plans for them…

When the news had come to him of their deaths, and the identity of their killer, he’d broken down and wept for the first time since Melanie had left him. Once again, he’d felt that he was to blame. It was like Ruth eight years ago; often he felt like he was personally responsible for Riddick’s kills.

The psychiatrists had jumped all over the Barracks Incident, as they liked to call it. “He doesn’t know Kowalczyk survived,” they’d told him. “This is a vengeance killing.”

He’d made sure the word got out throughout the Systems that the girl was alive and recovering, but it was too late to save his boys. Too late to save his own soul. He wondered if Riddick would have gone after Melanie if their divorce hadn’t been long over by the time Jack was shot. Frightening thought.

A month ago he would never have even considered it. He’d thought that Ruth’s killing was an anomaly, that Riddick had been responding to her own unique predatory nature, because as far as the Project could tell she was the only woman he’d ever killed. That was, of course, before Jack Kowalczyk’s savaged remains turned up on Seti Station. All bets, as far as he was concerned, were off…

“Sir?” The hesitant voice jerked him back out of his reverie. He glanced up at the corporal standing nervously in his doorway.

The last week or so he’d been an absolute terror to his staff, he knew. Most of them dreaded having to approach him. They’d started drawing lots to see who had to go talk to him.

The loser of the latest draw was almost shaking as he stood there, waiting to be acknowledged.

I must have really turned into an ogre, Jarvis mused. He hoped the smile he gave the kid wasn’t too scary.

“Yes, Corporal?”

He must have gotten the smile right; the soldier relaxed a little and took a step into the room.

“An odd sequence of events that may be significant seems to have occurred on the planet Troubadour, sir.”

Troubadour. Jarvis let his mind recall the planet’s profile. Population 73 million, mostly descended from colonists originating from France, Belgium and Quebec. It was situated between the harshest parts of the frontier and the more established colonies, notorious smuggler territory. For all its urbane chic, the planet had one of the roughest, most vicious underbellies of any in the Known Systems.

“Tell me.”

“Well, sir…” The corporal cleared his throat nervously. “The first item looks like nothing, really. Just another underworld hit. Drug lord called Benicio Godot, who trafficked in Morphine-6 and Adrenosynth. It was flagged because of the MO.”

He held out the hard copy. Jarvis took it and glanced down.

“Knifed in the abdominal aorta. A precise hit, too.” Jarvis nodded slightly. Yes, that was something of a trademark of Riddick’s, although he wasn’t the only one who could do it. He was still one of the best at it, though. As far as the Project could tell, he’d only ever missed his target once, and he’d been suffering from a bullet wound and a concussion at the time.

Godot’s thumbs had been removed, however. That was a Syndicate trademark, not a Riddick one.

“And?”

“That happened about a day before the story of Miss Kowalczyk’s death was released to the media. Four days later, someone on Troubadour… a doctor at a back-alley regen clinic, it says… inquired as to whether or not Miss Kowalczyk had a sister of approximately the same age, or perhaps a cousin.”

“Any reason for his inquiry given?”

“Her. No… and it could just be morbid curiosity, but then this happened.”

“This?” Jarvis waited patiently.

“A body was found about thirty-six hours ago, in a New Paris alleyway. It’s been identified as Peter Malcolm. He was an orderly at the same clinic as the doctor who made the inquiry. And the MO of his killer… well, see for yourself.”

He held out the picture, suddenly looking a little ill. Jarvis took it from him. The world around him seemed to freeze in place as he stared at the photo of the body. Oh yes, he knew this one very well…

His eyes moved, almost unwillingly, to the twelve faces on his wall. He knew this modus operandi entirely too well.

“Call General Baldwin. Set up an appointment for me with him. Tell his secretary that it’s extremely urgent.” His voice had gone soft, awe-struck. “Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, Corporal. Then call the space docks and tell them to start prepping the Messina for departure.”

“Is the destination what I think it is, Sir?”

“Absolutely,” he whispered. Slowly, deliberately, he arranged the three pieces of evidence in front of him. Three incidents. The magic number.

The axiom itself was centuries old. Jarvis had first learned it from his drill sergeant at the Special Forces training facility. He’d since repeated it to all of his own students, on countless occasions.

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

When on the hunt, one always had to search for a pattern. Even the wiliest of prey left spoor. One just had to be clever enough to see it, to spot the symmetries among the disarray of wild chance.

Here was a pattern. Some would call it extremely tenuous, but it was more than enough to start things moving.

A drug dealer dies in what looks, at first glance, to be a mob hit. The only anomaly is in the death wound itself, its precision, its history. Once is happenstance…

A doctor at a nearby regen clinic reads about the death of Audrey Jacqueline Kowalczyk and posts an inquiry about the existence and whereabouts of female relatives. Reasons for the inquiry are unknown. Twice is coincidence…

An orderly from the very same clinic is found in an alleyway, eviscerated in exactly the same manner that twelve of Jarvis’ own students had been four years ago. Only one man in the galaxy is known to use that particular MO. The chances of a copycat are almost nonexistent because the Tribunal never declassified the details of the original killings. Three times…

…Three times is Enemy Action.

These days, for Lieutenant Reginald Jarvis, “The Enemy” had a single face.

Riddick was somewhere on Troubadour.