Silent Threat

by Jeff Gunhus

“Are you hurt?” her mom yelled over the screaming engine.

  Lucy shook her head. “Where’s Dad? We can’t leave him.”

  “He can take care of himself,” their mom said. “You girls stay down.”

  “Mom! Don’t leave him. You can’t,” Mara screamed.

  Their mom, keeping a hand on the wheel, crouched down low out of the wind. “Your dad knows what he’s doing. You girls want to worry about someone, worry for the idiot who just fired that shot at us. Now stay down. Not another word.”

  Lucy wrapped her arms around Mara and hugged her tight. Mara hugged her back and held on as they bounced down the river, running from whatever lay behind them.

  Twenty minutes later, they pulled into a cove that twisted and turned into the marshy weeds. Once they were far enough back, the tree canopy reached out from both sides to form a kind of tunnel. Their mom cut the motor and told Lucy to throw out the anchor.

  “Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” Mara asked.

  Her mom pulled a small walkie-talkie from her pocket and put it on the console above the steering wheel. “Now we wait.”

  They’d heard that tone before and knew there was no point in asking further. Lucy reached out and held Mara’s hand. She hadn’t done that in years, but she’d never been happier to have her sister by her side than at that moment. She clutched her hand and leaned into her chest, letting her stroke her hair.

  It was over an hour that they sat anchored in the cove. A sickening wait, during which the small walkie-talkie her mom held in her hand refused to make a sound. Finally, her dad’s voice rang out. “All clear. You ladies all right?”

  Her mom, who’d gone from looking angry when they’d first anchored, to frustrated as the minutes stretched out, to scared as the time went longer, put her hand to her mouth and stifled a short sob. As fast as it was there, it was gone. She toggled the walkie-talkie and replied, “What took you so long, Roberts? You’ve got fish to clean.”

  She gave Mara and Lucy a wink as if to say everything was all right. Mara wasn’t buying it.

  “Had to tell this fool hunter that it wasn’t duck season and that he wasn’t alone on this lake,” came the reply. To Mara’s ears it sounded like the most obvious lie in the world. Like a bad actor saying some shitty line they hadn’t even bothered to completely memorize.

  But her mom ate it up. Or more likely, she thought, she was part of the lie.

  “Was the guy hunting by himself?”

  “He said he was. But he’s outside waiting for me. I’m going to ask him again.”

  Her mom lowered the walkie-talkie, frowning. She thought for a second before answering. “Should I meet you?”

  “The floatplane’s coming for pickup. Tell the girls sorry, but when I came back to the cabin there was a message from work. I gotta go in. Vacation’s over.”

  Lucy groaned. But all Mara could think was that her dad was telling another lie.

  “Okay, we’ll hold here until contact with the floatplane.”

  A long pause and then her dad’s voice came back softer. “Sorry, Wendy. I wanted this time . . . I wanted, you know . . .”

  “I know,” she said. “Just be careful.”

  Lucy moaned about how unfair it all was, how both of them always had work things getting in the way. That the whole purpose of the trip was to have a getaway from work. Their mom just repeated that she knew and that she was sorry. Mara didn’t say a thing. She was piecing together what her dad had meant on the radio, trying to read between the lies. She’d been to the gun range enough with her dad to know that the sound she’d heard hadn’t been a shotgun. And why would the hunter be at their cabin waiting for her dad to ask him again if he was alone?

  Then, as the breeze drifted toward them, Mara heard a new sound in the air. Her mother heard it, too, cocking her head to the side the second it came. Soft at first, then louder. Proving that sound did carry over water.

  Especially when it was the sound of a man screaming in pain.

  With sudden insight, Mara understood it was her dad asking the hunter if he was alone. And that the hunter hadn’t been there for ducks. She made eye contact with her mom and they shared a look, confirming that they both knew the truth of it.

  Her mom reached down and clicked on the boat’s radio, turning up the music to drown out the man’s screams. As they waited for her dad to be done getting answers, it occurred to Mara that she maybe she really didn’t know what her parents did for a living. One thing was sure. Her dad wasn’t a salesman. He was something else altogether.

  * * *

  Mara checked her watch again. Twelve minutes past. There wasn’t a large crowd outside the museum, so she didn’t worry that she’d missed him going inside. Even with her thoughts floating back through memories she hadn’t dredged up for years, she’d kept her attention sharp. She decided to give it until fifteen after and then move on.

  She tried to push away the flashes of the rest of the fishing trip. The fake smile on her dad’s face when he’d met them at the floatplane. The way his change of clothes made her even more suspicious about what he’d been doing. The dark red fleck on his neck that her mom wiped off as she walked up to him. A fleck that looked like dried blood.

  After that trip, she’d known the truth, or at least the version of the truth she conjured up in her head. On the way home, she’d played that day over and over in her mind. Not only her dad’s reaction, but her mom’s. Everything about her had changed the second the shot was fired. She’d turned cold and hard, focused only on their escape. She was barely recognizable. Such a different person that for weeks she found it uncomfortable to be around her. It was like a mask had been pulled back and once seen, the real person underneath it couldn’t be forgotten.

  It was a year before they came fully clean about who and what they were, and only then because she’d left them no choice in the matter. Her parents were out, a rare date night because they were both in town. She’d presented a good rendition of “bored teenager” as they left, flopped out on the couch with the TV on while talking on the phone with one of her friends. But once their car had cleared the driveway, she was on her feet, all business.

  She started in their bedroom. Through their drawers, closets, under their bed. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she felt a strange sense of certainty that she would find something. And that something wouldn’t belong in the perfectly designed suburban life of Scott and Wendy Roberts.

  Her first search came up empty. But that only made her more resolute. She started over, this time searching in the nearly impossible to reach places. The first thing she found were the guns. Back then she didn’t know what kind they were, only that they were cold and black and taped to the back of the top nightstand drawer on either side of the bed.

  After finding these, her search took on a more frantic pace. She stopped worrying about putting things back in their places. She didn’t care if her parents, the liars, found out she’d rifled through their things. A creak in the floor under the area rug stopped her in her tracks. After rolling it back, an effort that required moving a chest of drawers and her dad’s leather reading chair, she uncovered the spot. A tiny hole in the floor was her way in. Unbending a wire hanger, she inserted it into the hole, twisted it, and yanked. A small section of the floor lifted up to reveal a small lock box.

  She stared at it for a few seconds, almost not believing the search had actually paid off, then quickly lifted it out. It was a combo lock with six digits on it. She set it to all zeroes. Nothing. She knew their ATM pin codes from when they’d given her their card to get money for them. She tried both of those. Nothing. She’d never get it. She needed to break the box open. She scoured the room for a tool to bash it with. Her dad kept an iron for his dress shirts in the closet. She ran and grabbed it, then positioned the box on the ground in front of her.

  But as she lifted the iron over her head, her dad’s voice, calm and soft, came from the bedroom door behind her.

>   “1-0-0-3-6-3,” was all he said.

  She spun around. Both of them were there, watching her. Their expressions confused her. She thought they’d be incensed. Angry at the violation. Instead they both looked sad and, oddly enough, just a little proud of her.

  “If you want to open it, the code is 10-03-63,” he said.

  Saying the numbers that way, she recognized it as her mother’s birthday. She spun the numbers and opened the box. Inside were stacks of cash. She knew dollars and euros, but there were some Asian currencies she didn’t recognize. There were passports, a bundle for each of them. She flipped through, seeing different names for her mom and dad, different nationalities, different identities. Each had at least one credit card that matched the name inside.

  She put everything back in the box and turned to her parents. Adrenaline pumped through her body. She felt a mix of excitement and terror. It came down to the next question she asked, the question she wasn’t certain she wanted the answer to. With a shaking voice, she asked, “Are you the good guys or the bad guys?”

  Her dad’s expression turned pained. But the question didn’t shake her mother. Mara never forgot her answer.

  “We’re the good guys,” she said, walking across the room and sitting next to her on the bed. “But we’re the kind that have to do bad things to protect what we love.”

  Then the three of them had sat in the room together and they’d told her the truth. Her dad worked for the CIA. Her mom did as well, but described herself as more of a “diplomat with an extra portfolio.” Of course, Mara had asked a million questions, apparently none of them answerable due to security reasons. By the end, the feeling of betrayal was gone, replaced by a sense of pride in her parents. And worry that they lived in constant danger.

  From then on, whenever her dad was on a business trip, her stomach twisted as she imagined the danger he might be in. She, Lucy, and her mom had spent many nights watching late-night TV together, trying to block out the fear as they waited for a check-in phone call. Whenever the call was late, they all felt the anxiety as the minutes, and sometimes the hours, ticked away past the time when he was supposed to call. None of them discussing it, only watching show after show of bad TV until the phone finally rang telling them he was all right.

  As she stood waiting for him, eyes searching the growing crowds of tourists heading toward the museum, she felt like a kid again, curled up on the couch and waiting with a cold dread that this time was going to be different. This time the phone would ring and it would be some stranger to tell her mom that something had gone wrong.

  Only now she was waiting by herself. Her mom and sister were dead. And only two days before, she’d considered her dad dead to her, too. It’d been a long time since she’d felt anything but bitterness toward him, but that was changing. As she checked her watch again and again, she told herself the lie that she was concerned about him because he was still her path to saving Joey. That his safety was an operational necessity.

  But it was more than that. Now that there was a chance he was innocent, even if it was still slight and unproven, she felt the possibility of having him back in her life. In Joey’s life. She was worried because it was her dad who was missing. And she needed him.

  She felt her eyes sting and she blinked hard against the tears that welled there, both surprised and angry at her reaction.

  Then she spotted him across the plaza. He had a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, and he wore a Chicago Cubs windbreaker that looked two sizes too big for him, but she knew it was him. She let out a short sob and then turned away as if checking the perimeter to make sure no one was watching them. She used the movement to discreetly wipe her eyes. There was no way she was going to give him the satisfaction of knowing she’d been worried.

  “Hey,” he said as he walked up, as if they were just two people meeting for lunch in the park.

  “What took you so long?” she said, trying to sound casual.

  “Cubbies went into extra innings. Wanted to see the end of the game.”

  “Funny, it’s not baseball season.”

  He smiled, but it turned into a grimace. Now that he was closer she saw he had a swollen lip and bruises down one side of his face and neck. “I should have given you the harder exit. You’re younger. More agile.”

  “Nah, your old man immune system couldn’t have handled the Chicago River.”

  They turned and walked down the row of trees, paralleling the museum and heading back toward the city. She noticed he favored his right side as he walked.

  “We made a splash in the news,” she said. “Wall-to-wall coverage of the global warming activists who kidnapped and roughed up the president.”

  “Imagine that. Who knew the tree huggers had it in them?”

  “So Townsend is playing ball.”

  “We’ll see. Who knows what story he told the Secret Service? That old saying about how do you know when a politician is lying—”

  “When his lips are moving.”

  “Right. I’m not trusting anything from that man.”

  “Why’d he choose global warming activists? I thought he was a big environmentalist?”

  “Every news channel is playing the highlight reel of Townsend’s environmental record, making that same point. They’re reminding America about the one good thing there was about the Townsend presidency.”

  “He wants to pull an Al Gore.”

  “A Nobel Prize is a pretty coveted piece of hardware. I bet he’ll use this to launch a huge environmental campaign. Not because he gives two shits about the polar bears and their shrinking ice floes, but because it’s something that’ll draw cameras and coverage.”

  “Maybe he’ll accidentally do some good along the way.”

  “I doubt he’ll live that long. Whoever set us up to kill him isn’t going to stop that easily.” He waved a hand ahead of them. “We need to get the hell out of Dodge. The truck’s up here.”

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him roughly to a stop. “We need to get Joey.”

  Scott’s shoulders hunched forward. He looked suddenly tired and old. Whatever he’d been through over the last eighteen hours had done a number on him. She wondered for the first time if he was up to the challenge ahead of them.

  “We need to regroup. Just a few hours to think and figure this out. Preferably with no one from either Omega or the Agency trying to kill me while I’m doing it.”

  “Joey—”

  “Is all I’m thinking about, Mara. Trust me.”

  She let go of his arm. Did she trust him? She was starting to, and she realized that might be a problem. “Any ideas?”

  “There’s a safe house. A farm just over the Iowa state line.”

  “Hawthorn might be Omega, but he’s still pulling the levers at the Agency. They’ll be watching their own places.”

  “It’s not an Agency location. They don’t know about it.” She must have looked unconvinced because he continued. “I’m going to fall asleep standing up if we don’t go to the truck. Unless you’re willing to carry me. . . .”

  “Let’s go, then. But you’re going to fill me in on some missing details on the way there. To hell with deniability, I want to know everything. I’ve already defied direct orders, assaulted an ex-president, and probably another dozen things that could land me in prison, so I don’t think I have anything to lose at this point.”

  He looked defeated and worn-out. Part of her wanted to press him right there and leverage his exhaustion to her benefit. It was what she’d do if she were on a mission. But she didn’t. Instead, she slid her arm into his and took some of his weight. He didn’t object, and together they walked slowly toward where he’d indicated the truck was parked.

  She’d waited years for the truth. A couple more hours wouldn’t make a difference.

  Besides, a part of her buried deep inside knew something her conscious mind refused to acknowledge. She wasn’t totally sure that she wanted to know the truth at all.

  CHAPTER 16 />
  Preston Townsend was enjoying himself more than he had in a long time. The entire nation was tuned in to his story, hanging on every detail that was released about his abduction. Every headline scroll on each network and cable news channel had his name on it. He was loving every minute of it.

  He rested comfortably in his favorite leather chair in his den, a space designed to make him look learned and serious. He hadn’t read any of the books that filled the shelves behind him, but he’d picked them out himself based on the titles and authors so that they conveyed the image he wanted. The cameraman and two producers were in the room with him setting up for the next interview. His chief of staff Mirren refreshed his glass of water.

  “The last one was perfect,” she said. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, thank you,” he said. “You’ve been great through this. I appreciate it.”

  She smiled, seemed to want to say more, but then gave way to the hair and makeup person and exited the room.

  Townsend watched Mirren leave as the tech touched up his hair, wondering who her replacement ought to be. Did she really think he didn’t remember how dismissive she’d been over the last few months when she thought she was on a sinking ship? He couldn’t wait to fire her and put a high-powered pro in her place. The fun was about to start, and he needed a better team at his side.

  “Two minutes, Mr. President,” one of the producers called out.

  “Who is this one?”

  “NBC. They are breaking into regular programming to carry it.”

  He smiled. This was the kind of treatment he enjoyed. He tried to remember the last time he’d felt this good and had a hard time coming up with something. No, this was his sweet spot. The eyes of the world on him. It was the way things were supposed to be.

  Casting a shadow on his fun was the fact that he’d nearly been killed, a fact that bothered him more than he cared to let on. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the rage on Roberts’s face when he’d held the gun to his head. Then, strangely, there was a second image. A police officer pointing a gun at him. But that one was hazy and confused. The SWAT team had explained to him that the CPD uniform cop had been the first to find him, so that must have been what he was remembering. He’d given instructions for the cop to be found and brought to him. What a photo op. But he was still waiting on them to figure out the name of the officer.