by Barry Eisler
He had to admit, the instructor the army had brought in to teach urban disguise had known her shit. “We always approach disguise like an onion,” the woman, a CIA specialist named Kim, had explained. “Whether we’re building it or peeling it off. Enough layers one way or the other, and you disappear—and another person takes your place.” Snake had been skeptical at first, but seeing how much the woman could do with just a few simple tricks had been a revelation.
A revelation, and so useful, too.
Of the various possibilities, homeless was Snake’s favorite. Civilians didn’t like to look at homeless people—it embarrassed them about their own good fortune. So as long as you avoided eye contact yourself, which was typical behavior for the homeless when they weren’t actively panhandling, you were practically invisible to passersby. Cameras would pick you up, sure, but with what he’d learned from Kim and practiced on his own, the cameras just recorded someone else.
He glanced up, and there she was—Hope Jordan, no question, the same woman he had checked out in the online photos. Short brown hair, slender, legs looking good in a pair of yoga pants. Boomer’s age, of course, but she looked younger. Took good care of herself, like Noreen had. Snake had to hand it to Boomer, the man had good taste.
The shopping cart the woman was pushing had a kid in it, a little boy, it looked like, maybe two years old, his legs dangling through holes at the front of the cart. Snake wasn’t surprised. Married, late thirties . . . he’d figured it was possible she’d have a kid with her when she did the grocery shopping, or maybe two. It didn’t really change anything. Might even be an advantage.
She pressed a button on a key fob and the hatch of her car, a Volvo SUV, opened with a beep. She spent a minute getting the groceries inside, then pressed another button. As the hatch closed, she pushed the cart over to a designated return area, the little boy still in it. A good citizen, not leaving the cart in an empty parking space like so many people did. And a good mother, too, not wanting to leave her little boy alone in the car while she returned the cart, not even for a minute. That was good to know.
She hoisted the boy out of the cart and carried him back to the car, pressing another key-fob button on the way. A double beep. She opened the rear passenger-side door and spent a minute strapping the little boy into a car seat. Snake looked around. There were a few other people coming and going, but no one paying any attention to their surroundings. After all, what could ever happen in a suburban Portland grocery garage?
The woman closed the back door and started around to the other side. No new beeps. Meaning she’d unlocked all four doors to get her boy in, and hadn’t bothered relocking them after. But why would she? All that unlocking and relocking and unlocking would be a pain in the ass. She was too careful to leave the boy alone, sure, but locking the doors again when all she was doing was getting in the car herself? That would have been too much. Once she was inside the car, though, that might be a different story. Some people were pretty quick to lock the doors the second they were inside. Especially if they had a kid with them.
Snake ghosted in, making sure to time it right. The woman opened the driver’s door, stepped in with her right foot, lowered herself, sat—
As Snake reached the front passenger-side door, he could see her through the window, turned to face her own door, grabbing the handle, pulling it toward her—
Snake opened the passenger door and popped inside, the Ruger Boomer had given him pointed at her. It was the SP101 chambered in .22 LR—not as quiet as a suppressed pistol, of course, but quiet enough, and with the advantage of not ejecting shells the police would collect later.
The woman finished closing her door by reflex and spun toward Snake, flinching when she saw him and gasping, her face contorting in panic. Snake leaned away, reached across his body with his left hand, and pulled his door closed. Keeping the Ruger low and close to his torso, he said, “Don’t make a scene. I want you to withdraw money from an ATM. That’s all.”
There were a lot of variations, but social engineering always came down to giving the person something to hope for, something to believe in. The impression that what was happening was just a transaction, a kind of contract with an acceptable price and a reasonable expectation of performance by the other party. Sure, the other party was offering terms at gunpoint, but under stress most people clung to their everyday beliefs, including the belief that their fellow humans could generally be counted on to carry out promises. The alternative—an acceptance of imminent mortal jeopardy, and a recognition that the only way to avoid it was the risk, the utterly unfamiliar notion, of fighting back—was hard and scary. By comparison, clinging to everyday beliefs was easy and comforting. The instructors who had schooled Snake in the fine arts of extraordinary rendition, otherwise known as kidnapping, had taught him this and more, and he’d learned it was all true.
The woman glanced at the gun, her eyes bulging. The Ruger wasn’t particularly large, but Snake knew what she was seeing: something the size of a cannon, the muzzle pointing directly at her heart.
“I’m just an old friend,” he said quietly, calmly. He glanced back at the kid. The kid was holding a toy, some kind of puzzle, but he was looking at Snake. Snake gave him a reassuring smile, then looked back at the woman. “That’s so nice that we ran into each other. Old friends, right? And you’re going to give me a ride to the bank. Okay? Just a ride to the bank.”
She nodded.
“Good. I don’t want to scare anyone. And I won’t hurt anyone unless you give me a reason. You’re not going to do that, are you?”
She shook her head. Her hands were shaking.
“Say it.”
She swallowed. “I won’t give you a reason.”
Fuck. He felt himself getting hard. It was the way she obeyed so quickly. And how afraid she was. It was her son, he knew. She’d do anything to protect her little boy. The thought made him harder.
“That’s good. Then fifteen minutes from now we’ll be done with this. What’s your name?”
“H-Hope.”
“Okay, Hope. Put your seatbelt on. Come on, go ahead.”
She couldn’t do it—her hands were shaking that badly. She stabbed the buckle at the insert three times, missing consistently. She started to hyperventilate.
“Hope,” Snake said. “I told you, don’t give me a reason, and you and your little boy are going to be fine. Right? Go ahead, you can do this.”
She nodded, blew out a couple of long breaths, and managed to get the seatbelt buckled. Snake buckled his, too. He would have preferred to leave it off for greater freedom of action, but he’d seen a movie once where a woman had convinced the guy holding her up to take off his seatbelt, and then rammed her car into a tree. The seatbelt and the airbag had saved her. The guy had gone through the windshield.
“Good girl. Now press the door-lock button.”
She did.
“Okay, start the car. Come on.”
She pressed the ignition button and the car started up smoothly.
He loved this. Was Simon Says the best game ever?
“Make a right when we get to the street,” he said. He didn’t want her to have to cut across traffic yet—she was still too shaky. Better to give her a minute to get her shit together.
She glanced back at her boy as though to make certain he was still there. Then she blew out another long breath, put it in reverse, and started backing up.
Half a minute later, they were out on the street. She’d gotten the shaking under control, probably in part from having the steering wheel to clamp on to. The windshield wipers had come on automatically. Snake liked the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump they made as they swiped away the rain.
“Good job,” Snake said. “We’re going to make a left now. On Forty-Fifth Street. Use your turn signal.”
“But my bank—”
“We’re not going to your bank. There’s a branch I like better. Turn signal, Hope. Now.”
She did as he said, and a mome
nt later, they were heading north on a quiet, tree-lined street, nothing but neat lawns, driveway basketball hoops, and wet leaves raked into neat piles alongside curbs.
Snake had reconnoitered the area, of course, and the place he was taking them was a construction site—a halfway-done McMansion project that had obviously come to a standstill some time earlier, probably because someone ran out of money and the contractor had stopped work. The site was at the end of a cul-de-sac, lots of trees, all the houses set way back, a long gravel driveway. Private. Discreet. The kind of spot he and Boomer always looked for when they were traveling and couldn’t go to the Salton Sea. It had actually gotten to the point where Snake would get aroused just driving by one of these places, he didn’t even have to have a girl with him.
Although today, of course, he did.
He reminded himself it was supposed to be just a carjacking gone bad. That’s what he and Boomer had discussed, and it made sense. But . . . fuck. He was so turned on. Had he known what maybe he was planning? He’d told himself he scouted the site just to have a quiet spot to kill her. But now he wondered.
You’re a bad man, he thought. He would have smiled at himself, but she was doing well and he didn’t want to scare her.
They came to the end of the street. “Left here,” he said. “Use your turn signal. Then bear right.”
He knew she wanted to ask where they were going. But she didn’t. She was too afraid. Oh, goddamn. He was so turned on.
She followed his directions for another few minutes. Snake looked back at the kid. He was playing with his puzzle or whatever.
They came to the driveway of the construction site. “Pull in,” Snake said.
The woman glanced in the rearview at her boy. “Where are we?” she said, one kind of fear getting the better of another. “What are we doing here? You said a bank. The ATM.”
She was shaking again. Her instincts were okay, actually, she just should have listened to them sooner. It wasn’t her fault, though. Not really. It was how the brain worked. She knew this was bad now, even worse than she’d admitted to herself at the beginning. The problem was, she’d made it this far by cooperating. And now her brain was saying, I’m cooperating, and I’m not dead. So cooperating must be the right thing to do. If I keep doing it, it’ll keep me alive. It was a loop, and once it started, it was hard to get out of. She would have been better off saying no right at the outset. Negotiate, fight, whatever. No one should ever go to a secondary crime scene. The only reason a bad guy wants a secondary crime scene is rape, torture, or murder. Or some combination. And yet. Even people who understood all that had a hard time accepting it when it counted. The brain. What could you do?
Yeah, it really wasn’t her fault. A weird part of him wanted to tell her that. Well, maybe he still would.
“I need to pick up my stuff,” he said. “Then the bank, then I’m gone.” He motioned with the Ruger. “Go on. Pull in.”
She did. They rolled along, rain pattering on the roof of the car, the wipers going thump-thump, thump-thump, gravel crunching under the tires. The driveway slowly looped to the back of the site. The framing on the exterior of the house was mostly done, but the garage doors hadn’t been hung yet. Three gaping holes in the back of the unfinished structure, the interior too dark to see clearly from the car.
Snake gestured with the Ruger. “Drive in. Out of the rain.”
The woman shook her head. “You can have my purse,” she said, her voice getting higher. “My wallet. I’ll tell you my ATM number. You can take the car, go to the bank yourself—”
“Pull in,” Snake said, his tone deadly calm. “I’m going to get my stuff, and then we’ll go to the bank together. You’re not going to give me a fake ATM number.”
“The number is 5-9-5-9. I’m telling you the truth.”
Snake glanced at the boy. He was looking up from his puzzle, his expression concerned bordering on frightened. He’d picked up on his mother’s distress, obviously. Well, it didn’t matter now.
Snake looked into her eyes. Since getting in the car, he’d been trying to project a reassuring, businesslike vibe. But he dropped that now. He wanted her to feel the fear. All of it.
“Pull into the fucking garage, Hope,” he said. “You really don’t want to make me ask again.”
The boy started crying. The woman did, too. But she crept forward, out of the gray daylight, into the shadowy space before them. The patter of the rain ceased. The wipers stopped, too. In the sudden silence of the car’s interior, Snake imagined he could hear the pounding of her heart.
He took out the iPod and hit “Play.” Sorry, Boomer, he thought, so hard now it hurt. I promise, man, this will work, too. Maybe even better.
8
That night, Livia walked with Little along a dim path in Fremont Canal Park, a strip of green paralleling the narrow waterway separating the neighborhood of Fremont from Queen Anne in Seattle.
Little hadn’t been irritated about the delay. His primary concern, he said, was that they be cautious. And even though they’d been talking on two burners, he’d used oblique references to make her understand the meeting point would be the Theo Chocolate factory in Fremont, just before closing time. From there, it had been a short stroll to the dark beside the water.
They walked in silence, their breath fogging in the chill air. Livia waited, wondering what this was about, not wanting to seem eager by asking. Finally, Little stopped and looked at her, his gaze intense behind the trademark green plastic-framed eyeglasses.
“Thank you for meeting me,” he said. “And I’m sorry for all the precautions.”
Livia checked behind them. The park was deserted.
“What’s going on?” she said.
There was a long pause, punctuated by nothing but the lapping of water on the muddy bank to their left and the crunch of dead leaves beneath their feet. Livia had the sense Little was collecting himself.
“I told you about my daughter,” he said.
Little’s daughter was named Presley. About ten years earlier, when she was fifteen, she had disappeared while walking to the neighborhood grocery store to buy popcorn for a movie she was going to watch with her parents. Little had shown Livia a photograph from his wallet. A beautiful black girl with a radiant smile, her arms wrapped around her beaming father’s neck.
“Yes,” Livia said, feeling wary.
“I told you what it’s like,” he said. “With resources like mine, and still not able to find her. Or to find out . . . what happened to her.”
They came to the end of the park. Beyond them, the grounds of the Lakeside Industries asphalt plant were spotlighted in frozen white. Little stopped in the shadow of some trees and flipped up the collar of his suit jacket. He left the jacket open, though. Buttoning it would have slowed access to the pistol Livia knew he carried in a waistband holster.
Little turned and looked at her. In the mottled darkness and light, his eyes were large and seemed haunted. Livia took in the bags under them, and realized the man seemed not just tired, but older than when she’d last seen him, only a month earlier.
“The men who took her,” he said. “They’re back.”
“What do you mean?”
But what she meant was What do you want from me?
“The night she went out to rent that movie, Presley was on her way to the grocery store about a half mile from where we lived. A creek on one side. Houses set far back on the other. Just getting dark, and people home from work. Not much car traffic at that hour on that winding neighborhood road, and even fewer pedestrians. A perfect time and place to snatch a teenaged girl, if that’s what you were of a mind to do.”
Livia said nothing.
“It might have been a lone wolf,” he went on, “choosing his time and place, but still getting lucky no one noticed him lurking, or got a plate or a vehicle description, or saw him dragging a struggling girl into a car.”
His voice broke and he paused. She remembered him saying to her: How many people,
Livia, how many people could look you in the eye like I am right now and say, “I know what you’ve been through? What you’re going through”? Well, I can. And I do.
He wasn’t wrong. The problem was that it went both ways.
He cleared his throat. “But it wasn’t a lone wolf. It wasn’t someone impulsive, or lucky.”
Livia watched him warily. “Why do you say that?”
“Because for four years after, I practically lived inside ViCAP and databases like it. Over time, I identified seven similar disappearances. A pattern. And the pattern didn’t involve a singleton. It’s two men. And they’re not lucky. They’re methodical. This is no hobby for them. It’s what they do.”
ViCAP was the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a database the Bureau had established in 1986 and ran out of Quantico.
“Why do you think two?” Livia said, the cop in her momentarily pushing aside her other concerns. She didn’t have to ask why he assumed it was men. It was virtually unheard of for this kind of crime to be committed by a woman.
“Because one wouldn’t be enough to pull it off so consistently. Too much luck required. You wouldn’t be able to control the terrain—monitor for potential witnesses and other problems. And it would take too long. You’d have to subdue a struggling kid, restrain her, keep her from crying out, get her into your vehicle. Then drive off. Maybe you could get away with it once. Twice. Hell, three times. But not eight. And it’s almost certainly more than eight, because you and I both know if there were eight in ViCAP, there are probably another dozen that didn’t get filed.”
Livia knew he was right about that. ViCAP was a good idea, but so many local cops didn’t bother to upload their cases that using it was hit or miss, more often the latter.
“Why two men?” Livia said, already knowing the answer. “Why not three?”
“Not impossible, but unlikely. Three’s an unstable number. And the chances of three men being this evil and still managing to trust each other and work together so efficiently over time doesn’t feel right to me. You see it differently?”