by Ed James
Something creaks, then the door opens and light crawls across the brown carpet toward me. “You’re awake?” Holliday stands in the doorway, arms folded, lit up from behind. But I can still see his politician smile, his teeth glowing in the half-light. “You won’t be able to move, Mason. If I know one thing, it’s how to tie a knot.”
“Good old boy scout, huh?” I try to move my head, but it feels like my scalp’s on fire. “What did you do?”
“I hit you with a griddle.” Holliday squats in front of me. A cast-iron frying pan is face down on the floor at his feet. “You turned your back on me, Mason. Bad move.” And it’s his turn to put the gun in my face. Point-blank range, pressing against my teeth. I can taste the steel, dull like the pain in my arm. The way he’s holding the gun, the one I took from the guard, he’s obviously used a weapon before, and not just on a firing range. He’s trained, he knows how to shoot. Or he’s a very good actor. Can’t take my chances. “Just so we’re clear, I’m in charge here from now on. Okay?” He tears the towel off the wound on my arm and pokes at it with a wooden spoon, handle end first.
A trail of fire burns up to my skull, making me gasp.
“Where is Avery?”
I clench my jaw, tight. Keeping quiet, but I know what’s going to happen.
Sure enough, he sticks the spoon back in my wound.
The weirdest sound comes out of my mouth, like a hushed squeal. I focus on it as everything tightens around the pain.
He lets go, but the agony stays with me, blood thudding in my ears. “Come on, Mason. Enough of this. Where’s my daughter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I was working with someone. She was supposed to wait here and look after your daughter. She’s gone.”
“Where has she taken Avery?”
“I don’t know.”
He pushes the spoon in, deeper this time.
I try to swallow down my gasp, but it hisses out like a deflating balloon. I bite my teeth together, trying to be strong, trying to hide any signs of weakness. There’s no way out. He’s got my ankles tied together.
Maybe if I overpower him, I can get to the kitchen. Find a knife, slice through the bonds.
Maybe.
Turning my back on him like that… Should’ve cuffed him to the wheel, but I used my cuffs on Delgado when I didn’t have to.
I deserve everything I get.
He pushes the spoon into my wound. “Who has her? Layla, right?”
No choice but to give it to him straight. Play it slow, calm, and wait for an opening. “How did you know that?”
“You said her name when you were calling her.” It doesn’t buy me any time, just a whole new world of pain. “Who is she?”
I can’t stop myself from panting as he pulls the spoon away.
“Her son went missing during the exercise. Kid called Faraj. The official line was he disappeared, but they never found the body. She thinks they kidnapped him. Layla found me, we knew each other from play dates. We were looking for the same answers.” I swallow hard. “Faraj going missing and my boy dying on the same day as this military exercise? Far too much of a coincidence. So we started digging. Together.”
“And you think that justifies abducting my kids?” Anger flares in his eyes. He’s going to kill me. I can tell. “Because your son died, you think you can endanger mine?” He digs the spoon into my wound like he’s stirring a pot of soup.
The searing pain makes me black out.
Holliday slaps me, brings me back around. “You think you can do that to me? To my family?” He’s gasping, out of breath, out of control. “That was your son in the video, right? The one who died? Heart-attack boy.”
“You sick fu—”
The revolver cracks off my jaw, pushing me back against the bed. I taste blood, thick and bitter. And he pistol-whips me again, hard metal hitting my cheek this time. My head jerks back and hits the bed. Another wave of pain floods through me, from the back of my skull.
I black out again.
Another slap brings me back.
I try opening my mouth. Feels like his pistol-whipping cracked the bone. Probably the least I deserve.
“I don’t know how to find her.” I make eye contact with him, or as close as I can when I see three of him and he’s lit from behind. “And that’s the truth.”
“Why me?” Holliday grabs my shirt with his free hand and pulls me close.
I could head-butt him, if I wasn’t too woozy.
“Why did you target me?”
“We thought you’d know the answers.”
“Me?” He rocks back on his heels. “Why would I know?”
“You sponsored a bill through the Senate.” I give him a shrug. “It’s one of those things where you’re following the logic as they tell you, but as soon as you leave, you can’t remember any of it.”
He hits me again with the gun. Different cheek. Sorer, harder, but I don’t black out this time. The pain builds and vibrates then gives enough ground that I can breathe again.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about your stories.” His hand grips my throat, squeezing my windpipe. “You’ve put my family through hell based on an assumption. I’m going to kill you.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Carter
Carter yawned. The coffee hadn’t kicked in yet and boy did he need it. He clutched his cell tight. “Karen, I need everything I can on it. Everything.”
“Max, I don’t want you dredging up old cases. The family are at peace with what happened to their son.”
“And they never found his body, Karen. Makes me think there’s something in the connection.”
“Max, you sound like you’re wearing a tinfoil hat. You’re sure of this?”
“Mason Wickstrom is. Isn’t that enough to at least explore it?”
“I’m dealing with all kinds of fallout here. Two dead bodies now, and you’re getting further and further from finding Avery. It’s probably time you thought about standing down, let Lori take over.”
Carter stabbed the End Call button and pocketed his cell.
Elisha’s frown released almost as soon as it formed. “She playing ball?”
“Told me to stand down.”
“And are you?”
“I hung up on her.” Carter stretched out in the car. “Childish, I know, but I can’t give up on this.” He looked out of the window just as the rain started up again. Thin strands, giving way to stair rods. “We should visit the school and ask about the boy.”
“On a Saturday?”
“Fine. We find the principal’s home address. Visit, dig into it.”
“You think there’s something in this conspiracy stuff?”
“Olson mentioned possible CIA involvement. Hard not to fall down that rabbit hole.”
“Did Karen give you anything on it?”
“Shut me down. Respect the families, blah, blah, blah. She doesn’t get it, Elisha. It’s just statistics to her.”
“Karen Nguyen ran that case. You were on leave. Maybe she just doesn’t like being audited. You were in Hawaii, right?”
“Right. You worked that case, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Go through it from the start. Okay? Everything you remember.”
“Max…”
“I’m serious. Fresh pair of eyes, a year’s distance. Sometimes that’s enough.”
“You’ll be the death of me.” Elisha ran a hand through her hair, let it fall back into exactly the same position. “Kid went missing on his way back from school. Never heard from again. We went through standard procedure, yada, yada, yada. Karen had it pegged as a parental abduction. The boy’s father.”
“What did you have to back that up?”
“First, we got several witness statements of an Arabic man seen near the school around the time of abduction, matching the description of the boy’s father. Second, we got an Interpol message saying the kid was in Syria,
safe as you can be over there.”
“Read it out.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you, Elisha. It’s everyone else I have a problem with.”
“You can be such a dick sometimes…” She logged into her laptop. “The Interpol message said that Faraj was alive, quite well, and had no intentions of returning to the USA. Happy living with his father.”
“You believe it?”
She laughed. “I must be getting like you, Max, because I don’t believe anyone these days.”
“Best way to be.”
“Take your word for it.”
“You ever find the father?”
“There’s a warrant out, but he’s believed to be in Syria. He’s on a watchlist, so if he comes back in the country, he’ll be spoken to at customs.”
“If he comes back, he’ll use a fake passport. Nobody’s that dumb, are they?”
Elisha hammered the laptop’s keys, her forehead creased in concentration. “Either way, no extradition treaty and we have no jurisdiction in that part of the country, unless we topple the Assad regime, which I don’t see happening any time soon. And SAC Nguyen put it in the unsolved bucket.”
Carter played it through, trying to get inside her head. He could buy keeping it open so the father got spoken to, but there were plenty other ways to achieve that. No, there was something strange going on. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Oh yeah, those three letters.
CIA.
Carter twisted around to look straight at Elisha. “Mason Wickstrom thinks his son died during the military exercise.”
“Jacob.” Elisha swallowed hard, like she’d personally been at fault. “Kid died of a heart attack warming up for soccer, Max. There’s nothing to suggest his son’s death is connected to what happened to Faraj. The exercise was early afternoon, and Faraj went missing after school. Besides, he was on the roll call from the evacuation, and we’ve got eyewitness reports supporting it.”
“Who from?”
Elisha tapped at her laptop. “The principal. The sports coach.”
“Anyone else?”
“Max, are you auditing my work now?”
“I just want the truth.”
“Max.” Elisha slammed her door, then ran a hand through her hair again. “Stop being a prick. You know how hard these cases are. You think we didn’t do our jobs just because you were in Hawaii?” She held his gaze, long and hard until he looked away. “This was the hardest case I ever caught.”
Carter nodded slowly. He’d been to that dark place a few times himself, but always kept coming back to the light. Those kids needed people looking for them. Luck of the draw meant one or two would stay missing. “Can I check the paperwork?”
Elisha laughed. “Be my guest.” She handed him her computer, logged into the case file. “A roll call was taken before the exercise, then after when the kids returned to the school.”
Carter checked through the file structure. Everything in the right place. He found the scans, twenty-seven pages of roll call. He opened the first one, crystal-sharp on her screen, like the original was right in front of him.
Right at the bottom of the page, two signature boxes.
One for a teacher, signed N. Anthony Smith.
The military signature was Franklin K. Vance.
Carter let out a groan loud enough that Elisha tutted. “This guy.” He tapped the screen. “Olson told us he does a lot of work for the CIA.”
Elisha rubbed at her face. “You don’t seriously think the CIA took Faraj?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s enough that Mason Wickstrom thought they did.” Carter played it through, slowly. Wickstrom’s belief that the school covered something up started to look a whole lot more sane. “If the CIA took the kid and someone covered it up, who stands to benefit?”
“GrayBox.”
“Right.” Carter sat there, silent, focusing on it.
Jacob Wickstrom died warming up for soccer. Congenital heart defect, undiagnosed. Happens all the time in college sports, even in the NFL, the NBA, the MLS.
Faraj al-Yasin went missing somewhere between school and his home. Elisha was right—it looked like parental abduction, taken to a country that might as well have been Mars.
Carter knew that feeling. He blanked it out, trying to extricate himself from the case.
That Interpol message smoothed off the jagged edges. Easy if the message was from Canada or somewhere in Europe. From Syria? Who knows how legit it was.
“What did the mother think happened?”
“She had no idea.” Elisha let out a deep sigh. “She reported Faraj missing when he didn’t come home from school that night. Other than that Interpol message, we never had any leads on the father.” She bit her lip, hard, like it could break the skin. “He left Layla two years earlier. Just walked out. No forwarding address. No calls. No birthday cards for Faraj. Layla was the breadwinner and she stayed strong for her son. Faraj needed his mother and she had to work hard to pay for their home, to put him through school.”
“What do you have on the father?”
“Born Kenny Hassan. His parents were Egyptian. Standard immigrant folks, working a horrible job to pay for a better life for their kids. And they gave Kenny that life. Software engineer at one of the big tech firms. Amazon, I think. Could’ve been Microsoft, I’d need to check. Maybe Valve. But he hated it, so he quit and became a yoga instructor. Next thing, Kenny Hassan has changed his name to Quraish al-Yasin. Made his wife change her name too.”
“He was radicalized by yoga?”
“I mean, he was certainly radicalized. We checked his message history, but he was smart, knew how to cover his tracks. Two years ago, he just upped and left. I followed the route through his transactions. One-way flight to Turkey before we cracked down on that sort of thing. Got surveillance footage from the airport, definitely him getting on. And from there, it’s just a short trip to the Syrian border. You can guess the rest.”
Carter nodded. “ISIS.”
It fit the official story.
And it was so close to home. Father abducting a son against a mother’s wishes.
But it also fit another narrative.
If Kenny Hassan, an American citizen, fled the US to fight for ISIS in the Syria desert, then it made some sense for the CIA to want him.
And Olson figured the CIA paid Vance and Youngblood to abduct the boy. Would they abduct his son? Interrogate a kid, find out if he knew where his father was. The darkest of all black ops. Looked like it’d been covered over.
And if Faraj’s father hadn’t taken him, and the CIA had, did they still have the boy?
It sent a shiver up Carter’s spine. He stared at the laptop screen again. “Okay, let’s speak to this coach first. See if the boy was definitely at school that day before we hare off elsewhere.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Carter
Tony Smith lived in a one-bed condo in Highline, a good commute from Tang Elementary. The apartment building was three stories of beige-painted wood, a carport cutting into the first floor and the developer’s profits. Cars hurtled past on the street outside, not far from I509. Jaunty disco music blared out of an apartment above.
Elisha hit the buzzer and leaned back against the wall, arms folded.
Carter looked around. Hard to figure out which apartment it matched up with in the crazy layout.
A weary sigh rasped out of the intercom. “What?” Male voice, high-pitched.
Elisha leaned in close. “Looking for a Tony Smith.”
Another sigh. “That deadbeat moved out months back.” Texan accent. Long way from home. “Dude moved out in a big hurry, headed back to Minnesota. No forwarding address.”
“You know him?”
“Who are you?”
“FBI.”
And he was gone.
Elisha’s turn to let out a sigh.
Carter tried to swallow down the butterflies in his gut. “Th
is guy oversaw a soccer practice where a kid dies. Then another of his kids goes missing. And now he’s gone?”
“As much as I don’t like coincidences, what if this is unrelated?” Elisha grimaced, like even she didn’t believe what she was saying. “This guy’s son dies and then he’s digging into the worst parts of the internet, looking for the truth, but conspiracies are much easier to find. The hard part is finding proof. Sometimes a grieving father just needs time to grieve.”
A door opened under the carport. A three-hundred-pound monster stood there, sporting a rolled-up Mariners baseball cap, his distended belly poking out the bottom of a Houston Texans tee. “Can I see your ID, ma’am?”
Elisha showed her shield, waiting for him to paw it. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Douglas.” Took his time inspecting her badge.
“That a first name or a last name?”
“Take your pick.”
“Like that, huh?” Elisha held his gaze, then glanced at Carter.
He gave her a shrug. It didn’t really matter.
She focused on Douglas again. “Any idea where we can find Mr. Smith?”
“Nope.” Douglas pulled off his hat and twisted the brim. His hair underneath was surprisingly long, all twisted into a topknot. “Jerkwad didn’t leave a forwarding address or nothing.” He tossed a package to Carter. A bunch of mail, all bound up. “Would you look at all that mail. Still comes every day.”
“You own this place?”
“I’m the concierge.”
Last place you’d expect a concierge. Maintenance man, sure.
Carter smiled at him. “When did Mr. Smith move out?”
“December fifteenth. Remember it like it was yesterday.”
Carter checked the mail pile. “This seems a bit light for almost a year.”
Douglas snorted then spat on the ground. “Dude came back and cleared out his apartment in July, just after Independence Day. He’d paid the rent in advance, so…” He shrugged.
“You speak to him?”
“Nah.” Douglas pointed at the other end of the carport. “I was out washing my truck and there was an Econoline parked over there, in the space allocated to another apartment. The tenant, Krist, he came back, and man that dude was pissed. Got me to have a word with Tony, you know? So I went up. Guess what? The deadbeat didn’t answer. An hour later, the Econoline was gone and the place was empty. Key was under my door.”