“Could have been before Keator got there,” Davis said hesitantly. “Maybe to set him up.”
Roberts was grateful for the support, but it was about time. She continued to stare Hunt down. He pivoted and peered at the white board, took two steps and traced Keator’s route in the past several hours on a road map that was stuck to the board.
“Davis—no, wait—Brown, you checked the airlines, right?” He went on without waiting for a response. “Didn’t you say you found Zane Keator booked on a flight from Tucson to D.C.?”
“Yeah. Passenger manifest says he got on, too. Flight arrived on time yesterday afternoon.”
“Do we have video feeds from security in both airports yet?”
“I’ll check. We should have gotten it by now.”
“Okay, people. Let’s pack this stuff up and get it ready to move. We’re going back to D.C.”
“Are you crazy?” Machowski said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand.
Hunt tapped the map. “That’s where he’s headed. That’s where we’ll get him. Both of them.”
“You think I’m right,” Roberts said, not sure whether to believe what she was hearing.
“We got suckered. This thing was a diversion. I don’t know what his end-game is yet, but al-Qadir wanted us chasing our tails. He wanted to divert attention away from D.C.”
“But why would Keator go there?”
“Wouldn’t you if someone stole your identity? I admit it; we made this guy’s life hell. If it were me, I’d want to confront the bastard who put me in this position.”
It made an odd kind of sense, but Roberts wasn’t convinced. “How would he know where to find al-Qadir?”
Hunt shrugged. “I don’t know. But if he keeps running in the same direction, that’s where he’s going to end up. And anyway, al-Qadir’s the one we want. Oh, I want Keator, too, for all the trouble he’s caused. But don’t forget, people, our primary job is stopping a terrorist. The most wanted in the world.”
46
Preston opened his eyes and yawned. His ears hurt. Not a lot, but enough to waken him. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but the loud drone of the jet engines coupled with all the excitement had caused his eyelids to get very heavy. With a full stomach from the sandwich Mr. Samara had given him, he’d finally succumbed and drifted off.
Wondering how long he’d been asleep, he looked around the jet. Everything looked the same as when he’d eaten, except that now he noticed the floor in front of him seemed to tip downward. The roar of the engines seemed to reach his ears through layers of cotton. He yawned again, and his ears popped. He leaned over and stretched to see out the window. The plane descended toward some fluffy clouds, their shadows ambling across the sunlit ground below. Wooded, rolling hills gave way to houses laid out in squiggly patterns on curved streets. The airplane banked and a long strip of asphalt appeared ahead, gradually disappearing as the plane’s nose curved around and lined up with it.
Mr. Samara turned to see if Preston had fastened his seatbelt, and Preston’s excitement began to build again. The plane would land soon. Part of him knew that he should be afraid. They were rushing toward the denouement of some grand master plan that involved him, but Mr. Samara hadn’t actually lied to him yet. And no one he’d met so far had felt threatening. So, Preston resolved to let things unfold in their own time.
In another ten minutes, they’d taxied past rows of small propeller planes to a larger hanger on the airfield grounds. The pilot expertly rolled the jet into the hanger and shut down the engines. Mr. Samara got up and walked forward with his head bent under the low ceiling. Popping the latch on the door, he pushed it open and motioned to Preston to follow him. Preston unfastened his seatbelt, picked up his backpack and made his way forward. Mr. Samara waited at the bottom of the airstairs, and led Preston across the hanger to a waiting SUV. Wordlessly, Preston climbed in and buckled up.
He had a million questions, so many that he thought he would explode. But he sensed that asking them would make Mr. Samara mad, like his mom got when he peppered her with queries about one subject or another. He rocked gently and boiled the millions down to one that would at least act as a safety valve if he asked it, and prevent him from bursting.
“Where are we going?” Preston finally asked after they’d been on the road for several minutes.
Mr. Samara glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “You’ll see.”
The drive seemed to take forever, and Preston nearly fell asleep again. Determined to see where they were going, he fought off the drowsiness, forcing himself to watch his surroundings. As they drove on a busy interstate, he counted cars. When that didn’t distract him enough from worry, he put vehicles into separate columns—sedans, minivans, hatchbacks, pickup trucks, delivery trucks and tractor-trailers, and counted them all. And he read the highway signs as they flashed by. None of them had familiar names until he saw one that read “Geo Wash Mem Pkwy” with the word “Washington” below it and an arrow pointing off to the right.
Mr. Samara drove in the direction of the arrow, and after looping around most of a circle the road narrowed to just two lanes in each direction. Now Preston counted the fingers and toes of all his classmates, picturing each one in his mind. But barely ten minutes later, Preston could hardly keep his jaw from dropping as he stared in awe at sights and monuments he’d only seen as pictures in books—the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Tidal Basin. And then, right in front of them, rising from a low mound in the center of the National Mall, the Washington Monument pierced the blue sky. To his amazement, Mr. Samara drove as close as he could, and parked the SUV at the side of the road.
“Come on,” he said. “We can only stay here for a minute or two, but I can take your picture with the monument behind you. Would you like that?”
Preston’s eyes widened, and he hurried to unfasten his seatbelt and clamber down from the back seat. Mr. Samara took his hand and led him a ways up the path toward the monument and stopped. Preston wandered onto the grass and turned a slow circle, then craned his neck until he looked up at the very top of the huge obelisk. He turned around and saw Mr. Samara snapping pictures with his cell phone.
“Can we go to the top?” Preston asked.
“Some other time,” Mr. Samara said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “Right now, we need to go where you’ll be staying.”
Preston shrugged. “Okay.”
He trudged back to the SUV behind Mr. Samara and climbed back in. Within minutes they’d driven past the Capitol, and not long after they approached what looked like a large stadium. This part of town quickly turned from nice apartment and office buildings to parking lots and construction sites, to big, dusty, lots filled either with lots of scrap or huge mounds of gravel surrounded by giant trucks, bulldozers and backhoes. Without meaning to, Preston started rocking again, forward and back.
Mr. Samara pulled up in front of a two-story brick building across the street from a square block filled with metal towers and thick power lines all threading into a central metal lattice like a big rectangular spider web. Preston craned his neck to look through the rear window. He guessed it must be a power station of some kind. In front of him, several big garage-type doors were cut into the brick building several feet above the ground, almost like blank windows. Wooden stairs next to most led up to regular doors.
Mr. Samara got out and waited for Preston to climb down with his backpack, then led the way up one set of steps and opened the door with a key. Inside, Mr. Samara flipped a switch, turning on lights mounted on the high ceiling, revealing stacks of boxes sitting on wooden pallets on the concrete floor. Three large worktables stood in parallel on one side of the small warehouse, covered with electronics gear and equipment Preston didn’t recognize. He shivered. The place felt spooky.
“I’m staying here?” he asked in a small voice.
Mr. Samara looked at him with his glum face and shook his head. “No, not here. Upstairs.” He sighed. “Come
on.”
In the rear of the space another set of narrow wooden steps climbed up to the second floor. The ceilings were lower here. Mr. Samara led the way through an office with several desks and filing cabinets scattered about, all covered in a layer of dust. A doorway led into a similar room, and then a third. This one, however, was much smaller, and contained a narrow bed under a window brown with dirt caked on the outside. A little table with a lamp on it sat next to the bed. A wooden chair stood in the corner. Across from the bed a tiny television sat on another small table. At least that’s what he thought it was. It was boxy and had two antennae sticking up out of the back. He’d never seen anything like it. Preston turned a full circle.
“Where’s the bathroom? I have to go.”
Mr. Samara pointed to another door. Preston set his backpack on the foot of the bed and walked into the bathroom hesitantly, not sure what to expect, hoping it wasn’t full of bugs or spiders. The small room wasn’t like his bathroom at home with white sink and toilet and shiny fixtures, but it was clean, even if the fixtures were old. He lifted the lid of the toilet and didn’t encounter anything scary coming up out of the sewer. He did his business, washed his hands, wiped them on the clean towel, and went back into the other room. With great care, he opened his backpack and extracted the list he’d compiled on the plane and handed it to Mr. Samara.
“What’s this?” Mr. Samara said, frowning at it.
“You told me to make a list,” Preston said. “Those are the things I need.”
“You’re a strange kid,” Mr. Samara said. “D’you know that? You’re not what I expected.”
Preston didn’t say anything. He knew he was different from other kids, but he didn’t think he was strange at all.
“I’ll go get this stuff in a while,” Mr. Samara said. “Shouldn’t be too much trouble, but you’ll have to stay here. Anything else?”
“I want to talk to my dad,” Preston said firmly.
Mr. Samara nodded as if he’d expected Preston’s request, and waved his hand for Preston to follow him.
“We have a special set-up for that,” he said over his shoulder. “Do you know what a green screen is?”
“You mean like the weatherman uses on TV? My dad told me about that.”
“Exactly like that. They use them a lot in the movies, too. So, now’s your chance to be like a movie star.”
They entered a room on the other side of the first office Preston had seen. This one was mostly empty except for a big green screen against one wall surrounded by high-intensity stage lights on stands with big rectangular diffuser screens. Computer gear covered a worktable outside the semi-circle of lights, some of the cables leading to a video camera mounted on a tripod directly in front of the table. Mr. Samara waved Preston toward the green screen and flipped switches on the worktable, bathing half the room in light. Preston felt the heat from the lamps, and squinted to see Mr. Samara in shadow behind the table.
A monitor on the table came to life and Preston saw himself standing in front of the green screen. As if by magic, the green disappeared, replaced by green several shades darker—the green grass of the mall. Now Preston stood on the grass with the Washington Monument behind him. Mr. Samara swiveled the laptop so the screen faced Preston, and Preston heard the sound of a phone ringing. And again, magically, the laptop screen came to life, revealing an empty office chair with a window behind it. Preston heard voices in the background, as if people in the office stood just out of camera range. One of them he recognized as his dad’s.
“Dad!” he called. “Dad! Dad!”
47
Beer cans lay strewn across the narrow room as if a tornado had ripped through a brewery. Freakishly, half a dozen rose from the table to form a pyramid, untouched by whatever storm had trashed the single-wide’s living room. Cigarette butts dangled on the rims of several. A few, still smoldering, had fallen to the table, scarring the faux wood with black burns. The sound of a car door slamming outside felt like a bomb going off in his skull. He groaned, pain filling his head like a rapidly expanding balloon, and shut the one eye that had surveyed the damage. The dull ache gradually lessened as the rumble of a car engine receded in the distance. When he opened the eye again, it took in the sight of a brown, patterned industrial carpet. In the center of his vision was a round, dark brown spot that looked for all the world like a bullet hole. Or maybe an eye staring back at him. As it came into focus, the spot turned into another cigarette burn. Jesus, it was a wonder he hadn’t burned the place down yet, with him in it.
As he lay there deciding what to do next, Jack Calhoun tried to remember why he was there in the first place. In dribs and drabs, the prior day’s events slowly came back to him. He’d started and ended the third week of employment at Jim Taylor’s car dealership, the fourth job he’d lost in six months. The job had actually been the best of the four. He’d found a vocation that suited him in most ways, since talking people out of something, whether a free beer down at Red’s or an extra large helping of hash browns at the diner, was an art he’d perfected over the years. Talking people out of their money and into a car seemed a natural extension of what he’d been doing most of his life.
Take that secretary, Belinda. It had taken him most of the three weeks at the dealership to talk her out of her panties, but damn if he hadn’t managed to convince her to join him in the parts room after lunch for a quick fuck. Of course, he hadn’t counted on the boss coming back from lunch early and catching them in the act when he stepped in to help a customer. Belinda had almost been worth it, too, except for the aggravating way she’d called him Billy-Ray several times on her way to an orgasm. With the rest of the afternoon free, he’d gone out and gotten drunk, and around midnight, when he hadn’t been able to talk any of the ladies at the bar into taking him home, he’d driven back to his own home and had polished off another couple of six-packs in front of the tube.
Now that he thought about it, he remembered walking home, not driving, and wondered what the hell he’d done with his truck. He sat up and waited for the room to stop spinning and the wave of nausea to pass. When it did, he stood and walked to the bathroom to take a piss. He startled at the sight of the face that confronted him in the mirror. Haggard, wan and unshaven, he looked older than thirty, an age he’d once thought ancient. The boyish charm was fading, but the worst was the bruised lump over his right eye. He frowned, and suddenly remembered the tree that had jumped out of the road at his truck. His face had slammed into the steering wheel right above the eyebrow.
Rachel was going to flip. Not about the girl. Belinda. Jack doubted Rachel would find out. She hadn’t found out about the dozen or so others Jack had screwed over the years they’d been married. And Jack could clean up the mess before she got back from a double shift at the hospital. Maybe even retrieve the truck, depending on what kind of condition it was in. But she’d sure as shit be pissed about him losing another job. If he didn’t start bringing in some regular money they could lose the trailer. He could get away with a lot where Rachel was concerned. She still melted when he touched her just so. He started getting hard just thinking about it. But the one thing that could be a deal-breaker between them was losing their home. It was one of the reasons she worked double shifts and took graveyard, for the extra pay.
He splashed cold water on his face, rolled on some deodorant under his T-shirt and wandered back out to the living room. Haphazardly, he collected empties, changing direction as fast as his mind jumped from one thought to the next. And in the back row, one thought niggled its way forward until jumping out and saying, “Ah-ha! Hello!” He’d been roused by the sounds of a car out front.
Whoever had stopped by was long gone, but curiosity got the best of him. He went to the front door, opened it and stepped out onto the small landing. As he suspected, no visitors. The nearest cars were out on the highway a couple hundred yards away. Their trailer was the last of six on a cul-de-sac just east of town, a little spur off another street lined with them on
both sides. The town had neighborhoods of real houses, but single-wides like theirs were just as common. He breathed in the autumn air and spotted Mrs. Daniels a few doors down lugging bags of groceries to her door.
“Morning, Anna-May,” he called.
The woman glanced at him with what looked like disgust—hard to tell at this distance—and hollered back, “Afternoon, you mean. And it’s Missus Daniels to you.”
He grinned and turned back to the trailer. That’s when he spotted the large manila envelope propped against the siding next to the door. He glanced down the street. Mrs. Daniels had retreated into her trailer, so he bent down, plucked the envelope between his thumb and two fingers and took it inside. A glance at the neat, block printing on the front made him instantly forget his hangover. The enveloped was addressed to his father-in-law, care of Rachel. He sat down on the couch and turned the envelope over in his fingers.
To say there was no love lost between Jack and Zane Keator was an understatement. Zane had despised Jack the moment they’d been introduced. Jack knew part of it was that no guy, not just Jack, would ever be good enough for Rachel in Zane’s eyes. Jack had seen that kind of response before in the fathers of girls he’d dated. No big surprise there. But Jack’s easy charm had never worked on Zane, as if the man had x-ray vision and saw right through a lifetime’s layers of bullshit to Jack’s core. Not very deep, granted. Jack didn’t fool himself into thinking he was some complex, profound thinker. He knew what he was, liked the fact that he was content with life’s simple pleasures. Why get complicated? But Zane’s dislike was so complete that he’d ended up cutting Rachel, his only daughter, out of his life completely. That was cold.
The fact that he held an envelope with Zane’s name on it suggested that Zane planned to visit, an event Jack thought he’d never witness in his lifetime. Which meant that Zane wanted and/or needed something. Maybe what was in the envelope. Jack’s internal debate lasted all of six seconds. He pulled out his pocketknife and slit the envelope open. Tipping it upside-down, he dumped the contents into his other hand. A standard, white, #10 envelope slid out. The flap was tucked inside. He reached in and pulled it out, spread the opening wide and peered in at the contents. Five cards—two credit cards, a driver’s license, a health insurance ID, and an AAA membership card. Jack picked them out and took a look. All were issued to Michael J. Zeman. But the photo on the driver’s license was Zane. Older, grayer, but definitely Zane.
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