by David Pepper
Cassie maintained a casual pose, legs crossed and leaning back. She knew what was coming.
Sue typed for a few more seconds.
“Oh, I see now. Darn.”
“What? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. But you’re not going to be able to interview Kat Simmons.”
As she expected.
“Shoot. Why not?”
“Because she’s one of our remote students. It’s a program we started two years ago.”
“Remote?”
“Yeah. Students take all their classes online. Tests, too. It’s really helped us expand enrollment and is more accommodating to students with families.”
Genius, Cassie thought. Escape the scene of the crime, enroll in a school two thousand miles away, and then attend remotely so you’re even further off the grid.
“So how can I get in touch with her? Is she in another part of the state?”
For the first time, Sue Schwartz looked at Cassie askance. “They can do it from anywhere. But we can’t give out that kind of private information. You’re going to have to interview someone else.”
“Too bad. Sounded like she would’ve given good feedback for you guys.”
“That is too bad. But we’ve got rules here. Let me see if I can find any others.”
Two hours later Cassie walked out of the old building and back past the Gates and Allen Centers, stewing.
The students lavished praise on the school and were eager to make a difference in the world. To their credit, they believed that politics could once again be about policy. Cassie hoped they were right.
But guilt dampened her mood. Each student had skipped his next class to talk to her, and she’d scheduled times later in the week when they’d connect up via satellite to do the actual interviews. “You guys are perfect,” she’d assured them, a relieved Sue Schwartz beaming next to them. But in a few days she’d call to inform them that the story had been canned. The story that never was.
Before heading back to the airport, Cassie had one more stop to make. After a short walk, she grabbed a seat on a wooden bench near the fountain, close enough that tiny droplets of water kissed her face as a light breeze blew through. From her seat, Mount Rainier towered in the background, a dense green forest beneath it. The yellow and gray construction equipment remained in the foreground, along with even more trees and bushes encircling much of the fountain.
This was the view she’d seen on Sue Schwartz’s computer, the one she’d seen once before.
She took out her phone and called up Kat Simmons’s profile once again on Facebook. Because they weren’t friends, she could only see what Kat had chosen for the whole world to see. But what Kat displayed told Cassie everything she needed to know.
First, the location listed on Kat Simmons’s page was Seattle, not some remote town far from UW.
Second, the third-most-recent photo displayed was a selfie. In it, Kat looked every bit the grad student, wearing a ponytail, glasses, and a UW Huskies sweatshirt. But it was where she was standing that mattered even more: within yards of where Cassie now sat, the cascading water of that fountain in the foreground, Mount Rainier rising behind it, trees all around. But, as in the picture on Sue Schwartz’s computer, one element was missing. There was no construction equipment anywhere in the shot.
Cassie cast a knowing smile.
It was absolutely perfect. A postcard-worthy image placing Kat Simmons in the Pacific Northwest studiously pursuing her master’s degree. Holed up and off the radar.
Unless someone was enterprising enough to fly thousands of miles for a site visit, there would be no way to know it was Photoshopped from the campus’s website.
CHAPTER 57
I-80, EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA
Oh my God!”
Tori’s words began as a shriek and ended as a wail. She twisted her head toward her window and pushed the phone away with her left hand.
“What? What is it?”
We were forty minutes outside of New York, driving west amid the placid waters and rolling, wooded hills of the Delaware Water Gap, when her phone vibrated.
“It’s my campaign manager!”
“What about him? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. His face is cut to pieces.”
Shaking, she angled the phone in my direction.
I swallowed hard, smothering the nausea building in my throat.
I’d visited morgues. I’d covered deadly accidents. I’d paced murder scenes. All had provided stomach-churning glimpses of lives that ended horribly. But nothing like the mangled, bloody mess on her screen. The kid’s cheeks were gone, what was left of them a combination of wet, pink flesh and skull. His nose was no longer there, the center of his face now flat with two oozy, oversized holes not far below his eyes. In contrast, the eyes were fully intact—both buggy and glassy—freezing into place the sheer horror that must have marked this kid’s final seconds alive. And it looked like his ears were gone, too. With his lips removed, both rows of teeth were fully visible in a haunting grimace. And a deep gash stretched across his neck, opening an inch-high window into the purple flesh inside.
Beyond the gore, each wound was so intentional, the slices symmetrical. Like a turkey after Dad had finished carving.
I grabbed the phone and placed it facedown on my lap.
“Are you sure that’s him?”
“I’m sure.”
The phone vibrated again. Tori recoiled as if it might bite.
I picked it up, my heart pounding.
It wasn’t another photo but a text message. Thankfully, the photo had scrolled up so that the chin and neck were the only parts still visible.
Greetings Victoria.
An ellipsis appeared as new words were being typed. I alternated between watching the road and the screen.
After losing his ears, he told me who you are.
“What is it?” she asked, shaking. “Another photo?”
More words appeared.
But he wouldn’t tell me where you are.
Another pause.
So I had no choice.
“Just some texts.”
“From who? What do they say?”
“It’s sort of cryptic.”
Regrettable.
“I’m not a child, Jack. What do they say?”
My skin prickled with alarm as I contemplated the messages. The violence was bad enough, even if the tone was oddly polite. The monster knew her phone number. He knew her name.
Before I could react, she snatched the phone out of my hand.
“Oh, no.” Her voice steadied, her initial horror swelling into anger. “They killed him to find me.”
She leaned forward in the seat, gripping the phone with both hands. Her thumbs lifted as she prepared to type a message back.
“Stop! Don’t type a thing.”
“Why not?”
“This was sent to spark a reaction. Your reaction. We can’t write back.”
“Jack, two people have died because of me,” she said, practically yelling. “What are we supposed to do? Keep letting it happen?”
I paused, choosing my words carefully.
“This person is clearly a professional. And he gave up the element of surprise. He wouldn’t have sent this if he had another way of finding you. This is desperation.”
“Desperation?” She glared at me like I was nuts. “Aren’t we the ones who are desperate?”
“It may feel that way, but no. They are desperate to find you, and now he’s trying to smoke us out. Let’s keep him guessing.”
She handed me the phone. “I don’t want to think about it.”
We drove another ten minutes in silence, crossing the Pennsylvania line. The combination of dusk and low clouds dimmed everything around us to a stormy gray
.
The phone buzzed again, and I picked it up.
The first image that came through looked like an odd-shaped piece of undercooked meat. A pinkish-tan oval with a circular chunk missing from one side.
Normally, I wouldn’t have guessed that it was a human body part. But because of the prior texts, seconds of studying the image made clear what it was. A human ear, removed from its head. Disgust turned to anger. The sender had already shown us the dead kid’s butchered face, so why a separate image of his removed ear?
The next image, seconds later, chilled me.
The photo was a profile shot, but not of the campaign manager. The person in it was very much alive. And the hawk nose, the buzz cut, the protruding chin, gave him away immediately. But below where his buzz cut ended, a semicircle of ooze appeared, a hole in its center—where his ear used to be.
“What now?” Tori asked, clearly reading the alarm on my face.
“Tori, you do not want to see this.” I shifted the phone to my left hand so she couldn’t grab it again.
“What is it?”
“They have your dad.”
* * *
• • •
No daughter was going to sit idly by as her own dad was tortured to death, so I gave in. We would respond.
I pulled into a rest area near a town called Stroudsburg, navigating a maze of snoozing semis and RVs to find a parking spot.
What do you want? I texted, somehow feeling better if I served as the middleman.
Is this Victoria?
No.
Who is this?
Her boyfriend.
A pause. Tori wiped her red eyes, then leaned over to watch the conversation.
If you lie to me again he will lose his other ear . . . Who is this?
A friend trying to keep her safe.
He didn’t care about me. What he wanted was to find Tori and eliminate her.
What do you want?
I want her father to live. He agrees. But only she can make that happen.
“Jack, we need to do what he says.”
And how can she do that? I typed.
She must come home.
Then what?
Then we will talk.
Tori shook my left shoulder. My guess is she meant it to be gentle. It wasn’t.
“Jack, tell him we’re coming. Please. We can’t do this to him. My God, he already lost an ear. That monster cut off my dad’s ear.”
“Your dad would not want you to go home, Tori.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. But I don’t care. We have to help him.”
“Help? Look at what he’s already done. This guy is out to kill you and will kill me and your dad as soon as he gets rid of you.”
“I don’t care, Jack,” Tori said, almost yelling again, shaking even more than before. “We’re not leaving my dad alone any longer.”
I couldn’t say no.
We will drive back to the farm.
When?
Now.
CHAPTER 58
CLEVELAND
Through large glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, the gray-haired nurse zeroed in on her target. She thrust the needle into his spindly arm, below his armpit, creating the lifesaving conduit between the gray bag hanging above his head and the quarter-sized port implanted under his pale, loose skin.
The needle’s pinch was hardly noticeable. What he dreaded was what would come next.
“Are you comfortable?” the nurse asked, walking toward the door of the palatial private room at the Cleveland Clinic.
“I am.”
But Oleg Kazarov wasn’t comfortable. Nothing about the circumstances—the treatment, the room, the old city on the lake—comforted him. Even worse was the weakness. The lethargy. The grogginess had already set in after the previous day’s chemotherapy and would surely intensify along with the nausea. And it was on the second day that sudden jolts of pain would flare up throughout his body like earthquakes along fault lines in his bones, in his joints, in the blood vessels just below the skin. The permanent low-grade headaches would also kick in soon.
But worse than even those side effects was the distance.
From his earliest days, he had seized full and direct control of every enterprise he ever led. The initial takeover of a Soviet-era energy concern in the nineties. His successful expansion into Siberia and eastern Europe. The development of fracking technology. The foray into the United States’ Midwest and the perfectly timed acquisition of a dying election equipment company to secure his American operation’s success. Step by step, he’d risen from his humble Leningrad beginnings to unimaginable riches by exercising fanatical oversight of all aspects of his operations. Of course, he delegated tasks, but all the big decisions came to him.
But because of the port lodged in his arm and the chemicals about to flow through it, he’d been forced to loosen that iron grip. And, most frustrating, this was all occurring amid the most audacious enterprise he’d ever pursued.
As the nurse closed the door behind her, drops of fluid fell from the bag, one every few seconds, worming their way down to the bottom of the translucent tube. Kazarov watched each trickle impatiently. With voracious cancer cells eating away at him from within, these meandering droplets presented such a timid response. So unnecessarily slow when the cancer was so aggressive and he had such important work to do.
He trusted Katrina more than anyone in his life. She was family and the only person alive who understood him. On his first visit to Brooklyn, he could already see the nascent genius within his young niece, smothered by her deplorable circumstances, waiting to be unleashed. So he’d arranged for the best schools and private tutoring along with the sudden exit of her drunk, derelict father. Apart from his corporate conquests, Katrina’s success had become his most important mission. And, elevated by his intervention, she’d surpassed every expectation he’d had.
The liquid amassed at the tube’s curved bottom until the pressure pushed it up the other side, through the port, and into his arm. He eased back in the leather chair. Comforted that the cocktail of poison was about to renew the months-long battle inside him, he closed his eyes.
After attaining her PhD and leaving several unsatisfying posts in corporate America, Katrina had flown to London and lobbied that they work together. And he’d agreed, having always assumed that she’d someday take the reins of his empire.
He hadn’t expected it to be so soon.
He cursed himself for his obstinance, having endured months of burning pain in his lower abdomen before finally consulting his London physician. Days later the doctor delivered the bleak news: an aggressive cancer was ravaging his bladder and nearby lymph nodes, giving him only a 30 percent chance to live. To beat those odds, his doctor insisted on an immediate trip to America for intensive treatment. He flew to Cleveland three days later for testing and, a few weeks after that, relocated to the Ohio city to receive the best care on the planet.
That was five months ago.
“All flowing well?” a woman’s voice asked.
He opened his eyes to see a young nurse strolling through the door, a bright smile beaming across her intensely tan face.
“I believe so.”
He scowled as he cast her a glassy stare. It happened each round. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, just as he’d escape to faraway thoughts and places, an intrusion would pull him back into this cold room.
The bronzed nurse inspected his arm, then examined the bag, which still was full.
“All looks nice and clean,” she said before walking out as quickly as she’d appeared.
Kazarov said nothing as the door closed behind her. He closed his eyes again.
The original idea had been all Katrina’s: he’d been too narrowly focused to notice. She’d been an idealist since childhood, so it hadn’t surprised him. Not long after joining him in L
ondon, she explained that a small number of corporate giants—including the two she had worked for—were squeezing the life out of the American economy. After he requested a deeper analysis, she delivered binders of articles and a short academic book that he spent a week absorbing.
And she was right.
Banking, agriculture, natural resources, new technology, airlines, media—a few behemoths dominated sector after sector of the world’s largest marketplace. It reminded him of the calcified economic structure that was impeding progress in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
“If the system ever changes as proposed here,” she predicted, holding up a copy of the book she’d given him, “there will be vast riches to be gained in a liberated American marketplace.”
He initially dismissed it as academic theory. But as she talked about it again and again, they brainstormed a plan to take advantage of this structural weakness in the American economy. Which industries presented the greatest opportunities? Which partners should they bring in? How to structure it all?
But the biggest obstacle involved the politics of Washington. Since initiating his American operation, Kazarov had seen it all up close. The wheels were greased by large corporate dollars. No doubt, a primary goal of those corporate dollars was to ensure that the top-heavy system remained in place. Getting around the stranglehold of that money to topple the American system was a necessary step, but his experience told him it posed an almost insurmountable obstacle. He’d pulled it off once, but on a much smaller scale.
For a time they were stumped, especially since Congress had clamped down on voting machine security since his last endeavor. Then came two more breakthrough observations that, along with good timing, illuminated the path forward.
It finally hit.
Like a thick blanket pushing down every inch of his body, a paralyzing languor fell over him, clouding all his senses. His head suddenly weighed as much as a boulder, too much for his emaciated neck to bare, so he leaned back farther in the chair, placing his head against its cushion.