by Harlan Coben
“Go on,” Dash said.
“A television report just aired,” Chambers said. “There’s a young girl missing. Her name is Naomi Pine.”
Dash looked at Delia. Delia shrugged.
“And?”
“Naomi goes to school with Crash. They are in several classes together.”
“I’m still not sure—”
“She’s been communicating with your son. Texts mostly. Also the journalist who reported her missing just now? Her name is Hester Crimstein. Her grandson Matthew is downstairs with Crash.”
Delia put the student papers down on the side table. “I still don’t see how this connects to us, Colonel.”
Chambers said, “Neither do I…”
“So?”
“…yet.” Then for emphasis, Chambers repeated the sentence: “Neither do I yet.” He stood at attention and stared straight ahead. “But with all due respect, I don’t believe in coincidences, especially right now.”
“What do you think we should do about it?”
“I think we need to talk to your son and figure out his relationship to Naomi—” His phone buzzed. He put it to his ear with a snap, almost as though he were saluting a superior officer. “Yes?”
After three seconds, Gavin Chambers pocketed the phone.
“Don’t leave this room,” he told them. “There’s been an incident.”
* * *
Racing along Skyline Drive toward Maynard Manor—man, what a pompous name—Wilde hoped to feel his phone buzz with another text from Matthew.
It didn’t.
The last text just kept coming back to Wilde, taunting him: Something bad is going down.
Wilde might not go with his gut—that was what he’d told Hester—but as he turned into the manor’s driveway, every instinct told him that he should pay heed to that message.
Something bad is going down.
Maynard Manor sat atop thirty acres of disputed mountain the Ramapough people claimed as their own. There were barns for a dozen horses and a track for steeple jumping and a pool and a tennis court and who knew what else. The centerpiece was an enormous Classical Revival Georgian home, built by an oil tycoon in the Roaring Twenties. The upkeep on the thirty-five-room estate had been so steep that the manor had fallen into disrepair for nearly a quarter century, until Dash Maynard, mega television producer and cable-network owner, and his wife, Delia, swept in and brought the place back to its former splendor and then some.
From the ornate gate where Wilde had to stop, the manor house was still a solid quarter-mile drive up the mountain. Wilde could see some distant lights, but that was about it. He pressed the intercom button while checking his phone, hoping maybe he just didn’t feel the buzz.
Nothing from Matthew.
He sent another text: I’m at the guard gate.
“May I help you?” the intercom said.
Wilde had his driver’s license out. He held it up to the camera.
“I’m here for Matthew Crimstein.”
Silence.
“Matthew is a friend of Crash’s.”
“What’s your relationship to him?”
“To Matthew?”
“Yes.”
Odd question. “I’m his godfather.”
“And what is the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m here to pick him up.”
“He arrived in Mason Perdue’s vehicle. We were told that he was leaving with him.”
“Well, the plans have changed.”
Silence.
Wilde said, “Hello?”
“One moment, please.”
Time passed.
Wilde hit the intercom button again.
No reply.
He pressed down on the button and held it down.
Nothing.
He checked for wires near the gate. None. The fence had no electrocution setup. That was good. It was high with spiked tops, but none of that would be an issue. There were security cameras, of course, lots of them. That didn’t matter to him either. If anything, he wanted to be seen.
Wilde threw the car into park and stepped out. He eyed the gate. Twelve feet high, he guessed. Bars spaced six inches apart. The seam where both halves of the metal gate met would be the way to go. Thicker bar. Get a running start. Just up and over. Wilde had spent his life climbing—mountains, trees, rocks, walls, as a child, as a civilian, as a soldier. This gate, even with the spikes on top of every bar, would offer him little resistance.
He took two large steps toward the gate when he heard the voice from the speaker say, “Halt. Do not—”
He didn’t hear the rest.
Wilde leapt, his foot hitting the bar in midstride. He hoisted himself up, as though running vertically, grabbed the bars with both hands, and tucked his legs. He spun, let go with his left hand, and put his feet out. The soles of his shoes hit the bars on the other side, slowing him. He let go and dropped to the ground as two cars sped toward him.
Not one car. Two.
That seemed like overkill.
Or maybe not. Dash Maynard had been in the news lately. Rumor had it—a rumor Dash Maynard adamantly denied—that he videoed everything when people were on his shows, including conversations in the dressing rooms. Rumor further had it that these videos could take down a lot of top celebrities and politicians, most notably former self-help guru and current United States senator Rusty Eggers, the budding tyrant running for president and gaining ground.
Both cars pointed their headlights at him and screeched to a stop. Four men, two from each car, got out. Wilde kept his hands out where they could see them. The last thing he wanted was for someone to do something stupid.
The two from his left, big men, began to approach him. They both had their chests puffed out, their arms swinging with a little too much alpha preening. One wore a hoodie. The other, the one sporting dyed-Thor locks, had a suit jacket that didn’t fit well.
Didn’t fit well, Wilde noted, because he had a gun holster under the left armpit.
Wilde had known too many guys like these two. They wouldn’t be an issue, except for the weapon. He braced himself, sifting through his options, but the man who got out of the car on the right—close-cropped gray hair, military bearing—held up a hand and stopped them. Clearly the leader.
“Hey there,” Gray Hair shouted to Wilde. “Nice fence hop.”
“Thanks.”
“Please keep your hands visible at all times.”
“I’m not armed.”
“We can’t let you go any farther.”
“I don’t have any interest in going any farther,” Wilde said. “I’m here for my godson, Matthew Crimstein.”
“I understand. But we have a policy.”
“Policy?”
“All the minors who entered tonight had to inform us of how they were leaving,” he began, the very voice of reason. “We clearly explained to them that no one is allowed in unless they are specifically invited or properly vetted. Matthew Crimstein came in with Mason Perdue. That was who Matthew told us he would be leaving with. Now you show up unannounced…”
He spread his hands, not only the voice of reason but the very essence of reason. “Do you see our dilemma?”
“So contact Matthew.”
“We have a policy about not disturbing social gatherings.”
“Lots of policies,” Wilde said.
“Helps keep the order.”
“I want to see my godson.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible at this time.” The gate behind him opened. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.”
Gray Hair might have smiled.
“I’m going to ask you one more time.”
“Matthew texted me to pick him up now. So that’s what I’m doing.”
“If you’ll just go back to the other side of the gate—”
“Yeah, again, that’s not happening.”
The big guys didn’t like Wil
de’s attitude. They furrowed their rather enormous brows. Dyed-Thor turned to Gray Hair, hoping for permission to take this to the next level.
“You have no legal standing, Mr. Wilde.” The use of his name threw him, but only for a millisecond. He’d shown his driver’s license at the gate. “You’re not the boy’s father, are you?”
Gray Hair smiled. He knew the answer, more specifically than just the part about Wilde being Matthew’s godfather, which meant somehow he knew the history.
“More to the point, you’re a trespasser who illegally scaled our security fence.”
They all took a step closer. Wilde stared straight ahead, at the leader, but using his peripheral vision, he could see Thor sidle a little closer, hunching down like he was some sort of invisible ninja. Wilde didn’t shift his eyes.
Gray Hair said, “We would be within our rights to meet your threat with physical force.”
So they were there now, all of them, standing on the same narrow precipice off which so many men over the entire course of human history had slipped and then plunged into bloody violence. Wilde still didn’t believe that they would go there, that they would risk a big incident which might make the news or social media and awaken whatever controversy had finally quieted down. But you never know. That was the thing with the precipice. It was slippery. The best-laid plans do indeed go awry.
Man may be evil or good, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that man rarely considered the consequences of his actions.
In short, man was often just plain stupid.
That was when it all changed.
At first, the change was noticed only by Wilde. For scant seconds, the knowledge was his and his alone. Two seconds, maybe three, no more. Then, he knew, this advantage—and the change would be, he hoped, an advantage—would be null and void.
Wilde felt what he had come to know as The Disturbance.
There were those who called it an omen or a harbinger or a premonition, something that gave his already heightened capabilities a supernatural undertone. But that wasn’t it. Not really. Over the millenniums, man has adapted both for better and worse. A recent example: Navigation GPS. Studies show that parts of our brain—the hippocampus (the region used for navigation) and the prefrontal cortex (associated with planning) are already changing, perhaps even atrophying, because we now rely on GPS navigation. That’s happened in a few years. But take the whole spectrum of mankind’s history, how we sat in caves and forests, sleeping figuratively with one eye open, no protection, our primitive survival instinct in overdrive, and then think of how that has softened and eroded over the years with the advent of homes and locked doors and civilization’s give and take. But Wilde didn’t have that. From the time he could remember, Wilde grew up with those primitive impulses awakened. He understood before he could articulate it that a predator could attack at any time. He learned to sense it, to be attuned to any sort of Disturbance.
You still see this in nature, of course, in animals with supersensitive hearing or smell or sight, who flee before the danger gets too close. Wilde had this ability too.
So he’d heard the sound. No one else had. Yet.
It was just a rustling. That was all. But someone was running toward them. More than one probably. Someone was in danger and sprinting fast. Someone else was giving chase.
Without so much as glancing away from Gray Hair, Wilde glided a little closer to Thor. He wanted to be as close to the armed man as possible.
A second later, no more, Wilde heard the scream: “Help!”
Matthew.
This was where Wilde had to fight off his instincts and let his training take over. Instinct told him to run toward his godson’s cry. That would be the natural reaction. But Wilde had braced for this moment. The scream, coming from behind Gray Hair and up the hill toward the house, made all heads turn. That, too, was natural and expected. If you hadn’t known that the scream was a possibility, you couldn’t help but react.
Thor looked in the direction of Matthew’s scream too.
And away from Wilde.
That was all the opening Wilde needed. The rest took a second, no more. Spinning with his left elbow at the ready, Wilde struck Thor in the side of his head. At the same time, before Thor could stumble back, Wilde’s right hand dove into the opening of the jacket. His fingers found the butt of the gun in the holster under Thor’s arm.
By the time Matthew yelled “Help!” for a second time, Thor was on the ground, and Wilde had the gun up and aimed, moving the muzzle between Gray Hair and the other two men.
Wilde said, “Breathe wrong and I’ll shoot you dead.”
From the ground, Thor groaned and lunged toward him. Wilde kicked him in the head. The slapping of feet on driveway drew closer. For a second, they all waited. Matthew turned the corner, sprinting seemingly for his life, two other boys not far behind him.
Matthew pulled up, a look of confusion crossing his face. The two other boys did the same.
“Go through the gate,” Wilde told Matthew. “Get in the car.”
“But—”
“Do it.”
One of the boys said, “We were just playing, is all. Tell him, Matthew. Tell him we were just playing.”
Keeping his hands in the air, Gray Hair slid in front of the boy speaking. “Stay behind me, Crash.”
“It’s just a game,” Crash said.
“A game,” Wilde repeated.
“Yeah, it’s called Midnight Skull.” He pointed to the smile-skull ring on his hand. “It’s like night tag. Tell him, Matthew.”
Matthew didn’t move. His eyes were glassy with near tears. In the distance, Wilde heard a car engine start. Reinforcements.
“Matthew, car now!”
Matthew snapped out of it and hurried toward the gate. Walking backward so as to keep the gun aimed at them, Wilde did the same. He kept his eyes on Gray Hair. He was the leader. The others wouldn’t make a move without him. Gray Hair nodded as if to say, It’s okay, get out of here, we won’t stop you.
Ten seconds later, Wilde sped away with Matthew in the seat next to him.
CHAPTER
NINE
Hester was back in her limo when she saw the calls coming in.
She’d expected that. You can’t just drop a bomb like this one about a missing girl and not expect something to explode. It was, in fact, her hope—that someone would come forward or act or make a mistake or do something so that they’d know what really happened. Right now, when you added all the pros and cons, the options and possibilities, Hester figured that the girl had run off and was perhaps contemplating suicide. Not to be too cold and analytical, but if the awful task were already completed, well, there was nothing anyone could do. But if Naomi had taken pills, for example, or slit her wrists, or maybe she was just off someplace, standing on the edge of a high-rise or bridge, then this was the best chance to save her.
Then again—because you have to see every side—maybe Hester’s pushing would do the opposite. Maybe it would make the girl panic and act or, if she were being held, maybe it would make the kidnappers react with violence. Hester understood the risks. But she was not a woman who took stock in inaction.
The first call she took had a caller ID that read CHIEF WESTVILLE POLICE. That would be Oren, she thought.
“That was fast,” Hester said.
“Huh?”
“I mean, I’m flattered, Oren, but next time, wait a few days. It makes you look a little desperate.”
“Uh, I am a little desperate. What the hell was that report, Hester?”
“You saw it? Thanks for being a fan.”
“Do I sound like I’m in the mood?”
“Something isn’t right with Naomi’s disappearance,” Hester said.
“Then you should come to me.”
“I did, remember?”
“I do. So what changed?”
“Her father said Naomi was with the mother. The mother said she’s not with her. Her teacher—”
�
�Wait, you talked to her teacher.”
“Art teacher or guidance counselor or something, I don’t remember. Ava something.”
“When did you have time to talk to her?”
This part would not go so smoothly. “I didn’t. Wilde did.”
Silence.
“Oren?”
“Wilde? You got Wilde involved in this?”
“Look, Oren, I probably should have given you a heads-up before I went on the air—”
“Probably?”
“—but I have a really bad feeling. You need to put some resources into this.”
Silence.
“Oren?”
“Matthew put you onto this,” Oren said. “Why?”
Now it was her turn to be silent.
“Whatever your grandson is hiding, he has to come clean now. You know this.”
* * *
As they sped off from Maynard Manor, Wilde asked, “What happened?”
“It’s like Crash said,” Matthew said through a wince. He was still trying to catch his breath. “We were playing a game.”
“You’re going to lie to me now?”
Matthew blinked back the tears. “You can’t tell Mom.”
“I’m not going to.”
“Good.”
“Because you are.”
“No way. I’ll tell you, but we can’t tell her.”
“Sorry, it isn’t going to work that way.”
“Then I’m not telling you a thing.”
“Yeah, Matthew, you are. You’re going to tell me what happened. And then you’re going to tell your mother.”
He hung his head.
“Matthew?”
“Okay.”
“So what happened?”
“Did you know what Nana was going to do?”
“Do?”
“She went on the air about Naomi. She told everyone she’s missing.”
Wilde had wondered whether that was going to be her next move. Hester had been worried about leads drying up. What better way to beat the brush?
“What did she say?”
“I didn’t really hear it,” Matthew said. “But Crash and Kyle and the others did.”
“And they got upset?”
Matthew started blinking.
“Matthew?”
“Crash kneed me in the balls.” More tears came to Matthew’s eyes. A few spilled out.