by Abbott, Jeff
The unexpected words, delivered with a twist of steel, froze him.
‘Barbara died in an accident. Anything else is a lie.’
‘She did, she did. A well-timed accident.’
‘It was an accident! It was!’
‘But now, he won’t believe you, Henry. You’re the nowhere man: always on the fringes, always laughing a bit late at every joke, who has to practice his smile. You finally get a family after years of being alone, one too good for you, and you toss it all away. I doubt Barbara Dantry and Luke ever quite recognized the stray dog they let in their house was a wolf.’
Every word was a pile-driving fist, through bone and brain. Henry sucked in a harsh breath. ‘I’ll give you the money. Please—’
‘I want you to understand that if you don’t transfer the money within thirty minutes, Luke is dead.’
Oh, God. God, no, he thought. ‘Eric has the code for the accounts. Not me,’ he said. ‘Please don’t hurt Luke, I’ll find the money …’
‘Eric doesn’t have the money.’
‘Jane, he does. He’s lied to you.’ And they would kill Luke now, he was useless to them. No, no, no. ‘That’s why I couldn’t give you the money before. Please. Believe me. Please …’
Jane hung up.
He fumbled on the phone. There was no call log; it had been disabled. No way to call back.
Henry drank the whiskey, very slowly. The shaking in his hands stopped. He drank another, neat. Then he poured the rest of the bottle down the sink.
She might be killing Luke right now. Right now, while you stand crying over a sink, whiskey on your breath, and you have caused the death of the one remaining person in the world that you care about, Henry thought.
The phone rang. The phone he used only with Mouser. Mouser’s voice sounded raspy, hard, tinged with fury. ‘Luke identified Eric Lindoe as his kidnapper.’
‘Is Luke okay? Tell me you have him.’
‘Oh, I’ll get him back for you. He stabbed me in the leg and he ran.’
‘Why did he stab you? I told you not to hurt him …’
‘He knows we came from you, Henry, and you’re on his shit list. Watch your back. Your boy is pissed and apparently able to fight.’
The warning coasted over Henry’s ears. Luke was alive. And out of Jane’s clutches. Or maybe she had recaptured him after he escaped Mouser? ‘You sure someone else didn’t grab him?’
‘Not sure, but he was free as a bird last time I saw him.’
Then Jane was bluffing. He had to fight back, he had to find this woman, find out who she was. And destroy her. ‘I don’t understand. Why would Eric Lindoe turn against us and target Luke?’
‘Luke says some Brit bitch named Jane used him as ransom for Eric’s woman. This Jane thought you could deliver the fifty million, but Eric must have already hidden it. If he hasn’t given it to her, then Eric has it. We have to find him.’
Henry wiped sweat from his jaw. ‘Eric lied to us all. Including this Jane. She made him kidnap Luke to force my hand, and he did it to cover up that he had taken the money. She must have asked him for it originally and he convinced her he didn’t have the access. That I did.’ Oh, Christ, Luke’s life destroyed by a single lie. ‘Eric hasn’t given Jane the money. She just called me, thinking I could get it for her.’ Henry sank to the couch. ‘I don’t understand. Luke stabbed you?’ Luke, fighting two nutcase extremists with experience in murder and combat? He could not picture the scene.
‘I wonder, Henry, how well you know Luke. He seems far more capable than you gave him credit for.’
‘I … I don’t understand.’
‘It’s simple. He’s loose. He is a danger to us.’
‘No. I can take care of him.’
Henry thought quickly. ‘I’m going to put tracers on every friend Luke has, anyone he might turn to for help … the police will do the same, but we must be smarter than the police. And faster. We have to find Eric. And we have to find Luke. I can make Luke understand.’
‘That I doubt.’
‘I can.’ Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘And if he’s been as smart as you say, he might be very useful to us. Listen, I’m sorry he stabbed you. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. But I’m not happy. Find where he’s at and I’ll bring him back to you. Maybe in one piece.’
Luke, running. With Mouser and Snow and now that bastard Drummond all after him. What would he do? Come here? No. Washington was too far. And he wouldn’t trust Henry now, and he might believe the police were watching Henry, waiting for Luke to show. How else would he try to clear his name?
Eric. Eric, if forced to confess, could clear Luke’s name of murder.
‘He’ll go after Eric.’ Just like he chased after his father’s ghost, all the way down to Cape Hatteras. ‘We find Eric, we find Luke.’
Henry felt charged with the fire of battle. He could win. He called a Night Road hacker, ordered him to find any records in the airlines or credit card databases that indicated where Eric Lindoe or Luke Dantry had gone. Over time, he had found hackers with backdoors into such valuable databases. If they were not motivated by Night Road-style ideology, they were motivated by money.
His hunters, either on the ground, or electronic, would find Luke, and faster than Drummond could. He did not need to worry about warrants and permission. He did not want to think about Luke not believing him, and what awful sacrifice he might have to suffer. All he had to worry about was telling, and selling, the greatest lie of his life.
13
For twenty minutes Luke ran, walked, ran again through the woods. He crossed open fields, cleared for cattle or horses, and he felt vulnerable and alone in the open. The pine trees, when he could stay in their dense growth, were like having a shield. He stumbled out onto a road, close to a bridge on the river. He had no idea where he was and he kept glancing over his shoulder.
He saw a teenage boy in a yellow slicker then, trudging up from the swollen riverbanks.
‘Hi,’ the boy said. ‘Which search team were you with?’
‘Oh,’ Luke said. ‘I got separated from my search team. I’m a friend of the Olmsteads, staying at their place on the river for a few days.’ He tried not to talk too fast or let his nervousness seep into his words. ‘Just thought I’d help. But I’m useless, I don’t know the country around here.’
‘Well, I can give you a lift back to the search base.’
‘Thank you.’
He followed the kid along the thin stretch of paved road, thinking if this kid’s been involved in the search for the trucker, then maybe he hasn’t seen the rest of the news with my face on it. He couldn’t dwell over-much on the trucker. If he did the guilt would overwhelm him and he’d make a mistake and be caught or dead. He could not bring the trucker back to life if he hadn’t made it out of the river. But he could be sure that Mouser and Snow paid for what they did.
A red truck sat at the edge of the road. The kid offered his hand and said, ‘My name’s Dumont.’
‘Hi, Dumont, I’m Warren,’ Luke lied. Using his dad’s name felt easy and right. He shook the kid’s hand. They got into the truck.
‘I feel bad for this gentleman’s family. Wondering when we’re going to find him.’ Dumont wheeled the truck south - away from the house where Luke had hidden. He tried not to sag against the door in relief.
‘You look exhausted, man,’ Dumont said.
‘Didn’t sleep well. The storm kept me up.’ He stared out the window. Mouser was out of play for maybe just a few minutes, unless Luke had hurt him worse than he thought, but where was Snow? And how on earth was he going to find Eric?
They turned onto a main road that headed toward the town of Braintree and a Mercedes shot by them. He could see snow-white hair at the wheel and thought she might notice if he ducked suddenly. So he stayed put and rubbed his face with his hand.
‘You sure you okay?’ Dumont asked. He sounded as though he were doubting his decision to offer this odd stranger a ride.
In the rearview he watched the Mercedes vanish over a rise in the road. No glow of brake lights, no indication she’d spotted him. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just tired.’ He had to get out of this area now. He needed to know where Eric and Aubrey had gone. There had to be a clue in something Eric and Aubrey had said or done. Something he’d seen. He began to blink past his exhaustion and tried to replay every nuance when Eric spoke from the beginning.
The truck pulled into a parking lot of a small motel, filled with police cars.
Police. His face had been all over the news, and there was probably an APB out on him.
To one side stood a news crew associated with a Houston station - a single reporter, a cameraman - interviewing rescuers. The media was more of a threat - they for sure would have seen his face on broadcasts.
‘Thanks, Dumont,’ Luke said. ‘I appreciate the lift.’ He opened Dumont’s truck door and stepped out into the rain.
The reporter, forty feet away, wiped rain from her face and raised a hand. ‘Hey! Y’all just get back in from the search?’
Oh, God, Luke thought. He turned and walked away, toward a tent set up for the search parties.
How the hell was he supposed to get out of here? Steal a car? He had no idea how to, and while breaking into a cottage for warmth and food after being starved for a day and surviving a cold river seemed forgivable, grand theft auto did not.
‘Warren, hey man!’
He glanced over his shoulder and saw Dumont standing with the reporter, gesturing at him to join them.
Luke forced a smile, mimed a shiver and drinking coffee. He waved and kept his hand up by his face. Then he turned, pulling the jacket’s hood halfway over his face. He ducked into the tent.
Coffee, bottled water, breakfast tacos and doughnuts were being served on a short table. He snagged a cup of coffee, steaming and black, and collected his thoughts.
Nowhere to go and no way to get there. He watched a police officer speaking into a walkie-talkie. Just turn yourself in, he thought, with a sudden and deep ache of resignation, of surrender.
Find Eric. Find the answers. Don’t you dare give up.
Braintree wasn’t a big town and he walked down to the main street. He had no money, no way out of town. He checked his watch, a Rolex that his mother had given him when he graduated from college. That would be a source of cash, but he’d rather pawn it in a town where he wouldn’t be remembered so easily. And he hated to give up a gift she had given him, but these were desperate times.
The library was open; it was just past ten in the morning. He walked inside, wandered the maze of the stacks. The smell and sight of books gave him a sudden comfort. They had been his friends after his father’s death, after his mother’s accident, and a library was a place he knew how to use. He went to an array of public computers, nodding at a tall blonde woman who was working at the main desk.
He opened a web browser and jumped to the Houston Chronicle web page.
The chlorine bombing in Ripley still dominated the headlines. The rains had removed the immediate threat, and the ruptured tanks had been sealed. Forty confirmed dead. Chemical plants around the country were on a massively increased state of alert.
The homeless man’s murder was a second-tier story; but the report offered no picture of the victim, and no name. Except that the homeless in the area didn’t seem to know much about the man. Several said he was a stranger.
That wasn’t a mystery he could solve here. He had to find Eric and Aubrey.
Luke Googled Aubrey kidnapped. He found references to a soap opera character snatched as part of a storyline, a Chilean activist who’d been missing since the Pinochet terrors, the sad detailing of a girl stolen in Oregon by her father five years ago. But nothing recent.
Maybe Aubrey hadn’t been reported as kidnapped, either. Eric had gotten her home before anyone realized she was missing.
But missing wasn’t the same as kidnapped. He searched on Aubrey missing.
Three results down he found it. A personal blog called Grace-amatic, written by a young freelance designer named Grace in Chicago:
My friend Aubrey (I designed the logo for her export-import business) is missing. She’s not returning phone calls, she’s not at home, she’s not at her office, she’s not updating her social networking pages, and no one has seen her. I called the police and they were useless, they said I have to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing persons report. That’s insane. Her boyfriend, well, they just broke up a couple of weeks ago, but he said he doesn’t know where she is. I don’t know what to do omg I’m a little freaked out that the cops really do make you wait twenty-four hours.
Then two entries later:
Update on my missing friend: Aubrey is no longer missing and apparently wasn’t. She called me this morning to say she took a few days to deal with some personal issues and she’s fine, thank God, and to please not blog about her life and I feel like fricking Chicken Little for panicking. The cops were right.
Chicago.
He went to Grace’s portfolio and found the one logo she’d done for an export-import company. Perrault Imports, specializing in ‘artistic’ imports from South America, Europe and Asia - modest pottery and wall hangings, sold in turn to retail outlets. The contact name was Aubrey Perrault.
Who then was Eric?
He risked signing onto the social networking site - he had an account there as well, as did most of his generation - and found a profile linked to Aubrey’s. Ah, sweet, hello Eric, one of her top friends. Eric Lindoe. He jumped to Eric’s profile. Thirty-five. Working at a private bank called Gold Maroft in Chicago. He Googled Eric Lindoe, found a few news stories, mostly tied to press releases from his employer about promotions. He had gone to the University of Illinois on full scholarship. He had started in bank operations and moved rapidly up into overseas banking: for construction projects in Saudi Arabia, Britain, Switzerland, Dubai and Qatar.
A man with so much to lose, committing kidnapping and murder - there had to be a reason.
He did another Google search, tying Eric’s name with Henry Shawcross. No results.
He had to get to Chicago. He had no money, no resources. And he couldn’t turn to his few school friends, he couldn’t put them in danger.
But he had people who wanted to be his friends. In the Night Road.
He remembered the other night showing Henry postings from the one who called himself ChicagoChris. He went to his email account through a website that allowed you to surf the web anonymously. He’d learned about it in one of the discussion groups. Chris had sent him a phone number in one of his emails to Luke. He found it in an email from two weeks ago and wrote it down.
Then he surfed to Twitter, the web service that allowed you to send short updates and messages to all your friends in your network. His network included all his grad school friends, a few college and high school buddies. People he cared about.
He sent a message to everyone on his Twitter list: I’M INNOCENT. In case he didn’t make it out of this mess alive, he wanted to make that gesture, to give his friends reason to believe him.
Then he erased the browser’s history and logged off the internet.
He glanced up at the librarian, who sat frowning at a computer screen. He saw two volunteers murmuring over a book cart, sorting volumes. One laughed softly. The librarian stood and vanished into an office. The two women stepped toward the back of the library - Luke could smell coffee, hazelnut on the air.
Luke looked over the counter and saw a purse. He peered inside and found a cell phone. He grabbed it and hurried to the back of the stacks. No one noticed.
He called ChicagoChris’s number.
‘Hello?’ A young smoker’s rasp, sounding tired.
‘I hope this is ChicagoChris. This is Lookout. From TearTheWallsDown discussion group.’
‘Hey, man! Hey! How are you?’ Chris sounded happy to hear from him, but it was the overabundant enthusiasm of someone who spent far too much time alone, and not
happily.
‘I hope it’s cool to call. You sent your number.’
‘Sure, glad to finally talk.’ ChicagoChris painted himself online as a badass, a man who wanted to right the wrongs of the world by redistributing wealth on an extreme basis, a prescription for saving the world from over-industrialization, but he sounded like a giddy schoolboy. ‘You in Chicago?’
‘Hardly,’ Luke said. ‘But I need to get to Chicago, and I need help. I’m getting hassled big time.’
Chris clicked his tongue in his mouth, waited.
‘I wrote some truth on a board I shouldn’t have, and the FBI’s looking for me.’
‘You shouldn’t say FBI in a phone conversation. The government picks up and records any conversation in the fifty states that mentions the FBI and it gets played back to the FBI. So if you say, fuck the FBI, they know you said it. They open a file on you.’
‘Sorry,’ Luke said.
ChicagoChris hung up.
Luke dialed again. Chris answered. ‘You have to be more careful. You don’t want to trigger their monitoring software with a keyword.’
Luke thought in Chris’s paranoid world monitoring software was probably a keyword but he didn’t want Chris to hang up again. ‘All right. I know you don’t know me, but we’re brothers in the struggle, aren’t we?’
Chris was silent again. ‘Maybe.’
‘I need to get to Chicago. I need your help. But I can’t travel on a charge card, and I don’t have money.’
‘You want me to send you money.’ He sounded slightly incredulous.
‘I swear I’m good for it.’ Most people would hang up. Help a friend you only knew from online? Not likely. But he was gambling on two things: Chris had sent him the contact information to begin with, because he liked Luke’s postings to the group, and because Chris seemed needy for friendship. And the communities - even being online - still had the feel of closeness, of a bonded brotherhood. These people were so alone in their hatreds, they needed each other to reinforce their certainty about the world’s wrongs. It was a key to terrorist psychology: violence was a group decision. He had to play on that sense that they were partners. ‘Brother, I just need enough to cover a bus ticket to Chicago, and a bit for food.’