by C. S. Graham
Following the Colonel’s instructions, she’d carefully gone over her own VW before leaving his house. “They might have put a tracking device on it,” he’d warned her, telling her exactly where to look and how. But she hadn’t found anything. And so now, for the first time in her adult life, she was about to steal something.
“You do realize,” McClintock had told her, “that they could have put out an APB on your car?”
Tobie had stared at him. “What are you saying? That I could have the police chasing me, too?”
He shrugged. “Until we know who you’re dealing with, it’s better to be safe and assume the worst. Even if these people haven’t brought the police in on this, it’s not that hard to get someone’s license plate number. And that car of yours is like a yellow beacon.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Steal another car?”
He’d laughed. “Now that would get the police after you. You don’t need a new car, Tobie; all you need is a new license plate.”
Tobie took a deep breath and opened her car door. In the stillness of the night the clicking latch sounded dangerously loud. Now that the worst of the storm had passed, the temperature was rising again. The smell of wet earth and leaves hung heavy in the air, mingling with the sweet scent of a mimosa blooming unseen somewhere in the darkness.
With a quick glance up and down the street, she went to crouch at the back of her car and slip the Colonel’s screwdriver from her pocket. “How often do you look at your license plate?” he’d told her. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t even know what their own license plate number is.”
She hadn’t said anything, but she was one of those people. Whenever anyone asked for her license number, she always had to go look at it.
The two screws holding the metal plate came off easily. She dropped them into her pocket and stood up, the license plate tucked out of sight beneath the inside of her still damp jacket, her heart pounding uncomfortably at the thought of what she was about to do.
There were people, she knew, who did memorize their license plate number. Her own stepfather, Hank Bennett, could rattle off the license plates of every car he’d ever owned. What if she made a mistake and picked a car belonging to someone like him?
The first floor of the parking garage was separated from the street by no more than a low wall, easily stepped over. She walked up the ramp, her footsteps echoing eerily in the low-ceilinged, deserted space. What she needed, she decided, was a car that obviously belonged to a girl, the kind of girl unlikely to obsess about things like license plate numbers.
It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for: a silver Honda Civic with a pair of miniature pink ballet slippers hanging from the rearview mirror, an ALPHA LAMBDA DELTA decal in the back window and a MOUNT CARMEL VOLLEYBALL sticker on the bumper.
With another quick glance around, Tobie hunkered down at the Honda’s rear bumper. She kept expecting to feel the clamp of a heavy hand on her shoulder or hear a shout from across the garage. Setting aside the Honda’s plate, she fit her own license in its place…
And felt one of the screws slip from her fingers to roll away into the darkness.
Easing her weight down on her good knee, she skimmed her hands in ever-widening, panicked circles across the pavement. Just when she thought she wasn’t going to find it, she felt the screw roll beneath her palm.
She sat back on her heel, her lower lip held tight between her teeth, and carefully twisted the screws into place. Sweat dampened her forehead, plastered her T-shirt to her body. Hiding the Honda’s license plate beneath her jacket, she stood up and walked away.
Her legs were shaking, but she was breathing easier now. Moving quickly, she fit the purloined plate onto the rear of her car, then slipped behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine roared to life and she felt a zing of elation run through her so powerful it left her fingers tingling.
I did it. Ha!
Smiling, almost giddy with relief, she slipped the car into reverse, backed onto the street, and took off toward Tulane’s Student Union, where she knew she’d be able to find a twenty-four-hour ATM. She was going to need cash.
The Colonel had wanted her to spend what was left of the night at his house, but she’d refused. She knew from an incident last Easter, when one of Mary McClintock’s nieces came to visit, that it confused Mary, having people in the house overnight.
Tobie had seen snapshots of Mary McClintock in the Colonel’s study, photographs of her as a beautiful woman with thick hair the color of sunsets and a wide smile. After years of casually forgetting things, she’d now slipped so far into the fogs of Alzheimer’s that she no longer recognized her husband, although she still loved to listen to his voice reading to her.
But it wasn’t only a desire to avoid confusing Mrs. McClintock that had stopped Tobie. She also realized, belatedly, that she’d already put the Colonel and his wife in serious danger simply by coming to him.
He’d tried to argue with her, of course. When he realized he wasn’t going to change her mind, he warned her not to use her credit card to pay for a hotel. But he hadn’t told her not to use an ATM, and she hadn’t thought to ask.
She knew she was running a risk, using one. But did it really matter, she reasoned, if some computer in Maryland or Virginia flagged her withdrawal? She’d be gone before anyone could possibly show up to check it out.
Lance was going through a stack of printouts when Michael Hadley stuck his head around the door frame. “Our girl just hit an ATM at Tulane, near the Union. Withdrew two hundred dollars.”
Lance looked up. They’d taken a suite at the Sheraton for the night, although he had started to worry that their quarry might already have headed out of town. “Good. That means she’s still here in New Orleans.”
He pushed to his feet. They had men at the airport and at the bus and train stations, but there was always the possibility she’d simply driven out of town. He’d alerted their people in Colorado to tap her parents’ phone and keep an eye on their house. He glanced at his watch. “What do you suppose she’s been up to for the past couple of hours?”
Hadley shrugged. “If she used a Tulane ATM, it means she’s staying close to the familiar.”
“We need a list of all the hotels in that area.” Lance stretched. “With any luck, we might get out of here before morning after all.”
20
Broadmoor, New Orleans: 4 June 11:00 P.M. Central time
Barid Hafezi stood in the doorway to his daughter’s darkened room and watched her sleep.
Yasmina was eight years old, a small, wiry tomboy with laughing brown eyes and a mischievous grin. Her ten-year-old brother Faraj was the serious one. He was probably reading a book with a flashlight under the covers in his room down the hall. But Yasmina was like her mother, a carefree spirit who drew like an angel and could charm the squirrels out of the trees.
Barid sucked in a deep breath, but it did nothing to ease the tight pain in his chest. Twenty-five years. It had been twenty-five years since he’d fled the turmoil of Iran for the United States. He’d built a new life for himself here, a safe life for his wife and children. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d managed to get a Ph.D. in journalism from NYU while his wife, Nadia, earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from Columbia. Now he was a professor at the University of New Orleans, while Nadia had just earned tenure at Loyola. They owned a graceful old cottage in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina had made them refugees again for a while, but now they were back home and soon, Inshallah, the repairs on the house would finally be finished. Only, he was very much afraid he wouldn’t be here to see that happen.
It had been four months now since the man he called “the Scorpion” had first come to him. Barid had never learned the man’s real name. The man wore cowboy boots and a Stetson, and had a tattoo high on his bulging bicep—a tattoo of a scorpion superimposed on two crossed arrows with the words DE OPPRESSO LIBER beneath. Barid had looked it up on the Inter
net. It was a United States Special Forces tattoo.
At first the Scorpion had smiled and talked pleasantly, although even then the man made Barid nervous. He had known men like the Scorpion before, in Tehran. In Tehran, such men had been agents of the SAVAK, the Shah’s old secret police. The SAVAK might not have worn Stetsons and cowboy boots, but at heart such men were all the same. Perhaps such men had believed in something, once. But soon they believed only in their own power.
Like the agents of the SAVAK, the Scorpion was well versed in the use of fear and intimidation to control men. He showed Barid pictures of his children: candid shots of Yasmina at school; of Faraj walking down the street; of brother and sister at play with their white bunny, Cupcake, in the backyard. The message was implicit: Your children are not safe from me. I can get at them anytime, anywhere.
Then Cupcake disappeared and the Scorpion had shown Barid more photos—ghastly, sick images that haunted his dreams. This time the message was explicit: Follow instructions or what was done to your children’s bunny rabbit will be done to your children.
At first the Scorpion’s orders were simple. Barid was to form a small group of Islamic students who would meet once a week to study the Koran. Jamaat Noor Allah, they were called: the Light of God. Some of the students were politically moderate, others more angry. Did that matter? Barid had no way to know.
Then he was told to assign certain journalism students to certain projects. Again he reluctantly complied. Surely no harm could come from that? But the requests soon became more ominous. He was given the funds to buy a derelict house in the Lower Ninth Ward. Then he was told to rent another house, this one in the Irish Channel in the unflooded part of the city near the river. Because of the way the Scorpion phrased his instructions, Barid knew there were more men than the Scorpion involved. “This is the house we want you to buy,” the Scorpion would say. Or, “Here are the Korans for the group’s meetings. We want you to make certain each student has one.”
Barid never asked why he was being made to do all these things. At first he hoped that if he did as he was told and kept his nose out of it, the men might spare him. But eventually he’d had to admit that he was only fooling himself. He might not know what these men were doing, or why. But he knew too much to be allowed to live.
At one point he’d given some thought to going to the American authorities, but the memory of that Special Forces tattoo always stopped him. He had no way of knowing whom the Scorpion worked for, and so he knew there was no one he could trust. Ever since 9/11, too many Americans treated Muslim citizens the way the Nazis had started treating Jews in 1930s Germany. If the Americans locked him up as a suspected “enemy combatant,” his family would be left completely vulnerable. And so for the sake of his children, he continued to cooperate. And he kept his mouth shut.
“Barid?”
He felt his wife’s hand touch his shoulder, slide down his arm in a gentle caress. “You’re doing it again. Watching them. Why?”
He turned to enfold her in his arms and draw her close so she couldn’t see his face. He longed to tell her the truth, to say, I watch them because there are evil men out there who have threatened to kill my children if I don’t do what they say. And even though I have done all that they have asked, I know it won’t be enough. I know that one day they will kill me, if for no other reason than to keep me silent. And so I watch my children because I know that someday, soon, I will never see them again.
Except of course he couldn’t say any of that to Nadia, because when he was gone, his children would need their mother, and he couldn’t do anything that might put her life in danger, too. So all he said was, “I watch them because it brings me peace.”
And even though he knew she didn’t believe him, she said no more.
21
The Coliseum Street Guest House lay on a narrow, cobble-lined block of Coliseum, across from Trinity Church and just half a block down from the official boundary of the Garden District. A narrow, two-story galleried building with thick brick pillars and transomed French doors, it had once served as the garçonnière and kitchen of a Creole plantation. The plantation house and its sprawling acres had long since disappeared, leaving the garçonnière looking like a bit of French Quarter architecture that had somehow strayed into a neighborhood of Yankee-built Greek Revival and Queen Anne–style mansions.
The current owners had grandiose plans for someday turning the ancient building into an upscale bed and breakfast. But at the moment the place was still seedy enough that they had no problem taking in a guest who chose to pay cash, carried no luggage, and had a streak of dirt across her nose.
Tobie was given a room on the second floor overlooking the deep backyard where a giant sycamore rubbed against the double hung window with every gust of wind. Dropping her messenger bag on the wicker chair that stood beside a chipped, white-painted iron bed frame with a sagging mattress, she caught sight of her reflection in an age-spotted mirror hanging above the empty fireplace and said out loud, “Oh, Jesus.”
Her eyes were wide and dilated, her face white, her hair hanging in damp, stringy clumps. The wet vines and shrubs she’d run through had left green stains across the front of her white T-shirt and skirt, and her calves and sandaled feet were flecked with drying mud. She looked like a wino just coming off a three-day binge.
The room had a compact bath carved from one corner near the fireplace. Stripping off her clothes, she turned on the shower and stood beneath it, letting the hot water cascade over her head and shoulders. The backs of her legs were still trembling, and it was a minute or two before she could set to work washing her hair with the bar of soap she found wrapped up beside the sink.
It was such a wonderfully mundane task, washing her hair, a touchstone of normalcy in a life careening suddenly, wildly, off track. For one moment she closed her mind to everything that had happened in the last hours, to the whirlwind of confusion and suffocating fears, and simply concentrated on the sensation of wet hair gliding through fingers and the familiar comfort of hot steam filling her lungs.
The room had an air-conditioning unit built high up in the wall, but she couldn’t get it to work and finally just gave up and opened a window. The last thing she wanted to do was call attention to herself by complaining about it. She washed her T-shirt, skirt, and under-clothes as best she could in the sink and spread them out near the open window. She wasn’t sure the clothes would even dry in the moist, hot night air, but hotels like this one didn’t furnish their guests with hair dryers.
Wearing nothing but a towel, she sank down on the edge of the bed and attacked the wet, snarled mess that was her hair. The sultry breeze pushing through the screen of the open window brought with it the pungent aroma of wet earth and sweet jasmine underlain by the subtle, pervasive hint of decay that was ever-present in New Orleans.
Once, when Tobie was seven or eight years old, her family had passed through New Orleans on their way to visit her mother’s people in South Carolina. Like most of the Bennett-Guinness family’s vacations, it had been a tumultuous two weeks of her stepfather barking orders and her mother softly pleading as Tobie and her brother and sister squabbled in the backseat. But the three days they’d stopped in New Orleans had been pure magic. She remembered hours spent in the dusty wonder of the Cabildo; hours more exploring the tangled batture that stretched between the levee and the Mississippi, with Hank yelling, “If you get bit by a snake, I’m going to make you pay the hospital bill.” Tobie smiled at the memory. Then her smile slipped. The urge to call Colorado, to hear her mother’s soft drawl and her stepfather’s flat, calm tones, was so overwhelming it brought the sting of tears to her eyes. But she knew better than to give in to the urge to call anyone close to her.
For hours, her focus had been on survival, the need to escape, to find a safe refuge for the night. Now came time for reflection, and with it, anger. A man she’d both liked and respected had been brutally murdered. She’d been shot at and chased through a driving rainstorm b
y three men who claimed to work for her own government, whether they actually did or not. Because of them, she was alone in a cheap hotel room, without a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. She was worried about her cat. She had classes in the morning she didn’t dare go to. She couldn’t use her cell phone or her credit cards. She couldn’t even talk to her own mother and stepfather.
Raising her head, Tobie pushed her hair out of her face, her hands clenching together behind her neck as her anger hardened slowly into determination.
That viewing session had obviously been a success. What had she seen?
She and Henry had done dozens of sessions—perhaps as many as a hundred or more, many of them with buildings as targets. How was she supposed to remember the details of one seemingly insignificant session?
She shoved away from the edge of the bed to stand beside the open window and draw the warm air deep into her lungs. Calm down, she told herself. Think.
Henry had designed a special soundproofed room in the Annex, with heavy curtains at the windows, thick carpet on the floor, and a comfortable reclining chair. In the beginning, when he first introduced her to the phenomenon he called remote viewing, he used to have her listen to a series of tapes—soothing tones that were fed to her through earphones and were designed to help her sink down into what he called “the zone.” But it hadn’t taken her long to learn to reach the zone herself, once she understood what was required. She simply needed to put herself in a state of pure relaxation. When she was ready, Henry would start the remote viewing session.
At first they used live targets. Henry would have another student or associate drive to an unknown location at a preappointed time. He’d say to Tobie, “Elizabeth is at the target,” and she would close her eyes and focus on that person. Gently at first, like a feather brushing across the mind, the images and impressions of the target’s location would come to her.