The Collective

by Jack Rogan

  Monteforte glanced at the papers on her desk. “Not yet. I want to run down this Marcus Freiberg guy. I’m sure it’s a dead end, but I want to dot all the i’s, y’know?”

  “All right. Let me know what you find.”

  “Will do,” Monteforte agreed. “Listen, though. If you’re headed out, maybe you oughta take a drive past Cait McCandless’s place yourself. If we’ve got no one else who can do it …”

  Jarman sighed, but then gave a firm nod.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I’m gonna go home, change my clothes, and then I’ll go out for a drive. And if I happen to pass by the McCandless girl’s apartment, well, the department doesn’t have to pay overtime for what I do when I’m out driving around.”

  Cait watched the six o’clock news with horrified fascination. Sarah Lin had treated her gently in the interview, reported on the tragic irony of her brother’s death occurring the same day, and delivered the televised version of the attack on Jane and the attempted abduction of Leyla with a grim air of consequence.

  What horrified her was the way that watching the report changed her. She recognized the twisted irony of it, but seeing the story told on television made her confront it in a way she had not previously allowed herself to do. She watched herself sitting on the sofa in her living room, pale and ghost-eyed, talking to Sarah, and she felt pity for the poor little girl on the TV screen.

  Vanity had nothing to do with it. Cait saw how awful she looked but, more, she studied her own eyes and saw someone who was lost. Perched on the sofa—first on her own and then holding Leyla—she looked sixteen or seventeen years old, if that. Her short hair, petite build, and almost elfin features nearly always made people underestimate her, which had sometimes been a curse and sometimes a gift.

  But now she wanted to reach into the TV and slap herself awake. Her father had not raised her to rely on other people to provide answers. She and Sean had both been taught to search for their own solutions to problems. This might be an extreme situation, but the police had been awfully quiet today, and she’d placed very little hope in them to begin with, considering how little information they had been able to gather during their canvass of the neighbors on Badger Road.

  She hoped the interview would help, that maybe someone had seen something they had yet to report to the police and would now come forward. But as she watched it, Cait realized it wasn’t enough. Monteforte and Jarman had seemed competent, but they weren’t family. They got to go home at the end of the day and stop thinking about Leyla, and untraceable license plates, and the sudden death of Sean McCandless.

  Cait sat on the edge of the sofa, forking macaroni and cheese into her mouth as the commercials blared—why were they always so much louder than the regular programming? In minutes the weather forecast would come on, and then sports, and then what? The long night stretched out ahead of her. Even the idea of going to sleep made her uneasy. Sean had died shortly after she’d last spoken to him. If she slept, how would her life have changed when she opened her eyes again?

  In her playpen, Leyla started to cry. It didn’t start the way it usually did, with a fussy whimper. Instead, the baby wailed in what sounded like a strange combination of protest and sorrow. Cait set her plate on the coffee table, her already diminished appetite vanishing completely.

  “All right, sweetie. Mommy’s coming.”

  Leyla’s face was red but there were no tears in her eyes. It wasn’t that sort of cry. Cait plucked her from the playpen and held the baby against her chest, patting her back and humming a tired melody. In talking to other mothers, she had long since realized that she had gotten lucky with Leyla. Compared to horror stories Cait had heard, Leyla was a pretty easy infant, and she slept better than most. Even so, being the mother of an infant was draining, and most days she suffered from a kind of new mother exhaustion that had quickly replaced what had once been her normal life.

  Now she did the slow dance around the living room that always calmed Leyla, and after a few seconds of complaint, the baby snuffled and went silent, trying to grab her face. Cait smiled tiredly.

  “You’re going to sleep with me tonight, baby girl,” she said.

  Leyla had eaten already. If Cait wasn’t going to finish her own dinner, it was time for her to give the baby a bath, put her in her pajamas, and give her a bottle. They both needed to stick to their routine tonight.

  Tomorrow, the routine would be shot to hell.

  Cait knew that even if she went down to Washington, D.C., real answers about what happened to Sean would never be forthcoming, and pressing for them might endanger Herc and others. But she had to do something.

  The phone startled her. She realized she ought to have been surprised it had taken so long to ring. Someone she knew must have seen her on the news and was calling now to tell her how sorry they were, to lend their support.

  Cait wasn’t sure she wanted to talk, no matter how sympathetic the caller might be. If she talked, she might cry again, and she needed to stop that shit. On the other hand, it might be someone calling for an interview, or even the police, phoning to tell her that they’d had a break in the case and knew why someone had tried to take Leyla.

  On the fourth ring, she carried Leyla into her bedroom, but she paused in the open door as the answering machine picked up and her own voice filled the room.

  “Hi, it’s Cait. You know the drill.” And then the beep.

  “Cait, are you there? Oh, my God, pick up,” Miranda Russo said, her voice on the edge of frantic. “Cait?”

  She propped Leyla on her hip, picked up the phone, and hit the button to halt the answering machine’s recording. “Hey.”

  “You are there. I saw the news. It’s horrible. Are you okay? No, scratch that, of course you’re not okay. Do you want me to come over?” Miranda said, the words coming out in a torrent.

  Cait felt the muscles in her shoulders relax, just slightly, as she swayed back and forth to keep Leyla happy. She and Miranda might not have anything in common anymore, but the woman’s frantic babble reminded her so much of the closeness they had once shared that suddenly it did not seem that long ago at all.

  “No need,” she said. “I’ve got to give Leyla a bath. I need to keep her on a schedule.”

  “Are you sure? I wouldn’t get in the way,” Miranda said. “I just thought maybe you could use some company.”

  Cait hesitated, all of her conflicting emotions about friendship clashing in the space of seconds.

  “Maybe I could. If it’s no trouble,” she said quietly.

  “Are you kidding? How could it be trouble? You need me, I’m there. We may not see each other much these days, but that hasn’t changed. Have you eaten?”

  Cait said that she had.

  “All right,” Miranda replied. “Give me an hour or so and I’ll be over. Should I bring wine?”

  “You’d better. And Miranda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  On Sundays, the Northern Virginia office of the NGA operated on the equivalent of a skeleton crew. There were staffers there around the clock, watching satellite feeds and monitoring the equipment for glitches, but a lighter complement of analysts and administrative staff.

  Brian Herskowitz had worked plenty of Sundays, hurrying to finish up a regional analysis or doing map overlays showing any topographical changes—sometimes to indicate geological events and others to reveal the appearance or disappearance of settlements and training camps.

  Tonight, Herc had waited for Roger Boyce to leave the office and then let the clock tick off twelve full minutes—enough time for Boyce to get into his car and drive down to and through the security gate—so that he knew the asshole wouldn’t be back until morning.

  With a glance out into the monitoring room, which always reminded him of Mission Control at NASA, he closed and locked his office door. If Boyce ever learned what he was about to do, it would cost him his job, but his hesitation lasted only a second. Right was right and wron
g was wrong, and Sean McCandless had been closer to him than his own brother.

  Herc sat behind his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed from memory. The phone rang only twice before it was picked up.

  “Stanovitch.”

  “Terry, this is Herc.”

  “Herc, you calling on a secure line?”

  “I am. Did you hear about Sean McCandless?”

  Stanovitch sighed. “Fuck, yes, I heard. I couldn’t believe it, man. You like anyone for it?”

  “Why, you don’t think it was a heart attack?”

  A second or two went by before Stanovitch replied. “That’s not funny.”

  Herc leaned back in his chair and stared at the door to his office, watching the knob, paranoid even though he knew it was locked.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not. There are a lot of people who would have wanted Sean dead if they’d known who he was, but he was not a sloppy guy, Terry. You know this. I hope we’ll figure out who did it, and I hope we burn the fuckers down, but for now, I’m still getting used to the idea that someone got to him.”

  “I know what you mean,” Stanovitch said. “But you’re calling me, and I’m guessing it’s not just to reminisce about Sean. What do you need, Herc?”

  “I’ve got a license plate number, unregistered, though definitely from a vehicle that’s on the street. Could just be a fake, but intuition says otherwise. I’m guessing covert surveillance, but I’d like to know who’s running it and why.”

  “Simple enough,” Stanovitch told him.

  “Maybe not so simple,” Herc said. “Once you’ve done it, I need you to forget you did it.”

  “You coloring outside the lines?” Stanovitch asked.

  “Depends on who’s setting the lines. But I can tell you it’s for Sean. Does that help?”

  “I’ll be a ghost in the machine, brother. No one will even know I was there.”

  Herc smiled, nodding to himself. Stanovitch was CIA, but he was good people. Thanks to the synergy efforts of Homeland Security, they had worked together frequently, sorting out various intelligence reports and satellite analysis. Sean had been a part of most of those meetings.

  “You want to ring me back?” Herc asked.

  “Nah. Just give me the number.”

  Herc read it off to him and heard Stanovitch tapping away on his keyboard on the other end of the line.

  “Got it,” the man said. “Now let’s see what we can see.”

  A few more clicks and clacks over the phone were followed by a low exhalation that might have been nothing, but made Herc frown.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Wow,” Stanovitch said. “We’re both pretending this call never happened, right?”

  “Terry—”

  “I’m covering my tracks right now, logging off, and going home,” Stanovitch said, words punctuated with his keyboard.

  “—talk to me,” Herc finished. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. And that’s the problem. This is definitely someone’s op, but I couldn’t tell you whose. The plate number is on a list I just found of ‘blank slates.’ Those plates are given out to field actives, sometimes to civilian contractors, for classified domestic ops only. Whatever questions you’re asking, buddy, the answers are way above my pay grade.”

  “Terry—”

  “Sorry, Herc. I’m going home.”

  The click that ended the call brought a terrible chill to the office. Herc stared at the phone in his hand for a second before putting it down. Terry Stanovitch had access to some of the government’s best-kept secrets, things Herc himself would never know. If the holder of that license plate was above Terry’s clearance level, that did not bode at all well for Cait McCandless.

  Herc turned and stared out his office window as the summer twilight began to spread across the distant trees. He told himself that if Sean were there, he would know what to do. And then he realized that there really was only one thing he could do.

  But it would have to wait. If this went up so high that Stanovitch couldn’t crack it, he didn’t dare risk Boyce finding out. More than his job might be at stake. But now that he had started along this path, he couldn’t turn back. Sean McCandless would have done anything for him. He knew that. And while Sean could not be there to take care of his little sister, Herc would be damned if he let anything happen to her.

  He wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

  Detective Bill Jarman pulled his dented Saturn into the traffic at Powder House Circle with the same sort of aggressive daring that he imagined must fill the hearts of the fools who ran with the bulls at Pamplona. The traffic circle seemed to breed contempt in place of caution, filled day and night with drivers who seemed to approach the task as if it were a joust. And Jarman had never been one to back down from a challenge.

  The worst of the various dings and scrapes on the Saturn had been earned in battle right there in Powder House Circle, courtesy of an attractive Tufts University history professor who’d nearly torn off his rear bumper with her pretentious purple PT Cruiser. But all he cared about was that the car ran, and pieces didn’t fall off while he was driving.

  Tonight, he managed to make it through the vehicular sparring in the circle without incident, heading up Boston Avenue. The university rose up to the left and he could see the peaks of its dorms and oldest academic buildings at the top of the hill. On the right were blocks of neatly kept older homes, most of which had long since been converted into apartment housing for Tufts students.

  He drove slowly and with the windows open, letting the warm night air eddy around inside the car. The air-conditioning worked, though poorly, but he preferred fresh air whenever possible. His police radio crackled, keeping up a constant low muttering, but he had music on as well, a station called “The River,” which played a little bit of everything.

  Young guys, every one of them king of the world, laughed and taunted one another as they walked along the sidewalks with gorgeous girls of every conceivable shape and shade. Jarman wondered if girls had been that beautiful when he was in college, or if he had just come to see them with the eyes of age.

  Like Cait McCandless. Now, there was a beautiful girl.

  He mused on this almost wistfully. His interest in Cait had nothing inappropriate about it, except that he had taught himself to put some distance between himself and the people his job brought him into contact with every day. Most of them started out as suspects, victims, or witnesses, and if they weren’t at first, they often became one of the three during the course of an investigation.

  But he liked Cait McCandless. It didn’t hurt that she was so damn cute, but mostly he respected her. She had served her country and fallen in love. She had a baby she obviously adored. And she could kick the shit out of a three-hundred-pound football goon without breaking a sweat. Jarman flat-out admired her.

  None of that would have been enough to get him to do a personal drive-by, however. If she called and asked him, maybe, but to volunteer? No, there was more to this detour than his admiration for the former sergeant. Jarman did not like mysteries.

  Thoughts kept trying to surface in his mind, but he pushed them away because they were simply absurd. The license plate number she had given them had to be wrong or fake; it wasn’t difficult to make a fake plate, though it wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny. But a third possibility existed, which was that the plate was off the books for a reason, which meant … what? Secret government assholery?

  That made no sense. Federal agents would not beat up a middle-aged woman in her driveway and try to steal a seven-month-old baby. But someone had attacked Jane Wadlow.

  Cait McCandless and her baby might not be in any danger at all. But driving by every couple of hours for a day or two was the least they ought to be doing. It would take such little effort. No time at all, really.

  Hoffmeyer obviously disagreed. He had canceled all drive-bys on Cait’s apartment. Either he thought there was no danger—and maybe he was right—
or protecting people in trouble simply wasn’t as important to him as the bottom line.

  Monteforte had been right to suggest he take a drive past the house. He was off duty now, and his time was his own.

  So he watched the numbers going by as he drove past the houses on Boston Avenue. In the dark some of them were difficult to make out, but he slowed as he came to Cait McCandless’s block. A car drew up behind him, tailgating for a few seconds before the driver honked his horn. Jarman stuck his hand out the window and flipped the guy the bird, prompting the driver to gun his engine and swerve around him, speeding ahead toward a light that turned from yellow to red. Another night, he might have been tempted to put the bubble on top of his car and pull the guy over, put a scare into him.

  Instead he pulled over to the curb across from Cait’s apartment and killed his headlights. He was in a No Parking zone, but he wouldn’t be there long. He let the engine idle as he studied the front of the house. There were two cars in the driveway and one of them belonged to Cait. The windows on the second story were dark, but the first floor was lit up, and after several minutes he saw a brunette woman move across what he thought must be the living room. He didn’t see Cait, but nothing seemed out of order.

  Killing the engine, he climbed from the car. If nobody else would be checking up on her, it wouldn’t hurt to do more than just drive past the house, so he walked up and down the street a block in either direction, studying parked cars. If whoever had beaten Jane Wadlow really had been after Cait’s baby, he wanted to be certain they didn’t come back. At last, finding nothing suspicious, he returned to his own car, climbed in, and sat watching the house.

  Jarman had been parked at the curb for nearly ten minutes when his stomach started to rumble. Much as he wanted to keep an eye on Cait, he knew he couldn’t stay out there all night, and he hadn’t eaten much of anything since breakfast.

  He started up the battered Saturn and put it in gear. On Boston Avenue, on the other side of the hill, was a little joint called Sparky’s that had the most extraordinary selection of chicken wing flavors he had ever encountered. Jarman stopped there at least a couple times a month and had been working up the courage to try their peanut butter and jelly wings.