True Path

by Graham Storrs

  “And you’ve no idea where they took her?”

  Cara shook her head. “Just that the guys were Americans. Do you think they’ve taken her to America?” She was beginning to think it was time Jay started doing something instead of just sitting there asking questions. But then, he didn’t look like the kind of action man, hero she’d been expecting. “Do you do karate too?” she asked, hopefully.

  “What? No.”

  “Mum said you would save her. She said the Norwich cops were useless.”

  “Did she? And did she tell you I’m a cop?”

  Cara couldn’t help letting her disappointment show. “I got the impression you were in some kind of special ops unit, or something.” Looking at this slender man in his business suit, she realized what a stupid notion that had been. Whatever her father was, he was definitely not a tough guy.

  Jay looked dismayed. “Is that what she told you?”

  Cara shook her head. “Not really. Mum’s always a bit vague about what you do, probably so I don’t go off trying to find you. She said you were in an anti-terrorist unit. I always supposed she meant you were in the SAS or MI5 or something. I didn’t expect to find you in an office in Belgium. Look, shouldn’t we be trying to find her, instead of just …?”

  Jay regarded her steadily for a moment. “I’ll try to find her. You are going home to Norwich. I’ll call Olivia and have her meet you off the train.”

  She sat back and folded her arms. “No way. I’m staying with you. Mum said.”

  She saw him frown, not knowing what to do. “You can’t stay with me. We don’t know who’s got her or what it will take to get her back.”

  “I’m not going. I’m staying with you.”

  He put his hand to his temple and rubbed his head, closing his eyes. Then he looked at her. “All right. Just for a while. You can go home tomorrow. Come on.” He got up, paid the bill, and led her out into the street. “We’ll go to my office and I’ll see if I can find anything out about what happened.”

  This was better. They were finally doing something. “Mum said you had resources.”

  He looked harassed. “Not for this. The UK police, Interpol, they’ve got resources for finding missing persons. I can’t use my team for that.”

  “You’ve got a team.”

  “Yes. No. Not anymore. Shit.” He became flustered and tried to apologize for swearing. “I’m not used to dealing with kids.”

  Cara took umbrage. “Yeah, well, if I see any kids I’ll warn them about you.”

  Which made him even more flustered. “I didn’t mean to … You’re obviously a …” He gestured for a while in lieu of finding the right words, then gave up and walked on in silence.

  He had to sign her into the building. A security guard scanned her and checked her bag. It was an old building, scruffy and musty. Jay took her up in the lift, along corridors, and through another security checkpoint that led to a big, open office. People looked up from their work to stare at her as she went by. It was a little intimidating, which made her straighten her back, tilt her chin up and walk with a bolder stride.

  They passed a young woman at a desk who greeted Jay and told him about calls and appointments. She studied Cara with open curiosity but Jay did not enlighten her. “I do not want to be disturbed—for anything—until I say otherwise,” he said. “Got that?”

  The woman looked ready to protest. She cast a quick glance at Cara, opened her mouth and closed it again. “Yes, Chief.”

  They went into Jay’s office and he closed the door behind them.

  “All right,” he said. That stupid phrase was beginning to grow irritating, but Cara let it pass. “You sit quietly and read a book, or whatever. I need to run some queries.”

  As long as things were happening, Cara was happy. She sat down on a beat-up old sofa and brought up a magazine on her commplant while Jay went to his desk and began popping up virtual displays. She watched for a while as he became engrossed in his searches and then began flicking through the pages.

  It took Jay less than half an hour and a handful of phone calls before he sat back in his chair with a sigh and called Cara over. He did some quick gesture-work in his desk’s sensor field and suddenly Cara had access to his virtual displays. They appeared on a wall in front of them. Cool tech, she thought but didn’t say anything.

  “OK. This is the story,” Jay said. He pulled a display forward, zooming it so it almost filled Cara’s vision. It showed two still images of two men, one old and rugged, the other young and beefy. “These images are from campus security cameras. These two men were the only ones at the university that morning who are not in any European database. Which means they are probably our two Americans. There are no border security images from anywhere in the Union that match these shots, so we can safely assume they’re here illegally. I’ve done a search of all passenger vehicles—aircraft, boats, cars, trains—leaving the Union within twelve hours of your mother’s disappearance. These two have not crossed any border. Meaning they’re either still here, or they left by some other means. So I searched for any non-passenger vehicle leaving the UK for the U.S. or any destination that could have made a connection to the U.S. There were quite a few that were suspicious-looking—but nothing obvious.”

  “So you drew a blank?”

  “So I tried another approach. They had to have some kind of car or van to get Sandra away from the campus. Preferably, something parked near the lab. I found it on the campus security recordings. In fact …” He pulled forward another display. It was a recording of two men—the same two—walking with Sandra between them. There was no sign of coercion or rough treatment. They stopped at a van and Sandra climbed in the back with both of her kidnappers. Her hands were tied. After a while, the van pulled away. “I’ve got transponder hits of the van passing various checkpoints. It travels to an Airfield in Cambridgeshire, and doesn’t move again.”

  “So they caught a plane?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably? Of course they caught a plane.”

  “There’s no record of a plane taking off after they arrive, apart from a couple of flying school trainers, both two-seaters. There was also the scheduled shuttle to Stansted Airport—all passengers accounted for—and a robot freighter bound for Schipol in Amsterdam.”

  “So they’re on the freighter?”

  “We don’t know. Recordkeeping at the airfield is pretty lax and the freighter isn’t licensed to carry passengers. It landed at Schipol about three hours after your mother was abducted. They have excellent recordkeeping there, but it’s one of the biggest airports in the world. If they were hiding in the freight, they could have been shipped on to any of hundreds of different destinations by now.”

  “Including America.”

  Jay nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So you’ve got to track every piece of freight from that plane and see where it went.”

  “I’ve already sent out the requests to do that but you shouldn’t get your hopes up. If Sandra was in a box, they’d just need to have the box delivered to a warehouse, then swap her to another box and send it on to its next destination. There’s still a chance we can find someone in the chain and make them talk, but this is looking well planned and well organized. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get hold of your mother and get her out of the country. I’ve put out a missing persons call to Interpol and I’ve sent pictures of the kidnappers to the FBI. Maybe they’ll know who they are.”

  Cara didn’t like the way this was going. She walked away from the desk, unable to stand still. “So you’re just going to give up? You’ve done a few poxy computer searches and that’s it? Now it’s somebody else’s problem?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I can see it in your body language. It’s in your voice. You’ve done all you can. That’s what you think. My mum’s just some woman from your past. Someone you had a fling with sixteen years ago. So why should you care what happens to her now?”

  “Cara! Y
ou don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jay was on his feet, looking mortified. But Cara didn’t buy it.

  “That’s why you never came looking for her, isn’t it? That’s why you just left her to fend for herself? You didn’t care how much we struggled. You didn’t care how hard she had to work. The sacrifices she had to make.” She saw the look of horror growing on his face. Well, it’s about time he heard some home truths, she thought.

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said, coming around the desk. “It wasn’t anything like that. She insisted on going back to the Institute to sort herself out. I all but begged her not to go. I knew if she got herself together she wouldn’t—” He stopped dead.

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  He seemed to be in real pain, struggling to breathe. For a moment, Cara wondered if he was having a heart attack. But he pulled himself together and said, in a more even voice, “I thought she wouldn’t want me anymore.” He looked away from her as if ashamed of himself. “She was supposed to join me in Brussels. I found us a place, furnished it, got everything ready. Then, just like that, she stopped answering my calls. I knew why, of course, but I went to the Institute to see her. I wanted her to tell me to my face that she didn’t love me.”

  He walked over to the window and looked out, a dark figure against the gray skyline. “She’d gone. Left. Her doctor wouldn’t tell me anything. Wouldn’t even give me her number. He said I should respect her wishes. That she’d get in touch when she was ready. I could have tracked her. I wanted to, even though it would have cost me my job. But what would have been the point?” He turned back to Cara. “The thing is, I really did love her, and I thought, ‘If she’s happier without me, then that’s what I want for her.’ So I came back here and got on with the job of putting away every scumbag splashteam in Europe. And I did it with such a vengeance that I ended up running the place. But there was never anyone else. For a long, long time, I waited for her to call. After that … Well, I stopped waiting. If I’d known about you, it would have been different.”

  He fell silent. Cara could feel her heart thumping in her chest. She hadn’t meant to say those things to him—about him neglecting her mum and all that. They’d just come pouring out. She realized she had never really believed her mum when she’d said what a nice man her father was. She’d always wondered why, if he was so bloody nice, had he made no move to find them and help them for all those years? Now he was standing there looking crumpled and beaten and saying it was all her mum’s fault for dumping him and hiding his child away from him.

  She thought about going to him and giving him a hug, but he was still a stranger and every second that passed made it harder. Besides, it didn’t matter how he felt, or how she felt. Her mother was still out there and they had to do something to find her.

  She took a breath and tried to keep her voice steady. “We still have to find her. You have to find her. She trusts you. She told me to trust you. I can’t do this on my own.” She found herself crying again. Not the deep wracking sobs of last night, but a quiet trickle of tears that hardly did justice to the wild turmoil of misery that filled her up.

  He took a step towards her. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how bad this is for you.”

  “Then find her, please. Just find her.”

  He looked like he might come and hug her. He actually swayed where he stood. But she didn’t want that. That would be too much on top of everything else. She turned away and put her head in her hands, feeling the wetness of her cheeks, feeling tears slide between her fingers. She stood there a long time and, when she looked again, he was back at his desk, his long-fingered hands doing their silent dance within the sensor field.

  Chapter 7: The Border

  Four of them set off for Texas the next morning in a rugged, Kenyan Jeep knockoff, the seats configured for manual driving. They drove through countless miles of hot scrubby desert. The few towns they passed looked abandoned.

  Polanski and Sandra rode up front, with Peter and another man in the back. The plan was to cross the border and let the fourth man take the Jeep back to the farm. Others would meet them in Texas and take them farther.

  “Couldn’t you just take these things off while we drive?” Sandra asked, holding up her tethered wrists.

  “Sure,” Polanski said, not taking his eyes from the road. “But if I did, you’d be tempted to make a run for it, and, if you made it, you would most certainly die out in that desert. So I think it’s best we just keep you trussed up. For your own safety.”

  “I suppose that’s what passes for humor where you come from.”

  “Hell, yes. I’m considered a regular wit and raconteur back home in Baker. Ain’t that right, Peter?”

  The young man laughed, at some kind of inside joke, Sandra assumed. “So is that where we’re going?” she asked. “Baker?” Again Peter laughed, but this time the laugh was cut short as the Jeep swerved to avoid a pothole that could have swallowed the entire vehicle.

  “Gets worse every damned year,” Polanski grumbled. The fourth man grunted his agreement and rattled off a long complaint in Spanish.

  “So where are we going?” Sandra asked. “Isn’t it about time you told me what the hell is going on? You said something about restoring democracy to your country. Maybe you’d like to expand on that.”

  “You don’t even know who he is, do you?” Peter asked. He sounded angry. “This is Zadrach Polanski.”

  Sandra turned to give the boy a cold stare. “Yeah, we did the introductions. Zadrach Polanski: legend in his own lunchtime. And you must be Robin, the Boy Wonder.”

  The young man lunged at her, shouting, “You fucking atheist whore!” His fist struck at her, clumsily in the confined space of the car’s interior. Sandra dodged it easily and grabbed his arm. She intended to pull down on it over the back of her seat and maybe break his elbow, but she didn’t get the chance. Polanski slammed on the brakes and everybody was thrown forward. The Jeep slewed sideways on the sandy road and Polanski was out before it had rocked to a stop. He threw open the door next to Peter and dragged the boy out of the car and then kept on dragging him away across the scrubland.

  Sandra watched as Polanski harangued the young man, clearly furious. She couldn’t hear what was said, but the older man was doing all the shouting. Peter looked so obviously shocked and horrified at this treatment by his mentor that Sandra half expected him to burst into tears. Despite the younger man’s size, she had no doubt that there was some element of physical fear behind the boy’s reaction to Polanski’s anger.

  After an age, Polanski stopped shouting, but carried on speaking to his protégé. Peter began nodding and shaking his head, clearly responding to questions. Then he was allowed to talk. Eventually, Polanski nodded, satisfied. He smiled and slapped the young man’s upper arm. Then he put his arm around the lad’s shoulder and led him back to the car. Peter climbed in, subdued, avoiding Sandra’s eyes. Polanski got in and started up the car.

  “Peter didn’t mean what he said,” he told Sandra. “It won’t happen again.”

  They drove in silence for a while before Polanski spoke up again. “Are you a good teknik, Sandra?”

  “Fuck do you care?” She wasn’t in the mood for polite conversation with this bunch of crazies.

  “I care a great deal,” Polanski said and something in his tone made Sandra’s jaw clench.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No way.” Polanski said nothing. “You want to make a big splash? You grabbed me so I could build you a rig?” Again no reply. “Well fuck you, Mr. Charismatic Leader of The Cult of One Deranged Kid. If you’re recruiting for your splashteam, you picked the wrong woman. You might as well let me out right here, because there is no way in hell that I’m going to help you kill innocent people. I would rather die in your fucking desert.”

  Polanski sighed but kept his eyes on the road. “I’m sorry, Sandra, but you’re it. We don’t have the resources to go all the way back there and kidnap someone else. Heads up! There’s
the border.”

  In the back, Peter and the fourth guy reached under their seats and pulled out machine guns. Ahead, Sandra could see nothing but more desert. The car lurched as Polanski drove off the road and along a winding track that he seemed able to pick out from the rugged desert by some kind of magic sense that Sandra did not possess. She put both hands on the dash and hung on as best she could as the Jeep bounced and lurched across the rocky ground, heading about forty-five degrees away from the road. They kept it up for ten or fifteen minutes that felt like twice as long, grinding through low gears, the car’s electric engines straining under the demand. When they rounded a ragged outcrop of rock, they stopped.

  Beyond a level overgrown strip of land, Sandra saw a fence. It was easily five meters high and topped with razor wire. Massive steel posts held it in place. Far to her right, where the road should be, Sandra could make out a guard tower rising another five meters above the fence. The sinking sun glared from one of the tower’s windows. She looked back along the fence in the opposite direction and thought she could make out another tower shimmering in the heat haze.

  Big signs on the fence advertised various dangers. The fence was electrified, the sign said, and she should look out for dog patrols, land mines, and automated gun emplacements. Beyond the fence was a thirty-meter strip of scrub with landmine signs planted in it like grave markers. Beyond that was another fence, just like the first.

  Polanski gave a nod to Peter and he and the fourth man got out. They ran to the fence and, heedless of the warnings, grabbed it and pulled. A small cut-out section came away, just big enough for the Jeep to get through. They set the piece of fence aside and ran on, through the supposed minefield to the second fence.

  “They don’t electrify it any more,” Polanski said. “Not since Texas broke away from the United States. They don’t patrol it much worth talking about, either. Part of the secession deal was that they keep the border strong, and they did, for a while, but Texas ain’t got no particular beef with Mexico. And it ain’t like a lot of Mexicans want to get into the States no more.”