The Final Play

by David Baldacci

  As he had waited for the police to arrive, North had looked at his father’s body, trying to ignore the fact that part of the man’s head was missing from the impact of the bullet fired into it. He didn’t know what he had expected to feel: grief, sadness, depression…relief. But he had felt none of these things. The fact was, sitting there alone with his father’s corpse, North had felt nothing at all.

  The whole experience had been a painful for one for him, though. North’s dedication to the discovery of truth at all costs had been severely tested. What had happened to Swift had been his fault, and cost his friend a shot at the NFL. But one did not get concussions working on Capitol Hill, at least not on a weekly basis. North told himself that perhaps Swift would live a longer, healthier life by not catching and running with an oddly shaped ball on Sundays for the vicarious pleasure of millions.

  And while his integrity had survived this journey intact, it had made North more fully respect not just the truth, but also the consequences of such truth. And yes, he had finally come to accept that sometimes the cold, harsh facts were better left unsaid.

  Let sleeping dogs lie? Yes, sometimes we have to.

  That might have been the reason why he had felt compelled to make one final pilgrimage here. To examine once and for all—and hopefully lay to rest as well for all time—the personal devastation that the solving of Herschel Ruggles’s disappearance had caused him.

  He examined the trophy case in the small stadium entry, where photos of Herschel Ruggles and his gravity-defying ability dominated everything else. But in one corner there was a relatively new photo that North spent some time looking at. It was a picture of him snapped right as he hit that wedge of orange and black allowing Jimmy Swift and him to have their moments of fame. It preserved for all time the image of the quantum tunneler who had exited before he had entered. It was a marvelous display of what brains and the art of physics could do on any given Saturday in the fall, when the crowd wanted blood and pain, and young, reckless men would sacrifice all they had for a few precious moments of glory on a field of dirt and grass, or neurons and cortical columns, if you still believed Merlin North.

  If only these sedentary spectators understood the true cost of this “game,” as they called it. They cheered on Saturday and then went home, secure in their patronage of such an outstanding sport. Would they so readily come on Sunday, or Monday, and help the player pee into a bottle because he was too sore and swollen to make it to the bathroom? Would they come and push him around in a wheelchair at age forty when his once-splendid wheels were no longer capable of supporting him? Would they be there when at age fifty the player succumbed to the collective battering that had reduced his insides to that of an eighty-year-old?

  North thought not. North knew not.

  In the tunnel, he needed no chalk line to find it. The fallen door had long since been removed. North stepped through the opening and proceeded over to the entry into the “great shit” room that, of course, was no longer there. In fact, it never had been, at least in mankind’s puny one-dimensional existence.

  North believed that a time warp underneath Herschel Ruggles Field had enabled him to step partially into the past and discover the clues he needed to solve the mystery of the man’s disappearance, never anticipating that it would also lead to the absolute destruction of his own father. Newton’s Third Law of Motion still held true: When an object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first. God, it had indeed.

  Had North been the ultimate spoiler in the observer effect on a quantum state? Had his sheer will and intensity not allowed the pot to boil? Indeed, had it been his destiny to unearth the secret of his father’s betrayal? Had some unknowable power waited all these years for North to appear and finally wrestle the mystery to its logical conclusion? There were really no answers to be had, at least no conclusive ones. Yet by merely asking the questions, North felt better for it, not only as a man of science but, more important, as a human being.

  And North also believed that a second crevice in the walls of the dimensional universes that kept folks in their proper lanes had allowed a wronged man to rise, Phoenix-like, from his awful potter’s grave in here. And that slash in the space-time continuum had enabled Herschel Ruggles to enter a place of even greater depth under the earth and settle the score with the wretched, foul person who had taken his life away.

  North tried to imagine what John Milton Draven’s face must have looked like when he saw the spectral image of Herschel Ruggles enter that small pocket of life a hundred feet under the surface at the Gloria No. 3 mine. What he must have been thinking even as he felt those iron fingers close around his scrawny throat, inexorably tightening until the John of the Mighty Johns had been defeated by a force he could never come close to equaling, in life or in death.

  Obviously, North could not prove whether Ruggles, utilizing some time-dimensional gash, had actually been able to take out his revenge on Draven, yet North hoped he had. There were many things North had unearthed that could not be explained by conventional means. Yet even if the football star had been unable to have a final confrontation with his killer, Herschel Ruggles had lived on, in part because of the disappearance orchestrated by Draven, a bleak, insufferable man whom history had totally forgotten. This was despite a university being named after him, because when one thought of Draven University, the only name conjured was that of Herschel Ruggles.

  No scientific formula could have done it any better.

  “I told you, great shit.”

  North turned around and stared at the doorway, where a figure looked back at him. In the poor light it was impossible to see who it was, yet North had no doubt as to the man’s identity.

  “BJ?”

  The man did not step forward, and North did not shine the light he carried with him at BJ.

  “Who are you, really?” asked North.

  “Just a man who moseys around, helping folks who sometimes need it.”

  “You helped me,” said North. “You made a lot of things clearer to me.”

  “You helped yourself.”

  “I want to thank you.”

  “You already have.”

  And though he never remembered how it came to be, North somehow found himself out of that room and free of that tunnel and standing under the bluest sky and under the most brilliant sun that he could ever recall in this stark, man-made valley of perpetually darkened hues.

  And even that stubborn east wind had subsided, bothering him no longer, as Merlin North walked out of Herschel Ruggles Field for the last time.

  MERCY

  Atlee Pine’s sister was abducted thirty years ago from the Pine family home; now it’s time for the truth of what happened on that fateful night.

  Read on for an extract . . .

  CHAPTER

  INCH BY SOLID INCH, Atlee Pine watched the battered coffin being lifted to the surface from where it had rested six feet down for nearly two decades. Coffins and bodies were not supposed to be retrieved. They were supposed to stay right where they were planted, at least until a dying sun lashed out across space and bid farewell to all on earth.

  But, for Pine, it was just that kind of day.

  Just that kind of year, actually.

  She gazed over at a black crow as it stridently cawed from its perch on the branch of a sickly pine overlooking the pierced grave. The bird seemed to think its meal was being delivered up as a boxed lunch, and the creature was getting impatient.

  Well, I’m thirty years impatient, Pine thought.

  Pine was an FBI special agent. Tall at five eleven in bare feet, she possessed a muscular build from years of lifting massive amounts of weights, first for athletic glory, and currently to survive the rigorous demands of her occupation. Some agents spent careers mainly on their butts staring at computer screens or supervising agents on the streets. Pine was not one of them.

  Her normal beat was in Arizona, near the Grand Canyon. It was a
lot of ground to cover, and she was the only FBI agent out there. Pine preferred it that way. She hated bureaucracies and the paper pushers who lived and died by their stifling mountain of rules that got you nowhere fast. Certainly not with putting bad people away, which was really the whole point for her.

  She was currently in Virginia working on something personal. This was her one shot to get things right in her life.

  Next to Pine was her administrative assistant at the Bureau, Carol Blum.

  Pine and Blum were searching for Pine’s twin sister, Mercy Pine, who had been abducted from their shared bedroom in Andersonville, Georgia, when the girls were just six years old. Pine had nearly been killed by the abductor, surviving by a combination of sheer luck and, Pine supposed, her absolute unwillingness to die. She hadn’t seen Mercy since. It was an incident that had destroyed the Pine family and stood as the one defining moment of her life.

  They had tracked Mercy’s whereabouts to a place near Crawfordville, Georgia, in Taliaferro County, the most rural and least populated county in the state. She had been given the name Rebecca Atkins and had been kept as a prisoner until she’d escaped many years ago. Now, the trail was as cold as a morgue freezer.

  Joe Atkins, one of her captors, had been found murdered the day after Mercy had escaped. His wife, Desiree, had disappeared at the same time. Pine had unearthed that her sister’s kidnapper was a man named Ito Vincenzo. He was the brother of Bruno, a mobster who had held a grudge against Pine’s mother, Julia. She had acted as a mole for the government in its successful attempts to bring down several New York crime families back in the 1980s. Members of crime families did not like to be brought down. They held it against you. The Vincenzo family had certainly held it against the Pine family. At the urging of his murderous brother, Ito Vincenzo had tried to obliterate the Pines, and had largely succeeded.

  The Bureau had recently put out a PSA using an image of Mercy captured at the exact moment she had broken free from her improvised prison cell. Pine had hoped that if Mercy was alive she would see the notice and come forward. That had not happened, so Pine had decided to work on a different lead.

  Years ago, her mother had told Pine that her father, Tim Pine, had killed himself. Subsequently, she had learned that Tim was not her biological father. A man named Jack Lineberry was. Lineberry had been nearly killed in an attack aimed against Atlee Pine in an unrelated case. The revelation that he was her father had stunned Pine, but what she had found out recently had shocked her just as much, if not even more. That was why she was here.

  I know all families are dysfunctional, but mine seems to be the undisputed world champ in that competition.

  The coffin finally reached the surface and was shifted away from the hole and set on the grass. Its metal carcass was visibly damaged by water, and also by sitting in the earth all those years. She wondered how preserved the contents would be.

  A forensics team hurried forward, quickly prized open the coffin, and placed the human remains in a body bag. They zipped it up and loaded it into the back of a black van, which was quickly driven away. Pine thought she knew who was in that grave. But thoughts weren’t enough, certainly not for an FBI agent, or a grieving daughter, hence the exhumation. DNA identification was as definite as it got. That would reveal who had been in the coffin, of that she was certain.

  Pine had never been to this grave in rural Virginia, for the simple reason that her mother had lied to her about where her father’s supposed suicide had taken place. Her mother had also told her that her father had been cremated and his ashes scattered by her at some unknown place. All lies. But then again, it seemed everyone had lied to her about her past.

  She now believed the man in the grave was none other than Ito Vincenzo. He had apparently discovered Tim Pine’s whereabouts and come to exact revenge on him. Only he had ended up being the one to die.

  Pine had also been led to believe that her parents had divorced because of irreconcilable differences related to their guilt over Mercy’s disappearance. Now she knew that Tim had faked his death, and her mother had voluntarily left her remaining daughter shortly thereafter. Julia Pine had in fact joined her ex-husband, and they had vanished together.

  And left me all by my lonesome. Thanks, guys. What great parents you turned out to be.

  CHAPTER

  PINE LOOKED AT CAROL BLUM. In her sixties, a mother of six grown children, and a longtime employee of the Bureau, Blum had become something of a surrogate mother to the federal agent, to some degree taking the place of the one who had abandoned her.

  Blum stared resolutely at her boss, who had her hands shoved deep into her jeans pockets, and whose features held a frown that seemed to run out of room on her face.

  “How soon will they know if it is Ito Vincenzo?” asked Blum.

  “Hopefully a couple of days max. I gave them samples of his DNA.”

  “How’d you get those?”

  “From his son’s and grandson’s bodies. A familial match under these circumstances constitutes a slam dunk.”

  “Yes, of course,” Blum said quickly. “There’s no other way a DNA connection to the Vincenzo family could be in that grave.”

  They walked back to the car and drove off.

  “So what now?” asked Blum.

  “We have some time, since the Bureau has given us an official leave of absence.”

  “It was the least they could do after you and Agent Puller solved that case in New York.”

  John Puller was an Army investigator who had teamed with Pine to run to ground a blackmail operation that had reached into the highest levels of the country’s power structure. Puller had been shot in the process, but he was on his way to a full recovery.

  “You were in on all that, too, Carol. And you almost lost your life because I screwed up.”

  “You also saved my life.”

  “After needlessly putting it in danger,” countered Pine. As she turned out of the cemetery she added, “If she sees the PSA she might come in. That would be the ideal scenario.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then it could be that she’s . . . no longer alive.” Pine shot a glance at Blum. “I’ve accepted that possibility, Carol. A long time ago. I know Mercy was alive when she got free from the Atkinses. But a lot could have happened in between.”

  Blum said, “And it doesn’t seem like the Atkinses did anything to, well, to educate her or . . . ” Her voice trailed off and she looked uncertainly at her boss.

  “Let’s just acknowledge it—she looked like a wild person,” said Pine slowly. “And I’m not sure how she could manage to function in society on her own, at least mainstream society. And people who live on the fringes with no support can be exploited.” Pine looked out the window and said dully, “The person I saw in that video . . . could be exploited.”

  “But she was resilient and resourceful, Agent Pine. Look at how she survived the Atkinses and then outsmarted them and escaped.”

  “And Joe Atkins ended up dead with a knife sticking in his back,” replied Pine.

  “I already told you how I feel about that. He deserved what he got.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you, Carol. But I am saying that if Mercy did kill him, if she is violent, then the intervening years might not have been kind to her. She might have done other things.”

  “You’re thinking that she could have hurt other people?”

  “Or, more likely, had violence done against her,” Pine said.

  “Which brings me back to my original question: What do we do now?”

  “Her last sighting was near Crawfordville, Georgia. She got away that night, or at least it appeared she did.”

  “What do you mean ‘appeared’?” asked Blum.

  “Desiree Atkins has never been found. There are at least three scenarios that I can see.” Pine counted them off on her fingers. “She killed her husband and fled. Mercy killed her and fled. Or she killed Mercy and fled.”

  “Why would Desir
ee kill her husband?”

  “By all accounts, she was a sadistic nut. We heard a gunshot on the video and just assumed it was Joe firing at Mercy. But what if Desiree had the gun and was doing the shooting? What if Joe tried to stop her? He gets the gun away but she stabs him.”

  “So you think Joe might have wanted Mercy to get away? I just don’t see that. When the truth came out they both would have been in a great deal of trouble.”

  “I’m saying it’s possible, not probable. She might have managed to kill Mercy, then Joe got nervous and wanted to call the police, so she stabbed him and fled with Mercy’s body. Only it would have been a real chore for her to lift the body into Joe’s truck. Desiree was tiny, and Mercy looked to be over six feet and probably outweighed her by seventy pounds. And they brought cadaver dogs in after we found out what happened there. There are no bodies buried anywhere in that area. So that option is out. But what if Joe helped her get rid of Mercy’s body, then got cold feet or regrets? Then Desiree plunged the knife in his back.”

  Blum mulled over this. “Or, like you said, Mercy could have killed both of them. She left Joe’s body and maybe took Desiree’s remains and buried them somewhere far away.”

  “It’s possible. But that would mean Mercy would have had to drive the truck.”

  Blum said, “Surely she could have figured that out.”

  Pine shook her head. “The truck has a five-speed manual transmission. I don’t know anybody, particularly someone who has been kept in a hellhole for years and never attempted to drive anything, who could have figured out, on their own, how a clutch works. Certainly not under such stressful conditions. And I can’t see the Atkinses having taught her.”