Pray for the Innocent

by Alan Orloff

  Evidently, they’d reformatted the book for its e-book reissue. So it was possible Dragunov gleaned those names directly from the acknowledgments page. Shit, shit, shit. Which version had Gosberg used in his experiment? Only one way to find out. He pulled out his phone and called Gosberg.

  No answer. After five rings, the call rolled into voice mail, and King left a message asking Gosberg to call him ASAP. Then he reread the acknowledgments page again, carefully. Same exact wording as in the hard copy edition.

  Then he advanced to the next page, and his hands began to shake. He became light-headed as he read the chilling words of his dedication:

  To Nick Nolan’s biggest fans, the two brilliant lights in my life, my lovely wife Rina and my darling daughter Amanda. Two Kings, but also a queen and a princess.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  If Dragunov had seen the acknowledgments page and killed Feinbaum and Connelly because of it, then surely he’d seen the next page, too. Which meant . . .

  King stabbed his chubby fingers at the buttons on his phone, trying to call his princess. With great effort, he forced himself to calm down enough to click the correct number. He jammed the phone to his ear and listened to it ring on the other end.

  Once. Twice. Three times. No answer.

  Four times. Five.

  Voice mail. Hello, this is Amanda. Please leave a message, and I’ll get right back to you! Thanks bunches!

  King didn’t leave a message, just stared straight ahead, phone still at his ear. Finally, he snapped out of it and called another number, Amanda’s landscaping business.

  “Green Things, how can I help you?” A chipper voice, but not Amanda’s.

  “May I please speak to Amanda? This is her father.”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. King. Uh, Amanda’s not here. She hasn’t come in yet today.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” A short pause. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. No. Not at all. Please ask her to call me when she gets in, okay? It’s important.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. King.”

  He clicked off and dialed the landline at her house. While King still received most of his calls on his own landline, he knew Amanda had been ready to dump hers. King had insisted she keep it, though, for those occasions when there was an emergency and the power was out and her cell phone needed charging. When he’d told her that, she’d scoffed at his archaic notions—and paranoia—but after he offered to pay for the service, she’d relented.

  The house phone rang five times, then rolled into a different voice mail, which King also ignored.

  King lowered himself onto the bed, fighting the rising panic. Glanced at the time. Amanda was probably just at the grocery store or the hairdresser or visiting a supplier’s nursery, and she was too busy to answer her phone. Or maybe she’d turned her phone off for some other perfectly plausible reason; King did that himself every so often, preferring to have a little time to think without the possibility of being interrupted.

  Even as he imagined those scenarios, he knew he was spinning stories. Amanda kept her phone with her, and on, and charged, 24/7. That’s what people in her generation did.

  King considered his options. He could wait there and keep trying to get in touch with her. But passivity in the face of anxiety wasn’t a good prescription, not for him. He could try to hunt her down. But . . . he didn’t have a car; he’d left it at the Stop Inn. Taxi back there to retrieve it? What if Locraft had someone watching the car, waiting for him to resurface? They’d nab him for sure.

  Where was the nearest rental car place? He always rented one at the airport. Wasn’t there one company that delivered? Shit. He didn’t have time for messing around. He punched in Emily’s phone number. She answered immediately.

  “What’s up, Professor King?”

  “Listen, Emily. I didn’t want to drag you farther into this thing, but I’m afraid I need your help.”

  “Just name it.”

  “I need a ride.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Great,” King said. “Please hurry.”

  #

  Emily arrived in nineteen minutes, wearing a white T-shirt with black letters that read, Strunk ’n White Got Style. They sneaked out the side door, Emily first, scouting the way, King on her heels with the bill of his Nationals baseball cap almost to his nose. When they got to her Prius, he threw his stuff into the back and scrunched down in the front seat as much as he could, but the little car wasn’t designed for overweight old men. After they made it out to the main drag, King unfurled himself—physically. Emotionally, he was still wound tighter than the innards of a baseball.

  He filled her in on his conclusions as she drove, and with each fear-filled sentence, her knuckles got whiter on the steering wheel. She didn’t respond, simply drove faster.

  King persuaded Emily to break a few traffic laws: zipping around traffic in a right-turn-only lane, then cutting back into the flow at the last minute; exceeding all posted speed limits; and ignoring a “No Turn on Red” sign. When Emily didn’t balk at any of his “suggestions,” King figured she was either having the time of her life or was as worried as he was. One glance at her face told him it was the latter.

  En route, King tried Amanda’s phone a dozen times with no luck.

  They pulled up at the curb in front of Amanda’s house, and Emily hadn’t even turned off the engine before King was bounding across the lawn. He poked the doorbell, heard it ring inside, and stepped back. Three seconds later, he poked it again and again.

  Emily came up beside him. “Check the garage,” he said to her. She nodded once, then scampered around the side of the house. He waited at the door, hopping from foot to foot, pressing the doorbell every few seconds.

  She’d have to be deaf not to hear it.

  Or dead.

  He rapped the doorknocker hard, krak, krak, krak, as panic seized him. He wished he’d put the spare key Amanda had given him on his key ring, instead of on a hook by his front door, at home.

  He spotted Emily walking toward him, grim expression on her face. When she got within ten feet, she uttered the words King didn’t want to hear, not after all the doorbell ringing and knocker banging. “Her car is here.”

  King exhaled. “Shit.”

  “Maybe she went someplace with a friend.”

  “Maybe.” King left the front landing and circled the house, peering into every window he could. All he could think about was his visit to James Connelly and what he’d found inside his house. If Dragunov had done that here . . .

  He rushed around to the back door, Emily trailing behind. The back door was locked, of course; his daughter knew firsthand about the importance of security. His anxiety had mushroomed to dangerous levels. If he didn’t get inside, and quickly, he felt as if he would explode. There was no way he was going to waste even ten minutes going back to his house to fetch Amanda’s key.

  King picked up a rock from the border of an herb garden. Hefted it. “Stand back, Emily.” Then he rammed it through one of the window panels in the back door. He snaked his hand inside and unlocked the door, avoiding the jagged shards. They entered the laundry room. “Amanda!” King yelled. “Amanda!”

  On the wall panel by the door, he punched in the security code to disable the alarm. Then he hustled through the first floor, looking for his daughter. Nothing seemed awry. The air was still and cool and innocent. “Amanda!” He searched the dining room, living room, and family room. In the kitchen, he checked the sink. A glass and a plate. Probably from breakfast. More importantly, no bloody body on the floor.

  He exhaled and felt his level of panic ease, just a hair. They still had to check upstairs. He met Emily’s gaze, and she reflected what he felt. Worry. Fear. He smiled, trying to put her at ease. “You know, you’re probably right. She probably went someplace with a friend. I’m sure we’re just overreacting and letting our imaginations run unfettered.”

  “I’m sure that’s what happened, Professor.”
Her blanched face was at odds with her reassuring words.

  Upstairs, they searched the three bedrooms and found nothing, then he went up to check the attic, hoping she’d decided to continue the cleaning he’d started. Empty. He climbed down the attic staircase and found Emily waiting at the bottom. They’d searched the entire house. No Amanda, but also no sign of, as Gosberg might say, “Foul play.”

  “Come on, let’s get something to drink.”

  They returned to the kitchen, and King got them a couple of sodas from the fridge. They sat at the kitchen table, and King tried to calm himself by generating a list of plausible scenarios. Every one ended with Dragunov looming over Amanda’s lifeless body, except the monster didn’t look like Dragunov—he looked an awful lot like Oscar Boorman.

  “Don’t be worried, Professor King. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  He glanced at her, realizing his emotions must be playing out all over his face. “I’m sure you’re right,” he said, pulling out his phone. “But I’ll feel a lot better when I hear her voice telling me she’s okay.” He called her again.

  Two seconds later, they heard a ringtone, right there in the kitchen. Emily popped up and tracked the next ring. She found Amanda’s phone lying underneath a chair in the corner.

  King’s hopes tumbled yet again. Amanda didn’t go anywhere without her phone. Not of her own free will, anyway. And why would it be on the floor? More mental images, of Amanda and Dragunov in a struggle, flashed through his mind.

  “So what should we do?” Emily asked.

  King opened his mouth to answer, as he did whenever Emily, or any student for that matter, asked his opinion. Only this time, he didn’t have anything useful to say. He closed his mouth and shrugged.

  “Are we sure she . . . isn’t someplace with a friend? Maybe she took off on a spur-of-the-moment getaway with a boyfriend.”

  “What about her phone? She doesn’t go anywhere without that.” King slumped in his chair.

  “This doesn’t fit, not with what you told me about James Connelly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dragunov killed him, right in his house. He probably did the same thing to Fred Feinbaum. Dragunov didn’t kidnap either of them.”

  “If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re not succeeding. I need to call Gosberg.” King pulled out his phone and called him, but there was no answer. “Peter, this is Mathias King. I . . . I think Dragunov has taken my daughter, Amanda. Please call me as soon as you get this.” He clicked off and set the phone down on the table. “I should call the cops, too.” He didn’t reach for his phone.

  Emily watched him. After a moment, she said, “Aren’t you going to call them?”

  “Should I? What if we are wrong? And what will we tell them? Gosberg said he told them what he could about Dragunov without starting an all-out panic. Maybe if I . . .” King paused, trying to put the indecision behind him. He had created Dragunov from his imagination, so he should be able to think this through. If he were a Russian operative, where would he take a kidnapping victim?

  King closed his eyes and tried to channel Dragunov, but all he could think about was Amanda. Her impish smile when she put ice down his shirt one summer at the pool. The tears she cried when her date for the senior prom got sick at the last minute and had to cancel. Her smile when he said he’d take her to the dance instead, despite their rocky relationship at the time. But no Dragunov. He opened his eyes.

  “Are you okay, Professor?”

  “Just give me a few minutes, Emily. I need to concentrate. Would you mind looking in Amanda’s car to see if she happened to leave something that might tell us where she went?”

  “Uh, sure. Good idea.” She rushed out of the kitchen.

  He closed his eyes again and fortified himself with a few deep breaths, trying to mentally transport himself back in time thirty-odd years. In 1981, Jimmy Carter was living in the White House. The Cold War was still in progress and on everyone’s minds, but looking back, King realized it was less frightening knowing who your opponent was than not knowing where the next terrorist strike might come from.

  He recalled doing research for the scene settings. Walking around DC. Taking in the monuments and the museums and the stately buildings housing century-old institutions. He’d taken a lot of notes and picked out a lot of potential settings, a sampling of what the DC tourists saw, and the DC nobody wanted to see. One scene unfolded at the zoo. Another in the downtrodden neighborhoods of Anacostia. One on the Capitol steps. The climactic scene, which became the major set piece in the movie, took place just outside the Supreme Court Building. Dragunov had cleverly eluded his pursuers and was able to set up in a position where he had a clean shot of the president as he got out of his armored limo. To accommodate his story, King had depicted the fictional president as a man of the people, who would get out of his limo and interact with citizens on the street, much to the consternation of his Secret Service detail.

  Just before Dragunov squeezed the trigger, though, Nick Nolan discovered him, and they faced off in the requisite man-to-man, protagonist-vs.-antagonist duel. Although Dragunov had been trained in martial arts and possessed the monomaniacal drive of a zealot, he succumbed to Nick Nolan’s brains and brawn—and true-blue American patriotism—in fifteen or twenty tension-filled pages.

  And they all lived happily ever after. Except for Dragunov, of course.

  The hero, Nick Nolan, hadn’t simply sailed off into the sunset—he’d gone on to save the world in other books. King had constructed Nick Nolan along the lines of an American James Bond. Unflappable, supremely capable, proficient with the ladies. As was pointed out by many a reviewer, he’d created an idealized version of who he wanted to be, sort of an autobiographical case of wishful thinking. Nick Nolan never failed to quash his opponent, and he did it his way. Not much use for rules and procedures. Sort of like the younger Mathias King.

  Attack on America was the first Nick Nolan book, and at the time, King wasn’t sure it was going to be a series, so he’d placed his hero in one perilous situation after another. Which was fine, except he felt he needed to raise the bar in Chaos in the US, the second book. And further in the third, Conflagration in the Nation. By the fourth book, War in Washington, Nick Nolan had morphed into an invincible cartoon superhero, and King was beginning to lose interest in perpetuating the franchise, much to the dismay of his editor and the rest of Haddon Heights Publishing. Lanny hadn’t been happy, either, but he’d already made plenty off Nick Nolan, so he didn’t press too hard. You could squeeze the golden goose until it squawked, but you couldn’t kill it.

  Then Rina had been murdered by the psycho Boorman, which cemented King’s decision to give up on Nick Nolan and the bloodshed and death and destruction right along with him. He left it all behind, red faced and resolute not to contribute any more to the culture of violence in society.

  King squirmed in his chair, brought his thinking back to the matter at hand. Attack on America. In it, the Russians had planted a family in the US many years earlier. They’d behaved like ordinary Americans, focused on raising their only son, Viktor Dragunov—Vic Daniels, to the outside world—like any other boy next door. Apple pie, baseball, Chevrolet. When he was in his late teens, they introduced a few, more insidious, topics into his upbringing. King knew the pretense was far-fetched, that a boy raised as an American would be so easily turned into a traitor, but he was writing fiction, telling a story. In his talented hands, disbelief would be suspended.

  And so Dragunov the Destroyer was born and raised, a Russian operative in Levi’s jeans.

  Dragunov’s mission was simple: destroy America. No methods were deemed too outrageous. He killed government leaders. He blew up national treasures. He kidnapped key figures. He destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Whatever moved the story along. Whatever would elicit the fears of his readers. King pulled no punches.

  His readers loved him for it, and their adulation and support at the bookstores turned him int
o a celebrity almost immediately after Attack was released. His nighttime hijinks, often in cahoots with hell-raiser extraordinaire James Connelly, helped fuel the public’s infatuation with his bad-boy image and bolstered his bank account. Thinking back on that now practically turned King’s stomach.

  “Professor King?” Emily asked, almost in a whisper.

  King opened his eyes. “Huh?”

  “I didn’t find anything in her car. Did you get any ideas?”

  “No, I’m afraid—” King’s phone rang, and he jumped in his seat. He grabbed for his phone and bobbled it for a moment, then hit the right button, ready to tell Gosberg about Amanda’s abduction.

  “Dr. King? Will Slattery here. I understand you’ve been trying to reach Peter. There’s been—”

  King interrupted. “My daughter is missing, and I think Dragunov might have taken her. You’ve got to tell Locraft or Peter or whoever and get them to call out the troops.”

  His plea was met by silence.

  “Dr. Slattery? Hello?”

  More silence. Then, “Don’t go anywhere. We’re bringing you in.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Five minutes later, the doorbell rang.

  Something didn’t sit right in King’s stomach. How could Slattery have gotten there so quickly? He crept to the front window and peeked out. There was a car in the driveway, another Town Car, like the one he’d ridden in to the task force meeting. From his angle, he could see two men at the door, dark suits.

  He turned to Emily and whispered, “Hurry out the back door. Hide and wait until we’re gone. Then hop in your car and get out of here. Forget all about Dragunov.”

  Emily stared at him for a beat, then nodded once and dashed toward the back of the house.

  The doorbell rang again.