by Brett Adams
The physical facts alone should have thrown doubt on the guilt of Cory Wayne. But to young Marten’s profiler’s eye—albeit freshly minted—Wayne was thirteen kinds of wrong for the crime.
And the man Marten’s deconstruction of the case pissed off the most? That was Grover Jackson. He was the one to suggest the assignment of Marten Lacroix, the star product of the FBI’s International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship—a young, black firebrand, now on faux secondment from the UK. A marketer’s dream.
Grover. She sighed. He was definitely a Grover. His parents must have consulted an oracle who peered into the mists of time and saw the hard-ass in the womb.
This Grover was now the head of the FBI in New York. He was the guy she would have to convince to give her the resources and the latitude she needed to find Hiero Beck.
Her current boss, Collins, had told her how to get Grover on-side. Thinking about it made her mouth curl as if she had tasted something sour. But he was right.
She had to sell Grover on the devil coming ashore on his beloved US—one Jack Griffen, the Intercontinental Killer.
62
Date: 2015-31-10: 2015-10-31T13:53:29-02:00
From: JackTheKipper
To: Big Daddy
[9 threads inlined, reverse – emacs/Mu+]
Matt, can you forward this to our friend? “Did you get off your arse and start looking for Hiero Beck?”
> You’re lucky I found this, Prof. It was thrown into spam, but being the anal guy I am, I check. Forwarding . . . I’ll relay any response from our friend. Cheers, The Blackbird.
> She says: “Beck? No. I’m busy hunting Jack Griffen.”
> Oh, that’s hilarious. Can you pass on my burner number? Email is too slow. I want to talk to her when I make landfall. (PS: ‘The Blackbird?” I like it. Very Spy Who Came In From the Cold.)
> She says you should consider yourself lucky she’s even acknowledging your emails. No phone calls. (PS: What’s a Spy Who Came In With A Cold?)
> She wants deniability? Shit, there are more important things at stake than her career. She should know. She held Jane as she died. Could do with some perspective. Tell her Beck is heading for the US. (PS: ‘What’s the Spy?’ Sheesh, Matt. Get an education.)
> She says she knows. And—get this—his real name is Randall Todd. (PS: You should be more polite. Remind me again, how many people in the world don’t think you’re a serial killer?)
> Fair. I repent in sackcloth and ashes . . . Hiero is a Randy? That’s gold. I take it all back. Tell her she’s doing a plum job. I’ll call him Randy next time I’m talking to him with anything other than the muzzle of a gun.
> A gun? Jack . . .
63
I watched Longman’s leathery fingertips poke at the laptop keys with their incongruous delicateness. If pirates had carried laptops, this would have been a pirate’s laptop.
It took me a moment to discern what was wrong with the beaten-up laptop, aside from the obvious age of the device in the hands of a billionaire. Its keys were in alphabetical order. Where normal keyboards spell QWERTY from the top left, this one spelled ABCDEF.
And Longman was the slowest typist I have ever seen. Paint dries quicker than he types. He seemed to return to ‘A’ before scanning to find the letter he wanted each time, as though his finger were the head of an old dot matrix printer.
“Why don’t you dictate,” I said, “or get a PA?”
“I had a PA,” he grunted. His gaze flicked to me. “She destroyed my life.”
He knew how to destroy a conversation before it began, too.
Visible through the cabin portal were the swells making the boat pitch. After a day of green gills and retching over the side of the boat, I now felt only mildly nauseous, something about which I felt quite proud.
We were just days from the Florida coast, making good time on the beeline Longman had charted since I’d spilled my guts. The engine chugged away night and day, a constant background noise added to the wind and wash, like another force of nature.
Machines that just keep going amaze me. I can’t help anthropomorphizing them, imagining them flesh and blood. The analogy falls down when I consider my own flesh and blood. My own traitorous heart.
With a start, I realized I hadn’t checked my Medline in over a week.
I twisted its face toward me and saw the heart icon blipping along at a steady, safe 60 bpm.
The sailor’s life for me.
But actually, the cause was living with someone who trusted me. Two someones who trusted me. Heck, Scrub had sat by my feet every day this week listening to me read aloud. I’d found a tattered, salt-stained copy of The Never Ending Story in a bedside drawer. I experimented by reading the first chapter aloud when he was near. After that he was hooked.
My calm also came from the fact there was nothing I could do but wait. For the moment, I was a passenger of life.
I glanced at Longman. I couldn’t let his comment about the PA who destroyed his life pass.
“You seem full of life to me,” I said.
His finger paused, hovering above the keyboard.
“I had resolved,” he said, and the slow clack, clack of his typing resumed, “to spend what was left of my strength on someone other than me for once. That woman nearly took even that from me.”
The clacking ceased again, and I watched his gaze follow Scrub as the boy passed by the outside of the cabin carrying a book.
“Scrub?”
The typing resumed again.
“Justin Charles Finn.”
“Your grandson.”
“Your,” he muttered. “Such an elusive thing, ownership of a person. My grandson. His father’s son. His sister’s brother.” He paused. “The state’s ward.”
I let the silence stretch, waiting to see if he would continue. He did.
“Do you know anything about US prisons?”
“Only what I learned from Shawshank Redemption.”
He grunted. “In the US, prisons are a business.”
“Like Walmart?” I said, dubiously.
“Like Walmart.” My doubt must have registered on my face. “I’m not joking. One of my investment advisors tried to convince me to invest in CoreCivic—their shares are classed as a ‘Real Estate Investment Trust’. Shortly after, they were investigated for treatment of prisoners and a higher than acceptable death rate of detainees. But in any case, I wasn’t buying. It’s repugnant.”
“And this is connected with—” I gestured in the direction of the prow, where Scrub had been heading.
“It would have been his future, if left to his mother and father. My son, and his ex-spouse.”
He returned to his typing—clack! clack!—a simmering anger bending his frame. I let him pound away with measured wrath, and waited.
“The boy was being shuffled between institutions while his parents played ping-pong with their child, the prize being the freedom to live like children themselves. A perverse irony.
“His own parents failed to recognize what was patently obvious to one grumpy old man—he wasn’t rebellious, or anti-social, or ‘authority-averse’; he was special.”
He waved away my response. “A horrible word, I know. But from age two the boy had been different. He didn’t speak a word. He would arrange his toys in lines, by size and color. He remembered things. Incredible detail. They used to call these kids Idiot Savants. It’s the autism spectrum these days, but even that implies we know what the hell we’re talking about.”
“So you tried to, what?”
“I tried to point out their bloody responsibility to their child, and to actually look at him, and consider his needs. In the end, their needs were money. A lot of it. Controlling interest. In business terms, I showed too much.”
“That you loved him.” It slipped out. But Longman just nodded without looking at me.
“And would you believe that slime at Time had the gall to
pretend the cover was just about my money? Life had the follow up story of my ‘Secret crusade: a grandson’s guardianship’ already warming their presses.”
“So you faxed them the bird.” I couldn’t help smile.
He grimaced, almost a smile, and I saw his gaze kindle for a moment with relish. “I faxed the bastards a flock. Threatened a legal shitstorm if they ran with the cover.”
“Then you bought a boat.” I joked.
“Yes. Before he became the mayor of Providence, Vincent Buddy Cianci, joked he had enough cash to either become the mayor or buy a boat. He did the sums; becoming mayor was cheaper.” He paused. “He didn’t do his sums right.”
I had heard of Buddy Cianci. “He paid in pounds of flesh to the mob. What did you pay?”
Longman watched the ocean tilt a degree through the cabin portal a moment, then said: “That’s just it. I’ve paid nothing. It’s taken me four years to be able to say it, but I’m the most blessed man alive.”
64
“Ms. Lacroix.”
Marten shook the proffered hand. “It’s ‘Mrs’, and you bloody well know it. Start how you mean to finish.”
A perfect smile split the face of Grover Jackson, but did not touch his eyes. “Would you prefer ‘Cadet Lacroix’?”
“Would you prefer to keep your teeth?”
“That time of the month, Marten?”
Marten seethed for a moment, before remembering who she was. “You might have grown up some in seven years.”
They walked in silence through the terminal exit and into the haze around JFK. The air was still and neither warm nor cold—like a bath at body temperature. Marten tasted engine exhaust at the back of her throat.
Grover’s eyes disappeared behind aviator shades as he slipped behind the wheel of a black Cadillac. Marten dumped her hand luggage—all she had brought—onto the rear seat before sitting in the front passenger seat. Her door was barely shut before Grover wedged the car in front of a taxi and headed for the exit ramp.
The Cadillac had barely settled into the flowing metal river of the Van Wyck Expressway before he spoke. “Tell me this story about Griffen is crap, and you’re just here because you needed a break from the ball and chain.”
“His name is Benjamin, and we have a son, now—David.”
“Congratulations,” said Grover automatically. “And it also wouldn’t have anything to do with fleeing the stink you put on in Oxford?”
How did he know about that?
“No, and no, Jack Griffen is real, dangerous, and probably on US soil.”
“Why do I care?”
“Because if he kills again and it gets out that the FBI knew he was here and did nothing about it . . .”
Marten felt Grover’s eyes move behind the mirrored lenses.
“Shit, Marten. What do they put in the water in London? You’d talk to the media?”
Marten watched the traffic in silence.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I told you. A car. A jet, if I need to get interstate. And access to NCIC databases.”
He laughed. “You don’t want much.” Then, “Done.”
“Done?” It slipped out. Marten had prepared herself for a long argument, and was ready to call Collins back in London for support, and even then hadn’t been sure of getting what she needed. But, ‘Done’?
Warning bells were just beginning to ring when Grover said, “On one condition.”
“What condition?”
“You apologize—full and frank.”
“Apologize for what?”
“All of it,” said Grover, and he flashed that full smile. Marten knew without seeing behind the mirrored lenses that his eyes were smiling now.
“Look, Grover, I’m sorry—”
“Not to me,” he said, and Marten’s heart sank.
65
Call me Ishmael.
Actually, txt me, Ishmael. The reception here is crap.
My brain played absurd games.
It was trying to distract me from the anxiety cramping my guts. From my hideaway in the owner’s cabin beneath the bridge, I heard voices rise and fall over the gurgle of water against the hull. Longman was having a conversation on which my freedom hung.
A sudden clang of iron startled me, and I remembered Scrub was loose topside. From the constant pad of his feet on the deck, and the frequent scrapes and thuds that overlaid the conversation I was straining to hear, I got the impression he was trying hard to make it appear the boat held no secrets. I smiled despite my churning guts.
Another minute of holding my breath in the dark, and I heard a sound that frightened me to my core. The heavy clump of a man’s tread. Longman had said he was known here, trusted. He would sign the customs forms on the jetty, or in the officer’s booth if it was cold. The officer would not come aboard.
Timber creaked directly above my head. I was inches from a custom’s officer, at that moment the embodiment of civilization—the thing I’d stepped outside the day I tore open the door in a Hong Kong high rise. The night I first laid eyes on a dead body.
The tread moved over my head and away. I heard the officer call, I assumed, to Scrub. The boy made no response, of course. Longman’s voice rose in explanation, and I heard his feet land heavily above me, and follow with what my imagination told me was nervous haste.
The sound of the latch on the cabin door opening, a sound that had welded with my new familiarity with the ocean, told me the officer was homing in on my position.
The customs officer’s voice came clearly through the hatch, which was all that sat between where I squatted and the bridge above.
“That’s the new Furano Multi Beam Sonar, right?”
“Yeah,” Longman’s voice, sounding breathless. “Not so new now.”
“But top of the line, right? These puppies can see one-twenty degrees, school and bed in real-time, huh?”
Longman grunted agreement.
“And this—” I heard the slight squeak the captain’s chair made when it swiveled. “A man could sleep in this thing.”
“Hardly,” said Longman, but I could hear a little pride seeping into this tone.
There was a click, and a slight tremor shook the boat as a pump pulsed.
“Where’s De Hayes, anyway?” Longman again.
“Got croup, would you believe it. At his age.” The chair squealed again, and the radio crackled. “He said you called him direct, but his answering machine took it. Said you were early this season, and he regretted not being able to catch you for that ‘pint’.”
“De Hayes doesn’t need me for an excuse to drink,” said Longman. To my ears his levity sounded forced.
“Why are you so early this year? He said you’d normally come through the Caribbean, and take your time tooling around the islands.”
“Something came up. I set straight course a few days south of the Azores.”
“You wouldn’t believe what people try to smuggle in these days.”
There was a pause. I willed myself to be a stone.
“Want a look through the cabins?” said Longman. I almost wet myself.
More silence, broken only by the rhythmic squeaking of the captain’s chair.
“No, I’m done. I just wanted to check out your sweet ride. I’ve seen these Nordhavn’s, but never one tricked out like this.”
The chair squealed one last time, and I heard the clump of the man’s weight coming down on the cabin floor, and then he was leaving.
A minute later I bustled out of the stowage into the cabin. The cabin light was off; Longman’s head and shoulders were silhouetted against the marina lights.
“Give it a minute, Jack. Don’t waste a year’s care for the want of a moment’s patience.”
I froze, and peered through the cabin portal at the jetty, and the retreating back of the customs officer. Beyond him, where the jetty ended, lay solid ground. Only dark parking lot, but a sudden hunger for earth took me. I fought to wait.
W
e waited in silence, motionless for what felt like hours. Scrub slipped soundless into the cabin and stood by his grandfather’s side, kept vigil with us.
The jetty had been empty minutes, and at last I could stand it no longer. I stooped to pick up my backpack, but Longman laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. With his other hand, he thrust something toward me.
“For your journey.”
He held a bundle the size of a thick book. I took it without examination, and tucked it into my backpack beside my meager belongings.
My hand was on the cabin door handle when his hand grasped my arm again. The thought of landfall was a fire in me now, and I had to suppress the urge to tear away.
“You know, Scrub never took to anyone before. Except me.” Longman’s eyes glinted in the darkness. “And I’m not getting any younger.”
I turned to look at the boy.
Only days ago he’d been holding a gun on me. Now his eyes were shining.
“If I come out of this, I’ll drop you a line. Promise.” I didn’t say it, but deep down, I’d been thinking for a while now that those chances weren’t good. “And, thanks.”
The cabin door whooshed shut behind me as I stepped onto a deck scoured by a rising wind. The tide-run beyond the marina on St Johns River glimmered with white chop, and the night was riven by the occasional lonely gull’s cry.
Adrenaline fizzed in my veins as I vaulted over the rail and onto the jetty. I made my way, swift but as casually as I could manage while my heart hammered in my chest. The faint orange light of my Medline strobed the planks. The jetty seemed to sway, but I knew it was my sea legs that were lying to me. The thick planks were rock solid.
Soon dry land was a stone’s throw away.