Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5)

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  The truth was, though, there was too much. With a team of agents assisting her she might only get through half the material concerning Art Jefferson before her seven-day access was up. And she didn’t have a team.

  “Dammit,” Emily said.

  It wasn’t a curse signaling surrender, though. Not even close.

  “Where are you, Leah Poole?” Emily asked as she opened still another digital folder, scanning its contents. “And who are you?”

  * * *

  “How are you feeling today?” Dr. Michaels asked.

  Simon sat at the table in the processing room, a pad of paper before him. Atop it lay three pens, already clicked open. Michaels stood opposite him, smiling, as though there was something true and real to smile about.

  “I’m…”

  He couldn’t get out what he wanted to say. Not because his brain couldn’t choose the word. It was simply the remnants of the sedatives he’d been given over the past several days, all of which hadn’t worked its way out of his system.

  There was more, though, that was stuttering his response. It was the place he sat. The room in particular. It was familiar, and not. He looked around, seeing everything where he remembered things being. There was a window set into the wall to his right. Through it he could see Audra Lamb, a headset on, a mix of computers and cameras before her. She seemed to be speaking to someone as she looked into one of the cameras, but Simon could hear none of it.

  This room is soundproofed…

  Nothing said in here would be heard outside. Unless, of course, it was allowed to be heard.

  “You’ll feel better once we get you working again,” Dr. Michaels told him before taking a seat that faced his subject. “So, let’s get started.”

  He slipped into a headset and looked through the window to the receiving room. That was the space where the connection with the outside world was made. It was the early hours of the morning at The Ranch, but mid-day where the first of their scheduled contacts was located, in Norway, Michaels believed. Or was Oslo after Hong Kong on the schedule? He couldn’t recall. Vance had sent the listing of contacts over just hours before, when his focus had been on readying their subject to fill his role.

  And fill it he would.

  “Audra, can you hear me?” Michaels asked. He received a thumbs-up and she began speaking into her headset.

  Simon lifted his gaze from the tablet and pens to the doctor seated across from him. The man was listening as Audra Lamb spoke to him.

  This is how it works…

  She would tell Dr. Michaels what was being asked from someone on the outside. Occasionally a diagram or an equation would be shown to Simon through the window, transmitted by one of those seeking his assistance. Physicists, mathematicians, researchers. The questions which had been posed to him over the years had come from those groups almost exclusively.

  Two hundred and eighty had come from physicists…

  That fact popped into Simon’s still dulled thoughts from what felt like the old part of his mind. Not a part that was gone, but which had been eclipsed by some new brightness streaming in. It seemed almost superfluous now, such recollections. They’d flitted about his mind like comforting talismans, always available for recall, whether wanted or not.

  “Simon…”

  He looked to Dr. Michaels. The man was speaking to him.

  This is how it works…

  “The first problem we have today involves fluid dynamics,” Michaels said. He reached across the table and picked one of the pens up, holding it out to Simon. “Are you ready?”

  This is how it works…

  This was how it worked. People asked him things. And Dr. Michaels made him answer. Made him give solutions. Validate theories. That had seemed to be his purpose for so very long.

  But should it be?

  “Simon…”

  He looked to the pen and took it in hand, pushing the other two off the pad. There was no point defying the doctor. He had nowhere to go and would not be allowed to even if there was someplace waiting for him.

  I’m alone…

  “Simon, the issue involves flow rate calculations of fluids at depths greater than nine hundred feet,” Michaels said, relaying the parameters being given to Audra.

  “Over a surface or through a conveyance?”

  The question came without prompting, surprising Michaels. And Simon. No longer were the queries one sided, with numerous questions necessary to narrow down specifically what the mind of Simon Lynch was concluding. He was doing that himself now.

  “Through a conveyance,” Michaels answered.

  The person asking the question in some distant place was a naval engineer, Simon knew. They were vexed by turbulence issues as water moved through a shrouded propeller system of a submersible at great depth. The shape of the shroud was their issue when combined with its speed through water under tremendous pressure.

  You know this…

  Simon did. With ease. He wrote the calculation matrix down on the pad with swift certainty. He could figure anything out.

  Except how to free himself of this new life which had been thrust upon him.

  Sixteen

  Ezekiel Sanders sat on the couch in his room at the boutique hotel on the edge of downtown Minneapolis and waited, his gaze literally fixed on the vintage clock above the aquarium bubbling atop the television stand.

  Two hours. That was when he was going to make his move on Emily LaGrange. Though the term seemed almost salacious, it was an accurate descriptor of what he envisioned. He’d spent the previous night going over the information he’d amassed, and the options he’d decided upon. That she hadn’t returned immediately to her home after being dropped off in Salt Lake City was curious, but the quick trip she’d taken to Los Angeles to drop in on Jefferson’s old partner seemed to offer possible explanations.

  Emily LaGrange might be having second thoughts after meeting Simon Lynch. The assignment might not be something she could see herself continuing with. Or, the rigors of the security protocol she’d been put through could have turned her off to any further involvement.

  That damn black hole…

  That was what Sanders had termed it, the void of information between Emily LaGrange’s departure from Idaho Falls and her reappearance in the Utah capital. If he’d only had the information that filled that absence of knowledge, specifically the location of Simon Lynch, he might have been able to bypass entirely the machinations and risks to come by arranging a snatch team to deliver the savant to him. But he didn’t. And he couldn’t press too hard within the power structure he inhabited for that information, lest the effort itself draw attention to what he was attempting. That lack of freedom, he knew, put him, and the group, at a disadvantage. Others with less pure motives were shackled only by resources. They could bankroll an operation to find Simon Lynch.

  And to take him…

  The latter possibility chilled Sanders. What would they do to the man to draw from his mind what they wanted? Maybe the same things that were already happening. Things which had upset Jefferson. But, Sanders knew, they could also do worse.

  Kimura would have done worse.

  Keiko Kimura, the Japanese assassin, had been sent after Simon when he was still a boy, and had nearly killed Jefferson trying to take the child from him. Her savagery and sadism were well documented. But her brutality would have been ineffective against what afflicted him.

  Brutality, though, was not only something that could be delivered by physical means. What sort of mental pressure one could employ on Simon Lynch was something Sanders did not want to think about, nor what effect it could have on the innocent man.

  Extreme innocent…

  He was that. Since he’d shown up on the NSA’s radar twenty years earlier, Simon Lynch had been that. And more. A pawn. A target.

  But he was also, as many might forget, a person. A human being. Damaged and brilliant. The perfect dichotomy which Sanders thought accurately described humanity as a whole. A won
drous horror.

  Ding.

  Sanders looked to his cell phone where it lay on the coffee table. He was expecting no contact at this late hour, yet someone was reaching out on a number which few possessed. He picked the phone up and read the simple text facing him on the screen.

  Look outside

  Sanders stared at the message for a moment. The number it had been sent from, noted at the top of the screen, consisted of all zeroes except for the final spoofed digit, which was a 4.

  “Shit…”

  He stood, leaving the cell on the coffee table as he crossed the room to the window. From its third-floor vantage he could see only a sliver of the city at night, mostly just the street and sidewalk below, a man standing beneath a street lamp across the empty four lanes of blacktop.

  Lane…

  Sanders didn’t speak the name out of habit. There could be electronic ears anywhere. Even the secure cell he carried on this trip could be coopted by the right people. Or the wrong ones. He dared not offer any description of the man who, in no way, should be where he was right then.

  * * *

  Three minutes after seeing the member of the group from his hotel room window, Sanders stood with the man in the icy Minneapolis night, a wispy trickle of snowflakes fluttering down from the sky.

  “You can chew my ass out all you want for being here, but you won’t if you let me talk first,” Lane said.

  “How the hell did you even find me?” Sanders pressed the man from Justice.

  “You used a credit card to check in,” Lane said, puzzled by the man’s question. “That’s a normal thing to do. I tracked that.”

  “You’re right, using a credit card at a hotel is normal,” Sanders half agreed with his visitor. “But running that card to lock in a location is not. That leaves a trail. A trail that leads to me.”

  “I was careful,” Lane assured him. “This is what I do every single day. A thousand innocent people get run through the system for every one who ends up a suspect. It won’t look odd.”

  Sanders shook his head. The younger man was too confident in himself, and in his place in the bureaucracy. The fact was, there was no true safety in any action, much less in one so seemingly impulsive.

  “Talk,” Sanders said. “Convince me you haven’t become a liability to this group.”

  There were many things Lane could have said, all extended variations on the single word that should do precisely what Sanders demanded.

  “Traeger,” Lane said.

  Traeger…

  There was only one person by that name of any consequence that could impact their operation.

  “Damian Traeger?”

  Lane nodded. “The funds that were funneled through a ghost account in Madrid originated from the Traeger Group. His company is knee deep in this.”

  “Traeger,” Sanders repeated the name. “You’re certain.”

  “My people confirmed it,” Lane said. “He’s the paymaster.”

  If the money to take operatives off the market and direct them toward Simon Lynch was coming from his business, then it was coming from the man himself. He ruled his empire with more than an iron fist, Sanders knew. A bloodied fist was more appropriate.

  “He’s been under investigation a dozen times,” Lane said. “Money laundering, arms transfers to embargoed states. That doesn’t make him unique, I know, but—”

  “He’s never even been charged,” Sanders reminded his younger associate. “Not a single one of his companies has run afoul of the law in any country.”

  “You sound like you’re exonerating him,” Lane said.

  “No,” Sanders countered. “I’m pointing out his greatest strength—he doesn’t get caught. He leaves no loose ends.”

  Lane knew what that meant, and what Sanders was suggesting—that Damian Traeger was calculating and ruthless all at once.

  “He could have an army of operators ready to pounce on Lynch,” Lane suggested.

  “He doesn’t need an army,” Sanders said. “He just needs a location. The same as us.”

  “What do we do about him?”

  “We watch him,” Sanders said. “That means you watch him, Mr. Lane. Any means necessary that won’t place us at further risk.”

  He paused for a moment, letting the flakes falling from the dark sky tickle his face. Winter was almost here. Ezekiel Sanders wondered if it would be the last time he would know that season. Or any season. The doctors had given him no specific timeline other than six months. Maybe.

  “Mr. Sanders…”

  He looked to Lane, drawn from the momentary sojourn to thoughts of his impending mortality.

  “You were right to come,” Sanders told him. “But don’t ever do it again.”

  With that complimentary admonition, Lane watched the man turn and cross the empty street, disappearing into his hotel. He wondered if this was it. Was his part in the operation complete? If so, it was a hollow sense of accomplishment. He’d provided one piece of the puzzle, maybe even a vital piece, but, he feared, he would not be there to see what the final picture would resemble once all was said and done.

  Seventeen

  Emily LaGrange’s cell phone rang at a quarter after two in the morning. She rolled toward the nightstand where it lay and picked the device up. ‘No Caller ID’ showed on the screen, enough information for her to send the call to voicemail with the tap of a virtual button.

  She set the phone aside and rolled away from it, facing the window, her groggy gaze taking note of the soft fall of snow beyond the glass, the peaceful sight easing her down toward sleep once again.

  Until the phone rang once more.

  “Come on…”

  She spun fast beneath the covers and grabbed the phone this time, quickly noting the same message on the screen, but opting not to send the anonymous caller to voicemail another time. Instead, she answered.

  “Whatever time zone you’re calling from to sell me some cut-rate cruise, it’s two in the God damn morning here, so fuck the hell off.”

  She was about to take the phone away from her face and tap the screen to end the call, but the voice on the other end upset that plan.

  “Take a walk, Emily.”

  It was a man. A man who knew her name. A man she didn’t recognize who knew her name and was calling her after two in the morning. She brought the phone close to her face and sat up in bed.

  “Who is this?”

  “Take a walk, Emily. South from your building.”

  She listened but could make out nothing on the line other than the unknown voice. A voice which she now realized was altered, if only slightly, some electronic transformation applied to disguise it. The caller didn’t want to be identified by her. But why?

  “Give me your name,” Emily said.

  “You’ll want a coat,” the caller said. “It’s snowing.”

  The call ended not with a click, but with a rush of silence and a beep on her end. She pulled the phone away and instinctively looked at its screen. But there was nothing there to tell her who that was, or just what was going on. The only way those answers would come, she suspected, was to do precisely what was told to her.

  She set the phone aside and looked to the window. The snow was coming down now, more than just a dusting. The caller was right—she was going to need a coat.

  * * *

  ‘South from your building…’

  That had been the direction given her, and that was the direction she was walking, the coat she’d grabbed after quickly dressing unzipped, the pistol on her hip easily accessible. She’d wondered as she armed herself before stepping out her door why, in fact, she should do so. The answer was both odd and obvious.

  Because you’re involved with some unreal shit now…

  The NSA was her guess. The people responsible for Simon Lynch. After her initial meeting with the man, and considering the reaction from his doctor to the effect she appeared to have on his patient, she suspected that someone in the agency’s power structure had
decided there needed to be a ‘clarification’ session to remind her of her role, and its limits. That the action seemed wrapped in bits from some bad spy movie didn’t surprise her. Little did, anymore.

  One block she walked. Then two. Her shoeprints marked her path through the fresh coat of wintry white covering the sidewalk, no sign of anyone else out at the hour.

  Until there was.

  As she neared the spot where a narrow alley split from the sidewalk to mark the space between two buildings, Emily stopped. Just beyond that spot, more footprints were visible in the snow. Fresh prints, it was obvious, considering the rate at which the flakes were falling and coating the ground. More telling, though, was the fact that the shoeprints disappeared into the alley.

  Emily let one hand rest atop her pistol as the other retrieved a small flashlight from her coat pocket. She eased forward, peering around the corner and down the dark alley. Wisps of light from a streetlamp across the street filtered down the long passage between the old brick buildings, both commercial. There would be no residents to disturb in this space. And none to bear witness to what might transpire.

  “Emily,” the voice said from the shadows, no electronic manipulation distorting it now.

  She didn’t withdraw. Didn’t hesitate. With fluid motion she brought both her pistol and flashlight up as she stepped into the alley, activating the beam so that it lit up the face of the man a dozen yards distant.

  “Don’t move,” she ordered.

  “I won’t,” Ezekiel Sanders assured her. He held his hands out, palms toward her.

  She advanced, scanning the area beyond Sanders, searching for any who might have accompanied him.

  “I’m alone,” Sanders told her.

  Emily stopped ten feet from him and zeroed the light on his face, her pistol’s aim dead center on his chest.

  “Open your coat,” she said.

  Sanders complied, spreading the halves of both his overcoat and the blazer beneath it.

  “I’m not armed,” he said.

  “Strangers I’ve met in dark alleys usually are,” Emily said.