Simon Sees (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 5)

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  ‘Under a tree by a house, by a field washed with rain, lies a boy all alone with his thoughts and his dreams...’

  Dreams…

  He could have dreams now. Real dreams. That was what Emily was telling him. What she was promising him.

  Even if that was true, if he truly would have a real future, he’d lost so much. He walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. A bed not unlike the one he’d known, but that he’d never know again.

  Now, he only had those thoughts and dreams of what might be. Of a future that was his to make. If Emily was right.

  If not, the best he could imagine was a nightmare.

  * * *

  The fire finally took, sustaining itself. She’d need to feed it throughout the night to break the chill in the house, but for now she could let it burn and do what she must.

  Emily stood and took the pistol from the mantle, crossing into the dining room. A hand-crafted buffet sat against the wall between the space and the kitchen. She slid the piece of furniture out and reached behind, into a hollow she’d built into the antique. A second later a .45 caliber Glock was in her hand. A second reach behind the buffet retrieved two spare magazines. She slipped the pistol she’d taken from the guard at The Ranch into the hollow and slid it back into place.

  There was no need to check if the weapon was loaded. It was. Others that she’d hidden around the house and property were as well. If she ever needed to retreat to the place, she believed, there might come an Alamo moment where those she’d been working against while undercover came at her in force. This situation didn’t compare directly to that, but her desire to be ready at a second’s notice was serving her well regardless.

  She tucked the Glock into her waistband and placed the spare magazines on the mantle, the fire building nicely now. It was only then that she thought of the man she’d brought to her hideaway.

  “Simon…”

  She listened, but heard no reply. In actuality, she heard nothing but the crackle of the logs.

  “Simon,” she repeated, but again there was no response.

  Dammit…

  She moved quickly into the kitchen, fearing that he’d made his way out the back door, but found it locked and bolted from the inside. Next, she checked the cellar, the bare bulb she switched on weak but revealing that he had not found his way down there.

  “Simon!”

  Emily bolted up from the cellar and ran to the stairs, bounding up the steps to the second floor. That was when she saw it—light. Spilling from one of the three bedrooms past the partly open door. She slowed, approaching the opening with her heart still racing. What she saw, though, when she reached the doorway both calmed and saddened her.

  Simon Lynch lay beneath the covers on the bed, lamp alight on the nearby nightstand. His back was to her, but in the cadence of his breathing she could see, and hear, and sense a calm that she suspected he’d not known for far too long. Maybe never.

  Emily backed away and made her way back downstairs. There was more she needed to do. She turned the light outside the back door on and made sure the front porchlight was off, a signal she’d previously worked out with the neighboring farmer who looked after the place to indicate that she was there, and not some squatter.

  Next she went to the downstairs bathroom, just sink and toilet in the space. From the drawer in the vanity cabinet she took a scissors and stared at her face in the mirror for a moment, taking a last look at her longish brown hair before she began cutting it off.

  * * *

  Hours later she sat in the living room downstairs near the fire crackling in the hearth, running her fingers through the short mop atop her head. It was odd but necessary. People would already be looking for them. People from both sides. In actuality, they would be looking for her.

  No picture of Simon would be circulated. Emily knew this without a doubt. To plaster his images on the screen of patrol cars all over the country would be to admit that he existed. And that admission would draw questions as to who he was and what he’d been doing.

  It was her they would focus on. A cropped head of hair would not render her entirely unrecognizable, but it would help.

  A cough sounded from upstairs. Just a single pulse of congested breath. Then silence as the man settled back into a quiet sleep.

  Man…

  He was that, she knew. But so much of what made Simon Lynch special was what he had been when he was a child. That part still existed, only in the form of an adult who’d never known that state of life. Now, he had been thrust into it through a mix of hellishly expensive pharmaceuticals and life-threatening circumstances. The brief taste he’d had of this world, the one that seemed commonplace to others, was not what it should have been for him.

  Emily wondered if, at some point, Simon Lynch might wish he’d never been given this opportunity. His old world, an unknown to her, could very well seem like a place of comfort should things not improve. And soon.

  For now, though, he was resting. He was safe. He was away from the place and people who’d manipulated and used him under the guise of care and science. Emily LaGrange stared into the fire and knew that she’d done the right thing. She might be among the few who thought so, but that didn’t change the fact.

  The warmth of the fire washed over her, the pile of logs she’d fed into the old brick hearth raging. In an hour or so she’d need to stoke it again. For a while, Emily decided, she could close her eyes. Her weapon lay on her lap beneath the blanket she’d drawn around herself.

  You did okay, Em…

  She told herself that as the crackling logs soothed her.

  You did okay…

  Thirty Two

  The sound of footsteps woke her.

  They were soft and close. In her mind as it transitioned rapidly from deep sleep to instant alertness, she feared that they’d been found. That some hit team had made their way into the house, as they had Jefferson’s, and were about to fulfill their mission—killing her and taking the prize she’d stolen from them. From all of them.

  But as her eyes snapped open and her hand gripped the Glock beneath the blanket, that ingrained fear, and the reactions it elicited, drained instantly, almost incomprehensibly away.

  “I made eggs,” Simon said, holding the simple white plate out toward Emily. He stood near the chair where she’d curled up next to the now cold hearth. “The directions said to add water and stir and cook in a pan.”

  For a moment she said nothing, staring first at the breakfast he’d made for her, and then at him.

  “The label on the can said they taste like real eggs,” Simon told her. “They don’t.”

  Emily smiled lightly and shook her head.

  “Powdered anything never does,” she said. Beneath the blanket she tucked the pistol in her waistband, then reached out and took the plate, a fork lying next to the yellowish egg mixture. “Thank you.”

  Simon stepped back, as if by some reactive awareness that Emily might not appreciate others being in close proximity. He recognized that very feeling, but, despite all that he was, all the brilliance and complexity, he could not form either concise thoughts nor clear words to express it. It was as if a piece of who he was had been short circuited without being excised.

  “I already ate mine in the kitchen,” Simon said, glancing through the doorway to the space beyond. “There’s a table in there. I’ll sit with you if you want to have your breakfast there.”

  It was impossible for Emily to not notice that, as Simon made the very ordinary offer, he did not look at her. It was an avoidance not like those behaviors he’d exhibited before the doctors had put him through their protocol. She’d witnessed the focused avoidance of eye contact in recordings attached to the case files. Video images of a child, then a teenager, and finally a young man, all versions of Simon Lynch existing in his own world, his own universe, maybe, while those on the outside strained to peer within. The autism that had been a wall between worlds had been breached, at least partially. What she was s
eeing now was not a vestige of that other place, of the other Simon, hanging on.

  It was simple shyness. An awkward attempt at normalcy. Sweet and stumbling at the same time.

  “I’d like that,” Emily said, sliding the blanket aside and standing. “I’ll whip us up some fake orange juice.”

  * * *

  They sat at the small table tucked into a corner of the kitchen and ate like normal people. Like people without a care in the world. For a while, it didn’t feel like a lie.

  “Your hair is different,” Simon told her.

  “Yeah. It’s a precaution for when we get moving again.”

  Simon studied her new look, then his gaze settled on the pistol she’d set on the table.

  “Your gun is different, too.”

  She glanced at the weapon. “Another precaution. I have some hidden in different places. So I can get to them quickly. So I can always be ready. The other gun was…I prefer this one.”

  He took in that explanation, which was completely reasonable in a sad sort of way. But there was much about Emily LaGrange that was similar. Things that made sense, but shouldn’t. Like the house they had come to.

  “What is this place?” Simon asked. He’d finished the glass of powdered orange drink that Emily had made for him and now sat watching her. Thinking. Wondering. It was an alien feeling to him—to not know. To not be able to completely decipher a question before him.

  A question like Emily.

  “Just like I said,” she said, focusing on her breakfast and not the question. “A farm. A safe house, if you want to call it that.”

  He looked around the kitchen. The cupboards had been stocked with dehydrated food and bags of staples which would last for years—rice, beans, flour. Those things all pointed to the answer she’d offered. But there was more.

  “It seems like more than that,” Simon said.

  Emily looked up from her plate. “What do you mean?”

  “It seems a lot like the places you described in those videos you watched,” he told her. “A homestead, maybe. You know, the kind of place where a person puts down roots.”

  She set the fork down on her plate, the eggs almost gone. Simon stared at her, any shyness he’d exhibited just moments before gone.

  “I never really thought of that,” Emily said. “I just thought of this place as somewhere to come in a time of danger.”

  Simon nodded. “It’s a nice place even without that.”

  He saw ‘danger’ as something imminent. As a tangible that was right before him. It existed for them both now as a reality which could burst forth at any moment, without warning, turning this ‘nice place’ into something very, very different from that.

  “Are we staying here?” Simon asked.

  She hesitated, thinking. Deciding how much of what lay ahead she should share with him. As it was, keeping knowledge of their moves closely held was not only wise—it was imperative. When Kirby Gant had discussed routes to the ultimate destination she was shooting for, she’d told him she wouldn’t discuss specifics. If the way forward existed only in her head, it could not be discovered. Not easily. Someone could try to extract such information from her, as she suspected others had planned to extract information about Simon’s location from Jefferson, but if she found herself facing that situation, then she would have lost already.

  “We’ll be moving on in a few days,” she told him.

  “To where?”

  The truth was, she could answer his question honestly. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know where it is. It’s not time for me to know.”

  “Where what is?”

  “The place Art picked for you,” she told Simon.

  Simon let that sink in, quieting once again.

  “He cared for you a great deal,” Emily said. “And you cared for him.”

  “Yes,” Simon said. “I wish I’d been able to talk to him like I’m talking to you. I never could when I was like I was.”

  Emily considered the man for a moment, then leaned forward, elbows on the table. “What was it like?”

  Simon considered the question, just as he’d considered every question throughout his life, and in that he found the answer to hers.

  “Imagine that you know everything,” he said. “Not in some omnipotent way, but that everything you see, or hear, or feel, becomes something that has an explanation. Then, if you can, try to imagine that you have to figure all those things out. Not because you want to, or need to, but simply because your brain starts working them out. You have no say in the matter, and all you have, even when there are distractions, like drinking chocolate milk or sledding in your back yard, that part of you in your head is calculating heat loss through a ceramic mug, or the drag coefficient of fiberglass on snow bearing a certain weight at varying angles of attack.”

  “That sounds exhausting,” Emily said.

  “It wasn’t,” Simon told her. “Not while it was happening. I didn’t have the ability to comprehend that sort of correlation between fatigue and what was happening in my brain. It’s only now that I can look back on it and see it through new eyes that it feels that way.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  “I could just say different,” Simon said, and Emily smiled. He smiled back at her. “That old part of me is still there. I still look at things that are normal to everyone else, like you starting that fire inefficiently last night.”

  “I see,” Emily said, her smile doubling. But in his explanation she thought she sensed more than just the parameters of what had changed for him. “It will get better. I promise. Your life is going to be your own now.”

  He accepted what she said with a slight smile, one that was tinged with a hint of doubt. “I’m not sure that’s completely up to me.”

  “Maybe not now,” Emily said. “But it will be.” She reached across the small table and put her hand atop Simon’s. “Believe that.”

  He looked to her hand where it lay upon his, and he smiled now. A true smile. One whose doubt had been replaced by hope.

  * * *

  He hadn’t sent donuts to call this meeting. Just a text as he had before.

  “You have something?” Sanders asked as he climbed into the passenger seat of Lane’s car. They were parked in the lot of a shopping center twenty minutes outside of Washington, the last wisps of daylight just a pinkish line hovering low in the western sky.

  “Look at this,” Michael Lane said, handing a smartphone over. “I put the video on there.”

  “What am I looking at?” Sanders fixed his gaze on the frozen image, some sort of security checkpoint. People in blue shirts were scanning travelers, it seemed. “TSA?”

  Lane nodded. “At Baltimore Washington. The private terminal. Those are overseas arrivals from corporate jets and such. I’ve been monitoring those types of arrivals since he dropped off the grid in London.”

  “Who dropped off the grid?” Sanders pressed.

  “Damian Traeger. He cancelled longstanding meetings, hasn’t been seen at his apartment, his house. You told me to watch him, so I watched him.”

  In an instant, Sanders felt a queasiness rise in his gut. One that had nothing to do with the cancer chewing away at his insides.

  “Traeger,” Sanders said, and again Lane nodded.

  “He’s here,” Lane said, then reached over and tapped the screen to make the video play. In just a few seconds a bald man appeared, emptying his pockets into a plastic bin. “That’s him.”

  “I don’t remember him looking like that,” Sanders said.

  “He altered his appearance,” Lane explained. “And he’s traveling on a false passport.”

  “You have the name?”

  “I do.”

  “Where is he?”

  Lane shook his head now. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. He had a private car service drop him in downtown Baltimore. I can’t link the vehicle to anyone, and he just faded away once he was in the city.”

  “He’s good at this,” Sanders
said, watching the brief video again. The man was conversing with the TSA agent. Being polite. No sign of nerves. “Very good.”

  “I’m sorry I lost him,” Lane said.

  Sanders shook his head and handed the smartphone back to the man from Justice. “You found him first. That counts for something.”

  “What do want me to do now?” Lane asked.

  “Keep trying to nail down that car service,” Sanders said. “It will probably be pointless. I’m sure he used people you don’t find in the phone book, but we have to try.”

  “All right,” Lane said.

  Sanders stepped from the car and closed the door. A moment later he was standing alone beneath the parking lot lights, watching Lane drive away. Then, for no reason he could fully express, he looked around. Behind and to either side. Then back to the front. No one was near. Only shoppers walking to their cars in the near distance. But still he felt something. A presence.

  Traeger…

  The man wasn’t near him, but he could be. He could be anywhere.

  Thirty Three

  By three in the afternoon, Simon Lynch was asleep again, curled up in the bed upstairs beneath a layer of blankets and comforters. Emily sat in a rocker on the covered porch, floor boards creaking beneath with every motion of the chair. The air was biting, the high thirties at most, but she savored the simple act of what she was doing. Savored the quiet. The sense of calm.

  She wondered if Simon was right. If this place she’d purchased as some personal Alamo was born more of a desire to live simply. To live quietly. To make her own peace.

  Also, though, she had to remind herself that the man she’d rescued was a certain kind of genius, and wasn’t necessarily equipped to pass judgement on her life. Or what her life might be.

  One thing he certainly was was tired. It was more than exhaustion, she knew. It was as if some well of tension had been drained, and, for the first time in his life, both mind and body were free at the same instant. Or as free as they could be considering the circumstances.