Hard Road

by J. B. Turner

  He didn’t dwell on that. It wasn’t his role to worry about them. He had to focus on his part. He pulled on a T-shirt and running shorts and laced up his Adidas sneakers. Then, like he always did, he headed downstairs to his gym in the basement and did five miles on the running machine, twenty minutes pumping iron, ten minutes on a rowing machine, and topped it off with fifteen minutes hitting a punch bag, jabbing and hooking until he thought his heart was going to pack in.

  He checked his pulse. It was within acceptable limits for aerobic workouts. He was in great shape. He was ready. Had been for weeks.

  Afterwards, sweating profusely, endorphins running round his body, he took a long, hot shower. He closed his eyes and wondered if he needed more sleep. He reckoned he’d managed, at best, four hours sleep.

  Caan enjoyed the warm water pummeling his skin. He knew it wouldn’t be long. Any day now. He wondered if his coworkers were asking why he hadn’t been in work. He thought of the eight long years he had given to the company. The sacrifices. The hours. The time he could never get back. But he also knew it would all be worth it.

  The more he thought of it the more he realised how well he had done, concealing his secret life from his coworkers. He was playing a long game. They thought he was just the quiet guy who was diligent and liked to go for runs at lunchtime. The guy who worked long hours and never complained, or bitched or made any trouble. The guy who did his job and never, under any circumstances, attracted attention. But they didn’t know him. They didn’t know him at all.

  He turned off the shower, dried himself and put on a clean set of clothes that had been carefully chosen for him. The pale blue checked button-down shirt, the dark blue jeans, thick blue jumper and the Timberland boots. After cleaning his teeth and combing his short dark hair, he put on his black puffa jacket and clipped on his pager. Then he headed to a diner, three blocks away.

  Outside, the cold air nearly took his breath away, a sharp frost on the ground. The forecasters had warned of a serious cold front heading down from Canada, perhaps bringing snow. He had been keeping an eye on the forecast for days, checking the weather in New York and Washington DC.

  He was glad to get into the warmth of the diner where he ordered a hearty breakfast of waffles, bacon and poached eggs with his black coffee. The chubby black waitress brought him his meal and coffee and said, “Enjoy your breakfast, sir.”

  Caan just smiled but said nothing as he tucked into the meal and ate alone.

  It had been ten days since he had moved to Hagerstown. It was the largest city in western Maryland with a population of nearly forty thousand. It was a semi-rural setting which had a nice, friendly feel to it. He enjoyed leisurely lakeside walks at City Park, then visiting the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts. The sort of things his dad was interested in and that he’d encouraged when he was growing up. He particularly loved gazing at the Norman Rockwell painting, The Oculist, showing a red-haired boy with a baseball glove, being fitted for a pair of glasses by a middle-aged man. It was classic Rockwell. The symbolism of a supposed American golden age. An America vanished.

  He had always been entranced by the Rockwellian mythology of small town America. The idealised and sentimentalised world of friendly faces, white picket fences and impossibly blue skies that evoked nostalgia for simpler times. The world he had grown up in, in the small upscale town of Skaneateles in central New York State.

  His mind flashed back. He remembered the biting cold winters. The colonial house overlooking the water. The family round the dinner table at Thanksgiving. Huge snowfalls. The ice-skating on the frozen lake with friends, the hockey and the snowball fights with his two brothers and sister. His mother and father arm in arm. He felt safe and happy. The seasons changed, and the village was awash with color. The village teemed with visitors in the summer who descended on the lake – one of the famous Finger Lakes. Boat trips. The smell of hot dogs. The daily summer concerts at the Presbyterian Church where they heard recitals during the Skaneateles Festival.

  The water was so pure the city of Syracuse used it unfiltered. Then it was the fall. The smell of the damp, red leaves falling.

  A waitress shouting an order snapped Caan out of his reverie.

  He sipped some coffee. He felt alive for the first time in years, perhaps since his childhood. He had a purpose. A purity of purpose, like a Rockwell painting. Most of all, he had been given a plan.

  He only received coded instructions. But in the last year, they had begun to talk specifics: a timescale, methodology, resources.

  It had all been formulated and thought through.

  He knew what was at stake.

  His pager bleeped and he felt his stomach lurch. The last time it had bleeped was a week ago instructing him to go to Baltimore. Was this the day? Unclipping the pager from his belt he read the coded message he had been waiting to hear. It read simply: “Blue skies in Madrid.”

  This was indeed it.

  “Want a refill, sir?” the waitress asked, seeing his mug was empty.

  Caan clipped his pager back on and smiled. “I’m good thanks. Gotta dash.”

  “You have a good day, now.”

  Caan smiled back and left a five-dollar bill under his empty mug of coffee. Then he paid the tab at the counter and left for the short walk back home. He went to the spare bedroom and picked up his suitcase that was already packed and lugged it downstairs and then popped it in the trunk of his beat-up Datsun. Then he got in the car and headed up I-95 N to a state-of-the-art storage facility on the outskirts of Baltimore.

  The traffic was heavy as he switched on a Bach CD. His mind drifted, thinking back years earlier to the time his father took him, his brothers and sister to an open-air summer concert, beneath the stars, given by the New York Philharmonic on Central Park’s Great Lawn. He remembered his father explaining the importance of Bach in classical music, and how the composer pulled together the strands of Baroque period, creating an enriched form of music with unheard of texture. More than anything, he felt his heart swell, as the music washed over them, his father wrapping his arm around them. That was a year before his father and mother died. The crash. A dumb drunk driver in a pick-up, loaded with cheap liquor. He often thought of that night and wondered if things might have turned out differently if they had lived.

  He remembered the heated political discussions between his parents – his father was a leftist, his mother a Republican. But most of the time, it was good stuff. The trips to musicals in Manhattan, up to the upper west side to the American Museum of Natural History where they saw a full-size model of a blue whale, the music of Bach and Mozart wafting out into the balmy Skaneateles night, and staring over the lake from his bedroom window of their home on East Lake Road, watching the snow fall.

  The sound of a car horn snapped Caan back to the present. He checked in his rearview mirror for signs of any tails. But there was nothing. The journey was uneventful.

  He drove off the freeway and into the quiet streets of a business park. He saw the sign for the I-Store facility he had visited less than a week earlier.

  The guy behind the reinforced screen was chewing gum. Caan showed the fake ID and took the elevator to the third floor and punched in the four-digit pin code, before pressing his thumb up against the biometric scanner. Then the sound of mortise locks clicking and he opened the locker. Inside was the sports holdall he had deposited seven days earlier.

  He carefully picked up the bag and headed to the exit.

  “You get what you were looking for?” the guy at the desk asked politely.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Have a good day, sir.”

  Caan opened the trunk of his car and placed the bag inside, before slamming it shut. And so began the near two hundred mile journey to New York City.

  As he headed along I-95 N into Delaware, he checked again for any tails in his rearview mirror.

  He changed lanes a few times, but nothing.

  He afforded himself a smile. Not long now, he
thought.

  ELEVEN

  A pale orange sun was peeking over the art deco rooftops as Reznick returned to the car on 19th Street in South Beach. He felt wired. He couldn’t believe Magruder had gone so quickly. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Magruder was the only one who might have had information about his daughter’s whereabouts. It seemed inconceivable that he knew nothing.

  Fuck.

  The whole thing had descended into a living nightmare.

  He popped open the trunk. Luntz was lying in the fetal position, eyes screwed up against the sun.

  “Get the fuck out,” Reznick said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do as I say.”

  Luntz clambered out. He looked unsteady on his feet and Reznick helped him into the passenger seat, before strapping him in. “This is insane.”

  “Get in and stop whining.” Reznick fired up the car. “You hungry?”

  “I don’t think I can eat. I feel sick.”

  “Too bad.”

  Reznick drove to a nearby 7-Eleven on 6th Street and took a subdued Luntz in with him. He ordered two hot English muffin breakfast sandwiches, black coffees and picked up some donuts for later. They wolfed the sandwiches in the car, washed down with a strong coffee.

  “Feel better?” he said.

  Luntz nodded as he chewed his food.

  The sun was edging higher in the sky and Reznick squinted, using his left hand to shield him from the glare. Suddenly the iPhone rang. He didn’t recognise the number.

  “Dad…Dad, it’s Lauren.”

  Reznick’s heart missed a beat at the sound of his daughter’s voice. “Lauren, are you OK? Talk to me, honey.”

  Silence.

  “Lauren! Speak to me!”

  More silence.

  “Lauren! Lauren!” Reznick closed his eyes tight. “Lauren! Are you there?”

  “Yes, she is,” a man said. The same voice he’d heard before. “And she’s alive. For now, anyway.”

  “Listen to me, if you harm her in any way, and I mean in any way, I will hunt you down and rip out your fucking heart.”

  “Shut up! We’re running the show. So, here’s how it’s gonna work. You hand over the scientist and you get Lauren back. Any attempt to call in the police or Feds will result in Lauren being killed. Are we clear?”

  Reznick sighed. “Crystal.”

  “I don’t want to harm her. But I will if Luntz is not handed over. I’ll call you in an hour with the delivery point.”

  Then the man hung up.

  Reznick felt sick. His daughter’s life was hanging by a thread. All alone and at the mercy of God knows who. But she was alive. That was something. But where the hell was she?

  Luntz broke the silence. “Was that them?”

  “Was that who?”

  “The people who want me?”

  Reznick said nothing.

  “They have your daughter, don’t they?”

  “You talk too much.”

  “You’re going to hand me over, aren’t you?”

  “Just be quiet.”

  Luntz stared straight ahead. “I’m a family man too. My wife and two other kids need their dad back.”

  “So does my daughter.”

  Luntz looked away.

  “Someone wants you dead, real bad. Why is that?”

  “I know things.”

  “Stop playing fucking games. Why do people want you dead?”

  Luntz went quiet for a few moments before he spoke. “I need to speak to the FBI.”

  “About what?”

  “I believe lives may be at stake. American lives. And that’s why you need to hand me over to the FBI.”

  “Not while they’ve got my daughter.”

  Reznick was running out of time and options. He knew he couldn’t just sit and wait for them to call and bounce him all over Miami. But he couldn’t give up Luntz, as he was the only bargaining chip he had.

  There was only one real option.

  He had to take the fight to them. The problem was that the only lead he had was the downtown tower where he’d followed Magruder to. Norton & Weiss.

  Luntz said, “Please, don’t hand me over to those people. You’ve got to believe me. I’m begging you.” He clutched the photo pendant tight and pressed it to his chest. “I swear on my son’s grave that I’m telling the truth.”

  Reznick looked into Luntz’s sad blue eyes and could see he wasn’t lying. He started up the car and headed away from the beach and back across the causeway into Miami. He saw a sign for Brickell Avenue and headed into slow-moving traffic, the towering skyscrapers either side.

  He recognised the green sign for the parking garage he had followed Magruder into and pulled up beside the elevator doors.

  “Where’s this?” Luntz asked.

  Reznick turned and sprayed another dose of sedative in Luntz’s ear. His eyes rolled back in his head and he was out of it again. “Sorry, Frank. I’ll tell you later.” He got out of the car, popped open the trunk and shoved him inside, knowing he was going to be out of it for quite a while.

  Reznick looked around the parking garage. At the far corner, he saw a brown UPS truck, its engine was idling. The driver was sitting filling out a log sheet, one arm out of his window. He walked over and knocked on the driver’s window. The man wound down his window.

  “Think you got a flat, buddy,” Reznick said.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” The man got out of his truck frowning and cursing under his breath. Reznick pressed a gun to his head.

  “Hey, what the fuck?!”

  “In the back of your truck. Now!” He hustled the man into the back of the truck, alongside parcels and boxes. The man was shaking and terrified, cowering in the corner of the van. “I’m not going to hurt you. But I need your clothes.”

  The guy didn’t protest. He just stripped off and threw his clothes towards Reznick. He was then tied up with duct tape. “Not a sound for half an hour. If I hear a peep out of you, you get a bullet in your head.” The man nodded furiously, sweat beading his forehead.

  Reznick took off his top and pulled on the brown UPS shirt (which was a bit tight, but would do) matching baseball cap. He picked up a parcel and the delivery clipboard. “Not a fucking word.” He stepped out of the truck and carefully locked the door. Then once he had made sure that there was no one around, he walked on over to the elevator and punched in the button for the forty-second floor.

  He stepped into the empty elevator. The door closed and less than twenty seconds later he was on the forty-second floor. He walked up to the glass doors in the outer lobby. On closer inspection, the black metal buzzer on the metallic silver keypad had the name Norton & Weiss Inc engraved in small writing.

  Behind the huge glass doors, a small bespectacled young man wearing a suit looked up from his computer.

  Reznick pressed the buzzer as he smiled through at the guy.

  The kid inside got up from his chair and ambled across to the intercom. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “Our firm doesn’t accept visitors.”

  “It’s a delivery from Washington. Urgent.”

  The man shook his head. “I’m not expecting any deliveries today.”

  “Look, I need a signature, man,” Reznick said. “I’ve not got all day. Real urgent.”

  The kid bit his lower lip as if he was thinking it over.

  “Look, I ain’t got all day, pal. You wanna sign?”

  The kid cracked open the door.

  Reznick barged inside and pressed a gun to the startled young man’s temple. “Be very quiet.”

  The kid stumbled backwards as the door clicked shut.

  TWELVE

  The outer office was mostly open-plan, a cool grey-blue interior, laptops and iPads on half a dozen desks. Reznick could see there were two other offices inside, their doors closed.

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Please… I’m the only person in just now.”

  Reznick pushed him back into one of th
e wood-paneled inner offices. Legal tomes and journals lined along the walls.

  “What do you want?”

  Reznick pressed the gun to the man’s head. “Tell me about your company.”

  “We’re a law firm. What the hell is this?”

  Reznick pulled back the slide of his Beretta. “Don’t take me for a fool, son.”

  The kid flushed crimson. “I work the back office stuff. That’s all I can say.”

  “What was Magruder doing here earlier?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Stop bullshitting me, son. If you want to do this the hard way, that’s fine.”

  “Please, we’re a law firm. There must be some terrible mistake.”

  Reznick slapped the man hard on the side of the face. Blood poured from his mouth, just like it had with Magruder. Then he pressed the gun to the man’s head. “Now, if you don’t tell me what you know, you’ll be checking out of this world earlier than you thought.”

  “Please! Please!”

  “I want some fucking answers. Do you understand?”

  “Please, don’t…” He composed himself. “Please believe me, I have nothing to do with this.”

  Reznick shook his head. “Wrong answer.” He pressed the gun hard up against the kid’s forehead.

  “Christ almighty!”

  “He’s not going to help you. No one is. Now tell me what Magruder was doing here.”

  The kid began to whimper as he cowered. “I am… I am not what you’re looking for.”

  “Why can’t you answer a simple fucking question? Tell me about Magruder.”

  A long silence opened up before the kid spoke. “All I know is that he did a job for us. I don’t get involved in that. Look at me. Do I look like I get involved in that end of things? I’m an analyst, OK?”

  “So, what’s this setup?”

  “We are a private company. We receive commissions to do security consultancy for the government.”