by James Raven
‘OK, I’ve got her,’ Kate said, scooping her daughter up in her arms.
But Anna tried to struggle free and Kate had to whisk her away from me and distract her by taking her over to the window and pointing outside. I stared after them, bemused and disoriented by the disparate emotions that were converging inside my head.
‘Hurry up,’ Kate said, over her shoulder. ‘If she can’t see you she’ll calm down.’
Once I’d closed the bathroom door behind me Anna went quiet, like she had been silenced by the flick of a switch. I examined myself in the mirror. My complexion was pallid and sickly. My eyes were crusty with sleep and there were dark bags under them. The stubble on my chin rasped as I rubbed it, but it went some way towards altering my appearance so I decided not to shave.
The shower revived me, but this time I didn’t dwell under the steaming jets. I got out, dried, and dressed. I was brushing my teeth when Kate started banging on the door and telling me to come out.
I swallowed a mouthful of foam and rushed into the bedroom. She had switched on the TV and was watching a news report on the shooting in Mountain City. There was night footage of the outside of Emily’s house and lots of flashing blue lights.
‘It just came on,’ Kate said. She was holding the baby in her arms and staring intently at the screen.
I froze, feeling my gut twist and realized that the cat was about to leap out of the bag.
‘The house belonged to Emily Jordan,’ the newscaster said. ‘According to police sources she was one of the three people found shot dead. The other two are unidentified males. Miss Jordan was the sister of Lee Jordan, the man who was executed on Monday evening at Huntsville in Texas for the murder ten years ago of Kimberley Crane, former wife of congressman Gideon Crane. The FBI, who are in charge of the investigation, say they have no idea at this stage who is responsible for the killings and whether it is in any way linked to Lee Jordan’s execution.’
The picture they put up was the one they had always used and despite what the Feds had done to my hair, there was no mistaking it was me staring out of the screen.
Kate’s head whipped around. As she stared at me I heard the air rush out of her lungs.
‘Let me explain,’ I said.
She shook her head and her jaw twitched. I could see she was trying to swallow her panic.
‘My God,’ she exclaimed. ‘I saw it on the news. They said you died. There were witnesses.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Just hear me out.’
I shifted under the intensity of her gaze. Every cell in my body was shaking. I didn’t know what I would do if she made a run for it or started screaming for help. There was no way I was going to hurt her.
After a few moments her nostrils flared, her mouth tightened, and she spoke in a taut voice. ‘So how come you’re alive?’
I slumped in the armchair, feeling desperate and defeated.
‘That’s the million dollar question,’ I said.
30
TO HER CREDIT, Kate listened without saying a word whilst pacing the room clinging to Anna. But it was clear she was struggling with what she’d learned. She had the look of someone trying to hold onto reality while their brain was screaming in disbelief.
I tried to keep my voice low and even, but it came out shaky and disjointed. It was a hard thing to explain. How I was led into the execution chamber and laid out on the gurney. How I saw the faces of the witnesses and listened to the chaplain’s prayer. How I felt the ‘lethal’ cocktail of drugs enter my veins and then waking up in a strange room to be told by a man named Aaron Vance that the execution had been faked by the FBI. Followed by a trip to a restaurant in San Antonio where a guy named Martinez was going to tell me what I had to do for them.
‘But it never happened,’ I said. ‘After I got out of the car it sped away. Then a guy who’d been standing on the pavement produced a gun and shot at me. By some miracle he missed and I managed to run away. They came after me, but I got another lucky break when I saw you in the parking lot.’
Kate just stared at me as her mind processed what I’d told her. A loose hair drifted into her eye and she tucked it up. The baby tried to wriggle free and kept pointing at the floor. Outside I could hear the low beat of the city.
Eventually, she said, ‘As I recall you’ve always claimed to be innocent.’
‘That’s because I am.’
‘So you’re saying you didn’t kill that woman?’
I shook my head. ‘I did a lot of bad things back then, including invading that house with my partner. But I never killed anyone until last night.’
‘So if you didn’t kill her then who did?’
I shrugged. ‘I had my suspicion, but I could never prove it.’
‘So how come they convicted you?’
I shrugged. ‘The evidence against me was strong. And I had a lousy lawyer.’
She put Anna on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes continued to drill into me, unblinking.
Did she believe me? I couldn’t tell.
After a few seconds, she said, ‘How did they fake the execution?’
I told her what Vance had said about the knockout drugs and the rigged heart monitor and the people like the warden who had been involved.
‘And you have no idea why they did it?’ she said.
‘None at all. When I walked into the execution chamber I didn’t expect to come out of it alive.’
‘But faking an execution is a big deal. Why would they go to all that trouble only to have you gunned down the next day?’
‘It’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. But none of it makes a shred of sense.’
Anna had crawled across the floor to where I was sitting. She started climbing up my leg and wanting me to pick her up. But I didn’t move, afraid that Kate wouldn’t want me to touch her baby now that she knew the truth about me.
‘It’s a far-fetched story,’ Kate said. ‘And if you weren’t sitting right there in front of me I wouldn’t believe it.’
‘I’m not sure I believe it myself,’ I said.
Anna started bawling and tears spilled from her eyes.
‘You’d better pick her up before her crying shatters the windows,’ Kate said.
I leaned forward and lifted Anna up. But she didn’t stop crying until I got to my feet and started walking her around the room.
‘So what the hell happens now?’ Kate said, her voice strained. ‘Shouldn’t you go to the police?’
‘That’s not an option. If I’m locked up or dead I’ll never know who was ultimately responsible for Emily’s death.’
She grunted out a bitter laugh. ‘So what about me? What am I supposed to do?’
‘You have to stay with me, at least until you know it’s safe to go home.’
‘But how will I know that?’
‘I won’t lie to you,’ I said. ‘Right now I don’t have the answer. But if I can get to the bottom of what’s going on I’m sure we’ll see a way out.’
‘But where will you start?’
‘With Aaron Vance,’ I said. ‘The FBI guy.’
‘You know nothing about him.’
‘That’s why our first port of call after leaving here will be an internet café. We’ll look him up. See where it takes us. And we’ll also find out what we can about Raymond Garcia.’
‘Who?’
I took out the business card wallet from my pocket and held it up.
‘The guy whose cards were left in my suit. Maybe he’s somehow involved. I need to find out.’
‘That’s clutching at straws,’ she said.
‘Sure, but it’s all I’ve got.’
She let a few moments pass in silence. Her face was red, her eyes moist. While I waited for her to speak my stomach grew heavy and I felt the bile rising. I needed her to stay on side. If she jumped ship now she’d put her own life at risk and make it impossible for me to seek out answers.
Eventually she said, ‘You know there’s only one thing
stopping me walking out that door with my daughter and telling you to go to hell.’
‘What’s that?’
She took a quick breath. ‘I happen to believe what you said about not being a murderer. Which probably means I’m really stupid.’
‘You’re not stupid,’ I said.
‘I guess that depends on whether you’ve told me the truth about Kimberley Crane.’
31
IT WAS EIGHT in the morning on the eve of Thanksgiving. Aaron Vance was back in his office, feeling like shit. He hadn’t slept a wink all night and his eyes were sore and heavy.
He sat behind his desk in the building on University Heights Boulevard that housed the Bureau’s San Antonio field office. On the wall behind him hung the FBI’s seal and a ten-most-wanted poster. The poster was out of date, of course. The most wanted person in America was not an Al Qaeda terrorist or the lunatic who had murdered three women in Tampa.
No, it was Lee Jordan, the man who posed a diabolical threat to the Bureau and everything it stood for.
Vance still found it hard to believe what had happened overnight. First the bungled attempt on Jordan’s life. And then the carnage up in Mountain City in which two FBI agents had been shot dead.
He dreaded to think what today would bring. Jordan could be anywhere by now. Maybe he was even thinking about turning himself in to the cops. That’d be tricky, but manageable. It’d be an altogether more difficult problem if he went directly to the media.
But Vance’s instincts told him Jordan wouldn’t do that because even in the best case scenario he’d end up back in prison.
He swivelled his chair and looked through the window. It was pouring outside, great sheets of rain lashing onto the street. The sky was an angry morass of clouds that just about matched his mood.
He felt really down. It was at times like this he wished he was still with Jennifer. At least he would then have someone in his corner. Someone he could trust to be there for him when his world collapsed. But she was now shacked up with a firefighter back in LA. So he was on his own and standing on the edge of an abyss.
His secretary, a matronly type in her fifties, knocked on his door and peeked in.
‘What is it, Liz?’
‘Sam Boyd is downstairs, Mr Vance. Do you want him to come right up?’
He nodded.
Liz was in the dark about Jordan, like almost everyone else in the building. She knew only that all hell had broken loose because of what had happened in Mountain City. But it was going to get more and more difficult to stop the truth from getting out.
Vance was still behind his desk, chewing his fingernails, when Boyd was brought in.
‘I’ll get some coffees,’ Liz said and closed the door behind them.
Boyd had a reputation as a charmless manipulator who had backstabbed his way to the top. He had a bland, symmetrical face and dark brown hair complete with a wave at the front. He was in his early forties and his head looked too small for his robust frame. For three years he’d been the FBI’s deputy director of Special Operations. He’d been responsible for advising the FBI director to approve the faked execution plan that Vance had come up with. So he was up to his neck in this shit and that’s why he was the one sent by Washington to get a handle on things.
‘You look a mess, Aaron,’ Boyd said, as he sat down on the other side of the desk. His voice was a deep baritone and it suited him.
His blue jacket was tight and ill-fitting and beneath it he wore a black open-neck shirt.
‘I haven’t been to bed,’ Vance said. ‘It’s been a fucking nightmare.’
‘So what’s the latest on Jordan?’
‘Nothing new. He’s disappeared again.’
‘And the woman and child – are they still with him?’
‘As far as I know, they are. She may even be helping him.’
‘Oh?’
Vance told him about the neighbour who claimed he saw Jordan get into an Explorer that was being driven by a woman.
‘This gets worse by the minute,’ Boyd said, his face tight with supressed anger. ‘I can’t believe you let it happen?’
‘The shooter fucked up,’ Vance said. ‘He missed from almost point-blank range.’
‘That’s no excuse, goddamn it. You were in charge. You should have made sure there was no room for error.’
Boyd’s words were as sharp as razor wire. Vance felt them stick into him. A bitter taste filled his mouth and an intense heat radiated from his brow.
‘Fill me in on what happened at the sister’s house,’ Boyd said.
Vance sucked in a breath. ‘We sent two agents to cover it. To be honest I didn’t expect Jordan to show up there. But he did and when our guys tried to get him he started shooting at them.’
‘So what story are we putting out?’
‘We’re saying Emily Jordan called the Bureau and asked to speak to an agent. We sent two along and when they got there they were fired on by an unidentified gunman, who then killed her.’
‘Sounds plausible, I suppose. What about the cops? They can’t be happy.’
‘They’re not, but they’ve been leaned on from on high.’
‘I had to do the same with our field office in Austin. They were up in arms about it.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘What about our lawyer friend?’ Boyd said.
Vance shrugged. ‘He’s pissed off. I spoke to him last night. Told him to hold fire and we’d get the deal back on track. I’ll arrange to meet up with him later. Try to put his mind at ease.’
‘That won’t be easy.’
At that moment Liz brought in a tray with coffees and biscuits. She didn’t hang around and quickly retreated from the office.
‘The director says we have to do whatever it takes to stop this from getting out,’ Boyd said. ‘I don’t need to tell you what the implications will be if it does.’
‘I’ve thought about nothing else,’ Vance said.
‘If there’s even a whisper of it outside the family then the media will start digging around. And we don’t want that. They’ll resurrect all those rumours from a few years ago. The ones about executions being faked so government agencies and the military could carry out medical experiments with impunity on guys who were supposed to be dead.’
‘They were more than rumours, Sam.’
‘I know it and you know it, Aaron. But the fucking public at large has no idea what we do in the interests of national security. And they don’t want to know. That way they get to sleep at nights.’
A long, awkward silence stretched between them. Vance drank some coffee and tried to ignore the buzz swirling inside his head.
Then Boyd said, ‘We need to delete Jordan’s prints and DNA from the database.’
‘I’ve already asked for that to be done,’ Vance said.
Then he sat back and felt his blood pressure rise a notch. The muscles in his jaw ached and he realized he’d been grinding his teeth.
There was a light tap at the door and Liz came back in.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Vance, but there’s someone on line two who insists on talking to you.’
‘Tell them to call back,’ Vance said. ‘I’m busy.’
A puzzled look wrinkled her features. ‘But he’s a police officer and he says it’s about Lee Jordan.’
Vance felt a chill spread through his belly.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Frank Larson. Detective Frank Larson.’
‘OK, put him through.’
‘Is he the cop you came across in Mountain City?’ Boyd asked.
Vance shook his head. ‘Larson is the boyfriend of Kate Pena, the woman whose car Jordan hijacked.’
‘Shit. Put him on speaker.’
The phone rang. Vance picked it up and pressed the speaker button. He tried to keep the tremor out of his voice.
‘Hello, Detective Larson. How do you feel?’
‘I’ve just left the hospital with a broken nose and ten stiches in m
y head. Plus, my daughter’s been kidnapped. So how the fuck do you think I feel?’
‘We’re doing all we can to find your daughter and girlfriend,’ Vance said. ‘As soon as we—’
‘Cut the bullshit, Vance. I want to know why the guy who took them isn’t in a fucking coffin.’
Vance and Boyd exchanged anxious looks.
‘What do you mean?’ Vance said.
‘I mean the whole world was led to believe that a murdering bastard named Lee Jordan was executed in Huntsville on Monday. Only he wasn’t because last night he attacked me. I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t be certain until I got the lab to check the coffee mugs for prints.’
‘Coffee mugs?’
‘I’m a cop, agent Vance. Did you really think I wouldn’t try to find out who the guy was? The mugs were on the table. I took them with me. His prints were on one of them. There’s only one way they could have got there.’
‘Have you spoken to anyone about this?’ Vance said.
‘The lab guy thought it was odd, but assumed Jordan had used the mug in prison. I thought it best not to put him right on that score.’
‘So who else have you told?’
‘Not a fucking soul. But so help me everyone will know about it unless you clue me in.’
‘OK, Frank,’ Vance said. ‘Stay calm. I guess you have a right to know what’s going on. But we can’t talk over the phone. Are you at home?’
‘I’m at Kate’s. Dropped by to pick up my car. I walked right in. Your guys did a piss-awful job of fixing the lock.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then stay put and I’ll come right over. And for your sake as well as ours please don’t talk to anyone about this. It’s all part of a highly classified operation.’
‘I guess it would have to be,’ Larson said. ‘You can’t make a noise about something this crazy.’
Vance hung up the phone and blew out his cheeks.
‘This is all we need,’ he said.
‘Well you know what you’ve got to do,’ Boyd said. ‘He’s not one of us. He’s a fucking cop and he’s bound to talk. So let’s nip this one in the bud right away.’