“I can’t let you leave,” he said.
Patrick still recovered. “What did you do to me?”
The man shrugged. “A mere hint of what could come if you fail to accomplish what we ask,” he said.
The waitress brought a washcloth over to the table to take care of the spill, but the man grabbed the cloth from her hand.
“I’ll handle this,” he said, and began to sop up the spilled coffee. He wadded the photograph and set it in the seat next to him. “Go grab my friend here another cup of coffee.” The waitress nodded, and she turned around and walked back to the counter, leaving Patrick to wonder if this man had done something to her too. He eyed the man warily.
As the man cleaned up the mess, he appeared to take little interest in the way Patrick glared at him. “I said I liked your spirit,” he said, “but you came in here with a chip on your shoulder that I didn’t particularly care for.” He gathered up the brown coffee into the cloth. “I had to make sure you were ready to listen.” When he was done wiping, he turned his eyes up to Patrick, peering over the rims of his glasses again. “Are you ready to listen?”
“Yes,” Patrick said.
“Good.” He reached down beside him into the booth and pulled out a manila envelope that he laid on the table, though he didn’t move it any closer to Patrick.
The waitress returned with another cup of coffee, and this time, Patrick took it and began to fix it the way he liked, the whole time watching the envelope.
“You are able to find people, correct?” the man asked him.
Patrick stirred his coffee. He said nothing at first. He’d searched for his team. He had a talent, as he called it, for being able to find anyone or anything, living or dead. He only had to focus on a person or object until his need for it consumed him like it was the one key thing missing in his life. That feeling gave him a bead on it, a sense of direction, that led him to whatever it was he needed to find. He had no explanation for how it worked. It just did.
And this talent had never failed him before, not until his team went missing and he was unable to use it to locate them. He tried over and over until his nose bled and his head pounded with the worst migraine headache he’d ever experienced. It was no good. His team was lost. He was forced to resort to conventional methods, exhausting every route up the chain of command to initiate a search and rescue mission. His efforts met with roadblock after roadblock. Finally, he was threatened with sanctions if he didn’t let it go.
Not letting it go is what brought him here, seven-thousand miles away from where his team was being held in Afghanistan. It didn't make logical sense to be here and not there, but it was all he had at this point. He was desperate.
Patrick nodded. “I used to think I could find people,” Patrick said.
“You found me. That’s a start.”
The man was right. And Patrick had done it how he’d always done it. Part of him knew deep down he took this assignment to see if he still had his talent.
Thankfully, the man didn’t wait for any further explanation. He simply slid the envelope over toward Patrick.
Before Patrick took up the envelope, though, he eyed the man again. A little bit of the defiance crept back into his gut, and he squinted. “Tell me this, first. Did Cyril have anything to do with my team going missing?”
“Cyril is the only thing keeping your team alive. When the time is right and you’ve completed the operation, Cyril will see to it that their release is secured.”
Patrick leaned forward and looked the man directly in the eye. “If I find out your boss had anything to do with their capture—”
The man raised his hand again, giving Patrick pause, and he half expected to feel the constriction in his lungs again. This time, whatever had overtaken him before never came. “I can assure you that he did not.” The man sat back, his hands on the table, and he shrugged. “With your escape, however…”
Patrick’s brow knit. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The man waved his hand like dismissing the question. “Your skill set is very valuable to him. Cyril only waited for the right moment to present itself. That is all. You have been someone he has paid a keen attention to for quite some time. He assured me that he shared all of this with you.”
He had. When they met, the man who introduced himself as Cyril seemed to have all the answers at exactly the right time Patrick was looking for them. As a CIA operative, it made him endlessly suspicious. But, while his superiors seemed content to let his team rot, Cyril said he had a way of securing their freedom—only if Patrick would agree to do this job for him.
“Given your skills, Mr. Rowe, everything you need to know about the job before you is in that envelope,” the man said.
Patrick opened the envelope and pulled out the contents. The top sheet looked like a standard dossier that included things like hair color and eye color. There was a picture too. A skinny kid with a big grin on the typical blue, blotchy background reserved for high school photo day.
“Liam Yates,” the man said.
“This is a kid. I thought Cyril said he was in college.” The kid in the picture couldn’t have been any more than fifteen.
“That’s the latest picture we have of him. It was taken eight years ago. He’s twenty-three now.”
Something else inside the envelope caused it to bulge, and Patrick turned it upside down. A small plastic case skittered onto the table that Patrick picked up and opened. It looked a lot like a temporary bug that the agency used from time to time that stuck to a target’s clothing.
The man pointed to the case. “When you locate him, touch that directly to his skin. Take care you don’t touch the wrong side.”
Patrick squinted. “What’s it do?”
“It will mark him so that we can find him.”
“A tracking device.”
“Something like that,” the man said. “It will leave a small mark on the location so you’ll know if the tracker is in place and functioning.”
Patrick had been trained in the use of a lot of devices similar to this one. Most tracking devices were meant to be hidden. This one left a mark? He slid the picture and the dossier back into the folder. “And you’re sure this kid’s in Chicago?”
“There’s no doubt.”
“And when I find him, Cyril will secure the release of my team back in Afghanistan,” Patrick said.
“When you complete your tasks,” the man said.
“Tasks? The deal was to find this kid.”
“Part of the deal was to find him.” The man leaned back. “When you do, there may be further requirements of you.”
Patrick wanted to argue, to put up a fight to secure his team’s immediate release. But there was so much about this that he had no clue about—like how a man who looked like a drunken college professor was able to freeze a guy like Patrick in place. He clamped his mouth shut. But he did lift his chin to stare at the man. “So why do you need me?”
“I thought we’d been over this.”
“No, if you know he’s here in Chicago and you have all of this information about him, why do you need me to be the one to locate him?”
“Because we believe you are the only one who is capable of finding him.”
Patrick shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense,” the man said. “It only has to get done.”
Patrick gathered up the envelope.
The man pushed his plate of food aside, and he leaned closer to Patrick. “And, Mr. Rowe, we are running out of time. There are events in motion that are far beyond both you and I,” he said.
“Time for what?”
“Big changes.” The eye contact he made with Patrick was locked and intense. Patrick wasn’t one to be intimidated, but this time, he suppressed a shiver of apprehension. “One person stands in the way of those events coming to fruition, and you are going to help find him so that everything can proceed as planned.”
Patrick squinted. He continued to meet the man’s gaze. “What are you going to do to this kid when I find him?”
“He is very important to us. That’s really all you need to know.”
“You’re not going to kill him?”
“Would it stop you from doing your job if we were?”
Patrick thought about it. He hated himself that he needed to think about it. Killing clearly wasn’t outside his consideration, but those he’d seen killed—or that he had a hand in killing—were representatives of a government declared an enemy of the United States. Morally, killing was wrong, but in the course of keeping one’s country safe, allowances were made. Was this kid a representative of a foreign government or terrorist organization with the desire to bring harm to innocent people? Patrick doubted it.
But his team was important to the safety of the country. Their job was to stop terrorists who were planning to bring harm to American lives or to America itself.
“I’ll do my job,” Patrick said with a firmness in his jaw.
“Very good, Mr. Rowe.” He reached down to the seat beside him again, and he produced a burner phone. “This has the number you will use to contact us. I assume you won’t be using your own phone?”
Patrick shook his head. He dumped it in Dubai. He took out the SIM card and snapped the smart phone in two. Patrick knew all too well how easy it was to track a cell phone, and he had no desire to be found until he was able to complete his mission.
“Good.” The man also produced another standard-sized envelope that, when Patrick opened it, contained a fair amount of cash. “That will be enough to cover your expenses while you’re here. We’ve set you up at The Drake hotel.”
Patrick quirked an eyebrow. “An upgrade from the usual places I’m forced to stay in.”
The man smiled. “You’re working with us now. That comes with a certain set of perks.” He pulled the plate of food back in front of him again, and continued eating. “You’re still welcome to join me,” he said. “The burgers here are some of the best in the city.”
“I’ll pass, thanks,” Patrick said. He gathered up the envelope, the phone, and his expense money. “I’d rather get to work,” he said as he slipped out from the booth. But he stopped and turned back to the man. “I do have one more question,” he said.
The man waited.
“Who is Thaddeus?”
“Stick around long enough,” the man said, “and you might just be lucky enough to find out.”
Three
Chicago, IL - Near North Side
The girl named Molly talked about the time she tried to kill herself by taking a whole bottle of pain meds. She fidgeted in her chair, and Liam tried not to devolve into feeling sorry for her. He was the leader, the facilitator of this group, and his job was to focus on her words without judgment. She couldn’t be any more than sixteen or seventeen.
“I was just a teenager being angsty,” Molly said. “That’s what my mom used to say, anyway. It’s like she turned a blind eye. All the signs were there. I mean, I was cutting myself. Who wouldn’t notice that?” She had black hair with a pink strip in front that she brushed from her ear so that it fell and curtained over her face. withdrawing into herself.
They were in a dim basement room, a room used for coffee after communion upstairs in the sanctuary. The basement hopper windows revealed a stray glow of street lamps from outside or a black square of night. It was an inner-city church north of Chicago’s Loop, the city where he came to live with his aunt and uncle not long after the murders. Tonight, he sat in the Sacred Heart Church, the room big enough to handle a hundred people or more. Only seven were there now, and they sat in a circle in the center of the room.
One section of lights was turned on, leaving most of the room in shadow. Folded chairs lined the back wall, and tables stacked on their sides with their legs tucked up like dead insects. Only one table was set up for refreshments, and the chairs they sat on placed in their circle. The room smelled of mildew and old coffee.
Molly looked around the room like she just realized they were all sitting there, waiting. Her eyes were haunted. Liam recognized that look. He’d seen it in his own eyes.
“Take your time, Molly. You're safe here,” Liam said.
He’d been coming to these groups for three years now. Sometimes they were the only place he felt comfortable when it came right down to it. There was a selfishness too. Listening to other people talk about their problems gave him a welcome break from his own. Somebody thought he might actually be able to help other people work through their problems, so they asked him to lead a group of his own. Sometimes he marveled at how well he was able to fool so many people. They thought he had his shit together.
If there was one thing Liam didn’t have, it was his shit together.
Molly lifted her head. She took a deep breath. A tear escaped down her face. “I’d try to talk to my mom about how I felt, that I was depressed, and she’d always say, ‘what do you have to be depressed about?’ I thought she was right. I had decent grades. I had a boyfriend, a car.” She shook her head. “People don’t understand that you don’t need a reason to be depressed. You just are.”
“Yes, exactly!” someone in the group said, Dorinda, a girl who tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists. Dorinda and Liam shared the same wrist scars. He touched the black-bead bracelets he used to cover his scars.
Liam lifted a hand to quiet Dorinda, and Dorinda shrugged an apology. But Liam continued to watch Molly. He wasn’t a doctor. He couldn’t commit anybody, but he’d walked people to the emergency room before. He searched her body language for signs she might be close to another attempt. Molly’s hands were clenched tight into fists, tight enough that she probably had deep crescents from her fingernails in the palms of her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Molly said. “I’m just not used to this whole thing yet.” She wiped at her face with a still-clenched hand.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Liam said. Others in the group mumbled an agreement. “We’ve all been here for our first time. Take your time and tell us when you’re ready. And if you’re not ready to talk about it yet, that’s okay too. There’s no pressure here.”
After a moment, she unclenched her hands and nodded. “No, I’m ready.” A deep breath, and she lifted her chin again to continue. “I was always really bad at coping. I started self-inflicting just to even try to feel normal. I never told anybody. I got really good at hiding it, and I’d only do it in places nobody’d ever see.” She paused. Her fingers picked at the hem of one of her shirt sleeves. “By the beginning of my junior year, it got really bad. A lot worse, actually. I was basically spiraling out of control.” Her focus on somewhere in the center of the circle they all sat around. With a shrug, she said, “And that’s when I did it. I took a whole bottle of anti-depressants. I guess it was my way to finally make those pills work the way I wanted them to. Get rid me of my depression once and for all because I wouldn’t have to wake up and deal with any of it ever again.”
No one reacted except with nods of recognition, of having been there themselves. This was a place for people to share their truths, their struggles, and to not be judged. People outside the group—non-suicidal people—usually felt the need to fill these silences with platitudes. That must have been so hard or, Liam’s favorite, I know what you’re going through.
But in group, nobody assumed they knew what each other was going through, even though everyone there had tried to take their own lives in one way or another. Everyone’s pain is not always the same. People suffer in different ways. It was up to the person talking to make sense of their pain and to share that with the group.
And Molly struggled. Her bottom lip quivered.
Sara, the girl sitting next to her, leaned over and asked, “May I comfort you?”
Molly nodded, and the girl leaned over and put her arm around Molly’s shoulders.
“You’re here,” Liam said to Molly. “That’s saying something. We’re
all here for the same reason. We all have to be able to face our pain. You took a big step by sharing it with the group. That’s what we’re all here for, to face each moment, one moment at a time.”
“I just want to not feel like I’m worthless anymore,” Molly said.
Liam leaned forward in his chair. “You’re not, Molly,” he said. “You’re not. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how dark and alone it feels, you’re not worthless. Everybody has a purpose on this earth. If you don’t know yours, it just means that the higher power hasn’t revealed it to you yet. Trust that one day he or she will.” He tried to make it sound as if he believed what he was saying. Even a group like this had its own canned platitude.
Purpose was elusive for Liam too.
After the night that Walter Yates killed his entire family except for Liam—Liam had taken to thinking of his father as Walter Yates as if to distance himself from the man who gave Liam his last name—the question burned: Why? Why was Liam spared and not his baby sister? Not his step-mom Becky or his sister Tamara? What did he have to bring to this world that they didn’t?
What was his purpose? He couldn’t believe this was it.
Molly had finished, and the rest of the group sat in a comfortable silence. Liam glanced at the wall clock—nearly 9 p.m. And Liam had a British Lit paper to write before bed.
“Anyone else have something to let go of before we end the group?” Liam asked them. He didn’t rush it. Sometimes people were too nervous to speak, but the pressure of the end of a session caused them to push the nerves aside to get whatever they were experiencing off their chest.
But when no one spoke, Liam closed his notebook. “All right then,” Liam said with a smile and clapped his hands on his knees. “Thank you, everyone, for sharing tonight.”
People began to gather their things. Some of them moved to the coffee and cookies to load up on the way out. Liam went over to Molly and waited for her to acknowledge him. She stood with Sara still, and they were talking.
Liam touched Molly’s shoulder. “You did good tonight,” he said. “Real good.”
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 2