The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  Voices shouted at him. He was leaving the scene of an accident, an accident he had caused. He ignored the shouts. He dug in, ignoring the sharp pain radiating from his left knee, which had struck the steering wheel when they’d collided with the truck, and he ran against the blast of wind coming down the avenue, wanting to put as much distance as he could between himself and the man who’d claimed to be Megan’s father.

  R’mel remained calm. They knew precisely where Belfast was headed. But this new face, the man who’d held Belfast at gunpoint and forced him to drive the Saab, was a problem. Who was he, and what business did he have with Belfast? These were not questions for R’mel to answer or to even bother with. No, his job was simply to follow the man and update his employer. And follow he did.

  37

  SHE DIDN’T REMEMBER MUCH.IT HAPPENED IN A FLASH, ANDmost of it was a blur. Megan had no idea where she was or why. Wherever she was, it was cold. And she was blindfolded.

  Periodically there were voices. Footsteps came and went, and she was pretty certain she could smell someone’s constant presence. One of them—if there was indeed more than one—wore a very distinctive cologne. She smelled it now as she lay on her side with her hands tied behind her back. There was also a musty odor. That made her wonder if she was somewhere near water.

  She’d been awake for what she guessed was close to half an hour. She had woken from a hazy sleep, most certainly drug-induced. Her mouth was gagged and made breathing a bit of an effort. She grunted through the gag. She wanted a drink. Her throat felt scratchy, dry.

  Footsteps approached, and she grunted again.

  “What?” a man’s voice said. It was a deep voice, lungs full of tar.

  “…ursty,” came the plea through the fabric of the gag.

  Hands worked at the back of her head, loosing the knot on the rolled strip of fabric.

  “Water…” she managed to say in a thin, hoarse voice.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “No,please…”

  There was a long moment of silence. She was lost in a world of darkness, and in that world her only source of vision was her imagination. She had a mental image of the hard surface on which she lay, and of the man standing before her, and of the room that they occupied. Every sound, every smell, every texture and taste produced a new snapshot against the canvas of her mind. And now she pictured this brute standing above her, deciding whether her thirst was a priority.

  Apparently it wasn’t.

  “Later,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  The ball of fabric was crammed back into her mouth. Footfalls echoed across what could only be a broad, empty cement expanse and faded from the room.

  The rag stuffed over her tongue and down her throat only served to make her even more thirsty. It dried up her saliva. And the drugs, whatever they’d injected her with, had left her dehydrated. Megan had never been so scared in her life.

  She’d ridden in the taxi with Olin, intending to spend the morning shopping while he took care of his business errand. She walked half a block, rounded a corner—and the rest was a blur. The best she could dust off from the wreckage in her brain was a memory of being seized by the arms, and then a quick stinging sensation in her right arm. Within an instant, the world around her grew fuzzy, and then went black. Now, she lay in this cold damp room, thirsty, and with a raging pain in her skull.

  As the glazing effect of the injection slowly dissipated, the numbness was replaced with absolute fear. Who had done this? And why? In this cloud of panic and horror, her own words floated back to her, the mild thoughts of trepidation she had silently voiced to herself on the flight to New York. It had all sounded so immature and paranoid on the plane. Why had she not insisted on accompanying Olin on his errand? The answer was comically simple: after spending three or four days with Olin, her insecurities had melted away.

  Now all she could do was wait and listen, and prepare for the worst.

  A flash of color dodging between cars about three hundred feet dead ahead, and Joel knew he had spotted his man. Pain twanged from the shoulder to the elbow of his right arm. Price cut to the left, disappearing for a moment, then reappearing on the other side of a silver Mustang. Joel made a similar move and found himself skating across a sidewalk.

  Behind him, in the mash of the intersection, there was honking and shouts and general confusion because of the Saab they’d abandoned in the middle of the road. This Price character had pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Joel had to give him that much.

  As he ran, plowing through foot traffic, heading southbound on the sidewalk, he patted his left hand down the front of his coat, trying to feel the hard lump. He felt it, suddenly, and skidded to a stop, pausing long enough to fish the .22 from his coat pocket.

  Price had a good jump. And he looked to be widening the gap with every second that passed. Joel’s heart felt like it might explode, and having run so hard in such freezing temperature had set his lungs on fire.

  St. John raced around the corner and stole into the alcove of a storefront. Shoppers squeezed past him, entering the store. He bent at the waist, hands on his thighs, catching his breath. His breath came out in puffs of white vapor. He leaned out slightly, rolling forward on the balls of his feet, peeking back down the street. No sign of his friend.

  He checked his watch. It was nearly 2P .M. He had thirty minutes to be at JFK. Realistically, he figured he could show up an hour late and still be okay, but he wouldn’t risk it. By the looks of things, he’d lost the guy. He waited another two minutes, then flipped up the collar of his coat over his ears and then hurried on.

  Joel’s eyes were watering from the cold, and the brisk run in cold air had reawakened the virus clinging to his insides. He doubled over, hacking. He braced himself with a hand to the wall of a building, and just stood there, bent at the waist, trying to keep from coughing up a lung. An intersection lay before him. He looked north and south down what he thought was Park Avenue. Looking to his left, he thought he saw his man hurrying east with a slight limp.

  St. John flagged a taxi. Stepping from the curb, he sank to his ankles in slush. The taxi angled toward him, slowing and then easing to a halt four or five feet from him. He jerked open the back door.

  The driver turned his chin, a toothpick sticking out from the space between his teeth. “Where to?”

  St. John had his hands cupped around his bad knee. Every beat of his heart sent gusts of pain through his leg. “JFK,” he said.

  “You got it.”

  He leaned over the seat, resting his weight on his elbow. He was out of breath; his jogging routine didn’t generally include wearing a suit, coat, and leather-soled shoes. St. John glanced out the rear window, barely seeing over the backseat from his lowered position. If the guy was back there, he couldn’t pick him out among the faces on the sidewalk. Had he lost him? Maybe. Probably.

  It didn’t matter now.

  The taxi was mulling through traffic, putting masses of cars and people between him and the guy from room 1018. St. John pursed his lips, letting out a long breath slowly. This one had been too close for comfort. He’d wasted time and energy going back to the Waldorf. It was hard for him to accept the possibility that the guy wasn’t one of Albertwood’s people.

  Regardless, the detour to room 1018 had been a waste of time.

  With his lungs heaving, and webs of fire spreading throughout his legs, Joel had been near total collapse when he spotted Price jumping into the taxi. He shoved the .22 back inside a coat pocket. No matter how hard he panted, he simply couldn’t suck down oxygen fast enough. He watched the taxi merge into the flow and bleed into anonymity. Price was gone.

  In a rush of emotion, the events of the past week blazed through his mind in rewind, and suddenly he was back standing at JFK. The passage of time between then and now was dreamlike. He half expected to wake up in his bed at home any minute now, his body and bed and clothes drenched in a cold sweat from this otherworldly dream. Because certainly
none of this could have really happened.

  I am a no-name businessman from St. Louis!

  If he’d developed a mantra for the week, that had to be it. It was the tune to which he danced.

  Only a few days earlier Megan had climbed inside a taxi and vanished into the streets of Manhattan. And now the taxi carrying Joel’s one concrete link to her had vanished into the crush of Manhattan as well.

  He’d been so far behind Price that he wasn’t close enough to catch the cab number. That was just as well. Price was on his way to Syracuse, and that was all Joel knew. Without a name or a street address, he would be just as lost in a city of less than two hundred thousand as he was in this city of millions.

  Price had mentioned something about chartering a flight out of JFK. But Joel pondered what good that knowledge would do him. He could only guess that there would be dozens, if not hundreds, of charter companies stationed at JFK. The odds of finding the right one in time were astronomical, especially when he considered that Price was likely not the man’s real name. He could easily be anybody or nobody. Price, whoever he really was, was gone. There would be no catching him. It seemed the end of the line had finally come.

  38

  IF SHE DROVE STRAIGHT THROUGH, STOPPING ONLY FORfood and to use the toilet, the drive to Chicago would take twelve hours, maybe more in this weather. That was way too long. By that time she’d be dead. If she stayed on the road, they’d catch her eventually.

  Brooke hunkered down behind the wheel of the Subaru, driving like an escaped convict. The wipers madewick-wock sounds on the windshield, brushing off the snow as it fell. She started out going north on US-11, then took a left onto NY-5. Even in such hazardous weather the traffic was amazingly heavy. She blamed it on the holiday.

  It broke her heart to leave her family as she had, but she knew she was in immediate danger, and staying home would have served no other purpose than to put Mom, Dad, and Wyatt in danger as well. A mile down the road, she saw the sign for the N West St. ramp, and she slowed to make the turn. She expected any minute to see a dark sedan with tinted windows pull in behind her, guns blazing. It could happen in the blink of an eye.

  She kept her eyes open for signs leading to Baldwinsville. A left turn took her up the ramp to I-690 West. Once she hit I-90, it would be nothing but a meandering line due west. Just set the cruise control and hang on tight. But she wasn’t ready for I-90 just yet. A few miles before the exit, she pulled into a Shell station and parked back around on the side. A pay phone hung on the wall.

  She hadn’t dared use the phone at her parents’ house. If the phones weren’t bugged, any calls could still be traced, and then they could begin to unravel her strategy. It would be pay phones for her from here on out. She slipped inside the convenience store and purchased a thirty-dollar calling card. Outside, she dialed operator assistance and got the number for Syracuse-Hancock International Airport. All flights heading to Chicago were booked. She could land in Detroit or Toledo and rent a car, but that still meant too much time on the ground. Once she got in the air, she didn’t want down until Chicago.

  Another operator connected her to Niagara Falls International Airport in Buffalo. There was a seat on a United flight bound for O’Hare International leaving in two hours and twenty minutes. She made the reservation and read her credit card number over the phone. Less than two and a half hours to drive from Syracuse to Buffalo. The odds weren’t good. But it was all she had.

  The Subaru sailed out of the Shell station and hit the I-90 ramp screaming like a banshee. She turned on the radio, scanning channels for the news. The clock readout on the radio told her it was 2:40P .M. As soon as the speedometer pegged at eight-five, she punched the cruise control and prayed for a little understanding from the highway patrol. She set the radio on scan, and stopped it at the tail end of a report that stated that the funeral for James Ettinger was scheduled for tomorrow morning. That got her blood pumping.

  Time was the enemy. The longer she was on the ground, the more she was at risk. If they knew she had the tape, they’d be on their way. She needed to get in the air, but that was two and a half hours in the future. Her next concern was O’Hare International. If they’d done the math, there was every reason to believe they’d try to beat her there. And her greatest fear was of stepping off the plane and being greeted by a huddle of men in dark suits with dark glasses. If she was lucky, she’d be on the ground and in a rental car before these guys wised up to her plan. But she wasn’t counting on being that lucky.

  She found a station playing Jimmy Hendrix and cranked the volume until the windows shook. Then she gave the gas pedal a little nudge, and reset the cruise at ninety.

  The snow and ice had wrought havoc on the electrical and phone lines of the neighborhood, and did so every year. So it didn’t seem the least bit out of place when a white van with telephone company insignia on the side stopped at the edge of the trees around the block about 2:17P .M. A fellow in a hard hat and equipment hanging from his belt climbed a pole. The van had a nice view of 87 Birchlawn Drive. Inside, two men in navy turtlenecks and coats listened through headsets and watched through field glasses.

  Their orders were to not make a move unless absolutely necessary. They were to simply watch and listen, and report anything out of the ordinary. They sat there for half an hour, and there was no movement. Another van was parked near the entrance to the subdivision, ready to give chase if the girl made a break for it. But after an hour, it was clear that the family was settled in for the afternoon.

  Inside 87 Birchlawn Drive, Dean, Grace, and Wyatt Weaver sat in front of the television, warmed by the fire. Grace fixed a late lunch. Periodically, Dean would go to the front window and peer through the drapes. As of yet, he hadn’t seen anything unusual. He was certain that Brooke was just being paranoid. Whatever had spooked her was surely no big deal. Around 2:40P .M. he peered out again, and shrugged. He backed away from the drapes, and strolled to the kitchen to pour himself some coffee. He shook his head, smiling with amusement at his own foolishness. He’d seen nothing unusual out there, nothing but the falling snow and a guy from the phone company working on their line.

  39

  “AFTERNOON, SIR.MY NAME’SYANCEY, ANDI’LL BE YOURpilot today.”

  The fellow was tall and slim, and a gee-shucks smile gleamed across his face. He shook St. John’s hand and led him out across the asphalt apron to where the twin-engine Cessna sat waiting for them. St. John followed him, snow flitting in sheets across the asphalt.

  “Not a great day to be in the air,” Yancey called over his shoulder.

  St. John nodded.

  “Been like this ’bout every day for two weeks.”

  The Cessna looked like a small red and white bird sitting on the broad expanse of the apron. A small knot stiffened in St. John’s stomach at the thought of putting along in the flimsy little aircraft in such nasty weather. But the plane looked well maintained, and Yancey, on first impression, seemed capable enough.

  “Any bags, Mr. Price?” Yancey asked over the howl of the wind.

  A shake of the head. “No.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s saddle up and get this bird in the air.” Yancey gave him a big thumbs-up. Yancey jerked up on a lever, and the door swung open. “Hop on up there, Mr. Price, and I’ll get you buckled in here in a jiffy.”

  St. John nodded, climbed into the cockpit of the Cessna, and wormed his way into the front passenger’s seat. He’d flown in Cessnas before—many times in the rain—but the thought of ice building up on the wings or the propellers gave him pause. True, he’d earned his living by dangerous means, but he’d always maintained a level of control in every matter on every occasion. And he wasn’t big on letting the elements get the upper hand.

  Yancey had on a Yankees cap. He handed St. John a radio headset, and put one on himself. The windshield was peppered with moist flakes.

  “You fly often, Mr. Price?”

  “Too often.”

  Another big thumbs-up.<
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  The engines fired, and the props on each wing went into action. Yancey radioed the tower, and they sat in the wind and snow, waiting for clearance to taxi onto the runway. Fifteen minutes passed before they began to roll. The Cessna maneuvered onto the long gray strip, its propellers buzzing in the cold air. St. John could feel the vibration coming up through his seat. The tower gave them the all clear, and Yancey throttled up. The Cessna eased forward, then quickly picked up speed. St. John looked out the window and watched the gray asphalt sink away beneath them.

  “Sit back and enjoy the ride, Mr. Price,” Yancey’s cheery voice crackled through the headset. “It’s smooth sailing from here.”

  “Just call me Allan,” St. John said, congenially.

  Yancey liked that. He grinned and gave his new pal a nod. “Will do.” He scanned the instrument panel, and keyed the radio, saying farewell to the tower. “So,Allan, you have big plans for the holiday?”

  The engines droned on as they pushed northwest toward Syracuse. There was a bit of turbulence, but actually not as bad as St. John had figured. He listened to the hum of the engines and watched the snow fling past outside the windows. Finally, without turning to face his pilot, he gave a slight shrug and said, “Nothing special.”

  He brought her water. Megan wrapped her lips around the plastic bottle, suckling at it, desperate for fluids. She sucked hard, then choked when a long, breathless gulp went down the wrong pipe. Her hands were still bound behind her back, the blindfold over her eyes, but the man who’d brought the bottle of water helped her sit up so she could drink. She choked again, coughing violently until her face flushed red.

  Droplets of the distilled water beaded on her lips and chin, while she futilely moved her head about, struggling to become aware of her surroundings.