by Eric Bernt
The name of the place was proudly announced in appropriately colored neon in the window. Red’s. It was named after the bear of a proprietor, who was 6’5” when he stooped. Red, whose given name was Jameson Dulaney, got his nickname while playing defensive tackle at Wisconsin. Most of his family members hadn’t been sure exactly where Wisconsin was before Jameson started sending home all kinds of red Badger gear. But soon enough, the only color his family could be seen wearing was red, which was how their son got his nickname.
Butler loved the place for its authenticity. It wasn’t some fake TGI Friday’s or one of those other prefab chains. The walls were decorated with all kinds of genuine Badger memorabilia and pictures from Red’s Badger career. Red falling on a Hawkeye fumble. Red crushing a Wildcat quarterback. Red standing over a fallen Wolverine. The bar was the kind of neighborhood joint where you stepped down half a flight of stairs when you entered. The old wooden floors were covered in peanut shells. Most of the patrons were cops, or former cops, which was the other reason Butler liked it. Red’s father was a cop, and helped establish the bar’s regular clientele. If you were a cop and lived in this part of Queens, this was where you did your drinking. And cops around here did a lot of it.
Butler was surveying the numerous televisions showing a variety of sporting events—including the third round of some golf tournament he’d never heard of, college softball, dirt-track auto racing, and bowling—when his cell phone rang. He hadn’t even had his first sip of Rolling Rock, and he would soon be glad he hadn’t. “Detective McHenry.”
“Detective, this is Skylar Drummond. We met Wednesday night at Jacob Hendrix’s apartment.”
McHenry immediately recognized her voice. “Of course. What can I do for you?”
“I have some information I would like to share with you.”
“What kind of information?”
“I’d rather not say over the phone.”
He could hear that she was frightened, as well as desperately trying to hide it. “When would you like to meet?”
“Right now.” Her voice quivered ever so slightly.
“Skylar, you sound scared. Are you in any danger?”
“I’m honestly not sure. I might be.”
He sat upright. She had his full attention. “Tell me where you are.”
“I’m driving northbound on the I-95.”
“Why don’t you find someplace to pull off, and I can meet you there.”
“I’d rather keep going, if it’s all the same to you. Can I come to you?”
“I’m in Queens.”
“What’s the address?”
As Butler McHenry gave her the location, she repeated the street number for Eddie to memorize. What neither Skylar nor the detective realized was that three other individuals had been listening to their conversation. One was Barnes, inside his basement office at Harmony House. The other two, Lutz and Hirsch, were listening on speakerphone as they accelerated toward Queens. Lutz was behind the wheel. Hirsch jotted down Butler’s address on a notepad next to the computer on his lap. The screen showed the same map Barnes had in his office, which was tracking Skylar’s present location.
He clicked off the speakerphone when the conversation ended. Hirsch spoke into another phone, which was connected to Barnes. “We’re about seven minutes behind them.”
“Get your ass in gear. I don’t want her talking to this cop.” Barnes hung up the phone, confident that Dr. Skylar Drummond, Edward Parks, and his device would be back on the grounds of Harmony House within the hour.
CHAPTER 35
Harmony House, Woodbury, New Jersey, May 27, 11:17 a.m.
On her afternoon rounds, Nurse Gloria had stopped by room 237 to check on Eddie, as she often did. There was no sign of him or the echo box. This was no cause for concern, until a quick stop by the cafeteria showed no sign of him there, either. She approached Jerome behind the counter. “Have you seen Eddie?”
“Not today.”
Nurse Gloria was surprised. “You sure?”
“Sure as I can be. He’s kind of hard to miss.”
She nodded and headed to the two other places she thought Eddie might be: Dr. Fenton’s office and Dr. Drummond’s. Finding him in neither, she picked up a facility phone and dialed the extension for Security, to report the missing patient. Michael Barnes reported that Security was aware of the situation. “The patient was complaining of stomach pain and taken to a local hospital for observation.”
“When did this happen?”
“Ten thirty-seven.” He picked that time because he knew the nurse’s workday had started at eleven.
“Why wasn’t I notified?”
“It isn’t protocol to notify you.”
Nurse Gloria had never liked these security people. It was their combination of intensity and loyalty that made her uncomfortable. That, or just her innate fear of being discovered, which resulted in her approach to dealing with them: as little as possible. Today was an anomaly, just like the message she was going to send her secondary employer from the grounds of Harmony House. Her instructions were to send her communications at the end of the day from the confines of her residence, unless the matter was urgent. Gloria figured that Eddie and the box being off grounds qualified.
Her message read: EP & box off grounds. Location unknown. From the moment she hit “Send,” it took less than fourteen seconds for notice of the encrypted transmission to appear on one of the screens in Michael Barnes’s office. What Nurse Gloria could not have known was that any transmission that originated from or was received within the grounds of Harmony House was logged by the last man she would ever want to see it.
While the encryption might prevent him from reading the body of the message, the very fact that an encrypted transmission originated from within Harmony House immediately following her phone call to him was enough to set off all kinds of alarm bells.
Barnes saw the recipient’s number, but knew that the number would be a dead end. Anyone clever enough to have engaged the nurse so surreptitiously would use a relay to forward the message again and again until the trail ran cold. The ultimate recipient could be anywhere in the world, and would never be known. But that didn’t matter.
Nurse Gloria had made his job easy. And Michael Barnes was going to make sure that she paid for it dearly.
CHAPTER 36
American Heritage Foundation, Alexandria, Virginia, May 27, 12:03 p.m.
Bob Stenson normally arrived at the American Heritage Foundation before seven in the morning, but he played doubles tennis on Saturday mornings, and then treated himself to a ninety-minute deep-tissue Swedish massage, so he didn’t pull into the parking lot until after noon. He parked his Chrysler 300C, enjoying the crisp afternoon air as he entered the building. He was immediately approached by his most promising lieutenant, Jason Greers. “Sir, I tried reaching you on your cell . . .”
Stenson kept walking toward his office. “You know I take personal time on Saturday mornings.”
“Yes, sir, I do.” He followed his boss into his utilitarian office.
Stenson sat behind his desk. “So?”
“We got a message I thought you would like to know about right away.” Barely able to contain his excitement, Jason handed him a copy of Gloria’s text message.
Jason now had Stenson’s attention. “You’re correct.” He read the brief message again, remaining perfectly calm.
Stenson had learned over the years never to get excited, because there was no such thing as checkmate in this never-ending game of chess. There were only moves and countermoves, day in and day out. Some had much greater significance than others, but the game would always continue. Which was why he could allow himself to play his weekly tennis and deal with any crisis when he got back to the office.
The echo box might be the exception to this, but Stenson agreed with the majority of the government scientists: he doubted the technology would ever work. Was it significant that the device was off Harmony House grounds? Possibly.
But there were other things that were far more certain. “Did you happen to note the time the message came in?”
“Yes, 11:19.” Jason Greers had a photographic memory.
“Do you know why that is significant?”
Jason thought for a moment. “Gloria Pruitt’s shift started at 11:00, so Parks probably left the grounds sometime before she arrived. She must have immediately noticed Eddie and the box were missing, and texted us right away. Which was exactly what we had instructed her to do.”
Stenson nodded. “Her diligence will also be her downfall. Barnes has that facility wired every which way to Sunday. He may not have been able to read the message, but I can promise you he now knows someone on their staff is playing for another team. It won’t take him long to figure out who it is, if he hasn’t already.”
“There’s no question he’ll take her out.” Greers spoke with certainty.
“He won’t do it himself, but you’re right.” There was no emotion in Stenson’s voice, because he had no emotional issue with letting Gloria Pruitt die. She was a chess piece about to be taken off the board, nothing more. And a pawn, at that. “He’ll have it done tonight. Which means we have a choice to make.”
“If we intervene, Barnes will recognize the scope of what he’s up against and further fortify his position. It will require a great deal more effort to establish a new foothold inside Harmony House.”
“Barnes is now aware that he has a security problem. He’s going to batten down the hatches no matter what we do.”
Greers grinned slyly, like he was about to reveal something big. “Have you considered the possibility that the echo box now actually works?”
Stenson cleared his throat. No, he hadn’t. Jesus, he was slipping. “Jason, if we could confirm that, we would devote the entirety of our very considerable resources toward retrieving it.”
Jason smiled with wonder. “It really would be astonishing, wouldn’t it? If the echo box works, I mean.”
“So astonishing that it’s also highly unlikely.”
The apprentice was determined to impress his mentor. “I’ve been thinking about how Edward and the box could have managed to leave Harmony House grounds.”
“He didn’t just walk off by himself.”
“No, he didn’t. He must have had help. And there is only one logical candidate.”
“The new resident. Dr. Skylar Drummond.”
“If our nurse’s reports are accurate, he wouldn’t trust anyone else enough to venture off facility grounds. This is the first time he’s left.”
“You’re assuming Parks was conscious.”
“If he wasn’t, he could have been taken by anyone at Harmony House. But if he went willingly, there is only one person he would have left with.”
“Have you confirmed that she was living with the victim of the subway event?”
The ambitious lieutenant nodded, certain that he had found the missing piece of the puzzle. “Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Stenson nodded, recognizing where Jason was going with this. “It’s still a bit of a stretch.”
“Michael Barnes is a psychopath. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“He’s a pit bull. He only does what Fenton tells him to. What reason could the good doctor have given him?”
“I can think of three. One is emotional. One is paranoid.”
“What’s the third?”
“That Fenton isn’t paranoid. The professor might have exposed something, intentionally or otherwise.”
The man in charge of the Foundation scratched his chin, recognizing the probability of a connection, which almost always meant there was one. “You think someone might have been running the professor?”
“Things had been going awfully smoothly for him,” Greers suggested.
“They sometimes do without anyone’s help. By all accounts, the young man was a star.” He looked pointedly at Greers.
“Well, something seems to have put him on Fenton’s radar.”
Stenson considered the young medical resident who had just started working for Fenton. “The new resident didn’t give herself much of a mourning period, did she?”
“The walls start to close in on you pretty quickly after a loved one passes.”
Stenson was lucky. He’d never cared for anyone who’d died suddenly. He imagined that he wouldn’t take it very well. That was one reason he’d been so impressed with Jason during his background check. The young man’s fiancée had been killed by a drunk driver committing his fourth offense. Jason handled the loss stoically, which contributed to his being hired at the Foundation. Stenson had the offender killed as a little signing bonus for his new hire. To this day, Stenson had never acknowledged the deed.
He pieced the day’s events together. “So she comes up for air, and decides to go to the office. But, as soon as she gets there, she does something that might end her career with Fenton. Why would she risk her dream job?”
“I’ve come up with several scenarios, but each involves Edward Parks successfully demonstrating the echo box. I believe he played something for her.”
Stenson folded his arms behind his head. “What could she have heard that would make her want to risk everything?”
“The only way to answer that is to listen to the device for ourselves.”
“That would kill two birds with one stone, wouldn’t it?” Proving the box worked, and hearing what Skylar had heard.
“I believe the fact that she took Eddie Parks and his device off Harmony House grounds proves that the echo box is now functional.”
Stenson shook his head in disagreement. “Edward Parks is known to have extraordinary hearing. He could have overheard something, which he then told the doctor. She could have taken Edward and his device to use as leverage.”
Jason nodded. “Dangerous game. She has no idea what Fenton’s capable of.”
“She will soon enough.”
Jason returned to the previous matter. “What do you want to do about the nurse?”
“What concerns me is how losing his mother might affect her son, Cornell.” Gloria Pruitt’s son was the X factor. While Bob Stenson still considered the echo box a long shot, he saw Cornell as a sure thing. He believed with complete confidence that Cornell could be the next great African American leader of the country.
That is, if the American Heritage Foundation had anything to do with it.
“She’s all the family he has.”
Stenson didn’t care about the family issue. Strategically, anyway. “It could be an opportunity to bring a handler into his life.”
Jason knew he meant a woman they controlled. “He isn’t ready to settle down yet. He has too many oats to sow.”
Stenson grinned slightly. “Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” The man in charge of the American Heritage Foundation admired Cornell’s prowess with women. Every great leader possessed it.
“I believe it’s too soon to introduce ourselves to him directly.”
“He doesn’t have enough skeletons in his closet.”
“Perhaps it’s time we put some there.”
Stenson immediately liked this idea. Liked it a lot. “Nothing too major, but something with enough gravitas that it would tarnish his otherwise-sterling reputation if it ever got out.”
Jason jotted down a quick note. “Without the mother as our conduit, this could get messy.”
“I don’t like messy.”
“Then the matter of intervention on her behalf is settled.”
The boss nodded. “Send a team. Have them follow Ms. Pruitt home from Harmony House. Barnes might become impatient and act the moment she’s off the grounds. They are to shield her from any knowledge of the threat, if possible.”
Jason nodded, jotting down more notes. “Any preference who we use?”
“Get the baseball fans. The National League East guys. They shouldn’t be more than a couple hours’ drive.”
“You do realize we could be stirring up a hornets’ nest
. There’s no telling how Barnes will react when his people don’t return.”
Bob Stenson stared directly at the subordinate he viewed as a younger version of himself. “I’m of the opinion that Mr. Barnes is requiring more of our attention than he deserves.” It was clear that Stenson had something in mind.
“I agree.” His promising young lieutenant didn’t yet know what his boss was thinking, but he was about to.
Stenson gave him a hint. “What do you do when a pit bull turns rabid?”
“You put him down.” Jason now understood.
Stenson looked out the window, reflecting. “The most elegant solutions are always the simplest, aren’t they?”
CHAPTER 37
I-295 South, Throgs Neck Bridge, May 27, 12:17 p.m.
Skylar and Eddie drove over the East River from the Bronx toward Queens on the Throgs Neck Bridge and then finally found their destination on Jamaica Avenue. Skylar parked in front of Red’s, then quickly got out and checked to see if anyone had followed them. She didn’t see anyone. She had no idea that the transmitter in her wheel well and the one inside her phone were broadcasting their location loud and clear.
Eddie got out of the passenger’s seat and closed his eyes, slowly rotating his head from side to side. He didn’t realize he was standing in the middle of the street until an oncoming car just barely avoided hitting him. HONK! The driver yelled out his window at the top of his lungs, “Freakin’ moron! Get outta the road!”
Eddie panicked and started slapping himself. “Freakin’ moron! Freakin’ moron!”
He was on his fourth refrain by the time Skylar reached him. She gripped him firmly, holding his arms tightly until the fight left him, as Gloria would have said. “It’s okay. Just take a few deep breaths.”