On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

  “Thanks, Craig, but I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Allie woke me at seven A.M.

  She didn’t knock on my door or come in and shake me. She was too subtle for that. Instead she made so much noise in the kitchen that I would have come to if I were in a coma.

  I went out to the kitchen and said, “Was there an earthquake in here?”

  “Sorry, I was just puttering around.”

  “Why?” I asked. “We’re having breakfast on the road.”

  “I wasn’t cooking puttering. I was just puttering puttering.”

  “You were trying to wake me up.”

  She nodded. “It worked.” Then, “I’m anxious to get going. You know me, I want to feel like we’re getting somewhere.”

  “That’s where we differ,” I said. “I want to actually get somewhere.”

  We were on the road within the hour, crossing over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey and driving up Route 17 almost into New York State. Allie was quiet most of the way. She’d been a lot moodier since she got back, and it was understandable. I could actually tell when she was thinking about her sister, and I would watch as she tried to shake herself out of her depression. It was amazing how well I was getting to know her, and how much I cared about her.

  I reached over and took her hand, then held it. She looked at me and our eyes connected, staying that way until I decided I probably should look at the road. Neither of us said anything, and our hands stayed entwined until a toll booth broke the mood.

  The pancake restaurant was crowded as always, and we had to wait fifteen minutes for a table. Patty’s was a place that my parents took me to as a kid, and it had not changed one iota in the intervening years. I would go there maybe twice a year as an adult, and the look of the place, and especially the aroma, brought back extraordinary memories. Hopefully they were real memories.

  “These are unbelievable,” Allie said, once she had chewed enough to clear a path in her mouth, thus enabling speech. “I’ve got to learn how to make these.”

  “Or maybe not,” I said.

  “You don’t think I’m a good cook, do you?”

  “You’re not Aunt Patty.”

  She took another bite. “That’s for sure.”

  We were back on the road at about nine-thirty, going up route 17 and on to the New York State Thruway. We were about twenty minutes south of Monroe when my car seemed to slow down, and I stepped on the gas.

  Nothing happened.

  The car had shut down and the motor seemed to be off, even though the key was still turned. It had just died, and we were coasting along, with no power behind us.

  “What’s wrong?” Allie asked.

  “I have no idea.… I just filled it with gas yesterday.”

  I turned the key off and then back on, but it had no effect. At the same time I veered the still-moving car to the side of the road, on the shoulder. We finally slowed to a stop, right near a sign that said there was a rest area one mile ahead.

  “Do you know anything about cars?” Allie asked.

  “I know how to call Triple A. What about you?”

  “Make the call,” she said.

  I took out my cell phone and immediately noticed that there were no bars at the top; we had stopped in a rather desolate area without cell service. “I don’t believe this,” I said. “You have any reception on yours?”

  Allie checked her phone and confirmed that she did not.

  “I’m going to walk to that rest area,” I said, opening my door. “I would think there would be a pay phone there. Or maybe cell service.”

  “You want me to go with you or stay with the car?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you go with him?” It was a voice I recognized, and I involuntarily stiffened. I finally turned, and confirmed my fear that it was the guy who had been following us. He was holding a gun and pointing it at my chest.

  I raised my hands in the air without being told to, and the man frowned. “Put your hands down, asshole. This isn’t the movies.” He moved toward the open door and said to Allie, “Get out of the car.”

  Allie opened the door and got out. I was scared to death, but Allie looked more angry than afraid.

  Two cars passed by, but I noticed that our captor had his body between the gun and the road; there was no way that anyone passing by would think anything was wrong. That’s probably why he didn’t want us raising our hands. I also noticed that ours was the only car visible; this guy must have come walking out of the woods alongside the road. Perhaps his car was back there.

  Which meant he had known where we would stop. Which meant he had somehow stopped us.

  “What happened to your camera?” he asked, a not-so-subtle reminder of the last time we’d met. It also wasn’t lost on me that he’d ended that last conversation by calling me a “dead man.”

  “Let’s go. That way,” he said, pointing toward the trees. There was a path cut out of them, leading farther away from the road, and that was where he was indicating we should go.

  Allie sent me a look that said, Don’t do it. I considered our limited options. I thought about refusing, but there was so little traffic that he could have shot us there and gotten away without being noticed. I didn’t know what he had planned for us down that path, but at the moment I didn’t have the guts to force his hand.

  I nodded slightly to Allie, and we started walking, with the man behind us. We were about ten feet into the woods when Allie stopped.

  “No,” she said. “This is as far as we go.”

  The man laughed. “She’s a hell of a lot smarter than you are,” he said to me. “But this will do fine.”

  He meant that we were even more shielded from the road than we had been before. We shouldn’t have walked at all, and Allie hadn’t wanted to, but she had let me make the decisions, at least for a few moments.

  I still didn’t see his car or any obvious way the man had gotten there, which didn’t mean much to our position either way. The point was that he was there, and he could drive away in our car after he buried us, if he wanted to and if he could get it to work.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  We turned toward him. He still had the gun in his right hand, but now there was also something in his left. It was metallic, and as I looked at it, he tossed it to me. I flinched and didn’t catch it, and he laughed at me.

  “Pick it up, tough guy,” he said, and I did so. It was a pair of opened handcuffs. “Wrap your arms around that tree and put them on. Then me and your new girlfriend can be on our way.”

  I was thinking surprisingly clearly, though it wasn’t doing me any good. I knew that if I did as told, my usefulness in this situation was over. Whatever limited ability I had to protect Allie and myself would be officially gone.

  I had to believe that his plan was to keep me alive, or there would have been no reason to cuff me to the tree. He was going to either take Allie with him, or hurt her there in front of me. I couldn’t let either of those things happen, though I had no idea how to prevent it.

  I wished that I had tried to do something out by the road; the secluded place we were in now reduced our chances considerably. I should have listened to Allie, who was now again shaking her head at me. This time I listened, but it was probably too late.

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t be a hero, Kilmer. Lassiter wouldn’t mind if I put a bullet in your head.”

  I had to assume that he was lying, or he would have killed me already. The fact that he had confirmed that Lassiter was behind this was not a surprise, nor top-of-mind at the moment. I had bigger problems to worry about. “I’m not doing it,” I said. “And we’re leaving.”

  He shrugged his disinterest. “Have it your way,” he said. He raised his gun up and forward, threatening to shoot.

  “No!” Allie screamed, and she started to move toward him.

  I heard a strange noise, almost like a soft ripping sound, and the man moved farther forward. But
it was just his upper body, not his legs, and as he looked toward Allie he had a strange look on his face, as if he were confused.

  He fell forward, sort of toppled, and landed facedown in the dirt. He had to be unconscious before he fell, because he made no effort to protect his face from the direct fall.

  “Oh my God,” Allie said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t…” Before I could finish my thought, I saw a small circle of what looked like blood in the hair on the back of his head, directly centered. It confirmed what I had thought, that the noise represented a shot, perhaps with a silencer, that brought him down.

  Simultaneous with that thought was the realization that we could be the next targets. I tried to look through the trees, but couldn’t see anything. “Come on,” I said, grabbing Allie’s arm. “There’s somebody out there shooting.”

  We started to run, not looking back, and not stopping until we got to our car. I quickly tried it and saw that it was still not working, and then confirmed the same thing about my cell phone.

  We ran to the rest area a mile away. I’m not much of a runner, but I certainly never considered stopping at any point. Allie wasn’t even breathing heavy when we got there.

  There was a pay phone, but when I looked at my cell again there was coverage there, so I used that instead. I called Kentris’s office, and was told he was in a meeting.

  “Tell him it’s Richard Kilmer calling. And tell him it’s life-or-death.”

  When Kentris came on the line, I quickly told him what had happened, as well as our location.

  “Do you know who it was?” Kentris asked.

  “It was the guy who’s been following us, the one whose picture I gave you.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “Lock yourself in a bathroom.”

  I hung up, and told Allie that Kentris wanted us to lock ourselves in a bathroom. “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m getting there. That was pretty scary; I have no experience with things like that.”

  “Join the club. I should have followed your lead and made him deal with us on the side of the road. When we walked into the trees we lost whatever leverage we had, which wasn’t much. You were right, and I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Richard. Once we got there you took a stand. Starting now we need to take a stand against these people.” Then she smiled. “Which bathroom are we supposed to lock ourselves in? Men’s or women’s?”

  I thought for a second. “Let’s go with women’s.”

  Kentris showed up with a caravan of four police cars and two ambulances.

  We came out to meet them, and Kentris simply said from the passenger seat of his car, “Get in and lead the way.”

  Once we were in the backseat, he asked us if we needed any medical treatment. We told him that we did not, though I could have used some vodka to calm my nerves.

  We directed him back to the spot on the highway where we had stopped, not exactly a difficult thing to do, since our car was still there. Two more police cars arrived, as well as two motorcycle cops, and they closed off the highway.

  We all got out, and Kentris asked, “You never saw the shooter?” Allie and I answered no simultaneously. We pointed in the general direction of where the body was, and Kentris went over to talk to the officers. He came back and told us that the officers would lead the way, and we would bring up the rear with him, while giving directions.

  We set off on the short walk in that fashion, behind the group of officers with their guns drawn. It seemed like a military formation, and I was glad we were not leading the way. Everyone walked slowly, carefully, watching for any movement.

  Allie and I exchanged eye contact and I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it as well. We were walking back to the place where less than an hour before we had thought we were going to die.

  We saw the officers ahead of us reach the area, and they stopped. I was surprised that I didn’t see more activity, but it was hard to tell what was going on from where we were. There were too many trees.

  One of the officers from the front came back to talk to Kentris. “It’s clear,” he said. “Nothing there.”

  “Is there a body?” Kentris asked.

  “No.”

  “That can’t be,” I said.

  Kentris told the officers to secure the area, and that process took about five minutes to do to their apparent satisfaction. Only then were Allie and I allowed into the clearing. The body was, in fact, gone.

  “He was lying right there,” Allie said.

  “Could this be the wrong location?” Kentris asked.

  I shook my head. “No chance. That’s the tree he wanted me to cuff myself to, and that’s where his body was. No doubt.” I looked toward Allie, and she nodded in agreement.

  “You sure he was dead?” Kentris asked.

  “I didn’t take his pulse, but he had a hole in his head, right here.” I showed him the location on my own head. “That would seem to be a tough thing to live through, much less walk away from.”

  “We’ve got forensics coming in, but I don’t see any blood,” Kentris said.

  “Look, this happened, okay? He somehow stopped our car, took us back here, and then he got shot. Maybe the guy that shot him took the body, or maybe somehow he wasn’t dead. I don’t know, but it doesn’t make what happened to us any less real.”

  Kentris nodded. “Okay. Let’s go back to the office and we’ll take your statements.”

  “What about our car?”

  “We’ll have it towed in and checked out.”

  Before we left I looked around pretty closely at the area. There was truly no sign that anything had happened there. Had Allie not been with me, I would have been once again in the position of swearing that something was real, with everyone else saying it was not. Of course, Garber had raised the possibility that Allie wasn’t real. I thought that maybe the truth was that I was home in bed, imagining all of this.

  I went toward the tree, hoping the handcuffs would be where I had dropped them, but they were gone as well.

  We went back to Kentris’s office and both Allie and I gave lengthy statements, answering every question we were asked. We did that separately, but I had no doubt our answers would match. We had lived through the same near-nightmare.

  Once we had finished, we sat down with Kentris alone in his office. He told us that the mechanics had reported that the car was tampered with, and that there was a device that remotely shut it off. If there was any doubt that we were telling the truth, that removed it.

  “Among the things that puzzles me is that we took a different route than we usually do to get up here, because we wanted to stop at a restaurant. But this was all set up, right down to the knowledge that we’d have no cell phone service. So he had to know what we were doing.”

  “Looks like he still had a way to record your conversations,” Kentris said.

  Mark Cook told me that he had successfully dealt with that, but he had also said that there was no such thing as a private conversation. “Why do you think he was going to take Allie?” I asked.

  “Maybe to use as future leverage against you,” Kentris said.

  “He could have just killed me right there; that would have provided all the leverage against me he’d need. But he wasn’t going to. He … and Lassiter … wanted me alive. They’re using me for something; I’ve felt it from the beginning.”

  “We need to figure out how this ties in to Jen,” Allie said. “If we can do that, everything will fall into place.”

  Kentris didn’t answer, but the look he gave told me what he was thinking. There was no concrete evidence that any of this tied into Jen, whether or not he thought she ever existed.

  I was getting really tired of people doubting me and doubting Jen. “She called me,” I said. “You heard the damn tape. And I identified your murder victim as the man who was presented to me as Jen’s father.”

  Kentris nodded. “Point taken. And just as
big a point is that we know the feds are all over this. So something important is going down.”

  “So where do we go from here?” I asked.

  “To be honest with you,” Kentris said, “I’m in a tough spot; I’m going to be getting a lot of pressure to back off this. The feds won’t let it go. And today doesn’t help any.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea.

  “You’re not considered the most stable guy in the world; you’ve been very publicly looking for someone nobody thinks is real. And now you’ve taken my entire department on a wild goose chase after a murderer, except there’s no victim.”

  “You know better than that,” Allie said.

  Kentris nodded. “I do. But I don’t get to call all the shots. There’s going to be a limited number of things I can do, so we’ll have to pick our battles. If I’m going to make a move, we have to be sure it’s the right one.”

  “Which leaves it up to us,” I said.

  “Which leaves it up to you.”

  These are the people who made it happen.

  That’s what Gates thought as he prepared to address them at the hastily called gathering. There were some murmurs of unrest that had been reported back to him, and it was determined that he should do what he could to quell them.

  It was amazing that the project had come this far, and in such secrecy. But these were honorable people, and the ones who knew what was happening thought they were doing something that would not only enrich themselves, but more importantly would both benefit humanity and increase the national security of the United States.

  Each of the fifty-one people had signed confidentiality pledges, and Gates had seen no evidence that any of those pledges had been violated, even though he had investigators looking for just such violations. But word had come back that some of them were troubled and growing uneasy, and that’s why Gates had called them together.

  Gates knew how to handle people; it was an instinct he always had. He knew the right things to say and the right time to say them. And this was the time to show it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here tonight. I know how hard you’ve all been working, and I thought it was time to bring you together to thank you and provide an update on just how valuable that work has proven to be.”