by Thomas Perry
The man heard the engine start as he dashed toward her. Just as his fingers brushed the door handle, the rear wheels spun, bits of loose gravel shot out behind, and he had to step back to keep from being dragged out into the traffic as the car shot past him.
“Fasten your seat belt, Timmy, and don’t be scared,” I said Jane. She drove as fast as she dared, threading her way between slower vehicles and accelerating into the clear stretches. Even half an hour before sunrise there were beginning to be places where knots of cars jammed all the lanes at once. She turned off the freeway at White-oak, then shot under the overpass and up the eastbound ramp. The traffic was heavier heading into the center of the city. She had intended this as an advantage for Mary, because the slow, close-spaced stream would make it hard for even a superior driver to catch up with her. Now Jane was fighting the inertia herself.
She glanced down at the dashboard. The gas tank was full. Of course it would be. The car didn’t seem to have a radio, but there was a black box about the size of one mounted in front of the shifter on the hump for the driveshaft. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “How you got here.”
Timmy shrugged. “They brought some of my stuff. You know, from the apartment where Mona and I lived in Chicago. There were things they wanted me to identify that belonged to Mona. Then there was another box with some of my clothes and things. The next day I tried to put on my good shoes, but I couldn’t get one of them on because your note was crumpled up in the toe.”
“My note?” Once again Barraclough had been thinking faster than she had. Timmy’s location had been kept secret, but the Chicago apartment had not. Barraclough had known that the F.B.I. or the Chicago police would search it. Because he had been a cop, he had also known that after they had preserved and labeled everything that could be considered evidence, there would be a lot left. They would release some of Timmy’s belongings. Barraclough had even known that if nothing else got to Timmy, his best shoes would. He was going to have to look presentable in court.
“Yeah. So I called the phone number on your note, and the lady told me you weren’t home but to call again when I could. And she asked me what the address was. I thought that was kind of odd, but she said you forgot to tell her. So last night when I called, she told me you wanted me to meet you.”
Jane held herself in check. It wasn’t Timmy’s fault. For over two years he had been surviving by following whatever incomprehensible directions some adult—Morgan or Mona or Jane—had given him. “What else did she tell you?”
“That you told her if I could make it to the door by the garden, I could crawl along between the bushes and the house and slip right through the hedge to the next yard without anybody seeing me. You were right about all of it. Nobody saw me go. Then I walked over two streets, found this car right where she said it would be, climbed in the back seat, and lay down to wait. After a long time that man got in and we drove off. He said we were going to meet you.”
Jane groped under the seat and beneath the dashboard, and then realized it was a waste of time. If there had been a gun in the car it couldn’t be anyplace where the driver could have reached it or she and Timmy would be dead. Barraclough had made sure the assignment had stayed specific. Probably what he had feared most was not that Jane would see a gun and call the meeting off. He would be more afraid that his court-certified violence-prone trainee would show his initiative by using a gun where Mary might get hit.
She studied the inside of the car. “Did you see the driver use this black box?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Timmy. “He said it was how he knew where we were going to meet you. See?” He pointed at a dial on the top that looked like the face of a compass. Jane was on a long, straight stretch of freeway, and she could see the needle was moving.
“Timmy,” said Jane. “I didn’t send the note. If I ever come for you again, I won’t send a note or make a telephone call either. I’ll make sure you see me. Don’t go to some woman with dark hair who waves from a hundred feet away. I’ll be up close, so you can tell.”
He looked alarmed. “You’re taking me back?”
“I can’t drive you to a policeman’s house in a stolen car,” said Jane. “I’ll have to drop you off in a safe place.”
Jane leaned forward a little to glance at the black box. The needle was moving again. They had swung around to the east, just as she had. She had only the vaguest idea how direction finders worked. There was some kind of transmitter in Barraclough’s car, and the black box received the signal and pointed out the direction it was coming from. But what could the range possibly be? A mile? Five miles? As though the machine had read her thoughts, the needle wavered, then swung to a straight vertical position and stayed there. It had already lost touch with Barraclough.
Jane maneuvered through the crush of vehicles. At any minute Barraclough or one of his lieutenants would know that she had the car, and they would take the necessary steps to find it. Probably they would report it stolen and let the police catch her for them. She had only one way to avoid the police. She drove to the parking structure at the Burbank airport.
She parked beside the gray Toyota and took the car keys from under the bumper. For a moment she considered ripping the black box out of the red car and trying to install it in her own car. But by now Barraclough certainly knew she had it. If she got the direction finder to work, eventually she would find that it was following a transmitter Barraclough had placed where she could be ambushed. She ushered Timmy into the gray Toyota and drove out of the parking ramp.
Ten minutes later Jane dialed a pay telephone and listened to Judge Kramer’s voice. “Hello?”
She said, “Judge, it’s me. Do you know for sure that your phone is not tapped?”
“I have it swept every day. No bugs so far. What’s going on? How did you get this number?”
“Listen carefully. I’m with Timmy. They found him and lured him out. They know I’ve got him back and they’re about to start looking for us, if they aren’t already. I’m leaving him in the waiting area of the emergency room at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank. He’s faking a stomachache, so they’ll have to keep him at least long enough for a doctor to be sure it’s not his appendix. The guard inside thinks I’m calling his father to say we got here. Say that’s who you are when you come for him.”
“But what—”
“He’ll tell you. Bye.” She hung up and looked in through the glass doors of the emergency room at Timmy for a heartbeat, then hurried to her car.
As Jane got back on the freeway she had to struggle against the feeling that Barraclough was simply too smart for her. Every time she tried anything, he seemed to have anticipated it and brought it back to bear on her. She pulled off the freeway and made her way to the quiet side street in Sherman Oaks. She climbed the fence with a growing dread. She made her way up the little hill and crouched beside the freeway. The rented car was still where Mary had left it, and across the freeway she could see hers too. She moved to Mary’s car, looked in the windows, then under the seats and mats and in the glove compartment. Barraclough had won again. When he had produced Timmy, Mary had gone to him with the tapes still in her purse.
Jane forced herself to move. She slipped away from the freeway, leaving the camera, microphone, and recorders in the brush. She climbed the fence and drove out to Riverside Drive. Everything depended on her ability to use time efficiently now.
She glanced at her watch. It was six-thirty A.M. and the sun glinted on the windows ahead as she drove west. She tried to think of all of the facts that carried with them some bit of hope. Timmy was alive. Barraclough would never have kidnapped him if he had not expected the driver to take him somewhere and kill him quietly as soon as Barraclough had Mary. Mary was also alive, and would stay alive as long as she was able to keep from giving Barraclough the last dime she had stolen. This thought led Jane in a direction she did not want to go, so she forced herself away from it. Even the black box might help. If Barraclough thought Jane had it
, he would try to use it to trap her. This would take some of his time and attention, and anything that accomplished that would help to neutralize the enormous advantage he had.
Jane had an advantage too, and she began to concentrate on it. There was no way that Barraclough could know that the young man she had met in the housing project had told her about Enterprise Development. He had said 5122 Van Nuys Boulevard. She turned right on Van Nuys Boulevard and watched for the building.
When it came up on her right, she could see the car Barraclough had been driving. It was parked on the street near the side door of the small, four-story building. Jane took a breath and felt the air keep coming and coming, expanding in her chest with a feeling of joy. Maybe Barraclough had finally done something foolish. She had assumed he would take Mary to a safe house somewhere. Maybe he had gotten overconfident and stopped at Van Nuys Boulevard to direct the search for Jane. Maybe the driver of the red car had not been heard from yet and Barraclough assumed she and Timmy were dead. Even as she formulated the idea she knew it was impossible. Barraclough had stopped here just long enough to change cars. She pulled her car around the corner out of sight, then went across the street into a coffee shop.
She waited in the coffee shop and watched Enterprise Development for half an hour before a man came out the door of the building. She checked her watch. It was exactly eight. Something prearranged was going on. The chance that someone would happen to emerge from the building on the stroke of the hour was exactly fifty-nine to one against. As the man approached Barraclough’s car she studied his wiry gray hair, the razorsharp crease of his pants, the cocky toe-out walk and impeccably shined shoes.
He must be Farrell, the one who called himself the training officer at Intercontinental but who ran the undercover operation out of this building. He took a set of keys out of his pocket, pretended to look down to select the right one while his eyes scanned the block, then got in and drove off. Jane was confused for an instant. Of all the people Barraclough had working for him, Farrell was the only one she had been sure would not be here. He would be where Mary was.
Jane made up her mind quickly, hurried to her car, and drove after him. She had gone only a couple of blocks before she noticed the second car. It was black and nondescript, with one man in it. She turned off Van Nuys Boulevard, then left up the parallel street and watched her mirror, but he didn’t follow. She pulled back onto Van Nuys Boulevard two blocks behind him. When Farrell turned right on Victory Boulevard and he followed, she realized that the black car had not been following her; it was following Farrell.
After the turn Jane pulled a little closer to the black car. Even if he was the star graduate of the police auto-surveillance team he couldn’t follow a car ahead of him and watch his own back at the same time.
Then Farrell’s gray car reached its destination. Jane watched the second car pull to the curb ten feet from the entrance. She drove another two blocks before she parked and watched them in her rearview mirror. Farrell was returning Barraclough’s gray car to the agency from which it had been rented. A few minutes later he emerged from the little building, walked out to the street, and got into the black car with the other man. Jane drove around a block to come out behind them on Van Nuys Boulevard. They continued south only as far as the Enterprise Development building and turned in at the parking lot.
Even as Jane winced with frustration and disappointment, she knew she had been right. Farrell was the one Barraclough trusted to manage his separate under-the-surface operation. He was the one to select and recruit young thugs, deliver pep talks, and give them the skills to do his hunting. He was the one who talked about potential, initiative, motivation, and all the nonsense that made them think that whatever qualities they had gone to jail for were now going to make them rich. He was the specialist in the psychology of brutality. He would be the one person Barraclough was sure to want with him for the interrogation of Mary Perkins.
Mary sat on the bare, ridged, metal floor of a van. The bumps of the pavement were regular, and she was beginning to get used to them now. Her spine was jarred by the ba-bump as the front wheels, then the back, went over each crack, then paused and went ba-bump again. She had felt a moment of relief when they had dragged her out of the car, but before she had taken a step under her own power they had pushed her into the back of the van and put the bag over her head. It was a burlap sack that had been sprayed with several coats of black paint so she couldn’t see through it. The bag went over her head and down her arms to her elbows, and then unseen hands cinched it at the neck. It looked like the black hoods convicts wore in old photographs of hangings—no holes for the eyes or nose, just a gap at the mouth for breathing.
Her heart had stutter-started when she saw it, and then just when she had begun to sense that it wasn’t what it looked like, she had felt them pulling her wrists together behind her. This made her remember the article in the magazine about doing anything you could before you got into the car, because afterward it was too late. She had struggled then to save the use of her hands, but she knew she had already missed her best chance to accomplish an escape. She resisted only because her fear was jumping around inside her and making her body move. With the black-painted hood over her head, any one of the three men could have tied her hands while the others went away.
The van was white. She had seen that much before the hood went on. For some time thereafter, while the white van turned sharply a couple of times to topple her over onto the floor, then gathered speed, she wondered why she was no longer afraid. It took her more than an hour in the solitude and darkness of the black-painted hood to detect that it was because none of this was happening to her.
The distinction was a delicate, slippery one that had to be grasped carefully and not squeezed too hard. She was here feeling movement and hearing activity, but even before they had put the hood on, the sights had been distant and the sounds hollow. This didn’t feel real. She had been afraid this was going to happen for such a long time that she knew the way it should have felt. It wasn’t happening to her; it must be happening to someone else.
The van turned off the big road with the regular cracks on it and went more slowly. Now and then there would be a sharper bump, maybe a pothole, and the hard floor of the van would abruptly jolt her. It was not the bumps that bothered her; it was the fact that the van was moving more slowly, the way people drove when a trip was nearly over.
For the first time she became conscious of everything about the hood over her head. It was hot and rough, and the petroleum smell of the black paint was nauseating. She could feel an itch on the side of her cheek, but her hands were fettered behind her. She tried rubbing the side of her face against the metal strut beside her, but the fabric was so rough and prickly that it seemed to spread the itch from her hairline to her chin. Then the van hit another pothole and the jolt knocked the strut hard against her cheekbone. She let out a little cry and felt tears welling in her eyes.
She hoped the men had not heard it. She knew they had, so they must be aware of her weakness now, staring at her with critical, unpitying eyes while her hope deteriorated into a bitter wish that she had not been so stupid. The physical pain in her cheek kept insisting that she examine it, so she stopped resisting. She allowed herself to contemplate it and to wait for it each time her heart beat and then experience the throb. It was a small pain, only one of the bumps that the body was made to take, but it brought her bad news: this wasn’t happening to somebody else. It was happening to her. She had filed somewhere in the back of her mind the information that a person in this situation might have to face some physical violence. Now she could not ignore what her common sense told her: that the pain was not going to be incidental, but was the whole purpose of this trip. They were taking her someplace to hurt her profoundly. It wasn’t going to be her standing outside of herself and watching the tall man slapping her once across the face so she didn’t really feel it. She was in a kind of trouble that made her heart release a flow of heat tha
t went up her throat and got trapped under the hood with her so that it felt as though her head were in an oven. She could barely breathe, gasping in air through her mouth and tightening her neck and shoulders to bring the small mouth hole they had cut in the hood closer. The hood was wet now from the humidity of her breath, but this didn’t seem important. Every sensation was uncomfortable and unpleasant, and her mind couldn’t choose only one to think about.
The van turned and tipped her against the wall again, but she didn’t dwell on that either. She was consumed by the fear of the pain that was to come.
As Jane watched the office building on Van Nuys Boulevard she searched her mind for other ways to get Mary back. It was mid-morning already, and there had been no further sign of Farrell. She longed to call the police and get them to find Barraclough. The reasons she couldn’t do so flooded into her mind. Barraclough would take time to find even if the police did everything right, and usually they didn’t. Even then there was no way they could do anything without talking to somebody who worked for Intercontinental or showing up at one of their offices. If Barraclough had a few minutes of advance warning, Mary would disappear forever.
Barraclough would be taking Mary to a safe house somewhere. The property would probably be a place Barraclough owned, but there would be no way to use his name to find it. He had been in the business of kidnapping people for some time now, so his routine would be practiced and efficient, field-tested and refined. The only reasonable way of finding the place where Mary was being held was to get Farrell to lead her there. That was not going to be simple. She thought of trying to find another Intercontinental car with a direction finder installed in it. But this meant figuring out what car Farrell would drive to the safe house, hiding a transponder inside it, and teaching herself how to operate the receiver. Then she would be stuck behind the wheel of a stolen car, probably for some distance. It wasn’t a plan; it was a fantasy.