Trust Me

by Jeff Abbott

  ‘Didn’t sleep well. The storm kept me up.’ He stared out the window. Mouser was out of play for maybe just a few minutes, unless Luke had hurt him worse than he thought, but where was Snow? And how on earth was he going to find Eric?

  They turned onto a main road that headed toward the town of Braintree and a Mercedes shot by them. He could see snow-white hair at the wheel and thought she might notice if he ducked suddenly. So he stayed put and rubbed his face with his hand.

  ‘You sure you okay?’ Dumont asked. He sounded as though he were doubting his decision to offer this odd stranger a ride.

  In the rearview he watched the Mercedes vanish over a rise in the road. No glow of brake lights, no indication she’d spotted him. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just tired.’ He had to get out of this area now. He needed to know where Eric and Aubrey had gone. There had to be a clue in something Eric and Aubrey had said or done. Something he’d seen. He began to blink past his exhaustion and tried to replay every nuance when Eric spoke from the beginning.

  The truck pulled into a parking lot of a small motel, filled with police cars.

  Police. His face had been all over the news, and there was probably an APB out on him.

  To one side stood a news crew associated with a Houston station – a single reporter, a cameraman – interviewing rescuers. The media was more of a threat – they for sure would have seen his face on broadcasts.

  ‘Thanks, Dumont,’ Luke said. ‘I appreciate the lift.’ He opened Dumont’s truck door and stepped out into the rain.

  The reporter, forty feet away, wiped rain from her face and raised a hand. ‘Hey! Y’all just get back in from the search?’

  Oh, God, Luke thought. He turned and walked away, toward a tent set up for the search parties.

  How the hell was he supposed to get out of here? Steal a car? He had no idea how to, and while breaking into a cottage for warmth and food after being starved for a day and surviving a cold river seemed forgivable, grand theft auto did not.

  ‘Warren, hey man!’

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw Dumont standing with the reporter, gesturing at him to join them.

  Luke forced a smile, mimed a shiver and drinking coffee. He waved and kept his hand up by his face. Then he turned, pulling the jacket’s hood halfway over his face. He ducked into the tent.

  Coffee, bottled water, breakfast tacos and doughnuts were being served on a short table. He snagged a cup of coffee, steaming and black, and collected his thoughts.

  Nowhere to go and no way to get there. He watched a police officer speaking into a walkie-talkie. Just turn yourself in, he thought, with a sudden and deep ache of resignation, of surrender.

  Find Eric. Find the answers. Don’t you dare give up.

  Braintree wasn’t a big town and he walked down to the main street. He had no money, no way out of town. He checked his watch, a Rolex that his mother had given him when he graduated from college. That would be a source of cash, but he’d rather pawn it in a town where he wouldn’t be remembered so easily. And he hated to give up a gift she had given him, but these were desperate times.

  The library was open; it was just past ten in the morning. He walked inside, wandered the maze of the stacks. The smell and sight of books gave him a sudden comfort. They had been his friends after his father’s death, after his mother’s accident, and a library was a place he knew how to use. He went to an array of public computers, nodding at a tall blonde woman who was working at the main desk.

  He opened a web browser and jumped to the Houston Chronicle web page.

  The chlorine bombing in Ripley still dominated the headlines. The rains had removed the immediate threat, and the ruptured tanks had been sealed. Forty confirmed dead. Chemical plants around the country were on a massively increased state of alert.

  The homeless man’s murder was a second-tier story; but the report offered no picture of the victim, and no name. Except that the homeless in the area didn’t seem to know much about the man. Several said he was a stranger.

  That wasn’t a mystery he could solve here. He had to find Eric and Aubrey.

  Luke Googled Aubrey kidnapped. He found references to a soap opera character snatched as part of a storyline, a Chilean activist who’d been missing since the Pinochet terrors, the sad detailing of a girl stolen in Oregon by her father five years ago. But nothing recent.

  Maybe Aubrey hadn’t been reported as kidnapped, either. Eric had gotten her home before anyone realized she was missing.

  But missing wasn’t the same as kidnapped. He searched on Aubrey missing.

  Three results down he found it. A personal blog called Grace-amatic, written by a young freelance designer named Grace in Chicago: My friend Aubrey (I designed the logo for her export-import business) is missing. She’s not returning phone calls, she’s not at home, she’s not at her office, she’s not updating her social networking pages, and no one has seen her. I called the police and they were useless, they said I have to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing persons report. That’s insane. Her boyfriend, well, they just broke up a couple of weeks ago, but he said he doesn’t know where she is. I don’t know what to do omg I’m a little freaked out that the cops really do make you wait twenty-four hours.

  Then two entries later: Update on my missing friend: Aubrey is no longer missing and apparently wasn’t. She called me this morning to say she took a few days to deal with some personal issues and she’s fine, thank God, and to please not blog about her life and I feel like fricking Chicken Little for panicking. The cops were right.

  Chicago.

  He went to Grace’s portfolio and found the one logo she’d done for an export-import company. Perrault Imports, specializing in ‘artistic’ imports from South America, Europe and Asia – modest pottery and wall hangings, sold in turn to retail outlets. The contact name was Aubrey Perrault.

  Who then was Eric?

  He risked signing onto the social networking site – he had an account there as well, as did most of his generation – and found a profile linked to Aubrey’s. Ah, sweet, hello Eric, one of her top friends. Eric Lindoe. He jumped to Eric’s profile. Thirty-five. Working at a private bank called Gold Maroft in Chicago. He Googled Eric Lindoe, found a few news stories, mostly tied to press releases from his employer about promotions. He had gone to the University of Illinois on full scholarship. He had started in bank operations and moved rapidly up into overseas banking: for construction projects in Saudi Arabia, Britain, Switzerland, Dubai and Qatar.

  A man with so much to lose, committing kidnapping and murder – there had to be a reason.

  He did another Google search, tying Eric’s name with Henry Shawcross. No results.

  He had to get to Chicago. He had no money, no resources. And he couldn’t turn to his few school friends, he couldn’t put them in danger.

  But he had people who wanted to be his friends. In the Night Road.

  He remembered the other night showing Henry postings from the one who called himself ChicagoChris. He went to his email account through a website that allowed you to surf the web anonymously. He’d learned about it in one of the discussion groups. Chris had sent him a phone number in one of his emails to Luke. He found it in an email from two weeks ago and wrote it down.

  Then he surfed to Twitter, the web service that allowed you to send short updates and messages to all your friends in your network. His network included all his grad school friends, a few college and high school buddies. People he cared about.

  He sent a message to everyone on his Twitter list: I’M INNOCENT. In case he didn’t make it out of this mess alive, he wanted to make that gesture, to give his friends reason to believe him.

  Then he erased the browser’s history and logged off the internet.

  He glanced up at the librarian, who sat frowning at a computer screen. He saw two volunteers murmuring over a book cart, sorting volumes. One laughed softly. The librarian stood and vanished into an office. The two women stepped toward the back of th
e library – Luke could smell coffee, hazelnut on the air.

  Luke looked over the counter and saw a purse. He peered inside and found a cell phone. He grabbed it and hurried to the back of the stacks. No one noticed.

  He called ChicagoChris’s number.

  ‘Hello?’ A young smoker’s rasp, sounding tired.

  ‘I hope this is ChicagoChris. This is Lookout. From TearTheWallsDown discussion group.’

  ‘Hey, man! Hey! How are you?’ Chris sounded happy to hear from him, but it was the overabundant enthusiasm of someone who spent far too much time alone, and not happily.

  ‘I hope it’s cool to call. You sent your number.’

  ‘Sure, glad to finally talk.’ ChicagoChris painted himself online as a badass, a man who wanted to right the wrongs of the world by redistributing wealth on an extreme basis, a prescription for saving the world from over-industrialization, but he sounded like a giddy schoolboy. ‘You in Chicago?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Luke said. ‘But I need to get to Chicago, and I need help. I’m getting hassled big time.’

  Chris clicked his tongue in his mouth, waited.

  ‘I wrote some truth on a board I shouldn’t have, and the FBI’s looking for me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say FBI in a phone conversation. The government picks up and records any conversation in the fifty states that mentions the FBI and it gets played back to the FBI. So if you say, fuck the FBI, they know you said it. They open a file on you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Luke said.

  ChicagoChris hung up.

  Luke dialed again. Chris answered. ‘You have to be more careful. You don’t want to trigger their monitoring software with a keyword.’

  Luke thought in Chris’s paranoid world monitoring software was probably a keyword but he didn’t want Chris to hang up again. ‘All right. I know you don’t know me, but we’re brothers in the struggle, aren’t we?’

  Chris was silent again. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I need to get to Chicago. I need your help. But I can’t travel on a charge card, and I don’t have money.’

  ‘You want me to send you money.’ He sounded slightly incredulous.

  ‘I swear I’m good for it.’ Most people would hang up. Help a friend you only knew from online? Not likely. But he was gambling on two things: Chris had sent him the contact information to begin with, because he liked Luke’s postings to the group, and because Chris seemed needy for friendship. And the communities – even being online – still had the feel of closeness, of a bonded brotherhood. These people were so alone in their hatreds, they needed each other to reinforce their certainty about the world’s wrongs. It was a key to terrorist psychology: violence was a group decision. He had to play on that sense that they were partners. ‘Brother, I just need enough to cover a bus ticket to Chicago, and a bit for food.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The library in Braintree, Texas.’ He fashioned a half-lie, one Chris couldn’t resist. ‘I got information on that chlorine accident in Texas. That the government was involved.’

  ‘What exactly do you have?’

  ‘Well, get me to Chicago, and I’ll share the info with you. If the you-know-what with three letters doesn’t grab me first.’

  ‘What’s the info worth?’

  ‘Send the money and I’ll bring it to you.’

  ‘You could also be a cop, trying to trick me. The cops would love to get hold of me.’

  ‘I’m not. I can’t email you because I’m being followed. I’ve got to stay off the grid as much as I can. I’m making the call on a cell phone I stole from a lady’s purse. So make your choice. Help me or don’t.’

  Silence again.

  ‘There’s a bus station in Braintree,’ Luke said. ‘You can buy a ticket online for me.’

  ‘Do you need cash?’

  ‘I have zero, Chris, so yes please.’

  He heard the background clatter of typing. ‘I’ll find a Western Union close to the Braintree library address, send you cash for food. If you don’t pay me back’ – he clicked his tongue – ‘I’ll find you and I’ll destroy you.’

  He sounded different from Mouser. Erratic, not cool and focused. ‘No worry, I’m good for it. And thanks man. Thanks so much.’

  ‘You’re gonna pay me back,’ ChicagoChris said, and he hung up.

  Luke erased the call from the phone’s log. The volunteers had not returned from the stacks. He dropped the woman’s phone back into her purse and walked out of the library.

  Snow and Mouser knew Luke would be on the road, and all roads led to Braintree. Luke tried not to let the fever of paranoia build in his heart. He walked a half-mile and found the Western Union agent at a Price-Right chain store. Chris sent him $999 – if he’d sent a thousand, Luke would have had to show ID. It said so on a sign behind the clerk’s head. Luke couldn’t believe the guy was actually doing it. And being smart.

  ‘Lost my ID,’ Luke said as the customer service agent counted out the money. ‘Lost my wallet.’

  ‘That sucks,’ the agent said, not caring.

  In the Price-Right store Luke bought a bottle of hair color. Blond. He thought: when you’ve decided to color your hair, that’s when you know you’re in serious freaking trouble. He bought a baseball cap and sunglasses; a small backpack, peanut butter crackers, bottled water and apples; toiletries, sturdy sneakers, underwear, socks, and jeans.

  It was just like what he’d packed when he ran away from home all those years ago, and Luke missed his mom and dad with a pain that cut to his spine. He threw the stolen galoshes and the oversized jeans he’d stolen from the cottage in the trash after he left the store. He walked to a wireless dealer at the other end of the shopping center and bought a prepaid cell phone.

  He hurried to the bus station. His online ticket, courtesy of Chris, had not been processed. He ate an apple and all the crackers. Fidgeting. Waiting for Mouser and Snow to walk through the doors as they shut off every route of escape out of Braintree.

  A nerve-wracking hour later his ticket was ready, and twenty minutes after that the northbound Greyhound pulled out of Braintree.

  Five miles out of town, Luke Dantry fell into a deep, desperate sleep.

  The phone call came as Henry stepped out of the shower. He felt sick from lack of sleep and worry. Please be good news, he thought.

  It was the Night Road hacker. ‘You wanted me to find Eric Lindoe. He and his girlfriend were on the passenger manifest for a flight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Thailand yesterday.’ He fed Henry the details. Thailand. Of course Eric could run far; he’d taken the Night Road’s money. It would be most difficult for Luke to follow Eric there, without cash, without a passport. Without help.

  ‘What about breaking into Eric’s bank?’ Henry asked. It was their chance, without Eric, to find where the fifty million had been moved.

  ‘I think your Eric screwed us and his own bank. I hacked into the bank’s audit trail – the history of every transaction that’s taken place this month. Someone inside looped the audit trail onto itself – there’s dozens of gigabytes of transaction data more than there should be, it’s a complete information overload, it’s entirely disrupted the audit trail, destroyed its integrity. I expect there’s a lot of upset people at Eric’s bank right now. No one’s going to be able to find what money went where for several days. Even their backups are corrupted. Eric knew exactly what he was doing.’

  Disaster. The Arab prince had given Eric to Henry as a contact. But Henry could hardly go to the prince and say: lost the fifty million somewhere in that bank, could you lean on the bankers to cough it up? Admitting failure would be a death sentence. And the bankers, if Eric had sabotaged their internal auditing system, would hardly be eager to admit they had a rogue employee; it would destroy their reputations. No. Henry would have to find the money without letting the prince know it had gone missing.

  ‘I don’t think I can risk a further hack at the bank. I set off intrusion alarms as it was.’

  Henry thanked
the hacker and hung up. Then Henry’s office phone rang. He hurried down the hallway, wrapped in his towel, to answer it. ‘Yes?’

  A flat, cold voice he didn’t recognize said, ‘You want your stepson back?’ Not Mouser, not the British woman, not Drummond.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘You want your stepson back?’

  Now he realized he’d heard this vaguely whiny voice before. Where? He couldn’t remember. ‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I’ll call you back when I have him, and we’ll make a trade.’ Then the caller hung up.

  Henry checked the call log. The phone’s number was not one he recognized, but the area code was for Chicago. Eric Lindoe’s home-town.

  Seventeen critical displays stood in the Braintree Price-Right store, considered vital because the Price-Right buyers wanted to measure customer response to price and product combinations. Twenty-four security cameras watched the store. Six of the cameras above the displays had been doubly purposed; not only for security, but to observe customer behavior. What path through the store did a customer who’d paused to look at the display take? Did they go first to clothing, then to toiletries, or electronics? What facial expressions did customers show at displays – smiles, frowns, shaking of heads, curiosity? How long did each customer study the display? Did they pick up and examine items, and for how long?

  Tens of thousands of faces were captured at the Price-Right displays in thirty-nine states every day. The video feed went instantaneously to the corporate headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. There it would be run through a preliminary computer analysis, to provide the company’s marketers with initial data to help them refine pricing and stock strategies.

  But, for the past several hours, the film was also being siphoned off to another server, in the company’s special projects division. This was done by a very quiet request from outside Price-Right. There, every face that had been captured at one of the monitored store displays was compared to a photo. A young man, in his mid-twenties, light brown hair, blue eyes, with a defined and analyzed set of facial proportions, rendered into mathematical equations. The length of his mouth. The distance from lower lip to jawline. The angle of cheekbones. The distance between his eyes. The length and width of ear.