by Jeff Abbott
Every face caught at the displays was compared to the young man’s photo.
Comparison number 10,262 found the closest match by far, a photo snapped when a young man bought a pair of shoes in Braintree, Texas. The server automatically sent an anonymous email alert, snaking through the world and masking its traces, arriving on a screen in Paris, France.
The man who received the message studied Luke Dantry’s face. For a long time. Then he picked up a phone, to order a search of all cellular calls coming in and out of the small town of Braintree, Texas, monitoring all communications, all financial transfers, all transportation records.
The man stared at the photo on the screen and thought: They will kill you when they find you.
14
Mouser had disinfected and bound the stab wound. No way he was going to let Snow know he’d been hurt. He’d explain the knife’s rip in his jeans as a tear from running through the piney woods. He had called her to come pick him up at the cottage, but Jesus, the pain was a hot bolt and the bandage didn’t seem to be adhering well.
The little bastard. He’d cut Luke’s throat after he told them what they needed to know.
Snow was fooled for all of five seconds as he walked toward her car. ‘You’re hurt.’ She turned him back into the cottage and sat him on the edge of the bathroom tub. She undid his zipper and slid down his pants – he didn’t protest – and then she went and got a medical kit from her car’s trunk. She tended to the wound with a brisk professionalism that startled him. Disinfecting and then suturing the wound.
‘I learned to bind wounds at an early age,’ she said. ‘Had to.’
‘Same as your daddy teaching you to build bombs?’
‘Uh huh,’ she said.
‘That must have been quite a summer camp he sent you to.’
‘Camp Life,’ she said.
‘Tough life.’
‘I was a Child of the Lamb,’ she said.
He was silent, in deference to her past. The Children of the Lamb had been a religious group, sheltering themselves away in a compound in Wyoming. The Beast had sent its army to flush them out – there had been lies about weapons being massed, and tax evasion, and child rape on the altars, and similar silky untruths that unfurled on the Beast’s forked tongue. After a two-week siege, the Feds had laid waste to the compound, killing thirty, leaving a dozen survivors. It had been ten years ago.
‘I see,’ he said quietly. With respect.
‘One of the four kids who survived the siege,’ she said. ‘I was fifteen.’
It explained the burn scars. ‘Your parents?’
‘Dead. Burned up. Daddy shoved me out the window. His hair was on fire. I ran but the agents caught me, wrestled me to the ground. I watched our temple burn. I saw my people rise, in the smoke, to God.’ She focused on his bandage.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ Snow answered. Now she looked up at him. ‘It made me who I am, and I like myself just fine.’
He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re gonna beat the Beast together. We’ll find Luke. Hellfire will happen.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He picked up his phone, rang Henry, talked, listened. He hung up. Snow still sat on the tile floor, looking at him, seeing a rising mix of judgment and anger in his eyes. ‘Your old boyfriend Bridger, he tried to talk. He told some group called Quicksilver about Hellfire. At least its names. But he was holding out on the details for money. But we got to move fast. How much does the bastard know?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I never told Bridger a word. Maybe he heard me mention the word on the phone when I spoke to Henry about how to make all the bombs. But I never told him. But I can’t guarantee he didn’t spy on me.’
‘Does he know where the bombs are? Does he know our targets?’
She didn’t answer right away, and he could see was flipping through the pages of her memory. She did this with care and he believed her now, completely. Instead of reaching for her neck to strangle her, he barely touched her hair with his fingertips. ‘No. He doesn’t know where they’re stored, he doesn’t know the targets. About that, I never told him, never wrote anything down he could find.’ She spoke with such calmness there was no room in her words or her breath for a self-serving lie. But she ducked her head. If he wanted to kill her, he could, and he realized she would accept her fate like a soldier. He felt his heart shift in his chest. He pulled his hands away from her head, folded them back in his lap.
‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was hoarse. ‘Where will Bridger hide?’
‘His family’s from Alabama. He might go there. Or he might stay in Houston. He’s not real bright.’
‘We’ll get the Night Road looking for him. We’ll find him and he can tell us who these Quicksilver assholes are.’
Now she looked up at him. ‘Why do you hate the government?’
‘I just do.’
‘I told you my reasons. Tell me yours.’ She leaned toward him, their faces an inch apart. ‘Please, Mouser.’
For a moment the words, hanging in the wet air between them, were more intimate than a kiss.
‘I prefer not,’ he said.
She leaned back and closed the medical kit.
‘Thank you for tending me,’ he said. ‘You could have been a doctor or a nurse.’
‘No. I don’t much like people any more.’
He knew how she felt.
‘What now?’ she asked.
‘Luke might be in the town nearby.’
‘Or hitchhiking up the highway. He seems to like trucks.’
‘Then we better get resources on our side. He’s going to stick his head up and we need to be ready.’
‘How’s the pain?’
‘Tolerable,’ Mouser said. She’d given him a woozy shot of relief from her medical bag.
‘Let’s see what’s tolerable.’ The wound was low on his leg, above the knee. She reached out to touch it but her hand slid up past the bandage to his underwear. She reached inside the opening of his boxers, closed her hand on him.
‘What?’ he said in utter shock.
‘It’s a lonely life, isn’t it, Mouser?’ she said.
It had been four years. He had the mission, he did not need women. But his hands didn’t rise to push her away and her mouth was a warm buzz against his lips. The pain seemed to fade for him, when she slid his jeans off all the way, there on the cool bathroom floor. An hour later they left the cottage and he thought: damn, you don’t let feelings get in the way of fighting the Beast. Should have been chasing him. Not chasing her. He was ashamed of himself.
When he called Henry again, he got a surprise.
‘I want you two to go to Chicago,’ Henry said. ‘I have reason to believe Luke is heading there.’
15
The hand shook Luke awake and his first thought was, they’ve found me.
He opened his eyes to see the kind face of an elderly woman who had been sitting across the aisle from him, working a pencil patiently through the pages of a crossword puzzle book.
‘Texarkana, honey. We got a dinner stop and layover here if you’re going further.’
He blinked and thanked her in a broken mumble. She stepped back with an uncertain smile and waddled down the aisle.
Luke stumbled off the bus. The air was cool and humid, the rain past. He started to walk down the street in search of food.
A four-hour layover before his ticket took him onward to Little Rock, Memphis, and then Chicago. He devoured a double hamburger at a fast-food chain, careful not to meet anyone’s gaze. He walked down a couple of blocks to a bar, slipped inside its welcoming darkness, and ordered a Coke.
The television was on, the early news reporting that the demolishing rains that had moved up from the Gulf had begun to subside. Confirmation from a reporter outside Ripley that the rail yard disaster had been a bomb. Not an accident. The bar hushed as the reporter described how the FBI was trying to determine if this was a jihadist attack
or a domestic enemy. The screen went to a commercial and the conversation of the beer drinkers resumed, although subdued. Luke sipped his soda. The news came back on, covering the bizarre shooting of the homeless man again, Henry speaking on camera once more, the betrayal repeating itself. Luke’s face was on the screen. The few early drinkers were lost in their conversations, studying their beers, or clicking billiard balls. Luke kept his sunglasses on.
But now there were new reports. Luke saw a shot of a friend’s cell phone, with the message Luke had sent to all his friends on Twitter. I’m innocent. And one of his grad school friends, rising to his defense, blinking into the camera said, ‘If Luke Dantry says he’s innocent, I believe he is. What motive does he have to kill a homeless stranger? None.’
But then the reporter went back to Luke’s past. A runaway, a couple of run-ins with the law as a kid. Enough to confirm to the casual viewer that Luke was trouble, reinforced by his stepfather’s pleas to surrender.
The barkeep let two more stories play out on the news and as a steady stream of customers began to enter the bar he clicked over to ESPN for the Dallas Mavericks game.
Luke left a dollar tip and walked a half-mile until he came to a larger gas station, one with a sizeable convenience store attached. He bought a pair of nail scissors and went to the bathroom, locked himself in a stall, and read the hair dye directions. He faced the mirror, applied the hair dye quickly and a little sloppily. He returned to the stall, sat, waited, while a few customers came and went. After thirty minutes, he rinsed the gunk from his hair quickly in the sink, dried it with a paper towel. Then he took the scissors, clipped his hair close to his head. Messy but now blond and he covered most of his new hair with his baseball cap.
He tried Chris with his prepaid phone, but got no answer. He felt tense, restless. He walked back to the bus terminal and kept his back to the passengers.
He heard the call for the bus servicing Little Rock, Memphis, and Chicago. He boarded – the bus was more crowded than he expected. Not good, but it was easy to be as anonymous as you wanted on a bus, especially at night. Luke settled into a rear seat, kept his sunglasses on, his cap low. He dozed, on and off, and as the bus made its stops and brief layovers in Little Rock and Memphis and a dotting of towns in between, the long evening and his clear lack of interest in chatting kept him in a cocoon.
When he didn’t sleep, he thought about Henry. He didn’t truly know the man who had helped raise him since his father’s death. The man who had barely survived the crash that had killed his mother. The realization sent a twisting chill down his spine. After his own dad died, Henry had been a constant rock in his life. Strong when Luke was weak, focused when Luke drifted. He was the one who always believed in Luke; the gentle man who’d married late in life and seemed both surprised and grateful to fate for giving him a special friend, and son, in Luke.
Had it all – every sign of support, every gesture of kindness, every encouragement – simply been the cruelest and most calculated of lies? What kind of monster was Henry?
I’m going to uncover the truth about you, Luke thought. Every awful truth. No matter what it would take, no matter what he would have to do.
The next day, he arrived in Chicago at three in the afternoon; the bus had been delayed extra hours in Memphis. Luke felt exhausted and grimy. The bus station near downtown Chicago was busier than Luke expected. He saw young mothers, soldiers, older couples, single men. He could vanish into the crowd, get his bearings. Then figure out a way to find Eric and to see if he could learn anything useful from ChicagoChris.
His nerves felt taut as violin string. Now he would be playing someone he knew to be dangerous, maybe even homicidal; possibly someone who was part of the Night Road. This could be a lions’ den. It could be a trap. He felt almost like bouncing on the balls of his feet, getting into a fighter’s stance, trying to cut past the fatigue to force himself to be smart.
Luke headed toward the doors on Harrison Street, navigating through the crowds of people arriving and departing, and a hand closed around his arm. He jerked away, nearly falling over. The man who held his arm was young, head shaved bald, an intense glare burning behind his clunky glasses.
‘You’re Lookout.’ He steered Luke out into the bright sunshine of the street. ChicagoChris was shorter than Luke, with a brow furrowed as if in constant worry or anxiousness or anger. Pale lips and eyes of light hazel gave his face an unfinished look. His teeth shone, tile-like, in his tense grin and Luke thought, I bet you got teased about that grill. He wore a black leather jacket and a black T-shirt with a raised fist in gaudy red. ‘You made it!’
‘Um. Yes.’ Luke had not expected him to show up at the bus station, but why shouldn’t the guy? He’d paid the ticket, he knew the itinerary, he’d been promised information in return.
‘I’m glad my money was helpful.’
‘I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.’
‘Your face is all over the news, Luke. You can’t be out here. Let’s go.’ He knows you’re Luke Dantry. Luke didn’t want to go – he wanted to find Eric and Aubrey’s trail. His reluctance must have shown on his face because Chris unveiled a harder diamond smile and said, ‘Of course I could scream out to all these nice people that I found you. The cops would be here in no time.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ Luke said.
‘Glad we agree. Let’s go. I’ve got an art studio over in Wicker Park. We can talk there.’
‘Wicker Park.’ He had heard of it. ‘Very hip, right?’ If this guy had a high-end address and money to risk sending to online friends, he must be a successful artist. So why would he be spending his time posting hate and anarchy and revolution? What was he so angry about?
‘Wicker’s so ancient now,’ Chris said. ‘It’s all going corporate.’
Feeling like he had no choice, Luke followed Chris to a car. A polished new Porsche. They pulled away from the bus terminal and headed north, past downtown. Luke stayed low in the seat, wondering if Chris was the only extremist he’d found who drove a rich man’s car.
The Texarkana barkeep finally said to his wife, over cigarettes and coffee before going in for his next evening’s shift: ‘That young man on TV. The one who shot the homeless guy down in Houston.’
‘Who?’ She did not follow the news much; she found it depressing, and the recent chlorine attack in Ripley only confirmed her pessimism.
He told her what he had seen on the news and that one of his customers from a day ago sure looked like that young man. ‘He wore sunglasses inside. Weird unless you’re blind.’
‘Maybe he was blind.’
‘It’s preying on my mind, I should call the police,’ the barkeep said.
‘I seriously doubt you saw a fugitive,’ the wife said. Her practicality was a gift to the marriage. ‘I mean, all the bars in the world, and he comes into yours. While there’s a news story on about him. Please.’
‘He’s got to be somewhere when the news is on. I can’t quit dwelling on it. He had a knapsack. We get business when the buses come in the late afternoon.’
‘A fugitive on a bus. I thought they always stole cars.’
‘That’s the movies. Do I call the police or the FBI?’
‘The FBI,’ she said. ‘If you saw him, he’s already crossed a state line. No one runs to Texarkana and stops.’ She lit another cigarette, watched him stand before the phone as though deciding on a vote. She gave him a gentle nudge, for the sake of family peace. What harm would a phone call do? ‘If you’re right, and they catch him, you’ll be on CNN this week. Of course they’ll be no living with you then.’ She loved him a lot and she smiled.
The idea pleased the barkeep, but he just made a grunt, and he picked up the phone and opened the phone book. ‘I’ll call the cops first. Out of respect. Cops come into the bar and I’ve never seen an FBI agent there.’
The wife shrugged, went back to proofing their teenage daughter’s essay on Alice in Wonderland for her English class, only half-listening to her
husband start to explain his silly, overwrought suspicions.
16
Chris worked near the heart of Wicker Park, not far from the Damen train station, in an old building converted into retail on the first floor and office and loft space above. The exquisite metal carved sign mounted on the brickwork read BENNINGTON GALLERY. Next door stood an open-air coffee shop, with idlers on laptops soaking up the nice sunny day; on the other side was a high-end martial arts center that looked like a Japanese spa. Behind the building, Chris eased the Porsche into a reserved parking spot below an old iron fire escape. As they walked inside a nervous doe of a woman hurried toward them. She was in her forties, dressed all in black, skinny as a teenager, with an elfin face that looked like a kinder version of Chris’s stony stare.
‘Hi, Chris, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Is this a friend of yours?’ She gave Luke an uncertain smile that seemed to beg Luke to be Chris’s friend. But almost like she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet any friend of Chris’s. A conflict of emotions swirled on her face.
Chris’s eyes hardened at the word sweetheart and he said, ‘Yeah, he’s a friend, and fuck the hell off, Mom.’
Luke froze. He had fought plenty with his mother through the years, but he never would have dreamed about speaking to her that way. Chris’s mother’s smile wavered and then withered but didn’t entirely vanish. Chris gave his own little smile as if to say: just what I expected.
‘I’m sorry,’ Luke said. He didn’t know why he was apologizing but he felt someone must. ‘I’m Warren. It’s nice to meet you.’ He gave his father’s name again.
‘Nice to meet you,’ the woman said and hurried off, toward a wall of multicolored smears of abstract art. No customers were waiting. She simply retreated from her son’s ugliness.
‘She’s useless,’ Chris said. ‘Come on. My studio’s up here.’