The Unseen

by Hines

  First things first. What if Saul came back a second time? After all, if you forget one thing, it’s just as likely you’ll forget something else.

  Lucas went to the front door, found a vase holding some reeds sitting by the door. He pulled them in front of the door, so the door opening would hit the vase and topple it. If Saul came back, he’d knock over the vase, curse as he uprighted it and cleaned the mess, wondering how the vase had got behind the door. But he would dismiss it, thinking he had knocked over the vase when he left or something similar. Lucas knew this; it was the way people naturally thought. Part of looking but not seeing. Part of hearing but not feeling.

  In the meantime, that would give Lucas enough time to make his way up the nylon rope and back into the ceiling. If Saul used the garage instead, he knew the electric door opening would give him plenty of time to escape.

  He turned away from the front door, went back through the sitting room and down the hallway. In the hall there were three doors, all of them closed. The first was a bathroom, the second a bedroom, the third a guest room/home office. He smiled as he stared at the desk and file cabinet in the office. This was where he would start.

  First he went to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer. Four or five years of income tax returns, some owner’s manuals for various equipment, a file for warranties, and another filled with bank statements. He checked the front page of the first tax return, filled out for a Saul Slater. Lucas paused; so Saul really was his name. Go figure. Saul’s occupation was listed as a federal agent for the United States government. That wasn’t much help.

  Lucas pulled out the tax file and checked the declared income, then compared it to what he found in the banking folder. Nothing looked suspicious, until he got to the back of the banking. In the past couple of months, Saul Slater had opened a Swiss account and made deposits totaling something more than $200,000. Lucas doubted those figures would show up on this year’s tax return.

  The second drawer held nothing of interest. Health club memberships, some medical records, various insurance policies. The desk held nothing he wanted, either, so he backed out of the room and went to Saul’s bedroom. Something in his gut told him he was looking for something well hidden, something Saul wouldn’t just leave out in the open. What it was, he didn’t know. But he felt there was something in here. Still, after searching Saul’s closet, dressers, and bed, checking for false bottoms and other hiding spots, he came up empty.

  The banking files were there, suggesting Saul wasn’t just your friendly patriotic secret agent, but that’s all he had.

  Disappointed, Lucas went back to the sitting room, sank into the easy chair with a deep sigh. He knew he should be cleaning up, moving things back where they were, getting out of the house—Saul could be back again any time—but he needed to think. He didn’t want to leave the house without . . . something tangible. If he hadn’t seen the bank records, he wouldn’t be suspicious. Well, wouldn’t be as suspicious, anyway. But something smelled fishy, and he needed to find the fish before he left.

  A sudden whirring sound startled him, and he leapt to his feet, only to realize it was the giant wall clock across the room from him. It was the top of the hour, and a small mechanical bird came out of its perch behind a small door, tilting its head and chirping. After ten chirps, it retreated, and the small door shut behind it.

  Lucas smiled. A cuckoo clock. That’s what it was called. Had he seen a cuckoo clock? Once again, his gut told him yes, he had been around one of these things before. But he couldn’t say when. It was something that existed in the Dark Years—the years before the orphanage, when he knew nothing about himself.

  Still standing, he walked slowly across the floor and approached the clock, much like a bomb technician approaching a suspicious package. This was a powerful totem, he knew, a very powerful personal totem, and he didn’t even know why.

  Standing in front of the clock, he watched the large pendulum swing back and forth a few times, creating giant arcs in the air. The heavy tick-tick-tick of the clock was louder than ever, and he could hear gears and movements spinning inside the cabinet.

  He touched the face of the clock, running his fingers over the surface. Then he moved to the glass over the giant pendulum, and finally to the closed wooden cabinet making up the base of the clock. He half expected the cabinet to be locked, but its dark walnut door opened easily for him. Nothing inside to see, but he felt around with his hands, knocking on the surfaces, and in a few moments he found a small lever at the very back of the space. When he pressed the lever, the side of the cabinet folded out, holding a sheath of papers.

  His trembling fingers touched the papers, then grasped them and brought them out. He pulled open a seal on the sheath and examined the papers inside.

  Lucas knew immediately that he was looking at dark secrets, secrets that could get him killed. The first several sheets were printed with vertical characters he faintly recognized: Japanese writing, or Chinese maybe.

  Below these thin onionskin papers, he found a printout of an Excel file: names and addresses of several people—at least a couple dozen in all. Next, a stack of half a dozen photos. Surveillance photos, obviously, of several people he didn’t recognize.

  And a few he did recognize, from his Creep Club meeting. One in particular: Snake, the founder.

  Okay, that shouldn’t be too surprising. Saul had said, after all, that he was tracking the Creep Club, trying to break into their midst.

  Next were a couple of compact discs in cases, and finally, several sheets of correspondence. He glanced at the notes and printouts of e-mails back and forth between someone identified as Native Son and another identified as Beast from the East. A quick glance at the correspondence told him it was setting up a series of meetings, dropoffs, exchanges.

  Lucas thought of the bench near the Lincoln Memorial. Had Saul met this contact there the day before? He thought it was a good bet.

  Lucas kept scanning the documents, his mind taking in the information and storing it. One word in particular caught his attention and begged for further consideration: Guoanbu.

  Lucas put down the files, then swung around his backpack and dug around in it for a few moments. He came out with a small digital camera and began snapping images of the papers and photos. He didn’t need the images for himself; his photographic memory was filing away information as he looked through the folder. But he thought he might need to show the images to someone else.

  The more Lucas studied the documents he held, the more he became convinced Saul was, indeed, working for a secret government agency.

  But he was also convinced it wasn’t a government agency of the United States.

  Lucas put everything back in the sheath, refastened the seal, and set it all back in the secret compartment. Part of him wanted to take the compact discs, but that would certainly alert Saul that someone had been in his secret stash.

  That done, Lucas replaced the vase beside the front door, then combed through the house again, making sure everything was exactly as it had been when he entered. Finally, he climbed his nylon rope through the ceiling, one word flashing in his mind again and again.

  Guoanbu.

  FOURTEEN

  BACK AT THE LIVEWIRE, HE PUNCHED INTO THE CREEP CLUB HOME PAGE again. Donavan’s username and password were deleted from the system, which meant Lucas was now locked out.

  It also meant he had no way of tracking the movements of the club; he had no idea where or when its next meeting would be, unless he made it back over to Donavan’s house and trailed him. Something he’d have to try, just as soon as he did a bit of research.

  He picked up the latte he’d ordered, took a sip, and typed Guoanbu into the Google search engine. Immediately several hits confirmed what he’d been thinking: Guoanbu was the intelligence agency for the Chinese government.

  He sighed, setting down his cup. Saul was a double agent for the Chinese government. Lucas wasn’t a hundred percent certain what that meant, but he knew
it was big. He also knew that meant he couldn’t work with Saul.

  Or could he? Maybe his best bet was to be a double agent himself; work with Saul and pretend to be infiltrating Creep Club, but instead feed information to . . . to whom, exactly?

  He didn’t know.

  Lucas felt his nerves getting jittery, and he knew it had nothing to do with the caffeine. For so many years now he’d cultivated his anonymity, made himself invisible, lived between the seams of society. He’d lived happily, comfortably, with his manufactured histories for the people he watched, his mementos snatched from offices.

  He’d been alone, just him with his own thoughts, his own creations. Comfortably cocooned inside his shell.

  But now, all of the events of the last few days had pulled him into the blinding light. He felt like exposed prey, waiting for death to come swooping down and clutch him in its razor-sharp talons.

  He was no longer in control of his world.

  Even worse, he wasn’t sure who was.

  Okay, it was time to make a plan. He closed the browser window on The LiveWire’s computer, flushed the cache, and reset the app to erase its history. No sense leaving more tracks.

  He picked up his cup and went to the door, making eye contact with no one else in the café.

  He’d swing by Donavan’s apartment before returning to his current hideout. That was the next step, the only step he could take right now. He wanted to leave it all behind—just head out on the highway, catch a ride headed west, and set up again in a new city, because he really didn’t know what he was doing here in the District anyway. That was the logical thing, the sensible thing, the Lucaslike thing he had always done.

  But maybe the Lucaslike thing wasn’t what he should do. So long ago, as a young boy in the orphanage, he had stared at the lights of DC, dreaming that those lights held something for him, that they would one day draw him to something important. That they would make him part of something bigger than himself.

  And now, despite the odds, they had. This was a chance to belong to something bigger, something he knew was far removed from spying on people at their desks. He was part of . . . something. He knew about a double agent, someone who was most likely selling state secrets to the Chinese government. He couldn’t just walk away from that.

  He had to walk into it.

  He arrived back at Donavan’s apartment in the late afternoon, taking half an hour to watch for movement or activity before approaching the door. He knocked and, when no answer came, looked for the key in its usual hiding spot. He was surprised to find it still there. He wasn’t sure that was a good sign.

  Inside, Donavan’s apartment was the same as it had been the last few days. Same laundry, same dirty dishes, and now a slightly putrid smell—maybe something going bad in the refrigerator—hung in the air.

  This made Lucas’s stomach do a slow revolution, because it meant his last hope of a link to the Creep Club had gone into deep hiding. He shouldn’t be surprised, really; after all, he himself had recently done the same thing. When your home turf is compromised, you move, leave everything behind. That’s exactly what Donavan had done. Maybe even before Lucas had entered the picture. In retrospect, Donavan was just a pawn to get him into this game, wasn’t he? Maybe Donavan’s “apartment” wasn’t even really his apartment, but just part of the game.

  Still, as he rode the Metro back to his fourth-floor apartment in the late afternoon, Lucas knew he was getting pushed out of this giant chess match before he’d even had a chance to plot a few moves. With Donavan missing, Lucas’s connections were gone. With his connections gone, he had no way to string along Saul.

  He needed to think, so he retreated to the hidden closet inside the bathroom at Dandy Don’s Donuts. This late in the day, few customers were there. So he sat, staring at empty tables through his peephole, considering his options, trying to work his angles.

  If he could somehow find the next meeting of the Creep Club, maybe . . . maybe he could present his evidence against Saul. But without Donavan, he was unmoored.

  Maybe Saul had ears to the ground, people who could tell him when and where the next meeting was going to take place. Use Saul to get information, then turn it back around. Possible, but he didn’t like it as his first option.

  Besides, what would he do if he showed up at the next Creep Club meeting, anyway? His last one hadn’t exactly been a rousing success, and he was fairly sure he wouldn’t be welcomed back with open arms.

  No, it would be better if he were at the meeting, but not part of it. If he could find the meeting and creep into it, he could get a better idea what they were discussing, and get a handle on Donavan again.

  Follow his movements.

  If only he had a way to hook back into —

  He smiled as his mind made a connection. There was a way back into the Creep Club.

  He accessed his memory banks, replaying the video Dilbert had presented at the last meeting. The title cards for the video rolled by. First: Symphony in Violence. Then: Music by Johann Strauss. And finally: Subjects: Kleiderman and Leila Delgado, 4815 Suncrest, Alexandria, VA.

  Dilbert had said he was still collecting video, adding to his workin-progress.

  Lucas had an address; if he visited Kleiderman and Leila Delgado’s home, he was sure he’d find Dilbert.

  And once he found Dilbert, he’d find his way back into the Creep Club.

  THE DELGADO HOME WAS A LARGE, CAPE COD-STYLE HOUSE OF TAN AND cream tones in a well-to-do neighborhood. A mere facade for the things that happened inside the home, Lucas knew; images of Dilbert’s hideous film floated back to him again.

  Stereotypically, when you thought of domestic abuse, you thought of poor people in trailer homes, drunk men who lashed out at their families in impotent rage.

  But this was more like Green Acres.

  Lucas wasn’t interested in the couple right now; in fact, he stayed away from the house entirely. Instead, he set up inside a garden shed in the backyard, squeezing in between the lawnmower and some other gardening implements that obviously never saw any use. In a neighborhood such as this one, you didn’t mow the yard. You had a lawn service.

  Inside the storage shed, Lucas curled into a ball and waited for night to fall. While he waited, he retrieved his spotting scope and cased the exterior of the home, looking for signs of Dilbert’s presence.

  He gasped a bit when he saw it: the familiar CC symbol—two uppercase letters, turned on their sides to resemble mountains—scratched under a water spigot near a basement window. Evidently the Creep Club members loved to leave their calling cards at every building or home they visited.

  After seeing it at the Stranahan Building, Lucas realized he’d seen the symbol on several buildings around the DC area; he’d always written it off as just one more bit of graffiti left by a casual infiltrator, but now he realized the symbol was so much more than that. It was a sign to others within the Creep Club, a way of marking territory.

  Lucas shivered, put the spotting scope away, sat down, and tried to relax while he waited for night to fall. Something inside told him Dilbert wouldn’t show up until it was dark outside.

  He pulled his jacket tighter around him and put his backpack over the front of him like a makeshift blanket, surprised at how chilly it was; the last several days it had been warmer than usual, but now the whole DC area was in the midst of a cold snap. In August. Go figure.

  The astringent smell of gasoline from the mower, mixed with the earthy smell of grass clippings, made him light-headed. All in all, probably not the best place to spend a few hours waiting. But it was the safest.

  He pulled his knees up toward his chest and rested his chin on his knees. Within a few minutes his mind was retreating to the past, to times he hadn’t visited in so long.

  The orphanage. The far-off lights of the city.

  After several minutes, darkness fell, and Lucas saw lights inside the home flicker on. He moved, still peering through the tiny crack between the shed doors, but s
aw no activity in the basement beside the—

  Wait. He saw shadows shifting, very subtly. He smiled, knowing instantly that it was Dilbert. He had no reason to know this, and yet he knew it anyway.

  His smile was interrupted by something shattering inside the home, followed by a long scream.

  Lucas felt his throat dry instantly. This was precisely why he had holed up in the garden shed; he knew things would happen inside that house he wanted to avoid. He remembered the images from Dilbert’s presentation, and he had no desire to see them acted out live and in person.

  So he had chosen this garden shed, where he could wait for a sign from Dilbert, then follow him unobtrusively, tail him until the next Creep Club meeting.

  But the scream changed everything. How could he sit here and do nothing, knowing what was probably happening inside right now? For that matter, how could he tell himself the main reason he was here was to find Dilbert? He had sought out this shed, away from the house, in an attempt to smother what he knew he must do.

  But the scream made it all crystal clear again. He was here first to help the woman inside that house. And second, if he got lucky, to figure out some way to tail Dilbert.

  It might mean throwing away his chance at reconnecting with the Creep Club, but Lucas had to act. His body knew it before his mind did, because he was already opening the shed doors and moving quickly across the manicured lawn before he finished the argument raging inside him.

  He moved quickly, quietly, hoping to escape detection as he approached the house.

  Avoid detection. The words stuck in his mind for a few moments, and he suddenly had a plan.

  A security system.

  A house like this had to have one. True, it wouldn’t be armed right now with people inside the house, but he could change that. He knew his way around security systems, and he knew one of the quickest ways to trip one was to bust off the access panel hiding the electrical system—usually on the exterior of the house.