Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “Not necessarily. Maybe Rogers wasn’t lying about working out some kind of arrangement.”

  “So I’m relying on Rogers’ veracity for my continued existence. Great,” he said. “Anyhow, what does this have to do with Candy Bresnahan being tired?”

  “Oh, right. I think she’s actually tired of being in the organization. She’s been saving the world for the better part of three decades. That has to get exhausting. When she says ‘This has to end,’ she’s not talking about me. She’s talking about the entire Praesidium. She wants Vanslow DeGange to be able to die without a replacement so she can go back to being a small-town grandma.”

  “Why couldn’t she just leave? Rogers made it sound like working with the Praesidium was voluntary.”

  “Maybe it is at first, before you get in too deep,” Jenny said. “But you really think they’re going to let someone like Candy just walk away? Someone who knows everything about the operation? That’s a huge liability. From a strictly legal standpoint, the Praesidium isn’t some altruistic organization dedicated to saving human lives. It’s a vast criminal conspiracy organized around committing serial murder. Every single one of them could be indicted based on having that PR brand alone. All it would take is one person who has departed telling law enforcement to keep an eye on what goes on there—one person who knows just how often the Praesidium is involved in a murder—and everyone still involved goes to jail for a long time.”

  “So Candy could basically never get out.”

  “True. Except if DeGange dies and there’s no replacement. At that point, the Praesidium disbands and everyone goes their own way. Yeah, any one of them could still inform on the others. But there’s no longer an ongoing operation, so the only thing you could inform about is stuff that’s already happened, stuff that would get you in trouble too.”

  “Meaning there’s an element of mutually assured destruction.”

  “Precisely.”

  They bounced along the dark, unlined country road for another quarter mile or so.

  “And that brings me to the other thing I’ve been thinking about,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve figured out how we can get out of this. It’s probably the only way out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Vanslow DeGange has to die,” she said.

  “You mean we have to kill him?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Since it seems to be either him or me, I agree with you. There’s just one problem.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “We have to find him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And we have to do it before he finds us,” Nate said. “Any idea how we are going to do that?”

  “None.”

  “Can’t you just gaze into the future and figure out where he’ll be at some specific moment?”

  “I’m trying,” Jenny said. “Believe me, I’m trying.”

  Everything was dark when they arrived at Seb and Deb’s place.

  Almost too dark.

  Seb normally kept a light on over the barn out back, believing it discouraged anyone who might have a thought about busting the lock and helping themselves to his tools.

  Had he just turned it off, or . . .

  Nate already had them rolling up the long gravel driveway. In the gloom, Jenny could just make out the smudge of the house at the top of the small hill. It was, much like the people who lived there, solidly constructed: a two-story brick farmhouse with a porch that wrapped around the front and both sides. Jenny’s great-grandfather had built it. And each generation since then had lovingly maintained it.

  For a moment or two as she got closer, Jenny worried the Praesidium had gotten there first, that Seb and Deb were already dead, that her family was traipsing into an ambush.

  But it didn’t feel like a thought arriving from the future. It was more run-of-the-mill anxiety.

  She peered into the night until she made out Seb’s tall shape silhouetted against the brick, standing on the side of the porch that was nearest to the driveway.

  As she got closer, she could see he was loosely carrying a rifle in one hand. And a smaller figure—Deb, of course—was keeping vigil next to him.

  Seb and Deb, as always.

  They got the girls inside the house—Parker to a bed, Cate into a crib—then convened at the kitchen table.

  Jenny immediately recognized that Seb and Deb had switched into farmer mode (or perhaps never left it). Which meant they weren’t going to let this rattle them. Whether it was a sick calf or a murderous secret society coming after their daughter, it was just another problem to tackle. They were ready for it, because they were ready for anything.

  Deb had just put on a fresh pot of coffee. Seb had his rifle across his knees and kept glancing out the window. They kept the lights off inside the house, just in case.

  “So when are you thinking these fellas are going to come after you?” he asked.

  “No idea,” Jenny said. “Maybe tonight, maybe a week from tonight. There’s no telling.”

  “Okay, then we should probably keep watch,” he said. “We’ll do it in shifts. I’ve got some floodlights I can turn on. No one is going to be able to sneak up on this place. If you see or hear anything, raise hell.”

  “And then what?” Jenny asked.

  “You let me worry about that,” Seb said gravely. “I’ll take first shift. You two look pretty tired.”

  “I’ll take the second shift,” Nate quickly volunteered.

  Jenny nearly objected, then decided against it. She was already starting to recognize that her best chance to be able to sense the currents was to be well rested.

  The last thing she did before turning in was to check her phone.

  Richmond.com had updated its story about the train accident. There were four victims altogether.

  None was named Lorton Rogers.

  CHAPTER 43

  NATE

  A soft rain had begun falling while I slept.

  By the time I jolted awake to the 3:55 a.m. cell phone alarm I had set for myself—so I wouldn’t be late for my turn at watch—a fog had rolled in, as often happened in the low country that hugged either side of the James River.

  When I spread apart the blinds to have a look, all I saw was this charcoal-gray mist that seemed to have smothered everything.

  I walked out to the front porch to relieve Seb, who was sitting in a rocking chair, in the dark, with the hunting rifle across his knees.

  “Anything to report?” I asked.

  “Been using my ears more than my eyes,” he said. “So far, all’s quiet.”

  Then he added: “For now.”

  “Why don’t you go get some rest? I got this.”

  He paused like he wasn’t sure he believed me, then slowly rose to his feet with a grunt.

  “Mind giving me the rifle?” I asked.

  I felt myself straighten and stick out my chest as I asked, as if—ridiculously—I needed to affirm my masculinity before handling a firearm.

  He jerked his head behind the rocking chair. “There’s another one right there. I’d just as soon keep this one with me.”

  “Is that one . . . loaded?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Ten-round magazine. It’s automatic. That means it’ll reload for you.”

  He seemed like he wanted to add more, then thought better of it. But when he reached the front door, he said, “You know which end shoots, right?”

  “The pointy one,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Like I said, raise hell if you hear anything.”

  I promised him I would. After shooing him away, I started patrolling the length of the porch, pausing now and then to listen—because staring out into the fog wasn’t doing much good.

  Eventually, I sat on the rocking chair, though I can’t say I was ever really comfortable there. It was nerve racking, not being able to see more than ten feet beyond the porch. Vanslow DeGange himself could have been midwa
y up the driveway with the First Infantry Division right behind him, and I felt like I wouldn’t have been any the wiser.

  As the time passed, the animals began waking up—a cacophony of Angus cattle bellowing and roosters sounding. There was no sunrise to speak of, just a gradual transition in the color of the mist, from dark to light gray.

  I can’t say the time passed quickly. But it definitely passed. By the time Seb spelled me at 8:00 a.m., some of the fog had burned off. The rain continued.

  When I returned inside, everyone was awake, including the girls. Deb had already established that she was on kid duty. The old farmhouse had a half basement that Seb and Deb had finished many years earlier. It now served as a combination playroom for the girls and entertainment center for the grown-ups. It left Jenny and me alone in the kitchen to plot our next steps.

  The first issue at hand was Barry Khadem, who had been desperately trying to contact Jenny and was (justifiably) out of his mind with worry. His hired bodyguards had gone incommunicado. He had driven by our place and found it locked up tight, with no one answering the door.

  There was now a pile of texts, emails, and voice mails all asking where she was and whether she was okay.

  We debated how to respond, mindful that while Barry worked for a law firm, he wasn’t a lawyer. Any communication we had with him might, eventually, be legally discoverable by the police.

  As far as we knew, Rogers had left those dead bodyguards in our dining room, with the murder weapons—covered in my fingerprints—somewhere nearby. He was keeping the threat of framing me for those murders in his back pocket, using it to prevent us from going to the police—and, perhaps, to blackmail us in ways we hadn’t even imagined yet.

  And there didn’t seem to be a lot we could do about that at the moment. We couldn’t return to our house, since Rogers would almost certainly have it under surveillance and/or have turned it into one big trap. I could imagine a horde of Praesidium henchmen surrounding the place the moment we stepped inside.

  Even if we could access the place, I didn’t know what we would do. Dispose of the bodies? Attempt to find and destroy the guns? Any of those types of efforts could easily backfire and make me look even more guilty—if not seal the question of my guilt entirely in the minds of law enforcement.

  Eventually, we decided on a carefully worded email to Barry. Since the police would be able to roughly recreate our movements based on where our cell phones pinged, we stuck with the truth: we had decided at the last minute to spend the weekend at Jenny’s parents’ house in the country, having left late on Friday night; the guards were at our house when we departed, but we could not advise him on their current whereabouts; and he needn’t worry about her, because she was in a safe location for the weekend.

  We then got to work on the next issue, the one that was far more daunting:

  Finding Vanslow DeGange.

  We had one possible lead on the man’s location. The driver’s license for Candice Carter Bresnahan—who had been a member of the Praesidium in good standing up until she’d gone rogue—listed her address as White Stone, Virginia.

  So that’s where we began our search.

  CHAPTER 44

  JENNY

  The question in Jenny’s mind was not if Rogers would come for her again.

  It was when.

  The Praesidium had already dedicated significant energy to bringing her in. It wouldn’t quit now simply because she had slipped away.

  What she still couldn’t figure out was why it was now willing to be so violent about it. The first time Rogers had approached her, he had laid out everything quite openly—like he was offering her a position at a competing law firm and it was her choice whether to accept.

  She had considered it and declined. And while he had attempted to be persuasive—about the power she would yield, about the riches she would command—he had stopped short of coercion.

  This latest effort had a very different feel to it. A more desperate feel. The Praesidium was acting like it was running out of time.

  So while this was a lull, it wouldn’t last long.

  The next onslaught was coming much sooner.

  She kept hoping another thought about the future would arrive and give her guidance about what to expect. But nothing was happening in that department.

  It was almost like the harder she tried, the less likely it was to happen.

  What she was left with, then, was just logic. The Praesidium had lost four men in the train accident. That may well have been the entire contingent Rogers had been dispatched with to Richmond.

  Still, there would be reinforcements. The train accident was nothing more than a temporary setback.

  With Nate staring intently into his laptop, she got to work doing the same with hers.

  Barry Khadem had already done a fair amount of due diligence on Candice Carter Bresnahan. And Jenny similarly found that, from an investigative standpoint, Candy was a dead end.

  Her post office box in White Stone, Virginia, was not.

  Candy wasn’t the only one who used it. Thanks to LexisNexis, Jenny was soon inundated with others who also conducted business through that post office box. There were dozens of names suddenly flashing across her screen, including those of all four victims of the train accident.

  Recognizing she was about to get overwhelmed by information, Jenny opened a new spreadsheet to keep track of it.

  Before very long, she had tallied twenty-seven people—including Lorton Rogers—associated with that PO box.

  Were these all Praesidium members? That certainly seemed like a reasonable assumption.

  She started searching those names, seeing if any of them might yield a physical address nearby. But all the other addresses associated with them were far from White Stone and the Northern Neck, probably previous addresses. Obviously, whatever rules the Praesidium had developed for its membership to hide its precise whereabouts had been successful.

  Interestingly, some of the previous addresses overlapped. There were PO boxes in Colorado, California, Washington State, New York City, and New Hampshire. And those PO boxes, in turn, had other names associated with them.

  Were these other locations for the Praesidium? Other homes that Vanslow DeGange owned?

  But each of those PO boxes was attached to fewer names; and whereas people sometimes flowed from elsewhere to White Stone, it seemed that no one went from White Stone to somewhere else.

  White Stone was the hive.

  Jenny knew a little about the Northern Neck, having first visited it for long-ago high school basketball games. Like Surry County, the region was sparsely populated, consisting mostly of farms. It had abundant waterfront property, with the Rappahannock River forming its western boundary and the Chesapeake Bay defining the east. Its citizens tended to mind their own business, having either grown up in or chosen to relocate to a place where you could easily find enough land that you didn’t have to see your neighbor.

  It seemed like as good a place as any to base a secret organization. Because for as much as it was out of the way and quiet, it was still in the middle of the US Eastern Seaboard, a relatively short trip—especially by air or water—to cities and states that were home to tens of millions of people.

  And yet—and this was now their problem—it was also huge. Lancaster County alone was more than two hundred square miles. Add the counties that shared the same peninsula, and you were looking at an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. They couldn’t exactly start wandering around and knocking on doors.

  At noon, Nate went to relieve Seb from watch duty. After Deb insisted they eat lunch, Seb asked for Jenny’s help with “a chore”—which turned out to be setting up a series of trip wires around the property.

  This would be their early-alert system.

  There were three main ways to gain vehicular access to the farm. The driveway was the first and most obvious. There was also a back exit, a sort-of-road—really, just some ruts in the grass—that started behind th
e barn and led out to another field, which connected to another field, which connected to a road. Lastly, there was a path in the woods that wasn’t wide enough for a car or truck but could be traversed by a four-wheeler or all-terrain vehicle.

  At each location, they selected what they felt was the best spot to stretch a thin wire across the roadway, keeping it low so it hopefully couldn’t be seen. Seb rigged it so when the wire was depressed, it would complete a circuit connected to a battery. That, in turn, would send electricity to a combination buzzer/light in the kitchen.

  All the materials came from Seb’s seemingly endless supply in the workshop.

  Once they had the system set up and tested, Seb got a strange look on his face.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now that’s done, there’s one more thing I need to show you.”

  “What?” Jenny asked.

  “Just come on.”

  Jenny followed Seb as he tromped down into the basement. He walked to the entertainment center and started shoving it away from the wall where it normally lived.

  “Dad, what are you doing?”

  “We always told you this was a half basement.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “It’s not.”

  He went to the corner of the room, knelt, and peeled back a section of carpet, which came away easily to reveal a square piece of metal the size of a salad plate.

  “This is getting weird,” Jenny said.

  Seb pressed down on the plate. There was a loud click, and suddenly the wall—a section of laminated-faux-wood, 1980s-style paneling that Jenny had looked at a thousand times since childhood—was gliding to the left, revealing a steel door.

  “What,” Jenny said, “is that?”

  “I finished this basement when you were a baby. It was the Cold War. Your mother and I worried about being close to DC. It was a very different time.”

  “You built a bomb shelter under the house?”

  “It’s properly ventilated and lined with enough concrete to withstand a good bit of fallout. We never told you about it because at first you were just a little kid. We didn’t want you to worry. After that? I don’t know. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Cold War was over. The whole thing almost seemed silly.”