Out of Reach: A Novel

by Patricia Lewin

  The thought had Alec loosening the .38 beneath his jacket.

  No one approached her, however, as she passed him without acknowledging his presence and climbed into her car. She pulled away from the curb, and after giving her enough time to disappear in traffic, Alec followed.

  They’d agreed to meet on the mall, Erin coming in from the west end near the Lincoln Memorial and Alec from the east and the Washington Memorial. After finding a parking spot, he made his way along the path skirting the reflecting pool, its dark water glassy in the moonlight.

  She’d arrived first, but he didn’t recognize her right away. She’d covered the sleek dress with a belted all-weather coat and replaced the sexy heels with a pair of practical flats. She’d donned a pair of glasses and carried a slim briefcase, which sat near her feet. Relaxing on a bench across from the Korean War Veterans Memorial, she looked like any other federal employee after a particularly grueling day. As a disguise, it wasn’t foolproof, but it worked for the casual onlooker. Not many people would connect her with the sophisticated woman who’d just left the German Embassy.

  He dropped down onto the bench beside her, his anger stirring again now that she was near. “Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “Neville’s involved.”

  He snorted. “You have proof?”

  She leaned over and pulled a file from the briefcase at her feet. “Read this.”

  Using a small penlight, he spent the next ten minutes studying the three sheets inside the folder. The first was a detailed list of William Neville’s early business holdings in Thailand, Brazil, India, and Africa. It included purchase and sale dates of companies, locations, and primary products bought, sold, or produced. It was more detailed than the file Alec had pulled on the man and his dealings.

  The second sheet was a summary of the major slave markets around the world: Brazil, Bolivia, India, Thailand, Africa. How slaves were obtained. How they were used. It hit Alec hard, coming at him from left field. It wasn’t a problem he’d ever thought much about, but according to this, it was serious and widespread.

  The third sheet brought the first two together: William Neville and the slave market. Though the evidence was circumstantial, the connections were all there, pulled together by a brilliant analytical mind.

  “Where did you get this?” The documents were unlabeled.

  “The same place I got the information on Garth.” Then she seemed to understand Alec’s dilemma. “Look, Donovan, I have access to information you don’t, especially in the international arena.”

  “Obviously.” He wasn’t going to ask again whom she worked for. If she decided to tell him, fine. Otherwise, he could make his own guess. The training, the years overseas, her access to information not even he could get to, and her familiarity with the diplomatic world, it all added up. She was CIA. He’d bet his life on it. He only hoped he hadn’t bet Cody’s as well.

  “Okay, I understand why you think Neville’s involved, but there’s still no proof.” He needed more. Cody needed more than some analyst’s theories. “And nothing, really, to link him to the boy.”

  She looked at him for the first time, her eyes filled with a dangerous glint that was unmistakable. “There’s the Desert Sun, the Magician, and a little girl named Suzie.”

  For a moment, Alec didn’t respond. He understood her anger and frustration. All his instincts and experience, gathered over fifteen years with the Bureau and eight hunting child abductors as a CAC coordinator, told him there was a connection. That somehow William Neville was the key, the link that would lead them to the Magician and Cody Sanders. Neville, however, was a foreign diplomat, attached to the German Embassy, which gave him a certain amount of immunity. But even if that could be circumvented, there was a little thing called due process that neither he nor Erin Baker—no matter whom she worked for—could ignore.

  “I wish that were enough,” he said, and meant it. “But it’s all conjecture, and it doesn’t explain why you put everything, including Cody, in danger by verbally attacking Neville.”

  For a few long seconds more, she held his gaze, defiant. “It was a calculated risk, to learn if Neville was involved.”

  His anger rose up, hot and furious, and he barely kept his voice down. “What right had you to make that call? There’s a young boy’s life at stake.”

  “You don’t think I know that?” Her temper matched his, the memory of her sister’s loss haunting her eyes. “But we have nothing but guesses here.” She tapped the folder in Alec’s hand. “If Sam’s wrong, if we’re wrong about Neville, we’d be wasting time going after him. I pushed, purposely, to get a reaction from him.”

  For a moment, he couldn’t speak, unable to believe she’d taken such a foolhardy risk, endangering not only Cody, but herself as well. Yet he couldn’t help but admire her logic, and her courage. “So did you?”

  “Enough to know he’s involved. No doubt.”

  She was always so sure of herself, so confident. He wondered if the CIA had given her that, or whether she’d possessed it when she came to them. Either way, time would render her either a hero or a screwup as far as Cody was concerned. Alec could only hope, and pray, she’d end up the hero. Meanwhile, she’d put things in motion he couldn’t stop, and he needed to deal with it.

  “If Neville has Cody, he’ll move him now.”

  “And we can watch him.”

  Again silence fell between them. A few hundred feet away, the seven-foot-tall, stainless-steel soldiers of the triangular “field of service” that was the centerpiece of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, rose in soft illumination against the night sky. In a way, Alec would have rather fought in such a war than the one he currently waged. One where he knew the enemy, and the route to victory, though hard, was clear.

  “So where does that leave us?” she asked.

  Nowhere.

  To be honest, Alec admitted, there never should have been an us in this investigation. He’d taken a chance that this woman could help him find a child, and he didn’t know whether it had been the best decision he’d ever made or the worst. Not her fault. His. Now it was time—past time—she was out of it. He’d take her suggestion and make Neville his priority, but other than that, he needed to move on and attempt to find Cody Sanders without any more detours.

  Before he could put words to the thought, however, she turned to him. “How do you do this?” she asked.

  He glanced at her, not sure what she meant.

  “How do you spend your life looking for lost children?” she clarified.

  “Oh. That.” He sighed and leaned back against the hard wooden bench. “Sometimes, I’m not sure myself. But”—he shrugged—“someone has to do it.”

  “But doesn’t it . . .” She hesitated, as if searching for the right word. “Doesn’t it eat you alive?”

  He studied her, thinking of the sister she’d lost and his own thoughts about getting out of the CACU. “Yeah, it does.”

  She turned away again, letting the silence settle between them for a few minutes, and he thought she was done with her questions. Then she said, “Did you always want to be an FBI agent?”

  He laughed shortly and shifted again, drawing one leg up to fold over the other. “Actually, it was pretty near the top of things I did not want to do with my life.”

  “Really?” She threw him another glance. “What was at the top of that list?”

  “Cop. I was not going to be a cop.”

  It was her turn to laugh, and he realized again that he liked the sound of it. “How come?” she asked.

  “You really want to hear this?” He wondered what had sparked this sudden interest.

  She nodded. “Tell me.”

  So he did, because maybe they both needed a momentary distraction. “You see, I come from a whole family of cops. And it’s a big family. My dad and all three of his brothers were cops, and their dad before them. And of my five brothers, three are cops. Then there’s my sister, Emily, who’s the meane
st one of the whole damn bunch.”

  “I like her already.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, you would.” He thought of his sister, the scrapper, who’d held her own against her six brothers. She and Erin Baker would be a dangerous combination. “She’d like you as well.” And he’d like to introduce them. If circumstances were different, if they’d met at another time, another place, he’d like nothing better than to take her home to his family. “Anyway, I swore I’d never be a cop.”

  Erin shook her head, a bit sadly. “I can’t imagine having a family like that.”

  “Let me tell you, it can be hell.” His smile broadened despite himself. He loved his family. No doubt. But sometimes they drove him crazy. “Or the best damn thing in the world. Depending on which day you ask me.”

  “Okay. So you didn’t want to follow in your dad’s footsteps.”

  “Nope. Not me. I wanted to be just about anything else.”

  “So what happened?”

  He looked at her, again gauging whether she really wanted to hear this.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “College happened. I was planning on majoring in math. I was going to be a teacher.” He laughed again, embarrassed. He didn’t like talking about himself. “Can you imagine me trying to corral a bunch of rugrats every day?”

  She smiled. “Actually, I can.”

  He skated right by that and went on with his story. “I had a roommate who talked me into taking a criminal psychology class. I needed an elective, and the rumor mill had it that the course was an easy A. Besides, I figured I’d been listening to this stuff all my life. How hard could it be? So I took it.”

  “And you fell in love with it.”

  “Nope. I absolutely hated it. I just barely squeaked by with a C, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.” He reached up to shove the hair off his face. “It was the same old stuff I’d been listening to all my life. Though, I admitted that when my dad and uncles talked about the streets and the creatures who inhabited them, their descriptions were a bit cruder than those given to first-year psych majors.

  “Anyway, I was really upset with that C. So I went and saw the professor, and he told me I had a bad attitude and knew a lot less than I thought I did. He said that if I’d paid attention, or read the book, I might have learned something.”

  She laughed again.

  “So I took the second course in the sequence, just to prove the SOB wrong.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not exactly. That’s when I pretty much discovered that there was a whole lot more to this than chasing down bad guys and throwing them in jail.” He paused, remembering his own youthful stubbornness and determination to avoid his father’s world. “I still had no intention of going into law enforcement, but by the time I finished school, I had enough credits for a minor in criminal psychology. Then I couldn’t find a teaching job.”

  “Sounds like fate stepped in.”

  He let out an abrupt laugh. “That’s one way to put it. That entire summer my dad kept harping at me to apply to the police academy. Until one night at the dinner table, when he wouldn’t let up, I told him I wasn’t applying for the police academy because I planned to take the entrance examination for the FBI.” The declaration had escaped that night, surprising him as much as anyone else at the table. “That shut him up.”

  “I’d think that would have made him happy.”

  “Ha. How little you know cops. I was going over to the enemy, and Dad didn’t talk to me for months.”

  “But you went ahead with it?”

  “I had no choice. Everyone was expecting it.”

  She laughed lightly, shaking her head. “I love it, you ended up working for the FBI because of—”

  “Because of my big mouth.”

  She looked away again, but this time she was still smiling. Then her cell phone beeped.

  Pulling it out of her pocket, she flipped it open. “Yes?”

  He watched the one-sided conversation, and the slow drain of color from her face.

  “Where have they taken him?

  “Yes, I know it. I’ll be there shortly.” By the time she pushed the disconnect button and slipped the phone back into her pocket, her face was white.

  “What is it?” Alec asked.

  “There’s been an accident.” She stood. “It’s Sam. He’s at Walter Reed Hospital.”

  XX

  “THE DOCTORS SAY he could wake up at any time.”

  Erin turned toward the voice. A tall, distinguished-looking man she’d have known from his pictures, even if she hadn’t seen him at Langley, stood in the door. Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence, Thomas Ward.

  “Or,” he went on, “he may never wake up at all. He’s hovering somewhere between a four and five on the Glasgow Coma Scale, caused by a severe trauma to the head. Since the lowest possible grade on the GCS is a three, he’s in pretty bad shape.”

  Ward stepped forward and offered his hand. “I’m Thomas Ward, Sam’s boss.”

  Erin took his hand, maintaining her cover despite her certainty that Ward knew exactly who she was. “Erin Baker. Sam and I went to school together.” Not exactly a lie, if you considered their year at the Farm a school. She glanced back at Sam, silent in the bed. “What happened?”

  Ward hesitated, then nodded toward the door. “Coffee?”

  She followed him out and down the hall to a bank of vending machines. He bought and then led her farther down the hall to a set of glass doors leading to a terrace. “Let’s talk out here.”

  Outside, the wind bit, making her wish for more than a trench coat over her thin dress.

  Director Ward, in nothing more than a suit jacket, seemed unaffected. “Sam’s car skidded off an embankment and ended up nose first in the Potomac, near Chain Bridge.”

  Erin’s throat tightened. “When?”

  “Around seven thirty.”

  A wave of nausea rolled through her, and she reached out to brace herself against the back of a nearby chair. Sam had been on his way to meet her.

  “Fortunately, there was still enough traffic that someone saw it happen. A kid home from boot camp. He went in after Sam and pulled him out of the vehicle. Otherwise he might have drowned.”

  Erin shivered. “How did he lose control?”

  “I’ve spoken to the police on the scene,” Ward said. “They believe it was a hit-and-run. Sam’s rear bumper was crushed . . . Someone hit him hard.”

  Erin watched his face, willing her own to a stillness she didn’t feel. His remained calm, but there was a spark of anger in his eyes that was for her as well as the driver who’d hit Sam. So far, Ward had carried on the pretense, but once they were inside the walls of Langley, she suspected he’d take off the kid gloves and she’d feel the full wrath of a CIA Deputy Director.

  For now, however, she needed all the available information about Sam’s accident. “And what do you think, Mr. Ward?”

  He hesitated, surprised perhaps that she hadn’t cringed from his thinly shielded anger. Then he said, “I think someone purposely ran him off the road.”

  “I see.” Erin sipped at her coffee, the hot liquid doing nothing to dispel the cold kernel of anger growing inside her. Sam must have found out something that had someone running scared. Either that, or someone had struck out at her through Sam, before she’d even spoken to Neville. As a warning? Or to punish her? And in either case, who? The Magician?

  “You were supposed to meet him this evening,” Ward said, without a question in his voice.

  It was pointless to deny it, though she shrouded her answer in pretense once again, hoping it would at least protect Sam’s job. “We had a date.”

  “Have you been seeing each other long?”

  “Off and on for the past couple of years.”

  For several long minutes, he said nothing else, but when he finally spoke again, the charade and kid gloves were off. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, Dr. Baker, but I won’t lose Sam to some
. . .” He hesitated, about to say something about her CIA position, perhaps, then thought better of it. “To some woman’s undue influence. He’s too valuable.”

  “No, sir, I don’t blame you.”

  “Then I expect this to be cleared up within the next forty-eight hours. And I want a full report in my office at that time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Until then, I think it’s best if you stay away from the hospital.” A command, wrapped in a suggestion. Then the sham of civility fell back into place, though the edge in his voice was not as easy to eliminate. “For your own safety, that is.”

  “Of course.” She left him there, dropping her half-empty cup in the trash can on her way back inside and passing Sam’s room without going in.

  She couldn’t blame Ward for his anger, nor could she deny that she was at fault for Sam’s condition. It hurt her heart that she’d gotten him involved, exposed him by having him meet her outside Langley. Nothing she could do would ever make up for that. But she was trying to save a young boy’s life, and catch a monster in the process. Sam wouldn’t want her to apologize for that.

  Outside, she found Alec Donovan waiting for her. Gratitude settled over her, and she almost smiled. When she’d gotten the call about Sam, Donovan had offered to drive her to the hospital. She’d refused, perfectly capable of getting herself the less than ten miles to Walter Reed. Despite that, he’d followed her. And waited. It was a stupidly old-fashioned, gallant gesture, but at the moment, she couldn’t think of a kinder one.

  She walked over to his car and climbed into the front seat. “Someone ran him off the road on his way to the embassy,” she said, again feeling the weight of her responsibility for Sam’s condition.

  “How bad is it?” She heard sympathy in Donovan’s voice.

  “The doctors don’t know yet.” Her elbow on the door, she leaned her head against her hand. “He’s in a coma.”

  “This isn’t your fault, Erin. Sam knew the risks.”

  She looked over at him, another rush of gratitude sweeping through her. It was almost her undoing, almost unlatched the control she’d held on her emotions, her fear for Sam, her anger at Neville and whoever was helping him steal children, and her frustration because it seemed she could do nothing about either. “Yes, he did.” Although that didn’t make her feel any better, and she barely kept the tears at bay.