3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  Jack’s mind seemed to drift, as if the jolt he’d received in the crash had dislodged him from the present. He saw himself standing in National Memorial Park over the freshly dug hole in the ground into which Emma’s mahogany casket would be lowered as soon as Father Larrigan ceased his interminable droning. Sharon was standing beside him, but apart. There might have been a continent between them. For her, he didn’t exist, or rather, he existed in a world full of horror and death she could no longer inhabit. They’d yelled and screamed at each other, dishes had been hurled, a lamp that caused a flurry of flame that Jack quickly stamped out. No matter. The fight went on as if no bell had rung, until they came to blows, which was what they wanted or, at least, needed. Then all was still, save for Sharon’s quiet sobbing.

  Father Larrigan was done and the casket began its mechanical descent into the ground.

  “No!” screamed Sharon, breaking to the casket. “My little girl! No!”

  Jack made a move toward her, but Father Larrigan was closer. He put a sheltering arm around her.

  Sharon leaned against his big Irish frame. “Why did Emma die, Father? It’s all so senseless. Why did she have to die?”

  “God works in mysterious ways,” Father Larrigan said softly. “His plan is beyond human understanding.”

  “God?” Sharon shoved him away from her in disgust. “God wouldn’t take the life of a young innocent girl whose life hadn’t yet begun. No plan could be so cruel, no plan could excuse my daughter’s death. Better to say it was the work of the devil!”

  Father Larrigan looked like he was about to faint. “Mrs. McClure, please! Your blaspheming—”

  But Sharon would not be denied. “There is no plan!” she howled to Father Larrigan, to the unfeeling sky. “There is no God!”

  As Jack sucked in pure oxygen, his brain ceased its wandering. He opened his eyes.

  “Ah, you’re with us again,” Bennett said.

  He sat with only one buttock on the bench, tipped slightly forward. “D’you feel up to telling me what happened, Jack? Last I know you defused the packet of C-four the perp set in the basement of Friedland High School.”

  To the EMT woman’s distress, Jack slipped off the oxygen mask. “The perp broke free of custody, I don’t know how. I know my way around that basement, I knew he must be headed for the Bilco doors on the east side—besides the stairs, they’re the only way out. I went after him. He hot-wired the principal’s car, took off. I took off after him.”

  “You lost him?”

  Jack tried to smile, but grimaced instead. In the aftermath of the crash, his head throbbed, but his body buzzed with the excess adrenaline it was still pumping out. “There’s a steep embankment about a half mile back. He swerved into me there. I braked, swung into him, and he did a three-sixty while going off the edge.”

  The EMT strapped the mask back over Jack’s nose and mouth. “Sorry, I need to get him back on oxygen.”

  Bennett shot her a glance. “Is he in shock?”

  “No, but he will be if you keep this up.”

  Bennett frowned disapprovingly. “I mean, how’s he doing overall?”

  “There’s no outward sign of concussion.” She tightened the straps of the mask. “No broken bones, and the laceration to his scalp is superficial.” Noting Jack’s pallor, she recalibrated the flow of oxygen. “But I’m not a doctor. He needs to be properly evaluated.”

  The chief nodded vaguely. His face was fissured by hard decisions, painful failures, bureaucratic frustrations, cragged with the loneliness that only men like Bennett and Jack could feel. We’re a breed apart, Jack thought. We inhabit the world just like everyone else, but we walk through it as shadows. We have to in order to find the places where the vermin live, worm ourselves in to lure them out, or to chop them into tiny pieces. And after a while, even if we’re extremely vigilant, we become so used to being shadows that we don’t feel comfortable anywhere else but the darkness. That’s when, like it or not, in order to save ourselves, in order to preserve our way of living, we sever our ties with normalcy, because it becomes more and more difficult to make that transition back from the shadows into the light, until it becomes impossible altogether. And then here we find ourselves, deep in the places where only shadows exist.

  The ambulance came to a stop, and the EMT woman opened the rear doors. Jack was rolled out of the ambulance, wheeled through the automatic doors of the emergency room.

  “I’ll handle all the paperwork,” Bennett said to the admitting attendant.

  “But the patient has to read and agree to—”

  “I have power of attorney for the patient,” Bennett said in his brook-no-argument tone of voice.

  The attendant bristled, gathered herself around her ample bosom. “Do you have proof?”

  Bennett whipped out a pad and pen, stared at her ID tag. “Ms. Honeycutt, is it?” He scribbled on the pad. “Gimme the name of your supervisor.”

  Ms. Honeycutt’s glare was as sharp as a scalpel as she handed over the clipboard, but whatever was on her mind she kept to herself, which was all Bennett required.

  Jack was sent down for X-rays and a CAT scan. Then his laceration was cleaned and dressed while he was hydrated intravenously.

  When Bennett pulled aside the opaque curtain that had been drawn around Jack’s cubicle, Jack said, “No breaks, no concussion. Are you satisfied now? Can I get the hell out of here so I can get back to work?”

  “In a minute,” the chief said. “Your ex is here.”

  Jack sat up in the bed. “Damnit, not now.”

  “Too late,” a husky female voice said.

  Jack, sliding off the bed and onto his feet, saw Sharon appear like a fallen angel.

  She smiled. “Hi, Roddy.”

  “Sharon.” The chief leaned forward, pecked her on the cheek. “Good to see you again.”

  Looking at Jack frown, she said, “I’m glad someone thinks so.”

  She made her way past Bennett, who behind Sharon’s back, gave Jack a small nod of encouragement before disappearing back into the holy hell of the ER, although at this precise moment, Jack didn’t really know which was more of a holy hell, outside the curtain or inside.

  It was as she stood silently contemplating him that Jack became acutely aware that he was without trousers. Her hair was lighter than it had been when they were married, and she wore different makeup. She looked both familiar and strange to him, as if she had gone through a mysterious transformation.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Rodney called me.” She ran a hand through her hair, golden highlights glinting in the overhead fluorescents. “He said he thought you were okay but maybe I should come down and see for myself.”

  There was some shouting and the hasty squeaks of doctors’ rubber-soled shoes on the ER’s rubberized floor. The curtain rippled behind him as a patient was wheeled into the next cubicle. From the raised, rushed voice, Jack gathered that there was a lot of bleeding that needed to be stopped, stat.

  “I don’t know why you bothered,” Jack said. “Aren’t you too busy fucking Jeff?”

  Color rose to her cheeks. “Your best friend is still in the hospital.”

  Jack felt the muck that had lain on the streambed of his mind being stirred up once again, and his heart began to shrivel. He could end this fight now, before it escalated out of control, but some part of him that was not finished punishing himself goaded him on. “He stopped being my best friend when he took you to bed.”

  “Neither of us meant it to—”

  “Bullshit! Those things don’t just happen. You both wanted it.”

  Her gray eyes stared placidly into his. “I wanted a shot at happiness, Jack. Something I came to realize you know nothing about. After Emma died, I spent six months in mourning. I went on Prozac so I wouldn’t tear my heart out.”

  He stood, stunned, rooted to the cold linoleum. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you needed Prozac even more than I
did. The difference is, you didn’t get help. You wallowed in your pain, the self-flagellation became your reason to live. You became a black hole. I had to get out before you sucked me into it with you.

  “I was so tired of you chasing criminals, of never knowing when you’d come home, if you’d come home.” She took a step toward him. “Without you, our bed grew cold.”

  In the next makeshift cubicle, the doctors’ voices rose. They were losing the patient. A spray of blood hit the other side of the curtain, which ballooned out briefly.

  “Dear God,” she started, “what’s happening over there?”

  “Forget it,” Jack said. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  Sharon’s eyes turned back to him. All the fierceness had gone out of her. Like a tire running flat, she seemed suddenly wobbly, unsure of herself. “Anyway, I’m no longer seeing him.”

  “Found someone better already?” Jack snapped.

  To her credit, she ignored his dig. “He’s intent on pressing battery charges against you. I tried to persuade him he was making a mistake, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  Jack felt his heart skip a beat. Is that why she’d broken up with Jeff? Had she sided with him? He stared at her, too many emotions flitting through him for him to recognize even one. After all that had happened, all that had come between them, she still had the uncanny ability to draw him like a flame. And yet he felt the gulf that lay between them: the broken promises, the lies, the guilt—the unforgiven. It had substance, the form of life. It felt like the holding of one’s breath just before the onrush of a storm.

  Beyond the stained curtain, there was silence, the activity had ceased, the doctors had gone on to the next urgent case. The patient was lost.

  In a clumsy attempt to counteract the gulf, he moved closer to her. “Do you think I stopped loving you?”

  Her lips parted, and her breath fanned his cheek. “No, I think you loved me. I know I loved you.” Putting her hand on his biceps, she pushed herself away from him so gently, he didn’t—couldn’t—resist.

  Despite his best intentions, he couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. She had kept so many things from him, even before they’d split up: the depths of her grief, her depression, taking Prozac. He lashed out in twisted fashion. “So you show it by spreading your legs for—”

  She slapped him then.

  He noticed that her lipstick was the same bloody color as her nails, which meant that she wasn’t biting her nails anymore.

  “Why did you make me do that?” Her voice was filled with sadness. “I didn’t come here to rehash the past. I wanted … I want to offer you a bedroom, a good home-cooked meal, if you like.”

  He had no idea how to respond.

  She gave him a nervous smile. “I went back to church, Jack.”

  He looked at her in bewilderment. He felt disoriented, as if he were in a forest of mirrors. Who was this woman standing in front of him? Not his ex-wife, surely.

  “I suppose you think I’m either crazy or a hypocrite after the tongue-lashing I gave Father Larrigan.” With a long finger, she swept a wisp of hair off her face. “The truth is, the Prozac didn’t work. Nothing did. My heart was too damaged. The Prozac masked the pain, but it didn’t take it away. In desperation, I turned to the Church.”

  He shook his head mutely.

  “I’ve found a measure of peace there.”

  “Don’t you see that all you’re doing is running away from the world, Shar?”

  She shook her head sadly. “You have a perverse way of turning something beautiful to ashes.”

  “So you’ve found religion,” Jack said. “Great. Another secret revealed.”

  Sharon pulled open the curtain, said, not unkindly, “You need to get it into your head, Jack. We all have a secret life, not just you.”

  4

  After returning with Bennett to HQ, Jack took a long-overdue shower. In the locker room, he found a set of fresh clothes on hangers waiting for him, but was surprised they included a rather expensive suit of midnight-blue worsted wool, a pair of English brogues, a similarly expensive Sea Island cotton shirt, and a fashionable though decidedly conservative tie. He’d never worn such extravagant clothes; nor could he imagine his chief having an allowance for them in his budget.

  He had just finished knotting his tie when Bennett returned.

  Jack closed his locker door. “So tell me, what am I doing in this monkey outfit?” He tried and failed to straighten the knot in his tie. “Who am I going undercover as? A Secret Service agent?”

  “Actually, you’re not far off the mark.” Bennett gestured with his head. “Come on.”

  He led Jack out the rear door, where a smoke-windowed limo idled. Bennett opened the rear door and they climbed in.

  Jack settled into the backseat. The moment the chief sat down beside him, the limo took off at an almost reckless speed.

  Jack stared at his boss. “Where are we going?”

  Bennett was looking straight ahead, as if at a future only he could see. “To your new assignment.”

  Bennett, elbows on his bony knees, laced his fingers together. Jack felt his own muscles tense, because he knew that tell: Bennett’s hands got busy when he was agitated, so he laced his fingers to keep an outward semblance of calm. But Jack wasn’t fooled. During the time he’d been in the hospital, something very big and very nasty had landed in the chief’s lap.

  “Okay, give. What the hell’s happened?”

  At last, the chief turned to face him. There was something in his gray eyes Jack hadn’t seen before, something that clouded them, darkening them in a way Jack hadn’t thought possible. The chief’s voice was dry and thin, as if the words gathered in his throat were choking him. “Alli Carson, the president-elect’s daughter, has been abducted.”

  “Abducted?” Jack’s stomach felt a drop, as if he were in a suddenly plunging elevator. “From where, by whom?”

  “From school, from under the noses of the Secret Service,” Bennett said dully. “As far as who took her, no one’s been contacted, so we have absolutely no idea.”

  And then, with a shock like a splash of cold water, Jack understood. For the first time since he’d known the man, Rodney Bennett was frightened to death.

  Truth to tell, so was he.

  Langley fields was a private, closeted all-girl’s college, very chichi, very difficult to get into. It was situated more or less adjacent to Langley Fork Park, which was just under seven and a half miles due north from the Falls Church location where the ATF had its regional headquarters.

  The sun had broken through the overcast, throwing the passing buildings and trees into sharp relief. Telephone lines, black against the sky, marched into the vanishing point ahead.

  “In just a few weeks from now, Edward Carson is going to be sworn in as President of the United States, so there is an absolute, airtight media blackout,” Bennett said. “You can just imagine the intense feeding frenzy that would attach itself to the news. All the talking heads and bloggers in Medialand would speculate—wildly, perhaps recklessly, but in the end uselessly—about the identity of the perpetrators, from Al-Qaeda and Iran to the Russian Mafia and North Korea to god alone knows who else. These days, everyone has a reason to hate our guts.”

  Bennett, staring out the window as they barreled along the Georgetown Pike, frowned. “I don’t have to tell you that the soon-to-be First Daughter’s abduction has caused an intelligence mobilization of nine-eleven proportions.” He turned to Jack. “The head of the special task force in charge of the investigation has requested you, not simply because you’re my best agent by far, but I assume because of Emma.”

  That was logical, Jack thought. Emma and Alli both went to Langley Fields; they were roommates and good friends.

  When the limo turned onto Langley Fields Drive from Georgetown Pike, it was met by a fleet of unmarked cars. There was not a police or other official vehicle to be seen. The limo stopped while the driver handed over his creds; then a grim-face
d suit with an earful of wireless electronics waved them through the tall black wrought-iron gates onto the school grounds, which were guarded by a twelve-foot-high brick wall topped by wrought-iron spikes. Jack felt sure those metal points were more than decorative.

  Langley Fields was the epitome of an exclusive, expensive women’s college. The colonial-style white brick buildings were scattered across a magnificently groomed campus whose expansive acreage now revealed volleyball and tennis courts, a softball field, an indoor gym, and swimming facilities. They passed a professional dressage ring on their right, behind which was the long, low clapboard stable, its doors closed against the winter chill. Beside it, neat golden bales of pale hay were piled high.

  The limo crunched over blue-gray gravel, moving along a sweeping drive toward the sprawling administration building. Jack pressed the button that rolled down his window and stuck his head out. At regular intervals, unmarked cars had been pulled unceremoniously onto the immaculately tended lawns, green even at this time of year. Beside them, more suits with ear candy consulted with the outdoor staff or were either setting out or returning in search parties of three or four.

  Jack counted three sets of K-9 unit dogs straining at the ends of their handlers’ leashes as they tried to catch a trace of Alli Carson’s scent. High overhead a stationary helicopter whirred, no more than another bird with acute vision. With the president-elect’s priority visits, the chopper wouldn’t betray any unusual activity to the school’s neighbors, Jack surmised.

  The suits watched the limo’s slow passage, their pale gimlet eyes narrowing as they spotted Jack. Their mouths turned down in disdain or outright hostility. He was an outsider come to take their Golden Fleece, make it his own. As they realized this change in the order of things, they bared their teeth slightly, and, aggrieved, their cheeks puffed up.

  The car came to a stop under the porte cochere, held aloft by massive fluted Doric columns. Jack stepped out, but when the chief didn’t follow, he turned, bent into the interior.