3 Great Thrillers

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

  “Very likely,” Jack said. “If you can marshal your resources to help me find the killer, you’ll have the best weapon you can hope for to fight the media firestorm the Administration is planning to rain down on you.” He watched a speeding car pass by. “The problem, as you can see, is that you don’t have much time. I can hold these people off for a day, maybe three, but that’s it.”

  Armitage groaned. “What d’you need from me?”

  “For starters, a list of your defectors,” Jack said. “Then you and I are going to have to run them down.”

  Armitage stared out the window at the low sky, the driving sleet. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “You tell me.”

  Armitage pointed. “We’d better get to my office then, as quickly as possible, so I can access the encrypted database.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Kansas Avenue. Just south of the junction of Eastern and New Hampshire,” Armitage answered. “You ever heard of the Renaissance Mission Congress?”

  Jack said he had.

  “Back in the day, before it moved to larger, more luxurious quarters, it was known as the Renaissance Mission Church. We moved into its original building two years ago. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Armitage didn’t know the half of it, Jack thought.

  His phone beeped. It was Chief Bennett.

  “How did the stop ’n’ shop go?” he asked with no little apprehension.

  “It didn’t,” Bennett said. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into, Jack, but I got an official reprimand and a strict ‘stay clear’ order from the commander.”

  “Sorry, Chief, but you also got them off my tail.”

  A blur at the corner of Jack’s eye made him reach for his Glock. There was a loud crack, the car swung on its shocks as the bullet entered the car’s metalwork, and Armitage screamed. A second gunshot shattered the windshield, and Jack used the butt of his gun to punch out the crazed sheet of safety glass. Wind and sleet filled the interior, half-blinding him. But his mind had already formed the three-dimensional picture of his car, the road, the BMW. He could see the angles, feel the shifting vectors even as they formed and re-formed.

  Just ahead of them, off the driver’s-side fender, rode the gray BMW. Jack could see that the expert driver was jockeying for the perfect position, to enable the shooter to have a clear line of fire. The professionals were leaving nothing to chance.

  The scenario was clear in his mind, the playing field existed in his world, and there was no one better at its mastery.

  Jack’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, his mind performing a thousand calculations in the blink of an eye. He braked suddenly. The Toyota behind them screeched to slow down, rear-ended them at a reduced speed, jouncing them sharply against their seat belts, then back against the seats. In the following moment, when most people would be in shock, Jack’s brain figured vectors, speeds, distances. Then he slammed the BMW’s right rear fender.

  The BMW spun clockwise; then everything happened very quickly. Jack put on speed. The BMW careened out of control, veering sharply to the left, its rims sparking off the wet tarmac. Jack caught a glimpse of the driver desperately scrambling to regain control, the shooter off-balance, white-faced. Then the BMW struck the left-hand guardrail at speed, its rear end rose up angrily before the car punched through the rail, spun crazily down the slope at the side of the parkway.

  A moment later, flames flickered and an explosion of debris geysered up as the gas tank cracked. Jack floored the car, heading for Kansas Avenue NE, smack in the middle of his past.

  Part 3

  24

  Alli Carson lay drowsing in the pantry, on the folding cot Kray had provided for her. The sheets and blanket were tucked up around her chin. Her face was flushed but calm. Kray, standing over her, emptied a syringe into the crease behind her left earlobe, where the puncture would never be noticed. On the counter below Carrie’s lair was a full syringe, capped to keep the needle sterile. Kray dropped the empty syringe in the hazmat waste bin, bent over Alli, began to whisper in her ear.

  Alli’s mind was adrift on a cloud that shape-shifted first into her favorite toys as a child: Splash the dolphin, Ted the giraffe, and Honey the teddy bear. They romped and laughed as she played with them, before dissolving into other images. At first, these images were jumbled, smeary, and confusing, but presently they resolved themselves into scenes intimately familiar to her. Specifically the incidents that more or less defined her life up to the moment she was abducted.

  Her mind brought her back to just before she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease. At thirteen, she suffered moods so black, her mother took her to a psychologist. She referred Alli to her physician, who in turn referred her to an endocrinologist, who finally made the diagnosis. Her pituitary gland was affected, her eyes bulged slightly, her mood swings were vicious, the bouts of anxiety left her limp and exhausted, drenched in her own sweat. There were times when she was sure she was losing her mind. Lying on her bed, she would stare up at the ceiling, lost in the blackness of the universe, the essential futility of life. Future, what future? And why would you want one, anyway? Her heart galloped faster and faster until it seemed as if it would burst through her chest. Methimazole prevented her thyroid from producing too much hormone, so gradually the anxiety loosened its grip on her, her heart rate returned to a normal trot, her eyes ceased to bulge.

  These memories, running one over the next, vanished into a pearly mist, only to be replaced by visions of the summer when she went to camp for the first and only time. She was fifteen. She’d begged her parents to let her go, not only to separate herself from the suffocating atmosphere of a senior senator’s entourage but also in order to get a sense of how she’d do on her own. She needed a venue where she could explore who she was. She met a boy—an unutterably handsome boy from a wealthy family in Hartford. His father owned a huge insurance firm that generated obscene profits. His mother was a former Ford model. All this Alli learned from the boy, whose name was Barkley, though with the particular cruelty of teens, everyone called him Bark. Well, almost everyone; the kids on work programs at the camp in order to pay for the privilege of being there had another name for him, Dorkley.

  That a portion of the community—so tight-knit, it was incestuous—reviled Barkley only endeared him to Alli. He was a misfit just like her; she could relate to his being marginalized. After dinner, they took walks in the long cobalt twilight, hanging at the edge of the softball field or on the sloping muddy shoulder of the lake. Often they stared as one at the raft moored in the center of the lake. They sat close together, but they never brushed shoulders, let alone held hands. And yet a certain magnetism, plucked out of the droning summer air, drew them, caused them perhaps to feel the same longing, an ache deep down in a place they could not identify. Once, they spoke about the raft in an argot they understood better than anyone else at camp—as Oz, Neverland, the other end of the White Rabbit’s hole, heavily romanticized worlds that were home to Others, the people so special or different, they didn’t belong in Kansas or London or the English countryside.

  That night they spoke while the last smears of color faded under the onslaught of darkness. The air grew chill and damp, and still they did not move. Their talking had come to an end; there seemed nothing left to say. It was difficult for Alli to remember who began to strip first. In any event, there came a time when they stood in their underwear side by side, feet in the cool, still water. They heard a bullfrog out on the lake, saw water spiders skimming the surface. All the lights were behind them, up the hill where the buildings were situated. Here their own world began, and Alli, with a shiver of intent, pushed aside her anxiety about her nude body as she slipped out of undershorts and bra.

  Wading into the water, arms held high, they lay down in the deliciously cool water, as if it were a bed. Alli did an excellent crawl out to the raft, arrived there seconds before Barkley. She hauled herself, dripping, from the w
ater; he was right behind her.

  At first they lay on their stomachs, out of modesty perhaps or because this was the way most children slept. They were still more children than adults, knew it, clung to its safety.

  As a certain fear flooded her mind, Alli said, “I don’t want to do anything. You know that.”

  Barkley, head on folded forearms, smiled slowly. “Neither do I. We’re just here, right? Just us. We’ve left all the knuckleheads behind.”

  Alli laughed softly at how sweetly he used words that were so, well, dorky. It occurred to her that his very unhipness was another reason she liked him. Preening boys, showing off their cool in the most obvious and ostentatious manner, had a tendency to buzz around her because they wanted something from her father, if only to bask in the penumbra of his celebrity. Proximity to power was a potent aphrodisiac for boys of that age, and would be, until they had gathered their own. Later in life, it would be the women who’d be buzzing around these boys’ moneyed hives.

  They lay side by side on their softly rocking island, silent, listening to the slap of rope against the raft’s pontoons, the lap of water, and in the humming night the occasional bellow of the bullfrog, the call of a skimming loon on its way to nest for the night, the eerie hoot of an owl high overhead. Who turned first? Alli couldn’t recall, but all at once they were lying on their backs, their eyes focused on the spangled blackness of the sky, not on the pale flesh beside them, a blobby blur in the corners of their eyes.

  “I wish we were up there,” Barkley said, “on a spaceship heading for another planet.”

  He was a sci-fi nut, reading Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl. Alli had read them also, saw through them. They were men from the dying pulpmagazine world—men with amazing ideas, granted, but they weren’t writers, not when you compared them with her current favorites, Melville, Hugo, Steinbeck.

  “But the planets have no breathable atmosphere,” Alli said. “What would we do when we got there?”

  “We’d find a way to survive,” Barkley said in a very grown-up tone of voice. “Humans always do.” He turned his head, looked at her. “Don’t we?”

  Alli, mute, felt paralyzed beneath his serious gaze. Trying to put herself in his head, she wondered what he thought of the body stretched out before him. She herself had not looked at his.

  He rose up on his side to face her, head propped on the heel of one hand. His hair was golden, his skin glowing. All of him seemed golden. “Don’t you want to fly far, far away, Alli?”

  A moment ago, she would have said yes, but now, forced to make a decision, she didn’t know what she wanted. She thought she’d miss her family, no matter how annoying and stifling they sometimes could be. She didn’t want to be without them, and then the revelation hit her: She was a conventional girl, after all. The thought depressed her momentarily.

  “I want to go back.”

  She sat up, but Barkley put a hand on her forearm. “Hey, it’s early yet. Don’t get spooked, no one can see us, we’re safe.”

  Reluctantly, she lay back down, but a subtle shift had occurred inside her, and she was unable to keep her thoughts at rest.

  As if sensing her unease, Barkley wriggled up behind her, put one arm gently around her. “I’ll just hold you close, I’ll protect you, then we’ll swim back, okay?”

  She said nothing, but her body nestled back against his and she gave an involuntary sigh. Folding one arm beneath her cheek, she closed her eyes. Her thoughts, like fireflies, darted this way and that against the blackness of her lids. Eventually, though, she felt a warmth spread from Barkley to her, the fireflies dimmed, then vanished altogether as she fell into peaceful slumber.

  She was awakened slowly, almost druggily, by a repeating rhythmic sound and a persistent sensation. Drawn fully out of sleep, she realized that it was pain she felt, pain and pressure in a localized area, the place between her buttocks. It was then that she realized that the rhythmic sound and the pressure were connected. Barkley, grunting, held her tight against him. Sweat slicked the surface of her back, spooned against his front, and a peculiar musky scent dilated her nostrils, roiled her insides.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice was thick, still slurry with sleep.

  His grunting became more intense.

  All at once, she snapped fully awake. She felt something rubbing against her bare buttock.

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  For what seemed like an eternity, she struggled silently in the prison of his arms.

  It was only later, in the relative safety of her bunk, that she began to realize that she had been the victim of violence. At the moment, she was defeated by shock and terror. Her little body shook and quivered with each masculine thrust. She wanted to curl up into a ball, a crushed and discarded paper bag. She wanted to cry, she wanted to beam herself to another planet like they did in Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty, she thought despairingly. But she remained locked in the sweaty embrace of this monstrous octopus that had risen up from the muck of the lake to entwine her in its tentacles.

  Suspended time ticked away like taffy being pulled in slo-mo. She was no longer there, on the bucking raft, pinned to sun-beaten wooden slats. Pine trees on the shore ruffled; a sinister cloud, spreading like mist, masked the bone-white moon. An owl hooted, and a squadron of bats winged low over the water like Darth Vader’s TIE fighters. But she was deaf and blind to the world around her. Her mind fled down pitch-black hallways that smelled of him, of them, of sweat and fear, of wood-rot and despair. But this place wouldn’t do, so she went deeper, to a fortress her mind made impenetrable, and there she pulled up the drawbridge, locked herself away like a princess in a fairy tale, retired to the keep in the still center.

  Without knowing how, she wormed her way to the edge of the raft. Perhaps Barkley was done and simply let her go. Rolling into the still, black water, she gasped, wept as she swam back to shore.

  She never told her parents what had happened that night. In fact, she scarcely spoke a sentence to them in the aftermath, preferring to grunt or not to respond at all to their probes. In those months when autumn strode confidently after summer, her mother badgered her about dating Barkley, who, she felt certain, was the perfect match for her daughter. In fact, Alli was boxed into going to dinner with Barkley and both their parents. What seemed to her in summer handsome was now in autumn reptilian. She felt her stomach heave at first sight of him, and when forced to sit beside him, all appetite fled her like a mouse at the pounce of a hungry cat. What followed was an excruciatingly awkward, secretly embarrassing evening. Over ashy coffee and cloying flourless chocolate cake, Barkley, his nose firmly up her father’s ass, contrived to tell him a joke. At the same time, hidden beneath the table, he slithered his hand between her thighs. Alli leapt up and fled the restaurant, for which, later, she was severely reprimanded. She’d broken her mother’s strict rules of social engagement, and that was that.

  That might have bothered the old, proper Alli, her mother’s clone, but that girl was dead, left at the mercy of the sweaty octopus on the raft. When she’d dropped into the lake, the black water closing over her head, swirling her hair across her face, there had come a breach. Her old self turned to misty cloud that masked the illumination of the moon. She left behind everything she had felt or believed. In the process, she shriveled, closed up like a clam inside its striated shell. But alone with herself she was safe.

  In time, even her mother came to dimly realize that something was wrong. Since neither tough love nor punishment worked, she sent Alli to a psychologist, which made Alli retreat even further into her citadel of solitude. She was reduced to weaving lies in order to avoid being sucked into that cold, impersonal office furnished with psychobabble. She never once considered what the solemn man sitting across from her made of those lies; she didn’t care. She had already developed a healthy cynicism about males, and as for trust, forget about it.

  Within six weeks, unable to make any headway, the shrink recommended a meds psychiatrist, who met
with Alli for twenty minutes. Diagnosing her depression, he handed her a smile along with a prescription for Wellbutrin XL.

  “We’ll give the Wellbutrin several weeks. If it doesn’t do the trick there’s a whole galaxy of medications we can try,” he said. “Worry not, we’ll have you right as rain in no time.”

  She promptly threw the little cream-colored pills into a trash bin at the pharmacy.

  In Alli’s drugged mind, it was now three years later. She heard “Neon Bible” by Arcade Fire as if from a long distance away. Superimposed over it was the drone of a familiar voice, repeating instructions she found so rudimentary, a half-wit could follow them. Still, they were repeated to the cadence of “Neon Bible” until they became as much a part of her as her lungs or her heart.

  Presently, on a cloud of memory, she drifted off again, into her past. She had met Emma McClure on her first day at Langley Fields, and from that moment on she knew she wanted Emma to be her roommate. The college had assigned her someone else—a blonde from Texas, whom she loathed on sight; her accent alone set Alli’s teeth on edge, not to mention her obsessions with high-end clothes and imported beauty products. Alli lobbied for a switch, for she and Emma to be together, and finally the administration acceded to her request. It wasn’t that she’d demanded they do as she asked; she didn’t have to go that far, merely point out that she’d mention the “stressful” situation to her father. The headmistress didn’t want Edward Carson on her case; no one would, not even the president.

  There were reasons Alli liked Emma. Emma came from the wrong side of the tracks, from a family that had to take on debt to send her to Langley Fields. She was smart, funny, and, best of all, utterly without pretensions. Born into a family with, it seemed to her, nothing but pretensions, Alli lived in fear that this trait lay buried in her DNA, sealing her fate, would at any moment turn itself on like a geyser, humiliate her to tears. And when, at Emma’s insistence, she read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, she understood that Emma was a kind of talisman, her subversive bent a magic charm that could immunize Alli against her screwed-up hereditary disease.