“You know about the other … issue?”
“Yes.”
“Those convictions were a long time ago, for both of us. We were in our twenties. Anyone who had bothered to look at our lives since then would realize…” Kenneth Eden didn’t finish.
“Assuming Gisella’s parents can’t be traced, I would personally hope that you and Darlene could be left alone to raise her. But if that happens,” Sarah added gently, “you will have a terrible burden to bear.”
“Knowing that one day we would have to tell her the story of her life.”
“Yes.”
Kenneth Eden took a deep breath. “You want to know how we arranged the adoption. You want to work backward from us to that freighter.”
“That’s right.”
“The agency is called Engender,” Darlene said.
“Engender, LLP, to be exact,” Kenneth added.
“Where’s its office?”
“We don’t know. An agency rep called us. He said he understood we’d had a problem adopting. We figured his firm must monitor the other agencies’ rejections. He came to see us twice. He did everything out of his briefcase. Made it really simple—nothing like those other people we dealt with.”
“How much did he charge?”
“A hundred thousand up front, another hundred on delivery.”
“So you knew you were buying a baby.”
They both looked uncomfortable.
Kenneth finally answered. “Admitted. But we also thought we were adopting an orphan. We have the money, and it was a fair price to pay just to get out from under all the red tape.”
“And not have our old run-ins with the law and my medical history stop us from having a child!” Darlene added heatedly.
“But, why would you trust this man? A door-to-door baby salesman?”
“He gave us some names and telephone numbers. We talked to other couples. Solid people, some prominent enough that we’d heard of them. A few of them have their own pages on Wikipedia. They said they’d done it, and it was all good—that we were saving an orphan.”
“I’ll need this rep’s name—and those other parents’ names he gave you.”
Sarah’s phone rang. She checked the screen. It was Marco. She was about to answer when Kenneth and Darlene Eden suddenly stiffened, looking past her, instant terror in their eyes.
She heard a whisper of movement.
Her hand went for her weapon, but it never arrived.
The blow came from nowhere.
Oblivion …
LAURA
24
MARCH 2015
Laura Pace parked her stolen car in the back row of the crowded parking lot of the Miccosukee Resort and Casino on Route 41, slotting it between a blowsy ’83 Cadillac DeVille and a hulking Land Cruiser. She briefly considered stealing the Caddie, but figured she’d only attract unnecessary attention. People expecting to see a white-haired old man driving the vintage land yacht might remember seeing a young woman behind the wheel.
Always drive plain vanilla.
People forget plain vanilla.
She went for a walk.
Circumnavigating the vast parking lot, she inventoried its sporadically placed security cameras and flagged a promising candidate for her next stolen ride. Maintaining an unhurried pace, she entered the casino through the main doors, wandered past half an acre of clamorous slot machines, and located a coffee bar. She bought a latte and then left the building through a different exit. Carefully navigating her way back through the parking lot, keeping to the CCTV blind spots, she reached her target vehicle—a ’95 Camry with rust-chewed doors that was parked behind the hotel’s kitchen. The car made “nondescript” sound like a compliment. The fact that the owner had left it unlocked was a bonus feature. Hot-wiring presented no challenge to a girl who had grown up in Newark. She was rolling out of the parking lot in under two minutes.
It was a half-hour drive from the casino to her apartment on NE 27th. She guessed the place would be staked out, and she was right. Her first clue was a pair of silhouettes in an unmarked Crown Vic parked down the block from her building. The second was the Miami PD blue-and-white emerging from NE 27th Terrace, the grandiloquent name assigned to the narrow alley behind her building.
She checked the Camry’s dash clock: 10:20 P.M.
Her address was on file, and Phyllis Corbin and a few other CBP officers had known where she lived. Now that the word was out that Sarah Lockhart had been detained in Everglades City, and then, within hours, had escaped from a hospital in Naples, the investigators were obviously betting she’d head for home. In other words, despite everything Homeland and the FBI knew about Laura Pace, aka Sarah Lockhart, they actually thought she’d be dumb enough to return to her apartment and get caught doing it.
She figured the marked unit was probably assigned to area patrol, which would give her enough time to dump her ride at the soccer field on the other side of Highway 1 and walk back.
Before she left the Camry, she grabbed the tire iron from the trunk.
A circuitous route brought her to the north end of the alley. She ghosted past her own building and hopped the fence into the rear garden of the private home next door. In two steps, she was standing under the lean-to roof that sheltered her neighbor’s barbeque pit.
Almost invisible in the murky darkness, she waited.
Finally, she heard it.
The marked unit was rolling through the alley. It slowed when it reached her building, tires crunching on the broken asphalt. After several seconds, it drove away.
Laura tucked the tire iron into her belt and vaulted the fence that divided the neighbor’s property from her building’s rear yard. She ducked into the shadow of the garden shed, and in seconds she was crouched on its roof. With a few quick strides and a leap, she launched herself across the ten-foot space between the corner of the shed and her apartment’s second-floor balcony.
It took her less than a minute to jimmy the sliding door and slip inside.
The place smelled musty, and she knew instantly that it had been searched. From the look of things, it had been searched more than once.
But not, she hoped, as thoroughly as it should have been.
She strode directly to the front hall closet and pulled out her vacuum cleaner. She released the housing that enclosed the disposable bag. Under the bag, right where she had left them, were three strapped bundles of twenty-dollar bills—six thousand dollars in cash, with random serial numbers.
Before she’d left for Italy, Laura had sold her car and made arrangements with her bank to keep her utility bills up to date. Mortgage payments weren’t a problem, since she owned her apartment outright. In fact, she owned the entire building. She could thank the now dead and conspicuously unlamented Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for that, if for nothing else. The only good thing that had ever come out of the Pan Am 103 disaster was the millions of dollars in compensation the Libyan dictator had been strong-armed into paying to the families of the victims.
The tenants in the other three apartments paid their rent by direct deposit into her account. But she knew it wouldn’t be long before the FBI showed up at her bank armed with a warrant to monitor her account, so it was just as well she’d gotten in the habit of keeping a supply of cash on hand for emergencies.
Although running from the law wasn’t the sort of emergency she’d had in mind.
Tucked under the strap of one of the cash bundles was a Virginia driver’s license bearing Laura Pace’s—and Sarah Lockhart’s, and Lisa Green’s—photograph.
A driver’s license in the name of Barbara Faye Hyatt.
Laura had operated in deep cover for over a year before taking down one of the longest-serving members of the United States Senate, along with the mayor of San Francisco and a prominent Chinatown gangster. When the operation began, the senator’s involvement wasn’t even suspected. Because of the inherent dangers of her assignment, Laura had been provided with two quick-escape IDs. She’d never
had to use them, but the lessons of those months spent undercover had not been forgotten. When she’d turned in her go-bag after the arrests, she held back one of the undeployed identities. The joke was that, by then, Homeland had become so big, so unwieldy, and so fiercely obsessed with terrorism that no one had even noticed.
A joke, yes, but a depressing one if you gave it any thought.
There were a few other little treasures tucked under the vacuum bag: an orange plastic card embossed with three printed words: WIND PIÙ VICINI, a Walmart Visa money card—which was basically a reloadable prepaid debit card—in the name of Barbara Hyatt, a ziplock bag filled with quarters, and a cell phone.
Laura had bought the phone in Arizona last spring. It was one of three prepays she’d bought, each purchase a week apart, and each purchase from a wireless store in a different state. In each case, she’d paid extra for an eighteen-month expiry date on the credit balance. She’d programmed the first phone to automatically forward all calls to the second one, and the second to the third. Then she’d destroyed the first two phones. If she needed someone to call her, she only had to give that person the first cell number. As far as the caller knew, he was calling area code 541 (Oregon). Unknown to him, his call was actually forwarded to a number in area code 307 (Wyoming) before ringing finally on the phone in her hand—registered to a number in area code 928 (Arizona). Outgoing calls would be more difficult, but there were always pay phones. That’s what the quarters were for.
When in doubt, go low-tech.
She pocketed her haul and shoved the vacuum cleaner back in the closet.
She went looking for her old knapsack. She didn’t have to look far. Every drawer in her bedroom dresser had been pulled out, and the empty knapsack was lying on the floor. She stuffed it with the bundles of cash and then picked through the mess on the floor until she’d managed to assemble two complete changes of clothes: short jacket, ripped jeans, and a plain old T-shirt for mucking around, and black slacks, a cashmere pullover, and dress flats if she ever needed to be presentable. There were thrift stores all over Florida—she could buy secondhand clothing if she needed it and stay off shopping mall security cameras. She kicked off the ridiculous sandals Roland Lewis had bought her and pulled on her favorite Merrell boots—they were tough, well broken-in, and added an inch and a half to her height. She pawed through drawers until she found her old Timex watch, and she strapped it on.
She moved to the kitchen and opened her junk drawer. The key ring she was hoping to find was exactly where she’d left it. As any cop worth his salt knew, you can tell a lot about people from the contents of their junk drawers. It isn’t always scissors, pens, and household knickknacks. Sometimes it’s also randomly stowed receipts, medications … or extra sets of keys. In other words, objects that could tell you something about your quarry. It baffled her that none of the searching officers had bothered to investigate the two keys on that ring.
She slung on her pack and headed for the balcony. In the living room, she stopped for a few seconds and took a look around. The pale solitude of this apartment had sometimes oppressed her, but it had been her sole sanctuary from the job and the press of hurrying humanity. With a pang, she realized that she had no idea when, or if, she would ever return.
She stepped outside and slid the balcony door shut. After climbing over the railing and dropping silently to the ground, a few strides took her to the garden shed’s door. Using one of the keys on the ring, she unlocked the shed and disappeared inside. Seconds later she reappeared, wheeling her 2006 Yamaha XT225.
Simple, clean, stripped down, and fast.
Even better, it wasn’t registered in her name. It was registered to Silvana Pace, lately of an address in Lake City, Florida—an address that didn’t exist.
She wondered if the agents sitting in the sedan down the street would ever figure out that Laura Pace had come and gone right under their noses.
She opened the chain-link gate into the alley, wheeled the bike through, carefully shut the gate behind her, and rode away.
25
There was a time when phone booths were everywhere. They were ubiquitous on urban streets and in suburban shopping malls, and could always be found outside a convenience store. But those times were over. In an age of cell phones and text messages and VOI apps, pay phones were becoming scarce. But even in 2015, there were still a few holdouts—in airports, train stations … and bus terminals.
There were two phones mounted on the outside wall of the Greyhound terminal in Fort Lauderdale. It was close to midnight when Laura got there.
She knew it was a long shot, but she called the Everglades substation and asked for Detective Scott Jardine.
He was in.
“Hi, Scott. Working late, I see. Is that because of me?”
It took him a second. “Sarah?”
“Who else?” No sense confusing the man with her real name.
“Where are you?”
“You know I’m not going to tell you that. Did you find out what I asked?”
“I’m starting to hear stories. Rumors. Nothing official. About your … history.”
“You’re wasting time.”
“You promised to send me a statement. About what happened with Lewis.”
“I said I would, and I will. Eventually. You’re stalling, Scott. Are the feds standing over you?”
He hesitated—just long enough to signal to her that they were.
“No.”
“I asked you to find out one thing. Do you have the answer?”
“There was no monitor in the nursery. No cameras anywhere in the house. And no cell phones.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you again.”
“When?”
“When I have something to tell you.”
She hung up the phone, jumped on her bike, dropped south three blocks, and swung onto Route 842, heading east. She stayed just below the speed limit. The last thing she needed was a traffic stop. Two miles later, she stopped at Walmart and loaded fifteen hundred in cash on her card.
It was coming up on 5:00 A.M. when she rolled into Clewiston, Florida, population seven thousand, give or take. It shouldn’t have taken that long, but staying off toll roads and using secondary highways and back roads had racked up the miles.
Clewiston was a textbook rendition of Anytown, U.S.A., squatting safely behind the Herbert Hoover Dike on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. The broad, empty lanes of US 27 brought her to the Executive Royal Inn, near the center of town. Despite the grandiose name, it was a simple, one-story motel with a dozen or so units, no different from hundreds like it on every secondary highway in the country.
In other words, it suited Laura perfectly. She pulled in.
The greeting sign she’d passed on the way into town had read CLEWISTON: AMERICA’S SWEETEST TOWN. Laura vaguely recalled that the nickname dated to a time when the local area was the sugarcane capital of America. Its honeyed sentiment failed to animate the check-in clerk who finally appeared after several long rings on the night bell, but Laura welcomed the woman’s sullen indifference. She had no interest in being noticed. She’d chosen Clewiston for its location. Equidistant between Palm Beach on the Atlantic and Fort Myers on the Gulf, the town placed her an hour away from either coast, with the added bonus of a labyrinth of county roads in every direction in the event she needed an escape route.
She checked in as Barbara Hyatt and used the Walmart card to pay for five days in advance.
“Since you’re checking in this early, you’ll have to pay for last night.”
“I understand.”
“There’s also a hundred-dollar damage deposit, for extra cleaning in case you smoke in the room,” the unsmiling woman intoned. “It’ll be refunded to your card.”
“That’s fine.”
Despite the building’s unremarkable exterior, her unit, the one closest to the office on the western end of the complex, turned out to be larger than she’d expected. It had obviously been recently ref
urbished. She took in laminate flooring, spotless bed linens, and solidly functional furnishings. A minifridge and microwave completed the package. Satisfied, she hung out the Do Not Disturb sign, checked that the interconnecting door to the adjacent unit was secure, and went straight to bed.
26
Before Laura left Walmart the night before, she’d called Dickie on a pay phone. It was after midnight, but she knew he was addicted to the late-night talk shows.
It was a cruel call to make, but it had to be done.
Her voice almost unhinged him. Pain and relief and anger all poured into her ear.
“LAURA? THANK GOD. I thought you were dead! I thought those mob bastards had—I know you didn’t kill those people. I didn’t know who I should talk to. I didn’t know what to—” His voice caught in his throat, and the outpouring ended in a deep sob.
Laura felt sick.
Sick for Dickie, and disgusted with herself.
Dickie was her oldest friend. Her truest friend. She knew he loved her. She knew he’d always loved her. There had been a time, while she was undercover, when he had willingly risked his life for her.
In the years since, she’d sometimes played on his abiding love for her own ends. She knew that he knew that … and that he was resigned to it.
But the belief that he’d lost her forever had ripped him apart.
Laura’s stomach knotted with shame.
“Dickie … Richard. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what this did to you. I have a lot to tell you. I’ve … I’ve been…”
No, don’t you play that card! Comfort him!
“I’ve been held as a prisoner … since February sixth.”
Coward!
Silence. Then a snuffle. “A prisoner? What happened? Where are you?”
“I escaped. But now the mob and the feds are looking for me. I’m going to give you a phone number. Memorize it and call me at noon tomorrow from somewhere private. Somewhere away from your office. Can you do that?”
“Noon my time?”
“Yes.”
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