by Diane Capri
Never let them see you sweat, Kim heard her mother whispering in her brain.
The video’s first scene was a grainy aerial shot. Could have been a satellite, but more likely, a drone. An irregular intersection of two curved, oak-lined streets, bordered by wide lawns. No traffic signs visible. Night-time. Full dark. Generously spaced, dim gaslights illuminated little. No people. No vehicles.
No clock or timer in the frame.
“Do you recognize the place?” Gaspar asked.
“Looks like about four blocks west of here,” Neagley said, watching, never taking her gaze from the oversized screen.
“How can you tell?” Gaspar asked.
“Streets in this neighborhood are distinctive. No two intersections the same.”
A panel van arced into the frame along one of the curved avenues, moving slowly and without headlights. It stopped between two gaslights and in the deep shadow of the adjacent oak tree. No audio, so Kim couldn’t tell if the van’s engine remained running. If it had a license plate, it wasn’t visible.
Neagley reached over and pressed the remote’s pause button. She squinted at the screen. Kim saw, perhaps, a man’s shadow in the lower right edge of the frame. Neagley restarted the video. The shadow grew larger and the man casting it followed behind.
“Where’s the light coming from?” Kim asked.
Morrie said, “We had a bright moon last night. There’s no streetlights behind him that would throw a shadow like that.”
As the man’s silhouette grew larger on the screen, Neagley said, “It’s Paul.”
“You’re sure?” Gaspar asked.
“Yes.”
Paul moved quickly, but he wasn’t running.
“Where’s he headed?” Gaspar asked.
Morrie replied, “Toward the highway. He likes to hitchhike. Truckers will pick him up on the highway. Around here, people are more cautious. He knows that.”
Paul crossed the sidewalk, the narrow blacktop, and loped up onto the opposite curb. As soon as his body reached the other side, he crumpled as if he’d been shot, and lay twitching on the ground.
Neagley didn’t react at all, as far as Kim could see. She continued to watch intently, as if the video might evaporate after she’d seen it once.
A few moments after Paul went down, he stopped twitching. He lay perfectly still. He might have been dead.
Less than two minutes later, a figure emerged from the shadowed van nearby. The video zoomed in closer. The Boss said it was Berenson, but the figure was dressed in a heavy, coverall-style jumpsuit that made its sex difficult to determine.
The figure pushed Paul with the toe of a heavy work boot and he flopped with the pressure but otherwise didn’t move.
Seeming satisfied that he was not a threat, she—Kim decided to give the Boss the benefit of the doubt—returned to the darkness where the van was parked and came back with a four-wheeled hand cart that she lowered to a few inches above the level of the ground. She stooped and with significant effort managed to work Paul’s limp body up onto the cart.
She stood, pumped a lever near the handle with her foot a few times, and the cart rose up. She must have been overheated with the exertion because she wiped her face with a gloved hand and then lifted her face to a refreshingly cool breeze that had begun to ruffle the oak leaves on the nearby trees.
That’s when the camera zoomed in on her face. Even in the dim light, her scars cast a complex roadmap over her complexion—a gruesome tangle of distinctive intersections, Kim thought. She remembered the scars, the keloids near her eye. Definitely Berenson.
After a moment or two, she wheeled the cart into the shadows. Maybe a minute more and the van pulled away from the curb and traveled further along the street until it came to a corner, turned, and disappeared.
The first video ended. A few empty frames came next. And the next video began.
This one was footage from an exterior airport security camera. The scene was LaGuardia in New York, according to the signs out front of the well-lit terminal at baggage claim. The frame counter said 12:13 a.m. Saturday, November 13. Busy airport sounds had been left intact.
Karla Dixon walked out of the terminal pulling her travel bag and lugging a laptop case and an oversized designer handbag. She was dressed in slacks, a blazer and an unbuttoned overcoat.
A uniformed driver approached her. He wore a hat, dark blazer, dark trousers and heavy soled shoes. He said, “Ms. Dixon? This way, please.”
“Where’s Harry?” Dixon asked.
“Home sick, they said. Asked me to fill in for him.”
“Pause it,” Neagley said. She cocked her head slightly to one side, narrowed her eyes. “The driver. Dean.”
“You’re sure?” Kim asked, but had to accept Neagley’s silence for an answer. The Boss said Dean abducted Dixon. Neagley recognized him. Nothing more was needed. She hit play.
Dixon followed Dean as if she’d never seen him before and he was no threat to her. Maybe she never had. The two reached the black sedan. Dean opened the back passenger door and said, “Luggage in the trunk?”
“Sure,” Dixon responded.
He took her travel bag and stashed it while she tossed her laptop and purse into the back seat and tucked into the cabin. Dean shut the trunk, then moved purposefully to the driver’s seat.
The video switched to the interior of the vehicle, a fish-eye lens mounted above the rearview, by the looks of things.
“Neat trick,” Gaspar said.
Dixon was snugged into her seatbelt in the back. Dean started the engine. “Good to go back there?” he asked.
She laid her head back on the headrest and closed her eyes. “Ten-four,” she said. “Wake me up when we get there.”
“Will do,” he replied and then pulled away from the curb. Just like that.
Back to the exterior view. The video grabbed a shot of the car’s rear license plate as it pulled away. New York, it said.
The next scene was time stamped 12:56 p.m. The big sedan was parked along the curb on a vaguely familiar city side street. Dixon was asleep or passed out or maybe sedated in the back seat. Dean had left the vehicle but was now returning. He used the remote to open the trunk. He pulled off bloody coveralls, bloody paper booties, bloody latex gloves and a bloody paper shower cap and tossed them all inside the trunk.
He returned to the driver’s seat and departed. As he pulled away, the video panned to the building’s exterior address. The office of David Downing, recently deceased private investigator.
The video cut again to the final six seconds. 2:24 a.m. The vehicle was abandoned in a multi level parking garage.
Neagley said, “Now we know who murdered Downing.”
“Indeed,” Kim replied. Not Reacher. The Boss’s cell phone began vibrating on the conference table. Kim picked up the call. “Yes.”
“Neagley’s seen the video?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Let me talk to her.”
Kim held out the phone. Neagley brought it to her ear. Her tone was far from respectful when she asked, “What do you want, Cooper?”
“You know I can’t help you with this,” he said loudly enough for Kim to hear.
“No surprise there,” Neagley replied, coldly. “Where is Dixon now?”
“Still looking,” he said.
“And Paul?”
“The same,” he said.
Neagley’s eyes were as dead as marbles and her tone frigid. “Just stay out of the way, Cooper. See if you can manage that. Because if you screw this up any more than you already have, I promise you, you’ll live to regret it.”
“You’ve always been a woman of your word, Neagley,” he replied.
She disconnected and tossed the phone back. Then she leveled a steady gaze first at Gaspar and then at Kim. Maybe she was making up her mind or maybe she was playing another kind of game. Impossible to tell.
Neagley said, “We don’t have time to screw around. The ransom call came in while you we
re upstairs. The exchange happens in less than six hours. We could use a couple of extra hands to get Paul back alive, but you heard what Cooper said. He’s refused to assist us. Are you two in or out?”
Kim replied, “Are you asking because you want to piss off Cooper? Or do you really need the help?”
Neagley said, “Does it matter?”
Of course it did. Two trained agents could make the difference between success and failure in what was bound to be a tricky hostage-for-ransom exchange. Kim could think of only one reason Neagley needed help before and now seemed not to care one way or the other: Reacher.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sunday, November 14
1:36 p.m.
Chicago, IL
Sunday afternoon, the area around Neagley’s mansion was deserted except for Neagley’s strategically placed team. Outdoor temperatures were cold, weak sunlight provided minimum atmospheric warmth, but the adrenaline coursing under Kim’s Kevlar supplied sufficient body heat.
Kim and Gaspar were stationed inside the front great room, ten feet from a dark grey hard-shell Samsonite containing bearer bonds printed by Neagley’s ink-jet in the security room, two drawstring pouches containing cheap cubic zirconias she’d bought at the local drug store, and a single page of fake Swiss bank access codes they’d downloaded off the internet. The total value of the contents of the Samsonite was about $6.50. But the Samsonite was real and the weight was okay. It might fool Berenson for a second or two, if she just flashed to its contents then lifted it.
Neagley’s Secret Service guy Morrie was stationed outside in one of the garages, assigned to direct the team to monitor Berenson and Paul when they arrived and capture Berenson after she left Paul at the mansion. Neagley shuttled back and forth, confirming.
Kim would have preferred a larger, more expert team. Fifteen FBI agents would have been enough, maybe. Reacher might have helped to level the playing field, had he not ignored Neagley’s summons.
As it was, they had a total of six Neagley personnel in addition to Neagley, Gaspar and Kim. Nine in all. Which was at least six guns, twelve eyes, twelve ears, and six brains short. Kim had not supervised their training, and she remained wary of Neagley’s team. She felt fairly confident in Gaspar only. In every arena, Neagley’s procedures had proved unpredictable at best. Had Marion Morrison done the job he’d been trained by the Secret Service to do, Paul wouldn’t be missing and in Berenson’s clutches to start with. And fatigue levels were too high.
All of which meant Kim was far from comfortable with the plan, the team, and the probable outcome. But Neagley had made it clear that she was running the operation and Kim could participate or go.
“How would you do it?” Gaspar asked, probably as uncomfortable with Neagley’s plan as Kim was.
“Exchange my hostage for $65 million in ransom right now? I wouldn’t,” she said. “Not in Neagley’s home, for sure. Not even in Chicago. It’s Neagley’s backyard. I’d want a better opportunity somewhere else. Preferably on terrain and under conditions I controlled.”
“Me, too,” he said, thinking aloud. “But Paul is not easy to handle if he’s awake. Drugged is another set of problems. They have Dixon now, too. That’s a lot to manage if it’s just the two of them. Maybe Berenson and Dean have more help and maybe they don’t. They’re better off getting rid of Paul as soon as possible. Then they’ll be able to move more effectively.”
Kim looked at him as if he’d lost his grip on reality. “You do know they’re going to kill him, right?”
“I know they’re going to try. Neagley knows that too, don’t forget.”
Kim said, “I read her file. I know she’s formidable. But she’s going into this thing blind, too. We don’t know where they are or how many people they have with them or what kind of training they’ve got.”
“My money’s on Neagley,” he said, rubbing his shoulder.
Kim felt the same pain in hers but said nothing because, as she watched through the great room’s large plate glass windows, Neagley was walking toward the house from the garage office. Neagley closed the main doors quickly enough, but a blast of cold air still rolled through the great room—the big front doors opened right into it. She stood and scanned the room again as if something might have changed in the past few minutes. Nothing had.
“Any doubt at all, act first and think later. Okay?” Neagley checked her watch. “Ten minutes to go. Are you ready?”
“As ready as we were going to get,” Kim replied, which wasn’t exactly affirmative.
“You worry too much,” Neagley said.
“It’s not possible to worry too much in my line of work,” Kim replied. “You should understand that. Or don’t you deal with as many lethal people now as you did in the military police?”
“Different kind of lethal now, I guess. Back then, I couldn’t shoot them. Now, I can.” Neagley’s lips slashed in what for her might have been a smile. “You are wearing your vests, right? No point in taking unnecessary chances.”
Kim didn’t say again that Neagley’s entire plan was one big unnecessary chance. She wanted to pace because she was nervous, thinking through the last minute checks for the hundredth time and worrying about everything she knew could go wrong as well as the thousand things she didn’t know about. You never see the bullet that gets you.
She listened for vehicles but heard none. She listened for footsteps and heard none of those either.
While they waited, Kim again attempted to find out something Neagley had refused to discuss. “What happened to Paul on Friday? In your office before we got there, before Sanchez died?”
Neagley frowned. As if she was creating an official report, again without emotion, she delivered the facts. “Paul lives in a group home during the week and here on weekends. A year ago, we found him a job working in a local office. We never leave him alone. He’s escorted everywhere. But he walks to work—with his detail, of course. And he stops off on the way home to get a strawberry milkshake every day.”
Neagley sat there, perfectly relaxed. Her cold competence was unnerving. Maybe Colonel Silver was right. Maybe she was some sort of psychopath.
Kim said, “And?”
Neagley picked up where she’d left off. “On Wednesday, when Paul stopped for his strawberry shake, Berenson was there. He didn’t know her, but when he described her to me, I knew who he meant. She approached him and touched his arm—”
“Wait,” Kim said. “Why didn’t the detail step in?”
“The detail was waiting outside.”
Kim stared at her. So did Gaspar. Finally Kim said, “The detail was waiting outside? What kind of security—”
“Paul likes to go in alone. It makes him happy.”
“Well that might be, but—”
“Not much makes Paul happy.”
Neagley’s expression was implacable. No advantage to be gained in pressing. Maybe she simply loved her brother.
Which meant Frances Neagley was capable of love.
Was that possible? A moment ago, Kim would have bet against it.
Kim said. “So Berenson touched his arm and then what?”
“You can’t do that with Paul. His kind of autism makes physical touching painful for him.”
Kim remembered that Neagley tried to talk to her brother and calm him down when he freaked out in her office, but she never touched him. It had seemed odd at the time. Still did, even explained.
“Berenson backed off, but it took quite a while to get Paul to calm down.” Neagley took a deep breath and released a thin smile. “His detail had to come inside.”
“And Berenson?”
“Slipped away in the disturbance.”
Kim nodded.
Neagley went on. “So when Berenson walked toward Paul in my lobby on Friday afternoon, he just lost it. And his behavior can be quite frightening, as you saw. Sanchez had his gun out, kind of waved it around. Maybe he felt threatened, or he thought a gunshot would stop Paul’s outburst. Or maybe he wa
s just unhinged. Who knows? You saw the video. For whatever reason, he didn’t shoot to kill, but he discharged his weapon. And the bullet grazed Paul’s arm. And then Paul turned it up a dozen notches.”
After a couple of seconds of thinking about it, Gaspar shook his head. “Too convenient.”
“What?” Neagley asked. Matter-of-factly.
“You already knew Sanchez killed O’Donnell by Friday afternoon because you’ve seen O’Donnell’s surveillance.”
“So?”
“Sanchez shows up in your office and approaches you at gunpoint. Paul freaks out. Sanchez shoots and the bullet grazes Paul’s arm.”
“That’s right.”
“And then Sanchez has a heart attack and dies? And Berenson bugs out and gets away?” Gaspar said. “Damned convenient.”
Neagley snorted. “Not even close to convenient, Gaspar. Paul had to be sedated after that. Sanchez—a man I had worked closely with and at one time considered to be part of my family—was dead. Berenson escaped. O’Donnell is dead. We can’t find Dixon or Franz’s widow and son. Doesn’t sound the least bit convenient to me.” Neagley checked her watch. “Stay alert. I’m going for a last check on the team outside.”
After she left, Gaspar said, “She could have told us that about the lobby before. You believe her?”
“Not at all,” Kim said. “She killed Sanchez. There’s too many stories just like that in her Army file. Guys who were standing too close to her one minute and flat out on the ground the next.”
“How’d she do it?”
Kim shrugged. “She’s exceptionally proficient at unarmed combat, according to the Army. Probably a heel kick to the heart muscle. Maybe an elbow. Anything hard enough and placed correctly would do it.”
Thoughtfully, Gaspar said, “The autopsy wouldn’t show a bruise over the heart. Bruising requires blood flow, and there wouldn’t have been any after his heart stopped.”
“Makes you feel lucky to be alive with nothing but a sore neck, doesn’t it?” Kim glanced at her Seiko. “Stay sharp. Berenson and Paul are supposed to be here in five minutes.”