Silence and secrecy didn’t matter anymore, time did. He scurried on all fours, caught footing, and ran for the road where there’d be nothing to obstruct sight.
CHAPTER 13
JACK
AGE: 26
LOCATION: OUTSIDE DERIDDER, LOUISIANA
PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA
NAMES: JONATHAN THOMAS SMITH
HE PLOWED THROUGH THE UNDERBRUSH, CUTTING AN ANGLE TOWARD the house, racing the clock while his feet caught against vines and twisted saplings. The woodland responded to the noise with an eerie quiet, which only made the yowls from the kennels out back that much louder.
He reached the embankment, scrambled onto the road where the gravel curved for a clear view of the porch.
He waved his arms at the house and the untamed land around.
“Ray, it’s me,” he yelled. “Don’t shoot!”
The dogs’ distracting ruckus answered in reply.
He walked to the middle of the road and there, out in the open and fully exposed, started toward the house.
Metal zinged into the gravel a yard ahead, spewing rock and dirt projectiles.
Jack stopped hard, turned, and faced the direction from which it seemed the shot had come. Overgrown foliage and the marsh faced him back.
He waited.
The morning breeze rustled through the treetops.
Jack said, “Warning received, Ray. I’m headed toward the porch, that’s all.”
Another bullet ricocheted off the ground, closer than the last. Sound suppression made it difficult to tell how quickly Ray was moving and in which direction.
Jack placed the rifle on the ground, then unzipped the tactical vest and let the weight drop. He lifted his T-shirt, flashed his back and stomach to the woodland in a full three-sixty and, hands up in surrender, head in the crosshairs, and mind filled with doubt, moved forward again.
Ray came from behind at the cul-de-sac opening.
A single misstep against the gravel gave him away.
Jack froze, resisting the urge to turn. He said, “It’s been a while.”
The muzzle pressed into his back, hot, even through his shirt.
A muddy, torn tennis shoe kicked his legs apart.
Jack said, “I’ve got nothing on me.”
Ray’s calloused hand hurried up his legs and around his waist, and a voice, deep and sandy, said, “It’s a surprise to see you like this, son. What brings you home?”
“Thought I’d be neighborly-like and pay a visit.”
“Front door’s always been open to family, but runnin’ my land with that pop toy don’t make for a good impression on your intentions. You know well enough to know better.”
“Don’t mean no harm, Ray. Been a long time. Wasn’t sure if this was still your place. Wasn’t sure you’d be happy to see me if it was.”
“Missed ya is more what it is, boy. You always been welcome. Where’s your sister?”
“Don’t know.”
The muzzle jabbed into Jack’s spine, and Ray’s voice turned the corner from cautious to dangerous. “You two only run in pairs. Where’d she be, if you don’t mind?”
A clink of metal answered for him.
Jill’s voice said, “Nice to see you, Ray. Put the fire stick down.”
Jack hadn’t heard her approach, and, apparently, neither had Ray.
The muzzle eased slightly up off Jack’s spine, but Ray stood firm.
Jill said, “I shoot, you shoot, and everyone gets dead but me.”
Ray said, “Must be nice.”
She said, “We didn’t come to hurt you. Didn’t come to cause trouble. Just wanna talk, that’s all.”
“A phone call woulda done you better than guns.”
Jack said, “Clare’s missing.”
Silence filled the air between them.
Ray said, “How’d you say?”
“House blew up night before last. Helicopter lifted off the property a few hours later. Don’t know if she’s jacking with us like old times or if we have a problem. Rumor says you might know which is which.”
“You think I blown it up?”
Jill said, “You’re the only one besides us who knows where she lives.”
“I had nothin’ to do with whatever it is you saw.”
Jack said, “Have you heard from her?”
Gravel crunched, and clothing ruffled. The muzzle lifted off Jack’s back, and the air seeped out of his lungs. He lowered his hands, glanced over his shoulder, and turned, gaze tracking over the only man who’d ever understood what it was like to crawl the earth in his skin.
Ray studied the ground, his once formidable body draped in a T-shirt and jeans two sizes too big. His weathered hand traversed a coarse beard that had shed lush black for wiry gray. He was a smaller, older, and more tired Ray than Jack remembered, with thinning hair and new patchworks of sunspots mottling his leathered skin.
Passing time and wasted opportunity punched Jack hard in the heart. He should have come home long ago.
Ray said, “She called me a night ago. Hung up when I answered. Tried to call her back and got nothing, and I ain’t heard from her since.”
“Called us, too,” Jack said. “Summoned us down but never said why. We were late getting to her and watched the end unfold.”
Ray’s gaze traced south, and he stared into the long, far distance, as if wandering through a maze of secrets. He shook his head. Jack’s stomach dropped and his brain pounded, and he knew he’d been right about Clare, and wished he hadn’t.
His voice choked in a struggle to ask the question. He chewed his words, swallowed them down, and spit them back up.
For reasons that ebbed and flowed with the seasons, every one of Clare’s absurd demands or insane behaviors had been based on a need to stay ahead of “them.” As he and Jill had gotten older and less believing, they’d challenged her—mocked her really—brushing off her conspiracies and geopolitical convolutions by demanding she elaborate on who “they” and “them” were.
“Everyone that matters,” she’d say. “CIA, FBI, FSB, SVR, GRU, BND, DGSI, DGSE.” And that was right about where Jill would roll her eyes and he’d zone out.
Asking the question now felt like validating a hallucination by holding a conversation with someone else’s voices.
He said, “Do you know who could have done it?”
The older man looked up, clear blue eyes full of fatalistic acceptance and unspoken pain. “Son,” he said, “there ain’t a thing I can tell you about your mother that she ain’t told you herself since you was young. Saying it again here won’t make you believe it any more than you ever have.”
“She said a lot, Ray.”
“You know what she is. Known it since you was eight, I reckon.”
“That’s not helping.”
Ray sighed. “Look to what you just seen with your own two eyes. No one but government brings a helicopter to claim the dead.”
The words were a kick to Jack’s brain. He’d gone in circles trying to make the pieces fit a portrait in which delusional Clare was the one pulling the strings.
Ray didn’t have that kind of baggage.
Jack said, “Clare’s not dead. Whoever got to her came in on foot, abandoned what remained of their own dead, and all but one of those alive left by air. This was six, maybe seven hired guns, using a civilian helicopter. They took Clare out alive.”
Ray looked toward the sky and tugged his beard.
Jill said, “You do know something.”
“Depends,” he said. He ran a palm across his cheek, and his fingers followed the gray to its very tip. “There’s knowing, and there’s knowing. Example being I known your mother since before you could string three words together, but that don’t mean the same as knowing her movements every year since. I known her long enough to recognize a repeat, though.”
Jack looked at Jill, she looked at him, and they both looked at Ray.
He spoke worse gibberish than Clare ever had.
Ray said, “Whe
n’s the last time she talked about your daddy?”
Jill’s mouth opened. She glanced down the road, as if trying to decide if she should stay for more or wash her hands of the huge waste of time this trip had been.
Jack said, “Years. What does he have to do with anything?”
“Your mom ever surfaces to look for him, stuff happens.”
“Stuff?”
“Stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Last time—oh, I think you musta been right around thirteen or so, tucked away where she was sure no one could find you—best as I remember, was an ambush in Budapest that got her, or might maybe have been Bucharest. They hauled her off to a black site, had her for a week before she squirreled free. Tight call that one was, and still not sure who done it. Had a touch of government to it. Rationally, we figured Russian military intelligence, but who knows?”
“You’re saying that’s who did this now?”
“No, son, I’m sayin’ any time she goes looking stuff happens, is all. She did call you down.”
“More like demanded. Urgent. No time to waste. The usual.”
“My guess’d be she got wind of trouble on the way. Maybe wanted to warn you, let you know she was running again, or maybe try to convince you to run with her.”
“We never would have.”
“Yup. No question on that, not even for her.”
“Why bother waiting for us, then? Why not just go?”
“Because,” Ray said, and he looked pointedly at Jack, “she loves you.”
Jill snorted.
Ray’s cheeks reddened, and his chest rose. “Oh, you don’t think it, missy. Maybe she don’t always show it in ways you understand, but you been the world to that woman. Time’s gittin’ on, and running gets harder. She mighta suspected this’d be the last time, might maybe thought there’d be no coming back and couldn’t bear leaving with no good-bye.”
Jack clenched his fists. His gaze drifted to the near distance and his thoughts followed. They’d been late getting to Clare. If what Ray said about her wanting to say good-bye was true then they wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation if he and Jill had gotten to her in the time frame she’d given.
He said, “What does any of that have to do with our dad?”
“None she ain’t already told you more times ’n you can count.”
“Help me out here, Ray. You know her history, and you know her connections. You’ve gotta give me something I can work with today, not twenty-seven years ago.”
“I ain’t being abstruse. Told you, son—and nothin’s changed since—I dunno what’s happened to your mom or where she’s gone.”
“You said ‘stuff happens’ whenever Clare surfaces to look for our father.”
“That it does.”
“Was she looking for him now?”
“None that she told me, but like I said, time’s gettin’ on, and with your mother, there’s just no tellin’ what she’s up to or why.” Ray shrugged. “That woman’s had a lotta years to make a lotta enemies. If it was me lookin’ to find her now, first thing I’d be askin’ is which way’d the chopper go.”
“Due east.”
“Houston, then, more ’n likely. Lotsa ships in Houston. Two big airports, plus a handful of regionals.”
“Easy route out of the country.”
“Could be,” Ray said. “Or to other parts of the country.”
Ray went back to studying the ground and nodded slightly, as if plotting his way through a maze and then, one blink to the next, his head was gone, obliterated into red mist with a rifle crack that split the morning like a bullwhip wrapping around Jack’s throat, cutting off his air, slicing his veins, and bleeding him dry.
In slow-motion disbelieving horror he watched Ray’s body fall, and Jack was rolling, stumbling to his feet, running for the porch, body on autopilot while his insides bellowed and brayed. Jill barreled off the road in the direction the report had come.
Another crack ruptured the air.
Jack heaved into the front door, lifting the handle as he shoved, and it popped open for him, just as it always had. The windowpane beside him shattered.
He flung himself to the floor beside the couch, stretched a hand beneath fabric folds, found the casing strap, and yanked.
An old .308 thumped to the carpet, a trusty friend from Raymond’s past. Jack grabbed the rifle and bolted through the living room, down the hall, and tore out the back to where the dogs, howling in their runs, pawed at the fences.
The staccato of Jill’s semiautomatic fire hurried him on.
He raced along the chain-link, slamming latches, opening gates.
The Catahoulas darted first, with the blueticks right behind, tearing out of the kennels and around the corner, hunting and tracking dogs, all of them. They knew Jack, they didn’t know Jill, and they’d probably head for Raymond first, but none of that mattered as far as the shooter was concerned, because unless he planned to stay in a tree until they shot him down, the dogs would find him, and dogs were trouble.
Jack followed the pack, running from the back porch to the carport and from the carport into the verdure. Most of the dogs broke off for the cul-de-sac, and he kept going, tracking his sister in his head, plunging down the opposite side of the road.
The pack quieted. Gunfire stayed silent. His breath labored hard in his ears, and then, in the distance, an engine turned over and he knew they’d lost their target. He found Jill on her knees at the base of a tree four hundred yards to the west.
“I hit the motherfucker,” she said. She dabbed her fingers against the ground and pulled them back red. “The bastard hit and ran,” she said. “Same MO as the asshole at Clare’s place. Gotta be the same guy.”
Jack leaned into the tree and slid to the ground.
Rifle across his lap, he drew air into burning lungs, and his focus drifted toward the house, toward the closest thing he’d had to family now lying dead under the bayou sun.
What little he’d had was lost forever. So many years he could have come home and hadn’t.
Jill said, “We need to get out of here before this comes back on us.”
His head rolled against the tree in her direction. “Shooter came for Ray.”
Jill stopped and turned and took a step back toward him.
Jack said, “You, me, and him huddled close like that, it could have been any one of us first, but he took Ray. Wasn’t luck of the draw and wasn’t an accident.”
He didn’t finish the thought. Jill had been the shooter often enough to know how things worked with multiple targets and only one clean shot.
She said, “Is this on us? Did we lead him here?”
“It’s on Clare. She called him.”
“She called us, too.”
“Yep,” he said. “Whoever did this is already looking for us. Ray was just easier to find. Only a matter of time, really, before they figure out that the same people who keep showing up in the right place at the wrong time are the ones the phones trace back to.”
He heaved up and stood and started a slow trudge toward the house.
Jill caught his arm. “Wrong direction,” she said. “Car’s that way.”
He shrugged her off. “I’m not leaving Ray out there rotting for the dogs to eat.”
Jill stood in his way. “We need to go,” she said. “We need to go now.”
She was right, of course. Ray’s place, rural as it was, wasn’t surrounded by thousands of empty acres like Clare’s. The rifle reports had been heard by someone who’d recognize them as something other than hunting or target practice, and even if they hadn’t been heard, the dogs would eventually bring attention back.
Fingers would point at them, the hammer of the law would fall hard, and that was the best-case scenario if they were caught here.
Jack couldn’t bring himself to care.
Hands against his chest, Jill pushed him back. “Can’t let you do it, John.”
He gripped he
r wrists and shoved her aside.
She raised the rifle and put the muzzle between them. “You’re thinking with your heart, and this is not the time to have a heart. You can hurt it out all you want when it’s over, but right now you need to use your brain.”
Disgust rose up like bile in his mouth.
He said, “You sound just like your mother.”
Jill’s jaw clenched, and she shoved into him. “I’m warning you. I will take you down before I let you become a liability.”
He looked at her, through her, reached for the muzzle, and nudged it aside. “You can’t,” he said. “I’m the only one left who knows what it’s like to be you.”
CHAPTER 14
HOLDEN
AGE: 32
LOCATION: MIAMI, FLORIDA
PASSPORT COUNTRY: SPAIN
NAMES: THIAGO MARTÍN MORENO
HE MOVED BENEATH THE SKYLIGHTS, SWALLOWED IN A KALEIDOSCOPE of race, color, and social class, jostled this way and that by hurried people and waddling people and tired children and travelers with too many bags. Airports, big, fat international airports, were where the rich rubbed shoulders with the poor, and light touched dark, and East met West in ways otherwise impossible. Airports were where the folds of the world overlapped, and they were ground zero in the study of becoming someone else.
A large African in a bright green head wrap had taught him this.
He’d been seventeen then, waiting out a layover in Zurich Airport’s food court.
She’d sat across from him, the African woman, with three orders of fries and nothing else, had dumped the fries onto her tray, and then slipped off her sandals, lifted bare calloused feet onto the chair at his left, and with long, red toenails pointing toward his face, had begun to eat.
The clash of cultures had left him fighting not to stare.
He’d failed.
And by failing, he’d awakened understanding.
He’d grasped then, for the first time, the way enough small details correctly assembled could warp perception and create a new reality, could provide invisibility.
That woman with her fries and long red toenails could have been Eurasian or Middle Eastern, could have been an American white man on the run, and he never would have seen beyond the details—never would have seen the details at all had he not been present within those overlapping folds—and so airports became his university, and the people in them his study major. How appropriate, then, that the schooling he needed now would come from the same hallowed concourses and corridors.
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