by Ty Patterson
‘Surely you can do better than that.’
His lips curled. ‘Try living in this place for ten years, and then tell me.’
He flicked the picture back and dismissed it from his mind.
He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. ‘You know the real reason the military shut the program down?’
‘No, sir.’ This time Meghan didn’t hold back her sigh.
‘They saw other uses for the program.’
‘Like what, sir?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Stoll sneered and leaned back.
His expression changed when Zeb moved fractionally. The hostility drained out when he saw something in Zeb’s eyes. The anger left him. His voice became soft.
‘Civilian uses.’
His voice became fearful.
‘Dividing Zero could be used in civilian life.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Gulfstream scoffed at the distance between Hazelton and New York and delivered its passengers back to the city of bustle and fumes in short time.
The twins hadn’t been idle on the return leg.
Stoll had smirked when he had given them the names of the five operatives. ‘Good luck with finding them.’
The operatives were given code names once they entered the program. They carried false papers when they were deployed. Those legends were erased when they returned to the U.S.
Stoll hadn’t contacted them on their return; court cases had consumed his life, and then Hazelton had become his home.
‘They could be anywhere. They could be dead,’ he taunted.
‘You know that the program was used on civilians?’ Zeb asked him quietly.
His bravado left him instantly. ‘No. It could be misused, though. That’s why the military got cold feet.’
‘You don’t have much, do you?’
‘You know more now, don’t you?’ Stoll sneered as he was led away.
Beth had set Werner loose on Stoll and Brown Spear as soon as they boarded the aircraft.
His story checked out. Dividing Zero wasn’t mentioned in any of the lurid headlines that followed his downfall, but the timelines fit.
The Rise and Fall of a Hotshot Defense Millionaire, read one article by a reputed financial journal. Beth read it, made notes, and sprawled back when she had finished.
‘He’s right?’ Meghan quirked an eyebrow at her.
‘Yeah. You found anything?’
Meghan grimaced. ‘Nope. The general says he hasn’t gotten far. Military bureaucracy. And Cover Your Ass. Chang says the suit is still not talking.’
Zeb wasn’t surprised at General Klouse’s lack of progress. ‘The defense establishment doesn’t like him. He plays it too straight. On top of that, his role is a purely advisory one.’
‘So we just leave it at that?’ Beth glared at him as he lounged in his seat. ‘John Doe could be one of those five operatives.’
‘I’m working on it,’ Zeb replied languidly.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Beth snorted.
Bwana was waiting for them at JFK, leaning against his ride, oblivious of the wide berth other travellers gave him.
‘This dude could be anywhere?’ He gave incredulous looks when Beth broke down their findings for him.
‘Yeah.’
He glanced out and stared at the vehicle in the next lane. ‘That guy over here, he could be one of them?’
‘Don’t start.’
They were skirting Central Park, when Zeb called out from the rear.
‘Stop.’
Bwana braked hard amidst a chorus of angry honking.
Zeb slipped out of the vehicle and walked away without a backward look.
‘Where are you going?’ Meghan yelled when they had stopped gaping.
‘To work,’ came the reply.
‘Has he always been this insufferable?’ she rolled her eyes at Bwana.
‘He has been nothing else.’
Zeb had exchanged several texts with Clare while on the flight.
I need to meet someone who knew about Dividing Zero, had been his first message to her.
Anyone?
Preferably a General. Someone who would know everything.
She had made calls, had wielded her influence, and had arranged for the meeting.
There had been conditions. The general would be unnamed in any development. The general would meet in the dark so that Zeb couldn’t identify him.
The meet would happen late at night; to give the general time to fly out from Washington D.C. Zeb would come alone to the rendezvous.
Clare didn’t tell him who the general was. Zeb didn’t ask. He agreed to all the conditions.
He caught a cab to the United Nations Headquarters, stopped it when it was on East 34th Street and exited.
He walked down FDR drive, ignoring curious looks from passing motorists, went to the riverfront and headed to a pier.
It was gated and chained.
He leapt over it and made his way over a narrow wooden bridge, to a shelter at its end.
Barges berthed at the bridge in daylight. At night time, it was deserted and lonely in the busiest city in the world.
A flashlight pointed at him when he neared and shone on his face.
To blind me.
‘That’s far enough,’ a voice called out.
He stopped.
‘Raise your hands.’
He raised them.
Two men approached him, large, muscled, carrying handguns. He sensed more men at the shelter.
The men frisked him expertly, removed his Glock, his knife, his mags. They removed his spare gun and the headpiece.
‘A walking arsenal, aren’t you?’
Zeb kept quiet.
One of the men nodded in the direction of the shelter. A shadow emerged from behind it.
The shadow didn’t approach him. The flashlight remained on his face.
‘You wanted to meet me?’
Zeb recognized the tone in the voice. It was one used to giving commands, accustomed to having them obeyed.
‘You know why,’ Zeb replied.
The voice remained silent for a moment, and then it became reflective.
‘Normally, I wouldn’t have met you. However, these aren’t normal times. I owe someone a favor. A big one.’
A cruiser wailed in the distance. One of the heavies behind Zeb tensed. He relaxed when the sound grew fainter and disappeared.
‘What’s your interest in the program?’
Zeb told him.
‘You might expose the program. How can I trust you?’
Zeb lowered his hands without permission. ‘There are a handful of people who know me. Know what I do. I suspect you know a couple of them.’
The voice didn’t reply.
‘You can ask them. They’ll tell you what I am capable of. If I wanted to expose you, we wouldn’t be meeting like this.’
The voice was resigned when it spoke again. ‘Someone had to hear about it one day, I guess. Dividing Zero isn’t something I’m proud of.’
It hardened. ‘You’ll disappear if this ever comes to light. Just like that. No one will know you exist.’
Zeb couldn’t help laughing. ‘Can we cut out the threats? Lots of people have tried to make me disappear.’
The voice considered him in silence. It was clipped and short when it spoke.
It reeled out five names and addresses.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Meghan was logged onto Werner, early on day eighteen, giving it new instructions.
We never checked if any notable incidents went down in Toccoa and Connersville.
She brewed herself coffee while Werner searched, and when she emerged from the kitchen, her sister was in the office.
Beth had her bag slung across her shoulder, a jacket over her T-shirt and was looking at Meghan impatiently.
‘Don’t make yourself comfortable. We are going.’
Meghan took a sip. ‘Where?’
Beth’s eyes sparkled. ‘Toronto.’
‘Zeb got five names.’ Beth explained on the way down. ‘I got them from him when you were lazing on your bed.’
Meghan didn’t tell her sister about the search string. It might come to nothing.
‘I got Werner to check them out,’ Beth continued, oblivious of her twin’s silence. ‘Two of them don’t look like John Doe.’
‘So what’s in Toronto?’
‘Jerry Cusak, one of the operatives.’
‘That’s his new name?’
‘Obviously,’ Beth rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath. ‘Looks like I have to do all the thinking here.’
Zeb was waiting in a vehicle when they emerged and swung out without a word after the sisters climbed inside.
‘Calling him will be easier, won’t it?’ Meghan yelled above a passing car’s honk.
‘And spook him?’ Beth retorted. ‘This dude has been living a new life. No one knows who he is. How would he react to a call out of the blue?’
‘None of these guys could be John Doe.’
Beth looked Heavenward as if seeking forgiveness for her sister’s stupidity. ‘Yeah, I know. However, do you want to find out what the heck is going on?’
That silenced Meghan till they boarded the Gulfstream.
‘You know what he looks like?’ she asked, once they were airborne.
Beth brought up three photographs on her screen. ‘I got them from their driver’s licenses.’
The men looked similar to John Doe.
No wonder Stoll wasn’t sure. Meghan swiped through them swiftly and then turned to the brown-haired man with them.
‘Who did you meet yesterday?’
Zeb filled her in while the aircraft defied gravity and made short work of the three hundred and fifty miles that separated the cities and landed at eleven a.m.
Zeb rented a vehicle at Toronto airport and drove downtown, to the Distillery District, a commercial neighborhood in the Canadian city.
He parked in a public parking lot, crossed the street, and waved in the direction of a glass-fronted building.
‘He’s in there. He works as an insurance broker.’ He mentioned a well-known firm.
‘You aren’t coming in?’ Meghan asked as she eyed the building and its surroundings.
‘Nope. It might spook him.’
Of course it would. Stupid question. Zeb has the look. Cusak was an operative. He might wonder at Zeb’s presence.
Cusak hid his surprise and put on a neutral expression when he approached the twins in the enormous lobby of his office.
‘Ms. Petersen?’ he inquired, looking from one sister to the other.
‘We both are, as you can see,’ Beth smiled disarmingly and introduced themselves.
‘How can I help you? My office didn’t give me any details.’
She showed him John Doe’s photograph.
‘Do you know him? Was he a Dividing Zero operative?’
Color drained from Cusak’s face.
They were back in the aircraft three hours later, leaving behind a shaken man.
Cusak had cooperated fully once he had heard about Maddie. He had been thin on details.
‘I am still bound by various oaths of confidentiality,’ he explained. There was no bitterness in his voice. No anger, that his previous life had been washed away.
‘We knew how it would be.’
He mentioned a few details in passing; didn’t elaborate on any of them.
No, he responded to a final question from Beth. He hadn’t met the other operatives at all. They were deliberately isolated from one another. All each one of them knew was there were five of them.
The Gulfstream didn’t return to New York. It winged to Atlanta, where Randy Weinerger, another of the operatives, owned an upscale bar.
The twins visited the establishment on the evening of the eighteenth day, jostled through stockbrokers, TV anchors, minor celebrities, and asked for Weinerger.
A smartly dressed waiter nodded his head in the direction of a discreet office.
Beth knocked once and opened the door without waiting for a response and stopped suddenly.
Weinerger looked exactly like John Doe.
He wasn’t.
Weinerger reacted in the same way Cusak had. He closed down immediately on hearing the program’s name, and thawed only when Maddie was mentioned.
He didn’t have any more leads than Cusak had.
‘You could have called,’ he said as he was escorting the twins out an hour later.
‘Would you have taken it?’ Beth challenged him.
‘No, ma’am.’
They flew to Seattle the next day, the nineteenth.
Beth was disappointed at their lack of progress and was silent on the flight. Meghan wasn’t disappointed. The wisp of a thought floating in her mind, was taking shape. It was helped by Werner’s search results.
Still too many blanks to be filled in, she decided and didn’t enlighten her sister.
Gary Dubronovik had done well for himself. He owned a palatial home in the Madrona neighborhood with views of Lake Washington.
He was a restorer of old homes and his business was doing well, going by the activity in his home office.
Dubronovik’s reaction was different from Cusak’s and Weinerger’s. He denied any knowledge of Dividing Zero and threatened to call the police.
‘I’m a builder. I know nothing of the world you describe.’
He waved away Maddie’s story. ‘I have never been to Toccoa or Connersville. Don’t even know where they are.’
He hadn’t left Seattle in a year. He had alibis.
Beth was silent on their flight back. Chang and Pizaka hadn’t made any progress in the two days either. There were no more videos or pictures from John Doe.
‘We get leads. They disappear,’ she said once, sheen of tears in her eyes.
There’s one more lead. Meghan bit her tongue and held the words back. No point in raising her hopes. Let me dig into it, first.
‘How is it that these operatives are doing so well?’ she queried aloud, in an attempt to distract her sister.
Beth shrugged. She didn’t know.
Zeb looked up when he felt two pairs of eyes on him.
‘Their silence has been bought. The military made a settlement with them. Money and new identities, in return for silence.’
They reached New York in the afternoon and instead of heading back to their office, they headed to Amy Kittrell’s home.
She had been discharged. She still wasn’t talking to the cops. Darien Kile, her lawyer, was still running interference.
However, he had allowed one brief meeting for the twins.
Meghan was shocked at the mother’s appearance.
The lively woman in the photographs was missing. In her place was a listless, worn out woman who rarely spoke. Whose hands trembled constantly.
A flicker of hope lit her eyes when the twins entered her home. That light disappeared when she saw they were alone.
‘We are close, ma’am. We will get her back soon,’ Meghan said in sudden certainty, her gut telling her she was finally chasing the right lead.
‘We have just one question for you.’
Amy Kittrell looked at her in askance.
‘Your husband never hit you, did he? Maddie interpreted all that, wrongly.’
The mother looked at Meghan dumbly for a moment and then her eyes filled and tears rolled down her cheeks.
She nodded and began sobbing quietly.
Chuck Keyser had made his plans.
All the loose ends would be taken care of.
Just one kidnapper is in a position to speak. And he won’t. There will be another attempt. This time, it will succeed.
He dialed a number and waited for it to ring.
Meghan’s phone rang and echoed inside the SUV.
Zeb was driving them back, to their Columbus Avenue office.
He raised an eyebrow at Meghan an
d accepted the call at her nod.
‘Meghan Petersen?’ a male voice asked.
‘Yes.’ Her eyes narrowed as she tried to place the voice.
‘It’s Chuck Keyser, ma’am. We spoke a while back.’
‘We did, Mr. Keyser.’ Excitement flooded her voice. ‘You have something for us, sir?’
Keyser paused for a moment.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I know where your man will be.’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Day twenty saw the twins winging it in their gleaming white aircraft; an early start to their day, before the sun warmed the earth and made heat rise from the asphalt and concrete highways of the country.
‘What’s in Courtville? You know it’s somewhere in Illinois, don’t you? Another small city. Why would John Doe be there?’
Beth was in rapid fire mode as she seated herself opposite her sister. ‘You have joined the dots haven’t you?’
Keyser had asked them to meet him in Courtville; a request that had led them to jetting across the country again.
The twins had decided to go to the meet alone. There was something in Keyser’s voice; something that hinted he would be spooked by a large group.
‘I’m waiting,’ Beth prompted when Meghan didn’t respond immediately.
‘I know some of it. I think Keyser will fill in the blanks,’ Meghan replied, reluctantly.
Beth studied her sister; it wasn’t like looking in a mirror since the two knew where they differed.
Meghan’s eyebrows were closer on her forehead than Beth’s. Their noses had the minutest difference.
They were different in personality too. Meghan was analytical. Beth was more emotional and impulsive.
I knew she would crack it. I knew she was working on something the last few days. She had that distracted look on her face, Beth thought.
They had different social habits too.
I have Mark and spend as much time I can, with him. She hardly dates. Says most of the men she meets are uninteresting.
Beth made a gimme gesture with her hand. ‘Spill,’ she ordered her sister.