Anna watched Glen jump out of his car and hurry up the walk. She had never seen Martin’s best friend look so anxious. Glen spotted her behind the two officers, waved, and called out, “Anna, thank God you’re okay.”
“Hold it right there, sir.” The two officers stood shoulder to shoulder on the walk, cutting off Glen from Anna. Both had their hands on their weapons.
Glen froze. “Hey, it’s cool. I’m Glen Grossman. I’m the one who called—”
“We’re aware of that, sir,” the older officer said. “Are you aware that making a false police report is a felony?”
Anna held her breath waiting for Glen’s response.
“But it’s not a false report,” Glen said emphatically to the glaring officers. “I’m really glad you’re here. Anna’s life is truly in danger.”
Anna gasped.
* * *
After they had moved inside, into the living room, Glen explained everything to Anna and the two police officers. How less than an hour ago he had received an odd telephone call from a man in West Virginia named Fred Tynan. This man claimed to have found a note handwritten by Martin Grey that was left under a rock in the middle of an abandoned highway. The note contained instructions for the person who found it to contact attorney Glen Grossman in New York City and warn him that Anna Grey was going to be murdered that very day.
When Glen was through with his story, the two officers did not appear very impressed, but Anna was terrified. It wasn’t the threat to her life that frightened Anna; it was Martin’s life she was worried about. Anna had no doubt that the letter was real; it was just too crazy, just too random to be a fabrication. The fact that the letter was found in West Virginia and not Washington State also did not comfort her; in truth, she had no idea where her husband was. All at once, Anna’s fears about the mysterious rafting trip, about what really happened to Donald Jackson, about the hatred and fear that she saw in Mrs. Jackson’s eyes—it all came clawing back to the surface.
Verging on panic, Anna said to Glen, “Martin’s in trouble.”
Glen frowned. “I think you’re right. But wasn’t he supposed to be on the West Coast?”
Anna shook her head. “None of that matters. Glen, I know he’s in trouble. I know it.” Anna whirled to the two officers. “My husband’s in trouble, you have to do something. Please.”
The officers appeared equal parts doubtful and confused. The older one scratched the back of his neck. “Ma’am, this supposed letter, it’s about you, not your husband.”
“I don’t care what the damn letter says,” Anna snapped. She was beginning to sound frantic and she didn’t care. “You have to call somebody. You have to find him. His life is in danger. I know it.”
“Okay, ma’am. Just settle down. Please. I want you to explain to me very carefully how you know that.”
“I can’t,” Anna said, tears welling in her eyes. “I just—I just know.”
That’s when telephones began to ring. The cell phones in the pockets of both police officers, Anna’s cell phone upstairs in the bedroom, and the phone in the living room, simultaneously began to ring, chime, and buzz.
As the puzzled cops grabbed their phones, Anna crossed to the coffee table and picked up the wireless handset. She brushed tears and hit the talk button. “Hello?”
The male voice on the other end had a stiff, formal clip. “This is Agent Rivers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Am I speaking to Mrs. Anna Grey?”
“Yes.” Anna’s heart began to race. “Yes, this is she.”
“Can you confirm for me that there are two NYPD police officers in your home at this time?”
“Yes, they’re right here. What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain everything at headquarters, Mrs. Grey. Please follow the officers’ instructions. Good-bye.”
“No, wait.”
There was a click followed by a dial tone.
When Anna turned around, she saw Glen gaping at the two officers, who were moving now with great urgency. Both men had their weapons drawn. The younger officer opened the front door and scanned the exterior of the house while the older officer approached Anna, gun lowered at his side. He addressed her with laser-like focus, as if Glen weren’t in the room.
“We have an emergency, ma’am. I need you to get dressed as quickly as you can and come with us.”
“Just one second,” Glen said. “You can’t just—”
The older officer stifled Glen with a stare. “Mr. Grossman, you’re welcome to accompany her, but do not interfere.” Glen deflated. The officer pivoted back to Anna. “I’m really going to have to ask you to hurry, ma’am.”
“First you have to tell me,” Anna said, “what’s happening. What’s happened to Martin?”
“Honestly, Mrs. Grey, I do not know. All I can tell you is that I just got off the phone with the director of the FBI himself. Whatever it is, it’s damn important.”
* * *
After climbing out the upstairs bedroom window and shimmying down to the Greys’ backyard, the Handyman had no trouble slipping back to his parked car without being noticed.
The smart thing would have been to drive away, but the Handyman was frustrated, so instead he sat there and watched. He watched the two cops talk to Anna Grey at her front door, he watched Grossman drive up like there was some big emergency, and then he watched all of them leave in the cruiser.
It was obvious to the Handyman that someone had tipped the police off to Anna Grey’s hit. But who? Ultimately it didn’t matter. The bottom line was that he had failed.
The Handyman sighed and picked up his iPhone. Now he had to endure the unpleasant task of reporting his failure to the client. Not only would he not be paid; his professional reputation would be damaged.
The Handyman dialed the number; no one answered. This had never happened before. Day or night, the client always took his call. The Handyman dialed again, and again no answer. The phone just rang and rang.
Something had changed.
As the Handyman killed the call, he felt an odd sensation, one that he didn’t recognize at first. This feeling clouded his thoughts and made it difficult for him to decide his next move. Should he wait for another opportunity to kill the Grey woman; should he wait to hear back from the client; should he go off the grid? He just wasn’t sure.
Then it came to him. Fear, that’s what the feeling was. Something big had changed, and now the Handyman was afraid.
CHAPTER 94
Martin Grey peeled open his eyes and squinted at the blinding white light. The light flicked back and forth from eye to eye.
“Wake up,” an unfamiliar male voice called. “Time to wake up.”
“Stop,” Martin groaned. He turned away from that annoying light. His head felt like it weighed a ton.
The light shut off and he heard the voice again. “Good morning. Can you tell me your name?”
Martin squinted up at the man staring down at him. He was African American, about Martin’s age, and he was wearing a white coat. Martin realized that the man was a doctor.
“What’s your name?” the doctor repeated. “Can you tell me your name?”
Martin’s lips were dry, and there was a nasty taste in his mouth. “Martin,” he answered hoarsely. “Martin Grey.”
The doctor smiled. “That’s good. How old are you? Do you remember that?”
His vision clearing, Martin could read the name tag on the doctor’s white coat. It read Dr. Gordon Hudson.
“Mr. Grey,” the doctor pushed, “tell me how old you are.”
“I’m thirty-three,” Martin said. “Where am I?”
The doctor smiled. “You’re at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. My name is Dr. Hudson. You’ve been in an induced coma for four days. Welcome back.”
“Four days? But—” As Martin tried to absorb this, images and memories began flying back, like pieces of a puzzle coming together. Then all at once he remembered everything. “Anna!” Martin cried as he shot up. Dr.
Hudson and a nurse pounced immediately to hold him down. The nurse secured the IV tubing and monitoring cables tethered to Martin’s body.
“You must calm down, Mr. Grey,” Dr. Hudson said firmly.
“But Anna— They’re going to—”
“Your wife is safe, Mr. Grey. She’s right here.”
Martin blinked at Dr. Hudson, not sure that he had heard right. “What? Where?”
Dr. Hudson didn’t answer. Instead he just stepped back and allowed Anna to step forward.
Martin couldn’t believe his eyes. It was really her, it was Anna, staring down at him. There were tears streaming down Anna’s face but she was smiling and so, so beautiful.
Anna threw herself onto Martin and they shared a hug so long and so tight that finally the doctor had to intervene. “Easy, you two. We have to be careful of that shoulder for a while.”
As they parted, Martin grabbed Anna’s hand. “That place, Forty Acres. It was horrible. It’s—”
“I know,” Anna said. “Martin, everybody knows. I think the whole world knows what you did.”
Confusion leapt onto Martin’s face. “What I did?” Martin remembered the trapped slaves. He remembered time ticking away. He hesitated, afraid to ask Anna the question. “You mean . . . they’re okay? The mine didn’t explode?”
Anna shifted sideways to allow another person to approach the bedside. The young woman wore a pink patient’s gown. Beneath the gown Martin could see that her entire torso was wrapped with bandages. Her long, strawberry-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail.
It was Alice. She was alive. Which meant that they were all alive. Martin reached out and squeezed Alice’s hand, and Alice squeezed back. They shared a warm smile and Alice wiped tears from her cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” Martin said. “What I did to you—I had no choice. If I didn’t—”
“If you didn’t,” Alice finished for him, “none of us would have gotten out of there. You saved my life, Mr. Grey. You saved all of us. That’s all that matters.”
“I wasn’t sure what I did worked,” he said. “How did everyone get out?”
Alice shook her head. “I don’t know. I was out of it. They said that all the lights went out and then the doors just opened. I heard that it was Vincent who found you.”
“That big guy?”
Alice nodded.
Dr. Hudson returned to the bedside. “I hate to break this up, but there are several tests that I need to run.”
“We’re next-door neighbors,” Alice said to Martin. Then she waved good-bye and headed for the door.
As Martin watched Alice leave, he noticed something inside the room that made his eyes widen. “What the—?”
His hospital room was filled with flowers and gift baskets and balloons and what looked like thousands of get-well cards. There was barely any room for the medical equipment. Martin noticed the TV set mounted on the wall. The sound was muted, but on-screen Martin could see a reporter standing before a huge crowd outside a tall white building. The sign on the side of the building read Emory University Hospital.
Martin turned to Anna and the doctor. “That’s here?”
Dr. Hudson nodded. “That’s live. It’s been like that ever since they brought you here.”
Anna, beaming, took Martin’s hands into hers. “You won’t believe what’s been going on. It’s the biggest story ever. Martin, you’re a hero.”
Stunned, Martin looked back at the screen. The crowd was completely mixed—whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, just people. It was nothing like the helter-skelter that Oscar had predicted.
Martin turned back to Anna. “Did they catch them?” he asked. “Please tell me they caught them.”
Anna shook her head. “Not yet. But it won’t be very long. There was a story just this morning that they think they found a list of secret members.”
“Okay, okay.” Dr. Hudson laid a hand on Anna’s arm. “Give me about forty-five minutes with your husband, then you can come back in. I promise.”
Anna planted a kiss on Martin’s cheek. “I’ll be right outside.”
Martin waited while Dr. Hudson turned to the nurse, who was the only other person in the room, and said, “I left my notebook in my office. Could you run and get it, please?”
The nurse appeared puzzled. “Your notebook, Doctor?”
“Yes, it’s right on my desk. Thank you.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
The nurse exited and Dr. Hudson turned his full attention to Martin. “That’s a pretty brave thing you did, Mr. Grey. I feel lucky to have you as a patient. I mean, you being a genuine hero and all.”
“Thanks,” Martin replied, feeling a bit awkward about his new status.
As Dr. Hudson removed a syringe from his coat pocket and uncapped the needle he said, “That business about secret members—that’s pretty unbelievable, huh?”
Martin fixated on the syringe in Dr. Hudson’s hand. That Forty Acres had secret followers wasn’t unbelievable at all. In fact, Martin knew that it was true. Any successful black man, anywhere, could be one of Dr. Kasim’s loyal followers, even a young doctor in Atlanta.
“Mr. Grey, are you okay?”
Martin pointed to the syringe. “What is that?”
“Vitamins. My own special brew. I’ve been giving you an injection every day.” Dr. Hudson threw Martin a sideways look. “Don’t tell me the hero is afraid of needles.”
Martin knew that if he let the paranoia he was feeling take hold, he might not ever be able to get past it. Martin refused to live his life in fear. He shook his head and said, “No, I’m good. Go for it.”
Dr. Hudson chuckled. “Well, all right, then.”
While Dr. Hudson swabbed his arm with alcohol, Martin turned to the TV set across the room.
News footage from four days earlier of the slaves being rescued from Forty Acres filled the screen. Martin watched a dramatic helicopter shot of the compound grounds, speckled with dozens of tiny figures. As the angle descended, the tiny figures resolved into people—the white slaves draped in rags, waving their arms, jumping, shouting, cheering, praying, and embracing each other.
Martin had saved them.
CHAPTER 95
Two weeks later, Martin, his arm in a sling, was slumped on the couch beside Anna, munching on potato chips while watching the evening news. It was a CNN special report about the ongoing roundup of criminals involved in what CNN had christened “The Forty Acres Conspiracy.” Shots of handcuffed men escorted into police stations, courtrooms, and FBI headquarters flashed on Martin’s beloved fifty-two-inch flat-screen. Martin spotted several familiar faces: Kwame, Tobias, Solomon, even the two forest rangers. What surprised both him and Anna was that the two rangers weren’t the only Caucasians complicit in Dr. Kasim’s madness. During the report, several other hunched-over white men were seen being led away by federal agents.
A huge portion of the news special was devoted to the two men conspicuously absent from the perp walks, Dr. Thaddeus Kasim and Oscar Lennox. There was endless speculation and theories about where the two ringleaders could be hiding, but the authorities had yet to track them down. Martin had been debriefed several times by several different agencies about the entire incident, and questions about Dr. Kasim’s whereabouts were always high on the list. Unfortunately, like everyone else, Martin had no clue. He’d never tell Anna, but the fact that Dr. Kasim and Oscar were still at large made him more than a little uneasy. The sooner those two were behind bars, the sooner he’d be able to get a full night’s sleep.
Martin’s face appeared on the television screen. It was a clip from his very first interview, while still in his hospital bed. “Jesus, not that guy again,” Martin said. “Enough already.”
Anna chuckled as Martin picked up the remote and switched the channel.
Their smiles evaporated when a report about Lamont Bell filled the screen. Lamont Bell was a sixteen-year-old African American high school student who had been abducted and tortured, his dead b
ody dumped in a park in West Chicago. Racial epithets had been scrawled all over his mutilated body, including several references to Forty Acres. The story had broken only a day ago, and already it was everywhere, a news juggernaut second only to the Forty Acres story itself. It was as if the exposure of Forty Acres were a major quake that had shaken the entire nation, and the Lamont Bell story a tsunami that followed it. And there were other Forty Acres aftershocks sprouting up around the country. In Greeleyville, South Carolina, a century-old black church had been burned down. In Athens, Georgia, a bar brawl between white and black college students erupted after a report about Forty Acres played on the bar’s television. In Washington, DC, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial had been vandalized, Dr. King’s granite visage desecrated by a splattering of bloodred paintballs. All these reports were disturbing and received plenty of attention from the media, but none had the impact of Lamont Bell’s murder. The images of the teenager’s brutal injuries were difficult to look at, especially for Martin. However irrational, Martin couldn’t help feeling responsible.
“Martin,” Anna said, squeezing his hand, “turn it off.”
But Martin kept watching. He watched fidgety home video of Lamont shooting hoops with his dad. He watched Lamont’s mother sob before a crush of reporters. He watched a candlelight vigil made up of hundreds of Lamont’s classmates and a small mountain of flowers and cards. Martin watched because he had this crazy feeling that it was his duty to watch. He’d made a choice and now he had to live with it.
Anna reached out and pivoted Martin’s head away from the television screen so that he was facing her. She answered his tortured eyes with a firm yet loving gaze. “You did the right thing,” she whispered. “Now please, turn it off.”
Martin nodded. He aimed the remote and pressed the off button.
The doorbell rang. Anna looked at her watch and groaned. “They’re early.”
Forty Acres: A Thriller Page 35
