The Target

by David Baldacci

  “Forensics team is going over everything right now. Cassidy might be some help once the docs sort him out. But I’m not holding out much hope. Cops say he was pretty garbled when he called 911. And I doubt they left a business card with helpful contact information.”

  Reel nodded and glanced at Robie. But her gaze shot back to Vance with the woman’s next words.

  “Julie’s phone was left behind. She didn’t drop it. It was on the table in the foyer, like they meant for us to find it. There was a text on it. From the time stamp it had to have been sent about the time she was taken. They’d turned off the auto lock on the phone so we could access it when we got here. It wasn’t addressed to Julie, but to somebody called Sally Fontaine.”

  Reel and Robie exchanged a significant glance that Vance did not see because at that moment one of her men came up to her to deliver a report.

  Vance finished with him and turned back to the pair. “You said you had dinner with her. Did she say anything that would make you believe she was nervous or scared?”

  “No,” said Robie in a distracted tone. “Quite the opposite.”

  “Did you see anybody following you?”

  “Not that we noticed,” said Reel. “But they wouldn’t have to follow us if they knew where we’d picked Julie up from. They just had to wait for us to bring her back.”

  “That’s true,” said Vance wearily. “Poor kid. She’s been through so much hell already. You’d think she’d catch a break.”

  Robie said, “Any leads on this Sally Fontaine person? Can you trace where the text came from?”

  “Nothing so far, but we’re working on both right now.”

  “Why did you call me?” asked Robie.

  “It was Julie. I thought you’d want to know. And we looked at her phone calendar. You were listed on there for tonight. Didn’t know it was dinner. But I figured if you had seen her you might have something useful.”

  “I’m sorry that I don’t,” replied Robie. He eyed Vance warily. “You want some help on this?”

  “Official or unofficial?”

  “I think it’s going to have to be the latter.”

  She considered this. “I’m okay with that so long as you are completely up front with me about anything you find. I’ll do my utmost to respond in kind.”

  Reel said, “Didn’t know the Bureau was so cooperative.”

  “Oh, we can be,” retorted Vance. “So long as we’re accorded respect.”

  Reel nodded at this but said nothing. Her mind was evidently elsewhere. Then she said, “The text to this Sally Fontaine. What did it say?”

  Vance shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s apparently written in code. At least it made no sense to any of us.”

  “Can we see it?” asked Robie after Reel gave him a sharp look.

  “Why, are you guys codebreakers?”

  “I’ve got some experience with it,” said Robie.

  “Well, I guess it can’t hurt.”

  Vance made a call and about fifteen minutes later one of her agents brought her a written copy of the text. The phone itself was already tagged and bagged and in the Bureau’s evidence truck.

  Reel glanced at the paper but showed no reaction.

  Robie said, “We’ll take a look at this and get back to you with anything we might have.”

  “So, you two are a team again?” asked Vance.

  “Of sorts,” answered Reel.

  “How about that,” said Vance without a trace of enthusiasm.

  Robie said hurriedly, “We’ll be in touch.”

  He took Reel by the elbow and turned her away from Vance, ushering her down the street. He looked back once to see Vance staring at them.

  Reel did not speak until they got back to the car.

  They climbed in and she held up the paper.

  “Sally Fontaine,” said Robie.

  “They took her because of me,” said Reel, and her voice trembled as she said this.

  “You couldn’t have known, Jessica.”

  “The hell I couldn’t. It was a setup, Robie, clear and simple.”

  “Your father?”

  “Wanting me to come and see him so he could say goodbye? What bullshit. Was I a damn idiot?” She slammed her fist against the dashboard. “Shit!” she screamed in fury.

  “He was dying all alone in a prison he’d been in for twenty years. Not the sort of guy you worry about.”

  She held up the page again. “He wasn’t alone, Robie. He got me down there for a reason.” She added dully, “And this tells me why.”

  “You can read that code?”

  “I helped invent this code.”

  He looked at her, stunned. “What?”

  “When I was a teenager and working undercover for the FBI.”

  “You mean when you’d infiltrated the neo-Nazi group?”

  She nodded. “The neo-Nazis needed a safe way to communicate. I helped them come up with this communication protocol. Only they didn’t know I was feeding it to the Bureau at the same time.”

  “So this is the same group? I thought they’d been arrested.”

  “That was almost twenty years ago, Robie. Many of them are out now.”

  “So they used your old man to get to you.”

  She gave a hollow laugh. “It was probably his idea, not theirs.”

  “So what does it say?”

  Reel placed her hand over her eyes.

  “Jessica, what does it say?”

  She removed her hand and looked at him. “It’s a choice, Robie. It’s an ultimatum.”

  “What ultimatum?”

  “They’ll release Julie unharmed.”

  “And what do they want in return? You? As revenge all these years later?”

  “Partly.”

  “Partly? What else, then?”

  Reel gave a little gasp and Robie saw tears flicker across her eyes.

  She composed herself and said, “They want my child.”

  Chapter

  38

  ROBIE PULLED THE CAR TO the curb and cut the engine. He turned sideways in his seat to look at her.

  “Your child? You have a kid?”

  “She’s grown now. I was only seventeen when I had her.”

  “I didn’t know about that.”

  “It’s not part of my ‘official’ file. But the doctor who examined me back at the Burner knew.”

  “How?”

  “I had to have a caesarean. She could tell by the scar.”

  “But how would these Nazi wannabes know anything about this?”

  Reel wiped her eyes. “Because their leader is the father of my child.”

  Robie’s features betrayed his astonishment at this admission.

  She looked at him and noted this. “He raped me, Robie. It was not consensual. I was only sixteen. I carried the child and gave birth to her three days after the FBI came down on the group. They went to prison. I went into WITSEC.”

  “And the baby?”

  “I had to give her up. They said I had to.”

  “Who did?”

  “The powers that be, Robie. I was seventeen. I was in Witness Protection. I was moved around six times in less than a year. I had to testify against these scum. And I did.” She snapped, “You can’t exactly raise a kid with all that going on, can you? I could take care of myself. What I couldn’t take care of was an infant.”

  “So it was your choice, to give her up?”

  “I told you, I didn’t have a choice.”

  “But if you’d had one?”

  “What does it matter? I gave her up.”

  “You said the leader of the neo-Nazi group is the father. He raped you.”

  She nodded. “Leon Dikes.”

  “You said he had a good lawyer and didn’t go to prison for all that long.”

  “Even though I knew he’d ordered the murders of at least six people.”

  “But he never knew where you were?”

&n
bsp; “Not until I walked into that damn prison in Alabama. They must have been waiting. Followed us. And now they have Julie.”

  “Do you even know where your daughter is now?”

  Reel didn’t answer.

  Robie said, “Do you know—”

  “I heard you! But do you really think I’m going to bring her into something like this? Why do you think Dikes wants her, Robie? To tell her how much he loves her? To shower her with money and a wonderful life?”

  “I don’t know what he wants with her. I would imagine he wants to kill you.”

  “Not nearly as much as I want to kill him.”

  “He probably doesn’t know what you are, though.”

  She glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “He knew you were in WITSEC. He doesn’t know who you are now. Or he never would have done what he did.”

  She nodded slowly. “But how does that help Julie?”

  “I don’t know. And if they had followed us, why not just try to take you? Why go after Julie?”

  “Because he may know where I am, but not where my daughter is. And he knows I’d never tell him.”

  “So Julie is the bait. Put your daughter in danger or Julie dies.”

  Reel put her face in her hands and started to weep, her body shuddering painfully.

  Robie reached over and put his arm around her shoulders.

  She finally calmed and wiped her eyes clear.

  “There is no way out of this, Robie. The only thing I can do is offer myself for Julie. That’s it.”

  “And if he won’t let Julie go?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  She closed her eyes and looked down.

  He said, “They have to have a way for you to contact them somehow.”

  Reel straightened. “That was in the code too. There’s a number to call.”

  “There are no numbers on the paper,” said Robie.

  “We didn’t use numbers in the code. Too obvious. We had letters represent numbers.”

  “How would you know whether they were numbers or the actual letters, then?”

  Reel pointed at the paper. “When a line begins with ‘TNF,’ that means ‘the numbers follow.’ That’s how we distinguished them.”

  “The number’s probably a burner phone, untraceable.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “So they want you to call? When?”

  Reel held up her phone. “Now.”

  “So what are you going to say?”

  “That I’ll trade myself for Julie.”

  “And if they don’t agree to that? And they probably won’t.”

  “What else can I do, Robie? The fact is, I don’t know where my daughter is now. It’s been over twenty years. I wouldn’t even know what she looks like,” she added miserably.

  “But you’d recognize this Leon Dikes?”

  “I’ll never forget him,” she said coldly. “If it’s possible, he’s even worse than my father.”

  “Well, that is saying something.”

  Reel ran her fingers along the edge of the dash. “So what do we do, Robie? We have to get Julie back. I’ll give my life for that to happen.”

  “I know you would,” he replied quietly. “And so would I. But maybe it doesn’t have to come to that.”

  She glanced at him. “Do you have a plan?”

  “I have something. I’m not sure it qualifies as a plan just yet.”

  “We have to get her back,” said Reel. “We have to. She’s an innocent.”

  “She is an innocent. I’ve known that for a long time. And we will get her back. So let’s go to my apartment, you make the call, and we’ll see what these bastards say.”

  Chapter

  39

  THE OLD PLANE BUMPED ALONG the runway before coming to a stop with its wheel brakes grinding, the fuselage shuddering, and the dual turboprops spinning slower until they too ceased.

  The cabin door opened and steps came down.

  A man in a black uniform stepped out first, followed by the only unwilling passenger on this flight from hell.

  Julie was bound and gagged and a hood was over her head. Since she couldn’t see where to go, the man behind her, also dressed in the same black uniform, lifted her down the stairs. When her feet hit the tarmac he pulled her roughly over to a white van with no windows. Julie was loaded in and the van drove off along roads that quickly went from asphalt to macadam and, finally, to plain dirt.

  She slumped against her seatback. She made no attempt to look around since the hood prevented her from seeing anything or anyone. Two minutes after she’d walked into her house she had been attacked. They had been quick and effective. A wet cloth over her face, fumes that made her head spin, and then nothing. The next thing she knew she was coming to as the plane she was in was taking off. And now she was in a van.

  She didn’t even know if her guardian, Jerome Cassidy, was alive or dead. She didn’t know why she’d been taken.

  Well, she had a guess. It might have to do with Will Robie. Or Jessica Reel. It seemed to her far too coincidental that as soon as she had been dropped off by them she had been kidnapped.

  The van drove for another half hour and then stopped. She was jerked out of the vehicle and led through a doorway, down a set of stairs, and through another doorway. It closed behind her. She was pushed into a seat, and through the hood she could sense a light being turned on.

  The hood was abruptly pulled off and she blinked rapidly to adjust her eyes to the brightness. She was in a small room with stone walls and a dirt floor. She was seated at a rickety wooden table. On the walls were swastika banners. An overhead bulb crackled and blinked.

  These observations were really afterthoughts.

  Seated across from her was a thin man of medium height with dyed black hair carefully parted and sharp, angular features. His eyes did not match his hair color. They were pinpoints of shocking blue. Like the other men in the room, he wore a black uniform, but his was different from theirs. It had more stuff on it, Julie noted. Stars and medals and the armbands were a brilliant red, with the black swastika in the middle and three white stripes around it. A military-style officer’s cap lay on the table within the man’s reach.