by John Altman
Nothing. The battery was dead.
Her head felt suddenly stuffy, stupid with despair.
Someone was coming down the sidewalk. A couple walking a pug. They glanced in her direction. Maybe they had seen the newspaper. Some kind of Photoshop. But why? Who? How? To what purpose?
Later.
She smiled. The couple smiled back. They passed.
Her smile fell away. She sagged.
Now what?
She might try hitchhiking. But hitchhikers were noteworthy. Rare enough to stand out.
She might steal a car from a driveway. But cars stolen from driveways got reported.
She could see how this ended. She was circling the drain.
Her eyelid twitched.
She had missed the window when turning herself in would have meant anything.
One more try.
A 2003 Honda Civic: no windshield, no plates, one crunched taillight. She got beneath the hood.
She ran a wire to the battery, forced the steering lock, found the solenoid, stripped two more wires. This time, she didn’t bother holding her breath. She crossed the wires.
Nothing.
Her face relaxed into soft lines. Her fingertips tingled as if an electric shock had come through the wires. Maybe it had.
Giving up hope was, in its way, a relief. She could stop running at last. They would capture her and probably execute her. But first, she would get a real meal, a real bed. She could not remember her last real meal or good sleep.
She would walk over to Main Street and buy herself some food—that was what she would do. That line had not wound from the bagel store for nothing. She would buy a toasted sesame-seed bagel with cream cheese, and a carton of sugary orange juice. She would sit on a stool by a window counter—it was the kind of place that would have a stool by a window counter—and enjoy her bagel and juice as she waited to be noticed and then arrested.
Of course, it meant death for her brother. It meant dishonor for her children. But she was only human. She had done all she could.
A few minutes passed. She slumped behind the Honda’s steering wheel. No one else came down the sidewalk. No one showed up to open the locked office. The Adderall she had gulped before entering town started working. Layers of fatigue began peeling away. Beneath them, a second wind she had thought beyond her was gaining momentum.
She sighed. Miles to go before I sleep.
Wearily she opened the door of the Civic and climbed out of the car.
Brookhaven, NY
The pilot turned and said, “Go!”
Jim McConnell shucked off his headset and safety belt, then yanked open the door. He jumped down. When he turned back to help Dalia, rotor wash lifted his comb-over like a roof shingle in a gale.
A Southampton Village Police cruiser waited to bring them to the beach. A prisoner screen separated them from their chauffeur. The driver concentrated hard on the road despite the complete absence of traffic.
After ten minutes, they turned at a sign reading private property. no trespassing. violators will be prosecuted. A chain had been unhooked. At the end of the road was a small parking lot. They pulled in beside two windowless vans, both bare of agency logos.
The cruiser’s rear doors had no interior handles. They had to wait for their chauffeur to release them. Setting the cane carefully, Dalia stumped down a sandy path, past garbage cans and an outdoor shower, to the beach.
Her stomach was still unsettled from the helicopter ride. The organic tang of seashore made it roll queasily. She paused, letting her gut calm. Leaning against the cane, she shielded her eyes with one hand and looked out across the bay.
A barrel-chested man wearing an FBI windbreaker strode toward them. Police tape snapped loudly in the breeze. Two men wearing protective suits, rubber gloves, goggles, and helmets picked through a pile of wet wood on the rocky shore. A woman, also in an FBI windbreaker, took pictures. Far out above the water, a helicopter hung beneath the sun. Dalia glimpsed a frogman, surfacing briefly, getting his bearings before diving again.
“Bob Haynes,” the barrel-chested man said. His eyes seemed too close together. “You’re Charlie’s guys?”
He crushed Dalia’s hand with a trying-too-hard shake, then paid attention only to McConnell. “Underwater team’s drawing a blank. But ERTU”—the FBI’s Evidence Response Team Unit—“found this.” He gestured down the sand, where a small vinyl bag sat like an abandoned puppy among long strands of algae. “Weight bag for the downrigger. Empty now. Possible the loads went to the bottom. But we’re also one life vest short. Might have gone to the tide. But then, we’d expect to see it floating.”
McConnell looked thoughtfully across the bay, toward a lone house on a stretch of beach.
Dalia faced the other way, down the beach. She blocked out the scent of seaside, the distant hovering helicopter. Opened her senses. Trying to feel the truth of what had happened here.
A dark and moonless night. The murder of a friend. A desperate theft of a boat, hazardous rocks.
It was certainly possible.
But it was too perfect. You could almost see the brushstrokes.
She moved sand with the toe of her shoe. Gravel, shells, tiny pieces of quartz, countless dips and valleys—the beach covered its secrets nearly as well as the water did.
She tested the relative weights of different possibilities. This, her instinct said, was not how Song Sun Young died. Song had stayed ahead of a trillion dollars’ worth of equipment. She had escaped two high-security North Korean prisons before the age of twelve. Song had juche in spades. Song was master of her destiny. She didn’t get herself killed in a stupid accident.
Dalia set her cane. Dry brush ran alongside the path. Scowling, she paced the distance: step-clomp, step-clomp. Something invisible startled into flight at her passage, rustling branches.
Here was a whitewashed fence. The beginnings of scrubby forest. Pine trees. A blue jay hopping, head cocked.
A trillion dollars’ worth of equipment. ARGUS recorded one million terabytes of video per day. Operators could scan back over the entire thirty-six-square-mile overview at their leisure, cherry-picking a time and place after the fact, zooming in close enough to read a license plate. But ARGUS had been parked over Manhattan last night. The technology was worthless unless, as McConnell had said about Rainbird, you knew where to point it.
The path vanished over a low hill. She turned to look back down the beach, toward the talking men and the parking lot and the road beyond. Too close. Song, if she lived, would have wanted to gain more distance before rejoining civilization.
Dalia pressed on. The ground sloped up. Here were distinct prints, probably deer. The sun rose another degree in the sky. The day’s heat was building. But a few hours ago, it had been dark. Cold, too, if you had just swum in the North Atlantic. Dark and cold and foreboding. And dispiriting, Dalia guessed, if you had the blood of a trusted friend on your hands. But Song would have been determined. And maybe not so dispirited after all. Maybe Dalia had misjudged her completely. Maybe she was utterly pitiless.
A glint caught her eye. The years when she could easily bend down were behind her. She stirred it with her foot. Just a flattened beer can.
The beach was giving way to woodlands now. The path was straggling, slowly disappearing. Up ahead, sand become actual dirt. Underbrush thickened. Dalia could not go much farther. She came to a stop.
But Song was young, fit. She would have kept going. Into the woods. Dalia wondered what was on the other side.
She closed her eyes. Listening, scenting, feeling. She opened her eyes and then, despite the effort, despite the scary shift of her center of gravity, she half-knelt, leaning heavily against the cane, ignoring the stab of pain from her knee.
Here were old leaves, half-mulched, from last autumn. Ants, a small cloud of gnats, a caterpillar. No prints
, no sign of passage. But nothing that would have made passage impossible, either—not to a fit, determined young woman.
Master of her destiny.
Even as they had been laying a trap for the woman, she had been laying one for them.
Dalia straightened awkwardly, set the cane again, and went to rejoin McConnell.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
East Quogue, NY
Song watched the café from across the street. A scrappy-looking girl with a long red ponytail pushed a broom across the sidewalk. Next door, a man leaned against a brick wall, reading a newspaper. Even from here, Song could see the headline. The man wore a double-breasted suit with a pocket square. Every time he turned a page, he gave his paper a smart crack to straighten the leaves.
Song looked up the street, then down. She saw a Capital One Bank, a self-proclaimed gourmet deli, and a restaurant called China Delight. A storefront labeled New Horizons Kitchen and Bath, a gift shop called Calico Garden, and a side yard with weathered boats stacked on a dry rack. One traffic light, one small church. Through a line of trees, blue water sparkled.
She looked back at the New Moon Café. A small hand-lettered sign in the window read hampton jitney pick up here.
This was the sticks. It was entirely possible that no one was watching this tiny café. It was entirely possible that she could walk across the street and the man with the newspaper would not recognize her face. She could go inside, buy a ticket, and board the next bus without any trouble.
It was also possible that the man would place her, call the police, or attempt a citizen’s arrest. Or maybe the FBI was waiting just on the other side of that door. Or watching via satellite or drone or closed-circuit security camera. Maybe they had set up roadblocks on the highways. Maybe the man with the pocket square was their agent. But no. He was dressed too conspicuously. Wasn’t he?
She fixed the brim of the hat—eyes in the sky would not find her with facial recognition, at least—and then drew a deep breath and let it out.
She crossed the street.
The overdressed man registered her presence without much interest. The girl pushing the broom smiled. Song smiled back and went into the white clapboard café. A bell chimed softly. She saw no cameras, but she kept her face angled down anyway.
The tables and booths were unoccupied. She heard activity from a back room: clattering, scraping, clunking. Through a cutaway, she saw a slice of kitchen: kettle fryer, reams of paper napkins on shelves, doors labeled employees only and emergency exit—alarm will sound.
A metal sideboard held Proctor Silex hot plates, syrup-encrusted caddies, trays of flatware, bleary plastic water glasses. The front counter had a cash register and a menu under glass. A wooden rack just inside the door held brochures for various local businesses. And more newspapers—but not with the same headline, thank God. These were weekly locals, covering high school sports heroes, zoning disputes, requests for gently used donations.
She found a jitney schedule. Westhampton Line South Fork. Monday. She had missed the eight fifteen. The next bus left at ten fifteen. She found a clock shaped like a porthole, hanging on the wall beside an old Coca-Cola sign. Half an hour.
The bell chimed again. The redheaded girl came in, leaned the broom against the wall behind an antique umbrella stand, and went behind the counter.
Something in the kitchen started sizzling. The smell of bacon wafted out. Song’s stomach stirred, then grumbled loudly.
The girl laughed. “Table for one?”
Song paused; worked up a nice light laugh, and nodded.
Southampton, NY
Entering the spotless living room, Dalia became aware of her own unwashed clothing.
She glanced at McConnell, standing beside her, taking in the baby grand piano and the dried sea life on the walls. He had on the same sweater vest he had been wearing since Friday. Beneath it, his collar was noticeably dingy.
Dalia stood for a moment, feeling the room. Her quarry had been here. Seeing this same piano, same grandfather clock, same dried starfish and seahorses.
A few moments passed. Outside, the bay murmured and whispered. From the foyer near the front door the man standing guard gave a shallow cough. An edge of sunlight crept across the polished floor, touching the tips of Dalia’s toes. She caught McConnell’s eye and nodded.
They climbed the half-spiral staircase, Dalia gripping the banister hard. A gull outside gave a cracked caw. The first door they passed opened to a bed littered with stuffed animals. Song would have seen these same toys. She would have been reminded that Nina Brooks had a young daughter. As Song herself did. But that had not prevented her from shooting the woman, according to the medical examiner, from nearly point-blank range.
Dalia wanted to think the best of people. But she had misjudged Song. The woman cared about no one but herself.
Maybe.
They reached the master bedroom. Chalk outline, dried blood. Gray magnetic dust used to pick up fingerprints covered every smooth surface. Genetic material and prints recovered here had matched samples taken from Song’s Lexington Avenue apartment.
Dalia saw no television or computer. They wanted to keep it simple here, these city dwellers. They wanted a break from the plugged-in world they inhabited in Manhattan. So it was possible that Song had gotten this far without seeing the news.
She looked out the window. Sparkling bay, circling gulls, floating lighthouse, and, farther away, suspended helicopter.
She thought about the interview DeArmond’s men had conducted with Tristan Brooks in Manhattan. Brooks had last seen his wife on Sunday morning, when she went downtown to look at possible rental spaces for a fund-raiser next fall. Song must have called her friend. Doubtless told her a story. But Nina’s phone was missing, so this, too, was only a theory.
One thing was sure: Song Sun Young had stood here. Looked out this same window. Seen this same lighthouse, these same hazard buoys.
Exhausted, frightened, disoriented, operating a boat she had never piloted before, on a dark and moonless night, the woman might easily have made a very human mistake, running aground and drowning. It would be a happy enough ending.
But the brushstrokes were too neat. And Song Sun Young had juche in spades. Song Sun Young was master of her destiny.
You give her too much credit, McConnell had said.
He joined her by the window. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I think …” Dalia spoke slowly, feeling her way. “She stood here. She saw the lighthouse. The hazard buoys. She got an idea, staged a scene for our benefit. Throw off the pursuit.”
He nodded. “She’s got ten hours’ head start.”
“But she’d want to avoid traveling in any way we could trace. Not until she gained some distance. So maybe she’s still on foot.” Dalia noticed a wraithlike group of deer standing on the white sand. They boldly returned her gaze.
“Dogs?” he asked.
She nodded. “And checkpoints. And Coast Guard. And jitney stops, and train stations, and ferries. Get ARGUS out here. Scan every tollbooth camera on the Long Island Expressway. Police reports, too. If a car was stolen anytime in the past twelve hours, anywhere on Long Island, we should know. Hell, a bicycle. A skateboard.”
McConnell was already dialing.
East Quogue, NY
The jitney pulled up outside. Song took a final sip of coffee, put down money, and left her booth.
Outside, the huge green, black, and silver motor coach hulked over the tiny storefronts. A moment passed before the doors gave an asthmatic wheeze and opened.
A driver descended, trim and compact in tie and nicely cut suit. He accepted Song’s ticket, ripped it, and gave back a stub and an anemic smile.
She climbed four rubber-matted stairs. The bus was about half full. Heavily tinted windows screened out the bright morning sun. The air-conditioning was set too
cold. Passengers wore earbuds, oxfords, and crop tops, sweaters draped over shoulders. A quick survey revealed no evidence of the incriminating newspaper, yet she hardly felt at ease.
She found a side door and, at the far end of the long coach, a rear exit. But those would require the driver to open them. She took a seat three rows in, as close as possible to the front, in case she had to make a quick exit. She took off the fanny pack and set it beside her to discourage company.
The engine idled. The driver loitered outside.
She exhaled.
A painfully thin man came aboard. His eyes grazed the fanny pack. He tossed Song a nasty look, then shuffled by.
Still they idled. Song gazed blankly through her window. She could see a stretch of sidewalk in front of the café, a parking meter, a fuzz of moss growing in a crack. Two college-age young men, laughing, broadcasting hail-fellow-well-met, appeared first as shadows. They passed. Someone on the bus was listening to music through headphones. She could pick out of a faint, tinny melody.
“Mommy, can I have a snack?”
Sitting behind Song, across the aisle. “We just had breakfast, Aiden.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“That’s a no.”
“But I’m—”
“Aiden Montgomery Portis, if you keep whining I will take you off this bus this instant.”
The boy wound up, paused, and then burst into tears—not real tears, but the bratty, manufactured kind.
