by Brett Adams
“Look, someone’s at the door. I’m sorry I can’t help more. I’m worried for Jack. But I have to go.”
72
It turns out that fury and fear don’t mix.
They’re oil and water. They don’t smear together to create excitement or apathy. They slip and bobble against your mind, tugging all of your will first one way and then the other.
“Dad, what are you wearing?”
Tracey. All of my fear.
We were seated at a table in the café that served the best Cheesecake in New York, all four of us, and it was the first thing Tracey said after she gave me a rib-creaking hug. The smell of her shampoo hung in the air.
“And, what happened to your hair?”
I swept a hand over my stubbly head, rubbed at the tangle of beard collecting on my chin. Its touch was surprising.
She reached across and plucked gently at my shirt.
“You look like something straight out of Greenwich Village. And—oh, my gosh!” She leaned forward, gaze intense. “Are you missing a tooth?”
“He’s a gypsy-poet.” It was the first thing Hiero had said. “Aren’t you, Jack.”
“Are you okay, Dad?” Tracey’s eyes squinted with concern. “You look piqued.”
And still my mouth refused to speak. My thoughts were a tornado of questions, and lying at its center, a single question: How? How could it have come to this? How was it I was sitting in a New York café across a table from the person I hated the most in all the universe, and next to him, the one I loved the most?
Out on the street, before the ghostwriter had guided me to the café entrance, he instructed me. “Play along, Jack. Play nice. Give it away and your daughter dies.”
I looked properly at my daughter, in the flesh, for the first time since she had visited me in Perth three years ago.
She had grown. She was a woman. Not even I could see the child in her now. Her brown hair was its natural color, and fell in a curling cascade past the back of her chair. She wore a simple floral-print dress over tights—always Spring for Tracey, no matter the true season. A sweater lay in her lap. Her skin was clear and tanned, and over her nose the California sun had further etched the constellation of freckles. Her mouth quirked in an odd way, and her eyes rested on me, alive with the question of what I was doing there.
Saving your life, was the answer. For the moment. But as soon as I’d seen to that, the next priority would scream for attention.
My gaze flicked to the ghostwriter, to his laptop bag in which he’d stowed my gun. Could I snatch it away before he got the gun? He sat there, cap pulled snug and low, his fingers flickering away on his cellphone, seemingly oblivious to the rest of us. If I failed to snatch the gun, would he use it? Perhaps it was all a bluff. We were sitting in a café on a busy New York street in daylight. Surely he wouldn’t risk it.
But then, the ghostwriter was a completely new player. I knew nothing about him.
He was a little-d Deus Ex Machina.
I felt a momentary twinge of regret: what if, on that train from Vienna, I had stormed his compartment, knocked him out, ransacked his laptop? What might have changed? Might that have been enough evidence to convince Collins that I wasn’t the bad guy? Would Jane still be alive? Would Tracey have been kept out of it?
Perhaps this ghostwriter was insane. Or maybe Hiero had some hold on his ‘Ghost’ stronger than a lifetime behind bars.
My gaze drifted to Hiero.
Hiero. All of my fury.
I knew what he was doing. Writing the novel of a lifetime. With my life. And now he’d drawn Tracey into the plot, tangled her life in the skein of his narrative.
Hiero—Randall Todd, according to the London profiler. But to me he would always be Hieronymus Beck. US exchange student. Sharp of tongue, and gold of looks. Writer wannabe.
I took my first proper look at the boy I’d been chasing for seven weeks, and tried to square that experience with the person seated across from me now.
His hair was cropped shorter than usual. He wore brown chinos, and layers in different shades of green in place of his usual white t-shirt. But the smile and the gaze that kept finding me, they were the same I had faced every week in my office, as we talked novels, and lambasted or worshipped their authors, sometimes both in the same breath, and generally spouted crap.
But was he the same?
No, not the same. Our journey had wrought change on Hiero, too.
Maybe the differences were all in the eye of the beholder; I looked now with hatred.
Beneath his eyes were half-moons of faint purple. A speckle of stubble glinted in the café’s retro electric-bulb light where his razor had missed it. And his smile—it wasn’t quite the same. It needed attention. If, for a moment he was distracted, it fell away, leaving his face mannequin-blank.
So the writer-strain is telling on you, eh, Hiero? The thought gave me a curious buoy up.
Act Three, the ghostwriter had said. Act Three was the climax, the resolution. The end.
Well, that ending wasn’t written yet.
And while every book has an author, he is not the only one able to effect which words ultimately lie on the pages of the final manuscript.
Hiero had decided to edit my life. But two could play at that game.
What was Hiero’s climax? What denouement did he have in mind? What was the perfect resolution for his magnum opus?
Putting fear and fury aside, I concentrated, tried to spin up the wheels of an entirely different part of my mind. It took willpower that felt physical in its strain.
I tried to invoke again the author’s mind. Conjure the muse. Think Hiero’s thoughts after him. That I might anticipate, that I might reshape.
—And struck again the bane of every writer, the thing that had dogged my own novel down through the years: writer’s block.
What the hell did Hiero have in mind? I drew a big fat blank.
Act Three. It is the ratcheting up of the stakes to eleven. The final assault on the mountain summit. The dip of despair as the would-be-lovers are sundered and the against-all-odds reunion.
Act Three is a hopeless rebel assault on a planet-sized battle station, its destruction, and the birth of hope; it is the drawing back together of a sundered fellowship and an act of bravery that breaks an ancient evil; it is the showdown with a serial killer, in his domain, in the dark, when all hope of help is gone.
Hiero had left bloody fingerprints half-way around the world.
Rhianne Goldman in a bed in Perth, body bruised and mind enshadowed.
Li Min, lying cold in a stainless steel box in Hong Kong.
Annika Kreider plumbed into life-support in a Viennese hospital. Vegetable or vital young woman awaiting a coin toss.
And Jane Worthington. Stainless steel box number two, Oxford.
Student in my school.
Student in my faculty.
Student in my class.
Old friend . . .
Daughter.
The trajectory should have been obvious.
What an idiot.
The day I understood that Hiero’s next target was Tracey was the day that murder, having fully gestated, cracked from its egg, and took roaring possession of my heart.
Of course Hiero’s final prey would be my daughter. What higher stakes were there? Yet another of Aristotle’s inevitable surprises.
If I had seen this coming sooner, I could have spent my energy getting Tracey the hell away. At my urging, Kim would have done it. Come to New York herself, and dragged Tracey away. That woman has diamond bones and molten blood when she needs to, and she learnt she possessed them long ago, when Tracey fell prey to a different kind of evil.
I must have grimaced. “Are you sure you’re okay, Dad?”
“New York coffee,” I said, turned it into a smile.
“Won’t have to stomach it much longer, eh, Jack.” Hiero’s smile was back, looking a little less effortful.
I raised my eyebrows, non-committal. I had
no idea what part I was acting here. It felt like playing tag on a minefield.
“Don’t tell me you forgot?” said Hiero. “Road trip was your idea. You can’t beg off now.”
Road trip?
“Why didn’t you ask me earlier?” said Tracey. “I’ll miss the last day of lectures, but of course the answer is ‘yes’.” She beamed. “I still can’t believe it. I didn’t think you had a devious bone in your body, Dad—talking about next summer, when you knew you were coming to the US this year. And you cooked it up on the sly with—” She glanced at Hiero. “It’s ‘Hiero’ now?” He nodded, and her shrug told of a frightening familiarity with his eccentricities. “Anyway, you didn’t need Hiero for leverage. You know I love to hang out with you.”
Hiero smirked. I read more than simple amusement in the depths of his pupils.
Thinking fast, I said, “This screenwriter guy, McGee? Travis McGee?”
“McKee.” She knew I didn’t forget names, was used to bad Dad jokes.
“McKee. Is he that good?” She nodded, and thumped a thick stack of what I assumed to be seminar notes in her lap.
“I don’t mind waiting a day or two,” I said.
“But you were adamant,” said Hiero. The smile had gone. “If we don’t leave today, we risk not making the date.” He emphasized ‘the date’.
Playing tag on a minefield—in the dark, I amended.
Ghost glanced up from playing with his phone, and gave me a dead stare, daring me to protest.
“The date,” said Tracey with a mock shiver. “It’s kind of exciting.”
The bottom dropped out of the world.
My subconscious has been rolling on ahead of events and finally chose that moment to reveal to me what Hiero’s end game was.
73
Breaking her own rule, Marten thumbed the number into her phone.
She listened impatiently to background fuzz as the network sought to make the connection, willing someone to pick up. She had never called this number. She had to hope the geek in Perth, Australia, wasn’t lying to her.
The call tone cut out. The other end had picked up, but answered only with silence.
“Griffen?” said Marten.
“Here.”
Hallelujah.
But the lassitude in his response gave Marten pause. She didn’t know what she expected from this man, contacting him again directly, but it wasn’t apathy.
“It’s me, DCI Lacroix. Marten.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I have—wait. You’re not alone?”
“Uh-huh.”
So he couldn’t talk. Adjusting quickly, Marten took the story she had been about to spill to Jack in its entirety, and shook it until only the branches remained.
“I’ll make it quick. Just let me know if you need something repeated. Pretend I’m your boss, and switch to autopilot.”
“Okay, Kim.”
Fainter, a voice said, “Hi, Mum!”
Marten couldn’t believe her ears.
“Is that your daughter?”
“Uh-huh.”
Why wouldn’t Jack be able to talk in front of his daughter? If she was with him, she either didn’t know he was a fugitive, or had accepted his explanation.
Marten resisted the temptation to ask, and continued. “I’m in the US, and I’ve been digging into the life of our friend Hieronymus Beck, aka Randall Todd.”
“Sure.”
“You remember he was peddling some story about being descended from the Lawsons of Germanton, the famous Christmas murder. Well, I visited Germanton. He’s no Lawson. But—get this: he’s tried it before. Playing make believe for real. At least once.”
There was a pause as Marten waited for a response, but there was only silence punctuated by the occasional car horn.
“Are you in traffic?”
“Manhattan. We’re in a taxi.”
“Anyway, he’s done it before. There was a girl in Germanton, and she got mixed up with Hiero.”
A cough. Male.
“Wait—who’s that—?”
Marten didn’t finish the sentence. She was interrupted by a ping from her phone, announcing the arrival of a message.
She thumbed it open to find a single photograph. She enlarged it and tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
The image was taken at an angle, with one corner obscured by a dark blur, perhaps a thumb or finger. Three people sat on a seat, silhouetted by an overexposed blaze of light filling a window behind them. The back seat of a car, Marten realized. To be precise, a taxi. Jack had snapped a shot, presumably over his shoulder from the passenger seat, of those riding with him in the taxi.
Marten held the phone close and peered at the poorly exposed figures on the seat. In the middle sat a young woman. Her resemblance to Jack Griffen confirmed her to be his daughter. To one side of her sat a young man in a New York Yankees cap. It was pulled low, but his head was tipped back, and his eyes were closed as if he were resting. He was unfamiliar.
On the other side of Jack’s daughter, eyes open and fixed on the camera was a face Marten did recognize, albeit by secondhand experience, Hieronymus Beck.
The sudden confirmation of his existence shocked Marten. She recoiled from the photo as if his gaze projected physical force.
“Kim?” said Jack.
Mentally, Marten assembled the pieces, conscious of the silence and the need to speak. Jack Griffen was riding a taxi in New York with his daughter, an unknown man, and the man he accused of murdering two women and attempting to murder two more. He was on the other end of the line, calmly pretending that she, Marten Lacroix, was his ex-wife, and they were having a chitchat catch-up, while she, Inspector Marten Lacroix, was trying to tell him that she had found prior evidence of Hiero doing precisely what Jack had accused him of—warping reality to fit a sick fantasy. Only this time, the fantasy was as dynamite to a firecracker.
She took a deep breath, and spoke. “Message received, Jack. Hang in there. Good luck.”
A pause, then, “Eight years divorced, Kim, and your nagging will be the death of me.”
He chuckled, perhaps to lighten the remark, and hung up.
74
The burner phone was plucked from my hand, and I twisted my neck around to find it now in Ghost’s hand.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot to fix your battery. I know what’s causing it now.” With the hand not holding my phone, he unzipped his laptop bag, and from it produced a cable, which he plugged into my phone. Whatever he was doing, I had to assume the phone was his thing from now on.
If Tracey thought anything strange about it, she said nothing. She was looking through the window at something Hiero was pointing at.
“Park and 128,” the taxi driver grunted. It was the first thing he’d said in the fifteen minutes it had taken him to drive us from the café to the RV hire. The mountains and foothills of Manhattan skyscrapers had fallen away to an uneasy plain of pawn shops, and launderettes, and cookie cutter apartment blocks. Harlem.
The taxi came to a stop on the curb, at a slant, to the noise of honking traffic. Hiero, Tracey and Ghost piled out of the back. The taxi driver’s dull brown eyes rested on me, while the cab bounced slightly as the luggage was pulled from its trunk. Apparently I was paying.
For a moment I considered trying to alert the taxi driver to my predicament. But I couldn’t think of what to say—certainly not anything that would bring the cops aiming for anyone but me. So I fished into my bill fold and pulled out two crisp notes depicting Ulysses S. Grant, a hundred dollar tip, in the vague hope he might remember me fondly.
He took the cash, the brown gaze not even flickering, and was already gabbling to dispatch. Uber has done nothing to improve the mood of taxi drivers the world over.
On the pavement I found the others collected around our pile of backpacks. Tracey turned to me, and said over the scrape of the taxi’s tail on the curb, “Really, Dad? A Winnebago?”
The corner of Park and East 128 was
a car and RV hire yard. Behind chain-link fence sat a motley fleet of cantankerous looking rust buckets and aging Winnebagos. Hiero turned from gazing at the RVs, smiling like a kid who’d been told he was going to Disneyland, and gave me two thumbs up. I wanted to punch his white teeth down his throat.
Ghost coughed, reminding me of my part.
“Got to hit all the American clichés, right?” I said.
Ten minutes later, with the image of the manager’s hands full of a prodigious tip and face full of astonishment lingering in my mind, I was behind the wheel of a 2000 Winnebago Rialta. It had 80000 miles on the clock, a grumble in the low end, and maneuvered like a dump truck down roads that seemed like shopping aisles.
The feel of the wheel under my hands was grainy and sticky, but it answered to my command, if sluggishly. It gave me a small satisfaction. This RV was the only thing left in all the world that answered to my will. Everything else was going to hell while I watched.
Beside me, three feet away on the passenger side of the continental bench that was the front seat of the RV, sat Hiero. His manner seemed easier, the tightness around his eyes had faded. I guessed he was feeling pretty good about himself.
His master plan was nearly done, his narrative nearly told. All the main characters were finally together, on the other side of the world from where the story began—no mean feat. A wonderful talent, demonically applied.
Myself, Tracey, Hiero . . . and Ghost, although I had no idea how he fit into this. A ghostwriter normally didn’t enter the story, unless it was a novel by Phillip Roth.
We were on the road to the final destination. Nothing stood in the way of the climax. And still I had no idea what shape it would take.
No. That’s a lie. I had an idea of its contours. I simply quailed from examining them too closely.
My grip tightened on the wheel. I suppressed a momentary urge to plough the Winnebago off the road and into a street lamp or store front.
But Tracey was loose back there. A crash could kill her.
And if it didn’t, Hiero had made the situation painfully clear: if I did anything to threaten the forward progress of his story, any attempt to harm them or escape; if there was even one whiff of police. He would kill Tracey. Kill her and frame me. He and Ghost had a failsafe way to do it, he told me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
