by Brett Adams
If it was a bluff, it had succeeded. I was terrified it was true. It might as well be. I could not risk it.
Unless I could take them both out with one stroke.
“Take a left here.” Hiero’s voice broke me out of my daymare.
Obeying, I saw we were entering a highway that in the distance arched up into a bridge. We were leaving Manhattan.
We passed under a gantry on which electronic boards listed traffic speeds at what I guessed were points along the route. The current temperature and date were displayed in the top left. 53 degrees Fahrenheit. Thirteenth of November. A Friday.
Dusk was drawing down.
In two days it would be the Fifteenth of November.
My mind hit the date and careened off it like a bullet.
My thoughts drifted inexorably to the other side of the world . . .
November in Perth, Australia.
Late Spring, according to theory. But Australia for the most part, Perth in particular, doesn’t do Spring—except perhaps for an afternoon in September on occasion.
School would be letting out. Graduating students flocking to Rottnest Island, west of Perth, or south to Dunsborough. Letting hair down, drinking, hunting for hijinks that at least someone frowned at.
The campus of UWA would be breathing a collective sigh, even the lawns, the trees, the koi in the pond beneath Reid library. Researchers and staff would stretch their legs in the cafés, take their time, stroll between appointments without looking where they were going.
The days would seem somehow slower. Afternoons taking a little longer to come, and a little longer to cede to twilight.
I could picture myself in my office, frowning over supplementary exams that needed marking, for students who had received sudden diagnoses of incidentalomas. But for the most part, my thoughts would be turning to the novel that sat to hand, enticing me, condemning me. Reaching for the bottle in the bottom drawer, I’d take a steadier. Then another. What was good for Hemmingway . . .
I pushed away the memory of a chat with Hiero that threatened to intrude on the flow of memory and imagination.
My mind slipped further into the past.
November was a month that held its store of happier times.
My first communication with Kim that lasted longer than ten seconds happened in November. She told me not to stand on her saplings, so it was probably a twenty second conversation, but they got longer after that.
Walks along Leighton beach with Kim. The water chattering over our toes still crisp, clinging to winter’s cold, but the breeze racing over the sand now warm. The sun falling into the Indian Ocean in an apocalypse of purple, orange, yellow, and casting the massive freighters plying the port of Fremantle in silhouette. Days that each felt like the earth had been forged anew.
It was fourth of November 1993 that Kim showed me the pregnancy test with its three little bars that as good as spelled ‘Tracey’.
Tracey.
Distant past.
And now, in the near future, Hiero was going to draw a line through the life of my Tracey. For a novel.
Bugger that.
I failed her nine years ago. I wasn’t about to fail her again.
What could I do to screw with Hiero’s novel?
He must have caught the look on my face.
“You know Jack, there’s a bed back there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the RV’s living space, where Ghost was parked at the table with his ever-present laptop open before him. Tracey was seated in the cross-angle. “Hey, Trace,” Hiero called. “You feeling sleepy?”
“No?” she replied, confused.
I stole a look at Hiero. In reply, he simply raised his eyebrows. The implication—there were worse punishments he could inflict on me than the death of my daughter.
The smile I forced in return was a rictus.
“Imagine how this is going to spur your novel,” he said. “You’ve been stalled forever, admit it. I’m doing you a favor. Think of all the experiences you would have missed without my goading.” He ran an appraising eye over me. “But look at you now. You began a starchy, buttoned-down academic. Now you’re a card-toting gypsy poet.”
“My novel hasn’t been front and center.” All thought of it had vanished the moment I realized Hiero had drawn Tracey into his novel.
“But it has to make you laugh,” he said. “I’ve read your early drafts, remember? It used to be some literary wank. But then you recast it as a murder mystery, and planted your family in the middle of it under a lens.” He chuckled. “You were the one told me bad books tell us more about their authors than their characters.”
A sign passed out of sight above us. It had read: “Hackensack, three-quarter mile.”
Not exactly the Oregon trail, but we were heading west. And just like pioneers, some of us would be dead before we made the Rockies.
Well, that was Hiero’s plot.
With a glance to check he wasn’t watching, I laid a hand on the metal lying flush against the skin of my inner thigh. The RV’s spare key. It had lain there since I’d scooped it into my pants—and sweated through waiting for Hiero to ask for it—only minutes before, but somehow it still felt cold. Perhaps it was because it was the repository for my hope. Such a small vessel for such a mighty hope. I touched it gingerly, as if it were a seashell that might shatter at my touch.
Thirty seconds alone in the RV, and we would be free.
Just thirty. The time it takes to tie a full Windsor. Was that asking for too much?
Thirty seconds versus eternity. Would Hiero give us thirty seconds? You could flip a coin.
Yeah, fifty-fifty some of us would be dead before we made the Rockies.
I still didn’t like the odds.
75
“I’m telling you, it was Jack Griffen. Here, in Manhattan.” Marten looked in Grover Jackson’s eyes for a spark of recognition of what she was telling him, but he was barely listening. “He’s wearing a bow, Grover. Winding a claxon. Carrying a placard that says, ‘The FBI is incompetent.’”
Grover paused in the corridor of the FBI’s New York field office, 26 Federal Plaza, to hand a folder to a clerk, and turned to face Marten.
“Marten, you’ve been running on my meter for days.” He held up a hand to forestall her reply. “And before you start calling me a bean counter, let me put you in the picture. Things have changed a little since your stay with us.”
Stay with us? Marten chose not to be offended by the slight. There was a time Grover hadn’t assumed Marten was simply visiting.
“There’s that little thing that happened sometime before you headed back to the green isles called 9/11. Thousands dead? Or maybe you heard of Fort Hood 2009? Boston 2013? The FBI has doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism, tripled the number of analysts. Are you getting the picture?”
Leaning away from him, Marten framed an imaginary headline in front of him: “FBI intercepts intercontinental ballistic missile, Jack Griffen.” He twitched. “Sub-heading: Assistant Director Jackson lauded for tenacity in the follow up of murky leads.”
“Fine. I’ll give you a pass on data and intel.” Marten raised her hands in mock ecstasy of supplications answered. “But I’m not flying your sorry ass anywhere else. You can hitchhike from here.”
Five minutes, two elevators, and seven doors later, Marten was leaning over the desk of an FBI data analyst, musing at how fifty years had turned typewriter pools into digital intel pools. Not much had changed, except the twenty-odd heads bent over keyboards belonged mostly to males barely past the cusp of adolescence instead of women.
The particular head bent over a keyboard before her was covered in black hair that curled tightly over the scalp except for a round bald spot near the crown. The pattern reminded Marten of how her son, when an infant, had rubbed away a patch of hair on the back of his head. She quickly pushed away a pang of guilt. The intel operative that Grover had sent her to was Nick Alvero. She hoped this wasn’t some joke, and
that the similarity to her son’s infant head didn’t portend difficulty.
“Good afternoon—”
This was met with an upraised hand, while Nick’s head remained bent over the keyboard, gaze flicking out at intervals to inspect the effect of his rapid fire typing.
“Nowhere on this chance-kissed rock is it ‘good.’”
Momentarily taken aback, Marten thought again of her son, who was probably tucked up in bed, the memory of her husband’s lullaby echoing in his ears.
“My name is—”
“I know who you are. It is afternoon, I’ll grant you that.”
Still he did not look at her. His fingers were a blur on the keyboard.
“I need—”
“I know what you need. Satisfaction. Does this look like a place that serves satisfaction, Detective Chief Inspector Marten Lacroix?”
For the second time in bare seconds Marten was struck dumb. Nick didn’t seem to notice nor care. Then, in one swift motion, she bent over, seized the plug of the power board beneath his desk, and yanked it from the socket.
“Jeez!” Nick sprang away from the screen, rolling to a stop on his chair, and finally looked at Marten. “Ten seconds. Ten seconds and that auction was done!”
Placing each hand on the lip of his desk with deliberateness, Marten leaned over them and said, “In a moment I’m going to reach down and plug your toys back into the power. When I have done so, you are going to greet me with joy and listen to my instructions with the solicitude my rank and experience deserve, and then follow them as if your life, your eternal happiness, depended upon it.”
A smile quirked the corner of Nick’s mouth.
“And if I don’t?”
Marten’s eyes narrowed.
“I will hand you your ass in front of your colleagues.”
He swept a hand across a fringe that had long since receded.
“Chill. You can chill, Marten.” He jumped up from his chair, stole a chair from a nearby desk, ignoring the barbed glance of the young man behind that desk, and trundled it in front of his own by the standing Marten. He gestured for her to sit, then promptly prevented her sitting by bending over the seat cushion to peer at nothing Marten could see, and sweeping its surface with the palm of his hand.
Marten was still squinting at him as he returned to his seat, trying to gauge if he was mocking her. He had made her smile, so she decided she didn’t care.
“Jackson said it’s crap,” he began, “but to get what you wanted and move on to real work.”
“Wow,” said Marten drily. “Customer service is a real priority for the FBI’s IT section.”
Nick tapped at his keyboard again, gaze fixed on the centermost of three large flatscreens that curved around him like the cockpit of an airliner.
“We’re very customer focused. Director Jackson just has narrow criteria for who our customers are.”
“Jack Griffen—”
“Dr Jack Donald Griffen, of Nedlands, Perth Australia, forty-five years, six-foot-two, until recently sporting mid-length brown hair, with a penchant for expensive jeans and supermarket shirts.”
“Wait,” said Marten, suspicion solidifying into certainty. “That’s my profile.”
Nick smiled tightly. “Plagiarism is the truest form of flattery,” he said. “But that’s just my intro.
“This isn’t from your profile: Jack Griffen entered the US sometime between the 9th and 10th of November, likely landfall a water rat tie-up at Jacksonville, Florida, or St Augustine. He bought an old model brown Dodge, unregistered, probably from a dealer where he made landfall, and then drove an average of five hours a day until he entered Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel yesterday, double parked the dodge in Midtown, locked the keys in, and walked away. The dodge was towed. Subsequent to that we know he met with three people at a café in Chelsea this afternoon, and had something from the dessert counter and a coffee—we’re unable to determine if it was a latte or a cappuccino. The vision isn’t great.”
“Holy shit,” breathed Marten, earning her a scowl from the seat-owner opposite.
“Everyday shit,” returned Nick.
“How did you do that?”
“His daughter.”
“His daughter?”
“She held a Hell’s Kitchen hotel room with her credit card two weeks ago.”
“So?” said Marten, feeling like a wet-behind-the-ears cadet, but compelled to ask anyway.
“Well, you said Jack Griffen was here in the US. What were the chances he would be so close to his daughter and not see her? Worth checking at least.”
Okay. That was normal investigative grunt work, but—
Anticipating her next question, Nick continued. “We traced her phone’s handshake with the hotel’s free Wifi network leading up to today. The first two days were erratic—probably sight-seeing. After that, her phone left the hotel sometime around quarter past nine every morning, except for the weekend, and one other time—”
“Today,” said Marten.
He nodded. “So I poked around the anomaly. CCTV from the cross-streets south and north found her heading down Tenth Ave at quarter to three. I lost her two streets later. Cameras were out. She must have taken a lane.”
Marten felt a shudder of disappointment, forgetting that she already knew this story had a happy ending.
“Fortunately for us, she allowed her phone to connect to the café Wifi in Chelsea. We spotted its MAC address.”
“MacAddress?”
Nick laughed. “You make it sound like a burger. It’s M-A-C, media access control address. Every phone on the planet has one, and it’s unique. Baked into the silicon.”
Marten smiled. “The FBI must be on better terms with the spooks these days.”
“NSA needs all the friends they can get since Snowden pulled their pants down, and revealed they’re tapping everything.”
Everything. No, not that. Not yet. They had access to virtually every phone record in the US, every single phone call into or out of the Bahamas and Afghanistan, and via a program called XKeyscore, could interrogate anyone’s internet browsing history, searches, emails, and online chats for good measure—and all without a warrant. So far, they hadn’t cracked reading minds. That was the CIA’s bag.
“From there I found a camera capturing a sliver of café window. Miss Griffen ordered at the counter, then disappeared. I guess she found a table in back. After half an hour I nearly gave it up as a solo breakfast, when a young guy appeared. He took a table in plain view, and a minute later she joined him. I figured it was a date after all, and a waste of time.”
“Until Jack showed.”
“Yeah.” Nick’s brow wrinkled. “It drew my attention straightaway, because Griffen was with another guy, and they appeared to be arguing—it felt off. But—why am I telling you?” Abruptly he peppered the keyboard, and swiveled the screen toward Marten. “You can see for yourself.”
Marten leaned toward the screen. Four videos were playing, tiled within a window that filled most of the screen. Each offered a vantage covering part of an intersection, a slice of sidewalk, and shopfronts that shrank with foreshortening before they were occluded by a welter of tree canopy and shop signs. Cars sporadically raced down the street in one video, and sprang with mind-bending physics onto another, racing away at right angles. In the top corner of each video a string of digits marked the time, the last digits flickering in a white blur.
Motion in the corner of the bottom-left video caught Marten’s eye. A young woman stepped onto the sidewalk. Marten’s gaze flicked to Nick.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
The young woman on the video entered the café. Visible through the sunlight reflecting from its window was a short counter, a table and chairs. The young woman, Tracey Griffen, hovered at the counter. She didn’t fidget or play with a phone. She glanced a few times at the streetscape visible through the window, ordered, and moved farther into the café, out of sight.
Without asking, Marten reac
hed past Nick and grabbed his mouse. She placed the pointer on the video skip button and prodded it forward in thirty-second jumps. She knew Nick well enough now to trust that when he said half an hour, that was what he meant. She ignored the lone figures, pairs, and groups that seemed to materialize whole onto the sidewalk from another dimension, until—
There! Another figure appeared. Caught for a moment in freeze-frame, one hand outstretched toward the café door, head turned, gaze seeking over his shoulder, almost as if he knew he was being watched.
That face. Despite knowing it was coming, seeing his face was still a shock. Marten’s breath caught.
“You know this guy?” said Nick.
Does anybody know this guy?
“His name is Randall Todd. I’d dearly love to talk to him.”
“Oh,” said Nick, and something in his tone drew Marten’s attention.
“Oh, what?” she said, steel in her voice.
“Nothing,” said Nick, but a blush spread up his neck. Marten continued to stare at him as the seconds ticked by until, “Director Jackson said . . .”
“Yes?” but Marten had already guessed.
“That you . . . and, well . . . That you were desperate for someone to pin the murders on other than—”
“Other than Jack Griffen, because—what?—I have a crush on him? I’m carrying his baby?”
Nick laughed sheepishly. He seemed to want to join Marten in her joke. Problem for you, Nick: this isn’t funny.
Now it was Nick’s turn to lean toward the keyboard and prod the skip button. The video jittered forward until two figures leapt into the foreground. A young man with a Yankees cap pulled low, and a middle-aged man with sparsely-cropped hair.
“I don’t know who the Yankees fan is, but—” With a click of the mouse, Nick framed the pair and zoomed. “There’s Waldo.”
Nick seemed relieved to offer a different target for Marten’s ire.
Silent a moment, Marten studied the grainy image of Jack Griffen’s face. She had come to know it with a kind of intimacy—the intimacy the hound has with the rabbit. Or so it had been. She hunted different prey now.
