The product of German design, American manufacturing, and international investing, Zonda is on the verge of being about so much more than cars. The company has already agreed to a multibillion-dollar contract with one of the world’s largest airplane builders, military contracts are expanding, and, one week after a woman with a knife arrived to talk to Tara Beckley—and kill her—the company was to have its initial public offering. All has been trending positively for Zonda with the exception of one troublesome engineer who, in the months before the IPO, began to reach out to a handful of select individuals, informing them of rumors and promising documentation. What he could show, he told them, was the equivalent of the Volkswagen diesel-emissions scandal that cost the company billions in fines and led to the criminal indictments of nine executives. One of the world’s most exciting young companies had been built on a carefully protected lie, and he was prepared to share evidence of that or remain silent about it—whichever was more profitable.
“I’d love to tell you that Amandi Oltamu was noble,” Roxanne Donovan says to Tara. “But our early information suggests that he was only looking for a payday.”
This disappoints Tara. Donovan is right; Tara wants him to be noble. She wants to have his death and her own suffering wrapped in righteousness.
She won’t get what she wants.
“He made at least three offers,” Donovan continues. “Two were to people who had stakes in the company. Extortion efforts, basically. When those demands weren’t met, he went in a different direction. He contacted a rival.”
The rival, it seemed, had gotten in touch with a woman named Lisa Boone.
The source of the baby-faced kid in the black hat is less clear. He is the son of a killer, seventeen or eighteen or possibly nineteen years old, and Roxanne Donovan will say only that the Bureau is working on leads, many of them generated by interviews with Abby Kaplan. Lisa Boone is dead, shot on the railroad bridge over the Willow River where Tara had once nearly died herself, but the young killer is missing. The best lead there, Donovan tells them, involves a rural airport in Owls Head. An isolated hangar on the Maine coast, it serves as a touchdown point for the private-jet set. On the morning after the killing on the bridge, a small jet from Germany landed in Owls Head and refueled. Its lone passenger was an attorney from Berlin. The plane took on another passenger at Owls Head, a young man with a limp and one arm in a sling. The aircraft then flew to Halifax, and from Halifax to London, changing flight plans each time. Upon the plane’s arrival in London, the young passenger from America disembarked after informing the pilot that the German attorney was sleeping and wasn’t to be bothered. By the time the pilot discovered the man wasn’t sleeping but dead, the unknown American was gone.
While Tara was a feature story, the death of Dr. Pine received sidebar coverage. She thinks this is a crime, that all the nobility Oltamu lacked, Pine had shown.
She hopes that his family will come to see her. On the day that she lifts her right thumb on command for the first time, she uses Dr. Carlisle’s computer software to compose a short letter to Dr. Pine’s family. It is the first writing she’s done in this condition, and the words don’t come as easily as she’d like, but would they ever for a letter like this?
The Coma Crime Stopper isn’t sure.
What she is sure about is that the task of calling up the words is good for her. When she closes her eyes after that first bit of strained writing, she sees more of the green and gold light, sparklers and starbursts of it illuminating new rivers and tributaries, uncharted waters.
She writes again the next day.
Dr. Carlisle’s prognosis becomes a bit less guarded in the following days. More enthusiasm bleeds through, perhaps more than she’d like to show. Tara exchanges e-mail with a woman who recovered from locked-in syndrome and who has just completed her third marathon since the injury. She is an outlier, of course. But Tara watches videos of her race over and over.
She must become an outlier too. She owes them all this much. She owes Pine, obviously, but also Shannon, Abby Kaplan, and so many more. People she never met. A man named Hank Bauer. A man at a junkyard where her devastated Honda still rests.
She knows the journey ahead is long, and a good outcome is not promised. But she has so much fuel to carry her through it.
Weary but hopeful, she closes her eyes, flexes her thumb, and searches for those green-gold glimmers in the dark.
64
We’ll find him,” the investigator from Scotland Yard promised Abby after three hours of taped interviews and the review of countless photographs taken from surveillance cameras around the city of London, Abby having been asked to search the crowds for a glimpse of Dax.
When she considered Dax’s destination, the city that shared Luke’s last name, she couldn’t help but feel that it was a taunt. His silent response to the raised middle finger she’d offered that black hat. Somehow, she is sure that he saw that.
He was not in any of the photographs.
“How will you find him?” Abby asked the investigator.
“The way it’s always done: Patience and hard work. We’ll follow his patterns, learn who he trusts, and find him through them or when he makes a mistake. It will happen.”
Abby wasn’t so sure. She didn’t think the kid trusted anyone. And while she knew the kid made mistakes, she felt as if he would make fewer of them by the day, by the hour. Each moment was a learning experience.
Abby remembered the salute he’d given her in the dim dawn light across the river, just before the kid got back into Hank Bauer’s Challenger and disappeared. He’d been in three countries since then, and no one had caught him yet.
“He’s adaptive,” Abby said. “And I think he has big goals.”
The man from Scotland Yard didn’t seem interested in Abby’s opinion. “He’s no different from the rest of his family,” he said. “Which means that, sooner or later, he’ll end up dead or in jail. We’ll see to that.”
Abby wondered how long it had taken Scotland Yard to see to that for the rest of the kid’s family, but she didn’t ask. The last question she asked was the one she felt she already knew the answer to.
“What was his father’s name?”
“He had a dozen of them.”
“The most common one, then. What did most people call him?”
The investigator hesitated, then said, “Jack.”
Abby nodded, remembering the bottle of poisoned whiskey that the boy had presented to Abby and Hank on the night they’d met.
“And the last name?”
“Blackwell.”
“Blackwell,” Abby echoed. It seemed right. It suited the family.
“He’s quite dead,” the Scotland Yard man said in a nearly chipper voice.
Abby looked at the photographs of the boy contract killer, and again, she wasn’t sure the investigator was right. The man named Jack Blackwell might be dead, but his legacy was alive and well, moving through Europe like a ghost.
If he was even still in Europe.
“I’ll tell you this,” the Brit continued, “you’re bloody lucky—and so is Shannon Beckley—that you can drive like that. Put anyone else behind the wheel out there, and you’re both in the morgue.”
“You’re right,” Abby said, and for the first time she did not doubt the accuracy of the man’s statement.
Abby had needed the wheel for this one.
“Not making light of it,” the Brit said, “but it seems to have been rather fortunate for your reputation too, based on what I’ve seen.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Luke London thing.”
The Luke London thing. Ah, yes. When she didn’t respond, just stared evenly at him, he shifted awkwardly.
“I just mean in the media. Plenty of kindness from the same folks who crucified you before. Changes the narrative, right?”
“No,” Abby said. “It doesn’t.”
The man looked at her curiously. Abby said, “It all happened. Nothing’s
replaced by anything else. They fit together.”
“Sure,” the Brit said, but he didn’t understand, and Abby didn’t try to clarify. The wins were the wins, the wrecks were the wrecks, as Hank Bauer used to say. They all worked together. The only risk was in expecting that one or the other was promised to you. Neither was. When the starting flag was waved, all you ever had was a chance.
“I won’t waste it, though,” Abby said, and this seemed to please the Brit; this part he thought he followed.
“Good,” he said, and he clapped Abby on the shoulder and promised her that they’d be in touch soon. Abby was going to be important when they got the Blackwell lad in a courtroom.
Abby assured him she’d be ready for that moment. Then she left to drive to the hospital, where Shannon Beckley waited with her sister. Tara had therapy today. Tongue-strengthening exercises. Dr. Carlisle thought she was coming along well enough that spoken conversation might be possible sooner rather than later. She wouldn’t make any bolder predictions, but she’d offered this much encouragement:
She fights, and so she has a chance.
It was, Abby thought, a patently obvious statement, and yet it mattered.
She drove south to Massachusetts alone.
The coastal Maine sun was brighter than the cold day seemed to allow, an optical illusion, the sky so blue it seemed someone had touched up the color, tweaking it beyond what was natural. The Scotland Yard man had taken longer than expected, and rush-hour traffic was filling in. Abby drove at seventy-five in the middle lane, letting the impatient pass her on the left and the indifferent fall behind to the right.
Her hand was steady on the wheel.
65
The girl in the kayak is testing new waters. There are channels all around her, currents previously unseen that are now opening up, and some are less inviting than others, as dark and ominous as the mouth of a cave. Others show promising glimmers of brightness but are lost quickly behind gray fog. Still, she knows they are out there, and she has the paddle, and she has the will. She knows that she must be both patient and aggressive, traits that seem contradictory only if you have never run a long race.
She pushes east through fogbound channels, and then the current catches her and carries her, turns her east to south, and the fog lifts and gray light brightens, brightens, brightens, until she is flying through it and there are glimmers of green and gold in the spray.
Satisfied, she coasts to a stop. Pauses, savoring the beauty of it all, savoring the chance.
When she’s caught her breath, she paddles back upstream. The current spins and guides her, north to south first, then south to north. These are unusual waters, but she’s learning them, learning when to fight them, when to trust them. Each day she travels a little farther and a little faster.
She dips the blade of the paddle and holds it against the gentle pressure, bringing the boat around in a graceful arc. Now she faces the dark mouth of one of the many unknown channels looming ahead. So much of the terrain is unknown, but none of it is unknowable.
There is a critical difference in that.
She paddles forward boldly into the blackness, chasing the light.
Acknowledgments
Let’s start off with readers, librarians, and booksellers—who should always be first when it comes to author gratitude.
The team at Little, Brown and Company is the best. Thanks to Joshua Kendall, Michael Pietsch, Reagan Arthur, Sabrina Callahan, Craig Young, Terry Adams, Heather Fain, Nicky Guerreiro, Maggie (Southard) Gladstone, Ashley Marudas, Shannon Hennessey, Karen Torres, Karen Landry, and Tracy Roe. Everyone involved in the process of taking the book into the world is deeply appreciated.
Much gratitude to Richard Pine and the team at InkWell Management, and to Angela Cheng Caplan. Lacy Whitaker has done her best to make me presentable to the social-media world, which is no small task.
Thanks to Dr. Daniel Spitzer for his guidance and expertise.
Early readers who suffered painful drafts are always appreciated—Christine Koryta, Bob Hammel, Pete Yonkman, and Ben Strawn provided invaluable feedback and support. My parents always do, and always have.
And thanks to the Blackwell family. You’re the gift that keeps on giving.
Also by Michael Koryta
How It Happened
Rise the Dark
Last Words
Those Who Wish Me Dead
The Prophet
The Ridge
The Cypress House
So Cold the River
The Silent Hour
Envy the Night
A Welcome Grave
Sorrow’s Anthem
Tonight I Said Goodbye
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About the Author
Michael Koryta is the New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels, most recently How It Happened. Several of his previous novels—among them Last Words, Those Who Wish Me Dead, and So Cold the River—were New York Times Notable Books and national bestsellers. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has won numerous awards. Koryta is a former private investigator and newspaper reporter. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and Camden, Maine.
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