by J. B. Turner
Meyerstein’s mind flashed back to the day the world fell in on America. She remembered watching the nightmare images on the big screen in her office. The dust cloud over Manhattan.
“Tell me about his medical history.”
“He was shot in the leg in Afghanistan, but he made a full recovery. Tough as hell.”
“Has he been involved in anything high profile?”
“Textbook stuff. We believe he headed up a CIA team that went into Afghanistan, to help the Northern Alliance topple the Taliban. He led Task Force 121, a Special Forces group answerable to no one, assembled from Delta, Navy Seals, CIA paramilitary operatives and others, into Fallujah to assassinate some hardline Baathists. Then they had to fight their way out, street by street, for nearly six hours, after two Black Hawks were downed during the rescue mission.”
Meyerstein pointed to an NSA guy, Kevin Warwick. “So, Kev, what about Reznick’s phone records? Has Fort Meade unearthed anything?”
“Untraceable number made a call to a cell phone which is registered in his name. GPS pinpointed his home in Maine. Someone called him a matter of hours before he appeared in Washington. We’re still trying to pinpoint who it was.”
Meyerstein turned and stared long and hard at the ‘ghost’ on the screens. “So where is he now?”
Stamper blew out his cheeks. “We know he took Luntz to the Clarence Suites, close to the St Regis. Night desk guy said a man matching Reznick’s description checked in under the name Withers, with a man who matched Luntz’s description. The body of what we believe to be an unidentified foreign national, without any ID, was found in one of two rooms booked under the name Withers. Forensics are on the scene. We’re checking surveillance cameras in the street as we speak. Still drawing a blank.”
Meyerstein let her gaze wander round the room. “Luntz is top priority. We must get him back. But to do that, we must find Reznick.” She went quiet for a few moments as the assembled agents scribbled or punched in notes on their iPads. She faced Stamper. “What about Luntz’s wife?”
“Two agents speaking to her right now.”
“What’s she saying?”
“She said he didn’t talk about his work.”
“That doesn’t seem credible. Are you telling me he didn’t mention anything about why he was heading to Washington?”
“Apparently not.”
“Check out his computers, files, records, everything on Luntz. I want to know about him from his friends, neighbors, people at the lab, I want to know about him. I also want Bangor field office to go over Reznick’s home, from top to bottom. We need to get into his life. Are there are cellphones? Laptops? Phone books, anything. I want to know everything there is to know about him.”
Stamper nodded in agreement. “I believe he’s got cousins that live in South Carolina. He’s also got relations in Nova Scotia.”
“Good. Let’s get onto the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency. We need to build up a complete picture of Reznick. Has he been in contact with anyone he knows?”
Meyerstein sighed as she looked at Stamper and knew both would be away from their families until the investigation was resolved. She hated that part of her job. She turned to face the assembled agents and sighed. “I want to make one thing clear. There must be no mention of our missing scientist or a murdered Fed. Am I making myself clear?”
The agents and specialists nodded. For the next fifteen minutes, the analysts gave their take on what was happening, sharing and sifting any trends, the log boards being updated all the time with a plethora of information on the case.
“OK, people, I want calm heads on this. Let’s get to it.”
FIVE
It was still dark as Reznick headed off the freeway at Exit 24 and into Annapolis, Maryland, Luntz still out of it in the back seat. The car hit a pothole and it jolted Luntz from his slumber.
“Where are we?” he asked.
Reznick said nothing as he glanced in the rearview mirror as Luntz’s head lolled like a rag doll.
“I said where are you taking me?”
“Never you mind.”
Luntz began to dry retch.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Reznick said.
“I don’t feel too good.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“No, I’m not.”
He dry retched again.
“Better keep it in.”
“I’ll try.”
Reznick sighed. He got onto Rowe Boulevard and drove on for a few blocks. He couldn’t wait to get shot of Luntz and let Maddox figure out what to do with him. A short while later he pulled up at the deserted parking lot at Gate 1 in the shadow of the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. He opened up Luntz’s door. “This is as good a place as anywhere to be sick,” he said.
Luntz stumbled out of the car. Then he fell to his knees and heaved the contents of his stomach on the asphalt. He retched a few more times before he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I’m sorry.”
“You finished?”
“I think so.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He had a ghostly pallor that wasn’t surprising in the circumstances.
“Please… can you tell me what you’re going to do with me?”
“You’re gonna be fine, trust me.”
“Why don’t you answer my questions? Why were you sent to kill me?”
“It’s nothing personal.”
“Who hired you?”
“Too many questions.”
Reznick buckled him back up and slammed his door shut, before he drove off towards the safe house.
“Why didn’t you kill me when you could?” Luntz asked from the back seat. “What stopped you?”
“You’re starting to bug me now. Like I said before: too many questions.”
A few minutes later, Reznick was driving through a near-deserted downtown Annapolis, past the floodlit Maryland State Capitol Building and over the King George Street Bridge.
The dead man’s cell phone rang.
He picked up. “Yeah,” he said, expecting to hear Maddox’s voice.
A long pause. “We need to talk, Mr Reznick.” It wasn’t Maddox.
Reznick realised it had to be an accomplice of the guy he had taken out. The last thing he needed was to get into a discussion with them. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
He ended the call and dropped the phone onto the passenger seat. But a few minutes later, only half a dozen blocks from the safe house, the phone rang again.
Reznick sighed and picked up. “I thought I told you–”
“You have something we want.”
“Not interested, thanks.”
“Don’t be so hasty, Mr Reznick. You need to hand him over.”
“I think we’re done.”
The man let out a long sigh. “We have something of yours, Mr Reznick. Do you want to know exactly what?”
Reznick felt his insides go cold. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you recognise this woman?”
A few seconds elapsed before a familiar voice came on the line. “Jon? Jon, is that you?”
Reznick’s chest tightened and a feeling of dread washed over him. He was listening to the fragile and frightened voice of his late wife’s mother. His thoughts were in free fall. He took a few moments to gather his thoughts. “Beth, what the hell’s going on?”
“Jon, I’m so sorry…”
“Sorry, what do you mean sorry?”
Silence.
“Beth, what’s wrong?”
A deep sigh before she spoke. “Some men… some men took me from the house and–”
The man’s voice came back on the line. “I have a gun pointed at your mother-in-law’s head as we speak. You give me what I want and you’ll see the lovely Beth again. But you must listen very carefully to what I have to say.”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Wrong answer. Maybe this will fo
cus your mind.”
A shot rang out down the line as Reznick drove on in stunned silence.
The man came back on. “Do we have your attention now? I hope so. OK, Jon, hopefully you realise that we are serious people. So, I’m going to come straight to the point. It’s not just Beth that we took. We also have your daughter.”
Everything seemed to slow down as he tried to comprehend what was happening. The word daughter sent Reznick spiraling into a private hell. His beautiful daughter. How could this be happening? Wasn’t she still at school? The chain of events was swamping him and he realised he’d gone into shock.
“She’s very pretty. But if you want to see her again, you need to do exactly as I say. I will call you back in two minutes.”
The line went dead as an unbearable emptiness opened up inside Reznick.
He pulled over on a tree-lined residential street four blocks from the safe house in the pre-dawn darkness. His heart raced as a black anger began to build deep within him, ready to devour him at any moment. Part of him wanted it to. But then, slowly, it subsided, as his training kicked in.
He began to think and reason, moving beyond a visceral reaction as he tried to figure out exactly how to respond.
The questions began to rain down. How on God’s earth had they kidnapped Beth and Lauren? She boarded at an exclusive school in western Massachusetts. But then it slowly dawned on him that she must’ve stayed over in New York with Beth for a day or two – which she did occasionally – before she was due to meet up with Reznick on Christmas Eve in Maine.
So, was she being held in New York? But that didn’t explain how those guys knew about his family.
He wracked his brains. He’d only had a handful of friends over the years, and they’d drifted from him since Elisabeth’s death.
No one, not even among his oldest friends in Rockland – guys he’d grown up with throughout the late nineteen seventies and into the nineteen eighties, when his hometown was a tough fishing port struggling with boarded up shops on Main Street and motorcycle gangs with their dogs running amok in the bars – had any inkling of Lauren’s whereabouts. He’d deliberately tried to shield her from his shadowy world. Even Davie McNeish, his closest friend since High School – who he used to drink beers with on the Rockland harbor breakwater when they were both fifteen – was kept in the dark. Davie, who now ran Radio Free Rockland, the only guy he felt he could trust with anything – who he’d called at crazy hours to talk about Elisabeth and who he used to occasionally hang out with at the Myrtle Street Tavern when he was back home – was none the wiser about Lauren. He’d kept it that way since Elisabeth had died. He wanted her to be away when he came home from a job. He was always in a black mood, and wanted to be alone. She didn’t need to see him like that.
The bottom line was that he didn’t want his daughter anywhere near him or his world.
His mind flashed back to an evening at the Myrtle. The only time the subject had been openly broached by someone out with his tightknit circle. Danny Grainger, a lobsterman and obnoxious High School classmate, who hated his life and liked to drink himself into oblivion six out of seven nights a week, approached Reznick and asked about his daughter. He had heard that Reznick was in the military. Reznick knew he was spoiling for a fight and would have gladly obliged. But he just smiled and said his daughter was fine, and thanks for asking, and left it that.
The answer’d seemed to placate Danny and he’d smiled his best drunk’s smile, put his arm around Reznick and proceeded to talk at length about how he didn’t recognise the working class town of Rockland these days. The once tough waterfront of fish-packing and commercial docks now transformed, especially downtown around Main Street and the harbor, with countless art galleries, museums, fancy restaurants and the North Atlantic Blues Festival. But Reznick hadn’t given him or anyone, that or any night, a clue about where his daughter was.
He knew that in his line of work, the best way to get to people is to get to their family. Easy targets.
Luntz cleared his throat loudly in the back seat, snapped Reznick back to reality. “What the hell is going on?” he said.
Reznick turned round and pointed a finger in Luntz’s face. “Not a fucking word.”
Luntz looked close to tears as he shook his head.
A few moments later, a chime tone on the dead man’s iPhone signaled a message. He opened up the inbox. A short video clip. His mother-in-law was lying tied to a pillar in a dingy basement or warehouse, hands behind her back, blindfold over her eyes. He noticed the emerald stone round her neck, the one her late husband had given her as a fiftieth birthday present. He watched her bony shoulders begin to shake, then her lip, before the gun was pressed to her head and her brains splattered onto a steel pillar.
He closed his eyes as revulsion swept over him. He shut down the message as his breathing quickened.
Reznick needed to get control back. Focus. He thought of Lauren. She was only eleven. He couldn’t be sure they had her. But deep down he sensed they weren’t bullshitting.
He needed to contact Maddox.
Reznick picked up the cell and punched in his number. Then, just as he was about to press the green phone icon to dial, he stopped. He didn’t know why but he just did. He needed to take things slow. He needed time to think.
The more time he thought of it the more it began to dawn on him that he couldn’t entrust anyone else on this. The less people who knew the better. He had to do this his way. This was his daughter. She was priceless. He couldn’t allow one false move that could jeopardise her. All it would take would be a phone call to Maddox, which they would be monitoring.
The cell phone rang again.
“If you don’t want the same thing to happen to your daughter, listen and listen good. You will take what I want to Miami. You will drive him there so as to avoid any problems at airports or trains. In just over twenty-four hours’ time, we will contact you on this number, and talk about an exchange. If you speak to the police, the Feds or anyone, you will receive the same video image of your daughter getting a bullet in the head. Don’t disappoint me, Jon.”
Then the line went dead.
The call was the beginning of a nightmare for Reznick, the voice like a dark whisper that echoed in his head.
Terrifying emotions clouded his shattered mind as he started the long drive south on I-95, the beginning of a fevered journey. What if they were about to kill his daughter? What if she was screaming for her life at that moment?
He imagined his beautiful daughter being pulled by her auburn hair and then slapped. Was she being humiliated?
He began to burn up inside. Nightmarish images seared into his psyche as if by a hot poker. His mind flashed back to Beth’s dreadful final moments. A woman who had suffered so much with the loss of her daughter, Reznick’s wife, on 9/11. A woman who had tried to rebuild her shattered life, despite not having a body to bury. A woman who had looked after Lauren in the years after her mother’s death. What a terrible end to a fine woman.
His mind flashed back to the first time Reznick was introduced to Elisabeth’s parents. It was dinner at the Café Carlyle in the Carlyle Hotel on the East Side, half a block from their townhouse. A pianist played jazz standards as the wine flowed, and Elisabeth draped her arm around him as Beth smiled.
Waves of guilt swept over him. He alone was responsible for Beth’s death and his daughter’s kidnapping. His shadowy world had encroached on his family.
He drove on as his mood darkened further. The anger coursed through his blood and veins, developing like a cancer, threatening to eat him alive. On and on he drove south.
Reznick pulled over four times during the sixteen-hour journey. Deeper and deeper, closer and closer. The man in the back seat, Luntz, tried to make conversation. But Reznick was too busy trying to figure out what the hell to do.
The hours dragged. He wondered if he was making a monumental mistake going it alone. Was he doing the right thing? Wouldn’t Maddox have been the guy to
call? It wasn’t too late.
On and on as doubts filled his head.
He drove on, tormented as he headed down through the Carolinas. Eventually he pulled off I-95 and drove into Florence, South Carolina. He still had blood relations that lived nearby although he had never met them. His mother’s bloodline could be traced back to Scots who had been forced off the land during the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century. They had immigrated first to Nova Scotia before they crossed the border, stopping off in Maine. His mother could trace her roots back to one Jimmy MacKinley, who had moved his family to Maine in the late nineteenth century, where he became a fisherman. The rest of the MacKinleys headed down to the Carolinas. Poachers, trappers and outlaws, unable and unwilling to be tamed. They lived on the land. Backwoodsmen. Renegades. It was their home. Wild people.
He pondered on that as he found a parking garage and stole a black Lexus with tinted windows. Afterwards, they went to a diner and ate in silence, before Reznick got back onto the freeway, headed for Florida. But as the day drew to a close, as he crossed the Florida state line, a plan had begun to formulate in his mind.
Simply turning up and handing over Luntz wasn’t an option. They held all the cards. What he needed was someone he could trust to keep Luntz safe and someone who could help him out.
He knew such a man. A man he’d trust with his life.
Just before midnight, Reznick turned off I-95 and headed into Fort Lauderdale, South Florida. Luntz was out cold in the trunk, and had been for the last hour, trussed up like a chicken. He pulled up half a block from the neon-lit and spray-painted entrance of the Monterey Club. The bar was located south of downtown, close to the commercial bars of Las Olas, next to a tattoo parlor, part of the same complex that sold classic bikes.
The owner of the bar was an old Delta operator, Harry Leggett, his best man at his wedding. Tough, funny and a complete nightmare after ten bottles of Heineken. Leggett was the only one from Delta his late wife, Elisabeth, had liked.
It was Leggett’s sister Angie, who worked alongside Elisabeth, who’d introduced her coworker to Reznick.
