Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  “So you’re saying the Romeros got to Markowitz.”

  “Or they didn’t have to because it could have been his idea in the first place. No one is saying Leopold Markowitz walks on water. He could be bent. He could be broke. He could have approached the Romeros for protection while he went about stealing the list. We won’t know until we get there.”

  “Are you saying if we find Markowitz, we find Penny?”

  “It’s a possibility, yes. If the Romeros are behind this-and I’m convinced they are-then finding Markowitz gives us the Romeros, and we’re that much closer to Penny.”

  “And how do we find him?”

  “WITSEC is convinced he’ll need a supercomputer to accomplish the decryption.”

  “If it’s one-twenty-eight-bit or higher, then, yes,” she said, interrupting. “It would be painfully slow, even on the fastest PC.”

  “And with such computers in short supply,” he continued, “that makes them a good lead. We have guys spread out from accelerators at Stanford to cyclotrons at U of M, Indiana, and Duke.” He saw a sparkle in her eyes. “What is it?” he asked.

  “By now, knowing you guys, you’ve confirmed where he last was seen?”

  “Stanford- Palo Alto, yes. Just before that, Wash U. And he was in any number of places before Palo Alto. We’re still chasing his travel, his finances, and the like. It’s a job even tougher because Justice is not eager to let anyone know he’s missing.”

  “But that’s stupid!”

  “Government work,” he said, as frustrated by it as she was.

  “What department at Wash U.?”

  “Planetary Sciences, I think it was,” he answered.

  “Makes sense. Weather prediction. That would be a Silicon Graphics or even a Cray. Those machines create processor reports, ways to determine a machine’s activity, even if they’re not showing Markowitz himself as having been logged on.”

  He welcomed her excitement, her computer expertise surfacing. “I’m assuming we’ve checked all that,” he told her.

  “I can’t just sit here,” she said. “Can you?”

  “No.” For one thing, he’d fall asleep.

  A look of defiance overcoming her, she said, “Good. Then let’s check for ourselves. I’ll need access to the processor reports. We can start at Wash U. ”

  “I can’t take you out in public.”

  “I thought the best place to hide a person like me was out in the open.”

  He felt himself losing ground. She had the will of seven. He felt a heat hanging between them, wondering if she felt it, too.

  “Trust me,” she said, “I’ve become something of an expert in the art of disguise.”

  He told her if she slept for a few hours, he’d consider it.

  She nodded her assent.

  Larson double-checked his BlackBerry. No messages. Rotem would understand his going AWOL, would contact him when he was certain FATF was safe again, the internal threat contained. Fatigue was getting the best of him, he realized.

  Hope brought him out of it. “The point being that if they aren’t going to bring Penny to me, then we’re going to find her without them. I haven’t spent a single night without Penny since she was born. Not one, single night.” Her lower lip trembled despite her efforts to keep it steady. “This is my first.” She looked up at him then, her eyes carrying anger, frustration, and a mother’s pain.

  Her hands were right there on the table, and seeing them Larson felt compelled to reach out and surround them with his, which he did. Of all he’d done that day, he considered this his biggest act of bravery. Hope did not pull her hands away. Instead, just as the awkwardness of the moment required him to let go of her, she looked up and they met eyes, and his hands stayed where they were.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The bathwater continued to rise, and Penny along with it. Lifted, it seemed to her, by the fingers of angels come to rescue her. Extremely cold at first, she’d managed one more bump into the faucet to make the handle point up at twelve o’clock, resulting in a lukewarm stream. Even so, Penny was cold, shivering cold, and she wanted out of the tub.

  At a little over the halfway mark, the rising water hit the overflow drain, forcing Penny to wedge her head in front of the soap dish mounted into the wall tile in order to then hold the toes of her right foot over the vent in the drain and allow the water to continue to fill.

  Water still seeped out, but there was more water coming in than going out. The tub continued to fill.

  She peed in her pants, into the tub, unable to hold it. Sight of the yellow stream motivated her. Soaked through, the duct tape had lost some of its stickiness. The tape at her knees came loose, her knees able to bend, her ankles wiggling.

  She hooked a knee, rolled over the edge of the tub and crashed onto the floor of the bathroom, face-first, a splash of bathwater following with her. As she sat up, she saw the water on the floor was pink. Blood pink. Her nose screamed with pain, and she screamed right along with it-a muted, worthless cry forced through a knotted sock. The thin puddle of water grew as she kneeled. A dead fly floated past. This all but yanked her to standing.

  Then, her knees giving out, she sank back and collapsed onto the toilet with a loud bang. Try as she did, she could not get hold of the chip of pottery she’d hidden in her sock. It took her several minutes to get feeling back into her legs. Her strength returned, she kicked and fluttered, and tried everything to break the tape at her ankles, but it held.

  Soaked through to the bone, more determined than ever, she rose, held her stance, and hopped toward the bathroom door, angling like a penguin to use her right hand, still taped to her waist, to try to open the door. Locked.

  She remembered the man with the scars reversing the doorknob. On her side of the door the knob now had a hole in it. But Penny knew such doorknobs. More than once she’d locked herself out of her room and then watched as her mother did the clothes-hanger-in-the-hole trick to pop the lock. Another time she’d used a paperclip.

  Penny spun, hopping like a rabbit. She looked for anything that might work as a pin or nail to shove into the doorknob and free the lock. And there it was, right on the bathroom counter: a thin piece of silver metal. She moved, and it moved. A mirrored reflection of her own belt.

  Her arms and hands held to her sides with tape, she nonetheless fingered the belt and drew it around her waist toward her fingers. The buckle caught on the first belt loop. But this proved close enough for her to deftly unfasten her belt with outstretched fingers. It did not go smoothly. She fell back onto the toilet twice, losing her balance, only to stand again and continue with her efforts. Finally, the belt buckle came open and Penny sprang forward, hopping a little to position herself before inserting the buckle’s metal tongue into the doorknob. She pushed and nothing happened. She pushed again. Click.

  She had to push her arm against the knob and slide down to make it turn. It took four tries before the door finally came open, the bedroom lit only by the shifting colors of the TV.

  Her face exploded into a smile: She’d done it. Better, she’d done it herself. Along with the fear, the dread of Him returning, came a gleeful sense of accomplishment. Usually Mommy did everything; told her what to do; made all her decisions. Somehow, this one act of floating herself out of the tub and winning her freedom was the best feeling she’d ever had.

  Wanting nothing more than to find her mother and tell her everything she’d been through, all that she’d accomplished, Penny hopped toward the motel room’s door, determined to open that one as well. She was on a roll; why stop now?

  She was just past the bed, past the TV bleating out its news, when the door seemed to jiggle.

  She stopped, frozen.

  The door didn’t just seem to jiggle, it was jiggling. And it wasn’t the loud TV making it move.

  She wanted to turn and head back to the bathroom, would have given anything to mop up the dark stain of bathwater that now loomed at th
e junction of the door, her wet footprints where she’d hopped across the carpet. But her legs would not move, would not cooperate.

  The door came open.

  Again, she screamed one of her muted screams.

  It wasn’t Him.

  In the blue flickering light of the television, she saw the blistered face and red dripping eye of a two-legged monster.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  By the time the morning sun set the Mississippi ablaze, broken only by the rolling brown Vs cut into it by slowly moving river barges, Larson and Hope were eating bagels wrapped in butcher paper and drinking OJ from plastic bottles in the second-floor offices of Grossman Iron and Steel, five acres of dirt dedicated to mountains of scrap metal. Beyond the yard, a massive twenty-foot wall had been erected forty years earlier by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back the river’s spring floodwaters.

  Skip Grossman was a rowing buddy of Larson’s from Creve Coeur Lake. Mike, who worked the graveyard shift and sat guard on the yard’s gate, knew Larson well enough to admit him. It wasn’t the first time Larson had stashed a witness for a few hours in this brickyard neighborhood that had risen from the Mississippi ’s banks at the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

  The two ate their bagels in silence, both lost. It was a matter of waiting now, until Washington University ’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department opened. Their hunt for Markowitz was about to begin in earnest.

  In its heyday, in 1904, St. Louis hosted a World’s Fair, the Olympics, and the Democratic National Convention all in the same year. Hundreds of stone mansions that had been erected during this golden era still stood in the area, including a long line of such homes along Lindell Avenue on the northern boundary of Forest Park. Immaculately kept lawns spilled down to what had once been a busy cobblestone thoroughfare.

  “You can almost picture the carriages, the gentlemen in top hats, and the Victorian women with their parasols,” she said.

  “Gateway to the West,” Larson said from behind the wheel of the Explorer as they made their way toward Washington University. “Anyone heading west resupplied here. It made it a very rich city.”

  At the far western edge of the park, just across Skinker Boulevard, the pale stone buildings of Washington University rose in dramatic fashion, showing off a neo-Gothic architecture that rivaled the Ivy League colleges. The buildings stood amid towering oaks, maples, and a few elms that had survived Dutch elm disease. Larson had attended its night-school MBA program, though he had dropped out in the middle of a difficult protection six years earlier-a protection he couldn’t help but be reminded of, given the woman next to him.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I was thinking back six years ago. And then I was thinking that Penny’s five years old.”

  She applied makeup to her face using the small mirror in the back of the sun visor. She slowly created the look of a hollow-eyed woman ten to fifteen years older.

  “Do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then find her. Take a good long look at her. You’ll know.”

  His chest tightened as his heart ran away from him at a full gallop. “I’ve known all along,” he said softly. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

  “And I’ve waited for you to ask.”

  “And I’ve waited for you to tell me.”

  “I thought it would be cheap of me. Manipulative. Unfair. ‘It’s your daughter, so do something.’ How could I say that?” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “Are you okay with this?”

  His throat caught. He found himself overwhelmed with wonder. Curiosity. Anticipation. “I’m great,” he managed to whisper.

  “Light’s green,” she said.

  He took an enormous risk by bringing her along. But it seemed a bigger risk to leave her behind and without protection. He could easily justify her being here because of her computer expertise, but what good would justification be if something went wrong?

  He drove.

  “Why haven’t they called?” she asked yet again.

  “What’s she like?” he asked.

  She pursed her lips, looked away from him, and attempted to conceal her eyes, now glassy with tears. “Not now. You wanted to know. That’s as far as I can go right now. Please don’t push me on this. The more I think about her…”

  He said, “Look… they probably don’t know what to do next. They never meant to have Penny instead of you. They tried to trace your phone and we cut that off, and now all that’s left is to hunt you down while we hunt them. They’re not going to try to negotiate Penny’s release until they’ve figured a way to beat us, and there is no way to beat us. They know that. We know that.”

  He pulled to a stop at the next light, the university now directly in front of them.

  She fidgeted in her seat. Larson pulled through the intersection and found a place to park. He shut off the motor, and she popped open her door.

  “Which one is Earth and Planetary Sciences?”

  “Macelwane Hall.”

  “Which one?”

  “We’ll find it.”

  She was out of the car. Larson climbed out, locked up, and caught up to her on the sidewalk. The neo-Gothic architecture towered over them.

  Her shoulders slumped, she trudged, head bent, up the incline.

  He caught up to her for the second time. “You came to St. Louis because of you and me. For Penny.” He waited. “Tell me why you came to St. Louis, Hope,” he persisted. “Did you want me in Penny’s life, or both of your lives?”

  “I didn’t choose it for the weather,” she said. “But do me a favor and don’t go all warm and fuzzy on me because I don’t think I can handle that right now. Okay?”

  He moved closer to her as they walked. He held his hand out to her.

  And she took it, their fingers interlaced. Entwined.

  Larson squeezed, and she squeezed back. Just for a moment it felt as if he were floating.

  “We can’t do this,” she said. “We can’t get everything all confused.”

  “Sure we can,” he said. “It can’t get any more confused than it already is; it can only get better.”

  “Later,” she said, increasing her pace to keep up with him.

  The Earth and Planetary Sciences office was staffed with a combination of salaried assistants and graduate students. The walls were lined with photographs of tornados and satellite images of hurricanes. Dr. Herman Miller, a man in his late sixties, had sad brown eyes, wet lips, and a runny nose he tended to with a white handkerchief. He wore a navy blue cardigan sweater populated with pills of yarn, some the size of bunny tails.

  “Why more questions about Leo?” he asked. “I spoke to someone just yesterday.”

  Larson introduced Hope as Alice. “She’s our contract I.T. specialist.”

  “We’re interested in reviewing your mainframe’s access logs,” Hope said. “Specifically, the past six weeks.”

  “And we’ve been looking them over, just as your guy asked. ‘No stone unturned,’ ” Miller said to Larson. “That’s how your other guy wanted it.”

  That was Stubby by the sound of it. Trill Hampton was too street-cool to bog down in clichés.

  Nonetheless, Hope and Miller got started, talking their own language. ID log-ons, pattern recognition software, spyware, key-trackers. Hope pushed for specifics each time Miller fired off too quick an answer.

  Miller asked rhetorically, “Could Leo Markowitz get in and out of the Cray and the Silicon Graphics without our knowing it? Of course he could.”

  “But if Markowitz is on the system, decrypting these records one by one, which we know for a fact he has to do because that’s the way he set it up in the first place-and there are thousands of records, don’t forget-then your processor logs are going to reflect that, even if they don’t tell you exactly who’s doing it.”

  Larson asked for a definition of a processor log, and at the same time both Hope and Miller met him squarely with
expressions of exasperation. He took a step back and let them go at it.

  A few heated exchanges later, Miller said something like: “If you want an exercise in futility, be my guest.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Lead on.”

  Miller, annoyed with her, walked down a hall covered with weather-radar printouts and time-lapse photographs of lightning. They passed through a steel door and down two flights of stairs that took them into a subterranean lab. They arrived at a door where Miller used his ID card to gain access.

  The expansive room was chilly and the equipment it contained-mostly rack-mounted black and blue and yellow boxes with thousands of multicolored wires-hummed loudly. Row after row of them. Wires and lights, routers and hubs, all interconnected.

  “Your networking,” Hope said.

  “Our routing center,” Miller answered. “One of three such hubs on campus. On any one day, we have around fifteen thousand PCs hanging on this system. Every student, every department that wants access.”

  Hope glanced down the long rows of machinery and narrow aisles. She studied the racked routers as Larson and Miller continued on without her. Eventually, Miller turned back toward her to hurry her along.

  Familiar with that searching look in her eyes, Larson placed a hand on Miller’s arm to silence him as he was about to call out to her.

  “The Cray is down this way,” Miller finally said.

  “Dr. Markowitz is a systems expert,” she said, repeating what Larson had originally told her.

  “A description that hardly does him credit,” Miller added from a distance.

  “He served as a consultant here?”

  “Yes. Our weather simulators, our forecasting modules.” He walked a few steps back toward her. Larson followed. “Leo is far more than a systems analyst. He’s a designer, a code writer. Custom apps, source code. He ramped us up to full integration. He identified nearly thirty percent more processor headroom than we thought we had. Stabilized the platform. All without touching the Cray.”