The Hunted

by Alan Jacobson

  “In his room, at the Academy.”

  “Room number?”

  “Two thirty-two West.”

  Knox picked up his phone and dialed the Academy. Waller and Haviland listened while their boss directed a nameless acquaintance to enter the room and disable the Ethernet port. “Make it seem like it’s a software glitch or something. I don’t want him to think it was deliberate.” Knox hung up and looked at Waller. “No more favors for him. You know what’s at stake. We need him focused. On Scarponi, not his wife.”

  37

  When the door slammed, Lauren bolted upright in her bed. The room was dark. She was dressed in her clothes—that much she could tell. But where was she?

  She was so disoriented. She rubbed at her eyes, but that just made them burn more. She swung her legs off the bed and realized her shoes were still on her feet. Although she had been sleeping, she was still exhausted.

  She felt around the room and found a wall-mounted lamp. The sudden burst of light made her eyes ache, but she could at least see she was in a motel room.

  Think, Lauren, think.

  Michael—cabin—gun—Bradley—plane. Okay.

  Just then, there was a hard knocking at the door.

  “Lauren, you in there? Lauren!”

  “Coming,” she said, stumbling forward.

  She peered through the peephole, then turned the knob.

  Bradley’s head was tilted in curiosity. “I tried knocking before, but you didn’t answer. I figured you weren’t back yet, so I waited.”

  “I was asleep. I heard a door slam and it woke me.” She found her way to a nearby chair. “I’m still a little out of it. What time is it?”

  “Seven.”

  “I remember getting back from the mall around five-thirty. I laid down and that was it, I must’ve fallen asleep.” She sat down heavily in the chair.

  “I take it Michael didn’t show.”

  Lauren rubbed her eyes. “It was one of the more boring days in my life. Sitting in a mall, watching the people come and go, isn’t the most intellectually stimulating activity in the world.” She rose from the chair and walked into the bathroom to splash her face with water. “If there’s one good thing in all of this, it’s been a hell of an effective treatment plan for my agoraphobia. The ultimate in cognitive therapy.”

  “I wish I could say my day was better than yours, but so far, my guys haven’t turned anything up. I hit some well-known places, even the Metro Police. Nobody knows anything, let alone seen him.”

  She dabbed at her face with a white towel. “So now what? Back to the mall tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we call doctors’ offices and hospitals.”

  “I feel so damned helpless. We’re in the same town and he’s one person among millions. Unless we hear from him, how are we going to find him?”

  “We’ll check your credit cards again. Maybe we’ll get lucky. If he’s charged something, we can interview the vendor, see if Michael mentioned anything about where he’s staying. It’s a long shot, but the idea is to assume nothing and investigate everything.”

  “If he had his credit cards, he’d know his name.”

  Bradley nodded. “Okay, scratch that. No, try it anyway. It can’t hurt. I’d also call your home machine, see if he’s left a message. Then check your e-mail. At the moment, our best lead will come from Michael himself. While you’re doing that, I’m going to go get us a couple of Cokes over by the office.”

  Bradley left and Lauren went to work. With her heart tapping out a fast rhythm, she picked up the phone and called home. But there were no messages. She pulled out her handheld PC and checked her e-mail. There was a message from Amber at Cablecast, but nothing from Michael.

  She sighed disappointment, clicked on Amber’s message, and began to read.

  Dear Lauren,

  Got your message about a security consultant named Nick Bradley. I never heard Michael mention him, so I checked with human resources. They said no one by that name ever worked for Cablecast...

  Paralyzed. Her hands, feet, face, her mind... she couldn’t move or think.

  Just then, Bradley walked in carrying two cans of Diet Coke. He put them on the table in front of her and turned to close the door. “It’s getting cold out there, wouldn’t be surprised if we got some snow.... Lauren? You okay?”

  She saw him reach out, his hand about to touch her shoulder, when suddenly she pushed back in the chair. “Stay away, Nick! Just stay away from me!”

  “Lauren.” He held out a hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  She reached over to the table and pressed the button on the small PC. His eyes, wide and concerned, followed her actions. But he didn’t move.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “Everything’s fine. I just don’t think I need your help anymore.” Her voice was laced with anger. If she had a brick, she would’ve thrown it at him. “You can leave, go back home. Send me a bill for your time if you want.”

  “This is insane. I don’t understand.”

  “Please, just leave,” she stammered, backing away from him.

  “No, I’m not going to leave,” Bradley said, his voice rising to meet the pitch of hers. “Not without an explanation. What’s gotten into you? Are you having one of your... panic attacks?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. It’s all in her head. I’ve heard that before. I thought I could trust you. Get out!”

  Bradley looked down at the PC, then turned back to Lauren. “Is it a message? Did you get a message?”

  She did not answer. Bradley reached over and pressed the POWER button and the LCD display instantly appeared, the e-mail from Amber still on the screen.

  “That’s none of your business,” she yelled.

  “Jesus,” he said, reading Amber’s letter. “No wonder you’re upset.”

  “You lied to me, Nick. If that’s even your real name. It all makes sense. You didn’t have any business cards at the Neighborhood Watch meeting. You’re not really a private investigator and your name’s not Nick Bradley—”

  “Lauren, calm down! Just relax for a second. This is ridiculous.” He held both hands out in front of him, palms to the floor. “First of all, I didn’t have any cards because I was out of them. I told you that. Second of all, remember how you got my number when you called me from that bar in Nevada?”

  Lauren looked at him. Her heart was still pounding in her ears. “I dialed the operator.”

  “That’s right. And you asked for Nick Bradley, and they connected you.”

  “You lied to me. You told me you knew Michael, that you worked for him.”

  “That’s right, I did know him. And I did work for him. But my name didn’t show up on the payroll because he paid me out of a discretionary fund. He didn’t know who in the company was in on the security breach. By keeping me off the payroll, I could do my thing without anyone knowing. Do you hear what I’m saying? So no one would know,” Bradley said slowly.

  She stood there looking at him for a moment, trying to sort it out. It made sense. What he was saying did make sense. But could she trust him? That’s the part that gave her the most difficulty.

  “I swear, Lauren, I’m here to help you. I want you to find Michael just as much as you do. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “What if you’re an accomplice of Hung Jin or Anthony Scarponi or whatever the hell his name is?”

  “Then I would’ve killed you already. You obviously wouldn’t be of any use—you don’t know where Michael is either.”

  She sat down heavily in a chair and covered her eyes.

  “Lauren,” he said as he carefully approached her.

  She held out her hand to ward him off. “Please, I just need some time alone.”

  Lauren kept her head down. A few seconds later, Bradley left, the door clicking shut behind him. She grabbed the nearest object—her purse—and flung it across the room.

  38

  The early-mo
rning sun was fighting through the slits in the narrow-slat venetian blinds of one of Bethesda Naval Hospital’s second-floor windows.

  Harper Payne sat in a blue-and-white gown on an examination table, the thin butcher paper wrinkling and crinkling beneath him as he shifted positions.

  He had been waiting for thirty-five minutes and was beginning to get restless. Although he had gotten through nearly three-quarters of the Bureau training material he needed to learn, there were still hundreds of pages of reports and trial transcripts to review. The last thing he wanted to be doing was sitting in a doctor’s office wasting time. Still, he had been looking forward to the neurologist’s exam because he wanted a more definitive explanation as to what had happened to him, why he had difficulty remembering things, and when his memory would return to normal. He had had yet another sleepless night, and the vivid images were becoming more frequent and defined.

  As he was about to slide off the examination table to look for a nurse, the door opened and a scowling man walked in. He was in his late fifties and the only hair left on his head consisted of tufts of gray above his ears.

  “Morning. I’m Dr. Noble.” He took a seat on the stool in front of the counter and started to jot some notes.

  Great bedside manner.

  “Dr. Assad gave me a report of his two visits with you, and I just received your medical records from your prior doctor’s office, Manfred his name is. Or was.” Noble hmmphed a few times while reading the chart. “Director Knox wanted me to take a real thorough look at you today.” He flipped to the back of the file, looked at a lab test. “Other than Dr. Assad, have you had an exam in the past six years?”

  “Wish I could tell you, Doc, but I honestly don’t remember.”

  “Hmm, so I’m told.” Noble continued to leaf through the chart. “How’s your memory been the past few days?”

  “I can’t remember,” Payne said with a smile.

  Noble sat there staring at him, his face a piece of rough-hewn stone.

  Payne cleared his throat. The man obviously didn’t have a sense of humor. “I’ve been getting some very vivid images. They seem to be from my more recent life. Nothing but fragments. A woman, a house, what I think is my car, and... well, some emotions, too. It’s hard to describe, but I sort of feel a sense of yearning for the woman I keep seeing in my mind. I think she’s my wife, but I don’t really remember much about her. I just feel drawn to her for some reason.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I got an e-mail from her, so now I know a little bit about my life after I left the Bureau. But I’m torn, because I want to talk to her, have her fill in the blanks. At the same time, I don’t want to know more about my recent past because it’d mean having to choose between my Bureau life and my life back home in some small town called Placerville. I made a mistake leaving the Bureau. Regardless of the risk, I shouldn’t have run from it.”

  Noble looked at him, his face a blank. “Do you need something from me?”

  “Need?”

  “Counseling. I don’t practice that area of medicine, but I can call in a colleague.” Noble reached for the telephone on the wall.

  “I was just making some observations. I didn’t say there was anything wrong. I just thought... no, everything’s fine.” Payne felt like a fool. This man obviously did not care about what he was going through; all Noble was concerned about was the clinical examination. What’s on paper, and what’s in the body. The black and white. Diagnosis and treatment. Refer him to someone else to deal with the esoteric, emotional baggage. It’s not my job.

  “Let me check that thigh of yours,” Noble said, having Payne lie on his left side. After slipping on a pair of latex gloves, Noble prodded the wound, nodded, and then sat down to make some notes. “It’s not my specialty, but it looks good, healing nicely. If you don’t get too gung ho with all that macho FBI stuff you people do, it’ll heal fine, with no residuals.”

  Payne sat up. “No macho FBI stuff, got it.”

  “Anything else bothering you?”

  “Sleep. I can’t remember the last good night’s sleep I had. And I don’t mean that as a joke. I think it’s probably related to the dreams, or fragments of memories, I’m having. I toss around until I finally wake up, and then I spend the next few hours lying there trying to make sense of what they mean.”

  Noble pulled his prescription pad from a pocket and scribbled a few lines of chicken scratch. “Valium, ten milligrams. One before bed. Should knock you out pretty good.” He handed Payne the slip and clicked his pen shut. “Any other problems?”

  Payne shook his head. “I think that’s enough.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Noble performed a comprehensive neurologic examination. Payne stood and hopped on one foot, smelled coffee grounds and cinnamon, smiled and frowned, and had his face poked with a needle. After that pleasant experience, he was taken through a mental-status examination. He counted by threes and fives, forward and backward, answered questions of general knowledge having to do with time and place, and ended with his recollection of the first thing that Noble had asked him during the examination.

  Finally, Noble had Payne lie back so he could perform a general physical exam. All the while, he was questioning his patient on a variety of topics with health-related implications: Any problems moving your bowels? Any unexplained night pain? Does the room ever spin? And so on.

  Noble jotted some notes in the chart, then placed an ice-cold stethoscope on Payne’s chest. He listened, moved it around, and listened some more. “Hmm,” he said, crinkling his brow and then thumbing through his patient’s chart, beginning in the front with the earliest entry.

  “Anything wrong? Did you find something?”

  The doctor shook his head. “No, nothing’s wrong,” he said in a voice devoid of inflection as he continued to read. A few moments later, he returned to the exam table and listened again to Payne’s chest for what seemed like several minutes. Payne was instructed to stand up, sit down, hold his breath, lie down, and jump on one leg.

  Noble made a few more notes, rose from his stool, then pressed a button on the wall. “Please send Jan in with a cart.” He released the intercom and turned to Payne. “Okay, I’m going to have a nurse draw some blood and take an ECG tracing of your heart. Radiology will then take you downstairs for an MRI of your brain, and after that you’ll be free to go.”

  Payne sat up. “Wait a minute—you found something. Something’s wrong.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Everything’s fine, Agent Payne. Don’t worry.”

  Payne looked hard at Noble, who broke eye contact. He doubted the doctor was telling him the truth. “At least tell me what you think of this amnesia, how long I might have it.”

  Noble clasped the file in front of his chest and folded his arms. “All right, I’ll tell you what I think. I’ve never heard of the type of memory loss you’re claiming to have. I’ve never seen such a case either in practice or in the journals. When someone has a head injury like what you’re describing, if it’s substantial enough to cause such considerable memory loss, it usually causes other neurological disturbances.”

  “In English, Doc.”

  “You’d probably be brain-dead or damn near a mental vegetable.”

  “Probably?”

  “I can only tell you what I know, Agent Payne. But, I can also tell you that it seems like every day I see something I haven’t seen before. There was a case I heard about on TV, of all places, that dealt with a man who would disappear for weeks at a time. Whenever he returned home to his wife and children, he’d claim that he didn’t even know he’d been gone. This went on for years. This neuropsychiatrist from Stanford they interviewed went on about episodic memory and procedural memory, and how you can retain one and lose the other. I’d never heard of that. I called him up, we chatted, and he quoted a dozen references for the condition. So, Agent Payne, just because I haven’t come across something in the journals I read
doesn’t mean it wasn’t written up in one of the dozens of others I don’t read.”

  Payne sat there, staring at the doctor, his eyebrows bunched together.

  “Medicine isn’t as much of a science as we’d like to think,” Noble continued. “Sometimes we’re just guessing, is all. Follow me?”

  Payne nodded. “Then the answer to my question is, you don’t know.”

  The door opened and a heavyset, middle-aged nurse stepped in, pushing a stainless steel cart that was supporting an electrocardiograph. “That’s right, son. I don’t.” With that, Noble walked out of the room.

  “Go on and lie back,” the nurse said with all the enthusiasm of a patient about to receive a tetanus shot.

  Arthur Noble sat down in his private office and poked out a phone number with his index finger. He leaned back in his leather chair and rubbed at his eyes with his left hand while the call connected.

  “Douglas, this is Arthur. I’ve taken a look at that package you sent over.” He slipped his reading glasses on, leaned forward, and opened Payne’s medical file. “We need to talk.”

  39

  The chill was still in the morning air when Lauren walked outside her motel room to take a breath and clear her mind.

  Bradley was standing out there, too, sucking a See’s chocolate lollipop. “A little raw, but a beautiful morning.”

  Lauren had a sweater on, but still felt the need to wrap her hands across her chest. “Sitting in a cabin in the Sierra wearing pajamas is raw. This is refreshing.”

  Bradley pulled the pop out of his mouth. “Guess it’s all a matter of perspective.”

  Lauren had spent the night trying to decide whether she could continue to trust him. She told herself she had not had any reason to distrust him until the message from Cablecast had upended his credibility. But he did have a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy. And Carla Mae, who had known him for almost two years, more than personally vouched for him—she damn near raved about the man.