Yet, at times, none of it seemed real.
She remembered walking toward the high school, taking her usual route from the college campus. She remembered the van following too close and stopping at the curb. The passenger door opened. The driver’s face was hidden beneath the rubberized Lincoln Howe Halloween mask. A man who definitely wasn’t Reggie grabbed her by the arm. The rest, however, was a total blur. Flying through the air and tumbling to the floor. A thick blanket of blackness over her eyes. A stabbing pain in her thigh like the jabbing of a needle. And finally, a weird, weightless sensation that numbed her body, the way she felt when she’d had her tonsils removed.
The next thing she knew she was waking up, her hands and feet bound, her mouth taped shut. At first, the blindfold made it impossible to discern whether she was really awake. When she closed her eyes, she saw nothing. Eyes open, nothing still. It was yesterday, or maybe the day before, when the blindfold came off for the first time. The sudden burst of brightness had overpowered her eyes, and when she finally focused she saw a man in a ski mask. She nearly screamed, but the gag prevented it.
By the fourth or fifth time it was becoming a routine, something to mark the passage of time, a ritual that reminded her she was still alive. The man would come and remove the cuffs. He’d lead her up a flight of stairs to the bathroom and remove the gag and blindfold, then leave her alone with soap and a washcloth, a toothbrush. Then he’d give her something to eat. It became a little less scary each time, but his ski mask definitely gave her the creeps. Even so, his voice wasn’t mean or anything. He was actually gentle and attentive to her needs, always asking if she was hungry or warm enough. After a few visits, she knew his voice well. When the men talked upstairs, she could distinguish his voice. So far, she’d been able to pick out three different voices. She couldn’t hear everything they said, especially when the furnace was running. But she’d heard enough to know that he was the only one looking out for her, making sure she was clean, fed, and comfortable. She’d even heard him threaten one of the other men, telling him no one was going to hurt the girl. Repo was his name. One of the men had called him Repo.
“Kristen,” she heard him say. “It’s morning.”
It was that Repo guy, and his voice made her shudder. She cringed as he gently removed her blindfold. Kristen opened her eyes slowly, then blinked at the ceiling. The dim light from the lamp on the dresser cast a nebulous glow across the basement. The shutter on the little window above the sink made it impossible to tell whether it was night or day. She had no idea if it was actually morning. She would just have to take his word for it.
Last night had been weird. He had talked for several minutes, exactly how long she didn’t know. The edge to his voice had made her nervous. He hadn’t said anything bad. But even if he weren’t a kidnapper, she would be inherently suspicious of any stranger who so desperately wanted her to believe she was safe with him.
Her eyes fixed on a crack in the ceiling. Standing before the lamp, the man cast a shadow across the bed, darkening her torso. She didn’t dare look at him, couldn’t find the courage to turn her head in his direction again. Last night, when he’d removed the blindfold, she’d caught a glimpse of him without the ski mask, and she didn’t want to see more. But as the silence lingered, she felt compelled to look, the way the young eyes of curiosity eventually peer out from the beneath the covers late at night.
Kristen Howe is not afraid, she thought, repeating her mantra. Then she turned her head a smidgen to the left.
She caught her breath, containing her fright. She’d seen the same thing last night, but it still startled her. The ski mask was gone. He was wearing a towel or something over his face, letting her see the top half of his face. She looked away and closed her eyes tightly.
Her hands shook as she wrestled with confusion. He was changing the routine, acting more friendly-like he wanted her to talk. She never talked to strangers, never talked to snakes. And she knew that “strangers” weren’t just the perverts who hung around playgrounds with slimy drool dripping from their chin. “Say no, walk away, and tell an adult”-that was the rule her mother had drilled into her head. It was a good rule to live by before you’d been abducted. But what’s a kid supposed to do after it happens?
“I’m going to take the gag off now,” he said quietly.
Oh, God, she thought. Another switch from the routine. Did he expect her to say something? Do something? Her body stiffened as he tugged at the tape, freeing her mouth. She struggled to repeat her mantra and remind herself she wasn’t afraid. But she was too scared to remember the simple words, let alone believe them. She could scream, but that seemed pointless. The only people who would hear were the other kidnappers, the mean ones. At least this Repo seemed nice.
Her heart fluttered. Screaming was a bad idea. He might panic and hurt her. Maybe he’d stay calm so long as she stayed calm-or at least if she acted calm. Acting-yes! That was the key. People always said she could sell snowshoes in Jamaica if she put her mind to it. By turning on the charm, she’d even managed to talk Reggie Miles into letting her walk to the high school.
Reggie? she thought. What happened to Reggie? Sweet Reggie. The grandfather she’d never had. The simple but wise old man who’d said Kristen was twelve going on twenty-one and destined to be a heartbreaker who could talk her way out of anything.
Maybe that was true. Maybe she could talk her way out of this mess, too, charming the snake into letting her go home. To do that, she’d have to talk to him. She’d even have to be nice to him. She might even have to flatter him.
No way! She was too afraid to pull it off, too afraid to speak. She was lost for the moment, paralyzed with fear. Her mantra, she thought-say your mantra. But the words wouldn’t come. Finally she heard it-a message from within.
Kristen Howe, don’t be afraid, said the voice in her head.
Her spine tingled. It sounded different this time, nothing like her own voice or that of her mother. It was a deeper voice-peaceful and soothing, one that flowed like a friend’s embrace from a faraway place, a safer place, a place beyond. It was only in her mind, but it warmed her entire body and calmed her fears, giving her the courage to do exactly what she needed to do.
She heard the voice of Reggie Miles.
“Time for breakfast,” said Repo.
A lump filled her throat. Did she dare speak? Listen to the voice, she told herself. Listen to Reggie. Her mouth struggled to form the words-any words, the first thing that came to mind. “Could-could I maybe have some cereal today?” she asked quietly.
“Sure, what kind do you want?”
“Froot Loops.” She cringed inside. She didn’t even like Froot Loops, but it was all she could think of.
“I’ll get some for you.”
A noise rattled above, startling her. A door creaked upstairs, maybe the bathroom or another bedroom. One of the other men was definitely awake.
Repo said, “I gotta go now. No matter what happens, you can’t tell the other guys we talked. Okay?”
She nodded timidly, then held her breath as he gently replaced the gag and blindfold. As his heels clicked on the wood stairs, she counted his steps. The door opened, then closed. He was gone.
That wasn’t so bad, she thought. She’d taken the first step, started a dialogue. Maybe this Repo really was her ticket out of here. Maybe he wasn’t just pretending to be nice. After all, she’d overheard the men talking upstairs, through the old floorboards. She’d even heard Repo stand up to the others, telling them he wouldn’t let them touch her.
Panic suddenly gripped her. She realized her mistake.
Kristen Howe is not afraid, she told herself, shivering at the thought of what the other snakes might do when Repo went out to buy her stupid Froot Loops.
The limousine stopped at the traffic light near Pennsylvania Quarter. Allison sat alone with her thoughts as she glanced at the mix of condominiums, retail outlets, and restaurants that had rejuvenated a three-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between
the White House and the Capitol, the district’s most famous parade route. Her stomach was still in knots from the outburst at her campaign headquarters. She still wasn’t sure if she had simply sounded off or if she’d actually just fired her campaign strategist with less than five days remaining to the election.
The outburst, of course, was a cumulative thing, which had begun with the photographs. Maybe it was true that Wilcox had had nothing to do with that bozo-looking character snapping pictures of Allison down by the river in Nashville. But she was less convinced that the Lincoln Howe photos had leaked to the press with absolutely no help from Wilcox.
She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. One thing, however, wouldn’t shake from her mind: the bad joke her running mate had made about Allison, “the scarlet letter president.” Life had become such a whirlwind since Kristen’s abduction, she’d almost forgotten that her precipitous slide in the polls had begun with the bogus adultery charges. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed the two incidents-the adultery accusation and the abduction-were too proximate to be unrelated. And Governor Helmers’s joke had actually sparked a theory on how they might relate.
She picked up her phone and rang Harley Abrams on his cellular phone.
“Harley, there’s something I have to show you. Can you meet me at Justice?”
“I won’t be back from Nashville for another couple of hours or so. What is it?”
“It’s-I can’t describe it. You have to see it.”
“Fax it to me.”
“You have to see the original, and I don’t want copies floating around anyway. It’s too confidential.”
“I’ve been known to handle a few confidences in my career,” he scoffed.
“This isn’t entirely business. It has to do with me, personally.”
There was a pause on the line. “Can it wait until I get back?”
“Yes,” she said, reeling in her excitement. “Barely.”
24
The office suite of the attorney general was on the fifth floor of the Justice Building, overlooking busy Pennsylvania Avenue. Unlike many of her predecessors, Allison had resisted the urge to turn her small private office into a self-congratulatory shrine. No plaques, commendations, or laminated personal correspondence from the president covered her walnut-paneled walls. A colorful impressionist landscape brightened one wall. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy walking on a New England beach. The furniture was early American, some period, some tasteful reproductions. Legal and literary volumes filled the bookshelves behind her desk. Perched above the door was a framed needlepoint inscription that her proud mother had stitched. It quoted the stone-chiseled motto outside the Justice Building, with an added parenthetical: “‘Justice is the great interest of man on earth,’” it read, “(and of at least one woman).” An eight-by-ten photograph of her husband graced her leather-top desk. On the credenza, next to the telephone, rested a small framed portrait of a younger Allison Leahy holding her infant daughter.
The intercom buzzed. “Mr. Abrams is here,” announced her secretary.
“Send him in, please.”
The door opened. Allison welcomed him, offering a seat on the couch. She took the chair facing the window, then laid an expandable file on the coffee table.
“This is what I wanted you to see,” she said.
Harley reached for the file, but Allison withdrew.
“A little background first,” she said. “Confidential background, I would add. What I’m going to tell you, I haven’t even told my husband. I feel since you and I talked last night that we have an understanding. A bond of trust. I hope I’m not wrong.”
Harley looked her in the eye. “You’re not wrong.”
She flashed a thin smile of relief, then spent the next ten minutes telling him about Mitch O’Brien, the awkward reunion at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach last August, and the disastrous follow-up a week later in Washington at the gala-including Mitch’s drunken blowup and her fear that someone may have overheard.
“About two weeks after that,” she continued, “I received this in the mail.” She removed a large manila envelope from the file. “You can see it was addressed to my home, marked personal and confidential. Since there was no return address, I brought it to the Justice Building the next morning to have it X-rayed. It checked out, so I opened it. And this is what I found.”
Her hand shook-just as it had the first time, more than a month ago-as she removed an enlarged black-and-white photograph. She laid it on the table.
“That’s me, obviously.”
He leaned forward for a closer look. The photo had been defaced. In bright red strokes, the letter A had been scrawled across Allison’s forehead.
“Obviously the artwork was the handiwork of whoever mailed me the photograph. As is the message on the back.” Allison flipped it over, revealing a handwritten message in the same red scrawl.
It read, Doesn’t stand for attorney general, bitch.
Harley looked up. “What did you do with this when you got it?”
“I just kept it.”
“Why didn’t you give it to the FBI?”
“Like I said, I get plenty of these threats. The last thing I wanted was a scandal that would have the FBI beating on my ex-fiancé’s door. I was pretty convinced it came from Mitch, who I saw as harmless. I just let it go.”
“So why dig it up now?”
“Because now I’m not so sure it’s harmless.”
Harley leaned back. “What’s your thinking?”
“I’m sure you’re aware that my recent political troubles didn’t start with Kristen’s abduction. They started with phony accusations of adultery after the last debate.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I figured that if this scarlet letter photograph related to anything, it might relate to the recent adultery scandal-which all started less than a month after I got this photograph. But then just this morning I overheard my running mate make this bad joke. A slogan, actually, that went something like this: Allison Leahy, the scarlet letter president-don’t think adultery, think abduction.”
Harley glanced again at the photograph. “So you’re thinking that when your secret admirer scribbled on the back of this photo that the A doesn’t stand for attorney general, he didn’t mean it stood for adultery.”
“It stood for abduction,” said Allison. “Maybe it was a warning or a foreshadowing of things to come.”
“Seems a stretch.”
“It does in the abstract. But think of it in the context of your theory that the same person who abducted my Emily also abducted Kristen Howe. Then it’s not such a stretch. It’s a bridge between the two.”
He stroked his chin, apparently warming to the idea. “Let me take everything over to headquarters for analysis. I also think we should track down Mitch O’Brien, find out once and for all if he sent it. Is he still in Miami?”
“As far as I know.”
“I’ll send out a couple of Miami field agents.”
“Let me at least try to reach him by phone before you call out the troops. The history is kind of complicated here.”
“I’d prefer to catch him cold. He is a lawyer, after all. Give a lawyer time to think about it, and they’ll never talk to law enforcement. But catch them cold, and they’re often as stupid as the rest of us. We don’t have time to dance with this guy. Time is of the essence.”
“Yeah,” she scoffed, thinking of the presidential election less than five days away. “You’re telling me.”
“By the way,” said Harley. “I’ll do my best to keep the history between you and O’Brien under wraps, but sometimes these things have a way of leaking. I just mention that, since you said you haven’t even told your husband about your…your recent interaction. He probably wouldn’t appreciate hearing thirdhand that your drunken ex-fiancé was virtually stalking you, professing his undying love for you one day and then cursing you out the next, maybe even sending
you threatening mail. He could even think there’s more to it than that.”
“I realize that,” she said with a sinking sense of dread. “I guess maybe it’s time Peter heard the truth. From me.”
General Howe entered the White House through the east side residence gate so as not to be seen by the press corps hovering in front of the West Wing, near the Oval Office. The president’s personal assistant led him to the Map Room, though he knew the way.
The last time Lincoln Howe had visited the inner sanctums of White House power, President Sires was midway through a tumultuous first term, urging the general to withdraw his resignation as deputy secretary of defense. Sires had assured him that the existing secretary was on his way out, and that the top job at the Pentagon would be his within six months. Howe had yet to declare himself a member of any political party. Although presidents sometimes did look outside their own party to fill their cabinet, Howe had chosen not to remain part of a Democratic administration once he’d resolved in his own heart that he was a Republican with presidential aspirations of his own.
Howe sat in the armchair near the fireplace. Over the mantel hung a small map of Europe with red circles and blue markers. The plaque beside it said it was the last situation map of the Allied and Axis armies that Franklin Roosevelt saw before his death, just weeks before the Nazi surrender. The general thought it fitting that nearly all great presidents had served in times of war or were themselves war heroes. Washington. Lincoln. Both Roosevelts. He was of the same great tradition. Sires, he knew, was not.
“I saw your speech last night,” said President Sires. He was wearing a dark suit and striped tie, his power look. He lowered himself into the matching silk armchair, half-facing Howe, half-facing the fireplace. “Very high drama.”
Howe showed no reaction. “It wasn’t intended to be dramatic. You just never know how you’re going to react in these situations. Until it happens to you.”
“Still, it surprised me. I’d always heard that Lincoln Howe is the kind of general who had learned from his experience in Vietnam. Never declare war without a clear set of objectives. Never fight a war you can never win.”
The Abduction Page 15
