Just as quickly as the question presented itself, however, it faded from her thoughts and lost all importance.
I want to go home.
She just wanted to go to sleep and wake up again in her own bed.
Please someone. Let me go home.
Chapter 14
“We’ve got your Lara,” Gavin told Jack as he slid into the passenger’s seat of the dark blue SUV.
It was two hours before dawn, more than a day since Jack’s aborted first run to reach Lara, about 15 hours since her appearance in his bedroom at the safe house. He’d spent most of the night in a hotel in Alexandria, waiting for Gavin to assign him another safe house so that he could go after her. Instead, his boss asked him to meet him in a mall parking garage in suburban Baltimore.
Gavin sat behind the wheel, alone, no back up agents along for the ride. Tall and lanky, Jack’s boss carried the aura of a street fighter with a Hamptons veneer. Jack had never known someone with hair that light of a blond who wasn’t also an albino. In the wrong environment, his coloring made him an easy target, but something very cold lived in Gavin’s eyes that would give even the worst of the Society’s enemies pause. It was a good cold if you could call it that, but Jack hoped he never had the misfortune to rouse it from its frost.
Gavin passed Jack his smartphone. “That her?” he asked.
A photograph of a woman of Scandinavian descent with fine blonde hair, though no where near as pale as Gavin’s, smiled out at the viewer. She wore a khaki uniform shirt with a patch on the right arm. The patch bore the silhouette of a sea bird.
Jack was blown away by the image. He hadn’t seen Lara smile yet. What a difference. He’d thought her stunning from the moment he’d found her, but the beauty he’d seen so far was a haunting one that hid itself inside, safely out of harm’s way. The woman in the photograph Gavin showed him appeared genuinely happy, open, ready to take on life’s adventures.
“How old is this photo?” he asked.
“About three years,” Gavin said.
“I knew it couldn’t be recent. It’s her, though,” Jack said. “Who is she?”
“Lara Freberg.”
“Where?”
“Here. Baltimore.”
Jack almost choked. He’d expected Gavin to say Nova Scotia, or San Diego, some faraway locale, not that a Lost One so desperately in need of rescue had been on his doorstep all this time. During the last three years, he’d found Lost Ones as far away as India, so how could he have missed one so close? Conventional dreamrunner wisdom dictated that the closer a runner was geographically to a finder, the stronger their signature; the easier they were to spot. To have not found her before now was gross negligence on his part.
“Idiot,” he cursed himself.
Gavin wasn’t the there-there-don’t-feel-bad type. He said nothing to make Jack hate himself less for letting Lara fall into the hands of the Greys.
“What does she do?” Jack asked.
“Works for a wetlands nature park about 30 miles from here on the Maryland shore. She gives bird tours to school kids. It was the patch you saw that made the difference in finding her online. Zeke said to tell you ‘Audubon guide.’ ”
“Not a seagull, then.”
“A piping plover.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. “Anyone report her missing?”
“Not so far.”
“No one has missed her at all? Not even work?”
“We haven’t wanted to draw attention to our interest in her, but Zeke contacted the park from a burner and told them he was calling about past due payments on her school loans.”
“Does she have school loans?”
“Of course, or else we wouldn’t have used that. Owes $36,731. She’s 60 days delinquent.”
“No surprise there. How much can playing tour guide pay?”
“Not enough.”
“So?”
“She’s missed her last two shifts. It was all he could get out of them.”
“Did they sound concerned?”
“According to Zeke, the woman he talked to sounded pissed.”
“Great. The Greys couldn’t pick a better target. No one gives a damn about her enough to wonder where she is,” Jack said. “Her place?”
“Close your door.” Gavin said and started the SUV.
Jack shut the passenger door and pointed his remote entry key at his own car. A horn responded, telling him the Land Cruiser locked itself.
Twenty minutes brought them to a modest condo complex in a middling neighborhood with a depressing lack of trees. The parking area had a gated entry, though no guard. Jack spotted a sign for a local security company displayed in the yard. Nice for show, but not much else. Getting past the keypad and gaining access would have posed no problem for the Greys, nor would outwitting any alarm control pad for individual condos.
They’d had a light rain overnight in Baltimore. Green, then red, reflected off the wet asphalt from a street signal changing several blocks away. Gavin drove by the complex, turned at the next corner and continued up a steep hill, where they parked in a lot for a boarded up dry cleaners. Locals used it for extra off-street parking, and the lot was three-quarters full, so Gavin’s SUV wouldn’t stand out. They had an excellent view of the condo complex, Jack using night vision binocs and Gavin a camera with telephoto lens.
“Hers is the third in from the left. Upper unit.”
Lara had left the living room drapes open. A light over the sink in the adjoining kitchen gave off the only illumination in the pre-dawn darkness. No movement inside.
Gavin used his cell to make a call, then put the phone on speaker.
“Talk to me,” he said.
A quiet, yet alert-sounding woman’s voice answered. “You’ve got watchers.”
“How many?”
“Just two, in a grey sedan about 100 yards north of the complex. They’ve been here all night.”
Jack swept the street below with the glasses. He found the Greys exactly where she said they’d be. Grey, government-issue type sedan with rainwater beading on the windshield. Two men, slim, in their 20s, grey suits. A lidless cup of coffee on the passenger’s side dash. The coffee didn’t steam up the windshield, even in 40-degree temps, which meant the beverage had gone cold.
“Got ‘em.”
“Where are you?” Gavin spoke into the phone.
“One block over from you on the same hill. They don’t know I’m here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Both have yawned so much they’re like a couple of mimes chewing the fat.”
“I’d like to get inside,” Jack said.
Gavin shook his head. “Not a good idea.”
“They don’t have eyes on her window, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Gavin’s female operative reported. “Their angle only gives them the gate, parking area, and stairs leading to her apartment.”
“Thanks, Mona,” Gavin said.
He ended the call.
“Gavin, I’ve got to get in there,” Jack said, taking up the argument again. “I can’t tell you how I could have missed her before this, but I do know her signature isn’t an easy one to recognize or follow.”
Tracking Lara once he’d caught her scent in the fields hadn’t taken hours; it had required weeks. Why? What made her so difficult to find?
“Maybe her gift is weak,” Gavin said. “Perhaps that’s why she could only manage the half-run she made to your safe house.”
Jack bristled at the suggestion his Lost One was weak. The amount of torture she’d endured so far was more than most people he knew could survive. He didn’t believe her gift to be subpar either. If anything, it was strong.
“No,” he said.
Gavin was taken aback by Jack’s stony reply. “Pardon?”
“No. She’s not weak. Her gift is not weak.”
“You know this because…?”
“Because it’s different. I can’t explain how or why, but her gift isn’t like yours or mi
ne. It interferes with her signature.” Jack felt the rightness of his answer, another piece of the puzzle of Lara falling into place. “It obscures it.”
To find Lost Ones, you didn’t look for them when they were active. You tracked them when their abilities were dormant, ideally when they were asleep. Following another dreamrunner on a run was dangerous and stupid. To trace someone through the convoluted nonsensical pathways of the fields, you had to ignore where you were going. Every bit of focus was required not to lose sight of the target. Following a Lost One’s run had left more than one finder stranded in that hellish maze for days, unable to find their way back to their own bodies. It was one of a runner’s greatest fears, getting lost. Stay lost long enough and the connection between a finder and his body stretched and grew thin to the point of breaking. Once the connection severed, you were done. In the real world, your body fell into a permanent, vegetative coma, while your essence, some would call it the soul, was abandoned forever to the slippery, inconsistent, non-reality of the fields.
Jack didn’t know for certain, of course, any more than he knew what it was like to die, but he couldn’t imagine a situation more prone to driving a mind insane.
“Her gift obscures her signature, how?” Gavin asked.
“My best chance of locating a Lost One is when they’re dreaming,” Jack said. “But she doesn’t dream right. Or, no, that’s a misstatement. Her dreaming state is unlike anyone else’s I’ve ever come across.”
Tracking Lara had defied yet another accepted rule of behavior. He’d been unable to pin down her location while she was asleep, because unlike the normal dreamer, her signature didn’t stay put in one specific corner of the fields. Hers didn’t cling in close proximity to her body. Rather, it wandered. Where it went, he’d never been able to ascertain, but it went fast and far. She’d led him on over half a dozen chases, all of which ended in him having to pull himself back before it was too late and he broke the tether to his body in the pursuit.
“Let me in there,” Jack said of Lara’s condo. “If I can learn more about her, it could help me better identify her signature and track her back to where the Greys are holding her.”
“No. Too risky,” Gavin said.
“Too risky?” Jack argued. “How can you say that when The House could be overrun at any moment? Or don’t you think her abduction is connected to the threat? Because I do. Taylor and Lara Freberg, both within 24 hours. You do the math.”
“The two events could be completely unrelated,” Gavin said. “They probably are.”
“Do you want to stake innocent lives on that guess?” Jack asked. “We need to know what the Greys know before it’s too late. Or are you going to give Lara the same low priority you are to evacuating our children and the ill to safety?”
Jack regretted the words immediately.
Gavin turned his face toward Jack and the first glints of dawn, ice blue light glowing on Baltimore’s eastern horizon, reflected in the man’s eyes.
Jack had pushed too far. If ever there was a moment in his relationship with his boss where he would be wise to fear that dark unknown the man carried around with him, this was it.
Well, you just officially screwed up. Back away gracefully and figure out some other way to get to Lara. Gavin is not the enemy. You know he’d never intentionally let you or anyone else down.
Similar to Jack’s conversations with him on the phone, Gavin allowed a long silence to develop between them before replying. Jack assumed he always spent those pauses weighing his options, sorting through variables, or whatever it was agent handlers did. Nevertheless, Jack wished he had the ability to read minds right now, other than his surprising connection with Lara, and know if he was about to be on the receiving end of something abrupt and painful.
Instead, Gavin smiled.
Jack didn’t like it.
Not a good sign.
The smile widened a fraction the moment he thought this.
Christ. Jack tensed.
Gavin’s cell phone rang.
Jack breathed an internal sigh of relief. Thank God for small favors.
Gavin answered.
“Guys?” It was Mona phoning them again. “Is that, um, Lara Freberg down there?”
“What? Where?” Jack and Gavin said in unison.
Jack brought up the binoculars and scanned the condo complex, not knowing where exactly to look.
“There,” Gavin said.
Jack didn’t need him to explain. He saw her himself.
Inside the condo, a woman passed from the kitchen into the living room dressed in an oversized tee and panties smeared and spotted with blood, a lot more blood than she’d been wearing the last time he’d seen her. Lara. She wove on her feet, hunched over, clutching one arm protectively to her chest while using the other to prop herself up and pull herself along from one piece of furniture to another. Her reactions were slow. She appeared dazed.
Or sick.
It was like a battering ram to Jack’s gut. What more had they done to her? It was obvious she had injured herself when touching the doorknob. Had she lost fingers? Or the full hand? He couldn’t tell from his angle. She held the arm too close to her torso. Either way, he was going to rip the entire arm off the man who’d sent her unschooled and unprepared to that safe house to spy for the Greys.
“They’ve released her?” Jack said.
He had to get in there. Now. Save her. Rush her to a trauma center before it was too late. But how, with those guard dogs down in the sedan? Jack could take them out easily without help, but how long until others showed up?
“I don’t understand,” Jack said. “Even injured, she’s still a commodity for them. Valuable. Why just dump her back here?”
Gavin didn’t reply. Instead, he trained the camera’s telephoto lens on her, studying her intently, following Lara’s every step.
“Is it a trap? To lure us?” Jack ventured. “I figured they stationed the two down there just in case anyone interesting—us, for instance—showed up wondering where Lara was, but–”
“No. You’re right,” Gavin interrupted him. “That’s exactly what those two down there are doing, hoping we’ll show up.”
Jack frowned, puzzled.
“They didn’t dump her here,” Gavin said. “That’s not the original. That’s Lara’s twin.”
“What!” Jack said. “You think she ran here?” He stared hard through the binoculars, trying to decipher clues in Lara’s stumbling form he knew he lacked the capability to see. He’d heard some in the Society could tell the difference between a dreamrunner and his or her twin, but he wasn’t one of them. Unless something obvious was wrong with the twin, as had happened with Lara’s half-run.
“Yes,” Gavin said. “But sending her here makes no sense.”
“Unless the Grey’s didn’t send her.”
“You think she did this on her own,” Gavin said, a statement rather than a question.
“Think about it,” Jack said. “She was kidnapped while sleeping in her own bed, by people who have spent the last day and a half torturing her. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Doesn’t understand dreamrunning. She may think she hallucinated the whole thing at the safe house, which would leave her terrified about her mental state. She’s injured, perhaps gravely, with no hope of being let free. If you were her, where would you want to go?”
“Home,” Mona’s voice came through the speaker on Gavin’s cell phone. Jack had forgotten she was still there on the line.
Lara passed out of sight of the open draperies, heading for another part of the condo. Her bedroom?
“Mona, did they see her?” Jack asked. “Do they know she’s there?” His entire focus had been on Lara, not the two Greys down on the street.
Gavin reached up, grasped Jack’s binoculars and forcefully lowered them so that Jack had to concentrate on his boss.
“Forget it,” Gavin said. He wasn’t going to let Jack go in.
“No,” Mona answered Jack’s question. �
�No reaction from our Greys. The one in the passenger’s seat just poured his cold coffee out the window. The other one is busy studying the side mirror. My guess is he’s wondering where their replacements are. But I told you. They don’t have an angle on the window anyway.”
“I’ll enter through the bedroom. I almost got there before,” Jack said.
“No!” Gavin put some bite in his bark.
Jack ignored him. Quietly, keeping his movements low key, he got out of the car, opened the rear passenger door and climbed in. He lay down across the rear bench seat, trying to make his body as comfortable as possible in a space not meant for bedding someone who was 6'4". Nothing like coming back after a run twisted into a cramped knot it would take minutes to unkink. Gavin watched him in the car’s rear view. His expression may have been neutral, but Jack had known him long enough to read him. His boss fumed inside. He thought Jack was being stupid, putting the entire society at risk.
Jack didn’t care. At the moment he couldn’t think of anyone but Lara. He’d let her down twice so far. He wasn’t going for a third.
“What if we have to move?” Gavin asked.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “I’ll find my way home.”
Chapter 15
Lara huddled beneath her favorite comforter, shivering violently. Her pain had grown so intense it now overwhelmed everything else. Even her terror of dying locked up and abandoned in her cell, couldn’t compete. She knew she no longer had the capacity to think clearly and her ability to keep track of what went on around her diminished by the hour. A high fever drenched her in sweat to accompany the blood on her clothing.
She had no idea how she’d gotten here. Was she really back home in her condo, lying in her own bed? It couldn’t be real. Was it another hallucination? She hadn’t dared look for her reflection in her closet mirror when she’d passed it, coming from the kitchen, for fear of what she might see, that ghostly version of herself she’d faced before in the room with the rust drapes and yellow lamp.
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