by Jeff Abbott
Not a single word that Luke had been kidnapped, or a ransom demanded for his return.
Not a hint that he was innocent.
Not a breath that Henry knew he was in danger – only an implication that Luke himself was guilty.
We’re from your stepfather. Luke was sure now that Snow and Mouser had told him the truth.
The betrayal was complete. Not just abandoned, but framed. A rage rose in his chest. ‘I’m going to take you down, Henry,’ he said aloud. The words jarred him; he had never made such a threat in his life. In the quiet of the cottage the words sounded odd, even frail, lacking power. He didn’t know how to start. But he was going to stop this, stop Henry, force him to own up to what he had done. The reason for Henry’s betrayal didn’t matter; Luke could not understand it. Only the reality of it mattered.
What had his father said? You might be called to fight one day, Luke. Think of Michael. Think of strength and know you can win.
One day was now.
He heard the anchor say that the homeless victim’s name had not been released, pending notification of kin.
Eat, get your strength back, think, he told himself. Luke devoured the pizza. He knew if he went to the police, he would be arrested, charged at the least as an accessory to murder. Until he had information that could clear his name, a terrible danger loomed in contacting the police or in asking Henry for help. And how would he explain the Night Road? He had, after all, helped put it together. Would anyone believe that he didn’t know its true purpose?
Eric. Eric was the key. Eric had to know what was happening – why Luke had been grabbed to force Henry’s hand, why the homeless man had to die.
Luke turned off the television. The weight of what he had to do hit him like an avalanche.
His only choice was to hunt down his kidnapper and force a confession.
The victim, going after the kidnapper. Alone, without the help of the police or anyone else.
Luke finished the pizza. He washed the plate and his cup. As he put them back in the cabinet footsteps sounded on the porch.
11
He’d broken a pane of glass on the door facing the river to get inside the cottage. Assuming the owners hadn’t ventured into the torrent to check their weekend property, this was either the police, a neighbor, or worse – Mouser or Snow.
What would they have done when the truck crashed and burned? Run to the bridge to see if Luke was dead. Maybe they saw him surface, and then wash down the river. They could just be following the river – and heading towards the cottage.
He slid open a drawer and found a steak knife, held it close to his hip.
Luke had never fought with a knife, but he’d kept a small blade on him during his runaway days. Knives were easy to come by, easy to hide. He’d only had to use it once, just to show a tough kid in a Richmond alley who wanted his money, and then he’d run like hell.
It was clear he had been in the house: damp shower, his clothes and his shackles in the trash, the stove warm. He stepped back into the walk-in pantry, left the door cracked. He couldn’t hide and hope they just left. He’d have to make a stand.
A man’s hand emerged from under the gingham curtain on the back door’s broken pane, fumbled for the knob. Luke retreated to the kitchen.
The door opened, the volume of the wind rose slightly, then faded again as the door was shut. No call of hello, anyone here, you might expect from a neighbor. The intruder stood still, as if listening for Luke.
He opened his mouth to silence the rasp of his own breathing.
He heard the sound of a foot on floorboard. Approaching.
‘You must be scared to death,’ Mouser said from the hallway. ‘I sure would be. People only have so much courage’ – a pause, and Luke could imagine Mouser swinging an open, loaded gun into the first bedroom’s doorway – ‘and I suspect you’ve burned through all yours.’
All Luke had to do was reach the back door, on the other side of the kitchen, and run. In galoshes. Right. Mouser would put a bullet in him before he was down the driveway. ‘I just need to talk to you, Luke.’
The shelves of the pantry pushed against his back. Mouser was silent. Luke felt the heavy weight of the cans. Thrown or bashing into a skull, they would hurt. They did not require the closeness of the knife. It would give him two weapons and maybe Mouser wouldn’t think he had improvised more than one. He thought of putting the knife in the back of his pants, but there wasn’t room in the pantry to reach. He carefully stuck the knife up the sleeve of his long-sleeve T-shirt, the blade’s tip barely hidden by the cuff. Then he reached carefully above his shoulder and closed his hand on a large can of corn.
‘So scared,’ Mouser said, like he was cooing to a child. ‘Holding onto that truck must’ve exhausted you – swimming in that hellhole of a river…’ Then Mouser moved into view, across the lit inch of open door, one hand hovering over the stove, testing its heat.
Then Mouser looked right at the nearly closed pantry door. Raised the gun and behind it he wore a smile. ‘I spy, with my little eye, a running boy. That was a merry chase. Come on out.’
With one hand, Luke pushed the door open.
Mouser smiled. Now Luke could see his face clearly. He was bigger than Luke, a solid six-foot-six, body knotted with muscle. He had a boyish face – cheeks ruddy from the rain and wind. He wore a shirt streaked with dirt, jeans crusted with mud from the chase. His dark hair was cut in a burr and his brown eyes held a sick amusement but no warmth. Bags under his eyes showed exhaustion.
‘Drop whatever’s in your hand, buddy,’ Mouser said.
Luke dropped the heavy can of corn to the tiled floor. It rolled to Mouser’s feet. Mouser laughed at him. ‘Corn is a lethal choice. Step out slowly. Hands on head. So we can have a nice talk.’
Luke shook his head. The steak knife, parked in his sleeve, felt looser than he’d like, as though it might just slip out of its hiding place. The blade lay cool against his skin.
‘We need to have a nice calm talk. The trucker was… not planned,’ Mouser said, as if contrition would erase the idea of murder. ‘My partner got overeager.’
Luke said nothing.
‘I want you to tell me who kidnapped you, Luke.’
Luke said nothing. Make him talk, he thought. Make him tell you more.
‘I don’t repeat myself.’ Mouser slapped him. It was a hard, vicious blow that felt like it would part the flesh from Luke’s cheekbones. Luke slammed against the refrigerator but steadied himself back onto his feet.
Now Luke spoke. ‘Murder’s worse than kidnapping. You were going to kill me.’
‘Were we? I myself just wanted to talk to you. Now. Your stepfather wants you back in reasonably good condition. Don’t make me pound the living hell out of you, boy.’
‘I’m sure Henry’s worried I’m going to kick his ass when I see him.’
‘I hate family squabbles. So. Back to facts.’ He raised his hand for a second slap, fingers wiggling in anticipation, laughing when Luke flinched. ‘Who grabbed you?’
‘I don’t know his name.’
‘Just one guy?’
‘Yes.’
Mouser looked at him as though allowing himself to be kidnapped at gunpoint by a single assailant was a moral failing. ‘Tell me what he looked like.’
‘Let’s say I do. What happens then?’
‘Then I don’t beat your ass into the ground and I take you to your stepfather.’
‘You’ll kill me. You already tried. I got shot at in the woods and that trucker got shot.’
‘Are you sure?’ Mouser put on a hurt little frown. ‘That was sure a noisy storm. You’re exhausted. You don’t know what you heard.’
Luke decided to give Mouser enough to maybe get him to talk, but not enough to make Luke expendable. He realized this was no different from the online prodding he’d done with the extremists. Except he was facing a gun instead of a computer screen.
Luke cleared his throat. ‘The guy grabbed me at the airport. Forced me
to drive to Houston; he shot the homeless man.’ He paused. ‘Do you know who the homeless man was?’
Mouser said, ‘Keep talking, or I’ll break your nose. With your can of corn.’
First attempt deflected. ‘He made a phone call and we drove to the cabin. He took a photo of me, emailed it. We found a woman chained to the bed. He left me in place of her. Then he called my stepfather. Who stabbed me in the back.’
‘Yes, I’m aware of your Greek tragedy family dynamics. What else?’
‘He’s not my dad. My father’s dead.’
‘I don’t care. Everyone dies.’ Mouser slapped him again; the pain throbbed up his jaw, down his neck. He’d drawn close, his breath sour against Luke’s nose. ‘Now let’s stay on topic.’
‘He got a call earlier in the day from a British woman.’
Mouser frowned. ‘Who is she?’
Luke decided to keep Jane’s name to himself. If he gave too much, he might not be useful any more. ‘I don’t know. He never mentioned a name.’
Mouser tented his cheek with his tongue. ‘Physical description of your kidnapper.’ Now Mouser raised the gun. He didn’t aim it at Luke, but he inspected it, as though admiring its steel.
Luke took a deep breath. Eric was tall; Luke said he was medium height. Eric had dark hair; Luke said it was dirty blond and thinning. Eric had no accent so Luke gave him a thick Boston inflection.
‘I want to show you something.’ Mouser pushed him into a chair at the kitchen table. He reached inside his jacket and handed Luke a black and white picture, printed from a computer. It was Eric.
Mouser sat across from him. ‘Now. Revisit your description. Think hard. He look familiar to you?’
‘No.’
Mouser smiled. ‘You’re a psychologist, right? You know there are physical clues to lying. A shift of the eye, a twitch of the mouth. Especially apparent in the exhausted and over-educated.’ Now he aimed the gun straight at Luke. ‘Yes or no, you see this guy?’
‘Yes.’ He stared at the gun, wondering if the answer was going to result in a bullet in his chest.
‘Did he mention money?’
‘Just the insane amount of money he wanted from Henry.’
‘Did he mention any names? Dates? Say anything about a Road? Use the word Hellfire?’
This is where he decides to let you live or die, Luke realized. Luke bit his lip. ‘I… I can’t remember what all he said, not with you pointing a gun at me…’
‘I’m going to let you live, Luke. Trust me. Henry’s eager to see you, to explain.’
Trust me. Fat chance. Henry had said the same to him the last time he’d seen him. Trust me, we can change the world. Eric had said it too, assuring him that he’d be released if he cooperated. Trust was dead to him. ‘Tell me. Did I find you on the internet for Henry?’
Mouser studied him. ‘I don’t waste much time on the web. Others, yes, not me. Now. What names did he mention?’
‘Names. Yes. But… let me think for a minute.’ He could feel the weight of the knife hidden in his sleeve.
‘Concentrate. You’re supposed to be such a smart boy.’
Luke hunched over the table. He dropped his arms and he fake-shivered, and the knife began to work its way down into his hand, below the table’s edge.
‘He mentioned my stepfather… he mentioned a Night Road, but I didn’t understand, it was a name I made up for Henry…’
‘He did?’
‘Yeah, he said something about Hellfire… is that a code name?’ That was a lie but it worked.
‘Tell me what he said.’ The cool evaporated from Mouser’s voice.
Under the table, the handle of the knife slid into his hand. And for a moment fear stopped him. You have a knife, he has a gun. Seriously. How do you think this is going to end? ‘… Can I have paper and pen to write down everything I remember?’ He put a tired whine in his voice.
Mouser stood and walked past Luke toward the kitchen drawers and Luke drove the knife hard into Mouser’s leg. The knife sliced through the denim, the blade sliding into Mouser’s flesh.
‘Jesus!’ Mouser screamed as he doubled over in surprise. His hand instinctively grappled at the knife’s handle. But as Luke bolted past him, Mouser let go of the knife and got a steel hand on the back of Luke’s neck. He worked his fingertips into a claw that pushed expertly against nerve juncture and artery.
The agony staggered Luke. He reached back and twisted the knife’s handle and Mouser released him with a mix of roar and shriek.
Luke scrambled across the floor and he grabbed the heavy can of corn that he’d dropped and he lobbed it straight and hard at Mouser. The can nailed Mouser on the forehead as he tried to stand. Mouser collapsed to the floor again, staring at the tiles as though he didn’t quite comprehend the past minute.
Luke wasn’t about to risk getting close to the man again; he’d learned a hard lesson trying to fight Snow. He just thought: run. He ran out of the cottage. No car. Which meant that Snow might be driving up and down the river road, hunting him, same as Mouser.
He ran into the thickness of the pines.
12
The waiting was pure hell for Henry Shawcross. The police were gone, and he’d ignored the phone calls from the press after the brief statement he’d had to make on his front porch after the reporter showed him the Houston shooting footage. He was badly shaken; he hated to feel unprepared. He wasn’t going to speak to anyone unless it was Mouser or Luke or the kidnapper, calling to arrange another deal.
He’d watched the coverage of the disaster in Ripley for five minutes with a coolness in his heart; the crushing rains had scraped the chlorine from the sky. But the damage was done, the fuse of panic lit in the American heart. Politicians were demanding, in gusting words, to know that the cargo railways of rural America were safe, that the chemical plants around the country where chlorine was stored were secure. Of course all they cared about was covering their asses, he thought. That was all any of those jerks cared about.
But they – his clients, and his soon-to-be clients – all wanted to know what would happen next. His dozen policy papers released in the past few weeks all outlined a variety of potential attacks, some inspired by overseas trends in terror, some inspired, privately, by the ambitions of the Night Road.
Success was simple. Predict the attack; then the attack happens, and you have the ears of the most powerful people in Washington. That was the kind of power, of respect, he needed to wield. His blistering, uncannily accurate paper on a possible chlorine attack had made the rounds of the Washington power brokers last month; his voicemail was full of inquiries from potential think-tank clients. From the government, from private industry. All wanting his insights, all wanting his opinion on what the future would hold now, where the terrorists would strike next.
It should have been his shining moment. But Luke’s situation had tarnished it for him. The same pols eager to hire him would be watching the coverage of the shooting involving Luke, perhaps holding back. Which meant he had to distance himself from Luke and get his next papers out quickly so he would still be seen as the main, most authoritative voice on the next stage of terrorism. He would be respected again. He would be close to the levers of power in Washington. Luke, on the news, would fade. The country would have much more to worry about in the days ahead.
Henry remembered, with a pang, a magician his mother had hired to perform at his sixth birthday party. I don’t want a magician, Mom, and her answer had cut him to the bone: Well, Henry honey, it might make the kids want to come to your party. She’d said it without thought or malice; she was possessed of a brutal honesty and a steady disregard of others’ pain. Henry had inherited only the latter from her. So he’d sat on the cool cut grass, with neighborhood acquaintances who didn’t much like him and who he didn’t know how to make like him. While the kids who’d just come for the show and the squares of chocolate cake oohed and aahed, Henry had drilled his gaze on where the cheap-rate teenage magician didn’t wa
nt him to look: the hand in the pocket, the coin secreted between fingers, the intact paper curled up the jacket sleeve. He’d seen there was no magic, only distraction.
It etched a lesson on his brain.
Now Henry sat in his study in his Arlington, Virginia home, the chessboard Luke had given him for Christmas five years ago on the table, the pieces locked in battle. Henry imagined Luke slumped across from him, sitting the way he always did when lost in the game, leaning hard to the left on an elbow, hand trapped in his brown thatch of hair, tongue tenting his cheek while he thought, humming some rock tune Henry didn’t know. Henry played black against white, playing Luke’s side in aggressive style. He moved his own pieces with the timidity of a mouse. Luke’s bishops and knights closed in rapid conquest, his white queen shadowing Henry’s black king, defeat three moves away.
Exactly what you deserve, Henry thought. To lose and to lose badly. Just like how you lost Barbara. You’re going to lose Luke. You already have.
Henry rose from the chessboard, headed down the hall to get a cup of coffee. Steam danced above the mug. He added a dollop of milk. He took a fortifying sip. Mouser would find Luke, bring him to a safe place where Henry could question him and then make him understand. Make him see that the Night Road was the key to a golden future for them both – a road to respect, to power, to importance.
He stepped back into his study. From his left a gloved hand raced a knife to his throat, stopped the blade right above his Adam’s apple. Hot coffee, sloshing from his mug, burned his hand. Henry froze and his gaze slid to the face of his attacker. He stayed still because he knew this man would kill him without a moment for mercy.
‘Hello, Shameless,’ the man with the knife said. Henry hadn’t heard that nickname in years. The man’s voice was Southern-inflected, scraped from the bottom of an ashtray. ‘We need to talk.’
Henry forced his voice to remain calm. ‘Drummond.’
‘Let’s pour that hot coffee on the floor, please. I prefer you unarmed.’
Henry obeyed. Then dropped the cup. It shattered on the hardwood.
