3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  “This is as far as I go.” Bennett’s face was impassive, but his fingers were firmly laced together on his lap. “Your ass belongs to someone else now.” His lips seemed to twitch in a grimace. “A word to the wise, Jack. This is a different arena. You go off the grid, they’ll for damn sure make you wish you were dead.”

  5

  Jack, ID’d at the front door, was taken in through the vast echoing vestibule, with its domed ceiling, huge ormolu-framed mirror, and ornate spiral staircase to forbidden upper floors. A crystal chandelier hung like a cloud of tears caught in the moment before it’s drops fall to earth.

  The familiar polished mahogany console with its gold-tipped cabriole legs, delicate as a fawn’s, stood to the left, a large bouquet of purple-blue hothouse irises rising from within its glass bed. To the right, through mahogany pocket doors, was the sumptuous drawing room used for teas given by the headmistress or for holiday parties. Jack stood for a moment, transfixed, as he stared in at the room’s yellow walls, yellow flowered sofas and chairs, white trim. He saw himself with Sharon and Emma, having tea with the headmistress. He remembered their hostess had worn an unfashionable dress. In sharp contrast to Emma’s shockingly short pleated skirt and formfitting V-neck sweater, the dress was ankle-length, covered with tiny Victorian flowers amid twining vines. In fact, it was Emma’s alterations of the college’s dress code—what the headmistress labeled subversive—that was the subject of the conference over tea, scones, and clotted cream. Jack had been proud of how his daughter stood up for her rights, though both the headmistress and Sharon had been scandalized. Inevitably, his gaze was magnetized to one of the sofas where Emma had sat, ankles primly crossed, hands in her lap, staring at a spot somewhere over the headmistress’s left shoulder, her expression for once solemn as an adult’s. She spoke respectfully when asked for an explanation, throughout seemed contrite. But this, Jack suspected, was merely a ploy to end the inquisition. Tomorrow, he was willing to bet, she would show up in class as outrageously dressed as before. The memory made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. From the moment the limo had entered the gates of Langley Fields, he was plunged into the past, and now he knew there was no escape.

  He was about to turn away when his eye was caught by a slight rippling of the window drapes. His escort cleared his throat and Jack put up a hand. Quickly crossing the room, he pulled aside the drape. The window was firmly shut, but there came to him the hint of a smell: mascara, makeup, something Emma had used on her face. Behind him, he heard a whisper. Burnished light seemed to fall on the narrow space between the window and the drape. A shadow moved, a whisper like wind through a field of grass. Was it his daughter’s voice?

  A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “Emma?” he said under his breath. “Are you here? Where are you?”

  Nothing. The smell had vanished. He stood for a moment, lost in time, feeling like an idiot. Why can’t you face it? he told himself. She’s gone. But he knew why. During the six months while Sharon was popping pills behind his back, while she and Jeff were finding shadowed corners to couple in, while his marriage was falling apart, he’d spent every minute of his spare time trying to piece together the hours before Emma’s death. The truth was, he hardly slept, using the nighttime hours to prowl, run down leads, talk to snitches. Emma’s cell phone, crushed in the accident, was no help, but he got a friend at the phone company to pull her records. He worked the list of numbers, building charts of her friends and acquaintances, but always the nodes and connectors circled back on themselves, like a snake eating its tail. He laboriously read the transcripts of her text messages for the previous two weeks, the longest the phone company kept such things. He scoured the hard drive of her laptop, looking for suspicious e-mails, links to Internet chat rooms, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous Web sites. It was like the dark side of the moon in there, the hard disk was clean of such ubiquitous detritus. If this had been a spy novel, he’d suspect it had been purged, but Emma was no spy and this wasn’t a novel. He spent hours with Alli Carson, braced the faculty and staff at the school. He interviewed every neighbor of the school’s in an ever-widening circle until even he understood he’d exhausted all possibilities. He’d run down all Emma’s girlfriends until the father of one had taken out a restraining order on him. He’d followed every possible lead, even ones that appeared improbable. For his tireless and often frenzied efforts, he’d come up with nothing. After six months, he was no closer to finding out what had frightened his daughter so thoroughly. She’d always been something of a fearless creature. Not reckless, so far as he knew—though he’d finally had to admit to himself that he’d known Emma not at all. The bitter truth, as Sharon had said, was that their daughter had a secret life from which, even in death, they were excluded.

  “Emma, I want to listen,” he whispered into the space between the curtain and the window. “Honest I do.”

  Moments later, amid an eerie silence, he returned to his escort and was taken away, down the paneled corridor hung with photo portraits of the college’s more illustrious alumnae, who had achieved fame and fortune in their chosen fields. Before he reached the end, the door to the headmistress’s office opened and a woman came out. Jack’s escort stopped, and so did he.

  Closing the door firmly behind her, the woman strode toward him with her hand outstretched. When he took it, she said, “Jack McClure, my name is Nina Miller.” Her clear blue eyes regarded him steadily. “I’m a special operative of the Secret Service and the Department of the Treasury,” she said with exquisite formality. “I’m assisting Homeland Security First Deputy Hugh Garner. The president has appointed him to spearhead this joint operations task force.”

  Nina Miller was tall, slim, proper. She wore a charcoal gray man-tailored worsted suit, sensible shoes with low heels, a pale blue oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. All that was missing, Jack observed, was a rep tie. This one was trying too hard to fit into an old-boys network that obviously wanted no part of her. She had the narrow face of a spinster, with a rather long, aggressive nose and a pale, delicate complexion that seemed as translucent as a bowl of light.

  She gestured. “This way, please,” as she led him to the end of the hall, opened the door to the headmistress’s three-room suite. It had been transformed into another world.

  The first room contained the desks of a pair of administrative assistants, as well as file cabinets in which were stored meticulously maintained documents on each student, past and present. For the time being, at least, the assistants were sharing space in their boss’s office. A forensics field crew laden with machinery Jack could only guess at, agents with the latest surveillance equipment, and what seemed like a battalion of liaison personnel now clogged the space. The room was sizzling with electronics from multiple computers, hooked up variously to satellite nets, closed-circuit TV cameras, and every terrorist and criminal database in the world. A battery of laser printers continuously spat out minute-by-minute updates from CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, NSA, DOD, Pentagon, as well as the state and local police in Virginia, the District, and Maryland. Uniformed people were making calls, receiving them, barking orders, exchanging faxes, making more calls. Their pooled knowledge was like a living thing, a city of shadows being built out of the ether through which information traveled. Jack could feel the low-level hysteria that gripped everyone in the room, as if they had the jaws of a rabid dog clamped to their throats. Their shared concentration, like a stale odor, like sardines too long in the can, made him want to draw back to catch a breath.

  Beyond, one could go left into the headmistress’s office proper, or right into a room she used for private conferences. It was into the latter room that Jack was led. His silent escort left him at the door, disappearing presumably to handle other pressing concerns.

  When Jack stepped into the room, a man looked up. He was perched impatiently on the edge of one of the two facing sofas separated by a glass-topped coffee table. Nina raised a hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled. �
��This is First Deputy Hugh Garner.”

  “Please sit down,” Garner said with a smile as narrow as his retro tie. He was a tall man with prematurely gray hair, severe as his smile or his tie. He had a face Jack associated with a late-night TV pitchman—smooth of cheek, shiny of eye, his manner confident or glib, depending on your point of view. One thing Jack could see right away: He was a purely political creature, which put him at odds with Jack, and therefore dangerous. “You need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.”

  He offered a sheaf of papers—forensic reports, possible witness interviews, search results, photos of everything that had been vacuumed up from Alli and Emma’s room. (Jack couldn’t help thinking of it in that way.)

  Nina Miller settled herself by scooping the sides of her skirt under her thighs. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive, completely noncommittal.

  Garner said, “First thing: We’ve sent out a news brief on the reason for government agents here, as well as the whereabouts of Alli Carson.”

  Jack, preoccupied with the reports, did not immediately respond. He had stood up, moved over to the window so sunlight spilled across the pages. He kept his back to the others, shoulders slightly hunched. He tried to relax his body without much success. The letters, words, clauses, sentences on the pages swam in front of his eyes like terrified fish. They swirled like snowflakes, spiraled like water down a drain, pogoed like Mexican jumping beans.

  Jack was having trouble finding his spot. Stress always did that to him, not only made his dyslexia worse but interfered with the techniques he’d been taught to work around it. Like all dyslexics, he had a brain designed to recognize things visually, not verbally. The speed of his thought processes was somewhere between four hundred and two thousand times faster than for people whose brains were wired for word-based thought. But that became a liability around written words, since his mind buzzed like a bee trying to find its way into a blocked hive. Dyslexics learned by doing. They learned to read by literally picturing each word. But there was a host of disorienting trigger words, such as a, and, the, to, from—words crucial to decipher even the most elementary sentences—for which no pictures existed. In his lessons, Jack had been asked to make those words out of clay. In fashioning them with his hands, his brain learned them. But stress broke the intense concentration required to read, stripped him of his training, shoved him out onto a rough sea of swirls, angles, serifs, and, worst of all, punctuation, which might have been the scratching of a mouse against a wedge of hard cheese for all the sense he could make of it.

  “There’s no way of knowing, however, how long our disinformation will hold up. On the Internet, where every blogger is a reporter, there’s a limited time we can keep something like this a secret,” Garner continued.

  Jack felt the others’ eyes on him as he crossed the room. He spoke up, more to distract himself from his growing terror than from a need to engage Garner. In fact, his fervent wish was for a sinkhole to open up under Garner and Nina Miller, swallow them whole, but no luck. When he looked, both of them were still alive and well. “How long do we have?”

  “A week, possibly less.”

  Jack turned back to the gibberish that spitefully refused to resolve itself into language.

  “You aren’t finished yet?” Garner said from over Jack’s right shoulder.

  “I’m sure Mr. McClure needs a moment to orient himself to our standards of methodology,” Nina said, “which are quite different from those of the ATF.” She walked over to Jack. “Am I right, Mr. McClure?”

  Jack nodded, unable to get his vocal cords out of their own way.

  “ATF, yes, I see.” Garner’s laugh held a rancid note. “I trust our protocols aren’t too difficult for you to follow.”

  Nina pointed to paragraphs on certain pages, read them aloud, as if to speed the process of familiarization by highlighting elements the team found of particular interest. Jack, his stomach clenched painfully, felt relief, but with it came a flush of secret shame. His frustration had morphed into anger, just as it always did. Trying to control that poisonous alchemical process was the key to maneuvering through the briar patch of his disability. He shuffled the papers as if scanning them for the second time.

  “The reports contain no pertinent information, let alone leads or conclusions as to which direction the investigation should go,” he said. “What about the private-security people, any last-minute changes in the night watchmen, and have you reviewed the CCTV tapes for last night?”

  “We’ve interviewed the security personnel.” Nina took the file from him. “No one called in sick, there were no sudden personnel substitutions. Neither the men on duty nor the tapes showed anything out of the ordinary.”

  Had Nina read off sections of the report to help him? Had she somehow found out about his secret? Bennett wouldn’t have given him up, no matter the pressure, so how?

  Garner said, “Edward Carson prevailed on the president to have you reassigned to us. I’m not one to beat around the bush, McClure. I think his interference is a mistake.”

  “A moron could understand president-elect Carson’s line of reasoning,” Jack said with a deliberate lack of edge to his voice. “I’m intimately familiar with the college grounds and the surrounding area. And because my daughter was Alli Carson’s roommate, I’m familiar with her in ways you or your people can’t be.”

  “Oh, yes,” Garner sneered. “I have no doubt Carson considers those assets, but I have another take. I think this intimacy is a personalization, and will play as a detriment. It will distort your thinking, blur your objectivity. You see where I’m going?”

  Jack glanced briefly at Nina, but her face was as closed as a fist.

  “Everyone’s entitled to his opinion,” Jack said carefully.

  The narrow smile appeared like a wound. “As the head of this task force, my opinion is the one that counts.”

  “So, what?” Jack spread his hands. “Have you brought me here to fire me?”

  “Have you ever heard of ‘missionary secularism’?” Garner continued as if Jack hadn’t spoken.

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “I rest my case.” Garner flipped the file onto the carpet. “That’s about all those reports are good for—floor covering. Because they’re built on old-school assumptions, we have to give those assumptions the boot or we’ll never get anywhere on this case.” He perched on the edge of the sofa again, linked his fingers, pressed the pads of his thumbs together as if they were sparring partners about to go at it. “It can be no surprise even to you that for the past eight years the Administration has been guiding the country along a new path of faith-based initiatives. Religion—the belief in God, in America’s God-given place in the world—is what makes this country strong, what can unite it. Move it into a new golden age of global influence and power. But then there are the naysayers: the far-left liberals, the gays, the fringe elements of society, the disenfranchised, the deviants, the weak-willed, the criminal.”

  “The criminal—?”

  “The abortionists, McClure. The baby killers, the family destroyers, the sodomites.”

  Again, Jack glanced at Nina, who was flicking what appeared to be a nonexistent piece of lint off her skirt. Jack said nothing because this argument—if you could call it that—was nonrational, and therefore not open to debate.

  “There’s a Frog by the name of Michel Infra. This bastard is the self-proclaimed leader of a movement of militant atheists. He’s on record as claiming that atheism is in a final battle with what he terms ‘theological hocus-pocus.’ He’s far from the only one. In Germany, a so-called think tank of Enlightenment, made up of Godless scientists and the like—the same dangerous alarmists proclaiming that global warming is the end of the world—are promulgating the devilish notion that the world would be better off without religion. The president is beside himself. And then there’s the British, who haven’t had a God-driven thought in their heads in centuries. The God Delusion is a book written by one of them.�
� He snapped his fingers. “What’s his name, Nina?”

  “Richard Dawkins,” Nina said, emerging from her near-coma. “An Oxford professor.”

  Garner waved away her words. “Who cares where he’s from? The point is, we’re under attack.”

  “What’s further aggravated the Administration,” Nina continued blandly, “is a recent European Union survey asking its citizens to rank their life values. Religion came in last, far behind human rights, peace, democracy, individual freedom, and the like.”

  Garner shook his head. “Don’t they know we’re in a religious war for our very way of life? Faith-based policy is the only way to fight it.”

  “Which is why this Administration is hostile to the incoming one.” Having awoken, Nina now seemed on a roll. “Moderate Republicanism as represented by Edward Carson and his people is a step backward, as far as the president is concerned.”

  “Okay, this is all very enlightening,” Jack said, “but what the hell does it have to do with the kidnapping of Alli Carson?”

  “Everything,” Garner said, scowling. “We have reason to believe that the people who planned and carried out the kidnapping are missionary secularists, a group calling itself E-Two, the Second Enlightenment.”

  “That refers to the ongoing—often violent—conflict originating in Europe’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment,” Nina said.

  “A so-called intellectual movement,” Garner sneered, making the word synonymous with criminal.

  “Reason over superstition, that was the Enlightenment’s battle cry, led by George Berkeley, Thomas Paine, who returned to the pioneering work of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo, and Isaac Newton,” Nina said. “And it’s E-Two’s credo as well.”

  “I never heard of them,” Jack said before he could stop himself.

  “No?” Garner cocked his head. “Your ATF office was forwarded the official memos Homeland Security sent around. The last one was—what?—but three months ago.” He leered like a pornographer. “If you didn’t see it, either you’re negligent or you can’t read.”