The den was dark—he’d left the lights off, and the sun had already set. He turned on the lamp by his armchair and built a fire in the hearth, twisting old newspaper and putting it underneath the grate with two pieces of fatwood, then stacking three logs of hickory on top of that. When he struck a match and set it to the newspaper, the fire kindled and took hold swiftly. He poured himself a finger of whiskey and set the glass down on the side table next to his armchair.
Nick sat in his chair, thinking. Annalise was either telling the truth or she was a very skilled liar. Nick had met very skilled liars before. He needed to do some research, and for that he needed Internet access. The library in Cashiers had Wi-Fi and computers available for the public, but it was closed for renovations. He would have to drive to Highlands instead. But before that he would need to have a serious talk with Annalise. He picked up the glass of whiskey and looked at the amber liquid, then held it to his nose and breathed in. Sweet and spice, wood and grain.
Jay, he thought. What the hell did you do?
GROWING UP IN San Diego, Nick navigated the worlds of both middle and high school with relative ease. His father worked for USAID in San Diego, helping Afghan refugees relocate, and also taught an international relations class at San Diego City College. This was a far cry from his more exalted post as a USAID foreign service officer in Afghanistan, but he never complained, and Nick was proud of his father and of his job helping immigrants become American citizens.
Jay, by contrast, seemed to have chosen his mother’s path of resistance, often asking what Afghanistan was like and why his father had made his mother leave. With his sneer and curled lip that he’d perfected ever since turning thirteen, Jay announced at breakfast one morning that he was going to take his mother’s family name, Bashir.
Their father had paused, then put his coffee down on the breakfast table. “When you’re eighteen, you can do as you like,” he said, puzzled, as usual, by his youngest son. “Bashir is a fine name. It means ‘bringer of good news’ in Arabic.”
Jay rolled his eyes. “I know what it means.”
Nick glanced at their mother, who was busy at the stove, her back to them, pretending she wasn’t listening. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” he asked Jay. “That’s our last name.”
“I didn’t choose it,” Jay said.
Their father raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Afghans have always taken and borrowed names,” he said. “Your great-grandfather was the first in his family to take a last name.”
“This is stupid,” Nick muttered.
“What’s your problem?” Jay said.
“We were born in San Diego,” Nick said. “You’ve never even been to Afghanistan.”
“Only because Dad made Mâmân leave,” Jay said.
“Jay,” their father said.
There was a crash as their mother dropped a pan into the sink, and then she walked out of the kitchen, went upstairs, and slammed the door of the master bedroom.
Jay began frequenting the local mosque, a display of piety that made their mother happy. Little else did. If their father had returned home and Nick was an all-American teenager, their mother fought a rear-guard action against assimilation. She complained of the weather in California, the traffic, the noise, the women who walked around practically undressed, the strange food, the sun that was not their sun.
“It’s the same sun that shines in Afghanistan, Mâmân,” Nick said.
“It is not,” their mother replied. “How can you even say such a thing?”
Her outrage extended to all of them, even Jay, whom she usually doted on, giving him extra sweets as a child, excusing his stubbornness as standing on principle and his dislike of school as evidence of a superior mind. Nick knew their mother was having a very bad day when she would turn on Jay, chastising him for letting his hair grow too long or for not perfectly reciting a verse from the Koran.
Their father got the worst of it, though. He was baffled by his wife’s outbursts, even moved to tears of frustration. Some evenings she was kind and spoke lovingly to him, and others she would rail and curse at him for not making enough money. He had argued that he was lucky to have a job at all, let alone one that was similar to his previous career. The communist regime in Kabul had marked him as an intellectual and a possible dissident, and he was already under suspicion as an American. Once the Soviets had decided to invade, they’d had to flee. Didn’t she see that?
But their mother would not be mollified. As Nick and his brother had grown older, she had become prone to rages so strong that her tongue would fail her and she would instead use her hands, slapping or pushing or punching. One evening when Jay was attending prayers at the mosque, she picked up a plate of kofta and hurled it at Nick, who ducked. The plate shattered against the wall, the spiced balls of ground lamb rolling across the floor. The shattering plate and his mother’s cries brought his father running. “What’s going on?” his father shouted. Her face red, mouth opened in a shriek, Nick’s mother flew at her husband, slapping, hitting, shoving. His father fended her off with his arms but did not raise a hand to her. He let her expend her rage like a thunderstorm on him, and when she finally collapsed to the floor of the kitchen, sobbing, he picked her up like a child and carried her to their room, while Nick scraped up the mashed kofta from the kitchen floor.
That night, lying in bed and listening to Van Halen on his Walkman, Nick at first didn’t hear the knock on his bedroom window. Then someone started pounding on the window so that it rattled in its frame. Nick sat up in bed and stared out the window at Jay, who stood outside in the dark, dress shirt untucked and dirty. Let me in, Jay mouthed. Nick took his headphones off, got up, and with a little difficulty opened the window. Jay climbed in clumsily, nearly falling on his face. “The hell is wrong with your window?” he said.
“What are you doing?” Nick demanded. His room and Jay’s were on the lower floor of their split-level, their parents’ bedroom just above. “You’ll wake Mom and Dad up.”
“ ‘Mom and Dad,’ ” Jay said, mocking Nick. “Relax, beraadar.” Beraadar was Dari for brother. Jay used that term only to annoy Nick. He stood up, and as he did, the sharp medicinal smell of vodka hit Nick in the face.
“What the hell?” Nick said.
Jay chuckled. “It’s good, I’m fine.”
Nick grabbed Jay by the shoulders. Jay tried to brush his hands away but he kept chuckling, even when Nick shook him a little. “Oh no, beraadar is angry,” Jay said, shaking with laughter.
“How did you get drunk?” Nick demanded.
Jay closed his eyes, contemplating the question. “Aaqil had the vodka. I didn’t ask where he got it.”
“I thought you were at the mosque. Have you not been going?”
Jay opened his eyes and managed to look offended. “I attend services. Tonight we left and Aaqil had vodka and orange juice and gave us some. It was very good.”
Nick slung an arm across Jay’s shoulders. “Come on, you’re going to bed.” Jay slumped against Nick but managed to move his feet enough to walk with his brother across the hallway to his own room. He fell across his bed, and Nick threw a blanket over him and closed the door. Nick returned to his room and slipped his headphones back on, but the music did little to calm his anger. What was his brother thinking? He was thirteen. Nick could scarcely imagine what their mother would do if she found Jay drunk.
The next morning, Saturday, their mother opened Nick’s door and told him to get up if he wanted breakfast and that his father needed help moving some plants in the backyard. Nick muttered a greeting and got out of bed, yawning, and then with a shock remembered Jay. “Mâmân!” he called, scrambling out of bed. “I’ll get Jay up!” Too late, he heard his mother open Jay’s bedroom door. Shrieks and wails followed, and Nick ran across the hall. Their mother stood shouting over Jay, who was lying on his back in bed, bleary eyed, covered in his own reeking puke. “What?” Jay kept saying. “What?”
Their father appeared in the do
orway, dressed in blue jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of gardening gloves in one hand. He wrinkled his nose at the smell. “He’s drunk,” he said.
Their mother’s eyes seemed to swell with anger. “You are drunk?” she hissed at Jay, who cowered on his bed. She reached for him as if to strangle him, then withdrew her hands, disgusted by the puke on his shirt and bedsheets. “You drink alcohol and then vomit like a dog in my house? You miserable, useless child! You disgrace your family! I—”
“It’s my fault, Mâmân,” Nick said, the words coming out of his mouth the same instant they sprang to mind. “I … gave him the alcohol.”
A stunned silence fell on the room.
His voice flat, their father said, “You gave him the alcohol.”
Nick hung his head. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
Their father folded his arms across his chest and frowned. Even his moustache registered disapproval. “Why would you do that?”
Nick glanced at Jay, who sat in his fouled T-shirt stained yellow from the orange juice, and at their mother, who stared dumbfounded. He remembered his mother throwing the plate of kofta at him the night before. “It was stupid,” Nick said, looking at the floor. “I wanted to know how it felt to be drunk, and I offered some to Jay.”
Their father stepped forward and slapped Nick across the face. The sound was like a green branch being snapped over a knee.
“You’ll both work in the yard today, all day, as punishment,” their father said. “No breakfast. Mâmân, would you please wash Jay’s sheets and clothes?” He turned on his heel and walked out of the room without waiting for a reply. Their mother, nonplussed, muttered at Jay to take off his clothes and bring them with the bedsheets to the laundry room, then hurried after their father.
“Why did you do that?” Jay whispered.
Nick felt his cheek where his father had struck him. He didn’t know which stung worse, the slap or the fact that his father had slapped him. “Because I didn’t want Mom to lose it,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Jay looked down at himself and his bed, grimacing. “Shit.”
“She threw a plate of food at me last night, Jay,” Nick said. “A whole plate of kofta. She just chucked it across the room at me and started screaming.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because she’s angry. At everything. And she doesn’t want to be here.” Nick shook his head in disgust. “Get your clothes off. You stink.” He turned to leave.
“Hey,” Jay said, and Nick stopped in the doorway and turned back. Jay looked pale and bilious, but his expression was serious. “Dad only slapped you so Mom wouldn’t,” he said.
Nick nodded. “I know. But that doesn’t make it any better.”
SITTING IN HIS armchair, Nick held the glass of whiskey to his lips, not touching but so close. He remembered Clarence, a colleague at Oxford, talking to him over whiskey about Prince Hamlet, how students focused on his suicidal tendencies. “What they ignore,” Clarence had said, refilling an honest-to-God pipe with tobacco while an interminable January rain fell outside the study windows, “is that the poor bugger doesn’t want to kill himself as much as just cease to exist.”
“ ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,’ ” Nick had said, quoting from memory.
Clarence had smiled, a wrinkled, jowly expression of pleasure, and pointed his unlit pipe at Nick. “Just so.” He had picked up his glass of whiskey and held it up in salute. “Sláinte.”
Now, sitting in his den with the fire crackling in the hearth, Nick contemplated the glass in his hand. A simple tilt of the wrist, and he could pour the whiskey into his mouth. The first sip of a long, slow slide into oblivion.
Then he stood and walked into the kitchen and poured the glass out in the sink.
In the tiny laundry room off the kitchen, he found and changed into a clean T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants, leaving his jeans and Henley on the floor, then padded out to the sofa and set up his pillow and blanket. After stoking the fire and adding one more log, he used the bathroom off the foyer and flushed, then went into his office, glancing as he always did at the picture of Ellie. He missed her smile. He missed her. He pulled open the top desk drawer and took out the pistol that lay there, then found the magazines in the drawer below it and loaded one into the pistol. He placed the pistol back into the top drawer, closed it, and went back to the sofa to stare at the fire as it crackled and hissed in the hearth.
CHAPTER TEN
The plane carrying Cole and his men touched down at Charlie Brown airport west of Atlanta. Everyone unbuckled, but Jonas, Hicks, and Waco remained in their seats. Randy the pilot told Cole he could be in the air and on the way to Hilton Head in under thirty minutes. Poncho and Dawes went to check on ground transportation, which they had arranged through a rental agency in Tampa.
Before leaving the plane, Cole huddled one last time with Jonas. “Just surveillance for now,” Cole said. “Keep an eye on the grandparents. If you see the girl, call before doing anything else.”
“Got it. Where will you be?”
“Gonna find a place to stay until we hear something different. And we need to resupply. Winslow’s contact is in north Georgia. I’ll keep you posted.” Still Cole hesitated. He did not like breaking up the team, even though it made the most sense. With the girl in the wind, they needed to cover all possibilities in order to find her.
Jonas seemed to understand. “It’s only an hour away,” he said. “We’ll be there before you know it. And we can get back fast, long as we have this ride.”
“It’s ours for as long as we need it,” Cole said. “Whoever’s hiring us has deep pockets.”
“Best kind of client.”
“Stay safe.” Cole gently punched Jonas on the arm and then turned and stepped outside onto the stairs. The sky was dark—it was after midnight—although the county airport was brightly lit. Hopefully they could get a meal and a few hours’ sleep before continuing the search. Speed was essential, but so was being prepared. Exhaustion led to careless mistakes. The thought reminded him of Winslow, and Cole grimaced like he had just smelled something rank. Winslow hadn’t been exhausted, just stupid.
Cole walked down the stairs to the tarmac just as Poncho drove up in another Suburban. Cole helped Dawes and Zhang unload their gear from the plane and put it in the vehicle—they were the only people on the field this late at night, and Cole didn’t want to draw any more attention to themselves than necessary. Cole looked back at the jet and saw Jonas watching from a window. Jonas nodded at him, and Cole tossed off a casual salute before stepping into the Suburban.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “What are the sleeping arrangements this evening?”
It was an old setup to a long-running joke. Cole had asked this question when they had been humping across a desert, when they were trying not to drown in a jungle downpour, and once when they were in a Liberian prison before they could bribe their way out. Usually when Cole asked it, one of them would make a comment about which one of them was boning Waco, the youngest of them, or some other wiseass crack. This time, there was the barest pause after Cole asked the question, as if no one wanted to speak.
It was Dawes who answered him, as reliably no-drama as ever. “A Super Inn off I-20, just south of here,” he said. “Got a Waffle House across the street.”
Behind the wheel, Poncho groaned. “Fucking Waffle House, man.”
“I love Waffle House,” Cole said. “Eggs, steak, burgers, chicken salad, whatever you want, twenty-four/seven. Scattered, smothered, and covered.”
Poncho nodded wearily but said nothing as he starting driving, the Suburban crossing the tarmac toward an exit gate.
Cole looked straight ahead through the windshield and said, “Why is everyone acting like someone just shit themselves?”
Silence except for the hum of the tires. Even Zhang’s constant typing on his laptop had stopped.
In a quiet voice, Cole said, “Is there a
problem?”
“No problem, boss,” Poncho said, glancing over at Cole before returning his attention to the road. “Just tired, is all.”
The fuck that’s all, Cole thought. They were wary of him. Scared, even. Because of Winslow. He hadn’t noticed on the plane because he had been talking with Jonas, and Jonas wasn’t scared of anything this side of the grave. Some men who led squads of mercenaries or “security contractors” wanted to be feared. But fear wasn’t the same as respect. Cole felt a small light in him grow dimmer. He stifled a sigh.
“Yeah, we’re all tired,” he said. “Zhang, where are we with the girl’s phone?”
“Making progress,” Zhang said, typing on his laptop. “Should get into their phone records in the next twenty-four hours.”
Cole drummed his fingers on his knee. Hacking into a telecommunications company was tricky, especially if you wanted access to records without alerting the company or leaving a trace. But if Zhang said it would be done in a day, it would be done in a day.
“All right,” Cole said. “We eat, check in, and get some rack time. Then we start looking.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Zhang stayed in the motel room with his laptop, continuing to try to hack into the girl’s cell phone carrier, while Cole, Dawes, and Poncho drove to the Atlanta airport. They left the Suburban in short-term parking and made their way to Arrivals in the domestic terminal.
Hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers went missing each year in the US. The vast majority returned home alive within twelve months, but thousands slipped through the cracks. Police did their best but were often overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and teen runaways were a lower priority than young children who had disappeared. Cole was counting on that as he and his men spread out in the cavernous Arrivals lobby at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Thousands of people passed through the space every hour; ten million passengers flowed through Hartsfield-Jackson a month. It was searching for a grain of rice in a snowbank. But they had to start somewhere.
True to his word, Kobayashi had called soon after dawn to tell them that the girl had not been on the manifest of any commercial flight in the United States since arriving in Atlanta yesterday. Assuming they could trust Kobayashi’s information, and Cole thought that was a safe assumption, the girl had not left Atlanta by plane. She was too young to rent a car, and according to Zhang her phone was turned off, so she hadn’t called for an Uber or Lyft, at least not on her own phone. Unless she had gotten another phone or somehow gotten in touch with a friend in Atlanta to come pick her up, that left taxi, bus, or MARTA, the regional public train system.
A Fire in the Night Page 7
