Authors: James Patterson
He was taunting me now. Trying to get to me. He was. I wanted to smash the screen with my fist, but I couldn’t. I took a breath and refused to give him what he wanted.
“That’s true,” I said calmly. “Good point, Manuel. Hughie’s gone to God.”
I paused as I leaned in closer to the computer’s camera.
“Just like your wife, Manuel. No, wait. I made a mistake. How could she be with God? I sent that bitch directly to hell.”
Perrine hurled the ball against the wall and didn’t bother catching it this time. He stood up and walked over to the camera until his face filled the screen.
“I have one more thing to show you, Bennett. My men are sending it to you right now. If you have any popcorn available, I advise you to get it popping and pull up a seat. You’re going to like this, Mike. I know I will. We can talk after. Maybe when it’s over, we’ll trade notes. But if you don’t feel like talking, that’s OK, too. I’ll understand. You probably won’t be in the mood.
Au revoir.
”
The screen went blank.
“Wait,” I said to Agent Downey. “What in the hell is he talking about? He’s sending something else? What is it? Where is it?”
“Something’s coming in now. It’s another Skype request,” a tech said, clicking a button.
The first thing I noticed about the footage on the screen that opened up was that it was from a night-vision camera. It was showing an empty field. The grainy image reminded me of a black-and-white TV image, only with dark green instead of black, and light green instead of white.
And it wasn’t footage, I realized suddenly. Since this was Skype, it meant what I was looking at was something that was being filmed in real time.
The camera swung shakily to the left. A kneeling figure appeared. It was a soldier of some kind, wearing a dark hazmat suit with a full gas mask.
The fentanyl
, I thought. Perrine was ordering another fentanyl attack and making me watch. Two more hazmat-suited soldiers appeared beside the first, and the camera started moving, shaking a little as the group moved across a field.
There was some kind of fence at the far end, which they climbed, and then they were standing in a dirt road. The soldiers started moving up the slightly curving, uphill road, covering each other. Then they went around a bend, and suddenly, there was a house.
Realizing what it was hit me not like an electric shock but like a sudden shot of anesthesia. I felt numb. Like I wasn’t there anymore. Like I wasn’t anywhere. Like the bottom of the world had just dropped out from underneath me.
“It’s his safe house!” Emily yelled from somewhere behind me as the soldiers on the screen arrived at the porch.
“In Susanville! My God, his family!” Emily yelled as she burst into the office. “Contact the marshals! Where are the marshals? Perrine is attacking the Bennett family in Susanville as we speak!”
THE SKYPE IMAGE WAS
showing a dead marshal on the porch when I stood and walked out of Downey’s office. I walked over to the corner desk Emily and I were sharing and just sat there rigidly, with my feet on a plastic file box, gazing steadily forward at a blank spot on the wall.
Emily rushed over to me.
“The image cut off, Mike. They kicked in the door of the house, and the image went blank. We’re sending everybody there. Everybody.”
I didn’t reply, didn’t look at her. I kept staring at the wall. I needed to be there for my family, and yet it was impossible for me to be there. This did not emotionally compute for me, apparently. It was like being tied to a chair and having to watch your two-year-old climb out and off the ledge of an open window. I felt beyond confused, beyond disoriented. I felt disintegrated inside.
I don’t remember much about the next twenty minutes that went by. I vaguely remember a lot of activity around me, Emily making a lot of heated phone calls and Downey coming over to me a few times in order to assure me that every available unit was on its way to my family.
And what will they find when they get there?
I kept thinking.
The next thing I knew, I was being guided by Emily up onto my feet. I followed along obediently as she took me out into the stairwell. But instead of heading downstairs, she led me up.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled.
“They’re bringing you up there to Susanville, Mike. A chopper is going to take you to a plane waiting for you back at the SoCal Logistics Airport. I’m going to be right beside you the whole time, OK?”
I suddenly stopped on one of the landings.
“What have you heard?” I said, breaking her hold on my elbow.
“Nothing yet.”
“But it’s been a while. Someone should have gotten there already,” I said, grabbing her wrist. “They’re all dead. Just say it now. Don’t lie to me.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Mike. I’m not sure why no one has responded. All we know is that the US marshal on scene is not answering the radio or his phone, and neither is your family. I swear to you, the second I hear anything, I’ll tell you, Mike. Let’s just get up there and see what’s going on, OK? You need to be up there,” Emily said as we went out onto the roof.
Five minutes later, an MH-60 Black Hawk swooped down out of the night, and a burly young soldier guided me aboard and strapped me in. I would have said it felt unreal as we lifted off, out over the lights of Wilshire Boulevard, with the wind rushing in through the chopper’s nonexistent doors, but it already felt unreal. I’d felt like I was outside my body ever since Perrine had shown me the video of my family’s not-so-safe safe house.
At the airport, an air force jet was already gassed and waiting. A couple more unbelievably gracious and young, competent soldiers strapped me into this new aircraft, and we took off. Emily didn’t tell me to sleep or calm down or talk to her or anything. After a while, I turned away from the window and found her hand in mine.
We touched down less than an hour later at Susanville Municipal Airport. When they dropped the jet door, I could see marked town-police and state-trooper cars parked alongside the tarmac, their lights wheeling. A trooper car rushed us to the state road where Cody’s farm was. There was another clog of official vehicles just in front of the driveway turnoff. There had to be twenty cars, but why weren’t they up at the house? My mind felt like it was exploding. Why were they just sitting there!?
A lanky, brown-haired FBI agent rushed out of the black Chevy Tahoe as we came to a skidding stop.
“What the hell is going on?” I said before he could get a word out.
“I know you’re upset, Detective,” the agent said. The young agent was handsome, square jawed. Instead of the MIB suit, he wore a tweed jacket and jeans, like a popular young college professor.
“My family is up there!” I screamed as I grabbed his tweed lapels.
He tried to shake me off. He wasn’t trying hard enough. I swung him around into the road. “Four boys, six girls, my grandfather and nanny. Why aren’t you helping them?”
The fed was finally able to dislodge one of my hands by punching down on it. I retaliated by punching the agent in his mouth. I was about to do it again when the state trooper who had brought me there linked his big arms around mine from behind.
“Is my family dead? Tell me!”
“Jeez,” the young fed said, thumbing his lip. “We don’t know, OK? We don’t know yet. We can’t get up there because of the fentanyl. We have a hazmat team on its way.”
I went really nuts then. I elbowed the trooper in his ribs and started running for the driveway. Then I was tackled by two more troopers and another agent.
“Get off me now, or I swear to God, I will shoot all three of you!” I snarled as I writhed and fought them in the dirt alongside the driveway. I lost it then. Some wall inside me broke, and I was bawling. My face filled with tears and dust as I sobbed.
“Get off me. Get off me, you fucking cowards,” I said as I wept.
“It’s poison up there, Detective,” said one of the troopers, with a Barney Fife twang. “I know you want to get to your family, but if you go up there unprotected, you’re going to die.”
“I know,” I cried. “I want the poison. Give me the poison. I just want to be with my kids.”
I CALMED DOWN AFTER
another few minutes of crying. Emily had taken me over to one of the fed SUVs and sat with me in the back. I’d melted down emotionally before, but never in front of so many people. And still I hadn’t faced it yet. Hadn’t faced the unfaceable.
The FBI hazmat squad showed up in a fire truck–like vehicle, already wearing their white hooded jumpsuits. After Emily spoke to them, they allowed me to gear up as well and follow them, as long as I stayed behind them and didn’t hit anyone else.
Emily and I started up the road behind the eight-man contingent. The air filter of the full-face breathing mask had some sort of pine scent in it that made me want to throw up.
The agents halted suddenly as something moved in the distance ahead. One of the SWAT guys raised his rifle.
“Don’t shoot!” I said through the interior mike when I saw what it was.
It was one of Cody’s sheepdogs. He stopped in the road and started barking at us.
Good God. Aaron.
I hadn’t even thought about him. Was he dead as well? For helping us? The dog barked some more and then ran back up the road from where it had come.
We went around a slight curve in the dirt road and saw the house for the first time, up the slope. There was no light on in the windows. Not a sound. In the dull, grainy moonlight, it was like I was seeing it for the first time. Its fish-scale shingles on the gabled roof, its gingerbread trim. The Queen Anne–style Victorian looked like it should be in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, not out here in the middle of the high desert.
I shook my head and stared at the dormer where Mary Catherine slept.
Mary Catherine.
I pictured her.
Mary Catherine sewing a vintage lampshade she’d bought on eBay. Mary Catherine down on her knees in the hallway with the girls around a bucket of joint compound, teaching them how to spackle and sand. How to fix something. How to make a house, even a safe house, into a home.
In my heart, I’d been planning on our being together someday, I realized as I stopped walking. Now, in a few minutes, I would be making a phone call and telling her family back in Ireland that she was dead. I squeezed my hands into fists when they started shaking.
“You OK, Mike?” Emily said. “You want to go back?”
I shook my head quickly. For a second I thought I was going to throw up, but then it passed.
“Let’s keep going,” I said.
I stepped on something when we got to the front yard. It was a Wiffle ball, or what was left of one. Brian hit them so hard, he caved them in. I thought about Brian then. Watching my oldest son play his first football game back in New York, the smile that creased his face on that rainy, freezing field when the coach sent him in off the bench.
I turned and looked at the open front door as the SWAT team went inside. There was a sudden bang of another door being flung open. “Clear!” someone called. I squatted down and stared at the dirt as I listened to more bangs and more shouts of “Clear!” as the SWAT guys swept the house.
Then one of the agents appeared at the front door. It was the preppy-looking one I’d hit. He waved us up.
“Mike, you really, really don’t have to do this,” Emily said.
I lifted the crushed Wiffle ball and stared at it as I gathered myself.
“Yes, I do,” I said, standing and stepping toward the house.
“Mike,” said the agent, holding up his palm. “I don’t know what this means, but there’s no one here.”
“What do you mean?” I said, staring over his shoulder, into the foyer. “You mean they’re dead? They’re all dead?”
“No, Mike,” the agent said. “There are no bodies. There’s no anything. Your family isn’t here, Detective. The house is completely empty. Everyone is gone.”
THE TEST FOR THE
fentanyl powder actually turned up negative. I quickly shucked off the suffocating mask and frantically searched the house.
It was true. Everyone was gone. I looked through the rooms. The beds were unmade. Everyone’s clothes seemed to be all there, including their sneakers. I even found Mary Catherine’s cell phone charging on the bookshelf beside her bed. It was hard to say if there was any kind of struggle, but it was obvious that they had all left quickly and suddenly, in the middle of the night.
I stared out Mary Catherine’s window at the dark mountains, going crazy. Perrine had my family. He’d taken them away.
Roadblocks were set up in the entire area. Troopers and local police came with bloodhounds. The dogs kept running around in circles in the farmyard, indicating that it was unlikely that anyone in my family had left on foot.
I peeled off the hazmat suit in the kitchen and just sat there at the table, rubbing a hand through my hair over and over again as I stared at the worn pine floor, trying to think. Why would Perrine come to kill my family and just take them instead? The implications of it wouldn’t stop coming, the possibilities of what he could do.
It was worse than finding them dead, I decided. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. How could I?
I looked up to see Emily take a seat next to me. She began to cry.
“I caused this,” she said. “You didn’t even want to go to LA, and I came up like a good little soldier and put on the con job and the pressure. You didn’t want to leave for exactly this reason. I caused this. I’m responsible.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I was in no shape to comfort anyone. The lead jacket of what was happening was too heavy. I was surprised I had the strength to breathe.
That was when the dog came in through the open back door. It was Cody’s border collie. She rubbed against my shins, and I reached out and patted the sad-looking pooch on the head.
As I was doing it, I remembered what Cody had told me about border collies. How brave and smart they were. How they always kept moving, kept circling. How they never quit.