Authors: Alafair Burke
M
cKenna was frozen in the hallway, the apartment key hovering one inch from the lock.
She had to get out of here. She took the stairs one floor down, to be sure Patrick wouldn’t hear the elevator ding on their floor, and then she headed straight to the Union Square subway station to lose herself in the nearest crowd available.
I have it under control. Problem solved.
There was only one person who could have been on the other end of that phone call
.
Those paranoid voices were making more sense.
I have it under control.
She made her way into a pack of subway commuters standing just inside the turnstiles to watch a guy playing an electric violin on the makeshift staging area at the southwest corner of the station. McKenna had seen the performer before. He favored recognizable rock anthems, punctuating the high notes with eccentric moves like side squats and karate kicks. She knew he’d draw a large enough crowd to keep her concealed. She also knew she could get a phone signal this close to the station entrance.
She checked Twitter. Her blasts were working. The magazine had deleted her posts from its official feed, but there had to be nearly a hundred retweets already. Those people’s friends would continue the pattern, and then theirs, and so on. She also had eight hundred new followers to her personal account. If the trend continued, she’d have a healthy platform to communicate directly to the public as more information came in.
She checked her e-mail next, in case any tips had come in. There was a message from Detective Forbus. The attachment was a booking photo for Pamela Morris from a prostitution arrest in 1998. Morris would have been twenty-four at the time but looked at least thirty. Three inches of roots revealed her to be a natural brunette, but the rest of her hair was bleached and processed to the texture of straw. Her face was simultaneously drawn and sagging. Although she’d clearly tried to put on a tough face for the camera, black smears around her red eyes revealed that she’d been crying. It looked like she was recovering from a fat lip.
That was fifteen years ago. No arrests since, but that morning an FBI agent had mentioned her name in the context of a weapons explosion at the suspected site of domestic terrorists. McKenna reminded herself that she had no way of knowing whether this Pamela Morris was the same Pamela Morris.
This particular Pamela Morris had been—in Forbus’s words—keeping a low profile. Plus, Mercado had said that the college student who owned the house had been shacking up with a group of “older” P3s, and this Pamela Morris was closer to Greg Larson’s age than to a college student’s.
McKenna’s cell phone rang. It was the home number. She almost answered it. Maybe Patrick would have an explanation.
But she knew what she’d heard. And now she was hearing those voices in her head again. The picture of him with Susan. All his attempts to talk her out of looking into her disappearance. The afternoon when he left work early but denied it later. The worst-case scenarios.
She waited for the voice-mail alert to flash on her phone and then checked the message. “Hey, babe. I got home as fast as I could, but now you’re not here. Let me know where you are, okay? We’ll figure this out. Try not to worry.”
How could his voice sound so different than it had a few minutes earlier? When she’d heard him inside their apartment, his voice had been crisp. Stern. The way people sounded when they were alarmed or angry or frantic but struggling to maintain control. His military voice.
And now? When he called her?
Hey, babe.
Like, Hey, let’s go grab some enchiladas and margaritas and make everything better. Even the tone of his voice was a lie.
She thought about calling Adam Bayne. He did private security. He had offered to help.
But he already thought she was nuts for asking about Patrick’s past with Susan. If she started talking about erased Skybox accounts and forged e-mails from her iPad, he’d think she was certifiable. And he’d known Patrick a hell of a lot longer than he’d known her.
She was on her own.
T
he address McKenna had gotten from Detective Forbus for Pamela Morris’s mother turned out to be a brick duplex south of downtown Jersey City. Two symmetrical halves. Fifty-fifty odds.
The east side of the porch was adorned with an array of well-maintained potted plants. A plaster frog sat next to a teak rocking chair. The welcome mat read, HI. I’M MAT. The west side of the porch was . . . a porch.
McKenna was looking for the mother of a middle-aged former prostitute. She played the odds and rang the west bell.
The woman who came to the door fit the role. Probably only in her mid-sixties, but hard years. She wore sweatpants and a New York Jets T-shirt and smelled like an ashtray. Despite the age difference, she bore a strong resemblance to Pamela Morris’s booking photograph. Pale eyes and thick eyelids. Wide bridge of the nose.
The look she gave McKenna made her feel like she was supposed to give the woman something.
“I’m looking for Loretta Morris,” McKenna said.
“You can stop looking, because I’m right here.”
“My name is McKenna Jordan. I’m trying to find an old friend of mine, and I think she might be connected to your daughter, Pamela. I’m afraid it’s a bit of a long story, ma’am.”
“I’ve got nothing if not time, and you look harmless enough.” She stepped aside to usher McKenna in.
The house was dated and cluttered but otherwise well maintained. Linoleum entranceway. Fake brick fireplace. Brown carpet in the living room. Probably typical of the homes built in the neighborhood in the 1970s.
Loretta let out a small groan as she lowered herself to the sofa. McKenna took a seat next to her. “Is there any way I can get in touch with your daughter? That might be the easiest way to find my friend.”
“Is your friend in Pamela’s church?”
McKenna couldn’t imagine trying to explain:
Well, you see, I think I saw my long-lost friend, but the only lead I have is a button for a batshit-crazy environmental group that blew up its own house this morning. And someone named Pamela Morris—who may or may not be the same Pamela Morris as your daughter—had something to do with that bombing. But now the house is blown to bits, and the people inside—including maybe your daughter and maybe my friend—are now pink vapor.
Instead, she lied. “My friend is missing, and I’m trying to find her. She told me she was doing some kind of work with a woman named Pamela Morris. It might not be your daughter, but I figured if I find every Pamela Morris in the area, I’ll eventually find the one who knew my friend.”
“Sounds sensible enough, but my Pamela’s not in the area.”
“Is that right?” Her one lead was fizzling out.
“She travels. Found herself a nice man some years ago. He’s a preacher. They’re sort of like missionaries, I guess—going around the country, converting people or whatever. I was never much for religion, but I guess it works for them.”
If Pamela were tied up with the head of the P3s, she could have sugarcoated it for her mother. In the fictional version of Pamela’s life, the lead organizer for an ecoterrorist group became a preacher. Attacks on research laboratories and oil refineries became missionary work. Protests became proselytizing. “Do you know where she is now? It would be helpful to contact her.”
“No. We don’t check in day-to-day. She mostly sends me Christmas cards. Mother’s Day. Just to let me know she’s doing all right.”
“Maybe I can give her a call?”
Loretta shook her head, as if realizing that a mother should have her daughter’s telephone number. “I’ve never been much for the phone.” She waved a hand for emphasis.
“I see. The Pamela Morris I’m looking for had a couple of police interactions back in the nineties. For—” She struggled for a euphemism. “For being a lady of the evening.” She cringed at the sound of it.
Loretta’s gaze moved to the fake brick fireplace. “That was a long time ago. Pamela’s doing better now. Turned her entire life around. This area was a bad influence on her. When she left, everything changed. Has a man. Has her church. No more police. No more—lady of the evening.” She returned her gaze to McKenna with a twinkle. She’d known it was a corny phrase.
“So, I’m sorry . . . when did you last see her?”
“It’s been a while.”
The woman did not want a stranger to know she never saw her daughter and didn’t have her phone number. “I’m so sorry to press, ma’am, but my friend is missing. It’s important.”
“I haven’t seen her in person since—I guess it would be fall of 2003. Doesn’t seem that long ago, really.”
“That’s—um, that’s quite a long time not to see your daughter.”
Loretta’s breezy tone became stern, and her face darkened. “Maybe in some families. Not this one. Pam started running away when she was fourteen years old. Dropped out her senior year. Moved out right after. Seemed the only time I ever saw her was when she needed money. Or bail the one time. I guess I suspected the kind of life she was living, but at least when she got arrested, she came clean with me. I let her move back in while she tried to get her act together—went to counseling for girls trying to get out of that . . . lifestyle. It would last a few weeks at a time, then she’d be gone again and we’d start the cycle all over.”
“That must have been hard for a mother to see.” McKenna didn’t know what else to say.
“You have no idea. I just kept thinking every time the phone rang, it would be the police telling me my baby girl was dead. At one point I let her stay with me even when she was in the life. It was a terrible compromise to make, but at least I knew every night that she was alive and in one piece. And because she didn’t need as much money, she promised me she’d only see her regulars, not the kind of guys who would beat her up. She told me a couple of the guys were married with sick wives and told themselves that being with her wasn’t the same as cheating, since it wasn’t emotional. One guy was a funny-looking dude—and a little slow—but she said he’d bring her flowers and love notes and stuff. One guy paid her just to talk to him and watch movies. That kind of thing.”
“How did you go from that . . . arrangement to her leaving?”
“She was getting a little too comfortable telling me about the work. I lost it one night and told her it was still— Well, that’s not what I said. I told her
she
was still a whore. It would’ve been better for me to just slap her across the face. She walked out, and that was the end of the—arrangement, as you called it. Frankly, the cards she sends a couple of times a year, that’s about as much as I heard from her when she was living two miles away.”
“Did you ever hear her mention a woman named Susan Hauptmann?” McKenna pulled up a picture of Susan on her iPad, the same one that her father had used for the reward posters.
Loretta shook her head. “Nope. Pam never had many female friends. Or male ones, for that matter—at least I wouldn’t call them friends.”
“How about the People for the Preservation of the Planet?”
Loretta chuckled, then covered her mouth. “Sorry, but that’s quite a tongue twister, isn’t it? Nope, never heard of that one, either.”
“Would you say Pamela was an environmentalist? Or passionate about animal rights?”
“She had a hamster in the fourth grade and traded it to the boy next door for a Popsicle. You sure you’ve got the right Pamela Morris? You might want to try the other ones.”
But McKenna left Jersey City with a feeling in her gut that she had the right Pamela Morris. Happy talk in holiday cards might keep a mother at bay, but the fact remained that Loretta hadn’t seen her daughter since 2003, the same year McKenna last saw Susan Hauptmann. Something had happened. Something to explain both of them leaving. Something to explain their shared connection to the P3s. Something that had changed life for both of them forever.
C
arter lit yet another match. Dammit. That was the problem with these enormous hotels. The windows didn’t open. Too many concerns about liability.
No open windows meant no fresh air. Which meant that Carter’s room at the Marriott smelled like vomit.
Three times on his knees in front of the toilet bowl. The last time had been dry heaves, but still.
He had even given himself the talk, the one from two years ago, when he’d made the decision to go private. He saw what was happening. Other people were doing the same work for ten times the money and without all the bullshit.
Since then, the line had gotten blurred. What had been a government job became private. Some of the things he couldn’t do then he was allowed to do now, but other things he was authorized to do then were now off the table. The geography changed, but the skills were the same. Usually the same cast of characters, too. Different theaters but somehow still all connected. Working for the same people. Playing the same angles.
The explosion out in Brentwood was a perfect example. He’d killed people before. In Kandahar, he’d started thinking of it like a video game. They had all signed on to the game. Some people won, and some people . . . didn’t.
But in Brentwood, he’d screwed up. The woman who was part of the game had won. She’d made it out of the house before the explosion, run 1.6 miles in ten minutes, and now she was in the wind.
In response, the client had tweaked the mission once again. The client had new, undisclosed information. There was a third party in the picture. He was a threat, too.
This time, Carter’s usual pep talk wasn’t doing the trick. This latest mission wasn’t the war zone come home. It wasn’t a situation where everyone had signed on to play the game.
He wasn’t sure why he had puked. Was it the realization of what he’d already done? The pressure of what was expected of him next? The fact that, as hard as he had tried to become the man who’d accomplished what he had in the past two years, he’d been given an assignment that he couldn’t bring himself to execute? If this job crossed the line, where was the line? And how many times had he already blazed right over it?
He had lived the last two years in a lie. Lying to the clients. Lying to himself. He wasn’t the man who’d earned all that money. He wasn’t the hired gun who could carry out this next job. He wasn’t . . . Carter. And he had no idea what he was supposed to do next.
He walked out of the hotel without checking out. He went to a cash machine and withdrew the maximum amount of four hundred dollars. He had a foreign bank account under an untraceable name that he could get to later. He had saved about four hundred grand so far. It wouldn’t last a lifetime, but it was enough. Enough for him to walk away.
In about ten minutes, the client would figure out that a man who was supposed to be dead was still alive.
He passed a thrift store and remembered a book he’d read about an ex-military drifter who traveled the world with nothing but a toothbrush. Five minutes later, he paid twenty-eight bucks for a pair of used Levi’s, a white canvas work shirt, and a pair of Timberland boots. He stuffed his own clothing in a trash can on Forty-fourth. He’d learned that GPS devices could be planted anywhere. He wasn’t taking any chances.
A bus was heading his way on Seventh Avenue. The advertisement plastered across the side promised a new beginning through weight loss.
He threw his phone under the front tire as it passed. Heard the crunch. Looked down over the curb to make sure it was in pieces.
A kid stepped out of Chipotle shoving a football-sized burrito in his face. “Dude.” He spoke through a full mouth. “Your gear is toast. Bummer.”
As Carter passed a pay phone, he thought about calling in an anonymous tip about his client and the man Carter had been instructed to kill. But they wouldn’t believe him. And they’d trace the call. Police response in midtown could be fast.
It was time for him to walk away. Carter was free.