Authors: Alafair Burke
I
t’s said there are certain moments in history that everyone remembers. The moon landing. The day Kennedy was shot. The night the United States elected its first African-American president. The day the towers came down.
The first reports came in right around nine
A.M.
on September 11. McKenna was on her way to the morning plea docket. Heading from her office to the elevator, she passed a lounge area for civilian witnesses—the most luxurious area on the floor, complete with a television set—and saw early reports of an airplane colliding with the World Trade Center. The anchors were trying to calm the worldwide audience: “The most likely scenario is that this is a private commuter plane that left its intended route. City officials are encouraging everyone to remain calm.”
From there, McKenna went to the courtroom of Judge John DeWitt Gregory to accept routine guilty pleas from routine defendants on routine charges. Forty-five minutes passed without interruption. It was a different world then. It was a world without an omnipresent information stream playing constantly in the background via phones and other devices. It was also a world where the date she wrote on each of those plea agreements, September 11, 2001, was just a date. By the time she was done taking that morning’s pleas, the world and America’s place in it had changed.
She sensed something was wrong the minute she hit the hallway. Usually lawyers piled up outside the sluggish elevators, no matter how long the wait, because people, let’s face it, are lazy. That morning, people were sprinting up and down stairs. She remembered the panic on the face of a former coworker turned defense attorney who passed her in the hallway: “We’ve got to get out of here. Leave downtown. Leave the city. This is really, really bad. They’re saying there are eight other planes unaccounted for.”
It wasn’t until McKenna got to her office that she connected the frenzy in the courthouse to the television report. Her mother had left a panicked voice mail. “Kenny, we just heard the news. Aren’t you right down there by the towers? I think you are, but your daddy says you’re a ways away. Let us know you’re safe, okay?”
By then, McKenna couldn’t get a dial tone. She did manage to find a cabdriver filling up on the Lower East Side. “Stupid day to let the tank go low,” he was muttering. He didn’t want to take a passenger, but she begged, then offered to pay for the entire tank plus fare to go anywhere outside of Manhattan. She and the cabdriver actually argued about which route to take. Some attributes of city life were truly ingrained.
And now here she was again. It wasn’t 9/11, not by a long shot, but she did feel like her life had changed forever. She’d lost her job. Susan was back, possibly tied up in a Long Island bombing. The FBI had searched McKenna’s office, when she still had one. And once again, she was bickering with a freakin’ cabdriver who could not accept that the best way to Forest Hills was the LIE and not the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.
It had taken her enough work just to get Scanlin to agree to meet. Even after he relented, their conversation had turned to a geographic bartering of the metropolitan region. Surely it was easier for Scanlin in his own car to meet her in Manhattan than for her to leave the island. But he was in Forest Hills, having spent the day consoling Scott Macklin’s widow. Yep, that was the moral high ground. Scanlin got to name the spot. She was schlepping to Queens.
In retrospect, she was grateful he had a head start. By the time she met him at the Irish pub he had chosen, he was at least two Scotches in and no longer sounded like he wanted to pound her skull against concrete. She took the seat across from him in the booth. She didn’t bother with introductions or even words of solace about the death of Scott Macklin.
She started with the absurd chase to determine the identity of the subway Superwoman and summarized every last detail until he called her with the news of Mac’s death. The face that looked like Susan’s. The missing video. The button that linked the woman to the People for the Preservation of the Planet. The bombing in Brentwood. The extremely coincidental timing of the fake tip about Frederick Knight. Even her stupid suspicions about Patrick. Everything.
“What does any of this have to do with Mac?” Scanlin asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Nice.”
“Hear me out. If I’m right, if Susan is alive, it means that for ten years, she was perfectly happy doing whatever it is she’s been doing. But now, after a decade, she’s back in New York. And look at all of the things that have happened since then.” She ticked off the points on her fingers. One. “The man I call the Cleaner did not want her to be seen.” Two. “Deleting the video of her is one thing, but someone also set me up with those forged e-mails from Judge Knight.” Three. “Which means I no longer have a book deal about the Marcus Jones shooting, and everything I say from now on will be considered false.” Four. “Now Scott Macklin is dead, and someone claiming to be a female reporter was at his house yesterday.”
There was only one conclusion. “Susan being back has something to do with the fact that it’s been ten years since the Jones shooting. Maybe my article triggered something.”
She could tell from his expression that Scanlin didn’t want to buy it.
“The timing works,” she argued. “Susan disappeared not long after the Jones shooting. Look, I’m the last person who thought I’d say this. I was sure someone killed her. We all said she’d never just walk away—”
“Not
everyone.
”
“Not you, of course.”
“Not her sister,” Scanlin said. “And not your husband.”
“Patrick never thought Susan would leave. He still insists that she must be dead.”
“I know you think I’m incompetent—”
“I never said you were incompetent.”
“Close enough. But I’m quite sure Patrick was the one who told me that Susan had major issues with her family, hated her job, hated the pressure to work with her dad. He told me that in his gut, he thought she just started over again.”
She had set aside her doubts about Patrick, and now they were back.
What had he said to her the other day?
She’d never just leave. That’s what we all said. That’s what we all told the police.
Yet another lie she’d caught him in.
When she looked at Scanlin, he was taking her picture with his cell phone.
“What the—”
His phone was against his ear now. “You have a picture of Susan Hauptmann on that gadget of yours?” he asked, gesturing to the iPad sticking out of her purse.
“Yes, but—”
He held up a finger to cut her off. “Josefina, this is Joe Scanlin. I’m so sorry to bother you, but it’s really important. That reporter at your house yesterday? You remember what she looked like? Okay, I need you to look at a couple of pictures for me. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was urgent. Do you have an e-mail address?”
They sat in silence after the pictures had been sent. There was nothing more to say until they had their answer.
He picked up his phone the second it chimed. “You got the pictures? You’re sure? Okay, let me see what else I can find out. Try to get some sleep.” He set his phone down on the table. “Tell me everything again. From the beginning.”
“What did she say?”
“That she was a hundred percent certain the woman she saw with Scott yesterday was Susan Hauptmann.”
C
arter should have left town. He should have gone to his safe-deposit box, pulled out his passport, and taken the first flight from JFK to Switzerland.
But some part of him—the part that had puked his guts out at the Marriott, the part that had started to reach for the pay phone yesterday, before it was too late—had kept him in New York. And the same part of him brought him to the Apple store in SoHo to search the latest local news updates.
“Good afternoon, sir.” The kid who greeted him wore a black T-shirt and a giant ID badge around his neck. He looked entirely too helpful. “What can I help you find today?”
“To be honest? I’m not buying. My phone’s almost dead, and I’m hoping to check some game scores.”
“No problem. I hear ya. All our demos are hooked up to the Web, so have a go wherever you’d like. No pressure.”
Carter picked a laptop at the far corner of the display table. Scott Macklin. Enter.
It had already happened. The suicide of a retired cop wouldn’t necessarily be newsworthy, but reports had identified him as the police officer whose controversial shooting of Marcus Jones incited citywide protests, widespread racial tensions, and his early retirement. Macklin’s former partner was quoted as suspecting a connection between the suicide and the ten-year anniversary of the shooting.
Carter knew better. He knew because he was the one who was supposed to have killed Scott Macklin.
The story was accompanied by two pictures of Macklin with his family—one at his wedding, and one at the son’s high school graduation last May. In both, the boy looked at his father like a hero.
Was it too late for Carter to be a better man?
When Carter started thinking about going private, all the work was international. That was fine. After three deployments, Carter was used to it. He would do the same job in the same hellhole and earn a hell of a lot more dough.
Then more and more people took gigs working the homeland. Now they didn’t even call it the homeland. It was just home.
P
olice were estimating that Officer Macklin had taken his life at about nine o’clock this morning. Carter had killed his cell phone at eight o’clock the night before. Even if the client had figured out immediately that Carter was off the rails, that left about thirteen hours to line up another doer. No way.
That confirmed what Carter had suspected the minute the client had changed the mission the first time. What had been a surveillance job had become an order to blow up a house in the suburbs. He was willing to do it. The woman was fair game. The rest of them were domestic terrorists, as far as he was concerned.
But the order didn’t sit right with him. Carter worked best when the people giving the orders were as calm and rational and dispassionate as he was. The house explosion was about emotion. So was the order to kill Scott Macklin.
For Macklin to have died this morning without Carter pulling the trigger meant that the client had done it personally. And the client would know that Carter knew.
Carter had seen firsthand what the client’s strategy was for people who knew too much. The woman. The retired cop. It was time to clean house.
It was unavoidable: Carter would be next. And he had no interest in spending the rest of his life in hiding.
Carter was a firm believer that any mission required complete knowledge of all available facts. Usually his mission was narrow—watch someone, break through a security alarm, find out a true identity. Here, it had escalated from following the woman, to planting the bomb, then taking out Scott Macklin. It was not his job to know the larger “why” behind these assignments.
Now that he was on his own, the “why” was precisely what he needed. But the two people who could have helped him were gone.
He should have called Macklin yesterday, before it was too late. He could have warned the man. Maybe it wouldn’t have saved him, but it would have given him a chance to protect himself. And Carter could have asked Macklin why someone wanted him dead.
The woman might know, but Carter had no idea how to find her.
Without the woman, and without Macklin, Carter lacked the information he needed to get himself off whatever hit list the three of them shared.
He could think of only one other person who might be able to help: the man he’d seen meeting the woman on the train. Carter remembered his address.
He searched for the apartment’s sales history online. Bingo. Purchased five years ago by Patrick Jordan and McKenna Wright.
He did a Google search of both names. Ah, a very nice wedding announcement in the Sunday Styles section of
The New York Times
. He was West Point, army, museum security. She was Stanford, Boalt Hall, prosecutor, writer.
Prosecutor. Carter clicked back to one of the stories he had read about Scott Macklin’s suicide.
Last week
New York City
magazine published a ten-page article about the Marcus Jones shooting. The article was authored by McKenna Jordan (née Wright), the former prosecutor who initially raised doubts about Mr. Macklin’s claim of self-defense.
Interesting.
Was it too late for Carter to be a better man? He was about to start finding out.
Their phone number was listed under P. Jordan, same address.
“Hello?”
Carter was calling from a pay phone. Even if Patrick Jordan had caller ID, the number would mean nothing to him.
“You’re going to be very interested in what I have to say.”
“If that’s a sales pitch, you need to work on it.”
“Your girl is in danger,” Carter said. He wanted to get this guy’s attention. Patrick Jordan had to believe he needed Carter’s help.
“Who is this? Do you have her?”
Huh. Carter had been hoping Patrick could lead him to the woman. Was Patrick looking for her, too?
“I’m not interested in hurting anyone. But you and I need to talk.”
“We’re talking now.”
“In person,” Carter said. He didn’t know how Patrick might fit in to the picture. He didn’t know where his loyalties were. He needed to meet him—alone. To read his body language. See his expressions. Figure out if they could trust each other.
“Leave McKenna out of this. She doesn’t know anything.”
Carter heard the break in Patrick Jordan’s voice. He wasn’t worried about the woman. For some reason, he was worried about his wife.
“If you care about her, you’ll come,” Carter said. “Trust me.”
“Those two sentences don’t belong together, guy.”
Carter could see Forty-second Street and Lexington from the pay phone. Occupy Wall Street protestors were beginning to stream out of the 6 train exit. Others were pouring into Grand Central up Park Avenue. He’d selected the train station for the meeting because there was an unauthorized OWS flash mob scheduled to start in an hour. Big crowds. Big police presence. Big chaos. If he needed to get lost in the mob to get rid of Patrick, the protestors would provide cover.
“Grand Central Station. The north side, by the MetLife escalators. I’ll come to you. One hour.” He hung up, hoping that would do the trick.
He should have realized that he wasn’t the only person who might be interested in the whereabouts of Patrick Jordan. Or that his attempt to get the man’s attention would be so successful that Jordan would be too worried about his wife to notice he was being followed.