No Time to Die (13 page)

New York City
Four days later: Tuesday, June 18, 8:30
A.M.

N
atalie awoke to the screech of her bars swinging open. A prison guard's leathery face peered down at her, the closest she'd come to human contact all weekend. He usually just slid her half-edible meals through a flap and marched away.

“What's going on?” she murmured, raising herself onto her elbows.

“Bail was posted. You're free to go.”

She stared up at him, dumbfounded. His formidable figure stood in silhouette at the entry to her cell. “What?”

“You heard me.” The hint of a smile tugged at his lips, but his eyes remained stoic. “Get out of here. Go.”

“I—I don't understand,” she stammered. “I don't have the cash—who?”

“Said his name was Mr. Roy. Your ex-husband?”

“Nick?”

“Yeah, that was it.”

She shot upright, swinging her legs out of bed. “But I haven't heard from him in a decade!” Once he remarried and started another family, he had stopped sending Theo birthday cards. After that, she'd wanted nothing to do with him or his money, even if he was a successful venture capitalist. “How would he even know what happened?”

The guard shrugged. “Maybe he saw the papers. Here's your stuff.” He handed her a plastic bag containing the cashmere sweater, jeans, and low-slung heels she'd been wearing the night of her arrest, as well as her purse with her wallet, phone, and keys. “I'll leave, you get changed, then I'll show you out. He's waiting for you.”

“He's here?” Her mouth hung open as she tried to picture what Nick might look like. Would his curly blond hair be receding? Would he still be slender and athletic, or paunchy around the middle?

“Out front,” the guard said. “Hurry up. I don't got all day.”

He stepped out, and she ripped off her jumpsuit and slipped into her soft, familiar clothes. The scent of her gardenia perfume still lingered on them and reminded her of Helen. Natalie had never missed her friend more.

The guard was waiting as promised when she stepped through the bars. With a smile, she handed him her barely touched breakfast of peanut butter on toast, picturing the lox and bagels she would never take for granted again.

“It's all yours,” she joked.

“Ha.” He patted the EpiPen in his front pocket. “I don't do nuts. But for prison food, it don't look half bad.”

“Can't say I'm going to miss it.”

They walked down the corridor to jeers and catcalls of the incarcerated women whose cells lined the long stretch. Natalie kept her head down until they turned the corner into an administrative holding area, and through that, to the heavily watched lobby. Cameras were stationed in all corners. Burly security officers stood by the door, eyeing her. Fresh air was just steps away. She was practically bursting to run out, but waited for the guard to clear her as he entered notes into a computer.

He turned to her and announced what sounded like a script. “You're to return to court for your hearing date on August seventh, and on condition of release, you're to have zero contact with the victim. Failure to comply will lead to your immediate arrest.”

She nodded vigorously.

“Okay, then you're free to go. But just so you know, some reporters are waiting to hound you out there. News travels fast.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

She spun around and charged through the metal detector, out the wide double doors, and into the windy early morning, with the guard trailing behind her. Five strangers swarmed her and thrust black recorders into her face, cameras clicking.

“Tell us why you did it.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Do you think you deserved to get caught?”

She stumbled backward, waving them away, but they continued to buzz around her, snapping pictures and yelling.

“What would you want to say to Zoe's parents?”

“No comment,” she muttered. “No comment.”

They showed no signs of backing off, so she elbowed through the cluster to the edge of the sidewalk. Cars whizzed by on the busy street, honking, and well-dressed men and women walked to work clutching briefcases, oblivious to the dark world just out of their sight. The racket of voices and traffic thudded against Natalie's eardrums, sensory overload after days locked in a cell. She glanced upward, breathing in deeply. The sun was inching up into the sky—the sky!—and at first, she didn't notice the tall bearded man standing a few feet away, watching her.

A man she had never seen in her life. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap over short black hair. His plain gray T-shirt and faded blue jeans revealed a tanned, muscular physique, but his age was impossible to tell. He could have been thirty-five or sixty.

He approached her and smiled as if they were sharing a private joke. The reporters noticed him, and ceased shouting to watch her reaction.

“Natalie!” he exclaimed. “I know you weren't expecting me, but when I saw on the news that you were in trouble, I had to come.”

She froze, too confused to move. The reporters waited. He reached out his arms and enveloped her in a hug before she could say a word.

“Play along,” he whispered in her ear. “I've come to get you out of here.”

He pulled back and she suppressed a gasp. Up close, she noticed the faint blending makeup around a prosthetic nose masking his own.

“I've thought about you and Theo every day,” he said. “I picked him up. He's waiting in the car.”

“He is?” She saw that a blue sedan with tinted windows was parked along the curb.

“Yes, now let's get you home.” He took her hand, but her feet remained planted. “I know I have a lot of apologizing to do, but I've missed you both more than you can imagine,” he said. “Won't you give me the chance?” A strange urgency in his voice prompted her to respond, before she'd had a chance to think.

“Oh, Nick,” she said, the lie sounding shrill to her ears. “I've missed you, too.”

He kissed her hand and led her to the car, as the reporters snapped pictures. Like a gentleman, he opened the front passenger door. With no time to stop and ask the torrent of questions clamoring for release, she climbed inside. One question rose above all else. She twirled around to inspect the backseat.

Theo was there.

He was not alone.

The only free road, the Underground Railroad,
is owned and managed by the Vigilant
Committee. They have tunneled under the
whole breadth of the land.

—
H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

Washington, D.C.
8:30
A.M.

T
he call came while Les was finishing his six-mile run on the treadmill at the local gym. Without slowing, he plucked his cell phone from the plastic holder and eyed the number. It was a 212 area code. New York City. He wiped the sweat off his ear.

“This is Les.”

“Les? Stephen Kincaid.” The words tumbled out as if they couldn't be spoken fast enough. “Zoe's father. We talked last week?”

“Of course.” Les continued to jog, pumping his free arm. “What can I do for you?”

“She's—she's disappeared. We woke up this morning and she was gone, her backpack was gone. We've already called the police. Please, you have to do something!”

Les jabbed the treadmill's emergency stop button and slid backward off the machine.

“You weren't supposed to let her out of your sight!”

“She must have left in the middle of the night—What could we do? Lock her up?”

“You said she's very independent, right? Could she have run away on her own?”

An irritated sigh came over the line. “I can't believe she wouldn't tell anyone, not even her grandfather. They're bonded at the hip.”

“And he doesn't know anything?”

“That's what he says, but he's a bit of a rebel, my father-in-law. I wouldn't be surprised if he had something to do with this.” Les heard a woman's angry shout in the background. “Sorry, my wife thinks I'm just being paran—”

“Hello? Les?” interrupted a panicked female voice. “It's Pam. Is there anything you can do to help us?”

“Everything in my power.” He was having trouble keeping his voice even. “But first we have to try to rule out the most serious scenario.”

“The Network? Do you really think they could have—?”

Les clenched his teeth. “I'm afraid it's possible.”

Her shriek pierced his eardrum. He glanced around, searching for privacy. The joggers on the treadmills were plugged into their headphones, paying him no attention.

“Listen to me. I need you to stay calm while I look into this. I'll call you when I know more.”

As they hung up, snatches of images bombarded him—Zoe Kincaid's cherubic face, the splashy headlines that would be all over this story if she wasn't found stat, the map of the U.S. on his wall, with its twenty-seven red pushpins from coast to coast, where each prior victim had vanished.
Still twenty-seven,
he thought.
No more than twenty-seven.

For the rest of the morning, he waited in dread, going in a blur from the gym to his office, hoping that any second Stephen would call back to say she had come home. No call came. Finally, just after 11:00
A.M.
, the mail arrived. He quickly scanned the pile of letters, memos, packages. And then he saw it—a postcard of the Earth revolving around the sun. On the back was Zoe's name, the same cryptic message—
And yet again it moves
—and Galileo's bold signature. It was postmarked from D.C. yesterday, when she was still safe at home—which meant her abduction had been carefully planned and executed. There was no telling where she was now.

The next moment the phone was in his hand, Stephen Kincaid on the line.

“Don't move,” he instructed. “I'm getting on the next flight to New York.”

 

 

This day was getting worse by the hour. When his flight landed, Les received a message from Benjamin Barrow at the committee with more bad news—Natalie Roy had been bailed out of jail, and now she and her teenage son were nowhere to be found. A mystery man had posted every last penny of her $250,000 bail, which the FBI had already traced to an offshore Cayman Islands account in the name of G.I. Joe—an insult and a mockery, in Les's opinion. Exactly the kind of stunt the Network prided itself on.

The New York media was reporting that the man who had come to Natalie's rescue was her ex-husband, with a picture of their embrace on every outlet's home page, but Les was informed that her actual ex-husband had been tracked down in Oregon and knew nothing of her plight.

The close-ups of the man at the jail proved no help. His baseball cap and black aviator sunglasses covered half his face. What was left—a slightly hooked nose and overgrown stubble—was not enough to positively ID him against any other photos on file, though the FBI was trying to find a match. Les felt certain there would be none. Because if he was working for the Network, he was a clean specimen—an agent sent to do Galileo's dirty work. Rounding up targets. Natalie. Her son. Zoe.

Now where was he taking them, and why?

By the time Les arrived in his chauffeured car at the Kincaid brownstone on a tree-lined Upper West Side block, he had received yet another disturbing update—one that he guessed would not go over well with Zoe's parents.

Her mother ushered him inside, all pleasantries forgotten. From the look of the home, one would have thought a violent crime had occurred. Yellow police tape marked off Zoe's upstairs bedroom. Police had clearly combed the entire house for evidence of an intruder. Furniture was out of place. Sofa cushions littered the floor of the living room, a chair was overturned in the kitchen, cabinet doors haphazardly flung open.

Pam, a curvaceous woman with auburn hair, showed Les to a spacious office in the rear of the apartment, which took up the first two floors of a brownstone. She halfheartedly apologized for the chaos. Behind them trailed Stephen, a big-boned, imposing man whose expression Les recognized. It was the realization that you were in hell. Last into the office came a slow, elderly man who wore a cast on his left arm and carried himself with the majesty of an older era. The grandfather. He also appeared concerned, though his body language lacked the anger of Stephen's, Les noted. No one seemed relaxed enough to sit down.

Stephen crossed his arms. “Do you know anything we don't already know?”

“We're dying for information,” Pam said. “Please, anything at all.”

Les glanced at the old man, wondering if he knew what was coming. Was that why he was so quiet?

“In fact I do.” He cleared his throat and sat down in a black chair next to a large wooden desk. No one else moved. “I assume by now you've heard about Natalie Roy.”

“We've been watching the news nonstop,” Pam said. “Do you think the man who bailed her out is the same guy who took Zoe?”

“It is our suspicion, unfortunately.”

“If I could get my hands on that maniac—” Stephen began. He dug his fingernails into his palms.

“We're doing everything we can,” Les said. “We've set up an AMBER Alert to find the car, and we're tapping the phone records of those who could have even the slightest involvement. What we've found already is . . . startling.”

“What?”

Les leveled his gaze at the grandfather. “You received a call on your cell phone from Natalie Roy on the night she took Zoe into her lab. At 9:37
P.M.
It lasted five minutes and twenty-two seconds.”

“Dad!” Pam exclaimed, whirling on him. “Is this true?”

“You checked into
my
records?” His eyes widened. “I barely even use the cell phone.”

“I knew it!” Stephen shouted in his face. “Goddamn it, Silas!”

“Honey, stop, let him explain. I'm sure there's an explanation?”

“So you don't deny it,” Les said. “You spoke to Natalie Roy that evening?”

“She called me,” Silas said.

“And what did you discuss?”

“Nothing really. I can't remember that well.”

“Dad, you have to tell us,” Pam implored. “Come on.”

“Silas, Zoe's life could be at stake. We absolutely need your full cooperation.” Les's omitted threat hung in the air.

Stephen looked ready to explode. Pam put one hand on his back.

Silas shot his son-in-law a withering glare, then looked at Les. “I didn't do anything. She called me and asked to talk to Zoe, so I let her. She was no criminal then. I went to sleep. The next thing I knew, Zoe was coming home in a police escort. I had nothing to do with it.”

“You facilitated it!” Stephen snapped. “What else do you know that you haven't told us?”

“Nothing! I swear it!” His wrinkled hands flew up, and right then, Les noticed a crinkly bulge in the front pocket of his shirt. When Silas caught him staring at it, the guilt on his face was unmistakable.

You're a terrible liar,
Les thought, extending his hand. “Mind if I?”

“I'd rather not.”

Pam clutched his arm. “Dad, please. No one will be angry with you if you just cooperate.”

“Bullshit,” he muttered. But he stuck two fingers into his shirt pocket, withdrew a folded piece of paper, and reluctantly handed it to Les. “I found it this morning, under my pillow. I swear on my father's grave, that's the last thing I know.”

Les snatched it and read the bubbly handwriting aloud, the obvious script of a young teenage girl.

Pam clasped a hand over her mouth. “No. No.”

“They've brainwashed her!” Stephen cried. “How could we have let this happen?”

“Silas,” Les said. “What is ‘this' she's referring to? ‘For us'?”

He shrugged. “I can only guess. She's been obsessed with this antiaging research ever since we found out about her condition. I know she's desperate to try to help me live longer, and if she has a unique genetic mutation . . . which seems highly probable . . .”

Les shook his head, chilled by a sense of foreboding. If some mercenary scientists unlocked Zoe's DNA for future generations to exploit—it was the beginning of the end.

He thought with disgust of the back alley near his childhood home in the Bronx. The place was teeming with cockroaches, their flat shiny shells skittering in all directions and spilling out into the street. Was that a microcosm for human life on Earth if too many people survived for too long? He thought of his mother, whose life had been marginalized already from poverty and disease, though she had deserved so much more. With even more restricted resources, what would become of all the people like her?

“I've got to get to work,” he declared, rising to his feet. “We haven't got a minute to lose.”

“I wish I could help more,” Silas said. “That girl has a real mind of her own when she gets an idea in her head.”

“Did she keep a diary?” Les asked. “Or anything that might give us some more insight?”

Pam was wiping a tear from her cheek. “The police tore the house apart and couldn't find a thing. Her laptop and cell phone are gone. We even broke the lock on her jewelry box, but there was nothing—”

“Wait!” Silas grabbed her wrist. “Has anyone checked her medicine cabinet?”

“Yes, Dad. Nothing was out of place, all her—” She broke off with a gasp. “Oh my God.”

“No! It was there?”

“What?” Les demanded, glancing between them. “What was there?”

“I can't believe I didn't notice before, I was just so frantic. She must have forgotten it.”

“She has a severe seizure disorder . . .” Stephen started, trailing off and shaking his head.

“A complication of her condition,” Silas added. “She requires a special pill every day, or else . . . and . . .” He seemed on the verge of crying. His arthritic hands were trembling.

Les shifted his focus to Pam. The sight of the dignified old man so upset made him uncomfortable, a reminder of how carefully constructed his own composure might be.

“Could she have taken another bottle?”

Pam shook her head. “Our insurance only covers one bottle at a time. The pill is a combination of two antiepileptic drugs that are mixed in a specific ratio just for her. It's the only thing that works. And right now, it's upstairs.”