Reflex (2 page)

She contemplated the long hike in front of her, the fact that her ID was in Oklahoma and she couldn't fly without it, or rent a car, and she'd have to take the bus. She thought about walking a minimal distance away from the Aerie and setting off the PLB, but gritted her teeth. Not yet.

She reached the edge and sighed, letting some more rope out and dropping over the edge. She started down with small jumps, then swore as the rope crumbled a bit of the edge, showering her with gravel and a nasty piece of limestone that caromed off her shin. Sand drifted into her eyes, causing her to blink in the morning sunlight.

Oh, great!

She couldn't help picturing the condo, cluttered, friendly, sand-free, with her clothing, her wallet, and a fridge with milk in it.

Davy Rice, you're a real pain-in-the
—Above her, there was the sound of grinding rock, and then a sharp crack. The rope went slack and she dropped backwards, watching, in horror, as the bolt and a partial plug of concrete, still tied to the end of the rope, came flying over the edge. She dropped like a stone, still a hundred and seventy feet above the rocks below, her arms and feet flailing. The cold air cut past her ears and the adrenaline stabbed into her chest like a sword.

Oh, God, ohgod, ohgodohgodohgod—

She crouched in the small living room of the condo in Stillwater, a pile of rope draped across her knees and feet. The heavy bolt and ring, with a small collar of concrete, dropped to the carpet at her side with a thud.

That was the first time.

She stopped screaming, hadn't realized she'd started, but her voice cut off into choking sobs. She sat back from the crouch, banging into the glass top of the coffee table and spilling a pile of books across the carpet.

She tried to rub her back where she'd struck the table edge. It stung—she'd scraped skin.

The trouble with being a trained psychologist is that when you experience something unreal, you consider the chance that you are experiencing a psychotic break.

Well, at least I know it's
possible.
Davy didn't the first time it happened to him.
Her breathing slowed and some of the tension eased out of her. She felt drained, weak, as if she'd run up several flights of stairs.

Can everyone? If they've taken thousands of experienced jumps?

She wanted to talk to Davy about it but, of course, she couldn't.

Where are you, David Rice!

There were several messages on voice mail but they were all from the secretary she shared with the other two therapists at the clinic. She'd missed seven client appointments yesterday. None of them were from Davy.

She called his pager number and punched in 911, their code for come home
now.
He didn't.

She checked her watch. It was only six-thirty in the morning. She had wanted a good start for her hike. But it was after eight on the east coast.

She started by calling the Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. Davy wasn't there. All the patients admitted in the last forty-eight hours had their own names. None of them were John Does. None of them had appeared suddenly, inexplicably.

It took her forty-five minutes to find the number in an old phone bill. Usually, when Davy received a page from Cox, he'd jump to D.C. and use a payphone to answer, but there'd been a time when he was sick with the flu, dizzy and feverish, and had actually called from the condo.

It rang several times before switching to the voice mail system. "Brian Cox here. Leave a message. I'll get back to you."

The voice took her back ten years, to her only meeting with the man, a judge-supervised interview when the NSA first discovered Davy. Not long after that, she'd spent several days illegally detained in an NSA safe house. She shuddered and almost forgot to speak at the tone.

"This is Millie Harrison-Rice, Davy's wife. Please call me." She left the condo's number and the clinic's, then pushed the handset cradle switch down, cutting the connection.

Shit!
What had Davy gotten into?

She tore off the clothes she was wearing and took a quick shower. She ran the water hot, hoping it would thaw the frozen place in her chest, a knot of suppressed grief, fear, and anger.
I'll let it out soon. When I don't have to function.

She put on therapist clothes, comfortable but slightly formal, a combination she'd found gave her the right mixture of accessibility and authority with her clients. Jeans, a nice blouse, a silk jacket, and flats. She put her palm against the window. It was cold enough that she started to grab her overcoat, but, at the last minute, she pulled on Davy's worn leather jacket, a bit large on her, but comforting, his smell mixed pleasantly with the leather.

There was a bulge in the inside pocket and she checked it. It was an envelope with fifty twenty-dollar bills. One thousand dollars. They were new twenties, oversized Andrew Jacksons, so it wasn't his older stash, the used bills he'd stolen ten years before, from the Chemical Bank of New York.

She shook her head.
Spy money.
A small portion of a payment from one of his "errands" for Brian Cox. Non-lethal, zero-exposure transportation—an agent inserted into Beijing, a remote electronic radio monitor left in Serbia, a dissident pulled out of Baghdad. More rarely, hostages rescued, but he kept those to a minimum, for her sake. He'd done a few jobs a month—more recently during the mess in pre-occupation Iraq. The original plan had been to pay back the million he'd stolen while still a teen, but he'd kept on going, even after it had been returned with interest. He hadn't returned it to the bank, though. He'd donated the money anonymously to dozens of shelters and drug treatment centers across the country.

He still donated heavily, now, but there was also a closet back in the cliff house with over three million dollars in it.

"What else am I going to do?" he'd said. "Garden?"

She put the money back in the jacket. She might need it to find him.

Her office was only a quarter-mile away, a five-minute walk, but she tried to visualize it, tried to
will
herself there.

It didn't work.

Dammit. Did I imagine the whole thing? Was I at the condo the whole time?

The climbing rope with ring, bolt, and concrete was still in the corner of the living room, where she'd piled them.

She walked to the office, kicking through drifts of fallen leaves, unable to enjoy the colors of the changing trees. She wanted to find him, to do something. But she had no idea where he was, where to look. Davy would come to her, when he could.

She didn't know if she was strong enough.

Waiting is the hardest role.

Davy jumped to an alley running behind Nineteenth Street Northwest, just east of George Washington University. It was cool and the pavement was wet from recent rain, but it wasn't quite as cold as New York had been and, for once, the alley didn't smell of urine. Water dripped from fire escapes and telephone wires and he hunched his neck into his jacket as he turned toward the lighted street.

Just short of the sidewalk, where the alley widened behind a store, a refrigerator carton lay tucked against the wall, waterproofed by a layer of split plastic garbage bags. The ragged blanket that served as a door curtain was half-open and Davy saw two sets of eyes reflecting the mercury streetlamp. Children's eyes.

He paused.
Did they see me arrive?
The dim faces moved back into the shadow and vanished.

Sighing, Davy crouched down without moving any closer to the box. "Where're your parents, guys?"

There was no response.

He pulled a small flashlight from his inside jacket pocket and twisted it on, pointing it down. The two children flinched in the faint light. They were cleaner than he expected and the sleeping bag they were sharing looked fairly new. The face in front was pure Mayan, bright dark eyes and shocks of midnight hair. The second face was paler, with straw-colored hair, but the features were identical. Girls, he guessed.

"¿Donde está su madre?"
he tried.

Reluctantly, the eldest, perhaps eight—he couldn't really tell—said,
"Está trabajando. Una portera."

A janitor. Nightshift work that didn't require good English.

"¿Y su padre?"

She just shook her head.

"¿De dónde es usted?" Where are you from?

"Chiapas."

Displaced. He thought about what their trip must've been like. They probably traveled on third class buses up the length of Mexico, then in some horribly crowded van from someplace like Laredo after crossing the border illegally.

The little girl, perhaps five or six, suddenly spoke,
"Papa fue desaparecido."

Disappeared. The matter-of-fact way she said it made Davy want to cry.

"¿Cuándo vuelve su madre?"

"Por la mañana."

He dug his emergency cash out of an inner pocket—five hundred dollars in twenties, another thousand in hundred dollar bills, all wrapped with a rubber band.

"Oculte esto."
He mimed hiding it beneath his jacket.
"Dé esto a su madre. Para la cubierta." Give it to your mother. For housing.

The girls looked blank. He said,
"Para su propia casa." For your own house.
He tossed the cash lightly into the box, onto the foot of the sleeping bag.

The kids stared at it, like it might bite them.

"¡Oculte esto!"
he repeated. That amount of money could easily get them killed in their situation.

The older girl finally took it and shoved it beneath the sleeping bag.

He turned off the flashlight and stood up. As he turned to walk away he added,
"Buena suerte."
They'd need luck, even with the money.

He heard movement in the box but didn't look back.

When Davy finished threading his way through the entrance foyer and into the side room, he found Brian Cox sitting near a front window with a newspaper open, but not lifted quite high enough to block his view of the restaurant. Davy could tell Cox had spotted him first, probably while he was still on the street.

Cox was wearing his hair longer these days, looking somewhat professorial, and the football lineman physique of a decade past had turned into middle-aged heaviness draped in tweeds. Davy dropped into the seat opposite him with a sigh.

"Something the matter?" Cox folded the paper and put it down on the table.

"Yeah. I just had a delightful conversation with two little girls from Chiapas."

"You jum—came here from Mexico?"

"No. These two little girls are living in a refrigerator carton two blocks from here. Their mother works the graveyard shift as a janitor, leaving them alone most of the night. Their father was disappeared back in Chiapas."

Cox looked at him, surprised. "How do you find these people?"

"They're all over the place, Brian. You just have to open your eyes."

"You want me to call Child Protective Services?"

"Hell, no. So they get taken away from their mother? How is that going to help? I left them some money. Enough to get off the street, I hope."

Cox grunted and looked thoughtful. "You can't save them all, Davy."

"I know that!" Davy snapped. "It's just—" A waitress with dirty blond hair escaping her barrettes, a bare midriff with a pierced navel, and a large patch of thigh showing through a ragged hole in her jeans stopped at the table. Davy exhaled. "Tea, please. Something herbal." He glanced at the list. "Lemongrass-chamomile."

Cox pointed at his coffee. "A slice of the apple pie and a refill."

She smiled mechanically and left.

Davy looked down at the tabletop. "You have kids, right?"

Cox nodded. "Two boys. And yes, I was thinking of them when you told me about those two little girls."

Davy shook his head. "No. That's not the connection I'd made." He sighed heavily. "I had an argument with Millie tonight. She's ready to have kids."

Cox raised his eyebrows. "Oh? And the argument is what? That you aren't?"

"Not yet."

"I see."

Davy winced. "What do you see?"

Cox blinked, his face mild. "That she's ready and you're not."

A different waitress, a heavily made-up brunette in a tightly knotted tie, snow-white shirt, and black slacks, brought out the tea and Cox's pie. Her hair was tightly pulled back to a severe bun. Davy shook his head, bemused at the contrast.

Cox looked annoyed. "Could I get that refill on the coffee?"

"Coming right up, sir."

Davy played with the tea bag, dipping it in and out of the water. He'd had coffee in New York only a half-hour before and hoped he wasn't in for another sleepless night. He inhaled the odor of the lemongrass and it cascaded a memory of spicy Thai soups eaten on high stools under a thatched roof in ChaAm on the coast road to Malaysia. With Millie. He took a gulp. It felt good on his throat, a surprise, since he hadn't realized his throat hurt. "She's restless, I think. She has friends but it's hard for her to get really close when she can't be truly open with them."

Cox sighed. "I know that one—at least you guys are open with each other, right? There are things I can never tell my wife."

The brunette waitress returned with the coffeepot and refilled Cox's cup. "How's the tea, sir?"

"Good. Really good." He drank some more.

Cox stared at him then at the waitress's retreating back. "She dresses a lot better than the other servers here."

Davy said, "Probably a law student at George Washington. They need money, too, considering tuition and all."

Cox shrugged. "Seemed a bit old for that, but you never know."

"What's the job, Brian?"

Cox glanced around and lowered his voice. "You've never gone into Pyongyang, right?"

Davy shook his head. "No. South Korea, yes. I've got jump sites in Seoul and Pusan but I've never been in the Democratic Peoples Republic." He drank more of his tea.

"We have something coming up in two weeks. We'd like you to acquire a site near the Hotel Pothonggang in Pyongyang. We can put you on an Air Koryo flight from Tokyo. You can go in as a Canadian."