SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (14 page)

Could she get past the man between her and the door? Remove the bag from her head, push him aside, open the door? Then what? Would she be able to survive hitting the pavement at seventy miles an hour?

In the end, as she felt the vehicle slow down and lean into a turn, probably in this case to merge onto 87, as she had suspected, Jennifer realized that besides her one hand, her body was completely numb. She didn’t have to affect that she was still unconscious and pretend to lie there helplessly – her body was doing it naturally. In a bright moment of terror she realized that she couldn’t even lift her head. She could only remain there helpless, listening to the drone of the tires as they raced along the highway.

The blow to the back of the head hadn’t knocked her out as the men had intended – but had it crushed some bone or nerve in her neck? Had she been permanently paralyzed?

The van careened along, sailing over the undulating road, gathering speed on 87, the Major Deegan. Or, if that’s not where they were, she was completely lost. So far the men hadn’t said a word.

And she felt that thing again, that sense of something which she’d felt in the diner with Petrino. This dark field, black as her vision inside the hood, covering and permeating everything.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / Monday, 8:18 AM

Brendan woke up with a jolt. Something had disturbed him. His dreams glutted together in his mind, diffuse feelings and images slipping over each other. A storm drain. A baby crying. He tried to get his bearings, suddenly unsure where he was.

He was in Argon’s house. Slumped over on Argon’s couch. Fully clothed – he’d barely even shifted position from when he had passed out. He thought to check the time, and that was when he realized what had woken him up – Argon’s phone was ringing. Brendan groaned, got himself up and moving, and snatched the handset from the cradle.

“Healy?” The voice on the other end was vaguely familiar.

“Yes.”

“Cushing, Mount Pleasant PD. I was about to give up.”

“Sorry.”

“Not used to calling people on landlines. Except for Argon.”

“What can I do for you, Cushing?”

“This is just a courtesy call. I, ah . . . I wanted to let you know that Anthony Carrera is no longer conducting the investigation.”

“He’s not? How come?”

“He, well. He had to take leave of the case.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, we can’t locate him at the moment.”

“He’s missing?”

“I didn’t say that, exactly. I’m sending over a family liaison officer today. Leonard Dutko. Maybe you worked with him?”

Brendan remembered the name. Leonard Dutko looked like the consummate cop – tall, cropped dark hair, thick Groucho Marx mustache. Polish. They had worked opposite shifts and only seen each other once a week at the general briefing.

“I did.”

“He’ll be by to look into Argon’s personal effects. We still need to move forward with the funeral. You’re aware that Argon’s sister is not competent to arrange funeral services?”

“I am, yes.” Brendan might have put it differently, but Cushing didn’t seem like the most sensitive guy in the world about people with physical infirmities, or generally to anyone, for that matter.

“Well, maybe you would be able to help Officer Dutko as he attempts to gather the necessaries. Sound good?”

Brendan was sure Cushing didn’t give a shit in the begonias whether it sounded good or not.

“What are you really asking me, Chief Cushing?”

Cushing cleared his throat. Brendan could tell the man was swallowing an immense amount of pride, and perhaps it was getting stuck in his esophagus.

“I think we should . . . communicate. In the interim. Until I TOT another investigator. That will likely be a man named Goro Uchida.”

Brendan understood. “TOT” was cop-speak for “Turn-over-to.”

“If we’re communicating, can I ask you one thing, Chief?”

“Mmm?”

“In the procedurals following an LODD, is it standard practice for the department to obtain a copy of the deceased officer’s medical records from the hospital?”

“It’s not. But it is customary for any investigating officer.”

“So Carrera would have Argon’s medical records? Do you have his files on Argon?”

“Carrera was waiting on the records, to my knowledge.”

“Because one of the nurses at Westchester Hospital had interesting things to say about men in suits coming in to take Argon’s records. And then I got a call from the hospital saying that the originals were missing. Said that they may have been misplaced.”

Cushing seemed a little unsure of himself. “They’re a bit of a shit-show over there at Westchester Med. Who did they say took the records?”

“They thought they were federal agents. Is the FBI on this, Cushing?”

“The FBI?” Cushing let out a sigh. “Why the hell would the FBI be involved?”

“I don’t know. Why is there so little on Argon’s death in the media? Decorated officer – ‘Baby Sloane’ officer no less – is killed in the line of duty; you’d think the media would make hay. But there’s barely anything. I want to see the body, the car, talk to the other driver, everything. Let me fully piggyback on your investigation – Uchida, or whoever you give it to now that Carrera has just mysteriously dropped off the face of the Earth. You want my help? I need full access. To everything.”

Cushing was silent. Brendan could almost feel the man’s antipathy coalescing on the other end of the line. “You know, Healy, I wasn’t going to say anything, but if it wasn’t for Argon pulling strings with Larry Taber, you never would have made detective. At least, not here.”

“That’s fine, Chief. But it’s Taber who asked me to come down here in the first place. He suspected Argon met with foul play.”

“Now why would he suspect that, Healy?” There was a condescending edge to Cushing’s tone, but the question made Brendan think, nonetheless.

“I don’t know. He and Argon were friends. Maybe Argon said something to him, was worried that something was about to happen.”

“Happen? Like what? Argon had some premonition he was going to get into a traffic accident with some random douchebag?”

“Is he a random douchebag? Who is he? Let me see the body, the car, the driver, like I said.”

“I’ll think about it, Healy.”

“I appreciate that. Take care.” Brendan hung up before Cushing could say anything else. He wasn’t trying to make enemies, but Cushing was an asshole, and Brendan had reached the limit of his patience. If they had to work together this way, then so be it. At least they were working together; he knew Cushing would follow up on the medical records situation.

He headed to the bathroom to clean himself up and change his clothes. It seemed like someone was always taking over where another had left off. Carrera had gone AWOL in the middle of the Argon investigation with some guy named Uchida coming on board; a DOJ agent named Wyn Weston was mounting a major investigation into human trafficking around the Heilshorn case and then a woman named Jennifer Aiken had taken over.

Brendan didn’t believe in coincidences. Someone was stalling things, making it nearly impossible to get answers.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN / Monday, 8:30 AM

She was barely able to breathe. The men had gagged her. This, on top of everything else, and maybe even more so, was a sickening thing – Jennifer had suffered wicked allergies as a child and could remember watching movies where people’s mouths were taped over and thinking that she would die if it ever happened to her; she couldn’t always breathe well through her nose. And now it was happening for real.

She did the best she could, trying to keep calm, drawing trembling thin breaths that whistled through her nasal passages as she tried to get her bearings. She was on a chair, hands lashed behind her. Binding her were the plastic zip ties often used in lieu of traditional handcuffs.

Her feet were unbound, however. She was able to push with her sneakers and rock the chair back – it was a standard chair, wooden, straight-backed.

She was in a loft space, open and unfurnished. It looked like it had been given a fresh coat of paint. As Jennifer slowly turned her head to look around, mindful of the throbbing pain in her neck, she saw a wall of mirrors with a balance bar that ran the length of the room.

It was a dance studio of some kind.

She could see herself in the mirrors. Bright morning light shone through a bank of windows overlooking the city; the tops of several tall buildings and a gauzy glimpse of skyscrapers in the distance. It wasn’t White Plains. It was New York City. And she could also see the man standing behind her, motionless, his hands neatly folded in front of his waist, the palms resting on his belt buckle.

At the far end of the wall of mirrors was a door. It opened now, and another man in an expensive-looking suit walked in. He was young, maybe thirty, and neatly groomed. He looked like a young Brad Pitt, but his eyes were more hawkish, his demeanor instantly recognizable as volatile. Something in the way he walked – he cut across the wooden floors at an angle, his head turned to her. He moved like a predator, stalking his prey, sidling back and forth before lunging to devour its meal. He was in charge, she assessed.

A third man followed behind him. Jennifer thought she recognized this one, and the man behind her. They were the two who had abducted her.

As soon as the one in charge took his position a few yards in front of her, she started making noises. She needed to make him take the gag off her. She breathed in and out with extra force to emphasize her struggle. Mucous sprayed from her nose as she fought against the rising tide of panic, and pleaded with her eyes.

The man’s gaze shifted behind her, over her shoulder. He nodded his head, and the man behind her reached around her and pulled the gag out of her mouth.

Jennifer took in deep, rattling, grateful breaths. Her whole body was shaking, and she breathed the way a baby breathed after it had been crying, spluttering and whooping. It was so good to have air.

“Thank you,” she said. The words spilled out of her, a natural response to regaining the ability to breathe properly.

“You’re welcome.” He had a soft voice, almost feminine. Jennifer could detect the faint bulge of a weapon holstered on the left side of his torso.

“My name is Jeremy Staryles,” he said, and pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. He read from it. “And you are Jennifer Aiken.”

He gave a handsome smile. “Just kidding. I knew your name. I didn’t need to read it.”

Staryles held a lighter in his other hand. He sparked the flint and fed the flame to the edge of the torn paper. He let it burn until it almost reached his fingers and then he let the last flaming fragment drop to the ground, where he mashed it out with his heel.

Now he pulled something else from his pocket. It was a small vial, and it contained a brownish powder. It was hard to see exactly – Jennifer didn’t have her contacts in, and the men who had taken her certainly hadn’t paused to ask if she wanted to get anything, like her glasses, before they brutally abducted her.

She felt panic ripple through her body, like an electric shock.

Keep it together
, she told herself. But the half-hearted pep-talk had zero effect. She could sense the rising gorge of fear, could feel that dry suck at the base of her throat which signaled real terror.

* * *

“This is exactly one gram of thallous sulfate. It can also be referred to as just thallium sulfate, or simply, thallium. In most cases, as little as five hundred milligrams are fatal in adult humans.”

As he spoke, his gaze went back and forth between Jennifer and the vial.

“This is used in some medical treatments, you know. It’s funny – I always think about this: there are so many deadly things which can also do good. Do you know what I mean? I think people like to lump things into two categories. Like good and evil. But it’s the way it is with that symbol – do you know what I’m talking about? The yin-yang. I have that tattooed somewhere on my body – I won’t say where; I’ll let you guess. Reality is like that symbol – each ‘thing’ contains its opposite. What can heal you, can also kill you. Pretty amazing. You think?”

“Yes.” Jennifer’s voice was hoarse. Her throat was dry, she wanted to suck the oxygen out of the air like a vacuum. Her heart beat a hard, steady rhythm against her sternum. Her mind was feverish, rent with horror.

Jeremy Staryles took a step forward, bent down, and placed the vial on the floor. They were nice wooden floors, probably oak, Jennifer saw, feeling suddenly disconnected from what was happening to her. The vial sat there, catching the light from the bank of windows with the view. The light threw a glassy shadow of the vial against the hardwood. Looking at it, she swallowed, and found that she had no saliva.

Staryles glanced up from the vial and looked at her.

“The thallium ions enter the cells of your body. The poison concentrates its attack on your kidneys, your liver, and your brain. After that, it spreads to all of your tissues. Your hair starts to fall out. You feel like your feet are burning, like your legs and arms are getting twisted and mangled by some giant combine.”

He tilted his head a little, sizing her up. “You’re what? You’re fifty-five, maybe fifty-six kilograms. In Iraq we used this on guys, skinny guys, probably weighed just about the same as you. Skinny guys with ribs. And it took two days, three, tops, to kill them.”

“Please . . .”

Staryles held up his hand, and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and looked around the room.

“This space here is nice. No one uses it. Because no one we don’t like comes anywhere near this building.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Now Staryles returned his scrutiny back to her. He lowered himself into a crouch on the floor, and tented his fingers out on the hardwood in front of him, getting himself closer to the thallium, driving home to her its presence there on the floor.

“What I want you to do,” Staryles said, drawing out the last word, “is first and foremost stop thinking you know anything about anything. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” She would say anything.

He seemed unconvinced and his handsome face creased with doubt. “Really? You don’t think that will be hard for you? You’re very book-smart. Lots of academic work. You can’t undo all that just because I ask.”

She had no response. Her heart was pumping blood into her body so fiercely that she felt a certain vigor returning. And then, for a fleeting moment caused perhaps by a rush of endorphins or dopamine, she felt almost sanguine, like this was all something she could work her way out of. That this man was going to reason with her, and she was going to convince him to let her go. The world seemed to grow still and calm.

“I didn’t go to college,” Staryles said a little wistfully. “I went straight to boot camp after high school. My father, you know . . . I had no choice. And then, boom, 9/11. Like he knew that shit was gonna happen. Before I knew it, I was on the ground in Iraq and then in 2003, oh man, the shit hit the fan. But I’m sure you know about all of that.”

She felt nothing now. Numb and emotionless. The fear had abated.

“You work for the Justice Department,” Staryles said. “You knew what JSOC was when the journalists were still going around undercover, wearing their ridiculous beards to blend in, trying to put the pieces together, thinking they were on to something. The Joint Special Operations Command. Then,
boom
again. Osama Bin Laden, dead. Only after Pakistan completely manipulated the American government into thinking Afghanistan was the bad guy, while they hid Bin Laden away right by a Pakistani military academy. Crazy, right?”

She stared into his light blue eyes as he continued.

“But after we finally get him, shit, suddenly the whole world knows about JSOC. And you’ve got special ops guys popping out of the woodwork and taking credit for training, and talking about how
surgical
it all is, and how it’s the new way of warfare. Right?”

“Yes. You’re right.” The words sounded robotic to her. Programmed by someone or something else.

“Thank you. But, it doesn’t matter. We’re a country of neophiliacs. All we care about is ‘What’s the next shiny thing?’ We’re addicts. And we have no memory. We have only
Lebenslüge
.”

He stood up, his hand darting out and grabbing the vial up in one quick, predatory move.

She realized that he had gloves on. For some reason she hadn’t noticed that before – either hadn’t noticed it or denied seeing it. She was in shock, she told herself; the rollercoaster of emotions she was feeling, the hyper-fear, the sudden trough of apathy. But everything was going to be alright.

“I
am
from the Justice Department,” she said, feeling that sense of programmed language. What had he just said?
Lebenslüge
? “And I’m happy to cooperate with you for anything you might need. This is unorthodox, sure – I’m still in my exercise clothes over here.” She laughed, and it was a sick, lilting sound that echoed in the room. “But I’m used to improvising, doing what I have to do . . .”

As she droned on in this deadpan way, alternately assured that this would all blow over and convinced she was going to die (
he told me his name
), she watched the men putting small white surgical masks on.

“All you have to do is tell me what you want. I’m sure you’re looking for some information. You want to know about my investigation. My role with the HTPU. I literally wrote the textbook on it, you know. I can tell you anything.”

She could hear herself, but she couldn’t stop. Her voice had changed, taking on a high, crackling, pathetic quality.

But everything was going to be okay. Everything was going to be fine.

She found herself looking out the window now as she talked. She looked at those buildings out there. People working, people talking on the phone, having coffee. Far below, the hustle of the city as it beat its drum on the dirty sidewalks, yellow cabs and city buses jostling for space, everything surging.

“You want me to tell you what I know about Titan. What we know. Because there are eight of us in the task force. And we report directly to the Attorney General. And he’s a decent man. He knows how to play ball. I can introduce you. Maybe talk on the phone. Give me a phone, and we can talk to him. You can negotiate my release.”

Staryles and the other man had finished with their masks and were looking at one another, and down at the vial Staryles was holding, murmuring something in low voices. Now they came quickly over towards her.

Oh dear God. Oh Mom, Mom where are you? I’m sorry.

She felt pressure on her forehead as the man behind her took her head in his hands. His leather gloves slid around her cheek bones. His thumb on one side of her mouth, his fingers on the other. He started to squeeze.

She couldn’t talk anymore. Instead, what came out of her was nonsensical, just a gargle of pleas.

Staryles looked like he was considering some mild unpleasantness as he approached her, like how to go about scooping dog poop off the sidewalk. A light furrow of his brow. His blue eyes shone. They were beautiful eyes, some shocked, insane part of her mind observed; mineral blue like a quarry lake.

He stood in front of her, staring down and into her. The vial in his hand was open.