Five miles out of town, Luke Dantry fell into a deep, desperate sleep.
The phone call
came as Henry stepped out of the shower. He felt sick from lack of sleep and worry.
Please be good news
, he thought.
It was the Night Road hacker. ‘You wanted me to find Eric Lindoe. He and his girlfriend were on the passenger manifest for a flight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Thailand yesterday.’ He fed Henry the details. Thailand. Of course Eric could run far; he’d taken the Night Road’s money. It would be most difficult for Luke to follow Eric there, without cash, without a passport. Without help.
‘What about breaking into Eric’s bank?’ Henry asked. It was their chance, without Eric, to find where the fifty million had been moved.
‘I think your Eric screwed us and his own bank. I hacked into the bank’s audit trail - the history of every transaction that’s taken place this month. Someone inside looped the audit trail onto itself - there’s dozens of gigabytes of transaction data more than there should be, it’s a complete information overload, it’s entirely disrupted the audit trail, destroyed its integrity. I expect there’s a lot of upset people at Eric’s bank right now. No one’s going to be able to find what money went where for several days. Even their backups are corrupted. Eric knew exactly what he was doing.’
Disaster. The Arab prince had given Eric to Henry as a contact. But Henry could hardly go to the prince and say: lost the fifty million somewhere in that bank, could you lean on the bankers to cough it up? Admitting failure would be a death sentence. And the bankers, if Eric had sabotaged their internal auditing system, would hardly be eager to admit they had a rogue employee; it would destroy their reputations. No. Henry would have to find the money without letting the prince know it had gone missing.
‘I don’t think I can risk a further hack at the bank. I set off intrusion alarms as it was.’
Henry thanked the hacker and hung up. Then Henry’s office phone rang. He hurried down the hallway, wrapped in his towel, to answer it. ‘Yes?’
A flat, cold voice he didn’t recognize said, ‘You want your stepson back?’ Not Mouser, not the British woman, not Drummond.
‘Who is this?’
‘You want your stepson back?’
Now he realized he’d heard this vaguely whiny voice before. Where? He couldn’t remember. ‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’ll call you back when I have him, and we’ll make a trade.’ Then the caller hung up.
Henry checked the call log. The phone’s number was not one he recognized, but the area code was for Chicago. Eric Lindoe’s home-town.
Seventeen critical
displays stood in the Braintree Price-Right store, considered vital because the Price-Right buyers wanted to measure customer response to price and product combinations. Twenty-four security cameras watched the store. Six of the cameras above the displays had been doubly purposed; not only for security, but to observe customer behavior. What path through the store did a customer who’d paused to look at the display take? Did they go first to clothing, then to toiletries, or electronics? What facial expressions did customers show at displays - smiles, frowns, shaking of heads, curiosity? How long did each customer study the display? Did they pick up and examine items, and for how long?
Tens of thousands of faces were captured at the Price-Right displays in thirty-nine states every day. The video feed went instantaneously to the corporate headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. There it would be run through a preliminary computer analysis, to provide the company’s marketers with initial data to help them refine pricing and stock strategies.
But, for the past several hours, the film was also being siphoned off to another server, in the company’s special projects division. This was done by a very quiet request from outside Price-Right. There, every face that had been captured at one of the monitored store displays was compared to a photo. A young man, in his mid-twenties, light brown hair, blue eyes, with a defined and analyzed set of facial proportions, rendered into mathematical equations. The length of his mouth. The distance from lower lip to jawline. The angle of cheekbones. The distance between his eyes. The length and width of ear.
Every face caught at the displays was compared to the young man’s photo.
Comparison number 10,262 found the closest match by far, a photo snapped when a young man bought a pair of shoes in Braintree, Texas. The server automatically sent an anonymous email alert, snaking through the world and masking its traces, arriving on a screen in Paris, France.
The man who received the message studied Luke Dantry’s face. For a long time. Then he picked up a phone, to order a search of all cellular calls coming in and out of the small town of Braintree, Texas, monitoring all communications, all financial transfers, all transportation records.
The man stared at the photo on the screen and thought:
They will kill you when they find you
.
Mouser had disinfected and bound the stab wound. No way he was going to let Snow know he’d been hurt. He’d explain the knife’s rip in his jeans as a tear from running through the piney woods. He had called her to come pick him up at the cottage, but Jesus, the pain was a hot bolt and the bandage didn’t seem to be adhering well.
The little bastard. He’d cut Luke’s throat after he told them what they needed to know.
Snow was fooled for all of five seconds as he walked toward her car. ‘You’re hurt.’ She turned him back into the cottage and sat him on the edge of the bathroom tub. She undid his zipper and slid down his pants - he didn’t protest - and then she went and got a medical kit from her car’s trunk. She tended to the wound with a brisk professionalism that startled him. Disinfecting and then suturing the wound.
‘I learned to bind wounds at an early age,’ she said. ‘Had to.’
‘Same as your daddy teaching you to build bombs?’
‘Uh huh,’ she said.
‘That must have been quite a summer camp he sent you to.’
‘Camp Life,’ she said.
‘Tough life.’
‘I was a Child of the Lamb,’ she said.
He was silent, in deference to her past. The Children of the Lamb had been a religious group, sheltering themselves away in a compound in Wyoming. The Beast had sent its army to flush them out - there had been lies about weapons being massed, and tax evasion, and child rape on the altars, and similar silky untruths that unfurled on the Beast’s forked tongue. After a two-week siege, the Feds had laid waste to the compound, killing thirty, leaving a dozen survivors. It had been ten years ago.
‘I see,’ he said quietly. With respect.
‘One of the four kids who survived the siege,’ she said. ‘I was fifteen.’
It explained the burn scars. ‘Your parents?’
‘Dead. Burned up. Daddy shoved me out the window. His hair was on fire. I ran but the agents caught me, wrestled me to the ground. I watched our temple burn. I saw my people rise, in the smoke, to God.’ She focused on his bandage.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ Snow answered. Now she looked up at him. ‘It made me who I am, and I like myself just fine.’
He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re gonna beat the Beast together. We’ll find Luke. Hellfire will happen.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He picked up his phone, rang Henry, talked, listened. He hung up. Snow still sat on the tile floor, looking at him, seeing a rising mix of judgment and anger in his eyes. ‘Your old boyfriend Bridger, he tried to talk. He told some group called Quicksilver about Hellfire. At least its names. But he was holding out on the details for money. But we got to move fast. How much does the bastard know?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I never told Bridger a word. Maybe he heard me mention the word on the phone when I spoke to Henry about how to make all the bombs. But I never told him. But I can’t guarantee he didn’t spy on me.’
‘Does he know where the bombs are? Does he know our targets?’
She didn’t answer right away, and he could see was flipping through the pages of her memory. She did this with care and he believed her now, completely. Instead of reaching for her neck to strangle her, he barely touched her hair with his fingertips. ‘No. He doesn’t know where they’re stored, he doesn’t know the targets. About that, I never told him, never wrote anything down he could find.’ She spoke with such calmness there was no room in her words or her breath for a self-serving lie. But she ducked her head. If he wanted to kill her, he could, and he realized she would accept her fate like a soldier. He felt his heart shift in his chest. He pulled his hands away from her head, folded them back in his lap.
‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was hoarse. ‘Where will Bridger hide?’
‘His family’s from Alabama. He might go there. Or he might stay in Houston. He’s not real bright.’
‘We’ll get the Night Road looking for him. We’ll find him and he can tell us who these Quicksilver assholes are.’
Now she looked up at him. ‘Why do you hate the government?’
‘I just do.’
‘I told you my reasons. Tell me yours.’ She leaned toward him, their faces an inch apart. ‘Please, Mouser.’
For a moment the words, hanging in the wet air between them, were more intimate than a kiss.
‘I prefer not,’ he said.
She leaned back and closed the medical kit.
‘Thank you for tending me,’ he said. ‘You could have been a doctor or a nurse.’
‘No. I don’t much like people any more.’
He knew how she felt.
‘What now?’ she asked.
‘Luke might be in the town nearby.’
‘Or hitchhiking up the highway. He seems to like trucks.’
‘Then we better get resources on our side. He’s going to stick his head up and we need to be ready.’
‘How’s the pain?’
‘Tolerable,’ Mouser said. She’d given him a woozy shot of relief from her medical bag.
‘Let’s see what’s tolerable.’ The wound was low on his leg, above the knee. She reached out to touch it but her hand slid up past the bandage to his underwear. She reached inside the opening of his boxers, closed her hand on him.
‘What?’ he said in utter shock.
‘It’s a lonely life, isn’t it, Mouser?’ she said.
It had been four years. He had the mission, he did not need women. But his hands didn’t rise to push her away and her mouth was a warm buzz against his lips. The pain seemed to fade for him, when she slid his jeans off all the way, there on the cool bathroom floor. An hour later they left the cottage and he thought: damn, you don’t let feelings get in the way of fighting the Beast. Should have been chasing him. Not chasing her. He was ashamed of himself.
When he called Henry again, he got a surprise.
‘I want you two to go to Chicago,’ Henry said. ‘I have reason to believe Luke is heading there.’
The hand shook Luke awake and his first thought was,
they’ve found me
.
He opened his eyes to see the kind face of an elderly woman who had been sitting across the aisle from him, working a pencil patiently through the pages of a crossword puzzle book.
‘Texarkana, honey. We got a dinner stop and layover here if you’re going further.’
He blinked and thanked her in a broken mumble. She stepped back with an uncertain smile and waddled down the aisle.
Luke stumbled off the bus. The air was cool and humid, the rain past. He started to walk down the street in search of food.
A four-hour layover before his ticket took him onward to Little Rock, Memphis, and then Chicago. He devoured a double hamburger at a fast-food chain, careful not to meet anyone’s gaze. He walked down a couple of blocks to a bar, slipped inside its welcoming darkness, and ordered a Coke.
The television was on, the early news reporting that the demolishing rains that had moved up from the Gulf had begun to subside. Confirmation from a reporter outside Ripley that the rail yard disaster had been a bomb. Not an accident. The bar hushed as the reporter described how the FBI was trying to determine if this was a jihadist attack or a domestic enemy. The screen went to a commercial and the conversation of the beer drinkers resumed, although subdued. Luke sipped his soda. The news came back on, covering the bizarre shooting of the homeless man again, Henry speaking on camera once more, the betrayal repeating itself. Luke’s face was on the screen. The few early drinkers were lost in their conversations, studying their beers, or clicking billiard balls. Luke kept his sunglasses on.
But now there were new reports. Luke saw a shot of a friend’s cell phone, with the message Luke had sent to all his friends on Twitter.
I’m innocent
. And one of his grad school friends, rising to his defense, blinking into the camera said, ‘If Luke Dantry says he’s innocent, I believe he is. What motive does he have to kill a homeless stranger? None.’
But then the reporter went back to Luke’s past. A runaway, a couple of run-ins with the law as a kid. Enough to confirm to the casual viewer that Luke was trouble, reinforced by his stepfather’s pleas to surrender.
The barkeep let two more stories play out on the news and as a steady stream of customers began to enter the bar he clicked over to ESPN for the Dallas Mavericks game.
Luke left a dollar tip and walked a half-mile until he came to a larger gas station, one with a sizeable convenience store attached. He bought a pair of nail scissors and went to the bathroom, locked himself in a stall, and read the hair dye directions. He faced the mirror, applied the hair dye quickly and a little sloppily. He returned to the stall, sat, waited, while a few customers came and went. After thirty minutes, he rinsed the gunk from his hair quickly in the sink, dried it with a paper towel. Then he took the scissors, clipped his hair close to his head. Messy but now blond and he covered most of his new hair with his baseball cap.
He tried Chris with his prepaid phone, but got no answer. He felt tense, restless. He walked back to the bus terminal and kept his back to the passengers.