There was no reckoning the hours. What he did know precisely was the number of rescues he’d participated in: forty-eight, roughly two a year. He remembered every face and all the names, each identity inextricably wrapped up with tactile impressions of the case: the texture of a sleeping toddler’s hair against his bare arm on an early morning ferry leaving New York; the scent of datura flowers outside the moonlit walls of a Palm Springs mansion; the sand crunching under his boots as he sprinted across the Mexican beach toward the waiting Orca Queen; the laugh—a song of joy and wonder—that the small blond woman named Wanda gave out when she stepped from the mountaintop cabin and saw the ten thousand acres of trees that separated her from a husband with murder in his eyes.
Strong, clear memories that made the fatigue, the rootlessness, the danger, and even the endless gut-churning surveillance tapes all worthwhile.
If there’d been just one kid like Jamie in the past twenty-six years, Allen would have felt his life justified. To have been instrumental in preserving seventy-nine kids, that felt like a gift.
Not that all the children had been like Jamie. Most had been simply a logistical problem, a potential source of disruption that he needed to keep under iron control until he had them away from danger. Most of the kids had been either so young they were unformed, or else so confused and frightened that he couldn’t tell what their personalities would be. He did his job, he lodged his evidence, he made sure they were cleanly away, and then he turned his back. Only rarely had he been tempted to look up one of his rescues and see what had become of them. But Allen already suspected that Jamie O’Connell would be a different matter—not that he’d endanger the kid by hanging around to check on him, of course not, but somehow he knew that he was going to be tempted. Maybe it was because the boy had been his very last client. Maybe he’d spent a day too long in Jamie’s company, and what a shrink would call countertransference had begun to establish itself.
And maybe he ought to think about other things.
With a wrench, Allen pulled his mind away from Jamie, from Montana, and from the past. That was over; he had a life to live now. He was still a young man—well, a healthy middle-aged man—and he had a life ahead of him. He’d leave Alice dangling for a while before accepting her offer, just long enough so she didn’t take him for granted. In the meantime, there was his increasingly interesting relationship with the extraordinary woman who owned Sanctuary Island, to say nothing of the challenge he would face in ingratiating himself back into his extended family, finding a way of convincing his younger brother the sheriff that his long, long absence was neither sinister nor unfriendly, merely eccentric. It was June: the beginning of a promising summer.
The miles spun on beneath the truck’s tires, and as they did, the myriad gossamer threads that bound Allen Carmichael to his life as a professional kidnapper grew taut, and silently, one by one, parted, leaving him, for the first time in his adult life, a free man.
Or so he told himself. In fact, a portion of his mind could not quite let go of Jamie O’Connell, a boy whom he almost hadn’t met at all.
Allen had retired for the first time barely a month before, once blond-haired AmberLyn McKenzie was safe with her mother over the Canadian border. And maybe that was the problem—he’d just begun to relax, only to be snatched back for Jamie; some part of him anticipated it happening again.
Relaxation did not come naturally to Allen Carmichael. Relaxation was as dangerous to a man who spent his life on the wrong side of the law as it was to a soldier in the jungle, and most of what he did in the course of disappearing people was illegal: He was, after all, a man who routinely committed breaking-and-entering, burglary (both physical and electronic), hideously illicit and often supremely tasteless forms of electronic surveillance, blackmail, assault (twice, when it had proven unavoidable), threat with a deadly weapon, kidnapping persons whose custody had been granted to others and transporting them across state lines, conspiracy, falsification of evidence, and half the offenses in the penal code. Once he’d even murdered a guard dog.
Kidnapping was a tool with a whole lot of really sharp edges to it. It had taken Allen years to refine the techniques, figuring out ways to use them without causing a world of hurt to himself and others. That first time, stealing Streak’s kids away from their Cuban stepfather, had been an ignorant grab-and-snatch, and he and Ed had been incredibly lucky not to have been caught and either shot by the stepfather’s pet cops—a bullet had whizzed over their heads, for God’s sake—or arrested by their U.S. brothers. One time was all it took and, adrenaline rush or no, he’d had to confront the hard fact that luck just wouldn’t do it. What he was doing was the equivalent of long-range patrols into a VC-infested green, and on that kind of mission, a man’s luck ran out fast.
The key was not high-tech gadgetry or super-spy techniques, although Allen had used plenty of cutting-edge technology and had trained in a wide variety of arcane secret-agent skills, from lock-picking to martial arts. He was no black belt, but he’d taken a lot of classes, mostly the sort of dirty fighting that would win him no prizes on a mat but which might save the life of a client, one day. He hadn’t fired a gun at a living being since Vietnam, but he practiced regularly at the range, both with a scoped rifle and a handgun. He was no master of disguise, but he could apply makeup that made him look younger or older or of a different ethnic background, and he’d practiced long hours with a coach to learn to change the way he moved. He was no race-car driver, but on a racetrack he’d mastered the controlled skid, the quick hundred-and-eighty-degree hand-brake turn, and the trick of nudging a car ahead of him into a spin.
For twenty-six years, Allen had survived by appearing absolutely ordinary while telling himself that the police forces of five countries were on his neck. In another twenty or thirty years, when electronic surveillance would become so all-pervasive that cameras hooked to central computers would occupy every city block, his job might well become impossible, but so far, he’d managed to avoid becoming a blip on any official radar. Nod a greeting to the cop on the corner and walk on by; look curious instead of guilty when a siren screamed past; drive like a law-abiding citizen who knew that the worst he did was edge up a couple of miles over the limit; with young kids, be a granddad with white hair and a Pontiac, with teenagers, wear brown hair dye and the look of a harassed father.
Normal and invisible was the answer. Sure, they could find you if they were looking hard enough; the key was not to have them notice your presence in the first place. No police force would have a gun battle or put out an APB or do a credit card search unless they had a name, a face, or a fingerprint, and all of Allen’s skill over the years had gone into presenting none of those pieces of evidence. And those police forces that did have an unsolved disappearance on their books scaled the search down when they got a note from the wife or kids saying they’d run off, and here’s evidence (maybe not justifiable cause, but evidence) to show the man left behind was a dirtbag. Allen had even two or three times come across cops who’d taken a cold, hard look at the facts behind a child’s disappearance and chosen to turn their back on it. The letter of the law doesn’t necessarily save lives.
So he’d learned the skills of urban surveillance and Internet security, false identities and how to go unnoticed by the most suspicious of men, how to disappear completely when burdened by the innocent. He’d moved through a network of small churches and women’s shelters, making friends with doctors and psychotherapists who understood the necessity of going outside the law. He had set up the Sanctuary cave as a place to conceal kids and their mothers; he’d even learned how to snatch a frightened child who didn’t know him, who regarded this tall stranger as just one more threat in a lifetime of them. For that, he’d had to learn to think like a real kidnapper, and he’d studied his tapes of pederasts to see how they coaxed their victim into trust. He hated it; his skin crawled with self-disgust while he was seducing a child into going with him, but he did it. And afterward he slept, more of
ten than not unvisited by deRosa.
Thus it was that on a spring morning a little over four weeks earlier, following his fifty-second and (or so he thought at the time) final rescue mission of six-year-old AmberLyn, his biker’s jacket (still emanating the gentle aura of cat’s piss) stowed in the rental locker with a dozen or so other personas that he never intended to use again, Allen had been sitting on the balcony of his Seattle apartment, feet propped up, drinking a beer, enjoying the bustle of the waterfront below, and idly checking in his mind to see if he’d left anything undone. The child he’d spent most of April watching was physically fine and young enough to be psychologically resilient; copies of the tapes Allen had made were locked away both in his own safe and that of the private investigator who’d hired him in the first place; and the police would get a set of the evidence as soon as the PI was satisfied that the threads that linked her with Allen had been safely cut. The tapes and letters might not convict the bastard, but they would make him squirm, and keep him too busy to pursue his daughter. Another child safe, another creep with a heel about to crush his head. His final job well done.
So Allen sat with the gentle sun of early May shining full on his face, and thought lazily about giving Ed a call. They’d made loose plans for a fishing trip, maybe even a run on the Orca Queen down to Baja to soak up some serious rays and go scuba diving in the clear, soothing waters, but hadn’t been able to set a date for it, not until Allen was free. Well, he was free now, free as a bird, a man of leisure, a fifty-four-year-old retiree. And none too soon; God, he was tired, tired of the life, worn to the bone. A rest would be good. Maybe he’d even start it right here in the warm . . .
The beep beep of the fax machine tickled his awareness half an hour or so later, and although it was not enough in itself to wake him, it did make him aware that the sun was not really very warm. He stretched, picked up his empty beer bottle from between the legs of the deck chair, and went in for a sweater, then decided instead that he’d put off a trip to the gym for long enough, and checked to see that the sweatpants and lifting gloves were still in the bag before he left the apartment.
Two hours later, the sun was low across the water when Allen let himself back in. He took a bottle of water from the fridge and unscrewed the cap as he passed through to the shower, stripping off his damp sweatshirt and throwing it in the general direction of the clothes hamper, kicking his battered running shoes into the closet, feeling aches from calves to wrists. Too long, he thought. Damn, you neglect your body for two minutes, it turns to mush on you. Although when he turned on the shower, he caught sight of himself in the long mirror, and looked over his naked body with critical approval. Maybe not completely to mush, he thought, sucking in his gut only a little.
The shower felt great on his skin, and he let it run hot onto the trembling muscles of his shoulders and haunches. He shaved in the shower, and scrubbed dry with one of the thick, scratchy towels Rae had brought him from Sweden last fall. His hands slowed at the thought of her, off in Switzerland, he thought it was, or had she reached Belgium by now? At any rate, she would be far away for the next three weeks, which was the only reason he’d consider going to Baja with Ed. Much as he loved the old bastard, Ed was a distant second to the marvelous woman who shared his life on Sanctuary.
And thinking of Ed, better call him and let him know the trip was on. Allen wrapped himself in the terrycloth robe that matched the towel, wadded the damp cloth over the towel rack, and went into the room that he’d set up as a study.
That’s when he spotted the fax, patiently waiting in the machine’s tray. He knew before he reached for it who it would be from, knew that his mind had conveniently set aside the beep beep in order to put off having to retrieve the thing.
“God damn it, Alice,” he said aloud, scowling in irritation at the white edge of paper. I’m finished, I told her that. She agreed—I’ve gotten too old for this game. I’m as near as dammit to qualifying for Social Security, for Christ sake.
He picked up the paper from the fax machine’s tray, and read the scribbled note. How about lunch tomorrow? it asked, without signature. In Alice’s code, this actually meant dinner tonight, only it wouldn’t be dinner, it would be a business meeting, and because it was a, let’s see, Thursday, he even knew the place. Hell. For the first time in months, he became aware that he was craving a smoke, and pushed away the desire in irritation.
Maybe, he told himself, it would only be a review, or a distant proposal. Maybe she’d present him with an engraved plaque: THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP.
Yeah, right. He’d better not call Ed until he talked to her.
She was there when he arrived at the restaurant. Looking at Alice, you might think she was some mid-rank executive, or a teacher in a private high school. She had medium length brown hair that looked short but could be made to look longer, and the only distinguishing thing about her face was the nose, which Allen knew had been broken twice but which had been set straight by experts. The other scars, the injuries physical and mental, did not show until you knew her well. She had invested her million-dollar settlement wisely.
She greeted Allen with more friendliness than she’d have shown if they’d been in private, getting up to kiss the air next to his cheek and patting the chair next to where she sat. An onlooker would catch a long-standing affection in her manner, as if they were old friends or even relatives. In truth, she trusted Allen only slightly more than she did most men, and regarded him as a useful instrument in her cause, as replaceable as a laptop or a camera.
The waiter poured him a glass of the white wine sitting in the tabletop cooler, and they made a show of studying the menus before calling the young man back. When their salads were in front of them and the topics of weather and politics had been disposed of, she said without preamble, “There’s another case come up, if you’re interested.”
Only if we can finish in three weeks, Allen thought. The apparent lack of concern was typical of her. When they’d begun to work together nearly ten years before, he cautiously allying his one-man operation with her only slightly larger organization, she’d made it seem as if she was doing him a favor, allowing him to help with one of her rescues; now, at least, she’d graduated to a demonstration of indifference over whether he took it or not.
He wasn’t fooled. “Alice, I’m retired. Besides which, I made plans to go away for a couple of weeks.”
“If you want,” she said, cool as always. “I wasn’t sure you meant it.”
You knew damn well I meant it, he thought, then asked aloud (as she no doubt knew he would), “What have you got?”
“I’ll forward you the email. The terminal it came from is in a public library, but the letter looks genuine. A twelve-year-old boy.”
“Parent?”
“Father’s the problem. Mother’s dead.”
Problem, Allen reflected, was a word loaded with reverberations. Especially the way Alice said it.
“Isn’t there someone else who can take it?” Alice had a number of women who did the same thing he did, some of whom he had worked with, others whose existence he merely inferred.
She just shrugged, a ladylike gesture packed with disdain. God, she pissed him off sometimes. “How the hell did I ever get involved with you, anyway?” he said petulantly, startling the waiter, who was about to remove his plate.
She met his eyes for the first time that evening. The demure smile she gave him was a wicked thing, holding more mischief than Ed got into in a year; Allen shook his head in admiration, and in surrender. “Okay, but this really has to be the last one.”
The rest of the meal passed in conversation about nothing.
Afterward, they parted at the door with another air kiss. Allen went straight home and booted up his computer. He poured himself a small Scotch, then settled down to read about Alice’s twelve-year-old problem boy.
Chapter 17
The boy with the undependable cloak of invisibility he called The Quiet thought of himself as Jamie. N
o one else used that name: At school he was Jim or James (if you were a teacher) or Jam, Jerk, or J-Bo (if you were another student). At home he was nameless when things were good or, when things were looking grim, Jameson, or even Son. Only his mother had called him Jamie, and she was long gone.
Jameson Patrick O’Connell had been born twelve years earlier to a mother who loved him with all her heart, as much as she loved life itself, as much as she feared his father, almost. He came thirty-eight days before his mother’s due date, a tiny premature infant of less than five pounds. Despite his size, his thin-boned mother had a hard labor, and the doctor had been on the edge of calling for a cesarean when the black-haired skull finally crowned and the tiny squalling thing slipped reluctantly from the hot comfort of his mother’s womb.
It was almost as if Jamie knew already, before he’d so much as drunk a breath of air with his underdeveloped lungs, that the comforts of life in the open would be few and far between. He lay in the plastic-sided, artificially heated, overly lit ICU nursery for the better part of a month while his mother’s milk first came in, then dried up, and his father studied the enormous and ever-mounting bills in disbelief, vowing revenge on the insurance agent who had sold him the inadequate policy, the hospital that hadn’t had the guts to let such an obviously defective infant die, and the wife who had borne him this feeble excuse for a son. He had seen the thing once, two days after the birth; gazed for thirty appalled seconds at the hairless kitten with tubes running in and out and bandages across its eyes, and left the hospital. A son was a thing to be proud of, not this half-formed lump that hadn’t even the strength to yell.