“I talked. You never listened.”
“Like real people,” Mary plowed on. “See, I’ve got my baby now and there are things I have to do, and I know the pigs are hunting me but I’ve got to go on because that’s the way it is, that’s how things stand. I’ve got my baby now, and that makes me feel…like I belong in the world again. Hope, Mother. You know what hope is, don’t you? Remember, we talked about hope, and good and evil, and all that stuff?”
“I remember.”
“I’d like to see you. But you can’t let the pigs follow you, Mother. No. See, because I’ve got my baby. I’m not going to let the pigs take me and my Drummer. We’ll go to the angels together, but the pigs won’t take us. Can you dig it?”
“I understand,” the older woman said, her hand tight around the receiver.
“Gotta change Drummer’s diaper,” Mary said. “Bye, Mother.”
“Good-bye.”
Click.
Natalie backed away from the phone as one might retreat from a particularly deadly snake. She bumped into Edgar’s wheelchair, and he said something to her that sprayed spittle.
Perhaps thirty seconds passed. The phone began to ring once more.
Natalie didn’t move.
It rang and rang, and finally Natalie stepped forward, reached out, and picked up the receiver. Her face had gone deathly pale.
“We’ve got it on tape, Mrs. Terrell,” one of the FBI agents in the white van said. She thought it was the younger of the two, the one who’d shown her the phone-tracing device that automatically printed out a caller’s number. “It was from a pay phone inside the city limits, all right. We’re getting a precise location on it now, but your daughter’ll be long gone by the time we get a car there. Do you know where she’s going, Mrs. Terrell?”
Natalie had an obstruction in her throat. She swallowed and swallowed, but she couldn’t make it go away.
“Mrs. Terrell?” the young man urged.
“Yes,” she answered with an effort. “Yes, I do know. She’s…going to our beach house. In Virginia Beach. The address is…” She couldn’t get her breath, and she had to stop for a moment. “The address is 2717 Hargo Point Road. It’s a white house with a brown roof. Is that all you need?”
“Do you have a phone number, please?”
She gave it to him. “Mary won’t answer the phone, though.”
“You’re sure about this, then?”
“Yes.” Again, the breathless sensation. “I’m sure.”
“How?”
“She mentioned Grant, her brother. He committed suicide at the beach house. And she said she wanted to smell the water.” Natalie felt a sharp stab in her heart. “That’s where we used to take her when she was a little girl.”
“Yes, ma’am. Excuse me, please.” There was a long pause. Talking it over, Natalie surmised. Then the younger man came back on the line. “Okay, that does it. Thank you for your cooperation, Mrs. Terrell.”
“I—” Her throat closed up.
“Ma’am?”
“I…oh God, I don’t…want anything to happen to that baby. You heard her. She said she’d kill the baby and herself, too. That’s what she meant. You heard her, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you going to do, then? Go in after her?”
“No, ma’am, we’ll put the house under surveillance first. We’ll wait until daylight and try to pinpoint her position and the infant’s position in the house. If we have to, we’ll evacuate the other houses around it. We won’t go storming in like you see in the movies; all that does is get people killed.”
“I don’t want that baby’s blood on my hands. Do you hear me? I couldn’t stand to live if I thought I’d helped kill that child.”
“I hear you.” The young man’s voice was calm and sympathetic. “We’ll stake the house out for a while, and then we’ll see what has to be done. Just pray to God your daughter decides to listen to reason and give herself up.”
“She’ll never give up,” Natalie said. “Never.”
“I hope that’s where you’re wrong. We’re going to sit here awhile longer and make some calls, so if you think of anything, you know our number. One more thing: do you mind if we leave the tap on your line?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Thank you again. I know this hasn’t been easy.”
“No. Far from easy.” She hung up, and her husband made a gibbering sound.
At ten-thirty, Natalie put Edgar to bed. She kissed his cheek and wiped his mouth, and he gave her a weak, helpless smile. She pulled the covers up to his throat, and she wondered where her life had gone.
The white van left a little after eleven. From an upstairs window Natalie watched it go, the room dark behind her. She presumed another team of agents now had the beach house under watch. She let one more hour slip past, to make sure.
Then, bundled in an overcoat against the raw cold, Natalie left the house and went to the garage. She got into the gray Coupe de Ville, started the engine, and drove away into the night. For fifteen minutes or so she drove through the streets of Richmond, her speed slow, and she obeyed all traffic signs though there were hardly any cars out. She stopped at a Shell station on Monument Avenue to fill up with gas, and she bought a diet drink and a candy bar to calm her nervous stomach. She left the station and drove in aimless circles again, and all the time she watched her rearview mirror.
She pulled into an area of warehouses and railroad tracks, and she stopped the Cadillac next to a chain-link fence and watched a freight train speed past. Her gaze swept the dark streets around her. As far as she could tell, she was not being followed.
They believed her. Why wouldn’t they? She was the woman who’d vehemently said, in a 1975 interview on the Dick Cavett Show along with the families of other wanted criminals, that she hoped the police locked her daughter in a cage where she belonged and tossed the key into the Atlantic Ocean.
The quote had gotten a lot of newsprint. The FBI knew she was willing to help them in any way possible. She still felt that way. But now there was a vital difference: Mary had a baby.
Around one o’clock, Natalie Terrell turned the Cadillac up onto a ramp of I-95, and she headed north toward the wooded hills.
5
Into the Vortex
IT WAS BAD, THE nightmare.
In it, Laura gave David into the hands of the murderess, and she saw drops of blood falling from the woman’s fingers, falling like scarlet leaves through October air, falling to spatter on white sheets as ridged and rumpled as snowswept badlands. She gave David up, and the murderess and David became shadows that slipped away along a pale green wall. But something had been given in exchange; something was in Laura’s right hand. She opened her fingers, and saw the yellow Smiley Face pinned to the flesh of her palm.
Then the scene changed. She was in a parking lot on a hot and humid night, the blue lights of police cars spinning around her. Voices bellowed through bullhorns, and she heard the sharp clickings of bullet magazines being snapped into automatic rifles. She could see a woman standing on a balcony, caught in a white light, and one hand held a pistol while the other gripped David by the back of the neck. The woman wore a green paisley blouse and bell-bottom trousers with an American-flag belt, and she was raving as she held David in the air and shook him. Laura could feel his crying more than hear it, like a razor blade drawn along the folds of her labia. “I want my baby!” she told a shadowy policeman who passed on without speaking. “My baby! I want my baby!” She grasped at someone else; he looked blankly at her. She recognized Kastle. “Please!” she begged. “Don’t let my baby be hurt!”
“We’ll get your baby back for you,” he answered. “You can count on it.”
Kastle pulled away and disappeared into the vortex of shadows, and as Laura saw the snipers taking their positions she realized with a jolt of horror that Kastle had not promised to get David back alive.
“Hold your fire until I give the signal!
” someone commanded through a bullhorn. She saw Doug sitting on the hood of a police car, his head slumped forward and his eyes half closed, as if all this had no meaning to him whatsoever. A spark of light caught her attention. She looked up at the corner of a rooftop, and there she could make out a shadowy shape aiming a rifle at Mary Terror. She thought the man was bald-headed—slick bald—and that something might be wrong with his face, but she couldn’t tell for sure; she thought she might know him, but that, too, was uncertain. The man was lifting his rifle to take aim. He wasn’t waiting for the signal; he was going to shoot Mary Terror, and his would be the bullet that made the madwoman fire her gun and blow David’s head apart.
“NO!” Laura screamed. “STOP IT!” She began running toward the building the sniper perched on, but the concrete mired her feet like fresh tar. She heard the click of his rifle, a bullet slipping into the chamber. She heard the insane raving of Mary Terror’s voice, and the shrill, frantic crying of her son. A doorway was ahead of her. She started through it, fighting the earth, and that was when two muscular dogs with flaming eyes leapt from the darkness at her.
She heard two shots, a split second apart.
The scream started to come out. It swelled in her throat and burst from her mouth, and someone was over her saying, “Laura? Laura, wake up! Wake up!”
She came up out of the hot darkness, sweat on her face. The lamp beside the bed was on. Doug was sitting on the bed beside her, his face furrowed with worry, and behind him stood Doug’s mother, who’d arrived from her home in Orlando earlier in the evening.
“It’s all right,” Doug said. “You were having a nightmare. It’s all right.”
Laura looked around the room, her eyes wide with fear. There were too many shadows. Too many.
“Doug, can I do anything?” Angela Clayborne asked. She was a tall, elegant woman with white hair, and she wore a dark blue Cardin suit with a diamond brooch on the lapel. Doug’s father, divorced from Angela when Doug was in his early teens, was an investment banker in London.
“No. We’re okay.”
Laura shook her head. “We’re not okay. We’re not okay.” She kept repeating it as she pulled away from Doug and huddled up under the blanket again. She could feel sticky wetness between her thighs: the oozing stitches.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Mom, would you leave us alone for a minute?” When Angela had gone, Doug stood up and walked to the window. He peered through the blinds, out into the rainy dark. “I don’t see any reporters,” he told her. “Maybe they called it a night.”
“What time is it?”
He didn’t have to look at his watch. “Almost two.” He came back to her side. She smelled a stale aroma wafting from him; he hadn’t taken a shower since David had been stolen, but then, neither had she. “You can talk to me, you know. We still live in the same house.”
“No.”
“No what? No we don’t live in the same house? Or no you can’t talk to me?”
“Just…no,” she said, using the word like a wall.
He was silent for a moment. Then, in a somber voice: “I screwed it up, didn’t I?”
Laura didn’t bother to answer. Her nerves were still jangled by the nightmare, and she clung to the blanket like a cat.
“You don’t have to say anything. I know I screwed up. I just…I…well, I guess I’ve said everything I can say. Except…I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make you believe that.”
She closed her eyes, blocking out his presence.
“I don’t want…things to be like this. Between you and me, I mean.” He touched her arm under the blanket. She didn’t pull away, nor did she respond; she just lay there without moving. “We can work it out. I swear to God we can. I know I screwed up, and I’m sorry. What more can I say?”
“Nothing,” she answered without emotion.
“Will you give me a second chance?”
She felt like something that had been thrown off a ship in a heavy sea, thrashed from wave to wave and left stranded on jagged rocks. He had turned his back on her when she needed him. She had given up her son—her son—to the hands of a murderess, and all she wanted to do was turn off her mind before she went insane. Would God grant her a second chance, to hold her baby again? That and only that was what she steered toward, and everything else was wreckage in the storm.
“The FBI’s going to find David. They’ll take care of everything. It won’t be long, now that they’ve got her name and picture on television.”
Laura wanted desperately to believe that. Kastle and another FBI agent had come to the house at seven o’clock, and Laura had listened as Kastle told her more about the woman she’d come to identify as Mary Terror. Born on April 9, 1948, to wealthy parents in Richmond, Virginia. Father in the railroad freight business. One brother who’d hanged himself when he was seventeen. Attended Abernathy Prep, honors student, active in student government and editor of the school newspaper. Went to Penn State for two years, political science major, again active in student government. Evidence of drug use and radical leanings. Left college and resurfaced in New York City, where she enrolled in drama at NYU. Evidence of radical student involvement at NYU and Brandeis University. Then across the country to Berkeley, where she became involved with the Weather Underground. At some point she met Jack Gardiner, a Berkeley radical who introduced her into a Weather Underground splinter group designated the “Storm Front.” On August 14, 1969, Mary Terrell and three other members of the Storm Front broke into the home of a conservative Berkeley history professor and his wife and knifed them to death. On December 5, 1969, a bomb attributed to the Storm Front exploded in the car of a San Francisco IBM executive and tore both his legs away. On January 15, 1970, a second bomb exploded in the lobby of the Pacific Gas and Electric building and killed a security guard and a secretary. Two days later, a third bomb killed an Oakland attorney who was defending a winery owner in a civil liberties case involving migrant workers.
“There’s more,” Kastle had said when Laura had lowered her face.
On June 22, 1970, two policemen in San Francisco were shot to death in their car. Witnesses put Mary Terrell and a Storm Front member named Gary Leister at the site. On October 27,1970, a documentary filmmaker who’d evidently been doing a film on the militant underground was found with his throat slashed in a trash dumpster in Oakland. Two of Mary Terrell’s fingerprints were discovered on a roll of exposed film. On November 6, 1970, the chairman of a police task force on the Storm Front was ambushed and shotgunned to death while leaving his home in San Francisco.
“Then the Storm Front moved east,” Kastle had told her, the thick file folder on the coffee table between them. “On June 18, 1971, a policeman was found with his throat cut and hanging by his hands from nails in an abandoned warehouse in Union City, New Jersey, a communiqué from the Storm Front in his shirt pocket.” He looked up at her. “They were declaring total war on what they called—and excuse me for my language—‘pigs of the Mindfuck State.’” He continued on, along the trail of terror. “On December 30, 1971, a pipe bomb exploded in the mailbox of a Union City district attorney and blinded his fifteen-year-old daughter. Three months and twelve days later, four police officers eating lunch in a Bayonne, New Jersey, diner were shot to death and a taped communiqué from the Storm Front—with Jack Gardiner’s voice on it—was delivered to area radio stations. On May 11, 1972, a pipe bomb crippled the assistant chief of police in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and again a taped communiqué was delivered. Then we found them.”
“You found them?” Doug had asked. “The Storm Front?”
“In Linden, New Jersey, on the night of July 1,1972, there was a shootout, an explosion, and fire, and in the smoke Mary Terrell, Jack Gardiner, and two others got away. The house they were living in was an armory. They’d stockpiled weapons, ammunition, and bomb apparatus, and it was apparent they were about to do something very big and probably very deadly.”
r /> “Like what?” Doug was working a paper clip around and around, nearing its breaking point.
“We never found out. We think it was timed to happen on the Fourth of July. Anyway, since 1972 the Bureau’s been looking for Mary Terrell, Gardiner, and the others. We had a few leads, but they went nowhere.” He closed the file, leaving the picture of Mary Terrell out on the table. “We came close to finding her in Houston in 1983. She was working as a cleaning lady at a high school under the name Marianne Lakey, but she cleared out before we got an address. One of the teachers was an undergrad at Berkeley, and she recognized her but not soon enough.”
“So why haven’t you been able to catch her in all this time?” Laura’s father stood up from his chair and picked up the photograph. “I thought you people were professionals!”
“We do our best, Mr. Beale.” Kastle offered a thin smile. “We can’t be in all places at all times, and people do get through the net.” He returned his attention to Laura. “One of our agents on the scene that night in 1972 saw Mary Terrell at close range. He said she was pregnant and badly wounded, bleeding from the abdomen.”
“Well, why the hell didn’t he shoot her right then and there?” Franklin asked.
“Because,” Kastle said evenly, “she shot him first. One bullet in the face, one in the throat. He retired on disability. Anyway, we thought for a while that Mary had crawled off somewhere and died, but about a month later a letter with a Montreal postmark was delivered to the New York Times. It was from Jack Gardiner: ‘Lord Jack,’ he called himself. He said Mary Terrell and the two others were still alive, and that the Storm Front’s war against the pigs wasn’t over. That was the last communiqué.”
“And no one’s ever found Jack Gardiner?” Doug asked.
“No. The underground swallowed him up and the others, too. We think they must’ve split up, and were planning to converge again at some prearranged signal. It never happened. The reason I’m giving you all this background is that you’re going to be hearing it on the newscasts every day, and I wanted you to hear it from me first.” He stared at Laura. “The Bureau’s releasing Mary’s file to the networks, CNN, and the newspapers. You’ll probably start hearing the first stories on the late news tonight. And the longer we can keep the press interested, the better our chances of someone spotting Mary Terrell and leading us to her.” He lifted his eyebrows. “You see?”