“That’s right.”
Sampson fixed her with his limpid, liquid gaze. Not for the first time, Jane felt that horses, like dogs, with their heightened five senses—or even with a sixth—could read people far better than people could read them. In the stallion’s dark and steady stare, there seemed to be an awareness of the fear she denied and of her double grief at the loss of a husband and the necessary separation from this child.
2
* * *
AFTER DINNER, after a play session in the early dark with a glowing Frisbee and the two dogs, after Jane read to Travis from the storybook that Jessica had started three days earlier, after he fell asleep, and after she stood over him for some time, enchanted by his face, in which she saw both Nick and herself, she went to the family room off the kitchen.
Jess and Gavin sat in armchairs and the dogs dozed near the hearth. The only light issued from the fireplace, in which logs crackled and popped and flared briefly each time the flames opened a new vein of sap.
There was an armchair for her, a glass of cabernet on the small table beside it. She was grateful for both.
The TV was off, and the music somewhat surprised Jane. Windham Hill did not seem to be a genre first in the heart of either Gavin or Jess. This was an anthology album featuring Liz Story and George Winston piano solos, Will Ackerman solos on acoustic guitar.
The elegant simplicity of the music worked a peace upon the room as surely as did the fireplace.
She realized why only the firelight, why the music, when the first thing she thought to say after sipping her wine was “What’s the latest from Philadelphia?”
“Three hundred and forty confirmed dead,” Gavin said.
Jess said, “It’ll go a hundred higher, maybe more. And so many injured, burned, disfigured.”
Gavin sat with one hand fisted on the arm of his chair, the other around a wineglass. “It’s all over the TV. If you try to watch anything else, you feel…like you’ve lost your humanity.”
“Damn if we’ll watch it,” Jess said. “It’s not tragedy, the way they report it, not horror, certainly not war reporting. It’s all spectacle, and once you let yourself see it that way, your soul begins to turn to dust.”
3
* * *
SHE AND NICK had met Gavin and Jessica Washington fourteen months earlier, at a weekend-long fundraiser for Wounded Warriors, in Virginia. Competing in the 5K race, not in a division for those with disabilities but among the whole-body athletes, Jess’s time was less than a minute longer than Jane took to cross the finish line.
The four of them had recognized kindred spirits without long discussions about the state of the world, merely from nuances of speech and gesture and facial expressions, as much from things not said as from things said.
They had spent time together at a second event four months later, and it was as if they had been friends from childhood. Their ease with one another seemed like that of close siblings.
Gavin earned a living writing military nonfiction and more recently a series of novels with a cast of Special Forces ops. He hadn’t enjoyed a bestseller yet, but he had a mainstream publisher and a growing reputation that surprised him, considering that he’d fallen into writing rather than planning his career.
Working as a busy volunteer for veterans’ causes, Jess proved to have keen organizational skills and a knack for getting others to donate time and money without guilting them.
Of the qualities Jane liked about Gavin, his devotion to Jess spoke most highly of him. Many guys would have professed love for Jess until her legs were gone from the knees down, then would have vanished as if they were nothing more than ghostly manifestations of men. Gavin had never known her without prosthetics, which he seemed to regard as no more disabling than a need for reading glasses.
As one who had turned a few heads in her time, Jane had seen desires in men’s eyes that they didn’t hope to fulfill but that they couldn’t conceal. When Gavin looked at her, however, he might have been a monk or a brother of the more conventional kind, for there was no quickening in him, no desire for more than friendship.
She and Nick had planned to meet the Washingtons for a three-day weekend in Vegas in early December—but Nick hadn’t lived that long.
By mid-January, Jane’s insistent denial that her husband’s death was what it appeared to be, her inquiries into other peculiar suicides, and her research brought her to the attention of people who regarded her with pure venomous contempt. Nameless, faceless, they delivered such a convincing threat against Travis that even if she obeyed them and gave up her investigation, she knew that she and the boy would remain at risk.
Besides, she would not bend to them, not then, not ever.
Travis would not have been safe with family or with friends of long acquaintance. If the wrong people had wanted to find him, he would have been found in short order.
Jess and Gavin Washington did not live off the grid, but they weren’t given to swimming in social media. Like Jane and Nick, they didn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, perhaps because the experienced warrior in all of them intuitively recognized the danger in throwing off camouflage to strut in sunlight. An online search wouldn’t link their names. Their friendship was conducted face-to-face, by snail-mail letters that didn’t leave the indelible history of text messaging, and by telephone. Even if someone scanned phone records, the number of calls between them wasn’t sufficient to raise a suspicion that their relationship might be deep enough for Jane to entrust her son to them.
Once she realized that her days of living an aboveground life were behind her, she’d gotten her first car without GPS, an ancient Chevy purchased off a used-car lot, not yet a stolen vehicle repurposed and souped-up in Mexico. With Travis, she’d driven cross-country, from Virginia to California, employing her law-enforcement training to be sure they were never tailed and that they left no trail to follow, paying cash and keeping a low profile.
She had not called ahead to the Washingtons, neither from a pay phone nor with a disposable cell, telling herself that even such a tenuous lead was too much to risk, though in fact her true fear was that Jess and Gavin would decline to take responsibility for Travis. In that case, she would be at a cliff’s edge without options.
They hadn’t refused. Indeed, they agreed without hesitation.
In her heart, Jane knew that she had always read them right and that they could be depended on in a crisis. Yet their willingness had moved her to tears, though in the days following Nick’s funeral, she had sworn off tears, had forbid herself all expressions of doubt and weakness until she’d brought this business to an end.
Leaving the boy in California had cleaved her. When not in his company, she felt as if an essential limb was missing.
In Virginia again, she sold the house, liquidated investments, and salted the money where only she could draw on it. Her enemies seemed to have interpreted her hiatus from the investigation as abject surrender. When they realized that she was on their trail again, they sought her relentlessly.
4
* * *
TO THE MUSIC of Windham Hill and the snoring of contented dogs in firelight, two hours passed with wine and conversation, but with no further talk of Philadelphia, before she returned to Travis’s room for the night. Jessica wanted to make up the bed in the spare room, but Jane couldn’t abide that distance from the boy, for she would too soon be on the road again, alone.
She didn’t want to wake him by joining him on the bed. She sat in an armchair, legs propped on a footstool, wrapped in a blanket, watching him sleep in the low lamplight.
She had nothing to live for now except vengeance and this precious boy. She would revel in the vengeance, but if she died for either cause, the only good death would be to die for him.
For a while she couldn’t sleep, because she remembered….
5
* * *
SHE IS AT HOME that day in January, at her computer, collecting yet more stories of unli
kely suicides from local newspapers coast to coast, because many of the strangest deaths have not been reported by the national media.
Travis is in his room, building with his LEGO blocks. He has not been much interested in play since Nick’s death, and his recent obsession with building LEGO forts is either a first step back toward a normal childhood or a quiet expression of his fear and his sense of being defenseless in a world that took his father from him.
Appearing in the doorway of her study, bright-eyed and earnest, Travis says, “Mommy, what does it mean?”
She turns from her computer. “What does what mean?”
“Nat sat. What does it mean?”
“Well, I guess it means that somebody named Nat sat down on something.”
Giggling, he races away, footsteps pounding along the hall to his room.
Jane is mystified but also charmed and hopeful, because this is the first she’s heard him laugh in weeks.
A minute later, he returns. “No, that’s wrong. Natsat is one word. Can I have some milk plus?”
“Milk plus what, kiddo?”
“I don’t know. Wait. I’ll find out.” Giggling as before, he runs to his room once more.
Natsat, milk plus…Jane’s mind is busy with the details of unlikely suicides, puzzled by the disturbing and cryptic notes left by some of those who took their own lives, but slowly a memory rises from a time that now seems as long gone as Caesar’s Rome, from her college years.
She is getting up from her office chair when the boy appears once more, his enthusiasm in full bloom. “Mr. Droog says you know what milk plus is.”
Yes, she remembers now. Nineteen and in her last year of an accelerated college schedule, she is impressed by Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. The story is of a future society rapidly descending into disorder and brutal violence, and it influences her toward a career in law enforcement.
In the book, natsat is a dialect spoken by young British thugs, cobbled together from Romany and Russian and baby talk, spoken with Gypsy rhythms. Milk bars serve milk with a variety of drugs. The drug-crazed, ultraviolent thugs call themselves droogs.
By the time she rises from the chair in her study, Jane is fully alarmed.
In the doorway, Travis stands in a state of innocent delight, unaware that his next words spawn in her a shrinking, anxious dread.
“Mr. Droog says me and him will have some milk plus and then play a really fun game called rape.”
“Honey, when did you talk to this Mr. Droog?”
“He’s in my room, he’s really funny.” As he speaks, the boy spins away from her.
“Travis, no! Come back here!”
He doesn’t heed her. Off into the hall and gone. His footsteps thundering away.
The average time for police response to a 911 call in her area is three minutes. In this instance, there is no difference between three minutes and eternity.
She yanks open a desk drawer, retrieves the pistol that she put there when she sat down to work.
Natsat, milk plus, droog…
This is no ordinary home invasion. Someone has done background on her. Intimately. All the way back to college.
In that instant, she realizes she’s been expecting blowback of some kind, a response to her persistent research into the national plague of suicides. Blowback, but not as bold and vicious as this.
All search-and-clear rules forgotten, as panicked as anyone who had never graduated the Academy in Quantico, she later will have no memory of getting from her office to her son’s bedroom. She recalls only being there, finding him standing in mild bewilderment, saying, “Where’d he go?”
The closet door is closed. Standing to one side, she pulls-throws it open with her left hand, gun in her right, crossed over her left arm, to take him down, kill him, if he lunges. But he isn’t in the closet.
“Stay behind me, close to me, quiet and close,” she whispers.
“You’re not gonna shoot him, are you?”
“Quiet and close!” she repeats, and there is steel in her voice that he has never heard aimed at him before.
The last thing she wants to do is clear the house with a child in tow. A thousand ways things could go wrong. But she can’t leave him there, doesn’t dare, because maybe he won’t be there when she gets back, won’t be anywhere that she will ever find him.
He stays close, quiet, being the good boy that he is. He’s scared, she’s frightened him, but that’s good, that means he’s got some small idea, at least, of what is at stake.
Her own fear is so great that with it comes nausea, but she chokes it back, masters it.
In the kitchen, on the table, lies a copy of A Clockwork Orange. A gift and a warning.
The back door stands open. It had been locked. Too many people are foolish about locks. She knows the value of them, keeps them engaged on windows and exterior doors at all hours, day and night.
“Did you let him in?” she whispers.
“No, never, no,” the boy assures her, and she believes him.
The telephone rings. It hangs on the wall near the sink. She stares at it, not wanting the distraction. She has been taking calls, and her voice mail is not engaged. The phone rings, rings, rings. No caller would wait through so many rings unless he knows that she is home.
At last she picks up the handset but says nothing.
“He is a wonderfully trusting child,” the caller says, “and so very tender.”
No reply she makes will matter. But anything this man says might inadvertently give her a lead.
“Sheerly for the fun of it, we could pack the little bugger off to some Third World snake pit, turn him over to a group like ISIS or Boko Haram, where they have no slightest qualms about keeping sex slaves.”
There are two qualities that make his voice memorable. First, he affects the faintest imitation of a British accent, has done so for so long that it is natural to him now. She has heard others who do this, often certain graduates of Ivy League universities who will inform you unasked of their alma mater, of the generations of their family who have attended it, and who wish you to know that they have been overeducated and are of an elite intellect. Second, it’s a mid-tenor voice that, when he puts too much emphasis on a word, now and then shades toward alto, as with trusting and fun.
When she says nothing, the caller presses her. “Do you hear me? I want to know you hear me, Jane.”
“Yes. I hear you.”
“Some of those badasses over there are terribly fond of little boys as much as they are of little girls. He might even be passed around until he’s ten or eleven before some barbarian tires of him and finally cuts off his pretty little head.”
The words terribly and barbarian sliding toward alto.
She grips the telephone receiver so tightly that her hand aches and the plastic is slippery with her sweat.
“Do you understand why this was necessary, Jane?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We knew you would. You are a bright girl. You’re more to my taste than your son, but I wouldn’t hesitate to pack you off with him and let those Boko boys who swing both ways have a twofer. Tend to your own business instead of ours, and all will be well.”
He hung up.
As she racked the handset, Travis clung to her. “I’m sorry, Mommy. But he was nice.”
She went to one knee and held him—but she did not let go of the pistol. “No, honey, he wasn’t nice.”
“He seemed nice, and he was funny.”
“Bad people can pretend to be nice, and it’s hard to tell when they’re pretending.”
She keeps him with her as she goes to the back door, closes it, locks it.
That day she buys the ancient Chevy from the used-car dealer.
That night she sets out with Travis for Gavin and Jess Washington’s place in California.
6
* * *
HE WHIMPERED, and she got up from the armchair to stand over him. His eyes moved rapidly under his closed
and shadowed lids, and he grimaced, deep in sleep and dreaming.
She put a hand to his forehead to be sure that he didn’t have a fever, and of course he did not. She smoothed his hair off his brow, which seemed to smooth away the bad dream as well. He didn’t wake, but his face relaxed and he stopped whimpering.
The day Mr. Droog paid a visit, Jane had known that whoever wanted her to forget about a plague of suicide must have government associations. They were not necessarily a federal operation, but they had connections.
Her back door had been fitted with two Schlage deadbolts, the best locks available. No yaleman ever born could pop them open with the standard set of pick tools. To have disengaged both locks with little noise and quickly, Mr. Droog must have possessed a LockAid lock-release gun, an automatic pick sold only to law-enforcement agencies. For obvious reasons, LockAids were themselves kept under lock and key, and any officer who had a legitimate use for one would be required to sign it out from equipment inventory after presenting a court-issued search warrant limiting its use to a specific street address.
Maybe They weren’t law enforcement themselves, maybe they were not even government employees of any kind—most likely they were not—but they had serious sources in both of those official worlds.
She deduced this also for two other reasons.
They could have faked a carjacking or a burglary and shot her in the head. They could have staged an accident, a house fire or a gas-line explosion, and taken out both her and Travis. Murder caused them no twinge of compunction, certainly not remorse. Instead of simply killing her, they warned her off, and she could think of no explanation for receiving mercy from merciless people other than that, in recognition of her status as an FBI agent, they were extending her professional courtesy, either on their own hook or because someone in the Bureau or elsewhere in government had asked them to do so.