The Hunted (26 page)

Waller threw a sideways glance at Haviland. “Not exactly a problem, sir, but maybe a distraction.”

Knox folded his arms across his chest. “Explain.”

“He received an e-mail from his wife this afternoon. It seems to have shaken him up a bit.”

“E-mail?” Knox’s forehead was deeply creased, his eyebrows arched downward. “Where in the hell would he get access to a PC? The Bureau’s systems aren’t connected—”

“I’m afraid that’s my fault, sir. I brought him my laptop. I didn’t see it as being a problem, and SAC Lindsey said—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what Lindsey said. This investigation is being run through my office, do you understand, Agent Waller?”

Waller sighed. “Understood, sir. It’s just that Harper felt like a connection with the outside might help him regain his memory faster. I thought that was our goal.”

“Agent Waller, this is a highly sensitive investigation. More than just the Scarponi case is at stake. The president has taken substantial heat over his release, and he’s been on my ass to make sure we put him away for good. What’s never been made public is that there were some very delicate negotiations with the other countries when Scarponi was taken into custody. Even though we had jurisdiction over the Foster murder, the other countries all claimed they had first crack at him. In order to avoid a big pissing contest, which would’ve jeopardized our case against Scarponi, the president moved quickly. He had to virtually guarantee them that Scarponi would pay for what he’d done.”

Knox sat down heavily. “You can imagine what hit the fan when Judge Noonan released him on bail. If it gets out that Scarponi’s on the loose and that we don’t even know where he is, it would almost certainly screw up the arms pact negotiations the president has worked so hard to get them to agree to. The timing couldn’t be worse.”

“But it could backfire,” Waller said. “If they find out the president knew he’d escaped and didn’t alert them, wouldn’t that be worse?”

Knox broke a crooked smile. “That’s the point, Agent Waller. The president can’t tell them what he doesn’t know. If he doesn’t know about it in the first place, he can’t be accused of lying to them.”

“You’re insulating him.”

“Yes.”

“Which means you take the heat if we don’t find him.”

Knox shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We
will
find him. And Agent Payne’s testimony will put him away. On the other hand, his failure to testify will have the opposite effect. It all depends on what actions we take or don’t take in the next few weeks. That’s an enormous burden on all of us, but I’ve chosen to put a lot of the heat on you two because I thought you could handle it. Now I see you make a rookie mistake with this e-mail—”

“Sir,” Waller said, sitting ramrod straight, “I can assure you that it won’t happen again.”

“You better believe it won’t or I’ll pull you off the case and transfer you to the resident agency in Fairbanks, Alaska.” Knox stood up and began to pace in front of the darkened window. “I found out about his wife just before we brought Payne in. When our Sacramento field office called and told me they had a lead on him in the Placerville area, we put a few agents on him. But we were too late. Turns out he’d left on some kind of ski vacation in Colorado. They did a search of the airlines’ databases for flights leaving Colorado and immediately went there to intercept him.”

“Why didn’t we just tell him about his wife?” Haviland asked.

“I don’t owe you an explanation.” Knox stared the man down, then shook his head. According to protocol, he did not, of course, need to say anymore. However, he knew it would be best if he could provide them with a reasonable rationalization, if nothing else, in case they had to give Payne some kind of justification for their actions to maintain his trust. “If we bring his wife into this, we’d be placing her in harm’s way. We’d have to worry about Scarponi getting to her and using her to get to him. Not to mention the fact that she’d probably be a huge distraction for him. We need Payne totally focused on this trial.”

“But if the Bureau found Payne and his wife, shouldn’t we have assumed that Scarponi would, too?”

Knox sighed. “We made a tactical error.”

There was an uneasy silence, finally broken by Haviland. “So what’s the plan? Do we just tell him—”

“Nothing. Tell him nothing. This is not his decision, Agent Haviland. I want to be very clear on this. He is not to communicate with his wife. At all costs, I want that line of communication severed.”

“And if he insists?”

“Then handle the situation. You understand the forces at play.”

“He’s got my laptop,” Waller said. “He may’ve already put out a response to her message.”

“Where’s the computer?”

“In his room, at the Academy.”

“Room number?”

“Two thirty-two West.”

Knox picked up his phone and dialed the Academy. Waller and Haviland listened while their boss directed a nameless acquaintance to enter the room and disable the Ethernet port. “Make it seem like it’s a software glitch or something. I don’t want him to think it was deliberate.” Knox hung up and looked at Waller. “No more favors for him. You know what’s at stake. We need him focused. On Scarponi, not his wife.”

When the door slammed, Lauren bolted upright in her bed. The room was dark. She was dressed in her clothes—that much she could tell. But where was she?

She was so disoriented. She rubbed at her eyes, but that just made them burn more. She swung her legs off the bed and realized her shoes were still on her feet. Although she had been sleeping, she was still exhausted.

She felt around the room and found a wall-mounted lamp. The sudden burst of light made her eyes ache, but she could at least see she was in a motel room.

Think, Lauren, think.

Michael—cabin—gun—Bradley—plane. Okay.

Just then, there was a hard knocking at the door.

“Lauren, you in there? Lauren!”

“Coming,” she said, stumbling forward.

She peered through the peephole, then turned the knob.

Bradley’s head was tilted in curiosity. “I tried knocking before, but you didn’t answer. I figured you weren’t back yet, so I waited.”

“I was asleep. I heard a door slam and it woke me.” She found her way to a nearby chair. “I’m still a little out of it. What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“I remember getting back from the mall around five-thirty. I laid down and that was it, I must’ve fallen asleep.” She sat down heavily in the chair.

“I take it Michael didn’t show.”

Lauren rubbed her eyes. “It was one of the more boring days in my life. Sitting in a mall, watching the people come and go, isn’t the most intellectually stimulating activity in the world.” She rose from the chair and walked into the bathroom to splash her face with water. “If there’s one good thing in all of this, it’s been a hell of an effective treatment plan for my agoraphobia. The ultimate in cognitive therapy.”

“I wish I could say my day was better than yours, but so far, my guys haven’t turned anything up. I hit some well-known places, even the Metro Police. Nobody knows anything, let alone seen him.”

She dabbed at her face with a white towel. “So now what? Back to the mall tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow we call doctors’ offices and hospitals.”

“I feel so damned helpless. We’re in the same town and he’s one person among millions. Unless we hear from him, how are we going to find him?”

“We’ll check your credit cards again. Maybe we’ll get lucky. If he’s charged something, we can interview the vendor, see if Michael mentioned anything about where he’s staying. It’s a long shot, but the idea is to assume nothing and investigate everything.”

“If he had his credit cards, he’d know his name.”

Bradley nodded. “Okay, scratch that. No, try it anyway. It can’t hurt. I’d also call your home machine, see if he’s left a message. Then check your e-mail. At the moment, our best lead will come from Michael himself. While you’re doing that, I’m going to go get us a couple of Cokes over by the office.”

Bradley left and Lauren went to work. With her heart tapping out a fast rhythm, she picked up the phone and called home. But there were no messages. She pulled out her handheld PC and checked her e-mail. There was a message from Amber at Cablecast, but nothing from Michael.

She sighed disappointment, clicked on Amber’s message, and began to read.

Dear Lauren,

Got your message about a security consultant named Nick Bradley. I never heard Michael mention him, so I checked with human resources. They said no one by that name ever worked for Cablecast...

Paralyzed. Her hands, feet, face, her mind... she couldn’t move or think.

Just then, Bradley walked in carrying two cans of Diet Coke. He put them on the table in front of her and turned to close the door. “It’s getting cold out there, wouldn’t be surprised if we got some snow.... Lauren? You okay?”

She saw him reach out, his hand about to touch her shoulder, when suddenly she pushed back in the chair. “Stay away, Nick! Just stay away from me!”

“Lauren.” He held out a hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

She reached over to the table and pressed the button on the small PC. His eyes, wide and concerned, followed her actions. But he didn’t move.

“Mind telling me what’s going on?”

“Everything’s fine. I just don’t think I need your help anymore.” Her voice was laced with anger. If she had a brick, she would’ve thrown it at him. “You can leave, go back home. Send me a bill for your time if you want.”

“This is insane. I don’t understand.”

“Please, just leave,” she stammered, backing away from him.

“No, I’m not going to leave,” Bradley said, his voice rising to meet the pitch of hers. “Not without an explanation. What’s gotten into you? Are you having one of your... panic attacks?”

“Yeah, that’s it. It’s all in her head. I’ve heard that before. I thought I could trust you. Get out!”

Bradley looked down at the PC, then turned back to Lauren. “Is it a message? Did you get a message?”

She did not answer. Bradley reached over and pressed the POWER button and the LCD display instantly appeared, the e-mail from Amber still on the screen.

“That’s none of your business,” she yelled.

“Jesus,” he said, reading Amber’s letter. “No wonder you’re upset.”

“You lied to me, Nick. If that’s even your real name. It all makes sense. You didn’t have any business cards at the Neighborhood Watch meeting. You’re not really a private investigator and your name’s not Nick Bradley—”

“Lauren, calm down! Just relax for a second. This is ridiculous.” He held both hands out in front of him, palms to the floor. “First of all, I didn’t have any cards because I was out of them. I told you that. Second of all, remember how you got my number when you called me from that bar in Nevada?”

Lauren looked at him. Her heart was still pounding in her ears. “I dialed the operator.”

“That’s right. And you asked for Nick Bradley, and they connected you.”

“You lied to me. You told me you knew Michael, that you worked for him.”

“That’s right, I did know him. And I did work for him. But my name didn’t show up on the payroll because he paid me out of a discretionary fund. He didn’t know who in the company was in on the security breach. By keeping me off the payroll, I could do my thing without anyone knowing. Do you hear what I’m saying? So no one would know,” Bradley said slowly.

She stood there looking at him for a moment, trying to sort it out. It made sense. What he was saying did make sense. But could she trust him? That’s the part that gave her the most difficulty.

“I swear, Lauren, I’m here to help you. I want you to find Michael just as much as you do. You’ve got to believe me.”

“What if you’re an accomplice of Hung Jin or Anthony Scarponi or whatever the hell his name is?”

“Then I would’ve killed you already. You obviously wouldn’t be of any use—you don’t know where Michael is either.”

She sat down heavily in a chair and covered her eyes.

“Lauren,” he said as he carefully approached her.

She held out her hand to ward him off. “Please, I just need some time alone.”

Lauren kept her head down. A few seconds later, Bradley left, the door clicking shut behind him. She grabbed the nearest object—her purse—and flung it across the room.

The early-morning sun was fighting through the slits in the narrow-slat venetian blinds of one of Bethesda Naval Hospital’s second-floor windows.

Harper Payne sat in a blue-and-white gown on an examination table, the thin butcher paper wrinkling and crinkling beneath him as he shifted positions.

He had been waiting for thirty-five minutes and was beginning to get restless. Although he had gotten through nearly three-quarters of the Bureau training material he needed to learn, there were still hundreds of pages of reports and trial transcripts to review. The last thing he wanted to be doing was sitting in a doctor’s office wasting time. Still, he had been looking forward to the neurologist’s exam because he wanted a more definitive explanation as to what had happened to him, why he had difficulty remembering things, and when his memory would return to normal. He had had yet another sleepless night, and the vivid images were becoming more frequent and defined.

As he was about to slide off the examination table to look for a nurse, the door opened and a scowling man walked in. He was in his late fifties and the only hair left on his head consisted of tufts of gray above his ears.

“Morning. I’m Dr. Noble.” He took a seat on the stool in front of the counter and started to jot some notes.

Great bedside manner.

“Dr. Assad gave me a report of his two visits with you, and I just received your medical records from your prior doctor’s office, Manfred his name is. Or was.” Noble hmmphed a few times while reading the chart. “Director Knox wanted me to take a real thorough look at you today.” He flipped to the back of the file, looked at a lab test. “Other than Dr. Assad, have you had an exam in the past six years?”