Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (34 page)

The old wood-frame house stood as it always had at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the border in Maryland. The house and its attendant property had resisted the advances of time and civilization. The huge oak tree still rose to a height above the roof; there was still a bird’s nest in its branches outside Jack’s bedroom. The forested area was, if anything, thicker, more tangled.

It was to Gus’s house he took Alli. His home, the place Sharon had refused to move into, rejecting his past. In fact, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t sell it, use the proceeds to pay for Emma’s tuition at Langley Fields rather than taking out a second mortgage on their house. “You own that horrid old thing free and clear,” she’d said. “Why not just get rid of it and be done with it?” She hadn’t understood that he didn’t want to be done with it. Just as she hadn’t understood that the house and property had been a place he’d taken Emma and, quite often, Molly Schiltz, when the girls were younger. They adored climbing the oak tree, where they lolled in the crotches of its huge trunk; they loved playing hide-and-seek in the wild, tangled woodland behind the house.
They’d spread out like sea stars on the huge living room sofas, listen to Gus’s old LPs—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, whose over-the-top stage antics they imitated so well after Jack showed them the electrifying concert video of him performing at the Apollo in Harlem.

On his way up the front steps, Jack noticed the Secret Service vehicle parked down the block, in front of the neighboring house. From that vantage point, the detail had an ideal view of the front and side of the house.

Jack padded into the kitchen, put the Chinese takeout on the counter. When he returned to the living room, he went over to the old stereo, selected a vinyl disc, put it on the turntable. A moment later, Muddy Waters began to sing “Long Distance Call.”

Alli began a slow circuit, stopping here and there to peer at a photo, a book, a row of album covers. She ran her fingertips over an old guitar of Gus’s, a stack of Jack’s individually cased Silver Age comics of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange. His stacks of videocassettes of old TV shows.

“Wow! This place is exactly the way Emma described it.”

“She seemed to like it here.”

“Oh, she did.” Alli looked through the cassettes of
The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sea Hunt, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Bob Newhart Show.
“She liked to come here when you weren’t here. To be alone.”

“What did she do here?”

Alli shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe she listened to music; she was nuts about the iPod you gave her. She took it with her everywhere. She made playlists and listened to them all the time.” She put the cassettes aside. “She never told me what she did here. See, she had secrets from everyone, even me.”

Jack, watching her, experienced a piercingly bittersweet moment, because as happy as he was to have her here, her presence—in a way
that was most immediate, most painful—served to remind him of what he could have had with Emma. At the same time, he was overcome with a feeling of protectiveness toward her.

It had taken him some time after Emma’s death to realize that the world had changed: it would never again feel safe, never have the comfort it had held when Emma was alive. Its color had changed, as if cloaked in mourning.

And there was something else. Through Alli, he was coming closer to Emma, he was beginning to understand that he and his daughter were not so very different. It seemed that Emma knew how similar they were, but Emma being Emma, she needed to go her own way, just as he had when he was her age. All at once, he experienced a jolt of pure joy. It seemed to him that he and Emma would have come together again, that they would have reunited, perhaps as soon as the day she had called him. She was coming to see him, after all. What had she wanted to tell him?

“Abbott and Costello.” Alli was holding a cassette aloft. “Can we watch this? Emma talked about them, but I’ve never seen them.”

Shaking himself out of his reverie, Jack turned on the TV, slid the cassette in the slot. They watched “The Susquehanna Hat Company” bit until Alli laughed so hard, she was crying. But then she didn’t stop crying, not when the bit was over or when Jack popped out the tape. She just cried and cried, but when Jack tried to hold her, she shied away. He left her alone for a bit, going upstairs, sitting in Gus’s old room, which, now that the bed was gone, he could bear to be in. He spent time thinking of Ronnie Kray, trying to imagine him, trying to imagine what a serial killer could want with Alli. Had he meant to kill her? If so, he’d had plenty of time to slip his filed-down paletta into her back. Had he meant to torture her before he killed her? If so, there was no sign that he’d begun. Besides, torture wasn’t part of Kray’s MO. And if there was one thing Jack had learned in dealing with criminals—even the cleverest ones—it was that once established, an
MO never changed. The same aberrant impulse that drove a person to kill another human being also ensured it be done the same way every time, as if it were a kind of ritual of expiation.

So, to sum up, at great jeopardy to himself, Kray had abducted Alli Carson from the grounds of Langley Fields. If it wasn’t to kill her or to torture her, then what was his motive? And why had he abandoned her? Had they been lucky, had he simply been shopping for supplies when he and Nina raided the house? Could he have been tipped off? But how, and by whom? The more Jack worked the puzzle over, the more convinced he was that Alli was the key. He had to get her to talk.

When he came downstairs, she was sitting on the sofa.

“Sorry I freaked out,” she said.

“Forget it,” Jack said. “You hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s have something anyway.” Jack padded into the kitchen. Alli was right behind him. She helped him open the cartons, spoon out the food onto plates. Jack showed her where the silverware was, and she laid out neat place settings.

Alli was a carnivore, so Jack had ordered spare ribs, lacquered a deep-red, beef chow fun, roast pork fried rice, gai lan in garlic sauce.

Apart from the sticky ribs, they both used the wooden chopsticks that came packaged with the meal. Alli looked as if she’d been born with them between her fingers. Jack had been taught by Emma.

“I used to be a vegetarian, but that was before I met Emma.” She managed a wistful smile. “She could eat more pork than anyone I ever met.” She swirled the glistening noodles around with her chopsticks. “I made fun of her, you know? And she asked me why I was a vegetarian. So I told her about how animals are treated, and then slaughtered, all of that. She laughed and said if that was my reason for not eating meat, I was a hypocrite. ‘Can I borrow your suede jacket? How about your leather skirt, or one of your belts? And how many pairs of plastic shoes do you own?’ She told me about how small farms are breeding cows,
pigs, sheep, chickens in humane ways. She told me about slow farming, sustainable methodology, hormone-free raising. She said if I wanted to be a vegetarian that was my business, but that I ought to do it for the right reason. She was so damn smart. She’d done her research, instead of just spouting talking points like me. What really amazed me about her was that she never made a choice just for the hell of it. There was always a reason behind what she did.”

Who was this girl he was hearing about? “It never seemed like that to Sharon and me. All we saw was chaos and rebellion.”

“Yeah, well, there was that, too.”

“I wish I’d taken the time to see more.”

“Well, it might not have mattered.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Emma was a master in letting you see what she wanted you to see, and nothing more.” Alli pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. “I’ll tell you how it started with me. Emma didn’t have a lot of friends. It wasn’t because other girls didn’t try. They did. Everyone wanted to hang with her, but Emma didn’t want any part of a pack, even though it would’ve been so easy for her to be a leader. See, she saw herself in a totally different light. We both saw ourselves as being different, Outsiders, you know, with a capital O.”

The fact that his daughter had lived with the same sense of being an Outsider that Jack had lived with all his life shocked him to his core. Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, what shocked him was that he hadn’t recognized her as being an Outsider.

“The thing for me was that I always thought my being an Outsider was because of my father’s political ambitions,” Alli went on. “From as far back as I can remember, all he talked about, all he planned for was being president. There were times I actually thought he’d started making plans to become president when he was in grade school.

“Anyway, it was Emma who made me realize that being an Outsider had nothing to do with my father; it came from inside myself.”

Old Muddy had segued into the slow, rueful “My Home Is in the Delta,” one of Gus’s favorite tracks.

He said, “So Emma thought of herself as an Outsider.”

“She didn’t just think it,” Alli said at once. “She
was
an Outsider.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“At first, I didn’t understand it either.” Alli gathered up Jack’s plate and cutlery, put it on top of hers, took the small stack to the sink.

“Leave those,” Jack said, “I’ll take care of the washing later.”

“That’s all right.” Alli turned on the water. “I like doing this because no one’s told me to, no one’s even expecting me to.”

She squeezed some dishwashing liquid onto a Dobie, set about her job with some concentration. “I didn’t understand it,” she said, “until I took the time to get to know her. Then it hit me: Unlike most girls our age, Emma didn’t define or judge herself in terms of other girls her age. She knew who she was from the inside out. And because of that, she had a kind of—I don’t know—a savage energy.”

Finished, Alli dried her hands, returned to the table, and sat back down. “It was Emma who introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson, a modern-day Outsider if ever there was one. But she also suggested I read Blake.” She cocked her head. “You know William Blake?”

Jack felt a little thrill travel through him at Blake’s name. He had read and enjoyed Blake during his time in the District’s public libraries, which continued long after he was once again left on his own. But he couldn’t forget the telling excerpt Chris Armitage had quoted to him and Nina the other day. “I do.”

“Emma adored Blake. She identified with him intensely. And when I read him, I got her fully, because her favorite quote was this.” She closed her eyes, her brow furrowed in concentration. “‘I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s. My business is not to reason and compare; my business is to create.’”

“Emma wanted to create something.”

Alli nodded. “Something important, something lasting.”

“What, exactly?”

The tears came again, leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

A sudden awful premonition gripped Jack’s heart. “What is it?”

Alli rose, paced around the room. Muddy was in the middle of “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.”

She bit her lower lip, said, “Honestly, I don’t know whether I should tell you.”

“Alli, you’ve come this far,” Jack said. “Emma doesn’t need to be protected anymore.”

“Yeah, I know, but …” She exhaled slowly, said, “She was going to quit school.”

Jack was flooded with relief. “You mean she didn’t like it at Langley Fields.”

“No, I mean school—any school.”

Now Jack felt bewildered. “But what was she going to do?”

“Oh God, I don’t want to break a trust.”

“But you said Emma wanted you to tell me,” Jack said. He found that he was perfectly serious.

Alli nodded, but her expression was bleak. She came and sat down close to him. “She was going to do what she felt she had to do.” There were tears in her eyes. “She was making plans to join E-Two.”

39

The image of Calla Myers hung in the air, the projector enlarging her face to Hollywood size. No one in the room, least of all Secretary Dennis Paull, failed to notice the resemblance to Alli Carson.

“Gentlemen,” he heard the noxious Hugh Garner say in his most authoritative voice as he held up a bagged-and-tagged item. “We now have our smoking gun.”

Paull was part of a very select audience seated in Sit Room W in the Pentagon. With him were the president, the Secretary of State, and the president’s National Security Advisor. They sat around a polished ebony table. In front of each man was a pad, a clutch of pencils, glasses, and bottles of chilled water. After the meeting, all the writing materials would be gathered up and burned.

“This cell phone belonged to one of the murdered members of the Secret Service detail guarding Alli Carson,” Garner continued. “It was found near Calla Myers’s body. At the time of her death, the victim was employed by the First American Secular Revivalists. While it’s a sure bet that the late Ms. Myers didn’t kidnap Alli Carson, her implication is now all but assured.

“My guess is that she was getting ready to defect. She was going to the police with the cell phone. One of her compatriots found out about her act of heroism and killed her. She must’ve heard her attacker coming because she managed to toss away the phone. It was found in our initial search of the crime scene on the west side of the Spanish Steps, clear evidence that the FASR or E-Two is behind the abduction of the Alli Carson.”

“Well done, Hugh,” the president said. “Now if you’ll excuse us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Garner marched out of the room like a good soldier, but not before Paull caught the sullen look on his face.

The president cleared his throat. “This little item combined with the documentation President Yukin has provided will spell the end of the missionary secularists in America.”

He turned to Paull. “Dennis, I’m ordering you to begin taking members of the First American Secular Revivalists into custody. Since you have been unable to make any headway in identifying anyone in this underground E-Two, I want each one of the prisoners interrogated on the subject.” He raised a finger. “I needn’t remind you that my term of office is just about over. I personally won’t feel as if our job was finished unless we bring these homegrown terrorists to justice. I certainly don’t trust the incoming president to get the job done, so it’s entirely up to us.”