Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (40 page)

He must have fallen asleep because suddenly he opened his eyes and knew time had passed. It was the middle of the night. Traffic sounds were as scarce as clouds in the horse latitudes. He felt that he lay on the bosom of the ocean, rocked gently by wave after wave. He was aware of an abyss beneath him, vast, lightless. Light filtering in through the window seemed like the cool pinpoints of ten million stars. He was as far from civilization as he had ever been. Unmoored, he had said. And Alli had said,
I’m unmoored, too.

It was then that he heard a sound, like the wind sighing through branches, like moonlight singing in the trees. Rain pattered on the roof, and a voice whispered, “There’s someone in the house.”

Sitting up, Jack saw a slim figure silhouetted in the open doorway.

“Alli, what is it? What did you hear?”

“There’s someone in the house,” she whispered.

He rose, took his Glock and went toward her. She turned, retreated into the hall, as if to show the way. Shadows lay against the wall like wounded soldiers. The silence was palpable, even the house’s normal creaks and groans were for the moment stilled.

“Alli, where are you going?” he whispered at the receding figure. “I want you to go back to your room, lock the door till I come for you.”

But either she was too far away or chose to ignore his warning, because she went down the stairs. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her. A strange form of peacefulness came over him as he followed the slip of a shadow down the hallway, through the dining room and kitchen. Off the kitchen was a pantry that Gus had used for a storeroom and a half bath situated between the kitchen and the mudroom.

The mudroom was a space that was never used, either by Gus or by Jack. It seemed the oldest part of the house mostly because of its chronic disuse. It hadn’t been painted for years. There were cobwebs in the corners with the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable insects who’d met their end in their sticky strands. An old chair rail hung half off the wall, and an old-fashioned wooden hat rack leaned drowsily in one corner. The floor was constructed of ancient slate tiles, eighteen inches on a side. Many were cracked, some fractured entirely. One or two were missing.

As Jack crossed the kitchen, he could see Alli unlock the back door, disappear outside. Jack followed her. At once, he was engulfed by the odors of rotting wood, roots, and the mineral tang of damp stone. He pushed through into a deeper darkness as he moved into a patch of the forested area behind the house.

“Alli,” he said softly. “Alli, enough. Where are you?”

The tangle of branches, dense even in the dead of winter, kept the city at bay. The sky, grayish pink like old skin, was intermittently swept away by the wind. Rain seeped down, bouncing off twigs and vines, taking erratic pinball paths. Save for this, all was still. And yet
there was the sense of something stirring, as if the wild area itself were alive with a single will, had turned that will to a specific intent.

Jack, his anxiety rising, peered through the rain, through the Medusa’s hair of the thicket. It was impossible to know which way she’d gone, or even why she would lead him here. In and out of faint lozenges of city light he went, turning this way and that, searching, until he seemed to be in a maze of mirrors, where he kept coming upon his own reflection.

He was certain he hadn’t dreamt that whisper, certain that Alli had been standing in his doorway. After all, who else could it have been? Then, the fine hairs on his forearms stirred, because he heard the voice again.

“Dad …”

Dennis Paull, climbing the open stairs of the Starlight Motel in Maryland, was nearing the end of another grueling day. Part of it had been taken up by a meeting with Calla Myers’s parents. He could, of course, have had one of his assistants meet them, but he was not one for delegating difficult assignments. Calla Myers had been killed on his watch. There was no excuse for her death; its dark stain would be etched on his soul forever, to take its place alongside many other similar tattoos. But somehow this one seemed darker, deeper, more shameful, because she was a civilian. She hadn’t put herself in harm’s way as the two Secret Service agents had. That she’d been murdered in precisely the same way as the agents was no longer a mystery to him.

Paull had no illusions about going to heaven, but since he believed in neither heaven nor hell, it didn’t really matter. What concerned him was the here and now. He had conjured up all the right phrases of sympathy for the Myerses. He had even sat with them afterwards, while the mother wept and the father held her blindly, even after he’d run out of words of brittle solace. He tried not to think about his own wife, his two sons, tried not to wonder how he would react if someone
came to him with unthinkable news. He’d had a brother who’d died in the Horn of Africa in the service of his country. Even Paull hadn’t known the details of his mission. Nor had he cared to know the details of his death. He’d simply buried him with full honors and gone on with his work.

Having checked three times for surveillance, Paull walked along the open gangway on the second floor of the motel, inserted a key in the lock of a room at the far end, opened the door, and went in.

Nina Miller was sitting on the bed, her long legs stretched out, crossed at the bare ankles. She’d kicked off her sensible shoes and now looked fetching in a pearl-white silk shirt. Her dove gray wool skirt had ridden partway up her muscular thighs. She was a fine tennis player, as was Paull. It was how they’d met, in fact. Now they played mixed doubles whenever they had a chance, which, admittedly, wasn’t often.

Nina put down the book she was reading
—Summer Rain,
by Marguerite Duras—a first edition Paull had given her last year for her birthday. It was her favorite novel.

“You’re looking luscious.”

She smiled. “I could have your job for workplace sexual harassment.”

“This isn’t the workplace.” Paull bent, kissed her on the lips. “This isn’t harassment.”

“Flatterer.”

Paull pulled over the desk chair, sat down beside her. “What have you got for me?”

She handed him a thick manila folder. “I back-checked the dossiers of every member of the D.C. Homeland Security office. Everyone’s clean, so far as I can tell, except for Garner.”

“Hugh’s my deputy.” Paull shook his head. “No. He’s too obvious a choice.”

“That’s precisely why the National Security Advisor recruited him.” She pointed at the open file she’d compiled. “Over the past eight
months, Hugh has met five times with a man named Smith.” She laughed. “Can you believe it? Anyway, Mr. Smith is Hugh’s acupuncturist. He also happens to be in the office adjacent to the National Security Advisor’s chiropractor.”

Paull, paging through the file, said, “I see their appointments overlapped on those five occasions.”

Nina folded her hands in her lap. “What d’you want to do?”

Putting the folder aside, Paull leaned over her. “I know what I
want
to do.”

Nina giggled, took his head between her hands. “I’m serious.”

“I couldn’t be more serious.” His lips brushed the hollow of her throat. “How’s your friend Jack McClure?”

“Mmmm.”

Paull raised his head. “What does that mean?”

She made a moue. “You’re not jealous, are you, Denny?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She pushed him away. “Sometimes you can be so starchy.”

“I only meant that considering Hugh Garner hates McClure’s guts, perhaps between us we can work out a way for him to take care of Hugh for us.”

Her mouth twitched. “What a Machiavellian mind you have.”

Paull laughed appreciatively as he manipulated the tiny pearl buttons down the front of her shirt.

Tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, she said, “I’ve gotten as close as I can to Jack. He’s carrying a Statue of Liberty-size torch for his ex.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Nothing
you’ll
have to worry about,” she said. “You don’t have a heart.”

“Birds of a feather.” He made a lascivious grab for her. “Anyway, what could be better than an affair with no strings attached?”

“I can’t imagine.” She gripped his tie, pulled him down to her.

Jack turned and saw her, framed between two trees, her skin pale in the ghostly light.

“Dad …”

“Emma?” He took a step toward her. “Is that you?”

The rain, gaining strength, beat down on him, water rolling into his eyes, mixing with his tears. Could Emma have come back to him? Was it possible? Or was he losing his mind?

He moved closer. The image wavered, seemed to break up into a million parts, each reflected in a raindrop spattering black branches, glistening brown bark, pale gold of dead leaves. She was all around him.

Jack stood in wonder as he heard her voice, “Dad, I’m here….”

It wasn’t the voice of a person or a ghost. It was the sough of the wind, the scrape of the branches, the rustle of the brittle leaves, even the distant intermittent hiss of traffic on faraway streets, avenues, and parkways.

“I’m here….”

Her voice emanated from everything. Every atom held a part of her, was infused by her spirit, her soul, the electrical spark that had animated her brain, that made her unique, that made her Emma.

“My Emma.” He listened for her, to her, heard the wind, the trees, the sky, even the dead leaves call his name, felt her close all around him, as if he were immersed in warm water. “Emma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry….”

“I’m here, Dad…. I’m here.”

And she was. Though he couldn’t hold her, couldn’t see her, she was there with him, not a figment of his imagination, but something beyond his ken, beyond a human’s ability to comprehend. A physicist might call her a quark. Werner Heisenberg, architect of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, would understand her being here and not here at the same time.

Jack returned to the house dripping wet, feeling at once exceptionally calm and subtly agitated. He couldn’t explain the feeling any more than he could the last half hour, nor did he want to. Heavy-limbed, he wanted only to return to his bed and sleep for as many hours as he could until sunlight splintered the oak tree outside his window and roused him with warm and tender fingers.

Before he did so, however, he peeked into Alli’s room, saw her sleeping peacefully on her side. Silently closing the door, he tiptoed back to the bathroom to dry off. Then he stumbled into bed and, after pulling the covers up to his chin, passed into a deep and untroubled sleep.

44

Jack felt as if he were walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he had promised Edward Carson to deliver Alli at noon today; on the other, he needed to find some way to get Alli to open up about Ian Brady because she was his only link to him. She’d been with him long enough; it was possible she had seen or heard something that could lead him to the murderer.

“Alli, I know how hard this must be for you,” he said as she came down to the kitchen, “I know this man is scary.”

Instantly, she turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He ignored the deer-caught-in-the-headlights glassiness of her eyes, plowed relentlessly on. This might be his last chance to get her to talk about her ordeal. “Alli, listen to me, we need to know why Kray abducted you. He didn’t do it for a lark, he had a plan in mind. Only you and he know what that is. You’re the key to what happened.”

“I’m telling you I don’t
know.
I can’t remember.”

“But have you tried?” Jack said. “Really tried?”

“Please, Jack.” She began to tremble all over, absolutely certain that she was close to something terrible, that she was approaching a pit
of fire into which she could not help but walk and be consumed. Even Jack couldn’t save her now. “Please stop.”

“Alli, I’m sure Emma would want you to—”

“Don’t!” She spun around, her face flushed. “Don’t use Emma that way.”

“All right.” Jack held up his hands. He knew he’d gone too far. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” The more he pushed her, the more agitated she became. He wasn’t going to get anything more out of her this way or any other way he could think of. Like it or not, he had to back off.

He smiled at her. “Are we good?”

Alli tried to smile back, but all she could do was nod numbly.

They were just sitting down to breakfast when Jack heard a car pull up outside. Assuming it was the Secret Service detail, he crossed to the front door, stepped outside to tell them not to come into the house. Instead, he saw Egon Schiltz’s maroon classic station wagon, a superlative 1950 Buick Super Model 59 Estate Woodie Wagon, with its unique Niagara Falls bumper, real birchwood side panels, the original straight-eight-cylinder engine with 124 horsepower and GM’s then-innovative Dyna-flow automatic transmission. In truth, it should have been in a showroom or bombing down Victory Boulevard in L.A., but it was Egon’s second child, and he drove it everywhere.

He raised an arm as he got out of the woodie. “Finally. I tried all yesterday to reach you, but you weren’t answering your cell phone, and Chief Bennett gave me a number for the task force that’s no longer in service.”

Jack came down off the porch. The mild air was still in place; there was only the hint of a chill in the air, low sunlight already melting silver hoarfrost.

“How are you, Egon?”

“Ask me in a month.” Schiltz gave a wry smile. “I came clean with
Candy. I think she would’ve moved out, except for Molly. Molly must never know, that’s something the two of us absolutely agreed on.”

“If you agree on one thing, more will follow. You two should see someone.”

Egon nodded. “I want to. I’m sure Candy does, too. She just needs some time.” He scratched the back of his head. “You’re a good friend, Jack, thank you. I feel …” He sighed heavily. “It turns out you know me better than I know myself. Living a lie isn’t for me, which is why I’ve stopped going to church for the time being.” He leaned back against the mottled trunk of a tree. “It’s not so bad. Truthfully, I don’t think Molly misses it at all. I tried to make her see the light, but it’s no good, you see. It doesn’t work. You want for your child everything you yourself didn’t have, only to discover she wants only what she wants. And in the end, you’re meaningless, really. It’s her life.” He rubbed his hands briskly. “She never really got God. Either you believe or you don’t. There’s no point going through the motions.”