Comes a Horseman (34 page)

Zach's presence beside him tugged at his conscience the way heavenly bodies drew smaller objects into their gravitational field. He did not look again at the sleeping boy, but his awareness of Zach had not been greater since leaving the house. The flask held so much more than whiskey; it was an acid that could dissolve his family—his
remaining
family—his career, his son's future.

At least I'm not in denial,
he thought and took a swig, a small one.
An aspirin, that's all a sip is, liquid aspirin.

He was thinking about taking one more nip—take two and call me in the morning—when his cell phone began vibrating. It was protruding from the unused ashtray. The few coins in the bottom of the tray rattled metallically with the phone. He picked it up and looked at the screen: UNKNOWN CALLER. He thumbed the answer button.

“Hello?” he said quietly.

“It's me.” Alicia's voice.

“I'll call you back from a land line.”

She recited the hotel's phone number. “I'm in 522, but make it quick; I'm changing rooms.”

Ignoring his curiosity, he said, “Give me five,” and disconnected. If someone within the Bureau had sicced the killer on him, God knew what lengths he or she would go to to finish the job. Tracking the communications from a specific cell phone was as routine for the FBI as business lunches for civilian companies. And pinpointing the precise location of a cell phone was even easier than paranoid novelists claimed. With relay towers littering the landscape, every call was picked up by multiple towers. Typically the tower nearest the phone received the strongest signal and it would appropriate the call. By measuring the signal strength in all receiving transponders—with programs already heavily used by the government's alphabet soup agencies—the phone could be triangulated to within a foot of its location, even while it was in motion.

He passed a highway sign listing a variety of amenities available off the next exit. Anything would do. He exited and found a gas station with a phone in the lot. He owned a calling card but didn't want to use it. Before leaving home, he'd taken a handful of quarters out of a big mayonnaise jar full of coins on his dresser. He pushed eight or ten coins into the slot and dialed. When the hotel operator answered, he asked for room 522.

“What is the name of the guest?” the female operator asked.

“Wagner.”

The line clicked and rang once.

“Yes?”

Definitely her, but Brady asked anyway, “Alicia?”

“Can't you tell?”

“Shouldn't we have a code word? How about ‘perplexed'?”

“Not funny. Let's use ‘Morgan.' Say, ‘Is Morgan there?'”

He realized she was serious. “‘Morgan'?”

“Yeah, proper names make good pass codes. If everything's okay, we'll reply, ‘This is Morgan.' But if something's wrong, like you can't talk freely or you think the line is bugged or someone's coercing you, use the word
wrong.
Like ‘You must have dialed the wrong number.' Okay?”

“Are you sure this is really necessary?”

“You were attacked tonight.”

“I just thought—”

“And so was I.”

Silence. Finally, Brady said, “What are you talking about?”

“Some
one
—” Her voice broke on the second syllable. She was playing tough, but whatever happened had really shaken her. She tried again. “Someone broke into my room. He tried to kill me.”

“Alicia . . .” He didn't know what to say. His heart felt squeezed, and his stomach had somehow become untethered and was floating and flopping loosely inside. It was the same sensation he experienced whenever he thought of the jeopardy Zach had barely escaped tonight. He leaned his shoulder against the booth. “Are you all right?”

“I'll survive,” she said. “Look, I was going to come down there, but now I've got some things to handle here. Can you come to New York?”

“I'm on my way. Really. I'm less than three hours away.”

“Don't say anything else. Don't come to my room. Go to the third-floor stairwell landing. I'll leave something there for you.”

He felt like Dorothy whipping around in a cyclone; any second it would deposit him in a world so foreign anything could happen.

“Brady?” Alicia whispered.

“I'm here.”

“Be careful,” she said and hung up.

ALICIA SAT on the bed in room 522, her back resting on pillows piled against the headboard. In the corner of the room, sprawled on the floor and handcuffed to the stout leg of a climate control unit, her attacker was still unconscious.
Well, not still,
she corrected herself. He was unconscious
again
. Ten minutes ago, he'd stirred and groaned. She wasn't ready for him yet, so she'd given him another taste of the baton. She eyed the travel clock on the nightstand. She had called an old acquaintance thirty minutes ago. He had said to give him an hour. She thought the hyena would be good for the remaining half hour.

Prior to talking with Brady, she'd been making calls to other rooms in the hotel. On the bed between her raised knees was a legal pad with a list of numbers. The Marriott Times Square towered to a height of fifty-two floors. Each floor contained between twenty and forty guest rooms, depending on whether it also accommodated specialty areas like meeting rooms, lounges, workout space, and large suites. The first one or two digits of each room number designated the floor on which it was located. Her room was on the fifth floor. Twenty floors above her, she presumed, was room 2522. A call to the front desk—pretending to be a hick tourist awed by the majesty of such a grand hotel—had revealed that there were 1,528 rooms in all. And her cousin who was flying in later in the evening and who had failed to make reservations—“I swear the woman would forget her head if it wasn't screwed on!”—could rest easy: this was a slow time of year, and the Marriott had plenty of vacant rooms available.

She knew that most hotels tried to keep occupied rooms clustered together, which often resulted in whole floors void of guests.

Consulting her notes to see where she'd left off, she picked up the phone and dialed 3314. She listened to it ring. At nearly nine in the evening, it was not the best time to hunt for empty rooms. An unanswered call could mean the guests were at dinner, catching a Broadway show, or doing any of the ten thousand things New York City offered tourists at night. She depressed the disconnect button, released it, and dialed 3316.

A gruff voice answered: “Yeah?”

“Sorry, wrong number.” On her note pad she wrote “3314/3316.” She drew a line through “3316.” Taking a deep breath she dialed 3414. No answer, so she dialed 3416. No answer, so she tried 3412. A breathy woman picked up, sounding like she was expecting a call. But not from Alicia.

Twelve minutes and fifteen floors later, she found her empty corridor. No one answered calls to any room from 4910 through 4929. She was willing to bet dollars to doughnuts these rooms were empty not because everyone checked into them was out sampling the Big Apple, but because the hotel had avoided putting guests into them.

“Your room is ready, Mr. Hyena,” she said in a syrupy voice. The man on the floor didn't so much as twitch.

Gingerly, she ran her fingers over the hand towel she had wrapped around her injured forearm. Warm stickiness. Her fingers came away with spots of blood on the tips. Soaked through again. Third time. Her eyes found the clock. Her friend would be able to do something to stop the bleeding. Apollo was, after all, a physician, though he had not practiced medicine in a long while. His other trade—the one she had called him about—was much more lucrative and, according to him, more enjoyable. Watching the way the light played on her glistening fingertips, she regretted not telling him about her injury. At the time, she had been more concerned about Hyena and what she was going to do with him. Thinking about it now, she smiled, despite the knots in her stomach.

46

E
n route to the Oakleys' place in Wilmington, Brady detoured off the freeway system several times. Though he hated to lose time deviating from a straight course, he had to be sure they weren't being followed. Nothing was better for doing that than long, narrow country lanes. Once, he pulled over, got out, and surveyed the skies. No helicopters. Two hours into the two-and-a-half-hour commute, he cursed at himself and took the next exit. In the darkened bay of a self-serve car wash, he took a flashlight from the glove compartment and crawled under the SUV. He checked all the typical places for a tracking device and found none. Then he made a random search and again came up clear. He didn't have the sweeping equipment that would tell him definitively of the presence or absence of a tracker, but when he climbed back into the driver's seat, he felt sure he'd have found it if one was there to find.

He started the vehicle, and Zach stirred. Brady watched as the boy rubbed his face, stretched, and blinked away sleep. When he saw Brady, he smiled. That warmed Brady, knowing his son was comforted by his presence. He wanted to live up to that trust.

Zach looked out at the car wash walls and the closed strip mall across the street. “Where are we?” he asked.

“'Bout a half hour from Uncle Kurt's.”

“Is this a
car wash
?”

“Yeah, I thought I'd hose down the car, make it pretty. But the thing's broken.”

Zach looked at him, not believing a word.

“Hungry?” Brady asked. There was a tube of Pringles in the backseat.

Zach shook his head, smacked his lips. “Thirsty.”

Brady reached back, found the Nalgene bottle of tap water he'd put there with the chips, and handed it to Zach.

“Need a bathroom break?”

Zach had to think about it. “Yeah.”

“All right, we'll find a place. Then on to Uncle Kurt and Aunt Kari's.”
And New York and God knows what,
he added to himself.

“Do they know we're coming?” Zach asked.

“I called them from a pay phone. They're excited to have you. The boys started whooping in the background when Uncle Kurt told them.”

Zach smiled.

Brady hesitated, then said, “Look, Zach. I didn't tell them about the man who attacked us tonight. I don't want to scare them.”

The boy nodded. “Our secret.”

Relieved, Brady explained the rest of his plan. “Let's just say I have to go out of town for work, and our regular babysitter wasn't available, so we thought this would be a good time for you to visit.” In fact, this was the story Brady had already told Kurt.

Zach lowered his eyes, pursing his lips.

“Son, I know you don't like to lie. That's a great quality about you. But this is an unusual situation. I'm afraid if they know what's really going on, they'll try to help in some way. Maybe they'll call the police or try to reach me at the Bureau. Then maybe the bad guys will know where you are.” Brady paused. He hated himself for what he was about to say, for rekindling fear in Zach's heart.

“Zach, they may come for you again. And they may get you next time.” A tear spilled out of Brady's eye. He hadn't known it was there, hadn't even realized his emotions were churning. He supposed feelings of loss and despair had been just below the surface for so long, he'd become inured to them. He smiled and wiped it away.

Zach did not smile. His big, dark eyes traced the path of Brady's tear. Brady thought the boy might reach out and touch his cheek. Instead, Zach moved his eyes to Brady's. He said, “Are you afraid they'll hurt Uncle Kurt, Aunt Kari, and everyone?”

“I'm afraid . . .” Brady swallowed. “I'm afraid they'll hurt
you
.”

“Were you afraid for Mom? Before she died?”

He thought about it. “No, not really. In a vague way, maybe. I worried about car accidents and bad people, but I don't think I ever understood that wonderful things can be taken away from you. Just like that, they can be gone.” He looked out the windshield. All the shapes—of the street signs, trees, the strip mall—were in shades of blue-gray. He could imagine a world that was like that everywhere, always. Just gradients of grays, hints of blue. He turned back to his son. “I don't want you to be gone too.”

Zach leaned over the center console, trying to get his arms around his father. Brady leaned in and they hugged. Zach said, “I don't want you to be gone either.” He released Brady and pushed back to see him. His eyes were dry: Brady's words had not made him weepy; they had made him determined.

In a strong tone, Zach said, “So neither of us will do anything to get gone, okay? I won't tell Uncle Kurt and Aunt Kari about that guy and his dogs. And you . . . and you won't let that guy and his dogs get you. Okay?”

Brady shook his head. “You never cease to amaze me.”

“Deal?” Zach held out his hand, insistent. Brady shook it.