Measure of Darkness (31 page)

T
he birds are going nuts, making so much noise I feel it like a pressure in my ears. All of them shrieking,
Over here! There's a human over here!
Or maybe they do this every morning, regardless of intruders. I wouldn't know. The last time I went camping I was still married—or thought I was—and the experience involved a lovely little bungalow in the Berkshires. Paid for by me, of course, although I didn't know that at the time. Still, Girl Scout I'm not. Girl Scouts would have bug spray, in addition to nutritious cookies—I'm suffering from a distinct lack of breakfast—and I resent donating blood to the local mosquito swarm, however needy they may be.

The navigator turns out to be useful but limited. It guides me to the Tradeport, no problem, but for whatever reason it can't seem to come up with Gatling Security Group World Headquarters. Maybe it's been blocked or shielded, like other high-value security targets. Or maybe I just failed to find the right screen on the smug little GPS. Whatever, in the end all I've got to guide me is my recollection of Jack's description of where he was when he rescued Milton Bean. Something about a nature trail running alongside a huge airfield. The Tradeport is,
after all, built around a former U.S. Air Force base with a runway big enough to land the space shuttle—if we still had one, that is.

I located the runway—really, it can't be missed—and by following the signs found a trail marked, no surprise, Nature Trail. The only trouble, as soon as I ventured away from the paved road I somehow misplaced the trail part. The vast expanse of the airfield is in sight, just beyond the thick leaves, but I'm left thrashing around in the thick underbrush, trying not to panic because the birds, damn their little shrieking beaks, are going to give me away.

And that, of course, is exactly when my cell phone starts twittering. I'd turned it back on when I left the car, hoping Naomi will text me with something useful, but swear to the god of SIM cards that I left it on vibrate. Honestly, the rotten little Nokia seems to have a life of its own. I fumble around in my purse, nearly dumping out the Smith & Wesson, and flip open the phone. It is, as I expected and hoped, Naomi Nantz herself.

The message is succinct, and maddening, because she doesn't wait for my reply.

“I'll make this quick,” she says. “Jack is on the way. He says don't do anything foolish, wait for backup. And turn off your phone. If I can see you, they can, too.”

Then she hangs up. What I want to do is throw the phone all the way back to Boston. Instead I turn it off and remove the battery for good measure. The idea that I might be a little green blip on somebody's screen is unnerving to say the least.

I'm thinking, come on, Jack. Hurry. I messed up bad. I can't find Shane, hell, I can't even find myself. Rescue me and I'll let you call me “doll” anytime you like.

That's when a very large hand clamps over my mouth and drags me down into the bushes.

Randall Shane, big as life. Bigger.

“Who the hell are you?” he wants to know, his voice a husky whisper. And then he relaxes his grip. “Oh yeah, I remember you from the hospital.”

I explain about Jack getting delayed and sending me ahead with a gun.

“Have you got it?”

“In my purse.”

The big guy slips the Airweight and ammo out of my purse, but doesn't seem overly enthusiastic.

“You wanted a bigger gun?” I ask.

“No. I wanted Jack Delancey.”

“Sorry, it's the best we could do.”

He nods grimly and whispers, “Kathy? Come on out.”

His accomplice emerges from the ferns, smeared with dirt and looking not at all happy to make my acquaintance. I barely recognize her as the woman on the bridge with Joey. She's lost weight—she can't be a hundred pounds soaking wet—and her eyes have sunk back in her skull. Haunted eyes that burn with a feverish intensity.

“You trust her?” she hisses.

Shane shrugs and says, “Yeah, I guess.”

I'm tempted to make a wisecrack about the less-than-enthusiastic endorsement, but they both look so exhausted, so anxious and on edge that I can't bring myself to say anything but, “How can I help?”

“You know any first aid?” he wants to know. “Kathy has a bad burn that needs attending to.”

“Forget it,” his scrawny little companion says. “Not until we find Joey.”

The burn on her arm is festering. The pain must be
unbearable—the top layer of skin has burned away from wrist to elbow—but she makes no complaint. When I mention that, knowing Jack, the Town Car might have a kit in the trunk, she adamantly refuses to accompany me back to the vehicle. “Not until we find Joey,” she insists, repeating her mantra.

“She scratched her arm, made it worse,” Shane says.

The remark seems to make her eyes shine even more brightly. “It worked, didn't it?” she says. “That's what counts.”

He brings me up to speed. Explains how Kathy was made to think she was working with Shane, protecting the boy, and how she eventually figured out that she'd been duped and that Joey was in danger. She had risked her life attempting to escape with Joey and when it had all gone wrong she found Shane and begged him to help her find and save the boy.

“She saw Taylor Gatling loading Joey into a van,” Shane says, in an admiring tone. “According to the plate number the van was leased by GSG, Gatling's company, right here at the Tradeport. I don't care how many Pentagon big shots he has on his side, or how invulnerable they've made him feel, when they understand the evidence against him they'll throw him to the wolves. Kathy's prepared to testify.”

She nods, affirming, but insists, “Save Joey first.”

“Absolutely,” Shane agrees.

“You know why I know he's alive?” she says, directing the question to me, or maybe to the world, such is her intensity. “Because when they brought him out of the house his little hands twitched. That was a sign to me, a gift from God. I know he's alive because God told me so and we're going to save him and give him back to his
real mommy, and whatever happens after that, none of it matters.”

“Okay…” I say.

“They drugged him with something but he's alive,” she insists. “If they wanted to kill him they'd have left him there and burned him up in the fire, but they didn't, they didn't, so I still have a chance, I can still do it, I can make it okay.”

I look down at where she's gripping my arm with both hands and she apologizes and lets go. Shane gives me a very sober look, as if to say he hopes she's right but can't be sure. He measures his words with care. “We're working on the assumption that the kid survived. From Kathy's description of the situation, Gatling is operating in something of a panic, making decisions on the fly. He has to take the boy somewhere, so it makes sense he'd come here, to a location where he believes he's in complete control. Either to hold Joey in one of his secure facilities, or possibly to transport him to another, safer location.”

“You think we should notify the local cops or the FBI?”

He shakes his head, a firm no. “From what Monica told me, Gatling has ears everywhere. And even if he doesn't get tipped off, the FBI won't come in on tippy-toes, that's not the way they roll. If he suspects they're making a move he might do something drastic.”

According to Shane, he and Kathy have been out here since well before dawn, surveilling the buildings, bunkers and hangars that make up Gatling's kingdom, all readily visible across the wide expanse of runway. So far they haven't seen the white van, or any activity that looks out of the ordinary.

“I was hoping Jack could make a play from the other side, flush them out.”

“He's on his way.”

Kathy crawls through the foliage for a better view and almost immediately calls out, her voice urgent.

We both join her at the edge of the runway, where the early-morning light is already baking the acres of concrete.

“Over there,” she says, pointing toward one of the GSG hangars. “Just drove up. Is that a fuel truck?”

“It is,” Shane says, sounding impressed.

“When they flew me to Hong Kong to pick up Joey, we stopped to refuel along the way. The trucks were like that. There's a driver in the truck, see? He's waiting. Means a plane will arrive soon.”

“You're good,” he says. “Anything else?”

“I still don't see a white van.”

“Probably already destroyed, or at the very least being thoroughly cleaned and detailed. Gatling is very careful. That's how he's gotten away with it so far.”

“He wasn't being careful at the cottage,” she points out. “I've been going over it in my mind, everything that happened, and I don't think it was part of the plan, him coming to fetch Joey. He was angry and upset.”

“Because you'd messed things up by clobbering his lackey.”

“That's the other thing. Whatever he is, Kidder isn't a lackey. He despises Taylor Gatling.”

“And you're thinking maybe we can use that?” he says, treating her as he might a colleague.

“Maybe. Somehow.”

That little exchange makes me understand why Shane allowed her to come along. He believes that she has earned the right to risk her life if that's what she wants
to do. Maybe he understands because, according to everything I've heard about him, he's been indulging a save-the-child-at-all-costs impulse for years. Having a greater purpose is apparently what saved him from a suicidal madness of grief and loss, and he isn't about to deny Kathy Mancero a similar opportunity to redeem herself.

And me, normally not that much of a risk-taker, I'm along for the ride. A bit frightened—okay, I'm terrified, way out of my comfort zone—but nevertheless glad to be of help. Even if all I did was bring a man a gun.

“Jet,” Shane says softly, pointing into the sun.

We freeze in place until the midsize plane touches down. As the jet slows and taxis down the long runway, the driver gets out of the fuel truck wearing overalls, an orange vest and sound mufflers covering his ears. He uses a pair of orange wands to guide the jet within range of the fuel truck, fifty feet or so from the hangar. The engines wind down.

“Let's do it,” Kathy says, obviously eager to be on the move.

Shane touches her uninjured arm. “Hold position,” he says firmly. “Don't move until we have a visual on Joey. If he's there. If the jet is for him.”

“He's there.”

She sounds so certain.

“You see him?”

She shakes her head, the light of a true believer blazing in her haunted eyes. “God led me to this place. Just as he led you.”

And really, what can you say to that? We watch silently, intently, as the jet refuels. At no time does the aircraft open a hatch or lower stairs. Which I find strange. In my limited experience of flying on private jets, the pilots like to get out and kick the tires, go through their
checklists and so on. And when, finally, the refueling has been completed, the man in the orange vest returns with a small tractor. He hooks up to the front wheel of the jet and begins the slow process of pulling it toward the hangar.

As the superwide hangar doors begin to lift, yawning open to the dimness within, Kathy Mancero suddenly gets to her feet. “That's it,” she announces. “They want the plane under cover when they bring Joey out.”

Shane takes issue. “Sorry, hey, but we still don't know for sure the kid is there.”

“You don't,” Kathy says adamantly. “I do.”

She breaks free of Shane's restraining touch and runs. Heading along the edge of the woods, aiming for the hangar, as fast as she can go.

We have no choice but to follow.

K
athy runs instinctively, choosing an angle that will make her approach unseen to anyone who happens to be inside the hangar. If there are other guards in place they've not made themselves known, and she sees the intentional lack of witnesses as yet another signal that something terrible is about to go down. The ground crew had been limited to one. The pilots have yet to exit the plane, as if to make sure they never register on surveillance tapes, or because they suspect their mission is somehow shameful. And now the refueled aircraft is being dragged into the darkness of the hangar, as if complicit in some terrible act best concealed from the world of light.

All signs that the time for bad things has come.

Shane and the other woman may not quite be able to see it, but the meaning is clear to Kathy. It has been revealed. Her belief that she's being guided, that she has a purpose, a role to play, is absolute. The pain of her wound is as nothing. All that matters is Joey, who, in her desperate foolishness, she helped abduct in the first place. Now she's being given a chance to put that right,
to return balance and love to the world and, in her own mind, to confirm the existence of heaven.

Kathy runs like the wind, feeling light and strong and filled with an exhilarating sense of joy. She has no fear because everything she has ever feared has already come to pass. Her heart is open, her eyes are clear. She knows absolutely that her blessed daughter, Stacy, watches and approves, rooting for her to help the little boy with the music in his hands.

At some point, as if letting her feet find the way, she cuts across the wide expanse of the runway, heading for the north side of the hangar. A high wall of gray corrugated metal. It is there that she believes she will find Joey, there that he will be saved. She believes that in that same miraculous moment she, too, will be saved, and nothing on this earth will stop her from trying.