The Doll (21 page)

Bradford took in air, slow and steady, until no more would seep in. Stared at the paper. Saw through it, past it. Held that breath until his lungs burned, then gradually let it out. Jahan reached for the note, took it from him, and gave Bradford’s shoulder a gentle jab. Then together, without a word, he and Walker turned and wandered toward the war room, leaving him standing there alone, staring at the reception wall, his mind replaying the words on the page over and over.

The last three crazy days tumbled headlong into a long stream of movement that blended one moment into the next and made a laughingstock of time. It wasn’t until the door blurred and Bradford ran his hands over his eyes and pulled them back wet that he realized he was crying.

Pressure release.

Relief in knowing she was alive.

That she’d found a way to communicate.

That there was still hope and the clock was still ticking.

That she’d seen proof of life.

That he’d been right to focus his energy on tracing Logan.

Bradford dragged his shirt across his face, blew imaginary cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, waited awhile for the nausea to settle, then straightened and followed the others to the war room.

Jahan was at the desk, headphones to his ears, and Walker, arms crossed, stood beside him. Pen in hand, Jahan juggled jotting notes on a pad with tweaking settings with the mouse. Another notation, and Jahan put down the pen, handed the pad to Walker, and taking notice of Bradford, took off the earphones. “We’re good,” he said. “There’s other stuff, but I can’t make it out, either.”

“Can you trace the number?”

“Yeah, but will it do us any good? She’s obviously not in a place
where she can talk, so there’s no reason to call back. And it’s safe to assume she’s in Europe.”

Bradford shrugged. “Just in case,” he said, then he sighed, sank onto the sofa, and stared at the whiteboard while Jahan and Walker and their hushed discussion became white noise in the background.

Find Logan. Save Logan
.

Office or house
.

Munroe was handcuffed by Logan, as he’d expected, but her proof of life hadn’t come within the last three hours. Not if she’d seen him in a house or an office.

Office
.

Akman.

Had to have been
.

With the table and the duct tape, the wooden bat and the Ziploc bags.

Which would have explained why they’d taken him there in the first place. They’d needed a place to film without giving away anything that would lead to the way station.

Way station
.

Logan
.

Bradford lay back on the sofa, head to one side, feet to the other, willing himself past the exhaustion, trying to grasp that intangible thing he’d missed, the nameless thing that whispered taunts inside his head.

Warehouse
.

Transport depot
.

Office
.

House
.

None of their digging had turned up anything else. Was it possible that the way station was buried so deep that Kate Breeden had never touched it, that because of its disconnect to everything else, it essentially became invisible to the war room?

Invisible
.

Bradford swung his legs off the couch, sat upright.

Visible
.

Walker and Jahan stopped talking and turned to face him.

“The cameras,” he said.

Jahan’s face creased with the same psychiatrist-to-suicide-patient expression he’d worn this morning.

“The only place there were cameras or any kind of semi-serious security setup was at Veers Transport,” Bradford said. “And the cameras didn’t point in, they pointed out.”

Walker’s mouth had opened and shut again. Arguments were already tumbling and readying for formulation, but she held them back.

“The way station,” Bradford said, and he stood and strode to the board. Tapped the thread for emphasis to explain his train of thought. “We weren’t able to turn up anything else because there isn’t anything else. We still haven’t found their hiding spot, because it was right in front of us—but not really.”

He was talking nonsense. He could see it on their faces.

“Look,” he said. “The only place we’ve seen the potential for any serious form of security is at Veers, and there the cameras point out, not in. There’s nothing on the inside, everything’s out. The security isn’t there to keep an eye on the freight, it’s there to watch the lot. We haven’t found the way station because it’s mobile.” Bradford grabbed a pen. Erased a thread on the board. Filled it back in. “We’re looking for at least one special truck, maybe more. The lot had a few, but security was lax because
the
truck wasn’t there.”

Walker uncrossed her arms.

Jahan leaned back in the chair and, with his feet solid on the floor, began the swivel. He was thinking. Processing.

Walker said, “If Logan was there, if anything contraband was there, we would have seen a whole lot more people. Tighter security.”

“Exactly,” Bradford said. “He wasn’t there, they had him at the office. We’ve got proof he was at the office, we just don’t know for how long or when they moved him.” He paused. “I’ll put money on it,” he said. “We go back to Veers and there’s going to be another truck in the lot. That’s our target.”

Jahan said, “And if it’s not there?”

“Then it’s mobile and we need to pull vehicle records. Everything they have, and then we need to track down each and every one of them, because one of those trucks is the way station.”

The room was silent again but for the squeak of Jahan’s chair.

Walker, in her own form of agreement, said, “The gates and
wire fencing alone would be enough to keep vandals off the trucks. There’s no other reason for them to put security on that lot unless they keep something on it worth protecting.”

“It works for me,” Jahan said. “And it’s not like we have any other tails to chase.”

“Who goes?” Bradford said.

Walker looked toward Jahan, and he back up at her. To Bradford she said, “We all do.”

Hands on the wheel, stolen phone hidden beneath her thigh, Munroe tapped her thumbs in random rhythm to thought, parsing kilometers, counting minutes through the silence while the sun made its final stretch across the sky.

Inside the Schengen zone, they’d transferred from Slovenia to Italy, one country to the next without a hiccup of notice, winding a sort of parallel to E70, the intercontinental route that began in Georgia, paused in Turkey at the Black Sea, picked back up again in Bulgaria, continued on past Croatia and Slovenia, into Italy, through France, and finally Spain.

Whatever the highway might have been, the trip she was confined to consisted of country roads, two-laned and often empty, except when they passed with irregularity along the edges of, or completely through, small towns: a dot-to-dot that had put her once in the path of
carabinieri
, military police, and once the
polizia
, state police, both of whom, submachine-gun-toting, were known for pulling cars aside at random. For now, there was no point in worrying over it. If disaster struck, then she would face it, not before.

Countryside, fields, hills, and townships came and went, street signs and license plates had long since transferred from Slovenian
to Italian, architecture and landscaping subtly changed in ways that spoke of new borders and new territory, all of it a peripheral blur while memory loops of Logan, surrogate brother and star-crossed soul mate, morphed into images of him beaten and bloody: a consuming nonstop replay against the windshield that poked and prodded at nightmares, threatening to awake from sleep the whispered voices she thought she’d silenced.

Munroe glanced at the GPS.

Soon enough there would be another junction and the female voice, bossy and knowing, would kick in with instructions and provide another opportunity to mask the dialing on her stolen treasure.

They were now two hours inside Italy, and although Munroe had made several attempts, it had been a half hour since her last successful connection. The battery would eventually die, the theft would eventually be discovered, the tenuous link to Bradford permanently severed, and she hoped only for time, that one luxury of which she had so little.

She’d managed five messages so far, all of them explicit if the Morse could be deciphered through the background noise: She needed the choke chain off her neck, needed Logan found and freed, and had warned the war room against trying to return contact unless Logan was safe. But everything became pointless if Bradford wasn’t able to discern her message from the noise.

From the backseat, Neeva said, “I’m hungry,” and Munroe ignored her as she had since shoving her into the car at the gas station those few hours earlier. No matter that Munroe had the phone now, or that she’d allowed Neeva the opportunity to run so as to obtain it, the girl was not blameless in whatever punishment would surely follow.

It had been risky to let her get so close to a crowd, but being kept away from the cities as they were, it had been the only way to get hold of a phone. Munroe had counted on human nature, that desire of the mind to believe what was most palatable, the capacity to block out and then fill in the blanks and more readily accept a story about a grieving sister just receiving word of a lover’s suicide, than that the screaming woman in front of them, comforted by the nice young man, was a sex-trafficking victim.

Human nature had come through, but one escape was all she
could bear. As a message intended to prevent another run for freedom, Munroe had put a knee to Neeva’s stomach and, against her struggle, pressed thumbs to carotids until the girl had passed out.

To fight, to go down swinging, afflicting damage, however small, in recompense for your own suffering, was one thing; it was another entirely to be forced into the helplessness of oblivion. The difference, psychological and terrifying, was a lesson in survival Munroe had hard-earned. She had re-bound Neeva, put her on her side, and tucked the blanket tightly around her, all of it fixed within the time it took the girl to fully regain awareness.

Hours since, and there’d been no word from Lumani, not even after she’d pointed him out on the rooftop to Neeva, and additionally, only silence from the Doll Maker—she didn’t know when, but the promise of retribution in return for her supposed failure would certainly be fulfilled.

In the hypnotic hum of wheels against the road, Logan moved across the windshield again, picked up a cue stick, smiled, and pointed to an empty pocket; stepped through the door into the night and mounted a Ducati; plunged beside her in a BASE jump off New River Gorge Bridge; and wrested the oxycontin pill bottle out of her hands when self-medicating seemed to be the only way to deal with the trauma that had sent her running from equatorial Africa to the United States, those many years ago.

Against the glass, battered and bleeding, in a living mirage that refused to plead or beg, Logan nodded, confirming the bond that tied one outcast to the other, and with her eyes roving among GPS, the road, and the small town on the near horizon, Munroe slipped fingers between thigh and seat for the phone.

The first car in several kilometers approached and passed with headlights on. Dusk was fast approaching. Unless word from the Doll Maker’s people came otherwise, they would push through the night to wherever the final destination might be.

Munroe gauged distance on the navigation screen and took her foot off the gas to time progression toward the approaching traffic exchange. Nudged the phone from beneath one leg to the V between them, waited for the mechanical female voice, and when it came, punched the digits she’d been required to memorize as part of Capstone’s induction process. She worked by feel more than sight,
taking her eyes off the road only for an occasional stolen glance and to confirm she’d entered the numbers correctly.

Munroe hit send and shifted her leg back over the phone long enough to mute the short recording that would answer, counted seconds, and then nudged the phone out and tapped her fingernail against the side of the casing in the same deliberate shorthand she’d used for each call. The precautions were tedious and time-consuming, but in these hours of intermittent dialing they’d appeared to prevent detection.

From the back Neeva said, “I really am hungry. One pack of crackers in over a day is a starvation diet.” Munroe had positioned the girl with her head directly behind the seat so she couldn’t see the phone, and as such wouldn’t—through ignorance or petulance—blow what little chance they had for survival, and this had also made it easier to ignore the occasional requests for food and water.

Munroe paused in the tapping and glanced at the phone. “I can’t feed you,” she said, though she spoke for Bradford’s benefit. “We can’t stop without approval, and in case the sniper on the rooftop didn’t tell you anything, we’re being followed and guarded.”

In response, silence.

Hands tight on the wheel, Munroe willed Neeva to continue the conversation, to say something, anything, to provide a background of normalcy that would allow her to articulate more detail.