Torn (21 page)

Old habits die hard.

Shane hands Maggie a menu—it’s self-serve—but she waves it off. “I ate on the flight, believe it or not.”

They both know that chronic pain kills the appetite, and she doesn’t want to talk about the relapse of her rheumatoid arthritis. Maggie is clearly determined to be brave, and Shane prays that it really is, as she claims, just a flare-up.

He drinks strong coffee, not having slept in two days, and she sips delicately at a club soda with lime, as if the fizz might burn her lips.

“Any luck?” she wants to know.

“Not really,” he admits. “They could have landed here—plenty of private charter jets use DIA—but I haven’t been able to confirm an incoming flight from Rochester, New York, within the time frame. They could have come
into one of the other commercial airports, of which there are at least five within fifty miles of Denver. They could have landed at a private airstrip, of which there are scores, possibly hundreds. There are thousands of private flights into Colorado in any given time period. Rich folk come for the sights or the skiing or to tailgate the Broncos.”

“Tailgating on a fifty-million-dollar Gulfstream?”

“Hey, flaunt it if you’ve got it,” Shane says with a shrug. “Bottom line, the plane is a dead end. No way to walk it back. I have to assume my informant wasn’t fibbing and he really did overhear the perps say their destination was Denver. Which makes sense if the abduction was done by the Rulers.”

“You mentioned a name.”

“He mentioned a name. Missy. What he says the man called his accomplice. More than once. Missy do this. Missy do that. Missy be quiet. Possibly a nickname or a term of endearment.”

“I ran it. Nothing pops on the list of known Rulers. Not so far.”

“Like I say, possibly a nickname. You’ll keep trying?”

“Of course. Missy and her mystery man, headed for Denver. Possibly.”

Shane sighs. “I know it’s not much to work with.”

Maggie shrugs. “Hey, hey. We’ve started with less, as you know. Just so we’re on the same page, you remain convinced that Haley Corbin was abducted?”

“As opposed to being killed, you mean? Yes. The answer is yes. They went to too much trouble, luring her to the airport, knocking her out, loading her into the jet.”

“If your informant isn’t lying,” she gently reminds him.

“He was eager to share what he knew.”

“I’ll bet he was.”

“I’ve never done that before, Maggie,” he says, feeling ashamed in her presence. “I was desperate.”

“No lasting damage to the little cretin?”

“Nothing a change of underwear won’t fix.”

“And he won’t be pressing charges?”

“Doubtful. I impressed him with the need for silence, for both our sakes. Plus I let him keep the money. He wants to make a recording, thinks he can be the next big hip-hop star. Who knows? He’s ruthless enough.”

She pats his hand, smiles. “No worries, big guy. You did what you had to do.”

“It’s on me,” he says, feeling the need to explain. “If I’d been there, like I should have been, this never would have happened.”

“Or maybe you’d be dead and Haley Corbin would still be gone.”

“They took her alive,” he points out. “They could have shot her and left her by the side of the road, or made it look like an accident. A death, even a suspicious death, leaves fewer questions than a disappearance, so they’re taking a chance abducting her. There has to be a reason. My theory is, her little boy is alive and wants his mother, so they made it happen.”

Maggie says, “Not a bad theory.”

“Any word from your informants?”

She sighs. “Not a word about the boy, not a word about his mother. But ‘informants’ is too grand a term. Our contacts inside are strictly bottom of the heap. This will be happening at a higher level and the Ruler organization is structured in layers of secrecy. That’s part of their appeal. For Rulers, information is everything—the higher you go,
the more you learn. All we know for sure is, there are rumors about Arthur Conklin’s health declining, and a succession struggle between factions. Which you already know.”

“Wendall Weems versus Conklin’s wife.”

“So the rumor goes.”

Shane finishes his coffee. At this point in his cycle of insomnia, the caffeine barely blips. “I’m going in. It’s the only way.”

Maggie shakes her head disapprovingly. “And I flew fourteen hundred miles to persuade you otherwise.”

“You can try,” Shane says.

Maggie opens her briefcase, slips out her laptop, taps it to life. “I’ve done a little more in-depth research on Kavashi, the security chief. Turns out that ten years ago he was on the short list of suspects in a couple of murders.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Remember the deal new members make? By joining they agree to ‘share-in’ twenty-five percent of any increase in their net worth? Well, every now and then somebody gets rich and decides it was all their own doing and they refuse to pay the percentage. The contract they sign with the Rulers isn’t enforceable, why give up such a big chunk of their newfound wealth? Blah, blah, blah. So they walk away. Or attempt to.”

“This Kavashi guy is the collector, is that it?”

“More like the enforcer. The Conklin Institute has a forensic accounting division that enforces collections from the members. They know where every penny goes, and who earned what, and therefore what they owe. But human nature being what it is, deadbeats were always a problem,
right from the beginning. Refuse to pay and you were banned, shunned, thrown out. All personal and business connections were severed, loans were called in, and a full-court effort was made to ruin you by financial means. Lawsuits, mostly. Fail to pay and you get buried in shysters. Still, some of the deadbeats prevailed, got to keep all the loot. Until Kavashi came into the picture. Then things got untidy for a while.”

“Let me guess. He didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Maggie nods. “In both cases we know about, explosives were used. First victim was a car salesman from Montclair, New Jersey, who joined the Rulers and within a few years owned a chain of luxury dealerships. In his TV ads he was ‘Mister Mercedes.’ Until one fine day he went to start up his S600 and got blown to smithereens. That was bad. The second victim was way worse. Started up a wholesale jewelry business in Arizona, took it online, eventually sold it to Amazon or eBay, I can’t remember which. Anyhow, he walked away with something like fifty million dollars for his final payday, and decided the Rulers didn’t deserve their cut on this one. So he got necklaced. Cute, huh, a jewelry guy gets necklaced? Maybe you recall the one where the victim walks into a Sedona police station with a note begging the police to shoot him because he’s got this ring of plastic explosive molded around his neck, with a ticking detonator attached, and he hates the idea of his head getting blown off? Parts of the video were all over cable news for a few days.”

“Rings a bell,” Shane says. “The cops put him in a vacant lot, evacuated the area, and sent in a robot. But the bomb detonated anyway, right?”

“It did. And somebody tapped into the video feed from
the robot, put it all over the net. The uncensored, not-for-cable-TV-version. My guess is, nowadays when any Ruler decides not to pay, they suggest he or she check out the necklace video. It’s very, very gruesome, in a head-goes-into-orbit kind of way.”

“And these crimes were tied to Kavashi?”

“Tied is too strong a word. He was a person of interest in the investigations. Frankly the investigators knew he did it, or arranged to have it done, but there was no physical evidence linking him to the bombs, and nobody was willing to testify. Therefore no case. Word at the time was that Arthur Conklin wanted Kavashi thrown out of the organization, but that Evangeline backed her buddy Vash and prevailed. In any case, he handles Ruler security and remains as dangerous as ever.”

Shane smiles. “You’re worried he’ll blow me up.”

“I am, yes. Or just have you shot. So you
should
be worried.”

“I hate getting blown up. Therefore I’ll be very careful.”

“Don’t be flippant, Randall!” she says, fiercely. “I don’t worry easy and you know it.”

He grimaces. “Sorry, Mags. But I’m worried, too, and I don’t see any alternative. The FBI won’t send in the HRT based on my hunch about what might have happened to Haley Corbin.”

“The Hostage Rescue Team? That’s pretty elite. What’s wrong with a field-office SWAT team?”

“Nothing. They’re good, but the HRT is better, and something tells me taking on this bunch of nut bars requires the very best. But even the field-office SWAT needs some sort of verifiable evidence before they can
obtain a warrant. Therefore someone has to go in there and find evidence, help make a case. In this case a civilian. Me.”

“What about Colorado Social Services?” Maggie suggests eagerly. “Concern for an endangered child usually rings the right bells.”

“In Texas, maybe, when the suspected abusers are a known polygamist sect. I spoke to the DSS supervisor in one of the adjoining counties, just to see what it would take to initiate an investigation, and she said there has never been a child-endangered complaint filed against the Rulers, not as an organization, anyhow, and not in Conklin County. They’re simply not on the radar. And the DSS is very, very leery of taking on the Rulers without evidence that will stand up in court. They want something solid, something actionable. At the very least I need a credible witness from inside the compound. Which is what I intend to find, once you get me inside.”

“There has to be a better way.”

Shane leans back in his chair, making the legs creak ominously. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“Come back with me to D.C. We’ll work it from there. We’ll make a case. We’ll get you the HRT.”

Shane smiles wearily. “I’ll bet you could. But how long would it take to work through channels, convince the ’crats that my hunch is good, that their butts won’t be on the line, careers ruined? You’re good, Maggie, the best. But even for you, it would take weeks. Weeks that Haley and Noah might not have.”

“You’ve made up your mind.”

Shane nods.

Maggie sighs. “There might be a way to get you inside.”

“I’m all ears,” he says, wide-awake.

4. The Futility Of Crying

Snow is falling. I know that snow is falling because there’s a skylight in one of the many bathrooms, and the fat white flakes are starting to accumulate, blocking out the slate-gray sky. The skylight is the only window not obstructed by storm shutters. My only view of the world outside, and soon it will be covered.

For all I can see, I might as well be confined in a million-dollar igloo. Although, come to think of it, a home of this size and quality—the kitchen alone has more square feet than my entire farmhouse—probably goes for a lot more than a million.

Missy says that it snows frequently, because of the elevation, and that’s one of the many things they love about Conklin, the perfect snow. She says the village is like a ski resort without the lifts or the lines, and she should know because she and her husband own homes in Vail and Park City, for when they want to actually ski. They also own homes in Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Nantucket, and Key West, and, oh yeah, she almost forgot, this adorable little mews in London.

The Barlows are filthy rich and, from what I can tell, about as shallow as the manufactured celebrities they seek to emulate. Missy tells me that Eldon is brilliant—and I suppose he must be, on some level—but I haven’t seen it. In my presence he seems more keenly nervous than intel
ligent. Frightened, actually. As if terrified that complicity in my abduction will come back to haunt him.

Which it will, if I have anything to say about it.

For now I’m biding my time, holding my tongue. The strange, ugly little man with the beautiful eyes convinced me, for the moment, that calling in the authorities would put Noah’s life at risk. But watching that DVD of my little boy being tutored by that snake-in-the-grass Irene Delancey very nearly drove me over the edge. On one level I was intensely relieved to see him looking healthy, if not happy. On another level I’m outraged that they’ve stolen nearly two months of his childhood, two months that I didn’t get to share, two months I’ll never get back. How dare she! How dare they! To make it worse, there’s no sound on the DVD, so I’ve no idea what poison Delancey is spewing, or how much my little boy knows about what’s really going on.

Does he know I’m searching for him, that I won’t give up until he’s back in his mother’s arms? He must know. He’s his father’s son, and he knows the most amazing things.

Wendall Weems, my real captor—abducting me was his idea, obviously—claims he knew Jedediah as a child. “He was still in diapers when Arthur bought back and republished his book,” he says. “Quite a handsome baby, as I recall, but given to crying when he wasn’t being held. Colicky, I think they call it.”

Weems is musing, trying to be friendly, and I can only stare at him in disbelief.

“Colicky? I haven’t read that horrible book, but Jed did show me the chapter on child rearing. Unbelievable! His father thought it a worthy experiment to leave a three-month-old baby unattended in a dark room for twelve
hours. He calculated an infant would not actually die of neglect in that time period, and that it might, quote ‘learn the futility of crying.’”