Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

‘Ripley’s served its purpose, drawn the Beast’s stare right where we want it to be.’

She glanced at him. ‘Poetic.’

Mouser made a face at the idea of being poetic, and she laughed. Quietly. He ignored it. ‘I need to crash here.’

‘Guest room’s down the hall.’ She put her eyes back to the television screen.

‘You sure you can help me if we run into trouble?’

‘I can be whatever life needs me to be,’ Snow said, watching the dying town on the television, not looking at him. ‘You’re gonna kill his kid.’

Mouser didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

Henry Shawcross did not take a commercial flight back to Washington, as he had the day before. Rather, he returned to Washington the same way he’d flown down this morning: he went to the airport and boarded a Travport freight cargo jet by flashing an ID and driver’s license that confirmed him as a Travport consultant, entitled to fly at a moment’s notice on any of the carrier’s flights, domestic or international.

He sat in one of the few passenger seats, watched the plane fly over east Texas. He would be home in a few hours.

What’s wrong with you, Luke had screamed, give them what they want. His stepson’s pleas tore at his chest but he had to keep his heart of stone. I will get you back, he thought. I will get you back and I will make you understand, Luke.

He used the plane’s internet connection to watch the news coverage of the chlorine disaster in Ripley. The most visible attack so far in the first wave. The bomb had burned up more of the gas than it should have, but it had gotten the world’s attention. Security was being raised at chemical plants and railway stations and airports, analysts pontificated on news stations as to whether it was an al-Qaeda attack or another jihadist group or a domestic terrorist or an accident. Every chemical facility in the country would be on heightened alert. Too many cities, too many water treatment plants had massive stores of lethal chlorine and Henry had thought long that it was a terrible weakness of American infrastructure. He had written a paper about such a threat a month ago; he checked his email. Now his paper held an urgency it had not a month before. He’d been proven smart and in tune with terrorist thinking. He was being flooded with requests from new and old clients on how to deal with the threat, and what the next threat might be. He smiled, fleetingly, for the first time since Luke’s ransom call.

It was all a delicious prelude to Hellfire.

Very different from the first time he’d written a paper about the possibility of a major terrorist attack, and been ignored and jeered. He had been right then; he was making sure he was right now.

Now he had struck, made his point, and all the government’s resources would go to stop a repeat occurrence.

Which was perfect.

Henry arrived in DC, picked up his car, drove for an extra hour to be sure he wasn’t being followed, and went home.

He waited for another ransom call. He was prepared to talk this time; he knew what he would say that could shield him if the call was taped. He kept calling Eric Lindoe; no answer. He did not want to call the prince he’d met in the London park three days before and explain that the fifty million was missing. It would be an immediate death sentence. Unless he ran. But if he ran, Luke was dead.

He got up, paced his floors. He listened to Bach, to Mahler, to settle his mind, to try and determine what he could do.

He tried to distract his mind by going back through Luke’s Night Road database, reading the postings Luke had made while play-acting at extremism, marveling at the discussions he’d had with the lost. Brilliant work the young man had done. Complete, insightful, using everything he’d learned about the emotional needs of extremists to connect with them, even through the looking glass of the internet. He had been nearly a perfect spy for Henry.

Henry had wept twice in his adult life: first when his wife, Luke’s mother, died in a car accident that never should have been. Now he wiped a tear from his eyes when he thought about Luke.

Stupid weakness, he told himself. You didn’t even like him at first. Or his mother. You’re weak. You cannot care, you cannot.

But he did. Didn’t the prince have a family? Didn’t Mouser? Why should he be alone? It was unfair, just as so much of his life had been. A constant, unyielding thorn of unfairness.

On the ongoing television coverage, he watched the bodies laying forlorn in the streets of Ripley, film taken from helicopters, and he felt nothing. He saw a minivan crashed near the train depot, a boy’s body a few feet from the wreck, and he thought of Luke.

He slept fitfully at his desk, the phone by his head. He forgot to eat.

When the phone rang, nearly a full day after the first ransom demand, he grabbed it so hard that he nearly flung it across the room. He forced himself to gain control before he spoke. ‘Yes?’

It was the hacker that he had asked to break into the GPS database. ‘Your son’s BMW has been parked near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for the past day.’

‘Where was it before? From when it was at the Austin airport?’

‘The GPS tracker followed it to Houston. It stopped at two addresses. I can give them to you…’

Henry scribbled down the addresses. He called up the addresses on his computer while the hacker continued to talk.

‘Then it departed to an area outside a small town in east Texas called Braintree. The coordinates match that of a rental cabin. Stayed parked there for nearly twenty minutes, then proceeded to the DFW airport, arriving at 6.07 a.m.’

A nowhere town called Braintree. Why would a kidnapper after fifty million go to some rental cabin deep in the piney woods?

Stashing Luke, perhaps. Or killing him and burying him among the pines. The thought made Henry’s throat go dry.

The addresses in Houston were for a parking lot and then a bank.

He thanked the hacker. The doorbell rang again ten minutes later, as he hung up from talking to Mouser and giving him the information on the Braintree cabin.

Henry opened the door – to find a reporter and a television camera standing on his porch. The young woman shoved the microphone into his face and Henry froze.

‘Mr Shawcross, we need a comment from you…’

Everyone was dead. Luke knew it as soon as he opened his eyes. He stood in the back of the private jet and began to walk through the small cabin. The whine of the engines, racing to nowhere, was the only sound. His father’s friends lay slumped in their seats, faces blue, jaws slack. One had his fingers tucked into his collar, as though the fabric had strangled him with a noose-like tightness. Luke wasn’t breathing, either. He could see frost coating the inside of the jet’s windows. He tried to wipe it away with his fingertips. If he knelt he could see out the glass, an endless smear of the Atlantic below, no land in sight.

The medal his father gave him, the avenging angel, burned with cold fury against his chest.

A ghost plane, everyone dead. A flight to nowhere. He stood from the ice-shrouded window that looked out over the empty sea. The door to the cockpit was closed. Between him and the door stood a man in a mechanic’s uniform. Ace Beere. He was short, red-faced, pathetic. ‘You killed them all. You sabotaged the plane. You took my dad. For no reason.’

‘For every reason,’ Ace Beere said. He tapped his temple, marred by a bullet wound.

Luke pushed past him. His father and the pilots would be in the cockpit, they would be okay, not dead like everyone out here…

He opened the door. ‘Dad?’ he called.

The cockpit was empty, gone, the ocean rushing at him like a wall.