Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

Mouser frowned. ‘Who is she?’

Luke decided to keep Jane’s name to himself. If he gave too much, he might not be useful any more. ‘I don’t know. He never mentioned a name.’

Mouser tented his cheek with his tongue. ‘Physical description of your kidnapper.’ Now Mouser raised the gun. He didn’t aim it at Luke, but he inspected it, as though admiring its steel.

Luke took a deep breath. Eric was tall; Luke said he was medium height. Eric had dark hair; Luke said it was dirty blond and thinning. Eric had no accent so Luke gave him a thick Boston inflection.

‘I want to show you something.’ Mouser pushed him into a chair at the kitchen table. He reached inside his jacket and handed Luke a black and white picture, printed from a computer. It was Eric.

Mouser sat across from him. ‘Now. Revisit your description. Think hard. He look familiar to you?’

‘No.’

Mouser smiled. ‘You’re a psychologist, right? You know there are physical clues to lying. A shift of the eye, a twitch of the mouth. Especially apparent in the exhausted and over-educated.’ Now he aimed the gun straight at Luke. ‘Yes or no, you see this guy?’

‘Yes.’ He stared at the gun, wondering if the answer was going to result in a bullet in his chest.

‘Did he mention money?’

‘Just the insane amount of money he wanted from Henry.’

‘Did he mention any names? Dates? Say anything about a Road? Use the word Hellfire?’

This is where he decides to let you live or die, Luke realized. Luke bit his lip. ‘I… I can’t remember what all he said, not with you pointing a gun at me…’

‘I’m going to let you live, Luke. Trust me. Henry’s eager to see you, to explain.’

Trust me. Fat chance. Henry had said the same to him the last time he’d seen him. Trust me, we can change the world. Eric had said it too, assuring him that he’d be released if he cooperated. Trust was dead to him. ‘Tell me. Did I find you on the internet for Henry?’

Mouser studied him. ‘I don’t waste much time on the web. Others, yes, not me. Now. What names did he mention?’

‘Names. Yes. But… let me think for a minute.’ He could feel the weight of the knife hidden in his sleeve.

‘Concentrate. You’re supposed to be such a smart boy.’

Luke hunched over the table. He dropped his arms and he fake-shivered, and the knife began to work its way down into his hand, below the table’s edge.

‘He mentioned my stepfather… he mentioned a Night Road, but I didn’t understand, it was a name I made up for Henry…’

‘He did?’

‘Yeah, he said something about Hellfire… is that a code name?’ That was a lie but it worked.

‘Tell me what he said.’ The cool evaporated from Mouser’s voice.

Under the table, the handle of the knife slid into his hand. And for a moment fear stopped him. You have a knife, he has a gun. Seriously. How do you think this is going to end? ‘… Can I have paper and pen to write down everything I remember?’ He put a tired whine in his voice.

Mouser stood and walked past Luke toward the kitchen drawers and Luke drove the knife hard into Mouser’s leg. The knife sliced through the denim, the blade sliding into Mouser’s flesh.

‘Jesus!’ Mouser screamed as he doubled over in surprise. His hand instinctively grappled at the knife’s handle. But as Luke bolted past him, Mouser let go of the knife and got a steel hand on the back of Luke’s neck. He worked his fingertips into a claw that pushed expertly against nerve juncture and artery.

The agony staggered Luke. He reached back and twisted the knife’s handle and Mouser released him with a mix of roar and shriek.

Luke scrambled across the floor and he grabbed the heavy can of corn that he’d dropped and he lobbed it straight and hard at Mouser. The can nailed Mouser on the forehead as he tried to stand. Mouser collapsed to the floor again, staring at the tiles as though he didn’t quite comprehend the past minute.

Luke wasn’t about to risk getting close to the man again; he’d learned a hard lesson trying to fight Snow. He just thought: run. He ran out of the cottage. No car. Which meant that Snow might be driving up and down the river road, hunting him, same as Mouser.

He ran into the thickness of the pines.

The waiting was pure hell for Henry Shawcross. The police were gone, and he’d ignored the phone calls from the press after the brief statement he’d had to make on his front porch after the reporter showed him the Houston shooting footage. He was badly shaken; he hated to feel unprepared. He wasn’t going to speak to anyone unless it was Mouser or Luke or the kidnapper, calling to arrange another deal.

He’d watched the coverage of the disaster in Ripley for five minutes with a coolness in his heart; the crushing rains had scraped the chlorine from the sky. But the damage was done, the fuse of panic lit in the American heart. Politicians were demanding, in gusting words, to know that the cargo railways of rural America were safe, that the chemical plants around the country where chlorine was stored were secure. Of course all they cared about was covering their asses, he thought. That was all any of those jerks cared about.

But they – his clients, and his soon-to-be clients – all wanted to know what would happen next. His dozen policy papers released in the past few weeks all outlined a variety of potential attacks, some inspired by overseas trends in terror, some inspired, privately, by the ambitions of the Night Road.

Success was simple. Predict the attack; then the attack happens, and you have the ears of the most powerful people in Washington. That was the kind of power, of respect, he needed to wield. His blistering, uncannily accurate paper on a possible chlorine attack had made the rounds of the Washington power brokers last month; his voicemail was full of inquiries from potential think-tank clients. From the government, from private industry. All wanting his insights, all wanting his opinion on what the future would hold now, where the terrorists would strike next.

It should have been his shining moment. But Luke’s situation had tarnished it for him. The same pols eager to hire him would be watching the coverage of the shooting involving Luke, perhaps holding back. Which meant he had to distance himself from Luke and get his next papers out quickly so he would still be seen as the main, most authoritative voice on the next stage of terrorism. He would be respected again. He would be close to the levers of power in Washington. Luke, on the news, would fade. The country would have much more to worry about in the days ahead.

Henry remembered, with a pang, a magician his mother had hired to perform at his sixth birthday party. I don’t want a magician, Mom, and her answer had cut him to the bone: Well, Henry honey, it might make the kids want to come to your party. She’d said it without thought or malice; she was possessed of a brutal honesty and a steady disregard of others’ pain. Henry had inherited only the latter from her. So he’d sat on the cool cut grass, with neighborhood acquaintances who didn’t much like him and who he didn’t know how to make like him. While the kids who’d just come for the show and the squares of chocolate cake oohed and aahed, Henry had drilled his gaze on where the cheap-rate teenage magician didn’t want him to look: the hand in the pocket, the coin secreted between fingers, the intact paper curled up the jacket sleeve. He’d seen there was no magic, only distraction.

It etched a lesson on his brain.

Now Henry sat in his study in his Arlington, Virginia home, the chessboard Luke had given him for Christmas five years ago on the table, the pieces locked in battle. Henry imagined Luke slumped across from him, sitting the way he always did when lost in the game, leaning hard to the left on an elbow, hand trapped in his brown thatch of hair, tongue tenting his cheek while he thought, humming some rock tune Henry didn’t know. Henry played black against white, playing Luke’s side in aggressive style. He moved his own pieces with the timidity of a mouse. Luke’s bishops and knights closed in rapid conquest, his white queen shadowing Henry’s black king, defeat three moves away.