Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

Tens of thousands of faces were captured at the Price-Right displays in thirty-nine states every day. The video feed went instantaneously to the corporate headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. There it would be run through a preliminary computer analysis, to provide the company’s marketers with initial data to help them refine pricing and stock strategies.

But, for the past several hours, the film was also being siphoned off to another server, in the company’s special projects division. This was done by a very quiet request from outside Price-Right. There, every face that had been captured at one of the monitored store displays was compared to a photo. A young man, in his mid-twenties, light brown hair, blue eyes, with a defined and analyzed set of facial proportions, rendered into mathematical equations. The length of his mouth. The distance from lower lip to jawline. The angle of cheekbones. The distance between his eyes. The length and width of ear.

Every face caught at the displays was compared to the young man’s photo.

Comparison number 10,262 found the closest match by far, a photo snapped when a young man bought a pair of shoes in Braintree, Texas. The server automatically sent an anonymous email alert, snaking through the world and masking its traces, arriving on a screen in Paris, France.

The man who received the message studied Luke Dantry’s face. For a long time. Then he picked up a phone, to order a search of all cellular calls coming in and out of the small town of Braintree, Texas, monitoring all communications, all financial transfers, all transportation records.

The man stared at the photo on the screen and thought: They will kill you when they find you.

Mouser had disinfected and bound the stab wound. No way he was going to let Snow know he’d been hurt. He’d explain the knife’s rip in his jeans as a tear from running through the piney woods. He had called her to come pick him up at the cottage, but Jesus, the pain was a hot bolt and the bandage didn’t seem to be adhering well.

The little bastard. He’d cut Luke’s throat after he told them what they needed to know.

Snow was fooled for all of five seconds as he walked toward her car. ‘You’re hurt.’ She turned him back into the cottage and sat him on the edge of the bathroom tub. She undid his zipper and slid down his pants – he didn’t protest – and then she went and got a medical kit from her car’s trunk. She tended to the wound with a brisk professionalism that startled him. Disinfecting and then suturing the wound.

‘I learned to bind wounds at an early age,’ she said. ‘Had to.’

‘Same as your daddy teaching you to build bombs?’

‘Uh huh,’ she said.

‘That must have been quite a summer camp he sent you to.’

‘Camp Life,’ she said.

‘Tough life.’

‘I was a Child of the Lamb,’ she said.

He was silent, in deference to her past. The Children of the Lamb had been a religious group, sheltering themselves away in a compound in Wyoming. The Beast had sent its army to flush them out – there had been lies about weapons being massed, and tax evasion, and child rape on the altars, and similar silky untruths that unfurled on the Beast’s forked tongue. After a two-week siege, the Feds had laid waste to the compound, killing thirty, leaving a dozen survivors. It had been ten years ago.

‘I see,’ he said quietly. With respect.

‘One of the four kids who survived the siege,’ she said. ‘I was fifteen.’

It explained the burn scars. ‘Your parents?’

‘Dead. Burned up. Daddy shoved me out the window. His hair was on fire. I ran but the agents caught me, wrestled me to the ground. I watched our temple burn. I saw my people rise, in the smoke, to God.’ She focused on his bandage.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I’m not,’ Snow answered. Now she looked up at him. ‘It made me who I am, and I like myself just fine.’

He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re gonna beat the Beast together. We’ll find Luke. Hellfire will happen.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He picked up his phone, rang Henry, talked, listened. He hung up. Snow still sat on the tile floor, looking at him, seeing a rising mix of judgment and anger in his eyes. ‘Your old boyfriend Bridger, he tried to talk. He told some group called Quicksilver about Hellfire. At least its names. But he was holding out on the details for money. But we got to move fast. How much does the bastard know?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I never told Bridger a word. Maybe he heard me mention the word on the phone when I spoke to Henry about how to make all the bombs. But I never told him. But I can’t guarantee he didn’t spy on me.’

‘Does he know where the bombs are? Does he know our targets?’

She didn’t answer right away, and he could see was flipping through the pages of her memory. She did this with care and he believed her now, completely. Instead of reaching for her neck to strangle her, he barely touched her hair with his fingertips. ‘No. He doesn’t know where they’re stored, he doesn’t know the targets. About that, I never told him, never wrote anything down he could find.’ She spoke with such calmness there was no room in her words or her breath for a self-serving lie. But she ducked her head. If he wanted to kill her, he could, and he realized she would accept her fate like a soldier. He felt his heart shift in his chest. He pulled his hands away from her head, folded them back in his lap.

‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was hoarse. ‘Where will Bridger hide?’

‘His family’s from Alabama. He might go there. Or he might stay in Houston. He’s not real bright.’

‘We’ll get the Night Road looking for him. We’ll find him and he can tell us who these Quicksilver assholes are.’

Now she looked up at him. ‘Why do you hate the government?’

‘I just do.’

‘I told you my reasons. Tell me yours.’ She leaned toward him, their faces an inch apart. ‘Please, Mouser.’

For a moment the words, hanging in the wet air between them, were more intimate than a kiss.

‘I prefer not,’ he said.

She leaned back and closed the medical kit.

‘Thank you for tending me,’ he said. ‘You could have been a doctor or a nurse.’

‘No. I don’t much like people any more.’

He knew how she felt.

‘What now?’ she asked.

‘Luke might be in the town nearby.’

‘Or hitchhiking up the highway. He seems to like trucks.’

‘Then we better get resources on our side. He’s going to stick his head up and we need to be ready.’

‘How’s the pain?’

‘Tolerable,’ Mouser said. She’d given him a woozy shot of relief from her medical bag.

‘Let’s see what’s tolerable.’ The wound was low on his leg, above the knee. She reached out to touch it but her hand slid up past the bandage to his underwear. She reached inside the opening of his boxers, closed her hand on him.

‘What?’ he said in utter shock.

‘It’s a lonely life, isn’t it, Mouser?’ she said.

It had been four years. He had the mission, he did not need women. But his hands didn’t rise to push her away and her mouth was a warm buzz against his lips. The pain seemed to fade for him, when she slid his jeans off all the way, there on the cool bathroom floor. An hour later they left the cottage and he thought: damn, you don’t let feelings get in the way of fighting the Beast. Should have been chasing him. Not chasing her. He was ashamed of himself.

When he called Henry again, he got a surprise.

‘I want you two to go to Chicago,’ Henry said. ‘I have reason to believe Luke is heading there.’

The hand shook Luke awake and his first thought was, they’ve found me.