Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (5 page)

He shook his head mutely.

“I’ve found a measure of peace there.”

“Don’t you see that all you’re doing is running away from the world, Shar?”

She shook her head sadly. “You have a perverse way of turning something beautiful to ashes.”

“So you’ve found religion,” Jack said. “Great. Another secret revealed.”

Sharon pulled open the curtain, said, not unkindly, “You need to get it into your head, Jack. We all have a secret life, not just you.”

4

After returning with Bennett to HQ, Jack took a long-overdue shower. In the locker room, he found a set of fresh clothes on hangers waiting for him, but was surprised they included a rather expensive suit of midnight-blue worsted wool, a pair of English brogues, a similarly expensive Sea Island cotton shirt, and a fashionable though decidedly conservative tie. He’d never worn such extravagant clothes; nor could he imagine his chief having an allowance for them in his budget.

He had just finished knotting his tie when Bennett returned.

Jack closed his locker door. “So tell me, what am I doing in this monkey outfit?” He tried and failed to straighten the knot in his tie. “Who am I going undercover as? A Secret Service agent?”

“Actually, you’re not far off the mark.” Bennett gestured with his head. “Come on.”

He led Jack out the rear door, where a smoke-windowed limo idled. Bennett opened the rear door and they climbed in.

Jack settled into the backseat. The moment the chief sat down beside him, the limo took off at an almost reckless speed.

Jack stared at his boss. “Where are we going?”

Bennett was looking straight ahead, as if at a future only he could see. “To your new assignment.”

Bennett, elbows on his bony knees, laced his fingers together. Jack felt his own muscles tense, because he knew that tell: Bennett’s hands got busy when he was agitated, so he laced his fingers to keep an outward semblance of calm. But Jack wasn’t fooled. During the time he’d been in the hospital, something very big and very nasty had landed in the chief’s lap.

“Okay, give. What the hell’s happened?”

At last, the chief turned to face him. There was something in his gray eyes Jack hadn’t seen before, something that clouded them, darkening them in a way Jack hadn’t thought possible. The chief’s voice was dry and thin, as if the words gathered in his throat were choking him. “Alli Carson, the president-elect’s daughter, has been abducted.”

“Abducted?” Jack’s stomach felt a drop, as if he were in a suddenly plunging elevator. “From where, by whom?”

“From school, from under the noses of the Secret Service,” Bennett said dully. “As far as who took her, no one’s been contacted, so we have absolutely no idea.”

And then, with a shock like a splash of cold water, Jack understood. For the first time since he’d known the man, Rodney Bennett was frightened to death.

Truth to tell, so was he.

Langley fields was a private, closeted all-girl’s college, very chichi, very difficult to get into. It was situated more or less adjacent to Langley Fork Park, which was just under seven and a half miles due north from the Falls Church location where the ATF had its regional headquarters.

The sun had broken through the overcast, throwing the passing buildings and trees into sharp relief. Telephone lines, black against the sky, marched into the vanishing point ahead.

“In just a few weeks from now, Edward Carson is going to be sworn in as President of the United States, so there is an absolute, airtight media blackout,” Bennett said. “You can just imagine the intense feeding frenzy that would attach itself to the news. All the talking heads and bloggers in Medialand would speculate—wildly, perhaps recklessly, but in the end uselessly—about the identity of the perpetrators, from Al-Qaeda and Iran to the Russian Mafia and North Korea to god alone knows who else. These days, everyone has a reason to hate our guts.”

Bennett, staring out the window as they barreled along the Georgetown Pike, frowned. “I don’t have to tell you that the soon-to-be First Daughter’s abduction has caused an intelligence mobilization of nine-eleven proportions.” He turned to Jack. “The head of the special task force in charge of the investigation has requested you, not simply because you’re my best agent by far, but I assume because of Emma.”

That was logical, Jack thought. Emma and Alli both went to Langley Fields; they were roommates and good friends.

When the limo turned onto Langley Fields Drive from Georgetown Pike, it was met by a fleet of unmarked cars. There was not a police or other official vehicle to be seen. The limo stopped while the driver handed over his creds; then a grim-faced suit with an earful of wireless electronics waved them through the tall black wrought-iron gates onto the school grounds, which were guarded by a twelve-foot-high brick wall topped by wrought-iron spikes. Jack felt sure those metal points were more than decorative.

Langley Fields was the epitome of an exclusive, expensive women’s college. The colonial-style white brick buildings were scattered across a magnificently groomed campus whose expansive acreage now revealed volleyball and tennis courts, a softball field, an indoor gym, and swimming facilities. They passed a professional dressage ring on their right, behind which was the long, low clapboard stable, its doors closed
against the winter chill. Beside it, neat golden bales of pale hay were piled high.

The limo crunched over blue-gray gravel, moving along a sweeping drive toward the sprawling administration building. Jack pressed the button that rolled down his window and stuck his head out. At regular intervals, unmarked cars had been pulled unceremoniously onto the immaculately tended lawns, green even at this time of year. Beside them, more suits with ear candy consulted with the outdoor staff or were either setting out or returning in search parties of three or four.

Jack counted three sets of K-9 unit dogs straining at the ends of their handlers’ leashes as they tried to catch a trace of Alli Carson’s scent. High overhead a stationary helicopter whirred, no more than another bird with acute vision. With the president-elect’s priority visits, the chopper wouldn’t betray any unusual activity to the school’s neighbors, Jack surmised.

The suits watched the limo’s slow passage, their pale gimlet eyes narrowing as they spotted Jack. Their mouths turned down in disdain or outright hostility. He was an outsider come to take their Golden Fleece, make it his own. As they realized this change in the order of things, they bared their teeth slightly, and, aggrieved, their cheeks puffed up.

The car came to a stop under the porte cochere, held aloft by massive fluted Doric columns. Jack stepped out, but when the chief didn’t follow, he turned, bent into the interior.

“This is as far as I go.” Bennett’s face was impassive, but his fingers were firmly laced together on his lap. “Your ass belongs to someone else now.” His lips seemed to twitch in a grimace. “A word to the wise, Jack. This is a different arena. You go off the grid, they’ll for damn sure make you wish you were dead.”

5

Jack, ID’d at the front door, was taken in through the vast echoing vestibule, with its domed ceiling, huge ormolu-framed mirror, and ornate spiral staircase to forbidden upper floors. A crystal chandelier hung like a cloud of tears caught in the moment before it’s drops fall to earth.

The familiar polished mahogany console with its gold-tipped cabriole legs, delicate as a fawn’s, stood to the left, a large bouquet of purple-blue hothouse irises rising from within its glass bed. To the right, through mahogany pocket doors, was the sumptuous drawing room used for teas given by the headmistress or for holiday parties. Jack stood for a moment, transfixed, as he stared in at the room’s yellow walls, yellow flowered sofas and chairs, white trim. He saw himself with Sharon and Emma, having tea with the headmistress. He remembered their hostess had worn an unfashionable dress. In sharp contrast to Emma’s shockingly short pleated skirt and formfitting V-neck sweater, the dress was ankle-length, covered with tiny Victorian flowers amid twining vines. In fact, it was Emma’s alterations of the college’s dress code—what the headmistress labeled subversive—that was the subject of the conference over tea, scones, and clotted cream. Jack
had been proud of how his daughter stood up for her rights, though both the headmistress and Sharon had been scandalized. Inevitably, his gaze was magnetized to one of the sofas where Emma had sat, ankles primly crossed, hands in her lap, staring at a spot somewhere over the headmistress’s left shoulder, her expression for once solemn as an adult’s. She spoke respectfully when asked for an explanation, throughout seemed contrite. But this, Jack suspected, was merely a ploy to end the inquisition. Tomorrow, he was willing to bet, she would show up in class as outrageously dressed as before. The memory made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. From the moment the limo had entered the gates of Langley Fields, he was plunged into the past, and now he knew there was no escape.

He was about to turn away when his eye was caught by a slight rippling of the window drapes. His escort cleared his throat and Jack put up a hand. Quickly crossing the room, he pulled aside the drape. The window was firmly shut, but there came to him the hint of a smell: mascara, makeup, something Emma had used on her face. Behind him, he heard a whisper. Burnished light seemed to fall on the narrow space between the window and the drape. A shadow moved, a whisper like wind through a field of grass. Was it his daughter’s voice?

A tiny thrill shot up his spine. “Emma?” he said under his breath. “Are you here? Where are you?”

Nothing. The smell had vanished. He stood for a moment, lost in time, feeling like an idiot.
Why can’t you face it?
he told himself.
She’s gone.
But he knew why. During the six months while Sharon was popping pills behind his back, while she and Jeff were finding shadowed corners to couple in, while his marriage was falling apart, he’d spent every minute of his spare time trying to piece together the hours before Emma’s death. The truth was, he hardly slept, using the nighttime hours to prowl, run down leads, talk to snitches. Emma’s cell phone, crushed in the accident, was no help, but he got a friend at the phone company to pull her records. He worked the list of numbers, building
charts of her friends and acquaintances, but always the nodes and connectors circled back on themselves, like a snake eating its tail. He laboriously read the transcripts of her text messages for the previous two weeks, the longest the phone company kept such things. He scoured the hard drive of her laptop, looking for suspicious e-mails, links to Internet chat rooms, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous Web sites. It was like the dark side of the moon in there, the hard disk was clean of such ubiquitous detritus. If this had been a spy novel, he’d suspect it had been purged, but Emma was no spy and this wasn’t a novel. He spent hours with Alli Carson, braced the faculty and staff at the school. He interviewed every neighbor of the school’s in an ever-widening circle until even he understood he’d exhausted all possibilities. He’d run down all Emma’s girlfriends until the father of one had taken out a restraining order on him. He’d followed every possible lead, even ones that appeared improbable. For his tireless and often frenzied efforts, he’d come up with nothing. After six months, he was no closer to finding out what had frightened his daughter so thoroughly. She’d always been something of a fearless creature. Not reckless, so far as he knew—though he’d finally had to admit to himself that he’d known Emma not at all. The bitter truth, as Sharon had said, was that their daughter had a secret life from which, even in death, they were excluded.

“Emma, I want to listen,” he whispered into the space between the curtain and the window. “Honest I do.”

Moments later, amid an eerie silence, he returned to his escort and was taken away, down the paneled corridor hung with photo portraits of the college’s more illustrious alumnae, who had achieved fame and fortune in their chosen fields. Before he reached the end, the door to the headmistress’s office opened and a woman came out. Jack’s escort stopped, and so did he.

Closing the door firmly behind her, the woman strode toward him with her hand outstretched. When he took it, she said, “Jack McClure,
my name is Nina Miller.” Her clear blue eyes regarded him steadily. “I’m a special operative of the Secret Service and the Department of the Treasury,” she said with exquisite formality. “I’m assisting Homeland Security First Deputy Hugh Garner. The president has appointed him to spearhead this joint operations task force.”

Nina Miller was tall, slim, proper. She wore a charcoal gray man-tailored worsted suit, sensible shoes with low heels, a pale blue oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. All that was missing, Jack observed, was a rep tie. This one was trying too hard to fit into an old-boys network that obviously wanted no part of her. She had the narrow face of a spinster, with a rather long, aggressive nose and a pale, delicate complexion that seemed as translucent as a bowl of light.

She gestured. “This way, please,” as she led him to the end of the hall, opened the door to the headmistress’s three-room suite. It had been transformed into another world.

The first room contained the desks of a pair of administrative assistants, as well as file cabinets in which were stored meticulously maintained documents on each student, past and present. For the time being, at least, the assistants were sharing space in their boss’s office. A forensics field crew laden with machinery Jack could only guess at, agents with the latest surveillance equipment, and what seemed like a battalion of liaison personnel now clogged the space. The room was sizzling with electronics from multiple computers, hooked up variously to satellite nets, closed-circuit TV cameras, and every terrorist and criminal database in the world. A battery of laser printers continuously spat out minute-by-minute updates from CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, NSA, DOD, Pentagon, as well as the state and local police in Virginia, the District, and Maryland. Uniformed people were making calls, receiving them, barking orders, exchanging faxes, making more calls. Their pooled knowledge was like a living thing, a city of shadows being built out of the ether through which information traveled. Jack could feel the low-level
hysteria that gripped everyone in the room, as if they had the jaws of a rabid dog clamped to their throats. Their shared concentration, like a stale odor, like sardines too long in the can, made him want to draw back to catch a breath.