Duty and Honor

16

By the time Effrem had made his way back to the intersection, Jack had already logged into the Enquestor portal and punched in the Subaru’s license-plate number. As he climbed into the passenger seat the results appeared on his screen:

Without looking up, Jack said, “Find a coffee shop or diner or something.”

Using his Yelp app, Effrem located a Denny’s on Division Street, about a mile to the west, and started heading that way.

Having caught his breath and cooled off, Jack said as calmly as possible, “The next time I call you, answer the phone.”

“I couldn’t. I was afraid I’d lose him.”

Jack repeated, “The next time I call you, answer the damn phone.”

“Okay, I will. Sorry.”

“And I didn’t tell you to follow anyone. I told you to keep in touch.”

“You didn’t tell me not to follow anyone, either.”

Jack bit off the sharp reply on the tip of his tongue. Effrem had a point. They lived in different worlds. What Jack considered obvious or implied might be neither to Effrem. Effrem didn’t have the experience to know when initiative crossed into recklessness, or perhaps even the discipline to pull himself back across the line.

A thought struck Jack: He could easily imagine John Clark or Gerry Hendley saying the same things about him. And they wouldn’t be wrong.

“What’s happened?” asked Effrem.

“I think I might have been talking to Möller. He was right there, within arm’s reach,” Jack replied, then explained the encounter.

If it had been Möller, had he recognized Jack? Back at the nature preserve Möller’s attention had been divided between Effrem and his SUV and Jack and his Glock, and Jack’s cap had been pulled low. It was a toss-up.

“If it was him, why stop at all?”

“To check me out, maybe.”

“Maybe, but they’ve tried to kill you twice. It sounds like you were an easy target standing in that lot. Why not take advantage of it?”

“Good point.”

Then again, if Möller’s sole focus was escape—

Jack caught himself. Leave it.

The world in which he and the others at The Campus moved was one where there could always be a wheel within another wheel. At some point you had to stop the recursive thinking and make a choice. For someone like Jack, who was blessed or cursed with a fertile imagination, this was often challenging. It wasn’t unlike chess, a game he both loved and hated. He had read somewhere that the number of available piece positions was represented by a 1 followed by 43 zeros, and this was governed by strict rules and limited space. Neither of these factors existed in Jack’s world.

Still, Möller’s theft of the Subaru seemed like a departure for him. So far the man’s E&E — evasion and escape — plan had felt paint-by-numbers, with little room for improvisation. He’d used a credit card to call attention to his location, a risky but often effective strategy, especially when those pursuing you are part of a larger, less nimble force like the Secret Service or FBI, both agencies you’d expect to be called on to hunt down the would-be assassin of a VIP. Perhaps Möller and whoever he was working for had planned his exfiltration based on this assumption. Schrader was ex — German Special Forces. Möller might be as well, in which case their doctrine might be steeped more in rote response than it was in flexibility.

If so, stealing a car didn’t fit.

Unless Möller’s calf wound had worsened enough that he went off script.

Effrem pulled into the Denny’s lot and chose an open parking spot before the main doors. “Coffee? Anything to eat?”

“Just coffee.”

Jack used Enquestor to pull up Eunice Miller’s Department of Motor Vehicles file. The picture showed a woman with a plump face and short gray curly hair. Her birth date put her at sixty-five years old. According to Jack’s map, her address in Wolcott was about fifteen minutes north of Waterbury, off Highway 69.

Effrem returned with two large cups of coffee. He handed one to Jack, then climbed into the driver’s seat.

Jack showed him Eunice Miller’s picture. Effrem said, “Sweet old lady?”

“The question is, was she on that train?”

“And did Möller do something to her?” Had she been in the car with Möller, alive and bound, or dead in the backseat?

Shit. Jack chastised himself for not having checked the scrub brush bordering the train platform. If Eunice Miller had been lying there dying, only feet from where Jack had been standing…

“I need a pay phone,” he said.

“There was one a few blocks back.”

Effrem pulled out, retraced their route, and did a U-turn and pulled to the curb beside the pay phone. Jack got out, mentally rehearsed, then dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, Jack put some gravel in his voice and said, “Hey, I was jogging by the train station on Meadow. I thought I heard a woman screaming. Either on the platform or on the train, I don’t know which.”

He hung up.

Please don’t find anything.

At this time of night the roads were largely deserted, so they made the trip to Wolcott in ten minutes. Eunice’s house, what looked like a post — World War II single-story saltbox on Google Earth, sat two blocks behind a bowling alley off the town’s main thoroughfare.

When Effrem pulled up to the stop sign at the head of her block, Jack ordered him to cross the intersection and then pull to the curb and turn off the headlights.

“How are we going to do this?”

Jack didn’t respond immediately. He didn’t have an answer.

“Okay, let’s drive past, see if we spot her car,” Jack said.

Effrem turned the Sonata around, then turned onto Willow.

“Should be the fifth or sixth house on your side.”

Looking out Effrem’s window, Jack watched for house numbers. When they drew even with 6773, Effrem started to slow. “Don’t,” Jack warned.

There was no white Subaru in the driveway, and no garage.

Two houses down, there was a Subaru. The plate matched the one from the train station. Parked ahead of the Subaru was a green Rav4 SUV. The home, which was a duplicate of Eunice’s except for light yellow paint instead of white, was dark save the porch light and some yellow light around the edges of the front-room curtains.

“That’s not her house,” Effrem said.

“No, wrong number.”

“So—”

“I don’t know. Keep going, turn the corner, pull over.”

Effrem did so, easing the Sonata beneath the low-hanging boughs of an elm tree and then killing the headlights.

Jack punched this new mystery address into Enquestor. The deed record came back to Kaitlin Showalter.

Jack had tilted the phone so Effrem could watch. Effrem said, “Kaitlin’s a younger name.”

Jack went to Facebook and searched for her name, then sorted through several of them before finding the profile that listed a hometown of Wolcott, Connecticut. Kaitlin was single; her occupation: insurance agent in Bridgeport. Her last post, prefixed by a smiley-face emoticon, was from two hours ago:

Kaitlin had borrowed Eunice’s car to get to the train station for her daily commute.

Effrem said, “Could it have been her boyfriend?”

“Maybe,” Jack replied. Then: “No. The guy said ‘wife.’ He was picking up his wife.”

Unless Kaitlin had failed to change her relationship status on Facebook, which seemed unlikely, given how much time she spent there, she was still single.

“So how can we be sure it’s Möller inside?”

The quickest way to answer the question was also the one Jack didn’t like: Break into Kaitlin Showalter’s house and, if Möller was inside, snatch him up. Of course, as before, that approach left him with a captive and all the problems that came along with that. The other option was to wait until Möller moved again and follow. If the man was using Kaitlin’s house as an impromptu safe house/aid station, he was likely to make it brief.

For a moment, Jack reconsidered his approach to Möller. Maybe this was one of those times when violence would solve problems. Kill Möller and be done with it. It would make it harder to find the answers he needed, and if there was such a thing as good luck, Jack had already strained his. Committing cold-blooded murder on U.S. soil would give him a constellation of bigger problems, starting with a moral line he could never uncross.

Jack turned in his seat and reached into his rucksack, rummaged for a moment, then came up with a GPS tracker, the same kind he’d planted in Peter Hahn’s car.

“What’s that?” asked Effrem. Jack explained and Effrem said, “Let’s just hope he doesn’t switch cars again. Plus, we’re making a lot of assumptions about—”

“Welcome to my world,” Jack said. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”