Hostage Zero

CHAPTER TEN

A stick cracked.

While it could have been caused by anything, Harvey knew that someone was coming to kill him.

He’d dozed in the camp chair, leaving the sleeping bag and the air mattress for Jeremy. He hadn’t intended to sleep deeply. He hadn’t intended to sleep at all. Hell, he hadn’t intended a single moment of what had happened during the last twenty-four hours.

It didn’t matter, because he was wide awake now, and so was the new day, the sun hanging low and golden in the east. Without moving his body, he opened his eyes and scanned as far to the sides as his eyes could shift. The morning revealed nothing.

Another crack. Rustling.

From the darkness of the tent, Jeremy whispered, “Harvey?”

The words were barely audible, but they registered on Harvey’s ears as a shout. “Shh,” he hissed. “I hear it.”

The boy’s face appeared in the triangular opening of the tent. “Who is it?”

“Maybe it’s just a deer,” he hoped aloud.

“But I heard a car,” Jeremy said.

Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t really believed that it was a deer, anyway.

Jeremy crawled out farther. “It’s them, isn’t it?”

Keep it together, Harvey told himself. Losing it now wouldn’t help a soul.

“Harvey?”

“Shh!” This time, the hiss was emphatic. More than anything else, they needed silence. Silence and invisibility. A trip back in time to undo his decision to get involved in this crap would be good, too.

“I’m scared, Harvey.”

What part of “Shh” did the kid find confusing?

Jeremy kept coming. He crawled all the way into the open, and then over to Harvey, where he crouched next to the camp chair. He clutched Harvey’s arm.

He expects me to protect him, Harvey thought. What a stupid move that was. Harvey Rodriguez had room for exactly one important person in his life, and that was Harvey Rodriguez himself. If Jeremy-a stranger-thought for an instant that he would risk even momentary discomfort for some larger, nobler cause, then he was woefully mistaken.

The sounds of movement grew steadily clearer. Within a minute, he could hear voices. A few seconds later, he could hear what the voices were saying.

“…no goddamn sense.”

“When was the last time this job made sense to anybody?”

“So I gotta pay for it? This shit just ain’t right.”

Both voices were male, and both sounded neither young nor old-a conclusion confirmed just a few seconds later when Harvey got his first glimpse of them. Thirty yards away, they both wore jeans and T-shirts, and as they waded toward the tall grass, they headed directly toward the spot where Harvey had discovered the unconscious boy.

Jeremy’s hand tightened on Harvey’s arm. “It really is them, isn’t it?” he squeaked.

“Don’t move,” Harvey said. With the sun rising over the tent, into the eyes of the visitors, there was a chance that they could remain unseen if they just didn’t move. These guys weren’t moving with any sense of danger, which meant that they were likely to accept their surroundings as is. It’s human nature to accept a first impression as normal-making it possible to literally hide in plain sight. But thousands of years of evolution still had not erased the instinctive alarm triggered by movement.

Both men had a wiry athletic look about them, a clear source of pride for the one closest to Harvey. His T-shirt was at least two sizes too small, straining the fabric at his biceps and pecs. He was also the one who carried the folded gray body bag under his arm. It bothered Harvey that he could recognize it for what it was.

“Lie down,” Harvey whispered. “Very, very slowly.” As he spoke, he wrested his arm free from the boy’s grasp and pressed down on his shoulder. Jeremy did not resist. He lay flat on his belly, his arms tucked under his chest.

With the kid stable on the ground, Harvey edged his own butt to the front of the camp chair and pressed his shoulder blades against the sling backing. The effect was to lie flat, his front to the sky, though his eyes never moved from the visitors. Warnings against movement notwithstanding, a smaller target was always better than a larger one.

“So where is he?” asked Body Beautiful.

“I know what you know,” the other one said. He was as powerful looking through his shoulders as the other one, but wore his T-shirt looser. And his hair was longer-over his ears but not over the top. “He’s here somewhere.”

“Sayin’ it don’t make it so. Jerry said to go to the end of the parking lot and then straight till you’re almost in the water. That’s what he said, and that’s where we are. Show me a dead kid.”

His butt on the ground now, Harvey could still see the tops of the visitors’ heads above the swaying grass.

“Then he’s got to be here somewhere.”

“Maybe somebody moved him,” Muscles said.

“No way. Somebody found him, this place would be lousy with cops. It’d be all over the news. They’re already ape shit over the shit at the school. Can you imagine the shit if one of the kids was found dead?”

Muscles nodded. “Have it your way. How’d a dead kid get up and walk away?”

A long silence followed as they continued their search. As the sun rose higher, the details of these men’s appearance grew clearer, and Harvey had the terrifying thought that they were cops. They looked like cops. It was the military bearing, the focus on the task at hand. His already-pounding heart picked up more speed. Cops trying to kill a kid, with him stuck in the middle. He was so screwed.

“Hey, Billy,” Long Hair said. “Look at this over here.” By Harvey’s calculation, he was standing at the exact spot where he’d found Jeremy. “Look at this grass. It’s all matted.”

Harvey tried to recall what he’d left behind, but he pulled up a blank. He’d been concentrating too hard on the kid.

Billy joined his partner. “And what fine matted grass it is. Where’s the body?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Maybe animals dragged it off.”

“And where’s the blood?”

For the first time, Harvey considered bolting off into the woods and taking his chances. The kid was the one they wanted. If he ran…

…they’d still hunt him down and kill him. Who was he kidding?

“I’m beginning to think maybe he was never killed,” Long Hair said.

A long pause. “You can’t just stop there.”

“Think about it. Explains a lot.”

Billy was genuinely lost. “You’re saying he was wounded and wandered off.”

“Maybe. Or maybe…” He shifted his gaze directly toward Harvey’s campsite. “What the fuck is that?”

In unison, they drew firearms from underneath their T-shirts and pointed them at Harvey.

“You there!” Long Hair shouted. “Don’t you fucking move.”

“Ah, shit,” Billy whined. “Who the hell is he?”

Singular, Harvey thought. I’m the only one they see.

“Stand up!” Long Hair said. “And be really fucking careful if you don’t want to die.”

Harvey’s head raced faster than his heart. Dying was nowhere on his list of things to do today.

“Harvey…” Jeremy whined.

He ignored the boy. As he stood, he pressed down on Jeremy’s head for leverage, as if it were a rock. It was important that the kid stay out of sight. If they saw him, they’d shoot him. And if they shot the kid, what incentive did they have to let Harvey go on breathing? Jeremy needed to disappear, and since that wasn’t possible, he needed to keep out of sight.

“Hello,” Harvey said, as brightly as he could. He recognized the pistols in the man’s hands as 9-millimeter Berettas, standard military issue. Police departments hadn’t gone to that particular weapon in most cases, certainly not here in Westmoreland County.

“What are you doing there listening to us?” Billy asked.

Harvey pegged him as the hothead of the two, the one to be talked down first. “It’s hard not to listen to a conversation in an open place,” he said. “It’s quiet out here.” As he spoke he took a couple of steps forward, hoping that if they couldn’t see the boy, they wouldn’t make the connection. He also moved to his left to break their sight line away from the kid in case he moved in the background.

“Why are you hiding there?” Billy asked.

Harvey forced a chuckle that he hoped sounded more genuine that it felt. “Y’all heard what you were sayin’, right?” he quipped. “Wouldn’t you think about stayin’ outta sight if that’s what you heard?”

Billy raised his arm perpendicular to his body and drew a bead on Harvey’s chest. Harvey recognized the look. It was over for him.

But the other man grabbed Billy’s wrist and spoiled his aim. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“We’ve got to.”

“Not yet,” his partner repeated.

“Sean-”

“I said no.”

So the other guy’s name was Sean. It was always nice to know the names of the people who were going to kill you. Harvey’s heart continued to pound, but he was surprised how clear his head felt. “Yeah, Billy, he said no,” Harvey said.

“Christ, now he knows our names,” Billy spat.

Harvey had thought that a little levity might defuse things. He’d been wrong.

Sean let go of his partner’s wrist and allowed him to reacquire his target. “This would be a good time for you to do some explaining,” he said.

Harvey had been moving left the entire time, never closing an inch, but continuing to draw their aim away from the campsite. He stopped now. “I’m not a threat to you,” he said. “It’s like you said earlier. If I’d wanted to bring the police into my life, this place would be alive with them. Do you see any cops?”

Billy and Sean exchanged confused glances.

Harvey used the brief silence to design a lie that would buy him some time. “I was here night before last,” he said. “I saw them drag that boy out here and shoot him. Then I heard the chopper. Scared me to death.” He let the news settle on them. “If I was going to call somebody, that would have been the time, don’t you think?”

He could almost hear Sean’s brain trying to process it. He knew what the inevitable question would be, so he moved ahead with the scary-big lie. “Fact is, you’re about three hours too late.”

It registered on the visitors like a slap. As they recoiled with another shared look, Harvey noted movement behind them and off to the right. It was two men, one huge, the other average. He didn’t allow himself to look directly at them because they appeared to be armed, and through his peripheral vision, Harvey would swear that their aim was trained on the men who would kill him.

“Two guys came and took the body away,” Harvey went on, thankful that the new additions to the cast gave him more inspiration. “One was really big, and the other one just normal.”

“He’s lying,” Billy said. “You can see it in his face.”

Sean regarded him for a moment, then nodded. “I think you’re right.” Then to Harvey, “You’d suck as a poker player.”

Harvey couldn’t help himself. He shot a look directly at the new arrivals, a silent plea for help.

It came instantly. “Drop your weapons!” one of them yelled. The rest of it unraveled in mere seconds, but Harvey was too busy dropping for cover to see a thing.

Boxers drove the Batmobile while Jonathan rode shotgun. Boxers had christened the heavily armored and electronically enhanced Hummer H2 with its nickname due to the impressive technology it carried, and it stuck. Jonathan had finally shed his Leon Harris makeup and changed out of the suit that might have linked him to the breakout. He’d left them and their rental van at the farm with every confidence that everything would be properly disposed of, sanitized, or returned. During their ride back from the George Washington Memorial, he and Boxers had been generous in praising each other for the brilliance of their plan to return Jimmy Henry to jail.

The U-Lockit franchise in Kinsale had been the next logical stop in their quest to pick up the trail. Given the early hour, he didn’t know what he might find, but experience taught that delaying the inevitable rarely paid dividends in the long run. Besides, it had already been twenty-eight hours since the assault on the school.

“You know,” Boxers said as they closed within a mile of the place, “you’re gonna get your ass in a crack keeping the FBI out of this.”

“Let them collect their own evidence,” Jonathan said. “They don’t appreciate our methods.”

“Don’t you think this one’s a little close to home for pissing contests?”

Jonathan shot the big guy a curious glance. Boxers didn’t often push back like this. “They couldn’t use what we gave them even if we gave it to them,” he explained. “Fruit from the poisonous tree and all that.” Jonathan considered it one of the great weaknesses of the United States’s system of jurisprudence that even in egregious cases like this one, the process used to obtain evidence was given equal weight to the evidence itself.

“Besides,” he continued, “I’ll tip our hand to Doug when we get back to the Cove.” Doug Kramer was the chief of police in Fisherman’s Cove, and a childhood friend of Jonathan’s. Whether by accident or intrepid investigation, Doug had connected enough dots over the years to know the basic outlines of the illicit side of Jonathan’s firm, Security Solutions, and he’d made it very clear that badge notwithstanding, he saw no reason to interfere.

A moment later, Boxers pointed ahead through the windshield. “What have we here?”

An unremarkable black Chrysler sedan sat parked in front of the U-Lockit office, which was dark and appeared empty. The storage units themselves ran in parallel blocks behind it.

Jonathan checked his watch. Five forty-five. “Go in quietly,” he said, instantly on alert. Never a believer in coincidences, he concluded that this car had to belong to a bad guy.

Boxers coasted to a halt just inside the driveway and turned off the ignition. “How do you want to handle it?”

Jonathan said, “Let’s keep it light. Weapons holstered but ready.” He opened the door and slid to the ground.

Boxers joined him at the front bumper. “Who are you expecting them to be?”

It was a good question. As Jonathan thought through Jimmy Henry’s story, it could be anyone from a bad guy returning to the scene of the crime to a cop investigating a lead. “I just want to be ready for the worst,” he said.

As they approached the Chrysler, Jonathan noticed that the engine was still ticking as it cooled under the hood.

“Sounds like they just got here,” Boxers said, speaking his boss’s thoughts.

Jonathan cocked his head, listening. Something wasn’t right about this. “Who just parks in a storage lot at this hour? If you’re retrieving something from storage, you park in front of your unit. Whoever drove this car isn’t here for what’s in the units. They want something else.”

“Like what?”

That was the million-dollar question. Jonathan beckoned with his chin for Boxers to follow as he walked toward the woods at the edge of the lot. As the approached the grassy patch at the edge of the woods, he pointed to the ground. “Look here,” he said.

Clearly, people had recently walked this way. They drew their weapons and started into the woods.

Jonathan heard voices. On a still, humid morning like this, sounds traveled easily. He could clearly make out the hum of men’s voices in the distance, but a career of firearms, helicopter insertions, and explosives had made it impossible for his abused ears to decipher individual words.

Three minutes later, they were on top of what looked to be a mugging in process. Two clean-cut guys in T-shirts had drawn down on a gangly Latino hippie who appeared to have established a campsite near the edge of the water. From the look of the place, Jonathan guessed that the guy had been living there for a long time. The body language of all three men telegraphed an urgency that told Jonathan he’d arrived in the proverbial nick of time.

Moving with a choreographed unison that came from years of cooperation, Jonathan and Boxers spread out slightly to create a more difficult target, and they both brought their weapons to bear. As they approached to within twenty yards, Jonathan made brief eye contact with the bearded victim, and noted with interest how cool the guy remained as he continued to pivot in a wide circle away from the campsite. To Jonathan, that meant that there was something worth hiding in the camp.

At this range, their words were clear. The hippie was talking a mile a minute-something about these guys being three hours late.

Jonathan felt Boxers’ gaze on him and returned it with a nod. The time had come to intervene.

“Drop your weapons!” he yelled.

The hippie, who seemed to have been expecting the confrontation, reacted instantly, dropping to the ground to leave an unobstructed sight picture.

The men in the T-shirts whirled, with guns at the ready and murder in their eyes. There was no time for negotiation.

Jonathan and Boxers fired simultaneously, and the men died on their feet-triple-tapped with two shots to the heart and one to the forehead in the time that it took for the first spent shell casing to hit the ground.

Even with the targets neutralized, neither man broke his aim. Jonathan yelled, “If I didn’t just shoot you, you’d better by God stand up and show me your hands.”

Nobody moved. Boxers shrugged.

“Last chance!” Jonathan yelled. “If I have to come and find you, you will not be happy.”

As he spoke, he kept his aim trained on the spot where the hippie had disappeared. It surprised him when the man slowly rose above the grass thirty feet to the right. He and Boxers pivoted their aim in unison.

The guy looked older than he had before. Scrawnier and dirtier, too. He rose straight up, as if on an elevator, his large hands extended more out than up, his fingers splayed wide. He looked scared to death.

“Very well done,” Jonathan coached. “Very smart.”

He sensed movement near the campsite at the exact instant when Boxers said, “Left.”

Since Jonathan held the left flank, the target belonged to him. He pivoted as Boxers held fast.

Jesus, it was a child. The look of terror in the boy’s face didn’t touch the feeling of horror in Jonathan’s stomach as he broke his aim and redirected the muzzle of the. 45 to the ground. The weapon was still at the ready if he needed it, but even an unheard-of accidental trigger pull couldn’t do any harm.

“Don’t let that one move an inch closer,” Jonathan said, pointing to the hippie. He moved in closer to the boy, and within two steps, he recognized him. “Jeremy?” It seemed too good to be true.

The boy’s mask of fear morphed into a mask of confusion. Then, finally, recognition. “Mr. Jonathan,” he said.

Jonathan holstered his weapon, still cocked as always, and rushed to the boy. He stopped, though, when Jeremy recoiled. “Are you all right?” Jonathan asked. He shot a contemptuous glare at the hippie, whose hands remained high. Jonathan dared another couple of steps, stopping just a foot or two outside the kid’s personal space. “We’ve been worried sick about you,” he said. He resisted the urge to ask about the other missing child, Evan Guinn. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe he just wanted to savor this victory before finding out awful news.

Still, Jeremy didn’t move. He just cocked his head a little, as if trying to fit together the pieces of too complex a puzzle.

Jonathan had memorized the dossiers on the missing children, so he knew Jeremy Schuler to be thirteen years old-a seventh grader just three years away from having a driver’s license-but at this moment he could have been ten, or even eight. Six. Pick a number. As his features melted, he transformed from young man to little boy.

He launched himself at Jonathan, wrapping his arms around his chest in a crushing bear hug, and he dissolved into deep racking sobs. Jonathan wasn’t ready for it. The rawness of the emotion made him self-conscious. He patted Jeremy’s back, and then he cupped the crown of his head and pulled him in closer.

In Jonathan’s job, nothing good ever came from crossing the line that separated the heart from the head. His world was about life-and-death decisions made quickly, in the vacuum of professional detachment. That meant shunning hugs from relieved victims and constructing emotional walls to separate him from the people he helped.

As Jeremy Schuler trembled and sobbed, his hot tears soaking into the fabric of his shirt, Jonathan felt his defenses crumbling. A few yards away, Boxers searched the hippie for weapons.

This was a victory, Jonathan told himself. With one still missing, it was only one half of total victory, but it was a moment to be celebrated nonetheless. In the midst of a thousand unanswered questions, Jonathan Grave knew one fact beyond even the slimmest sliver of doubt: Whoever had hurt this child-whoever might still be hurting Evan Guinn-was going to pay an extraordinary price.