If She Wakes

45

Abby had succeeded in lifting the headrest to its fully extended position, which required bracing her feet on the front of the seat and arching and twisting her back like an Olympic diver attempting a half gainer. She could feel the release buttons, but removing the headrest entirely required more pressure and a lifting motion, a feat that was not easy to execute when you were tied to the damned thing and each lift strangled you and each push at the release buttons numbed already clumsy fingers.

She was close, though. She was very close, and she was so intent on the task that she’d almost forgotten about the scene playing out on Dax’s phone.

Then came the gunshot.

She spun at the sound and slipped, and the headrest slid back into place. She could hear it clinking down, level by level, lock by lock, like an extension ladder closing.

“Shit!” she cried, the cord tight against her throat, her swollen fingers numb, all of her gains lost. She could see the display of the phone again, though, and so she was looking at it when a man’s horrified face came into view, the man Dax had called Gerry. Gerry’s lips parted, and blood ran over them and down his chin. Abby stared at the image in horror, and when the revolver appeared from offscreen and slipped between the man’s bloodied lips, she closed her eyes, a reflex action.

“I want you to know,” Dax said, “how much I’ve appreciated the opportunities.”

She didn’t see the second shot, but she heard it. The sound was loud on the phone, but out here in the driveway, beyond the walls of the brick house, it was softer, swift and insignificant.

That was how a human life could end. Neither with a whimper nor a bang — just a muffled pop that wouldn’t turn any heads in the neighborhood. The night didn’t pause for the kill shot. The night carried on.

The night always would.

Abby sat in the passenger seat, breathing hard, eyes squeezed shut, sweat on her brow from the exertion of her work on the headrest. She’d been so close. A fraction of an inch away, a few more seconds, that was all she’d needed, but now she would have to start over, and without even opening her eyes to check the phone display, she knew that time was short.

It was. She opened her eyes in time to see the kid moving for the door, and then she didn’t require the display anymore, because she could see Dax emerging from the shadows. He was walking at a leisurely pace, no sign of panic or even concern. There was a brown paper bag in his hand. The gun he’d just killed with was nowhere to be seen.

He used the key fob to unlock the Challenger, and too late Abby wondered whether there was any sign of her nearly successful effort to free herself. Dax opened the door, dropped into the driver’s seat, and looked her over quickly but carefully, but if he saw anything that troubled him, he didn’t show it.

“Sorry you had to watch that,” he said, apparently attributing Abby’s sweat to fear over what she’d seen play out on the phone. “Remember, the man was going to kill you too.”

When Abby didn’t answer, Dax lifted a hand in an It’s all right gesture and said, “No thanks needed. Happy to help.”

He tossed the brown paper bag into the backseat. It landed heavily, and Dax registered Abby’s response to the sound.

“There’s a wallet, a watch, a gun, a phone, and two hundred thousand dollars cash in there,” he said. “I’m afraid Gerry was robbed. But good news — if anything happens to me, all of that is yours.”

He picked up the phone from the center console and closed out of the concealed-camera application. The video disappeared, and audio replaced it — the feed from Tara Beckley’s hospital room. Abby recognized Shannon’s voice and a lower, male voice that she thought was the doctor who’d been with them previously. They were making small talk now, long pauses between comments.

Dax listened thoughtfully, then said, “Killing time.”

It was a common expression, and yet when it left his mouth, Abby thought he meant that the hour of murder was upon them again.

“They’re waiting on the cavalry to arrive,” Dax said. “Which means we can get there first.”

With that, he backed out of the driveway. This time, the gates opened automatically. Abby still hadn’t spoken. She stared at the gates as they closed again.

“Onward!” Dax said jauntily, and he pulled onto the street. “It’s your time now, Abby. Are you ready to own the moment? A lot of people will be counting on you.”

He had a heavy foot on the gas pedal, was doing forty-five in a thirty-miles-per-hour zone and gaining speed. The Hellcat’s power could sneak up on you if you were distracted, and the kid was distracted. The cheerful mask was a false front, and his voice was no longer his natural taunt but something he was ginning up because he needed to feel that old confidence. Abby was confused. She had no sense that killing bothered Dax, and yet something about this one had rattled him.

“Who was he?” Abby said.

“No one of significance to you.”

“But he knew your father.” This much Abby had heard while she strained at the cord around her throat. Talk of a father and an uncle. That had mattered to him in a real way, one that his masks could not fully conceal. The car was still gaining speed, roaring down the residential street at more than fifty, and he had no idea.

“You’re going too fast,” Abby said.

He registered the speed with surprise and eased off the accelerator.

“Good eye,” he said, the forced cheerful demeanor back. “You’re a fine partner, Abby. Don’t ever let me forget to acknowledge that.”

The weakness is family, Abby thought, watching him, and then: One of them was named Jack. That person matters to him. And this last murder wasn’t like the rest. For a reason involving family, it was different.

Had he killed a family member back there? It seemed possible; with him, any horror seemed possible. But Abby didn’t believe that was it. The dead man had been important to him, but he wasn’t family.

The kid hooked a left turn and then they were on a four-lane street, leaving the neighborhood, and up ahead, the lights of the interstate showed.

Abby leaned back against the headrest to let the cord loosen as much as possible and felt the thrum of the big engine work into her spine. Only hours ago, that had driven panic through her, but now she felt the connection again.

She knew that the headrest would come off. She’d been close to getting it, and she would be faster the next time.

If she survived until the next time.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “Or have you killed enough people for one day?”

“We’re not done,” the kid said. His voice was a monotone, as if he couldn’t muster the energy to do his typical upbeat act. “You’re going to see Tara. If things go well, you might live a little longer. So might Tara.”

When Dax shifted onto the interstate ramp, the Pirellis spun on the wet pavement, and the Challenger fishtailed briefly. He got it under control fast, and he didn’t react with fear or even surprise. He might not understand the car, but he understood power, and he learned quickly.

46

Boone wanted her own car, but asking for assistance from her employers would break the silence around Tara Beckley, and adding more actors to the mix, even a simple driver/bodyguard who understood rank and wouldn’t ask questions, felt risky right now. The operations protocol around Oltamu had been silence, and though he was dead, she didn’t think that protocol should be.

The rental counter would waste time, and Uber would not, so when she made it to the ground, she went against her strongest instincts and sacrificed control for speed. The plane had circled for twenty-five minutes while the storm lashed the New England coast beneath it, but it had finally landed, and now all that was left between her and Tara Beckley was fifteen miles. She summoned the Uber, and when it arrived, she stepped off the curb, got into the car, handed the driver — a too-friendly chick with dyed-pink hair — a hundred-dollar bill, and told her to start moving fast and keep moving fast.

“I don’t want to get a ticket,” the girl protested. She had approximately twenty piercings and fifty tattoos, but she didn’t want to challenge a speed limit?

“If you get a ticket, I’ll pay it,” Boone said.

“It still affects my Uber status! They’ll know if I—”

“Then you won’t get a ticket,” Boone snapped. “I can make it disappear. Trust me on this, would you? Any cop who stops us will let us go in a hurry.” The girl, mouth open, looked at her in the mirror, and Boone said, “Keep your eyes on the damned road.”

Boone texted Pine while they pulled away from Logan. She told him she was en route and asked if anything had changed. Pine said no. Boone asked where the family was. Pine said the sister was present but the mom and stepdad were in their hotel room; did she want them? Boone said no. She just wanted the girl. Tara might or might not have the answers, but the parents definitely didn’t.

Get rid of the sister, Boone texted.

Can’t be done, Pine replied.

What do you mean, it can’t be done? Boone wrote.

You’ll learn, Pine responded.

47

Tara rests while Dr. Pine and Shannon talk about inconsequential things; everyone is waiting on the arrival of the investigator who will make sense of it all. Tara knows that will require conversation again, the exhausting process on the alphabet board. Dr. Carlisle has promised they’ll experiment with computer software soon, but that’s not going to help Tara now. She’s got to rely on her eyes, nothing else, and she’s got to call up the stamina to make it through. Last mile, running uphill. She’s been here before.

But she hasn’t, of course. She has never had to face that last mile suffering the relentless pain of tubes jammed into various orifices or the maddening cruelty of paralysis. There is no analogy in the world that applies here. She’s not invisible any longer, but she’s also no closer to leaving this bed or even making a sound than she was when she woke up.

Don’t let yourself think that way. Be strong.

She’s tired of being strong, though. Tired of how much everyone cares about Oltamu and his fucking phone. He’s dead, but Tara isn’t, and maybe she’s worse off than him. Endless days like this, endless expenses... what if there’s no finish line? What if this is it?

Remember your thumb.

Yes. Her thumb. Capable of spasmodic twitching. What a win!

You take your wins where you can find them, though. Water could erode rock, drop by drop.

She tunes out the conversation around her and focuses on the channel between brain and thumb. Visualizes it, imagines it like a river, sees her force of will like a skilled rower pulling against the current, forcing her way upstream. Brain to thumb, no turning back, and no portages around treacherous water. You had to beat the current.

The visual takes clearer shape, and she can see a woman who is like her but who is not her, a different version of Tara, more dream than memory, but so tenacious. The rowboat becomes a kayak, and though real Tara is awkward with a kayak paddle, dream Tara is not. She’s strong and graceful, fighting a current that flashes with green-gold light just beneath the surface. As she paddles, the river widens, and the current pushes against her, and then, impossibly, it reverses direction and begins guiding her downstream, an aid rather than an enemy now.

Make it to the thumb. Make it there, and once you know the way, you will make it again. Once you know you can go that far whenever you like, then try another river in another direction. We’ll explore them all, run them to the end. We have nothing but time.

She could swear she feels a tightening in her thumb, a faint pulse of muscle tension.

Yes, it can be done. It’s long and hard but it can be done. Keep riding the current, keep steering, keep—

“She’s on her way,” Dr. Pine says, and at first Tara is convinced that he’s speaking about her, that he’s somehow aware of her journey downriver. Then she sees that his eyes are on his phone.

“Fifteen minutes,” he reports. Then he looks at Tara. “Do you want your parents here?”

The two eye flicks are necessary, but they also take her away from the river, and she feels a loosening of tension in her hand. She was so close. Why did he have to interrupt?

No matter. She’s found the way once, and she will find it again. Over and over, however long it takes. The water was not so bad. Eventually the current had shifted to help her, and whatever produced that green-gold hue beneath the surface was good. She’s not sure why she’s so sure of that, but she knows beyond any doubt that it is a good sign.

I’ll be back, Tara promises herself, and then she gives Pine her attention again. He smiles in what is supposed to be a reassuring fashion, but she can tell that he’s nervous. Who can blame him? It’s not enough to be tasked with bringing a patient back from the dead; now he’s supposed to see that the patient provides witness testimony to some sort of government agent? Even for a neurologist, this can’t feel like another day at the office.

She’d like to smile back at him and let him know that she’s grateful for all he’s done and that she felt better the moment he walked into the room, looked at her with those curious but hopeful eyes, and introduced himself. And used her name. Sometime soon, when she has the computer software that makes all of this less of a chore, she will let him know how much that mattered. Small things, quiet things, but he gave her dignity when others did not.

Shannon isn’t offering any smiles. She’s not even offering her attention. She’s glued to her own phone and seems distressed. Tara watches Shannon tap out a text message and send it, but she can’t read the message because Shannon is shielding the phone with her free hand. It’s an unsubtle way of making it clear that she doesn’t want Pine to see it. Once the message is sent, she stands up, her chair making a harsh squeak on the tile.

“I’ll be right back.”

Pine turns and stares at her. “Where are you going?”

Shannon gives him an icy look. “Is that your business?”

“Right now, I feel that it is, yes. We’re fifteen minutes away from—”

“I know! Trust me, I am aware. I just need to... breathe for a few seconds. Okay?”

Pine doesn’t like it, but he decides not to fight it. He seems to think Shannon is on the verge of a panic attack, which would be a logical assumption if he were dealing with anyone other than Shannon. Tara knows better. Shannon has no fight-or-flight response; it’s only fight with her. If she were flooded with adrenaline, she’d refuse to leave the room. So what in the hell is going on, and why won’t she meet Tara’s eyes?

Then she’s gone. Without a look back.

48

Inside the Challenger, Dax and Abby listened to the exchange in the hospital room. Dax nodded, pleased, and said, “Attagirl. Way to stand your ground.”

Abby, still bound to the passenger seat of her dead friend’s car, said nothing. They were parked on the fourth floor of a five-floor garage attached to the hospital, and most of the spaces around them were empty, as were many on the third level, which connected to the hospital through a walkway. There should be little if any traffic up here.

When Dax had parked, he’d sent a text message to Shannon Beckley, making sure that Abby saw each word. He identified himself as Abby, and from there the text was simple: he told her the car he was in and where it was parked in the hospital garage, then said he would give Shannon Oltamu’s phone provided she came alone.

It was, Abby had to admit, a smart choice. Shannon wanted the phone, and she knew Abby had it. Any other tactic — threatening her, for example — might not have rung true. But the promise of the phone was tempting, particularly with the DOE agent on the way, and the situation made sense. As far as Shannon knew, Abby was doing what she’d said she would: reaching out to her from another phone number and offering what help she could from her own perilous position in the world.

Shannon should have no reason to doubt her.

“You’re going to have the opportunity to make some noise, I suppose,” Dax said, pocketing the phone and turning to Abby. “You could scream, kick the horn. I don’t know what all has run through your head, but I’m sure you’ve had ideas, and I can promise you that all of them are bad. Right now, she’s got the chance to walk in and out of this garage alive and unhurt. Don’t ruin that for her, Abby.”

He studied Abby’s eyes for a moment, then nodded once, opened the driver’s door, and slipped out. They were parked beside a large panel van with a cleaning company’s logo, and he vanished on the other side of that. Abby watched him go and then turned to her right, where the stairwell was.

Shannon Beckley should come from that direction. Maybe alone, maybe not. If she walked through the door with a cop in tow, Abby didn’t think it would take long for the shooting to start.

Shannon came alone. She’d moved fast too, because the wait hadn’t been long. The stairwell door opened and there she was, tall and defiant, or at least trying to look defiant, though you could see her nerves in the way she scanned the garage even after she’d observed the Challenger parked where she’d been told it would be. She hesitated, and Abby saw her glance back at the stairwell door as it clanged shut behind her, but then she steeled herself and started toward the Challenger with long, purposeful strides.

She made it halfway there before the kid got her.

Abby hadn’t seen him move. She’d thought he was still waiting on the other side of that van, but he must have crawled under it or around it, because he emerged from behind a pickup truck that was parked four empty spaces from the Challenger, now on Abby’s right instead of her left. Shannon Beckley was walking fast, her eyes on the Challenger, and she might have glimpsed Abby’s face through the darkly tinted glass because she seemed to squint just before Dax rose up beside her.

She had time to scream, but she didn’t. Instead, she tried to fight and run at the same time, stumbling backward while throwing a wild right hook. If she’d stepped into the punch, she might’ve landed it; she had a fast hand. But because she was trying to both attack and flee, she missed the punch, and then Dax had her. He caught her right wrist, spun her, twisted her arm up behind her back, and clapped his gloved left hand over her mouth.

Abby jerked forward instinctively as if to help. The cord bit into her throat and forced her back. She reached for the headrest release, but before she could even find it, they were walking her way, Dax whispering into Shannon’s ear with each step. When they arrived beside the car, he released her and drew the gun. He did this so quickly that it was pressed against the back of Shannon’s skull before she had time to react to being free. She stood still, staring through the window at Abby, close enough now to see the cord around her throat.

“Open the driver’s door,” Dax said to Shannon. His voice was soft but menacing, like early snowflakes with a blizzard behind them.

Shannon walked around the back of the car and opened the driver’s door, and then she and Abby were briefly face-to-face with no glass between them.

“I’m sorry,” Abby said. The words sounded as hollow to her as Shannon’s expression told her they felt.

“Backseat,” Dax said, folding the driver’s seat forward and allowing access to the back. Shannon hesitated, and he cocked the revolver. She crawled into the backseat, scrambled across the leather, and crouched in the far corner. Dax followed, swinging the door shut behind him and sealing them all inside, Abby tied to the front passenger seat, Shannon and Dax and the gun in the back.

“All together now,” he said. “Terrific. This thing is close to done, Shannon. Closer than you think. You’ve got a big job to do, though. You’ve got to get our beloved little phone to your sister and unlock it and bring it back. You’ve got to do that quickly and without anyone else seeing it. Otherwise, the killing starts fast.”

Shannon had been staring at Abby, but now she looked back at Dax and seemed to be sizing him up. Other than having the gun, he didn’t appear all that imposing. Abby remembered the night she’d made the same mistake.

“You need to listen to him,” Abby said. “And not for me. I’m not worried about myself anymore. But you need to listen to him because you need him to go away fast.”

“That’s excellent advice,” Dax said. “Abby’s been along for the ride for a while now. She’s seen some things. I’d trust her wisdom if I were you.”

Shannon Beckley looked at Abby and then back at Dax, and Abby knew her mind was whirling, and she was almost positive she knew what she was thinking.

“When the Department of Energy agent gets to the room, she isn’t going to be able to help,” she said, and Shannon’s eyes widened. “Nobody in that room can help, because he can hear you. He’s listening to the hospital room. Has been.”

She’d taken this chance expecting retribution from Dax, expecting maybe even a bullet, but instead she received a smile.

“That’s right,” Dax said. “But we won’t need to worry about ears anymore. Shannon’s going to give us eyes too.”

He took off the black baseball cap and extended it to her. She recoiled and smacked against the door. But she had nowhere to run, and it was far too late for that anyhow.

“The agent is en route,” Dax said. “My understanding is that she’s very close. That puts some added pressure on you, Shannon. I’m sorry about that, but...” He shrugged. “I’m not the one who sent for her. It’s your turn to wear the black hat.”

Abby watched in the mirror. Shannon took the hat from his hand like she was accepting a snake, then put it on. She pushed her hair behind her ears and settled it down. It looked natural enough. Looked good, even. But it wouldn’t look right to the doctor who was in that room.

“Why’d she leave and put on a hat?” Abby said.

“Good question,” the kid answered, not looking at her. “Why’d you do that, Shannon?”

Silence for a moment, then Shannon said, “I don’t know.”

“I think you do. I think you get migraines from the lights in the hospital. Stress and bright light? That can definitely bring on a headache. You took some Excedrin, you put on a hat, and now you want everyone to just shut the hell up about you and focus on your sister. I think everyone is ready to focus on Tara.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew Oltamu’s phone. When he tapped the display, Abby watched Shannon’s face change. She understood the picture. Or at least, she wasn’t confused by it.

“You’re going to need to hold this up to her eyes,” Dax said, “and hope that it unlocks. It asks for a name, but I think that’s bullshit. It just needs her eyes. If I’m wrong, though... there’ll be a lot riding on Tara figuring out what to do then. Because I know your mother and stepfather are in room four eighty-one in the hotel next door, and they’ll die fast if you make a bad choice.”

He pressed the phone into her hand. Her hand was trembling, but only a little.

“You can save a lot of lives tonight,” Dax told her.

“They’ll be watching me,” Shannon said. “At least, Pine will be. The doctor. How do you expect me to explain this to him?”

“Convincingly,” Dax said. “That’s how I expect you to do it. I’m not a fan of scripts. People get hung up on them, they forget their lines, and then things go to hell fast. I like quick thinkers with room to be creative. Maybe you want a word in private with your sister. Maybe you’re angry with Dr. Pine. I don’t know. But I think you’ll figure it out. And Shannon? Make it believable. Because if that phone finds its way back to my hand, your family stays alive. If it doesn’t...” He inclined his head toward the front seat. “Ask Abby what happened to the last person who disappointed me today.”

Shannon didn’t look at Abby. She put Oltamu’s phone in her pocket and said, “May I go now?”

“You in a hurry?”

“Yes. I don’t want any strangers around. Let me go now, before the detective or agent or whoever gets here.”

“Wise,” Dax said, and then he moved back, keeping the gun pointed at her, opened the door, and stepped outside. He lowered the gun and kept it down against his leg as she climbed out. He actually offered her a hand, looking like a high-school kid with his prom date. She ignored it and climbed out alone. She ignored the gun too. She ignored everything and just started walking toward the stairwell.

“He sees and hears you,” Abby called after her. She knew how pathetic the warning sounded, but she was terrified for Shannon. She was going to try something. Abby was sure of that. She might not have a plan yet, but this woman was absolutely going to try something.

Dax leaned on the roof of the car and sang, “‘He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good, for goodness’ sake!’”

The stairwell door opened and clanged shut, and Shannon Beckley was gone.

49

Pine wasn’t as helpless over the sister as he’d claimed because when Boone arrived, he came down to meet her and said that the sister was gone and it was just Tara now.

“Shannon will come back,” he said. “I’d be stunned if she didn’t. Maybe we should wait.”

“We are not waiting,” Boone said. “Less is more, Doctor, when it comes to time and witnesses in this scenario.”

She didn’t give him a chance to consider that, just walked in front of him and down the corridor as if she knew where she was going. Using motion to push past hesitation was one of her favorite techniques, and it worked. Pine reacted as most men in positions of authority did and quickened his pace in an attempt to not only catch up to her but make it seem as if he were actually leading the way, that the rush had been his idea all along.

The corridor ended in a T, and Pine turned left and exchanged quick greetings with two nurses in the hall. If they had any interest in Boone, they didn’t show it. She was just another stranger here to look at the brain-dead girl, evidently. Pine had done a good job of shutting down the chatter about Tara Beckley’s return to consciousness in his own hospital, at least. The girl’s mother had carried news outside the walls, but inside, it was business as usual. For the first time, Boone was pleased that she’d gotten here so late; the hospital was quieter at this hour.

“The process will seem simple to you,” Pine said. “It will seem easy, even. She moves her eyes to give you answers — what could be less taxing, right? But I warn you that it is a laborious process for her. We’ve pushed her hard already today. At some point, the fatigue will catch up to her. Remember that as you phrase your questions.”

“I tend to be concise,” Boone said, which was certainly not a lie.

“It’s not about being concise. You can talk all you want. What you need to consider is how many words are required for her to respond. You want to cut that down, down, down. As much as possible, use yes-or-no questions. When she has to spell out a word, make that word count.”

They had reached room 373.

“Omit needless words,” he admonished her, and then he opened the door.

50

Omit needless words.” Dr. Strunk is here! Damn it, if Tara could only speak, she would say that to see whether Dr. Pine is enough of a writing geek to laugh. She expects that he is. Aren’t all doctors well read? Their patients hope so, certainly.

As Dr. Pine ushers the new woman in, Tara finds herself thinking that she looks forward to having a real conversation with him at some point. She likes him and trusts him, and she suspects that he has good stories. In a business like his, how could you not? Tara wants to become one of his best stories.

A success story.

“Hello, Tara,” he says, “your guest has arrived.” He pauses, and then, as if reading her thoughts, he adds, “I’m sure Shannon will be here in a moment. But would you like to wait for her?”

Tara has no idea what bug crawled up Shannon’s ass to send her rushing out of here, but she’s comfortable with Dr. Pine and certain that Shannon will return soon. Then they will all get the lecture on how they shouldn’t have started without her. But in the meantime, why not get to it?

She flicks her eyes up twice. No need to wait.

The woman with Dr. Pine is tall and lean, well muscled. A workout junkie, probably. Not a runner, though. Or at least, not just a runner. She likes free weights. Her shoulder muscles are defined under her tight-fitting black top, and Tara is surprised and somewhat disappointed that she’s not wearing a jacket. She’d expected a jacket that might conceal a gun. Having never met a Department of Energy agent before, she allowed her imagination to go wild, and she should have known better. This is a notepad-and-laptop kind of law enforcement agent, not a gun-belt type. But, hey, she’s clearly strong.

“Tara, it’s very nice to meet you,” the woman says, walking closer, every movement balanced and her focus on Tara total. “Dr. Pine was explaining how I can make this as easy as possible for you. I’ll respect his guidance on that. I understand that yes-or-no questions are best, and I am going to stick to those as much as I can, but occasionally, I might need to ask you to spell. Do you understand all of that?”

Tara flicks her eyes up once, thinking, Say your name, damn it. At some point, she’s going to have to take the time to get that sentence out so Dr. Pine knows how important it is to her. Common courtesies like introductions make her feel more human, less like a spectacle, some tourist attraction or circus freak, the Amazing Locked-in Woman, five dollars for five minutes of her incredible nonverbal communication.

The woman sits on the stool that Dr. Pine usually claims, and for some reason this bothers Tara. Let the medical professional run the show, lady. But there’s no one in the room who matters to the woman except Tara.

Until the door swings open, and there is Shannon, dressed like a hostage negotiator. What in the world is she doing in that dumb black baseball cap?

“Sorry I’m late,” she says in an odd, too-loud voice. “I was getting a bad headache. The stress and the lights...” She waves her hand at the overhead fluorescents. “I was afraid it would become a migraine.”

The agent seems less than delighted to have Shannon join the party but accepts it with a thin smile and nod. “No problem. I was just about to ask Tara a few simple questions, and then I hope I can bring an end to your stress. At least this additional aspect of it.” She rises from the stool and offers her hand, and Tara thinks, Sure, the walking-talking girl gets an introduction.

“Shannon Beckley,” Shannon says, still too loud, as if she wants to be heard three rooms away. Her eyes are skittering all around the room, like someone taking inventory after a burglary.

“Nice to meet you, Shannon. I’m Andrea Carter, with the Department of Energy.”

Well, Tara thinks, at least we now have a name.

And then, as Tara stares at her sister, something troubling overtakes her: She has seen that hat before. She’s seen that hat in this room, when the Justin Loveless impostor showed up with the flowers.

What in the hell is happening?

51

Inside the Challenger, Dax and Abby sat side by side, like partners, and watched the video feed on the phone. It had been a disorienting show so far, with Shannon Beckley’s head creating the effect of a Steadicam in a horror movie. Now things finally slowed down, and room 373 took on clarity: Tara in the bed, the doctor named Pine standing in the corner, and the DOE agent sitting on a stool at the bedside. Abby couldn’t see her face, just the back of her head, blond hair against a black shirt, but then she turned to the door, and Abby waited with the sensation of a trapped scream for Shannon Beckley to say the wrong thing, to doubt the killing capacity of the kid who’d sent her in there. She might think calling 911 would be the right move, and then she would learn swiftly and painfully that such a mistake would be measured in lost lives.

Instead, she nailed it — voice too loud and a little unnatural, but the rest was right. The bit about the stress and the migraine worked well enough. Abby exhaled, feeling like the first step was a good one, but Dax went rigid.

What did he see that I didn’t? Abby wondered.

Dax picked up the phone and used his fingers to change the zoom. The agent’s face filled the screen.

“Well, now,” he said, and other than during the initial moments after his last murder, it was the first time he’d sounded unsteady to Abby.

“What is it?” Abby said. She wasn’t expecting an answer, but she got one.

“That’s not a DOE agent,” Dax said. “That’s Lisa Boone.”

“Who is Lisa Boone?”

“She worked with my father a few times. He thought she was very good.” Dax finally looked away from the screen, met Abby’s eyes, and realized the message meant nothing to her. His gaze was steady when he said, “That means she’s a professional killer.”

52

Shannon stands there wearing the black hat, the hat that Tara hasn’t thought about on this day of developments, her future opening in front, her attention being directed to the past, pulling her in opposite directions. The young man with the hunter’s eyes and the black hat seemed a forgotten player to her.

Now he is back. Tara knows this, and Shannon must too.

I could have warned her, Tara thinks.

Shannon says, “I don’t want to interrupt this. I really don’t. Trust me, I understand the importance. But I would like to have a few words alone with my sister before we begin any interviews.”

Agent Andrea Carter is not happy with this. She rises, and for the first time Tara can see the intimidation evident in that lean, well-muscled frame. She moves with a menacing grace, like the instructor in the one self-defense class Shannon made Tara take before she went off to college. For frat parties, Shannon explained. And pay attention to the groin shots.

“We’re not stopping now,” Agent Carter says. “This is a lot bigger than this room, Ms. Beckley. This is more crucial to more people than you can possibly fathom.”

“I’m not asking anyone to stop, just to give me a minute alone with my sister,” Shannon says, and if she’s intimidated by Carter, she doesn’t show it. In fact, her bearing seems oddly helped by the strange hat, all that flat black beneath the lighter silver thread that draws the eye above the brim.

“You’ve had plenty of time to discuss this,” Agent Carter says. “Tara just gave me consent in front of her doctor. I will not waste her time or put her at risk, but I will also not be interrupted. If you’d like to—”

“Hang on.” This is from Dr. Pine, and Shannon and Agent Carter seem surprised that he is still in the room. He and Shannon have clashed from the start, but he’s looking at her intently, seeing the insistence in her eyes, and when he looks back at Tara, he takes a protective step in her direction.

“This isn’t your jurisdiction,” he says, pointing at Agent Carter with his right index finger. “And it isn’t your decision.” He points at Shannon with his left. “This is my hospital, Tara is my patient, and she and I will make these decisions together. Tara gave consent to an interview, yes, Agent Carter. She also has the right to have a few private words with her sister beforehand.”

“I’m not trying to stop you,” Shannon says again. “But the private words... I need them.” She looks at Tara, trying to convey how badly she needs these words, but the look is unnecessary, because Tara knows the hat.

Dr. Pine pivots, looks at Tara. “It’s your call, Tara. I’m going to ask you two yes-or-no questions. First: Would you like a private word with your sister at this point?”

One flick. Yes. Very much so. Because that hat...

“I’m going to—” Agent Carter starts, but Dr. Pine cuts her off with a wave of his hand.

“Second: Once you’ve concluded that exchange with Shannon, are you willing to continue the interview with Agent Carter?”

One flick.

Andrea Carter’s chest rises and falls with a frustrated breath. She’s been overruled by the locked-in girl, and she doesn’t like that at all. Tara finds a strange pleasure in this. She can’t move or speak, but she can control the room. It’s a sense of power she hasn’t felt in a long time.

“Make it quick, Ms. Beckley,” Agent Carter snaps. “There’s a lot riding on this.”

Commands like this usually don’t sit well with Shannon, but tonight she barely seems to register the tone, just gives a half nod and keeps her eyes straight ahead. As Dr. Pine passes by Shannon on his way out, she whispers, “Thank you, Doc.” He almost stumbles, he’s so surprised.

“Of course,” he answers, and then he and Agent Carter are out the door. It closes behind them with a soft click, and the Beckley sisters are alone. With their respective questions. Tara knows hers — Where did the hat come from, and what does it mean, and did he hurt you? but she can’t voice any of those, so she has to trust her sister. She’s back in that basement at 1804 London Street again, steel doors between them, a thin band of light, and a lifetime of trust.

The doors are heavier here, the band of light narrower, but the trust has only deepened.

“Tara,” Shannon whispers, “I need your help right now. For both of us. And for Mom and Rick. I need you to understand that without me saying much more. I need you to trust me.”

Tara gives her one flick.

Shannon smiles awkwardly. Her grateful smile, the least natural, the most heartbreaking.

“Everything that you’ve been through,” she says, “and I need you to save us all. No pressure, T.”

Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone.

No, wait. It’s not her phone. It’s a black iPhone without a case. Tara understands immediately: It is Oltamu’s phone. Somehow, Shannon has come into possession of this oddly desired item, and it has something to do with the reason she’s wearing the black hat and is afraid.

Tara’s pulse begins to hammer. Not since they sealed her in the tube so she could demonstrate proof of life has she felt an adrenaline rush like this.

“Do you know what this is?” Shannon whispers, her voice so low it’s scarcely audible.

One flick.

“Okay. I don’t know if this will work, but I need you to try.” She taps the screen with her finger and then turns the display to Tara. The blackness has been replaced with an image: Tara standing uneasily beside Dr. Amandi Oltamu above the Willow River, the spindly shadows of the railroad bridge visible just beyond them.

The last memory Tara has of when her body was her own.

For a moment, her vision grays out, and she’s afraid she’s doing something that would seem impossible — can a paralyzed patient faint? She’s about to. But then there’s gold-green beneath the gray, and she sees the girl in the kayak, sees the river wide and rushing and the girl riding it out, riding the current into that shimmering gold-green mist, and Tara knows the mist this time — it is spray from a waterfall. There’s a waterfall up ahead, but the girl in the water is paddling straight for it, and she is unafraid.

Suddenly all of that is gone and the room is back and the phone is before Tara once more. Shannon’s face is hovering just behind it, her eyes darkened by the terrible black baseball cap.

“I’m going to turn this around now and try to capture your face. Just like a camera. It’s locked, and you... you might be able to open it. You understand what I mean?”

One flick. Tara grasps the idea, and, bizarre as it sounds, she thinks she even understands it. The odd photos, the way Oltamu gave her the phone... nothing was accidental. Not those choices, and not the choices of the man who drove into the two of them just seconds later.

All part of competing plans. Tara is the pawn in the middle. She has been turned into a human key.

Shannon wets her lips, breathes, and turns the phone around. Tara wants to adjust her head to face the small camera lens, but of course she can’t do that. She has to trust that Shannon will get it right.

It takes longer than it should, and Tara is sure it’s a failure, but then Shannon arches up a little and changes the angle, pointing the camera down at Tara’s eyes from above, and Tara can tell from the way her body relaxes that she has the result she wanted.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s good, and bad. Take a look.”

She turns the phone back to Tara. It says FRS verified and there is a green check mark. But just below that, there’s a red X and a white box beside the command Enter name of FRS-verified individual to complete authentication.

FRS. Facial-recognition scan? That seems right, but it wasn’t enough to unlock the device. The name prompt remains.

“Do I just try yours? First and last? First only?” Shannon’s voice is rising now, and her attention is totally on the phone, and that can’t happen, because Tara knows what she needs to enter, Tara knows this and has to speak it and—

The gray-out comes again, and then the green-gold mist, and Tara is riding the waterfall, tumbling and falling to an endless depth, spiraling down through the green-gold liquid light...

When she comes back, it’s with a vengeance — her thumb twitches, yes, but so do two of her fingers. A rapid twitch, a plucking gesture, like a child’s frantic grab at a firefly.

She’s not immediately sure that it was real, but then she sees Shannon staring at her right hand in shock, and the shock confirms the sensation.

Tara is opening the channel. Tara is forcing her way back into the world.

“Did you feel that?” Shannon asks.

One flick.

“Can you do it again?”

She can’t. Not yet. But maybe soon... Tara opts not to respond to that question. She doesn’t know the answer yet. Her control of her own body no longer belongs to the land of yes-or-no answers. What an amazing thing that was. She wishes Dr. Pine had seen it. And Mom, Rick, all of them. But at least Shannon was here. At least Shannon saw.

“I tried your name,” Shannon says then, and Tara remembers the phone, the reason for all of this. “It says ‘access denied.’ I’ve got only one try left.” Her voice quavers. “T., do you have any idea what he called you?”

One flick.

“You’re sure?” Shannon says.

One flick.

“Can you spell it?”

One flick.

Shannon reaches for the alphabet board with a trembling hand.

53

Her hand moved. Abby thought it was an optical illusion, some disruption of the camera’s feed, but then Shannon Beckley’s questions turned it into reality.

Tara can move. Maybe not consistently, but she can move.

“The name matters,” Dax said. “Shit. That slows us down. That might derail the whole thing, actually. Because if Tara doesn’t know what he put in there...”

He rubs his thumb over the stock of the revolver distractedly, a circular motion. Abby watches him and thinks about Tara’s hand, that sudden twitch. She’s coming back. Maybe. Or was it just a spasm? Regardless, it was something more than Luke had ever managed. Tara has vertical eye motion, and one of her hands can move. She’s not only still alert in there, she’s progressing.

“Boone is in play,” Dax said, uninterested in everything else, his attention lost to the blond woman who’d left the room. “But who put her in play? Not Gerry. I’m sure of that.”

Abby didn’t respond. Her attention was focused on the screen. All the things that had mattered just seconds ago seemed less consequential.

Tara can make it back, she thought. And then: If nobody kills her first.

54

Pine wanted privacy. He took Boone down the empty corridor that smelled of a disinfectant tinged with juniper and then turned into a small office. A desk took up all of one wall, and the other walls were lined with filing cabinets and bookshelves. The only chair was the one facing the desk, but he offered it to her. She sat, although she didn’t want to. She was buzzing with anger and energy, too close to be wasting more time now.

“If that sister tries to talk Tara out of cooperating, I’m not going anywhere. I hope you understand that. It matters—”

“Too much,” Pine finished for her with a weary nod as he closed the door. “I get it, I get it. I also think I’m going about this wrong.”

Boone cocked her head. “Meaning?”

“Something’s wrong with Shannon.”

“The sister. You’re worried about her?”

“Yes.” He looked at her defiantly. “I am worried about them all. But as I tried to explain to you, she knows a lot. She knows more than I do. She won’t tell me how, but she knows more than I do, and I have no idea who is giving her that information. Her behavior has changed since you arrived, but it’s not about you. I think she’s hearing something.”

Boone started to rise. “You believe all this, but you let her sit in there alone?”

Pine blocked her. “Yes! She deserves that. And I deserve a hell of a lot more than I’ve been given. You tell me how much is at risk here, but not what. I understand confidentiality, trust me. It has been my business and my life. I respect it. But this is...” He searched for the words. “Already operating at a level of secrecy that I’m not comfortable with. That I never should have allowed.”

“Dr. Pine?” Boone’s voice snapped like a whip. “Do not make a mistake at this stage. I will talk to that girl tonight. I don’t care if I have to get a DOJ order to make it happen, I will—”

“That’s exactly what should happen!” he fired back. “I want the damned order! I want the right security. I want the administrators of this hospital to be made aware of all possible risks. There are many patients here besides Tara Beckley. You’re acting as if they’re not a concern. I can’t do that.”

Boone was sitting on the edge of the chair, muscles tensed, eyes on Pine’s. She made a show of slackening. Easing back into the chair. Giving him a posture of thoughtful consideration that bordered on the verge of concession.

“I have an acquaintance with the special agent in charge of the FBI field office in Boston,” he said. “Her name is Roxanne Donovan. You know her, I assume. Or of her?”

“Yes,” Boone lied.

“Perfect. Then let me call her. Let me bring someone into this building whom we both know, whom we both trust, and proceed from there. I can’t let all this” — he waved a hand toward the closed door that led to the hallway — “continue in silence. Tara Beckley has experienced enough damage from silence. I won’t let the same thing happen to others. Or let any more of it happen to her.”

Boone steepled her fingers and rested her chin on them. Thoughtful. Then, with a sigh, she said, “I’ll make the call,” and she reached into her pocket as if going for a cell phone. She stopped before withdrawing anything, paused as if reconsidering, and looked at his desk phone, which was just past her left shoulder.

She said, “No, actually, you should make the call. From the hospital, and on speaker, so I can hear it. You can call Donovan. No one else. And no details should be shared before I have clearance to share them. Can you get her here with that much? Is your relationship that strong?”

“Roxanne Donovan will be here immediately when she understands the stakes,” Pine said confidently. “Can I at least share your name?”

“By all means.”

“Thank you,” he said, an exhale of relief following his words. He leaned forward and reached past her shoulder for the desk phone. He had his hand on the receiver and his focus on the keypad when Boone withdrew the syringe from her pocket, flicked the cap off with one snap of her thumbnail, and drove the stainless-steel needle into the hollow at the base of Pine’s throat.

His eyes went wide and white and he reached for his throat, but the needle was already gone, and Boone was up and had her hand over his mouth. He tried a punch then, but she blocked it easily with her left arm. She held him upright as he stumbled backward, kept him from falling, from making any noise. He looked at her with a cocktail of horror, accusation, and shame before his eyes dimmed completely. She watched him see his mistake and consider its ramifications just before his heart stopped.

Then she eased him into the desk chair. His head slumped forward onto the desk, his cheek on the keyboard, depressing keys, but they made no sound. It looked natural enough for a man who’d suffered a massive coronary, so she didn’t adjust his position. A standard autopsy would show a heart attack, and only if the coroners had reason to look very, very carefully would they find any evidence to suggest otherwise.

If that happened, Boone would be long gone.

She was pleased to find that the office door had a push-button lock. It wasn’t much of a security feature, but it would delay the discovery. She doubted any of the night nurses would want to disturb a doctor of Pine’s stature if he’d closed and locked the door. He had big things to work on, after all; he’d brought a woman back from the beyond.

Boone locked the door behind her and walked briskly back to room 373. The clock was speeding up now, and the time for games and lies was gone.

55

Twitch? You told him your nickname was Twitch?”

Shannon seems either disbelieving or disturbed. Tara — fighting for patience because Shannon doesn’t understand how hard it is to keep battling this current, to keep the channel open, commanding her eyes to answer properly even while her own mind races with unanswered questions that she can’t voice — gives one flick of the eyes. Yes, Twitch.

“If the facial recognition worked,” Shannon says, “maybe this will too.”

Her voice is doubtful but she turns her attention to the phone and taps the name into the display. She’s holding her breath.

“It worked,” Shannon says, and Tara adds this to her growing collection of points of light. Everything is progress right now. Everything is trending the right way.

Tara and Shannon are so focused on each other that neither one notices she’s no longer alone in the room.

Then Andrea Carter says, “I’ll need to see that.”

How long she’s been standing there, Tara has no idea, but it can’t have been long. Shannon has her back to the door, but Tara thinks she would have glanced right eventually. Carter’s face is a hostile mask. Apparently she feels Shannon has held her at bay long enough. Dr. Pine isn’t with her.

Shannon rises from the stool, lowering Oltamu’s phone and pressing it against her leg.

“Do you mind?” Shannon says. “I’d asked for just a little bit of privacy. If you could just give me a few more...”

Tara is watching Shannon, so she doesn’t understand why her voice trails off, why her eyes go wide. Then Tara looks back at Andrea Carter and sees the knife.

It’s a small knife but it seems to be all blade, a curved piece of metal with a razor edge, a crescent-moon-shaped killing tool. She’s holding it in her right hand, down against her leg, in a posture that mirrors Shannon’s with the phone.

“You need to be very quiet,” Carter says, “and you need to give me that.”

She advances with her eyes on Shannon, her movements sleek as a panther. Tara wants to scream but can’t; Shannon could and won’t. In fact, Shannon’s face seems oddly unsurprised, as if she’s been anticipating something like this. “What’s your real name?” she says.

Carter is only a stride from her now, and she moves the knife out and to the side, the curved blade glistening, and extends her left hand, palm up. “The phone.”

Shannon doesn’t hesitate, and Tara is relieved. There’s something in this woman’s eyes that promises violence. Her eyes remind Tara of the eyes of the boy in the black hat. The hat that is now on Shannon’s head. They must belong together, this woman and the boy. But why, oh, why is Shannon wearing the hat?

56

Dax was very still, his thumb on the revolver’s cylinder, his eyes unblinkingly focused on the video display, even his breathing so restrained that it was scarcely noticeable.

That’s Lisa Boone. She worked with my father. She’s a professional killer.

In those short sentences, he told Abby more about himself than he had in all the terrible hours they’d spent together. It explained the bizarre pairing of youth and skill, emptiness and professionalism, brutality and calculation. Abby knew his world now, and his world explained him. An assassin’s son was just right. Nature and nurture.

She found a strange comfort in this idea, as if there might be a rationality to him where before she’d seen only a sociopath.

Then again, she was still bound to the passenger seat, and less than an hour had passed since Dax had committed a murder. You took your reassurances where you could find them, but this one was a hell of a stretch.

When Lisa Boone stepped back into the frame, alone this time, no doctor at her side, Dax tensed and reached for the door handle, then stopped himself, lowered his hand, and relaxed back into the seat.

He knows it will be easier to take it from her once she’s outside, Abby thought. Entering the hospital was a risk that Dax clearly intended to avoid — he’d gotten Shannon to make the actual room call, and that was, Abby realized with dismay, a smart move. Right now, however capable a killer Lisa Boone was, she was a full step behind him, and he was patient enough to realize that as long as he had the upper hand, forcing the action was unnecessary. He saw more of the board than she did.

None of that was reassuring.

Abby watched the camera shift and weave as Boone approached and took Oltamu’s phone from Shannon Beckley’s hand. Then she walked backward, sure-footed and graceful, to the door. Only when she was there, with plenty of distance between herself and Shannon, did she glance at the phone.

For all of Abby’s horror, some small part of her just wanted to know — what was on it?

Whatever it was, it didn’t please Boone. Her face twisted in anger, and she said, “What is this?”

Offscreen, speaking from behind — and below — the camera, Shannon Beckley said, “How do I know?”

“Because you just said it worked. The facial recognition and then you put in her nickname and said that it worked. I heard you and watched you.”

“It did work. I thought it did. It changed screens, at least. The old screen was her. Once I held it up to her eyes and put in that nickname, it reloaded and the screen changed.”

She was speaking too loud, as if trying to draw people’s attention. Lisa Boone said, “Keep your voice down.”

Shannon went silent. Boone looked at the phone once more, studied it, then said, “It changed from her face to this?”

“Yes.”

Beside Abby, Dax sighed and said, “I’d like to know what this is.”

An instant later, Boone said, “Then what in the fuck is this?”

Dax spread his hands and gave a theatrical nod, like Thank you!

“I don’t know,” Shannon said, voice softer now.

“Does she?” Boone asked.

Shannon didn’t respond. Boone advanced, phone in one hand, knife in the other.

57

Tara hasn’t seen the image yet, but she has an idea of what the woman with the knife is looking at. In fact, she’s pretty sure she knows exactly what it is.

Andrea Carter is moving toward her, and Shannon steps protectively between them, and then the knife is nearly at her throat, the movement so swift and sudden that Tara scarcely registers the fact that her hand twitches again.

Carter speaks with the blade pressed against Shannon’s neck.

“There’s a way to do this without your sister dying,” Carter says. “But you need to cooperate.”

Shannon gives a strange, high laugh that surprises Tara as much as it apparently surprises Carter.

“Step back,” Carter says, “and shut up.”

Please listen, Tara urges silently. Do what she says, because I can answer her next question, I already did, I told you what he took pictures of, and then he was dead, so I know he didn’t take any more. I can answer her questions, and she will leave.

But will she leave? As Shannon moves away, taking two steps toward the foot of the bed, Tara watches Carter and is not so sure. If Tara doesn’t answer her questions, then they both have to die. But if she does... what changes? Is there really any way this woman is leaving them alive?

“Show Tara the phone,” Shannon says, and she looks at Tara for the first time, and there’s a knowingness to the gaze. Tara thinks, I am right about what’s there, and Shannon remembers what I said.

The woman turns the phone display to her then, and, sure enough, there he is: Hobo.

“What is the dog’s name?” the woman asks.

Tara looks at Shannon. Flicks her eyes up once. Yes, tell her. What is the point in protecting this? Saving our lives, that’s the point. But Tara’s instinct says that talking is better. It’s a strange instinct for a woman who can’t speak, and yet there it is.

“What does that mean?” Carter asks. “The way she looked at you. Her eyes moved up. That’s a yes. What is she saying yes to?”

Her voice tightens with anger, and Tara is terrified of what will happen if Shannon lies or resists, but for once, she doesn’t.

“She’s saying yes to me because she wants me to tell you who the dog is,” Shannon says.

“You know?”

Shannon nods.

“Say it.”

“Hobo,” Shannon says, once again in a loud voice, but this time the woman doesn’t tell her to lower it. She just stares at her as if she’s making a very dangerous joke.

“Hobo.”

Shannon nods again.

“How do you know that?”

“Because she told me. Earlier. When the doctor and I were asking her about her memories of the accident. Before it happened, Oltamu took a picture of her and a picture of Hobo.”

Andrea Carter eyes Shannon, then Tara. She sees either no indication of a lie or no reason for them to lie. She flips the phone over in her hand, and taps on it with her thumb.

“Doesn’t work,” she says, but her voice is troubled and she keeps staring at the screen.

“I think,” Shannon says cautiously, “that’s because you’ll need the dog’s eyes.”

The woman looks at Shannon as if she wouldn’t mind gutting her with that knife right here. Suddenly, Tara has a terrible fear for Dr. Pine. Surely she wouldn’t have killed him in a hospital.

But where is he?

Dead, she thinks. The fear turns into a certainty, and that grows into a certainty over how this will end. She and Shannon will die too. All for something Tara will never understand, all for whatever is on this stranger’s phone. Damn it, don’t they at least deserve to know what they’re dying for?

“That’s how it worked with her,” Shannon says. “Facial recognition first, then name.”

The woman looks at the display again, and Tara thinks she must be seeing a message that confirms this, because she seems even more frustrated by the device than by Shannon.

“That’s insane,” she says. “For a dog? It won’t work. The technology doesn’t exist.”

“Actually,” Shannon says, “they use it on pet doors. I saw an ad for one.”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit. You don’t have time to do this.”

“Google it,” Shannon says. “You can buy pet doors that open with facial recognition. I don’t know why. To keep out raccoons or whatever, I have no idea. But I am telling you, the way it worked with her was to get the facial-recognition lock first, then put in the name. The dog is named Hobo. I am positive.”

They stare each other down for a moment. Finally Andrea Carter says, “Where is the dog?”

“He was up there by the bridge. Where Oltamu died. She says he is a stray.”

“You’re lying,” Carter says, but it’s more hopeful than forceful.

“Ask her,” Shannon says.

Carter turns to Tara. “Is she lying?”

Tara flicks her eyes twice. No, Shannon isn’t lying.

Carter pauses, seems to fight down building rage, and then says, “Will the dog be up there? Is he easy to find?”

Hobo is not particularly easy to find, and he certainly won’t be for a stranger, but Tara sees more hope for them in that lie than in the truth, so she gives one flick — yes.

“He took a picture of you and asked for a nickname,” Carter says. “And then he took a picture of the dog and asked for the dog’s name?”

One flick. Yes. Growing more certain with each answer that she’s sealing their fates, but not seeing any way out. The world is an extension of her body now — a trap with no escape.

“Was that the last picture he took?” Carter asks.

Tara’s thumb jerks. Carter and Shannon both see this.

“What does that mean?” Carter asks warily.

“Nothing. It’s a spasm.”

But Shannon is wrong. That thumb twitch means everything. It means the girl fighting against the current has found the green-gold waters again, the secret channel where the water rotates and then the current becomes friend and not foe. It is so much more than a spasm. It is Tara coming back. Finding her way through dark halls and riding dark waters, chasing thin bands of light.

“Just use your eyes this time. Was that the last picture he took?” Carter repeats.

Tara sees it then, as if the last twitch of her thumb were a courier arriving with critical news, a message Tara should have understood already: She has power here. She has control of the situation in a way none of them suspect she does.

Yes, she is motionless and mute, locked in. But now she recognizes the strength in this. The only move that can save them will come because of her condition. She can buy Shannon time, at least. She can do that much.

She flicks her eyes twice, telling this awful woman, No, it was not the last picture he took.

Tara can’t do many things, but she can still think, and she understands the dilemma she’s placing the woman with the knife in now — the lie is worth the risk, because Tara knows what’s coming.

Sure enough, the question arrives like a hanging curveball, belt-high.

“Did he take another one of you?” Carter says.

One flick, and Tara swats it out of the park.

Yes, she lies, he took one more of me. And you know what that means, bitch? You can’t kill me yet. You’ll need my eyes again. Think about it. Won’t work with a dead face. Or at least, you’re not sure that it will. And you can’t take me to Hammel with you, so that means you’ve got to come back to find me, dead or alive. I’ll be harder to find if I’m dead, and you’ll have to trust that the phone will recognize my face if I am. I don’t think it will.

There’s a pause that seems endless but that can’t be more than five seconds. Those seconds feel like the countdown before an explosion, though. The crescent-moon blade glimmers, Andrea Carter stands with every muscle taut, and Shannon looks as paralyzed as Tara.

“Here’s how we’re going to handle this,” Carter says at last. “Shannon and I are going for a ride. Together. We will find the dog and test your story, Tara. If it works, and no one follows us, then Shannon will drive back to you. If it doesn’t, or if you somehow send someone after us? Well, I suppose you’ll have plenty of time to think about that in the days to come.”

Shannon is looking at Tara with an expression that Tara remembers well — quiet and restrained, thoughtful. A quiet Shannon is something to worry about, because on the rare occasions that she swallows her anger and retreats, she is lost to thoughts of settling the score. This is good, because it means she knows that Tara lied and that the phone will prove that. Tara bought her time, but Shannon will be alone when the lie is discovered.

“All right,” Andrea Carter says, and the blade disappears into a black handle that vanishes into her hand. “Then we’ll ride, Shannon. You’d better hope your sister understands the stakes. People will ask her questions about me. Her answers are going to decide your life.”

Shannon doesn’t respond to that. She just looks at Tara.

“You know how much I love you?” she says.

Almost too late, Tara remembers to look upward once.

Shannon nods and turns away. She opens the door and steps out with Andrea Carter walking just behind her, the knife not visible but not far away.

58

Brilliant play!” Dax shouted at the video like a color commentator breaking down a playoff game. “She’s caught lovely Lisa, do you see that, Abby? Do you understand? Lisa can’t kill Tara now. Not if she’s going to need her again. That’s ingenious. It might even be true that she’ll need Tara again, but I doubt it. Boone probably doubts it too. What can you do, though? You can’t pick the girl up and take her with you. So you take the sister and hope that keeps her quiet. But Tara called the shot on that one. Good for her.”

He spoke with true admiration, although Abby had no doubt that he would still kill Tara himself without hesitation or pity.

No one had passed them in the garage since they arrived, and only two cars had pulled out from the floors below. A hospital never shut down, but it had quiet hours, and they had arrived in the midst of them. When Shannon Beckley exited room 373 and began her walk out of the hospital with Lisa Boone alongside her, the camera showed a quiet hallway ahead. They avoided the main lobby and entered a side stairwell.

Dax started the car.

He backed out of the parking space and started down toward the garage exit, driving slowly, unhurried as always and seemingly sure of his choice. His treasured phone, the item worthy of all this bloodshed, was in the hands of an apparent rival, but he seemed unbothered.

They passed an elderly couple walking to a Buick, and if the pair had looked into the Challenger, they might have noticed the cord around Abby’s neck, but they did not look.

“Are you following them?” Abby asked. Once she’d hated listening to the kid’s incessant talk, but now she wanted to know. It felt, surreally, as if a part of her were rooting for Dax now. Shannon Beckley seemed more likely to die at Lisa Boone’s hands than his at this moment, and he was the only person who knew enough to intercede. Other than Tara, of course, mute and trapped.

“That wouldn’t be smart,” Dax said.

“You’re giving up? Just letting her take it?” Abby had a horrible thought: What if this Lisa Boone worked with Dax? What if his surprise at her presence was simply because she’d been unannounced, not because he viewed her as a rival?

Then he said, “Oh, we’re certainly not going to do that. Come on, Abby! We’ve come too far to give up now.”

“Then what are you doing?”

If the questions bothered him, he didn’t show it. He put his window down, fed a ticket and a credit card into the automated garage booth, and the gate rose. He took the credit card back, put the window up, and pulled away, out of the lights of the garage and back into darkness.

“It would be a mistake to follow her,” he said. “Boone is too good. At least, that’s my understanding. It’s a long drive, and she’d see us, and she would have the advantage then. Right now we have the advantage, Abby, don’t you see? We know where they’re going. And we can watch them.”

On the cell phone’s display, the camera was bobbing along, Shannon Beckley still on foot, walking across the street and toward a parking lot on the other side of the hospital. Lisa Boone was not in the frame.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Dax said, “but haven’t you been to the accident site?”

Abby didn’t answer right away. She was seeing the idea coalesce. It was a very simple trap, but a trap set for an assassin. She couldn’t imagine how anyone was going to make it out of this night alive. Dax might. Or Boone might. One or the other had to win. But as for Abby and Shannon Beckley?

He’ll get out of the car, she thought. He’ll have to, down there. And when he does, he’s going to leave you here. You’ll need to be a lot faster with that headrest than you were last time.

“Haven’t you?” Dax repeated, an edge to his voice now.

“Yes,” Abby said. “I’ve been there.”

“Then you’ll guide me and tell me what to expect when I get there. It’s important that you remember it accurately. If I lose my advantage, well, that could become an ugly situation for everyone.” He caught a green light and turned left, heading for the interstate. “We’ll need to drive a bit faster too. Boone won’t want to take risks, but I don’t think she’s inclined to waste much time.”

Once they were all on the highway, the camera’s livestream began to fade in and out, but they weren’t missing much. Just the open road in front of Shannon Beckley, the same open road that was in front of Abby. Dax paid the video feed no mind, but Abby watched, trying to identify mile markers and signs that would show her how far behind Boone and Shannon were. She guessed they were maybe ten minutes behind when Dax exited the interstate and began following the winding county roads that led to Hammel.

They were in the hills now, and a low fog crept through bare-limbed trees and settled beneath those that still had their leaves. A few houses had Halloween decorations up, and jack-o’-lanterns with rictus smiles sat on porches or beside mailboxes. The wind shivered dead leaves off skeletal branches. Autumn charm was dying; winter was on its way.

Dax drove with his right hand only, the gun in the door panel, close to his left hand, which rested on his thigh. Abby watched him bring that left hand up time and again on curves. Usually he didn’t bring it all the way to the wheel, but Abby knew that the Hellcat was still foreign to him, and even though he wasn’t driving recklessly, he was uneasy about that power and handling. Didn’t trust himself with the car yet.

Watching his weakness gave Abby a feeling of strength that would have seemed absurd to any spectator — one person had the gun and the wheel, and the other was tied to the passenger seat. And yet, as a passenger, able to watch the way Dax handled the car and the uncertainty he brought to it, she felt her confidence grow. That uncertainty was a small thing, but it was a weakness. If Abby could get the wheel back, he’d be gone. The gap she’d found in her panic on the rain-swept highway when she’d sliced through the semis and cars and glided through the break in the guardrail seemed to have carried some of her old brain back into her body. A door had opened in that moment. If she got behind the wheel, she could find it again. She could kick that door down if it didn’t open willingly.

All she needed was the chance.

She looked back down at the phone’s display. They’d lost the signal, and Shannon Beckley’s camera was gone. No surprise, not in these hills. Dax wasn’t pushing the speed too much, and Abby expected that the women behind them wouldn’t be either. They were clones — one killer, one hostage, nobody looking to attract police attention. That would give Dax his five- or maybe ten-minute lead at Hammel. What would he do with it? Abby thought he would leave the car. He would expect the car to attract attention that a man on foot in the darkness would not.

If I get five minutes alone, I’ll get that headrest off. I know how it’s done now. Feet on the dash, back arched, start with the left side...

She just needed those minutes.

“Turn left here,” Abby said.

Dax seemed surprised by the instruction, but he slowed.

“The signs say the college is to the right.”

“We’ll save a few minutes this way. Minutes matter now, don’t they?”

Dax turned to her, looking even younger and less hostile without the hat. Just a boy out for a ride in a muscle car.

“Yes,” he said. “Minutes matter.”

He turned left.

They wound through a residential stretch with Abby calling out directions, and then they turned on Ames Road and started a steep descent. The darkness was lifting in that barely perceptible way of predawn, not so much a brightening as a fading of the blackness.

“The railroad bridge is at the bottom of the hill,” Abby said. “Parking is on the left. There won’t be any cars down there now, probably.”

She thought about saying more, adding something about how they’d stand out to Lisa Boone if they parked down there, but she caught herself. Let him reach that conclusion on his own. He’d be suspicious if Abby offered too much help.

The transmission downshifted on the steep grade, an automatic adjustment that took the driver out of the equation and that Abby had always hated but that Dax seemed to prefer. You could switch the Challenger to a bastardized version of a manual transmission, no clutch pedal but paddle shifters. He hadn’t done that once, though.

Scared of the power, Abby thought, and again the ludicrous confidence rose. I can beat him if he just gets out of the car.

The headlights pinned the railroad bridge below them, the angled steel beams throwing shadows onto the dark river. Abby looked at the place and tried to remember what it had felt like when she’d paced this pavement with a camera in hand and confusion rising. That’s all it had been then — confusion. Carlos Ramirez’s story, so clean and simple, wasn’t accurate. Carlos, the second person to die. Hank, who’d wanted nothing but easy money and a chance for Abby to face down her demons, was the third. Gerry, the man who’d died on his kitchen floor, the fourth.

Will I be the fifth? Shannon Beckley the sixth? How many more die before it’s done?

“Do you know what’s on Oltamu’s phone?” Abby asked.

Again, Dax seemed startled by the sound of her voice. He hesitated, then said, “I don’t. Should be interesting, don’t you think? A lot of people seem willing to go to extreme lengths just to have it in their hands.”

“What if it’s nothing?”

Dax laughed. “I hardly think that’s an option.”

“It may be. He could have wiped the data. You don’t know.”

“No. All those locks on an empty phone? There’s something there.”

“It will involve batteries,” Abby said. “And I think it might involve cars. He came from the Black Lake. He watched testing.”

Dax seemed more intrigued now, but he was also in the place where he had to set the trap, and he wasn’t going to divide his focus.

“When I find out,” he said, pulling into one of the angled spaces in the spot where Amandi Oltamu had died and Tara Beckley had nearly been erased from existence, “you’ll be the first to know. You’ve earned that much, Abby. I’ll tell you before I kill you. That’s a promise.”

He was surveying the area, taking rapid inventory, his mind no longer on Abby but on the possibilities waiting here in the darkness above the river. The possibilities, and the pitfalls.

“Did you see the dog when you were here?” he asked.

“I did not.”

“But our girl Tara believes he will appear. Hobo. There’s a lot riding on a stray dog named Hobo.” He went silent, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and staring into the dark woods where birches swayed and creaked.

“Boone needs the phone to be opened,” he said at length. “Interesting. Gerry’s German friend seemed to think it was worth trying to open it, but it wasn’t a priority. So our buyer wants to kill the phone, and hers wants to see it.”

He looked at Abby again. “You’re right — I’m awfully curious about what’s on it.”

He dropped his right hand onto the gearshift, put the car in reverse, backed out, whipped the car around, and drove up the hill again. Abby tried to stay expressionless, tried not to let her relief show.

Dax was going to park the Challenger where it wouldn’t stand out, and that meant he would need to leave the car. The options, then, were to keep Abby in the car or bring her along. The latter carried more risk.

There’s a third option. He kills you here. He doesn’t need you anymore.

At the crest of the hill on Ames Road, where more houses began to appear, Dax turned the car and parallel-parked in a spot between streetlights where the Challenger would be obscured by shadows. He cut the engine and the lights. Paused and assessed. Nodded, satisfied. He took the cell phone, its screen filled with the image of the weaving night road that Shannon Beckley was driving just behind them, and slipped it into his pocket.

“Now, Abby, I’m afraid we’re going to have to separate for a time. I’ll miss you, but it’s for the best. You’ll have nefarious ideas in my absence, I’m sure. Things you could do to hurt me and, in your noble if dim-witted mind, help Shannon.” He plucked the gun from inside the door panel, and for an instant Abby could see the barrel being shoved through the lips of the man named Gerry just before the kill shot was fired and thought the same was coming for her.

Then Dax switched the gun to his right hand and reached for the door handle with his left.

“Before you make any choices,” he said, “I want you to consider this — I’ve kept you alive, and Lisa Boone is unlikely to do the same. You want me dead, and that’s fine. If I’m dead, though? She’s the last one left. I’m not sure I’d choose that if I were you.”

With that, he opened the door and stepped out into the chill night. He’d disabled the interior lights, and when he closed the door, he did it softly. Then he started down the hill at a jog, moving swiftly and silently.

Abby watched until he vanished into the woods. Then she braced her feet on the dashboard, took a deep breath, and arched her aching back to extend the reach of her bound hands as far as possible. She found the headrest releases quicker this time, and she set to work.

59

Boone hadn’t been planning on a hostage, but that didn’t mean she was unprepared for one. She was always prepared for such a contingency.

She used plastic zip-tie cuffs on Shannon Beckley’s wrists and a single piece of duct tape over her mouth, things that could be removed quickly in the event of trouble, but she used real cuffs to bind Shannon’s left ankle to a bar beneath the passenger seat. There would be no runaways on Boone’s watch.

Satisfied, she drove away in the girl’s rented Jeep. In the backseat, Beckley seemed composed enough; she was avoiding hysteria, at least, which was a help. Boone would have no trouble silencing her if it came to that, but she also needed to keep her alive until all sequences of locks had been defeated. Tara Beckley had managed to claim an infuriating amount of control. For a quadriplegic who couldn’t speak, an astounding amount of control, actually. Even if they found the fucking dog and the lock actually opened, Boone would still have to make her way back to Tara once more and deal with the challenges of the hospital without her helpful aide Dr. Pine. Shannon Beckley could be key to gaining access during the daylight hours, when the hospital was more active and the parents would be in the room, and Boone feared that the waking vegetable that was Tara Beckley could cause more trouble if she didn’t see proof of life of her sister. She could hold out. In fact, Boone suspected that she would, and she understood why — Tara didn’t have much left to lose.

Then again, there were the parents to consider.

Maybe Shannon wasn’t so vital after all.

All this would be decided after they left Hammel. For now the task was dictated by the image on the phone. Her current pursuit was ludicrous — this was a multimillion-dollar job in service of billions, and Boone was chasing a stray dog named Hobo. In her varied and diverse career, leaving corpses in more than a dozen countries, she’d never felt more absurd, and yet a part of her admired Oltamu. Somehow he’d felt the hellhounds closing in, and his response had been as resourceful as anyone’s could be in that moment. Nobody was going to get the intelligence he’d collected simply by picking up his phone. He’d played a risky game and lost it, but he’d made a fine effort all the way to the end.

Ask the girl, he’d instructed Boone, presumably having no idea just how difficult that would be. The doctor had come through, the girl had come through, and now the locks were turning, albeit slowly.

The drive ate away at hours Boone couldn’t afford to lose, and with the night edging toward dawn, she had to will herself to keep her speed down and use the time to consider what lay ahead. Pine was going to be a problem. People would find him soon enough, and while it would take a first-rate medical examiner to determine that he hadn’t died of natural causes, it would also inevitably cause chaos in the hospital. The place wouldn’t be nearly so quiet when Boone returned.

Chaos, though, could be used as a shield. It was all a matter of timing. The dog had to be dealt with, then Tara Beckley. Step by step. Unless, of course, Tara Beckley was lying, and there was no third lock. In that case, Boone could leave her sister’s body behind and be out of the country before Tara blinked her way through the alphabet board with any message that police might believe.

They reached the outskirts of Hammel, passed signs for the college, and then the winding New England road crested and dropped abruptly, a steep hill descending toward the river.

This was the place.

She slowed and checked the mirrors. No one had been behind them for long throughout the drive, and no one was now. To the right and to the left were peaceful houses with tree-lined lawns, windows dark, a porch light or outdoor floodlight on here and there. The streetlights were designed for form rather than function, and they cast only a dim glow over the sidewalks, where dead leaves swirled in the wind. Three cars on the curb to her right, one car and one truck to the left. None of them looked like police vehicles, but there was one that didn’t fit the neighborhood — a souped-up Challenger with a vented hood and wide racing tires. It was parked at the end of the street and in the shadows. Boone gave it a careful look as she passed, but the windows were deeply tinted and she couldn’t make out anything. Some professor’s midlife-crisis car, she decided, and drove on.

At the bottom of the hill, angled parking spaces lined the left-hand side, all of them empty, and then there was an ancient railroad bridge. Beneath it, the river was a dark ribbon, swollen from recent rains. The current would be strong. If Tara Beckley had gone in the water today, she likely wouldn’t have been rescued. That would have cost Boone some serious money. Tara’s miraculous recovery to waking-vegetable status had the potential to be very, very lucrative. Instant-retirement money, vanish-to-your-own-island money, though Boone had no intention of retiring. When you loved your work, why stop? And hers wasn’t a profession you left easily. Those who remained alert to every motion in the shadows stayed alive; those who didn’t died. There was no retreat. This was the journey of any apex predator.

She pulled into one of the angled parking spaces on the river’s eastern shore, cut the engine, and said, “It’s going to be very unfortunate for your family if the dog isn’t here.”

The threat had nothing behind it, though. The dog was Boone’s problem and one that couldn’t readily be solved with or without the Beckleys. Either the girl was right or she was wrong. The dog would be here or he wouldn’t be.

“Sit tight, Shannon,” she said. She popped the door open and stepped out into the night.

For a few seconds, she just stood there, surveying the scene. The lonely lamps in the area, too dim, cast the only light on either side of the bridge. The next street lamp was all the way at the top of the hill, where the houses began. No one had built down here, probably due to flood risk. The river was high and felt close, the low whisper of moving water almost intimate in the darkness.

To her left, a jogging path curled into the trees, went up a small rise, and then vanished, probably running parallel to the river. To her right, the bridge loomed high and cold above the water, the old steel girders giving the wind something to whistle through. It was a long bridge, maybe two hundred feet, spanning a narrow river below. She saw now that there were actually two bridges — the old railroad bridge, set higher, the tracks running on banked gravel when they crossed the river, and slightly below it, a newer pedestrian bridge, connecting the jogging paths on eastern and western shores. On the other side of the river, ornate lamps threw muted light onto the path as it led through a thicket of pines and on toward the campus. She could see the brighter lights of the buildings beyond, maybe a quarter of a mile off.

It was a dark and quiet spot. It suited her.

Satisfied that she was alone, she moved away from the car. She had the knife in her left hand and the gun holstered behind her back. She left Oltamu’s phone in the car, unconcerned about that for now. Priority one was ensuring that she was alone and knew the terrain.

She walked toward the pedestrian bridge, thinking of how far a stray dog might have gone in all this time. He could be in a shelter or dead, hit by a car. What were the odds of finding him?

She went farther out onto the bridge, pivoted, and looked back down at the parking lot. Shannon Beckley’s rental Jeep was a dark silent shape in the place where her sister had once posed for Amandi Oltamu, clueless to all that was headed her way.

A dog, Boone thought with disgust. Amandi, you took it a step too far.

Somewhere to the west, behind the cold, freshening wind, a train horn sounded, soft and mournful, like something out of another time. Maybe the girl hadn’t lied. Maybe the dog would appear for the morning train as promised. Maybe—

“Hobo.”

The sound of the dog’s name came at her so softly that at first she didn’t believe it was real, as if the voice had come from within her own mind. Then it came again, clearer now.

“Hobo! Hey, buddy. C’mere. C’mon out.”

Someone at the other end of the bridge was calling to the dog. Boone stared in that direction, trying to make out a shape, but it was too far off. Branches cracked, and bushes shook, and somewhere on the western bank of the river, the voice said, “Good boy! Eat up, chief.”

A male voice, young and foolish. A Hammel student, probably. Another fan of a stray dog that the kids had adopted like a mascot.

Or a trap? Had Tara managed to communicate quicker than Boone had anticipated?

Boone considered this and dismissed it. If the girl had been able to summon police this quickly, they wouldn’t have been the kind of police who would set a trap. They’d have raced up with sirens blaring, county mounties with big guns and small brains, looking for a heroic moment.

“Good boy,” the voice said again, and again the bushes rustled, and this time Boone spotted the point of motion.

She drew her gun with her right hand and her knife with her left. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have considered this — you fired with two hands unless you had no choice. But she didn’t want to make any more noise than she had to, and then there was the special consideration of the dog.

Oltamu’s phone was back in the Jeep. She considered returning for it but pressed ahead. She wanted to get a clearer view of what she was dealing with. She crossed the pedestrian bridge silently and swiftly, walking to the place where the bushes rustled. It was just below the pines, close to the water’s edge. As Boone neared the end of the bridge, the boy made one of those annoying clucking/cooing sounds that people used around animals and babies. It sounded as if he was trying to win the dog’s allegiance and hadn’t yet succeeded. This was a bad sign. If the animal was that skittish, Boone might have to risk a gunshot. But then, trying to get his eyes lined up for the camera presented its own challenges. How much fight would the dog have left, and how fast would Boone lose the opportunity to capture the life left in his eyes? Too many unknowns. Perhaps if she recruited the help of this kid who knew the dog, she could—

“Put the gun on the ground and then take two steps back, Boone.”

She knew better than to whirl at the sound. She was surprised by the voice, yes, but Boone had been surprised before, and she knew that you lived when you listened, stayed calm, and waited for the opportunity to correct your mistake. Clear head, fast hands. These were her gifts, and they weren’t gone yet.

“The gun,” he repeated.

Only the gun. This alone was a reassurance. If he hadn’t noticed the knife, then he was already on his way to death.

She knelt, taking care to let her left hand hang naturally, drawing no attention to the knife curled against her palm, and set the gun on the asphalt in front of her, then straightened and took two steps back as instructed. The voice had come from behind her and to the right. She looked that way, finally.

He was standing on one of the iron spans that held up the railroad bridge. That put him above her and shielded by the shadow from the bridge, his face obscured. She saw him only as a silhouette, framed above the dark rushing water.

“Hi, Boone,” he said.

The voice was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Youthful but with a lilt to it, a thread of taunt, that evoked someone she’d once known.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Call me Hobo.” His hand moved in the darkness, and on the west bank of the river, bushes shook. He had some sort of a line attached to them, designed to draw her attention. An amateur’s gambit, one that she should have spotted immediately, but she’d been so certain she was out in front that she hadn’t feared the trap. How did he know the dog’s name? Who was he, and how had he known that she would arrive in this place, on this mission?

“Who’s your client?” he said.

Boone didn’t respond.

The man shifted, his shadow unspooling like a piece of the bridge coming to life, and the bushes shook once more. He thought that was cute. Boone was pleased to see it. He had one hand busy with that trick. That he would face her down with one hand occupied told her that she didn’t need to worry about placing that voice; he was a stranger. He knew her name, but he did not truly know Boone.

“My client is an Israeli,” she said, turning her body to him and squaring her shoulders. “But I don’t know his name.”

He moved farther out on the steel beam, and she saw that there was a gun in his right hand but that it was held down against his leg. How foolish was he? How did one come to know Lisa Boone’s name and not know enough to keep one’s gun pointed at her heart? She was almost insulted.

He stood there watching her from what he thought was a clever hiding spot but was really just a convenient place for him to die. The dark river below waited to carry his body away when he fell. His left hand still held the cord that he’d tied to the bushes, and his right hand held the gun with its muzzle pointed at the river. He was out on the center of the beam now. It couldn’t have been much more than ten inches wide, and yet he never looked down, had moved with smoothness in the night. What he lacked in brains he made up for in composure and balance. It was a dangerous high-wire act out there. Boone’s own balance was also perfect, though, and she had a stable platform beneath her. She would have to throw the knife left-handed, but this was why you practiced with your left hand and in the dark. She was not worried about accuracy.

“You’d better remember the client’s name,” he said, “because Tara Beckley can’t blink that one out for me.”

Again, the voice sounded familiar, and Boone probably could have made the connection if she’d allowed her focus to drift. But she wouldn’t. Not as she slowly, almost motionlessly, thumbed the knife blade open in her cupped left hand.

“I don’t have names,” she said. “I only have phone numbers.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Deal,” Boone said, and when she threw the knife, she was almost sad that he’d end up in the river, because she wanted to see his face.

She was down on her back before she understood that she’d been shot.

How? How did he beat me? Did I miss? I’ve never missed.

Her knife was gone, but where was her gun? Somewhere below her and to the left. She told herself to reach for it, but the command couldn’t bring strength. She lay there tasting her own blood and watched her killer jump nimbly from the railroad bridge span down to the footbridge, a treacherous leap in the dark but one he made without hesitation. He caught the railing on the footbridge with his left hand, then swung himself up and over.

She saw then that she had not missed with the knife. The blade was embedded in the back of his right hand. His shooting hand. He’d brought the gun up just fast enough. Fraction-of-a-blink speed. That was the separation between life and death. Before this, Boone had always been the winner in this contest.

Who are you? She tried to ask it but couldn’t. No words came. She watched him advance, and her vision grayed out, and she hoped that she would last long enough to know who it was.

He’ll get the phone, Boone thought numbly, aware that it was no longer a concern to her yet still disappointed. It had been worth so much.

He came on patiently, without firing again even though that would have been the smart play, and Boone had the sense that he wanted her to know him too. When he was close enough to be seen, though, she realized something was wrong. In the confusion brought on by darkness and imminent death, he looked like a child.

He’d shot like a pro, though. Boone’s knife was still embedded in the back of his right hand, blood running down his fingers and falling to the pavement in fat drips. He hadn’t paused to address the knife yet, and Boone knew that he wouldn’t until he was certain that she was dead. There weren’t many in her business with that level of focus.

So who had gotten her?

She blinked and studied him. The boyish face was a lie; she knew his voice, knew his motions, knew his pale hair in the moonlight. Knew him because he’d shot fast and straight even with a knife embedded in his gun hand.

“Hello, Boone,” he said. He blurred before her eyes, and in the moment of double vision, she seemed to see two of him smiling down at her, and then she knew them. They came in a pair, always. Her brain whispered that this was impossible, but she couldn’t remember why. She squinted up at her killer.

“Jack?” she whispered.

“No,” the boy said, “but close enough.”

Then came the fulfillment of a promise that Boone had understood for many years now: the last thing she saw was the muzzle of a gun.

60

Abby was halfway down the hill, moving quietly but awkwardly, still trying to get her circulation flowing, when she heard the clap of the gunshot.

The sound came from the far side of the bridge, close to the western shore. She had no idea if Dax had killed or been killed.

She also knew that it didn’t matter. She’d escaped the car, the headrest coming free with one spine-popping twist, but Shannon Beckley was, presumably, still trapped in hers. Abby stopped in the blackness beneath a twisting oak limb and took gasping breaths of the chilled autumn air. She looked behind her, out to where the woods promised cover and the houses promised help, and then back down at the Jeep, where Shannon waited alone for whoever had survived the shooting on the bridge.

Abby’s hands were still bound at the wrists. She could run but not fight. They wouldn’t pursue her. Dax wouldn’t, at least, and the woman he’d called Lisa Boone was of his breed. They’d calculate risk and reward, and they’d run.

But they wouldn’t leave Shannon Beckley behind. The witness who couldn’t run or hide was the witness who would be eliminated.

Abby started downhill again, moving quietly, chasing the shadows. The bridge was bathed in blackness, but as she watched, a figure leaped from the upper bridge, beneath the railroad tracks, and landed on the footbridge, catching the rail with his left hand. In that moment when he flickered through the night, Abby knew who’d come out victorious in the showdown between assassins.

Dax hadn’t wasted his advantage. Those early minutes in the darkness, all-seeing and all-knowing as he waited for an unprepared adversary, had been put to good use.

His attention was diverted from the car now, though. The bridge crowned above the river, and the shooting had taken place near the opposite shore, which meant his view of the parking lot would be minimal. Abby stayed as low as she could, approaching the Jeep, and just before she reached for the door handle, she felt the overwhelming certainty that it would be locked and she would have come down here for no reason but to guarantee her death.

Right then, there was another clap on the bridge. A second shot.

She knelt and turned her hands palms up, like a beggar, and got her fingertips under the door handle. She pulled, bracing for the interior lights that would come on like a prison guard’s searchlight, pinning her escape attempt.

The door opened, and darkness remained.

She’s just like him, Abby realized. The woman named Boone had shut off the automatic lights. She was just like him, favoring control at all times.

And she was dead now.

Abby leaned into the car. Shannon Beckley was in the backseat, a strip of duct tape over her mouth. Her hands rested in her lap, bound with zip-ties, similar to Abby.

“We need to run,” Abby whispered. “Can you—”

She didn’t need to finish the question; Shannon was already shaking her head. She moved her foot and Abby heard a metallic jingle, looked down, and saw that Shannon was cuffed to something beneath the seat. Maybe to the seat itself.

Shit, shit, shit.

Shannon made a jutting motion with her chin, a series of upward nudges, like a cat seeking attention, and Abby understood what she meant. Shannon was telling her to run. To save herself. Just as Hank once had, and back then Abby had listened and lived.

Abby shook her head. She stayed in place, heart skittering, trying to keep her breathing as silent as possible while she looked around the car for any help, any weapon. There was nothing — except for a phone in the cup holder.

She reached for it excitedly, fumbling with her bound hands, and only when she’d secured it in her grasp did she recognize that it wasn’t a source of help at all. It wasn’t even a phone. It was Oltamu’s fake.

She dropped the phone with disgust, then jerked with surprise when Shannon Beckley kicked the back of the passenger seat, hard. Abby looked up into her fierce eyes and watched Shannon look pointedly at the center console.

Abby found the latch, lifted the console cover, and saw Shannon’s cell phone resting there.

Beside the phone was a set of car keys with a Hertz keychain.

Abby grabbed them and swung into the driver’s seat. She reached for the door handle with her bound hands and eased it shut, not quite latching it for fear of making noise. Just before she put her foot on the brake pedal, which would flash the telltale lights illuminating her escape attempt, she checked the mirror.

Dax was at the top of the bridge and walking their way.

Better hurry, she told herself, but she didn’t move. Instead she watched him walking confidently down the center of the bridge, a gun in each hand, and she saw that he was indifferent to the Jeep, indifferent to the darkness, indifferent to everything. In his mind, the threat had been eliminated, and the rest would be easy. Abby could start the Jeep now, well within pistol range, and hope he wouldn’t hit the tires. If he did, though...

She looked up the long, steep hill ahead and saw how it would end — the Jeep grinding to a pained halt on shredded rubber. He’d close on them easily enough then. This wasn’t like Hank’s house, where Abby had been able to get into the pines and be protected from the gunfire. She would be driving down the length of target range for him and counting on him to miss.

He wasn’t going to miss.

“Get down below the windows,” Abby whispered to Shannon Beckley. “Fast.”

Shannon’s eyes were wide above the strip of duct tape, but she didn’t hesitate in following the instructions. She slid off the seat and into an awkward ball on the floor of the car. She was tall, and the space wasn’t large, but she was bound to the car only by one foot, and she was flexible enough to burrow down tightly.

“Good,” Abby whispered. “Stay down. No matter what. I’m going to kill him now.”

Abby checked the mirror once more, then slid down in the driver’s seat, low enough to bring the back of her head almost level with the steering wheel. She lost sight of Dax in the rearview mirror but found him in the side-view.

He was almost off the bridge. From there it was twenty or twenty-five paces to the Jeep. Unprotected ground. For her, and for him.

If she got him, it would be over. If she missed...

The ignition lag will be the moment you lose advantage, she thought. That half-second hitch between engine cranking and engine catching. He’s very fast.

He’d shoot before he moved. She was almost certain of that. He’d shoot before he moved, and he would expect whoever was driving the Jeep to be in flight mode, not fight mode. He counted on fear.

He wouldn’t be getting any more of that from Abby.

He walked on with a fast but controlled stride. Refusing, as always, to be rushed. Abby bit her lip until blood filled her mouth. Her hands trembled just below the push-button ignition; her foot hovered above the brake pedal, calf muscles bunched, threatening to cramp.

Down he came. Stepping off the bridge without pause. He didn’t so much as glance up the road at the car from which she’d escaped. His eyes were locked dead ahead, and she was sure that he was looking right into the side-view mirror and seeing her eyes. The guns dangled in his hands, and the second of them was proof of Boone’s death, as sure a trophy as if he’d carried her scalp back.

Thirty feet away now. Abby almost pressed on the brake but managed to hold off.

Twenty feet. Close enough? No. He would have to be almost to the vehicle. Then, she just had three simple steps — press the brake and the ignition, shift from park to reverse, and hit the gas.

Oh, and duck. That was key.

Fifteen feet, ten...

Abby slammed her foot onto the brake pedal and punched the ignition simultaneously. The dash lights came on, and then, with what felt like excruciating slowness, the engine growled.

She ripped the shifter from park to reverse as the back window imploded, and then she hit the gas. Three shots were fired, maybe more. The Jeep ripped backward, and then there was an impact on the left side, glancing, almost imperceptible, but she knew what it was because there’d been only one thing between her and the bridge.

Got him. Got the bastard!

The gunfire was done, and the bridge and the river beyond had to be avoided, so she switched from gas pedal to brake and jerked the Jeep to a stop.

No more shots. Not a sound except for the engine.

She poked her head up and searched for him. The headlights showed a short expanse of grass and then the trees, the jogging path a ribbon of black between them. Empty.

She looked sideways and found him.

He was down in the grass behind the parking lot, fighting to rise to his feet.

He didn’t make it. He got halfway up and then fell to his knees. His hands were empty, and his left arm dangled unnaturally across his body, broken. He patted the grass with his right hand, searching for a gun, and Abby pushed herself all the way up in the driver’s seat, thin slivers of glass biting through her jeans. She let go of the wheel and used her bound hands to knock the gearshift into drive.

Kill him.

As if he’d heard the thought, Dax looked up at the Jeep. Before Abby could reach for the steering wheel, he lurched upward again. This time he made it to his feet.

Then he turned and ran.

She was so astonished that she left her foot on the brake. She sat motionless, watching him go. His run was awkward; he was hurting badly. But he moved fast for a wounded man. He was panicked.

You coward, she thought. Somehow, she’d expected he would fight until the end. She was almost disappointed to see him run.

But there he went, laboring up the hill toward the Challenger. Did he think Abby was still inside that car and that Shannon Beckley had driven the Jeep into him, or had he seen Abby’s face in the instant before she hit him? She hoped he had. She wanted him to know who’d gotten him. In any case, he’d know soon enough, when he found the Challenger empty. He was covering ground surprisingly fast despite his injuries, running on adrenaline. Running on fear. He was scared of her, and that filled her with a savage delight.

The train whistle shrilled to the west. To the east, at the top of the hill near the Challenger, the sky was edging from black to gray. Dawn almost here. Daylight on the way, and Dax on the run.

She’d won.

Abby twisted and looked into the backseat.

“You okay?”

Shannon nodded. Her cheek was bleeding where a ribbon of glass had opened it up, but she seemed unaware of the wound.

“He’s gone,” Abby said. “He’s running away.”

Two flashes of light came from up the hill, and she looked that way to see the Challenger’s headlights come on as the Hellcat engine growled to life, started with the remote as Dax limped that way. She watched him reach the car, fumble with the door, and then fall into the driver’s seat. He’d have a chance to escape now, and she almost wanted to pursue him.

She knew better, though. Let him run, and let the police catch him. He wouldn’t make it far. What Abby needed to do was get help on the way. She would go to one of the houses up the road and call for...

“Oh, shit,” she said, in a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice.

The Challenger was in motion, but it wasn’t turning around. He was headed down the hill, not up it.

The kid wasn’t fleeing. He was coming back to finish the fight.

61

Even as she hammered the accelerator, Abby knew there was no real gain to making the first move. She was backed in against the river, and her options were minimal — she could swerve left or right, trying to evade him, or drive straight at him. The Jeep had the advantage if she chose the latter, but that didn’t make her feel confident. A head-to-head crash would do more damage to the Challenger than the Jeep, yes, but there was hardly a guarantee of disabling the driver.

I already hit him, she thought numbly. I broke the bastard’s arm, I won, so why won’t he quit?

Beneath that thought, though, ran a soft, chastising whisper that told her she should have known better.

The cars would meet about halfway up the hill. Abby was bracing for the collision and thinking too late that she needed to yell out some word of warning to Shannon when Dax cut the wheel and brought the Challenger smoking in at an angle, and she realized what he was trying to do — block the road.

Easy enough. She swerved right, and the front end of the Challenger clipped the edge of the Jeep’s bumper, an impact that felt barely more solid than when she’d hit Dax. The Jeep chunked off the pavement and back onto it and then she was past him, open road ahead.

But the open road didn’t mean much to her. Not in the Jeep, not with him in the Hellcat. Ahead of Abby, Ames Road climbed up, up, up. It wasn’t a long distance, but it was steep, and distance was relative. The Hellcat went from zero to sixty in a breathtaking 3.6 seconds, absurd for a factory car, and the opening acceleration wasn’t even its strongest point. The Hellcat was truly special when it was already rolling. It could go from thirty to fifty or fifty to seventy in a heartbeat. The quarter-mile stretch ahead would take the Challenger maybe twelve or thirteen seconds.

She chanced a look in the mirror and saw the door open. Watched as he leaned out and picked up a handgun from the pavement.

“Fuck,” Abby said. Her voice was too calm; disembodied. She couldn’t see Shannon Beckley in the mirror. Shannon was still wedged down on the floor, where Abby had told her to hide back when she thought she could win this thing, a minute before that felt like a decade ago now. The rest of the race invited no such illusions. She’d hit him, yes; hurt him, yes; but he hadn’t stopped, and now he was outthinking her. Now he was in the superior car and he was armed, and whatever injuries he’d sustained suddenly seemed insignificant.

She glanced at Oltamu’s phone. What if she threw it out of the car? Would he stop to get it just as he had the gun? It was all he wanted, after all.

Not anymore, she thought grimly, remembering the way he’d fought to his feet, his arm dangling broken in front of his body, useless. No, he wouldn’t settle for the phone anymore. He’d take it, but he was coming for blood now.

Behind her, the Challenger’s huge engine roared, the Pirellis burned blue smoke, and the headlights swerved and then steadied, pinning Abby.

The top of the hill might as well have been five miles out.

The Hellcat roared up with astonishing closing speed.

He can’t even drive it, Abby thought. That didn’t seem fair, somehow. To lose to him when he couldn’t even handle that car was a cruel joke.

Then beat him, Luke said, or maybe it was Hank, or maybe it was Abby’s father. Hard to tell, but Abby understood one thing — the voice was right.

In a decade of professional stunt driving, Abby had asked the finest cars in the world to do things that most people thought couldn’t be done. Not on that list, though, was a controlled drift uphill with her hands tied together.

She wanted to use the hand brake, but that would require briefly taking her hands off the wheel, and instinct told her that that would end badly no matter how fast she moved. The Jeep sat up high, and if she didn’t have full control of the wheel, the jarring counterforce of the hand brake would likely flip the car.

Just fishhook it, then. Nice and easy. Maybe he’d overcompensate, flip his own car, break his own neck.

Sure.

The headlights were filling the Jeep with clean white light, the broken glass glistening and the roar of the Hellcat almost on top of them, and suddenly Abby knew what he would do.

He’ll be cautious, Abby thought, and she had the old feeling then, the swelling confidence that came up out of the blood, cool as a Maine river at night. She had watched Dax drive that car for hours now. He didn’t understand the car, but he respected its power. So he wouldn’t risk flipping it; he’d overshoot instead.

A tenth of a mile from the crest of the hill, Abby said, “Hang on,” as if Shannon Beckley could do anything to prepare, and then she jammed her foot on the brake and spun the wheel through her fingers, passing it as rapidly as possible, like paying out rope, left hand to right hand, feeding it, feeding it, feeding it as the world spun around them.

I needed the hand brake, she thought, but she was wrong. They hadn’t been going fast enough, and the hill worked in her favor. Physics came to her rescue as she shifted from brake to gas and pounded the pedal again. All around them was the sound of shrieking rubber as the tires negotiated with, pleaded with, and finally begged for mercy from the pavement.

The pavement was benevolent.

It granted the skid. The Jeep didn’t roll.

Beside them, the Challenger smoked by in a roaring blur.

Abby was already accelerating back downhill by then.

She chanced a glance in the mirror only when she was sure the Jeep was running straight. The fishhook had been a simple stunt — awkward and lumbering by any pro’s standard, actually — but it had been enough. The kid had had a choice: try to match it or ride by and gather himself. He’d opted for the latter.

Dax was executing a three-point turn to counter. In a Challenger Hellcat, he was executing a three-point turn to catch up to a Jeep. Abby wanted to laugh. We can do this once more, she thought, or twice more, however long it takes, back and forth, but he’s not getting a clear shot. Not as long as I have the wheel.

She actually might have laughed if she hadn’t looked ahead and seen the headlight from the train.

It was running northwest to southeast, cutting through Hammel and across the bridge on its dawn run, out of the night and toward the sunrise.

Up at the top of the hill, where the Challenger was executing its awkward turn, bells were clanging and guard arms lowering to block traffic on Ames Road. The train would soon take over that task. The train would block them above, the river already blocked them below, and Abby and Shannon would be sealed in the middle with Dax and his gun.

Abby brought the Jeep to a stop, twisted, and looked at Shannon Beckley. She’d clambered off the floor and back into the seat. Blood from the cut sheeted down her cheek, but her eyes were bright above it. Abby looked down at the handcuff that chained Shannon to the vehicle. Only one of them could walk away from this.

I’ll take the phone, she thought, I’ll take the phone and I’ll make him negotiate. Just like with the man named Gerry.

The man he’d killed.

The negotiating hour was past.

She looked down the hill. Ahead of her, there was only the parking lot, the river, and the railroad bridge.

And, now, the train.

She looked back at Shannon Beckley, expecting to see Shannon staring ahead. But she was staring right at Abby. Scared, yes, but still with a fighter’s eyes.

“I have to try,” Abby said.

Shannon nodded.

Abby started to say, It might not work, but stopped herself. That was obvious.

Behind them, Dax had the Challenger straightened out and was facing her once again.

Abby let her foot off the brake and started downhill. The wheel slipped in her bloody hands and pulled left, but she caught it and brought it back. Behind, the Hellcat roared with delight and gained speed effortlessly, a thoroughbred running behind a nag. Abby didn’t look in the mirror to see how fast Dax was pushing it. Her eyes were only on the bridge and the train. The train was slowing, navigating the last bend ahead of the bridge, and its whistle cried out a shrill warning, and the bells tolled their monotonous lecture of caution.

She fed the wheel back through her blood-slicked palms, bringing the car to the right when the road curved left, toward the parking lot. She pounded the gas as they banged over the curb and off the road and then headed for the short but steep embankment that led up to the train tracks. The Jeep climbed easily, and at the top of the embankment was the first of Abby’s final tests — if she got hung up on the tracks, it was over.

The front end scraped rock and steel as the Jeep clawed up onto the berm, and she managed to negotiate the turn, praying for clearance. She had just enough. The Jeep was able to straddle the rails, leaving the tires resting on the banked gravel and dirt on either side.

Behind and below her, Dax brought the Hellcat around in a slow, growling circle, like a pacing tiger. She knew what he was assessing — the Jeep sat high, able to clear the rails, and its wheelbase was wide enough to straddle them. The Challenger sat low, a bullet hovering just off the pavement. It would hang up on the tracks, leaving it stranded.

Dax didn’t seem inclined to try pursuit. The car idled; the door didn’t open; no gunfire came.

He watched and waited.

He thinks I’ve trapped myself, Abby realized.

And maybe she had. Squeezed from multiple sides now, she could go in only one direction: straight toward the train.

She kept expecting a gunshot but none came, and she realized why — he didn’t think she’d try it. His brake lights no longer glowed, which meant he’d put the Challenger in park — he was that confident that Abby was done.

She looked away from him and fixed her eyes ahead, staring down the length of the railroad bridge, where, just on the other side, the huge locomotive was negotiating its last turn and entering the straightaway of the bridge. How far off? A hundred yards? Maybe less. It couldn’t be more. If it was more...

I’ve just got to run it as fast as I can, that’s all there is to it, she thought. When it came down to the last lap, when the rubber was worn and the fuel lines were gasping for fumes, there was no math involved, no calculations, no time.

You finished or you didn’t. That was all.

Abby put her foot on the gas.

62

She was doing forty when she reached the bridge and she knew that she had to get up to at least sixty, maybe seventy, to give them any chance. But she also had to hold the car straight, and the gravel banks were built to keep the rails in place, not provide tire traction. It was a bone-rattling ride and one that made acceleration painfully slow.

The train was some thirty yards away from the bridge now. Thirty yards of opportunity remained for her to decide if it was a mistake and bail out. Ditch the Jeep, and then Abby could run, even if Shannon could not. With the diesel locomotive’s headlight piercing the fractured windshield and the train’s whistle screaming, it was easy to believe bailing was the right move.

Behind and below them, though, Dax waited.

He thinks I’m choosing my own way to die, Abby realized.

She kept her foot on the gas.

In front of her, the train straightened out until the diesel locomotive was facing her head-on. In the backseat, Shannon Beckley moaned from behind the tape. Abby was aware of a flicker of open grass to her right, a place where she could ditch the Jeep without falling into the river below.

Last chance to get out... take it.

She tightened her grip on the wheel. The last chance fell behind. Then they were on the bridge, and out of options.

A brightening sky above and a dark river below. A whistle shrilling, a headlight pounding into her eyes. The bridge seemed to evaporate into a tunnel, and though she wanted to check the speedometer to see whether she’d gotten up to seventy, she couldn’t take her eyes off that light.

She would never remember the last swerve.

There was no plan, no target, nothing but white light and speed and the question of whether she could make it. Then, suddenly, the gap appeared, and instinct answered.

Daylight.

Chase it.

She slid the wheel across blood-soaked palms, and the daylight was there, and then the daylight was gone, and then came the impact.

A bang and a bounce and blackness. I thought it would feel worse than that. That wasn’t bad at all, for being hit by a train, she thought, and then the furious scream of the whistle brought her back to reality. She was facing a wall of grass. It took her a moment to realize that it was the bank on the far side of the river.

The engineer was trying to slow the train, but with that much mass and momentum, it didn’t happen fast. The locomotive was across the bridge and headed uphill before the cars behind it began to slow. A timber train, flatbed cars loaded with massive white pine logs from the deep northern woods.

Abby looked in the mirror. The Challenger was in the parking lot, facing her, idling. It no longer looked so smug. In fact, it looked impotent.

She knocked the gearshift into park, then reached out her bloody fingers, gripped the edge of the tape covering Shannon Beckley’s mouth, and peeled it away. “You okay?”

Shannon nodded, as if unaware that she could speak now, then said, “Yes.” Paused and repeated it. “Yes. I think so.”

Abby opened the driver’s door and stumbled out into the morning air. The train was still easing to a stop beside them, each car clicking by slower than the last. In the pale gray light, she could see the Challenger’s door swing open, and she thought, After all that, he’s still going to shoot me.

The kid limped around the front of the idling car. He eyed the pedestrian bridge below the train. Abby looked in the same direction, and for the first time, she saw Boone’s body. Dax started to limp ahead.

He’s still coming, she realized with numb astonishment. He would cross that bridge once more, even after all of this. All for a...

She turned back to the car and reached for Oltamu’s phone. Her hands hovered just above it, then drifted left, and she popped the center console open and found Shannon Beckley’s phone.

It took her two tries to grasp it in her bloody fingers, and by the time she had it and stepped away from the car, the kid was at the foot of the bridge.

“Dax!” she screamed.

He looked up. He was limping badly, and his left arm hung awkwardly, obviously broken but disregarded, like a dragging muffler. The gun was in his right hand, but she was too far away to fear being shot.

“Go get it!” Abby shouted, and then she pivoted back and whirled forward and sent Shannon Beckley’s phone spinning into the air. It sailed in a smooth arc out above the river and then down into it.

Dax watched it splash and sink.

He stood there and looked at the water, and then, finally, he lifted his head to face Abby.

Duck, she commanded herself, but her body didn’t obey. She just stood there on the other side of the river, hands bound in front of her, blood running down her arms.

The kid raised his gun. Abby waited for the shot.

None came. Instead, he held it across his forehead, and for a bizarre moment she thought he was going to take a suicide shot. Then she realized that he was offering a salute. He held the pose for a moment, then turned and limped back to the car. As the train whistle shrieked again, he backed the Challenger out and pulled up the hill. The train had stopped before blocking the road, granting him an escape route.

Abby stood where she was until the car crested the hill and vanished, then she sank down into the grass.

She looked back at the bridge, at that narrow window between train and steel girder, and wondered how wide it had been when she slipped the Jeep through. She stared at that for a long moment, and then she struggled upright and went to Shannon Beckley. Abby extended her wrists.

“Can you untie me?”

Shannon looked at Abby’s face, then down to her hands. “Yes,” she said simply, and she went to work on the knots with nimble fingers. It didn’t take her long. Abby watched the cord fall away, and she remembered the strangling cord at her throat, her feet on the dash and her back arched. She flexed her fingers, then reached out and plucked the black baseball cap off Shannon Beckley’s head. She studied it and found the pinhole-size camera hidden just beneath the bill, beneath the odd silver stitching that drew the eye of the observer toward the top of the hat. Was he watching? No. But he would go back. He would go back to study what he’d missed.

She was sure of that.

Abby angled the bill of the cap at her face and then lifted her middle finger up beside it. Then she stepped back from the Jeep, turned, and pulled her arm back, prepared to fling the hat as far into the river as she could.

“The police will need it,” Shannon Beckley said.

Abby stopped. Sighed and nodded. Yes, they would. But damn, how much she wanted to watch it drown.

She tossed the hat on the driver’s seat. Sirens were approaching from somewhere on the campus and somewhere on the other side of the river. She ignored them, studying the plastic zip ties that held Shannon’s wrists together.

“I’ll need to cut that. You have anything that will work?”

“Get the phone,” Shannon said.

Abby was puzzled. Shannon had seemed so composed, but maybe she was delirious. Abby wasn’t cutting those ties with a phone. “No,” Abby told her patiently and began to root around in the console in search of a better tool.

“Get the phone,” Shannon said, each word firm as a slap, and when Abby looked up, she saw that Shannon was staring over her shoulder. Abby turned and saw the dog crouched at the tree line, head up, ears back, wary but intrigued.

She picked up Oltamu’s phone and walked away from the car. The sirens were growing louder, and someone was screaming at her from across the river, but she didn’t look away and neither did the dog. Abby went as close as she dared and then sat in the grass and extended a bloody hand.

“Hobo,” she said. “Come see me.”

63

Tara has been many things and is becoming many more. Each day seems to bring a new identity.

First she was the vegetable, the brain-dead girl, and then she was the locked-in girl, and then, within hours of learning that Shannon was alive, Tara was the Coma Crime Stopper.

This is because of the story Shannon told, giving credit to her sister’s nonverbal lie.

People look at her and think she’s helpless. But from that bed, she saved me without speaking a word.

The media loved that quote. They directed feature coverage to Tara on every network. Their attention, as is its way, swells and breaks. A van with bombs is found in DC, and a hurricane is howling toward Texas. The Coma Crime Stopper is forgotten.

Then the contents of the phone are revealed.

Photos, files, videos of an electric vehicle produced by a company called Zonda, which is the name of an Argentinean wind that blows over the Andes Mountains. Most of the files are complex equations or sets of computer algorithms, an FBI agent from Boston named Roxanne Donovan tells Tara and her family. The photos and videos are mostly of cars on fire. Zonda prototypes.

The product of German design, American manufacturing, and international investing, Zonda is on the verge of being about so much more than cars. The company has already agreed to a multibillion-dollar contract with one of the world’s largest airplane builders, military contracts are expanding, and, one week after a woman with a knife arrived to talk to Tara Beckley — and kill her — the company was to have its initial public offering. All has been trending positively for Zonda with the exception of one troublesome engineer who, in the months before the IPO, began to reach out to a handful of select individuals, informing them of rumors and promising documentation. What he could show, he told them, was the equivalent of the Volkswagen diesel-emissions scandal that cost the company billions in fines and led to the criminal indictments of nine executives. One of the world’s most exciting young companies had been built on a carefully protected lie, and he was prepared to share evidence of that or remain silent about it — whichever was more profitable.

“I’d love to tell you that Amandi Oltamu was noble,” Roxanne Donovan says to Tara. “But our early information suggests that he was only looking for a payday.”

This disappoints Tara. Donovan is right; Tara wants him to be noble. She wants to have his death and her own suffering wrapped in righteousness.

She won’t get what she wants.

“He made at least three offers,” Donovan continues. “Two were to people who had stakes in the company. Extortion efforts, basically. When those demands weren’t met, he went in a different direction. He contacted a rival.”

The rival, it seemed, had gotten in touch with a woman named Lisa Boone.

The source of the baby-faced kid in the black hat is less clear. He is the son of a killer, seventeen or eighteen or possibly nineteen years old, and Roxanne Donovan will say only that the Bureau is working on leads, many of them generated by interviews with Abby Kaplan. Lisa Boone is dead, shot on the railroad bridge over the Willow River where Tara had once nearly died herself, but the young killer is missing. The best lead there, Donovan tells them, involves a rural airport in Owls Head. An isolated hangar on the Maine coast, it serves as a touchdown point for the private-jet set. On the morning after the killing on the bridge, a small jet from Germany landed in Owls Head and refueled. Its lone passenger was an attorney from Berlin. The plane took on another passenger at Owls Head, a young man with a limp and one arm in a sling. The aircraft then flew to Halifax, and from Halifax to London, changing flight plans each time. Upon the plane’s arrival in London, the young passenger from America disembarked after informing the pilot that the German attorney was sleeping and wasn’t to be bothered. By the time the pilot discovered the man wasn’t sleeping but dead, the unknown American was gone.

While Tara was a feature story, the death of Dr. Pine received sidebar coverage. She thinks this is a crime, that all the nobility Oltamu lacked, Pine had shown.

She hopes that his family will come to see her. On the day that she lifts her right thumb on command for the first time, she uses Dr. Carlisle’s computer software to compose a short letter to Dr. Pine’s family. It is the first writing she’s done in this condition, and the words don’t come as easily as she’d like, but would they ever for a letter like this?

The Coma Crime Stopper isn’t sure.

What she is sure about is that the task of calling up the words is good for her. When she closes her eyes after that first bit of strained writing, she sees more of the green and gold light, sparklers and starbursts of it illuminating new rivers and tributaries, uncharted waters.

She writes again the next day.

Dr. Carlisle’s prognosis becomes a bit less guarded in the following days. More enthusiasm bleeds through, perhaps more than she’d like to show. Tara exchanges e-mail with a woman who recovered from locked-in syndrome and who has just completed her third marathon since the injury. She is an outlier, of course. But Tara watches videos of her race over and over.

She must become an outlier too. She owes them all this much. She owes Pine, obviously, but also Shannon, Abby Kaplan, and so many more. People she never met. A man named Hank Bauer. A man at a junkyard where her devastated Honda still rests.

She knows the journey ahead is long, and a good outcome is not promised. But she has so much fuel to carry her through it.

Weary but hopeful, she closes her eyes, flexes her thumb, and searches for those green-gold glimmers in the dark.

64

We’ll find him,” the investigator from Scotland Yard promised Abby after three hours of taped interviews and the review of countless photographs taken from surveillance cameras around the city of London, Abby having been asked to search the crowds for a glimpse of Dax.

When she considered Dax’s destination, the city that shared Luke’s last name, she couldn’t help but feel that it was a taunt. His silent response to the raised middle finger she’d offered that black hat. Somehow, she is sure that he saw that.

He was not in any of the photographs.

“How will you find him?” Abby asked the investigator.

“The way it’s always done: Patience and hard work. We’ll follow his patterns, learn who he trusts, and find him through them or when he makes a mistake. It will happen.”

Abby wasn’t so sure. She didn’t think the kid trusted anyone. And while she knew the kid made mistakes, she felt as if he would make fewer of them by the day, by the hour. Each moment was a learning experience.

Abby remembered the salute he’d given her in the dim dawn light across the river, just before the kid got back into Hank Bauer’s Challenger and disappeared. He’d been in three countries since then, and no one had caught him yet.

“He’s adaptive,” Abby said. “And I think he has big goals.”

The man from Scotland Yard didn’t seem interested in Abby’s opinion. “He’s no different from the rest of his family,” he said. “Which means that, sooner or later, he’ll end up dead or in jail. We’ll see to that.”

Abby wondered how long it had taken Scotland Yard to see to that for the rest of the kid’s family, but she didn’t ask. The last question she asked was the one she felt she already knew the answer to.

“What was his father’s name?”

“He had a dozen of them.”

“The most common one, then. What did most people call him?”

The investigator hesitated, then said, “Jack.”

Abby nodded, remembering the bottle of poisoned whiskey that the boy had presented to Abby and Hank on the night they’d met.

“And the last name?”

“Blackwell.”

“Blackwell,” Abby echoed. It seemed right. It suited the family.

“He’s quite dead,” the Scotland Yard man said in a nearly chipper voice.

Abby looked at the photographs of the boy contract killer, and again, she wasn’t sure the investigator was right. The man named Jack Blackwell might be dead, but his legacy was alive and well, moving through Europe like a ghost.

If he was even still in Europe.

“I’ll tell you this,” the Brit continued, “you’re bloody lucky — and so is Shannon Beckley — that you can drive like that. Put anyone else behind the wheel out there, and you’re both in the morgue.”

“You’re right,” Abby said, and for the first time she did not doubt the accuracy of the man’s statement.

Abby had needed the wheel for this one.

“Not making light of it,” the Brit said, “but it seems to have been rather fortunate for your reputation too, based on what I’ve seen.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Luke London thing.”

The Luke London thing. Ah, yes. When she didn’t respond, just stared evenly at him, he shifted awkwardly.

“I just mean in the media. Plenty of kindness from the same folks who crucified you before. Changes the narrative, right?”

“No,” Abby said. “It doesn’t.”

The man looked at her curiously. Abby said, “It all happened. Nothing’s replaced by anything else. They fit together.”

“Sure,” the Brit said, but he didn’t understand, and Abby didn’t try to clarify. The wins were the wins, the wrecks were the wrecks, as Hank Bauer used to say. They all worked together. The only risk was in expecting that one or the other was promised to you. Neither was. When the starting flag was waved, all you ever had was a chance.

“I won’t waste it, though,” Abby said, and this seemed to please the Brit; this part he thought he followed.

“Good,” he said, and he clapped Abby on the shoulder and promised her that they’d be in touch soon. Abby was going to be important when they got the Blackwell lad in a courtroom.

Abby assured him she’d be ready for that moment. Then she left to drive to the hospital, where Shannon Beckley waited with her sister. Tara had therapy today. Tongue-strengthening exercises. Dr. Carlisle thought she was coming along well enough that spoken conversation might be possible sooner rather than later. She wouldn’t make any bolder predictions, but she’d offered this much encouragement:

She fights, and so she has a chance.

It was, Abby thought, a patently obvious statement, and yet it mattered.

She drove south to Massachusetts alone.

The coastal Maine sun was brighter than the cold day seemed to allow, an optical illusion, the sky so blue it seemed someone had touched up the color, tweaking it beyond what was natural. The Scotland Yard man had taken longer than expected, and rush-hour traffic was filling in. Abby drove at seventy-five in the middle lane, letting the impatient pass her on the left and the indifferent fall behind to the right.

Her hand was steady on the wheel.

65

The girl in the kayak is testing new waters. There are channels all around her, currents previously unseen that are now opening up, and some are less inviting than others, as dark and ominous as the mouth of a cave. Others show promising glimmers of brightness but are lost quickly behind gray fog. Still, she knows they are out there, and she has the paddle, and she has the will. She knows that she must be both patient and aggressive, traits that seem contradictory only if you have never run a long race.

She pushes east through fogbound channels, and then the current catches her and carries her, turns her east to south, and the fog lifts and gray light brightens, brightens, brightens, until she is flying through it and there are glimmers of green and gold in the spray.

Satisfied, she coasts to a stop. Pauses, savoring the beauty of it all, savoring the chance.

When she’s caught her breath, she paddles back upstream. The current spins and guides her, north to south first, then south to north. These are unusual waters, but she’s learning them, learning when to fight them, when to trust them. Each day she travels a little farther and a little faster.

She dips the blade of the paddle and holds it against the gentle pressure, bringing the boat around in a graceful arc. Now she faces the dark mouth of one of the many unknown channels looming ahead. So much of the terrain is unknown, but none of it is unknowable.

There is a critical difference in that.

She paddles forward boldly into the blackness, chasing the light.