The First 48 Read online

  The quiet woods were suddenly disrupted by the distant crash of metal. The green veins in the back of Mike’s shooting hand grew shadows. His fingers were tight. His eyes darted toward some movement. A frog, launching itself from the bank of the creek, plopped into a murky pool. The ripples spent themselves completely, and the frog’s head popped up on the far side of the milky brown water. Then came the gunshots, muted, but echoing through the woods. One, then several in a row. The silence grew back. Mike licked salty sweat from his upper lip, his breathing shallow.

  Then he heard it: the soft shuffling of feet across the bottom of the concrete sewer pipe. Faint. His heart pounded so hard that the surge of blood filled his ears. His fingers were cramped and tight. He loosened his grip on the gun, wiped his hand on his pants, then grasped the weapon tight again. He crouched a little to take the strain off his knees. The shuffling was no longer a whisper, but the raspy scratch of leather against the dried silt in the bottom of the pipe. Then it stopped. Mike could feel the presence of another human being, could sense him scanning the thick foliage of the woods and the lush tendrils of vines that draped the gully’s sides. The creek trickled softly over the round stones in its bed.

  Mike strained for the hint of Jane’s presence—a moan, a soft gasp. All he heard was the clink of the lock as it was twisted against the latch. The grate groaned as it swung open.

  Mike sucked in a quick breath and stepped out in front of the pipe, aiming for the kill. Confusion struck him. Bob Thorne looked like his grandpa. Mike faltered under the steely gray eyes, the plastic glasses, and the white slicked-back hair that barely hid the liver spots on his pink scalp. Mike’s eyes flickered for a sign of Jane. Thorne was alone.

  “Don’t move,” Mike said. His voice trailed off down the pipe.

  Thorne’s hand was already inside his jacket, wrapped around the handle of his gun.

  “Take it out slow or I’ll paint the inside of that pipe with your brains,” Mike said. “Now drop it.”

  Thorne did as he was told and the gun, a small .22-caliber pistol with a nasty little silencer, clattered off the concrete. Mike was in control, but for some reason he found Thorne’s smooth compliance unsettling.

  “You shouldn’t do it,” Thorne said to him.

  “What are you talking about?” Mike said. Through the pipe, he could hear Tom’s footsteps, in the distance, sprinting toward them.

  “Terminate me,” Thorne said. “I’m you. You’re me. I was afraid of this: After all these years, instead of the payout, you show up. I was always afraid they’d cross me in the end. But I thought, If they do, and I can talk to him . . .”

  “Who do you think I am?” Mike said.

  Thorne snorted through his nose.

  “I know you’re from the company,” he said. “How would you know about this culvert?”

  “Did you kill the girl?” Mike said, nearly choking on the words. Tom’s footsteps were growing louder. When he burst out from the end of the pipe, the game would be up.

  “Is that why they sent you now?” Thorne said, glaring at Mike. “I’ve lost my usefulness? My record is unblemished. Perfect. And I didn’t fail this time, either . . .”

  CHAPTER 25

  Mike swallowed, but his mouth was dry. He could hear Tom. Running. Breathing hard.

  “What?” Mike said, the word escaping him, more a guttural sound from his throat than a word.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Thorne was saying. “She was gone. Someone got her before I did. If they can do this to me, they can do it to you. We’re the same. It’s against every protocol.”

  Thorne glanced over his shoulder. Tom’s form materialized, hunched over in the throat of the black hole.

  In a blink, Thorne dropped down and whipped a second gun from under his arm. Mike let out a shout, but Tom didn’t need it.

  Tom dropped and fired, just as Thorne’s gun licked a flame into the tunnel that roared noisily down its length. Thorne’s head hit the bottom of the culvert with a crack, and he lay still. Blood trickled from his ear.

  Tom gathered himself up off the bottom of the culvert pipe. He stumbled toward the light, plucked Thorne up by the collar, and angled his face toward the light.

  “Is he dead?” Mike asked.

  “Where’s Jane?” Tom said, his voice broken. Red welts striped his face, and the corner of his mouth was split and bleeding.

  “He was alone,” Mike said.

  Tom shook the old man’s limp form, growling.

  “He didn’t get her, Tom,” Mike said.

  Tom’s eyes narrowed, and he glared at Mike.

  “He thought we were with the Agency,” Mike said. “That they sent us to kill him. He said when he got there, she was gone.”

  “Gone?” Tom said. “Gone from where?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. “Her apartment? He didn’t say if it was him who dumped it or not. But he said someone else got her first.”

  “Someone else . . .”

  Tom let Thorne fall. He hopped down out of the pipe, climbed the bank of the gully, and marched toward the fence.

  Mike followed close behind, running quickly. Out of breath.

  “Where?” Mike gasped. “Are we going?”

  “Her apartment,” Tom said, turning. “Do you think he told the truth?”

  “I . . . think.”

  “Then we start over. And don’t look like that.”

  “What?”

  “Your face. We have to believe,” Tom said, staring intently at him. He was breathing hard. There were bags beneath his eyes now and they were beginning to droop. A gray stubble that matched his short stiff hair had broken out on his face. His tan work pants were stained and grubby. The collar of his polo shirt was wrinkled and bent at an awkward angle that left Mike wanting to straighten it.

  “Somewhere,” Tom said. “She’s somewhere and she’s okay.”

  Tom turned and started off down along the fence line. Mike let his eyes slip away. He looked at his own watch. A Harley-Davidson Special Edition Seiko with a sticky brown leather strap. Nine o’clock.

  Time.

  According to Tom’s theory, they were nearly out of it.

  CHAPTER 26

  Little Galloo Island’s two thousand skinny feet reflected on the calm black sheet of Lake Ontario. Even in the height of summer there wasn’t a single dab of color to be seen. The only hint that it had ever been anything but an island of guano and shrieking birds were the black skeletons of trees straining toward the pale blue sky. The three-hundred-acre island looked as if it had been hit by a nuclear bomb after being ravaged by thousands of cormorants.

  Mark Allen awoke. A cool dew had settled in on the boat and all its rigging. The air smelled of diesel, and a dull throbbing engine pulsed. The sun cast its first yellow spears of light over the tops of the trees back on the shore, taking the blue out of the sky.

  Dave was at the wheel of the refurbished coast guard patrol boat. When they pulled into the old station on Big Galloo, Mark ignored Dave’s glare. He looped the shoulder strap of his briefcase around his neck and hopped ashore without bothering to help moor the boat. His shoes scraped divots in the lichen that infested the crumbling concrete pier as he jumped into one of the jeeps. The engine started right up, but the only reward for his jouncing trip halfway across the island was a protracted wait. The door to Carson’s office was closed tight. Mark knew what that meant.

  He put his ear to the door and listened.

  “Find a goddamned engineering firm that’ll give you the results you need. Do I have to tell you Brits everything? They do a goddamned sampling, for Christ’s sake. Find someone who takes the samples in the right goddamned places. Have you ever dug up a fucking streambed? It never fucking ends. We dig that up and you can forget making your numbers for the year, forget about the quarter . . .”

  Mark sighed and walked down the hall to the next set of stairs. His rooms were on the third floor. He went there, set his briefcase beside his desk, and put in a ca
ll to the office.

  “Get me Slovanich, will you?” he said to his secretary.

  When he heard the gruff Ukrainian’s voice, he said, “It’s me. Where do things stand?”

  “Everything is ready,” Slovanich said.

  “For next week?” Mark said.

  “No. Is for today.”

  “I said next week.”

  “They say you back today. I like to work before deadline,” Slovanich said. “This I learn from many years communists.”

  “Where is it?” Mark asked.

  “I no leave this for people find,” Slovanich said. “I put in lab truck. Security truck. Sixty-gallon drum. Black. Truck wait for you at dock. Only just for you I tell man. Just like you say.”

  “It’s just sitting there?”

  “This what you ask. Everything is good. Every test, she pass.”

  Mark stopped pressing the Ukrainian because he knew better. It was like a house of mirrors, only with words. He got off with Slovanich and called Rusty at the docks.

  “Bronco’s right out front. I got the keys in my desk drawer,” Rusty said. “The Russian dropped it off and said you’d be coming.”

  Mark got off the phone and returned to the door outside Carson’s office. For a while he paced up and down on the heavy carpet, past the suits of armor and beneath the maces and battle-axes that hung crossed on the wall. Behind the thick carved-oak door, he could hear the ebb and flow of Carson’s voice. Now was when he made his morning calls to their European division, where it was already afternoon. He rested his head against the door.

  Mark made a fist and poised it just in front of the door, ready to knock. Then he thought better of it. It had been a long time since he’d done something undisciplined. It was years since Carson had beaten him, but the sensation was palpable even today. He felt a boiling sensation churning his gut that left him vaguely thirsty.

  Instead, he turned and let himself out at the end of the hall, onto the battlement that covered the driveway. At least Carson would be able to see him waiting dutifully from the office window. In order to give the appearance that he wasn’t upset, Mark pulled up a deck chair, leaned back, and braced his feet on the battlement.

  Overhead, a pair of golden eagles circled and dove in the blue sky. Their mating screech pierced the morning’s unusual stillness. Their dark shapes soared, then met, twisted together and plummeted toward the earth. Beyond the carpet of trees, the big lake stretched on forever, still flat and dark. Insects droned in the meadow below.

  It was a glorious day, actually, with the bright sun baking away the last pockets of damp coolness that invaded the island night after night no matter what the season. Mark heard Carson’s voice rise and then ebb. He gazed up at the stone tower that rose from the northwest corner of the house. To him, it was a house. To clients and executives, however, it was the Galloo Island Hunt Club.

  A Romanesque Revival home, it had been built in England in 1757 and taken to America, stone by stone, in 1867. Its owner, Tibernius Smith, a munitions manufacturer who made his fortune during the Civil War, had visions of other American aristocrats building similar homes throughout the Henderson Bay area. They did not.

  Instead, the house fell into disuse and disrepair until Carson Kale purchased it along with the entire six-mile island in 1983 for a mere $1.4 million. In the interim, the island had become the home of a waning hunt club that catered to duck hunters from both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. During the huge growth of Kale Labs, Carson continued to pour money into the house, refurbishing it to its original grandeur and writing off every penny of it as a business venture.

  Mark closed his eyes and remembered the sweat and the dusty film that would stick to his skin. No one had been immune to Carson’s zealous determination to restore the house. Like the hunting guides who worked the island, and like Dave, the former army officer who commanded them, Mark had done his fair share of sanding and scrubbing to help with the effort. Most of the time, Mark had lived and gone to school in Watertown, not far from Kale Labs’ massive pharmaceutical plant and corporate headquarters. But nearly every weekend and for the entirety of every summer vacation, home for Mark Allen had been this old stone mansion that Carson had renamed the Galloo Island Hunt Club.

  “Long night?”

  Mark jumped from his chair and turned to face his guardian. Carson wore jeans and a light flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  “Just resting my eyes,” Mark said, offering a firm handshake, the way he’d been taught. “It’s good to be home.”

  “You’ve been down there how long?” Carson said. “Two months?”

  “Everything is ready now, though,” Mark said, standing tall.

  “Is it?” Carson said, raising an eyebrow and crossing the balcony to stand at the battlement’s edge with his hands clasped behind his back. His wavy hair was longer than it used to be. Silver instead of black.

  “I tried to tell Dave,” Mark said, “that . . . that . . .”

  The words “son of a bitch” were on his tongue, but Carson deplored swearing.

  “. . . but he wouldn’t listen,” Mark said. “Nothing new there.”

  “Of course he didn’t listen,” Carson said, his back growing even more rigid. “He was obeying my orders.”

  “I forgot,” Mark said.

  “Well don’t.”

  “Or else I end up like my mother?” Mark said.

  Carson narrowed his dark eyes and said, “She was a whore and she wasn’t your mother.”

  “Because she didn’t obey your orders?”

  “Because she flaunted herself around here in those slutty bathing suits, trying to get a rise out of anyone within fifty miles of here, including you,” Carson said.

  “How the hell can you say that?” Mark said.

  Carson angled his head. The left half of his face was pulled down tight toward his collarbone. Tendons sprang from his neck.

  “Because this is my world,” he said. “And I let you live in it.”

  Carson turned his back on Mark with his hands clasped behind him.

  “I’m sorry,” Mark said after a while, “but what am I supposed to tell her when she wakes up?”

  The rhythm of Carson’s breathing slowed, and he turned to face him.

  “I hope you’re kidding,” Carson said.

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  Carson blasted a sigh.

  “If the girl had written her story and it went to press, then, yes,” Carson said, “But now? Think . . .

  “She’s already working on it,” Carson said. “The editors know about it. Now what happens when she disappears? How long before Gleason is being investigated? You can leak this Thorne’s name to another reporter. How long will it take for Gleason’s numbers to drop like a stone? He’ll be finished. Our candidate’s numbers aren’t bad as it is.”

  “But her article will do the same thing,” Mark said, fighting to keep his voice even.

  “Maybe,” Carson said. “Maybe not. And it certainly won’t resonate the way this will. A young journalist missing under strange circumstances? The media will do our work for us. Actually, I’m disappointed you didn’t think of it. Sometimes your failure to understand that next level disturbs me.”

  “But you’ll have to keep her . . . The election is more than three months away,” Mark said. “She’ll never . . . That’s kidnapping.”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong again,” Carson said, a faint smile curling the corners of his lips. “There’s another way.”

  Mark bit the inside of his cheek and said, “You know I don’t like to play your guessing games.”

  Carson’s smile melted.

  “Then I’ll spell it out,” he said. “Think like war. This company is fighting for survival. Everything I’ve worked for. The economy of this entire area depends on Kale Labs. Thousands of people. Families. You need a gut check, boy. In this world, people have to make sacrifices . . .”

  In the silence, Mark heard the e
agle’s scream. Carson’s tone cut him. The word “boy” rang in his ears.

  “Versed,” Carson said, cutting off his thoughts. “She won’t remember last night. We’ll keep her in isolation, and then put her back where we found her. No one will know. You never learned that in Military Intelligence? God damn . . .”

  Versed was an amnesiac, given to people who woke up during surgery. They never remembered a thing. If the dosage was strong enough, it could wipe out days of memory.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” Carson asked. “So indignant? So . . . offended?”

  Mark tried to quell the tremble in his voice.

  “She trusted me,” he said. “I learned that in MI.”

  “Good. She trusted you. I just don’t want you going sweet on me. I’ve got a plant manager in Manchester who’s sweet and he almost cost me ten million dollars.”

  “Was I sweet in Malaysia when I shot that union organizer?”

  “That was practically self-defense,” Carson said. “I’m talking about making calculations without getting emotional.”

  “Maybe I’ll surprise you one of these days, Carson,” Mark said. “Maybe I’ll live up to your ideal . . .”

  “I hope you will.”

  “In the meantime, I don’t want Dave and his thugs touching her,” Mark said. “Let them save it for their whores up in Kingston.”

  Carson looked him over and said, “You’re sweating and your fists are tight.”

  “I know.”

  “Remember, when you first came to me, that little shih tzu mutt you brought home?” Carson said, smiling warmly. “That thing slept in your bed, even though I told you not to. Remember?”

  Carson’s smile twisted into a perverse line.

  “And I told you and told you it wasn’t good for you. Then finally, you brought her out here for the summer,” he said. “And she disappeared . . .”

  “I know,” Mark said. “You told me about the coyotes and I didn’t listen. That was a long—”

  “No, you didn’t listen,” Carson said, “and that’s been a theme with you. And as well as you’ve done in some ways, sometimes you still don’t listen. But I’m not asking you this time. I’m taking care of things, and I’ll take care of the girl. She’s not your problem anymore. She belongs to me . . .”