Frame 232 (26 page)

“I will.”

“Great.” He looked at her and smiled warmly. The smile he received in return was superficial at best. “Okay, Noah, we’ve got to do another clandestine shopping run, then get some rest. Call me back when you’ve got the travel details.”

“I will.”

It was still dark outside when Hammond shook her awake. He had asked Noah to book Sheila’s train as early as possible so they could leave before sunrise. It took less than an hour for them to shower and dress, put on their new faces, and erase all evidence of their presence. They had the taxi driver pull through a Dunkin’ Donuts for an on-the-fly breakfast of orange juice and wheat bagels. At Union Station, they avoided as many security cameras as possible, retrieved Sheila’s ticket from the first available window, and went straight to the platform.

Sheila’s train
 
—which would deposit her in Boston in approximately seven hours
 
—was scheduled to depart at 8 a.m. As its headlight appeared in the distance, Hammond said, “Okay, this looks like your
 
—”

She turned abruptly to face him. “Jason, don’t do this. Come to the estate with me.”

“No, I appreciate your concern, but
 
—”

“You were talking again in your sleep last night. I heard you out there.” He had given her the bed while he slept on the living room sofa. “The nightmares are back, aren’t they?”

“No.”

“Jason.”

“Okay, yeah,” he said, “but it’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before. I can handle it.”

“You need
help
,” she said.

“This really isn’t the time to discuss
 
—”

“Come with me. We’ll figure it all out. Everything.”

He took her by the hand. “Not yet. Maybe later, but not yet. Try to understand
 
—I have to do this.”

The train rumbled up, blasting its horn.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few days.”

“You can’t be certain of that.”

“Yes . . .
yes
.” He guided her gently to the steps. “I want to see how this turns out too.”

“And then you’ll get some help?”

“We’ll see. Now get going. Noah’s dying to meet you.”

She started up, then turned. “Take care of yourself, please.”

He nodded. “I will.”

A conductor appeared and politely asked her to go inside and sit down. Hammond waved a final good-bye.

Sheila went past the conductor and found a seat in the rear. Her last image of Hammond was of him walking away, his broad figure weaving through the thick of the crowd on the platform until it disappeared. A sadness overwhelmed her then, and she struggled to hold the tears back. As the train jerked forward, she slid down into the seat and closed her eyes. Sleep came quickly, mercifully.

Meanwhile, the call she had accidentally placed on her cell phone, which was in her back pocket when she sat down, sent out a signal that was received by two people
 
—a very confused aunt in Jackson, Mississippi, and the assistant deputy director of the CIA.

NO SOONER
had Sheila closed her eyes, it seemed, than she found herself lying on a surfboard, rising and falling with the gentle respiration of a nameless sea. The day could not have been more perfect
 
—the sky shimmered without end, the sun was shining gloriously, and the water was as clear as liquid glass. Only dimly aware that she was dreaming, she looked back along the beach for other signs of life. There were none.

A wave
 
—not particularly large, but it caught her by surprise
 
—rolled in and pushed her off the board. She tumbled over the side and went under, a million tiny bubbles boiling up around her. She knew how to swim
 
—her mother had taken her to lessons every summer from third to sixth grade
 
—but those skills abandoned her now. She flailed about in a spasmodic attempt at the breaststroke, yet the surface of the water, though only a few feet overhead, never seemed to come any closer.

A tiny flicker of light caught her eye, no more than a glint in the distance. Then she saw it
 
—a metal rod of some kind, moving through the water in a hurry.
A spear,
she realized.
Not black and rusty like the one her uncle Brian, a lifelong enthusiast of deep-sea fishing, had mounted over the mantel in his den. This one was chromed from head to tail.

She tried to move out from its path, but her body refused to obey. The spear surged past her face and buried itself in her right arm. She tensed, expecting the pain to be extraordinary. It turned out to be nothing more than a muted sting, as if she had been poked with a freshly sharpened pencil. Then came a most magnificent sensation
 
—warmth, pure and sweet and fine, flowing down every physiological pathway.
No,
she thought,
not warmth
 
—at least not physical. Emotional warmth. Happiness . . . elation . . . euphoria.
It was the most blessed and blissful state of mind she had ever known.

She looked to the surface again. Sunbeams were splayed out playfully around their brilliant core, which only served to heighten the ecstasy. Getting back there no longer seemed imperative. It was too wonderful down here, too perfect.
Yes, perfect,
she told herself.
It is perfect here. Perfect everywhere. The world could not be a more perfect place right now.

A hand plunged through the water and went to her shoulder. She was jerked back and forth dazedly, in slow motion. Then the watery kingdom that surrounded her began to evaporate. The sunbeams retreated, although the bright core remained. She was shaken again, and a voice, murky and far-off but still intelligible
 
—
Come on, honey, we need to get off here. Honey . . . wake up.

Her eyes fluttered open. The ocean was nothing but a memory now, replaced by the bowels of the train. The cheerful sun had become a recessed light in the ceiling.

The voice spoke again, this time with greater clarity. “Honey? Let’s get going, okay? We don’t want to miss our stop.”

She found a person sitting across from her. The image was hazy at first; then it improved. It was a man, young and handsome. Dark hair, rugged features, fashionably unshaven. At first she didn’t recognize him. Then she thought she did, and a flame of fear alighted. In a peculiar way, she sensed that it should be greater, more intense. But the notion could not fully form because she was unable to access the rationale behind it.

“Come on, babe. We’ve got to get off now.”

She realized she was on her side, curled in a fetal position. When she went to sit upright, the effort was surprisingly difficult. Then she felt a soreness in her right arm. Pulling up the sleeve, she saw a circular area about the size of a silver dollar that had become pink and puffy. In the center was a little red dot.
How did that get there?

Her companion leaned over and pulled the sleeve down. “This is our stop,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He rose, slid a backpack up his arm, and took her by the hand. She still felt that initial twinge of caution, but it seemed halfhearted and unconvincing now. This man meant her no harm; he was a friend who could be trusted. Her earlier concerns had been unfounded, even silly. Whatever he wanted to do, it was fine with her.

Birk smiled as he led her off the train and through the thickening crowd of morning commuters. As he passed a trash can, he disposed of the brown paper bag containing both the syringe and the unlabeled bottle.

HAMMOND’S BOAT
cut a foamy scar through the waterway that linked the Caribbean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean while also separating the United States from one of its closest neighbors, the island nation of Cuba. Relations between the two had been strained from the moment Fidel Castro overthrew the American-friendly regime of Fulgencio Batista in January of 1959, then sunk to a nadir when Castro invited the Soviet Union to park a few boatloads of ballistic armaments along their northern shores. This led to the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962
 
—thirteen nail-biting days in which the world came within a hair’s width of nuclear war. President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev engaged in the greatest game of chicken in human history while citizens on both sides dug fallout shelters and cleared grocery aisles of all canned goods. In spite of Kennedy’s eventual success, diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba never resumed.

Having traveled the bulk of the ninety-mile journey from the Florida coast, Hammond could now see the island’s hulking form in the distance beneath the tropical sky. The boat,
which rented at five grand a week, was a forty-foot, fully modernized cabin cruiser that slept six and could effortlessly maintain the twenty-two knots required to cover the trip in about four hours. Her name was
Wind Dancer
.

Standing at the helm and staring through the bridge’s split window while the engines groaned away, Hammond concentrated on his objective. Finding Olivero Clemente would not be easy. Like his brother Galeno, Olivero was a specter. Beyond the three records at the CIA library, Hammond had found no further mention of him. The man had gone out of his way
 
—or at least
someone
had
 
—to erase all evidence of his existence. This meant a grassroots investigation would be required
 
—knocking on doors, talking to strangers, spreading cash around. Hammond knew American money went far in Cuba. The exchange rate favored the dollar to begin with, but on the street it held even greater value. He had learned this through the travel guides he bought at a bookstore back in Miami. Several of the more unsettling tips about Castro’s Communist paradise included the fact that his American health insurance would be invalid, his credit cards were useless, and any U.S. citizens who ventured out of the traditional tourist zones would be, at least from a security standpoint, “on their own.” One of the guides also urged travelers not to be alarmed by the apparently common sight of uniformed soldiers, armed with machine guns, on virtually every street corner.

As the island drew closer, Hammond decided his first order of business was to set up headquarters in the Old Havana neighborhood. It offered a broad selection of hotels, most of which were run jointly by the Cuban government and a variety of private European firms.
I’ll get something to eat,
he decided,
and then
 
—

His phone rang before he could complete the thought. He removed it from its belt case and checked the ID before answering. “Hello, Noah. How is our new guest do
 
—?”

“Jason, there’s a problem. A big problem.” He was out of breath.

Hammond tensed. “Tell me.”

“Sheila never showed up.”

“What?”

“I’m sitting in a cab just outside the station in Boston. Her train arrived an hour ago, but she never got off. I waited on the platform, watched every passenger. Then I got on and took a quick look around in case she’d fallen asleep or was in the bathroom or something. I talked to two different conductors, and neither even remembered her.”

“Oh no. . . .”

“Are you sure she got on in D.C.?”

“Yes, I watched her. And I watched the train pull away. You need to use the GPS tracking system that we’re devel
 
—”

“I did. In fact, I did that first. Her phone must be off.”

“Or it was turned off
for
her.”

“I also checked to make sure I had the right train. Number 4674 northbound from Washington.”

“That’s right,” Hammond said. His voice had reduced to a hoarse whisper.

He spun the wheel and gunned the motor, and the boat listed so severely that he nearly fell over. The phone flew out of his hand, bounced on the deck, and missed going over the wall by a hair before he managed to retrieve it.

“What was that?” Noah demanded.

“Nothing. I’m coming back.”

“Huh?”

“I’m coming home, right now.”

“Jason, no. There’s no point in that.”

“No point?”

“You won’t get here for hours, and we need to act on this right now. It’s a
missing person
. Besides, the authorities will pick you up the moment they see you. You know that.”

Hammond dropped the clutch and slowed the boat to a powerless drift. Now the only sound was the gentle waves slapping against the bow.

“What do you suggest, then?”

“We have to get the police involved. They’re the only ones equipped to handle this. They can mobilize immediately. If we try to do it privately, it’ll take too much time.”

“The media will find out. It’ll leak.”

“That could be to our advantage. And hers. It might put more pressure on whoever took her.” He added quickly, “Assuming that’s what happened.”

“That’s what happened,” Hammond said angrily. “It was the little slug who’s been trailing us all along, I’m sure. The one who tried to kill us before, the one who killed Ben.”

“If you’re right, then every second counts. We’ve got to stop discussing and start acting.”

Hammond let out a deep breath. There on a hunk of fiberglass bobbing like a cork in the open sea, he had never felt so helpless.

“Okay, go ahead. But I still think I should come back.”

“No, finish what you’ve started.”

“I thought you were the one who wanted me to come home.”

“You’re too far into it now. What happened to Sheila is proof of that. Whoever’s still hiding in the shadows, you’ve riled them. They’ll never let you rest regardless of where you go. Your only choice is to see this through.”

Hammond’s considered reply was delivered in a whisper
 
—“But at what price?”

“You should’ve thought of that a while ago, my friend.”

Hammond said nothing, but the bubbling pool of black grew just a little bit wider.

“Go on,” Noah said. “Get down there and try to find Clemente. I’ll take care of this.”

“Keep me updated, no matter what happens.”

“I will.”

Hammond put the phone back in its case. He continued considering and reconsidering the notion of heading back. But Noah was right
 
—they’d nail him in short order, and those who had been hiding underground would go even deeper. This opportunity would never come again.

Then he heard Sheila’s voice in his mind
 
—
“Think about what they did, Jason. To my mother, to the president, to his family, and to the country. If you give up, they win. Hasn’t that been their objective all along
 
—to get you to give up? To stop you before you found out too much? Before you found out the truth?”

Hammond heard all of this as clearly as if she were standing right beside him. And that was what he wished at that moment
 
—for her to be beside him, as she had been since the beginning. Now he didn’t know
where
she was or if she was okay or if she was even alive.
Maybe that’s why I’m hearing her so clearly
 
—maybe she’s speaking to me from above, urging me to go forward. Not just to avenge Kennedy, but now to avenge her as well.
His blood boiled at the thought. His breathing became rapid, and every muscle tightened like a steel cable.
If they’ve hurt her, may the Lord have mercy on their souls
 
—because I won’t.