Measure of Darkness (14 page)

W
hen it comes to shedding tails, Teddy Boyle is a mere tadpole, but surprisingly enthusiastic at being given the opportunity.

“This is sort of what Matt Damon does,” he confides as we head out on foot.

“Matt Damon has stunt doubles,” I remind him. “He's not
really
driving cars a hundred miles an hour on a wrong-way street.”

“Cool,” Teddy says. “But you should know I don't have a driver's license.”

“You won't need one. We won't be wrecking Lamborghinis or jumping from rooftop to rooftop. All we're going to do is go into the Nike outlet and shop.”

“That's it?” he says, sounding disappointed.

“The cool thing about this, you get to buy something, for real. I'm thinking, at the very least, a hoodie and kicks.”

“I hate the swoosh,” he says scornfully.

“Think of it as taking one for Team Nantz.”

So far, the black SUV is hanging back, but I have to assume they've got someone cruising the blocks ahead of us as we approach Newbury Street, which is
to Boston what Rodeo Drive is to Beverly Hills, except with way less celebrities and movie stars. Way less, but not none—I once spotted the aforementioned Mr. Damon coming out of Daisy Buchanan's, all on his own, no entourage. Take my word for it, he's even better looking in person.

“I think I see 'em!” Teddy hisses.

“Pay no attention. We're almost there.”

I'm not old enough to be Teddy's mother, but big sister fits comfortably, and that's the role I assume upon entering Niketown, on the corner of Newbury and Exeter streets. Handing over my own credit card, an act of faith I'm reasonably sure the young hacker won't abuse. And if he does I'll cancel his ass so fast he'll be gulping like a guppy. Actually, he's quite attentive when I explain the drill.

“'Kay, first I pick out shoes, then we go upstairs and find a hoodie,” he says, repeating the instructions. “Try it on, pay for everything and then leave with the hood up.”

“You got it.”

“And somewhere along the way, you'll, like, vanish or something.”

“Or something.”

“It's way too warm for a hoodie.”

“Look around, it's never too warm for a hoodie. Guys your age wear them down to breakfast while Mom pours the cheery little O's. Inside, outside, the hood is always up.”

“Guys like that are morons.”

“No argument. But the peepers will think you're attempting to disguise yourself. They'll pay attention.”

“Peepers? Is that even a word?”

“Try to stay focused. This is very important.”

No fool, Teddy, when it comes right down to it, he selects a pricey pair of the Zoom Kobes and a green cotton hoodie, one of the retro styles—or as I like to think,
timeless
—and hands the charge card to a teenage clerk who, from the look in her doelike eyes, finds my little brother totally fascinating, from the tip-top of his gelled hair spikes to his soon-to-be zooming feet. Her glance at me is dismissive—clearly a late-twenties female lacking in neck tattoos is no competition. On the positive side she's more than willing to clip away the tags so he can wear the product out of the store.

Bambi hands bashful Teddy a bag for the shoes and does everything but roll over with her paws in the air.

When he rejoins me I point out, “All you have to do is whistle.”

“Huh?” he responds, genuinely puzzled. Brilliant as he may be in all things internet, when it comes to girls he's as pathetically impaired as any teenage male.

“Never mind. We're going to make one last circuit of this floor, over by that double rack of T-shirts, and then you're going to put up the hood and head downstairs like you're in a hurry. Show your receipt if you have to, but when you get out the door, go very quickly up Exeter Street and turn left on Boylston. Look around as if you might be followed, because you will be. Don't worry about the peepers, even if you do spot them. They'll hang back. Go one block west to the corner of Dartmouth Street and go down into the T-stop. Take the green line to Park Street, exit onto the Common. Find a bench, sit down and pretend to be waiting for someone important. Give it ten minutes or so, then get all agitated when they don't show and make your way back to the residence.”

“I could try to lose them in the Public Garden, easy.”

“I don't want you to lose them. Ready?”

“'Kay, sure.”

He whips up the hood, hurries down the crowded stairway. Meanwhile, I step around the T-shirt display, scoot through a couple of racks in the busiest part of the store and take the staff stairway to the ground floor. Removing a plastic security card from my purse, I disarm the alarm for the door that exits onto the brick alley behind the store (what can I say, once upon a time we did a huge favor for a Nike exec). Crossing the alley I gain access to the Exeter Street parking garage through an unmarked door and meet Jack Delancey on the second floor of the garage.

“Your chariot awaits,” he says with a grin, opening the passenger door to the generic sedan he's just rented.

Swoosh, we're out of there, undetected.

B
efore leaving the garage, Jack takes off his tie and blazer, carefully folds both items, places them on the passenger seat, then dons wraparound sunglasses and a Red Sox cap. He suggests that I slump down in the backseat until we've cleared the area. A rental car is being utilized for a couple of reasons. First, the working assumption that Jack's regular ride has been compromised, planted with bugs and/or a tracking device. And more generally because even if that's not the case, his Town Car has no doubt been visually identified as to make and plate, and would pop on any surveillance team watch list.

“How did you ditch them?” I ask, chin on the floor mat. “The old car wash trick?”

He laughs. “Works every time.”

Jack has an associate—actually an old high school crony—who owns a chain of car washes. All he has to do, show up at one of the venues, swap out drivers while the suds are flying, and Jack's car drives off in one direction and Jack in another. Simple but effective—and it helps that the same crony also has a car rental franchise, and will rent for cash, making it that much harder to trace.

Jack says, “So what exactly did Shane say?”

“According to Dane, he said, ‘Kendall Square. Behind Dumpster. My laptop. Jack will know.'”

“He said I'd know, huh?”

“Does it ring a bell?”

“I recall the Dumpster. It was in the vicinity when I picked him up in Kendall Square. But if he left his laptop behind the Dumpster, somebody will have found it by now. Has to be hidden somehow.”

I can't help saying, “Well, duh.”

“I'm thinking out loud, Alice,” he snaps. “Give me a break.”

“Sorry. Can I sit up now?”

“Yeah. And fasten your seat belt, please.”

We've made it to Storrow Drive. Jack Delancey has the skills of a NASCAR driver, and is putting them to good use on the curving, lane-switching highway that hugs the Charles River. If there's anybody attempting to follow us, they have my sympathy. Vroom, vroom, then we're somehow off Storrow and crossing the river into Cambridge before my brain can quite catch up with Jack's expert maneuvering.

“Whoa doggies,” I say, sighing with relief as we finally begin to reenter earth orbit.

“Whoa doggies? Who are you, Annie Oakley?”

“Maybe. Is she a babe?”

“Sort of. Annie Oakley was a famous sharpshooter in a Wild West show. Shot a cigarette out of her husband's mouth.”

“Great idea,” I say. “Wish I'd thought of it.”

“Yeah, well,” says Jack, who's been hitched and unhitched so many times that he knows his way to the barn, so to speak.

He swings onto Cardinal Medeiros Avenue, keeping
slightly below the limit, and slows further as we enter Kendall Square. Not a lot going on here. Harvard Square, Central Square, those are the action areas in the People's Republic of Cambridge. Kendall is a sleepy backwater, quiet and somehow dignified, despite being only a few blocks from the MIT campus. Jack pulls around, just off the square, and parks a few yards from where the train tracks cross Binney Street.

“There,” he says, indicating a battered green Dumpster behind a plumbing supply warehouse. “Are you clear?”

I'm scanning the area. We seem to be the only living beings on this particular block. “Looks clear, but I don't have your eyes.”

“Give yourself credit, kid. You spotted the first tail.”

“Lucky.”

He shakes his handsome head. “Luck wasn't involved. Your gut told you to look for them. What's your gut say now?”

“Time to make the donuts,” I say, opening the door.

Jack looks over the top of the rental at me. “I heard about that. Save one for me.”

We cross the deserted street to the Dumpster. Have a peek over the rusty edge. Emptied recently.

“Okay, here I am,” Jack says. “Waiting for me.”

He means he's putting himself in Shane's place, hiding behind the Dumpster until his good friend Jack Delancey arrives like the cavalry and they proceed with the fun and games of blowing up an innocent vehicle in the vicinity of Shane's motel room.

He crouches, reaches out and sifts a few bits of gravel, eyes surveying the limited landscape. The Dumpster, a chain-link fence, the tracks, a nearby warehouse. I back away, not wanting to disturb his line of sight. He puts
his cheek to the ground, eyeballing the underside of the Dumpster. Dismisses that particular possibility, and stands up, dusting his knees. Question: How can a guy crouch in the gravel and still look so immaculate?

Jack nods to himself and begins to probe along the fence, where pieces of weather-beaten cardboard have escaped from the Dumpster and been blown into the chain links, stirred by the slow passage of trains, or gusts of wind. At a place where the chain has been partially separated from the galvanized fence pole, he slips through to the other side. Walking slowly, looking down, nudging aside thick hunks of rain-soaked cardboard.

A hundred feet or so from the road, in an area alongside the tracks where the tufts of grass are knee-high, he looks back at me and flashes a beautiful white smile that makes him look about twelve years old.

I'm thinking, go, Jack, do it, think like Shane, but he doesn't need any encouragement from me. He circles around like a dog preparing to lie down. Then he bends gracefully at the waist, hooks his right hand in something and stands up, showing me the find.

A laptop carrier, clotted with tufts of dirt and bits of grass.

 

If the boy wonder was any more amped his fauxhawk would explode. He's had quite a day so far, leading tails around the city, and now back home at his bench, doing his thing with the recovered laptop.

“This could be the mother lode,” Teddy says, lifting the lid of Randall Shane's small 13-inch MacBook Pro. “Let's see if she boots.”

We're gathered in the command center—everybody but Dane, still holding vigil at the hospital—more or less
standing over Teddy's narrow shoulders, watching with keen anticipation as he presses the power button.

There's a low-key
dong
and the screen illuminates, soon followed by the gray Apple logo in the center.

“System loading,” Teddy says, hushed.

Twenty-eight seconds later—by his count—he's trolling for downloaded video files.

“I'll start with the most recent,” he says, selecting from a pop-up menu. “This was attached to an email that originated from [email protected]. I'm assuming that's the professor.”

“Bingo,” says Naomi, almost before the video-player image has a chance to form on the screen.

A little boy on Harvard Bridge, looking into the camera with what could be fear or nervous anticipation, hard to say. A little boy, possibly Eurasian, maybe five years old, with a mop of thick dark brown hair in a bowl cut, straight across his forehead. Intelligent, wary eyes glancing upward and to the side. The camera zooms back to reveal a skinny Caucasian woman holding the child's hand. She has a similar, wary look when her eyes flick nervously at the camera. She says something but we can't hear it, and then the clip ends abruptly.

Teddy runs it again—the whole clip lasts a mere seven seconds—and I start to take in some of the details. For instance the child and the woman are close to the bridge rail, facing south, with the Cambridge shore behind them.

“Sound?”

“There's an open audio track,” Teddy says, tapping a finger on the screen, indicating a graphic. “No volume. My guess, this was recorded with a cell phone. I'll run lip recognition software, see if we can figure out what she's saying.”

“She's saying, ‘where do we go?'” I tell him.

Teddy reruns that segment several times, and we study her moving lips.

“Alice is right, it fits,” Naomi says, nodding.

“‘Where do we go?'” Jack says, musing. “Like she has no real idea what's going on, or what's supposed to happen next, or why they're in that particular location.”

“Who's shooting this, do you think?” Naomi asks.

“Not Shane,” says Jack. “She's frightened, or at the very least uneasy. So is the boy. Kids don't respond to Shane with fear. Quite the opposite.”

“The woman isn't his mother, obviously,” Naomi says. “Is she in league with the kidnapper?”

Jack shrugs. “Run it again, please.”

We see it all again. Close-up on little Joey, then a shaky pullback revealing a slender, nervous-looking woman clinging to the boy's hand.

“He's not afraid of her,” Naomi says. “He's not trying to get away. See how he leans in her direction? She's his caregiver.”

“Like a nanny?”

Boss lady shrugs. “Like someone who knows how to make a child trust her.”

“This is real,” I say. “She's worried for the boy's safety.”

“Maybe.”

“If she's in league with the kidnappers, why show her face? Why not keep it close on the boy?”

Naomi, looking thoughtful, gives me a nod of approval. “Good point. This was done with a purpose. Teddy? Check Shane's search history, his email. Who, if anybody, did he search for or contact after downloading this video?”

“On it.”

“I suggest we back away, give the young man some breathing room,” Naomi says. “There will be much to download and ponder. Iced tea on the rooftop deck, I think.”

She buzzes Beasley.

“Can I smoke a cigar?” Jack asks, straightening his blazer. “In celebration?”

“If you have one for me,” Naomi says, not missing a beat.

“Are you kidding?” Jack says, taken aback.

“Yes, I'm kidding. But permission to wreck your lungs is granted.”

“I never inhale.”

“That's what they all say,” Naomi says, leading the way to the roof.